December 23, 2024 • 46 mins
The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson examines Donald Trump facing his own version of Donald Trump and what that means. Enemies: A History of the FBI author Tim Weiner details what a weaponized FBI could look like.
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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 Trump says the US should retake
the Panama Canal if they do not lower.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
The transit fees.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
It's nice to see him trying to build consensus. We
have such a great show for you today, the Lincoln Projects.
Rick Wilson joins us to discuss Donald Trump getting his
own Donald Trump and.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Whatever that means.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Then we'll talk to author Tim Wiener about what a
weaponized FBI could look like.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
But first the news Somali.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
This is one of those nightmare things that I don't
think every American thinks about. But I read a tool
Gawandhi's book on the World Health Organization years ago, the
Checklist Manifesto, and realized how important it is. They really
lower death, they really help us have a better world.
And yean day one, their Trump administration is going to
(00:58):
pull out of.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Who yeah, the World Health Organization. Look, they're going to
do all this stuff again. And by the way, the
last Trump administration and I don't think Trump could have
I think perhaps some of the things he could have
done would have lessened the death toll. But I'm not
sure that he would that any president would have been
able to avoid the pandemic. That said, you would think
(01:21):
that having just presidented through a pandemic, one might want
to not have another one and be more careful about
such things.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
But RFK Junior and.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
The rest of the crew have decided that no, thank you.
Donald Trump's transition team is pushing to pull the United
States out of the World Health Organization on the first
day of the new administration, according to experts who warn
of the catastrophic impact it will have on global health.
Members of the Trump team told experts of their intention
(01:53):
to announce a withdrawal. I mean, by the way, this
is like Trump World, right, They're going to get out.
They're going to leave the World Health Organization. It will
damage the world's ability to respond to public health crisis
is such as the coronavirus pandemic. America is going to
leave a huge vacuum in the global health financing and leadership.
I see no one that is going to come in
(02:15):
and fill the breach. As anyone surprised by this, I
am not surprised by this, but you're going to see
a lot of this Trump World trying to get out
of things.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
That are small.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
By the way, a lot of these things are like
a rounding error. It's not millions and zillions of dollars,
but it is, for whatever reason, something that Trump wants
to cut. And we're going to see more of that,
where they cut things that are absolutely not at all
not worth doing, but and the returns on it are
going to be. It's just very stupid. So I don't
(02:47):
think anyone could be surprised by this.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yeah, Trump, the Heritage Foundation, whoever it may be. So
In other not fun news, it seems people are getting
a little more urgency about getting rid of money in
our politics and super PACs because they're realizing with the
richest men on earth now threatening the primary everyone via
tweet all the time, that things are not good.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
I think this is a case of something that happened
too little, too late, right, I mean, the idea that
now is the moment for super path to be banned,
when in fact we have a whole crew of very
rich people trying to influence elections. And this has been
going on for some time, right, Like the right is
(03:29):
obsessed with George Soros and the Koch Brothers have been
doing this forever. But Elon is much more blatant, He's
much more right.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Even.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
I think Elon seems much more passionate in a way
that even the Koch brothers perhaps were able to hide
their zeal a little better.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
One could argue Elon's expressing his passion with action, whereas
the Koch brothers they were just spending enough to keep
their taxt.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, but they did a lot of bad stuff, like
right to work stuff.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
But what I would say is, I do think all
of these ambitions are worthy. But the problem with with
any legislation like this is the Supreme Court is completely
in the tank for rich people. So good luck trying
to create legislation that would in any possible way try
(04:26):
to tamp down on the oligarchy. Because remember, you have
a six to three court, and six of those guys
are real, you know, I mean two of them are
like on and off Carlan Crowe's private jet every day.
I mean, there was reporting in the New York Times
this weekend. Justice Thomas didn't report is even more private
(04:48):
jet trips than he previously reported, and.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Well he was mad that they did get reported.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Democrats did an ethics investigation and found that he lied
about even getting even more stuff than he got from
Harlan Crow. So it's hard for me to imagine the
Supreme Court is going to do anything to stop billionaires
from just doing whatever they want.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Yeh, well, I find that disturbing. I remember that's in
the first Trump administration. Jared and I Vanka were disturbed
by a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yes, the moral compass of Trump World, which says a
lot about all parties.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Yeah, so Molly I have news though, she'll be being
disturbed from a distance this time in the next administration.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
For Avanka Trump's entire life, she worked for her father,
She was on his television show, she was very tall.
But now she said she's absolutely not coming back. Ivanka
Trump is done with politics.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Quote. I love my father very much, which is good.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
I guess this time around, I choose to prioritize my
young children and the private life we are creating as
a family. Iami, I do not plan to be involved
in politics, she said in a twenty twenty two social
media post after her father announced his third run for presidency. Again, okay,
(06:12):
maybe maybe not. I mean, I don't take anything these
people say.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
The bank.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
We'll see yeah, so may I have to say this
is the one good thing I've seen. I recently watched
a video on how bad sports gambling addiction is. I
am continually disturbed when I see how much some of
my younger employees who don't work on this podcast are
(06:37):
addicted to it. And Congress is weighing actually getting involved
because it's that ugly.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
I wait with baited breath for Congress to legislate, and
they're very good at legislating things where I don't want
to sound cynical here, okay, and someone who's sober since
I was nineteen, I think of the many ways in
which Congress could help with the treatment of addiction when
it comes to drugs and alcohol, or even when it
(07:04):
comes to the Internet. I mean, at every point Congress
has had opportunities to legislate technology, and every point Congress
has rejected those opportunities. The reason why sports betting and
also politics betting and betting betting is exploding right now
is because they've deregulated a lot of the betting markets, right. So,
(07:24):
this is what happens when you deregulate things, they get
out of control. You regulate them to put them in control.
I mean, this is not rocket science here, so hard
for me to imagine. First of all, it will be
a Republican Senate, a Republican has and Donald Trump as president.
So even if for some reason, and again, even if
for some reason some Republican decides that they're going to
(07:48):
make this work and they're going to pass the legislation,
the minute Donald Trump sits on an airplane next to
someone who likes gambling, or who owns gambling, or who
benefits from gambling in any way, they're going to say
to him, don't do that. That's a stupid thing, and
he's going to go okay. So like this is going
to be the problem for the next four years. Is
(08:09):
even if somehow you could get the legislation together, you
have Donald Trump, and if Donald Trump doesn't object to it,
you have Mini Trump. Elon, who's going to say, well,
you know, sports betting, I make a lot of money
off sports betting. It's based, it's based and red pilled,
and I want people to be able to do it
and lose all their money because it's good for whatever.
(08:30):
I mean, these people are so conflicted that, you know,
Donald Trump makes money on a lot of things. Elon
Musk makes money on gazillion things.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
And these are the people.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Running our country now, so you know which unelected oligarch
or the elected oligark. They're never going to be able
to agree on anything. And it's too bad because the
truth is, you know, gambling just like fent and all,
just like alcohol, just like drugs, just like any of
so many of these other things.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Really, you know, it's my one last consolation prize before
we head.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Off into it.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
You've ruined Live.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
The holiday break. Last week on this very podcast, Rick
Wilson laid out the big struggle between Trump World versus
d Sanctimonius Fron de Santis World about who will be
Marco Rubio's successor as an appointment temporarily in the Senate
before Ron de Sanctimonius tries to jump into that seat.
And we saw some big moves on this yesterday. What'd
(09:29):
you see?
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So the big moves are that Lara Trump. You will
remember her as being married to Eric. You know, someone
has to.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Be It's very easy to forget Eric.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Lara Trump has said she will not run for the
seat of Marco Rubio. Now here's what is happening. Marco
Rubio going to this Cannabi Secretary of State very likely.
Ron DeSantis probably wants that Senate seat. There was a
(10:01):
theory that if Pete Hegsets got knocked out of DoD
that Sanctimonius would.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Be the pick.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Now I am not convinced that Sanctimonius will be the pick,
nor am I convinced that heg Sets will get DoD,
though it's certainly possible either way. The setup was that
you do something for me and I do something for you.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
But looks like that may not happen.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Though again, with everything in Trump world, none of this
could happen or all of this could happen, and you
really do look foolish when you try to read the
tea leaves. Remember this is chaos theory. Everyone is just
doing chaotic things at all times.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
And on that note, we have a great show today,
but from here on out we will be on vacation
with some really really great interviews, and we both want
to wish you some happy holidays.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
We'll be back on January fourth. Rick well And is
the founder of the Lincoln Project and the host of
the Enemy's List. Welcome back to our pre vacation episode
of Fast Politics with Brick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
Have a holly jolly Christmas, Molly junk fast.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
That's right, that radio voice we know and love.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
The government did not get shut down, but perhaps this
is an indication of things to come and what the
Elon Musk presidency is going to look like.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Discuss it didn't get shut down, but only because Democrats
saved Mike Johnson's weird skinny ass again again. I think
what we have here is a preview of an endless
stream of crises, one after another after another after another,
that we are going to watch unfold in the first
(11:53):
opening acts of the Trump administration. And then it's going
to get really bad.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
So I'm not the person who cooked up this is
a Josh Marshall. But Josh Marshall had a really good point,
which is that Donald Trump now has a Trump.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
That's a great construction, it really is. That's a great
way of thinking about it, is that Trump now has
a Trump. He has somebody who is a chaotic disruptor,
who does not care about any other social or political
or personal pressure or persuasion, as they say, and so
he will end up doing the maximum amount of chaotic
(12:31):
damage he can all the time. Because that's fun for him.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
My favorite part about Trump's Trump is.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
That Trump actually now knows more about the federal government
and how it works than Elon does discuss.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
Look, I mean, Donald Trump is arguably one of the
dumbest motherfuckers to walk on two legs on the planet Earth.
But he has now been exposed to certain things and
concepts that an ordinary president would be exposed to as
they entered into, you know, discussions about government programs and services.
Elon thinks that this is all just like the rest
(13:08):
of his life, play money and absurd obeisance by people
who work for him or when we invest with him,
or or who make money off of him. That's not
how government works. That's not how it works even a little.
And now what you've got is a guy who is
going to act like an a hole to people, as
we know, and it's going to be it's going to
(13:28):
be very loud and very ugly.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
In my view, Elon has this theory. I'm not entirely
sure if it's his theory. So many of the things
that Elon preaches are these theories that are sort of
long term Silicon Valley theories. So, for example, we are
the media. Now that's a Mark Andreas and that's a
meniscus mollbug.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
You can call him by his real name is Otis Jarvin.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
But you know, these are tropes that Silicon Valley has
on trafficked in sure, and they're not new to Elon.
So trying to replace the media with a bunch of
far right guys, you know, with Jack Pisobiac is not new.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
All these people, Molly, and this I think is something
really important to recognize as we go forward. All these
people have a deep seated insecurity about who they are
as humans. They are not confident in their actual ideas,
and so they've lived in this bubble in Silicon Valley
where they'll find something that pokes their little meme bubble
(14:28):
in some way and they're like, oh, this is the
coolest thing I've ever seen, and they adopt it as
their whole personality. You know, for a long time Elon
Musk was not a far right wing maga extremist dipshit.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Well, or he didn't transmit it. I mean, who knows
what he was If he had.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
That belief, he didn't admit it, but there was very
little reason to believe that was what he believed. Okay,
now we are in a much different era now, and
it feels an awful lot like Elon Musk does believe
that shit, and it feels an awful lot like he's
embraced it. But these guys, they themselves up in this
pseudo intellectual Silicon Valley, can't and these dorm room philosophy
(15:07):
bullshit session ideas, and you're just like, grow the f up,
who are you? What do you think is actually happening
in this world that is amenable to the kind of
shit that they're trying to convince themselves of.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
So one of the things that I think is really
interesting is that now Elon has sort of decided he's
going to play a government and he knows even less
about government than Donald Trump, which in itself, again I'm
not against the theory of disruption, like I think there's
certainly something to be said for the theory of the case.
But clearly what happened here last week, which I think
(15:44):
is important because I think we're going to see a
lot of this in the next four years of trump Ism,
which is Elon found out about a cr which, by
the way, has been the whole way that Mike Johnson
has been running this government.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
This entire time CR.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Right, because he can't legislate his way out of a
bucking paper bag. So there's a huge, fatty CR filled
with stuff everything from moving the stadium right, this is
not what a CR supposed to look like at all,
to just a lot of shit in there and a
pay raise for members of Congress. And Elon gets furious
(16:20):
because he doesn't want the government spending any money on anything.
Irony abounds because Elon got rich on what government subsidies
for clean tech, right, but he doesn't want that government
money going to anyone but him. So he gets furious,
says everyone should vote against it. Trump never meant, you know,
a disruption. He doesn't want to get.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Involved in agrees.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Then Trump says, and also we should raise the debt
ceiling government money, but also yeah, and then that gets
the very few people who still have beliefs in the
on the right, which happens to be people like Chip Roy,
nobody's favorite but very much against government spending to engage.
(17:08):
Trump then wants to primary chip Roy. I mean, bring
it on the worst person you know could be. Right.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Here's the thing, and I think this is important to remember.
Say what you will about Chip Roy at least and.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
I will, yes, exactly, I mean that's right.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
No, Chip Roy has more real beliefs than Nancy Mays.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Oh sure, I've seen enough of Nancy May's midlife crisis now. Honestly,
I mean it's really tiresome.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
But also Nancy mayce, you know, she believes this. She
believes that, she believes whatever, whereas Chip Roy is like,
we are here to cut the government. We will not
raise the deadly limit, even if our you know, God King,
our Orange God King tells us too.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
It was real disarray.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
There was a lot of talk of primary every Republican member.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
Oh yes, well, look that that idea that you're going
to primary anybody who opposes Elon at any time. I
would like to remind people of, you know, one of
the most fundamental pieces of creative literary merit of our era,
and that is the Trump poem The Snake.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Oh yes, I know it, well, the snake is Elon?
Still tell you?
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Do you not understand it yet? You people? It's fucking Elon?
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Does you still tell this?
Speaker 1 (18:26):
You got you gotta tell the snake story?
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Okay. Trump does this piece of poetry at his rallies,
and he loves doing this. He loves it so much.
And folks, I'm not going to read the whole thing
because it's just like, no, but Trump loves this piece
of poetry. And it's from like a sort of a
song in the nineteen thirties or something. Anyway, long story short,
it's about a woman who takes in a snake and
the snake is pretty and it says, oh, take me in,
(18:50):
dear woman, and blah blah blah. Well she takes it in.
The fucking snake bites her. Okay. Trump uses this as
a parable about immigration. Here's the thing, y'all. Elon Musk
is the snake. They took him in and now he's
biting them. These people are not in any capacity able
to say that Elon, no, fuck you, no, we won't
(19:13):
do that. Do you know why? Because they realize that
he has both a ton of money and that he
is insane, and that Trump and Elon have formed this
weird symbiotic partnership relationship however you whatever you want to
call it, and that nothing right now is going to
change in the way that Elon feels like he has
(19:34):
control over the government and control over the United States,
all of our future decisions about how we govern the country.
Elon really thinks that's what he runs now. He believes
he now has control of the United States government.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And let us pause for a minute.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
You know what, sixty percent of the satellite enormous government
contracts top secret clearance. I mean, he runs the government
as much as anyone who is completely on elected.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
And you know what, Elon Musk is an unelected bureaucrat
now and this is what he's doing. It is bureaucracy.
He's playing with nothing about the future for for the
Republicans is easy because he has now this capricious nature.
He's always going to want control over everything. He's always
going to want to have his way on all these matters.
(20:23):
And when they say, yeah, Elon, that's really tough for
us to do because of X or Y, you know,
real world political factor. He doesn't feel bound by things
like trivial things like law and statute and the human
impact of what he wants to do. You know, And
I'm all, I think you know, you certainly noticed this
the other day that when they cut childhood cancer research
(20:46):
out of the budget and got called on it and
got in trouble on it, all of a sudden Elon's
trying to make it and do a meme and make
it funny and like ha ha haa cucks. Well that
didn't work. That scared the shit out of people. But
that's a sign of how utterly disconnected this guy is
from the ordinary lives of real people.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yes, I have just read about this theory. This is
something I want to talk about before.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
This theory of non playable characters that are characters. You know,
they're ancillary, they are objects, they're not people.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
They're background characters in games. Yes, I know. I'm very
familiar with it.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, and there's a sense in which, you know, Elon
sort of treats the people of the United States.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Like that, right, they're not they have no impetus.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
Well, going back to that Silicon Valley culture, there are
a lot of people in Silicon Valley now who really
believe that they are a separate species of human being.
This is why people like Curtis Jarvin and some of
these Dark Web idiots are arguing that the time for
a republic, and at the time for a democratically elected
(21:53):
government is passed and we need to just bow down
to a new monarchy of our tech overlords.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Right, oligarchy is sort of the play. Here we are
in this sort of eline world. What I think is
interesting is he then was saying, well, this now, this
new CR is much lighter than the original legislation. The
idea that somehow legislation should not be long is pretty stupid.
(22:21):
And you know, there were a lot of things in
that CR. It got very fatty, but there were a
lot of things in there that were actually important, and
like there was a revenge porn thing in there. There
were different sort of piece of legislation that kind of
got lost.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
You'd be shocked to hear. So he undid a lot
of work.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
But what I wanted to bring up was this guy
is the polling on him is still He's not that popular.
He's making Trump crazy. He's in ma a Lago, He's
making Johnson crazy. Like do you think this unlikely friendship?
How long does the first body last?
Speaker 4 (22:56):
This romance is doomed at some point, it's doomed because
you know, Trump is always there's not even like premas
Enter Parees. Trump has to be the main character in
the drama. He has to be the one person that's
out there where everyone's paying attention to him. He has
to be the radical center of a major and constant drama.
(23:18):
And that's fine. You know, there's a part of that
that is explicable in how we understand Trump. We get that,
we get we get Trump as we get who Trump is. Okay,
we all understand who Trump is. And because of that,
he's going to get angry. And the attention that Elon's
been getting has has been growing on the radar screen
(23:40):
and you can start to see some of the leaks
coming out of trump Land, which is clearly Susie Wiles,
by the way, putting the knife in the guy as
she does.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
You know, all of this chatter about trump World versus
the mainstream media. I was thinking about it today because
I was on a panel talking about it, and I'm
thinking myself, like the biggest leads in the entire world.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Donald Tnald J.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Trump, Right, So I'm thinking, you know, if you want
to shut down the mainstream media, instead of suing them,
you could just stop leaking to them.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
These people leak well. And I always say this is
one of my political rules that will someday go down
in a book about my political rules. There are two
kinds of leaks, administrations and organizations that work well leaked
deliberately for a purpose. The ones that work badly leak chaotically,
and they leak just because they leak. Donald Trump leaks
(24:33):
constantly because he's a terrible manager.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Well and also because everyone's trying to settle the score
in the mainstream media.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Yeah. Well, and look, let's also be realistic. Our friends
of the mainstream media right now have a great difficulty
in processing the fact that they don't work for Donald Trump,
and a lot of them are scrambling in the wake
of the ABC decision all these things. But you know,
Trump is Trump's actually quite happy with the media right now.
He's pretty delighted with the mainstream media right now. He
(25:01):
likes where their behavior is at. He's even bragging about
it to people. Oh they're nice to me these days.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
No, I know I saw that quid, But you know,
I do think there is his complaints about media and
his administration's ability to think that they can use media
to get rid of each one.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
And you know, we see this all the time. I mean,
part of why.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
It was so easy to write about Trump World was
because you would have you know, somebody would be in
there doing something and then all of a sudden we
get pieces. You know, Corey's out, Corey is having an
a you know this kind of thing, right.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
Oh yeah, Look, the endless revenge battles inside that world
where a feature of the kind of behavior Trump encourages
in his people. He loves for them to fight with
each other. He loves for them to be mad at
each other. That's that's a delight for him.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
And it's proof of Fieldy, right.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
Absolutely, they're always He's always looking to make sure somebody's
kissing his ass properly. He's always looking to make sure
that somebody's gonna bend the knee publicly to him once again.
And that's why a lot of these people come and
go into Trump world. You know, Steve Bannon was the
rogue genius in the beginning of twenty sixteen. Then he
(26:14):
got thrown out of the White House by the beginning
of twenty eighteen. You know, then he was scabby Steve.
But now he's back again. These people always circle back through,
they always come back around. And there's a reason Trump
likes to keep hitting them against one another. He likes
to keep making them fight with each other. It sounds
immature and terrible and stupid. But that's Trump. He's immature
(26:36):
and terrible and stupid. So he's going to make his
people behave like he behaves. Yeah, Rick Wilson, Muther, Jack Fast,
have a lovely Christmas and I will talk to you
again next time.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Tim Wiener is a New York Times correspondent and winner
of the Poolhit Serprise and the National Book Award. He
is the author of the Legis of Ashes and Enemies.
His new book, The Mission the CIA in the twenty
first Century.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Will be out in June. Welcome to Fast Politics him.
Speaker 5 (27:12):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
You've written two books on the FBI. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
Well, I've written one book on the NBI book and
history of the CIA, called Legacy of Ashes, right, and
there was plenty of FBI and CIA in book.
Speaker 5 (27:27):
I wrote about my favorite president, Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
First, the Trump Nixon parallels seem really so striking. Explain
to us sort of the parallels between the two.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
Well, Trump is Nixon minus fifty points of IQ. He
is an inveterate liar, he is secretive and conspiratorial. But
Richard Nixon, bless his heart, had been vice president for
eight years and a senator and congressman before that and
had a fair amount of respect for the institutions of
(28:01):
national security like the CI and the FBI, until he didn't.
And the moment of truth with Nixon and the FBI
came in the summer of nineteen seventy. Nixon was convinced,
as Trump is today, that there is an enemy within
this country, and the enemy was the left and the
more liberal elements of the Democratic Party. Nixon was already
(28:24):
using the FBI and the CIA despy on emerics that
violated the CIA charter. The FBI does not have a chart.
It does whatever the Attorney General and the President Teltive do.
And what Nixon did was to call in the head
of the A, the head of the National Security Agency,
and the head of the FBI, who was of course
(28:44):
Jaedgar Hoover. And at that point Hoover had been running
the FBI for forty six.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Years, right, it's a very long time.
Speaker 5 (28:51):
And he basically said, I want you to spy more
on Americans. I want you to subvert through espionage and
sabotage the institutions of the left. I want you to
step up wire tapping, bugging, burglaries, black bag jobs, and
I want you to crush the left, and for the
first time in his life, Hooper said, no, he didn't
(29:12):
want to sign a document. He didn't want to put
his name to this plan because he was convinced that
the FBI would get caught and that his great rule
was don't embarrass the FBI. Every agent in the bureau
knew that. So what did Nixon do. He set up
his own bucket shop of retired CIA and retired FBI people,
(29:36):
and two years later they broke into the Democratic National
Committee headquarters at Watergate. The way Nixon fell was that
he then ordered the head of the CIA, Richard Helms,
a man I got to know quite well later, to
call off the FBI investigation of the break in on
grounds of national security. And that was the smoking Gum tape.
(29:57):
And that was how Nixon fell. The difference today, more
than fifty years later, is that cass Paatel will never
say no to Donald Trump. He will do anything Trump
tells him to do, no matter how illegal, immoral, or crazy.
Why do you say that, because he has a track
(30:19):
record of doing crazy things for Donald Trump, and I
will cite a few examples. So, in the last year
of Trump's presidency, to the horror of the Attorney General
Bill Barr. Trump tried to make Patel the deputy director
of the NBI, and Barr wrote in his memoir the
very idea of moving Patel into a role like this
(30:41):
showed a stocking detachment from reality on Trump's part, and
he vowed that the appointment would happen, and I quote
over my dead thought. So instead, Trump installed Patel as
the top assistant to his new Director of National Intelligence.
That's the bureaucracy that overseees the THEIA, the FBI, and
(31:04):
sixteen other American intelligence agencies. That National Intelligence Director was
John Radcliffe, his present nominee to run CIA, and what
Radcliffe and Patel set out to do, on orders from
Trump was to rans fact the tox secret files with
the CIA and other intelligence agencies for anything that might
fulfill Trump's desire to deny that he was Putin's chosen candidate,
(31:29):
anything that would undermine what Trump called the Russia hoax,
which was the incredibly well founded investigation of the FBI
into connections between teen Trump and team Puten and Patel
mounted an attack on THEIA, as you know, the headquarters
(31:49):
of the deep state conspiracy, and both men tried to
find fragments of raw intelligence in a flailing attempt to
score political points for the president's re election campaign. After
he lost the twenty twenty election, Trump fired the Secretary
of Defense and made Patel Chief of Staff at depending
on it affect the shadows Secretary of Defense. When that happened,
(32:12):
the CI director told the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
General Milly and I quote, we are on the way
to a reglink coup. She saw it before it was happening. Then,
in the final month of Trump's first term, he attempted
to install Patel at the top of the CIA, and
he planned to fire Chris Ray after decapitating the CIA. Haspell,
(32:35):
the CIA director got Win to this plot and let
Trump know that if she were going down, all the
leaders with the American intelligence community would go down with her.
A mass resignation and protest Trump back down to five
days later, he summoned his supporters to Washington.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Do you think this is a factocomplete? What do you
think senators could do? I mean, it seems like Patel
would be hoover ask I mean, do you think that
I'm being hyperbolic? What do you think?
Speaker 5 (33:06):
Well again, Jay Edgar Hoover minus fifty IQ points. Under Hoover,
the FBI took aim at the enemy within and on
orders from President Eisenhower, Kennedy Johnson, Nixon and their attorney general,
he conducted wardless wire taps, black bag jobs, political harassment
of everybody, from Martin Luther King to the anti war movement,
(33:28):
to journalists and to National Security Council stoffers. Under Nixon
who were suspected of leaking to the press, among the
principal members of the enemy with him, according to Patel
and Trump are the press. Is the left in so
far as there is such a thing in the United
States body politic today, it's people who oppose Trump, and
(33:49):
like Nixon and Hoover, Patel and Trump have an extensive
enemies list. Patel has published one on the question of
will the Senate confirm a man like Cash Battel or
equally crazy and dangerous people like Chelsea Gabbert for the
Director of the National Defense Pete Hedson for Secretary of Defense.
(34:10):
I think they will roll right over and do it.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
It strikes me that Pete Hegseth is not the same
as Cash Battel. Well, Pete Hegseth may have problems, and
he may very likely. Again, I don't want to diagnose anyone,
but he's clearly got a lot of real problems. Cash
Battell has a sort of plan that strikes me as
and the FBI is used against Americans when.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
It is at its worst. I mean, isn't that sort
of what's happening here?
Speaker 5 (34:42):
You know, you have to take Trump's and his people
at their word. Patel published last year in his book
Government Gangsters, the people he wanted to see investigated and
indicted his enemies list, and that list includes Joe Biden,
Kamala Harris, Hillary Quinton, John Brennan, former director of the CIA,
Merrick Garland, Bob Muller, General Mark Melly, and Chris Right Right.
(35:06):
The FBI does not have a charter limiting its legal powers.
The FBI does with the Attorney General and the President
tell it to do. And if, for example, the FBI
wants to launch an investigation against people Trump has publicly
charged with treason, a crime punishable with death, those targets
(35:30):
include Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the former CIA director
John Brenton. He accused them of spying on him, spying
on his campaign and I quote the biggest single political
crime in the history of our country. Interesting choice of words.
A political crime, thought crime. If you will you start
(35:51):
prosecuting people for their political beliefs, you're down the road
to dictatorship of far peace.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, I know what I know.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Oh and my grandfather's jailed by the FBI, Herbert.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
Yeah, yeah, Well your grandfather was persecuted for his writings,
Are I correct?
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Actually he was persecuted because it was brought up by
the House on American Activities for his refusal to name
the people who he was involved with in a fundraiser
for post Spanish Civil War orphans.
Speaker 5 (36:23):
Was he a card carrying member of the Communist Party.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Yes, he was, but that wasn't why he was I mean,
theoretically he was jailed that he was sent to jail
on contempt of Congress, But he was targeted because he
was a communist.
Speaker 5 (36:39):
All right, So what is the favorite thing that House
Republicans and some Senate Republicans liked to do. They like
to hold hearings for clips on Fox News. They and
Patel as a member of the incoming Fox News cabinet,
will gin up political theater. At a minimum are they
(36:59):
going to aren't arresting people for their political beliefs? Well,
I mean, let's hope not. But that is what Trump
and Patel have threatened to investigate, indict, and put in
prison people for their political beliefs. Now, of course, Trump
also said he was going to build a wall in
(37:19):
Mexico pay for it. So some of this may deep
blustering rhetoric. But people were right to be afraid of
this guy.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Yeah, it's a real terrifying reality. So now, if you
could just talk us through what Cash Patel has at
his disposal, if he is able to become head of
the FBI, if.
Speaker 5 (37:40):
Cash Bateel is confirmed by the Senate, and if am
Bundy is confirmed as the Attorney General, they have at
their disposal thirty five thousand FBI agents and federal prosecutors
appointed by Trump because all the federal prosecutors in every
jurisdiction have to resign when the government changes hands to
(38:01):
go after their enemies to investigate. First of all, if
you are targeted by an FBI investigation, even if you
have done nothing wrong, you are in a world of pain.
You've got a lawyer up, You'll have to open up.
If there's a warrant against you, your computer, your telephone.
(38:25):
Just the harassment power alone, given the immense power of
the prosecutor under American law, is enough to destroy people's lives.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Well, that was what happened to my grandfather and his people.
Speaker 5 (38:39):
Sure, and that's just the beginning. If they are indeed
helping on proving Trump's quaint that the President of the
United States, Barack Obama and as Vice President Joe Biden,
and the directors of the CIA and the FBI under
Obama illegally spied on him, which is, in Trump's words, treason,
(39:03):
they can not only rip apart those people's lives, but
they can rip apart the CIA and the FBI. You know,
the CIA is my wheelhouse. I have written a book
about the FBI. But people are going to be confronted
with a real moral choice. That is, the agents of
the FBI and the officers of the CIA, will I
(39:25):
obey an illegal order from the FBI director, attorney general
or the president. You know, things could get very weird
because the Supreme Court ruled in July that presidents can
commit crimes in office without fear of prosecution, and it
(39:45):
preemptively authorizes illegal searches and seizures and violation of the
Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Writing in dissent from
that decision, Justice Sotomayr wrote, quote a hypothetical president who
admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals
(40:08):
or critics as a fair shot at getting immunity.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Right, that's the Seal Team six scenario. Right, Could a
president and hire Seal Team six to kill his political enemies?
Speaker 4 (40:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (40:19):
But if this president should choose to declare a political
rival guilty of treason and deploy a paramilitary group on
the CIA, from the FBI, from Seal Teams to assassinate
that rival, and direct the Attorney General to sign a
document saying this is cool, that death was necessary for
(40:40):
the securing of liberty. That would be an official act
for which the president is immut from presidentship. That's just
the fact.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
So, I mean, do we think there's a moment when
the Supreme Court, and again, I mean, I guess there's
no way to know what the Supreme Court will go
along with, right, because we've seen them go along with
quite a lot of staff.
Speaker 5 (40:59):
You know, you and me and everybody else we know
and all your listeners have been thinking all along, Well,
the courts will think they will not. Oh, the law
will state it will not. Okay, not now. And all
of this flows from the conspiratorial belief of Troupe and
Cash but Tel and the rest of the MAGA crowd
(41:21):
that there is a deep state. The deep state is
conspiracy of unelected soldiers and spies and diplomats and government
officials who are secretly pulling the strings of the United
States and usurping the power of the president. And they
have made no bones about attacking and dismantling the deep state,
(41:46):
which is in fact the state. And if they succeed,
even marginally, what they will create is a shallow state
in which institutions of government cannot perform their functions. They
will follow out the government of the United States, agency
by agency.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
That I think is the ultimate goal, but it is
just so scary.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Tim.
Speaker 5 (42:15):
You are more than well.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
No, no moment, Rick Wilson, Molly John Fast.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Who is your moment of fuckery?
Speaker 4 (42:27):
You know? My moment of fuckery this week is the
story of the Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger down in Texas.
And I want to say this first off, folks, I'm
not being facetious when I talk about this, but Kay
Granger has been in a memory care facility for some
time now, since July. Now, that is not in and
of itself something that is that is unexpected in America.
(42:49):
Many millions of Americans have as they grow older, they
have memory issues, they have Alzheimer's, they have they have
various forms of dementia, et cetera. And it is more
tragic than but the fact that we have had a
Republican Party dedicated to saying that Joe Biden is senile
and is broken and is a dottery old man who
(43:12):
knows nothing and is senile, blah blah blah, while you
have a member of Congress in a memory care facility
who was apparently trotted out for several votes that she
had no idea what she was voting on. It's kind
of uncool. I gotta be real here, It's kind of sick.
And I think that this is one of those things
where if you don't think term limits or should be
(43:33):
a thing, get your head examined. There is an upper
boundary I think that we should really be looking at
for service in the in federal offices, and this is
one of them. It is sad, it is tragic, but
it is real. And they lied about it. Her staff
lied about it. Look, this is the same thing was
happening with die Fi back in the day. Her staff
lied about it. It's unacceptable in my mind, but here
(43:56):
we are.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
The only thing I.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Would say, I would just add is that Kay Granger
is not the only one who's doing stuff like this,
and Republicans do not have a lock on this, because
I know for sure that there are Democrats who nobody
has seen in the House. So the world that is
creating this is a big fucking problem. And it's a
(44:18):
really good case for term limits. It's a really good
case for not being allowed to miss votes. It's a
really good case for this is not how any of
this should work.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
That's it. Fuck them, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:29):
Mollie, you and I both have older parents, and this
is a real thing. It's a sad thing that this
is something that has been for political advantage in a
tightly divided House of representatives. They've been keeping this ghost
in the situation that she's in. And I find it.
I think it's a moral Honestly, I really do. I
find it. I think it's a moral.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeah, it's really bad, but it's happening on both sides,
and there should be term limits and members should not
be allowed to trade stocks.
Speaker 4 (44:57):
Look honest to God. If Elon muscle to clean up
the processes in Congress, I could think of a dozen
other ways than being a diletant dipshit trying to rewrite
a cr You want to improve Congress, you want to
make it work better, okay, Go for non partisan redistricting,
you want to make it work better. Go for termal limits,
you want to make it work better. Go for actual
(45:18):
ethics reform. Those things would be I think great for
the country. But that's no fun. It's not truly enough,
and it doesn't cause enough people to get upset, and
it doesn't take cancer money away from kids. So you
know here we are, Rick Wilson, my John Fast. I
will see you on the flip side of a holiday.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 6 (46:00):
H
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 Trump says the US should retake
the Panama Canal if they do not lower.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
The transit fees.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
It's nice to see him trying to build consensus. We
have such a great show for you today, the Lincoln Projects.
Rick Wilson joins us to discuss Donald Trump getting his
own Donald Trump and.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Whatever that means.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Then we'll talk to author Tim Wiener about what a
weaponized FBI could look like.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
But first the news Somali.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
This is one of those nightmare things that I don't
think every American thinks about. But I read a tool
Gawandhi's book on the World Health Organization years ago, the
Checklist Manifesto, and realized how important it is. They really
lower death, they really help us have a better world.
And yean day one, their Trump administration is going to
(00:58):
pull out of.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Who yeah, the World Health Organization. Look, they're going to
do all this stuff again. And by the way, the
last Trump administration and I don't think Trump could have
I think perhaps some of the things he could have
done would have lessened the death toll. But I'm not
sure that he would that any president would have been
able to avoid the pandemic. That said, you would think
(01:21):
that having just presidented through a pandemic, one might want
to not have another one and be more careful about
such things.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
But RFK Junior and.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
The rest of the crew have decided that no, thank you.
Donald Trump's transition team is pushing to pull the United
States out of the World Health Organization on the first
day of the new administration, according to experts who warn
of the catastrophic impact it will have on global health.
Members of the Trump team told experts of their intention
(01:53):
to announce a withdrawal. I mean, by the way, this
is like Trump World, right, They're going to get out.
They're going to leave the World Health Organization. It will
damage the world's ability to respond to public health crisis
is such as the coronavirus pandemic. America is going to
leave a huge vacuum in the global health financing and leadership.
I see no one that is going to come in
(02:15):
and fill the breach. As anyone surprised by this, I
am not surprised by this, but you're going to see
a lot of this Trump World trying to get out
of things.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
That are small.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
By the way, a lot of these things are like
a rounding error. It's not millions and zillions of dollars,
but it is, for whatever reason, something that Trump wants
to cut. And we're going to see more of that,
where they cut things that are absolutely not at all
not worth doing, but and the returns on it are
going to be. It's just very stupid. So I don't
(02:47):
think anyone could be surprised by this.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yeah, Trump, the Heritage Foundation, whoever it may be. So
In other not fun news, it seems people are getting
a little more urgency about getting rid of money in
our politics and super PACs because they're realizing with the
richest men on earth now threatening the primary everyone via
tweet all the time, that things are not good.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
I think this is a case of something that happened
too little, too late, right, I mean, the idea that
now is the moment for super path to be banned,
when in fact we have a whole crew of very
rich people trying to influence elections. And this has been
going on for some time, right, Like the right is
(03:29):
obsessed with George Soros and the Koch Brothers have been
doing this forever. But Elon is much more blatant, He's
much more right.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Even.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
I think Elon seems much more passionate in a way
that even the Koch brothers perhaps were able to hide
their zeal a little better.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
One could argue Elon's expressing his passion with action, whereas
the Koch brothers they were just spending enough to keep
their taxt.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Yeah, but they did a lot of bad stuff, like
right to work stuff.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
But what I would say is, I do think all
of these ambitions are worthy. But the problem with with
any legislation like this is the Supreme Court is completely
in the tank for rich people. So good luck trying
to create legislation that would in any possible way try
(04:26):
to tamp down on the oligarchy. Because remember, you have
a six to three court, and six of those guys
are real, you know, I mean two of them are
like on and off Carlan Crowe's private jet every day.
I mean, there was reporting in the New York Times
this weekend. Justice Thomas didn't report is even more private
(04:48):
jet trips than he previously reported, and.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Well he was mad that they did get reported.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Democrats did an ethics investigation and found that he lied
about even getting even more stuff than he got from
Harlan Crow. So it's hard for me to imagine the
Supreme Court is going to do anything to stop billionaires
from just doing whatever they want.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Yeh, well, I find that disturbing. I remember that's in
the first Trump administration. Jared and I Vanka were disturbed
by a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Yes, the moral compass of Trump World, which says a
lot about all parties.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Yeah, so Molly I have news though, she'll be being
disturbed from a distance this time in the next administration.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
For Avanka Trump's entire life, she worked for her father,
She was on his television show, she was very tall.
But now she said she's absolutely not coming back. Ivanka
Trump is done with politics.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
Quote. I love my father very much, which is good.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
I guess this time around, I choose to prioritize my
young children and the private life we are creating as
a family. Iami, I do not plan to be involved
in politics, she said in a twenty twenty two social
media post after her father announced his third run for presidency. Again, okay,
(06:12):
maybe maybe not. I mean, I don't take anything these
people say.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
The bank.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
We'll see yeah, so may I have to say this
is the one good thing I've seen. I recently watched
a video on how bad sports gambling addiction is. I
am continually disturbed when I see how much some of
my younger employees who don't work on this podcast are
(06:37):
addicted to it. And Congress is weighing actually getting involved
because it's that ugly.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
I wait with baited breath for Congress to legislate, and
they're very good at legislating things where I don't want
to sound cynical here, okay, and someone who's sober since
I was nineteen, I think of the many ways in
which Congress could help with the treatment of addiction when
it comes to drugs and alcohol, or even when it
(07:04):
comes to the Internet. I mean, at every point Congress
has had opportunities to legislate technology, and every point Congress
has rejected those opportunities. The reason why sports betting and
also politics betting and betting betting is exploding right now
is because they've deregulated a lot of the betting markets, right. So,
(07:24):
this is what happens when you deregulate things, they get
out of control. You regulate them to put them in control.
I mean, this is not rocket science here, so hard
for me to imagine. First of all, it will be
a Republican Senate, a Republican has and Donald Trump as president.
So even if for some reason, and again, even if
for some reason some Republican decides that they're going to
(07:48):
make this work and they're going to pass the legislation,
the minute Donald Trump sits on an airplane next to
someone who likes gambling, or who owns gambling, or who
benefits from gambling in any way, they're going to say
to him, don't do that. That's a stupid thing, and
he's going to go okay. So like this is going
to be the problem for the next four years. Is
(08:09):
even if somehow you could get the legislation together, you
have Donald Trump, and if Donald Trump doesn't object to it,
you have Mini Trump. Elon, who's going to say, well,
you know, sports betting, I make a lot of money
off sports betting. It's based, it's based and red pilled,
and I want people to be able to do it
and lose all their money because it's good for whatever.
(08:30):
I mean, these people are so conflicted that, you know,
Donald Trump makes money on a lot of things. Elon
Musk makes money on gazillion things.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
And these are the people.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Running our country now, so you know which unelected oligarch
or the elected oligark. They're never going to be able
to agree on anything. And it's too bad because the
truth is, you know, gambling just like fent and all,
just like alcohol, just like drugs, just like any of
so many of these other things.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Really, you know, it's my one last consolation prize before
we head.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Off into it.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
You've ruined Live.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
The holiday break. Last week on this very podcast, Rick
Wilson laid out the big struggle between Trump World versus
d Sanctimonius Fron de Santis World about who will be
Marco Rubio's successor as an appointment temporarily in the Senate
before Ron de Sanctimonius tries to jump into that seat.
And we saw some big moves on this yesterday. What'd
(09:29):
you see?
Speaker 1 (09:29):
So the big moves are that Lara Trump. You will
remember her as being married to Eric. You know, someone
has to.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Be It's very easy to forget Eric.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Lara Trump has said she will not run for the
seat of Marco Rubio. Now here's what is happening. Marco
Rubio going to this Cannabi Secretary of State very likely.
Ron DeSantis probably wants that Senate seat. There was a
(10:01):
theory that if Pete Hegsets got knocked out of DoD
that Sanctimonius would.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Be the pick.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Now I am not convinced that Sanctimonius will be the pick,
nor am I convinced that heg Sets will get DoD,
though it's certainly possible either way. The setup was that
you do something for me and I do something for you.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
But looks like that may not happen.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Though again, with everything in Trump world, none of this
could happen or all of this could happen, and you
really do look foolish when you try to read the
tea leaves. Remember this is chaos theory. Everyone is just
doing chaotic things at all times.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
And on that note, we have a great show today,
but from here on out we will be on vacation
with some really really great interviews, and we both want
to wish you some happy holidays.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
We'll be back on January fourth. Rick well And is
the founder of the Lincoln Project and the host of
the Enemy's List. Welcome back to our pre vacation episode
of Fast Politics with Brick Wilson.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
Have a holly jolly Christmas, Molly junk fast.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
That's right, that radio voice we know and love.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
The government did not get shut down, but perhaps this
is an indication of things to come and what the
Elon Musk presidency is going to look like.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Discuss it didn't get shut down, but only because Democrats
saved Mike Johnson's weird skinny ass again again. I think
what we have here is a preview of an endless
stream of crises, one after another after another after another,
that we are going to watch unfold in the first
(11:53):
opening acts of the Trump administration. And then it's going
to get really bad.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
So I'm not the person who cooked up this is
a Josh Marshall. But Josh Marshall had a really good point,
which is that Donald Trump now has a Trump.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
That's a great construction, it really is. That's a great
way of thinking about it, is that Trump now has
a Trump. He has somebody who is a chaotic disruptor,
who does not care about any other social or political
or personal pressure or persuasion, as they say, and so
he will end up doing the maximum amount of chaotic
(12:31):
damage he can all the time. Because that's fun for him.
Speaker 2 (12:34):
My favorite part about Trump's Trump is.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
That Trump actually now knows more about the federal government
and how it works than Elon does discuss.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
Look, I mean, Donald Trump is arguably one of the
dumbest motherfuckers to walk on two legs on the planet Earth.
But he has now been exposed to certain things and
concepts that an ordinary president would be exposed to as
they entered into, you know, discussions about government programs and services.
Elon thinks that this is all just like the rest
(13:08):
of his life, play money and absurd obeisance by people
who work for him or when we invest with him,
or or who make money off of him. That's not
how government works. That's not how it works even a little.
And now what you've got is a guy who is
going to act like an a hole to people, as
we know, and it's going to be it's going to
(13:28):
be very loud and very ugly.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
In my view, Elon has this theory. I'm not entirely
sure if it's his theory. So many of the things
that Elon preaches are these theories that are sort of
long term Silicon Valley theories. So, for example, we are
the media. Now that's a Mark Andreas and that's a
meniscus mollbug.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
You can call him by his real name is Otis Jarvin.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
But you know, these are tropes that Silicon Valley has
on trafficked in sure, and they're not new to Elon.
So trying to replace the media with a bunch of
far right guys, you know, with Jack Pisobiac is not new.
Speaker 4 (14:07):
All these people, Molly, and this I think is something
really important to recognize as we go forward. All these
people have a deep seated insecurity about who they are
as humans. They are not confident in their actual ideas,
and so they've lived in this bubble in Silicon Valley
where they'll find something that pokes their little meme bubble
(14:28):
in some way and they're like, oh, this is the
coolest thing I've ever seen, and they adopt it as
their whole personality. You know, for a long time Elon
Musk was not a far right wing maga extremist dipshit.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Well, or he didn't transmit it. I mean, who knows
what he was If he had.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
That belief, he didn't admit it, but there was very
little reason to believe that was what he believed. Okay,
now we are in a much different era now, and
it feels an awful lot like Elon Musk does believe
that shit, and it feels an awful lot like he's
embraced it. But these guys, they themselves up in this
pseudo intellectual Silicon Valley, can't and these dorm room philosophy
(15:07):
bullshit session ideas, and you're just like, grow the f up,
who are you? What do you think is actually happening
in this world that is amenable to the kind of
shit that they're trying to convince themselves of.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
So one of the things that I think is really
interesting is that now Elon has sort of decided he's
going to play a government and he knows even less
about government than Donald Trump, which in itself, again I'm
not against the theory of disruption, like I think there's
certainly something to be said for the theory of the case.
But clearly what happened here last week, which I think
(15:44):
is important because I think we're going to see a
lot of this in the next four years of trump Ism,
which is Elon found out about a cr which, by
the way, has been the whole way that Mike Johnson
has been running this government.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
This entire time CR.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Right, because he can't legislate his way out of a
bucking paper bag. So there's a huge, fatty CR filled
with stuff everything from moving the stadium right, this is
not what a CR supposed to look like at all,
to just a lot of shit in there and a
pay raise for members of Congress. And Elon gets furious
(16:20):
because he doesn't want the government spending any money on anything.
Irony abounds because Elon got rich on what government subsidies
for clean tech, right, but he doesn't want that government
money going to anyone but him. So he gets furious,
says everyone should vote against it. Trump never meant, you know,
a disruption. He doesn't want to get.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Involved in agrees.
Speaker 1 (16:43):
Then Trump says, and also we should raise the debt
ceiling government money, but also yeah, and then that gets
the very few people who still have beliefs in the
on the right, which happens to be people like Chip Roy,
nobody's favorite but very much against government spending to engage.
(17:08):
Trump then wants to primary chip Roy. I mean, bring
it on the worst person you know could be. Right.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Here's the thing, and I think this is important to remember.
Say what you will about Chip Roy at least and.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
I will, yes, exactly, I mean that's right.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
No, Chip Roy has more real beliefs than Nancy Mays.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Oh sure, I've seen enough of Nancy May's midlife crisis now. Honestly,
I mean it's really tiresome.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
But also Nancy mayce, you know, she believes this. She
believes that, she believes whatever, whereas Chip Roy is like,
we are here to cut the government. We will not
raise the deadly limit, even if our you know, God King,
our Orange God King tells us too.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
It was real disarray.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
There was a lot of talk of primary every Republican member.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
Oh yes, well, look that that idea that you're going
to primary anybody who opposes Elon at any time. I
would like to remind people of, you know, one of
the most fundamental pieces of creative literary merit of our era,
and that is the Trump poem The Snake.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Oh yes, I know it, well, the snake is Elon?
Still tell you?
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Do you not understand it yet? You people? It's fucking Elon?
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Does you still tell this?
Speaker 1 (18:26):
You got you gotta tell the snake story?
Speaker 4 (18:28):
Okay. Trump does this piece of poetry at his rallies,
and he loves doing this. He loves it so much.
And folks, I'm not going to read the whole thing
because it's just like, no, but Trump loves this piece
of poetry. And it's from like a sort of a
song in the nineteen thirties or something. Anyway, long story short,
it's about a woman who takes in a snake and
the snake is pretty and it says, oh, take me in,
(18:50):
dear woman, and blah blah blah. Well she takes it in.
The fucking snake bites her. Okay. Trump uses this as
a parable about immigration. Here's the thing, y'all. Elon Musk
is the snake. They took him in and now he's
biting them. These people are not in any capacity able
to say that Elon, no, fuck you, no, we won't
(19:13):
do that. Do you know why? Because they realize that
he has both a ton of money and that he
is insane, and that Trump and Elon have formed this
weird symbiotic partnership relationship however you whatever you want to
call it, and that nothing right now is going to
change in the way that Elon feels like he has
(19:34):
control over the government and control over the United States,
all of our future decisions about how we govern the country.
Elon really thinks that's what he runs now. He believes
he now has control of the United States government.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And let us pause for a minute.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
You know what, sixty percent of the satellite enormous government
contracts top secret clearance. I mean, he runs the government
as much as anyone who is completely on elected.
Speaker 4 (20:00):
And you know what, Elon Musk is an unelected bureaucrat
now and this is what he's doing. It is bureaucracy.
He's playing with nothing about the future for for the
Republicans is easy because he has now this capricious nature.
He's always going to want control over everything. He's always
going to want to have his way on all these matters.
(20:23):
And when they say, yeah, Elon, that's really tough for
us to do because of X or Y, you know,
real world political factor. He doesn't feel bound by things
like trivial things like law and statute and the human
impact of what he wants to do. You know, And
I'm all, I think you know, you certainly noticed this
the other day that when they cut childhood cancer research
(20:46):
out of the budget and got called on it and
got in trouble on it, all of a sudden Elon's
trying to make it and do a meme and make
it funny and like ha ha haa cucks. Well that
didn't work. That scared the shit out of people. But
that's a sign of how utterly disconnected this guy is
from the ordinary lives of real people.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yes, I have just read about this theory. This is
something I want to talk about before.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
This theory of non playable characters that are characters. You know,
they're ancillary, they are objects, they're not people.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
They're background characters in games. Yes, I know. I'm very
familiar with it.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Yeah, and there's a sense in which, you know, Elon
sort of treats the people of the United States.
Speaker 2 (21:29):
Like that, right, they're not they have no impetus.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
Well, going back to that Silicon Valley culture, there are
a lot of people in Silicon Valley now who really
believe that they are a separate species of human being.
This is why people like Curtis Jarvin and some of
these Dark Web idiots are arguing that the time for
a republic, and at the time for a democratically elected
(21:53):
government is passed and we need to just bow down
to a new monarchy of our tech overlords.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Right, oligarchy is sort of the play. Here we are
in this sort of eline world. What I think is
interesting is he then was saying, well, this now, this
new CR is much lighter than the original legislation. The
idea that somehow legislation should not be long is pretty stupid.
(22:21):
And you know, there were a lot of things in
that CR. It got very fatty, but there were a
lot of things in there that were actually important, and
like there was a revenge porn thing in there. There
were different sort of piece of legislation that kind of
got lost.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
You'd be shocked to hear. So he undid a lot
of work.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
But what I wanted to bring up was this guy
is the polling on him is still He's not that popular.
He's making Trump crazy. He's in ma a Lago, He's
making Johnson crazy. Like do you think this unlikely friendship?
How long does the first body last?
Speaker 4 (22:56):
This romance is doomed at some point, it's doomed because
you know, Trump is always there's not even like premas
Enter Parees. Trump has to be the main character in
the drama. He has to be the one person that's
out there where everyone's paying attention to him. He has
to be the radical center of a major and constant drama.
(23:18):
And that's fine. You know, there's a part of that
that is explicable in how we understand Trump. We get that,
we get we get Trump as we get who Trump is. Okay,
we all understand who Trump is. And because of that,
he's going to get angry. And the attention that Elon's
been getting has has been growing on the radar screen
(23:40):
and you can start to see some of the leaks
coming out of trump Land, which is clearly Susie Wiles,
by the way, putting the knife in the guy as
she does.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
You know, all of this chatter about trump World versus
the mainstream media. I was thinking about it today because
I was on a panel talking about it, and I'm
thinking myself, like the biggest leads in the entire world.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Donald Tnald J.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
Trump, Right, So I'm thinking, you know, if you want
to shut down the mainstream media, instead of suing them,
you could just stop leaking to them.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
These people leak well. And I always say this is
one of my political rules that will someday go down
in a book about my political rules. There are two
kinds of leaks, administrations and organizations that work well leaked
deliberately for a purpose. The ones that work badly leak chaotically,
and they leak just because they leak. Donald Trump leaks
(24:33):
constantly because he's a terrible manager.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Well and also because everyone's trying to settle the score
in the mainstream media.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
Yeah. Well, and look, let's also be realistic. Our friends
of the mainstream media right now have a great difficulty
in processing the fact that they don't work for Donald Trump,
and a lot of them are scrambling in the wake
of the ABC decision all these things. But you know,
Trump is Trump's actually quite happy with the media right now.
He's pretty delighted with the mainstream media right now. He
(25:01):
likes where their behavior is at. He's even bragging about
it to people. Oh they're nice to me these days.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
No, I know I saw that quid, But you know,
I do think there is his complaints about media and
his administration's ability to think that they can use media
to get rid of each one.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
And you know, we see this all the time. I mean,
part of why.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
It was so easy to write about Trump World was
because you would have you know, somebody would be in
there doing something and then all of a sudden we
get pieces. You know, Corey's out, Corey is having an
a you know this kind of thing, right.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
Oh yeah, Look, the endless revenge battles inside that world
where a feature of the kind of behavior Trump encourages
in his people. He loves for them to fight with
each other. He loves for them to be mad at
each other. That's that's a delight for him.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
And it's proof of Fieldy, right.
Speaker 4 (25:54):
Absolutely, they're always He's always looking to make sure somebody's
kissing his ass properly. He's always looking to make sure
that somebody's gonna bend the knee publicly to him once again.
And that's why a lot of these people come and
go into Trump world. You know, Steve Bannon was the
rogue genius in the beginning of twenty sixteen. Then he
(26:14):
got thrown out of the White House by the beginning
of twenty eighteen. You know, then he was scabby Steve.
But now he's back again. These people always circle back through,
they always come back around. And there's a reason Trump
likes to keep hitting them against one another. He likes
to keep making them fight with each other. It sounds
immature and terrible and stupid. But that's Trump. He's immature
(26:36):
and terrible and stupid. So he's going to make his
people behave like he behaves. Yeah, Rick Wilson, Muther, Jack Fast,
have a lovely Christmas and I will talk to you
again next time.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Tim Wiener is a New York Times correspondent and winner
of the Poolhit Serprise and the National Book Award. He
is the author of the Legis of Ashes and Enemies.
His new book, The Mission the CIA in the twenty
first Century.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Will be out in June. Welcome to Fast Politics him.
Speaker 5 (27:12):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
You've written two books on the FBI. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (27:16):
Well, I've written one book on the NBI book and
history of the CIA, called Legacy of Ashes, right, and
there was plenty of FBI and CIA in book.
Speaker 5 (27:27):
I wrote about my favorite president, Richard Nixon.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
First, the Trump Nixon parallels seem really so striking. Explain
to us sort of the parallels between the two.
Speaker 5 (27:39):
Well, Trump is Nixon minus fifty points of IQ. He
is an inveterate liar, he is secretive and conspiratorial. But
Richard Nixon, bless his heart, had been vice president for
eight years and a senator and congressman before that and
had a fair amount of respect for the institutions of
(28:01):
national security like the CI and the FBI, until he didn't.
And the moment of truth with Nixon and the FBI
came in the summer of nineteen seventy. Nixon was convinced,
as Trump is today, that there is an enemy within
this country, and the enemy was the left and the
more liberal elements of the Democratic Party. Nixon was already
(28:24):
using the FBI and the CIA despy on emerics that
violated the CIA charter. The FBI does not have a chart.
It does whatever the Attorney General and the President Teltive do.
And what Nixon did was to call in the head
of the A, the head of the National Security Agency,
and the head of the FBI, who was of course
(28:44):
Jaedgar Hoover. And at that point Hoover had been running
the FBI for forty six.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Years, right, it's a very long time.
Speaker 5 (28:51):
And he basically said, I want you to spy more
on Americans. I want you to subvert through espionage and
sabotage the institutions of the left. I want you to
step up wire tapping, bugging, burglaries, black bag jobs, and
I want you to crush the left, and for the
first time in his life, Hooper said, no, he didn't
(29:12):
want to sign a document. He didn't want to put
his name to this plan because he was convinced that
the FBI would get caught and that his great rule
was don't embarrass the FBI. Every agent in the bureau
knew that. So what did Nixon do. He set up
his own bucket shop of retired CIA and retired FBI people,
(29:36):
and two years later they broke into the Democratic National
Committee headquarters at Watergate. The way Nixon fell was that
he then ordered the head of the CIA, Richard Helms,
a man I got to know quite well later, to
call off the FBI investigation of the break in on
grounds of national security. And that was the smoking Gum tape.
(29:57):
And that was how Nixon fell. The difference today, more
than fifty years later, is that cass Paatel will never
say no to Donald Trump. He will do anything Trump
tells him to do, no matter how illegal, immoral, or crazy.
Why do you say that, because he has a track
(30:19):
record of doing crazy things for Donald Trump, and I
will cite a few examples. So, in the last year
of Trump's presidency, to the horror of the Attorney General
Bill Barr. Trump tried to make Patel the deputy director
of the NBI, and Barr wrote in his memoir the
very idea of moving Patel into a role like this
(30:41):
showed a stocking detachment from reality on Trump's part, and
he vowed that the appointment would happen, and I quote
over my dead thought. So instead, Trump installed Patel as
the top assistant to his new Director of National Intelligence.
That's the bureaucracy that overseees the THEIA, the FBI, and
(31:04):
sixteen other American intelligence agencies. That National Intelligence Director was
John Radcliffe, his present nominee to run CIA, and what
Radcliffe and Patel set out to do, on orders from
Trump was to rans fact the tox secret files with
the CIA and other intelligence agencies for anything that might
fulfill Trump's desire to deny that he was Putin's chosen candidate,
(31:29):
anything that would undermine what Trump called the Russia hoax,
which was the incredibly well founded investigation of the FBI
into connections between teen Trump and team Puten and Patel
mounted an attack on THEIA, as you know, the headquarters
(31:49):
of the deep state conspiracy, and both men tried to
find fragments of raw intelligence in a flailing attempt to
score political points for the president's re election campaign. After
he lost the twenty twenty election, Trump fired the Secretary
of Defense and made Patel Chief of Staff at depending
on it affect the shadows Secretary of Defense. When that happened,
(32:12):
the CI director told the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
General Milly and I quote, we are on the way
to a reglink coup. She saw it before it was happening. Then,
in the final month of Trump's first term, he attempted
to install Patel at the top of the CIA, and
he planned to fire Chris Ray after decapitating the CIA. Haspell,
(32:35):
the CIA director got Win to this plot and let
Trump know that if she were going down, all the
leaders with the American intelligence community would go down with her.
A mass resignation and protest Trump back down to five
days later, he summoned his supporters to Washington.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Do you think this is a factocomplete? What do you
think senators could do? I mean, it seems like Patel
would be hoover ask I mean, do you think that
I'm being hyperbolic? What do you think?
Speaker 5 (33:06):
Well again, Jay Edgar Hoover minus fifty IQ points. Under Hoover,
the FBI took aim at the enemy within and on
orders from President Eisenhower, Kennedy Johnson, Nixon and their attorney general,
he conducted wardless wire taps, black bag jobs, political harassment
of everybody, from Martin Luther King to the anti war movement,
(33:28):
to journalists and to National Security Council stoffers. Under Nixon
who were suspected of leaking to the press, among the
principal members of the enemy with him, according to Patel
and Trump are the press. Is the left in so
far as there is such a thing in the United
States body politic today, it's people who oppose Trump, and
(33:49):
like Nixon and Hoover, Patel and Trump have an extensive
enemies list. Patel has published one on the question of
will the Senate confirm a man like Cash Battel or
equally crazy and dangerous people like Chelsea Gabbert for the
Director of the National Defense Pete Hedson for Secretary of Defense.
(34:10):
I think they will roll right over and do it.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
It strikes me that Pete Hegseth is not the same
as Cash Battel. Well, Pete Hegseth may have problems, and
he may very likely. Again, I don't want to diagnose anyone,
but he's clearly got a lot of real problems. Cash
Battell has a sort of plan that strikes me as
and the FBI is used against Americans when.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
It is at its worst. I mean, isn't that sort
of what's happening here?
Speaker 5 (34:42):
You know, you have to take Trump's and his people
at their word. Patel published last year in his book
Government Gangsters, the people he wanted to see investigated and
indicted his enemies list, and that list includes Joe Biden,
Kamala Harris, Hillary Quinton, John Brennan, former director of the CIA,
Merrick Garland, Bob Muller, General Mark Melly, and Chris Right Right.
(35:06):
The FBI does not have a charter limiting its legal powers.
The FBI does with the Attorney General and the President
tell it to do. And if, for example, the FBI
wants to launch an investigation against people Trump has publicly
charged with treason, a crime punishable with death, those targets
(35:30):
include Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the former CIA director
John Brenton. He accused them of spying on him, spying
on his campaign and I quote the biggest single political
crime in the history of our country. Interesting choice of words.
A political crime, thought crime. If you will you start
(35:51):
prosecuting people for their political beliefs, you're down the road
to dictatorship of far peace.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Yeah, I know what I know.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Oh and my grandfather's jailed by the FBI, Herbert.
Speaker 5 (36:03):
Yeah, yeah, Well your grandfather was persecuted for his writings,
Are I correct?
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Actually he was persecuted because it was brought up by
the House on American Activities for his refusal to name
the people who he was involved with in a fundraiser
for post Spanish Civil War orphans.
Speaker 5 (36:23):
Was he a card carrying member of the Communist Party.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Yes, he was, but that wasn't why he was I mean,
theoretically he was jailed that he was sent to jail
on contempt of Congress, But he was targeted because he
was a communist.
Speaker 5 (36:39):
All right, So what is the favorite thing that House
Republicans and some Senate Republicans liked to do. They like
to hold hearings for clips on Fox News. They and
Patel as a member of the incoming Fox News cabinet,
will gin up political theater. At a minimum are they
(36:59):
going to aren't arresting people for their political beliefs? Well,
I mean, let's hope not. But that is what Trump
and Patel have threatened to investigate, indict, and put in
prison people for their political beliefs. Now, of course, Trump
also said he was going to build a wall in
(37:19):
Mexico pay for it. So some of this may deep
blustering rhetoric. But people were right to be afraid of
this guy.
Speaker 1 (37:26):
Yeah, it's a real terrifying reality. So now, if you
could just talk us through what Cash Patel has at
his disposal, if he is able to become head of
the FBI, if.
Speaker 5 (37:40):
Cash Bateel is confirmed by the Senate, and if am
Bundy is confirmed as the Attorney General, they have at
their disposal thirty five thousand FBI agents and federal prosecutors
appointed by Trump because all the federal prosecutors in every
jurisdiction have to resign when the government changes hands to
(38:01):
go after their enemies to investigate. First of all, if
you are targeted by an FBI investigation, even if you
have done nothing wrong, you are in a world of pain.
You've got a lawyer up, You'll have to open up.
If there's a warrant against you, your computer, your telephone.
(38:25):
Just the harassment power alone, given the immense power of
the prosecutor under American law, is enough to destroy people's lives.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
Well, that was what happened to my grandfather and his people.
Speaker 5 (38:39):
Sure, and that's just the beginning. If they are indeed
helping on proving Trump's quaint that the President of the
United States, Barack Obama and as Vice President Joe Biden,
and the directors of the CIA and the FBI under
Obama illegally spied on him, which is, in Trump's words, treason,
(39:03):
they can not only rip apart those people's lives, but
they can rip apart the CIA and the FBI. You know,
the CIA is my wheelhouse. I have written a book
about the FBI. But people are going to be confronted
with a real moral choice. That is, the agents of
the FBI and the officers of the CIA, will I
(39:25):
obey an illegal order from the FBI director, attorney general
or the president. You know, things could get very weird
because the Supreme Court ruled in July that presidents can
commit crimes in office without fear of prosecution, and it
(39:45):
preemptively authorizes illegal searches and seizures and violation of the
Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Writing in dissent from
that decision, Justice Sotomayr wrote, quote a hypothetical president who
admits to having ordered the assassinations of his political rivals
(40:08):
or critics as a fair shot at getting immunity.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Right, that's the Seal Team six scenario. Right, Could a
president and hire Seal Team six to kill his political enemies?
Speaker 4 (40:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (40:19):
But if this president should choose to declare a political
rival guilty of treason and deploy a paramilitary group on
the CIA, from the FBI, from Seal Teams to assassinate
that rival, and direct the Attorney General to sign a
document saying this is cool, that death was necessary for
(40:40):
the securing of liberty. That would be an official act
for which the president is immut from presidentship. That's just
the fact.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
So, I mean, do we think there's a moment when
the Supreme Court, and again, I mean, I guess there's
no way to know what the Supreme Court will go
along with, right, because we've seen them go along with
quite a lot of staff.
Speaker 5 (40:59):
You know, you and me and everybody else we know
and all your listeners have been thinking all along, Well,
the courts will think they will not. Oh, the law
will state it will not. Okay, not now. And all
of this flows from the conspiratorial belief of Troupe and
Cash but Tel and the rest of the MAGA crowd
(41:21):
that there is a deep state. The deep state is
conspiracy of unelected soldiers and spies and diplomats and government
officials who are secretly pulling the strings of the United
States and usurping the power of the president. And they
have made no bones about attacking and dismantling the deep state,
(41:46):
which is in fact the state. And if they succeed,
even marginally, what they will create is a shallow state
in which institutions of government cannot perform their functions. They
will follow out the government of the United States, agency
by agency.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
That I think is the ultimate goal, but it is
just so scary.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Tim.
Speaker 5 (42:15):
You are more than well.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
No, no moment, Rick Wilson, Molly John Fast.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Who is your moment of fuckery?
Speaker 4 (42:27):
You know? My moment of fuckery this week is the
story of the Republican Congresswoman Kay Granger down in Texas.
And I want to say this first off, folks, I'm
not being facetious when I talk about this, but Kay
Granger has been in a memory care facility for some
time now, since July. Now, that is not in and
of itself something that is that is unexpected in America.
(42:49):
Many millions of Americans have as they grow older, they
have memory issues, they have Alzheimer's, they have they have
various forms of dementia, et cetera. And it is more
tragic than but the fact that we have had a
Republican Party dedicated to saying that Joe Biden is senile
and is broken and is a dottery old man who
(43:12):
knows nothing and is senile, blah blah blah, while you
have a member of Congress in a memory care facility
who was apparently trotted out for several votes that she
had no idea what she was voting on. It's kind
of uncool. I gotta be real here, It's kind of sick.
And I think that this is one of those things
where if you don't think term limits or should be
(43:33):
a thing, get your head examined. There is an upper
boundary I think that we should really be looking at
for service in the in federal offices, and this is
one of them. It is sad, it is tragic, but
it is real. And they lied about it. Her staff
lied about it. Look, this is the same thing was
happening with die Fi back in the day. Her staff
lied about it. It's unacceptable in my mind, but here
(43:56):
we are.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
The only thing I.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
Would say, I would just add is that Kay Granger
is not the only one who's doing stuff like this,
and Republicans do not have a lock on this, because
I know for sure that there are Democrats who nobody
has seen in the House. So the world that is
creating this is a big fucking problem. And it's a
(44:18):
really good case for term limits. It's a really good
case for not being allowed to miss votes. It's a
really good case for this is not how any of
this should work.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
That's it. Fuck them, Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:29):
Mollie, you and I both have older parents, and this
is a real thing. It's a sad thing that this
is something that has been for political advantage in a
tightly divided House of representatives. They've been keeping this ghost
in the situation that she's in. And I find it.
I think it's a moral Honestly, I really do. I
find it. I think it's a moral.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeah, it's really bad, but it's happening on both sides,
and there should be term limits and members should not
be allowed to trade stocks.
Speaker 4 (44:57):
Look honest to God. If Elon muscle to clean up
the processes in Congress, I could think of a dozen
other ways than being a diletant dipshit trying to rewrite
a cr You want to improve Congress, you want to
make it work better, okay, Go for non partisan redistricting,
you want to make it work better. Go for termal limits,
you want to make it work better. Go for actual
(45:18):
ethics reform. Those things would be I think great for
the country. But that's no fun. It's not truly enough,
and it doesn't cause enough people to get upset, and
it doesn't take cancer money away from kids. So you
know here we are, Rick Wilson, my John Fast. I
will see you on the flip side of a holiday.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 6 (46:00):
H
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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