American Presidents: Totalus Rankium - 45.2 Donald Trump

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

Part 2 of Trump and in this episode we leave his business career behind and say hello to his political career! So thats fun. Join us as we cover the election and the tumultuous first 2 years of his presidency! 

Welcome to Totalus Rankium. This week, Don't Take Trump Part 2. Hello and welcome to American Presidents Totalus Rankium. I am Jamie. And I am Rob, ranking all of the presidents from Washington to Biden. And we are on episode 45.2. It's Donald Trump. And we're in the meat of it, Jamie. Hello, Editing Rob here, jumping in straight away just to apologise for the audio quality in this episode. This is a cursed episode, obviously. Jamie's audio stopped working halfway through, and then when I went to edit, my audio deleted itself after five minutes, and I can't get it back.

Fortunately, we're very wise here at Totalus Rancum and we always record a backup, but in the backup I can't separate mine and Jamie's audio, so I can't do things like edit out History Dog and stuff like that, so sorry for the audio quality in this one. But don't worry, History Dog does quieten down after about five minutes. He's always very excited at the start. He loves history, what can we say? But hey, backups, they're good, aren't they? Anyway, I think I was talking about Donald Trump's meat or something. Yeah. Have fun.

We're in the meat of it, Jamie. In the meat of Trump. Any reflections from last episode since we recorded? Yeah. Terrible at business. Compulsive liar. Yeah. But he knew how and what to say in certain positions.

So he knew how to get away with things. Yeah. I mean, we kind of give him some credit in some areas. He was. knew how and what to say in certain positions so he knew how to get away with things yeah i mean to a point kind of give him some credit in some areas he was he he knows how to talk himself up he can yeah talk the talk and pretend he's walking the walk oh and fantastic decor as well oh his decor is second to none he'd love that compliment oh yeah i just won't say what category is second to none in but it is second to none right okay well um we've got a lot to get through today uh but i actually hit i wanted to get to the midterms and i did it jamie you'd be proud of the midterms got to the midterms wow i thought it's against the election cool oh no no no um so we we rush through some

stuff as i'm not going to go over again how we're not going to be able to cover everything. Everyone knows that. But we get to the midterms. But it's possibly by word count the longest episode yet. So let's just get through it. I think it'll be fine. Okay, so quick, a start. Just people cheering.

A crowd of cheering people. There you go. A crowd of cheering people. Start on a big crowd of cheering people there you go crowd of cheering people start on a big crowd of cheering people they're all wearing red hats they're all cheering lock her up they're shouting and then just keep panning around all over the place there's lots of people cheering shouting having a great time that's what's important jamie i think in politics people having fun yes and then You don't need substance. The camera swings round and

there's a man, a figure, a figure of a man, standing at the front and he suddenly holds up in his hand a sharpie and the whole crowd goes silent. And then the man leans towards the camera and does the Donald Trump signature on the

lens of the camera, Donald Trump Part 2. That's how we're starting today. Nice. Simple and effective. Did love a Sharpie. Sharpies are great. Yeah. Don't know why I'm talking about him in past tense.

That's wishful thinking. Yeah. Okay, we left Donald Trump as a failing upwards businessman slash TV host for a reality TV show. He currently has loads of businesses on the go, but nowhere near as big as his heights in the 80s. No. And now the idea of this episode is we kind of leave the business world of Trump behind us and we focus on the political career. So that's what we're doing.

So we're going to start. Do you actually do politics? No, not really. Until he very much did politics. But we'll see. We're going to start in 2010. So where we're starting, Trump by this point is a household name, thanks to his hit TV show, The Apprentice.

He also starts phoning into Fox News regularly at this point to talk about his views, because Donald Trump has views. Now, Fox News really liked this because Trump's ramblings were amusing and got viewers. He was good entertainment to have on. His opinions mostly aligned with the right-wing views of Fox, but were mostly to do with business and crime. Nothing much wider than that.

It was, we need to be more harsh on criminals and we need to stop taxing people. and we need to stop taxing people. Well, need to stop taxing me. Executing those three black teenagers in Central Park. Yeah, yeah, tough on crime. Yeah, exactly. Things like that. Just being tough.

Now, by this time, he had a number of people around him saying things like, you know what, Mr. Trump, you should get into politics. People like listening to the things you say. And Trump liked the idea because he liked the idea of people listening to what he had to say. So he started floating the idea around to some in the GOP. Very few took him seriously. But one high-up Republican named David Bossie heard him and decided to go and meet him. Let's see how serious this Trump fella is. And he was going to take a friend of his. And this friend was none other than Steve

Bannon. Oh, I know Steve. Good old Steve, eh? What an a**hole. Yeah. You people I dislike more than Trump. He is one of them. Anyway, at the time, Steve Bannon was mostly producing right-wing political

films, shall we call them. Like Birth of a Nation style kind of thing. It's propaganda. It's right-wing propaganda. That's what he's filming. Bannon, if you don't know, is ex-investment banker stock, which you might not know that about him because that's not how he presents himself, is it? He presents himself as a scruffy man of the people.

He has a very cultivated look, which is not neat and pristine. No suits. He wears like five jumpers, polo shirt things at a time, it's really weird but he is actually ex-investment bank stock he's rich, and three years earlier he had co-founded Breitbart

Breitbart, a so-called news channel for those who found Fox News just a bit too lefty you know it's a bit too wishy-wash for those who found Fox News just a bit too lefty. You know? Yeah. It's a bit too wishy-washy for me, this Fox News. Hold something harder.

Yeah, hold something harder. It's trouble. You get a good half of Fox News, and before you know it, it's not doing the same anymore, is it? Yeah, not getting the same hit. You're not. So then you end up listening to Breitbart. Oh, you just need something stronger.

Is it still around, Breit around? That's a good question. You don't hear of it as much. I think it faced a lot of legal troubles. I think Newsmax is now the new far-right, Burma-right from Fox News. But that's a very good question. I should look into it. Anyway, Bannon is a major player in the push

of what at the time was called the alt-right. Do you remember the alt-right? Yeah. Yeah, they were big when we were at uni, weren't they? Oh, that was fun. Essentially the new name of far-right extremism. Alt-right sounds new, like a computer. It sounds much better than fascist or white nationalist or Nazi.

Too many negative connotations with those. Too many. So, hey, we're right wing, but we're alternative. Hey. Alternative to what? The KKK? In what way? We don't wear hoods?

We just say it how it is. Yeah. So anyway, Bannon, big leader in that movement. Bannon and Bossy both go to Trump Tower to see whether this man is serious. And a short chat slash interview took place where Trump was shocked to learn that there was a record on whether he had voted in primaries before. Because Bossy came in and said, well, there's going to be a problem if you want to be a Republican is you'd never vote Republican. Trump said, yes, there's going to be a problem if you want to be a Republican, is you'd never vote Republican.

Trump said, yes, I do. I've always voted Republican. And there's no way you can tell because that's not records that are kept. And Bossy went, well, no, but we know whether you voted in a primary or not. We can't say who you voted for, but we know whether you voted. And you never vote in primaries. So you're clearly not interested in politics. Apart from one time when you voted for Rudy Giuliani and then Trump just went,

oh yeah, exactly. Rudy Giuliani. I voted for him. He was great. And then just changed the subject. Yeah. That was nice. Anyway, they then told him, well, another big problem you're going to have if you want to be a Republican running for high office is your views on abortion. That's going to be a problem. This really confused Trump, apparently. I don't have a view on abortion, is what he essentially said. It was then pointed out to him that he had gone on record several times saying he was pro-choice in the past. Trump simply replied, you tell me how to fix that. I'm, what do you call it? I'm pro-life.

Yeah. Although he did say fairly recently that he was more pro-choice wasn't he have i have i missed no no he has that's because roe v wade got overturned and some republicans did some crazy laws very recently that are so crazy that even the hardcore republicans are going oh that's a bit too far. So now you've got the likes of Trump saying, oh, no, no, when I say pro-life, what I mean is states' rights, and yeah, they're having to backpedal a lot. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make

is the guy clearly had no fixed opinions on these issues at all. He just wanted to be a big name. So Bannon was impressed with the showmanship. Really? Yeah, But he left the meeting knowing that Trump was just that. That was it. He was all show, no substance. In fact, I'll quote Bannon here, it was a waste of time, except for the fact that it was insanely entertaining. Now, we do not know what Trump's opinion was of this chat, but we can infer that he probably thought it went well. Because after that,

Trump started talking more and more about the possibility of running for president. Very few people took him seriously. Fewer, like across the country, even knew he was thinking about running for president. It just was not. Remember, this isn't 2016, the run-up to 2016. We're in 2010 here. We're talking run-up to the 2012 election. Obama president two years at this point. Yeah, exactly. So trying to go against Obama for the second term is what we're talking about here. Trump technically was talking about it,

but he was not a big name. But then he caught onto a conspiracy theory that really took his fancy. The birther movement. It's impossible to pinpoint exactly where the birther movement comes from. The conspiracy theory starts on the internet somewhere in chat rooms where some racist chat rooms that just assume that any black man who was successful clearly was not born in the usa

i can only assume that's where it starts we do know that it was definitely up and running as a conspiracy theory in earnest in 2008 when Obama was campaigning. All right. That actually predates him becoming the president. So this wasn't made up by Trump. He wasn't even one of the first ones to be talking about it. But it is still very French. No serious people are talking about the Bertha movement.

No news company would go near it. This is like 8chan or 4chan or 2chan or whatever. Yeah, one of the chans. One of the chans. So, yeah, it's just not a big thing. However, as Obama became president and an increasingly desperate right-wing media attempted to find dirt on the guy,

they soon resorted to the Bertha movement. They couldn't find anything. They kept opening closets looking for skeletons, and there was nothing there. Nothing at all. As we've covered, the guy was fairly squeaky clean. So, eventually eventually they just gave in to, well, let's just make stuff up. Newt Gingrich, the wonderful human being that he is, appeared on Fox News while they were speculating if the birth certificate that was released during the campaign was fake. Obama had released a short form of his

birth certificate straight away. Gingrich said that Obama's foreign policy could only be understood by Kenyan anti-colonial behaviour. Bloody hell. Yes. And this is on national TV. This is Fox News, yes. Yeah. Anyway, some others of the GOP were hesitant about jumping into a conspiracy theory,

but some of them get on board, slowly start talking about it. Knowing that the obvious lie could backfire at any point, though, most didn't get involved. Because they can just do this thing of, oh, we're just asking questions. Just asking questions. What if? What if someone was born not in the United States? Yeah. What if they'd be president? What if's just asking questions. Open mind. Anyway, by this point, Trump had heard of the conspiracy theory and started going all in on it. He started appearing on all the major news channels. He didn't stick to Fox News, and this is the important thing.

ABC, NBC, all of them, CNN. And he was spreading the idea that Obama was not American. We covered this in Obama's episode, so I'm not going to spend much more time on this, going into Obama releasing the long-form birth certificate, etc, etc. The important thing for this episode is to know that Trump is furious at Obama for being able to prove that he was a United States citizen, and then openly mocking him in public in front of a crowd of people he wanted to respect him. What I didn't cover about that night in the press dinner was that a late-night comedian, Seth Meyers, also got up and ripped into Trump. I'll quote Seth Meyers here.

Donald Trump has been saying he'll run for president as a Republican, which is surprising since I assumed he was just running as a joke. Yeah. Trump managed to put on a vaguely brave face when Obama was ripping into him. He did not in any way when Seth Meyers was. Trump has despised the late night hosts ever since this point.

I really hated them. Anyway, his resolve to run for president seemed to weaken after this night of being attacked. He didn't come out of it immediately going, well, if that's it, then I'm running for president, which is what I kind of assumed. But when I looked into it, you realize that's not the story that's there because it's two weeks after this dinner. He announced that he was no longer going to run in 2012. Yeah, so actually this knocked him back a bit. However, it wasn't long

before he was thinking about it again. And by this point, he hated Obama with a passion and spoke at CPAC, so the conservative conference place, in 2013. Spoke there, ripping into Obama, essentially. Those in the GOP suggested to him that, why don't you run for governor of New York? You could do that. That's a sensible step. And then maybe you could go for president afterwards. Trump wasn't interested. It was president or nothing.

After all, a man with his qualifications, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, instead, over the next couple of years, Trump became convinced that he could beat all the politicians at their own game. And in 2015, he comes down the escalator in Trump Tower and announced, and I quote, the American dream is dead.

Not the most rousing speech. There's more, don't worry. But if I get elected president, I will make America great again. Yeah. Now, make America great again is a phrase used in the past by reagan if you remember we mentioned that he thought about it politicians on both sides have actually used make america great again but it generally has been seen as part of the isolationist movement on the right trump himself has you had used it a couple of times before this point not always exactly worded

that way variations of make make America better and stuff like that. But this is where it solidifies. This is a phrase that becomes synonymous with him and his movement. Soon enough, make America great again is being sold on red baseball caps. And the red baseball caps become synonymous with the Trump movement also, to the point where a simple red baseball cap made a political statement. From a distance, people would walk down the street. If you saw a red baseball cap,

you'd be looking to see exactly what was written on there to see what kind of political thoughts they had. Now, obviously, everyone listening to this knows this, but if anyone in the future has found this podcast and is wondering what it was like, it's a bit weird that this baseball cap became such a symbol. But it did. I think Bart Simpson wears a red baseball cap as well.

The Simpsons. They predicted everything. They didn't. Although they did have Trump coming down the escalator. So I'll give them that. But they did not predict everything. Anyway, back to the speech. He's in Trump Tower.

He's given the speech. The crowd in the lobby area of Trump towers can you picture them yeah he's given a speech how many people do you think his his family slightly more about 50 people oh oh wow yeah i thought it was way more than that it seemed like hundreds no no this initial speech saying i'm running for president about 50 people that one that famous one him coming down the escalator you don't see the crowd there's hardly anyone there because why would there be apparently most of those 50 people were people who walked in through the doors because they were happy to be passing and saw something was happening no one gave a bleep that donald trump was announcing that he was running for president because everyone thought it was a bit

of a joke that he was running yeah okay he did not have supporters at this point he just he just didn't however trump being trump and in some ways being very clever got around the fact that there was only 50 people there by saying into the cameras that were facing him and i quote wow whoa there's some group of people, thousands. I mean, that would break a fire code in itself. There you go. So he just lies about the crowd, hopes the cameras don't turn around. They don't.

And when it's on the newsletter, everyone hears that thousands of people turned up. We'll see if lying about crowd sizes continues. Yeah. Shall we? I don't know. I can't think of a situation like that i would apply yeah anyway trump and his team then go into campaign mode for the primaries we simply don't have time to go into the primaries in a huge amount of detail which is a shame because it is fascinating highlights though the republican party is in disarray at this point the far right of the

party had been with some bumps growing in power more and more since the reagan years and the moderates were fighting for their survival. And with all the infighting, there was no obvious candidate in 2016. So in the end, 17 candidates were announced, all of whom had like a half-decent chance. It's the widest field in... I don't know if it's actually the biggest in history, I didn't check, but it's got to be one of the biggest.

It's a hugely wide field of people. There were a few Tea Party candidates, so far-right candidates, such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Opposing this were people like moderates, such as Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush crashed and burnt when he begged the crowd to

clap for him after he said something. Oh, I didn't know that that's really sad oh sorry i thought that was so famous you'd know it instantly there's there's a moment where he's delivering a talk he sat on the sofa with someone interviewing him and there's a crowd and he says something like something to do with hope and positive in the future something he wants to bring in and there's just quiet and he turns to the audience and says please clap and it was meant in a kind of oh come on come on, come on, you can clap that. But he didn't come across that way.

He came across as, please clap me. I just want to be clapped. It tanked. Yeah, it was it. It was all over for him. He then was, I can only assume, fuming after Trump did all his stuff. And everyone was just like, yeah, that's fine. Yeah.

Yeah. You can grab whoever by the what and it's absolutely fine for Trump. Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. You can grab whoever by the what and it's absolutely fine for Trump. Yeah.

Anyway, Trump got a lot of press, as he was, to put it bluntly, very amusing. Very few people thought he had a hope in hell. He was the joke candidate, but he could put on a show and he ignored all the rules of politics. That was entertaining. He viciously attacked his opponents personally. Yeah. Came up with nicknames for them. Said things that really should not be said about people.

He stoked racial fears openly. There were no dog whistles here. He was just saying things like, yes, the Mexicans are coming to rape you. Yeah. He seemed to have no clear political understanding or principles, but he put on a show. However, due to the fact that a lot of Republican voters were despairing of their own party by this point, someone coming along and telling the politicians in that party that they were useless, and then telling the voters of that party that they would fix all the country's problems very easily. I've got a plan. I'm not going to tell it to you now, but I've got a plan and I know how to fix it. It was a clear, simple message. And a lot of voters thought,

actually, this appeals to me. I mean, no one likes Ted Cruz. Who likes Jeb Bush? These are not popular politicians in any wing. They're the only politicians they've got. So it was a party who were clamouring for a big personality, and Trump started to fit that mould. Well, he made his own mould. He didn't fit one at all. Well, yeah, it's a very good point. He made a mould and people started flocking to it. He started to figure out what was working for him, so he gives increasingly angry speeches. And he soon realised that addressing immigration was what got the crowd worked up. This issue seemed to resonate with the crowds so much that he lent into it by stating that Mexico were, like I say,

sending their rapists and drug dealers to the United States. Now, according to one advisor to Trump at the time, the idea to build a wall actually came from the fact that Trump, a New Yorker who didn't really actually care about immigration that much, would often forget to mention it in his speeches to begin with. It just wasn't at the forefront of his mind to talk about taxes and crime a lot, because that's what he cared about. So in order to remind him to talk about something, remember, he didn't use teleprompters. He doesn't stick to the script. So in order to remind him to talk about immigration, they gave him a small, quick stock phrase to say.

And then he'd say it, and it would remind him to do the rest. A verbal cue. Yeah. And that was, I will build a wall. So he had no idea what he was saying to start with. He went, oh, yeah, build wall, yes, yes. Well, it's incredibly simple. It's such a simple idea that anyone can understand it immediately.

Anyone can. Ignore the fact that it obviously won't work. No. If you think about it for more than two seconds, you can't build a wall all across the southern border of America. Nope. For various reasons. It's not going to work.

Nope. But it didn't matter. It was something simple that Trump could remember. It helped him remember his speech. And when he said it, the crowd got it immediately. It sounds good, and if there's a politician there, or someone who's saying he's not a politician, but doing

a politician's job, saying that it is easy, well, okay, let's believe him that it's easy. Plus, it links to his construction past. He's a builder, isn't he? Wow't he so that's good yeah yeah it was a hit the crowds at his rallies loved it they started chanting it and after this trump was definitely going to bring it up every single time he loves a chance does trump yeah he does he does so when asked where the money would come from from other people running in the republican party this is my favorite bit it's like well okay it's just what are the many reasons why it won't work trump where

are you going to get the money to pay for this impossible wall that you want to build well it's fine trump had an answer mexico we're going to pay for it yeah i mean just such a brazen obvious lie yeah but because it was such a ridiculous lie a lot of people either chose to take it as a joke so therefore it's not trump not knowing what he's talking about it's clearly a joke or chose to suspend belief in reality and think yes that actually could happen so yeah so he just lent into the lie. We're going to build a wall and Mexico, for some reason, are going to pay for it. Yeah.

If you keep saying the same lie bigger and louder each time, people will believe it. And because it was such a nonsense lie, wow, it got airplay. You see what Trump, the funny candidate, is saying. Oh, look at this. But rather than it creating doubts in his increasing number of followers,

it actually was celebrated because this is what they wanted to hear. Big wall and we don't have to pay any money towards it. That sounds good, doesn't it? Trump goes from being the joke to being one of the forerunners quite quickly. And a lot of nervous people in the Republican Party start looking at each other and are kind of, is this really happening? We have spent all our careers building up to this point. We have spent so much money getting our policies perfect to look like the perfect Republican candidates, and then here's this guy just making stuff up, but it's working.

So a lot of the other candidates start to band together to criticise Trump, especially the fact that violence quite often was erupting at Trump's rallies. They weren't necessarily fun, happy crowds. There was a lot of anger in the speeches and a lot of people were getting worked up. Anyway, in May, he won Indiana. And I've skipped a lot there, but this makes it clear that he was going to get the nomination to the utter despair of everyone else, who had very publicly talked about how utterly useless he was, saying things like, if Trump gets elected, we will be destroyed as a party and we will deserve it.

That's Lindsey Graham, by the way. Oh, really? Yeah. And various other comments very similar to that from pretty much everyone high up in the Republican Party. They all realised they now need to get behind this guy. Some desperate backpedalling here. A lot of desperate backpedalling.

When I called him an idiot, what I meant was that Hillary is an idiot. Lock her up. Is that what he says? Lock her up. Yes, lock her up. Talking of Hillary Clinton, guess who Trump is up against? Hillary. Yeah.

Oh, sorry, just to finish up that last bit. Yeah, so the republican party are worried about trump but they are hoping that they can mold him and get him to be doing the right thing for the party okay we're gonna it's he's a popular populist but it's fine we're still a strong party he'll be the puppet on the throne and we will control things. Yes, of course. Think the Republican Party. Yes. Yeah. Anyway, like you say, Hillary Clinton, that's who he is up against, the senator and the wife of the ex-president. Trump was still seen by many of the country as a no-hoper of a candidate. Just because he won the primaries didn't mean the wider country thought he had a good chance.

Clinton was generally seen as the obvious winner here. She, not only you've got the obvious ex-wife of a president, but far more important than that, she had a very good career, as strong as her husband's in her own right. Apart from being president, you can argue even stronger. She knew her stuff. She was a career politician. She knows how to run a country. So most people thought, well, show-in for her she's finally got it she lost to obama but she's finally got her day in the sun however i thought that don't be robbed we all thought a lot of people thought that um however there's a problem here with that thinking the democrats had become quite fractious just like the republicans had many progressives in the party did not want a return to the more centralist

Clinton. Obama had meant to be the big hope, moving the party to the left. And it turned out, actually, he was far more centralist than most had hoped him to be. I mean, he wasn't bad in most Democrats' eyes, but a lot of progressive people wanted more from him, and he didn't really show it. So a lot of Democrats saw a return of a Clinton as a moving back to the centre. They didn't like it. So support had really risen behind a genuine left-wing politician. Don't get many of them, do you, in American politics? We've had a couple of them. But yes, we have Bernie Sanders sanders someone with what in this

country you would consider left-wing views now bernie sanders would be in the labor party you can't think of many politicians in america who would be so yeah so the progressives in the democrat party bernie sanders all the way we're gonna we're gonna finally get a left-wing government it's interesting that you mentioned this a lot that america leans far more to the right than the left like our labour party is central with its toe in the left yeah maybe a foot maybe a whole foot yeah it kind of depends where it's swinging but yeah our labour party's left of center just left yeah our tory party usually is right of center until the last decade where it's gone off the rails um Yeah, whereas that's not the case in America. The Democrats are right of centre and the GOP are over the horizon.

Yeah, cut a long story short here with Bernie Sanders. The Clinton campaign and the DNC as a whole worked very hard and rough to knock Sanders out. It was not a clean fight. There was a lot of accusations from both sides of cheating, of meddling in things. A lot of people ended up very angry at Clinton. So angry that a lot of Democrats swore never to vote for her. And many of them thought, you know what, a single term of a novelty TV star president would shake up the Democrats. Maybe they'll listen to us next time.

So some even went over to Trump. Wow. Oh. Shake things up. Break it. What's the idiotic term that people like to call themselves nowadays? People like Musk like to call themselves it.

They just mess things up. Disruptor. That's it. They just break things and then grin like a small toddler that was fun look i've broken something i must be clever yeah that's what they did they broke things and hoped that they'd be able to rebuild it better is the plan uh let's see if that works i feel like my own personal political opinions might be coming out a little bit more than they usually do in this episode. No, not so often. I'll try my best to rein that back in.

I might edit some of that out. Right, anyway. So, yeah, despite this blow from the faction, the left faction of the Democrats, Clinton is still by far the favourite. She really is. Yeah. And as the Trump campaign went on, they start to panic.

Trump was falling massively behind in the polls, and it looked like he was going to go down in an historic landslide defeat. No one in his team knew how to run a campaign, and it showed. The campaign was a mess. Personal upheaval was constant. Trump regularly grew angry with his staff and just fired them, just replacing them with people he knew but were not experienced. Eventually, Steve Bannon was contacted by a couple of very wealthy GOP donors. Shady deals, we're back to smoky rooms again here. Some very, very wealthy GOP donors contacted Steve Bannon and said, can you help out here? The Trump campaign is a joke. We need someone to go in and sort it out. Now, Bannon had

no campaign experience whatsoever, but he was the kind of person who could get things done. So he decided he would go in and he went in and he shook things up. Most of Trump's advisors, such as Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, Kellyanne Conway, they were all telling Oh, I forgot about Kellyanne Conway. Oh yeah, yeah, she's here. They kept telling Trump that he needed to be more presidential. Stop going off script. We're trying to get you to seem like a president.

Bannon came in and said the opposite. Stop trying to be a politician. People like you because you're not a politician. He's not wrong. He's not wrong. As you'll see, Bannon knew what he was talking about in terms of winning an election here. Christie found this infuriating.

He accused Bannon of bringing out the worst in Trump. Bannon essentially responded, deal with it. You don't like it? Just stop being an advisor. Anyway, Trump increasingly follows Bannon's advice. Up the rhetoric. Be more controversial. Stoke more racial fears.

Just do what you like doing and do it more. Go harder. And then, with a month to go, a tape was leaked to the press where Trump was joking about how he used to sexually assault young women. I don't think he was joking. Here's the quote. The bleep ready. ready when you are a star they let you do it you can do anything grab them by the yeah yeah it was a bombshell just point out there have been other bombshells that i am just just gonna skim over i mean he full-on mocked a disabled author at one point he did all sorts there's too much to talk about but this was the big bombshell trump had been making ground in the polls ever since he started to lean into how much he was not a politician.

It was working for him, but he was still losing. And pretty much everyone in the country assumed that this was the end of Trump. It was a very depressing thing to watch from SNL at the time, Saturday Night Live, where Lin-Manuel Miranda was hosting. And he's singing one of his songs, and he walks past a picture of Trump and starts singing the bit from his song, You're Never Going to Be President Now. Turned out that was wrong.

Anyway. Yeah, everyone assumes this is going to end him. You don't come back from that. They've just said how he goes around sexually assaulting young women. Trump's campaign offices were flooded with donors pulling their support. Angry high-up members of the GOP let it be known it's over. Trump's chief advisors all told him, in no uncertain terms, he is finished. You now need to drop out and give the race to Mike Pence. Now, literally, they're in an office with his closest advisors here. There's

only one person who tells Trump that he could beat it, and that's Steve Bannon. Of course. He said, 100% you can beat this. It's just locker room talk. All men talk like that. Well, interestingly, Trump actually grew angry at Bannon at this point, saying, you're just saying what you think I want to hear. Tell it to me straight. And then Steve Bannon doubled down. No, you can definitely beat it. That's very self-aware for Trump. Maybe. Hard to get a judge on it. That's very self-aware for Trump. Maybe. Hard to get a judge on Trump.

You never really see what he's like. So in the end, Trump decides he is going to try and beat it against all advice. So they hold a meeting. And in the meeting, they try and think about damage limitation, but nothing seems good enough. Trump released a statement saying that it was a long time ago and he pledged to be a better man and that Bill Clinton had done a lot worse, which, to be fair...

Yeah. But it's hardly an apology. Well, it technically was. He did say he was sorry for saying it, but it's not a great apology. It didn't seem enough. Maybe he should give an interview. So an interview was set up with ABC, but then Trump decided against it. He didn't want to go and start

apologising. It made him look weak. Never, ever admit a mistake. This is Trump philosophy, and it always has been. So I'm not doing an interview. Kellyanne Conway was hugely annoyed by this because she was using up personal favours to get an interview. And then he just kept going, oh, well, now he set it up. I'm not doing it. Trump then tweeted out, I quote, I will never drop out the race, I will never let my supporters down, MAGA. And then, on a whim, he just decided to go outside of Trump Tower and repeated the same message. The next day...

Turned into an empty street and I was there just shouting at the top of his voice. Well, no, because now there were crowds, because he is now the nominee and people are turning up outside Trump Tower now, so he says it to the crowds. The next day, Rudy Giuliani. Oh, good old Giuliani. Ex-Mayor of New York. He was America's Mayor during

9-11. He was. People loved him. Hero he was. He could have died a hero. Anyway, ex-Mayor of New York City. And at this point, he was one of Trump's chief advisors. But he is the only one who went out to defend Trump on the news channels the next day. No one else wanted to touch it. So Giuliani goes to every single news station and does interview after interview,

where he is verbally beaten up all day. after interview, where he is verbally beaten up all day. He then, very disheveled and very tired, gets back to the campaign headquarters, where Trump started calling him names. I'll quote here, Rudy, you are a baby. I've never seen a worse defense in my life. They took your diaper off there. When are you going to be a man? Yeah, a stunned Giuliani sat in silence as Steve Bannon tried to defend Giuliani to Trump, saying, look, he's the only guy who went out to bat for you. No one else did, so maybe cut him some slack. Trump would hear nothing of it, calling Giuliani weak again. He did not like what he saw on TV.

Anyway, Trump, he's refusing to back down on the remarks. It is, as you say, locker room talk. That was the line. You know, that's what we all say. Have you been in a locker room, Jamie? Not since... But you know what they're like, don't you? Yeah, yeah, just awkward and quiet and getting changed.

You're also a man, aren't you? How many times have you been joking about committing sexual assault on people? Does it happen often? It was ridiculous. I, this was their defence. Locker room talk was their defence. Everyone does it.

And what frustrates me is that the reporters go around to the Trump rallies and women would say, yeah, all men say that kind of thing. It's what happens. Yeah. No. Well, this is the thing thing the all men do it thing works on men who do do it and they go yes all men do so yeah anyway trump refusing to back down to many people's surprise had very little effect on the polls and this was a huge moment in politics

because this rips up the rulebook. Yeah. When a scandal like this happens, you resign. You've got to resign because you're going to tank. So to save face, you resign. Trump didn't resign and he was fine. I mean, he was still losing, but he was still losing by the same amount as he was losing before. It didn't seem to hurt him.

Anyway, the campaign continues. A lot could be said for how the Democrats mess up this campaign, by the way, but that's all in hindsight. They are leading and they think they're doing an okay job. You can say in hindsight, Clinton should have been going to certain states, et cetera, et cetera. They should not have been as complacent. But the fact is that election day comes along and the exit polls give Clinton an 85% chance of winning, which is about what everyone has been saying all along. However, this is where people's understandings of probability really falls down because let's face it, most people see an 85% chance of winning as a 100% chance of winning. I've talked to loads of people since Trump won

the 2016 election who have said, how did he win? Because I thought he wasn't supposed to win. And I say, yes, it was unlikely he'd win. And they say, but he won. Yes, he won. It was still unlikely he would win. You can still win when it's unlikely, but you can win. Yeah. If you have a 15% chance of winning, it means you can win.

Yeah. I beat you once on Mario Kart. Once. Don't put yourself down, Jamie. We were both quite good at Mario Kart when we were at uni. Yeah, but you were far too pretty. You were always better. I remember once I beat you and I was like,

yes, that's my child, I never played you again. And also, I think it says something about our friendship, Jamie, is the fact that we always played double dash and we always played as a team. Yeah, because I was so scared. We never really played against each other. It's teamwork. It's teamwork. Oh, good days. We should do that again. We never really played against each other. It's teamwork. It's teamwork.

Oh, good days. Anyway. We should do that again. We should. Let's do that again. Anyway, the night goes on. Clinton's clearly going to win. It became clear, however, quite quickly,

that the pre-election polls yet again and the exit polls yet again were way off. This is something that was becoming increasingly common in u.s politics and is still happening to this day they've not seemed to be able to fix it the polls surprising because ours uk one seemed quite accurate the exit polls anyway yeah we we our polls generally get it pretty close in this country and they're still fairly good in this country the last couple of decades in the United States, the polls have been all over the place,

and yet a lot of stock is still really taken in them. So anyway, Obama phones Clinton. Obama's still president at this point, and he realizes it's his job as president to phone Clinton to tell her the country cannot afford another uncertain election. We can't have another one. And it looks like you're going to lose this. So you need to concede quickly. I know it's a big shock, but do not waste time because we cannot have another Bush gore. I think that's a good

decision. Yeah. So Clinton did her duty. She phoned up Trump and she conceded. And pretty much to the amazement of the whole world, Trump wins the election. Yeah. Yeah. I remember waking up that day. Me too. I couldn't. Yeah. Very surreal. I looked at my phone and thought, no, no, surely not. Yeah. Yeah. When I said I spot the news, what? It was right on the back of the Brexit vote as well, which was obviously going to go one way and went another. It was an interesting time, 2016. And the year of death.

All the celebrities had died that year as well. Prince, David Bowie. It's where everything started to go wrong, Jamie. It was. Yeah, anyway. Harry Pratchett. Doesn't go wrong for everyone. That's 2015, wasn't he?

Was he 15? Yeah, yeah. He went first. And then that's when everything went bad. You're absolutely right. Anyway, Trump goes on to give his victory speech. We're talking about all this doom and gloom, Jamie. It's not doom and gloom for Trump.

He's cock-a-hoop. He's won. Let me quote him. Now it's time for Americans to bind the wounds of division. I pledge to every citizen. Jamie, stop laughing. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans.

We will, Jamie, keep listening. We will seek common ground, not hostility, partnership, not conflict. I was amazed when I found that Trump quote. It's not many times where it's so, so obvious that someone else forced him to read something that sounded presidential, but he did. I mean, anyone could have said that.

Lincoln could have said it. Obama could have said it. JFK could have said it. They probably did. It's copy and paste. The thing is set over. Could have been anyone. So there you go.

Trump's got his message of unity, peace and harmony. That's nice, isn't it? Anyway, soon after this, however, it becomes clear to the Trump team that they now needed to put a governing administration together. How the hell do we do that? Was pretty much the response. There's no experience in this team. They are not politicians.

This is all new to them and they don't really know what to do apparently there was a lot of feeling of nerves and worry that they had bitten off more than they could chew oh really yeah now fortunately there were lots of people in the gop who were going we'll help you thinking we'll shape you okay we didn't want you but at least we'll be able to control you because you guys don't know what you're doing. And we're the GOP machine. And that's one thing to Trump's credit. He is good at being told what to do.

Yes, he follows orders very well. Anyway, Steve Bannon and Rince Priebus soon come out as the two men who are actually putting the team together. Bannon was given a new job made up especially for him, called chief strategist, and Priebus was made the chief of staff. These are the two people who are going to be shaping the administration. So the cabinet was soon made up of a mixture of people.

There were people that Trump knew personally and wanted to give a job to because he trusted them. They were usually family members or long-term friends friends, or I say friends, acquaintances. And then there were members of the establishment GOP who were owed a couple of favours and were getting jobs in return for helping organise things. Meanwhile, there were reports coming out of the media that the CIA had been sitting on information that the Russians had been interfering with the election. Now, this is a long and murky and convoluted story, and we certainly don't have time to give it enough space to do it any justice whatsoever. This could be a whole series all on its own.

Yeah. So forgive me, there is a lot of detail missing here. But to sum up, and to use some knowledge later gained, yes, the Russians did interfere with the election. No, it is not clear to what extent, but we do know they were not flipping votes or anything. It's more subtle than that. So online bots and things like that. Online bots, financial aid to certain people, online targeted movements to undermine the faith in the election process as a whole. In other words, Russia were not trying to get Trump to win.

They were trying to get everyone in the United States angry at their political system. Interesting. Yeah. Well, there was a report in the UK about Brexit as well, wasn't there, for a similar thing? They used exactly the same. That's a whole Cambridge Analytica thing.

You go into that, it's a murky, horrible hole, and it's scary how much illegal stuff was done. And yes, it has done a lot of damage. And it would appear never going to be resolved or looked at. Wonderful, yeah. Wonderful. Anyway. Moving on.

Moving on. The CIA had sat on this information because they did not want to be accused of interfering with an election. Obama had been informed of this and he agreed, let's sit on it. Let's not tell anyone about it. The reason was Clinton was going to win. If we come out and say, oh, the Russians are trying to make it easier for Trump to win, it looks like we're trying to get Clinton to win. We don't need to do that. Clinton's going to win anyway. We'll sit on it and we'll work it out afterwards. But now the election was over and Trump had won and it all came out anyway. Trump saw this and did not like it at all because he saw it as devaluing his win. So he discounted it immediately.

They tried to inform him, no, this is interfering with American democracy, but he only heard, you didn't win properly, the Russians helped you. So he'd just ignore it. Shortly after this, the FBI director, James Comey, arrived to meet with Trump with various other officials for the president-elect. But the reason why I'm singling out James Comey, is because he had some information that was sensitive. The FBI, Mr President, he said, in a room with just Trump, has multiple credible sources that the Kremlin have a video of you performing, shall we say, lewd acts with sex workers in a Moscow hotel room.

I remember this story. Yeah. And it's hilarious. Well, Trump was very angry and asked if he seemed like the kind of man who needed to pay for sex. Amazingly, Comey didn't say yes. Sure, your wealth is enough. Yeah. Yeah, this is the whole pee-pee tape thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Which Trump has later come out and said it can't possibly be true because i'm a germaphobe uh which well yeah yeah you know out of all his denials i think that's possibly the most credible um it's like the david cabron pig penis story isn't it ah yeah but that definitely did happen that's true yes yes it just wasn't a sexual act it was a initiation prank anyway tommy assured trump that we're not investigating you i just need to you to know that we have been told this and it's not right for you

not to know and then he left it at that trump not happy the head of the fbi's just come in and said we have incriminating evidence against you but we're not investigating. Honest. Now that sounds like blackmail in Trump's mind. To be honest, it kind of sounds like blackmail. Yeah. It really does. We've seen heads of FBI and CIA go to presidents before and just say, by the way, we know things.

Anyway, the FBI were investigating things. They were investigating several links between people close to Trump and several important Russians. Now, this was based on credible evidence. There were connections between Trump's team and high-up Russian people.

But the hotel room stuff, the whole PP tape stuff, was very shaky evidence. Not the kind of thing that would ever be followed through. And also, none of this has come up since. Who knows if it is true? We don't know at this time. To be honest, I'm not sure it is.

I think we would have heard more about it since. But at this time, that was what was going on. And Trump is furious with Comey and for the FBI bringing it up, either because he knows that it's all made up or he knows it's true and he's seeing it as blackmail. Trump is angry with Comey and the FBI, is the point I'm trying to make.

Anyway, on the 20th of January, 2017, Trump is sworn into office as the 45th President of the United States. Hurrah. Hurrah. I remember watching that in my classroom. I was in the pub. I obviously shot out of work that day. I remember leaving work it was a friday that was was it friday must have been because i went to the pub after work yeah or

maybe we split up on a thursday but yeah after work drinks left immediately after the children left which is very rare and went to the pub and um sat down and there was Trump giving a speech. And I was sat there open-mouthed, I think. Yeah. It was a short speech. It's only 16 minutes long. It's one of the shortest ones in American history. It was written by Steve Bannon. It keeps coming up.

But there's also Stephen Miller. Oh, I know that name. Yeah. If you want to look him up, can you picture him? No. Just Google vampire. Sorry, I mean Stephen Miller. With a V or a PH.

Steve Miller. V, go for a V. Steve Miller. Trump aid, if you can't find him. American musician. No, no, not him. No. Trump advisor.

Put that in as well. Trump. Political advisor. Here we go. Yeah. Oh, wow, yeah. I No. Trump advisor. Put that in as well. Trump. Political advisor. Here we go. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's what you mean.

He is a vampire. There's no way he's not a vampire. No. And he's not hiding it either, which is interesting. No, no. He's got the widow's peak and everything. He is a man of the night. He's the same age as you.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Being a vampire ages you. Yeah. Miller's an interesting character. He is as racist as they come, and he does not hide it. He, yeah. I don't have time to talk about Miller. In fact, I'd rather not. Anyway, he helped write this speech, along with Steve Bannon.

It was bleak and dark in tone. It referred to American carnage. It referenced rising crime and abandoned factories, but offered little to inspire hope afterwards. It wasn't like, everything's awful, but don't worry, now we will rise. It was pretty much everything's awful. And that's it.

I remember that. He used the word strength quite a lot. Yes, power. Typical words he likes. George W., after hearing the speech, succinctly described the speech as, and I quote, some weird sh**.

Trump has done Bush so many favours. Bush comes across as so sane. I think even Andrew Jackson at this point is going yeah um not him but perhaps more bizarre than the speech the inauguration was remembered afterwards for its crowd size trump as i've mentioned at the end of last episode is obsessed with viewing figures and crowd sizes he had announced beforehand that his inauguration would have the largest crowd in the history of the United States. This is typical Trump rhetoric.

Everything is superlative. It's got to be the biggest, got to be the best. So it's going to be the biggest crowd in history. However, on the day, the crowd size was noticeably smaller than it had been for Obama. Like, we're talking between a third and a half the size. We're not talking a bit smaller. We are talking a lot smaller.

Obviously smaller. There were pictures, there was video footage, there's everything you need. It is very, very obvious to any sentient human being that this crowd was smaller than the last crowd. Yeah. Fact. Yeah.

Trump was angered by this and did what he usually did, which was lie. However, he's the president now, so he's going to do some delegation. Instead of him lying personally, he sent his press secretary, Sean Spicer. Do you remember Sean Spicer? Oh, Sean Spicer, yeah. Yeah. He sent Sean Spicer out to go and give a press conference to put the record straight. And Sean Spicer said, and I quote,

it was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe. I can imagine around the globe, perhaps. Perhaps, yes, yes. But he says in person. An incredulous media spent a few days confused how such an obvious lie was being pushed. What do we do? How do we report this?

This is so obviously a lie. How do we report the lie? We can't call the president a liar. That's not what you do, is it? So the press really struggled. And I remember this moment very clearly. In fact, I think if you were to ask me to list all the moments in Trump's presidency, this is in the top three, if not number one, which might surprise some people, because this is the moment where I realised just how much trouble the United States

was in. It's when I got a real sinking feeling, because if Trump was going to lie about this, then the next four years were going to be very hard. Incidentally, Trump was very angry at Sean Spicer after this, because he watched the news footage of Spicer claiming that the crowd was the biggest ever, next to photos showing that it was an obvious lie. And Trump was angry that it was obvious someone was lying. Now, Trump lies, but he thinks everyone believes his lies. So when it was obviously a lie, he was very angry with Spicer.

Spicer, way afterwards, talks about how he kind of regrets it. But I'll quote here, I sort of thought I knew what he wanted, as in what Trump wanted him to say, and went out and did it. And I'll be honest, if I could do a do-over of that day, I'd take it every day of the week. Sean Spicer and did it. And I'll be honest, if I could do a do-over of that day, I'd take it every day of the week. Sean Spicer regrets saying it. Trump wasn't happy with him.

There we go. And now we go on to the presidency of Donald Trump. Jamie, are you ready? You're buckled in. I'm strapped in. But before we do this, Jamie, before we talk about the presidency of Donald Trump, we're going to have a break from the chronological narrative.

Okay. Because I think it's very important to establish something. While putting this together, I realized that by only focusing on the important things, I have really missed what it was like under Trump. And the main thing was how crazy every single day was. Every day was crazy. And the main thing was how crazy every single day was. Every day was crazy.

Every day it seemed like he did something so obviously weird or strange that surely this time his supporters would finally go, yep, okay, fair enough, he's an impulsive liar, he's really weird, but we like his policies, so we stick with him. It was almost like, I mean, it wasn't, but it felt like it was a strategy just to bombard with so much crazy, he'd become numb to it. And everyone did. It became numb.

Yeah. And it never happened that his supporters went, yeah, he is weird, but we deal with it. He was always supported by his very large base. Not only supported, that support was always bordering on fanatical when the supporters were convinced that Trump was a genius and he was all doing this as a part of a clever ploy. And he's kept doing rallies as well. Oh, I'll get to that in a moment. So just to try and get across just how strange his presidency was,

I'm just going to do a quick fire list of some of the things he did whilst he was president that are ultimately not that important in of themselves so i'm not going to mention them again in the main narrative but i really feel that they're important in the sense that they build a bigger picture of what it was like so are you ready for all the weird that happened i think so here we go feel like we should have some nice music coming in the background try and keep up. You know what? I was just going to rattle them all off, but feel free to jump in if you're reminded by one or two.

So here we go. But I'm going to try and be quick here, because otherwise we'll be here forever. Right. Are you ready? One. Yes. He carried on campaigning after he was in office.

So after he won, he carried on campaigning, holding frequent rallies. That's weird. Two. He tried to buy Greenland. Yes, he carried on campaigning, holding frequent rallies. That's weird. Two. He tried to buy Greenland. Yes, he did. Three. He told a story about a sex party to an audience of Boy Scouts.

I don't remember that. That's fun, isn't it? Four. He complained that he wasn't thanked for John McCain's funeral, which he had nothing to do with whatsoever. And John McCain hated him. Yes. Yes. Five.

He physically pushed the Prime Minister of Montenegro out of the way for a photo shoot. That is a... I love that video. It's hilarious in all the wrong ways. Oh, yes. Number six. Six. He ripped up and threw in the toilet classified documents. Yeah, he did.

Seven. He suggested nuking a hurricane to try and stop it from hitting the shore. Oh my God. He stared directly into a solar eclipse. He hired and fired his communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, within 11 days. This time

period has now become known as a mooch. You get five moochies to a truss, by the way. That's political times. Anyway, next. He told a steel worker

one day, but his father was looking down on him with pride. The father was still alive. He advertised a company that sold beans

in the Oval Office because one day he heard the president of that company had praised him. There's a photo of him there with just lots of beans lined up in the Oval Office because one day he heard the president of that company had praised him. There's a photo of him there with just lots of beans lined up on the Oval Office. He's hucking beans. I remember that.

Yes. He told a seven-year-old that Santa wasn't real. Oh my, you don't do that. That is the worst thing you can do. To be fair here, I may be exaggerating that one ever so slightly. He asked the seven-year-old if he still believed because at that age it was, and I quote,

marginal. There's a very good chance that went over the head of the seven-year-old, but still. Anyway, next. 30. He served McDonald's as a White House dinner banquet for the winning college football team that year. I remember that because it was a government shutdown, wasn't it?

Government shutdown, so lukewarm McDonald's for everyone. Oh, fantastic. Yes. 14. He threatened to bomb sites of cultural significance in various countries whenever he didn't like the country. What an arse. Fun.

15. He thought Frederick Douglass was still alive. Really? Oh, do you not know that one?se. Fun. 50. He thought Frederick Douglass was still alive. Really? Oh, do you not know that one? No. Yeah. They're talking about Frederick Douglass, and he starts saying,

Frederick Douglass, oh, he's doing a great job. A lot of people are starting to realise how good a job he is doing. He obviously didn't know who Frederick Douglass was, so he just said he's doing a great job. Oh. Oh, next. I like this next one.

60. It's a good start he colored the united states flag in wrong without tips while sat with children i prefer the green and yellow oh i'd forgotten this one when i found the picture yeah he's just using the wrong colors he's using using blue in the stripe part. It's red and white. Yeah. Oh, it's red and white. And we're British. Yeah.

Talking of being British, next. 17. He cut Queen Elizabeth off whilst they were meant to be walking side by side. Oh, I remember that. He just stomped the head, didn't he? Yeah. That was fun. Next.

18. He constantly, constantly talked about how toilets don't flush anymore and that they take 15 minutes to flush. Stop doing such large poos, Trump. Do you know about this one? No. Constant thing. He talks about showers a lot as well.

The showers don't work and you've got to flush your toilet 15 times. He was saying this a lot in these rallies, these campaign rallies that he didn't need to do anymore because he was president and he was talking about toilets that didn't flush. It was weird. Next. Do you ever think he just didn't know how a toilet worked?

I don't know. It's just strange. It's really weird. Next. He referred to himself as, I quote, a very stable genius. He suggested that if Californians just raked their forest more,

there'd be no forest fires. Oh, I remember that one. Yeah, because after visiting Finland and Norway, they do that all the time. Yeah, and I didn't put it in, but he also says something around this time, something to do with the Californians waste their water

because they let their rivers go into the sea or something. Something ass weird happened at this point. What? Twenty-one! He encouraged police officers to purposely bump the heads of arrested people on the car doors. Less of a fun one, that one, but just a what? Twenty-two! Back to the fun stuff, though. He suggested, and I'm not lying here,

putting snakes and alligators in a moat on the Southern Boulder. Twenty-three! lying here, putting snakes and alligators in a moat on the southern boulder. 23! He kept calling the leader of North Korea Little Rocket Man. That is quite funny, though, to be fair. Yeah. 24! After calling him Little Rocket Man, he kept talking about how he had fallen in love with the North Korean leader.

Yeah, so he used to send letters to each other, didn't they? They did. We will talk more about this one later, but it was just weird. 25. When doing a standard physical mental health check that all presidents do, there is a standard dementia test. It's a cognitive test. It is very simple. This is him describing it. Trump would not stop boasting about how he passed a question where all he had to do was name five

things. And when he was interviewed, he kept talking about how he could remember person, woman, man, camera, and TV. Now, this is made even funnier when it becomes very obvious that these weren't the things in the test. He was being interviewed at the time and he was clearly just saying the words that he could see. Person, woman, man, so the two people in front of him, camera and the TV monitor attached to the camera. That is beautiful. I'd not considered that. Next. 26.

More of a depressing one, this one. He called soldiers who had died in past wars suckers and losers. What a... 27. He tweeted constantly. Yeah, he did. Constantly.

And these tweets were full of errors and misinformation. Yep. Such as... Such as... such as, one of his most famous, I'll go do the full quote, Jamie. Don't just, don't just say covfefe.

Sorry. Full tweet was, despite the constant negative press, covfefe. Yeah. But he did, he did write one afterwards about, oh, what could it mean?

It's like a, which I thought was, I thought that was quite a nice way out of it. Yeah, he clearly fell asleep whilst doing it. Lent on his phone. 28. He tear gassed protesters outside the White House just so he could cross the street

and hold a Bible up for some reason. Oh, and hold a Bible up upside down. I see, I did look into that. I couldn't actually figure out whether it was definitely upside down or not, so I didn't mention it. It is, because you know the floppy bit? It was hanging.

You know, you get like the bookmarker thing. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, okay then. 29. Okay, so this one's more his team rather than him, but it is one of the best moments in all of political history, and I think it will go down.

People will talk about this one literally in hundreds of years still. After losing the 2020 election, his team, probably Rudy Giuliani, booked the Four Seasons Hotel to deliver a press conference. But instead of the famous hotel chain, they accidentally booked a car park of a hardware and gardening store opposite a sex shop. Yes, I remember. The press conference went ahead anyway oh it's it's moments like that where you're just like what is going on how is this real and that's when rudy got uh

giuliani got the um information that it'd been called it biden won wasn't it yeah yeah it's just absolutely ridiculous um and then we go to my very favourite. This is peak Trump. Things being funny anyway. Trump one day... Sorry, a bit more context here. Hurricane Dorian was on its way. This is one I was going to mention because you hadn't mentioned it yet. I love it. Please continue.

It's my favourite. Hurricane Dorian is going to hit the coast of the United States. It's a big hurricane. It's going to cause a lot of damage. Yes. But these things happen regularly, as we know. Trump talked about the hurricane, warned where it was going to hit, and accidentally said Alabama as one of the states that was going to be hit. It was a slip of the tongue. It happens. Yeah. But instead of correcting himself, he doubled down.

The most ridiculous way. Sharpies at the ready. Well, he continued to say that Alabama was going to be hit, and it just carries on for a few days until it ends up in the farcical situation where there is an official map showing the path of the hurricane on an easel in the Oval Office, and on this official printed map is an extra loop drawn in Sharpie going around Alabama. He made up the flight of a hurricane rather than just say, sorry, I made a mistake. Yep. Now, there are many others. There are many others.

I'm sure there's ones that I have forgotten. The wind turbines kill birds. Yeah, there's that one. Surrounded by dead birds. Just weird. There's so much weird stuff that happened so much funny stuff happened where you can look back on it and go that was hilarious but all of this was going on constantly in the background when there were other very important things

happening leaving you in this weird state of flux of oh God, the world's going to end and this is hilarious. It was not peaceful. No. Ultimately, most of what I have just said will be lost to history to the bigger stuff. I hope the Four Seasons stuff stays though, because that is just objectively very funny. But I'm now going to talk about the bigger stuff, but yeah, just don't forget all the weird stuff was happening, right? Okay.

Everyone's having to deal with that at the same time. So anyway, Trump's president. So what's he going to do? Well, Bannon and Miller, duo that they are, they are soon two of the biggest advisors. Trump took their lead. And there was one thing that Bannon and Miller hated. That was immigration.

So let's tackle that first. In late January, the president suddenly announced that the United States border was closed to citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. All highly Muslim countries, as I recall. Yes, yes. Now, this came from a campaign promise slash rally chant, because they were two of the same thing, the Trump administration, that they would close the borders to Muslims. This quite often got a cheer. the borders to Muslims. This quite often got a cheer. Now, this was an executive order that was hastily put through, so hastily that none outside the White House knew it was coming at all.

Congress didn't know it was coming. None of the agencies knew it was coming. No one at airports knew it was coming. Down to the nitty gritty, how do we physically do it? It was an absolute car crash, instant chaos and cries of outrage from large portions of the population. The Trump administration attempted to claim that this was about protecting the country from terrorism, but that was nonsense. Saudi Arabia wasn't on the list. Saudi Arabia, the country where most of the people responsible for 9-11 came from. So it was not to do with terrorism at all, it was to say that they had banned Muslims going into the country. Protests start up in airports, legal action is taken, and within a week a judge blocked the order,

killing it dead. This was a big lesson for Trump because he found out very early on that, oh, presidents aren't kings. He had talked a lot about how bad it was that Obama just did executive orders and he did things that he hated, and he thought that it really was that simple, and he could say something and it would happen. Well, he learned very quickly that that's not how it works. It's more complex, and he was left embarrassed that his very first move as president had just fallen over immediately. So not the best start for him. There was something else taking up the administration's time. It had also been found out that Michael Flynn, his national security advisor, had been talking to the Russians about US sanctions off the books whilst Obama was president. This is a big no-no.

This is illegal. Flynn was a private citizen and he was negotiating with a foreign country. We have come across this when Nixon was doing things similar. Anyway, Flynn resigned. It was very obvious that he did it. Eventually, his charge would lie to the FBI, and he did serve some time. But the damage was done. There was speculation that several people close to Trump had close ties to Russia. So that idea of there being ties to Russia come up yet again. And before Trump knew it, the press was full of speculation on Russian interference once more. And this time, Russian collusion. Did the Trump team actually collude with Russia? Now, the deputy of the FBI let Priebus know that we don't have any evidence of collusion, by the way.

That we don't have anything that says that your campaign and Russia are closely tied and you colluded. However, the FBI were not going to say this publicly because they didn't want to get involved in the politics of the thing. Now, this infuriated Trump. He thought, well the FBI can clear my name, it's all over the press that I colluded with Russia. The FBI is saying that I didn't, so why can't they come out and say it? And remember he was already angry with the FBI and Comey, so he starts thinking that Comey is deliberately trying to take him down. So whilst he was raging about this, his advisors were arguing about Afghanistan. Trump had been a very vocal critic of Afghanistan and the war there. He promised that

he would end the war as soon as he was in office. Just like that. I get him, click his fingers, it's gone. Because he had a very good plan, the best plan. No one's ever seen a plan this good. Yeah. Don't ask for details, just know it's a really good plan. Yeah. Well, now he was in the Oval Office, he started asking about, well, okay, let's get out the war then and he kept hearing different advice again it turned out to be a bit more complicated than he first thought uh herbert mcmaster who had replaced flynn as his national security advisor outlined some options in order to keep stability over there we are going to have to come up with some kind of settlement with the taliban no we don't like it but we're going to have to do something like that we also need to have to come up with some kind of settlement with the Taliban. No, we don't like it, but we're going to have to do something like that. We also need to aid the Afghanistan government to

counter the Taliban, because if we're starting to pull out, they need to be stronger. And we also need to put pressure on Pakistan, who are helping the Taliban. Yes, they're our allies. No, they shouldn't be doing it. But yes, they are. So we're going to have to do that. And finally, we need to keep international support up for being in Afghanistan whilst we pull out. So yes, they are. So we're going to have to do that. And finally, we need to keep international support up for being in Afghanistan whilst we pull out. So yes, you want to pull out, Mr. President, but we need to do all of that first. We need to lay the groundwork, which is essentially what Obama was doing.

In other words, we need to keep doing what we have been doing. Because if we don't, we'll pull out badly and we will have achieved nothing for the entire war. It'll have all been a waste of lives. One advisor put it very simply that we are going to need some more troops. Yes, I know you want to get out, but we need more troops to settle it first. Trump was not happy about this at all. He thought he was being BS'd. He didn't see the point of the war. He never had seen the point of the war. He said he was going to end it,

so why can't he just end it? You're saying I need more troops there so we can pull them back home. That makes no sense. Anyway, Senator Lindsey Graham turns up at this point after his, if we support Trump, we will be destroyed and we deserve it. So he's had a change of tune as Lindsey Graham, like a really severe one. I don't want to go down conspiracy rabbit holes, but I won't be surprised if we find out future that more is going on with his sudden change of tune because wow he is now full-on trump supporter absolutely loves trump and he's in there it could well just be that trump is inviting him in and lindsey graham likes the the power being close to the president it could just be as simple as that who knows but lindsey graham has gone from

hating trump to loving him anyway graham meets with Trump and says the next 9-11 could come from Afghanistan. It very likely will. If we pull out in a bad way and a new 9-11 happens, it'll all be on you and you will be remembered for the guy who caused 9-11 part two. So Trump listened to this and said, okay, when can we get out then? And Lindsey Graham replied, and I quote, it never ends. It's good versus evil. Our goal is to make sure that the mainland is never attacked by Afghanistan. Trust your generals.

But Trump didn't trust his generals. Just simply didn't. And he came up with an idea. He told his advisors that he wanted to talk to the soldiers in Afghanistan. I want to hear what the people who are actually over there, not you politicians, you armchair generals. I want to know what's actually happening over there.

That's actually not a terrible idea. No, it's not. As much as I will criticise Trump a lot, there are glimmers of his foreign policy where I go, yeah, I can kind of see that. And this is one of them. He wants more information rather than his political advisers. We have seen time and again presidents be bullied

by the military and the intelligence agencies. Look at what happened to JFK to begin with. So Trump is saying, no, I'm going to talk to some soldiers. I'm going to find out what's really going on. So four members of the armed forces were found looking quite shocked. They were ushered in to have lunch with the president in their dress uniforms. And after lunch, Trump had made up his mind. They're getting out of Afghanistan. The soldiers we had had lunch with had told him what it was really like. NATO were doing nothing and were completely corrupt. The place was lawless.

There's no point being there. Now, the next day, McMaster attempted to explain why they can't just abandon years of military investment based on the word of four soldiers. Yes, there are brave heroes, but they also don't know the big picture. They're our soldiers. We should be listening to the generals. But Trump shut him down and in front of all the other generals said, and I quote, I don't care about you guys. He said to his generals that he had learned more in lunch yesterday than he had in any of their intelligence meetings. In fact, he said to them, and I quote Trump here, the soldiers on the ground could run things better

than you guys. So he's not making friends with high ups in the military. No. No. In fact, he said to them, and I quote Trump here, the soldiers on the ground could run things better than you guys. So he's not making friends with high-ups in the military. No. In fact, he spent 25 minutes going on a rant. Ah, wonderful. Yes, saying how incompetent they all were and asking for the quickest way out of Afghanistan. Eventually, one of the generals, frustrated, simply replied, and I quote, the quickest way out is to lose. Trump ignored this

and told the generals that the president of India had been talking to him yesterday, and he had told him that the United States had got nothing out of Afghanistan. So what they should do, said President Modi from India, we should start taking the minerals out of the country. Why aren't we doing that? We could make some money while we're over there if we're over there. Oh, and we need to stop paying Pakistan any money at all, because you told me the other day that Pakistan are helping the Taliban. So we need to stop any kind of aid that we ever send there for anything. Oh, and why are our soldiers over there? Can't we just pay mercenaries to fight over there instead of the United States troops, he asked. Eventually, Trump left, and the generals, pulling their hair out. Just like he doesn't understand how the military works.

They have their own meeting. And they've decided that, fortunately, because Trump has a certain scattery way of talking, he hadn't actually ordered them to do anything. He had wandered all over the place with his thoughts. He'd said things. He'd said things, but he'd not ordered us to do anything. So let's just... We all say things, don't we?

Let's all just carry on for now what we were doing anyway. Yeah. He said things, but he's not ordered us to do anything. Well, we all say things, don't we? Let's all just carry on for now what we were doing anyway. Yeah. And if we get a direct order from him to do something, then we'll do it, shall we? So essentially, the military sort of ignored the president, which is very interesting. Well, if they weren't given a direct order, then it's not... That's what they would argue, yes. Yeah, they were very frustrated at the fact that president just could not seem to grasp what they were saying meanwhile trump is

still fuming about the fbi that's what he is thinking about mostly in particular the director james comey who was convinced was trying to take him down now he had floated the idea of firing comey several times everyone told him not to you can't fire him bannon had told him not to. You can't fire him. Bannon had told him not to. When Bannon said you have to do something, you don't do it. Bannon told him that if you fire him, the whole of the FBI will turn against you. You don't want all the FBI against you. Trump would hear nothing of the sort, though. So he asked his advisors, figure out how can I fire Comey? His advisors, seeing that this could be a problem, did what they were increasingly doing,

which was tell Trump they were on it and hope that Trump would get distracted by something. And I bet they were right. Sort of, because they make a mistake. First of all, Trump did get distracted by things easily. This is well documented all through his life. However, sometimes he gets fixated on things. And this was a fixation, so he wasn't going to forget this one. And also, they attempted to stall it by getting the Deputy Attorney General to write a three-page memo

stating that Comey had violated some rules, maybe, when he had harmed Hillary Clinton's election by some statements that he had said about her misuse of emails when she was Secretary of State. They kind of hoped that this was a long and complex memo that didn't fit into Trump's narrative, didn't want anyone to say that someone had harmed Hillary's campaign. Hopefully it would delay things. It did not. Trump was fixated, like I say. He didn't care what it said. All he knew is he now had a memo saying that Comey was what was not perfect. So he immediately wrote a letter to Comey, firing him with immediate effect. Solves that problem then.

Well, no, it really didn't, because there was a reason why everyone was telling him not to fire Comey. It was a bad political move. He had not helped himself. As per usual, he was unable to not talk about things. So he had already talked publicly about firing Comey, saying things like he had decided to fire him before the memo gave him justification,

and another time saying that he knew that the Russian collusion thing was all made up, so he was just going to fire Comey anyway. So he admitted he was firing Comey for political reasons. Excellent. Yeah. Then Comey, very angry, decided to get some good old-fashioned rebegay. And he released notes from a meeting that he had had with the president

around the time that Michael Flynn had been found to be illegally talking to the Russians. Trump had said to Comey, and I quote, I hope you can see your way to letting this go, letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go. The this go, letting Flynn go, he is a good guy, I hope you can let this go. The president was caught in contemporaneous notes trying to influence the FBI. Not a good look. No, that's, that's, no. No. Talk of the possibility of impeachment started to be discussed. Oh dear. Now, if it's one thing that Trump did not want, it was to be impeached, that would be

on his record forever. He would always be known as a president that got impeached. And he knew that was bad. He remembered Nixon and how Nixon had to get out before he was impeached. Can you imagine the embarrassment of a president getting impeached once? He was enraged, was Trump. His mood got worse when he learned the next day that Robert Mueller had just been appointed to look into the Russian interference claims and also any ties to the Trump campaign. Now, Robert Mueller had been the director of, you guess it, the FBI for 12 years in the past. Yes. Yes. The Mueller report.

So Trump hits the roof. The FBI are after him. They're trying to take him down. According to witnesses, multiple witnesses, he spent the next few days pacing between the offices in the West Wing, fuming, shouting at people, and watching cable news. I'll quote one of them, we barely got by. Government grinds to a stop. He asked what a special counsel was. He wasn't really sure. He's not a politician. And when he heard that it was an unlimited investigation like Watergate or Lewinsky, Trump became very agitated, asking, can they look into everything? Can they just keep digging into my past?

Yes, came the answer. Oh, Trump did not like that. What, so they can look into everything? Not everything. Oh, did he? Not the videos. When he found this out, meetings for the next few days were cancelled completely. Witnesses say that it was like what they had read Nixon's final few days being like.

Right. Trump went on various increasingly paranoid rants, claiming that even the people working for him wanted to bring him down. He seemed to lose all trust in people even close to him. It didn't help that the White House was leaking like a sieve at this time, and news stories kept coming out about how stressed he was. Over the next few weeks, Trump struggled to concentrate on anything other than what he referred to as the witch hunt. He brought it up in most meetings. No matter what the meeting was about, he talked about the witch hunt.

In particular, he became very obsessed with the idea that he had been booked at some point in the campaign. Now, there is no evidence to suggest this, but he was convinced that he had been booked. He's very paranoid at this point. Full-on paranoia, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, then international news comes along and finally distracts him a little bit. North Korea had launched a ICMBD, no, I'm saying all sorts of letters there, ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile. They were one step closer to being able to launch a nuclear strike on the United States mainland. This was worrying.

Yeah. There were those advising Trump that he really needed to move preemptively against North Korea before it's too late. Essentially, the Iraq argument. Trump was also informed that plans had been prepared for such an event since clinton's time so we can do it we can go in we can military move and attack if you want but for now it was decided to hold fire because it's we're not quite there yet but this could well come up in your term mr president so maybe you need to be thinking about it but there's some good news at last you'll be pleased to for Trump, he's finally going to get a political win. It's not

gone well so far. No, it hasn't. Yeah, so far the administration have done very little apart from bringing in some deregulation, to be fair. They had deregulated a lot of stuff. And we all know how well that turned out when Reagan did it. Oh, yeah. Deregulation's great. Yeah, that's fun. Anyway, what Trump was able to do now however was step into the rose garden and announce that they were withdrawing from the paris climate accord hooray yay that's yes well this has been negotiated by obama and trump had for a long time talked about how it was an awful deal it was a deal agreed by pretty much every country in the world and its aim was to put into practice procedures that would keep global temperatures less than two degrees higher than the pre-industrial levels.

That sounds great. It was the biggest push to fight against climate change in history. Trump hated it for two reasons. Number one, he didn't believe in climate change. This is just a fact about him. He does not think it's real. He genuinely thinks it's made up. He's not doing it as a kind of graft, which lots of people do.

He genuinely believes it's not real. Yeah, I think a lot of people feel like it doesn't exist because they don't trust the science, which is scary. Yeah. It's really scary. Yes, it is. Yeah, he thought it was a con to get more money out of companies. That's what he thinks it is.

But possibly even more important than this is, number two, it was brought into the United States by Obama. Oh, well, there we go. Trump hates Obama on a personal level, and he wants to undo everything Obama did. Well, yeah. So he's going to pull the United States out of the Paris Accord. This pleased a lot in the cabinet, who had similar views to him.

However, a couple of people working in the White House were horrified. His daughter, Ivanka, and his son-in-law, Jared, were both official advisors in the White House. That's right, the whole nepotism thing going on, which I'm not going to talk about much, but it's all very dodgy having your own family as your advisors in the White House. But there you go. Anyway, both of them, who happened to be younger than most of the others, incidentally,

did what they could to try and change Trump's mind on this. And it was starting to annoy the other advisors, who didn't believe in climate change. One complained to Trump that his daughter and son-in-law were getting in the way too often, especially in the climate change issues. Trump just laughed and said, don't worry, they're just Democrats. Oh. Yeah. the climate change issues. Trump just laughed and said, don't worry, they're just Democrats. Oh. Yeah.

Bannon in particular hated the presence of the young family members and started leaking stories about them to the press. Now, Ivanka, hearing about this, went straight to her father and pointed out that Bannon was leaking to the press. And like I say, Trump, very paranoid at this time, he was obsessed with leakers, kept tweeting about it all the press. Like I say, Trump, very paranoid at this time, he was obsessed with leakers, kept tweeting about it all the time. His White House had leaked like a sieve since day one.

Trump is furious that he kept hearing about damaging things about himself that should have been kept secret. So he starts to worry about Bannon's loyalty to him. Starts to see a little bit of a rift here. Anyway, despite the political win of pulling out of the Paris Accord, Trump was angered that it had not been played as a win in the media. Apparently, the wider country weren't quite as happy about it. The leaks of his dysfunctional White House had dominated the news rather than the coming out of the Paris Accord, as did his late night tweets, which were often offensive to someone. His advisors suggested that maybe, Mr. President, you stop tweeting? Just calm down, Mr. Trump. All of your good work that you're doing,

which you're obviously doing, Mr. President, is being drowned out by these tweets. Maybe you should stop. Trump was having none of that. I'll quote him, this is my megaphone. He would repeat again and again how he'd refer to Twitter. is my megaphone. He would repeat again and again, this is how he'd refer to Twitter. With a megaphone. Yes. Anyway, more bad news then comes in for Trump shortly after this. Congress's attempt to repeal Obamacare had failed. This was the big one. This was Obama's legacy and he desperately wanted to get rid of it. And the Republicans have the numbers to make it happen. They've got Congress, they've got the White House, there's no reason why they can't repeal it. But the party

was in so much disarray that the infighting resulted in the bill failing. Obamacare survives. So one of Trump's main campaign policies, aside from building the wall, was repealing Obamacare and it had not happened. That is quite a disappointing

loss. It is a disappointing loss. A lot of people in the news talked about how this was a big blow to Trump and he did not like that. Anyway, all of this added to the stories that the White House and the Republicans were all a bit of a mess at this time. Then, in August, an emboldened group of far-right supporters went on a march in Charlottesville, chanting lovely things such as Jews will not replace us. This was a full-on Nazi march. The word fascist is bandied about a lot nowadays. This is full-on fascism going into Nazism.

There was no hiding it. This is what that was. There was no dog whistling. There was full-on megaphones. This is full-on fascism. Didn't even Trump say it was a bit too much, though? Oh, we'll get to it. We will. It was, as you can imagine, a disturbing sight to most in the country.

A very visual example on just how much the far right had risen in recent times. However, as you can expect, there was a very large counter-protest. There's far more people in America who aren't fascists than there are fascists. So you had a huge counter-protest. And skirmishes between the two groups erupted over the next day. A lot of hot-headed people, a lot of feelings.

And then one of the far right supporters drove his vehicle into the counter-protesters, injuring many and killing one. I remember that, yeah. Now this, the fact that a Nazi-supporting man killed a member of the public, hits the news big time. This is huge. Rightly so.

Trump was encouraged to say something. He's the president. He's got to get out there. He's got to say something. He was given a script. This is what you will say. Mr. President, here's the president. He's got to get out there. He's got to say something. He was given a script. This is what you will say. Mr. President, here's the script. It's very simple. You're calling for an end to the violence. Nice and simple. Off you go.

So Trump goes out and he starts to read a script. I condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of bigotry, hatred and violence. And his advisors all went, ah, excellent. Then he said, however. Yeah. As per usual for Trump, he then goes off script. Trump has a habit of, if he is reading a script, he'll say a line, but then he'll repeat it in his own words. So he then went on to say, and I quote, on many sites, on many sites, it's been going on for a long time in our country, not Donald Trump, not Obama. It's been going on for a long time. Now, I don't think it's too far

of a stretch to imagine where this came from. You can kind of see that he had seen people accusing him as being the reason for this violence. And he was taking that personally. He was like, but there's been racial tensions in this country forever. This isn't my fault. In fact, there've been people fighting each other forever. This isn't me.

So you can see where he was coming from. In his mind, he was saying, this isn't me. It's not Donald Trump. It's not even Obama. This is just people being racist.

But also, that explains the second part, but the on many sides, on many sides thing was very clearly both siding the fact that a bunch of fascists had killed and injured people. Yeah. Now that was not good. No. Not good at all. Many in the country were very outraged. The fact that he seemed to be unwilling

to call out the far-right protesters was picked up on by the media and many politicians started to ask questions such as why can Trump not say that Nazis are bad? Surely that's a low bar to pass. It's the lowest. Well, a script was then written for him that would clear up the issue.

They went into crisis mode at this point. But he refused to read it, saying that it would look like he was bowing down to political correctness. It's not political correctness to say Nazis are bad. Well, that's what his advisors said. No, no, seriously, sir, you need to clear this up. This, I don't think you realise how serious this is.

You need to come out and clearly say that fascists are bad. That's what you need to do. In fact, if you just walk on stage in front of the podium and say those three words, that would probably be enough. Well, again, they're going back on Air Force One to the White House by this point. And Trump is still refusing to do it.

He hadn't done anything wrong, he said to his aides. He also said that one side doesn't have a monopoly on bigotry. So he's still both sides in private as well as the speech. So he cannot say that it was a slip of the tongue. He was still saying it.

However, one of his advisors said, and I'll quote him, there is no upside to not directly condemning neo-Nazis. Seriously, there is no reason not to do this. You just need to say Nazis are bad. That's all you need to say. So eventually, Trump agrees to say the speech.

They get back to the White House. He's sat there. There's someone say the speech. Yeah. They get back to the White House. He sat there. There's someone writing the speech for him. The speech is a masterclass condemning racism. But Trump starts to have doubts. I'll quote him here. I don't know about this. It doesn't feel right.

I just love Nazis. Well, Trump was worried that it made him look weak and he was apologising. And as I keep coming back to, rule number one with trump is never ever apologize or back down however he was told he had to do it this is serious like this could spiral unless you get under it it's the kind of thing that brings down presidents so eventually a reluctant trump gave a five minute speech where i mean he looks if you watch it he looks uncomfortable he looks uncomfortable, he looks grim, and he looks unimpressed with the fact that he is there speaking. But he does denounce neo-Nazis and the KKK. Under pressure. There is nothing wrong with the words he said whatsoever. It is textbook what

the president should say. He condemns Nazisis nazis are bad he says that's not a direct quote there but that's the substance of the speech anyway he finishes the speech his advisors heap on the praise well done mr president brilliant fantastic that was exactly what you needed to do and trump seemed mollified he seemed to cheer up a bit okay maybe i did the right thing everyone's saying praise everyone's saying it's a good speech the best speech best speech he's ever seen his advisors went up to him tears in their eyes they good speech. The best speech. Best speech he's ever seen. His advisors went up to him, tears in their eyes they had, saying, Sir, sir, best speech I've ever heard. However, he then got back to his apartment and turned on Fox News,

where a reporter said that this was a horse correction. Trump was furious. Turned to one of his aides and said, and I quote, That was the biggest f***ing mistake in my life. You never apologise. I didn't do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak? I'm never doing anything like that ever again.

Yeah. Brilliant. That went well then. Anyway, the next day, still fuming, he's off doing his presidential stuff and obviously the press are around. And his advisers say to him, please don't take any questions. Please don't take any questions.

And he says, I'm not talking to the press, and the advisors go, good, that's fine, he's done his statement, this is all gone now. But this is Trump, and sometimes he can't help himself from talking, can he? So when the press did ask him questions about his speech yesterday, he changed his tune once more, and I'll quote him again. So this is the third one. He first of all, both sided it. Secondly, he condemned the Nazis. And this is the third one. He, first of all, both-sided it. Secondly, he condemned the Nazis. And this is his third speech on it. The alt-right came charging, but you had a group on the other side who were also very violent. And nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now. Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. There was

blame on both sides. You also have people that were very fine people on both sides. You have a lot of bad people in the other group too. There are two sides to a story. I remember this because I remember the outro of him saying there are very fine people. Very fine people. And I feel the same way I did then. I think I know what he's trying to do.

He's trying to skirt a line here. But it's like trying to throw a dart and then hitting an elephant in a zoo a mile away. He doesn't want to alienate his base. Yes. And I'm not saying that his base are all racist fascists, because that is not true. But if you are a racist fascist in America at this time, you're probably supporting Trump. And Trump doesn't want to alienate those people. So that's what he's doing.

But also, I think more important to Trump, I think it's not the politics. I don't think he's politically turned on to the issues enough to have an opinion on fascism. I think he genuinely is just annoyed because he thinks he hasn't done anything wrong. Yeah. So he's just angry. Yeah.

Anyway, shortly after this, David Duke, the former leader of the KKK, the grand wizard, because they're weird. Anyway, he tweeted, and I'll quote David Duke here. Thank you, President Trump, for your honesty and courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville. Now, when you've got David Duke saying. Thank you, President Trump, for your honesty and courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville. Now, when you've got David Duke saying that to you, you know you're on the wrong side of history.

Absolutely. Yeah. The outrage from the day before was nothing compared to this now. The heads of all military departments gave official statements condemning racism and hate groups. That's quite a big thing for them to do. Oh yeah, yeah. The United States military, all departments come out and say the president's wrong. Various CEOs took their companies out of Trump's business advisory council. We don't want

anything to do with the guy. His chief economics advisor told Trump that he was resigning. Trump was furious at this, shouting at Gary Cohn, who was the guy, that he, Trump, had done nothing wrong, and that Cohn was weak and committing treason for resigning. I'll quote him here, everyone wants your position, I made a huge mistake giving it to you. However, Gary Cohn decided to stay on in the end, because he really, really wanted to see through all the tax cuts for the rich that he was working on. Yeah. So he was able to just see past all of the racism and fascism supporting. That's fine. He did resign eventually, though. You'll be pleased to know Gary Cohn does have some principles. He resigned a few months later when he disagreed with Trump's plans on tariffs.

It's sometimes just a step too far. You just got to draw a line somewhere, haven't you? Well, yeah. at some point. The reason why I'm bringing him up so much, by the way, because he's not really that much of a big player, but he later admitted to removing various documents from Trump's desk about withdrawing from NAFTA and the trade agreement with South Korea. These were things that Trump said needed to be done. We are withdrawing our trade agreement with South Korea of immediate effect.

We are withdrawing our trade agreement with South Korea of immediate effect. And Gary Cohn just took that document off the president's desk and hid it. Trump, not always being on top of everything, just kind of forgot about it. That's crazy, the fact that that could just happen. Yeah. So not only have we got the military going, let's just see if he forgets. You've also got his own advisors doing the same. Anyway. It's like looking out for a toddler. Yeah. Anyway,

several of us did quit at this time, including Steve Bannon. I think I got fired. Yeah. Quit. Fired. We'll talk about that in a moment. Obviously, Steve Bannon, there's no way he's going to stand by while someone's praising fascism. Obviously, he's a man of principles.

No, it has nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with that at all. You'll be unsurprised to learn. Bannon was already getting annoyed that Trump was starting to listen to the generals about how Afghanistan had to go. Bannon was accusing Trump of turning globalist. Trump wasn't hardline enough. Trump was pandering to the GOP. It's just absolutely astounding that someone can have that opinion.

But yes, that's apparently what it was. With all the stuff about Charlottesville in the news, there was a torch being shone on Bannon's influence in the White House. Bannon had well-known ties to some of these far-right groups, and the public started speculating that Bannon was actually the power behind the throne. He'd been the campaign manager, and he got a brand new job made up for him that had never existed before. Who's actually president here? Trump wouldn't like that.

Yeah. Now, officially, Bannon resigned. But like you say, it does seem like Trump fired him, not liking the fact that the media started talking about him as a puppet. Anyway, Trump finishes his first year with yet another political win. Hooray! It's not all downhill. Those tax cuts that I just mentioned came in. They were a huge cut for the richest in the country. If you were a multi-millionaire or a business worth multiple millions, everything's gravy. is everything's good to be fair tax cuts across the board but it wasn't even subtle this was very much tax cuts for the rich oh i forgot to check it i was going to check something there was a time where after a tax cut uh trump then goes to mar-a-lago and there was a recording of him where he just jokes about how he's managed to make everyone in that room really

rich i'm assuming it must be here but i be wrong. It might have been another time he did that. Yeah, there was no subtlety of hiding it. It was, yeah, I've managed to make you guys rich. Yeah. Anyway, Bannon was outraged at this. Bannon was on the outside. He'd quit by this point, and he saw the GOP machine winning over Trump. A year had gone by, the wall wasn't built, and he saw the GOP machine winning over Trump. A year had gone by, the wall wasn't built, and now they were just giving money to the rich. Now, Bannon, for all his views, was not about making politicians rich.

He was about bringing politicians down. Now Trump's just making life good for the elite of the country. Does he not know Trump? Yeah. So Bannon starts talking to the press about Trump and about how dysfunctional he was uh highlighting just how much time trump spent watching tv or especially cnn instead of watching the country yeah like a room with well the room was uh i don't know how accurate is he just basically spent his time most of the days watching tv to see what was being spoken about

multiple tvs or, cable news, especially CNN. He'd watch the ones that didn't like him. He wouldn't watch Fox News as much because he wanted to know what the enemy was saying and it would wind him up. So he'd just get very frustrated. And yes, from sources we've got, and again, how much we can

believe it is hard, but from sources we do have, and these were people who worked with him, who he chose who worked with him who he chose to work with him say that he usually started work at around 11 and then finished fairly early and at 12 also the phrase executive time came up a lot so he was having lots of lots of jokes about that yes anyway so bannon started talking about how Trump was lazy and wasn't actually running the country. Trump hit back. Brand new nickname came out.

Sloppy Steve, it was. Oh, there we go. Loves his nicknames. That wasn't the only thing, though, that Trump was tweeting, because he responded to Kim Jong-un's statement that he now had a nuclear button on his desk and that the United States was now in range. That's right. North Korea just threatened the United States with nuclear attack.

I remember this point and going, oh my God, it's all going off. It's all going off. This is the end. Actually, what I remember thinking is, oh, this was what it was like during the Cold War. Everyone must be terrified all the time. Anyway, Trump tweeted back, and I will quote him here. Will someone please inform him that I too have a nuclear button and mine is much bigger and more powerful than his

and my button works? That's actually quite a good response. Yeah. Like I say, there were some glimmers of his foreign policy where I go, I mean, it's not orthodox, but as long as it doesn't backfire, if there weren't other horrible things going on, you could kind of see the humour in that. But equally, this is about nuclear weapons.

You don't take risks. You don't. You don't. And that, that's poking the North Korean bear. It's a Russian bear, isn't it what do they have in north korea they probably have bears probably have bears and tournament camps yes that's what i have anyway the whole world took notice for the first time since the height of the cold war there was a united states president threatening the use of nuclear weapons and in fact

i say that this is the fire twitter this is the most open threat of nuclear weapons. And in fact, I say that. Via Twitter! This is the most open threat of nuclear weapons in history. It's always been talked around before, but this was, I've got a big button. Yeah. It's always brag about size, isn't it? Yeah. It's the old talking a loud voice and carry a big stick, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Is that what it was? Something like that. Anyway, yeah, Trump wanted to tweet that he was going to order all United States citizens out of South Korea. Now, this was caught before it was tweeted by his advisors, thankfully.

Wrestled him to the ground, took his phone out of his hand. Well, yeah, the boast about I've got a bigger button thing is so ridiculous. It's like, well, okay, we can maybe let that slide. But if you take all your citizens out of South Korea, that would make North Korea think that the United States were

actually serious. And then who knows what they would do. The CIA then rushed to the White House and go, look, look, look, we've got some information. They're boasting they are not yet ready to do what they're saying. Calm down. So Trump stops tweeting about it, and the world breathes a sigh of relief. Then, over the next few months, there was a huge shift in approach to North Korea. Trump went from calling Kim Jong-un little rocket man

and threatening to nuke him, to telling the world they had fallen in love. Yeah, North Korea sent a bunch of letters very very cleverly written letters that just directed perfectly at trump's personality and just flattered the hell out of him and i remember them being very large as well like overly sized like huge this is what i mean this is what i mean by they were very well thought out there was someone over there in north k North Korea who knew what they were doing. We need to send a letter to flatter him. Will that work?

What about we send a huge letter? Like a really comically big one. He likes things that are big. Let's send him a big letter. And it works. Covering gold. Absolutely works. Something gold coloured.

It'll be fine. Yeah. Anyway, Trump, always a believer in talking to someone face-to-face. Remember back when, in the last episode, he walked into the room and wanted to talk to the lawyer face-to-face, kick out his lawyer. It's always how he's been. He always thinks he's the perfect negotiator

and he can get things done himself. So we told his advisors, right, I want to go and meet the dictator. That's what I want to do. It took half a year with both sides pulling out at least once before it finally happens, but it did. Historic meeting between the United States president and the dictator of North Korea. In June of 2018, they met in Singapore. The meeting seemed to go well, according to both men. North Korea agreed to work with South Korea on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, which was something they were already

agreeing to do. But they agreed to it again. Yeah, to Trump's face. In return, Trump agreed to stop military maneuvers with South Korea. And then Trump tweeted out that there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. Hurrah. He has just created world peace. Where's my Nobel Peace Prize, please? To be fair, Obama got one. Well, yeah. Anyway, the majority of America, however, were not convinced. Nothing's actually changed. North Korea agreed to do something they'd already agreed to do. And they've still got everything they said they had before.

And what have we done? Well, we've actually given them something. We're stopping our military manoeuvres with South Korea. The military, by the way, no idea this was on the cards. They were completely taken unawares. They then had to go to the president, the chief of SAVs did, and point out to him that you do realise these manoeuvres are our training. Where do you think we train our troops? We don't just run them around in America. We send them places. We get them to do manoeuvres. It's like, we need to do that somewhere. And this works really well for us. It means we can keep our eye on North Korea, and it means we can train our troops, and now suddenly we're not doing it. Ah, do it near China, it'll be fine. Well, Trump responded,

we are not fighting Bush's wars anymore, so no, we're not doing it. Yeah. The military weren't happy. Anyway, it was the intelligence agencies who were next to be unhappy. Trump, while in Helsinki, met with Putinin uh oh yes now trump was on a roll of talking to other leaders face to face at this point uh so he met with putin to discuss the interference in the election thing they both had a two-hour meeting where there were no u.s personnel present yeah apart from a translator i wonder what's going on with that translator now oh i'm he's no longer with us yeah it's absolutely insane but the american president unsupervised had a two-hour meeting with the russian president and no one in america knows what they talked about

here's my prediction yeah putin uh asked them to bring in a tablet, and they brought in a tablet, like maybe a Kindle. I'm not thinking like an Apple one, or a Russian equivalent, and said, here are the videos we have of you. Well, this is the speculation that went on at the time.

My speculation. You don't want to be drawn into conspiracy theories. You don't. So let's take best case scenario. Putin flattered slash bullied Trump and then got everything he wanted, even without a tape. I think Putin's too clever to bully. I think it'd be very much flattery. Oh, yeah. We did this for you. We did this for you. Well, like, you know, yeah, we did. But, you know, look what you got. I mean, we know we know that

Putin got what he wanted out of the meeting, because the two then held a joint press conference, where Trump said, and I quote, They say they think it's Russia, talking about his own security forces. I have President Putin. He said it's not Russia. I don't see any reason why it would be. President Putin was very strong and passionate in his denial. He's a strong type, isn't he? So he just believed the denials of Putin over his own intelligence forces. There was huge backlash, including from his usual supporters.

This was a big one. Oh, wow. Newt Gingrich said that it was the biggest mistake in his presidency. Fox News went after him. This was seen as a big deal. The former CIA director said that Trump was wholly in the pocket of Putin.

Meanwhile, the CIA and the NSA had been investigating, and they had found evidence that the Russians had installed malware in voting machines in two counties in Florida. It is undisputed, it's indisputable fact that the Russians did try and meddle in the election. Not necessarily in the way that the media and certain people talk about, but it did happen. Yeah. Mueller, he's still going on in the background, he put out indictments for 13 Russians who had interfered in the election because it did happen. Now, this was a sore point with Trump.

He didn't want any news that made it look like someone had happened to win the election, but his advisors were all telling him that this is really serious. For American democracy, we need to make sure our elections are secure. So we need to look into this more. Trump didn't want to because he saw it as an attack on him. But that wasn't the biggest thing in the news at the moment because a new policy of Trump was getting lots of attention. It was all about the border. Oh, the wall. He'd finally finished his wall. What? It's a big, beautiful wall. It's huge. Yeah, the fence. No, no, it's nothing to do with the wall. The wall was never built, as we know. It was definitely not the fence. No, no, it's nothing to do with the wall. The wall was never built, as we know.

It was definitely not the wall. No, because the people around Trump, and probably Trump himself, knew that the wall was ridiculous and was never going to be built. They knew they had to do something to appease their base on immigration. And it was decided that what we can do is get tough. Like, seriously tough. So, brainchild from Stephen Miller here, we are going to start separating the families. I'll remember this.

Yes, kids in cages. Anyone who crosses the border illegally, as a deterrent, we will split their family up. Now, all of this has been going on since right near the start, since the previous October. And it's just been going on behind the scenes. People know that stuff's going on since right near the start, since the previous October. And it's just been going on behind the scenes. People know that stuff's going on, but it's not really hitting the news or anything. It's just ticking along in the background. By this point in our narrative,

over 2,700 children had been separated from their parents. Now, jumping forward to the end of Trump's administration, that jumps to 5,500 children. Now, like I say, most of this under the radar, but by summer of 2018, it finally hits the news. Images of children being held in literal cages flood the news. There is outrage across the country. Reports start coming in that these children were underfed, they were sleeping on concrete floors, the elder children were looking after the younger one because no adults were being employed to look after these children, were underfed, they were sleeping on concrete floors, the elder children were looking after the younger one because no adults were being employed to look after these children, just imprison them. Full-on neglect abuse is happening to these children on top of the fact they have

been taken away from their parents. And these are children of all ages. These are small little children, these are teenagers. An audio tape comes out of a child begging for her mother. And this tape really affects the news because it's very easy to talk about policy and getting tough. But when you can hear a child begging for their mother, it's very hard to keep supporting a policy like that, even if you are tough on immigration. I just checked up the definition of a concentration camp.

It doesn't quite meet the criteria. No, no, it doesn't. It's a place with large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labour or await mass execution. Yeah, I mean...

So it's not quite, but it's skirting that bloody line. Yeah, concentration camps were talked about a lot in the media. And yes, it is skirting a line. It is uncomfortably close. And it has not been that long since there were far-right marches and people being killed and a president who kept saying that they were very fine people. A lot of things are happening that are making things seem very bad.

Yes. The public backlash is huge to the kids in cages thing. So much so that the Trump administration realised that maybe they had gone too far. So Trump comes out and says, and I quote here, I hate to see separation of parents and children. I hate the children being taken away. And then he just out and out lied and said that this was Obama's law that Obama brought in. And now he knew about it.

He was going to fix it. Yeah. Now, no one was fooled. The only people who believed it were people pretending they believed it because they wanted to believe it. No one was fooled by this. Everyone knew that this was a Trump policy. The paperwork's there. You can just see it.

But Trump continued to lie and lie and lie and say that the Obama administration had started it. So he signed an executive order ordering that separations stop. Hurrah, what a hero. By the time Trump leaves office, jumping forward here slightly, 628 children still had not been reunited

with their families. A lot of paperwork got lost. It's quite hard to figure out where the parents had gone. Yeah. I don't actually know how to respond because it's awful. Yeah, can you see why I decided to lump all the fun, silly stories at the start? Because whilst this was happening, all the weird stuff was happening as well, and your brain's being thrown all over the place.

Anyway, partly due to this, partly due to literally everything, the GOP lost the House in the midterms. They managed to keep hold of the Senate, but that's just so happened to be that the seats contested were mostly safe seats. There was no way the Democrats were going to be able to take the Senate, but the GOP did not do as well as they hoped. Ultimately, this was seen as a big loss for the Republicans. The warning signs were there to be seen by the administration. The Trump base were there to be seen by the administration. The Trump base were happy, but the country was not. And that is where we leave today. Ah, this is the first episode.

And I think because it's so modern and I can remember it, I've actually come away feeling sad. I mean, you can feel like horrified with things from the past and go, that was awful, like anti-tax and slavery. But it's not in memory for me personally but this yeah I'm it's also stuff that holds up to some of the awful stuff we heard

in the earlier days yeah it is bad it's really bad really bad and hey we've still got Covid and all that to come and we've got this nice like when he finally he finally leaves peacefully and they have a party and that's something that happens um so yeah high five on the steps the way yeah we still got plenty to go but yeah there we go

that's his second episode and uh yeah so one more episode to go which by the way i have been called out and it's a very good point. I keep saying, Biden's not going to have his episode before the end, because he's not finished his term as president yet. And people have pointed out, very rightly, there's no reason why Trump hasn't finished his presidency yet, because he could still be president.

And that is a good point. So we might be doing another episode in four years. I'm just going to say, it stops January the 6th. That's where we end up. And then we'll have bonus episodes. End on a high. End on a high.

End on a high. Yeah. End on an insurrection. Love it. There will be other stuff. Bonus stuff. There'll be knockout rounds. We will do stuff on Biden

at some point. And then eventually Trump. But we're going to end on a high. Oh, yeah. So there we go. Part two done. I've only got one more episode to research before the end. but we're going to end we're going to end on a high oh yeah so there we go part two done

and I've only got one more episode to research before the end yeah crazy any closing thoughts that you covered it with the you feel sad and angry yeah that's that's it

Jamie Jamie uh four seasons four seasons hardware and gardening store that is hilarious Sharpie Hurricane that is absolutely brilliant Sharpie Hurricane telling the boy absolutely brilliant. Sharpie Hurricane. Telling the Boy Scouts about his sex party.

Yes. Okay, just remember the fun stuff to cheer yourself up. Yeah. Horrified faces of children who are in the camps without their families, without food. Jamie, no, stop, stop. Right, okay. I'm in a dark place, Rob.

Right, anyway, thank you for listening to us and downloading us from wherever you do download us. It's really good. And yeah, please keep, you know, following us on whatever you follow us on and we will keep posting things. Yes, and thank you very much to everyone on our Discord. If you're our patron, you have access to our Discord.

They have been increasingly helpful. I mean, it's a brilliant community anyway, but that list, for example, of the fun stuff, silly things that happened, Discord server helped me out to remember some of the more crazy stuff. So thank you to you guys on there. As always, your support is fantastic.

Right, thank you very much then. And... I drank, I had to drink it, Rob. So me and Jamie poured a whiskey a while ago so we could just have a whiskey at the end but Jamie's is already gone so I'm gonna have mine and say goodbye goodbye goodbye Chad this is amazing. We're finally looking after the president.

Secret service, we're the last, we're the guards. Oh, this is amazing. I mean, I grew up on a farm in Iowa, and look at me now. I'm looking after the president who is here. He's amazing, and I've got a good in my pocket. This is brilliant. It's a dream come true.

Obviously, I voted for him. He's going to And I've got a good in my pocket. This is brilliant. It's a dream come true. Obviously, I voted for him. He's going to be the best president ever. MAGA. But I never thought I'd be here spending every day next to him. Oh, this is going to be amazing. Oh, he smells glorious. Oh, look.

What a man. What a president. What's he doing? Oh, he's colouring a picture with a couple of children, which I think is lovely. Look at that. Look how he's talking to them. It's great, Chad.

It's really small. It's really small. He's coloured the flag the wrong colour, Chad? Wrong colour? He's a busy man. He's a busy man. He probably just didn't notice. No, no, no. That's not the wrong colour. No? Okay. You busy man. He's a busy man. He probably just didn't notice. No, no, no, no, no.

That's not the wrong colour. No? Okay. You're right. Sorry. Anyway, yeah. Anyway, checking my six. Glorious day, Chad.

Glorious day. Look at them all. Young tykes. Were you in the Boy Scouts? Yes, I was. Yeah, yeah. I whittled my first wood. Yeah, that's good. In the Boy Scouts? Yes, I was. Yeah, yeah. I whittled my first wood in the Boy Scouts. Oh, look at him there.

Oh, the president. He's glorious with the children, isn't he? Absolutely. It reminds me of the other day when he was doing the flag. He did get that wrong, didn't he? Anyway, no, it doesn't matter. He's in his element now. He's giving a speech.

It's good. It's good. I see what he says. I see what he says. Oh, my God. Chad, did he just talk about a sex party? he's in his element now he's giving a speech it's good it's good I see what he says I see what he says oh my god Chad did he just did he just talk about a sex party

yeah he mentioned doggy okay um but I mean you know children should learn young right

you know yeah protects in the future good to have experience absolutely right absolutely right checking my six checking my six. Checking my six.

Okay, come on. He's on the move. Beached Whale is on the move. Beached Whale is on the move. Yes, we can see. Yes, we're photo opportunity here. So check on everything. Should be fine. We scoped out this room earlier. Check on exit. Are we free? Yeah, we're clear. We scoped out this room earlier. Check on exit. Are we free?

Yeah, we're clear. We're good. We're clear. All good. Letty, how chat? Oh, the Prime Minister of Montenegro has gone sprawling. Oh, he's on the floor almost. Trump just, oh, okay.

Okay. Did he just push? Did he? No. Accident. Must have been an accident. Yeah. I mean, he obviously obviously

tripped the president wouldn't just push through an elected member from another country definitely not checking my six checking my six oh look look look hickory he's he's sucking some children oh i think it's a seven-year-old oh Oh, I just love that presidents do this. And Trump, actually, to be honest, though, didn't the last couple of times he did stuff with children go wrong? That'll be fine, this. No, but this is Christmas. It's a magical time of year.

Christmas, magical. Look, what the hell is he saying now? Marginal. Marginal, Chad. Marginal. Marginal. Did he just say Santa didn't exist? Good God. Checking sixes. Good God.

Chad, it's just McDonald's burgers. And they're cold. Checking my six. Well, I mean, we've all come up with crazy ideas for weather. Chad, he said he wants to nuke a hurricane, Chad. I'm not sure I can do this much longer. He wants to nuke a hurricane. Oh, my God.

You're checking your six, aren't you? Checking my six. Chad, obviously, obviously, I love America and I love my job. I love the president. We all do. I'm struggling, Chad. I'm struggling. Yeah, well, I'm very certain that map isn't what I saw earlier.

It's not just me, is it? That has been altered, hasn't it? Yep. And there is a sharpie on the desk with the lid off. At what point should we say something to someone? It's not our role, Hickory. It's not our role. You're right.

Checking my six. It's just crazy. It's just absolutely crazy. Why? Why is he still talking about it? Why? How can I speak to my mum again? We were there in the analysis.

These weren't even the words. They weren't the words. It was elephant, table, pulse, computer and piano. I remember them. It's not even the words. Oh, but on the bright side, though, I gave him the history books. What? You're going to be in the history books? Why? Yeah, one of his words was man, and he looked at me.

I'm pretty sure that, you know, makes me the man.