IHIP News - A Panicked Trump Illegally Targeting Journalists?!
Episode Date: April 10, 2025Trump is using executive orders to go after people who oppose him. Pre-order our new book, join our Patreon Cult, and more by clicking here: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast.See Privacy Poli...cy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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If a convicted felon authoritarian is elected to be president of the United States, guess what happens in the Oval Office?
Authoritarian optics and propaganda. This is absolutely bone chilling. Play the clip.
What this presidential memorandum is going to do, one, it's going to strip any active clearance that he has in light of his past activities involving classified information.
It's also going to order the Department of Justice to investigate his activities to see
what else might come up in that context, given his egregious behavior during your previous
administration.
And I had no idea who this guy was.
I had no idea.
I saw him on CNN CNN or one of them,
I guess, CNN a lot. He'd be on all the time saying that the president is the president.
I had no idea. It's like, you know, in this office, you have a lot of young people.
Okay. All right. I've heard enough of him. This is regarding Miles Taylor,
and he worked in Trump 1.0. And he was the one who wrote the op-ed anonymously in the New York Times that there was a resistance within the Trump administration. And then he later wrote another anonymous op-ed. And then he wrote a book about the dangers of Donald Trump and the dangers of authoritarianism. And again, Trump lives on grievances.
And what he's doing right now is he is using the Oval Office to propagandize his power.
This is number one, an attack on the First Amendment, and number two, the weaponization
of the DOJ.
Again, every chance he gets, he attacks and delegitimizes the pillars that hold our country together.
Projection is what Trump was doing when he was saying Biden was weaponizing the Justice
Department. That's exactly what he's doing with Miles Teller. He didn't leak a secret.
He said, based on my observations, Trump is an authoritarian. It is absolutely unprecedented,
this type of authoritarianism from the White House.
Okay.
And then here is another video, and he has opened up another investigation.
And he's doing this via executive order.
And it's important to note that typically you would just call the DOJ and say, hey, investigate this person.
But he's making a big display of it because this is what
authoritarians do. He's normalizing this to his audience and to his personality cult to where
it's like, number one, the people that support him think, oh yeah, if you speak bad about our
leader, he's going to get you. But also it's sending a signal to anybody that's currently
working within this administration that might want to fight for democracy or might want to say, hey, this guy's doing a bunch of illegal shit right now.
He's sending them a warning sign that if you do this, I will weaponize the DOJ against you and I will silence you because integrity, honesty and transparency are not valued here.
Play this clip.
And this guy Krebs was saying, oh, the election was great. It was great. Well,
it's been proven that it was not only not great, when you look at all these lawyers and law firms that are signing, giving us hundreds of millions of dollars,
it was proven by so many different ways in so many different forms from the legislature's not approving to the 51 intelligence agents that worked from the law.
Okay, that's enough.
Kylie, what would this sound like to anybody who's rational? Here he is sitting there crying like a baby, and he is weaponizing the DOJ against a man who used to work for him, Krebs, who said the 2020 election was free.
It was fair.
There was no cheating.
There was no corruption.
He is so butthurt still that Joe Biden beat him.
And people, when Joe Biden won, went out in the streets and celebrated.
When Trump won this last time, when he beat Kamala, nobody celebrated. In fact, he had
to move his inauguration from outdoors to indoors because the optics of the lack of
support were going to be horrific. Because when it comes to Trump supporters, you have
the personality cult that watches his allies, the propagandists,
Fox News entertainment all of the time. And then you have the embarrassed Trump supporters that
won't say it out loud, but secretly they freebase Fox News and deep dive into the harder hitting
drugs like Shapiro and all of those other whack jobs. And people are not completely vocal about this because I think that some of the electorate
is still movable.
That's why he does this public display of normalizing the attacks on the First Amendment
and the attacks of the weaponization of the Justice Department.
These are plays out of the authoritarian playbook.
For as stupid as we think he is, he's a brilliant propagandist, and he's surrounded by other
brilliant propagandists who have studied how to make an authoritarian government where all of the
power is concentrated in one individual. I have one other point I want to add.
I completely agree with you on why he's doing this.
But I think another thing that we need to consider is the Supreme Court
gave him full immunity, anything that was within his executive authority.
Making these executive orders takes the review that a court might have
about the illegality of using the Justice Department
against an individual. And for me, I think that's just another way to manipulate the Supreme Court's
ruling. And one of the things that authoritarians do is they get everybody to obey first. And this
really, really is alarming to me. Yesterday, Governor Gretchen Whitmer was at the
White House, and she was standing in the background when he signed both of these executive orders,
and she continued to stand there. Please put up this tweet. Bill Kristol tweets,
Governor Whitmer stands in the Oval Office as Trump signs disgraceful executive orders targeting Chris
Krebs and Miles Taylor. She doesn't walk out. She doesn't say anything after to the media.
Later on, her office puts out a weak statement. Be better, Governor Whitmer. Be like Governor
Mills. And I like Gretchen Whitmer, but this to me, this is what authoritarians do. They like
to display obedience. And what they did here is they have a Democratic governor that looks like
she's being obedient. This is absolutely dangerous. You cannot, under any circumstances,
give authoritarian regimes an inch, not an inch, because then they keep moving the goalposts,
moving the goalposts, and eventually they're coming after you. Well, and also Michigan has been hit so hard by the Trump economic plans. And so she specifically targeting her, I do not think
to have her in the Oval Office, I don't think that was like a whim. I think that was planned.
Right. But as a Democrat and as somebody who's a fierce defender of democracy,
I agree with Bill Kristol. Oh, 100%.
She would have, she should have immediately turned around and walked out and her,
she should have immediately had a press conference and said, I was hoodwinked here.
He is trying to use me for the optics of his propaganda machine to make it look
like I'm obeying this dictator. And I do not. And we have to be better. Everybody has to be better
because what he's doing is he's blackmailing funds that he would send to these blue states.
And he's trying to control everybody via blackmail, which again is a play of authoritarians.
All right, next up, speaking speaking of obedience the reason that he went
after law firms is because when you go after chris krebs and miles taylor the law firms that they
would hire to defend themselves trump has already gotten them to obey first, which is rule number one in authoritarianism, never obey. And these
law firms are obeying. Please put up the video. And this guy Krebs was saying, oh, the election
was great. It was great. Well, it's been proven that it was not only not great. When you look at
all these lawyers and law firms that are signing, giving us hundreds of millions of dollars,
it was proven by so many different ways in so many
different forms from the legislature's not approving to the 51 intelligence agents.
Okay. So what he's saying here is he is saying that the law firm's settlements with him after
he targeted them, he's using it now to prove his point that he says that they agreed to do this
pro bono work, that they are admitting that there was something wrong with the 2020 election. Again,
all of this is historically proven when you study authoritarianism as to what they do. So the
lawyers that these two individuals would go hire have already been
attacked by this authoritarian regime. Targeting law firms was a part of this play. Put up this
headline. Kyle Griffin tweets, Trump has signed an executive order targeting Susan Godfrey, the law firm that helped Dominion Voting Systems obtain its $787
million settlement from Fox for the network's 2020 election lies. So imagine this. This law firm
proves that Fox lied to the tune of almost $1 billion. Trump is attacking these pro-democracy law firms. All of this is length.
All of this is the dismantling and the delegitimizing of the institutions and the
pillars that people in democracies value. He is attacking every aspect of this. This is corruption
of the highest order. It really is jaw-dropping how many law
firms have capitulated to him. And I know it's a big fight amongst attorneys in those law firms.
They're resigning, but giving him an inch, he will take a mile every time. And this is,
wow, it is so dangerous. Not only that, but you have universities that are capitulating. You have
Columbia and Harvard that are capitulating to an authoritarian, the very institutions that would
teach people about authoritarianism. And this is what authoritarians do with the jump. They attack
higher education and they get obedience. What he did with Gretchen Whitmer there was he,
it was the appearance of obedience. What he did with Columbia, obedience. What he's doing with
Harvard, obedience. What he's doing with these law firms, obedience. It is dangerous. You have
to pick a hill that you believe in democracy, you believe in social justice, you believe in human
rights, you believe in the First Amendment. And you do not cede.
All of the ceding that has happened in just 80 days is an absolute dagger.
And we cannot give oxygen to this.
There can be zero obedience with the authoritarian regime.
I'm so disappointed in these law firms and these higher ed institutions.
It's just despicable. But always,
always the one man who is always on message regarding this is Bernie Sanders. Please play
the clip. The idea that the president of the United States would threaten and harass
attorneys and law firms that defended people he did not like is a major step forward toward authoritarianism.
And by the way, some of these big law firms, was it Paul Weiss is one of them?
One of the biggest caved in.
We look to these law firms of hundreds of well-paid lawyers to defend the constitution to defend the
rule of law and these guys big law firms who often by the way defended democrats
they were more interested in getting millions of dollars from their lobbying or whatever the
hell they do in washington dc making huge amounts of money than standing tall and defending the
constitution they should be ashamed of themselves. They should be ashamed of themselves.
They absolutely should be ashamed of themselves. This is, we're on the precipice. And the reason Trump is moving at such a rapid speed is because he has to break it before midterms. He has to
break every bit of it. There is an optics propaganda campaign going on. The corruption
behind the scene, the little bit that's been exposed is just the tip of the iceberg. He is
going to permanently break the United States economy. And you have these billionaires that
thought it would be fun to support Trump because they were going to have record growth. Well,
what happens when you have a manic, bipolar president that tariffs are on,
tariffs are off? Oh, shit, this. Oh, shit, this. This is going to degrade these American companies.
Eventually, over time, nobody is going to want to mess with the United States,
much like they don't want to mess with Russia. And I want to remind the viewer and
the listener, the world's best economies have the best governments. This is a horrible government.
It's going to produce a horrible economy because it's corrupt. It's quid pro quo. It is not
transparent. He's getting his friends rich. He himself is breaking all sorts of ethics laws
financially with what he's doing behind that desk. The people that still believe in democracy,
this is a time where we all have to have uncomfortable conversations with those that
are indoctrinated in this cult. This is literally our country, or we're going to go the way of Russia,
or we're going to go, and we're going to go the way of Hungary. And all of the great things that
we all love about this country will disappear and are disappearing before our very eyes.
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