November 1, 2025 • 34 mins
ABC News’ Jonathan Karl details his new book Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign that Changed America. Then The Lever’s David Sirota examines his new book Master Plan: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
We're on vacation today, but that doesn't mean we don't
have a great show for you. The Lever's David Sirota
stuffs by to talk about his new book master Plan,
The Hidden Plot to legalize Corruption in America. But first
we'll talk to ABC News Jonathan Carl and he's going
to tell us all about his new book, Retribution, Donald
Trump and the campaign that changed America.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, Hole's politics. How are you, young Carl?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Doing great? Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm so excited, so talk to me about this book.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
Look, as you know, and I never would have thought
this would have been my destiny. But this is now
the fourth book I've written on the Trump era, starting
with when I was covering him the first time around,
and I wrote Front, wrote The Trump Show, and it
just keeps going. This, Molly, is the I think the
most important of the books I've written, and certainly it
was the most challenging. This is the longest book, it's
(00:59):
the most heavily reported book, and I think it's you know,
it's called Retribution. I chose that name the day after
Donald Trump won in November last year. And I chose
it for a reason. And you see it playing out
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, I mean it's kind of shocking. My favorite thing
on the campaign trail was where they'd be like, well,
you don't really want to exact retribution on your enemies,
and he'd be like, no.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
No, I do, I do.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
I mean we probably figured that out when he did
his first official rally of the campaign in Waco, Texas.
And at that rally, as you recall, he played on
the big screens behind the stage those huge jumbotron's images
of the January sixth attack on the Capitol, and of
course played the J six choir singing the national anthem.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, I would love you to just talk to us
about like, why, what we can learn from this? We
are watching retribution in real time, but what are the
sort of lessons from this book?
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Well, there were two moments that really drove my desire
to do another one of these books. The first was
going to see Donald Trump on trial in New York
in that dingy one hundred Center Street courtroom where he
was forced to appear four days a week. Compelled to
be there, had to sit silently while people on the
(02:25):
stands said, you know, terrible things about him, embarrassing things
about him, Stormy Daniels testifying about Trump wanting to spanker
with a magazine with his face on the cover, and
also being there as Joe Biden dropped out of the race,
it just occurred to me that we were watching a campaign,
a presidential campaign unlike any other that we have ever
(02:49):
seen in American history. I mean, maybe you have to
go back to like nineteen twelve to find something remotely
as chaotic and unpredictable and also, in this case, something
so high stated. So I started, you know, obviously I'm
reporting day to day for ABC News, I'm doing my
day job. But as I'm doing it, I was coming
back to what I would want to try to tell
(03:12):
the larger story of what was really happening in this campaign,
with the benefit of a little bit of hindsight and
the time to do some more in depth reporting about
what was happening. And that's the product of this book.
I mean, it's been frankly, it's been an working on.
This has been an obsession of mine for over a year.
There's a lot that It tells you about how Donald
(03:32):
Trump came back to power and what his intention was
from the start to do with that power, which is
in large part to get even at all of those
who he believes have wronged him.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
What does it end?
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Well, I don't know where it ends.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
I mean, that's what all of us are thinking all
the time.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Right Yeah, And I you know, I feel like I've
known Trump for more than thirty years. I've I've spent
so much of my professional life now, you know, cross
I'm ling him. I can tell you a lot about
Trump how it ends. I can't really tell you obviously,
you have all this talk now that he doesn't want
to leave the White House, the abandon talking about, you know,
him running again in twenty twenty eight. Donald Trump's not
(04:13):
ruling out trying to I mean, constitution, what constitution? You know,
staying in power. I don't really think that's where he's going.
But here's the thing, Molly, how does he pass the baton?
At what point does he stand up and make it official?
I'm out, I'm not running JD. It's yours, Marco, it's yours,
(04:34):
or you two get to fight it out and whoever else.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
But you know, RFK Junior r f K.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Believe me, I don't know how that happens, because the
minute that happens, he becomes a lame duck and the
attention goes to somewhere else. I covered the Obama White House,
and let me tell you, twenty fifteen twenty sixteen at
the Obama White House was often like a ghost town.
I mean, they were still doing things, but nobody was
paying any attention. You know, poor Josh Ernest, who was
(05:02):
the press secretary at the time, would have these hour
and a half briefings. Hardly any of the regular correspondents
were in there covering them, and they weren't really making
any news because the attention was all on at first
Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and the next you know
who would be the next president, and then of course
eventually Trump.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
That is attention, right if he admits he's not running again,
all of a sudden, the man behind the curtain, I
mean that gone.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
I mean, look, what really drove the reporting in this
book is seeing how Donald Trump left office disgraced a
pria he was banished on social media. I mean, think
about that. He was banished on social media and most
of the major companies in this country announced that they
would not be donating money, not just not to Trump,
but to anybody who was aligned with Trump in challenging
(05:50):
the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
He was gone. He was a pariah.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
This is why when Kevin McCarthy went to visit him
shortly after he left office, it was such a huge story.
Oh my god, God, what's Kevin McCarthy doing. And you know,
he managed to recapture the Republican Party in a way
that he had never captured it in the first place.
This entirely, you know, he has this power, and you
(06:16):
know how he managed to do that, and how he
wants to use that power. I think points to a
very different second term than what we saw on Trump's
first term.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Did he ever call you?
Speaker 5 (06:26):
He does?
Speaker 3 (06:26):
He calls me. I call him, I tell you.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
One of the strange things that I started to do
during the campaign was during the fall campaign, I would
sometimes call him every two or three days, and there
was a much higher percentage chance of him answering the
phone than say the deputy press secretary of the Kamala
Harris campaign. Mostly it's me calling him, but there were occasions,
and there are occasions where where he calls me, and
(06:52):
it's a highly unusual thing.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
I want to go.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Back to the sentence you just said that it's more
likely to get down Trump on the phone that it
was to get the deputy press secretary of the Kamala
Harris campaign on the phone, because I think that is
part of why come won.
Speaker 5 (07:10):
Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
I don't think there's any question. You know, we were
talking about Jeb Bush a moment ago. It actually kind
of brings back memories of Jeb Bush back when those
in those salad days, when he was the Republican front runner.
He was very hard to get through too, and it
did precious few interviews. His campaign events were tightly choreographed,
just like Hillary Clinton's were, And certainly I think Kamala
(07:34):
Harris did that even more so than those. I mean,
when you think about her, she and I tracked. Keep
in mind that this book is about what happened to
Biden and about and about Harris's quick rise and fall.
And you know, Harris gives the sense that one hundred
and seven days she ran out of time, she didn't
have enough time. In fact, it was the reverse. In
(07:55):
fact what happened is she was strongest during those first say,
thirty to forty days, and then tapered off. And part
of it was this intensely careful, precious few interviews, precious
few interactions with the press when Trump was out there
for everybody.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
And if you do that, if you do very few interviews,
then every minute you talk to anyone is scrutinized within
an inch of its life.
Speaker 5 (08:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
So, I mean you remember the first interview, which was
with Dana Bash, right, and it was she comes in,
she effectively wins the nomination. You know, there's no convention yet,
but she's effectively won the nomination and does absolutely nothing.
And for a period of a couple of weeks. The
best answer that I could get is that, you know,
she was spending much of her time preparing for this
(08:43):
big first scene in an interview.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
When she disappeared its August. I remember in August thinking
where is she?
Speaker 5 (08:51):
Why?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Why is she not out there? And you know what's
so interesting is that Hillary Clinton had a couple of
weeks too in August where she's effectively disappeared. You'll remember
Hillary's house, yeah, right, And maybe she was sick, maybe
she was not sick, but it didn't matter because if
you create a vacuum, anyone who's around will fill it.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
Yeah, I mean, to be entirely fair here, Harris had
a tremendous first couple of weeks.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Tremendous.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
I mean it was people who had thought that she
didn't have what it takes or was going to be
a terrible candidate were like, wait a minute, where was
this Kamala Harris.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
She's good, She's got it down, so.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Uh and then it was disappearing at least and then it.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
Was disappearing, and that she does the CNN interview and
because to your point, she hasn't been doing interviews, not
just as a candidate, but really not even as vice president.
I mean it was not a strong interview.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Right, and picked apart within an inch of It's like
because if you're Donald Trump and you're doing I mean,
like I think about how much media Donald Trump does
in a day when he's not calling journalists and you know,
I mean three four hours a day, I mean full
spray of this that a press conference, and then those
(10:04):
like insane cabinet meetings that are televised, which are like
you know a little North Korea, but you still have
a visual of the guy out there. And so you
say something crazy, if you've said seven thousand other things
since then, it becomes sort of hard to keep trap.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Yeah, and it's that, you know, it's that Bannon esque
flood the zone. You know, he may do five things
that are completely crazy and or you know, get would
get picked apart and get hit, but he does twenty
five other things, so you forget about those things he
just did. I mean, and it's as a journalist, you're
just you've got not just a fire hose coming at you,
(10:44):
but you have ten fire hoses coming at you.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
By the way.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
Also, why to me it was so important to write
this book is to try to get a little bit
of a step back and what did we just go through?
What did we just live through? And to go through
and take the time and to pick apart the key
moments that brought us to this point in American history,
and to try to go back and see what was
(11:09):
really happening behind the scenes. That's what I tried to
do with this book.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
This is a very different white House than Trump one
point zero, like, very different, different, priority is different, everything
different on fetteredness. So explain to me what you see
as the sort of main players in this White House.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Well, the first thing that makes it entirely different is
he is actually trying to fundamentally change things. He's going
to have an impact on this country and by the way,
also on the physical layout of the White House that
he never had in the first term. You don't say,
I mean, I mean the first term, all the chaos,
all the attention, all that took place when he left office,
(11:52):
he left office, it was ephemeral. There was not that
much of a lasting impact. That is not the case already,
just you know, less than a year into this White House.
And the two other biggest factors are he comes in
with an agenda that was part of what he was
into last time, but it wasn't central really, which is
(12:14):
to get back at the people that screwed him over
in his minds. I mean, he faced an election where
he was either going to maybe go to prison or
become the most powerful president that we have seen in
our lifetimes, thanks to a Supreme Court immunity decision, thanks
to a Congress that is entirely obsequious, and going to
do whatever he wants, the most powerful president of our lifetime.
(12:38):
So he becomes that, and he's going to use that
power to get back at everybody that investigated him, that
attacked him, the Republicans who tried to rein him in.
So not just this isn't just prosecutors and Democratic opponents
who impeached him or any of that. This is also
the Republicans that tried to rain him in enemies list.
(13:01):
High on that enemy's list are people like well, Jim Comey.
I wouldn't be surprised to see people like General Kelly
on that list, Mark Milly on that list, people who
served in his administration, Bill Barr. You had Bannon the
other day saying that Barr should go to prison, that
Bill Barr should be prosecuted. Is talk about that?
Speaker 1 (13:24):
No, I don't want to think about that. How much
is Bannon world talking to Trump World?
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Well, I don't know about Bannon World or Trump World,
but Bannon is talking to Trump absolutely?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Wow, all right?
Speaker 4 (13:35):
And there is absolutely a you know, a line there.
And also Bannon two things. One, he does have an
influence on Trump. He makes sure that his show he's
on for four hours.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
A day on the war and better him than May.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
And when he has the key messages that he wants,
they go to Natalie Harp Trump's assistant and they go
to Trump and Trump watches them and also.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Natalie prints it out right.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Well, these are video clips, so she she sets up
the video clips the human prins.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
But but I describe a scene in the book that
is really kind of mind blowing that helps you understand
what happened when Zelensky came to the White House in
February and you had that big confrontation. Well, in advance
of that, there was a National Security meeting with Vance
heg Seth, Rubio, Waite, Coough, Besant, then the National Security
(14:28):
Advisor Mike Waltz, and their meeting at the White House
with Trump and they're going over that minerals deal that
we're going to sign with the Ukraine, and Trump says,
get Steve Bannon on the phone. Waltz calls Bannon. Anyway,
they go back and forth. Bannon like puts Waltz to
h to voicemail. Then Trump calls Bannon himself on his
phone and Bannon takes the call and for the next
(14:49):
half hour, Bannon is basically lecturing the National Security team
on how they can't trust that punk Zelensky, which is
what Bannon calls him, and how if you give him
a you know, if you do a security he's gonna
want he's gonna want a natural resources deal. He's going
to want security guarantees. You cannot trust him, you cannot
do him. And that really Again, this has never been
(15:10):
reported before, but I think that that incident, and I've
talked to many people that were involved in that set
the stage for the confrontation with Zelenski. And that was Bannon.
He's not in the White House, he's not on the
National security team, but in that moment he had more
influence than the national security advisor of the Secretary of.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
State John Carl Thank you, Malli, I.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Love talking to you. Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
David Sirota is the founder of The Lever, the screenplay
author of Don't Look Up, and the author of Master Planned,
The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Welcome to Fast Politics, Dave, Thank you, thanks for having me.
I have so many places I want to start because
it's so bad, but let's start with John Roberts, the
man who just wants to cut away our freedoms versus
he wants to use a scalpel rather than a chainsaw,
but he'll use a chainsaw if he needs to.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (16:08):
I mean, we're on the twenty year anniversary now of
John Roberts' takeover of the Supreme Court, which is that's
really how you make yourself feel old is to realize
it's been twenty years, and I think people have forgotten
what that few month period was like in two thousand
and five, where there was Sandra Day O'Connor and William
Rehnquist were suddenly out of the picture and John Roberts
(16:32):
and Sam Alito were installed very very quickly on that court.
And soon after that, of course, came the Citizens United decision,
which transformed American politics almost overnight. I mean, our book
is about the master plan that conservatives hatched over fifty
years to deregulate the campaign finance system, kill off anti
(16:54):
corruption laws, anti bribery laws, and Citizens United was one
of the big obviously earning points, again engineered by John Roberts.
Speaker 5 (17:04):
And the thing that drives me crazy.
Speaker 6 (17:06):
And probably drives anyone crazy who remembers back in two
thousand and five was how he was presented as this reasonable,
almost moderate candidate, and I remember distinctly sort of trying
to sound the alarm in the position that I was
in like, this guy is not some easy going moderate.
(17:29):
This guy is a movement conservative. Arguably, I guess you'd
call him that. Maybe the second movement conservative put on
the court. I mean, you had Scalia, But this guy
was sort of groomed by the conservative movement to be
everything that he has come to be. And to my mind,
there are three priorities when you look at John Roberts' career, right,
(17:49):
I mean to really understand John Roberts passions. There is
his passion to destroy and dismantle voting rights laws.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
We really dosate the voting rights law.
Speaker 5 (17:59):
Really that he's been working on it forever.
Speaker 6 (18:01):
There is his passion to close the courthouse doors to
anyone who is inconvenient to political and corporate power. But
by that I mean his war on what's known as standing.
You are not allowed in this court. We won't even
adjudicate your issue because you do not have standing. Again,
that is a John Roberts passion. And then the other
(18:23):
John Roberts passion is equating and enshrining the connection between
money and free speech, the idea that money is a
constitutionally protected form of speech, which was started before John Robertson.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Right, it feels like a Mitch McConnell.
Speaker 6 (18:42):
Yes, Mitch McConnell, the Buckley case in the seventies. But
John Roberts really has taken that the Roberts Court has
to its logical extreme.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
In John Roberts defense, he has very rich donors.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
I guess that is it. In his defense, I.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Mean, these guys need of ation every once in a while.
And as Thomas has shown us, you know, those are
re's are expensive. I know.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
And the thing, the thing that kind of blows me away.
Speaker 6 (19:10):
Although the Court, as we traced in our book, is
is doing these rulings, deregulating.
Speaker 5 (19:16):
The campaign finance system.
Speaker 6 (19:17):
And narrowing the interpretation of anti bribery laws down the
to the point where.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Last se ribes are they bribed?
Speaker 5 (19:26):
No, they're protuities. Right.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
I have to say this out loud repeatedly because it's
almost like people won't believe it. In the last court term,
there was a case about a local official who had
gotten a payment from a government contractor. After the local
official delivered the government contract to this contractor gotten a payment,
and the court ruled that that was not a bribe,
(19:48):
that was a so called legal critulaluit.
Speaker 5 (19:52):
It's a tip, right.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
I just want to follow that up for one second
because it comes back in season two, which is Tom
Holman is wept up in an FBI investigation where he
is not the target, right, he just wanders in and
accepts a bag of fifty thousand dollars in cash, and
they say this is the Biden Justice Department says, well,
we may not even be able to prosecute this because
(20:15):
the Supreme Court just ruled that bribes aren't bribes.
Speaker 6 (20:19):
I mean, that's the world we are living in now.
And again, to underscore the point you alluded to, these
rulings are coming down at the very time that some
of these justices engineering them are accepting lavish gifts from
billionaires who have business in some cases before the.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Court in all cases right, or they're connected to someone
who does right.
Speaker 5 (20:44):
While they are legalizing corruption.
Speaker 6 (20:47):
They are effectively engaging in the kinds of practices without,
by the way, disclosure. We only know about that because
of reporting. They weren't in Thomas's case, he didn't disclose it,
et cetera, et cetera. So they are in an undisclosed
way engaging in the kind of behavior that they are
issuing rulings legalizing I mean it's mind blowing, yes it is.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
And yet it is also very much exactly what you
think of when you think of these guys. Right. The
thing that bothers me the most is the idea that
they are like, well, this is textualism.
Speaker 5 (21:20):
Right, which is crazy to me. Right, I mean, that
doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 6 (21:23):
The idea that the founders in the Constitution kind of
legalized bribery or equated by the way money with speech,
it's just severed from any textual reality. Frank, I'm not
a constitutional scholar here, but like the idea that money
is speech, the idea, by the way, that corporations have
(21:45):
constitutional rights is simply not in the Constitution at all.
And the court used to distinguish between sort of corporate
speech and human speech. The Court used to distinguish between
actual human beings and corporate persons. That's all been thrown out,
and we have to ask the question of why has
it been thrown out. It's because throwing it out provides
(22:08):
disproportionate political power to essentially conservatives who know that they
can't legislatively pass their unpopular agenda through democratic, small d
democratic institutions. In other words. I think this is a
missed point a lot like why is the conservative movement
doing it this way? Why do they want to legalize corruption,
(22:29):
Why do they want to deregulate the campaign finance system.
It's because if you realize that your agenda tax cuts
for the wealthy, et cetera, et cetera. If you realize
your agenda is wildly unpopular among voters who were supposed
to be in control of things in a democratic republic.
If you realize it's unpopular, then you have to rig
(22:50):
the game to make sure that those policies can go
into effect, and that allow you to circumvent the democratic
institutions that would say no to those policies.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
I think that's right. This court seems, especially the last
couple shadow dock at rulings we've seen, they have been
so blatantly partisan. It would be hard for me. And
I am an optimist, a person who has lots of
friends who used to be in the federal society, for
whom they really want you to believe that Emmy is
(23:23):
smart and Kavanaugh has some kind of ethos. But everything
I've seen over in this term especially has just been partisan.
Speaker 6 (23:33):
Hacker right, agreed, and now we've got a term coming
up talking about corruption, where jd Vance has quietly and
deliberately given the Supreme Court an opportunity to go even
beyond Citizens United and eliminate all of what's ever left
of campaign finance rules. It's incredible that this case hasn't
(23:53):
gotten more attention.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
What's the case.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
It's about the NRSC, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee
versus the f V.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
That's technically what it is.
Speaker 6 (24:02):
Essentially, jd Vance went into court and said that a
prohibition or a limit on how much party committees can
coordinate their spending with candidates. He's arguing that's unconstitutional. Now
people hear that and they're like, oh, that's kind of esoteric.
That's kind of like, what does that really mean. The
point is it's a rule about how much donors can
(24:24):
pass through their money to candidates through a party. The
idea of the limits was to say you can't use
a party committee to get around campaign contribution limits.
Speaker 5 (24:34):
That's what's at issue here, right.
Speaker 6 (24:35):
The Supreme Court has long held up that super PACs
can spend what they want, but if you want to
give money directly to a candidate, there are limits there
because that can be a corrupting force. Vance's case is
designed to give the court a way to do away
with all of the remaining campaign finance limits, the remaining
limitations on donations. This would essentially take Citizens United and
(24:58):
put it on steroids at a time that polls tell
us the public across the political spectrum, by the way,
the public hates Citizens United. And so you have Dvance
going into court at a moment when the public loathes
Citizens United and is giving the now six to three
court the chance to go way beyond Citizens United. And
I don't know what's going to come in this case,
(25:20):
but I'm not feeling all that optimistic because get this,
the Biden administration was defending existing law. When Trump came in,
Trump's Department of Justice switched sides and says it is
refusing to defend the current law. And way it gets
even more crazy. So then the Supreme Court has to
(25:40):
appoint a lawyer to represent the FEC and they appoint
a former John Roberts clerk who was clerking for Roberts
during the original Citizens United decisions. So, in other words,
the conservative movement has triangulated the entire case. They engineered
the case they have the Supreme Court, and a conservative
(26:02):
movement lawyer is now the defense lawyer for the existing law.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
I want to talk about where we go next. There's
another case that's in front of the Supreme Court that
I think is sort of my favorite case of this
semester because it's the one where than the most conflicted,
and that is the tariff case. So you've got Coke
Brothers versus Trump, and this is I think my favorite
(26:30):
case because this Supreme Court is so captured. It's a
captured institution period paragraph it's owned by wealthy conservative donors,
but it's also owned by Donald Trump. And here's a
case where the wealthy conservative donors want the tariffs gone
because the tariffs are terrible for business and make no sense.
And Donald Trump wants ultimate power via the unitary executive theory.
(26:54):
He is a god king and he can use these terriffs.
And you know, the thing that I think Trump loves
so much about tariffs is that it is really an
opportunity to pick winners and losers. You know, It's one
thing to do crony capitalism with our economy, but he
can do crony capitalism now with other countries' economies. So
how do you think this goes down.
Speaker 6 (27:14):
It's a great question, and I agree with you. Trump
likes tariffs because it forces other countries. And by the way,
big donors donor corporations to kiss his ring. There was
a study that we reported on at the lever from
the tariffs in the first term, in which it showed
that the companies that donated money to Trump and the
Republicans were more likely to get exemptions from the tariffs.
Speaker 5 (27:35):
In a sense, it's a corruption scheme. Now here's the thing.
Speaker 6 (27:38):
You're totally right to hone in on the fact that
the Supreme Court, the conservative Supreme Court, is caught between
always wanting to do what big money wants and always
wanting to give Donald Trump, and not just Trump, but
give the executive branch, certainly their executive branch when it's
controlled by Republicans, always wanting to give the executive branch power.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
And also they don't want Trump to be mad at
them totally. I mean, like this is an entire culture
of Americans who are scared of Trump's tweets exactly.
Speaker 6 (28:07):
So you've got these two conflicting forces. And what's really
interesting about the Supreme Court. Before we get to the
tariff stuff is to look at what they've done with
Trump's attempt to remove independent agency appointees the court. What's
really fascinating here is that the court has allowed Trump
to remove appointees at the agencies that are problematic to
(28:29):
corporate power, the FTC, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but
they have not allowed Trump to remove a member of
the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Board because that would be bad for the markets exactly.
Speaker 6 (28:41):
So what was fascinating was they somehow made up this
idea that the FTC commissioners are not independent, so they
can be thrown out ps they're annoying to corporations, but
nobody on the Federal Reserve Board aka Wall.
Speaker 5 (28:55):
Streets Institution can be removed at all.
Speaker 6 (28:58):
So I wonder if they're going to try to creatively
do something visa VI tariffs where they sort of say
something like these specific tariffs are not allowed aka business
doesn't like them, we can get rid of them, but
the president.
Speaker 5 (29:12):
Still retains the power.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
Like I wonder if they're going to try to find
some ridiculous middle ground in a binary situation.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Tariff sybey INDs but not batteries or something.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
Something like that.
Speaker 6 (29:25):
I mean I think you're totally right that it is
fascinating that they've built this machine and now the machine
is like sort of in a sense, at war with itself.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
I mean, that is the one bright spot in this
whole fucking disaster, is that you see MAGA is so
drunk with power that they're coming after each other. I mean,
the Wall Street Journal, the woke Wall Street Journal, perhaps
you've heard of it, owned by Rupert Murdoch, had a
piece today about Laura Lumer targeting MAGA.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
Trump like was a story for like three hours.
Speaker 6 (29:55):
But Trump going to war with Leonard Leo was like
kind of blew my mind. And for those who don't,
I know, Leonard Leo was the conservative activist.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
He's how we got here. Leonard Leo is how we
have a court that rubber stamps everything Donald Trump wants
to do.
Speaker 6 (30:08):
Exactly So, Leonard Leo is the conservative activist who packs
the court. Over twenty twenty five years, Federalist Society guy,
some of the Federalist Society judges at a certain point
once in a while sort of said hey, Trump, you
can't do this. Trump freaks out and essentially disavows. Leonard
Leo says he's like a bad guy.
Speaker 5 (30:26):
Right. It's like I've used the example of the French
Revolution dynamic.
Speaker 6 (30:30):
It feels like the Committee on Public Justice, right Like,
Robespierre's running the Committee on Public Justice and he's getting
his way. You know, they're doing the guillotine to everybody,
and then all of a sudden, it accelerates, it accelerates,
and then Robespierre's head is in the guillotine, right like,
metaphorically speaking, like the revolution quote unquote is sort of
accelerates so fast that it starts eating itself. And I
(30:51):
feel like that's what's happening right now. I don't know,
like we're in the abyss. I don't know where we
go from here.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
It's so interesting because I feel like we agree on
a lot of things about how we got here, and
like the many ways in which Democrats were unable to
bring a knife to a knife fight and brought a
stuffed animal to a knife fight, and then we're like,
just we're so disappointed by Republicans doing fascism. It does
(31:18):
strike me though, that all this energy they had saved
up for Dems and now Dems were like, we can't
legislate this, and so now they're using it on each other.
Speaker 6 (31:28):
Yeah, I mean, look the story of the Democrats. Let's
go back to where we started, John Roberts twenty years ago.
I'm old enough to remember that lots and lots of
Democrats voted to put John Roberts.
Speaker 5 (31:38):
On that court.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
And I remember back then, and I was a much
younger person. I was looking around being like what am
I missing here? Like why are they saying such nice
things about this person and helping the Republicans install him
on the court. And I don't think that's like a
historical anomaly. I think it was kind of emblematic of
this idea that the party and its leaders believed that
(32:00):
simply by adhering to so called norms, everything would at
a certain point revert back to normal. At this point, clearly,
that calculation, if you can call it, that was wrong.
I do understand people say it wasn't that they were wrong,
it's that they were a lot of them.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Were complicit, right, I don't agree.
Speaker 5 (32:22):
Maybe not all of them were complicit.
Speaker 6 (32:24):
I think the term doesn't necessarily mean you were sort
of deliberately in on it.
Speaker 5 (32:29):
It's that you were willing to tolerate it if you.
Speaker 6 (32:33):
Got to, For instance, keep your job in the Senate
or keep your job in Congress. You're not willing to
actually risk anything real to you yourself to stop this,
That to me is a form of complicity. And I'm
asking the question now I think everyone should be as like,
when are Democrats going to actually risk something? And by that,
(32:54):
I mean when are they going to actually really put
themselves out there to risk their own political cares to actually,
in a real sense, try to stop this. We've seen
very very few efforts that rise to this level of
an emergency.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
But I do want to just say, because I've been
very hard on Democrats and everyone is mad at me,
that the shutdown for them is a huge gamble and
it seems to be for today getting people to talk
about healthcare.
Speaker 5 (33:22):
Look, I hope you're right. I think it is.
Speaker 6 (33:24):
We haven't seen them do something like this in a
very long time, and I think it's better late than never.
But I would just tell you this, they're not doing
that because they're nice. They're doing that because people are
mad at them. The latest pupole shows that more Democratic
voters are mad at their own party than we've seen
in a generation or two. So that anger even if
(33:48):
some of your listeners are like mad at you for
being mad at Democrats. That wressure is actually necessary to
get them to stand up.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
One hundred percent. And quite frankly, Chuck Schumer saw the
right on the wall and knew we had to do
it from March. But let us give them a tiny
bit of credit.
Speaker 5 (34:05):
I agree.
Speaker 6 (34:05):
And the healthcare stuff is a disaster if it is
allowed to go into a fact like if those cuts happen,
I mean we're talking about doubling people's healthcare premiums. That
is something that I think is worth doing what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
And Trump is not going to make the price of
eggs any cheaper.
Speaker 5 (34:21):
No, He's making everything more expensive.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Thank you, Dave Saroda, thank you, thanks for having me.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
(34:44):
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
We're on vacation today, but that doesn't mean we don't
have a great show for you. The Lever's David Sirota
stuffs by to talk about his new book master Plan,
The Hidden Plot to legalize Corruption in America. But first
we'll talk to ABC News Jonathan Carl and he's going
to tell us all about his new book, Retribution, Donald
Trump and the campaign that changed America.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, Hole's politics. How are you, young Carl?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Doing great? Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm so excited, so talk to me about this book.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
Look, as you know, and I never would have thought
this would have been my destiny. But this is now
the fourth book I've written on the Trump era, starting
with when I was covering him the first time around,
and I wrote Front, wrote The Trump Show, and it
just keeps going. This, Molly, is the I think the
most important of the books I've written, and certainly it
was the most challenging. This is the longest book, it's
(00:59):
the most heavily reported book, and I think it's you know,
it's called Retribution. I chose that name the day after
Donald Trump won in November last year. And I chose
it for a reason. And you see it playing out
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, I mean it's kind of shocking. My favorite thing
on the campaign trail was where they'd be like, well,
you don't really want to exact retribution on your enemies,
and he'd be like, no.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
No, I do, I do.
Speaker 5 (01:29):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (01:30):
I mean we probably figured that out when he did
his first official rally of the campaign in Waco, Texas.
And at that rally, as you recall, he played on
the big screens behind the stage those huge jumbotron's images
of the January sixth attack on the Capitol, and of
course played the J six choir singing the national anthem.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, I would love you to just talk to us
about like, why, what we can learn from this? We
are watching retribution in real time, but what are the
sort of lessons from this book?
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Well, there were two moments that really drove my desire
to do another one of these books. The first was
going to see Donald Trump on trial in New York
in that dingy one hundred Center Street courtroom where he
was forced to appear four days a week. Compelled to
be there, had to sit silently while people on the
(02:25):
stands said, you know, terrible things about him, embarrassing things
about him, Stormy Daniels testifying about Trump wanting to spanker
with a magazine with his face on the cover, and
also being there as Joe Biden dropped out of the race,
it just occurred to me that we were watching a campaign,
a presidential campaign unlike any other that we have ever
(02:49):
seen in American history. I mean, maybe you have to
go back to like nineteen twelve to find something remotely
as chaotic and unpredictable and also, in this case, something
so high stated. So I started, you know, obviously I'm
reporting day to day for ABC News, I'm doing my
day job. But as I'm doing it, I was coming
back to what I would want to try to tell
(03:12):
the larger story of what was really happening in this campaign,
with the benefit of a little bit of hindsight and
the time to do some more in depth reporting about
what was happening. And that's the product of this book.
I mean, it's been frankly, it's been an working on.
This has been an obsession of mine for over a year.
There's a lot that It tells you about how Donald
(03:32):
Trump came back to power and what his intention was
from the start to do with that power, which is
in large part to get even at all of those
who he believes have wronged him.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
What does it end?
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Well, I don't know where it ends.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
I mean, that's what all of us are thinking all
the time.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
Right Yeah, And I you know, I feel like I've
known Trump for more than thirty years. I've I've spent
so much of my professional life now, you know, cross
I'm ling him. I can tell you a lot about
Trump how it ends. I can't really tell you obviously,
you have all this talk now that he doesn't want
to leave the White House, the abandon talking about, you know,
him running again in twenty twenty eight. Donald Trump's not
(04:13):
ruling out trying to I mean, constitution, what constitution? You know,
staying in power. I don't really think that's where he's going.
But here's the thing, Molly, how does he pass the baton?
At what point does he stand up and make it official?
I'm out, I'm not running JD. It's yours, Marco, it's yours,
(04:34):
or you two get to fight it out and whoever else.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
But you know, RFK Junior r f K.
Speaker 4 (04:40):
Believe me, I don't know how that happens, because the
minute that happens, he becomes a lame duck and the
attention goes to somewhere else. I covered the Obama White House,
and let me tell you, twenty fifteen twenty sixteen at
the Obama White House was often like a ghost town.
I mean, they were still doing things, but nobody was
paying any attention. You know, poor Josh Ernest, who was
(05:02):
the press secretary at the time, would have these hour
and a half briefings. Hardly any of the regular correspondents
were in there covering them, and they weren't really making
any news because the attention was all on at first
Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and the next you know
who would be the next president, and then of course
eventually Trump.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
That is attention, right if he admits he's not running again,
all of a sudden, the man behind the curtain, I
mean that gone.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
I mean, look, what really drove the reporting in this
book is seeing how Donald Trump left office disgraced a
pria he was banished on social media. I mean, think
about that. He was banished on social media and most
of the major companies in this country announced that they
would not be donating money, not just not to Trump,
but to anybody who was aligned with Trump in challenging
(05:50):
the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
He was gone. He was a pariah.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
This is why when Kevin McCarthy went to visit him
shortly after he left office, it was such a huge story.
Oh my god, God, what's Kevin McCarthy doing. And you know,
he managed to recapture the Republican Party in a way
that he had never captured it in the first place.
This entirely, you know, he has this power, and you
(06:16):
know how he managed to do that, and how he
wants to use that power. I think points to a
very different second term than what we saw on Trump's
first term.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Did he ever call you?
Speaker 5 (06:26):
He does?
Speaker 3 (06:26):
He calls me. I call him, I tell you.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
One of the strange things that I started to do
during the campaign was during the fall campaign, I would
sometimes call him every two or three days, and there
was a much higher percentage chance of him answering the
phone than say the deputy press secretary of the Kamala
Harris campaign. Mostly it's me calling him, but there were occasions,
and there are occasions where where he calls me, and
(06:52):
it's a highly unusual thing.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
I want to go.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Back to the sentence you just said that it's more
likely to get down Trump on the phone that it
was to get the deputy press secretary of the Kamala
Harris campaign on the phone, because I think that is
part of why come won.
Speaker 5 (07:10):
Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
I don't think there's any question. You know, we were
talking about Jeb Bush a moment ago. It actually kind
of brings back memories of Jeb Bush back when those
in those salad days, when he was the Republican front runner.
He was very hard to get through too, and it
did precious few interviews. His campaign events were tightly choreographed,
just like Hillary Clinton's were, And certainly I think Kamala
(07:34):
Harris did that even more so than those. I mean,
when you think about her, she and I tracked. Keep
in mind that this book is about what happened to
Biden and about and about Harris's quick rise and fall.
And you know, Harris gives the sense that one hundred
and seven days she ran out of time, she didn't
have enough time. In fact, it was the reverse. In
(07:55):
fact what happened is she was strongest during those first say,
thirty to forty days, and then tapered off. And part
of it was this intensely careful, precious few interviews, precious
few interactions with the press when Trump was out there
for everybody.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
And if you do that, if you do very few interviews,
then every minute you talk to anyone is scrutinized within
an inch of its life.
Speaker 5 (08:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
So, I mean you remember the first interview, which was
with Dana Bash, right, and it was she comes in,
she effectively wins the nomination. You know, there's no convention yet,
but she's effectively won the nomination and does absolutely nothing.
And for a period of a couple of weeks. The
best answer that I could get is that, you know,
she was spending much of her time preparing for this
(08:43):
big first scene in an interview.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
When she disappeared its August. I remember in August thinking
where is she?
Speaker 5 (08:51):
Why?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Why is she not out there? And you know what's
so interesting is that Hillary Clinton had a couple of
weeks too in August where she's effectively disappeared. You'll remember
Hillary's house, yeah, right, And maybe she was sick, maybe
she was not sick, but it didn't matter because if
you create a vacuum, anyone who's around will fill it.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
Yeah, I mean, to be entirely fair here, Harris had
a tremendous first couple of weeks.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Tremendous.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
I mean it was people who had thought that she
didn't have what it takes or was going to be
a terrible candidate were like, wait a minute, where was
this Kamala Harris.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
She's good, She's got it down, so.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Uh and then it was disappearing at least and then it.
Speaker 4 (09:32):
Was disappearing, and that she does the CNN interview and
because to your point, she hasn't been doing interviews, not
just as a candidate, but really not even as vice president.
I mean it was not a strong interview.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Right, and picked apart within an inch of It's like
because if you're Donald Trump and you're doing I mean,
like I think about how much media Donald Trump does
in a day when he's not calling journalists and you know,
I mean three four hours a day, I mean full
spray of this that a press conference, and then those
(10:04):
like insane cabinet meetings that are televised, which are like
you know a little North Korea, but you still have
a visual of the guy out there. And so you
say something crazy, if you've said seven thousand other things
since then, it becomes sort of hard to keep trap.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
Yeah, and it's that, you know, it's that Bannon esque
flood the zone. You know, he may do five things
that are completely crazy and or you know, get would
get picked apart and get hit, but he does twenty
five other things, so you forget about those things he
just did. I mean, and it's as a journalist, you're
just you've got not just a fire hose coming at you,
(10:44):
but you have ten fire hoses coming at you.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
By the way.
Speaker 4 (10:47):
Also, why to me it was so important to write
this book is to try to get a little bit
of a step back and what did we just go through?
What did we just live through? And to go through
and take the time and to pick apart the key
moments that brought us to this point in American history,
and to try to go back and see what was
(11:09):
really happening behind the scenes. That's what I tried to
do with this book.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
This is a very different white House than Trump one
point zero, like, very different, different, priority is different, everything
different on fetteredness. So explain to me what you see
as the sort of main players in this White House.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Well, the first thing that makes it entirely different is
he is actually trying to fundamentally change things. He's going
to have an impact on this country and by the way,
also on the physical layout of the White House that
he never had in the first term. You don't say,
I mean, I mean the first term, all the chaos,
all the attention, all that took place when he left office,
(11:52):
he left office, it was ephemeral. There was not that
much of a lasting impact. That is not the case already,
just you know, less than a year into this White House.
And the two other biggest factors are he comes in
with an agenda that was part of what he was
into last time, but it wasn't central really, which is
(12:14):
to get back at the people that screwed him over
in his minds. I mean, he faced an election where
he was either going to maybe go to prison or
become the most powerful president that we have seen in
our lifetimes, thanks to a Supreme Court immunity decision, thanks
to a Congress that is entirely obsequious, and going to
do whatever he wants, the most powerful president of our lifetime.
(12:38):
So he becomes that, and he's going to use that
power to get back at everybody that investigated him, that
attacked him, the Republicans who tried to rein him in.
So not just this isn't just prosecutors and Democratic opponents
who impeached him or any of that. This is also
the Republicans that tried to rain him in enemies list.
(13:01):
High on that enemy's list are people like well, Jim Comey.
I wouldn't be surprised to see people like General Kelly
on that list, Mark Milly on that list, people who
served in his administration, Bill Barr. You had Bannon the
other day saying that Barr should go to prison, that
Bill Barr should be prosecuted. Is talk about that?
Speaker 1 (13:24):
No, I don't want to think about that. How much
is Bannon world talking to Trump World?
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Well, I don't know about Bannon World or Trump World,
but Bannon is talking to Trump absolutely?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Wow, all right?
Speaker 4 (13:35):
And there is absolutely a you know, a line there.
And also Bannon two things. One, he does have an
influence on Trump. He makes sure that his show he's
on for four hours.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
A day on the war and better him than May.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
And when he has the key messages that he wants,
they go to Natalie Harp Trump's assistant and they go
to Trump and Trump watches them and also.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Natalie prints it out right.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
Well, these are video clips, so she she sets up
the video clips the human prins.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
But but I describe a scene in the book that
is really kind of mind blowing that helps you understand
what happened when Zelensky came to the White House in
February and you had that big confrontation. Well, in advance
of that, there was a National Security meeting with Vance
heg Seth, Rubio, Waite, Coough, Besant, then the National Security
(14:28):
Advisor Mike Waltz, and their meeting at the White House
with Trump and they're going over that minerals deal that
we're going to sign with the Ukraine, and Trump says,
get Steve Bannon on the phone. Waltz calls Bannon. Anyway,
they go back and forth. Bannon like puts Waltz to
h to voicemail. Then Trump calls Bannon himself on his
phone and Bannon takes the call and for the next
(14:49):
half hour, Bannon is basically lecturing the National Security team
on how they can't trust that punk Zelensky, which is
what Bannon calls him, and how if you give him
a you know, if you do a security he's gonna
want he's gonna want a natural resources deal. He's going
to want security guarantees. You cannot trust him, you cannot
do him. And that really Again, this has never been
(15:10):
reported before, but I think that that incident, and I've
talked to many people that were involved in that set
the stage for the confrontation with Zelenski. And that was Bannon.
He's not in the White House, he's not on the
National security team, but in that moment he had more
influence than the national security advisor of the Secretary of.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
State John Carl Thank you, Malli, I.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Love talking to you. Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
David Sirota is the founder of The Lever, the screenplay
author of Don't Look Up, and the author of Master Planned,
The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Welcome to Fast Politics, Dave, Thank you, thanks for having me.
I have so many places I want to start because
it's so bad, but let's start with John Roberts, the
man who just wants to cut away our freedoms versus
he wants to use a scalpel rather than a chainsaw,
but he'll use a chainsaw if he needs to.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (16:08):
I mean, we're on the twenty year anniversary now of
John Roberts' takeover of the Supreme Court, which is that's
really how you make yourself feel old is to realize
it's been twenty years, and I think people have forgotten
what that few month period was like in two thousand
and five, where there was Sandra Day O'Connor and William
Rehnquist were suddenly out of the picture and John Roberts
(16:32):
and Sam Alito were installed very very quickly on that court.
And soon after that, of course, came the Citizens United decision,
which transformed American politics almost overnight. I mean, our book
is about the master plan that conservatives hatched over fifty
years to deregulate the campaign finance system, kill off anti
(16:54):
corruption laws, anti bribery laws, and Citizens United was one
of the big obviously earning points, again engineered by John Roberts.
Speaker 5 (17:04):
And the thing that drives me crazy.
Speaker 6 (17:06):
And probably drives anyone crazy who remembers back in two
thousand and five was how he was presented as this reasonable,
almost moderate candidate, and I remember distinctly sort of trying
to sound the alarm in the position that I was
in like, this guy is not some easy going moderate.
(17:29):
This guy is a movement conservative. Arguably, I guess you'd
call him that. Maybe the second movement conservative put on
the court. I mean, you had Scalia, But this guy
was sort of groomed by the conservative movement to be
everything that he has come to be. And to my mind,
there are three priorities when you look at John Roberts' career, right,
(17:49):
I mean to really understand John Roberts passions. There is
his passion to destroy and dismantle voting rights laws.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
We really dosate the voting rights law.
Speaker 5 (17:59):
Really that he's been working on it forever.
Speaker 6 (18:01):
There is his passion to close the courthouse doors to
anyone who is inconvenient to political and corporate power. But
by that I mean his war on what's known as standing.
You are not allowed in this court. We won't even
adjudicate your issue because you do not have standing. Again,
that is a John Roberts passion. And then the other
(18:23):
John Roberts passion is equating and enshrining the connection between
money and free speech, the idea that money is a
constitutionally protected form of speech, which was started before John Robertson.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Right, it feels like a Mitch McConnell.
Speaker 6 (18:42):
Yes, Mitch McConnell, the Buckley case in the seventies. But
John Roberts really has taken that the Roberts Court has
to its logical extreme.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
In John Roberts defense, he has very rich donors.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
I guess that is it. In his defense, I.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Mean, these guys need of ation every once in a while.
And as Thomas has shown us, you know, those are
re's are expensive. I know.
Speaker 5 (19:08):
And the thing, the thing that kind of blows me away.
Speaker 6 (19:10):
Although the Court, as we traced in our book, is
is doing these rulings, deregulating.
Speaker 5 (19:16):
The campaign finance system.
Speaker 6 (19:17):
And narrowing the interpretation of anti bribery laws down the
to the point where.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Last se ribes are they bribed?
Speaker 5 (19:26):
No, they're protuities. Right.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
I have to say this out loud repeatedly because it's
almost like people won't believe it. In the last court term,
there was a case about a local official who had
gotten a payment from a government contractor. After the local
official delivered the government contract to this contractor gotten a payment,
and the court ruled that that was not a bribe,
(19:48):
that was a so called legal critulaluit.
Speaker 5 (19:52):
It's a tip, right.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
I just want to follow that up for one second
because it comes back in season two, which is Tom
Holman is wept up in an FBI investigation where he
is not the target, right, he just wanders in and
accepts a bag of fifty thousand dollars in cash, and
they say this is the Biden Justice Department says, well,
we may not even be able to prosecute this because
(20:15):
the Supreme Court just ruled that bribes aren't bribes.
Speaker 6 (20:19):
I mean, that's the world we are living in now.
And again, to underscore the point you alluded to, these
rulings are coming down at the very time that some
of these justices engineering them are accepting lavish gifts from
billionaires who have business in some cases before the.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
Court in all cases right, or they're connected to someone
who does right.
Speaker 5 (20:44):
While they are legalizing corruption.
Speaker 6 (20:47):
They are effectively engaging in the kinds of practices without,
by the way, disclosure. We only know about that because
of reporting. They weren't in Thomas's case, he didn't disclose it,
et cetera, et cetera. So they are in an undisclosed
way engaging in the kind of behavior that they are
issuing rulings legalizing I mean it's mind blowing, yes it is.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
And yet it is also very much exactly what you
think of when you think of these guys. Right. The
thing that bothers me the most is the idea that
they are like, well, this is textualism.
Speaker 5 (21:20):
Right, which is crazy to me. Right, I mean, that
doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 6 (21:23):
The idea that the founders in the Constitution kind of
legalized bribery or equated by the way money with speech,
it's just severed from any textual reality. Frank, I'm not
a constitutional scholar here, but like the idea that money
is speech, the idea, by the way, that corporations have
(21:45):
constitutional rights is simply not in the Constitution at all.
And the court used to distinguish between sort of corporate
speech and human speech. The Court used to distinguish between
actual human beings and corporate persons. That's all been thrown out,
and we have to ask the question of why has
it been thrown out. It's because throwing it out provides
(22:08):
disproportionate political power to essentially conservatives who know that they
can't legislatively pass their unpopular agenda through democratic, small d
democratic institutions. In other words. I think this is a
missed point a lot like why is the conservative movement
doing it this way? Why do they want to legalize corruption,
(22:29):
Why do they want to deregulate the campaign finance system.
It's because if you realize that your agenda tax cuts
for the wealthy, et cetera, et cetera. If you realize
your agenda is wildly unpopular among voters who were supposed
to be in control of things in a democratic republic.
If you realize it's unpopular, then you have to rig
(22:50):
the game to make sure that those policies can go
into effect, and that allow you to circumvent the democratic
institutions that would say no to those policies.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
I think that's right. This court seems, especially the last
couple shadow dock at rulings we've seen, they have been
so blatantly partisan. It would be hard for me. And
I am an optimist, a person who has lots of
friends who used to be in the federal society, for
whom they really want you to believe that Emmy is
(23:23):
smart and Kavanaugh has some kind of ethos. But everything
I've seen over in this term especially has just been partisan.
Speaker 6 (23:33):
Hacker right, agreed, and now we've got a term coming
up talking about corruption, where jd Vance has quietly and
deliberately given the Supreme Court an opportunity to go even
beyond Citizens United and eliminate all of what's ever left
of campaign finance rules. It's incredible that this case hasn't
(23:53):
gotten more attention.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
What's the case.
Speaker 6 (23:55):
It's about the NRSC, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee
versus the f V.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
That's technically what it is.
Speaker 6 (24:02):
Essentially, jd Vance went into court and said that a
prohibition or a limit on how much party committees can
coordinate their spending with candidates. He's arguing that's unconstitutional. Now
people hear that and they're like, oh, that's kind of esoteric.
That's kind of like, what does that really mean. The
point is it's a rule about how much donors can
(24:24):
pass through their money to candidates through a party. The
idea of the limits was to say you can't use
a party committee to get around campaign contribution limits.
Speaker 5 (24:34):
That's what's at issue here, right.
Speaker 6 (24:35):
The Supreme Court has long held up that super PACs
can spend what they want, but if you want to
give money directly to a candidate, there are limits there
because that can be a corrupting force. Vance's case is
designed to give the court a way to do away
with all of the remaining campaign finance limits, the remaining
limitations on donations. This would essentially take Citizens United and
(24:58):
put it on steroids at a time that polls tell
us the public across the political spectrum, by the way,
the public hates Citizens United. And so you have Dvance
going into court at a moment when the public loathes
Citizens United and is giving the now six to three
court the chance to go way beyond Citizens United. And
I don't know what's going to come in this case,
(25:20):
but I'm not feeling all that optimistic because get this,
the Biden administration was defending existing law. When Trump came in,
Trump's Department of Justice switched sides and says it is
refusing to defend the current law. And way it gets
even more crazy. So then the Supreme Court has to
(25:40):
appoint a lawyer to represent the FEC and they appoint
a former John Roberts clerk who was clerking for Roberts
during the original Citizens United decisions. So, in other words,
the conservative movement has triangulated the entire case. They engineered
the case they have the Supreme Court, and a conservative
(26:02):
movement lawyer is now the defense lawyer for the existing law.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
I want to talk about where we go next. There's
another case that's in front of the Supreme Court that
I think is sort of my favorite case of this
semester because it's the one where than the most conflicted,
and that is the tariff case. So you've got Coke
Brothers versus Trump, and this is I think my favorite
(26:30):
case because this Supreme Court is so captured. It's a
captured institution period paragraph it's owned by wealthy conservative donors,
but it's also owned by Donald Trump. And here's a
case where the wealthy conservative donors want the tariffs gone
because the tariffs are terrible for business and make no sense.
And Donald Trump wants ultimate power via the unitary executive theory.
(26:54):
He is a god king and he can use these terriffs.
And you know, the thing that I think Trump loves
so much about tariffs is that it is really an
opportunity to pick winners and losers. You know, It's one
thing to do crony capitalism with our economy, but he
can do crony capitalism now with other countries' economies. So
how do you think this goes down.
Speaker 6 (27:14):
It's a great question, and I agree with you. Trump
likes tariffs because it forces other countries. And by the way,
big donors donor corporations to kiss his ring. There was
a study that we reported on at the lever from
the tariffs in the first term, in which it showed
that the companies that donated money to Trump and the
Republicans were more likely to get exemptions from the tariffs.
Speaker 5 (27:35):
In a sense, it's a corruption scheme. Now here's the thing.
Speaker 6 (27:38):
You're totally right to hone in on the fact that
the Supreme Court, the conservative Supreme Court, is caught between
always wanting to do what big money wants and always
wanting to give Donald Trump, and not just Trump, but
give the executive branch, certainly their executive branch when it's
controlled by Republicans, always wanting to give the executive branch power.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
And also they don't want Trump to be mad at
them totally. I mean, like this is an entire culture
of Americans who are scared of Trump's tweets exactly.
Speaker 6 (28:07):
So you've got these two conflicting forces. And what's really
interesting about the Supreme Court. Before we get to the
tariff stuff is to look at what they've done with
Trump's attempt to remove independent agency appointees the court. What's
really fascinating here is that the court has allowed Trump
to remove appointees at the agencies that are problematic to
(28:29):
corporate power, the FTC, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but
they have not allowed Trump to remove a member of
the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Board because that would be bad for the markets exactly.
Speaker 6 (28:41):
So what was fascinating was they somehow made up this
idea that the FTC commissioners are not independent, so they
can be thrown out ps they're annoying to corporations, but
nobody on the Federal Reserve Board aka Wall.
Speaker 5 (28:55):
Streets Institution can be removed at all.
Speaker 6 (28:58):
So I wonder if they're going to try to creatively
do something visa VI tariffs where they sort of say
something like these specific tariffs are not allowed aka business
doesn't like them, we can get rid of them, but
the president.
Speaker 5 (29:12):
Still retains the power.
Speaker 6 (29:14):
Like I wonder if they're going to try to find
some ridiculous middle ground in a binary situation.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Tariff sybey INDs but not batteries or something.
Speaker 5 (29:23):
Something like that.
Speaker 6 (29:25):
I mean I think you're totally right that it is
fascinating that they've built this machine and now the machine
is like sort of in a sense, at war with itself.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
I mean, that is the one bright spot in this
whole fucking disaster, is that you see MAGA is so
drunk with power that they're coming after each other. I mean,
the Wall Street Journal, the woke Wall Street Journal, perhaps
you've heard of it, owned by Rupert Murdoch, had a
piece today about Laura Lumer targeting MAGA.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
Trump like was a story for like three hours.
Speaker 6 (29:55):
But Trump going to war with Leonard Leo was like
kind of blew my mind. And for those who don't,
I know, Leonard Leo was the conservative activist.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
He's how we got here. Leonard Leo is how we
have a court that rubber stamps everything Donald Trump wants
to do.
Speaker 6 (30:08):
Exactly So, Leonard Leo is the conservative activist who packs
the court. Over twenty twenty five years, Federalist Society guy,
some of the Federalist Society judges at a certain point
once in a while sort of said hey, Trump, you
can't do this. Trump freaks out and essentially disavows. Leonard
Leo says he's like a bad guy.
Speaker 5 (30:26):
Right. It's like I've used the example of the French
Revolution dynamic.
Speaker 6 (30:30):
It feels like the Committee on Public Justice, right Like,
Robespierre's running the Committee on Public Justice and he's getting
his way. You know, they're doing the guillotine to everybody,
and then all of a sudden, it accelerates, it accelerates,
and then Robespierre's head is in the guillotine, right like,
metaphorically speaking, like the revolution quote unquote is sort of
accelerates so fast that it starts eating itself. And I
(30:51):
feel like that's what's happening right now. I don't know,
like we're in the abyss. I don't know where we
go from here.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
It's so interesting because I feel like we agree on
a lot of things about how we got here, and
like the many ways in which Democrats were unable to
bring a knife to a knife fight and brought a
stuffed animal to a knife fight, and then we're like,
just we're so disappointed by Republicans doing fascism. It does
(31:18):
strike me though, that all this energy they had saved
up for Dems and now Dems were like, we can't
legislate this, and so now they're using it on each other.
Speaker 6 (31:28):
Yeah, I mean, look the story of the Democrats. Let's
go back to where we started, John Roberts twenty years ago.
I'm old enough to remember that lots and lots of
Democrats voted to put John Roberts.
Speaker 5 (31:38):
On that court.
Speaker 6 (31:39):
And I remember back then, and I was a much
younger person. I was looking around being like what am
I missing here? Like why are they saying such nice
things about this person and helping the Republicans install him
on the court. And I don't think that's like a
historical anomaly. I think it was kind of emblematic of
this idea that the party and its leaders believed that
(32:00):
simply by adhering to so called norms, everything would at
a certain point revert back to normal. At this point, clearly,
that calculation, if you can call it, that was wrong.
I do understand people say it wasn't that they were wrong,
it's that they were a lot of them.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Were complicit, right, I don't agree.
Speaker 5 (32:22):
Maybe not all of them were complicit.
Speaker 6 (32:24):
I think the term doesn't necessarily mean you were sort
of deliberately in on it.
Speaker 5 (32:29):
It's that you were willing to tolerate it if you.
Speaker 6 (32:33):
Got to, For instance, keep your job in the Senate
or keep your job in Congress. You're not willing to
actually risk anything real to you yourself to stop this,
That to me is a form of complicity. And I'm
asking the question now I think everyone should be as like,
when are Democrats going to actually risk something? And by that,
(32:54):
I mean when are they going to actually really put
themselves out there to risk their own political cares to actually,
in a real sense, try to stop this. We've seen
very very few efforts that rise to this level of
an emergency.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
But I do want to just say, because I've been
very hard on Democrats and everyone is mad at me,
that the shutdown for them is a huge gamble and
it seems to be for today getting people to talk
about healthcare.
Speaker 5 (33:22):
Look, I hope you're right. I think it is.
Speaker 6 (33:24):
We haven't seen them do something like this in a
very long time, and I think it's better late than never.
But I would just tell you this, they're not doing
that because they're nice. They're doing that because people are
mad at them. The latest pupole shows that more Democratic
voters are mad at their own party than we've seen
in a generation or two. So that anger even if
(33:48):
some of your listeners are like mad at you for
being mad at Democrats. That wressure is actually necessary to
get them to stand up.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
One hundred percent. And quite frankly, Chuck Schumer saw the
right on the wall and knew we had to do
it from March. But let us give them a tiny
bit of credit.
Speaker 5 (34:05):
I agree.
Speaker 6 (34:05):
And the healthcare stuff is a disaster if it is
allowed to go into a fact like if those cuts happen,
I mean we're talking about doubling people's healthcare premiums. That
is something that I think is worth doing what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
And Trump is not going to make the price of
eggs any cheaper.
Speaker 5 (34:21):
No, He's making everything more expensive.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
Thank you, Dave Saroda, thank you, thanks for having me.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
(34:44):
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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