The Bulwark Podcast - Trump’s Empire of Fraud

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

The ex-POTUS has been put out of business in New York, after his fraud was found so overwhelming that no trial was needed. Meanwhile, his lawyers are prepping for Alito and Thomas to weigh in on a gag order, and some Republicans go Team Menendez. Ben Wittes joins Charlie Sykes for The Trump Trials.

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with the Michelin X-Ice Snow Tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca. Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast, a new episode of Trump Trials with our partners from Lawfare.

And we, of course, are joined by the editor-in-chief of Lawfare, Ben Wittes, who joins us from the, is that a hammock studio? You're actually in a hammock, a hammock inside the house, Ben. At the beginning of the pandemic, I ordered this hammock from Latvia. It is handmade. I said, if I'm going to spend, you know, the next, I didn't know, I thought it was going to be three months, but it turned out to be two years. In this room, I am doing it in a hammock. I've done, you know, lots of shows, lots of podcasts from this hammock and all my meetings. I make no apologies. I was not asking for an apology.

I was just asking for a, I'm feeling a little bit, you know, jealous of all of this. I mean, obviously, I mean, does it make you more chill? I mean, what is the effect? Well, it makes me chill. It also allows me to move around. And, you know, the other thing that the hammock does is it allows when I'm wearing a dog shirt, which I'm not,

the eyes are particularly protuberant in the hammock studio, which offends all the right people. Okay, so for those podcast listeners who don't realize we're now doing this on YouTube, so you can actually check it out. Okay, so I have a lot of notes today for the Trump trials. It's been a rather extraordinary week, and let's just jump right into all of this. George Conway explained this yesterday, that this partial summary judgment by this New York judge, Arthur, we're going to pronounce it

Engorden, is the equivalent of the corporate death penalty for the Trump organization in the state of New York, which seems like a BFD to me. This is the AP story. A judge ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump committed fraud for years while building the real estate empire that catapulted him to fame and to the White House and ordered some of the former president's companies removed from his control and dissolved. This is a part of this lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James and found that Trump and his family and his company deceived banks. This was the fraud, the grip, deceived banks, insurance companies, and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth. And some of the

details, I think, are kind of dazzling details here, Ben. Trump's Fifth Avenue apartment in Trump Tower was inflated by as much as $200 million. Trump claimed that it was three times its actual size. Who knew that that would be a problem? You know, square footage between friends. That's right. I mean, it's just it's bigly. You just have to think about it. He claimed that Mar-a-Lago was worth about $600 million. The judge found no, actually more like $27 million. And so the judge agreed with the New York Attorney General who said that Trump had inflated the value of his properties by as much as $2.2 billion. And I guess I want to talk about this in terms of sort of the granular significance of putting Donald Trump out of business in New York. I mean, this business death penalty, but also the larger picture that I wrote about in my newsletter this morning, that the art of the deal was always based on this swindle. It was always based on this fraud.

It is the throne, the golden throne of fraud that Donald Trump has been pulling off and getting away with for years and years and years and may only be an asterisk going into 2024. But Ben, let's just talk about this. You know, the judge said that the evidence was so overwhelming that it didn't even need to go to trial or to hear evidence. I mean, because there's no facts to be decided. I mean, this is rather extraordinary, this kind of a remedy, isn't it, in a case without a trial? Just on summary judgment, your thoughts. With a bunch of these civil cases that we've talked about in the past, I've said, hey, you know, this is optically significant. But from Trump's point of view, it's just money.

It's just the cost of doing business. As sympathetic as I am to E. Jean Carroll, that's the way Trump regards these judgments, I think. Rape is just the cost of doing business. Rape is just the cost of doing business. Defamation is just the cost of doing business. This is not just the cost of doing business because it really affects your ability to do business in the future. And, you know, one of the consequences of this is that these companies are being removed from his control, they're being dissolved, removed entirely. And eventually, you start losing the assets, which in Trump's cases is two things.

One is the branding rights. I think that's probably something that you can't really take away from him. But the other is the buildings, right? And I do think you're reaching the point with some of these litigations where they really materially affect the Trump organization. It's really a cluster of organizations' ability to function, at least in the state of New York. And, you know, that's a significant thing. Now, whether it's a significant thing to voters or not, I very much doubt. But, you know, in the sense that there are really three drivers of Trump's, you know, wealth and prosperity, one of them, the original one is this real estate quasi empire. The second one is the brand. And the third one is the brand as implemented through fundraising in the political environment.

Right. And this really does start kicking the leg out, one of those three legs out from under it. And I don't want to say this is the thing that's going to end Donald Trump because we've all said that a hundred times and it's been wrong a hundred times. It's not trivial though.

And I do think that the idea that the empire is built on fraud, built on tax evasion, is something we've all known for a long time. And yet having it, you know, validated by the New York court system in a fashion with genuine consequences for Trump, albeit in the financial, not in the lock him up kind of space, is no small thing. No, it's no small thing, but it's not going to be the tipping point for Donald Trump. We know this. I mean, on Earth 2.0, this sort of thing would be shocking. It would be disqualifying for someone running for any office. But for Donald Trump, this is just an asterisk. I mean, a lot of this stuff has been known. The Republican Party and its great Faustian deal with Donald Trump, essentially acknowledge, yeah, he's kind of a fraudster.

He's a con man. He's a serial liar. We know all that, but we can go along with him anyway. But on the other hand, it is interesting to sort of put this in context and that before everything that happened, everything, I'm waving my hands here. There was this fraud, you know, the daddy's money, the assets that were built on paper, this, you know, elaborate swindle con game that was going on. David K. Johnson, who's been writing about Donald Trump forever, won a Pulitzer Prize, wrote yesterday, I marvel at people who do not realize that Donald is and always has been a con man who lies, cheats, steals, and got away with it using threats of ruinous legal action, et cetera. And then he goes through what this means. He says the effect of this ruling

is that Donald Trump is no longer in business. Worse, he writes, the self-proclaimed multi-billionaire may soon be personally bankrupt as a result, stripped of just about everything because for years he engaged in calculated bank fraud and insurance fraud by inflating the values of his property, a judge ruled on Tuesday. His gaudy Trump Tower apartment, his golf courses, his Boeing 757 jet, and even Mar-a-Lago could all be disposed of by a court appointed monitor, leaving Trump with not much more than his pensions as a one-term president and a television performer. Okay, this raises all kinds of questions for me. What does it say about the due diligence of the banks and the insurance companies? The fact that this has been going on and it's been kind of an open secret for a very,

very long time. What does it say about the people who are willing to hand out money to Donald Trump? And what does it say about law enforcement officials in Manhattan, in New York, in the Southern District of New York, who have looked the other way for decades as Donald Trump has been doing this? Those are very different questions. Yes. And let's take the bank example first. And I am no expert on real estate financing. So, you know, take this with a grain of salt. But it seems to me that the story that we've learned over the last decade has been that banks, more respectable banks pulled away from him. degree to which the kind of mainstream system was self-correcting in this regard. And that left him to do business with a group of much shadier banks, particularly and most famously Deutsche Bank, which took crazy risks on him and presumably got higher interest rates as a result. Now, what does it say about

them? It says that there are people in every industry who are willing to bend the rules if you suck at their jobs, if you up the price a little bit or a lot. And that also, by the way, put him in bed with some of their other clients, i, non-real estate fraud, you know, why is Donald Trump constantly doing business with, you know, Russian oligarchs kind of question. The question of law enforcement is a really interesting one, and I don't think we know the answer to it. So we know that Trump's tax returns have been under audit repeatedly because he's said so. I don't think we know why those audits haven't picked up any of these issues, or if they have. I also don't think we know why some of the same issues, you know, the New York Times did that exhaustive study of Trump's tax returns. Tax fraud. Yeah, exactly. Why that has not created law enforcement action at the federal

level and why some of those issues were invisible to state law enforcement earlier. So I do think there's a real law enforcement question here. There is one potentially very disturbing answer to this, or maybe there's more than one, which is that this sort of activity is so common in the New York real estate world that it's not actually that exceptional, which is, you know, I hate to sound like Trump, but a kind of everybody does it. Yeah, but is that a defense? Is that an actual defense, though? Absolutely not. But it may be an explanation as to why, you know, we all cross the street illegally, and nobody gets, you know, cited for it. And there may be some of that going on in New York taxes. And there could have been some favoritism, too. There could have been favoritism in the fact that, you know, sometimes, you know,

this whole notion that nobody's above the law, which, of course, is just simply not true. If you're wealthy and you're famous, you are going to be treated differently. So the judge in this case, I mean, he called bullshit on Donald Trump. I mean, this is just dropping the hammer. I mean, yeah, it's just one of those Democratic judges, though, Charlie, so it doesn't count. But I mean, the language he used, I mean, you know, he called Trump's, you know, explanations of the defense bogus and deceptive that his denials were straight out of fantasy world. So the trial next week will just be about, you know, he's basically been found guilty. I mean, he's basically lost the case, right? It's just a matter of, you know, how much of his ill-gotten gains has he had to disgorge? Is that what's going to be decided?

Exactly. It's not wholly dissimilar from the E. Jean Carroll situation where you kind of decide as a matter of summary judgment that it's a certain amount of it, but there are residual questions. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel. Wherever you go, you can get a pro at Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadexperts.ca slash locations.

We were talking before about the political fallout from this, which I think is somewhat predictable because, I mean, look, I think it's baked in. If you supported Donald Trump, you've kind of known a lot of this has been going on. I mean, you've noticed that you have these business failures, et cetera. But also, as I wrote this morning, there's something almost quaint about this kind of grift and graft compared to the string of horribles we've been seeing with Donald Trump, you know, and the rising threat that he poses to the American constitutional order. The problem is the zone has been so flooded with Donald Trump that even in the week in which he calls for, and I keep coming back to this because I do think this is relevant, where he calls for

the death penalty for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggests that he would use government power, you know, to retaliate against media outlets that he doesn't like. When all of that is going on, it's kind of like hard to know where to look. And I do get the sense, and I know that my colleague Tim Miller wrote about this, and Nick Cattagio over at the Dispatch, there's this danger that we've just gotten numbed to all of this, that we are all the boiling frogs, that Trump continues to up the ante, become more outrageous, more dangerous. I mean, there's still people out there who will accuse us of suffering from Trump derangement syndrome. And some of them are now looking around and going, why? Why has nobody done anything about this? This is just crazy. There is that danger,

that sense that right now that we've normalized so much of this behavior that he knows that simply lying about the value of your property, if you're willing to accept January 6th, if you're willing to accept the calls for the termination of the constitution, if you're willing to accept the attempted extortion of the Ukrainian president, if you're willing to accept all of the rest of that stuff and his abrasive conspiracy theories, you're not going to go, yes, but really he overvalued Mar-a-Lago, right? I mean, the thing about it is he keeps upping the ante. I actually disagree with you on a subtle point here.

I don't think the problem is that we're all frogs in boiling water. I think the majority or about half of the country shrieked and jumped out of the water a long time ago. And I think about 40% of the country actively enjoys the bath, that this is a spa to them. There's some part of this that the more outrageous he is, the more fun it is for them. And I think there's a heavy element of this that involves transgression and that involves people living vicariously through his voracious appetites and outrageousness. And the more of a criminal he is, the better. And then there's a small group of people who are the frog in the boiling water. And it's a certain group of people who are actually not into this stuff, but they're really susceptible to the argument that, you know, the drag queen story hour and Joe Biden

being old and inflation are so bad that they have to tolerate it anyway. And those are the people for whom the ever-increasing temperature of the water get is not enjoyable. They're not like the people who were into the transgression and who find it exciting and amusing. They actually don't like it. And they're the people who were into the transgression and who find it exciting and amusing. They actually don't like it. And they're the people who were quietly whispering in your ear, I feel the same way you do, but I can't say it publicly. But they're so offended by the comparatively minor excesses of the left and center-left and their genetic Republicans and they find it less uncomfortable to deal with the rising temperature than they do to feel the discomfort

of abandoning the pot. Tim Miller in his piece yesterday sort of imagined going back in time to 2015 or so and getting together a group of Republican worthies and then showing them the headline from January 6th, you know, mob storms Capitol. And then tell them that, you know, they would think, well, you know, that's gone too far. You know, surely there's no way that people will still support him. And then you explain to them that every one of you will in fact be on board with this guy, with the exception of say, Liz Cheney, it would blow their minds. And that's the boiling frog syndrome is that many of them, you know, I mean, they made small compromises. They made transactional compromises. They said, okay, the pussy grabbing, I don't, that doesn't bother me. That's locker room talk. Okay. So the Ukraine thing. And what happens is that after a while, you realize that you have become completely morally and intellectually corrupt. And at that point,

you're like in. Unless you're a Cassidy Hutchinson, you have sunken costs, and this is the choice you have made, right? This is the life, this is the business they have chosen. I think that's right. But that's a relatively small percentage of the electorate, right? Those Republican elites, the much larger percentage of the electorate, and I think this is disturbing, is people who actually get off on it and who are genuinely, you know, 35% of the country are hardcore and they enjoy this. So here's what I have a hard time reconciling. I don't know whether you've had this experience. We get out of our media bubble. We get out of the, you know, the political bubble and you go out into the world, you go to soccer games, you meet people at tailgate parties, you know, at baseball games and you go to church, you go to the farmer's market, everything,

and you meet Americans. And you're reminded, these people are pretty decent. They're not stupid. They raise their children to be, you know, good men and women. They have strong moral values. And I have a hard time reconciling, how do you, who are so moral and honorable and smart in other areas of your life, how are you willing to buy into this when it comes to politics? Is there a complete disconnect between our politics? And I do wonder, those people, is there some point in the temperature where they go, OK, I don't like Democrats. I don't like the welfare state. I don't want inflation. I'm concerned about the border and crime and all of those other things. I don't like drag queen story hour, but damn, it is just look around. It is too freaking hot here. I can't take this. But I think we know from all kinds of stuff that there is a difference between personal decency and political decency. And the number of people who are perfectly lovely in their ordinary lives and willing to contemplate at a political level things that are appalling,

things that should be unacceptable, undiscussable. Why is that? I mean, you're right, but I mean, I'm thinking about people, okay, in the context of our discussion with Donald Trump and his lying and his frauds and everything, there are millions of people who are going to vote for Donald Trump, but would never lend him money, would never let him babysit their kids,

would never let him walk their dogs. They would not hire him for any position in their businesses, but they're willing to make him president again. What is the dividing line in people's heads that say, I wouldn't tolerate this behavior from my kid's soccer coach. I would not buy a car from this man. I would not go into business with this man, but I'm willing to give him the nuclear codes and put him back in the Oval Office. The answer is that he's a cartoon character. And, you know, if you replace the name Donald Trump there with the name,

choose your, you know, your lovable villain cartoon character, and you say, do you like, I don't know, Donald Duck, right? And people say, yeah, I like Donald Duck. And then you say, well, would you lend him money? Not making Donald Duck commander-in-chief, though. But that's the stretch, right? The cartoon character becoming president. I don't think the stretch between what would your personal engagement with,

would you trust Pepe Le Pew with your kids? Is it more like that some people just kind of get off on the anti-hero? So for example, if you're watching Game of Thrones and you go, Cersei Lannister, really kind of rooting for her, kind of like her. She's evil, she's terrible, but you're kind of thinking, is she going to get away with this? And have you ever noticed the number of times you're watching a movie or particularly television and you realize, wait, I am actually rooting for the worst person in the world.

Exactly. And I wonder... This is exactly what I'm saying. And maybe your Cersei Lannister example is better than my cartoon character example. But if you think of these as a sort of two-dimensional screen character, we root for bad guys all the time. And we allow people to do horrible, horrible things as long as we've decided that they're the people that are on our side in the fight. And that's the way people react.

And by the way, when those characters, when they do that, the more transgressive they are, you know, swooping in on dragons and incinerating people, we think that's cool, right? And that's the effect that he has on a very large number of people. It's much more than the frog in the ever increasing temperature were actively into it, or at least those who were actively into it. But the flip side is that the other half of the political spectrum jumped out of that pot of water

a long time ago, early in 2016. Most of us were like, wow, this is disgusting. I don't want anything to do with this. Yeah. By the way, that's a dragon and it is incinerating an entire city here. I was about to say the first time I realized this, but I don't know it was the first time. I was well into this sort of process, but I remember watching, since we're on TV here, watching House of Cards and watching the president, who's a bad guy, and realizing that I'm rooting for him. I am rooting for him. He just killed somebody.

And I'm thinking, I want him to get away with this. And it's like, OK, I do wonder whether there's kind of a crossover. But I'm not going to get too deep into this. But I will confess that I did actually root for the bad guys. Like House of Cards, before Kevin Spacey turned out to be a real bad guy in real life. Right. But Kevin Spacey, he was perfect. You know, he was the perfect villain.

Very great actor. And I think that analogy is really the way a lot of people experience Trump with one really important exception, which is Kevin Spacey in House of Cards does not purport to be fighting for you. He does not purport to be your tribe's hero against the heathens or whatever. And Trump combines that sort of lovable, rogue, bad guy, anti-hero thing. I don't get the lovable part. Well, I don't either, but we're not on his team with the idea that he's the champion of our team, and he's fighting for us against the hordes of barbarians that are invading our town with trans people. So here's the great divide. You have Democrats who think that the world is like the West Wing

and that Americans want that kind of a president. And it turns out that tens of millions of Americans kind of want Kevin Spacey as president, I guess. Okay. So going back to the suggestion that Mark Milley be executed, by the way, I do think it's worthwhile pointing out how this rhetoric is escalating. The normalization of violent rhetoric can lead to the normalization of violence. In 2016, it was all about locking Hillary Clinton up. Now that has evolved to hanging Mike Pence and, you know, putting General Milley up against the wall and shooting him. I mean, this is this is dangerous rhetoric. So he's making these threats at the very moment when Judge Shutkin is going to have to decide what is she going to do about Jack Smith's demand for this narrow order that has been,

I think, unfortunately, colloquially referred to as a gag order. Of course, Donald Trump is playing that card saying, you know, this is outrageous. You're trying to gag me. You're trying to take away my First Amendment rights. But Judge Shutkin has a very narrow, I mean, she's on a tightrope here, isn't she? I mean, talk to me about how you see this whole issue of the protective orders playing out with Judge Shutkin and what her options are. Yeah. So as I said, I think last week, the main point here is not to get the order. The main point is to start a discussion with Judge Chutkin in which you're laying out the record and you're keeping track of it. And maybe that leads to some limited order, or maybe it leads to her giving a stern admonition that next time, you know, you better cut this out or else. Or maybe it leads to some acceleration of the trial, which is the record that there is an ongoing attempt to corrupt the system by intimidating witnesses and by affecting the jury pool.

Which is very real and not theoretical. It is not theoretical. special purpose grand jurors, a lot of whom have had harassment issues. And Georgia has a genuinely crazy openness rule that has allowed their names and locations to become public. And I think there's a real set of concerns here. So one of the interesting things about Judge Shutkin and these other judges is they know that the threat is real. They are accompanied by security all the time. They know this is not theoretical, that this is real and that it is escalating. We know Donald Trump's willingness to use rhetoric. We know the fact that many of his followers do take it both seriously and literally. There was a woman indicted and arrested for

threatening Judge Chutkan. These are not theoretical issues. And look, if you're a judge in that court, after the years of January 6th cases, there have been security issues associated with that court that are non-trivial. And that's not a new thing. There is something different about this. And, you know, I go to that court quite a bit for a lot of different reasons. And it's a tricky building to secure. It's got multiple entrances. It's used by a large number of people. And the marshals have a very tough job in making that place secure. And so, you know, all of this will be on her mind as she considers this. And, you know, she's never had a defendant that has his own social media site before.

Well, she's never had a former president of the United States who's running for president. I mean, there's no, you can't go to the manual. How do you handle cases like this? Because no one ever envisioned we would be in this moment. None of that is before her in this motion, but the motion is pregnant with all of that. And that's the subtext of it. When Jack Smith comes to her and says, hey, I want a limited order restraining the president's ability to do this stuff. It's limited in one sense, but it puts everything on the table in another sense. And it's going to be a very big deal. And how she rules in it will be really, really interesting to watch. It is going to be

a very big deal and it will have real consequences. So we got the response from Trump's lawyers this week, you know, arguing that the special counsel's office trying to limit Trump's first amendment rights to silence Joe Biden's top political opponent. And I think it was CBS's Scott McFarlane who tweeted, you can hear Trump's own voice in the latest motion filed by his defense in the 2020 election conspiracy case. The motion has lines like this. The proposed gag order is nothing more than an obvious attempt by the Biden administration to unlawfully silence its most prominent political opponent, who has now taken a commanding lead in the polls. Also,

keenly aware that it is losing that race for 2024, the prosecution seeks to unconstitutionally silence President Trump. I don't think it's a leap to say that does sound like Donald Trump, as I'm trying to imagine his lawyers thinking that that is a good way to persuade Judge Shutkin. So you have two tracks here, right? Actually, though, I want to, in defense of Donald Trump, I want to point out that John Lauro, one of his lawyers, has persistently and in court referred to the prosecution as the Biden administration and talked in similar language. So this may be turning the volume. I was surprised that John Lauro talked that way in the courtroom, but he did. And so whether this is the lawyers or Trump or the lawyers channeling

Trump or kind of a collaborative exercise, I really don't know. But who is this addressed to? I mean, this is like a two track because if you're the lawyer, okay, let's say the lawyers wrote this, they clearly are not writing this in order to persuade Judge Chudkin. No, it's addressed to Sam Alito and Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Thomas. You think so? Because the strategy works like this. Eventually, she's going to do something. Whether it's on this motion or on some motion down the line, she's going to do something because you know that your client is going to push her to do something.

The DC Circuit, depending on the panel, could be a friendly or unfriendly forum. But whatever happens with this motion, you're eventually going to take it up. And you're going to take it up as far as you can go. The DC Circuit, one way or another, is a way station. And so the question is, do you have four or five votes for the idea that the Justice Department can't do X to Donald Trump? And the more you've pounded the table, the more that maybe you've created your own record before the appellate judges whom you are most relying on. That's a really interesting point. I was thinking that the two-track was aimed at, you know,

voters and public opinion, but I think you are obviously right. You know that the audience of, you know, Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas will pay attention to that. And we'll probably think that those are serious arguments. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your dread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family.

Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. Treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there, treadexperts.ca. Okay, so there are developments in some of the other cases, including down in Georgia, that are less interesting. I wanted to get your take, though. In the other big legal case of the week, which is the Bob Menendez case,

which is kind of the old-fashioned, old-school crook, the guy with the cash stuffed into his clothes and the gold bars. It's old-fashioned in that sense, but it's got this new angle, which is, you know, the foreign government involved. Yeah, Egypt. This is a heart attack level serious indictment. Yes, right. This is a heart attack level serious indictment. I mean, it's unusually full of really awful stuff. It's really Trump-like, except for the cash and the gold bars and stuff. And the Mercedes. The indictment basically alleges at its core that Bob Menendez has this girlfriend, who's now his wife, who is in league with a group of

businessmen who are representing effectively the government of Egypt. And they are showering the girlfriend slash wife and through her Bob Menendez with cash, gold bars, jobs, Mercedes, other stuff. And he, in return, is doing favors for them and the government of Egypt. As chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, so it's not a trivial position. Correct, including passing information about local and U.S. employees of U.S. Embassy Egypt. By the way, I've been to U.S. Embassy Egypt. You want to talk about a facility that's hard to protect, giving the Egyptian military details of who's working there. He's intervening with the Department of Agriculture to protect a halal foods monopoly that one of these business interests own. He's pushing for U.S. military aid to Egypt. So this is a kind of, it's not a spying indictment, but it is a foreign interference indictment. He is acting as an agent of a foreign

government. I mean, he's been bribed to act as an agent of a foreign government on their benefit. So you're right. I mean, at one level, it is sort of, you know, the comic opera on the other level, he poses a real national security threat. I mean, this is a big fucking deal. It reminds me a lot of the Mike Flynn situation. Different country, Egypt instead of Turkey and Russia, but this is the oldest style national security threat. When the founders thought of a national security threat, they were talking about our officials in pay of or in league with foreign governments. And that's exactly what this is. So I just want to say to, first of all, to all anti-Trump people, don't what about this? This is seriously bad. It's exactly the sort of thing that we're afraid of in the Trumpist context. The fact that Menendez has done not the foreign government

thing, but the cash, bribes, gifts thing before. There was a hung jury. They didn't retry him. He learned no lessons there. Well, he learned the lesson that you can get away with it. You're right, but it didn't make him more prudent or more cautious. I mean, that's the thing that blows my mind. He knows they're looking at him, they're watching him, they're prepared to indict him, and he's still apparently stuffing the $100 bills into his clothes. And so the only thing that you can say that mitigates this, and it mitigates it substantially, but not from Menendez, is it does appear to be a highly isolated thing to Menendez. It's not, unlike the Trump thing, there's not a cabal of them,

Trump who has a relationship with Russia, hiring Paul Manafort who has a relationship with Russia, with Mike Flynn who has a relationship with Russia, with Mike Flynn, who has a relationship with Russia. You don't have the problem of, I'm just going to say this bluntly, a fifth column cabal in the administration and in the campaign. You have a major league corrupt individual senator, but there's no reason to think, at least not that I can tell, that anybody else other than the small group of people who did this are involved in it. And so I do think that mitigates it from a Democratic Party point of view, but they really need to get rid of this guy.

They really do. And the politics are, of course, very, very interesting. Democrats, first of all, they have not been defending him. They haven't been rationalizing it. There's no progressive media that's providing air cover for Menendez or saying that he's being treated unfairly or the victim of... Or attacking. No one's attacking the Justice Department for it. But with the exception of Republicans who, again, this is what a weird moment we're living in, where Republicans are kind of giving him a little bit of cover, right?

You know, the Tom Cottons of the world. I mean, I do think the Democrats were slow as of yesterday morning when I first wrote my newsletter that there had been only four Democratic senators had called for his resignation. I think the dam kind of broke over the last 24 hours. Cory Booker may have been, his fellow New Jersey senator may have been the tipping point. We'll see what the Biden White House says. The Senate's a very clubby environment. New Jersey Democrats are completely freaking out about this because they understand what a disaster it is if Menendez stays in office and is on the ballot. So that calculus is there. It's relatively easy for Democrats to take the high road here

because they know that if Menendez resigns, if he's forced out of office, that the Democratic governor of New Jersey will immediately appoint another Democrat. But it is this weird transvaluation of Trump world giving him kind of a little bit of cover because they can't really acknowledge that being indicted is disqualifying. So you are seeing the law and order party kind of lining up somewhat sympathetically. Behind the criminals. Behind the criminals. Yeah. It's not just that they can't acknowledge that being indicted is adequate grounds for resignation. It's that they can't admit that being inexplicably at the whim of foreign governments is, you know, to acknowledge that Menendez is not just outside of the bounds, but so far outside of the bounds. Then how do you explain Trump's relationship with Putin?

Yeah, you're right. How do you explain the weird solicitude that Trump has for all these dictators? Once you say that if you've taken gratuities from hostile or adversarial or run by dictators, foreign governments, and you're doing them favors in office. Well, how is it different to say once you've done real estate deals with Russian oligarchs and you've tried and tried to have, you've had Miss Universe in Moscow and you've traded nice things. You've tried to do a business deal with Trump Tower Moscow with Dmitry Peskov and Vladimir Putin. Once you've done those things, and they've intervened in the election on your behalf, exactly how do you answer that question?

You don't really want to raise any doubts that maybe there's something questionable about that behavior. So what's more likely? Want to engage in some rank, raw, gratuitous speculation now, Ben? Yeah, absolutely. Can we do irresponsible in there? Yeah, yeah. This will be totally irresponsible.

What is more likely? That Bob Menendez does the right thing and resigns, or that Bob Menendez announces sometime in the next few weeks that he's switching to the Republican Party and endorsing Donald Trump for re-election? I think it is highly- See where I'm going with that. Yeah, I do. There's a home for people like Bob Menendez, and it's the Republican Party. Look, I don't think he's going to resign because the only leverage he has is being a senator. Once you step down, once you're- You're little people.

You're little people. Once you're not in that office anymore, why will anybody return your call? You're just an indicted criminal. And I think the same reason that George Santos is still representative George Santos, at least for another few weeks, I think that's the only card he has to play. So I don't think he will resign.

I do think it is really important for Democrats to give him no quarter. And last time they gave him quarter for a couple of reasons. One was that the governor was Chris Christie and they didn't want a Republican appointed. But the other reason was that that was kind of garden variety graft. So the, let's see what the jury does. It wasn't quite as bread a line as this.

It was not quite as. It did not involve a foreign government. It didn't involve. Long time friend, you know, long time friend. It was gifts. It was, it was, look, it was really bad. I think he should have been convicted, but it wasn't threaten the republic bad. And it wasn't bad in the same way that we have all spent five years saying what

Trump is doing is unacceptable. And we can't tolerate this in a democracy, having foreign governments intervene in our politics. And that's what this case is about. And they need to just draw a big, bright red line and say, I mean, they drew a big, bright red line with Al Franken. And that's what needs to happen here. Whether it needed to happen there is a different question. Right. And then they need to do it very, very quickly. So, you know, you've raised a point, though, that we at least need to flag, which is that there is that cynical element in politics and that this whole thing would be playing out very differently if Bob Menendez represented a closely divided swing state with a Republican

governor right now. Let me just say, since I raised that, if the Senate would flip if Bob Menendez resigned and a Republican governor of New Jersey appointed a Trumpist U.S. senator, I would take exactly the same position. And I would do it with a heavy heart, but there can be no place in public office for this kind of behavior. It's not voluntary. It's not optional. It's not something you negotiate about. And it's not something that depends on who it helps and who it hurts. He's got to go. knowledge that not all members of the political world would have the same calculus as the Republican Party. So we don't have time to talk about it. But there is a Republican debate tonight, a Republican presidential debate. I hope they all lose. Well, they probably all will. It does seem to be a debate for second place at this point. And it's interesting that Fox, they've actually

slashed their ad rates in half because they realize that people are losing interest because Donald Trump's going to be a no-show again. And here's part of the new abnormal. He's paid no price for ditching his own party's debates and being too cowardly to show up on the stage. In fact, it is arguable that he was the big winner of the first debate. I mean, he's gone up since the first debate. He's paying no price for it whatsoever. So we're going to get to see the also-rans picking at one another. And I can't

imagine how it changes the dynamic of the race very much, except that if Ron DeSantis does as badly as he has done, and I think there's good reason to believe that he'll continue being Ron DeSantis, that this may be the end for him. Nikki Haley, I don't know. Should they start a band called the Also Rands? I think they already have that band. It's like, you know, me too. What's AI for if you can't make a video of Ron DeSantis as the lead singer of the Also Rands with Vivek on bass

and Nikki Haley playing keyboards. Oh, man. I just think that after this debate, somebody ought to hand a cell phone to Ron DeSantis and say, hey, here's Scott Walker's number, and ask him how this works, where you go right now. It is September. All right, Ben, thank you so much for the latest episode of The Trump Trials. It is always a pleasure to talk with you. I am very, very jealous about the hammock. I am jealous about the hammock. I'm thinking about the hammock.

I want you to know that. Lots of you, man. And we will do this again next week, okay? Cheerio. All right. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes, and we will be back tomorrow with our coverage of this debate. For those of you that are not planning on watching, we will do it so you don't have it.

Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. you