Weekly Roundup: Trump Calls Zelensky a Dictator While Crowning Himself King
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Brad and Dan discuss various alarming developments surrounding Donald Trump, including Trump's recent social media proclamations, the implications of his new executive order giving greater control over independent agencies, and his alignment with Russian propaganda. The episode also covers Elon Musk's controversial demands for advertisers on X, threats to Congress members' safety, and the erosion of democratic principles. Additionally, they explore the impacts on churches providing sanctuary to undocumented immigrants and the increasing authoritarian nature of the current administration.
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That's what Donald Trump wrote on social media this week.
That came after he posted a quote that said, He who saves his country breaks no law.
One inspired by Napoleon.
This, of course, scared everybody who's paying attention.
But what went under the radar was his executive order.
Today we discuss what that means in the context of reports about threats to congresspeople and their safety, as well as Elon Musk's demand that people advertise on X lest they be included in lawsuits or have other consequences.
All of this in the context of Trump's Inflammatory comments about President Zelensky in Ukraine calling him a dictator and essentially becoming a Russian propaganda machine.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am Brad Onishi, and good to be with you on this Friday with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Nice to see you, Brad.
Even like a civilized time of day and everything.
So like, here we are doing like regular podcast stuff.
Well, and you're a little more casual.
You don't have to teach today, so you're a little more casual than usual.
And I think before we get going, the people need to know how did dodgeball go this week?
You still sore?
Well, so yeah, I'm always sore for like four days after dodgeball.
But, Brad, I am proud to report that I believe I have climbed into the category of mediocrity.
So I think I've gone from being terrible to being pretty mediocre.
So last night was the first time somebody who is a long time, but he's been playing for like 10 years.
I hate everything else about the age we live in, but I do love the fact that we live in an age where some people have been playing dodgeball for decades now.
That's their hobby.
That's fun.
Good for you.
If you were listening and dodgeball has been your thing for 15 years and you've got the right shoes and the right knee pads and you practice your various arm angles to throw, good on you.
That's awesome.
Keep at it.
Stay in shape.
Have fun with other people.
You're amazing.
All right.
It's a tough weekend and I don't think there's any way to get around that.
Things continue to happen.
In a manner that is distressing and rapid.
And we're going to talk about those.
We're going to talk about Trump's comments on Ukraine, on Zelensky, and basically him, as Senator Chris Murphy has said, being a Russian propaganda machine nonstop.
We'll then get into his proclamations of himself as a king and the executive order that really does try to put into practice Project 2025 and unified executive theory.
We'll then go to churches that are trying to stop ICE from raids and the kind of politics involved there.
Not all churches have the same political access and political favor, and Dan will lead us through that.
So that's where we're going.
I know these are tough times.
We appreciate you being with us and hope that we can shed light on some important aspects of our public square and current events.
Here we go.
All right, Dan, I think most people listening are aware of what happened this week with Trump and Zelensky and Putin, but take us through some key parts and let's break that down.
Yeah, so sort of starting with an update and then, you know, what I think are my takeaways, and I'll throw it over to you for your thoughts, as I know you have many.
This is like this sort of ongoing episode.
Those of us of a certain age will remember in a time before streaming when, like, you would watch a TV show and then would end on, like, a cliffhanger or something.
You had to, like, wait a week to find out what happened.
And this is sort of the continuation from last week.
So last week we talked about Trump and Putin.
They had this, like, 90-minute phone call about Ukraine.
And then Hegseth goes to Europe and has the meeting with NATO allies.
And basically, you know, takes a Kremlin party line on a number of things related to Ukraine.
And the drama continued this week.
Senior Russian and U.S. officials met to talk in Saudi Arabia, and they did so without any representatives from Ukraine being present.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so serious.
Russian media featured images of the officials sitting together.
Russian newspapers, Russian social media sites had images of this and really hyped it up.
And a Russian tabloid summed it up this way.
This was the quote taken from a Russian tabloid, which I got from the BBC because I can't read Cyrillic in Russian.
But this is what it said.
Weak.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I know.
I'm soft.
If I had like two more weeks to prep, I'm sure I'd learn Russian.
It'd be fine.
But, you know, we do what we can do.
But this is what it said.
The Russian tabloid said, quote, Trump knows he will have to make concessions to Russia because he's negotiating with the side that's winning in Ukraine.
He will make concessions, not at America's expense, but at the expense of Europe and Ukraine, end quote.
It kind of says everything, like it's right.
The Russian tabloid is essentially correct and perfectly nails kind of where Trump is at with this.
All the evidence, as you indicated earlier, is that Trump is doing Putin's work for him, and it continued to mount this week.
And it confirms what we've known about Trump for years.
Trump's own former foreign policy advisor, John Bolton.
And so I think we list, like, I don't know, friends of the podcast.
John Bolton's not on that list.
Favorite people that have served in different administrations.
John Bolton, nowhere on the list.
But he summed it up this way.
He described Trump's deal to end the war in the Ukraine as close to surrender to Putin's objectives.
That's exactly what we heard from Hegseth last week.
It was sort of Kremlin talking points.
Bolton said that Europe should simply reject any deal between the U.S. and Russia.
And then Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.
Accused Trump of repeating Russian misinformation, so Trump responded with more Russian misinformation.
That was Trump's, like, doubling down.
Zelensky says that he was living, I think he said, in a misinformation space or something like that.
And so Trump doubles down.
And that's what really brings us into this week and, like, what heightened everything.
He called Zelensky a dictator.
He said that only 4% of Ukrainians approve of Zelensky.
His approval rating is something like 57%.
It's never been below 50%.
And really notably, he accused Ukraine of starting the war.
And so this is what he said.
Trump said, quote, So that was his response to Ukraine, that they somehow...
Provoked this, that they started the war, that they're the ones to blame because they didn't make a deal, which means surrender and capitulate.
That's what the deal would have been, and comes out swinging it then.
If all of this wasn't enough, for good measure, China said this week, comes out and says that it backs the new U.S.-Russia consensus on Ukraine, whatever that's...
Supposed to be.
U.S. officials keep saying there is no consensus, that there aren't really discussions.
These are all preliminary.
Of course, we'll involve Ukraine.
Marco Rubio says things like this and so forth.
But China's like, nope, there's already sort of essentially a deal in place and we stand on it.
So it's the U.S., China and Russia.
That's the new trifecta that are pushing this forward.
So it continues Trump's pattern of moving away from traditional U.S. allies, threatening to undo NATO, alienating the U.S. from Europe.
Embracing autocrats, all of that stuff.
That's the what happened this week pieces.
Here are my takeaways from this.
Here's why I think this is significant, what I think it tells us.
The first is that Trump, he just continues to be the wannabe lackey, pandering for the approval of what he sees as manly autocrats like Putin.
And I say that because We talk a lot about that vision of masculinity within Christian nationalism.
We talk about Christian Dume and militant masculinity.
We can call it toxic masculinity.
We can call it hyper-masculinity.
Whatever we want to call it.
But Trump fully embodies that.
And all the insecurities that come with it, he has always had this fixation on what he views, in my mind, as really manly, tough guys.
And he so wants to be in their crowd.
He wants to be included in them.
That there is this palpable sense of insecurity.
And this has always been his pattern, but this is what we see.
He gets on a phone with Putin and he basically gets off and says whatever Putin wants him to say.
He's like the wannabe bully, like who wants to be friends with the tough guy on the playground, who just keeps saying what the tough guy wants.
I think it also, and I think this is tied into it, it feeds into his failure as a dealmaker.
We've talked about this for years.
Trump's critics have talked about this for years.
Biographers have talked about this.
Business leaders have talked about this.
He has always positioned himself as this quote-unquote dealmaker, but he's not and has never been very good at negotiating deals and so forth.
He has no real answers for complex foreign policy like he never has.
This is why he can run and say that he's going to fix it all on day one.
I think, again, he's hugely intimidated by powerful men, like autocrats of various kinds, like Putin, like Xi, you name it.
So he capitulates to their terms, casts them as his own.
Basically, they come along and say, here's the deal.
He says, yeah, I like that.
I really like that.
That was my idea.
That's what I was going to say.
I was going to say that.
Comes out.
He gives them everything they want and then declares victory so he can be the quote-unquote dealmaker.
And we've seen this in Gaza with Israel.
This is the same thing that he did there.
It's now what he's doing with Ukraine.
He is just parroting back what Netanyahu says in Israel or what Putin says related to Ukraine.
And the final point is that it's also driven by his transactionalism and greed.
The other thing that happened that I think didn't get as much attention but was really significant is Trump basically presented to Zelensky.
A deal to sign over essentially like half of the mineral rights for rare earth minerals that Ukraine has a lot of.
Those are the kind of minerals that go into like chips and microprocessors and electronic devices.
And people who know anything about this know that certain geographical regions like China and Ukraine and places in that part of the world have a lot of these.
Trump tried to get him to sign all of those over.
Zelensky refused in part because there was no promise.
Of really anything from the U.S. in long term coming back from this.
Zelensky knows that this is going to be something that's going to be crucial for rebuilding Ukraine, is being able to capitalize on these resources that they have.
So he refuses to take this deal that isn't really a deal.
So what happens?
Trump comes out swinging and throwing his tantrums and calling him a dictator and picking up the Russian party line.
So it's everything about Trump that we've seen for years.
But, of course, he's president for a second term, and so the stakes are that much higher.
He is no longer just a guy on truth social or whatever into the void.
He's changing decades of American foreign policy.
He's threatening people.
So your thoughts on this, other takeaways, other...
There's a lot of elements to this.
I know that I haven't hit them all.
Well, I think one way to kind of reduce...
This whole issue from this week to its kernel is this is the week that Europe officially began to look at the United States as an adversary and as a threat.
Because if you have Donald Trump, the President of the United States, calling Zelensky a dictator and the The justification for this was, oh, there haven't been elections and there's martial law and there's martial law and no elections because they've been invaded by a much larger entity and are under threat daily and constantly.
One of the things floating around conservative circles was that Zelensky has a 4% approval rate, which is not true.
He has over 50% of an approval rate.
All of that aside, When Trump says you're a dictator, when Trump basically says instead of protecting Ukraine, because protecting Ukraine means protecting democracy, and we've said it on this show for months now, after World War II, I know some of you know this history and you're going to email me and say, Brad, don't lecture me, but a lot of us just need a refresher.
After World War II, the goal is to spread democracy around the world so we don't get dictators and totalitarian states like The Cold War was basically about a tussle over communism and capitalism, communism and democracy.
Symbolically, the United States was like, communism represents authoritarianism.
It does not represent the freedom of people to choose their leaders and for there to be open elections and human rights.
So from World War II to Ronald Reagan, With all of the evil and hypocrisy and just everything involved in those years from American foreign policy, from Iran-Contra to Reagan getting involved all over the place in Central America, etc.
The idea was, if we promote democracy around the world, we promote our interests.
And that included after 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and communism became something that was no longer seen as a kind of viable global ideology.
Now, Russia became a kind of totalitarian autocracy with no more of the ideology of communism.
China held out and is now the world power.
But nonetheless, my point with all of this is from 1945 to 2025, Europe has seen the United States as an ally that wants to protect democracy and thus protect the governments and see the governments as Europe has seen the United States as an ally that wants to protect democracy and thus protect the governments and see
This is the week that Europe, I think, is saying to itself, we are explicitly in a situation where the United States is either a threat or...
an adversary, or both.
That's clear to everybody now.
This is a new world order.
We are part of a new axis that includes Russia.
And, you know, Donald Trump is all kinds of things.
But he's trying to be part of the club, as you're saying, Dan.
And this is exactly what happens when he tries to be part of that club.
We already saw indications of this.
J.D. Vance last week.
Pete Hegseth last week.
The idea here is we don't want to create goodwill and friendship and alliance.
The idea is we only want relationships where there's a quid pro quo.
Give us your minerals and we might protect you.
Might I, I don't know everyone, remind you of when Donald Trump got impeached?
I think it was because he offered the president of, Dan, do you remember the country?
Was that Bolivia?
I can't remember.
Maybe it was, no.
It was Ukraine, a quid pro quo, to find dirt on Joe Biden and his family in exchange for, you know, military aid, weapons, and so on and so forth.
The foreign policy now is, if you give us stuff, we might protect you because we're a mob and we want to racketeer the world.
Might protect you, right?
It's not a true quid pro quo.
We might.
We're not going to say we will, but we might.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So I think this is the week that if you are somebody who is the kind of person who takes trips in the summertime to London or Paris or you like to visit other parts of the world, I think this is just one more moment as an American where you're going to need to mourn certain things.
And one of them is if you go to those places, you're going to have to be really careful.
And I'm not talking necessarily about physical violence, though.
I don't think that's out of the realm of possibility if you're in the wrong bar or pub at night and people find out you're an American.
Dan, you and I lived in the UK in the Bush years.
The amount of times that people wanted to yell at me in the pub because they found out I was an American, had no idea about my politics or whatever, right?
Is it about to be a thousand times worse?
And so...
I just think we need to take stock of the fact that we live in a country that is now part of the axis of authoritarianism.
And we're going to see how it plays out on the world stage here over the next year.
And again, when you have John Bolton, of all people, advising Europe not to do what the U.S. says, part of what he said in that, I think it was on a podcast on Politico is where he made those comments.
He basically said the Europeans...
He said they're playing too defensively right now.
They need to be more offensively geared against the U.S. strategically in the sense of they seem to be playing the game of, well, let's see what Russia and the U.S. come up with and then we'll respond.
And he's like, no, they need a more, for lack of a better term, a more muscular foreign policy response to just say there's not going to be a bilateral deal on Ukraine.
We're not going to accept that.
And I mean, it's just you want to talk about a realignment that you're describing.
It's when, again, when it's coming out of the mouth of John Bolton advocating that Europe needs to stand up and recognize that the U.S. is no longer a reliable ally and that it's on the side of factions like Russia and China.
I feel like that's the kind of through-the-looking-glass moment where we're at when I find myself looking at John Bolton and being like, yeah, John, those are some good points.
It's not a view I ever had of John Bolton before, and it tells us where we're at.
I mean, you know, so this is not just me doing speculation.
Zelensky has said that, you know, if things continue like they are, then Putin is going to try to take Europe, invade parts of Europe, exert influence on Europe in ways that are against the wills of certain governments and so on.
And then Europe has to wonder whose side will the United States take in that?
I mean, do you all see what I'm saying now?
Like, if Putin is able to make moves against Ukraine and then make moves in other places and be successful, and Europe is wondering, not only will the United States stay out of it, but is the United States going to start helping Russia in that?
Do you all understand the stakes of that?
Like, do you see what I'm talking about in terms of a new alliance and a new world order?
That is where we are.
And all of those sort of assumptions you had about how the world works, whether it's Canada, whether it's Germany, whether it's France, whether it's the UK, whether it's anywhere.
Those are gone now.
And we're going to have to kind of think through what that means.
Let's take a break.
We'll come back and continue on the kind of Trumpian moves of the week, including his proclamation that he is a king.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, I think a lot of folks know this already, but Trump wrote on social media that congestion pricing in New York is dead.
Long live the king.
So he was sort of proclaiming himself a king there.
He also wrote on social media, he who saves his country breaks no law, which is a kind of Napoleon-esque, it's inspired by Napoleon quote, and it really does exemplify the idea that if you are the ruler who saves the country, then you are the law.
There is no rule of law, it is the ruler who is the law.
A lot of people, of course, have been discussing Trump's open self-identification as a king, and I think that caught a lot of people right in the gut.
I'm not saying that that shouldn't be discussed, and I'm not saying that it's not important.
It is.
I think, for me, that's something you and I have discussed for a long time.
So it's not news to me, and it's not news to anyone who listens to this show.
The fact that he openly said it, I think, shows us he does not.
He doesn't plan on leaving office.
He does not have plans for elections in ways that are free and open.
And this is how he thinks of himself.
The thing that I think I want to spend more time on in a general theme of this segment is we have two men who are effectively in charge of the U.S. government right now, Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
And everybody can determine who's really in charge, Musk or Trump.
And we've been over this.
We talked about it last week.
But if you think about these two people, okay, so everyone just stay with me for a minute, just some basic facts so we can kind of reorient ourselves.
Donald Trump is a man who in the last year has sold Bibles for $60 each, sneakers.
He has released a Trump meme coin that has garnered him a lot of net worth.
In the past, he has sold steaks.
He is also a man convicted of fraud when it came to Trump University.
Like, we have a convicted fraudster, and I know we all know this stuff, and you see it written down, and everybody sort of glosses over to this point.
But I just want to remind everyone, this is a businessman convicted of fraud who had to pay a $25 million restitution to the people he defrauded.
The Trump organization was also deemed...
We can go on and on about the ways they misappropriated charitable funds.
That is the kind of businessman we're talking about.
Okay, so that's number one.
Number two, we have Elon Musk, who everyone just says, oh, he's the richest man in the world and all that.
And that's true.
But it's because he has received so much government assistance, government contracts.
He received a $435 million government loan.
Going back to the Obama years, right before Tesla kind of was about to go under.
But he wields immense power because he owns X. He bought Twitter, changed it to X, and now has immense power.
So I just want everyone to keep this in mind, that we are dealing with two businessmen who have dreams of mega power when it comes to control over finances and markets.
Thinks he's going to take us to Mars and keeps promising people a tube that will, like, tour you around Las Vegas at a thousand miles an hour.
The other used to be president, and in between his presidencies, Dan, was selling sneakers and selling people Bibles.
Okay?
Now, you're like, Brad, get to the point.
And the point is this.
Trump signed an executive order this week that is probably more important in terms of policy.
I'm going to read from a piece at NPR by Danielle Kurtzleben.
The executive order gives the president greater power over independent regulatory agencies, government entities, Congress set up to be shielded from White House control.
Well-known independent regulatory agencies include the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees markets, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures bank deposits, FDIC. I think you've all heard about that.
The Federal Reserve, which sets monetary policy.
And it's supposed to be outside of electoral politics because you don't want every four years there to be somebody who can just sort of decide how the Federal Reserve works.
Now, this executive order basically means that any new regulations have to be run by the White House, and there has to be White House liaison offices that regularly consult and coordinate policies and priorities.
It also says that the executive branch, going back to Trump and the president, is the only source of interpreting the law that exists, period, at least when it comes to the executive branch.
So, all of that to say, Dan, okay, is there is an attempt here to make sure that these independent agencies are under the control of the president, period.
Politico.
Peace by Megan Messerly and Bob King.
Independent agencies often find themselves in the political crosshairs either because they take actions that appear to align or conflict with a sitting president's agenda.
Those include the SEC's efforts during the Biden era to force companies to disclose the risks they face from climate change, as well as the FCC's more recent actions to investigate companies such as CBS for alleged bias against Trump during the 2024 campaign.
Daniel Farber, who is a professor of law at UC Berkeley, said this, One result will be to give the president much more control over the financial sector Especially via the SEC. The ultimate result could be regulatory whiplash.
The commission system has given these areas of law some degree of stability so the rules don't completely flip after every election.
That would change under Trump's order.
So, you're left with this situation, Dan, where the Federal Election Committee, the Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission...
And the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission, are basically not independent from Trump's will.
The argument is that from Russ Vogt, the architect of Project 2025, and friends, this is Project 2025. We talked about it on the show 18 months ago, in July of 2023, the unified executive theory.
Russell Vogt argues that there should be no agencies that are independent from The president.
Now, their argument is the president is elected and therefore the president should have full control over all of these agencies because if you're elected, that's what you get.
The reason these agencies were set up to be independent is because, right, one person should not have complete control over which companies are investigated for fraud, which companies are investigated because of consumer complaints.
I don't know, Dan.
Federal communications, does that sound like maybe one person shouldn't have control over the media and who's censored, whose licenses are under threat?
Maybe one person shouldn't have control over the Federal Reserve, especially when they're getting together with Elon Musk and talking about putting the National Reserve in Dogecoin, which is something that's been discussed already.
The Federal Trade Commission?
I don't know, Dan, we've had tariffs and things like that suggested.
Do you think that one person should have control over how our trade is completely regulated?
Especially when that person has business interests and billions and billions of dollars at stake, whether that's Donald Trump or Elon Musk.
Dan, it's not only that we have an executive who's trying to take control of these things.
We have the exact kind of executive who the people who set them up had in mind.
To protect us from.
A kind of like wheeling dealing businessman who's a failure at every turn when it comes to like making deals, who's thinking, if I just have control of the markets and trade, if I have control of the securities exchange, if I have control of all of those agencies, you have to come to me if you want favorable conditions for your businesses, your conglomerates, your communications, labor, etc.
So this is taking control of the government in a way that we've never seen before.
I got more to say on this.
I'm going to take us to Elon in a minute, but jump in here.
Yeah, so I know I do this a lot, but I want to sort of almost back up and look at the whole structure of the executive order system and the way that Trump is using it, because I think this is another important dimension.
So Trump, obviously, in the executive orders, makes these bold claims.
And they're real.
The threat is real.
Everything about Project 2025, all of that is real.
The part that is always sort of surprising to me, or maybe not surprising, but I want to keep in front of people is, again, I've referenced this before.
You made the reference weeks ago about people, this is my language, but the idea of sort of preemptively complying with the demands of autocrats, right?
And the weird thing about the executive order is they don't do anything.
It's Trump putting out a political fantasy.
It's Trump saying, here's what I want to be.
Here's what I want political reality to look like.
They're not self-enforcing.
They don't have the force of law.
That's why they get challenged in court and so forth.
And we can go down all the stuff about what happens if they don't listen to the courts, etc.
All real things.
We can talk about the fact that all of these are intended to go eventually before the Supreme Court and really try to push the boundaries of executive authority and so forth.
But what's striking to me is how much it's this performance, this political performance.
You sign this executive order.
You make this proclamation that has only as much force as people give it to begin with.
And this is the dimension that I keep seeing happen, is that every time Trump signs one of these, everybody just falls in line.
These executive orders, they are not self-executing.
They are not self-authorizing.
It's not a magic wand.
Trump did not wave a magic wand and suddenly make it so that all these regulatory agencies have to do what he says the way that he says he wishes they would do what he says.
And yet, with executive order after executive order after executive order...
We see individuals, organizations, institutions, government agencies falling in line in anticipation of them having the force of law, which of course makes it so they don't ever have to have the force of law.
Like everybody just does it and it's just this kind of performative thing.
And that's the part that I find so, a lot of things, a lot of adjectives.
I find it maddening.
I find it, if I'm just trying to be analytic about it, I find it fascinating.
I also find it terrifying that...
Yes, the claims in this are really, really scary.
But that's all they are right now, are claims until and unless everybody just falls in line and starts doing what Trump wants, in which case they give him the authority that he's claiming.
And I think that's the dimension that I find so disturbing about the way that these executive orders are being received at a national level.
And we've seen this, you know, with all the executive orders, everything from like, you know, trans health care.
To, you know, not allowing transgender women in sports, to Trump's authority, to, you know, birthright citizenship, like whatever they are, that performative dimension that people simply falling in line when they are not required to do so is what is giving the authority to Trump.
And I think that that's a really central dimension of this that has to be understood and appreciated as well.
Everybody worries about, oh, Project 2025, and it's a really terrifying thing.
Part of me is like, well, if we all quit just falling in line and doing what Trump claims he can do without any clear authority to do so, that gives time for these things to play out in court.
That gives time for people to think about how to respond to these.
That gives time.
For regular people who voted for Trump because they actually thought he was going to bring down the price of groceries, and now they're like, wait a minute, why is he doing all this other stuff to begin reflecting on that?
So I think that's the dimension that I keep coming back to with just the flurry of executive orders, is the fact that this is what they are intended to do, to be a flurry, to be an onslaught, to get people to normalize what he's demanding and to fall in line before anything actually has the force of law behind it.
Which then makes the force of law superfluous.
It makes it unnecessary to the Trump administration.
Yeah.
And so, look, we're not lawyers and this is not a law podcast.
So I know a lot of you out there are going to go listen to Amicus or you're going to go listen to some great stuff about what this means.
And I think there's other folks out there who are economists and law professors who can comment on what the independent agencies coming under executive control mean.
I think I just want to make one more point about it and then go to the like, why are people obeying in advance?
Yeah.
Question and specifically Congress.
Is.
A lot of average Americans.
Have no idea about what the SEC does, the FCC, there's no connection to those things.
And so if you just showed up and said, hey, I'm going to take away.
Social Security, that's one thing.
If you just come out with an executive order that says Trump's now in control of the FCC or the SEC, I can tell you most people are not going to look up.
And they know that.
They understand that.
And so that's one.
Okay, why are people obeying in advance?
So we can talk about, you know, Tech companies and others in the private sector.
I want to talk about Congress and a piece of Vanity Fair.
Kash Patel was just, you know, confirmed as head of the FBI. So here's a piece of Vanity Fair by...
Sorry, let me grab the...
All right.
Gabriel Sherman.
Sorry, Gabriel.
I had it written down and I lost it.
All right.
So, piece of vanity fair.
Senate and House Republicans know Trump will orchestrate the running of a primary challenger backed by Elon Musk's unlimited resources if a member defies Trump.
So, Dan, again, just real quick, why do you not allow unlimited campaign contributions?
Why do you not allow individuals to simply bankroll elections and campaigns?
Because the richest man in the world can look at every member of Congress and say, if you go against our agenda, I'll put $100 million into making sure your primary challenger wins next election.
This is not true, by the way, in places like the United Kingdom or Germany, where there's severe limits on how much money can be put into these campaigns.
Okay.
Let me keep reading.
In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don't rubber stamp his actions.
They're scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff, a former member of Trump's first administration tells me.
According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina Senator Tom Tillis told People that the FBI warned him about credible death threats when he was considering voting against Pete Hexess' nomination for defense secretary.
If you all remember, Tom Tillis was the one that signaled he probably was going to stand up to the Hegseth nomination.
He listened to women who had been victims of domestic abuse and violence.
He was the one that basically promised those who had been victims of Hegseth himself, I'm not going to let this guy go through.
And yet he did.
Right?
Tom Tillis ended up being the guy that made it all happen.
So one of the things that comes out in this piece is that Hillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits when psychopaths go to work.
I'm not going to read the entire piece, Dan, and I'm not going to belabor the point.
The point is this.
We've already talked at the top of this show about Trump allying with Russia and Putin and abandoning...
Democracy, abandoning the ideology of democracy, abandoning allies who are democratic governments and leaders across the world.
We then talked about Trump proclaiming himself a king and taking the entire executive branch under his absolute control such that our economy, our trade, our securities, our banking are all at the whim of him and Elon Musk.
I want to fill out the picture.
If you are a congressperson right now and you stand up to Trump, whether it's not putting Kash Patel through or voting against something in the House that Trump puts forward, not only will you get primaried and have $100 million spent against you so that you lose, you're going to get Gestapo-like threats.
Dan, this is the man that pardoned 1,500 January 6th rioters.
This is the man...
That let the people who attacked our Capitol after he incited a coup out of jail.
Do you think that, like, this is above him?
Right?
And I just want to add one more dimension to this about Kash Patel, which is not really a focus of today.
Kash Patel is now the head of the FBI. Kash Patel is a man who has talked about going after political enemies.
He's a man who has talked about finding those in the media who are anti-Trump and putting them in jail.
Kash Patel is somebody who is a raving conspiracy theorist.
Dan, Tom Tillis says the FBI warned him about credible death threats when considering voting against Pete Hegseth.
Hey, Dan, next time someone has that decision in front of them, it may not be the FBI warning them about credible death threats.
It may be the FBI sending the warning themselves.
That is what Kash Patel, as the head of the FBI, means.
Are you all with me here?
Tom Tillis heard from our intelligence community, hey, there's credible death threats against you right now.
The next time someone's in that position, it may be the FBI saying, hey, Tom, you're going to vote the right way.
Like, you know, you are?
I mean, like, you know, we don't want to, like...
Do you all see what's at stake here now that Kash Patel is head of the FBI? Now, there's a direct line here to Elon, Dan, and I can take us there, but you want to jump in here on Kash or on Tom Tillis or the fact that one of the reasons no one in Congress will stand up to Trump, including Republicans, is they're afraid they might get death threats against themselves or their family?
Do you know what kind of governments have that structure, Dan?
It's not democracies.
It's not where the rule of law works.
It's not where everybody gets a fair shot.
It's called something else.
So anyway, thoughts here?
Yeah, so I'm going to take a hard line here and say cry me a river, Congress people.
Like, just cry me a river.
Because you know what happens to Congress people who don't get re-elected?
They go into the private sector and they make tons of money.
Like, when is the last time somebody talked to somebody who lost in a primary and what?
They're collecting unemployment?
Like, they always land on their feet because that's how our government and our system and our country is structured.
So, number one, I am so tired of hearing Congress people cry about, well, I might lose an election, so I'm just not going to have any principles of any kind or stand up to anything or I'll talk to people off the record and I'll say these things.
Because I'm just like, so what?
So you lose a primary.
So what?
Like, what happens to you?
Nothing.
Credible death threats.
That's awful.
It is.
It's awful.
But guess what you're doing, Congress people, when you let this?
There are millions of Americans who have the threat of death and all kinds of things hanging over them right now because of the policies of the Trump administration, and that's what you're aiding and abetting.
And those people don't get warnings from the FBI. They don't have protections.
They don't have Capitol Police or Secret Service or anything else that they can lean on.
They don't have the resources to go into the private sector and make a quarter million or half a million dollars a year in some cushy job where they can hire their own security people if they really need to do that.
They don't get to do any of that.
So you sit in your offices being a part of the Washington problem that you say that you're opposed to.
While you enable this administration to actively threaten the lives of millions of Americans, and you do it because what?
Because you got some nasty emails?
Or because you're not going to be in Congress anymore, and you'll go out and you'll make more money than most of us will ever dream of making?
I have zero sympathy for the GOP crybabies who want to say, always off the record, or behind closed doors, or unnamed sources, or whatever, about how hard they have it.
As the ruling party under the dictatorial Trump, I just don't want to hear it.
Just leave.
Fine.
Just leave.
Just go do something else.
But stop with the crybaby stuff as you punish immigrants and you punish trans people and you punish women and you actively threaten the lives of millions of people.
You are complicit in this.
You are leveling death threats against Americans by enabling this administration.
So I just obviously get really worked up about this, but I just I am so tired of hearing people cry and whine about, well, Musk is going to come after us and there's going to be somebody with lots of money.
Fine.
Do something else.
Leave Congress.
What is your worst case scenario?
You're not in Congress anymore and you go to your cushy law firm job where your name gets put up as a partner and you make boatloads of money for not doing anything all the time ever.
Yeah, that's rough.
Really rough.
Really rough fallback option for you.
You know.
I get feedback that, you know, I'm usually the angry one and Dan calms me down, so I'm enjoying this a lot.
I just want everyone to know that.
It's about the only thing I'm enjoying about this week.
You know, people wonder, Dan, how you lose a democracy, how you end up with Hitler as supreme leader, how Orban is able to kind of take down the legislative, the parliamentary, the judicial wings of their government.
And it's this.
I mean, like, let's just be really clear where we are, people, because I think we need to just confront the reality we live in and the reality we're going to live in for the foreseeable future.
We have elected members of Congress who, as Dan said, are promised certain protections who are saying, I won't vote against the president because I'm afraid of what might happen to me or my family when it comes to physical violence.
This goes alongside something, Dan, that I want to make sure we get in here today, which is from the Wall Street Journal of all places.
Okay?
Let's just note that by Suzanne Veronica.
A lawyer at Advertising Conglomerate Interpublic Group fielded a phone call in December from a lawyer at X. The message was clear, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.
Get your clients to spend more on Elon Musk's social media platform or else.
Ex-CEO Linda Yaccarino has made comments that seemed like similar warnings in conversations with inter-public executives, according to people with knowledge of those talks.
In addition to this, there's a lawsuit that Elon Musk filed in August that accused the World Federation of Advertisers, an ad trade group, and several big brands, such as Mars, like the candy bars, and CVS Health, of coordinating an illegal boycott of X following Musk's $44 billion takeover of the platform.
There are a lot of companies out there, Dan, who are afraid that if they don't advertise on X, they will be added to that lawsuit.
Once again, please think about a president trying to take over the investigations into fraud, the investigations into the fair kind of workings of our markets.
Advertising, dollars spent, the merger of various conglomerates, all of this stuff.
And then you have the richest man in the world threatening companies to advertise on his platform, or else, not only does he have unlimited funds to use against them, but I don't know, Dan, he has our social security numbers, he's in charge of the treasury, and he's fired tens and close to hundreds of thousands of government workers to date.
Do you see maybe a situation where a lot of groups are just going to feel like we probably should just advertise on X because we don't want to be in the crosshairs of the regime.
We don't want to be in the crosshairs of the totalitarian government.
We will just have to pony up the money to advertise on X, which is becoming state media because it's where Doge, like, you know, posts what they're up to in their activity.
Unless we want, A, to have a lawsuit.
Or B, to face, I don't know, the de facto head of the government who holds press conferences in the Oval Office and went on Hannity this week with the actual president and just talked over him the whole time.
Do you understand how, like, it's impossible to have a fair market if one person in the market has the power and authority of the government to do things to you if you don't do deals with them in that market?
That's not how it's supposed to work.
Nonetheless, we're in a place where our congresspeople feel for their lives if they vote against the president, and people who are trying to do business are being forced into advertising on state media, lest they be sued, or something worse.
We need to wrap this up.
Thoughts on this aspect of things, Dan?
Just, again, I guess this is like my non-sympathy day or something.
In my view, when they talk about an illegal boycott of a company, I just cannot picture that that's going to win in court at some point.
A court's actually going to say you can be obligated to have to advertise on a private business platform.
What are these companies actually doing?
A platform that's full of like...
Nazi propaganda and, like, beheading videos and, like, all kinds of pornography.
Like, oh, sorry, I'm the court.
You better spend your dollars here.
You have to, right?
Yeah, a court that's stacked with a bunch of conservative judges now who are all free market, you know, whatever kind of sort of things.
So what are these corporations actually worried about?
They're worried about, like, just having to pay to go to court.
Having to, like, go, like, again, it's just, it's a lack of nerve.
It's short-sighted.
It's a bad business model.
All of these kinds of things, even in the corporate sector, it's just this preemptive compliance that just feeds the whole thing that they say they oppose, because how does anybody look at Trump or Musk and say, oh yeah, we gain a lot by giving in to them?
Nobody gains anything.
And these companies, again, if you're a CEO of a company, what happens?
Like, worst case scenario?
Oh, yeah, I guess I lost my job and I went from making like $50 million a year for this company to making like, I don't know, $40 million for this one over here for a few years and my golden parachute sort of option.
I just, again, I've got no sympathy for it.
I've got no sympathy for multi-billion dollar international corporations that are afraid of having to go to court for lawsuits that are probably never going to happen.
And if they do, they're not going to go anywhere.
All in the name of turning a profit.
While trying to say that there's some principled reason behind it.
It's this machine that feeds itself and keeps everything rolling.
Everybody, if you have not learned anything today, please learn something that I've been trying to convey to you for six months.
There are no more free market conservatives.
They want to bend the market.
They want to legislate and weaponize the market.
They want to make the market a matter of morality, but also a matter of bending to the will of the guy who calls himself a king.
There's no more free market conservatives.
And if there are, they're either out of Congress, they're out of the Republican Party, and they've run and hide.
Paul Ryan, Dan?
We're a long way from Paul Ryan and his abs at this point, aren't we?
Right?
We're a long way from, you know...
Barry Goldwater.
We're a long way from any of that libertarian stuff.
The libertarian side of any...
Do not come at me and tell me conservatism in the United States is all about, yeah, get the government off my back.
I just want to do business.
Did you hear what we just said for the last 10 minutes?
It's over.
That does not exist.
You only get to do business as long as your business aligns with the king.
That's where we are.
And just real quick, when is the last time anybody heard Musk or X or somebody else coming?
Threatening all the people on the right who threaten to boycott John Deere or Tractor Supply Company or Walmart for DEI initiatives or whatever.
I don't hear the right-wing Justice Department or anybody else coming after them saying, we're going to sue you for boycotting.
We're going to force you to have to shop at these places.
I don't hear any of that.
So that's the other piece of it.
Don't say this is not somehow ideological.
That it's not about building an authoritarian regime and making sure that it's white supremacist in nature and everything else that we've seen.
Let's take a break.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, we got a couple of minutes here.
Talk to me about ICE and churches and the politics of sacred places.
Yeah, so we'll try to do this quickly.
People know that in the past, there was a good CNN article by Catherine, and I don't know how to pronounce her last name, if it's Schwasset or Schwasset, something like that.
I apologize if I'm like butchering the last name.
But it was a great article discussing Christian congregations and their responses to Trump efforts to sort of ramp up ICE activities and deportation and so forth.
And the sort of context of this is the Trump administration rescinded an order essentially prohibiting ICE arrests at churches and places of worship.
And people know this.
I think the schools got more attention on this, that...
ICE could come into schools and seek out people that were there that were undocumented or, you know, start hanging around the car line.
You start figuring out maybe who's undocumented and which parents are picking kids up and things like that.
But churches were on this list as well.
And here's what was said by Benjamin Huffman, who was the acting Homeland Security Secretary at the time.
He said criminals will no longer be able to hide in America's schools and churches to avoid arrest.
The Trump administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement and instead trust them to use common sense.
And so this brings up the issue of so-called sanctuary churches, churches that, as a part of their Christian mission and their Christian understanding, believe that they are called to provide sanctuary to those who are undocumented in the country and so forth.
And the article looked at a range of responses to this, and it's really pretty intense.
It's from congregations that have moved.
They're, say, Spanish language services online.
They're no longer meeting in person because they're afraid that ICE is going to come in and target them and, like, round up their congregants.
There was another far extreme of this.
A church in Oregon whose pastor said this.
He said, we are a sanctuary church.
If you're afraid of being deported by hateful and unjust laws, let's call them what they are, you are welcome to come find that safe space.
He said, and this was by the Reverend Mark Knudsen of Portland's Augustana Lutheran Church.
And he went on to say this.
He said, if there were a mass action in Portland, we'd have hundreds of people coming to the church knowing that it's a safe place.
And we would not allow ICE to enter.
But we would also call every local news station around and surround ICE with people in the news.
And if it gets ugly, it's going to be recorded.
And that should really upset people all around the country.
So we're ready to make that stand.
So you've got churches.
Seeking to do what in their mind would be to serve the dispossessed, the marginalized, the least of these, the poor, the orphan, the widow.
That would be their sort of understanding of their prophetic calling.
And a range of responses from defiance to ICE to those who have sort of essentially gone into hiding because they're afraid of what this administration will do.
There are churches where there are undocumented members who are leading the churches openly.
Their own immigration appeals are withstanding and so forth.
All of these things are before the courts.
All of this is going on.
But here's what really caught my attention in this article, okay?
And it was the contrast from this.
Excuse me.
There was a megachurch pastor who sounded a little different, Brad.
He sounded different from the people that are, like, having their churches go into hiding or having to make bold proclamations.
This is what he said.
This is a pastor named Reverend Rodriguez.
He said, rest assured.
I have received assurances from those in authority that raids will not occur in churches.
Good, God-fearing families who've been here for decades are not the primary target.
Note the primary target.
They always use that language, the primary target.
Not that they're not targets, not that they won't be targeted, but they're not the primary target.
He says the focus remains on removing the criminal element that seeks to harm our communities.
Now, why different?
He leads a church called New Season in Sacramento, outside Los Angeles.
He's the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, and in the past, he's been an advisor to Donald Trump.
He's a pastor of a megachurch, Brad.
He's a pastor of a church with a lot of wealth, with a lot of money, a church that I'm pretty sure, if you were to poll their members, are pretty right-leaning.
He's somebody who has been in the Trump inner circle, and so for him, he says, I've got nothing to worry about.
He says, initially when I read it, that is the executive order and the recension and so forth, I had concerns and I did my due diligence and I spoke to those that know.
And my concerns have been addressed.
There is no intention of raiding churches.
None.
Zero.
So as I read this and I look, I'm like, wow, look at these really different responses.
Is it that these other churches that have gone into hiding, they didn't do their due diligence?
They didn't ask around?
They didn't find out what was going on?
Or is it, Brad, that...
Part of this administration is, if you're the powerful, wealthy evangelical church, the suburban church, the church with a bunch of voters who went for Trump this time around, is there a good chance that you have zero threat of ICE raids?
Probably.
But if you're a church that not only has immigrants, but, I don't know, probably has LGBTQ congregants, that probably firms, I don't know, social justice initiatives, are you in trouble?
Are you going to be targeted?
I think you are.
So I think that this article about the different responses that these churches of different kinds are having to ice also highlights, basically, if you're a Christian nationalist church, you're fine.
We're not going to take a hard look at your congregation.
We're not going to come in and break up families.
But if you're a church that isn't that, if you're in an urban area that didn't vote for Trump, you are going to be a target and you do need to worry.
And we will target you and we'll define you as criminal simply because you're here.
I think it highlights the real dynamics of faith and politics as they relate to the Trump administration, as they relate to ICE, as they relate to issues like immigration.
I'll just say that that megachurch pastor is fooling himself because I hear what you're saying, that the church that has openly welcomed Yes,
those churches are going to be the targets first, for sure.
And especially the Portland's of the world and the Seattle's of the world and the places that are seen as not friendly to Donald Trump.
But at some point, on some day...
The Trump administration, the white supremacists who support him, Tom Homan, etc., they will decide that your church, regardless of anything else, has enough brown people in it.
There's probably some folks that they should go in and get.
So that day will come way too late for anybody to wake up or to whatever, but it will come.
And I don't think that it's going to do much to sway.
Just one more quick point about that.
When we talk about this, if you build your movement on the idea of perpetual threat, that you are perpetually under threat by non-white immigrants, yeah, you start with, let's call it the low-hanging fruit, the easy, obvious targets.
But once you're through those, you will have to keep that threat alive.
And the way that you do that is by targeting anybody who doesn't fit.
That idealized vision of white America.
And that's exactly what you're highlighting.
It will come to these churches, even though they think it won't.
They won't come for them first.
But because they have to position immigrants as a perpetual threat, the time will come.
Trumpism is a promise to get the people that you think are the problem or the invader.
And what most people don't realize who vote for Trump is that somebody thinks of them as the person who needs to get got.
It could be that mega church pastor.
It could be someone else.
But fascism asks you to either be scared that you're in the crosshairs, as we've been talking about all day today, or it asks you to be somebody who goes and puts people in the crosshairs.
You either have to be...
An attacker or afraid.
All right.
Let's go to reasons for hope, Dan.
Judge Reyes, overseeing the executive order about trans care, says this.
Defending women from gender ideology, extremism, and restoring biological truth to the federal government.
And the EO states that sex shall refer to an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female.
It's the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.
Do you see that or do you remember that?
Jason C. Lynch, the lawyer representing the administration, I will take the court's word for it.
Judge Reyes, you understand as a matter of biology, it's just incorrect.
Lynch, do I understand that to be incorrect as a biological matter?
Judge Reyes, yes, it's incorrect.
You understand that, right?
Jason Lynch, I don't understand that to be incorrect.
Judge Reyes, you understand that not everyone has an XX or XY chromosome.
Jason C. Lynch.
Honestly, no, I don't.
Judge Reyes goes through all the ways that intersex people work, all the ways that people have different chromosome configurations, XXX, and so on and so forth, talks about the ways that genitalia can appear with folks who have various gender configurations, whether that's female or male,
blah, blah, blah, the ways that folks can have ambiguous genitalia, and the point being, I'm happy to have you guys brief this more if you want, but this, and I'm quoting Judge Reyes, I'm telling you right now, there are people who are neither male or female, and so the premise of the executive order is just incorrect.
Pretty good stuff, Judge Reyes.
It aligns with Galatians 3.27.
There's neither male nor female.
I don't know.
You know, then what am I going to say?
Whatever.
We're not going to do theology right now.
All right, Dan, what's your reason for hope?
The reason for hope is that Trump's polling is not great.
He has higher approval ratings than he's had in the past, but a couple polls this week, there was a CNN, SSRS poll, and a Washington Post, Ipsos poll.
Among other things, they showed a majority of Americans think that he has overstepped his presidential authority.
A majority of Americans say he hasn't done enough to lower high prices, which he said he would do on day one.
His approval rating is below 50. 62% of Americans, including almost half of Republicans, say he hasn't done enough, again, to reduce prices.
His tariffs are unpopular.
Musk is unpopular.
What does all that mean?
It means that Trump, like lots of newly elected presidents, has kind of a honeymoon period.
It's coming to an end, and we'll see what happens as he doesn't do the things he said he was going to do and that he would do so easily as he enacts economic policies that every major economist says will only do things like raise prices and increase inflation and so forth.
And as he continues to run roughshod, most Americans don't support, for example, the firing of thousands of federal employees.
So I only take hope from the polls because I think that Trump...
I think the polls matter to Trump, and we'll see what happens as we go along, as he becomes less popular, as he can't blame the Biden administration.
But I take hope in that.
There were a lot of people that I think were sold a bill of goods.
They voted for Trump.
They're beginning to realize that they didn't get that, and I think that that's a hopeful sign moving forward.
All right, y'all.
Well, this Tuesday, the first episode of One Nation Indivisible, Andrew Seidel is debuting.
Check it out.
You don't want to miss him talking with Annika Brockschmidt on whether or not we're living in 1930s Germany.
He's going to be doing this weekly.
So if you love this show, you're going to love Andrew's show.
And if you sign up for Swatch Premium, which is on sale for 50 bucks a month, you get access to the bonus content from Andrew's show too.
So don't miss it.
We're so excited about it.
Other than that, we'll be back next week with our regular programming.
Me on Monday with an interview.
Dan on Wednesday with It's in the Code and the Weekly Roundup.
