May 13, 2024 • 53 mins
Rick Wilson of The Lincoln Project ponders Trump's poor reelection strategies. Caroline Kitchener of The Washington Post gives a dispatch on the aftermath of a post-Roe America. Marc Elias of Democracy Docket details the GOP's new efforts to stop counting votes before all of them are counted.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast, and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds and artificial intelligence creation. Senator Katie Britt
has proposed a database of pregnant people. We're not going
to regulate guns, but we are going to regulate uteruses.
(00:22):
We have such a great show for you today the
Washington Post. Caroline Kitchener, who is a dogged reporter on
the abortion beat, stops by to talk to us about
what post row America looks like. Ben, we will talk
to Democracy Dockets Mark Elias about the GOP's effort to
stop counting votes before all of them are counted and
(00:44):
also after. It's amazing stuff. But first we have the
host of the Enemy's List, the one, the Only, Rick Wilson.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Rick Wilson, Hello, Molly John Fast. I'm joining you from
your fair city today as we record this.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And that's right, Rick is in New York, so let's
talk about But of course we're not in the same
room because where would we be, right.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Why would that even be possible?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
So last night Trump gave a speech bafflingly in New
Jersey Wildwood, New Jersey, which.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You know he's swinging state New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
I was puzzling through this and I was told by
someone pretty smart that it is actually the Philly media
market Wildwood. Yes, so he's trying to get local Philly,
I think press.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
What struck me about this was it was out at
the beach and there were a lot of people, like
a lot, maybe not four hundred thousand like they said
or whatever crazy made up number they did, but a
lot of people. And I thought, oh, wow, this is
probably not so good for Joe Biden. But then those
people started leaving in droves. And by the time he
(01:55):
was done, I saw a photograph from a reporter at
USA Today or video that really looked just like there
were very few people laughed. So talk to me about that.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I think you have. As always, the illusion of Trump's
rallies has some been something that has trick reporters since
way back in twenty fifteen. And are there places in
the country where a lot of yeah, who's want to
get together and go see Donald Trump. And these people
are like the Juggaloos, only with red hats. They are
not coming to this thing because you know that they
(02:27):
want to have political Enlightenment. They're coming because there's no
monster truck rally. Though I know I'm sounding like a
really dickish elitist right now, but you may have met
me by now and know that I have, in fact,
in dickish elitis when it comes to certain things. But
the thing, Molly is I think the rally was so
bizarre of Trump once again, like yes, we did a
great thing with Arbertrinity Row and we're not done, and
(02:50):
going on and on and on about it, about doctor
Hannibal Lecter, the late great doctor Lector, I mean a
poll wick. I tried to test me once Leva with Saba.
Oh God, madness.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
It was really interesting to me because the door is open.
People are mad at Biden for any number of reasons.
I'm not and you're not. We both really do.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Like rational adult human beings.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah, well, we just don't think that president is going
to give us a Christmas list. But I do think
that the door is open to trump Ism. But the
thing is, Trump has never been an organized politician. So
like last night, he did all the things that if
you were a political strategist you would tell him not
(03:39):
to do. He bragged about overturning Row. He mused about
what a good person Hannibal Lecter was, the late great
you know, he just did a lot of stuff that
he sort of bragged about his unforced errors. And I
wondered if ultimately people just got bored and went home.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, you can't sit and watch I mean I think
one cannot, but maybe some people can't. You can't sit
and watch, you know, monkeys throw their feces all day long.
It's briefly amusing and then you run, you know, instead
of everybody lasts about it later. But the Trump Show
that goes on and on and on and three, and
it's like these Castro esque linked speeches that are just
(04:20):
this stream of consciousness rattling, you know, kooky, weird, whatever
it is. All of it just gets tired. After a while.
You just get you just get sort of worn down
by it. And I don't mean by people who just
people who are critics or antagonists and Trump, I mean everybody.
I mean people who like the guy eventually go Okay,
(04:41):
that's enough for one day. I can't do this.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
So that's really my question when we look at this
from like again, we're six months out from this election.
So I was chastising a pundit for saying that he
was sure Joe Biden was going to be a one
term president. And I said to him, why do you
say that? And he said because the person asked me,
and I only say the truth. And I was like,
but you don't know the truth. I said, you just
(05:05):
know your.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Opinion, right, that's an opinion.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And I said, based on polls. I said, so you
don't actually know the truth. You just have an opinion
based on poles. And I don't necessarily think that's true.
But I also know enough to know that six months
from the election, none of us really know what's going
on because most of the country is not paying attention.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
To use a phrase beaten to death over many generations,
opinions are like the human asshole. Everyone has one. But
the idea that none of Trump's infirmities, weirdnesses, that the meltdowns,
the craziness, the self led legal defense efforts are not
weighing on Americans are just wrong. There are a lot
(05:46):
of reporters who are incentivized, for a hundred different reasons,
to make it overse race, to make a competitive to drama, drama,
drama all day long, and God bless them. Okay, that's
their work, that's their livelihood. I get a totally and
a lot of them who are following along on this
stuff are very amused by Trump doing his trick again
(06:08):
on America, of Trump doing his act once again of
making the press incapable of covering him. And right now
they are, they're once again showing us they're incapable of
covering Donald Trump. They don't know what to do. They
they do not know what to do with this guy.
And I'm sorry. I feel bad for them professionally, and
I feel bad for the country because too many people
(06:31):
right now still believe that Donald Trump does not obey
any political laws of physics. One other things that I
want to make very clear, there's this idea out there
that Joe Biden is somehow completely helpless, snake fit and helpless.
He's running and his campaign is running a good campaign.
They are running a good campaign.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
With a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
And that was my next point. With essentially unlimited resources
right now, that will start to add up over time.
I know it's not happening as fast as people want,
or as deeply and immediately st people want, but it
will happen. It is underway right now, and Trump is
getting you know, he's getting out spent one hundred to
one in a lot of these early states right now.
(07:10):
And that's it takes time to add up. It takes
time to add in, and you know, the economy to
use bubb a little long. People keep underestimating that, but
the economy keeps like stubbornly refusing to go into a recession.
For Donald Trump's.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Right, and also when we look at this inevitability of
trump Ism, which I think is largely based on anxiety
from twenty sixteen. Trump has lost every election since twenty sixteen.
He lost twenty eighteen, he lost twenty twenty, he lost
twenty twenty two, he lost twenty twenty three, he lost
the Virginia State House. And even you see like these
(07:47):
Republicans are now even trying to not run along with him,
like you have swing state senatorial candidate. It's saying they're
not going to lie about the twenty twenty election because
swing voters don't molly.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
There is something that I think is really important to
keep in mind that many of our colleagues and friends
in the journalism world have I think I don't know
they've deliberately forgotten it, but it's less fun and as
dramatic the Republican Party. Although the Magam movement is utterly
dominant inside the Republican Party, the Republican Party is in
a state of profound, wretched, terrible collapse and crisis. The
(08:27):
normies are gone, the crazies are largely in charge. When
Mike Johnson is the bastion right now sanity in the
Republican Party. You don't operate in a sane universe. You know,
You've got a party tearing itself apart. And they have
lost seats again, as you point out, starting in twenty eighteen.
Nationally speaking, this is at the state House, State Senate,
(08:49):
gresh always you know, very they've lost around a thousand
elected offices since Trump got elected in twenty sixteen. Trump
single handedly did all the work the Republican Party did
between the year two thousand and the year twenty sixteen,
because the Republicans were making a lot of gains in
the states over those years. And now those things are
being swept away. And that counts things like local school
(09:12):
boards and all this stuff. And so the GOP is
at a profound crisis, and I know they want to
pretend that's not the case, and so oh were you
know we're going to win this or that. But right
now they are desperate and a lot of the ones
that McConnell has out there that he's filled in, these
billionaires and these rich guys, there's trapped because the Maugus
don't like them, and the only thing keeping them them
(09:32):
alive is that they're writing checks with many, many, many zeros.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Say you're a GOP donor, So I mean, are you
wouned back? This is something you actually know about because
you know GOP donors. You talk to GOP donors all
the time.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
I mean I do.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
So we have Mitch McConnell trying desperately to raise money
because they are trying to pick up the Senate. You
have Mike Johnson really behind the eight ball, trying desperately
to raise money. You've Donald Trump trying desperately to raise money.
So what do you think their pitches to Republican donors
and do you think it's working well?
Speaker 2 (10:09):
If you bifurcate the pitch among Johnson versus McConnell, they're
very different appeals.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
So let's hear them.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Mitch mcconne was telling big Republican donors. I can still
save this. I can still be a firewall. We can
still prevent Trump if he's back in office from doing
the worst things.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Or do you think they're worried though, or do you
think they don't care about the worst things.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Here's the thing. Republican mega donors believe that Trump is
a disaster, an immediate threat to American democracy. He could
plunge the entire world into a billion years of nuclear
darkness and all that. But they will kill their own
children with a bloody, rusty butcher knife to get a
tax cut.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
There's nothing that appeals to them more than that. So
McConnell's trying to give them the best of both worlds.
I'm going to get you your tax cuts, and I
will prevent Trump from plunging the world into nuclear darkness. Right,
and is adopting a little bit more of a message
to donors. I actually talked to a donor who Johnson
pitched recently and failed. But pitched him, and sadly I
failed when I pitched him too. But the guy's just stubborn.
(11:10):
But Johnson's argument was, if you let the low Democrats
take over, they'll destroy your company. I'm not doing this
for Trumpian reasons. I'm a free market, small government Republican. No,
not true.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
What did the guys say when he said that?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
He just like, I have trouble taking you seriously about that.
And then the guy brought up to me, he goes, yeah,
a guy with the poor An app on his phone.
I don't think.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So so right, small government?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
You know, you saw the stories last week where trump
Is goes to the you know, the energy sector guys
and says, give me a billion dollars and I'll undo
every regulation. Joe Biden. Ever, that is some third world
cuptocracy right there.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, so let's talk about that for a minute, because
I think that a lot of us were just horrified
because of the planet. But I always wonder or who
is that for? Like how many oil billionaires are there
who are affected directly by regulation like that? I mean,
is that ten people? Is that five people?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I won't say they're all billionaires, but in that energy
sector there are about sixty or seventy donors right in
a whole variety of corporate roles. It could be as
big as a chevron, but it could also be the
people who are in the infrastructure part of the oil
and gas industry. The pyramid is very broad of people,
the guys who build offshore rigs and helicopters to service
(12:36):
the option. There's a huge it's a gigantic industry.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
But do you think it works. Do you think they
do that for him?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Listen, a billion dollars is a lot of money. The
problem with any gift to Trump of that scale, Okay,
a problem with that, and they all know it, is
that Trump is going to demand they go through a
certain pathway where he gets a skim right, And none
of these guys are in the business.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Of being stupid right with money, So it's going to
be hard for that.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
So it's going to be difficult to do that. Now. Look,
will be oil and gas industry raised Trump one hundred
million dollars? Sure? I think they could do that without
breaking a sweat. Yeah, But I don't think they're going
to raise him a billion dollars, no matter how much
he asks for it.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
But it's interesting. He clearly is quite panicked.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Oh, no question, no doubt about it. He is nervous
that the world is fluid in a way that he's
not as quick and agile enough to keep up with
as he might have been in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I think the guy we're seeing in court, the cranky,
you know, tired, exhausted, drawn, bitter, nasty, old man, I
think that's the real Trump. I think that he knows
that all of the posturing in the world about the
crooked judges and blah blah blah isn't true. He knows that.
I think he's starting a sense that there is a Again,
(13:53):
and I've said this one hundred times, I'll say it again.
I do not believe that Donald Trump is going to
have any of these trials meaningfully affect whether he goes
to prison before November. Would I like it, of course
it would. But I don't think he's happy. There's no
joy with Trump right now. And look he enjoyed twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
He also had to spend one hundred million dollars to
keep from going into trials, so like his legal fees.
I had an argument with someone about this because some
of his lawyers, Alena Habba is a disaster. But like
some of these lawyers are quite good. Now they have
a client who tells them what to do, and that's
(14:31):
not good.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Todd Blande is well regarded as a defense attorney. I
know Chris Kuyse, I was friends with Chris Kuyz years
and years ago.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
And Susan Necklace. I mean, these are mo stupid people now.
Luckily for US an American democracy.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
What lay life is left a terrible coin.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
They have a terrible client who won't let them actually
do law stuff, which is the good news. But I
do think, I absolutely think that we are seeing these lawyers.
He's gonna need another I mean, will he need another
one hundred million dollars to keep kicking the can before
the election? I think so.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
You know, I'm absolutely certain that the burn rate of
Trump's legal herald will be the thing in the end
of the day, because Joe Biden pulls this thing off.
We're going to look back and go, you know what,
if Donald Trump had spent seventy million dollars in in
the early States or in the Keys wedding States early,
he might might have beaten Biden. But right now it's
(15:31):
Joe Biden and Biden's allies that are on the air
in places like Arizona and Wisconsin, in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
And while Trump is still able to raise that small
dollar money. The hesitation level among most people is increasing.
They're dropping off the big dollar guys. They're taking a
lot of beating and seduction at phone calls and Susie
(15:53):
Wilds holding their hands to get them to write those
million dollar checks. It's not like twenty six even now,
it's not like twenty sixteen. I think there's just such
a unscored amount of legal peril that has hurt him
in ways that I certainly can tell you reporters have
not calculated it fully and adequately. I don't think most
(16:15):
people in the political environment right now have correctly.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
There's no president for like, your candidate is in criminal
trials at one hundred Center Street while the adult film
actress that he paid hush money to is testifying about
having almost non consensual sex with him.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Right I was writing something this morning when I was
on the plane coming up to New York House. I
was writing something about the bizarre nature of a world
where a former president is in court with the with
the adult film star who he threatened, abused, and continues
to abuse even after he's already been adjudicated as a
(16:58):
sexual assaulter with the aging care case and has been
forced to pay defamation for attacking her over and over again,
that we still live in a world where people don't
think about Trump as a form of political pornography enjoyed
by a few Americans, but that like tentacle porn or
something else, it's going to become an increasingly sort of
specialized taste. You can't look at this guy anymore. I go,
(17:20):
that's a regular guy. I can have a beer with
that guy. He's the normal He's the normal guy in
the room. I mean, Joe Biden may suffer from being
too much normal and too basic in the minds of
the press, not colorful enough or whatever, not young and
vibrant enough. People at the end of the day make
a lot of political decisions based on fear, and I
think Trump every day gives you more to fear and
(17:41):
more to load and more to be, more to be
disturbed about. And people who are disturbed by the behavior
of a Trump, I don't think there's any way where
they reverse their decision and go, you know what. I
know it's August now, and I've been thinking about vote
for Joe Biden, But suddenly Trump's going to be more
sane and cogent and not talking about imaginary serial killers
(18:02):
and not pretending he's a martyr on the same level
as Gandhi and Martin Luther King at Smith dell.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Rick Wilson, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
You are welcome.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Spring us here, and I bet you are trying to
look fashionable, So why not pick up some fashionable all
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(18:40):
Caroline Kitchener is a national reporter doggedly covering abortion at
the Washington Post. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Carolyne Kitchener.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
You have this beat, which is abortion. It is in
post row America. Just every piece is just an incredible
shit show. So I want you first to talk to
us about Florida. Let's talk about Florida first and then
we'll get to I mean, every abortion story in this country,
(19:12):
of which in post or America there are now millions
you cover basically, But let's talk about Florida first, because Florida,
it just happened last week, right.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yeah, I would love to talk about Florida. I think
that people are not really yet realizing how big of
an impact Florida is going to have on abortion access
through the entire country.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yeah, so set this stage here.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I went last week. I was there for like twenty
four hours. I was there on the day before the
band took effect.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
And this is a six week band enacted by DeSantis.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, he find it. So it's a ban on most
abortions and it's going down. Florida had a fifteen week
ban in place, and so this replaces that now. Yeah,
I mean so I was there on Tuesday, and it
was a wrenching day for these women because it was
the last day that they could provide abortions. But because
(20:09):
Florida also has a twenty four hour waiting period.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
So what does that mean? A twenty four hour waiting.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Period, So that means that they have to come in
for their first appointment and have an ultrasound and a
consultation twenty four hours before they get the actual abortion.
So the tuesday that I was there, you were having
first people turn away because they came for their consultation
and they were told that they were farther than six
weeks along, because most people are by the time that
(20:35):
they get in, and they were turned away and well,
it was one of the most emotional settings that I
have been in this reporting maybe ever, because I was
just sitting there. I mean I sat there as these women,
one after the other, was turned away, and I saw them,
you know, I saw them learning this, learning that they
were eight weeks or ten weeks and that they couldn't
(20:58):
get an abortion, and just one after the other, they're
just sobbing, just breaking down because they knew, they knew
what this meant. The advocate that the clinic director who
was there, was trying to assure them, you know, there
are resources, there's funds, you can go out of state.
But it's like I think for a lot of these women,
like they have kids at home, they have like a
(21:18):
very little money, So they were being told to go
to d C because that's just how far away Florida is,
and that you might as well have been telling them
that they could go to the moon.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You talk about that in the story that one of
these women, they say, well, you can go to DC
and will help you pay, and the woman is like,
I have two kids and no mine.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Yeah, that opposition just felt like insane for her, Like
what I go to d C right now, Like I
have my life, I have my kids, Like you know,
it was really like she was being told that she
had to have a third child.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Right because she was basically being told she had to
have a third child that she can't afford. So explain
to me Florida. What I think about when I think
about Florida. That's interesting is this is a state with
real libertarian leanings, which for a long time was sort
of a place where you could safely get an abortion
in this house.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that. I mean,
Florida has been a sort of like abortion haven for
lack of a better term, for a really long time
because of this provision in the state constitution in Florida,
this very very strong privaca clause in the Florida Constitution
that was passed by voters in the nineteen eighties that
has long long been interpreted to protect abortion rights. So well,
(22:31):
when you had all these other even you know, long
before the DABS decision, when you had all of these
other states in the South passing all of these restrictions,
Florida often resisted those restrictions because of this privacy clause
in the state constitution. What changed recently is you had
the State Supreme Court, which was totally remade by Ron Desanthos.
(22:54):
You had them say that, actually, no, this privacy provision
does not protect abortion rights, and therefore this six week
man that the legislature has passed can take effect.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
So one of the things I'm hoping that we could
just talk about for one more minute is your DeSantis.
I think knew this was a bad this was a
bad law, or knew that it would be unpopular with
voters because he signed it into law, not in a
big ceremony, but actually in the middle of the ninety
(23:27):
Can you sort of talk about that, because my theory
of the case is that he did it because he
thought it would help his presidential run, because when he
signed it in it was still when he thought he
might have a shot.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Right. Well, it was very striking the contrast because I covered,
you know, one year before he signed six week Lack,
he signed in the fifteen week law. The contrast between
how he did each of those laws was like day
and night. Because the fifteen week law he stayed like
a massive event in the middle of the day. He
invited everybody. It was like a real dog and Plenty show.
(24:01):
And then like you said the other one he's signed
late at night. I think it was in his office.
It was not you know, there might have been like
one picture taken, but it was very quiet. And then
if I'm remembering right, I think it was like the
next day or the day after, he actually spoke at
Liberty University and he didn't talk about this, which, like
I thought, was like very striking because obviously that's like
the setting, right that is, like, if you're ever going
(24:22):
to talk about your like anti abortion achievement, that's going
to be the setting that you're going to do it in.
And so his like, his silence was very striking. And
I don't know, I mean, I think, like, you know,
that theory that you black positive like certainly sounds plausible.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
I mean, I think he was certainly getting an enormous
amount of pressure from the base and from you know,
anti abortion activists in the state that have really helped
him in a lot of ways to do this. He's
never spoken about why.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yeah, it seems like it has political calculus written all
over it. So let's go to this Texas story you
wrote about. Power is such a central here and it
brings up the architect of SB eight, which was the
law that ultimately Republicans used to overturn Row. It's the
State Bill eight. I want you to do two seconds
(25:12):
on Jonathan Mitchell and then I want you to talk
about SBA.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Yeah. So Jonathan Mitchell is I would say, the most
well known anti abortion attorney in the country. He is
known for kind of coming up with new and extremely
aggressive and like I mean, I would say creative, like
very like out of the box ways to crack down
on abortion. He has a real reputation for that and
(25:37):
he's trying a lot of different things and he has
been for several.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Years, including like a fugitive slave law basically that had
bounties on women who went and got abortion. So if
you were a taxi driver who drove a woman to
get an abortion, you could theoretically be charged.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Well, so with Senate Bill A, the way that this
law got around Roe v. Wait, it's all about private
civil enforcement. So basically what that means is that any
person in Texas can you know, file a lawsuit against
anyone that they spec might have helped somebody to get
that abortion. And that was a really I mean, we've
(26:16):
now seen several states sort of refashion that, but at
the time that was really really novel and nobody had
had really done anything like that before. I that was
Jonathan Mitchell's idea.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
So crazy. Explained to us a little bit about what
it looks like with Texas now is woman wants to
get an abortion and the father of the fetus is
able to explain this to us.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Yeah, anytime it's Texas, there's a lot of like weird
legal things. I just find that if they're reporting. But
there's something in Texas called the Rule two O two
petition that allows you to basically petition a court to
allow you to investigate before even a lawsuit is filed.
So when there's like if you say, you know, look,
I'm like suspecting that there's some illegal activity happening here,
(27:08):
and you know, I want to investigate, you can like
petition a court to allow you to do that. So
there's a big if no lawsuit filed. But basically what
has happened is this man, represented by Jonathan Mitchell, has
gone to a court and said, look, my former partner
got into abortion against my wishes and I want to
investigate that. Now, what is like particularly striking about this case?
(27:32):
I think is that it's very clear from the records
that she went out of state. She went to Colorado
where abortion is still legal, and there's nothing illegal about that.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Right, states rights. They pretend to care about states.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Right, there's nothing illegal about that. I mean, we have
seen anti abortion activists really go after this, like really
clearly wanting to stop this, but there's nothing illegal about that.
So that for a lot of people ring a lot
of alarm bells in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, explain to us a little bit about what is
there anything that Jonathan Mitchell can do or is it
just to sort of make people afraid?
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Well, I mean, I think the vast majority of certainly
of abortion rights activists see this as a chilling mechanism,
you know, something to do that people will hear about this,
you know, and then they will be afraid. But basically,
what he is arguing in this petition is that, you know,
even though like the woman herself could not be charged
(28:30):
or could not be you know, punished in any way,
the people who like aided her in getting out of
state could be. Now, abortion rights attorneys vehemently disagree with
that statement. They said, say that nobody involved could be charged,
but that's what he's arguing.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
So crazy. So we have this Florida six week ban now,
and then Arizona has a pretty interesting situation. Can you
talk about.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
That Arizona's law has now been repealed, but that doesn't
necessarily mean that it's not going to take effect. And
it's very confusing what's happening in this area. But the
leadest that I heard is that it cannot. The earliest
that it could take effect is mid to end of June.
I mean, I think because Arizona has a democratic attorney general, like,
(29:14):
there's a lot in a democratic governor, there's a lot
that you know, obviously, those are extremely powerful leadership positions,
and they're sort of trying to do whatever they can
to stop this from taking effects. But we're sort of
in uncharted toiratory and nobody really knows what's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Okay, so we don't know, because I thought for sure
that the eighteen sixty law had to go into effect
at some point. Even though they were able to ultimately overturn.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
It, they're still using conditional language like the governor and
the attorney general. I mean, my impression is that they're
still trying to figure out a way to stop this
from happening, because initially they had said the earliest was
June eighth, and now they're saying the leadst that I
that I saw on I do think that this is
a this is kind of evolving. But then the latest
that I saw was meddle to to end of June,
(30:01):
So I think we don't know for sure yet.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
But right now the landscape is there's likely to be
a sixteen week ban, maybe worse, but something to that
effect in Arizona, which is also another state with real
libertarian leanings.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Talk to me about that there is a fifteen week ban.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
That's the Doug Doocey right.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
For over a year like that has been alot on
the land in Arizona. But you know, they like Florida,
are almost certainly going to have abortion on the ballot
in November. You know a lot of this is going
to come down to the election.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
You are seeing these women and you're really seeing those firsthand.
I mean, so I read this like amazing report from
Lyft to Louisiana which talked about how Louisiana they're seeing
doctors unable or unwilling to treat pregnant women in the
first trimester because of the anxiety about miscarriage is an abortion?
(30:55):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (30:57):
I mean, it's certainly happening. I thought that maybe by
now things like that would have sort of settled out
and you know, people would realize that, Like, you know,
cases are cases like this, as far as we know,
are not being filed against doctors. We have not seen
that against any sort of like medical emergency or anything
like that. But it really it hasn't. Like I mean,
people in emergency situations are still being turned away. It
(31:20):
seems like every day, and you know, I think that
just speaks to doctors have a lot to lose. Obviously,
they're you know, in most of these places, they're facing
jail time, they could lose their licenses, and that's a
lot paraska of a doctor, right And there are certainly
some that are willing to kind of put it on
the line like that, but many more I think that aren't.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
So there's an Mdollar case right now at the Supreme Court.
MDALA is this emergency medicine federal statute which says you
can't leave people to die. Very American that we had
to pass that the Biden administration is doing I hope,
because you have these women who are being menevacked out
of the state because doctors are refusing to formal life
(32:00):
saving abortions on them. Are you seeing that? I feel
like you're on the ground, so you're and you're traveling
around and you're talking to people. Are you seeing that
other places? And also what do you think the downstream
effect of that is.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
I'm definitely hearing about this in multiple different states, and
I would wager to guess that it's happening everywhere because
the laws are very similar and the fear is the same.
Something that hasn't been talked about as much is the
role that the hospitals have to play. I mean, doctors
that I'm talking to are extremely grateful when their hospitals
give them guidance about how to interpret these laws, because
(32:35):
what happens sometimes is that like some of these common
difficult conditions that women come in with, pregnancy complications that
women come in with, sometimes hospitals will say that one
is okay. You know, we have looked at the law
and we have sided together that that one is okay,
And that is so important for the doctor to hear.
But you have a lot more hospitals in my know
(32:56):
that I found in my reporting that they aren't say anything,
they're not giving any kind of guidance, So it's like
totally just the doctor out there on their own, you know,
encountering these emergency situations and having to figure out what
to do.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
You don't feel like in these states with the bands,
the life of the mother protection is being focused on
or being respected. I mean, that's what it sounds like
from what you're hearing anecdotally.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
They all phrase these exceptions in different ways. I would say,
I think the most common one that we hear is
medical emergency, like there is a there is an exception
for medical emergency. Now, the problem is that that's extremely vague,
Like any any doctor that you talk to will say like,
I don't know what medical emergency means, like, and I
don't want to risk, you know, acting in a situation
(33:43):
that then other people say, is not a medical emergency.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Right.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
A lot of these conditions that they're really reckoning with
are you know, and not all of them. Some of
them are like, you know, there is an urgent situation
and still somebody is being turned away. But a lot
of these situations are like you know, well, if she's like,
if the pregnancy is allowed to continue, she's at a
high risk for sepsis, she's at a high risk for hemorrhaging,
but it's not like immediately she could die now. And
(34:09):
so those are the sort of situations. It's sort of
like gray area situations that doctors are reckoning with. And
sometimes I'll step in and say, you know, you can
treat them in that situation, but yeah, more often they don't.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Yeah, Wow, thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope
you'll come back.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Thank you for having me on. I really love talking
to you.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Mark Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket. Welcome back
to Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Mark, thanks for having me again.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
I'm such a fan of yours. But also, more importantly,
like I feel like this story because there's so much
other news. We're sort of sleepwalking through it and there's
so much I mean, I was listening to Laura Trump
on television the other day basically telling Republicans to practice
voter intimidation. So what is happening?
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, I'm outside. I do you started there?
Speaker 4 (35:03):
Because I don't want people to walk away thinking I
don't think you should follow the Trump trials because obviously
it's important that you follow the Trump trials, but there
is this crowding out of what is happening to democracy
that I fear people are going to wake up in
September October and be shocked at what is befollowing them.
The Republican Party is openly saying it wants to engage
(35:26):
in voter suppression and election subversion. You know, you have
the Laura Trump, the vice share of the Republican Party,
you know, using language that you know is at best
coded around violence. You also have her saying that they
believe they can get the R and C can get
partisan people touching ballots, remember that, and that kind of means.
And then you have I think her saying what I
(35:47):
think you were referring to, which is that they want
to stop you know, Donald Trump tweeted in twenty twenty
stop the count She basically said, they're going to litigate
to try to prevent ballots from being counted after election day.
And you know at the same time that by the way,
Republicans prevent states from counting ballots before collection day. They're
being pretty out in the open about what they are
(36:08):
planning to do. Donald Trump, you know, gave an interview
that said he won't necessarily abide by the outcome of
the election, and then Tim Scott, who is supposed to
be one of the moderates in the Senate, refuses say
he would. So I think we need to be careful
at not letting ourselves be distracted from all of the
really bad authoritarian commentary and the voter suppression activity that
is going on while the trials take place.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
What's happening behind the scenes in the courts, Because you
are in these courts trying to preserve our right to democracy,
So what's happening there?
Speaker 4 (36:41):
Yeah, So, as we sit here today, there are one
hundred and forty two separate lawsuits in various states of
the courts in thirty seven states. The majority of them,
about eighty of them, are pro democracy lawsuits, but it's
important to understaid the other sixty some odd are actually
brought by votes pressers and election deniers. These are lawsuits
(37:02):
to make it harder of an easier cheat in the
twenty twenty four election. And the macro trend is that
we are seeing more and more of those lawsuits being
filed every day. The trend is towards the election deniers,
bringing more and more litigation, including the Republican National Committee
that is doing so. So that is kind of the
very macro trend. I would say underneath that, there are
(37:24):
a couple of notable things. The first is the Republicans
and their allies have brought three separate lawsuits around the country,
one in Arizona, one in Nevada, one in Minnesota for
the right to harass election officials. I want you to
take that yet, like you wake up one day and
you say, you know what law needs a challenge.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
There's a law that says I cannot harass or intimidate
an election official. Let's challenge that law.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (37:45):
Wow, right, So what does that tell you, Molly about
what we're going to see this fall?
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Right?
Speaker 4 (37:50):
I mean, if they're willing to spend money on lawyers
to litigate to be able to harass election officials, one
can assume that harassing election officials is on their dance card.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
When we get to a.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Too, do you think the courts will protect these people?
Speaker 4 (38:03):
I mean no, I doubt they've already lost the case Nevada.
I believe they're going to lose the cases in Arizona
and Minnesota. But I also don't think that they're done
bringing that litigation elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Okay, so this litigation is like kind of just trying
to move the goalposts, but not necessarily going to succeed.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Yeah. I think it's trying to do two things.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
And I think as we get closer to the election,
and hopefully this won't be the last time I talked
to you, I think we should keep this in mind
that there are goals that these that this litigation has.
One is to win the lawsuit. The second is to
shift the Overton window of what is.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Except that's always these great right So.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Even if they lose these lawsuits, they have sort of
put into play the idea that there may be there's
some first amount of right to harass election. I like
you and I will know they lost the case, but
like the gestalt that is the national sense of what's
going on in elections, they will have shifted what is
considered normal.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
I mean, it's like the trumpmmunity, right, he needs blanket immunity.
But they didn't really know. They knew they weren't going
to get blanket immunity. They just wanted to buy some
time and maybe get a little immunity.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
That's absolutely right, and that's actually there's probably no better
case that illustrates the danger to democracy and frankly, in
my view, the failure of the courts to protect democracy
than that case.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Because here's the thing. After that argument, which you know,
everyone agreed, went off.
Speaker 4 (39:25):
The rails, you know, with the justices at this point,
if they came back and said, there's not total immunity, right,
you can't kill your political opponents.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
People would be like, oh, wow, well that this reword
did something reasonable, even if what they're doing is less
reasonable than we thought they should be doing at the beginning.
And and Molly, I know you comment a lot on
the you know, the trial in New York. I want
to be frankly somewhat critical of the judge there. I
can't imagine a criminal defendant being held in contend ten
times before a judge lets them in jail.
Speaker 4 (39:56):
They have shifted. What the behavior is that Donald Trump?
Donald Trump has ten times now been contemptuous of the court.
Ten times he has violated a court order knowingly and intentionally,
and yet we're still in this like, well, let's give
him another future.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
Let's give him another fut chance.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Trump benefits from law expectations, right, you know, at every
point they say, well, if we hold him accountable, then
da da da. You know, they've gamed it out, which
is not how any of us do criminal law, you know,
in this country. But I do think that Mershon in
his I think is mostly focused on, like, you know,
just trying to get this thing done. Now, that's not
a defense, but it's more of just that Trump had
(40:37):
so primed the pomp for special legal treatment that Mershon
has sort of found himself in this look.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
I'm not singling him.
Speaker 4 (40:46):
I would say the same thing about the trial judge
in Georgia who let a side issue sort of derail
the trial. I honestly would say even the same thing
about the trial judge in DC who has had her
case put on hold. But she also frankly, if you
look back, he's just a criminal defendant, Like he's a
candidate who is a criminal defendant.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
That's all. He is, nothing else than that.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Also, I would add that he decided to become a
candidate because he thought it would help him with these
criminal cases.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
And that's a really good point, which.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
I feel like is just been lost in the United
States of amnesia. I feel like there's a lot of
voter role purging stuff going on. That's really scary.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:26):
So I've talked before about voter mass voter challenges, which
is when private citizens tried to get large numbers of
people removed from the roles. When the government does it,
it is referred to as a purge. Right, So this
is what I. Purge is when the state or the
county decides to remove large numbers of people in violation
of the protections against them being disenfranchised. And what we
(41:50):
have right now is the Republican Party in some instances
their allies in many instances are suing states to force urges,
to force the state eight to remove voters, some of
whom are lawfully on the rolls, being from being able
to vote. And you know this is at the same
time or shortly after, many of those same states or
(42:12):
Republicans advocated those states leave ERIC, which is an interstate
compact to keep voter rolls clean. So I want everyone
to understand how what this two step meant. Step number one,
you have an agreement between states to share information to
make sure you don't have dead people and people who
have moved and other other people on your voter rolls
and that they're cleaned So step one is, if you're
(42:33):
a Republican, you get your state to leave that compact,
so now you have fewer ways to remove those people
who should be removed. You wait a few months, then
you file a lawsuit against those states saying, look at
all the people on your voter roles who shouldn't be
on the voter roles, we think you need to purge,
not just those voters, but other voters.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Right.
Speaker 4 (42:50):
So it so the first serves as an excuse as
a reason why you now need to engage in a purge.
And yes, we are seeing an unprecedented level of voter
purge litigation. Mike Firm and I are involved in fighting
it back in a number of states, as are other people.
I don't think this will succeed, but again, what it does,
even if they lose Molly, they get to then say
(43:11):
on Fox News and in their other you know, Donald
Trump on the stop, look at these states. Their voter
rules are purge and these Obama judges or these liberal
judges or the Democrats are fighting to have illegal voters. Right,
they win either legally or they win by creating you know,
disinformation and rallying, you know, lying to their base.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, and that's this trumpy thing of you fight this
case in court and out of court. That's what it's about.
Let's talk about what this election is going to look like.
One of the things that Republicans are furious about was
the expanded ballot access mail in voting. You know, it
was a once in a lifetime pandemic. It's not the
(43:54):
same setup. So certain things will go back to normal,
but will they be able to sort of take back
some of the more kind of like early voting. I mean,
how worried are you about that?
Speaker 2 (44:07):
I'm very worried.
Speaker 4 (44:08):
I'm worried about early voting, but I'm particularly worried about
vote by mail because that has become even more than
early voting. You know, pre pandemic, if you were looking
for the partisan split, it actually would have been early voting.
You know, a lot of Democrats did a lot of
emphasis on early voting souls to the polls among black voters,
for example. With the pandemic, you really saw a very
(44:30):
sharp partisan split around vote by mail. And yes, there'll
be less vote by mail in twenty twenty four, and
there wasn't twenty twenty, but it, you know, it is
still people actually started doing it and they found it
convene and they like it, and it does have a
it continues to have a strong partisan divide. So we
are continuing to see laws and litigation. Sometimes we're bringing
litigation over vote by mail. In fact, vote by mail
(44:51):
is the most litigated topic right now. In that one
hundred and forty two cases, there are more cases involving
vote by mail than any other. There's going to be
a case argued in the next few days in the
Wisconsin Supreme Court over whether dropboxes are legal. So my
firm has sued to restore dropboxes.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
To be legal.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
They were legal in twenty twenty, the conservative state courts
struck them down said no drop boxes in twenty twenty two.
We are now suing and I think will succeed in
there being dropboxes. But we're seeing this around a whole
range of issues involving vote by mail. Whether it is
the Republican Party is suing in Nevada to try to
throw out ballots that are casked in postmarked before election day,
(45:29):
but which come in say the day after election day. That'll,
by the way, to also disenfranchise our military servicemen and
women oversee, there's no question, Molly, that the fight over
vote by mail, the whole naked ballots, misdated ballots in
Pennsylvania that you remember from twenty twenty, All of those
things are coming roaring back into the forefront.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
What is there any good news? Give us a little
bit of good news.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
Yeah, so, look, the good news is that they're not succeeding.
Here is the way I think your audience should think
about politics. Joe Biden's going to win the popular vote
in a landslide. Just pause for a moment and think
about that. Okay, it is simply not true when people
say that we are an equally divided country. Hillary Clinton
won the popular vote by three million votes. Joe Biden
(46:14):
won the popular vote last time by seven million votes.
If you put a gun to my head, I said,
Joe Biden wins the popular vote next time by nine
and a half million votes. But he will win the
popular vote by millions of votes. So what that means
is that the only way Republicans can win at this point,
because they're running out of runway to know count on
the electoral College. The only way they can win is
about making it harder to vote, easier to cheat.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
And right now we are in.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
The harder to vote phase, and we will get to
the easier to cheat phase as we did after twenty twenty,
you know, sometime in October November. But the good news
is they didn't succeed in twenty twenty and so far
they're not succeeding in twenty twenty four. So it's a
serious threat. It's something we need to take seriously. But
if you ask me, do I think they will succeed,
the answer is no, I don't think they'll succeed. What
(46:57):
makes me pessimistic, Molly, is not the outcome of the
twenty twenty four election or these cases. What makes me
pessimistic is that we are now perpetually in a place
in which only one party can win or else our
democracy decip.
Speaker 1 (47:10):
No, I know, that is the thing. I mean, there
are many things that keep me up at night, but
that is like top three, I mean, the only thing
that makes me feel a little better. And again, the
vibes right now are bad. The Acela cord Or vibes
are bad. But the one thing that I do think
could happen is Nikki Hlly is still getting tons of votes.
(47:34):
She's getting you know, she's got one hundred and thirty
thousand votes in the Republican primary that happened on Tuesday,
Mike Brown, So whatever state that is Indiana, Indiana. So like,
clearly never Trump is still never Trump.
Speaker 4 (47:50):
Yeah, and he is historically unpopular. Again, I come back
to how I think about our elections, which is more
people want the Democrats. The question is whether or not
between gerrymandering and the House, between the natural situation with
the Senate being divided by states by the electoral college,
will that be enough for Republicans to keep control. I
(48:11):
think that they don't think that that's enough. I think
that the Republicans don't think that's enough. I think Donald
Trump doesn't think that's enough, and that they need to
suppress voters and they need to cheat on the outcome.
So our job, my job as a lawyer, and you know,
all of our jobs as citizens, it's to be vigilant
and not let that happen. You know, make sure you know.
The thing I always say to the average folks is that, Molly,
(48:34):
you have an enormous town square. You are in any
given week, millions of people literally millions of people hear you,
they see you, or they'd read you like in some
form of fashion. They are influenced by what you're saying.
But that doesn't mean that for Molly Jones right now,
who is sitting in Scarsdale, New York, that she doesn't
(48:54):
also have a town square. Her town square may be different,
maybe the local coffee shop, or her workplace, or her Facebook.
And I think if we all project the importance of
protecting democracy and frankly voting for President Biden and Democrats
like I think the election will actually take care of itself.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Mark, I hope you'll come back. We have to keep
following this. It's like one of the many places where
being vigilant is so important.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
Look, here's the thing, Molly, I am like the guy
who is like hanging outside your favorite coffee shop, just
waiting for you to say a lot. So you tell
me where you want to be dot dot and I
will be here. No moment, fucker requisi my moment of thuckery.
Molly John's fast. He has my favorite moment of fuckery.
(49:39):
As you know, and you and I've known each other
a long time now, As far back as twenty fifteen,
I would tell people, Nope, leave Baron out of it.
Kid's innocent. The kid is a kid. Let it be
a kid. They attacked my kids, but I said to people,
don't attack Baron Trump. Here's my moment of thuckery though.
That article in the Daily Mail last week about Baron
Trump's political com out how he's a brilliant athlete like
(50:03):
his father and he's so strong like his political genius.
That was obviously Donald Trump going to the Daily Mail
and planting a story about his own teenage son entering politics,
and no one seems to have picked up on that.
This wasn't some random source. This was like, you know,
Donald Trump pulling a classic I'm gonna call Maggie at
(50:25):
three in the morning. That was so obvious that Donald
Trump was trying to make bear in the next inheritor,
And the fuckery of it was Trump doing the John
Baron routine and calling a news outlet and planning a story.
The second part that was amazing about the fuckery was
that Milagnia cock blocket in the worst way last week.
(50:46):
He says, no, then they'll not be going to a convention.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
Yeah, he won't be Benjon.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Two Slovakia with me to work on Far is Better lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
Yeah, that wasn't amazing. He got the children jobs as delegates,
and then Milania is like nope, and honestly, like, you know,
I'm no fan of Mlania's because I think she's just
as trumpy as everybody else. But you know, good for her.
Protecting your kids is always good. My moment of fuckery is,
ma is this Steve Bennon thing that is.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
So going to jail?
Speaker 1 (51:22):
So he is he like, is just stuck, right, He's
basically going to jail. And so now he's going to
try to have them here at en banc, which is
not going to happen. And he's going to try to
go up to the Supreme Court, which maybe, I mean, look,
never bet against the brainworms of one Justice Alito and
(51:43):
Justice Thomas. But if they're willing to put the whole
organization in jeopardy to appeal to Steve benn and then,
you know, respect, but I think Steve Bennon, it's going
to jail.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
If they're willing to burn down a reputation that.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
Is allfctly good lifetime appointment.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
And they've already spread enough gas around the place and
stacked up enough kindling around the place exactly. But if
they think that bailing Steve Bannon out of a And basically,
here's the thing. Bannon did this for clicks and they
know it. This is not some deeper legal question of
Steve Bannon being a bold resistor to some sort of
(52:23):
certainly whatever. Just classic. But you know what, you only
get one shirt in prison.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
Yes, Steve Mannon going to jail for four months? Are
mentus four months? Who cares? Four months? Right before this election.
He is one of the primary sources of trumpy propaganda. Yeah,
and it's like the death of Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 2 (52:43):
It's a bigger deal than people think. Yeah, that's right,
it's not just trumpy propaganda. Yes, the war room, all
this stuff is a lot. It feeds the MAGA base.
But folks, you would be shocked how many mainstream reporters
take Steve Bannon's bullshit without a single grain of.
Speaker 1 (52:59):
Salt, right to everybody in the world.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
And by the way, yeah, don't think Steve Bannon like
he may mock the New York Times. He's on the
phone with reporters and the Times of Political the watch
of us every single day for our wors working then,
So don't anybody fool you about that.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
Yep, I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Okay, thank you, see you later.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds
in politics makes 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 Molly John Fast, and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds and artificial intelligence creation. Senator Katie Britt
has proposed a database of pregnant people. We're not going
to regulate guns, but we are going to regulate uteruses.
(00:22):
We have such a great show for you today the
Washington Post. Caroline Kitchener, who is a dogged reporter on
the abortion beat, stops by to talk to us about
what post row America looks like. Ben, we will talk
to Democracy Dockets Mark Elias about the GOP's effort to
stop counting votes before all of them are counted and
(00:44):
also after. It's amazing stuff. But first we have the
host of the Enemy's List, the one, the Only, Rick Wilson.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Rick Wilson, Hello, Molly John Fast. I'm joining you from
your fair city today as we record this.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And that's right, Rick is in New York, so let's
talk about But of course we're not in the same
room because where would we be, right.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Why would that even be possible?
Speaker 1 (01:09):
So last night Trump gave a speech bafflingly in New
Jersey Wildwood, New Jersey, which.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You know he's swinging state New Jersey.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
I was puzzling through this and I was told by
someone pretty smart that it is actually the Philly media
market Wildwood. Yes, so he's trying to get local Philly,
I think press.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
What struck me about this was it was out at
the beach and there were a lot of people, like
a lot, maybe not four hundred thousand like they said
or whatever crazy made up number they did, but a
lot of people. And I thought, oh, wow, this is
probably not so good for Joe Biden. But then those
people started leaving in droves. And by the time he
(01:55):
was done, I saw a photograph from a reporter at
USA Today or video that really looked just like there
were very few people laughed. So talk to me about that.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I think you have. As always, the illusion of Trump's
rallies has some been something that has trick reporters since
way back in twenty fifteen. And are there places in
the country where a lot of yeah, who's want to
get together and go see Donald Trump. And these people
are like the Juggaloos, only with red hats. They are
not coming to this thing because you know that they
(02:27):
want to have political Enlightenment. They're coming because there's no
monster truck rally. Though I know I'm sounding like a
really dickish elitist right now, but you may have met
me by now and know that I have, in fact,
in dickish elitis when it comes to certain things. But
the thing, Molly is I think the rally was so
bizarre of Trump once again, like yes, we did a
great thing with Arbertrinity Row and we're not done, and
(02:50):
going on and on and on about it, about doctor
Hannibal Lecter, the late great doctor Lector, I mean a
poll wick. I tried to test me once Leva with Saba.
Oh God, madness.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
It was really interesting to me because the door is open.
People are mad at Biden for any number of reasons.
I'm not and you're not. We both really do.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Like rational adult human beings.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah, well, we just don't think that president is going
to give us a Christmas list. But I do think
that the door is open to trump Ism. But the
thing is, Trump has never been an organized politician. So
like last night, he did all the things that if
you were a political strategist you would tell him not
(03:39):
to do. He bragged about overturning Row. He mused about
what a good person Hannibal Lecter was, the late great
you know, he just did a lot of stuff that
he sort of bragged about his unforced errors. And I
wondered if ultimately people just got bored and went home.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, you can't sit and watch I mean I think
one cannot, but maybe some people can't. You can't sit
and watch, you know, monkeys throw their feces all day long.
It's briefly amusing and then you run, you know, instead
of everybody lasts about it later. But the Trump Show
that goes on and on and on and three, and
it's like these Castro esque linked speeches that are just
(04:20):
this stream of consciousness rattling, you know, kooky, weird, whatever
it is. All of it just gets tired. After a while.
You just get you just get sort of worn down
by it. And I don't mean by people who just
people who are critics or antagonists and Trump, I mean everybody.
I mean people who like the guy eventually go Okay,
(04:41):
that's enough for one day. I can't do this.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
So that's really my question when we look at this
from like again, we're six months out from this election.
So I was chastising a pundit for saying that he
was sure Joe Biden was going to be a one
term president. And I said to him, why do you
say that? And he said because the person asked me,
and I only say the truth. And I was like,
but you don't know the truth. I said, you just
(05:05):
know your.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Opinion, right, that's an opinion.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And I said, based on polls. I said, so you
don't actually know the truth. You just have an opinion
based on poles. And I don't necessarily think that's true.
But I also know enough to know that six months
from the election, none of us really know what's going
on because most of the country is not paying attention.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
To use a phrase beaten to death over many generations,
opinions are like the human asshole. Everyone has one. But
the idea that none of Trump's infirmities, weirdnesses, that the meltdowns,
the craziness, the self led legal defense efforts are not
weighing on Americans are just wrong. There are a lot
(05:46):
of reporters who are incentivized, for a hundred different reasons,
to make it overse race, to make a competitive to drama, drama,
drama all day long, and God bless them. Okay, that's
their work, that's their livelihood. I get a totally and
a lot of them who are following along on this
stuff are very amused by Trump doing his trick again
(06:08):
on America, of Trump doing his act once again of
making the press incapable of covering him. And right now
they are, they're once again showing us they're incapable of
covering Donald Trump. They don't know what to do. They
they do not know what to do with this guy.
And I'm sorry. I feel bad for them professionally, and
I feel bad for the country because too many people
(06:31):
right now still believe that Donald Trump does not obey
any political laws of physics. One other things that I
want to make very clear, there's this idea out there
that Joe Biden is somehow completely helpless, snake fit and helpless.
He's running and his campaign is running a good campaign.
They are running a good campaign.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
With a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
And that was my next point. With essentially unlimited resources
right now, that will start to add up over time.
I know it's not happening as fast as people want,
or as deeply and immediately st people want, but it
will happen. It is underway right now, and Trump is
getting you know, he's getting out spent one hundred to
one in a lot of these early states right now.
(07:10):
And that's it takes time to add up. It takes
time to add in, and you know, the economy to
use bubb a little long. People keep underestimating that, but
the economy keeps like stubbornly refusing to go into a recession.
For Donald Trump's.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Right, and also when we look at this inevitability of
trump Ism, which I think is largely based on anxiety
from twenty sixteen. Trump has lost every election since twenty sixteen.
He lost twenty eighteen, he lost twenty twenty, he lost
twenty twenty two, he lost twenty twenty three, he lost
the Virginia State House. And even you see like these
(07:47):
Republicans are now even trying to not run along with him,
like you have swing state senatorial candidate. It's saying they're
not going to lie about the twenty twenty election because
swing voters don't molly.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
There is something that I think is really important to
keep in mind that many of our colleagues and friends
in the journalism world have I think I don't know
they've deliberately forgotten it, but it's less fun and as
dramatic the Republican Party. Although the Magam movement is utterly
dominant inside the Republican Party, the Republican Party is in
a state of profound, wretched, terrible collapse and crisis. The
(08:27):
normies are gone, the crazies are largely in charge. When
Mike Johnson is the bastion right now sanity in the
Republican Party. You don't operate in a sane universe. You know,
You've got a party tearing itself apart. And they have
lost seats again, as you point out, starting in twenty eighteen.
Nationally speaking, this is at the state House, State Senate,
(08:49):
gresh always you know, very they've lost around a thousand
elected offices since Trump got elected in twenty sixteen. Trump
single handedly did all the work the Republican Party did
between the year two thousand and the year twenty sixteen,
because the Republicans were making a lot of gains in
the states over those years. And now those things are
being swept away. And that counts things like local school
(09:12):
boards and all this stuff. And so the GOP is
at a profound crisis, and I know they want to
pretend that's not the case, and so oh were you
know we're going to win this or that. But right
now they are desperate and a lot of the ones
that McConnell has out there that he's filled in, these
billionaires and these rich guys, there's trapped because the Maugus
don't like them, and the only thing keeping them them
(09:32):
alive is that they're writing checks with many, many, many zeros.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
Say you're a GOP donor, So I mean, are you
wouned back? This is something you actually know about because
you know GOP donors. You talk to GOP donors all
the time.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
I mean I do.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
So we have Mitch McConnell trying desperately to raise money
because they are trying to pick up the Senate. You
have Mike Johnson really behind the eight ball, trying desperately
to raise money. You've Donald Trump trying desperately to raise money.
So what do you think their pitches to Republican donors
and do you think it's working well?
Speaker 2 (10:09):
If you bifurcate the pitch among Johnson versus McConnell, they're
very different appeals.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
So let's hear them.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Mitch mcconne was telling big Republican donors. I can still
save this. I can still be a firewall. We can
still prevent Trump if he's back in office from doing
the worst things.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Or do you think they're worried though, or do you
think they don't care about the worst things.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Here's the thing. Republican mega donors believe that Trump is
a disaster, an immediate threat to American democracy. He could
plunge the entire world into a billion years of nuclear
darkness and all that. But they will kill their own
children with a bloody, rusty butcher knife to get a
tax cut.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
There's nothing that appeals to them more than that. So
McConnell's trying to give them the best of both worlds.
I'm going to get you your tax cuts, and I
will prevent Trump from plunging the world into nuclear darkness. Right,
and is adopting a little bit more of a message
to donors. I actually talked to a donor who Johnson
pitched recently and failed. But pitched him, and sadly I
failed when I pitched him too. But the guy's just stubborn.
(11:10):
But Johnson's argument was, if you let the low Democrats
take over, they'll destroy your company. I'm not doing this
for Trumpian reasons. I'm a free market, small government Republican. No,
not true.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
What did the guys say when he said that?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
He just like, I have trouble taking you seriously about that.
And then the guy brought up to me, he goes, yeah,
a guy with the poor An app on his phone.
I don't think.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So so right, small government?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
You know, you saw the stories last week where trump
Is goes to the you know, the energy sector guys
and says, give me a billion dollars and I'll undo
every regulation. Joe Biden. Ever, that is some third world
cuptocracy right there.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
Yeah, so let's talk about that for a minute, because
I think that a lot of us were just horrified
because of the planet. But I always wonder or who
is that for? Like how many oil billionaires are there
who are affected directly by regulation like that? I mean,
is that ten people? Is that five people?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I won't say they're all billionaires, but in that energy
sector there are about sixty or seventy donors right in
a whole variety of corporate roles. It could be as
big as a chevron, but it could also be the
people who are in the infrastructure part of the oil
and gas industry. The pyramid is very broad of people,
the guys who build offshore rigs and helicopters to service
(12:36):
the option. There's a huge it's a gigantic industry.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
But do you think it works. Do you think they
do that for him?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Listen, a billion dollars is a lot of money. The
problem with any gift to Trump of that scale, Okay,
a problem with that, and they all know it, is
that Trump is going to demand they go through a
certain pathway where he gets a skim right, And none
of these guys are in the business.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Of being stupid right with money, So it's going to
be hard for that.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
So it's going to be difficult to do that. Now. Look,
will be oil and gas industry raised Trump one hundred
million dollars? Sure? I think they could do that without
breaking a sweat. Yeah, But I don't think they're going
to raise him a billion dollars, no matter how much
he asks for it.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
But it's interesting. He clearly is quite panicked.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Oh, no question, no doubt about it. He is nervous
that the world is fluid in a way that he's
not as quick and agile enough to keep up with
as he might have been in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
I think the guy we're seeing in court, the cranky,
you know, tired, exhausted, drawn, bitter, nasty, old man, I
think that's the real Trump. I think that he knows
that all of the posturing in the world about the
crooked judges and blah blah blah isn't true. He knows that.
I think he's starting a sense that there is a Again,
(13:53):
and I've said this one hundred times, I'll say it again.
I do not believe that Donald Trump is going to
have any of these trials meaningfully affect whether he goes
to prison before November. Would I like it, of course
it would. But I don't think he's happy. There's no
joy with Trump right now. And look he enjoyed twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
He also had to spend one hundred million dollars to
keep from going into trials, so like his legal fees.
I had an argument with someone about this because some
of his lawyers, Alena Habba is a disaster. But like
some of these lawyers are quite good. Now they have
a client who tells them what to do, and that's
(14:31):
not good.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Todd Blande is well regarded as a defense attorney. I
know Chris Kuyse, I was friends with Chris Kuyz years
and years ago.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
And Susan Necklace. I mean, these are mo stupid people now.
Luckily for US an American democracy.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
What lay life is left a terrible coin.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
They have a terrible client who won't let them actually
do law stuff, which is the good news. But I
do think, I absolutely think that we are seeing these lawyers.
He's gonna need another I mean, will he need another
one hundred million dollars to keep kicking the can before
the election? I think so.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
You know, I'm absolutely certain that the burn rate of
Trump's legal herald will be the thing in the end
of the day, because Joe Biden pulls this thing off.
We're going to look back and go, you know what,
if Donald Trump had spent seventy million dollars in in
the early States or in the Keys wedding States early,
he might might have beaten Biden. But right now it's
(15:31):
Joe Biden and Biden's allies that are on the air
in places like Arizona and Wisconsin, in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
And while Trump is still able to raise that small
dollar money. The hesitation level among most people is increasing.
They're dropping off the big dollar guys. They're taking a
lot of beating and seduction at phone calls and Susie
(15:53):
Wilds holding their hands to get them to write those
million dollar checks. It's not like twenty six even now,
it's not like twenty sixteen. I think there's just such
a unscored amount of legal peril that has hurt him
in ways that I certainly can tell you reporters have
not calculated it fully and adequately. I don't think most
(16:15):
people in the political environment right now have correctly.
Speaker 1 (16:20):
There's no president for like, your candidate is in criminal
trials at one hundred Center Street while the adult film
actress that he paid hush money to is testifying about
having almost non consensual sex with him.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Right I was writing something this morning when I was
on the plane coming up to New York House. I
was writing something about the bizarre nature of a world
where a former president is in court with the with
the adult film star who he threatened, abused, and continues
to abuse even after he's already been adjudicated as a
(16:58):
sexual assaulter with the aging care case and has been
forced to pay defamation for attacking her over and over again,
that we still live in a world where people don't
think about Trump as a form of political pornography enjoyed
by a few Americans, but that like tentacle porn or
something else, it's going to become an increasingly sort of
specialized taste. You can't look at this guy anymore. I go,
(17:20):
that's a regular guy. I can have a beer with
that guy. He's the normal He's the normal guy in
the room. I mean, Joe Biden may suffer from being
too much normal and too basic in the minds of
the press, not colorful enough or whatever, not young and
vibrant enough. People at the end of the day make
a lot of political decisions based on fear, and I
think Trump every day gives you more to fear and
(17:41):
more to load and more to be, more to be
disturbed about. And people who are disturbed by the behavior
of a Trump, I don't think there's any way where
they reverse their decision and go, you know what. I
know it's August now, and I've been thinking about vote
for Joe Biden, But suddenly Trump's going to be more
sane and cogent and not talking about imaginary serial killers
(18:02):
and not pretending he's a martyr on the same level
as Gandhi and Martin Luther King at Smith dell.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Rick Wilson, Thank you.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
You are welcome.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
Spring us 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.
(18:40):
Caroline Kitchener is a national reporter doggedly covering abortion at
the Washington Post. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Carolyne Kitchener.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
You have this beat, which is abortion. It is in
post row America. Just every piece is just an incredible
shit show. So I want you first to talk to
us about Florida. Let's talk about Florida first and then
we'll get to I mean, every abortion story in this country,
(19:12):
of which in post or America there are now millions
you cover basically, But let's talk about Florida first, because Florida,
it just happened last week, right.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Yeah, I would love to talk about Florida. I think
that people are not really yet realizing how big of
an impact Florida is going to have on abortion access
through the entire country.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
Yeah, so set this stage here.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
I went last week. I was there for like twenty
four hours. I was there on the day before the
band took effect.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
And this is a six week band enacted by DeSantis.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, he find it. So it's a ban on most
abortions and it's going down. Florida had a fifteen week
ban in place, and so this replaces that now. Yeah,
I mean so I was there on Tuesday, and it
was a wrenching day for these women because it was
the last day that they could provide abortions. But because
(20:09):
Florida also has a twenty four hour waiting period.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
So what does that mean? A twenty four hour waiting.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Period, So that means that they have to come in
for their first appointment and have an ultrasound and a
consultation twenty four hours before they get the actual abortion.
So the tuesday that I was there, you were having
first people turn away because they came for their consultation
and they were told that they were farther than six
weeks along, because most people are by the time that
(20:35):
they get in, and they were turned away and well,
it was one of the most emotional settings that I
have been in this reporting maybe ever, because I was
just sitting there. I mean I sat there as these women,
one after the other, was turned away, and I saw them,
you know, I saw them learning this, learning that they
were eight weeks or ten weeks and that they couldn't
(20:58):
get an abortion, and just one after the other, they're
just sobbing, just breaking down because they knew, they knew
what this meant. The advocate that the clinic director who
was there, was trying to assure them, you know, there
are resources, there's funds, you can go out of state.
But it's like I think for a lot of these women,
like they have kids at home, they have like a
(21:18):
very little money, So they were being told to go
to d C because that's just how far away Florida is,
and that you might as well have been telling them
that they could go to the moon.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You talk about that in the story that one of
these women, they say, well, you can go to DC
and will help you pay, and the woman is like,
I have two kids and no mine.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Yeah, that opposition just felt like insane for her, Like
what I go to d C right now, Like I
have my life, I have my kids, Like you know,
it was really like she was being told that she
had to have a third child.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
Right because she was basically being told she had to
have a third child that she can't afford. So explain
to me Florida. What I think about when I think
about Florida. That's interesting is this is a state with
real libertarian leanings, which for a long time was sort
of a place where you could safely get an abortion
in this house.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Yeah, a lot of people don't realize that. I mean,
Florida has been a sort of like abortion haven for
lack of a better term, for a really long time
because of this provision in the state constitution in Florida,
this very very strong privaca clause in the Florida Constitution
that was passed by voters in the nineteen eighties that
has long long been interpreted to protect abortion rights. So well,
(22:31):
when you had all these other even you know, long
before the DABS decision, when you had all of these
other states in the South passing all of these restrictions,
Florida often resisted those restrictions because of this privacy clause
in the state constitution. What changed recently is you had
the State Supreme Court, which was totally remade by Ron Desanthos.
(22:54):
You had them say that, actually, no, this privacy provision
does not protect abortion rights, and therefore this six week
man that the legislature has passed can take effect.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
So one of the things I'm hoping that we could
just talk about for one more minute is your DeSantis.
I think knew this was a bad this was a
bad law, or knew that it would be unpopular with
voters because he signed it into law, not in a
big ceremony, but actually in the middle of the ninety
(23:27):
Can you sort of talk about that, because my theory
of the case is that he did it because he
thought it would help his presidential run, because when he
signed it in it was still when he thought he
might have a shot.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Right. Well, it was very striking the contrast because I covered,
you know, one year before he signed six week Lack,
he signed in the fifteen week law. The contrast between
how he did each of those laws was like day
and night. Because the fifteen week law he stayed like
a massive event in the middle of the day. He
invited everybody. It was like a real dog and Plenty show.
(24:01):
And then like you said the other one he's signed
late at night. I think it was in his office.
It was not you know, there might have been like
one picture taken, but it was very quiet. And then
if I'm remembering right, I think it was like the
next day or the day after, he actually spoke at
Liberty University and he didn't talk about this, which, like
I thought, was like very striking because obviously that's like
the setting, right that is, like, if you're ever going
(24:22):
to talk about your like anti abortion achievement, that's going
to be the setting that you're going to do it in.
And so his like, his silence was very striking. And
I don't know, I mean, I think, like, you know,
that theory that you black positive like certainly sounds plausible.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
I mean, I think he was certainly getting an enormous
amount of pressure from the base and from you know,
anti abortion activists in the state that have really helped
him in a lot of ways to do this. He's
never spoken about why.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Yeah, it seems like it has political calculus written all
over it. So let's go to this Texas story you
wrote about. Power is such a central here and it
brings up the architect of SB eight, which was the
law that ultimately Republicans used to overturn Row. It's the
State Bill eight. I want you to do two seconds
(25:12):
on Jonathan Mitchell and then I want you to talk
about SBA.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Yeah. So Jonathan Mitchell is I would say, the most
well known anti abortion attorney in the country. He is
known for kind of coming up with new and extremely
aggressive and like I mean, I would say creative, like
very like out of the box ways to crack down
on abortion. He has a real reputation for that and
(25:37):
he's trying a lot of different things and he has
been for several.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Years, including like a fugitive slave law basically that had
bounties on women who went and got abortion. So if
you were a taxi driver who drove a woman to
get an abortion, you could theoretically be charged.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Well, so with Senate Bill A, the way that this
law got around Roe v. Wait, it's all about private
civil enforcement. So basically what that means is that any
person in Texas can you know, file a lawsuit against
anyone that they spec might have helped somebody to get
that abortion. And that was a really I mean, we've
(26:16):
now seen several states sort of refashion that, but at
the time that was really really novel and nobody had
had really done anything like that before. I that was
Jonathan Mitchell's idea.
Speaker 1 (26:26):
So crazy. Explained to us a little bit about what
it looks like with Texas now is woman wants to
get an abortion and the father of the fetus is
able to explain this to us.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
Yeah, anytime it's Texas, there's a lot of like weird
legal things. I just find that if they're reporting. But
there's something in Texas called the Rule two O two
petition that allows you to basically petition a court to
allow you to investigate before even a lawsuit is filed.
So when there's like if you say, you know, look,
I'm like suspecting that there's some illegal activity happening here,
(27:08):
and you know, I want to investigate, you can like
petition a court to allow you to do that. So
there's a big if no lawsuit filed. But basically what
has happened is this man, represented by Jonathan Mitchell, has
gone to a court and said, look, my former partner
got into abortion against my wishes and I want to
investigate that. Now, what is like particularly striking about this case?
(27:32):
I think is that it's very clear from the records
that she went out of state. She went to Colorado
where abortion is still legal, and there's nothing illegal about that.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Right, states rights. They pretend to care about states.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Right, there's nothing illegal about that. I mean, we have
seen anti abortion activists really go after this, like really
clearly wanting to stop this, but there's nothing illegal about that.
So that for a lot of people ring a lot
of alarm bells in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, explain to us a little bit about what is
there anything that Jonathan Mitchell can do or is it
just to sort of make people afraid?
Speaker 3 (28:07):
Well, I mean, I think the vast majority of certainly
of abortion rights activists see this as a chilling mechanism,
you know, something to do that people will hear about this,
you know, and then they will be afraid. But basically,
what he is arguing in this petition is that, you know,
even though like the woman herself could not be charged
(28:30):
or could not be you know, punished in any way,
the people who like aided her in getting out of
state could be. Now, abortion rights attorneys vehemently disagree with
that statement. They said, say that nobody involved could be charged,
but that's what he's arguing.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
So crazy. So we have this Florida six week ban now,
and then Arizona has a pretty interesting situation. Can you
talk about.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
That Arizona's law has now been repealed, but that doesn't
necessarily mean that it's not going to take effect. And
it's very confusing what's happening in this area. But the
leadest that I heard is that it cannot. The earliest
that it could take effect is mid to end of June.
I mean, I think because Arizona has a democratic attorney general, like,
(29:14):
there's a lot in a democratic governor, there's a lot
that you know, obviously, those are extremely powerful leadership positions,
and they're sort of trying to do whatever they can
to stop this from taking effects. But we're sort of
in uncharted toiratory and nobody really knows what's going to happen.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Okay, so we don't know, because I thought for sure
that the eighteen sixty law had to go into effect
at some point. Even though they were able to ultimately overturn.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
It, they're still using conditional language like the governor and
the attorney general. I mean, my impression is that they're
still trying to figure out a way to stop this
from happening, because initially they had said the earliest was
June eighth, and now they're saying the leadst that I
that I saw on I do think that this is
a this is kind of evolving. But then the latest
that I saw was meddle to to end of June,
(30:01):
So I think we don't know for sure yet.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
But right now the landscape is there's likely to be
a sixteen week ban, maybe worse, but something to that
effect in Arizona, which is also another state with real
libertarian leanings.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
Talk to me about that there is a fifteen week ban.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
That's the Doug Doocey right.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
For over a year like that has been alot on
the land in Arizona. But you know, they like Florida,
are almost certainly going to have abortion on the ballot
in November. You know a lot of this is going
to come down to the election.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
You are seeing these women and you're really seeing those firsthand.
I mean, so I read this like amazing report from
Lyft to Louisiana which talked about how Louisiana they're seeing
doctors unable or unwilling to treat pregnant women in the
first trimester because of the anxiety about miscarriage is an abortion?
(30:55):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 3 (30:57):
I mean, it's certainly happening. I thought that maybe by
now things like that would have sort of settled out
and you know, people would realize that, Like, you know,
cases are cases like this, as far as we know,
are not being filed against doctors. We have not seen
that against any sort of like medical emergency or anything
like that. But it really it hasn't. Like I mean,
people in emergency situations are still being turned away. It
(31:20):
seems like every day, and you know, I think that
just speaks to doctors have a lot to lose. Obviously,
they're you know, in most of these places, they're facing
jail time, they could lose their licenses, and that's a
lot paraska of a doctor, right And there are certainly
some that are willing to kind of put it on
the line like that, but many more I think that aren't.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
So there's an Mdollar case right now at the Supreme Court.
MDALA is this emergency medicine federal statute which says you
can't leave people to die. Very American that we had
to pass that the Biden administration is doing I hope,
because you have these women who are being menevacked out
of the state because doctors are refusing to formal life
(32:00):
saving abortions on them. Are you seeing that? I feel
like you're on the ground, so you're and you're traveling
around and you're talking to people. Are you seeing that
other places? And also what do you think the downstream
effect of that is.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
I'm definitely hearing about this in multiple different states, and
I would wager to guess that it's happening everywhere because
the laws are very similar and the fear is the same.
Something that hasn't been talked about as much is the
role that the hospitals have to play. I mean, doctors
that I'm talking to are extremely grateful when their hospitals
give them guidance about how to interpret these laws, because
(32:35):
what happens sometimes is that like some of these common
difficult conditions that women come in with, pregnancy complications that
women come in with, sometimes hospitals will say that one
is okay. You know, we have looked at the law
and we have sided together that that one is okay,
And that is so important for the doctor to hear.
But you have a lot more hospitals in my know
(32:56):
that I found in my reporting that they aren't say anything,
they're not giving any kind of guidance, So it's like
totally just the doctor out there on their own, you know,
encountering these emergency situations and having to figure out what
to do.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
You don't feel like in these states with the bands,
the life of the mother protection is being focused on
or being respected. I mean, that's what it sounds like
from what you're hearing anecdotally.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
They all phrase these exceptions in different ways. I would say,
I think the most common one that we hear is
medical emergency, like there is a there is an exception
for medical emergency. Now, the problem is that that's extremely vague,
Like any any doctor that you talk to will say like,
I don't know what medical emergency means, like, and I
don't want to risk, you know, acting in a situation
(33:43):
that then other people say, is not a medical emergency.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Right.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
A lot of these conditions that they're really reckoning with
are you know, and not all of them. Some of
them are like, you know, there is an urgent situation
and still somebody is being turned away. But a lot
of these situations are like you know, well, if she's like,
if the pregnancy is allowed to continue, she's at a
high risk for sepsis, she's at a high risk for hemorrhaging,
but it's not like immediately she could die now. And
(34:09):
so those are the sort of situations. It's sort of
like gray area situations that doctors are reckoning with. And
sometimes I'll step in and say, you know, you can
treat them in that situation, but yeah, more often they don't.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Yeah, Wow, thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope
you'll come back.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Thank you for having me on. I really love talking
to you.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Mark Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket. Welcome back
to Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Mark, thanks for having me again.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
I'm such a fan of yours. But also, more importantly,
like I feel like this story because there's so much
other news. We're sort of sleepwalking through it and there's
so much I mean, I was listening to Laura Trump
on television the other day basically telling Republicans to practice
voter intimidation. So what is happening?
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Yeah, I'm outside. I do you started there?
Speaker 4 (35:03):
Because I don't want people to walk away thinking I
don't think you should follow the Trump trials because obviously
it's important that you follow the Trump trials, but there
is this crowding out of what is happening to democracy
that I fear people are going to wake up in
September October and be shocked at what is befollowing them.
The Republican Party is openly saying it wants to engage
(35:26):
in voter suppression and election subversion. You know, you have
the Laura Trump, the vice share of the Republican Party,
you know, using language that you know is at best
coded around violence. You also have her saying that they
believe they can get the R and C can get
partisan people touching ballots, remember that, and that kind of means.
And then you have I think her saying what I
(35:47):
think you were referring to, which is that they want
to stop you know, Donald Trump tweeted in twenty twenty
stop the count She basically said, they're going to litigate
to try to prevent ballots from being counted after election day.
And you know at the same time that by the way,
Republicans prevent states from counting ballots before collection day. They're
being pretty out in the open about what they are
(36:08):
planning to do. Donald Trump, you know, gave an interview
that said he won't necessarily abide by the outcome of
the election, and then Tim Scott, who is supposed to
be one of the moderates in the Senate, refuses say
he would. So I think we need to be careful
at not letting ourselves be distracted from all of the
really bad authoritarian commentary and the voter suppression activity that
is going on while the trials take place.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
What's happening behind the scenes in the courts, Because you
are in these courts trying to preserve our right to democracy,
So what's happening there?
Speaker 4 (36:41):
Yeah, So, as we sit here today, there are one
hundred and forty two separate lawsuits in various states of
the courts in thirty seven states. The majority of them,
about eighty of them, are pro democracy lawsuits, but it's
important to understaid the other sixty some odd are actually
brought by votes pressers and election deniers. These are lawsuits
(37:02):
to make it harder of an easier cheat in the
twenty twenty four election. And the macro trend is that
we are seeing more and more of those lawsuits being
filed every day. The trend is towards the election deniers,
bringing more and more litigation, including the Republican National Committee
that is doing so. So that is kind of the
very macro trend. I would say underneath that, there are
(37:24):
a couple of notable things. The first is the Republicans
and their allies have brought three separate lawsuits around the country,
one in Arizona, one in Nevada, one in Minnesota for
the right to harass election officials. I want you to
take that yet, like you wake up one day and
you say, you know what law needs a challenge.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
There's a law that says I cannot harass or intimidate
an election official. Let's challenge that law.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (37:45):
Wow, right, So what does that tell you, Molly about
what we're going to see this fall?
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Right?
Speaker 4 (37:50):
I mean, if they're willing to spend money on lawyers
to litigate to be able to harass election officials, one
can assume that harassing election officials is on their dance card.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
When we get to a.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
Too, do you think the courts will protect these people?
Speaker 4 (38:03):
I mean no, I doubt they've already lost the case Nevada.
I believe they're going to lose the cases in Arizona
and Minnesota. But I also don't think that they're done
bringing that litigation elsewhere.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
Okay, so this litigation is like kind of just trying
to move the goalposts, but not necessarily going to succeed.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
Yeah. I think it's trying to do two things.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
And I think as we get closer to the election,
and hopefully this won't be the last time I talked
to you, I think we should keep this in mind
that there are goals that these that this litigation has.
One is to win the lawsuit. The second is to
shift the Overton window of what is.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Except that's always these great right So.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Even if they lose these lawsuits, they have sort of
put into play the idea that there may be there's
some first amount of right to harass election. I like
you and I will know they lost the case, but
like the gestalt that is the national sense of what's
going on in elections, they will have shifted what is
considered normal.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
I mean, it's like the trumpmmunity, right, he needs blanket immunity.
But they didn't really know. They knew they weren't going
to get blanket immunity. They just wanted to buy some
time and maybe get a little immunity.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
That's absolutely right, and that's actually there's probably no better
case that illustrates the danger to democracy and frankly, in
my view, the failure of the courts to protect democracy
than that case.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
Because here's the thing. After that argument, which you know,
everyone agreed, went off.
Speaker 4 (39:25):
The rails, you know, with the justices at this point,
if they came back and said, there's not total immunity, right,
you can't kill your political opponents.
Speaker 2 (39:35):
People would be like, oh, wow, well that this reword
did something reasonable, even if what they're doing is less
reasonable than we thought they should be doing at the beginning.
And and Molly, I know you comment a lot on
the you know, the trial in New York. I want
to be frankly somewhat critical of the judge there. I
can't imagine a criminal defendant being held in contend ten
times before a judge lets them in jail.
Speaker 4 (39:56):
They have shifted. What the behavior is that Donald Trump?
Donald Trump has ten times now been contemptuous of the court.
Ten times he has violated a court order knowingly and intentionally,
and yet we're still in this like, well, let's give
him another future.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
Let's give him another fut chance.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Trump benefits from law expectations, right, you know, at every
point they say, well, if we hold him accountable, then
da da da. You know, they've gamed it out, which
is not how any of us do criminal law, you know,
in this country. But I do think that Mershon in
his I think is mostly focused on, like, you know,
just trying to get this thing done. Now, that's not
a defense, but it's more of just that Trump had
(40:37):
so primed the pomp for special legal treatment that Mershon
has sort of found himself in this look.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
I'm not singling him.
Speaker 4 (40:46):
I would say the same thing about the trial judge
in Georgia who let a side issue sort of derail
the trial. I honestly would say even the same thing
about the trial judge in DC who has had her
case put on hold. But she also frankly, if you
look back, he's just a criminal defendant, Like he's a
candidate who is a criminal defendant.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
That's all. He is, nothing else than that.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Also, I would add that he decided to become a
candidate because he thought it would help him with these
criminal cases.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
And that's a really good point, which.
Speaker 1 (41:17):
I feel like is just been lost in the United
States of amnesia. I feel like there's a lot of
voter role purging stuff going on. That's really scary.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:26):
So I've talked before about voter mass voter challenges, which
is when private citizens tried to get large numbers of
people removed from the roles. When the government does it,
it is referred to as a purge. Right, So this
is what I. Purge is when the state or the
county decides to remove large numbers of people in violation
of the protections against them being disenfranchised. And what we
(41:50):
have right now is the Republican Party in some instances
their allies in many instances are suing states to force urges,
to force the state eight to remove voters, some of
whom are lawfully on the rolls, being from being able
to vote. And you know this is at the same
time or shortly after, many of those same states or
(42:12):
Republicans advocated those states leave ERIC, which is an interstate
compact to keep voter rolls clean. So I want everyone
to understand how what this two step meant. Step number one,
you have an agreement between states to share information to
make sure you don't have dead people and people who
have moved and other other people on your voter rolls
and that they're cleaned So step one is, if you're
(42:33):
a Republican, you get your state to leave that compact,
so now you have fewer ways to remove those people
who should be removed. You wait a few months, then
you file a lawsuit against those states saying, look at
all the people on your voter roles who shouldn't be
on the voter roles, we think you need to purge,
not just those voters, but other voters.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Right.
Speaker 4 (42:50):
So it so the first serves as an excuse as
a reason why you now need to engage in a purge.
And yes, we are seeing an unprecedented level of voter
purge litigation. Mike Firm and I are involved in fighting
it back in a number of states, as are other people.
I don't think this will succeed, but again, what it does,
even if they lose Molly, they get to then say
(43:11):
on Fox News and in their other you know, Donald
Trump on the stop, look at these states. Their voter
rules are purge and these Obama judges or these liberal
judges or the Democrats are fighting to have illegal voters. Right,
they win either legally or they win by creating you know,
disinformation and rallying, you know, lying to their base.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, and that's this trumpy thing of you fight this
case in court and out of court. That's what it's about.
Let's talk about what this election is going to look like.
One of the things that Republicans are furious about was
the expanded ballot access mail in voting. You know, it
was a once in a lifetime pandemic. It's not the
(43:54):
same setup. So certain things will go back to normal,
but will they be able to sort of take back
some of the more kind of like early voting. I mean,
how worried are you about that?
Speaker 2 (44:07):
I'm very worried.
Speaker 4 (44:08):
I'm worried about early voting, but I'm particularly worried about
vote by mail because that has become even more than
early voting. You know, pre pandemic, if you were looking
for the partisan split, it actually would have been early voting.
You know, a lot of Democrats did a lot of
emphasis on early voting souls to the polls among black voters,
for example. With the pandemic, you really saw a very
(44:30):
sharp partisan split around vote by mail. And yes, there'll
be less vote by mail in twenty twenty four, and
there wasn't twenty twenty, but it, you know, it is
still people actually started doing it and they found it
convene and they like it, and it does have a
it continues to have a strong partisan divide. So we
are continuing to see laws and litigation. Sometimes we're bringing
litigation over vote by mail. In fact, vote by mail
(44:51):
is the most litigated topic right now. In that one
hundred and forty two cases, there are more cases involving
vote by mail than any other. There's going to be
a case argued in the next few days in the
Wisconsin Supreme Court over whether dropboxes are legal. So my
firm has sued to restore dropboxes.
Speaker 2 (45:08):
To be legal.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
They were legal in twenty twenty, the conservative state courts
struck them down said no drop boxes in twenty twenty two.
We are now suing and I think will succeed in
there being dropboxes. But we're seeing this around a whole
range of issues involving vote by mail. Whether it is
the Republican Party is suing in Nevada to try to
throw out ballots that are casked in postmarked before election day,
(45:29):
but which come in say the day after election day. That'll,
by the way, to also disenfranchise our military servicemen and
women oversee, there's no question, Molly, that the fight over
vote by mail, the whole naked ballots, misdated ballots in
Pennsylvania that you remember from twenty twenty, All of those
things are coming roaring back into the forefront.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
What is there any good news? Give us a little
bit of good news.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
Yeah, so, look, the good news is that they're not succeeding.
Here is the way I think your audience should think
about politics. Joe Biden's going to win the popular vote
in a landslide. Just pause for a moment and think
about that. Okay, it is simply not true when people
say that we are an equally divided country. Hillary Clinton
won the popular vote by three million votes. Joe Biden
(46:14):
won the popular vote last time by seven million votes.
If you put a gun to my head, I said,
Joe Biden wins the popular vote next time by nine
and a half million votes. But he will win the
popular vote by millions of votes. So what that means
is that the only way Republicans can win at this point,
because they're running out of runway to know count on
the electoral College. The only way they can win is
about making it harder to vote, easier to cheat.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
And right now we are in.
Speaker 4 (46:35):
The harder to vote phase, and we will get to
the easier to cheat phase as we did after twenty twenty,
you know, sometime in October November. But the good news
is they didn't succeed in twenty twenty and so far
they're not succeeding in twenty twenty four. So it's a
serious threat. It's something we need to take seriously. But
if you ask me, do I think they will succeed,
the answer is no, I don't think they'll succeed. What
(46:57):
makes me pessimistic, Molly, is not the outcome of the
twenty twenty four election or these cases. What makes me
pessimistic is that we are now perpetually in a place
in which only one party can win or else our
democracy decip.
Speaker 1 (47:10):
No, I know, that is the thing. I mean, there
are many things that keep me up at night, but
that is like top three, I mean, the only thing
that makes me feel a little better. And again, the
vibes right now are bad. The Acela cord Or vibes
are bad. But the one thing that I do think
could happen is Nikki Hlly is still getting tons of votes.
(47:34):
She's getting you know, she's got one hundred and thirty
thousand votes in the Republican primary that happened on Tuesday,
Mike Brown, So whatever state that is Indiana, Indiana. So like,
clearly never Trump is still never Trump.
Speaker 4 (47:50):
Yeah, and he is historically unpopular. Again, I come back
to how I think about our elections, which is more
people want the Democrats. The question is whether or not
between gerrymandering and the House, between the natural situation with
the Senate being divided by states by the electoral college,
will that be enough for Republicans to keep control. I
(48:11):
think that they don't think that that's enough. I think
that the Republicans don't think that's enough. I think Donald
Trump doesn't think that's enough, and that they need to
suppress voters and they need to cheat on the outcome.
So our job, my job as a lawyer, and you know,
all of our jobs as citizens, it's to be vigilant
and not let that happen. You know, make sure you know.
The thing I always say to the average folks is that, Molly,
(48:34):
you have an enormous town square. You are in any
given week, millions of people literally millions of people hear you,
they see you, or they'd read you like in some
form of fashion. They are influenced by what you're saying.
But that doesn't mean that for Molly Jones right now,
who is sitting in Scarsdale, New York, that she doesn't
(48:54):
also have a town square. Her town square may be different,
maybe the local coffee shop, or her workplace, or her Facebook.
And I think if we all project the importance of
protecting democracy and frankly voting for President Biden and Democrats
like I think the election will actually take care of itself.
Speaker 1 (49:11):
Mark, I hope you'll come back. We have to keep
following this. It's like one of the many places where
being vigilant is so important.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
Look, here's the thing, Molly, I am like the guy
who is like hanging outside your favorite coffee shop, just
waiting for you to say a lot. So you tell
me where you want to be dot dot and I
will be here. No moment, fucker requisi my moment of thuckery.
Molly John's fast. He has my favorite moment of fuckery.
(49:39):
As you know, and you and I've known each other
a long time now, As far back as twenty fifteen,
I would tell people, Nope, leave Baron out of it.
Kid's innocent. The kid is a kid. Let it be
a kid. They attacked my kids, but I said to people,
don't attack Baron Trump. Here's my moment of thuckery though.
That article in the Daily Mail last week about Baron
Trump's political com out how he's a brilliant athlete like
(50:03):
his father and he's so strong like his political genius.
That was obviously Donald Trump going to the Daily Mail
and planting a story about his own teenage son entering politics,
and no one seems to have picked up on that.
This wasn't some random source. This was like, you know,
Donald Trump pulling a classic I'm gonna call Maggie at
(50:25):
three in the morning. That was so obvious that Donald
Trump was trying to make bear in the next inheritor,
And the fuckery of it was Trump doing the John
Baron routine and calling a news outlet and planning a story.
The second part that was amazing about the fuckery was
that Milagnia cock blocket in the worst way last week.
(50:46):
He says, no, then they'll not be going to a convention.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
Yeah, he won't be Benjon.
Speaker 2 (50:52):
Two Slovakia with me to work on Far is Better lifestyle.
Speaker 1 (50:56):
Yeah, that wasn't amazing. He got the children jobs as delegates,
and then Milania is like nope, and honestly, like, you know,
I'm no fan of Mlania's because I think she's just
as trumpy as everybody else. But you know, good for her.
Protecting your kids is always good. My moment of fuckery is,
ma is this Steve Bennon thing that is.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
So going to jail?
Speaker 1 (51:22):
So he is he like, is just stuck, right, He's
basically going to jail. And so now he's going to
try to have them here at en banc, which is
not going to happen. And he's going to try to
go up to the Supreme Court, which maybe, I mean, look,
never bet against the brainworms of one Justice Alito and
(51:43):
Justice Thomas. But if they're willing to put the whole
organization in jeopardy to appeal to Steve benn and then,
you know, respect, but I think Steve Bennon, it's going
to jail.
Speaker 2 (51:56):
If they're willing to burn down a reputation that.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
Is allfctly good lifetime appointment.
Speaker 2 (52:02):
And they've already spread enough gas around the place and
stacked up enough kindling around the place exactly. But if
they think that bailing Steve Bannon out of a And basically,
here's the thing. Bannon did this for clicks and they
know it. This is not some deeper legal question of
Steve Bannon being a bold resistor to some sort of
(52:23):
certainly whatever. Just classic. But you know what, you only
get one shirt in prison.
Speaker 1 (52:28):
Yes, Steve Mannon going to jail for four months? Are
mentus four months? Who cares? Four months? Right before this election.
He is one of the primary sources of trumpy propaganda. Yeah,
and it's like the death of Rush Limbaugh.
Speaker 2 (52:43):
It's a bigger deal than people think. Yeah, that's right,
it's not just trumpy propaganda. Yes, the war room, all
this stuff is a lot. It feeds the MAGA base.
But folks, you would be shocked how many mainstream reporters
take Steve Bannon's bullshit without a single grain of.
Speaker 1 (52:59):
Salt, right to everybody in the world.
Speaker 2 (53:01):
And by the way, yeah, don't think Steve Bannon like
he may mock the New York Times. He's on the
phone with reporters and the Times of Political the watch
of us every single day for our wors working then,
So don't anybody fool you about that.
Speaker 1 (53:15):
Yep, I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Okay, thank you, see you later.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds
in politics makes 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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