January 9, 2025 • 45 mins
Evil Geniuses author Kurt Andersen provides a historical perspective on how Pat Buchanan paved the way for today's Trump. When the Clock Broke author John Ganz examines the path that led to our current political moment.
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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. And George Santos has asked a judge
to delay his sentencing so he can make more podcasts. Well,
that's a cursed sentence and that might be Peak twenty
twenty five. We have such a great show for you today.
(00:22):
Evil Genius is author KURTA. Anderson gives us his historical
perspective on how bad Buchanan brought us to the Trump
of today. Then we'll talk to author John Gants as
he examines the path that led us to this current
political moment. But first the news.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Somali, I have to say my mental health has not
been doing well for watching fires raging throughout la very
close to where I used to live once upon a time.
It is not looking good.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Yeah, it is really this. We're just watching and it
we're watching and thinking and praying for all the people
in California. My brother and my father and my other brother,
all of them live in California, and we're just thinking
about everybody. So there are three major fires. The Palasades
fire is the one closest to Los Angeles, or is
(01:18):
in Los Angeles. It's burned about eighteen square miles. And
then there's the Eton Fire, which is north of Pasadena,
which has burned about sixteen and a half miles. And
then there's the Hurst Fire Hurst Hurst Fire in the
San Fernando Valley, which has burned a little bit less
than a mile. So this is you know, we're watching
(01:38):
these videos come out of California and they're just really dystopian,
so dark, and we're just thinking about everybody and hoping
they're okay. Seventy thousand residents so far under evacuation orders,
and a lot of those evacuations were in the Palasa
Hides parts of Santa Monica. Four hundred thousand people without power,
that's half a million people. Continues with these high winds,
(02:01):
no ray and lots and lots of fire. It's really important,
you know. Right now, Trump and a lot of Republicans
are trying to blame these fires and Governor Gavin Newsom.
But the truth is, like we all know, these fires
have been getting worse and worse because of climate change,
because California is a hot, dry climate, and as it
(02:22):
gets hotter and drier and the weather gets more intense fires.
You know, they spread more, they cover more area, and
you know they have eighty mile an hour winds, And
it's just this is not Gavin Newsom's vault. It is
the fault of Exxon and Chevron and all the oil
companies that knew about climate change fifty years ago. So
(02:44):
there are things we can do to cut back on
all of the you know, effects of climate change, or
we're just going to keep living like this. And so
it's really dark and just thinking about everybody in California
and hoping that they stay safe, smiling.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
One of the things you and I often talk about
is there's some people who when they have a hammer
and everything is a nail. And I'm starting to think
that's Trump. With the economy and tariffs.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, this guy really really really really really wants to
really really wants to enact these tariffs. He is now
has this he's considering declaring a national economic emergency. By
the way, that is insane. Our economy is really really good,
(03:32):
and he's going to do it to provide legal justification
for a series of universal tariffs on allies and adversaries.
Cianna and who's reporting this again? It's Trump Earlier this week,
he said he was going to rename the Gulf of
Mexico the Gulf of America, or as those of us
in the Democratic Party call it, the Gulf of Trump
being unable to make egg prices any lower. Look, you know,
(03:55):
Trump is going to throw a lot of stuff at
the wall. This would be a terrible, terrible idea. I
hope Democrats will push back on it as much as possible.
We know historically Herbert Hoover did this. It caused the
United States economy to crash. It was a huge mistake.
Nobody wants these tariffs, not you know, but Trump somehow
(04:16):
thinks that it would make things less expensive. We all
know tariffs are wildly inflationary. It will make everything more expensive.
You know, he wants to put a sixty percent tariff
on Chinese goods and ten percent tariff on global exports.
Let's hope that there are enough cornups in the room
who convinced him not to.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Well, another fun news. Everybody's wondering why President Trump is
so interested in Greenland and the Panama Canal and willing
to use military coercion to get them. What do you
see here?
Speaker 1 (04:47):
May so Trump is saying he's willing to use military
coercion to get there. I wouldn't trust him. My thinking
is that Trump says a lot of stuff. He speaks
in this fombastic way, and the hope of getting our
allies to do what he wants, he wants people to
think he's crazy. He wants Mexico and Canada to think
(05:09):
he might invade them in the hopes of them negotiating
with him on tariffs. I don't think any of this
is Again. His justification here, or least according to USA Today,
is that it's an expansionist minded that he's worried that
an expansionist minded China and Russia might be jocking for
(05:29):
geopolitical supremacy. This is really stupid. China is in the
middle of having a somewhat of a financial crisis. Russia
is very very much, you know, financially exhausted by the
war in Ukraine, and this is ridiculous. Republicans have been
using about taking back the Paama Canal since Carter, and
(05:51):
it's really been a kind of dog whistle. It's totally
not going to happen. But it's also just a way
in which republic and are able to kind of show
themselves to be colonialists and to say, you know, these
other countries, we have supremacy over them. And so I
(06:11):
would just look to this as kind of it's its
own sort of dog whistle. It's like they're eating the dogs.
It's this idea that Trump thinks that he can sort
of do whatever he wants. And again it does feed
into this Nixonian idea that maybe he can be the
strong man and that can intimidate our allies and adversaries.
But I wouldn't put a lot of stock in this.
(06:31):
But I would also say that I think that they're
you know, Greenland continues to not be for sales, so
and Trump does not have you know, a one percent
win in the popular vote is not a mandate to
go to war with Denmark. So I think we all
just need to take a deep breath here and realize that.
And I wouldn't I Also the mistake, I think is
to sort of say that Trump is doing something that's
(06:54):
well thought out, when in fact, a lot of times
he's just doing whatever's right in front of him or
whatever somebody told him on plane on the way there.
So don't give Trump too much credit.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Somalie I think we have to eat a little crow here,
and I'm not talking about Harlan. We're not going to
eat the rich here. Merrick Garland intends to release Special
Counsel report on Trump's Gen six case. Doo JSAs So.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Merrick Garland says he's going to release the Special Council
Report on Trump's January sixth case. Look, Merk Garland has
tended to not be the horse to bet on for bravery.
But you know who knows.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Those are very very polite saying there you have there.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, but perhaps now he will change his spots. We
never know. It's possible. Good for Merrik Garland if he
wants to be brave at the eleventh hour. Anyone here
is welcome. Though he has really been such a disappointment,
let me tell you, you know, talk about not having
been playing three dimensional jazz.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Or even the two dimensional one or even two. Yeah, yeah,
i'd call it. You know those chess games where somebody
just leaves the board for a while, it doesn't do anything.
She decides to not make a move for a long time.
So I think we've been looking at.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
That's it, Marca. Yes, Kurt Anderson is the author of
Evil geniuses and the co creator of Commands THEE. Welcome
back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 5 (08:25):
Kurt, My pleasure as ever.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
You know why I wanted to have you on was
because I was reading a book that was all about
how Pap Buchanan, you know, said a lot of early
Trump stuff, et cetera, and that got me thinking about
sort of the history of how Republicans lost their minds,
and that is you So let us talk well.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
Happy Canon obviously was the Trump prototype. You know, he
was a famous journalist, media funded guy, and and that
is what led him to run for president in nineteen
ninety two, nineteen ninety six and did pretty well as
a Trump Trump plus thirty IQ points and Trump who
(09:11):
actually knows stuff and knows history, but and has this coherent,
more coherent idea about you know, the right wing populism
that from the degree he has in ideology bodies. So yeah,
there he was doing all this stuff, you know, back
in the nineties. And at the same time that, you know,
he had the new gingrich taking over the House and
(09:32):
being a right winger in that way and moving the
party right. But no, but Patty Cannon was really in
his way ahead of his time. That's why when we
did one of our spy magazine specials in right right
around then when he spoke at the right after he
spoke at the Republican Convention in ninety two, and he
gave this cultural war speech, and we we just we've
(09:53):
put it on our special on NBC Prime Time, ran
thirty seconds of it translated into well, not translated but
actually just with a soundtrack of Hitler speaking as his
book and amazingly standards and practices at NBC let us
do that. But yes, Pabriu Khan was there early, and
Donald Trump grew and inherited that beginning version of the
(10:13):
modern Republican party.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
He did.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
And it's funny because it's like I'm thinking about, like
the big Senate loss that Democrats had in nineteen eighty, Right,
wasn't that the biggest the second biggest loss a single
party had ever had?
Speaker 5 (10:29):
I trust you on that. But the eighties were, yeah,
I mean obviously the Reagan land slide and then bigger
Lan slide in eighty four.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, And I'm just wondering, like I'm trying, because I'm
trying to grapple with what exactly happened during this election
that I still am not able to process, and so
I'm trying to sort of think about it in the
historical precedent. I mean, do you when you think about
this election, what does it remind you of?
Speaker 5 (10:57):
Well, does it remind me of Reagan? Particularly because that
was genuinely, you know, a mandate in a landslide, especially
eighty four, so it was different there. I mean, you know, yes,
we finally had a Republican the first since you know,
two thousand and four, to become president, having won the
(11:17):
popular vote. But he won it barely, and I don't
want to over diminish the reality and the significance of
he won. He won by you know, healthy electoral vote margin,
and one in many areas, including New York City. Of course,
moves significantly right in being voting for trumpmore so it
(11:37):
meant something, But it isn't to me yet anything like
eighty eighty four. One thing is one I'm thinking about
nineteen eighty is you know, Yes, in nineteen seventy six,
seventy seven, eight nine, all of us liberals thought, oh
my god, this guy's a nut. What's he going to do?
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Well?
Speaker 5 (11:53):
Immediately, he didn't govern as a nut. He governed as
a very conservative Republican and talked to Tipple Neil, the
Speaker of the House, and yes, said mister Gorbacheff, tear
this wall down, but pursued daytide with NATO. You know,
it was it was a whole different thing.
Speaker 6 (12:09):
It was.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
It was in retrospect. Although there was a lot of
hair on fire Sky's falling talk in seventy nine and eighty,
it didn't turn out that way. I'm not saying he
was a great president, but he was a normal president
and we all like adapted to it and it didn't
do crazy things. So it isn't like that, so I
know in my lifetime, you.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Know, it is its own thing, closest to Nixon, except
if Nixon had gone realized.
Speaker 5 (12:37):
As he was an inheritor of Pat Buchanan, Pat Buchanan
before he became the famous Pat Buchanan running for president,
of course, worked for Richard Nixon. That was his big
first thing as a political figure. And he was to
Nixon's right and he was the House right winger, whereas Nixon.
Because it was nineteen sixty eight, sixty nine to seventy
seventy one, it was still the sixties. Effectively, it was
(12:59):
still this liberal hegemony. Democrats still ran Congress and everything else,
and you know, we have the Democrats and liberals were
complacent because they basically run the show for you know,
since the New DA in World War Two and done
pretty well, so like it was fine. So Nixon was,
in fact, until arguably I think the Biden administration the
(13:21):
most liberal president we've had in my life. But what
Nixon did and felt and embodied the way Trump does
in his bizarre worldwide was this resentment of the elite,
you know, the resentment of the elite. And he created
his silent majority during the Vietnam War and during the
counterculture and during the anti Hippie period, during the protests
(13:43):
that all of you regular, normal, good Americans, don't we
hate these the media and these hippies and these uppy
black people and all the rest. So, yes, Donald Trump,
in his crewed again Nixon minus fifty I key points
revived that he is, in his semi witning, unwinning way,
the inheritor of this of the worst of Republicanism of
(14:07):
the last sixty years.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Yeah, And it's funny because when we talk about I
just want to fact check from Jesse here in nineteen
eighty Democrats lost fourteen seats in nineteen eighty four. They
lost too in the Senate.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
Even though Reagan's victory was bigger, right, and you see
that and when it gets hopeful, like the electorate goes, okay,
we give you fourteen more seats in the center, Oh
my gosh, Senate, you know majority, Oh, big landslide for Reagan.
But it also at the same time pulled back, you know,
it reacted and kind of in his overall way, does
this thing of forward or to the right one two
(14:42):
steps back to the central one. And that's what it did,
as those numbers about the Senate and Congress showed. So
we'll see. I mean, it's very hard because you know,
we've gotten all tired of saying, oh, it's unprecedented, it's unprecedented. Well,
this is a freakishly new unprecedented thing. So well saying
it's like this election or that election in the past,
(15:04):
I don't know, I don't see it. You know, it's
not there. I mean, there are bits and pieces they're like,
I mean, there is some nineteen sixty eightitionists here, but
which was a close election but a victory for you know,
this bullying Richard Nixon version of the beginnings of you know,
working class appeal, which was, to say, in nineteen sixty eight,
(15:25):
as it was in sixty four, an appeal to the South,
that was the white South which was so upset about
civil rights.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Right, you're bringing this up a really important point here,
which is this idea of like the backlash from a
sort of backlash to this, a backlash to that, the
sort of movement of the sixties, and then a backlash
with Nixon, and then the seventies and Carter, and a
backlash with Reagan. It feels like if you look at
(15:53):
twenty sixteen, it was Trump and then it was me too,
and then there was there just been backlash and backlash
and backlash and back What do you make of that
and talk to us more about it.
Speaker 5 (16:04):
Well, it's you know, the right being the right uses
the backlash effectively again and again. I mean, that's almost
the nature of its different nests from the left in
this country to do it. But whereas what Democrats do
over and over again, did it with Clinton in the nineties,
did it with Obama in the aughts, Yeah, the aughts
(16:27):
and tens, and then did it again with Biden is
clean up the basically budget busting, deficit building messes of
the Republicans who precede them. So that's what they have
over these last six years, in addition to stupidly and
incorrectly dumping the white working class and labor unions as
they started doing in the seventies and eighties. They because
(16:49):
they're responsible good boys and girls, are the ones who
sort of balance the budget and try to be responsible
and govern after the kind of drunken, fiscally nuts benders
that they inherit from Republicans, you know. And that's how
we turned into in this last election, and Kama Harris
(17:09):
and the Democrats into the goody goody elitist responsible people
who are effectively conservatives. They want to get back to normality.
And there is this rowing hunger that has been here
for thirty years since since the industrialization of the rust
belt and all that happened economically starting in the nineties especially,
(17:31):
There has to be a change. There is I won't
say revolutionary, but there is this intense reformist, populist This
is screwed up, this is rig We don't understand our
healthcare system. It doesn't provide for us. You know. College
is unaffordable and our on. And so the electorate, in
its mostly low information, ignorant way, reaches out anywhere it can.
(17:55):
And Donald Trump looks like he'll shake it up, you know.
I mean, people don't know, and they for that rather
than this kind of college educated, good boys and girls
version of Democrats from al Gore to Kamala Harris.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
What do you think Democrats should do?
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Obviously it's a different world than it was in twenty sixteen.
There's not the same. The mainstream media is not what
it was. I mean, I am so struck by Oprah
doing an event with Harris.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
And I love Oprah and thinks she's a genius.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
But Joe Rogan having doing three hours with Trump gets
in front of like seventy million people, whereas television doesn't
get in.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Front of those numbers anymore.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
So I'm wondering what you think, Democrats, what that solve
is for this, because this is something I spent a
probably disproportionate amount of my time obsessing about. I mean,
what do you think the answer is? Because clearly what
we saw from Biden's loss was Biden passed a lot
of really good legislation and voters not the voters who
(18:55):
watch television or read the news, but the voters who
make up the line and share the vote, right, because
Trump won and he won the popular vote, they didn't know.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
So what did Democrats do?
Speaker 7 (19:07):
Well?
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Donald Trump is this unwittingly brilliant person in many ways,
And there's all these quotes that had such meaning in
the aftermath, like a star gets to do whatever he wants.
He said that you know years ago about sexual assault,
Well he's living it in every way. I can appoint
these idiots in the cabinet, I can shoot somebody on
Fifth Avenue. All those things are so true and so real,
and he's living not in so many ways. So I'm
(19:28):
not saying, oh, we need a Trump. However, the level
of understanding that politics is, and certainly for the lessons
in the TV age and since, been a show. It
is a show, and just face up to it. Maybe
you don't like it, Okay, fine, that's the way it is.
So all of that implies in a way that you
(19:49):
can still keep your human dignity and stick to more
or less the facts, live with that be a little
more incautious. I mean, that's the thing about you know,
whether you're again, whether you're al Gore. I don't want
to keep mentioning al Gore, but he he to me,
he was as people said at the time, he was
the boy who got good grades and every adult's idea
of a good young person and all that. Kama Harris, too,
(20:12):
was the well behaved and highly cautious person, you know who,
whether she did or didn't, have a a kind of
human political center that she shared with the world. And
I liked her fine, just like I like them all fine.
I like all these Democrats fine. But she was highly
cautious and that prevented her from being effective. So that's
one thing I think democrats have to do is and
(20:34):
people have talked about it. Whether you're Chris Murphy, oddly
the most good boy Democrat, we have one of them
who says, oh no, we got to be populous, we
got to I agree with him. It's funny coming from
that messenger, how right he is. But that's what you need.
You need the you know, the Dan Odsbourn's the guy
who did so well running as an independent Nebraska. You
need all these people from various ideological stripes. John Fetterman,
(20:56):
I don't care, you know, moderate, you know, progressive, socialists,
maybe even conservative Democrats, But it's less about this specific
ideological stripe, you know, and that all obviously depends on
where they're running from for what as opposed to the style,
the approach, the sense of authenticity, all those things. I mean,
(21:18):
none of this. I'm not saying anything you haven't heard
a million times and thought through. That's to me what
the Democrats need to do as well as you knows,
as Murphy and many other people say, you know, under
recapture what I wrote, what I've spent a book writing
Evil Geniuses, about a version, a twenty first century version
of being on the side of the powerless and the
(21:39):
workers against the man and capitalists and the ruling class
and the evil geniuses. And when you see as we
saw in this incredible Trump press comforence at his mansion
club the other day, you know, the brazen corruption, it's
really it's just amazing. It made me think of the
as I've been thinking about that comference, oh in the
(22:01):
week since it's happened, days since it happened, the oh,
we're not going back Comaho said again again, Well, we
if Trump and the Republicans have they wear, we are
definitely going back and not just to pre row, which
is what that The main subtext of that slogan was,
we're going back to the eighteen nineties and nineteen hundreds early,
(22:23):
you know, we're going back to robber barons. We're going
back to just shameless corruption. That press conference is amazing. Okay,
here it is at mar A Lago, an artifact of
the era. He has his his Emiathi billionaire golf course
developer partner there, who he said, oh yeah, we're going
to give this guy government deals to build data centers
and due real estate billions of dollars.
Speaker 7 (22:44):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
Here's Eric, my son over there in the back and
he's building Trump towers in the Middle East. Oh yeah,
and we also just got a new the Saudi Golf
Tour is going to have a great tournament at my
hotel in Miami, the Dural And oh yeah, yeah, here's
my here's my crypto business partner who's also my middist
envoy to Helly, Steve Wodcoff. He'll tell you about what
(23:07):
we're doing in Gaza.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
I mean very conflicted, right.
Speaker 5 (23:11):
I mean conflicted, beyond conflicted. It's just like, nope, this
is corrupt and this is no logarchy. Welcome to it now.
In the last time this happened in the center good
ended in what was you know, certainly until Watergate, the
most famous presidential scandal in history, which was the teapot
Dome scandal, which was oil and all that. This stuff
(23:33):
doesn't last forever. I guess that's what I take my
knowledge of history and my long view being old, is
that none of the there is all his here tofore
unless history suddenly changes. And I don't think it's going
to in this sense. It's one way or another. It
swings back. There is a counter reaction, and you know,
I mean the Republicans in a certain sense, and some
of them do know it, which is why the you know,
(23:55):
in his disgusting, egregious way, Josh Hawley, you know, for instance, uh,
you know, mouths and sometimes does more than mouth does
things with Bernie Sanders on behalf of you know, versions
of actual economic populism rather than just cultural populism and
be more manly and all that stuff. So so there
(24:17):
are you know, there are Republicans who understand that. To me,
the the the inherent contradiction that they've lived with, you know,
in the in the fifty odd years, they've been trying
to be both the party of the white working class
and the party of the billionaires. You know, at a
certain point, one hopes, one thinks it just becomes you know, irreconcilable.
(24:39):
But we'll see. I mean, that's that's that's the weird
contradiction that has exists among Republicans and on the right
and has which is, oh, yeah, we're the working class
party of people who are who are just you know,
who have undertaken and successfully done and now want to
redouble the transfer of wealth from the have not to
(25:01):
the tops of the haves. You know, that's what they
want to do in their big one bill that gives
you know, extends these twenty seventeen tax cuts for billionaires
another five or ten years.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
Thank you so much, Kurt. I hope you will come.
Speaker 5 (25:15):
Back always and happy to be your little resident historian
or when I play on podcasts anyway.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
John Gantz is the author of When the Clock Broke,
Comment Conspiracyists, and How America Cracked Up in the early
nineteen nineties, and the author of the substack on Popular
front Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
John, Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Molly. How are you doing You know, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
I mean, whatever is happening here.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
In fact, let's talk about what's happening here. I read
your excellent book.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Thanks, you're welcome. I want you to give us a
sort of how you think we got here?
Speaker 7 (25:55):
Where to begin? I mean, my book begins in the
nineteen nineties, and essentially what it begins to pick up
in the story that was still kind of going on
in the underbelly and hadn't really made its way through
the mainstream, was that there was a fact that the
Republican Party, who called South of Paleo Consbermaden, which wanted
the Republicans that pursue a very different kind of politics,
and they had pursued up until that point, which was
(26:16):
sort of moving to the sector, moderating, embracing certain ideas
of liberalism while you know, rejecting their own and bringing
along ideas of conservatism. For them, Ronald Reagan was two
at wing, which probably sounds to you and I, you
and I as being rather crazy. They wanted a type
of politics that could smash the institutions and elites of liberalism,
(26:40):
and they believed a kind of charismatic emigog figure. They
put it that bluntly would be the man to do it.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
They almost sort of got it.
Speaker 7 (26:48):
Huh, there were prefigurations of it. Patu Cannon's primary campaign
against George H. W. Bush was kind of unexpectedly strong
and gave that campaign fits and may have even sunk it.
And then you have Ross Perrot, who comes along in
that era, not exactly considering movement, would certainly come kinds
of conservative and right wing ailance to his populist campaign
(27:10):
running against the establishment as a kind of billionaire who
could fix everything. That era, you get kind of eerie
precursors to what's happened since I noticed that there is
a terrible distance act between the American public and the
institutions that are supposed to represent it. And this has
created an enormous amount of of resentment and anger. And
(27:32):
the least which which could be the beneficiary of this
of this anger against say, an unequal economy, hasn't seized
upon it. The right has with a different set of
issues and concerns, part of which is an unequal economy,
but they would do don't know why that is so. Yeah,
I think that we have come to the terminus of
(27:55):
this political wave that began at this time and likened
toy sixteen. What unites the rather contradictory, incoherent coalition behind Trump.
You know, you had people who were angry about the
war in Gaza for exactly opposite reasons. Voting for Trump
is a sense that he's a protest vote is a
(28:16):
sense that he represents the interruption of as usual. Now,
how much of that is real and how much of
that is part of the Trump showmanship? I mean, I
think we can tell, but that is definitely a big
part of his appeal.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
I think that's right.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Right, So the idea is the nineties again, is this
New Gingridge set the table for this?
Speaker 7 (28:34):
Right?
Speaker 5 (28:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 7 (28:35):
I think New Gingrich is definitely a part of it.
New Gingrich, I think saw the kind of confrontational politics
his constituents wanted. He was still a creature of the
Republican Party. Trump kind of brings us to his conclusion
by attacking the Republican Party from outside. You know, the
Tea Party was already beginning to do that, but again,
closer to the conventional conservative movement perhaps than Trump. But Trump,
(28:58):
you know, represents a kind of hostile takeover of the
Republican Party, and in a weird way internal democracy in
the Republican Party. The elites of the Republican Party could
not stop him and decided that it wasn't worth it.
Two because he was where their constituencies were at, where
the voter, what the voters wanted, and he was the
only really powerful figure on the national stage that they had. Now,
(29:21):
you know what's interesting even about this election, and I
think going forward to think about, is where are the
limits of Trump's electoral power?
Speaker 6 (29:27):
Right?
Speaker 7 (29:28):
Well, you know, he won the popular vote this time,
which he couldn't do before. But you notice the really
fringy people that he tries to bring along with him
often go down. It seems like the electorate has a limit, right,
So Roy Moore goes down, Mark Robinson goes down, Blake
Masters goes down. There are certain people who they just
decided are a little too weird. Now the line seems
(29:48):
to be that jd Vance is okay, He's relatively normal
in their view. Trump is relatively normal in their view.
But the line sort of gets dropped at the Moors
and the Robinsons.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
I want to talk about Jady Mans for another minute,
because Jadvance is a fascinating character to me because he
was never Trump, and then he was Trump curious, and
then he was Trump. So Trump loves a convert. But
does this crew just go along with that?
Speaker 7 (30:20):
I mean, jad Vance is an extraordinarily ambitious man who
came from a modest background and advanced himself through America's
elite institutions. He became, for a brief period of time
a kind of darling of Liberal America when Hillbiliology came
out as a kind of explainer of the Trump enthusiasm.
(30:41):
I think he had a bit of a falling out
with Liberal America because they soured on him and picked
up on some of the weirder, nastier parts of that book,
and we're not thrilled with its adaptation for Netflix. I
think he felt personally wounded by this, but I think
he also knew that the future of the Republican Party
was with Trump, and as a politically and socially ambitious person,
(31:01):
he went through this. He also had many of his
mentors and close friends moved in those circles. I mean,
he worked for Peter Tiel. He is part of what
I would call like the authoritarian Right family, which is
a kind of intellectual demimon that's you know, probably built
their social media and group chats. That's interested in kind
(31:23):
of post liberal and post democratic visions for America.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Right, I'm going to make you like explain this to
our listeners because you and I know the shorthand here,
but like I don't want to have a moment of
saying bacon if that makes sense for sure, So I
want you to explain. This is the mensches mo bug
that's Curtis Jarvin's stage name. These are this is the
intellectual dark Web, So explain what that is.
Speaker 7 (31:50):
Well, I think essentially what it is, I mean not
to get to you. Conspiratorial is is a is a
group of intellectuals and semi intellectuals and media figures that
exist in a broad patrenage network created by Peter Teel
who combine authoritarian ideas about American governance with a kind
of belief in technological advancement. So they're kind of reactionary
(32:14):
futurists or reaction ra a modernist group. But they have
a variety of different theories about American government that's non democratic.
Curtis Jarvin Menius mobug Is is very into It sounds silly,
but he's very into the history of absolute monarchy. He's
very elitist.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Yes, I was hoping you were going to bring up monarchy,
because can you explain to us what the history there is.
Speaker 7 (32:37):
He aligns on this idea by taking his anarcho capitalist
ideas to their absurd limit, which is that basically the
world should be modeled on family businesses, which he interprets
the history of monarchies and feudalism in Europe to be.
That's not quite right, but that's basically what he thinks
(32:58):
the model of the world should be is these kind
of patriarchal family businesses, of which Trump is close enough.
So yeah, he's interested in monarchy as a replacement of democracy,
which is different than say, people on the populist right
or even on the fascist right, who have a populist
notion of replacing liberal democracy with something that's more representative
(33:22):
of the true people. Now, Curtis Jarvin mentions Molbug, he
doesn't believe in the true people. He believes that the
Republican voter is not some kind of sturdy, heartland person
whose common sense could be relied upon. He thinks that
they're kind of redneck idiots who need to be ruled
by what he calls the dark elves, these true elites,
of whom, of course he's a member. So there's a
(33:44):
variety of different visions here, but what unites them all
is basically a belief that the liberal democratic model of
capitalism is exhausted, is over, and needs to be replaced
with some kind of form of authoritarianism. Some of these
people look very favorably to Singapore. Obviously, there's a lot
of interest on the right in dictatorships like Franco's and Salazar's,
(34:05):
and you know, among some people who don't get as
much public hearing, of course because they try to keep
them in the shadows Hitler and Mussolini, and a lot
of interest unsurprisingly and apartheid South Africa, where David Sachs,
Peter Teel and a lot of muscle got their start, yeah,
which was you know, an extremely hierarchical, brutal, authoritarian form
(34:28):
of capitalist development that took place in the middle part
of the twentieth century. So they basically believe in capitalism
without democracy. The thing about what united the American left
and right for you know, in the post Warrior and
longer than that, was a belief in capitalism plus democracy.
Now what Teal at all are proposing as capitalism minus
(34:51):
democracy or maybe a different form of democracy, not liberal democracy.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Certainly.
Speaker 5 (34:55):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
It's funny because I just recently read a book about
how much right has always loved authoritarians.
Speaker 7 (35:02):
Yes, that's also true America last.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Yes, America last, Yes. I just read that book, and
in it it is all about how even at their best,
Republicans were still like Franco's Gray, talk about that.
Speaker 7 (35:17):
Yeah, there's always been a curiosity on the American right
or authoritarian regimes. You know, they are not the only
people who can be charged with this. Obviously, American left
had a lot of sympathy and interest for a long
time in the Soviet Union, and not just communist liberals. Also,
you looked favorably on the Soviet Union until you know,
it became clear what Stalinism really was.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
My grandfather was one of the last people to reject Stiles.
Speaker 7 (35:42):
Yeah, of course, I was going to say, you know
this very well. So they can't be charged entirely with this.
There's a tendency among American and American politics in general
to look for models overseas. The models that the right
wing looks overseas, naturally, are you know, right wing authoritarian model.
You know, obviously, the Catholic National Review looked with great
(36:04):
interest at Franco and Salazar and some of them even
you know, sort of left the orbit of the National
View to kind of join those politics entirely. Even before
the Second World War, America firsters looked with great curiosity
at Mussolini and Hitler, and before that, you know, there
were some of the American rights who thought the Kaiser
offered a type of governance that might be preferable. So, yeah,
(36:26):
it is a very old tradition. The sans among conservatives
and the right is that American society is able to
be manipulated by liberals and changes too fast, and we
need a stronger way of governing to prevent those changes
from happening, a revert to older ways of doing things.
So obviously authoritarian models of rule look appealing, and I
(36:48):
think basically that that's become more less of only an
elite project and something that's shared among grassroots Republicans because
of the real fee years of the changes that have happened,
you know, in the liberalization of the United States around
issues like race and gender.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yeah, such an incredibly strange moment we find ourselves in.
I wonder if you could explain a little bit about
why Trump is a protest vote even though he was
president once before.
Speaker 7 (37:22):
Well, I think people have fond memories about that administration,
forget very much the downsides of it. I think, you know,
they feel like the economy was cooking and they were
doing well and the big I think these things were
Trump's fault, and because of his bad foreign policy decisions
and his upsetting of certain regular patterns of geopolitical order.
(37:43):
But you know, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are
concerning to people, seem to be out of control. He
comes along and says, I can put these things back,
and you know, under control. I don't think it can.
My sense is that he will make things much worse.
But it makes sense, you know, in a world that
seems to be coming apart. And also, you know, I
frankly think the United States, I mean, Trump is not
(38:06):
no spring chicken either, but the United States, where it
stands in the world in terms of its importance, cannot
be led by someone who looks so frail and old.
It's just it invites a lot of anxiety, both by
people here and people abroad. So I think there is
a sense fairly or unfairly, that the Democrats were unable
(38:29):
to govern, and Trump's kind of showmanship suggests governance. Whether
he's actually able to accomplish governance, I think it's pretty
clear that he's not that good at it, but he
gives the impression that he can take charge. That's out
of appealing to people in a world that seemed to
be coming apart.
Speaker 5 (38:46):
Now.
Speaker 7 (38:46):
The Democratic Party, you know, they got in shape when
they decided to change candidates, but it seemed like a
chaotic mess, you know, and it was to a certain extent.
It's kind of remarkable they did as well. I think
it stands to try sweaknesses and people's distrusted them that
they did as well as they did. But I think
in another circumstance it could have been a real blowout.
(39:07):
But you know, I think that the fact of the
matter is, rightly or wrongly, the perception among the public
was that the Democrats were unable to govern, and that's
usually why people vote for a different president. Trump kind
of synthesizes a protest and a return vote because he says, well,
I governed before and it wasn't so bad, and people
kind of remember it that way, which I mean there
(39:27):
was more to within that, and also, aren't you tired
of these people who don't know their business?
Speaker 3 (39:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (39:33):
I think that's right, but it is still just strange.
One of the things that Trump World has spent a
lot of time talking about is this idea that this
time and part of twenty twenty five was a little
bit of this sort of pr for this until it
wasn't that this time it's going to all be different
because this time Trump has got really smart people figuring
(39:54):
out how he can do a lot of the stuff
that he was not able to do last time. You
think that's pr we'll see.
Speaker 7 (40:00):
I mean, he probably has learned some things about Washington,
DC and governing and politics in his time. Him having
so many challenges with the really not seemingly very well
considered cabinet picks doesn't suggest to me that Republicans believe
he's a particularly strong leader who can menace them, either
(40:24):
at the polls or in other ways. It seems like
they're willing to stand up to him in limited ways,
especially when they think people don't care, aren't looking. I
don't know. I think also the lessons he has learned
may have been the wrong ones, and his opposition has
also learned lessons of how to deal with him. I
think right now everyone's in kind of wait and see mode.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
You know.
Speaker 7 (40:44):
I think Trump has personal challenges in terms of just
the capacity of his mind and focus to accomplish some
of the things. And I don't believe he has fully.
I mean, some people are willing to work with him now,
but I don't know if he has really first class
talent willing to go to bath for him. He also
(41:06):
enters office as a lame duck on day one and less. Instead,
you know, he goes through with his business of trying
to remain president and so on and so forth. But
I mean, I don't know how seriously that's going to
be taken by you know, there are other people waiting
in line right right.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
He's a very old guy. I mean, it's not like
he's sixty year old.
Speaker 7 (41:25):
He could kill over at any moment. I'm sure that
Vance wants to be president one day. I'm sure that
he will try to take advantage of a circumstance that
would allow him to do that. If that, if that
means betraying Trump, he might do it.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (41:40):
Yeah, I don't think he has any personal loyalties to
him or cares for him as a person. So yeah,
I think that what we're seeing is as the you know,
the possibilities of a post Trump future is also being considered,
and we'll see that, you know, with how much Republicans
are kind of willing to push back and ignore him,
which you know already looks like quite a bit. But again,
(42:02):
who knows, a very unpredictable person who's also you know,
unlike we can talk about politics normal politics, and that's
true so far as it goes, but it has to
be remembered and how much this stuff works or it's
just bullshit and actually backfires for him, I don't know.
But it has to be taken seriously that Trump is
willing to also do illegal things and not just work
(42:24):
in the in the in the channels of normal politics.
He's willing to commit crimes of of really grave nature. Now,
are we going to be in some kind of environment
where members of the opposition have to be worried about
being gunned down or thrown in prison. I think that
that might be a stretch, but let's hope not. It's
(42:46):
not totally out of the realm of possibility. Considering that
mobs have been willing to get in the streets and
try to do stuff for him before, So it's not
something that you can last. I mean, I don't see
that as being a law, long term effective mode of
politics and governments. Trumpet, it doesn't seem like he does
either with the way he's talking. He's talking about primary people.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
Right, which is much better than killing.
Speaker 7 (43:10):
Right of course, But you know, I don't think he's
above leaning on people in an illegal ways. So I
mean that is a new dynamic to American politics.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
It's not a new dynamic.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
It's everything as old as new again.
Speaker 7 (43:23):
Yeah, I mean, it's a dynamic that hasn't been in
American politics for quite some time.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
But yeah, yeah, since the sixties. Thank you, Thank you,
John Gantz, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 6 (43:34):
Molly Moment, Jesse Cannon, Samaijung Fast former two time guests
of this podcast.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Justice riggs down in North Carolina. She was ahead in
the final vote COUMP by seven hundred and thirty four votes.
But the Republicans because they are clinging onto any power
thereafter having a monumental loss in North Carolina state where
they've done massive remaindering the control for well over a decade,
they're cleaning on the power. What are you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (44:04):
So she won by seven hundred and thirty four votes
and Republicans are basically trying to throw it out. It
is so incredibly this is the nine to one one stuff.
This is the thing. They're refusing to certify the election
results because they don't like what happened. And this is
(44:25):
the kind of stuff that you should be paying attention to.
This is just really really bad, really like, this is
what trump Ism gave birth to, you know, is this
idea that if we don't like the idea, if we
don't like what happens, we can not not certify the election.
(44:45):
This is the anti democratic stuff that is so incredibly toxic, corrosive,
bad for democracy. And this is in norms and institution
that Republicans are trying to destroy. And I hope that
Roy Cooper will, in fact, you know, step in and
there is a new Josh din is the new governor,
(45:08):
and that Democrats will force them to certify. And this
may go up to the Supreme Court. But even if
you win by a litle if you win, even being
a Democrat, you still win. And that is why this
is just so appalling, and I hope this gets whooped down.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
(45:31):
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
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. And George Santos has asked a judge
to delay his sentencing so he can make more podcasts. Well,
that's a cursed sentence and that might be Peak twenty
twenty five. We have such a great show for you today.
(00:22):
Evil Genius is author KURTA. Anderson gives us his historical
perspective on how bad Buchanan brought us to the Trump
of today. Then we'll talk to author John Gants as
he examines the path that led us to this current
political moment. But first the news.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Somali, I have to say my mental health has not
been doing well for watching fires raging throughout la very
close to where I used to live once upon a time.
It is not looking good.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Yeah, it is really this. We're just watching and it
we're watching and thinking and praying for all the people
in California. My brother and my father and my other brother,
all of them live in California, and we're just thinking
about everybody. So there are three major fires. The Palasades
fire is the one closest to Los Angeles, or is
(01:18):
in Los Angeles. It's burned about eighteen square miles. And
then there's the Eton Fire, which is north of Pasadena,
which has burned about sixteen and a half miles. And
then there's the Hurst Fire Hurst Hurst Fire in the
San Fernando Valley, which has burned a little bit less
than a mile. So this is you know, we're watching
(01:38):
these videos come out of California and they're just really dystopian,
so dark, and we're just thinking about everybody and hoping
they're okay. Seventy thousand residents so far under evacuation orders,
and a lot of those evacuations were in the Palasa
Hides parts of Santa Monica. Four hundred thousand people without power,
that's half a million people. Continues with these high winds,
(02:01):
no ray and lots and lots of fire. It's really important,
you know. Right now, Trump and a lot of Republicans
are trying to blame these fires and Governor Gavin Newsom.
But the truth is, like we all know, these fires
have been getting worse and worse because of climate change,
because California is a hot, dry climate, and as it
(02:22):
gets hotter and drier and the weather gets more intense fires.
You know, they spread more, they cover more area, and
you know they have eighty mile an hour winds, And
it's just this is not Gavin Newsom's vault. It is
the fault of Exxon and Chevron and all the oil
companies that knew about climate change fifty years ago. So
(02:44):
there are things we can do to cut back on
all of the you know, effects of climate change, or
we're just going to keep living like this. And so
it's really dark and just thinking about everybody in California
and hoping that they stay safe, smiling.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
One of the things you and I often talk about
is there's some people who when they have a hammer
and everything is a nail. And I'm starting to think
that's Trump. With the economy and tariffs.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Yeah, this guy really really really really really wants to
really really wants to enact these tariffs. He is now
has this he's considering declaring a national economic emergency. By
the way, that is insane. Our economy is really really good,
(03:32):
and he's going to do it to provide legal justification
for a series of universal tariffs on allies and adversaries.
Cianna and who's reporting this again? It's Trump Earlier this week,
he said he was going to rename the Gulf of
Mexico the Gulf of America, or as those of us
in the Democratic Party call it, the Gulf of Trump
being unable to make egg prices any lower. Look, you know,
(03:55):
Trump is going to throw a lot of stuff at
the wall. This would be a terrible, terrible idea. I
hope Democrats will push back on it as much as possible.
We know historically Herbert Hoover did this. It caused the
United States economy to crash. It was a huge mistake.
Nobody wants these tariffs, not you know, but Trump somehow
(04:16):
thinks that it would make things less expensive. We all
know tariffs are wildly inflationary. It will make everything more expensive.
You know, he wants to put a sixty percent tariff
on Chinese goods and ten percent tariff on global exports.
Let's hope that there are enough cornups in the room
who convinced him not to.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Well, another fun news. Everybody's wondering why President Trump is
so interested in Greenland and the Panama Canal and willing
to use military coercion to get them. What do you
see here?
Speaker 1 (04:47):
May so Trump is saying he's willing to use military
coercion to get there. I wouldn't trust him. My thinking
is that Trump says a lot of stuff. He speaks
in this fombastic way, and the hope of getting our
allies to do what he wants, he wants people to
think he's crazy. He wants Mexico and Canada to think
(05:09):
he might invade them in the hopes of them negotiating
with him on tariffs. I don't think any of this
is Again. His justification here, or least according to USA Today,
is that it's an expansionist minded that he's worried that
an expansionist minded China and Russia might be jocking for
(05:29):
geopolitical supremacy. This is really stupid. China is in the
middle of having a somewhat of a financial crisis. Russia
is very very much, you know, financially exhausted by the
war in Ukraine, and this is ridiculous. Republicans have been
using about taking back the Paama Canal since Carter, and
(05:51):
it's really been a kind of dog whistle. It's totally
not going to happen. But it's also just a way
in which republic and are able to kind of show
themselves to be colonialists and to say, you know, these
other countries, we have supremacy over them. And so I
(06:11):
would just look to this as kind of it's its
own sort of dog whistle. It's like they're eating the dogs.
It's this idea that Trump thinks that he can sort
of do whatever he wants. And again it does feed
into this Nixonian idea that maybe he can be the
strong man and that can intimidate our allies and adversaries.
But I wouldn't put a lot of stock in this.
(06:31):
But I would also say that I think that they're
you know, Greenland continues to not be for sales, so
and Trump does not have you know, a one percent
win in the popular vote is not a mandate to
go to war with Denmark. So I think we all
just need to take a deep breath here and realize that.
And I wouldn't I Also the mistake, I think is
to sort of say that Trump is doing something that's
(06:54):
well thought out, when in fact, a lot of times
he's just doing whatever's right in front of him or
whatever somebody told him on plane on the way there.
So don't give Trump too much credit.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Somalie I think we have to eat a little crow here,
and I'm not talking about Harlan. We're not going to
eat the rich here. Merrick Garland intends to release Special
Counsel report on Trump's Gen six case. Doo JSAs So.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Merrick Garland says he's going to release the Special Council
Report on Trump's January sixth case. Look, Merk Garland has
tended to not be the horse to bet on for bravery.
But you know who knows.
Speaker 4 (07:32):
Those are very very polite saying there you have there.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, but perhaps now he will change his spots. We
never know. It's possible. Good for Merrik Garland if he
wants to be brave at the eleventh hour. Anyone here
is welcome. Though he has really been such a disappointment,
let me tell you, you know, talk about not having
been playing three dimensional jazz.
Speaker 4 (07:56):
Or even the two dimensional one or even two. Yeah, yeah,
i'd call it. You know those chess games where somebody
just leaves the board for a while, it doesn't do anything.
She decides to not make a move for a long time.
So I think we've been looking at.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
That's it, Marca. Yes, Kurt Anderson is the author of
Evil geniuses and the co creator of Commands THEE. Welcome
back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 5 (08:25):
Kurt, My pleasure as ever.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
You know why I wanted to have you on was
because I was reading a book that was all about
how Pap Buchanan, you know, said a lot of early
Trump stuff, et cetera, and that got me thinking about
sort of the history of how Republicans lost their minds,
and that is you So let us talk well.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
Happy Canon obviously was the Trump prototype. You know, he
was a famous journalist, media funded guy, and and that
is what led him to run for president in nineteen
ninety two, nineteen ninety six and did pretty well as
a Trump Trump plus thirty IQ points and Trump who
(09:11):
actually knows stuff and knows history, but and has this coherent,
more coherent idea about you know, the right wing populism
that from the degree he has in ideology bodies. So yeah,
there he was doing all this stuff, you know, back
in the nineties. And at the same time that, you know,
he had the new gingrich taking over the House and
(09:32):
being a right winger in that way and moving the
party right. But no, but Patty Cannon was really in
his way ahead of his time. That's why when we
did one of our spy magazine specials in right right
around then when he spoke at the right after he
spoke at the Republican Convention in ninety two, and he
gave this cultural war speech, and we we just we've
(09:53):
put it on our special on NBC Prime Time, ran
thirty seconds of it translated into well, not translated but
actually just with a soundtrack of Hitler speaking as his
book and amazingly standards and practices at NBC let us
do that. But yes, Pabriu Khan was there early, and
Donald Trump grew and inherited that beginning version of the
(10:13):
modern Republican party.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
He did.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
And it's funny because it's like I'm thinking about, like
the big Senate loss that Democrats had in nineteen eighty, Right,
wasn't that the biggest the second biggest loss a single
party had ever had?
Speaker 5 (10:29):
I trust you on that. But the eighties were, yeah,
I mean obviously the Reagan land slide and then bigger
Lan slide in eighty four.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Yeah, And I'm just wondering, like I'm trying, because I'm
trying to grapple with what exactly happened during this election
that I still am not able to process, and so
I'm trying to sort of think about it in the
historical precedent. I mean, do you when you think about
this election, what does it remind you of?
Speaker 5 (10:57):
Well, does it remind me of Reagan? Particularly because that
was genuinely, you know, a mandate in a landslide, especially
eighty four, so it was different there. I mean, you know, yes,
we finally had a Republican the first since you know,
two thousand and four, to become president, having won the
(11:17):
popular vote. But he won it barely, and I don't
want to over diminish the reality and the significance of
he won. He won by you know, healthy electoral vote margin,
and one in many areas, including New York City. Of course,
moves significantly right in being voting for trumpmore so it
(11:37):
meant something, But it isn't to me yet anything like
eighty eighty four. One thing is one I'm thinking about
nineteen eighty is you know, Yes, in nineteen seventy six,
seventy seven, eight nine, all of us liberals thought, oh
my god, this guy's a nut. What's he going to do?
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Well?
Speaker 5 (11:53):
Immediately, he didn't govern as a nut. He governed as
a very conservative Republican and talked to Tipple Neil, the
Speaker of the House, and yes, said mister Gorbacheff, tear
this wall down, but pursued daytide with NATO. You know,
it was it was a whole different thing.
Speaker 6 (12:09):
It was.
Speaker 5 (12:09):
It was in retrospect. Although there was a lot of
hair on fire Sky's falling talk in seventy nine and eighty,
it didn't turn out that way. I'm not saying he
was a great president, but he was a normal president
and we all like adapted to it and it didn't
do crazy things. So it isn't like that, so I
know in my lifetime, you.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Know, it is its own thing, closest to Nixon, except
if Nixon had gone realized.
Speaker 5 (12:37):
As he was an inheritor of Pat Buchanan, Pat Buchanan
before he became the famous Pat Buchanan running for president,
of course, worked for Richard Nixon. That was his big
first thing as a political figure. And he was to
Nixon's right and he was the House right winger, whereas Nixon.
Because it was nineteen sixty eight, sixty nine to seventy
seventy one, it was still the sixties. Effectively, it was
(12:59):
still this liberal hegemony. Democrats still ran Congress and everything else,
and you know, we have the Democrats and liberals were
complacent because they basically run the show for you know,
since the New DA in World War Two and done
pretty well, so like it was fine. So Nixon was,
in fact, until arguably I think the Biden administration the
(13:21):
most liberal president we've had in my life. But what
Nixon did and felt and embodied the way Trump does
in his bizarre worldwide was this resentment of the elite,
you know, the resentment of the elite. And he created
his silent majority during the Vietnam War and during the
counterculture and during the anti Hippie period, during the protests
(13:43):
that all of you regular, normal, good Americans, don't we
hate these the media and these hippies and these uppy
black people and all the rest. So, yes, Donald Trump,
in his crewed again Nixon minus fifty I key points
revived that he is, in his semi witning, unwinning way,
the inheritor of this of the worst of Republicanism of
(14:07):
the last sixty years.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Yeah, And it's funny because when we talk about I
just want to fact check from Jesse here in nineteen
eighty Democrats lost fourteen seats in nineteen eighty four. They
lost too in the Senate.
Speaker 5 (14:20):
Even though Reagan's victory was bigger, right, and you see
that and when it gets hopeful, like the electorate goes, okay,
we give you fourteen more seats in the center, Oh
my gosh, Senate, you know majority, Oh, big landslide for Reagan.
But it also at the same time pulled back, you know,
it reacted and kind of in his overall way, does
this thing of forward or to the right one two
(14:42):
steps back to the central one. And that's what it did,
as those numbers about the Senate and Congress showed. So
we'll see. I mean, it's very hard because you know,
we've gotten all tired of saying, oh, it's unprecedented, it's unprecedented. Well,
this is a freakishly new unprecedented thing. So well saying
it's like this election or that election in the past,
(15:04):
I don't know, I don't see it. You know, it's
not there. I mean, there are bits and pieces they're like,
I mean, there is some nineteen sixty eightitionists here, but
which was a close election but a victory for you know,
this bullying Richard Nixon version of the beginnings of you know,
working class appeal, which was, to say, in nineteen sixty eight,
(15:25):
as it was in sixty four, an appeal to the South,
that was the white South which was so upset about
civil rights.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Right, you're bringing this up a really important point here,
which is this idea of like the backlash from a
sort of backlash to this, a backlash to that, the
sort of movement of the sixties, and then a backlash
with Nixon, and then the seventies and Carter, and a
backlash with Reagan. It feels like if you look at
(15:53):
twenty sixteen, it was Trump and then it was me too,
and then there was there just been backlash and backlash
and backlash and back What do you make of that
and talk to us more about it.
Speaker 5 (16:04):
Well, it's you know, the right being the right uses
the backlash effectively again and again. I mean, that's almost
the nature of its different nests from the left in
this country to do it. But whereas what Democrats do
over and over again, did it with Clinton in the nineties,
did it with Obama in the aughts, Yeah, the aughts
(16:27):
and tens, and then did it again with Biden is
clean up the basically budget busting, deficit building messes of
the Republicans who precede them. So that's what they have
over these last six years, in addition to stupidly and
incorrectly dumping the white working class and labor unions as
they started doing in the seventies and eighties. They because
(16:49):
they're responsible good boys and girls, are the ones who
sort of balance the budget and try to be responsible
and govern after the kind of drunken, fiscally nuts benders
that they inherit from Republicans, you know. And that's how
we turned into in this last election, and Kama Harris
(17:09):
and the Democrats into the goody goody elitist responsible people
who are effectively conservatives. They want to get back to normality.
And there is this rowing hunger that has been here
for thirty years since since the industrialization of the rust
belt and all that happened economically starting in the nineties especially,
(17:31):
There has to be a change. There is I won't
say revolutionary, but there is this intense reformist, populist This
is screwed up, this is rig We don't understand our
healthcare system. It doesn't provide for us. You know. College
is unaffordable and our on. And so the electorate, in
its mostly low information, ignorant way, reaches out anywhere it can.
(17:55):
And Donald Trump looks like he'll shake it up, you know.
I mean, people don't know, and they for that rather
than this kind of college educated, good boys and girls
version of Democrats from al Gore to Kamala Harris.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
What do you think Democrats should do?
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Obviously it's a different world than it was in twenty sixteen.
There's not the same. The mainstream media is not what
it was. I mean, I am so struck by Oprah
doing an event with Harris.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
And I love Oprah and thinks she's a genius.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
But Joe Rogan having doing three hours with Trump gets
in front of like seventy million people, whereas television doesn't
get in.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Front of those numbers anymore.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
So I'm wondering what you think, Democrats, what that solve
is for this, because this is something I spent a
probably disproportionate amount of my time obsessing about. I mean,
what do you think the answer is? Because clearly what
we saw from Biden's loss was Biden passed a lot
of really good legislation and voters not the voters who
(18:55):
watch television or read the news, but the voters who
make up the line and share the vote, right, because
Trump won and he won the popular vote, they didn't know.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
So what did Democrats do?
Speaker 7 (19:07):
Well?
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Donald Trump is this unwittingly brilliant person in many ways,
And there's all these quotes that had such meaning in
the aftermath, like a star gets to do whatever he wants.
He said that you know years ago about sexual assault,
Well he's living it in every way. I can appoint
these idiots in the cabinet, I can shoot somebody on
Fifth Avenue. All those things are so true and so real,
and he's living not in so many ways. So I'm
(19:28):
not saying, oh, we need a Trump. However, the level
of understanding that politics is, and certainly for the lessons
in the TV age and since, been a show. It
is a show, and just face up to it. Maybe
you don't like it, Okay, fine, that's the way it is.
So all of that implies in a way that you
(19:49):
can still keep your human dignity and stick to more
or less the facts, live with that be a little
more incautious. I mean, that's the thing about you know,
whether you're again, whether you're al Gore. I don't want
to keep mentioning al Gore, but he he to me,
he was as people said at the time, he was
the boy who got good grades and every adult's idea
of a good young person and all that. Kama Harris, too,
(20:12):
was the well behaved and highly cautious person, you know who,
whether she did or didn't, have a a kind of
human political center that she shared with the world. And
I liked her fine, just like I like them all fine.
I like all these Democrats fine. But she was highly
cautious and that prevented her from being effective. So that's
one thing I think democrats have to do is and
(20:34):
people have talked about it. Whether you're Chris Murphy, oddly
the most good boy Democrat, we have one of them
who says, oh no, we got to be populous, we
got to I agree with him. It's funny coming from
that messenger, how right he is. But that's what you need.
You need the you know, the Dan Odsbourn's the guy
who did so well running as an independent Nebraska. You
need all these people from various ideological stripes. John Fetterman,
(20:56):
I don't care, you know, moderate, you know, progressive, socialists,
maybe even conservative Democrats, But it's less about this specific
ideological stripe, you know, and that all obviously depends on
where they're running from for what as opposed to the style,
the approach, the sense of authenticity, all those things. I mean,
(21:18):
none of this. I'm not saying anything you haven't heard
a million times and thought through. That's to me what
the Democrats need to do as well as you knows,
as Murphy and many other people say, you know, under
recapture what I wrote, what I've spent a book writing
Evil Geniuses, about a version, a twenty first century version
of being on the side of the powerless and the
(21:39):
workers against the man and capitalists and the ruling class
and the evil geniuses. And when you see as we
saw in this incredible Trump press comforence at his mansion
club the other day, you know, the brazen corruption, it's
really it's just amazing. It made me think of the
as I've been thinking about that comference, oh in the
(22:01):
week since it's happened, days since it happened, the oh,
we're not going back Comaho said again again, Well, we
if Trump and the Republicans have they wear, we are
definitely going back and not just to pre row, which
is what that The main subtext of that slogan was,
we're going back to the eighteen nineties and nineteen hundreds early,
(22:23):
you know, we're going back to robber barons. We're going
back to just shameless corruption. That press conference is amazing. Okay,
here it is at mar A Lago, an artifact of
the era. He has his his Emiathi billionaire golf course
developer partner there, who he said, oh yeah, we're going
to give this guy government deals to build data centers
and due real estate billions of dollars.
Speaker 7 (22:44):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
Here's Eric, my son over there in the back and
he's building Trump towers in the Middle East. Oh yeah,
and we also just got a new the Saudi Golf
Tour is going to have a great tournament at my
hotel in Miami, the Dural And oh yeah, yeah, here's
my here's my crypto business partner who's also my middist
envoy to Helly, Steve Wodcoff. He'll tell you about what
(23:07):
we're doing in Gaza.
Speaker 3 (23:09):
I mean very conflicted, right.
Speaker 5 (23:11):
I mean conflicted, beyond conflicted. It's just like, nope, this
is corrupt and this is no logarchy. Welcome to it now.
In the last time this happened in the center good
ended in what was you know, certainly until Watergate, the
most famous presidential scandal in history, which was the teapot
Dome scandal, which was oil and all that. This stuff
(23:33):
doesn't last forever. I guess that's what I take my
knowledge of history and my long view being old, is
that none of the there is all his here tofore
unless history suddenly changes. And I don't think it's going
to in this sense. It's one way or another. It
swings back. There is a counter reaction, and you know,
I mean the Republicans in a certain sense, and some
of them do know it, which is why the you know,
(23:55):
in his disgusting, egregious way, Josh Hawley, you know, for instance, uh,
you know, mouths and sometimes does more than mouth does
things with Bernie Sanders on behalf of you know, versions
of actual economic populism rather than just cultural populism and
be more manly and all that stuff. So so there
(24:17):
are you know, there are Republicans who understand that. To me,
the the the inherent contradiction that they've lived with, you know,
in the in the fifty odd years, they've been trying
to be both the party of the white working class
and the party of the billionaires. You know, at a
certain point, one hopes, one thinks it just becomes you know, irreconcilable.
(24:39):
But we'll see. I mean, that's that's that's the weird
contradiction that has exists among Republicans and on the right
and has which is, oh, yeah, we're the working class
party of people who are who are just you know,
who have undertaken and successfully done and now want to
redouble the transfer of wealth from the have not to
(25:01):
the tops of the haves. You know, that's what they
want to do in their big one bill that gives
you know, extends these twenty seventeen tax cuts for billionaires
another five or ten years.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
Thank you so much, Kurt. I hope you will come.
Speaker 5 (25:15):
Back always and happy to be your little resident historian
or when I play on podcasts anyway.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
John Gantz is the author of When the Clock Broke,
Comment Conspiracyists, and How America Cracked Up in the early
nineteen nineties, and the author of the substack on Popular
front Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
John, Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Molly. How are you doing You know, I'm good.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
I mean, whatever is happening here.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
In fact, let's talk about what's happening here. I read
your excellent book.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Thanks, you're welcome. I want you to give us a
sort of how you think we got here?
Speaker 7 (25:55):
Where to begin? I mean, my book begins in the
nineteen nineties, and essentially what it begins to pick up
in the story that was still kind of going on
in the underbelly and hadn't really made its way through
the mainstream, was that there was a fact that the
Republican Party, who called South of Paleo Consbermaden, which wanted
the Republicans that pursue a very different kind of politics,
and they had pursued up until that point, which was
(26:16):
sort of moving to the sector, moderating, embracing certain ideas
of liberalism while you know, rejecting their own and bringing
along ideas of conservatism. For them, Ronald Reagan was two
at wing, which probably sounds to you and I, you
and I as being rather crazy. They wanted a type
of politics that could smash the institutions and elites of liberalism,
(26:40):
and they believed a kind of charismatic emigog figure. They
put it that bluntly would be the man to do it.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
They almost sort of got it.
Speaker 7 (26:48):
Huh, there were prefigurations of it. Patu Cannon's primary campaign
against George H. W. Bush was kind of unexpectedly strong
and gave that campaign fits and may have even sunk it.
And then you have Ross Perrot, who comes along in
that era, not exactly considering movement, would certainly come kinds
of conservative and right wing ailance to his populist campaign
(27:10):
running against the establishment as a kind of billionaire who
could fix everything. That era, you get kind of eerie
precursors to what's happened since I noticed that there is
a terrible distance act between the American public and the
institutions that are supposed to represent it. And this has
created an enormous amount of of resentment and anger. And
(27:32):
the least which which could be the beneficiary of this
of this anger against say, an unequal economy, hasn't seized
upon it. The right has with a different set of
issues and concerns, part of which is an unequal economy,
but they would do don't know why that is so. Yeah,
I think that we have come to the terminus of
(27:55):
this political wave that began at this time and likened
toy sixteen. What unites the rather contradictory, incoherent coalition behind Trump.
You know, you had people who were angry about the
war in Gaza for exactly opposite reasons. Voting for Trump
is a sense that he's a protest vote is a
(28:16):
sense that he represents the interruption of as usual. Now,
how much of that is real and how much of
that is part of the Trump showmanship? I mean, I
think we can tell, but that is definitely a big
part of his appeal.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
I think that's right.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Right, So the idea is the nineties again, is this
New Gingridge set the table for this?
Speaker 7 (28:34):
Right?
Speaker 5 (28:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 7 (28:35):
I think New Gingrich is definitely a part of it.
New Gingrich, I think saw the kind of confrontational politics
his constituents wanted. He was still a creature of the
Republican Party. Trump kind of brings us to his conclusion
by attacking the Republican Party from outside. You know, the
Tea Party was already beginning to do that, but again,
closer to the conventional conservative movement perhaps than Trump. But Trump,
(28:58):
you know, represents a kind of hostile takeover of the
Republican Party, and in a weird way internal democracy in
the Republican Party. The elites of the Republican Party could
not stop him and decided that it wasn't worth it.
Two because he was where their constituencies were at, where
the voter, what the voters wanted, and he was the
only really powerful figure on the national stage that they had. Now,
(29:21):
you know what's interesting even about this election, and I
think going forward to think about, is where are the
limits of Trump's electoral power?
Speaker 6 (29:27):
Right?
Speaker 7 (29:28):
Well, you know, he won the popular vote this time,
which he couldn't do before. But you notice the really
fringy people that he tries to bring along with him
often go down. It seems like the electorate has a limit, right,
So Roy Moore goes down, Mark Robinson goes down, Blake
Masters goes down. There are certain people who they just
decided are a little too weird. Now the line seems
(29:48):
to be that jd Vance is okay, He's relatively normal
in their view. Trump is relatively normal in their view.
But the line sort of gets dropped at the Moors
and the Robinsons.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
I want to talk about Jady Mans for another minute,
because Jadvance is a fascinating character to me because he
was never Trump, and then he was Trump curious, and
then he was Trump. So Trump loves a convert. But
does this crew just go along with that?
Speaker 7 (30:20):
I mean, jad Vance is an extraordinarily ambitious man who
came from a modest background and advanced himself through America's
elite institutions. He became, for a brief period of time
a kind of darling of Liberal America when Hillbiliology came
out as a kind of explainer of the Trump enthusiasm.
(30:41):
I think he had a bit of a falling out
with Liberal America because they soured on him and picked
up on some of the weirder, nastier parts of that book,
and we're not thrilled with its adaptation for Netflix. I
think he felt personally wounded by this, but I think
he also knew that the future of the Republican Party
was with Trump, and as a politically and socially ambitious person,
(31:01):
he went through this. He also had many of his
mentors and close friends moved in those circles. I mean,
he worked for Peter Tiel. He is part of what
I would call like the authoritarian Right family, which is
a kind of intellectual demimon that's you know, probably built
their social media and group chats. That's interested in kind
(31:23):
of post liberal and post democratic visions for America.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Right, I'm going to make you like explain this to
our listeners because you and I know the shorthand here,
but like I don't want to have a moment of
saying bacon if that makes sense for sure, So I
want you to explain. This is the mensches mo bug
that's Curtis Jarvin's stage name. These are this is the
intellectual dark Web, So explain what that is.
Speaker 7 (31:50):
Well, I think essentially what it is, I mean not
to get to you. Conspiratorial is is a is a
group of intellectuals and semi intellectuals and media figures that
exist in a broad patrenage network created by Peter Teel
who combine authoritarian ideas about American governance with a kind
of belief in technological advancement. So they're kind of reactionary
(32:14):
futurists or reaction ra a modernist group. But they have
a variety of different theories about American government that's non democratic.
Curtis Jarvin Menius mobug Is is very into It sounds silly,
but he's very into the history of absolute monarchy. He's
very elitist.
Speaker 1 (32:30):
Yes, I was hoping you were going to bring up monarchy,
because can you explain to us what the history there is.
Speaker 7 (32:37):
He aligns on this idea by taking his anarcho capitalist
ideas to their absurd limit, which is that basically the
world should be modeled on family businesses, which he interprets
the history of monarchies and feudalism in Europe to be.
That's not quite right, but that's basically what he thinks
(32:58):
the model of the world should be is these kind
of patriarchal family businesses, of which Trump is close enough.
So yeah, he's interested in monarchy as a replacement of democracy,
which is different than say, people on the populist right
or even on the fascist right, who have a populist
notion of replacing liberal democracy with something that's more representative
(33:22):
of the true people. Now, Curtis Jarvin mentions Molbug, he
doesn't believe in the true people. He believes that the
Republican voter is not some kind of sturdy, heartland person
whose common sense could be relied upon. He thinks that
they're kind of redneck idiots who need to be ruled
by what he calls the dark elves, these true elites,
of whom, of course he's a member. So there's a
(33:44):
variety of different visions here, but what unites them all
is basically a belief that the liberal democratic model of
capitalism is exhausted, is over, and needs to be replaced
with some kind of form of authoritarianism. Some of these
people look very favorably to Singapore. Obviously, there's a lot
of interest on the right in dictatorships like Franco's and Salazar's,
(34:05):
and you know, among some people who don't get as
much public hearing, of course because they try to keep
them in the shadows Hitler and Mussolini, and a lot
of interest unsurprisingly and apartheid South Africa, where David Sachs,
Peter Teel and a lot of muscle got their start, yeah,
which was you know, an extremely hierarchical, brutal, authoritarian form
(34:28):
of capitalist development that took place in the middle part
of the twentieth century. So they basically believe in capitalism
without democracy. The thing about what united the American left
and right for you know, in the post Warrior and
longer than that, was a belief in capitalism plus democracy.
Now what Teal at all are proposing as capitalism minus
(34:51):
democracy or maybe a different form of democracy, not liberal democracy.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Certainly.
Speaker 5 (34:55):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
It's funny because I just recently read a book about
how much right has always loved authoritarians.
Speaker 7 (35:02):
Yes, that's also true America last.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Yes, America last, Yes. I just read that book, and
in it it is all about how even at their best,
Republicans were still like Franco's Gray, talk about that.
Speaker 7 (35:17):
Yeah, there's always been a curiosity on the American right
or authoritarian regimes. You know, they are not the only
people who can be charged with this. Obviously, American left
had a lot of sympathy and interest for a long
time in the Soviet Union, and not just communist liberals. Also,
you looked favorably on the Soviet Union until you know,
it became clear what Stalinism really was.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
My grandfather was one of the last people to reject Stiles.
Speaker 7 (35:42):
Yeah, of course, I was going to say, you know
this very well. So they can't be charged entirely with this.
There's a tendency among American and American politics in general
to look for models overseas. The models that the right
wing looks overseas, naturally, are you know, right wing authoritarian model.
You know, obviously, the Catholic National Review looked with great
(36:04):
interest at Franco and Salazar and some of them even
you know, sort of left the orbit of the National
View to kind of join those politics entirely. Even before
the Second World War, America firsters looked with great curiosity
at Mussolini and Hitler, and before that, you know, there
were some of the American rights who thought the Kaiser
offered a type of governance that might be preferable. So, yeah,
(36:26):
it is a very old tradition. The sans among conservatives
and the right is that American society is able to
be manipulated by liberals and changes too fast, and we
need a stronger way of governing to prevent those changes
from happening, a revert to older ways of doing things.
So obviously authoritarian models of rule look appealing, and I
(36:48):
think basically that that's become more less of only an
elite project and something that's shared among grassroots Republicans because
of the real fee years of the changes that have happened,
you know, in the liberalization of the United States around
issues like race and gender.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yeah, such an incredibly strange moment we find ourselves in.
I wonder if you could explain a little bit about
why Trump is a protest vote even though he was
president once before.
Speaker 7 (37:22):
Well, I think people have fond memories about that administration,
forget very much the downsides of it. I think, you know,
they feel like the economy was cooking and they were
doing well and the big I think these things were
Trump's fault, and because of his bad foreign policy decisions
and his upsetting of certain regular patterns of geopolitical order.
(37:43):
But you know, the wars in Gaza and Ukraine are
concerning to people, seem to be out of control. He
comes along and says, I can put these things back,
and you know, under control. I don't think it can.
My sense is that he will make things much worse.
But it makes sense, you know, in a world that
seems to be coming apart. And also, you know, I
frankly think the United States, I mean, Trump is not
(38:06):
no spring chicken either, but the United States, where it
stands in the world in terms of its importance, cannot
be led by someone who looks so frail and old.
It's just it invites a lot of anxiety, both by
people here and people abroad. So I think there is
a sense fairly or unfairly, that the Democrats were unable
(38:29):
to govern, and Trump's kind of showmanship suggests governance. Whether
he's actually able to accomplish governance, I think it's pretty
clear that he's not that good at it, but he
gives the impression that he can take charge. That's out
of appealing to people in a world that seemed to
be coming apart.
Speaker 5 (38:46):
Now.
Speaker 7 (38:46):
The Democratic Party, you know, they got in shape when
they decided to change candidates, but it seemed like a
chaotic mess, you know, and it was to a certain extent.
It's kind of remarkable they did as well. I think
it stands to try sweaknesses and people's distrusted them that
they did as well as they did. But I think
in another circumstance it could have been a real blowout.
(39:07):
But you know, I think that the fact of the
matter is, rightly or wrongly, the perception among the public
was that the Democrats were unable to govern, and that's
usually why people vote for a different president. Trump kind
of synthesizes a protest and a return vote because he says, well,
I governed before and it wasn't so bad, and people
kind of remember it that way, which I mean there
(39:27):
was more to within that, and also, aren't you tired
of these people who don't know their business?
Speaker 3 (39:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (39:33):
I think that's right, but it is still just strange.
One of the things that Trump World has spent a
lot of time talking about is this idea that this
time and part of twenty twenty five was a little
bit of this sort of pr for this until it
wasn't that this time it's going to all be different
because this time Trump has got really smart people figuring
(39:54):
out how he can do a lot of the stuff
that he was not able to do last time. You
think that's pr we'll see.
Speaker 7 (40:00):
I mean, he probably has learned some things about Washington,
DC and governing and politics in his time. Him having
so many challenges with the really not seemingly very well
considered cabinet picks doesn't suggest to me that Republicans believe
he's a particularly strong leader who can menace them, either
(40:24):
at the polls or in other ways. It seems like
they're willing to stand up to him in limited ways,
especially when they think people don't care, aren't looking. I
don't know. I think also the lessons he has learned
may have been the wrong ones, and his opposition has
also learned lessons of how to deal with him. I
think right now everyone's in kind of wait and see mode.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
You know.
Speaker 7 (40:44):
I think Trump has personal challenges in terms of just
the capacity of his mind and focus to accomplish some
of the things. And I don't believe he has fully.
I mean, some people are willing to work with him now,
but I don't know if he has really first class
talent willing to go to bath for him. He also
(41:06):
enters office as a lame duck on day one and less. Instead,
you know, he goes through with his business of trying
to remain president and so on and so forth. But
I mean, I don't know how seriously that's going to
be taken by you know, there are other people waiting
in line right right.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
He's a very old guy. I mean, it's not like
he's sixty year old.
Speaker 7 (41:25):
He could kill over at any moment. I'm sure that
Vance wants to be president one day. I'm sure that
he will try to take advantage of a circumstance that
would allow him to do that. If that, if that
means betraying Trump, he might do it.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (41:40):
Yeah, I don't think he has any personal loyalties to
him or cares for him as a person. So yeah,
I think that what we're seeing is as the you know,
the possibilities of a post Trump future is also being considered,
and we'll see that, you know, with how much Republicans
are kind of willing to push back and ignore him,
which you know already looks like quite a bit. But again,
(42:02):
who knows, a very unpredictable person who's also you know,
unlike we can talk about politics normal politics, and that's
true so far as it goes, but it has to
be remembered and how much this stuff works or it's
just bullshit and actually backfires for him, I don't know.
But it has to be taken seriously that Trump is
willing to also do illegal things and not just work
(42:24):
in the in the in the channels of normal politics.
He's willing to commit crimes of of really grave nature. Now,
are we going to be in some kind of environment
where members of the opposition have to be worried about
being gunned down or thrown in prison. I think that
that might be a stretch, but let's hope not. It's
(42:46):
not totally out of the realm of possibility. Considering that
mobs have been willing to get in the streets and
try to do stuff for him before, So it's not
something that you can last. I mean, I don't see
that as being a law, long term effective mode of
politics and governments. Trumpet, it doesn't seem like he does
either with the way he's talking. He's talking about primary people.
Speaker 3 (43:08):
Right, which is much better than killing.
Speaker 7 (43:10):
Right of course, But you know, I don't think he's
above leaning on people in an illegal ways. So I
mean that is a new dynamic to American politics.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
It's not a new dynamic.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
It's everything as old as new again.
Speaker 7 (43:23):
Yeah, I mean, it's a dynamic that hasn't been in
American politics for quite some time.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
But yeah, yeah, since the sixties. Thank you, Thank you,
John Gantz, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 6 (43:34):
Molly Moment, Jesse Cannon, Samaijung Fast former two time guests
of this podcast.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
Justice riggs down in North Carolina. She was ahead in
the final vote COUMP by seven hundred and thirty four votes.
But the Republicans because they are clinging onto any power
thereafter having a monumental loss in North Carolina state where
they've done massive remaindering the control for well over a decade,
they're cleaning on the power. What are you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (44:04):
So she won by seven hundred and thirty four votes
and Republicans are basically trying to throw it out. It
is so incredibly this is the nine to one one stuff.
This is the thing. They're refusing to certify the election
results because they don't like what happened. And this is
(44:25):
the kind of stuff that you should be paying attention to.
This is just really really bad, really like, this is
what trump Ism gave birth to, you know, is this
idea that if we don't like the idea, if we
don't like what happens, we can not not certify the election.
(44:45):
This is the anti democratic stuff that is so incredibly toxic, corrosive,
bad for democracy. And this is in norms and institution
that Republicans are trying to destroy. And I hope that
Roy Cooper will, in fact, you know, step in and
there is a new Josh din is the new governor,
(45:08):
and that Democrats will force them to certify. And this
may go up to the Supreme Court. But even if
you win by a litle if you win, even being
a Democrat, you still win. And that is why this
is just so appalling, and I hope this gets whooped down.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
(45:31):
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
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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