May 6, 2024 • 53 mins
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson surveys Hope Hicks' damning testimony in Trump’s hush money trial. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria details his new book "Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present." CNBC’s Ali Velshi examines his new book "Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And South Dakota Governor Christy nom has apparently threatened to
kill Joe Biden's dog commander. What are we doing here?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
People?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
We have a star studded show today though see it.
Ed's for Reid Zachariah Stopspy to talk his new book,
Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from sixteen hundred to
the President. Then we'll talk tomsnbc's Ali Velshie about his
new book Small Acts of Courage, a Legacy of Endurance,
and the fight for democracy. But first we have the
host of the Enemy's List, the ligod projects owed Rick Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Welcome to Fast Politics. You're a friend of mine, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
Mollie Jong Fast, I'm delighted to join you once again.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Christinome. Perhaps you remember her from Killing a.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Puppy, noted star of the show Killing My Innocent Puppy,
also the star of the nineteen nine sitcom what does
Corey taste like?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Oh talk, you loved it?
Speaker 4 (01:10):
Don't even play lie?
Speaker 5 (01:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:14):
All right?
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Anyway, moving on, she killed a dog in a goat.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
She defended herself by saying, the fourteen month old dog
is not a puppy.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
I feel like.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
When you're defending killing a puppy, you're losing.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
My thought here is twofold. One, when you're defending killing
a puppy, you are definitely losing. And the second is,
don't try your bullshit among other people. And I will
say this people from the left and the right who
actually know about hunting and hunting dogs myself included, don't
try your bullshit christinome of trying to say, oh, only
(01:49):
I understand the country, No, honey, that ain't it.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
But also let us pause for a moment and talk
about how she then said she killed three horses. Now
I have three dogs, one of whom is ten thousand
years old.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
I've met your ancient the rhyme of the ancient, the
ancient hound.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
It's Spartacus.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Spartaas has half a liver, he has a mouthful of
rotting teeth, and he is in continent.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
No dream date, ladies, it's spartacast.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
But Spartacus is killing it and we don't put amal.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
Bartacus is living his best life right.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
He is now on a really good arthritis medicine that's
really making him do much better. But I'm just saying
she killed three horses because she said they had arthritis,
Like she killed three horses because she didn't want to
pay for the food.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
Okay, let me go back on this one more time, because,
as you know, in addition to having owned many hunting dogs,
I have also owned many horses, many fucking horses, many, many, many,
many horses.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
What happens is they get too old to ride, and
you take care of them because you're not a total sociopath.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
Then you literally send them out to somebody's farm and
they graze in a field until they drop down dead. Okay,
that's a good life for a horse. And by the way,
we had a horse lived to thirty three years old.
Twenty five is not ancient for a horse. She's completely
full of crap, this woman. She irritates me because as
(03:20):
somebody who treats animals ethically and I mean all my
bullshit kidding aside right now, it's something I really care
about and I really believe in of treating animals ethically
and well, especially when they are in service to you,
as dogs or horses are, and so her cavalier, bullshit,
her lies about it. The combination of all of this
(03:42):
garbage from her Here's the amazing part. This was something
that brought left and right together in this country like
nothing I've ever seen what You've got Rick Wilson and
Liz Cheney on the same side of an argument as
cat Turd and Laura Lumer.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
The cat Turd killed the dog too, well, I think
he drove over him.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Right, I'm going to say, this cat Turn Foster's dogs.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Oh so then who did he kill? Cat Turn?
Speaker 4 (04:08):
He ran over one of his dogs, apparently by accident,
which I've never done. But okay, look it happens to.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
People, all right, Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
But for the love of God, if an issue unifies
Americans in such a way that it crosses every single
dividing line between the parties, give it up, Christy, and
now the peace out this morning in Politico or out
Friday morning sees me in Politico. Six separate Trump aids
were like, no, she's done, it's over. We only need
(04:36):
one person to appeld to the freak show.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
My favorite part of that whole story is when she
said that she had met Kim Jong un in twenty fourteen, which.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Has been easily debunked.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Playbook actually led with the story of all the other
lies in this book. Here's the thing about these books.
Politicians write incredibly boring books. They don't and write them,
and they likely don't read them. But somehow Christy No
managed to not be able to do that. The woman,
I've said it before, I'll say it again. She makes
Mitt Romney look like James Harriet. So let's talk for
(05:17):
a minute about what's happening with the Trump trial. We
are in day ten thousand, No, we're actually only like
eleven days into it, right.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Where Donald Trump feels a combination of desire and revulsion
watching Hopepicks testify against him, struggling between his incontinence and
his erectile dysfunction, wondering which will cause him more distress
as she testifies in her low, sultry voice, her penetrating
gaze staring directly at him.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yes, we're into Pete Rick Wilson here.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Take me, Donald, mount me and use me.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
O Jesus savage beast right.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
So, oh my god.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
You guys, I'm not going to stop.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I'm aware we do this, we know you anyway. So
Hopex is testifying.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
I mean, so far, we're two weeks into this fucking thing,
and it seems to me like every single day has
been bad for Donald Trump.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
It seems like Trump is having an entire sort of
broken and confused approach here. I mean, look, you saw
last week he started to talk to Todd Blanche in
the way that he talks to anyone he's about to fire. You, suck,
You're not aggressive enough, you don't defend me the right way,
you don't do what I want you to do. And
more importantly, he went and said to Todd Blanche, according
(06:37):
to some of the reporting last week, I don't pay
bills for lawyers that don't do the job for me,
which is to say, Todd Blanche, you best start getting
that shit in cash, brother, because those checks are going
to get canceled.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And we saw Maggie wrote a piece about how Trump
was not happy with Todd Blanche.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
So that's right, definitely coming around.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And also so the judge told Todd Blanche that he
was losing all credibility. I mean, I feel like that's
not what you judge to tell you. I'm no lawyer,
but I'm going to guess that that was not so good.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
Neither am I But I'm thinking that when the lawyer
reprimands you, not in front of the jury, luckily for him.
But I'm thinking when the judge reprimands an attorney for
the defense, they might want to tell their client, do
me a favor. Donald such a pie hole, no more talking.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
I mean, it's just kind of amazing.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
So Pepper did a pretty meticulous job laying out the story.
Still likes Trump, No crazy emotional drama there. He showed
that he did in fact do catch and kill and
that he in fact knew that he was running a
foul of campaign finance violations because he talked to his right.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Because his own attorneys were telling him this ain't great. Yeah,
this ain't it.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
Chief.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
But look, I mean, I think what we've seen right now,
and I think we're going to see this pretty constantly,
is that so far none of these witnesses have exactly
been great for Donald Trump. No, they're not exactly like
lighting up the world with a robust set of facts
that Trump can refute easily. And what we are going
to also see AND's telling you this in the next
in the next few days, at some point, Trump will
(08:17):
wake up from his nap time, and he at some
point he will say something in the courtroom like I'll testify,
I'll go on the stand, and at that moment the
world begins to tear itself apart for Donald Trump, and
there's nothing but bad outcomes for Donald Trump at that point.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Right, So we have hope x is on Friday, and
then next week we're going to have But I want
to point out, like, here we are on this trial
and so far we have still not had Stormy Daniels
or Michael Cohen, and it doesn't matter because we've really
seen them set the table.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
I think that the most interesting strategic decision the prosecution
has made so far is to bring in people who
win Stormy and Michael Cohen come up to the stand
to testify. All of the attacks that Trump is going
to make on them have already been kind of mitigated
by other fact witnesses saying what Michael is about to
(09:12):
tell you is true essentially, and what Stormy is about
to tell you is true essentially. And so you can
call them bad witnesses, you can say everything you want
about Michael or Stormy, but those folks like David Pecker
and the other lawyers and everybody else and Hope Hicks.
They're going to go in there and basically end up
laying a defensive barrier down for all the attacks that
(09:34):
are coming on Cohen. I will tell you I predict
next week you're going to see stuff on Fox like
Michael Cohen History's Greatest Monster, and Stormy Daniels the Horror
of Babylon. And I have seen a sort of bubbling
up in the right word media like, well, Donald Trump,
so what if he did? It's just his virility, you know,
and he's a man's man. And yet on the other hand,
(09:54):
anybody else would be would be slaughtered for the same
kind of stuff. It's a moment I think where Trump
expects a different trial than he's getting. Yeah, and the
nine thousand dollars in contempt charges, you know, Trump can
raise that in thirty seconds with some you know email
to the mooks out there. But the thought when the
judge basically said, okay, you could be sent to jail
(10:16):
and no, you know what, it won't be my fantasy
of Donald Trump being admitted to rikers and wanting to
bleach himself forever and ever after that that would be
his experience. He could not survive Rikers. But the idea
of Trump even going to mcc or spending a night
in any other jail cell in New York without his phone,
without his hairspray, without his makeup, I think it would
alter his perspective rather swiftly and dramatically.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
What's happening here is that he has been sort of listening,
Like he did delete those truths yeah on truth Social.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
When he wrote them.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So I think he gets the stakes here, which is
interesting because like so much of Trump is this shamelessness
and this inability to like behave the way everyone else behaves.
But like clearly that some of that's an act, right, No,
I think you're.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
Right, some of it it's an act, and the idea
that he's going to get away with every transgressive thing
he ever wants to do. And I will say this,
I'm a god. I'm going to sound like I'm defending
Donald Trump, but I'm really not. I think anybody who's
been president becomes psychologically accustomed to a certain degree of deference, right.
But in Trump's case, he came in there with a
gigantic level of sociopathic ego driven wild hair.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
I still don't hear you defending him.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Continue, yes, yes, well, okay, good, I'm glad. I'm glad.
It doesn't sound like I'm defending him, because I'm really not.
But in his case, having been president and thinking he's
also a god who is immune to the rules of
the rest of society, all of it, you end up
with this attitude that how can this be happening to me?
You can't tell me to shut up? And yet the
judge has slowly sort of wound down the freedom and
(11:53):
the latitude Trump has felt to ass off in court
as the weeks have gone on. I think it's really
kind of fascinating that that even his own people around him,
not just his lawyers, but his fans are like, Okay,
you know what if he did go to jail overnight,
what would happen? What does happen if he doesn't have
his fresh bespoke depends every morning.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
But it's also a question of he is being held accountable.
And the thing that I hate so much and think
is so bad is when people in pundit world say like,
if you do this, he will fundraise off of it,
or if you do this, it will book this right,
and like, here's the thing is like here's a trial,
a criminal trial. It's going on. Nothing is happening. Everything
(12:34):
is fine. There's no craziness at the court. There's barely
anyone there.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
The only member of his family you could get there.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Was Eric was slow. Eric.
Speaker 5 (12:43):
Yeah right. You know.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
People saying, well, he's going to do three dimensional chests. No,
he's not. He does not do three dimensional chess.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
Donald Trump couldn't make a three dimensional castle out of
his own feces. He's not that smart when it comes
to the a world that isn't mediated through social media
platforms or whatever whatever you know, fantasy bubble he's lived
in for a long time. He's he's a guy who's
a broken brained old man right now facing actual criminal
(13:12):
charges in a court of law for crimes. Yeah, for
real crimes. Yeah, the actual criming that is involved is
not something made up by the deep state or whatever.
He's not having a good time in this, and I'm
obviously I'm here for that because I want him to
be held accountable as everyone should.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
So as we watch this, I mean, I think it
should be weirdly comforting.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I often have this conversation with people like, are the
guardrails holding. That's like a favorite conversation.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
And you know, I.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Believe, like if you look at the Supreme Court, in
this Supreme Court, they're not right.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
I mean, these guys are in the tank for Donald Trump.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
But if you look at if you sort of pull
back and you look at like this criminal case, which
is something like straight out of Tom Wolf, really the
law is holding and so it is being held accountable.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
You know what, It's funny you mentioned Tom Wolf because
a friend of mine just just this morning texted me
that Tom Wolf would have loved this trial so much.
He would have gone absolutely crazy about this thing and
would have done the whole Charlie Croker style story. Because really,
when you get right down to it, this is a
(14:24):
tremendously great New York story. Yeah, I mean it is
a tremendously great New York story. Also, I have a question.
I know I should be the expert on this. Why
is Rudy dressing increasingly like the joker?
Speaker 3 (14:36):
I haven't seen Rudy lately.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Oh, Rudy was wearing like a purple shirt and a
yellow tie.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
You used to be a member of Rudy's inner circle.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
I did, indeed do we know what's.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Happening with Rudy. Do you have any uproots?
Speaker 4 (14:48):
He had to go back to bankruptcy court again. From
what I heard, I don't know what The outcome was.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Always a great song, right.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
You have to go back to bankruptcy court again.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
No, I do think you have a really good and
salient point here, which is that there is a sense
in which Trump World, Wow, maybe he pulls polling well again,
polls whatever Trump World is in itself really falling the
fuck apart.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Trump World internally is highly chaotic right now. And I
can tell you why. I know it's highly chaotic because
there's an old rule about campaigns and about white houses.
Bad campaigns leak, Good campaigns leak on purpose. They're just leaking. Now.
There's a lot of chatter coming out of Trump World. Now.
They really need to stop trusting the idea that we're
(15:41):
paying you a lot of money to run X or
y area of the campaign and there you're going to
be loyal. People are already trying to save their own
asses and protect themselves because I'm hearing that the need
for money to move money around and get money to
Trump for both the legal defense and otherwise is putting
a colossal skin on their fundraising, and even the big
(16:02):
guys who are like, I'm going to come back and
help Trump, there are even questions coming from those guys like, yeah, listen,
I want this to go to actually do something, right,
You're gonna do something with this money. It's not just
for the lawyers, right.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Right, But it is just for lawyers, right, of.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
Course it is. It's all it is. It's just for
the lawyers. It's all for Trump.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
And you think this is going to affect the campaign.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
I think it is affecting the campaign right now. And
look they are doing. They're doing a brilliant job right now.
And so button peak too early, and his polls are
and they're throwing a lot of these poles out there
that are fairly low quality surveys, right.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
They're definitely juicing the numbers.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
Yeah, yeah, Oh, they're flooding the zone so that the
real clear average and the five point thirty eight average
and all that other stuff. They're flooding the zone so
that those things will look as if you know, Trump
is miles ahead in all these states.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, I mean that for sure is true. Jesus Rick Wilson.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Thank you, Molly, Jong, Fast.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Spring is here, and I bet you are trying to
look fashionable, So why not pick up some fashionable all
new Fast Politics merchandise. We just opened a news store
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Speaker 2 (17:24):
Freed Zachariah is a Washington Post columnist and host of
CNN's GPS and author of Age of Revolutions, Progress and
Backlash from sixteen hundred to the present.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Welcome to Fast Politics for Reid.
Speaker 5 (17:37):
Thanks so much, Molly. Pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Really excited to have you. So let's talk about this book.
I always feel like you've written a ton of books.
How did you get here? It's sort of like, how
did you decide to devote a year of your life to.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
This or more?
Speaker 5 (17:51):
Oh, it was actually almost I mean on and off.
It's been ten.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Years, Jesus and someone who has written many books, it's
a killer.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
I know. I wrote two books along the way, two
shorter books, but this was the big project that was
ongoing in the background. But it's a very good question.
It really began about ten years ago when I started
watching the Tea Party come into being. What I realized
about the Tea Party was this was something very different
from normal American politics. Here you had the most hierarchical party,
(18:23):
the Republican Party, being taken over by an insurgency. And
there was a wonderful book by theater Scotch Paula Stolard Yale,
who pointed out in the book that she spent a
year basically just hanging out and talking to the Tea
Party grassroots. That while it started as an economic thing,
you remember, it starts with Rick Santelli on CNBC saying,
(18:45):
you know, why are we bailing out all these people
who don't meet their mortgage payments. Let's have a tea party.
But it actually is animated by all kinds of cultural issues, immigration,
Obama's birthplace, multiculturally what we would today called the wok Agena.
And to me what was fascinating is that was not
the traditional Republican Party platform or message. The Reagan formula,
(19:09):
if you will, was you know, limited government, low taxes,
entitlement reforms, spread democracy abroad. These guys were not talking
about any of that. They were talking all about cultural
nationalism against multiculturalism. And so I started to think with
something is happening to politics in America, you know. So
I signed a book contract actually ten years ago, and
(19:30):
it was initially called Beyond Left and Right because I
was feeling like this is something different from our normal
left right over the economy. And as time went on,
I felt like I was being proven more and more right.
You know, we Brexit than you have Trump. And so
it took me a little longer to write, partly because
it felt like I was just getting more and more
material to inform this historical survey, which was really about
(19:54):
how did we get here? It's the four hundred year
history of how we got to where we are.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, I think so much when we're talking about this,
about how it's such a good point.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
And I actually know the academic you're talking.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
About Theta Scotch board we did.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
We had her on the podcast and she's really brilliant.
Saying a Yale academic is brilliant not a huge stretch,
but she is really brilliant. And she did talk so
much about the fundamental underlying notion being so radical. It
reminds me so much of Susan Faludi's ideas about backlash.
(20:32):
I mean, isn't that sort of this thesis that you
have progress and then you have a sort of revolution
in a backlash or is that not quite the thesis.
Speaker 5 (20:42):
The central thesis here is that whenever you have periods
of very big structural change, and that's for me, revolution
I'm talking about when it really is upending the old system.
So for example, the massive expansion of globalization and immigration
that's taken place in the last forty years in the
Western world. The massive expansion of the information economy, really
(21:06):
the creation of a new digital economy, the massive expansion
of the rights of women, minorities, gays, all that. You know,
these things have always had a two effects. One is
they always produce a backlash, and two they always change
the politics because the politics has to adapt to all
(21:28):
these new changes and the backlash. I think what's really
fascinating to me is the backlash tends to be mostly cultural.
You know, Tony Blair had a very good line. He said,
you know, one of the central insights I've had in
politics is that when people feel deeply insecure and unnerved,
they don't move left economically, they move right culture. In
(21:50):
other words, you know that they start to worry by
my world is disappearing. I want to go back to
when it was, you know, when all this craziness wasn't happening.
And that is why demogogues like Trump are able to
play on that, because it's what they offer is the
politics of nostalgia, you know, the make America great again.
We're going to take you back to when it was.
(22:13):
Nicky Haley wants to tweet it wasn't life so simple
when you were growing up? You know, there's always this
imaginary of course, you think yourself, Nicki Haley grew up
in the seventies, that period of you know, Wardegate, Vietnam, staxlation,
oil prices, court grupling. I mean, what is she talking about?
But that's always, you know, in our memory, we always
(22:34):
think back nostalgically to the period when we were young,
and that's the appear yes.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
And that is an important point.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
I actually just read a book about the rights obsession
with authoritarian governments, which was really really detailed and talked
a lot about how even in the not the seventies,
but earlier times in the twentieth century, we saw conservatives
sort of have a love affair with authoritarian dictators, everyone
(23:03):
from Pinoche to Hitler and you see that right now
with the rights love of Erdulaan. Can you speak to
how that fits into this narrative.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
Yeah, it's a very interesting point because what we're seeing
come out is a kind of older right. You know,
what we're now realizing is that the Reagan Right was
a much more libertarian, internationalist, free market, free trade right
that took over the Republican Party, but that the core
of the party in its historical essence is actually not
(23:35):
that it is chauvinist, isolationist, protectionist, and as you say,
somewhat enamored of authoritarianism. And so it's not just you know, Pinochet,
but the right was fascinated by Franco Let's don't forget,
you know, the Spanish Civil War. The writer has always
been fascinated by these kind of strong men who were
able to deliver in some sense. And if you go
(23:58):
back to the thirties, there was a great fascination in
the right in the early thirties with Mussolini and Hitler,
and there was a deep isolationism. A lot of the
isolationism on the right was, you know, we shouldn't be
thinking about going to war with these guys. They're modernizing
their country. Charles Lindberg was frankly admiring, you know, Lindberg
admired what the Germans were doing. So there has always
(24:21):
been this deeper right, you know, the kind of cultural
right wing, and in a weird way, we all lost
track of it because Reagan really did remake the right.
But after the Cold War, that facade or that phase
of right wing politics has withered away. Well we're left
with this Trump in some ways Hawkins back to the
thirties exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
I mean, that will make America great again is actually
the nineteen thirties slogan of Lindbergh.
Speaker 5 (24:48):
Right, well, and certainly America First.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Was right, America First, That's what I mean.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
That's where it originated from. And when Trump was told that, interestingly,
his response was yeah, So you know, in other words,
I don't mind being associated with the Republicans of the thirties. Well,
most people forget is even after World War Two, the
Republican Party was still quite isolationist. There was wings of
the party, Vandenberg in the Senate who was an internationalist,
(25:15):
but the core of the party, even after World War Two,
wanted America to come home, no entanglements. Robert Taft, the
leading Republican senator from Ohio, who was the most likely
nominee in the nineteen fifty two presidential campaign, was deeply
opposed to NATO. He goes to see Eisenhower. Eisenhower is
at this point the head of NATO, the supreme Allied
(25:37):
commander in Brussels. And Robert Taft goes to Brussels and
says to Eisenhower, please don't run for the Republican nomination.
If you do, I don't have a chance. And so
I'm asking you now. Eisenhower is the most famous man
at that point in the world, right, and so there
was no chance anyone could could win against him. And
Eisenhower says to Taft, and we know this is truegers
(25:59):
both sides have reported of this. Eisenow sester Robert Taft,
I will issue a showmanes declaration that I will not run,
and if nominated, I will I will not take the
nomination if you issue a one sentence declaration that you
support NATO. Robert Tafft says, I cannot do that. This
is too core to my belief. So Eisenhower said, well,
(26:21):
then it sounds like we have a race, and that
so eisen Ower ran for president, to keep the Republican
Party internationalists, sort to make the Republican Party internationalist. And
so it's you know, it's been again. As I say,
it's what you're seeing is the re emergence of a
very old Republican party that is protectionist, isolationist, culturally, shaubnist,
(26:41):
you know, and has elements layered onto it of the
kind of the old Southern Democratic races.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
It's so funny because it's like, I come from this
family of communists, so you know, my grandfather.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Was hard fast. So growing up, my grandfather always say
like Reagan is the worse. You know, there's no one worse.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Than Ronald Reagan, you know, and you would go on
and on, and you know my mother too, oh and
the military industrial complex and YadA YadA. But the truth is, like,
if you're looking back, Reagan really was sort of a
high point in a lot of ways, pro immigration, pro
a sort of more inclusive America.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
I mean, certain things that he did.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
I mean, obviously I'm hardly you know Reagan fairly, but
there's certainly things that he did that were incredible for
this Republican Party.
Speaker 5 (27:27):
It was a much more sunny, optimistic, kind of conservatism.
And in a way it speaks to this point I
make in the book, which is Reagan was right wing
on the old left right spectrum in terms of the
state's room of the in the economy right, the old
left right spectrum was the left wanted more state, a
less market, and the right wanted less state, more market.
(27:50):
And Reagan was very much a right winger in those stones.
But in terms of the new spectrum, which I call
open versus closed. You know, do you want to open,
open economy, open information flows, open multicultural society, diversity, immigration.
On that spectrum, Reagan is actually very much open. You know,
he was for all the things and Trump, interestingly as
(28:11):
opposed to all those things that Reagan was in favor of. Right,
if you think about it, Reagan wanted more immigration, Trump
once less. Reagan wanted you know, was more than happy
comestable with diversity. Trump wants less. Reagan was a free trader.
Trump is a protectionist. Reagan loved the idea of America
being the symbol of democracy and spreading democracy around the world.
Trump hates that idea. It's fascinating that on the new spectrum,
(28:33):
Trump is basically disaviving the Republican Party, what the Republican
Party has stood for for thirty five years.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Yeah, let's talk about the economic questions, because protectionism I
am so sort of horrified by it, but it's happening
both on.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
The left and the right.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Right, I mean the tariffs, I mean, Trump is definitely
not as organized and a lot of his tariffs seemed
more emotional than they are strategic. But we're seeing it
on the left too, right, I mean, tariffs have become
all of a sudden a sort of popular tool in
the economy, which they hadn't been throughout my youth. So
can you speak to that and why?
Speaker 5 (29:13):
Yeah? First of all, you're one hundred percent right. The
creeping protectionism is there in both parties. Trump is almost
certainly much more protectionists. So for instance, he's talking about
campaigning on a ten percent tariffs on all imported goods.
He's talking about sixty percent tariffs on Chinese goods, which
would have a very significant sect. You know, people worry
about inflation, Well, you know, there's nothing more inflationary than
(29:36):
putting on tariffs because by definition, right, you're raising the
price of goods, You're raising the price of everything that
comes in and it's not just the goods we buy,
but everything that's made in America, lots of it has
imported parts. So you might buy an American car, but
maybe thirty percent of the parts come from around the world.
And if all that is more expensive, now, why is
(29:56):
it happening? It's a very good question. Basically, what's happened
is there is an narrative that has taken hold in
America that yeah, globalization was good, but it hollowed out
the middle class, it hollowed out the working class. The
statistics don't completely prove that, but it is true that
there are certain parts of the country that turned out
to be politically very sensitive, the rust belt, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
(30:20):
Michigan where the effects are felt very strongly. So even
though in aggregate, I would argue there's no question that
the thirty years of globalization raised America's GDP income, average
income for everybody, lowered costs for food, for clothing, for
appliances for everybody. It did have this effect in Ohio,
in Michigan, and those are so important politically in a
(30:43):
fifty to fifty country that, in my opinion, we're sort
of overreacting to that. Look, I'm an old fashioned liberal
in the sense that I believe we should. This is
FDR's view. We should use the market to generate well,
we should embrace free trade because it lowers costs and
gives you more efficiency, and then we should use that
(31:03):
money to redistribute to the people who get left behind.
Our biggest problem in my view, is over the last
thirty years, we did a lot of the first which
is embracing globalization, and we didn't do it enough of
the second. Right, you know, that's the most efficient thing
to do, rather than to have tariffs where you know,
there was a calculation that Obama put tariffs on tires
(31:26):
at one point, and it was calculated that the cost
of saving each one of those jobs in America was
one million dollars.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
I shouldn't laugh.
Speaker 5 (31:36):
But you know you'd be much write better of writing
a check for half a million dollars to each of
those displaced workers. But the problem is we never did
enough of that. You know, we never did invest in
retraining and all that stuff. And so this has bitten
us in the back because we you know, that was
the great failure in my view. We embraced a lot
of the good things that allowed for openness and innovation
(31:58):
and efficiency. But the flip side of that, if you
want to maintain a stable country and community, is that
you've got to help those who get left behind. But
we tend to have this view, which I think is
the you know, part of the kind of an inherent
American view that people get left behind as their own fault,
and I think that profoundly misunderstands how capitalism works. You know.
(32:22):
It's like something becomes more efficient, some industry becomes more efficient,
some other industry becomes less efficient. The workers working in
that steel plan, they could not have adjusted. They're not
in a position to adjust to the new more efficient right,
that's a decision being made, you know, by the CEOs
and by Wall Street, and those guys are the ones
where I'm saying we should be helping, you know, and
(32:43):
we somehow forget that those people are as much, you know,
victims of structural changes in the world economy, and we
should be helping them. We should be giving them more,
you know, for so just more cash, help with retraining,
help with relocating, whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
This is a certain sort of hearkening back though because
of the tariffs.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I totally agree with you.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
You cannot have capitalism without having, you know, some balance
with the capitalism, whether that's regulation or taxation or what
that looks like. The Chips Act was this idea to
bring manufacturing which had been to sort of pump up
manufacturing in the United States. That is a sort of
way to solve that problem, right.
Speaker 5 (33:26):
Yeah, So the Chips Act, it tries to address a
kind of different problem, which is there's some things in
America that are so vital to our national security that
we probably should make them at home. And I basically
agree with that. I think that we should keep that
list of essential vital national security related technologies small because
(33:46):
it's very expensive. The way we are getting these chip
plants to come back to America is by giving massive, massive, Yes, right,
we're talking about in the tens and tens of billions
of dollars. And I would just point out if we
were to take that money and spend it on early
childcare and education, I wonder whether we would get in
(34:09):
the long run of bigger banks for the buck. So
but as I say, I'm okay with it. But let's
not let this turn into the ever expanding list of
federal subsidies for things that we think are neat and
nifty to have. Let's keep it really focused, national security oriented,
and then I'm okay with it.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Thank you so much, as is totally fascinating and really
appreciate having you.
Speaker 5 (34:31):
Mollie is such a pleasure. I hope I see you soon.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Ali Velshie is the host ofmsnbc's Felshie and the author
of Small Acts of Courage, A Legacy of Endurance and
the Fight for Democracy.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Welcome back to Fast Politics, my brand and also one
of my favorite television hosts and also a really good writer,
Ali Belshie.
Speaker 6 (34:54):
Nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
I'm listening to your audiobook right now. It is so good. First,
it's so good, second.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Of them all. You ride a motorcycle.
Speaker 6 (35:04):
Yeah, it's definitely one of those thing that people don't
know about me. And it turned out, and by the way,
at the time that I write about riding the motorcycle,
my parents I was a grown man, but my parents
didn't know at a motorcycle, so they learned about it
much later. It was the way I got to the US,
and I still have the bike. I must say, I
don't use it much, but I'm a man of a
certain age, so if I get rid of it. I
(35:25):
can't get it back right. A four year old man
can't buy a motorcycle because that means you're having a
midlife crisis.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
So his grandfather did.
Speaker 6 (35:34):
My wife was like, could you get rid of the
motorcycle please?
Speaker 1 (35:37):
I love this book and I really love the story
of how Ashley Banfield was mean to you.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Ali.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
The book is called Small Acts of Courage, the Legacy
of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy.
Speaker 6 (35:53):
Yeah, And that's the good thing is that's the point
of the book that small acts are what we need
in a world that feels entirely overwhelming, where everything seems
to be collapsing all around us. People can really change
things with the small things they can do in their
families and their communities, you know where they are.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
And I think that's a really good point because I
do see a lot of people they're either distraught or exhausted.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
Yes, correct, And I think we have to understand that
it feels like you need to boil the ocean to
get any of these days.
Speaker 5 (36:22):
But you can't.
Speaker 6 (36:23):
Right, we can't end the Russia Ukraine War on our own.
We can't end Israel gods on our own. What we
can do is be fully engaged citizens, and that helps
because these people who are fully engaged go on to
do other things, or support candidates or fix things in
their communities, and that encourages others to go farther than
they did, and that those people can become senators or
(36:45):
presidents or members of Congress, or journalists or whatever the
case may be. I think we need to not underestimate
our own power as people anywhere in the world, and
particularly as voting citizens in the United States. We actually
have power that a lot of people in the world
don't have. And I want to get people sort of
motivated and feeling good about the fact that I have
(37:05):
agency and responsibility over how this can all turn out.
I don't have to just be a victim of the
waves that are coming over us.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah, I was glad you talked about that. And I
also do think we do have a lot of power
and a lot of agency. And also what we've seen
in a lot of these elections is these are tight elections.
As upsetting as it is that there's a large percentage
of this country that wants some form of wacky at
(37:37):
talk or say these are close elections, so we have
you know, if Democrats are not engaged, they lose.
Speaker 6 (37:43):
Yes, And you know, this is the electionist year in
modern history, right. I think like half the world's population
is going to vote, and a lot they're not real
elections like Russia or Iran. In a lot of them,
they're not close elections like Hungary's had one. India is
in the midst of having an election. Takes a long
time in India. They're not going to be closed mode.
He's going to win, probably by a landslide, and he's
(38:05):
sort of an anti democratic sort. We still have in
America democracy. We still have the right to vote, and
I think we still have more people who believe in
democracy and rights than not in America. We don't want
to be giving that away and we don't want to
be falling to trend that's going around the world. It's
always gone around by the way, it's historical that when
(38:25):
things feel overwhelming, elect the guy who says I can
fix everything for you, right, because that doesn't generally work out. Well,
we have agency, we can fix things. That's fine. Don't
give up here. Democracy don't happen through revolution. They happen
through people voting themselves out of power. They happen through
people voting anti democratic democratic people into power. So that's
(38:48):
the thing we have to be conscious of in this
next few months.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah, you right, really well about that, about this, you
know what it looks like to go from an autocracy.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
You know, India made this choice.
Speaker 6 (39:03):
Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. It is choice, which is
kind of wild because India under Gandhi, which is really
part of my story because later a role in my
family's history. India in nineteen forty eight got independence from
Great Britain because of literally a series of small acts
of courage by people like Gandhi and others around him.
They actually designed this, in fact, to the point that
(39:24):
the Indian flag has a spinning wheel on it. It's
a wheel on which you weave cloth because Gandhi told Indians,
you know what your small act of courage is, weave
your own cloth so that you don't have to buy
imported cloth from Britain, which was you know, cotton that
came out of the ground in India that went to
Britain and got resold a higher prices. To to Indians,
that's actually the symbol of their independence. And yet they
(39:46):
are prepared to vote for an autocrat because people they
find the stuff intoxicating, people who say they can fix things,
people who say they can give you things that are
outsized and not reasonable. So we've not fallen full victim
to that in the United States. But the idea that
Donald Trump still has standing and still is the presumptive
Republican nominee, tells you there is a danger.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
You're not a Nepo baby, but you do have famous grandparents.
As a Nepo baby, myself, I'm always trying.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
To worry baby. We're actually I was saying this too
at Leastia the other day.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
We're not Nepo babies, were Neposaurus because we're too old
to be babies. But your great grandfather was involved with
Gandhi right noe.
Speaker 6 (40:27):
And my grandfather was his youngest student on his commune,
his ushram, which was highly influential to my family because
it taught him. You know, this ushram was was sixty
miles away from where my grandfather was living, but in
those days is of sixty miles in dirt roads in
nineteen ten, so that was a two day journey, which
meant he didn't go home. He lived on the farm.
He didn't have the upbringing of his mother and father.
(40:49):
Gandhi was his person who taught him stuff. My grandfather
was Muslim, Gandhi was Hindu. And when my great grandfather
let my grandfather be gandhi student, said to Gandhi, there's
one condition you have to teach him is religion. Well,
Gandhi didn't know Islam, so he read it. He learned
Islam to teach it to my grandfather. He learned Judaism,
(41:10):
he learned Christianity, and of course he understood Hinduism. And
that was the birth of this concept of pluralism in
my family, which has persisted through the decades to the
point that my parents when they finally emigrated to Kenya
and then to Canada, all they wanted was a society
in which people are not judged or separated or distinguished
(41:30):
by the color of their skin, by their race, by
their religion. And they taught me to realize that what
value there is to live in a society where not
only are people different, but people have different ideas And
how do we value that, how do we nurture that?
What does that dialogue look like? And that's sort of
where I am today, That's why I am the journalist
I am today.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Yeah, you would talk about the diaspora in such an
interesting way, and what it means to be as jew
who has a similar team on having been so moved
from like nobody in your family lived in India for generations.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
Can you talk about how that informed?
Speaker 6 (42:08):
Sure, you know, I hear actually a lot from a
lot of people who read the book, but from my
Jewish friends who say, this sounds like my family's history
a little bit right. It's the idea that sometimes you
move by choice because you could see the writing on
the wall. Sometimes you moved by force. Sometimes you were
kicked out, but you went to places where maybe you
(42:29):
knew the language, maybe you didn't, Maybe you knew the culture,
maybe you didn't. Maybe you were welcomed, probably you weren't,
but you you so loved the quest for freedom that
you'll make it work. So even if any kind of
immigrant shows up somewhere where the streets aren't paved with
gold and everything's not as good as it sounded when
you made the decision to get there, you try and
(42:49):
make a go of it. You try and make it work.
And when I see and it was very relevant to
the immigration conversation we're having in America today, because you
and I live in New York and when I walk out,
chances are greater than I'm going to run into a
an immigrant or a migrant than I am a native
born New Yorker these days. And I just look at
it and I think, I wonder what these people's grandchildren
are going to write about them as they deliver food
(43:09):
or they offer some service as part of our economy.
Migration is the way of the world. It has always been.
It will only be more so between climate and wars
and economic migration, and we need to understand it better
because to me, this is a bit this book is
a bit of an ode to immigration. In some cases,
migration people who make the choice to move for a
better life for their family. It always works out, Molly.
(43:31):
People who do that end up being massive contributors to
the places to which they move.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Oh, my grandparents except one of my grandmothers is born in.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
England, but all of them were born in New York
and they lived in New York. And my parents lived
in New York, and I live in New York. My
kids live in New York City.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
And I often think, first of all, immigrants are the
reason that we have such a good economy, right, because
I was on with these Brits yesterday and they were
talking about how much their economy suck, and it's because
of Brexit, because of the same stupid ideas that Donald
Trump had, right that you know, immigrants are bad and
(44:08):
we can grow the economy by who knows, yes, right, right,
by whatever, by being more racist.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
And so I do think about that a lot.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
And there's zero difference between me and the guy delivering
the food, right, except that my family came here a
little earlier.
Speaker 6 (44:25):
That that was exactly right. And your trajectory is influential
to them. If they look at your family and your
history and my family and my history, they say, hey,
we can make a go of it, and they generally do.
Despite all the nonsense that we hear these days about
committing more crimes, I mean, it's statistically proven that immigrants
don't commit more crimes than native born populations because there's
(44:46):
a massive disincentive to commit a crime. If you're here
is an immigrant. If your is an undocumented migrant, it's
even more serious. You will get yourself deported. It's as
simple as that.
Speaker 5 (44:54):
You've seen them.
Speaker 6 (44:55):
They just work hard. And when I talk about my
family having moved from India to South afric in the
late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. You know, I
grew up thinking they were business people. They were business people.
They had carts like wheelbarrows into which they put things
and sold things. Some had vegetables and some had dried goods.
So we see here in America they're people doing whatever
work is available so that they can live to fight
(45:18):
another day. But they will, they will live to fight
another day, and they will have children who will get educations.
And God knows we need them because we're short of
everything in this country. We are sort of odors. We're
short of doctors, pharmacists, everything we need. But we have immigration.
You know, immigration in America falls under the Department of
Homeland Security, which I think is terrible framing because I
(45:39):
talk about Canada and our immigrants experience there. Canada understands
that immigrants turned Canada from a sort of a podunk
provincial place into a country that punches above its weight.
We frame it as a security threat, and I'm not
saying that the border is not a real issue.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
You have a door.
Speaker 6 (45:54):
You should be able to close your door and lock
your door and open it whenever you want. But that's
not all of immigration. Immigrant is what the country's built on,
and it's an economic imperative that we have to solve.
And what we're doing is we're falling victim to language
and discussions that don't do it justice.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
The right has gained the system in an insane way.
And the truth is, you shut the border and people
in Texas are furious with you because they go to
Mexico all the time. They go shopping, they go to dinner,
they go to the mall. I mean this whole idea,
you know, down Trump's like shut the border. You know,
there are a lot of Republicans who are driving to
Mexico right now.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
There's a lot of crossover.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
And the idea that we're somehow static in this continent
is insanity. I would also add that Canada is a
nicer place to immigrate too, because they have more services
for people.
Speaker 6 (46:43):
Well they do, and by the way, universal healthcare being
the main one, because fundamentally that doesn't become a strain
on the system. Canada accepts the fact that if you
are coming into the country, you will probably sooner than later,
become a contributing member of society. In the economy and
so week or so, I was in Toronto for a
fundraiser for the Toronto Public Library System. The beneficiary of
(47:05):
the fundraiser was new arrivals to Canada. How do we
provide them with financial counseling, how do we provide them
with language training? How do we help them find housing?
Because Canada still leans into that idea that without immigration
will fall apart. I mean, the truth is, so will
we in America. But we've so framed the discussion around
(47:25):
dangerous people coming across the border and flooding our cities.
And you know, some of our northern politicians are not
helping that situation. They lean into the alarmist language about
this stuff. So people tell you, you know, you can't
get housing in New York. It's too expensive because of migrants.
How there's been too expensive in New York for one
hundred freaking years. London, New York, Vancouver, San Francisco, Chicago,
every major city in the world has a housing infrastructure
(47:47):
problem which should be solved whether or not you have immigration. Right,
we should be building transit and housing for our people
and airports or whatever it is that we need to
be doing. So blaming immigrants for the stresses of our
cities is sort of cowardly and empty and economically not
going to work in the long run anyway.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Yeah, the whole idea, the division is just such a
large part of publican politics. Jesse just sent me an
interesting tax saying that throwing out Airbnb ultimately has helped
with the housing situation in New York, which makes sense.
Speaker 6 (48:20):
Yeah, but we're far from a solution, and like this
or anywhere, and if you, you know, the smart thing
to do economically would be really figure that out, Really
figure out what the growth rate of this city and
our cities are, and really figure out how to create
lots of housing mixed housing come for rich people and
some for low income people. And then it doesn't it
(48:43):
doesn't sort of have this backward influence on your immigration policy. Right,
if everybody can get healthcare and everybody get housing, we
certainly have the jobs that we know we have. We
certainly know that all of these immigrants that Donald Trump
warns about, these migrants, all of these dangerous people, they're
not driving our wages out because our wages are up.
So so we need to think about this differently. And look,
(49:04):
I'll say this Democrats didn't fix it when they had
the chance. Republicans, many of them, used to speak very
positively about immigration, particularly governors in Western states where they
knew they needed the labor. Or w Bush paints nice
pictures of immigrants these days, which is nice. But we're
all kind of in the wrong place on this, and
we need to redesign our conversations around the fact that
(49:25):
this is our future. It's our past. By the way,
all of us are immigrants in some fashion or children
of immigrants. We need to refashion how we think about
society and build our future on the basis of equal
rights for everybody, real civil rights for everybody, and the
fact that we're just going to be a constantly evolving society.
And that's a great thing.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
We're one hundred and seventy ish seventy six seventy eight
when this airs days to the election.
Speaker 3 (49:51):
What do you been surprised by?
Speaker 6 (49:53):
I sort of am surprised by the resilience of Donald
Trump in this thing. If you or I got into
a fraction of the trouble that this guy gets into,
the reputational harm done to us would be remarkable. And
I don't know whether he's just hit up bottom so
that he can't harm himself anymore. There's a bunch of
people who will just stick with him. Remember the core
who sticks with him sort of the same core number
(50:13):
of people percentage of Americans who believe in a lot
of conspiracy theories and things like that. So you can
get sort of a third of the American population to
believe a lot, particularly in the days of misinformation. I
do think that the Democrats are going to have to
get it together in terms of dealing with what their
message is on democracy, what their message is on reproductive freedom,
(50:33):
which seems to be a remarkable motivator for people to
turn out to vote. And they're going to have to
figure out what their message is on the Middle East,
because they're losing support in greater numbers than the margin
by which Joe Biden won some states. So there's work
to be done. I think they're working very hard toward
a ceasefire, which might help that situation, might help that
discussion a little bit. But this is by no means
(50:55):
an obvious outcome in November, and one that has me
quite worried right now. Oh, we have agency, We have agency.
That's the other part. That's the book part that you
know what we can do?
Speaker 4 (51:07):
Think about it?
Speaker 3 (51:07):
Okay?
Speaker 5 (51:08):
Good.
Speaker 3 (51:08):
I am also worried to thank you Alli. I hope
you'll come back.
Speaker 6 (51:13):
I would love to thank you, my friend.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
No moment, oh fuck Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (51:22):
Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
Do you want to know who my moment of fuckery is?
Speaker 5 (51:26):
I do.
Speaker 4 (51:26):
I would love to know your moment of fuckery.
Speaker 3 (51:28):
Mighty Mike Flynn, everybody's favorite.
Speaker 1 (51:33):
I don't know if Trump knows this, but he's ready
to be Trump's VP.
Speaker 3 (51:36):
Pick I like it.
Speaker 4 (51:37):
You know, since Mike Flynn is presently suing me for
ten million dollars, I'm going to refrain from comment for
once in my life.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
Well, in my mind, Donald, you cannot go wrong picking
Mike Flynn, and that is why I say to you.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
Definitely pick Mike Flynn.
Speaker 1 (51:54):
If a Baca's not around, hard to think of someone
better than Mike Flynn. Luck to all who definitely pick him.
I think that'll be great.
Speaker 4 (52:05):
Have fun storming the castle.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
Yeah, good luck, team, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 4 (52:10):
It's gonna be great. Well, my moment of fuckery, and
I know you're gonna be shocked, absolutely shocked to hear this.
But on Friday the Securities and Exchange Commission charged bf
Borgers CPA with systemic fraud, banned him permanently from practicing
as an accountant for any business regulated by the sec
(52:32):
and charged him fourteen million dollars in civil penalties. Wait,
who is what's the connection?
Speaker 5 (52:37):
You ask?
Speaker 4 (52:37):
He happens to be the auditing firm for Truths Social.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
Oh my god, amazing. That is amazing. That is an
amazing moment of fuckery. You win.
Speaker 4 (52:49):
Oh my god, I was laughing. I laughed so hard
on Friday that I wished for a moment I had
Trump diapers. I know you can't stop me. There's no
force of nature that will stop me from being a
twelve year old asshole.
Speaker 3 (53:03):
I'm aware. That was bad. That was so upseting.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
Oo God, that's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the
best minds in politics make sense of all this chaos.
If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to
a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks
for listening.
Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And South Dakota Governor Christy nom has apparently threatened to
kill Joe Biden's dog commander. What are we doing here?
Speaker 3 (00:16):
People?
Speaker 2 (00:17):
We have a star studded show today though see it.
Ed's for Reid Zachariah Stopspy to talk his new book,
Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from sixteen hundred to
the President. Then we'll talk tomsnbc's Ali Velshie about his
new book Small Acts of Courage, a Legacy of Endurance,
and the fight for democracy. But first we have the
host of the Enemy's List, the ligod projects owed Rick Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Welcome to Fast Politics. You're a friend of mine, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (00:46):
Mollie Jong Fast, I'm delighted to join you once again.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Christinome. Perhaps you remember her from Killing a.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Puppy, noted star of the show Killing My Innocent Puppy,
also the star of the nineteen nine sitcom what does
Corey taste like?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Oh talk, you loved it?
Speaker 4 (01:10):
Don't even play lie?
Speaker 5 (01:12):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (01:14):
All right?
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Anyway, moving on, she killed a dog in a goat.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
She defended herself by saying, the fourteen month old dog
is not a puppy.
Speaker 5 (01:24):
I feel like.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
When you're defending killing a puppy, you're losing.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
My thought here is twofold. One, when you're defending killing
a puppy, you are definitely losing. And the second is,
don't try your bullshit among other people. And I will
say this people from the left and the right who
actually know about hunting and hunting dogs myself included, don't
try your bullshit christinome of trying to say, oh, only
(01:49):
I understand the country, No, honey, that ain't it.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
But also let us pause for a moment and talk
about how she then said she killed three horses. Now
I have three dogs, one of whom is ten thousand
years old.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
I've met your ancient the rhyme of the ancient, the
ancient hound.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
It's Spartacus.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Spartaas has half a liver, he has a mouthful of
rotting teeth, and he is in continent.
Speaker 4 (02:16):
No dream date, ladies, it's spartacast.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
But Spartacus is killing it and we don't put amal.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
Bartacus is living his best life right.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
He is now on a really good arthritis medicine that's
really making him do much better. But I'm just saying
she killed three horses because she said they had arthritis,
Like she killed three horses because she didn't want to
pay for the food.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
Okay, let me go back on this one more time, because,
as you know, in addition to having owned many hunting dogs,
I have also owned many horses, many fucking horses, many, many, many,
many horses.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
What happens is they get too old to ride, and
you take care of them because you're not a total sociopath.
Speaker 4 (02:58):
Then you literally send them out to somebody's farm and
they graze in a field until they drop down dead. Okay,
that's a good life for a horse. And by the way,
we had a horse lived to thirty three years old.
Twenty five is not ancient for a horse. She's completely
full of crap, this woman. She irritates me because as
(03:20):
somebody who treats animals ethically and I mean all my
bullshit kidding aside right now, it's something I really care
about and I really believe in of treating animals ethically
and well, especially when they are in service to you,
as dogs or horses are, and so her cavalier, bullshit,
her lies about it. The combination of all of this
(03:42):
garbage from her Here's the amazing part. This was something
that brought left and right together in this country like
nothing I've ever seen what You've got Rick Wilson and
Liz Cheney on the same side of an argument as
cat Turd and Laura Lumer.
Speaker 1 (03:57):
The cat Turd killed the dog too, well, I think
he drove over him.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
Right, I'm going to say, this cat Turn Foster's dogs.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Oh so then who did he kill? Cat Turn?
Speaker 4 (04:08):
He ran over one of his dogs, apparently by accident,
which I've never done. But okay, look it happens to.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
People, all right, Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 4 (04:15):
But for the love of God, if an issue unifies
Americans in such a way that it crosses every single
dividing line between the parties, give it up, Christy, and
now the peace out this morning in Politico or out
Friday morning sees me in Politico. Six separate Trump aids
were like, no, she's done, it's over. We only need
(04:36):
one person to appeld to the freak show.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
My favorite part of that whole story is when she
said that she had met Kim Jong un in twenty fourteen, which.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Has been easily debunked.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Playbook actually led with the story of all the other
lies in this book. Here's the thing about these books.
Politicians write incredibly boring books. They don't and write them,
and they likely don't read them. But somehow Christy No
managed to not be able to do that. The woman,
I've said it before, I'll say it again. She makes
Mitt Romney look like James Harriet. So let's talk for
(05:17):
a minute about what's happening with the Trump trial. We
are in day ten thousand, No, we're actually only like
eleven days into it, right.
Speaker 4 (05:26):
Where Donald Trump feels a combination of desire and revulsion
watching Hopepicks testify against him, struggling between his incontinence and
his erectile dysfunction, wondering which will cause him more distress
as she testifies in her low, sultry voice, her penetrating
gaze staring directly at him.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yes, we're into Pete Rick Wilson here.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Take me, Donald, mount me and use me.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
O Jesus savage beast right.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
So, oh my god.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
You guys, I'm not going to stop.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
I'm aware we do this, we know you anyway. So
Hopex is testifying.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
I mean, so far, we're two weeks into this fucking thing,
and it seems to me like every single day has
been bad for Donald Trump.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
It seems like Trump is having an entire sort of
broken and confused approach here. I mean, look, you saw
last week he started to talk to Todd Blanche in
the way that he talks to anyone he's about to fire. You, suck,
You're not aggressive enough, you don't defend me the right way,
you don't do what I want you to do. And
more importantly, he went and said to Todd Blanche, according
(06:37):
to some of the reporting last week, I don't pay
bills for lawyers that don't do the job for me,
which is to say, Todd Blanche, you best start getting
that shit in cash, brother, because those checks are going
to get canceled.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
And we saw Maggie wrote a piece about how Trump
was not happy with Todd Blanche.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
So that's right, definitely coming around.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And also so the judge told Todd Blanche that he
was losing all credibility. I mean, I feel like that's
not what you judge to tell you. I'm no lawyer,
but I'm going to guess that that was not so good.
Speaker 4 (07:10):
Neither am I But I'm thinking that when the lawyer
reprimands you, not in front of the jury, luckily for him.
But I'm thinking when the judge reprimands an attorney for
the defense, they might want to tell their client, do
me a favor. Donald such a pie hole, no more talking.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
I mean, it's just kind of amazing.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
So Pepper did a pretty meticulous job laying out the story.
Still likes Trump, No crazy emotional drama there. He showed
that he did in fact do catch and kill and
that he in fact knew that he was running a
foul of campaign finance violations because he talked to his right.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Because his own attorneys were telling him this ain't great. Yeah,
this ain't it.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
Chief.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
But look, I mean, I think what we've seen right now,
and I think we're going to see this pretty constantly,
is that so far none of these witnesses have exactly
been great for Donald Trump. No, they're not exactly like
lighting up the world with a robust set of facts
that Trump can refute easily. And what we are going
to also see AND's telling you this in the next
in the next few days, at some point, Trump will
(08:17):
wake up from his nap time, and he at some
point he will say something in the courtroom like I'll testify,
I'll go on the stand, and at that moment the
world begins to tear itself apart for Donald Trump, and
there's nothing but bad outcomes for Donald Trump at that point.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Right, So we have hope x is on Friday, and
then next week we're going to have But I want
to point out, like, here we are on this trial
and so far we have still not had Stormy Daniels
or Michael Cohen, and it doesn't matter because we've really
seen them set the table.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
I think that the most interesting strategic decision the prosecution
has made so far is to bring in people who
win Stormy and Michael Cohen come up to the stand
to testify. All of the attacks that Trump is going
to make on them have already been kind of mitigated
by other fact witnesses saying what Michael is about to
(09:12):
tell you is true essentially, and what Stormy is about
to tell you is true essentially. And so you can
call them bad witnesses, you can say everything you want
about Michael or Stormy, but those folks like David Pecker
and the other lawyers and everybody else and Hope Hicks.
They're going to go in there and basically end up
laying a defensive barrier down for all the attacks that
(09:34):
are coming on Cohen. I will tell you I predict
next week you're going to see stuff on Fox like
Michael Cohen History's Greatest Monster, and Stormy Daniels the Horror
of Babylon. And I have seen a sort of bubbling
up in the right word media like, well, Donald Trump,
so what if he did? It's just his virility, you know,
and he's a man's man. And yet on the other hand,
(09:54):
anybody else would be would be slaughtered for the same
kind of stuff. It's a moment I think where Trump
expects a different trial than he's getting. Yeah, and the
nine thousand dollars in contempt charges, you know, Trump can
raise that in thirty seconds with some you know email
to the mooks out there. But the thought when the
judge basically said, okay, you could be sent to jail
(10:16):
and no, you know what, it won't be my fantasy
of Donald Trump being admitted to rikers and wanting to
bleach himself forever and ever after that that would be
his experience. He could not survive Rikers. But the idea
of Trump even going to mcc or spending a night
in any other jail cell in New York without his phone,
without his hairspray, without his makeup, I think it would
alter his perspective rather swiftly and dramatically.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
What's happening here is that he has been sort of listening,
Like he did delete those truths yeah on truth Social.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
When he wrote them.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So I think he gets the stakes here, which is
interesting because like so much of Trump is this shamelessness
and this inability to like behave the way everyone else behaves.
But like clearly that some of that's an act, right, No,
I think you're.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
Right, some of it it's an act, and the idea
that he's going to get away with every transgressive thing
he ever wants to do. And I will say this,
I'm a god. I'm going to sound like I'm defending
Donald Trump, but I'm really not. I think anybody who's
been president becomes psychologically accustomed to a certain degree of deference, right.
But in Trump's case, he came in there with a
gigantic level of sociopathic ego driven wild hair.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
I still don't hear you defending him.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
Continue, yes, yes, well, okay, good, I'm glad. I'm glad.
It doesn't sound like I'm defending him, because I'm really not.
But in his case, having been president and thinking he's
also a god who is immune to the rules of
the rest of society, all of it, you end up
with this attitude that how can this be happening to me?
You can't tell me to shut up? And yet the
judge has slowly sort of wound down the freedom and
(11:53):
the latitude Trump has felt to ass off in court
as the weeks have gone on. I think it's really
kind of fascinating that that even his own people around him,
not just his lawyers, but his fans are like, Okay,
you know what if he did go to jail overnight,
what would happen? What does happen if he doesn't have
his fresh bespoke depends every morning.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
But it's also a question of he is being held accountable.
And the thing that I hate so much and think
is so bad is when people in pundit world say like,
if you do this, he will fundraise off of it,
or if you do this, it will book this right,
and like, here's the thing is like here's a trial,
a criminal trial. It's going on. Nothing is happening. Everything
(12:34):
is fine. There's no craziness at the court. There's barely
anyone there.
Speaker 4 (12:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
The only member of his family you could get there.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Was Eric was slow. Eric.
Speaker 5 (12:43):
Yeah right. You know.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
People saying, well, he's going to do three dimensional chests. No,
he's not. He does not do three dimensional chess.
Speaker 4 (12:51):
Donald Trump couldn't make a three dimensional castle out of
his own feces. He's not that smart when it comes
to the a world that isn't mediated through social media
platforms or whatever whatever you know, fantasy bubble he's lived
in for a long time. He's he's a guy who's
a broken brained old man right now facing actual criminal
(13:12):
charges in a court of law for crimes. Yeah, for
real crimes. Yeah, the actual criming that is involved is
not something made up by the deep state or whatever.
He's not having a good time in this, and I'm
obviously I'm here for that because I want him to
be held accountable as everyone should.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
So as we watch this, I mean, I think it
should be weirdly comforting.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
I often have this conversation with people like, are the
guardrails holding. That's like a favorite conversation.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
And you know, I.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Believe, like if you look at the Supreme Court, in
this Supreme Court, they're not right.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
I mean, these guys are in the tank for Donald Trump.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Oh for sure.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
But if you look at if you sort of pull
back and you look at like this criminal case, which
is something like straight out of Tom Wolf, really the
law is holding and so it is being held accountable.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
You know what, It's funny you mentioned Tom Wolf because
a friend of mine just just this morning texted me
that Tom Wolf would have loved this trial so much.
He would have gone absolutely crazy about this thing and
would have done the whole Charlie Croker style story. Because really,
when you get right down to it, this is a
(14:24):
tremendously great New York story. Yeah, I mean it is
a tremendously great New York story. Also, I have a question.
I know I should be the expert on this. Why
is Rudy dressing increasingly like the joker?
Speaker 3 (14:36):
I haven't seen Rudy lately.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Oh, Rudy was wearing like a purple shirt and a
yellow tie.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
You used to be a member of Rudy's inner circle.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
I did, indeed do we know what's.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Happening with Rudy. Do you have any uproots?
Speaker 4 (14:48):
He had to go back to bankruptcy court again. From
what I heard, I don't know what The outcome was.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
Always a great song, right.
Speaker 4 (14:56):
You have to go back to bankruptcy court again.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
No, I do think you have a really good and
salient point here, which is that there is a sense
in which Trump World, Wow, maybe he pulls polling well again,
polls whatever Trump World is in itself really falling the
fuck apart.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Trump World internally is highly chaotic right now. And I
can tell you why. I know it's highly chaotic because
there's an old rule about campaigns and about white houses.
Bad campaigns leak, Good campaigns leak on purpose. They're just leaking. Now.
There's a lot of chatter coming out of Trump World. Now.
They really need to stop trusting the idea that we're
(15:41):
paying you a lot of money to run X or
y area of the campaign and there you're going to
be loyal. People are already trying to save their own
asses and protect themselves because I'm hearing that the need
for money to move money around and get money to
Trump for both the legal defense and otherwise is putting
a colossal skin on their fundraising, and even the big
(16:02):
guys who are like, I'm going to come back and
help Trump, there are even questions coming from those guys like, yeah, listen,
I want this to go to actually do something, right,
You're gonna do something with this money. It's not just
for the lawyers, right.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Right, But it is just for lawyers, right, of.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
Course it is. It's all it is. It's just for
the lawyers. It's all for Trump.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
And you think this is going to affect the campaign.
Speaker 4 (16:23):
I think it is affecting the campaign right now. And
look they are doing. They're doing a brilliant job right now.
And so button peak too early, and his polls are
and they're throwing a lot of these poles out there
that are fairly low quality surveys, right.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
They're definitely juicing the numbers.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
Yeah, yeah, Oh, they're flooding the zone so that the
real clear average and the five point thirty eight average
and all that other stuff. They're flooding the zone so
that those things will look as if you know, Trump
is miles ahead in all these states.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah, I mean that for sure is true. Jesus Rick Wilson.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Thank you, Molly, Jong, Fast.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
Spring is here, and I bet you are trying to
look fashionable, So why not pick up some fashionable all
new Fast Politics merchandise. We just opened a news store
with all new designs just for you. Get t shirts, hoodies, hats,
and top bags. To grab some, head to fastpolitics dot com.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Freed Zachariah is a Washington Post columnist and host of
CNN's GPS and author of Age of Revolutions, Progress and
Backlash from sixteen hundred to the present.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
Welcome to Fast Politics for Reid.
Speaker 5 (17:37):
Thanks so much, Molly. Pleasure to be with you.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Really excited to have you. So let's talk about this book.
I always feel like you've written a ton of books.
How did you get here? It's sort of like, how
did you decide to devote a year of your life to.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
This or more?
Speaker 5 (17:51):
Oh, it was actually almost I mean on and off.
It's been ten.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Years, Jesus and someone who has written many books, it's
a killer.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
I know. I wrote two books along the way, two
shorter books, but this was the big project that was
ongoing in the background. But it's a very good question.
It really began about ten years ago when I started
watching the Tea Party come into being. What I realized
about the Tea Party was this was something very different
from normal American politics. Here you had the most hierarchical party,
(18:23):
the Republican Party, being taken over by an insurgency. And
there was a wonderful book by theater Scotch Paula Stolard Yale,
who pointed out in the book that she spent a
year basically just hanging out and talking to the Tea
Party grassroots. That while it started as an economic thing,
you remember, it starts with Rick Santelli on CNBC saying,
(18:45):
you know, why are we bailing out all these people
who don't meet their mortgage payments. Let's have a tea party.
But it actually is animated by all kinds of cultural issues, immigration,
Obama's birthplace, multiculturally what we would today called the wok Agena.
And to me what was fascinating is that was not
the traditional Republican Party platform or message. The Reagan formula,
(19:09):
if you will, was you know, limited government, low taxes,
entitlement reforms, spread democracy abroad. These guys were not talking
about any of that. They were talking all about cultural
nationalism against multiculturalism. And so I started to think with
something is happening to politics in America, you know. So
I signed a book contract actually ten years ago, and
(19:30):
it was initially called Beyond Left and Right because I
was feeling like this is something different from our normal
left right over the economy. And as time went on,
I felt like I was being proven more and more right.
You know, we Brexit than you have Trump. And so
it took me a little longer to write, partly because
it felt like I was just getting more and more
material to inform this historical survey, which was really about
(19:54):
how did we get here? It's the four hundred year
history of how we got to where we are.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, I think so much when we're talking about this,
about how it's such a good point.
Speaker 3 (20:06):
And I actually know the academic you're talking.
Speaker 5 (20:09):
About Theta Scotch board we did.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
We had her on the podcast and she's really brilliant.
Saying a Yale academic is brilliant not a huge stretch,
but she is really brilliant. And she did talk so
much about the fundamental underlying notion being so radical. It
reminds me so much of Susan Faludi's ideas about backlash.
(20:32):
I mean, isn't that sort of this thesis that you
have progress and then you have a sort of revolution
in a backlash or is that not quite the thesis.
Speaker 5 (20:42):
The central thesis here is that whenever you have periods
of very big structural change, and that's for me, revolution
I'm talking about when it really is upending the old system.
So for example, the massive expansion of globalization and immigration
that's taken place in the last forty years in the
Western world. The massive expansion of the information economy, really
(21:06):
the creation of a new digital economy, the massive expansion
of the rights of women, minorities, gays, all that. You know,
these things have always had a two effects. One is
they always produce a backlash, and two they always change
the politics because the politics has to adapt to all
(21:28):
these new changes and the backlash. I think what's really
fascinating to me is the backlash tends to be mostly cultural.
You know, Tony Blair had a very good line. He said,
you know, one of the central insights I've had in
politics is that when people feel deeply insecure and unnerved,
they don't move left economically, they move right culture. In
(21:50):
other words, you know that they start to worry by
my world is disappearing. I want to go back to
when it was, you know, when all this craziness wasn't happening.
And that is why demogogues like Trump are able to
play on that, because it's what they offer is the
politics of nostalgia, you know, the make America great again.
We're going to take you back to when it was.
(22:13):
Nicky Haley wants to tweet it wasn't life so simple
when you were growing up? You know, there's always this
imaginary of course, you think yourself, Nicki Haley grew up
in the seventies, that period of you know, Wardegate, Vietnam, staxlation,
oil prices, court grupling. I mean, what is she talking about?
But that's always, you know, in our memory, we always
(22:34):
think back nostalgically to the period when we were young,
and that's the appear yes.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
And that is an important point.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
I actually just read a book about the rights obsession
with authoritarian governments, which was really really detailed and talked
a lot about how even in the not the seventies,
but earlier times in the twentieth century, we saw conservatives
sort of have a love affair with authoritarian dictators, everyone
(23:03):
from Pinoche to Hitler and you see that right now
with the rights love of Erdulaan. Can you speak to
how that fits into this narrative.
Speaker 5 (23:13):
Yeah, it's a very interesting point because what we're seeing
come out is a kind of older right. You know,
what we're now realizing is that the Reagan Right was
a much more libertarian, internationalist, free market, free trade right
that took over the Republican Party, but that the core
of the party in its historical essence is actually not
(23:35):
that it is chauvinist, isolationist, protectionist, and as you say,
somewhat enamored of authoritarianism. And so it's not just you know, Pinochet,
but the right was fascinated by Franco Let's don't forget,
you know, the Spanish Civil War. The writer has always
been fascinated by these kind of strong men who were
able to deliver in some sense. And if you go
(23:58):
back to the thirties, there was a great fascination in
the right in the early thirties with Mussolini and Hitler,
and there was a deep isolationism. A lot of the
isolationism on the right was, you know, we shouldn't be
thinking about going to war with these guys. They're modernizing
their country. Charles Lindberg was frankly admiring, you know, Lindberg
admired what the Germans were doing. So there has always
(24:21):
been this deeper right, you know, the kind of cultural
right wing, and in a weird way, we all lost
track of it because Reagan really did remake the right.
But after the Cold War, that facade or that phase
of right wing politics has withered away. Well we're left
with this Trump in some ways Hawkins back to the
thirties exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
I mean, that will make America great again is actually
the nineteen thirties slogan of Lindbergh.
Speaker 5 (24:48):
Right, well, and certainly America First.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Was right, America First, That's what I mean.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
That's where it originated from. And when Trump was told that, interestingly,
his response was yeah, So you know, in other words,
I don't mind being associated with the Republicans of the thirties. Well,
most people forget is even after World War Two, the
Republican Party was still quite isolationist. There was wings of
the party, Vandenberg in the Senate who was an internationalist,
(25:15):
but the core of the party, even after World War Two,
wanted America to come home, no entanglements. Robert Taft, the
leading Republican senator from Ohio, who was the most likely
nominee in the nineteen fifty two presidential campaign, was deeply
opposed to NATO. He goes to see Eisenhower. Eisenhower is
at this point the head of NATO, the supreme Allied
(25:37):
commander in Brussels. And Robert Taft goes to Brussels and
says to Eisenhower, please don't run for the Republican nomination.
If you do, I don't have a chance. And so
I'm asking you now. Eisenhower is the most famous man
at that point in the world, right, and so there
was no chance anyone could could win against him. And
Eisenhower says to Taft, and we know this is truegers
(25:59):
both sides have reported of this. Eisenow sester Robert Taft,
I will issue a showmanes declaration that I will not run,
and if nominated, I will I will not take the
nomination if you issue a one sentence declaration that you
support NATO. Robert Tafft says, I cannot do that. This
is too core to my belief. So Eisenhower said, well,
(26:21):
then it sounds like we have a race, and that
so eisen Ower ran for president, to keep the Republican
Party internationalists, sort to make the Republican Party internationalist. And
so it's you know, it's been again. As I say,
it's what you're seeing is the re emergence of a
very old Republican party that is protectionist, isolationist, culturally, shaubnist,
(26:41):
you know, and has elements layered onto it of the
kind of the old Southern Democratic races.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
It's so funny because it's like, I come from this
family of communists, so you know, my grandfather.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
Was hard fast. So growing up, my grandfather always say
like Reagan is the worse. You know, there's no one worse.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Than Ronald Reagan, you know, and you would go on
and on, and you know my mother too, oh and
the military industrial complex and YadA YadA. But the truth is, like,
if you're looking back, Reagan really was sort of a
high point in a lot of ways, pro immigration, pro
a sort of more inclusive America.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
I mean, certain things that he did.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
I mean, obviously I'm hardly you know Reagan fairly, but
there's certainly things that he did that were incredible for
this Republican Party.
Speaker 5 (27:27):
It was a much more sunny, optimistic, kind of conservatism.
And in a way it speaks to this point I
make in the book, which is Reagan was right wing
on the old left right spectrum in terms of the
state's room of the in the economy right, the old
left right spectrum was the left wanted more state, a
less market, and the right wanted less state, more market.
(27:50):
And Reagan was very much a right winger in those stones.
But in terms of the new spectrum, which I call
open versus closed. You know, do you want to open,
open economy, open information flows, open multicultural society, diversity, immigration.
On that spectrum, Reagan is actually very much open. You know,
he was for all the things and Trump, interestingly as
(28:11):
opposed to all those things that Reagan was in favor of. Right,
if you think about it, Reagan wanted more immigration, Trump
once less. Reagan wanted you know, was more than happy
comestable with diversity. Trump wants less. Reagan was a free trader.
Trump is a protectionist. Reagan loved the idea of America
being the symbol of democracy and spreading democracy around the world.
Trump hates that idea. It's fascinating that on the new spectrum,
(28:33):
Trump is basically disaviving the Republican Party, what the Republican
Party has stood for for thirty five years.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Yeah, let's talk about the economic questions, because protectionism I
am so sort of horrified by it, but it's happening
both on.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
The left and the right.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Right, I mean the tariffs, I mean, Trump is definitely
not as organized and a lot of his tariffs seemed
more emotional than they are strategic. But we're seeing it
on the left too, right, I mean, tariffs have become
all of a sudden a sort of popular tool in
the economy, which they hadn't been throughout my youth. So
can you speak to that and why?
Speaker 5 (29:13):
Yeah? First of all, you're one hundred percent right. The
creeping protectionism is there in both parties. Trump is almost
certainly much more protectionists. So for instance, he's talking about
campaigning on a ten percent tariffs on all imported goods.
He's talking about sixty percent tariffs on Chinese goods, which
would have a very significant sect. You know, people worry
about inflation, Well, you know, there's nothing more inflationary than
(29:36):
putting on tariffs because by definition, right, you're raising the
price of goods, You're raising the price of everything that
comes in and it's not just the goods we buy,
but everything that's made in America, lots of it has
imported parts. So you might buy an American car, but
maybe thirty percent of the parts come from around the world.
And if all that is more expensive, now, why is
(29:56):
it happening? It's a very good question. Basically, what's happened
is there is an narrative that has taken hold in
America that yeah, globalization was good, but it hollowed out
the middle class, it hollowed out the working class. The
statistics don't completely prove that, but it is true that
there are certain parts of the country that turned out
to be politically very sensitive, the rust belt, Ohio, Pennsylvania,
(30:20):
Michigan where the effects are felt very strongly. So even
though in aggregate, I would argue there's no question that
the thirty years of globalization raised America's GDP income, average
income for everybody, lowered costs for food, for clothing, for
appliances for everybody. It did have this effect in Ohio,
in Michigan, and those are so important politically in a
(30:43):
fifty to fifty country that, in my opinion, we're sort
of overreacting to that. Look, I'm an old fashioned liberal
in the sense that I believe we should. This is
FDR's view. We should use the market to generate well,
we should embrace free trade because it lowers costs and
gives you more efficiency, and then we should use that
(31:03):
money to redistribute to the people who get left behind.
Our biggest problem in my view, is over the last
thirty years, we did a lot of the first which
is embracing globalization, and we didn't do it enough of
the second. Right, you know, that's the most efficient thing
to do, rather than to have tariffs where you know,
there was a calculation that Obama put tariffs on tires
(31:26):
at one point, and it was calculated that the cost
of saving each one of those jobs in America was
one million dollars.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
I shouldn't laugh.
Speaker 5 (31:36):
But you know you'd be much write better of writing
a check for half a million dollars to each of
those displaced workers. But the problem is we never did
enough of that. You know, we never did invest in
retraining and all that stuff. And so this has bitten
us in the back because we you know, that was
the great failure in my view. We embraced a lot
of the good things that allowed for openness and innovation
(31:58):
and efficiency. But the flip side of that, if you
want to maintain a stable country and community, is that
you've got to help those who get left behind. But
we tend to have this view, which I think is
the you know, part of the kind of an inherent
American view that people get left behind as their own fault,
and I think that profoundly misunderstands how capitalism works. You know.
(32:22):
It's like something becomes more efficient, some industry becomes more efficient,
some other industry becomes less efficient. The workers working in
that steel plan, they could not have adjusted. They're not
in a position to adjust to the new more efficient right,
that's a decision being made, you know, by the CEOs
and by Wall Street, and those guys are the ones
where I'm saying we should be helping, you know, and
(32:43):
we somehow forget that those people are as much, you know,
victims of structural changes in the world economy, and we
should be helping them. We should be giving them more,
you know, for so just more cash, help with retraining,
help with relocating, whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
This is a certain sort of hearkening back though because
of the tariffs.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I totally agree with you.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
You cannot have capitalism without having, you know, some balance
with the capitalism, whether that's regulation or taxation or what
that looks like. The Chips Act was this idea to
bring manufacturing which had been to sort of pump up
manufacturing in the United States. That is a sort of
way to solve that problem, right.
Speaker 5 (33:26):
Yeah, So the Chips Act, it tries to address a
kind of different problem, which is there's some things in
America that are so vital to our national security that
we probably should make them at home. And I basically
agree with that. I think that we should keep that
list of essential vital national security related technologies small because
(33:46):
it's very expensive. The way we are getting these chip
plants to come back to America is by giving massive, massive, Yes, right,
we're talking about in the tens and tens of billions
of dollars. And I would just point out if we
were to take that money and spend it on early
childcare and education, I wonder whether we would get in
(34:09):
the long run of bigger banks for the buck. So
but as I say, I'm okay with it. But let's
not let this turn into the ever expanding list of
federal subsidies for things that we think are neat and
nifty to have. Let's keep it really focused, national security oriented,
and then I'm okay with it.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Thank you so much, as is totally fascinating and really
appreciate having you.
Speaker 5 (34:31):
Mollie is such a pleasure. I hope I see you soon.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Ali Velshie is the host ofmsnbc's Felshie and the author
of Small Acts of Courage, A Legacy of Endurance and
the Fight for Democracy.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
Welcome back to Fast Politics, my brand and also one
of my favorite television hosts and also a really good writer,
Ali Belshie.
Speaker 6 (34:54):
Nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
I'm listening to your audiobook right now. It is so good. First,
it's so good, second.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Of them all. You ride a motorcycle.
Speaker 6 (35:04):
Yeah, it's definitely one of those thing that people don't
know about me. And it turned out, and by the way,
at the time that I write about riding the motorcycle,
my parents I was a grown man, but my parents
didn't know at a motorcycle, so they learned about it
much later. It was the way I got to the US,
and I still have the bike. I must say, I
don't use it much, but I'm a man of a
certain age, so if I get rid of it. I
(35:25):
can't get it back right. A four year old man
can't buy a motorcycle because that means you're having a
midlife crisis.
Speaker 5 (35:33):
So his grandfather did.
Speaker 6 (35:34):
My wife was like, could you get rid of the
motorcycle please?
Speaker 1 (35:37):
I love this book and I really love the story
of how Ashley Banfield was mean to you.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Ali.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
The book is called Small Acts of Courage, the Legacy
of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy.
Speaker 6 (35:53):
Yeah, And that's the good thing is that's the point
of the book that small acts are what we need
in a world that feels entirely overwhelming, where everything seems
to be collapsing all around us. People can really change
things with the small things they can do in their
families and their communities, you know where they are.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
And I think that's a really good point because I
do see a lot of people they're either distraught or exhausted.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
Yes, correct, And I think we have to understand that
it feels like you need to boil the ocean to
get any of these days.
Speaker 5 (36:22):
But you can't.
Speaker 6 (36:23):
Right, we can't end the Russia Ukraine War on our own.
We can't end Israel gods on our own. What we
can do is be fully engaged citizens, and that helps
because these people who are fully engaged go on to
do other things, or support candidates or fix things in
their communities, and that encourages others to go farther than
they did, and that those people can become senators or
(36:45):
presidents or members of Congress, or journalists or whatever the
case may be. I think we need to not underestimate
our own power as people anywhere in the world, and
particularly as voting citizens in the United States. We actually
have power that a lot of people in the world
don't have. And I want to get people sort of
motivated and feeling good about the fact that I have
(37:05):
agency and responsibility over how this can all turn out.
I don't have to just be a victim of the
waves that are coming over us.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah, I was glad you talked about that. And I
also do think we do have a lot of power
and a lot of agency. And also what we've seen
in a lot of these elections is these are tight elections.
As upsetting as it is that there's a large percentage
of this country that wants some form of wacky at
(37:37):
talk or say these are close elections, so we have
you know, if Democrats are not engaged, they lose.
Speaker 6 (37:43):
Yes, And you know, this is the electionist year in
modern history, right. I think like half the world's population
is going to vote, and a lot they're not real
elections like Russia or Iran. In a lot of them,
they're not close elections like Hungary's had one. India is
in the midst of having an election. Takes a long
time in India. They're not going to be closed mode.
He's going to win, probably by a landslide, and he's
(38:05):
sort of an anti democratic sort. We still have in
America democracy. We still have the right to vote, and
I think we still have more people who believe in
democracy and rights than not in America. We don't want
to be giving that away and we don't want to
be falling to trend that's going around the world. It's
always gone around by the way, it's historical that when
(38:25):
things feel overwhelming, elect the guy who says I can
fix everything for you, right, because that doesn't generally work out. Well,
we have agency, we can fix things. That's fine. Don't
give up here. Democracy don't happen through revolution. They happen
through people voting themselves out of power. They happen through
people voting anti democratic democratic people into power. So that's
(38:48):
the thing we have to be conscious of in this
next few months.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Yeah, you right, really well about that, about this, you
know what it looks like to go from an autocracy.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
You know, India made this choice.
Speaker 6 (39:03):
Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. It is choice, which is
kind of wild because India under Gandhi, which is really
part of my story because later a role in my
family's history. India in nineteen forty eight got independence from
Great Britain because of literally a series of small acts
of courage by people like Gandhi and others around him.
They actually designed this, in fact, to the point that
(39:24):
the Indian flag has a spinning wheel on it. It's
a wheel on which you weave cloth because Gandhi told Indians,
you know what your small act of courage is, weave
your own cloth so that you don't have to buy
imported cloth from Britain, which was you know, cotton that
came out of the ground in India that went to
Britain and got resold a higher prices. To to Indians,
that's actually the symbol of their independence. And yet they
(39:46):
are prepared to vote for an autocrat because people they
find the stuff intoxicating, people who say they can fix things,
people who say they can give you things that are
outsized and not reasonable. So we've not fallen full victim
to that in the United States. But the idea that
Donald Trump still has standing and still is the presumptive
Republican nominee, tells you there is a danger.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
You're not a Nepo baby, but you do have famous grandparents.
As a Nepo baby, myself, I'm always trying.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
To worry baby. We're actually I was saying this too
at Leastia the other day.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
We're not Nepo babies, were Neposaurus because we're too old
to be babies. But your great grandfather was involved with
Gandhi right noe.
Speaker 6 (40:27):
And my grandfather was his youngest student on his commune,
his ushram, which was highly influential to my family because
it taught him. You know, this ushram was was sixty
miles away from where my grandfather was living, but in
those days is of sixty miles in dirt roads in
nineteen ten, so that was a two day journey, which
meant he didn't go home. He lived on the farm.
He didn't have the upbringing of his mother and father.
(40:49):
Gandhi was his person who taught him stuff. My grandfather
was Muslim, Gandhi was Hindu. And when my great grandfather
let my grandfather be gandhi student, said to Gandhi, there's
one condition you have to teach him is religion. Well,
Gandhi didn't know Islam, so he read it. He learned
Islam to teach it to my grandfather. He learned Judaism,
(41:10):
he learned Christianity, and of course he understood Hinduism. And
that was the birth of this concept of pluralism in
my family, which has persisted through the decades to the
point that my parents when they finally emigrated to Kenya
and then to Canada, all they wanted was a society
in which people are not judged or separated or distinguished
(41:30):
by the color of their skin, by their race, by
their religion. And they taught me to realize that what
value there is to live in a society where not
only are people different, but people have different ideas And
how do we value that, how do we nurture that?
What does that dialogue look like? And that's sort of
where I am today, That's why I am the journalist
I am today.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Yeah, you would talk about the diaspora in such an
interesting way, and what it means to be as jew
who has a similar team on having been so moved
from like nobody in your family lived in India for generations.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
Can you talk about how that informed?
Speaker 6 (42:08):
Sure, you know, I hear actually a lot from a
lot of people who read the book, but from my
Jewish friends who say, this sounds like my family's history
a little bit right. It's the idea that sometimes you
move by choice because you could see the writing on
the wall. Sometimes you moved by force. Sometimes you were
kicked out, but you went to places where maybe you
(42:29):
knew the language, maybe you didn't, Maybe you knew the culture,
maybe you didn't. Maybe you were welcomed, probably you weren't,
but you you so loved the quest for freedom that
you'll make it work. So even if any kind of
immigrant shows up somewhere where the streets aren't paved with
gold and everything's not as good as it sounded when
you made the decision to get there, you try and
(42:49):
make a go of it. You try and make it work.
And when I see and it was very relevant to
the immigration conversation we're having in America today, because you
and I live in New York and when I walk out,
chances are greater than I'm going to run into a
an immigrant or a migrant than I am a native
born New Yorker these days. And I just look at
it and I think, I wonder what these people's grandchildren
are going to write about them as they deliver food
(43:09):
or they offer some service as part of our economy.
Migration is the way of the world. It has always been.
It will only be more so between climate and wars
and economic migration, and we need to understand it better
because to me, this is a bit this book is
a bit of an ode to immigration. In some cases,
migration people who make the choice to move for a
better life for their family. It always works out, Molly.
(43:31):
People who do that end up being massive contributors to
the places to which they move.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
Oh, my grandparents except one of my grandmothers is born in.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
England, but all of them were born in New York
and they lived in New York. And my parents lived
in New York, and I live in New York. My
kids live in New York City.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
And I often think, first of all, immigrants are the
reason that we have such a good economy, right, because
I was on with these Brits yesterday and they were
talking about how much their economy suck, and it's because
of Brexit, because of the same stupid ideas that Donald
Trump had, right that you know, immigrants are bad and
(44:08):
we can grow the economy by who knows, yes, right, right,
by whatever, by being more racist.
Speaker 3 (44:16):
And so I do think about that a lot.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
And there's zero difference between me and the guy delivering
the food, right, except that my family came here a
little earlier.
Speaker 6 (44:25):
That that was exactly right. And your trajectory is influential
to them. If they look at your family and your
history and my family and my history, they say, hey,
we can make a go of it, and they generally do.
Despite all the nonsense that we hear these days about
committing more crimes, I mean, it's statistically proven that immigrants
don't commit more crimes than native born populations because there's
(44:46):
a massive disincentive to commit a crime. If you're here
is an immigrant. If your is an undocumented migrant, it's
even more serious. You will get yourself deported. It's as
simple as that.
Speaker 5 (44:54):
You've seen them.
Speaker 6 (44:55):
They just work hard. And when I talk about my
family having moved from India to South afric in the
late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. You know, I
grew up thinking they were business people. They were business people.
They had carts like wheelbarrows into which they put things
and sold things. Some had vegetables and some had dried goods.
So we see here in America they're people doing whatever
work is available so that they can live to fight
(45:18):
another day. But they will, they will live to fight
another day, and they will have children who will get educations.
And God knows we need them because we're short of
everything in this country. We are sort of odors. We're
short of doctors, pharmacists, everything we need. But we have immigration.
You know, immigration in America falls under the Department of
Homeland Security, which I think is terrible framing because I
(45:39):
talk about Canada and our immigrants experience there. Canada understands
that immigrants turned Canada from a sort of a podunk
provincial place into a country that punches above its weight.
We frame it as a security threat, and I'm not
saying that the border is not a real issue.
Speaker 4 (45:54):
You have a door.
Speaker 6 (45:54):
You should be able to close your door and lock
your door and open it whenever you want. But that's
not all of immigration. Immigrant is what the country's built on,
and it's an economic imperative that we have to solve.
And what we're doing is we're falling victim to language
and discussions that don't do it justice.
Speaker 1 (46:09):
The right has gained the system in an insane way.
And the truth is, you shut the border and people
in Texas are furious with you because they go to
Mexico all the time. They go shopping, they go to dinner,
they go to the mall. I mean this whole idea,
you know, down Trump's like shut the border. You know,
there are a lot of Republicans who are driving to
Mexico right now.
Speaker 3 (46:29):
There's a lot of crossover.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
And the idea that we're somehow static in this continent
is insanity. I would also add that Canada is a
nicer place to immigrate too, because they have more services
for people.
Speaker 6 (46:43):
Well they do, and by the way, universal healthcare being
the main one, because fundamentally that doesn't become a strain
on the system. Canada accepts the fact that if you
are coming into the country, you will probably sooner than later,
become a contributing member of society. In the economy and
so week or so, I was in Toronto for a
fundraiser for the Toronto Public Library System. The beneficiary of
(47:05):
the fundraiser was new arrivals to Canada. How do we
provide them with financial counseling, how do we provide them
with language training? How do we help them find housing?
Because Canada still leans into that idea that without immigration
will fall apart. I mean, the truth is, so will
we in America. But we've so framed the discussion around
(47:25):
dangerous people coming across the border and flooding our cities.
And you know, some of our northern politicians are not
helping that situation. They lean into the alarmist language about
this stuff. So people tell you, you know, you can't
get housing in New York. It's too expensive because of migrants.
How there's been too expensive in New York for one
hundred freaking years. London, New York, Vancouver, San Francisco, Chicago,
every major city in the world has a housing infrastructure
(47:47):
problem which should be solved whether or not you have immigration. Right,
we should be building transit and housing for our people
and airports or whatever it is that we need to
be doing. So blaming immigrants for the stresses of our
cities is sort of cowardly and empty and economically not
going to work in the long run anyway.
Speaker 1 (48:03):
Yeah, the whole idea, the division is just such a
large part of publican politics. Jesse just sent me an
interesting tax saying that throwing out Airbnb ultimately has helped
with the housing situation in New York, which makes sense.
Speaker 6 (48:20):
Yeah, but we're far from a solution, and like this
or anywhere, and if you, you know, the smart thing
to do economically would be really figure that out, Really
figure out what the growth rate of this city and
our cities are, and really figure out how to create
lots of housing mixed housing come for rich people and
some for low income people. And then it doesn't it
(48:43):
doesn't sort of have this backward influence on your immigration policy. Right,
if everybody can get healthcare and everybody get housing, we
certainly have the jobs that we know we have. We
certainly know that all of these immigrants that Donald Trump
warns about, these migrants, all of these dangerous people, they're
not driving our wages out because our wages are up.
So so we need to think about this differently. And look,
(49:04):
I'll say this Democrats didn't fix it when they had
the chance. Republicans, many of them, used to speak very
positively about immigration, particularly governors in Western states where they
knew they needed the labor. Or w Bush paints nice
pictures of immigrants these days, which is nice. But we're
all kind of in the wrong place on this, and
we need to redesign our conversations around the fact that
(49:25):
this is our future. It's our past. By the way,
all of us are immigrants in some fashion or children
of immigrants. We need to refashion how we think about
society and build our future on the basis of equal
rights for everybody, real civil rights for everybody, and the
fact that we're just going to be a constantly evolving society.
And that's a great thing.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
We're one hundred and seventy ish seventy six seventy eight
when this airs days to the election.
Speaker 3 (49:51):
What do you been surprised by?
Speaker 6 (49:53):
I sort of am surprised by the resilience of Donald
Trump in this thing. If you or I got into
a fraction of the trouble that this guy gets into,
the reputational harm done to us would be remarkable. And
I don't know whether he's just hit up bottom so
that he can't harm himself anymore. There's a bunch of
people who will just stick with him. Remember the core
who sticks with him sort of the same core number
(50:13):
of people percentage of Americans who believe in a lot
of conspiracy theories and things like that. So you can
get sort of a third of the American population to
believe a lot, particularly in the days of misinformation. I
do think that the Democrats are going to have to
get it together in terms of dealing with what their
message is on democracy, what their message is on reproductive freedom,
(50:33):
which seems to be a remarkable motivator for people to
turn out to vote. And they're going to have to
figure out what their message is on the Middle East,
because they're losing support in greater numbers than the margin
by which Joe Biden won some states. So there's work
to be done. I think they're working very hard toward
a ceasefire, which might help that situation, might help that
discussion a little bit. But this is by no means
(50:55):
an obvious outcome in November, and one that has me
quite worried right now. Oh, we have agency, We have agency.
That's the other part. That's the book part that you
know what we can do?
Speaker 4 (51:07):
Think about it?
Speaker 3 (51:07):
Okay?
Speaker 5 (51:08):
Good.
Speaker 3 (51:08):
I am also worried to thank you Alli. I hope
you'll come back.
Speaker 6 (51:13):
I would love to thank you, my friend.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
No moment, oh fuck Rick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (51:22):
Yes, ma'am.
Speaker 3 (51:23):
Do you want to know who my moment of fuckery is?
Speaker 5 (51:26):
I do.
Speaker 4 (51:26):
I would love to know your moment of fuckery.
Speaker 3 (51:28):
Mighty Mike Flynn, everybody's favorite.
Speaker 1 (51:33):
I don't know if Trump knows this, but he's ready
to be Trump's VP.
Speaker 3 (51:36):
Pick I like it.
Speaker 4 (51:37):
You know, since Mike Flynn is presently suing me for
ten million dollars, I'm going to refrain from comment for
once in my life.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
Well, in my mind, Donald, you cannot go wrong picking
Mike Flynn, and that is why I say to you.
Speaker 3 (51:51):
Definitely pick Mike Flynn.
Speaker 1 (51:54):
If a Baca's not around, hard to think of someone
better than Mike Flynn. Luck to all who definitely pick him.
I think that'll be great.
Speaker 4 (52:05):
Have fun storming the castle.
Speaker 3 (52:07):
Yeah, good luck, team, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 4 (52:10):
It's gonna be great. Well, my moment of fuckery, and
I know you're gonna be shocked, absolutely shocked to hear this.
But on Friday the Securities and Exchange Commission charged bf
Borgers CPA with systemic fraud, banned him permanently from practicing
as an accountant for any business regulated by the sec
(52:32):
and charged him fourteen million dollars in civil penalties. Wait,
who is what's the connection?
Speaker 5 (52:37):
You ask?
Speaker 4 (52:37):
He happens to be the auditing firm for Truths Social.
Speaker 3 (52:43):
Oh my god, amazing. That is amazing. That is an
amazing moment of fuckery. You win.
Speaker 4 (52:49):
Oh my god, I was laughing. I laughed so hard
on Friday that I wished for a moment I had
Trump diapers. I know you can't stop me. There's no
force of nature that will stop me from being a
twelve year old asshole.
Speaker 3 (53:03):
I'm aware. That was bad. That was so upseting.
Speaker 1 (53:08):
Oo God, that's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the
best minds in politics make sense of all this chaos.
If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to
a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks
for listening.
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