The Keith Edwards Show - Trump's Plan to Stop Elections... Exposed! Ft. George Conway.

Episode Date: August 23, 2025

Keith Edwards interviews George Conway about his firsthand account of the FBI raid on John Bolton’s Maryland home. Conway details what he saw and connects it to Trump’s broader ambitions. The discussion then turns to Trump’s potential plan to stop elections altogether by seizing control of police and military forces in Washington, D.C.

In what is one of the clear signs that we are fully in authoritarianism is this stuff right here. The FBI raided former national security advisor John Bolton's home. Here's this a bit. Quote, the FBI raided the Maryland home of John Bolton, President Trump's former national security advisor, on Friday morning yesterday. Why this matters? Because Bolton has been a vocal critic of the president after working in the first administration. Now, Donald Trump has said he didn't know anything about that. Do you believe that? I don't believe that. And there's been no crime charge. It's literally the president pushing his weight around to anyone who disagrees with him. It's very Putin-esque. Now, funny enough, you know who was on the scene? George Conway and also a Trump critic and he was live streaming it while it was happening. So I've got George here right now to talk to us about what this all means. we get to that, you could please like this and subscribe. It would mean so much. Thanks.

I do have here, this is what I want to start off with. You say, the bow were kind of quoted you here, said there's no law, not even a pretense of objectivity. There are only friends and enemies. This is Putinism. And it's happening right here today. Did I say that today? Yeah, that's, it's your face is on it. Maybe something else. I think it may be attributed, it should have been attributed to somebody else i don't remember saying that but i thoroughly agree with it okay so i mean that's this is this is basically the use of government use of government power you know the nazis did this putin does this the soviets did this um you know authoritarian regimes use the power of the state

and use the power of criminal investigation to disadvantage punish jail think of think of alphe novalmi and people who dissent. So this is classic. Do you feel like there's anything that can be done about this? Or is just like the new normal? And we just have to... It is kind of the new normal because the public is being conditioned to accept things that would have been absolutely unacceptable in years past

and bit by bit by bit, there seems to be an increased tolerance to it, whether it be the, you know, the abuse of the Justice Department to protect Donald Trump from the Epstein files or the use of national guards, guardsmen and the attempt to take over in D.C. And they attempt to take over the D.C. police department and the sending of people to concentration camps abroad without due process. I mean, all of this is just classic authoritarianism. And a lot of it's performative, to be sure. I mean, these troops here in D.C. aren't really doing anything useful.

They're standing around public monuments, mostly, although occasionally, you know, the federal police forces get to beat up somebody they're arresting. But other than that, but they're mostly, they're just here for show at Union Station and on the, them all. And that's a lot of what authoritarian do. A lot of what they do is performative. They create false problems or they exaggerate existing problems and then they look for a scapegoat and then they say we need to use powerful force and coercion to protect the people from the dangers that they exaggerate. And that's what they're doing here. Now, you know, to the sentence performative and silly, you can just sort of dismiss it. But the problem is it's expanding the power of government in ways that we here to four never

and it, you know, the notion that they're hiring tens of thousands of new federal agents to act as a police force throughout the country and to it is really, really scary. And it's particularly scary here in D.C. because, you know, accepting if Donald Trump were to achieve, suppose he had achieved the level of control that he now seeks over policing in the District of Columbia and over the use of force in the District of Columbia, let's assume for a moment he had that power on January 6th. He didn't call it the National Guard in real life, but if he had had that kind of power, he would have. And he would have used it to take. control of capital and he would have never left office and that's the really the scary thing about i don't know if you ever read about the july 20 plot or seen the movie balky but the whole object there what the what the what the people who were trying to what the Nazis were trying to do to

forestall any attempt um any any any attempt to take over berlin was they had a home army an army in Berlin that was designed to make sure that nobody could challenge the, you know, the criminal regime. And it was all about, you know, controlling the capital city. And what, you know, what these people are, you know, I think Trump doesn't think beyond 20 minutes in advance about what he's going to say and do. But, I mean, his instincts are to basically acquire control of as much as possible, whether that be a government. government prosecutions or government police forces or the Intel Corporation we just found out today gave him a 10% stake, gave the government a 10% stake in it. I mean, the control aspect

of this is is frightening because we know from the past that he will use a force in the District of Columbia. He would use it to perpetuate himself in office. He's already tried. He already wanted to do that. He just didn't have control over the police forces and the military forces that he would need to successfully launch a self-coup the way he tried to do in 2021. Yeah, I actually saw that you made that point earlier. I thought, one, that was brilliant, something I hadn't thought about, but two, I thought it was very chilling because you're right. like if he controls the military, if he controls the police force, and if he decides, I mean, he's even now, I mean, I kind of, I'm kind of on the, of the mind that yeah, Trump's a big liar,

but he also is someone who says exactly what's going to do. It's kind of a strange dichotomy. And he was even saying to Zelensky, that's a great idea. Having a war? Well, I guess there's a war. Don't have to leave. I'm like, it seems like he is setting up himself up in that direction. Yeah.

He is, you know, he is at his most truthful when he is at his most malevolent, when he's talking about his intent. And, you know, his intent here is to perpetuate himself. That's his ultimate goal. He's not thinking he's a sociopath, a psychopath. Well, sociopath. He can't really think in multiple steps. He's purely impulsive.

But his reptilian instincts are to acquire as much control or much power. and to bully as much as possible. And all of that leads to a place we don't want to go. And with him, there are no moral backstops. There's no guilt. There's no conscience. There is no remorse. There is no other to respect.

There's no empathy. It's all about him and all about vanquities and enemies, including people who simply disagree with him and resist his control. So we're headed toward a very, very bad place, and we're headed there. I have to say, we're headed there in an expedited fashion. It's happening very fast. It's only been, what is it, seven months now? It's seven months.

How do we survive three and a half years of this? That's the thing. Because like it's John Bolton today getting harassed, but what is it in a couple of months? All I can say it on all we can do is to bang. the drums about it and say, look you guys, look at this, look at history. This is not normal. Take a step back and think about what they're actually doing here and get people to pay attention. Now, it doesn't require, you know, getting 60% of the country out on the streets. I mean, there are some social scientists, some international affairs experts. I forget their names.

They've calculated that it takes basically three and a half percent of a population. out on the streets to object to an authoritarian regime. And that's, you know, I think that's achievable. That's not doable. It's, you know, I mean, it hasn't happened yet. We've seen some very massive rallies

and non-buff, you know, important that the protests be non-violent, of course. But, you know, the getting people motivated to actually say and do something and not simply just look at the television you know, scroll on, dooms scroll on their phone and say, oh, geez, woe is me, this is terrible, but to actually get out there and show other people

that they are not powerless to say something and do something and express their views and to, you know, to, and to do so with people of different political persuasions, races, colors, creeds, sexual orientation, whatever. And, you know, people who have different values of, you know, when it comes to ordinary politics, and different viewpoints as to particular issues.

I mean, we all share this heritage of a free country of the First Amendment, of the right to vote, of the right to basically petition government for the address of grievances. And we have a government here that is basically thinks it should be all-powerful. I mean, we have just the other day or just today or maybe yesterday, I don't know, Caroline Levitt, at the dingbat at the White House, was talking about how

we can't have a government where the president is constrained by the other branches. Excuse me? That's the whole point. Did you fucking go to elementary school? Did you go to high school? Did you take American government?

Did you learn American history? Wow. You know, our nation is all about the dividing powers up between the branches of government to prevent tyranny. And also, I mean, you know, the idea of taking over states and taking over state military,

the reason why we have a National Guard that is under the control of state governors is because Congress, when it passed these laws, people understood we don't want all the domestic, we don't want domestic forces, that domestic reserve forces under the control of the President of the United States. That's just too much power. We need, you know, to spread it. I guess this is my final question, and I'll let you go. But my question is then how can he do that? That's the thing I don't understand.

He's doing all these things that he's not, he shouldn't be allowed to. Like he is controlling the National Guard and the- Well, he isn't, he isn't. He's doing it. He's nibbling at it step by step, right? Yeah. He's by declaring emergencies and exaggerating the extent to which there are emergencies. That was the basis for his, for what he did in Los Angeles and in California and what he's

in the District of Columbia. The problem is from a legal standpoint, Congress has passed too many laws that give the president's emergency powers. Now, what happened in Los Angeles and what happened in D.C. when Big Balls got crushed was not an emergency, right? It really is not by any standard sense. You know, one guy getting, you know, getting assaulted is not an emergency, and crime is down. They were bragging about how crime is down in the District of Columbia and taking credit for just a couple of months ago. I mean, it's all bullshit that there's an emergency, but courts don't like to second guess presidential assessments of emergencies. And the reason is, is because they're not used to doing that because we've never had a criminal, insane, deranged, malevolent, authoritarian-seeking president before. And all of this, and one of the things the courts are going to have to accept is that they are, they are an important safeguard here because they are, they can't apply the same, you know, presumption of normalcy that they do in past years.

You normally, the government gets the benefit of the doubt in almost every situation, you know, you assume that the federal prosecutors aren't lying to you. You assume that the Justice Department isn't submitting affidavits from the Defense Department or the Department of Home. land security or from the White House that are just lying to you and gaslighting you, gaslighting you. But that's where we are today. And, you know, at the end of the day, though, the courts can't save us, even though the courts can do a little bit more. And the lower federal courts have been doing a tremendous job in standing up to Trump in enforcing the laws that he seeks to break and overturn. But on the other hand, the bottom line is at some at some point, and he's already done it sort of in a dog ain't my homework kind of way,

at some point he's just going to ignore the courts, including the court. And there's just no question about that because it's just, it's in his DNA. And you can, you know, we heard Emil Bovet about Emil Bovay telling a group of lawyers in the Justice Department that we're going to have to say fuck the courts. We are headed to a very, very bad place. And at the end of the day, the courts can't enforce their own judge. if the Justice Department doesn't cooperate because the Justice Department controls the U.S. Marshal Service, which arrests people and to bring them in to hold them for contempt for disobeyed court orders.

And because the Justice Department controls the Federal Bureau of Prisons. So you can't put somebody in jail for violating a court order if the Justice Department doesn't cooperate. At the end of the day, we need an executive that obeys the law. And at the end of the day, the courts can't make the executive that, who, who's decided to abjure his, his oath of office and to shit on the Constitution, the courts can't make him get off the pot. So that's why we got to get to that 3.5% because this is going to get worse. And people need to really, really be alerted as to like where we are in history.

And that this is not a normal time. We are way off the scale here. And it's not even, you know, somebody remarked the other day. I forget who wrote it. This isn't really a boiling frog situation. The frying pan is hot now. It's not slow, as we just discussed. Well, thank you.

Thank you for, you know, sending out the red alert. And I just want to say, I might just say at the top. I want to say now John Bolton did nothing wrong. There is absolutely no reason why the FBI should have been in his house, as far as we know. Yeah. And David says, but we'll. Yeah, but most likely this is just complete aggression. So, but thank you, George, for coming on.

I hope you'll come on again. And we'll be towards that 3.5. So thank you. Yep. Bye-bye.