The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump’s Election Win Proves There Are No Rules Anymore

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

America needs to go through significant change, but not without a price, according to the latest episode of The New Abnormal. Plus! MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner joins us to talk about Jack Smith’s decision to drop his case against Donald Trump. Then, Dartmouth professor and author Jeff Sharlet joins the show to discuss Christian nationalism and its effect on the country. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

We have such an excellent episode for you today. MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirshner joins us to talk about Jack Smith's decision into dropping his case against Donald Trump and what this spells for lawlessness in the new Trump presidency. Then we'll talk to Dartmouth professor and author of The Undertow, seeds from a slow civil war, Jeff Charlotte, who will dig into the rise of Christian nationalism and its profound impact on American culture and politics, but first, let's have some fun. So just before we were about to record, we got news that Jack Smith, the special counsel, has filed a motion in the D.C. courts to drop all the felony charges against Donald Trump.

This is in the case, because, you know, we still have to point out which cases these are. This has to do with Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, everything that happened on January 6th, etc, et cetera, et cetera. So those charges are going away, which is, I guess you could say, mission accomplished for Donald Trump, since that's a large part of why he ran for president in the first place this time around. So Danielle and I were talking and we were like, you know, there were a bunch of topics we were thrown around. And then this happened. And two of the other topics were the fact that we now, I think we're hearing that the Matt Gates report will not be released by the House Ethics Committee. And on top of that, Donald Trump is basically,

throwing out, you know, however many decades of norms and not signing an ethics agreement to set fundraising limits and transparency on his transition. And the thing we kind of hit on was all of this is of a piece. And that piece is no one is here to save us. Yep. None of the institutions that we have counted on for a very long time to at least put guardrail on the attempts to subvert democracy, to subvert the rule of law, et cetera, et cetera. None of those are coming to save us.

And a lot of people said 2020 was supposed to prove that the guardrails were in place. But the fact of the matter is no one is coming to save us. And that doesn't mean we can throw up our hands and we can say, fuck it, it's over. It means that when no one is coming to save you, but you need to be saved, you have to save yourself. and you have to get together and band together with others to save yourselves and to save ourselves. So I think that's sort of going to be the theme of this topic is there are no heroes. We have to be the heroes. Yeah, I don't know how we as a society will go about teaching children right from wrong moving forward.

We all watched what Donald Trump did on January 6, 2021. We all followed this insurrection. Jackson. Jack Smith now saying, well, we're dropping all charges. Now just means that you can do whatever you want, which is what we've been saying. If you are wealthy, if you are powerful, if you are white, if you are a man, you can get away with extreme acts of violence. And that is okay. Donald Trump, like you said, ran for office to avoid going to jail, to avoid prosecution. And all of the things that we said would happen if Donald Trump became president. again are unfolding day by day, minute by minute. How do you tell people now, oh, follow the law, you know, follow the rules? Why? To what extent? Who does it help? How many people were arrested after, well after the insurrection happened that Donald Trump is going to get ready to pardon on day one? So again, what we have said as a country, what has been decided on November 6th, isn't just that America wants Donald Trump, it's that they want everything that Donald Trump stands for.

And on top of that list is lawlessness that you can do and say whatever you want. There are no rules anymore. So if that is the case, right, and we were hoping and praying and believing that, you know, oh, sanity was coming in in 2021 when Joe Biden was elected, oh, look at the poetic justice of him appointing Merrick Garland. as Attorney General after Merrick Garland was shunned when Barack Obama tried to put him on the Supreme Court. Oh, look, he's going to take action because the full Mueller report was laid out for him on day one. He didn't even have to start with the insurrection. And we are here in this moment.

We have arrived at a time when our institutions have absolutely failed us because of people like Merrick Garland, because of people like Joe Biden who frankly had a failure of imagination. and this belief that somehow that him being elected president in 2020 was the only thing that was needed in order to restore faith in our institutions. No, it needed to have a robust and vigorous prosecution of a criminal on day one. And they waited until, what, two years in to appoint Jack Smith. And then Donald Trump did what he's been doing his whole goddamn life. He ran out the clock. So I'm like, you know, we're here. And I think that you're right. Andy, that the reckoning moment isn't just about those that listened and heard over the last nine years, everything that Donald Trump has said, everything that he's promised, every vindictive, every nasty, every horrific thing that he said, and said, oh, that's my guy and pointed to him and circled it and put on their MAGA hats and shirts and apparel and Bibles and all of it and said, this is my guy. But it's also like the institutions did not hold. They did not. They just didn't explode.

in the way that they, we thought that they were, but this is not what operating and a functioning democracy looks like. It's particularly when you can look at now, Brazil, France, and Italy, and see what they're doing with their extremists in comparison to America. It's wild to see what happened in Brazil over the last few days where former president Bolsonaro has been charged along with a bunch of other people with plotting a coup to overturn the 2022 election. And you see that like so many people's response to that was, wait, you can do that. Also, you could arrest people on the same day they try. Yeah. And yeah. We can't do that here, but other countries can do that. Countries that we are supposedly quote unquote better than,

but we don't have some kind of functioning system that will look at people who plotted a coup and who tried to overturn an election. And at the end of the day, not only does nothing happen to them, but the guy in charge of them becomes the president again? It is absolutely insane that we have a system that allows this. But what we have learned, again, is that we do, that our system, as currently set up, unfortunately, has allowed this to happen. And, you know, you can blame this on the system itself. You can blame it on the people that are in charge of those aspects of the system.

you can blame it on the Supreme Court. Whatever it is, again, all the things that was supposed to stop us from becoming a tin pot dictatorship, they're all failing us. I think it's important to make this clear that the response to this can't be, oh well, or, well, we tried, or, well, that's that. It can't be anything along those lines. It has to be to fight. And however you want to take that to mean, whether it's organizing, whether it's, you know,

running for office yourself. whether it, I don't even know because it sounds very overwhelming, you know, because it's like, well, this entire system, it's out of order. And how do you fix an entire system? And there are people that have fixed entire systems before. There are people who have banded together to fix entire systems and to make things better. And I do think we're going to find ourselves in the next four years. It's going to be very easy to put your head in the sand or to say, this is too big. I can't do anything about this. And I'm including me in this. I'm not lecturing anyone here. I'm talking about myself, along with, you know, I think everyone who kind of feels this way, we have to be on guard

against that. And we have to do whatever we think is in our power to do to try to fix this. Because again, the time for relying on other people to do it for us is long gone. The time to rely on the Constitution for doing it for us just seems to be gone. And so that leaves us. That leaves, I know this has become a right-wing phrase these days, which sucks. But it really does leave we the people in the sense of it leaves American citizens to sit here and say, no, no, we don't want a dictator and we don't want a lawless government. We have to say that and we have to say it loud and we have to fight for it because there are those among us as we've learned in this election, as we learned in the 2016 election, as we learned in the 2020 election, which,

you know, was by no means a landslide for Joe Biden. There are a lot of Americans who do want a lawless government, who do want a constitution that they claim to support right up until they don't. And we have to be, you know, I don't, God, I really don't want to sound like hashtag resistance here because that is not me. But we do have to make it clear that we're not just going to roll over for that. You know, and I think that, frankly, it's really hard for people right now, as you recognize, how could this, like, how could, I think that, you know, we're just still a couple of weeks removed from the election, still reeling from the fact that, like, this could happen here, that like all the evidence, all the information, all you had to do was just

listen to Donald Trump or just read any of the transcripts, so listen to the people that he is surrounded himself with. And yet we're here. Honestly, I don't know how, like, how does America, go and have the audacity to point at any other country and think that they are better, think that we are better than any other country when everyone else who had been presented with extremists has been able to figure their way forward, has been able to say, oh, they're not thinking to themselves in Brazil. Maybe we don't prosecute Bolsonaro because, you know, what would that mean about our government? Oh, maybe weird thing. It'd mean it fucking works. That's what they decided. They decided that their government wasn't fragile, that it was actually going to be able to move forward,

because when people do wrongdoing, whether they are presidents or not, that you prosecute them. And so what we've stated with our decision to reelect a man that attempted a coup, to reelect an adjudicated rapist, to reelect a racist, right, is that like this is who we are collectively. And that is okay. for people who were, again, looking at a Department of Justice and saying, oh, they're going to get the job done or looking at Joe Biden and saying, oh, he's going to get the job done. And recognizing now that no one got the job done except for Donald Trump, mission accomplished for him, for his team, for team broligarch and oligarch and whatever the rest, team sexual assault, right? Like, they won. And so I think that in this moment of deep kind of grief and despair,

Americans need to wake up and recognize that, right, like you said at the top, nobody is coming to save us. There is not an institution that has not fallen and bended a knee to Donald Trump, from the Supreme Court to the Department of Justice. And now we are seeing who is going to be running all of our other systems moving forward, running them completely into the ground. He said last week, oh, we don't need to worry about these people's qualifications because they're not being hired to do the job. They're being hired to destroy the agency they're put in charge of. So you don't need to have a resume that says you know how to do the job because they're coming in a sledgehammer's. So a part of me is in a space right now where I'm like, you know what? It isn't so much that America deserves Donald Trump, but America clearly needs Donald Trump as president of the United States.

America, a large swath of people actually need to lose everything in order to understand like what value there was in freedom. and bodily autonomy. And it's unfortunate that the host of us who already knew are going to be part of that collective pain. But I honestly now, given everything that we've seen and what we know over the last couple of weeks, I don't see any other way to get to the other side, obviously, than having to move through what is going to be maybe known at some point in history as like the Dark Ages 2.0. Yeah. And look, I think that's a really interesting discussion. Jonathan last at the bulwark wrote an interesting piece a couple weeks ago, like right after the election, in which he basically said, and he said he himself is not sure how he feels about this,

but he put forth the argument that Democrats should not save Donald Trump from himself this time around. They should not curb his wildest ambitions or whatever. They should let him run this country into the ground. It was similar to what you were just saying is like, that's the only way that people are going to realize, the people that voted for him are going to realize that they made a really big mistake. Like I said, he himself said he wasn't sure if he believed this position. He was just putting it forth as a possibility. And I understand the upside to that to not curb his worst impulses because then it'll, when you do that, it allows people to say, see, he wasn't that bad. But of course, as you pointed out, the flip side of that is so many people get hurt in the meantime or die. It's not an exaggeration to say people are going to die because of Donald Trump's policies.

And people are going to be hurt. People are going to be hurt physically. Talk to some trans people about the rhetoric that we've already seen happening in the past couple weeks about everything that's going on and the pain that they are feeling. It's really hard to say, well, we're going to have to go through four years of that. And yes, it sucks. So I don't know. It's a rough conversation. But I do understand, at least intellectually, I understand the argument of this is what you voted for. You see, this is what you're getting. But of course, the problem is a lot of people didn't vote for that. And like you said, like we shouldn't bear the brunt of this.

And it's going to be a lot of the people who didn't vote for Donald Trump who will bear the brunt of it. That is one thing we know for sure. I think it's an interesting thought experiment. But I don't know. I don't know if you can do that. I don't know if you can say, hey, let him do basically whatever he wants for the next four years. Because, man, it's going to be bad enough, even with people fighting back, but to just not fight back and to not try to put a stop to at least whatever you can. I don't know. I just don't know, man.

Yeah. I mean, look, I think that your point about Democrats not, I mean, I don't even know how Democrats would save Donald Trump from himself with absolutely no, like, you know, with no house, no. Senate, like, I don't know what Democrats are really doing to thwart his plans. And again, like, we said this. There would be no guardrails this time. There are no breaks. There is no nothing except full speed ahead. I think that the only thing that Democrats can do is stop pretending to be the adults in the room and stop playing by rules that clearly, as we stated from the top, no longer exist. This is a lawless country. There are no rules anymore. That's what Donald Trump has shown us. That's what MAGA has been celebrating. The lawlessness is what runs Supreme.

So I need for Democrats to stop pretending that they are somehow the adults instead of recognizing that they need to flip the table and figure out how the fuck to play a new game. Because this whole like Schumer Pelosi backroom doors and handshakes and scotch and this. And my friend across the aisle bullshit is like 20th century crap. And like they need to let that stuff go. And frankly, I would love to never hear the names of some of these like beacons of democracy that have been in Congress for 3,000 years. I would like them all to like move aside because they don't know how to play this new game at all. And it's and they show it every single day that they are not prepared to meet this moment.

Yeah, I think there's so much truth to that. And you brought up earlier and again just now, President Biden. And I think if you want to point to probably the biggest failure, of the last four years of his administration. It is exactly what you just said. And the way you said, it's that 20th century mindset of reaching across the aisle. And, you know, we can disagree without being disagreeable and all that stuff. And we have learned that, unfortunately, no, no, we can't.

It's one thing to reach across the aisles to someone when you're arguing about like a few percentage points in a tax rate. It's another thing to reach across the aisle when people basically want you gone from the country. They want you not to exist. Like if someone says to you, I want to kill you and you say, well, I don't want you to kill me. And they say, well, let me hurt you. And you say no. And then it's like, well, why won't you compromise?

But that's where we are now. It's like the compromising shouldn't be you want to kill me. And so no, I don't want you to kill me. So I'm just going to let you hurt me. Like, that's not a compromise. And that is where we seem to be in terms of politics in this country right now. I don't think either of us is sitting here calling for violence. You know, so I want to make that clear.

But I think this whole notion of compromising with people who do wish violence upon you, who refer to you as the enemy within and domestic enemies because you disagree with them politically or because you don't think that minority groups are less than. there's no compromise to be reached with people like that. And like you said, I think calling it a 20th century mindset is just the perfect way of putting it. And Joe Biden had a 20th century mindset. And look, he did some good things as president. And he didn't get any credit for them, but he did some good things. But that was, I think, the overwhelming mistake that he made, which honestly is not even his fault. That's who he is. He's a 20th century guy. And so is Chuck Schumer and the other people you mentioned. And I,

I think you're absolutely right. The Democratic Party, if it's going to stay viable, desperately needs an entire shift in mindset. Folks, I am so happy to welcome back to the new abnormal. Glenn Kirshner, MSNBC legal analyst, host of Justice Matters, and my go-to when I want to understand the rule of law. But today, it's how do we understand how to live inside of what is evidently with the announcement of Jack Smith, rescinding his case on January 6th against Donald Trump,

how do we exist, Glenn, inside of what is now a lawless country? We don't have the rule of law here. And this is what you've been fighting for your entire career. Yeah, as a career rule of law guy, as somebody who has fought for justice for decades, 30 years as a federal prosecutor, fighting for the fair, application of the rule of law, including being fair to all defendants. And then since retiring from the Department of Justice, fighting in this new battle, together with you, Danielle, and so many others, fighting for accountability and for the rule of law to apply to the ruling class criminals

like Donald Trump. You know, I think today is the day that one could probably observe that the rule of law died. I'm actually going to make my way to a point of light amidst all of the darkness, though it's a very dim point of light because, even though my gut screams, the rule of law died today because Jack Smith moved to dismiss both of Donald Trump's federal prosecutions, the one for him trying to steal the 2020 presidential election and ordering an attack on the U.S. Capitol to try to unconstitutionally cling to power and the second federal case down in Florida, where he stole and unlawfully retained, classified documents, our national security secrets obstructed. justice by refusing to give them back and violated our nation's espionage laws. Those two cases

are about to be dismissed by the judge because Jack Smith has said. Because there's a legal opinion from the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel that, gosh, we just don't think it's a good idea to prosecute a sitting criminal president. I, Jack Smith, have to abide by that DOJ policy, and I have to move to dismiss these cases. That, to me, feels like the death of accountability and the death of the rule of law. But there are two words, and here's where I'm going to try to find that dim point of light, Daniel. There are two words in the motion to dismiss that provide that little bit of light, and those two words are without prejudice. What does that mean? He's asked the judges to dismiss these cases without prejudice.

prejudice, meaning they can be re-bought, revived, re-indicted in the future once Donald Trump leaves office. Now, will that happen? If so, when will that happen? If a new administration comes in after Donald Trump does his nefarious best to destroy the government and all of our institutions, which is clear it's what he's trying to do, given his unqualified and even dangerous. if a new administration comes in with an attorney general and prosecutors who give a rat's ass about the rule of law. Rats ass, I think, is a legal term so I can say it. And they try to rebring these criminal prosecutions against Donald Trump as they should. They're going to have to fight a battle with the judges, with the federal court. And that battle will be, did they bring them in time?

Because there's this thing called the statute of limitations that says, you have to prosecute somebody within five years of the crime. And we know if Donald Trump serves four more years, those prosecutions will time out. And the law, the statute of limitations, will prohibit them from being brought because the time has expired unless the judge's rule that because the Department of Justice policy dictated to Jack Smith that he can't prosecute these cases. While Donald Trump is in office, that should also cause the statute of limitations. to stop running such that it doesn't matter if five years have expired. That is the legal fight that Jack Smith just heed up in these motions to dismiss.

And I'll read you the next to last sentence in his motion to dismiss. He says immunity from prosecution for a sitting president. That is the Office of Legal Counsel opinion, not the Supreme Court ruling, but the opinion saying, we don't think it's a good idea to prosecute a sitting president. That kind of immunity from prosecution for a sitting president would not preclude such prosecution once the president's term is over and he is otherwise removed from office by resignation or impeachment. So that is what Jack Smith is hanging his justice at on right now in hopes that maybe these cases

can be revived in the future. But Danielle, that is cold comfort to me that Donald Trump has gotten away with all of these crimes against the American people and instead of going to jail, he waltzes right back into the overlaw. I mean, you know, I appreciate you searching for the dim light in this time of real darkness. For me, it still will just remain dark because what I am really having a hard time with, Glenn, is what an absolute failure, Merrick Garland, is. And because of his, and because of him what I believe Joe Biden's legacy is going to be moving forward. A man that gave over 40 years of his life and career to America will be known and remembered as the president that allowed democracy

to die. Talk to me about Merritt Garland and how his inability to meet this moment, how Joe Biden and what I naming as a failure of imagination to recognize how bad and how much of a threat Donald Trump and MAGA is to this country that believe that they could just turn the page. And that's how we find ourselves here. Yeah, Danielle, I got nothing because Merrick Arlen, and his Department of Justice, for whatever reason, declined to hold Donald Trump accountable for his crimes in a timely manner. And they could have. And they could have. And they should have. And they didn't. I will never understand why.

I don't think I could ever be given an adequate explanation for why. I mean, you know, and it's not just the insurrection. And it's not just his theft and unlawful retention of classified documents. For God's sake, he committed crimes while in office last time, like 10 counts of obstruction of justice. But there was a policy that we couldn't prosecute him for those. those crimes that Bob Mueller meticulously detailed in volume two of the Trump-Russia report, couldn't go after Donald Trump until the minute he left office. And then the minute he left office, we sat there and we didn't do shit.

We did nothing. And now here we are again. This is governmental insanity and sloth and abdication of the responsibility to protect our fucking democracy. They haven't done it. They've given it all away. And they've given it away to a guy who committed all of these crimes to try to steal the presidency last time he lost it. We're now handing it to him. That's the first time I think I've used that word on air.

And I don't mean democracy. That's not the word. No, I know. I have interviewed you for years. Years. We have years of tape. Like, this is how I know that we have arrived at like the bottom, the door. the darkness, the end, because you have always, and I want people to really understand,

like you have always had faith and held on to know the rule of law will hold. The Department of Justice, which you know from the inside out, will be able to meet this moment, to hear the anger and the disappointment from somebody that has held this agency, this department in such high regard for your entire career. I want people to understand like, like, people listen to my anger all day every day. You are somebody that has always believed that justice will prevail, that justice matters, like the title of your show says. And so what does it mean now, though, Glenn, that here we are.

What do you think that this means for the American people moving forward? How do we even call ourselves a lawful country? How do we even manage to step forward in a way that makes sense when laws don't matter? They're not applied across the board. Yeah, they're applied to you and me and everybody else who is not, you know, rich, influential, connected, powerful, a member of the oligarch bro club, you know, it will still apply to everybody else. Everybody will still be going to jail, just like they always have.

But Trump, you know, gets to surround himself with billionaires and oligarch. and sex offenders and folks who are entirely incompetent to serve in government could never even pass a security clearance or a background check. First of all, justice does matter. It will always matter. The fact that it has failed doesn't mean it doesn't matter. In fact, I've had people screaming at me in all caps across all platforms because they're saying, you know, you say justice matters, but it doesn't. It obviously doesn't. And I would say to them, you know, your anger at the injustice that we're living through proves the point that it does matter. That's why you're so angry at the injustice that we see all around us. So the next battle we get to fight, Danielle,

is do we get to keep our republic? Do we get to keep our democracy or not? And I hate to say some of the people who will have the most direct opportunity to save our democracy are the Senate Republicans, why do I say that? Because they can still act as a check against Donald Trump's lawlessness and unconstitutionality. And here, this is another very dim point of light. You know, nobody ever made money betting on the bravery of Senate Republicans. But, you know, they have twice told Donald Trump no, right? Donald Trump wanted Rick Scott as Senate majority leader. Now, these senators went behind closed doors, so nobody knows who cast the vote for whom. And of the three candidates, Rick Scott came in dead last. Well, even if anonymously, that was the Senate Republicans

telling Donald Trump, uh, yeah, no, we know that's who you want. We're going to put John Thune in. The second was a little bit more publicly because Donald Trump said, okay, I want Matt Gates as my attorney general. And the Senate Republicans said, no, he ain't getting through. So we might as well withdraw. That's the second time they've said no. Here's what I'm hoping, Danielle, because the rule of law, unfortunately, is in hibernation now. I'm not going to say it's dead. It's in hibernation for the next four years as evidenced by today's motions to dismiss. I am hoping that the Senate Republicans don't have the appetite for dictatorship that Donald Trump has. Donald Trump loves him, some autocrats and strong men and dictators like Kim Jong-un and Putin. He

loves it. He wants to be a member of that club so desperately. But I think what he wants even more is to enrich himself. And I actually think if Donald Trump was told, you could make more money grifting off American democracy than you could make by converting America into a dictatorship, Donald Trump would say, I'm all in for democracy, if it means that's the way I can best enrich myself. But I don't think the Republican senators who were cowards. I mean, they were, you know, they were incredible cowards because they wouldn't break from Donald Trump because they didn't want to alienate his base. They wanted to get elected or reelected. Well, now they're all comfortably elected for the next two or four or six years.

Now, you know, at least they've stood up a couple of times to Trump. And I'm hoping they don't have an appetite for dictatorship. I mean, for gosh sakes, folks, you got all of the levers of power. You got the White House, the House, and the Senate. Just go ahead and pass a shit ton of conservative legislation. Just go ahead and victimize everybody who's not wealthy the way we know you love to do. Take advantage of it. But Danielle, in the first two years of the first Trump term, when he had the House in the Senate,

they accomplished nothing, nothing. They didn't build the wall of Mexico didn't pay for it. They couldn't even repeal and replace Obamacare. No infrastructure. The only thing they did was give tax breaks to billionaires, and they're going to do it again. I hope that the dysfunction and the infight and the infight and the lack of appetite for dictatorship that Donald Trump has, the lack of that appetite among the rank and file Republicans, I'm hoping, will act as something of a bulwark.

Yes, there are instances in which the Senate Republicans, a handful of them, have made the decision that, you know, I guess a man that is alleged to have underage sex and pay for it is a bridge too far. I'd like to remind people that Matt Gates wasn't on a path to confirmation, not because he has a history of sexual assault or violence or anything that they care about. It's that he's not liked at all. Do you foresee, though, Donald Trump throwing these senators a bone in a way that says, look, I got your back. I'll protect you.

Oh, your constituents will be fine. Your state will be okay. But just go along with this. Like, because, again, autocrats rise to power, not because they roll through the streets with tanks, but because they're duly elected. Because they're duly elected and the power is readily given to them. And so, you know, there are millions of Americans that found value. They were not all duped by Donald Trump. They found an alliance with Donald Trump.

They found a messenger in Donald Trump. They found a future that they want in Donald Trump. So is there something that remains, you think, appealing to these senators to persist with the rule of law when Donald Trump could offer them, you know, I don't know. the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, that they could say, yeah, okay, I'm good. You know, I don't know, but you're right. Most autocrats and dictators get elected first. And as you say, they don't roll through the streets with tanks, but, you know, Donald

Trump will roll through a cowardly Congress. And that is how he will consolidate power. Here's my hope. I don't have any hope that the patriotism that may be somewhere lying dormant in some of these Republican senators will surface, make a show. and help save the day from the aspiring dictator that Donald Trump is. But here's what I do believe of these senators. They love and covet their own power and position and prestige.

That I'm confident of. They want the power. They think they're the biggest, baddest boys on the block. And if they continue to give it all over to Donald Trump as dictator, eventually he will turn on them and he will take their power. He will ignore their power. He will emasculate them. And I don't think they want that.

because they want their power. Maybe they're like, look, we're not going to roll over for you because if we do, then we won't have any power left to exert. We won't get the flex anymore. You know, maybe that will motivate them. I don't know. But am I filled with optimism? No, hell no.

Hell no. Well, we will leave it there today, my friend, as we continue to reel through the emotion of what a Trump win, what this new power regime is going to bring in for, for all of us. But I can't thank you enough for the work that you've done over these several years, the voice that you have given to justice, you know, the education that you've provided to people. And we will see what comes next. But I appreciate you. Same to you, Danielle, because, you know, those of us who listen to you and who love listening to you know, you are a justice and decency and fairness and equity and equality warrior. You are. And that's why I so love

your voice and value that we've been doing this for years together, only to find ourselves in this place. But I can't speak for you, but I probably can speak for you. We're not going to lie down. We're not going to lie down. We're going to keep at it. We're going to keep punching until we can't punch no more. 100%. Thank you, my friend.

Jeff Charlotte teaches writing at Dartmouth College has won multiple awards for his own writing and is the author of seven books. His most recent, The Undertoe, Scenes from a Slow Civil War, was a finalist for the the National Book Critic Circle Award in the nonfiction category. He is one of my absolute favorite guests and he joins me now. Jeff, thanks so much for being here. Hi, Andy, good to be with you. So there's so many things I want to talk to you about, but I want to start with some stuff that has just sort of come to the four in the last little bit. Leonard Leo, who was the head of the Federalist Society, ProPublica unearthed something that he had said a while ago and he was talking about

culture in America and he said, I want to crush liberal dominance. This was months ago, but NPR did an interview with him more recently and they sort of talked about what he had said there and they asked him and he said, I want to make sure there's a level playing field for the American people to make choices about the lives that they want to have in their country. And he sort of went on from there. But you posted something really interesting on Blue Sky and you said, naturally the word used by Leonard Leo that's echoing his crush, as in his plans for a ideas other than his own. But you thought there was other stuff that he said in the NPR interview that really stood out to you. Yeah. Well, there was two elements. And they're partly because they were

just sort of kind of skeeving, creepy. He said, you know, we want to in Hollywood. They're building this sort of network like the Federal Society to promote right wing. And I want to say conservative, because those networks have been there for a long time. But right wing and fascist thinkers in Hollywood. You know, he says his project in life is cultivating talent, and we may disagree about talent, but he's right. He's people who are good at doing the things he wants to do. But the term he puts is, I'm looking for people with a knack for art. And there's no serious writer, artist, filmmakers, like, I don't know. Steven Spielberg, I just kind of got a knack for it.

And it seems, right, it seems kind of trivial and funny and glib, but it's also revealing of, and look, I mean, I went to the national media prayer. breakfast, oh my God, I think 20 years ago, which was a right-wing network in Hollywood, it speaks to the idea of the function of art, which is you can have a knack for propaganda, which is to say the story that works, that clicks, that moves people where you want them to move, right? And then the other word that he used that I thought, I deserved a little bit of intention, just partly because it's creepy, was he wants these people, he wants to inject this into Hollywood, right? And you can kind of think of the mad scientist. You can also So I guess think of, you know, RFK's vaccine conspiracy theories.

Right. But the idea of injection, which again is a term with a history in the Religious Right. You can find in the early 70s religious right figures talking about injecting their ideas into the culture. And again, it just seems gross, but think a little bit more deeply about it. They're not talking about like, oh, okay, so over here you're making this kind of movie or this kind of book or this kind of political ideas. we're going to come and we're going to discuss and things are going to kind of grow, they're going to say there is a body. And instead of engaging with that body, we're going to inject something into it that we hope

we'll be viral and will then take over. And they've got enough examples. So those are the two terms that jumped out to me and put that in combination with Leo, who is good at what he does. He is the talent. Yeah, for sure. And it's interesting because I saw, again, on blue sky, people were responding to you. And they were like, well, the right can never take over culture.

And you were like, I don't know how old those people were, but you and I, I think, are both old enough to remember the 80s. And you were pointing out that during the Reagan years, you had things like Red Dawn and Rambo and stuff like that. There are certainly elements of the right that are very good at getting into the culture. Yes. Yeah, they always have. And I mean, look, this idea of art as somehow intrinsically immune. to right-wing views or fascism is a reassurance narrative, and that's putting it politely,

it is time for the liberals and the lefts to stop fucking flattering themselves, to think that they own these ideas and that artists are somehow good, that art has something inherent in it that is redemptive. These are, by the way, conservative ideas. If you are saying about art that is inherently anything, well, now you've just constricted it, right?

But it's also to be in denial of not just the, I mean, the 80s are really, yeah, we're of the age. I remember Red Dawn, which I watched many, many times. We can, and there's any amount of scholarship about the way the conservative ideas started moving into other movies, movies that aren't necessarily as remembered as much. But yes, you can, it doesn't just mean that you have, you know, some Steve Bannon making a filmmaker, it means someone just sort of making a movie that kind of tends toward this way. That's an old, old project, by the way.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950. was paying for artists like Jackson CIA money. This sounds conspiratorial. There's a lot of scholarship on it. It's not controversial. The CIA came up with this idea to fund artists like Jackson Pollock. They wanted abstract artists to be a kind of soft power confrontation with socialist realism and the Soviet Union. So the idea, and of course, look, the WPA, FDR's administration, giving us Walker Evans and Margaret Burke White and all those great photographers.

I mean, the idea of art as somehow being immune from any kind of political influence is a kind of weird flip mirror image of the art that Leah wants, which is, as he says, it ostensibly not political, by which he means he doesn't want left political art. So we don't have time to go through this again. We just went through it with the last campaign, with Harris trotting out celebrity after celebrity after celebrity. Look, I like Bruce Springsteen, but the idea that working class Americans are going to say, oh, yeah, Yeah, that mega millionaire who lives on a horse farm in New Jersey. Well, if he says Harris is good, then she must be good. It's the imagination that we own art, and we don't. It's a struggle.

And either we can show up for the struggle like Leo is, or we can cede the ground. Yeah, and look, I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, but the idea that a man of his aid and, like you say, his wealth, and the fact that also his cultural moment has passed. I'm still a huge fan of his. It's not a knock on him, but his cultural moment has passed. And as you point out, I think you also mentioned this on Blue Sky. Like, Joe Rogan has a lot more cultural relevance than Bruce Springsteen does right now.

UFC has a lot more cultural relevance than Bruce Springsteen does right now. And these are the kinds of things that I think people, and you're saying this, that liberals and people on the left are overlooking. Yeah. I mean, like they say, oh, pop culture can't go right. Pop culture has gone right. And I think, you know, who has good insights on these are the never-trumpers who were, you know, they were Republicans and concerns, but they weren't the Rush Limbaugh right-wingers, and they didn't really like Rush Limbaugh, but they were sort of looking at the sort of

long before many leftists and liberals were sort of paying attention to, they were saying, look, the Republican Party was already transforming 25 years ago as the Rush Limbaugh's and right-wing radio moved it further and further right, you know, the old Overton window idea, I guess, which is kind of a flattened cliche, but such that if you grow up with Rush Limbaugh as normal, then you can absorb Andrew Tate, an outright violent misogynist under investigation for kidnapping and sex later and all this kind of stuff. You can say, well, I want, you know, it's a little more transgressive. He's not that far afield. That project, Joe Rogan didn't come out of nowhere. The UFC didn't come out of nowhere. This project happens. And I look at, for instance, the other day,

right, there's the big Netflix fight, Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, which was a huge, huge event. I'm not going to that there's anything intrinsically right wing in that event, it is coming out of right wing culture. And lots and lots of people who would not think of themselves as absorbing right wing culture. You know, my child's high school classmates, very, very liberal school, they all watched it, right? That's how right wing culture works. It's not the culture that comes and declare itself. It's not going to be like handmaid's tail. It's transgressive.

This is Leo what they're doing. It's the idea of, I was a kid watching Red Dawn and, you know, wovee. The battle cry of the good guys, Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze, man, Patrick Swayze was in the penny. Right, yeah. Good working guy. You know, you wanted to watch movie star power, right? And I think we get distracted by the grotesque of Kid Rock and Ted Nugent and it obscures for us the ways in which other forms of culture

moving right wing. You know, some person, somebody responded to me on Blue Scon, I thought this was worth thinking about, although it could be considered knee-jerk leftism. It says also the prospect of all these Hollywood stars endorsing a Democrat who was running, whatever she is, she ran a center-right campaign and not challenging that. That's the shift too, right? That's the Overton window. And I think this is going to be happening. We started this by talking about NPR's interview with Leonard Leo. And the interview itself is worth considering about not that I think NPR needs to be just saying, Leo, you're a liar. They just need to ask and form tough questions, and they didn't.

I think the term platforming can be abused. I talk to right-winger's. I'm not platforming them. But what I heard in NPR with Leonard Leo was, so what are you going to try and do? Well, you're very good at doing this, so that might work. There was no bringing, let's say, well, here's what you actually have done. Here's how the money has flowed.

Answer for this. Yeah, you know, I was going to move to something else next, but that brings me to something I wanted to get into later. And I think that I'm going to jump to that because it's exactly, I think, what you're saying now. You talked about one of the things you've been doing on your substack scenes from a slow civil war. You've been writing about Pete Hegset, and you actually read his book, The War on Warriors, behind the betrayal of the men who keep us free. And first of all, God bless you for waiting your way through that because I don't think I could do it.

But it's important, and I'm glad that you did. The point I want to get to now is something that you wrote about the failure of journalists to cover Hegsteth accurately. And you wrote, I don't think any of these journalists, some of whom at least are otherwise strong reporters, is secretly rooting for fascism. It's important to distinguish between advocacy, acquiescence, and simple abdication under cover of cabinet selection as court intrigue. And you went on to say, you said, many can't, won't see fascist rhetoric as such because they believe or fear that doing so is unsophisticated. They know that guys like Hegset are grifters, that in the green room, nobody's a Nazi. Sure, he's intense, but it's mostly just theater. And I apologize for reading such a long quote.

But I thought that was so important. And I think it's along the lines of what you were just saying that there's this absolute failure to cover people like Pete Higgseth and Leonard Leo in the way that they need to be covered. Yeah. There really is. And it keeps going. And it takes the form oftentimes of, in fact, we're being super tough, right? We're being super tough on Matt Gates because we're so focusing on the alleged sex crime,

So tough, in fact, that I'm sure some listeners will get angry at me for saying alleged, but that's actually journalism, right? I'm not saying he didn't do it. I'm not saying he did. This is alleged, right? Sure. Same with Hexeth, right? Here's where I want to be really careful because Hexeth committed a violent crime.

But here's a difference. Hexeth says, I didn't rape anybody. I am against rape. Okay? He's taken this bold stand of being against rape. But what Hegset also says, it gets much less attention is, I am for torturing and killing prison. He says this, right?

This is how he rose to fame is by calling for pardons, most famously for three war criminals, most famously for Eddie Gallagher, who, according to the testimony of his own men, stabbed to death a teenage prisoner who was receiving medical care and just decided, now I'm going to kill this guy, shot a girl because he could. Right there, even you don't have to do the report, you know, you don't report and, God forbid, we actually go out and the man writes a book about what he's going to do if he's in charge of the Pentagon. God forbid we read it. We've already got that right there on news clips on records.

And instead, we're talking about sex scandals. Rape is not a scandal. It's a crime. But it's being covered as a scandal. Will he get through or will that be too much? Not even dealing with the fact that the reality is the man was not convicted of a crime. I'm not saying he's not innocent and so on. But we don't want to go down the road where we're saying that's court politics.

That's court intrigue. It's a scandal because you don't have evidence, right? Now, you can go get that evidence, and you should, but you should also be getting the evidence of what he's talking about using military force in the United States. We can put this together. We can go with Mark Esper, the former Secretary of Defense, who said, yes, I had to block Trump from using military forces in the United States. Trump's saying, I'm going to use military forces in the United States. And then this not really being well covered or in depth, Hegset, writing a book saying the number one thing to do is to invade cities, that I view New York, San Francisco, Seattle.

He says, I view them as indigenous territory. He means indigenous is a bad thing. It's like he thinks he's in a Western. He means like Indian country. He says, I view these cities as like Samara. He says, in my previous books, I've talked for a political project. I am no longer talking about politics. This isn't a metaphor.

We are in a real war situation. He says it's been a cold civil war so far, but now we need to step up. That's a fucking story. And I hope the alleged sex crimes, which seem very plausible to me, bring him down. But it terrifies me that no one in the media thinks it's legitimate to say, is it appropriate to have an anti-democratic, fascist person, openly fascist? Hex-eth is, Gates is a fascist, a grift or whatever. Hexeth is an old-school fascist, you know, in charge of military.

We talk about the tattoos. The tattoos are revealing. It's a way of making the story, but keep going. And I haven't even gotten into the crazy theology in that book, which is, I keep meaning to write about that for the substack. That's coming soon. But suffice it to say that whatever you think about the religious right in American politics, I've been on that beat for many, many, many years and written historically. Nobody, nobody with the religious views of Hegsef has ever gotten anywhere near power. He is of a next order. Mike Huckabee is Ned Flanders, compared to this guy.

Man, it's so scary. You and I were talking before we started recording about religious nationalism. So I want to seg to that real quickly. And I'll start with, again, something you wrote on Blue Sky. You wrote, secular folk didn't pay attention to consolidation in America of traditionally antagonistic Protestant and Catholic rights. And then international alliance with international Orthodox right movements, Bipak evangelicals, Hindu nationalists and even Buddhist nationalists, ultra-nationalism being the common denominator. And I think that's so important because you don't want to let them get away with saying, we don't want a Christian nation. We are, we're big fans of Modi in India. And your point is that more attention has to be paid. And people like you have been

saying this for a long time that all these right-wing religious nationalist groups are finding common ground. And they may not exactly be 100% allies, but they're working toward a common goal. Yeah. And I should have added to that, of course, Jewish nationalists too. Yes. You know, there was a group in the aughts, I think it was called the International Congress for Families. It probably still exists. Catherine Joyce wrote about it. M. Gesson wrote about it. And that's exactly what they were doing. They were meeting in countries like Poland, very Catholic country. And they would bring together evangelicals. There would be Jews. There would be Russian Orthodox. There would be Muslims. Probably some Hindus then. That's a little bit of a later development in terms of that alliance. And they understood, like, we are fighting a big war. And we're all on the same side. Another way of putting of it is gender nationalism. They all had ideas about women's bodies and they all had ideas about queerness. So all those things coming together. And I think Trump has now just put together the most Hindu administration in American history,

two hinders and senior roles. And liberals sort of don't know about it and don't care and don't realize that there's a whole lot of other people saying, you know, I just don't buy that he is this bigot because look at what he's doing. And it's not enough to say they're fools. We need to say, look, there is a new fool. formation, a new world political theological formation that is a global movement that's just taking and taking and taking power while we assure ourselves that the old norms hold. They don't.

Let's step up and engage with things as they are, not as we wish they used to be. Yeah, it's so fascinating. And I wish we had more time to get into this, because I really do think it's so important. And as I was saying to you before we started recording, there's a reason that I've been having a lot of guests on who have written books or just write. in general about religious nationalism and right-wing religion. I just don't think it can be underestimated how crucial understanding that is to understanding where we are now as a nation.

Jeff, thank you so much. You're one of my favorite guests. And just to reassure you, nothing about today has changed that. Thanks, sir. Hopefully you'll continue to come on because I absolutely love talking to you. Thanks so much. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Andy Levy. Daniel Moody. How are you starting off? this week with your fuck that guy. Well, I think on our last show, we talked about Matt Gage dropping out of the running to be attorney general. And we were saying, you know, that's great. He should not be attorney general.

And then we were hoping that the person that was picked to replace him wouldn't be even worse. And I don't know that we got that, but we got someone who knows surprise at all also sucks. And that is Pam Bondi, who was a one-time Florida attorney. attorney general, and she has been a favorite of Donald Trump for a while. She is Trump's pick to replace Matt Gates, and she's not good. She's had some legal trouble of her own. In fact, in that Trump University case, she has denied claims, but the claims were made that she did not take legal action against Trump University because Donald Trump gave her a $25,000 donation.

So this is the kind of person we're dealing with. She said a really, really dumb thing about Palestinian protests on campus that we saw a lot of earlier this year. She said, frankly, they need to be taken out of our country or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away. And of course, she was trying to make the claim that the Palestinian protesters were, quote, unquote, pro Hamas, which we all know is, I'm not saying it wasn't the case for some of the protesters. it certainly was not the case for all of the protesters, a decent number of whom were actually Jewish. So to be talking about throwing protesters out of the country

doesn't really give me warm and fuzzy about her being the Attorney General. And she tried to undo Obamacare when she was a Florida's attorney general. She opposes same-sex marriage, et cetera, et cetera. She is generally an awful, awful human being. And if she's not as bad as Matt Gates, that's only because he set the bar, I guess, really high or really low, depending on how you want to look at it. But she's awful enough in and of herself. So she gets my fuck that guy for today. Yeah.

Nothing says democracy like wanting to throw out people in the country that have the right to assemble. Yeah. Given to us by the constitution of these United States. But what do I know? I think that that is just going to be a long piece of toilet paper in this new regime. Yep. So fuck that guy. All right, Daniel.

Whatever. Close us out on this. It's a holiday week. I keep forgetting that. I don't know how you would forget, Andy, because it feels so fucking cheery. I know. So close us out on this holiday week. Who's your fuck that guy?

It's going to be Donald Trump, surprise. And you could say, Danielle, what myriad of reasons? which one are you going to pick? And I'm going to pick this. Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order as soon as potentially January 20th to remove 15,000 trans service members from our military. Because nothing says that you care about the safety and well-being of our country and our military by removing 15,000 people for no other reason than you don't like them. And what I continue to say about this bullshit Jim Crow 2.0 crusade that is being waged by Nancy Mace, by Mike Johnson, by Donald Trump against transgender people, is that all you have to do is remove the name trans and put in black. Remove trans and put in Muslim.

Remove trans and put in Jewish. And you get the picture of what is being done. This is what segregation looks like. it's what segregation has always looked like. The tactics remain the same, but the targets change over time. And so this move is going to do nothing more than weaken our military. It's going to do nothing more than have people want to leave the military because what Donald Trump and God forsake, Heg Seth, if he gets in because, you know, this is a party

of sexual assault. So what difference does it make if he was not charged or charged? It wouldn't matter because this party will get. celebrate him regardless, is that our military is going to be in a host of trouble, which means that our country is going to be in a lot of trouble. Because, I mean, if you're one of our enemies right now and you're looking at what is unfolding in America, seems like the pickings are very ripe right now. For Donald Trump and for this party that cares little about our safety, and as a matter our fact is more hell bent on turning the military of these United States on its own people,

as opposed to our enemies abroad. I say, fuck that guy to Donald Trump, to Pete Hegseff, to the entirety of the Manga movement that sees our military as a game to be played rather than a really important agency that should have serious people at the top. So fuck those guys. Yes to everything you said. and I will add on top of that, the notion that a guy who did everything in his power to avoid military service is now going to kick out people who volunteered to serve in our military because he doesn't like something about them is so gross.

I'd like to say it's inconceivable except that I'm running out of times when I can actually use that word because all of this shit has become unfortunately. easy to conceive all the stuff he does. But it is wild to me that we have gotten to a point where a guy who did everything in his power and used his privilege and everything to avoid serving in the military thinks he is fit to kick out 15,000 people or however many it is who walked into a recruiter's office and signed up. And it's just so awful. And I just fuck that guy.

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