The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - The For-Profit Presidency
Episode Date: May 15, 2025As concerns mount over presidential profiteering, Jon is joined by Susan Glasser, New Yorker staff writer and co-author of "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021," and Eric Lipton, investig...ative reporter for The New York Times. Together, they explore the scope of Trump’s business entanglements, discuss the challenges of covering these ethical breaches, and examine the legal and historical precedents that laid the groundwork for Trump’s unprecedented abuses of power. This podcast is brought to you by Ground News. Go to https://groundnews.com/stewart to see how any news story is being framed by news outlets around the world and across the political spectrum. Use our link to get 40% off unlimited access with the Vantage Subscription. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more: > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast> TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Researcher & Associate Producer – Gillian Spear Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hello everybody. Welcome to the weekly show podcast.
My name is Jon Stewart.
It is Wednesday, May 14th.
The president is in the middle of his tour of kings,
his King of Kings tour, Kings of Comedy tour,
Kings of Corruption tour. He is on his way. tour of kings, his king of kings tour, kings of comedy tour, kings of corruption tour,
he is on his way.
I have to say, I don't know that I've ever seen
the president so happy and comfortable.
I think this is his happy place,
that being with kings, having just a lot of camels,
I would not be surprised if when the president comes back from the Middle East, he ditches
pantaloons.
I believe he may think, you know what, these guys have it, the free flowing robe, let the
boys breathe.
Let me have it.
Because I think the accoutrement of monarchy truly suits him.
He seems happier.
Maybe when he's done being president,
if I should qualify, if he's done being president,
that is where he will end up in the way that like certain,
like the Shah of Iran ends up sort of in exile somewhere else.
He may end up there because I think that's how he views the world.
I just want who's in charge here that dude the dude with the robe who's got the giant sword. He's in charge
Let's make a deal with him. It's why he
fucking hates
Canada in the EU now. It's like what do I have to do?
Well, we have a Congress we have to check with them and then the Parliament's gonna vote on it
He's like, ah
Just give me the plane and I will give you these
weapons and
That's how shit's gonna go down. I'll be honest with you. I expect big things
to come out of these meetings because
This is the type of deal making that he prefers
He doesn't want to talk about he sits you saw today. He sits. I was sitting with the Mohammed bin Salman
He's like you should really take all the you know, everything away from Syria the sanctions and everything is like you make a very
Convincing case. I'll just go do it
Like he could come back who you don't even know what he's gonna come back
It's he could come back and just be like Palestine's a state, actually Israel, you're out.
And then now he's got the South African refugees are allowed in because that's a genocide.
I, you know, look, there's children in Gaza, apparently, that should get visas right away.
If that's going to be the rule. I mean, you don't know what's going to happen
because there is no larger governing principle
other than I like these guys, I dig these guys,
they treat me well, I'll treat them well,
handshake, you scratch my back,
it's pure transactional wildness.
And I think he prefers it.
And it's the level of the corruption.
Because this is how those countries operate
to begin with, that they have sovereign funds.
They, hey, you know what we should do?
Buy some golfers.
How much you think it would cost for a Mickelson?
Eh, $200 million.
Like, Trump is Shopify for nations.
It's just, all this stuff's coming up on my feet.
I guess they really know what I like.
Let me just press this button.
Hey, look at that.
I just bought a golf course in Doha.
Boy, I swear to God, he is a Greek mythological figure
and not in the good way, in the Icarus way,
in the King Midas. Oh my god, I just everything I
want to touch to turn to gold. Oh no, my balls. So we're going to talk, we're going to talk a
little bit about these systems now and how we are operating as a country with two experts
on the topic and we'll get to them right now.
to experts on the topic and we'll get to them right now. So corruption, conflict of interest, this is all the name of the game that we are talking
and we're delighted to have our guest today, Susan Glasser, staff writer at the New Yorker,
co-author of The Divider, Trump in the White, 2017-2021. I'm assuming there will be a sequel,
because I don't know if you guys have heard, he's back.
And Eric Lipton, who is an investigative reporter
in the Washington Bureau of the New York Times
and has wrote about these issues.
Susan and Eric, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Eric, I'm gonna start with you because
you're in mid kerfuffle right now.
You are kerfuffling as we speak.
You've been writing about these conflicts of interest and corruption.
Can you explain to us very briefly what happened to Ignite Blue Sky, which turned into Red
Sky when they got a hold of this?
Eric, what happened?
I've been writing about the Trump family for a decade now,
and I've been watching the conflicts of interest
that emerge from the mixing of their personal businesses
with the governance of the United States.
And at the times, we're quite careful about the terms
that we use.
And what I'm seeing in this administration,
without question, is conflicts of
interest. These are not apparent conflicts. These are real conflicts. I'm seeing ethics violations.
I'm seeing, you know, unprecedented kind of breaking of norms in terms of, you know,
these financial conflicts. But when you use the word corruption to me, you really need a quid pro quo, which is you need to take a gift and then the
action that comes as a result of that gift needs to be in response to that specific gift. And I think
that there is the appearance of corruption and the governance is being corrupted, but whether or not
President Trump is acting in a corrupt way.
I see.
People were upset that you were not being definitive enough about calling it
corruption because you were using the more legal definition, which has been
watered down, I guess, by the Supreme Court. Is that sort of where all this is coming from?
I mean, I relate more to the terminology like around a bribe.
A bribe is something when you take money and you respond to that bribe offer with a direct,
you know, with that cash.
You got to go full Menendez.
Right.
You got to go full.
Gold bars.
I have gold bars sewn into my jacket.
Yes.
And I am going to be now giving Egypt a better deal because of that.
I think the governance has been corrupted through this process.
As to whether or not President Trump is acting corruptly,
I'm observing and waiting for additional evidence.
Agnostic.
I'm interested, Susan, in what you think.
Maybe you disagree.
Susan, talk to me.
Talk to me, Susan.
This word corruption.
Look, let's stipulate on the front end here
that corruption knows no party and no bounds.
We are here in Washington, both Eric and I, and we've been around long enough to see Democrats
and Republicans, of course Menendez, not the only gold bar.
I remember there was a congressman, Bill Jefferson, years ago, they found piles of cash in his
freezer.
In his freezer.
Right.
So I want to say that on the front end.
However, I also want to say that even for we journalists who are generally allergic
and should use this word unprecedented very, very sparingly, that this is a fair word in
my view to use right now for what's happening.
And the reason that I think Eric is being cautious about the word corruption, it's good
to be cautious.
But what I would say is that that's what we used to have a Justice Department for. And the thing that I think is the
particular tragedy of the moment is not only that Donald Trump and his family members are literally
adding zeros to the amounts involved in any previous known examples of-
They're doing quite well.
They're adding a lot of zeros here.
There's no freezer big enough to put what they're getting into there. Can you put Air Force One in a freezer? No. Yes.
But it's not only the scale and scope of the corruption that take it into a different realm,
but the fact that they've systematically gone after weakening the rule of law that would go
along with constraining our leaders from accepting this
kind of money from, you know, it used to be a big deal to do something that had the appearance
of potential impropriety or the appearance of confraction. I mean, this is what a lot of
Washington, quote unquote, accountability reporting was like when I got here as a kid
right out of college in the 1990s.
Okay, you know, there was a whole Bill Clinton fundraising scandal, no controlling legal
authority.
You know, forget about that, right?
Okay, now we've just exploded the campaign finance laws.
We have, and I'm sure we'll talk about it, crypto coin for the Trump family that's literally
going into the pocket of the president of the United States.
Right, the United States. So for me, this issue of I'm glad we started with this question of when is it corruption or
not, because if we stick to that legal definition, Eric, unfortunately, in a world where Donald Trump
has appointed his former personal lawyer to be the attorney general of the United States,
who literally was a registered foreign lobbyist
for the government of Qatar,
and has, according to you and your colleagues
at the New York Times,
personally signed off on illegal guidance
allowing Donald Trump to accept a $400 million Boeing jet
to be the new Air Force One from Qatar.
Yes, in his defense, it is a very nice plane.
Two bedrooms, nine bathrooms.
It is if this were being rented on the Upper West Side,
I think I think people would throw down quite a bit for it.
But let's talk about so I find this to be a fascinating discussion
because in the United States, there's sort of this idea, this fiction, I think
in the same with separation of church and state, there is this wall,
the separation of governance and business, but that separation with Trump does not exist.
But let's roll back further than Pam Bondi and, you know, whatever the DOJ might be saying about
this jet. And let's talk about what has set the ground for this, which I think is Citizens United A, right?
All those campaign financing.
B, when the Supreme Court said
it has to be an explicit, right?
Quid pro quo, was that that case?
Yeah, no.
For the former governor of Virginia?
Right, and was ultimately acquitted.
And then the third leg of this chair is the decision
that the president is immune from any of these kinds of corruption investigations, as long as
he is acting within the bounds of his presidential duties. Given those three tent posts, is there a world where even explicit quid pro quo
can be investigated when it comes to the activities
of the president?
Haven't we disarmed our entire ethics infrastructure
through the Supreme Court?
I'm not even talking about he's doing unprecedented things.
Eric, I'll start with you.
Yeah, it is a really important question.
I mean, first of all, the president
is exempt under law from the criminal conflict of interest
law.
It's a crime, and you could go to jail as a federal employee
for taking an action, a particular action that
impacts your family or yourself and your financial interests.
And you could be charged by the Justice Department if the Justice
Department were investigating that. The President and the Vice President are
exempt from that. But so already, you know, he and this President has cited that
frequently, that I have no conflicts of interest legally. I can't. Right. But what
the Supreme Court did last year, it opens a question as to whether or not the
Justice Department could even charge the president with accepting a bribe.
Because if it's an official act, there is an open question.
There's a footnote in that decision, which leaves it slightly ambiguous as to whether
or not actually in what the Supreme Court majority wrote, there's a footnote that leaves
a bit unclear whether or not there's enough room still
to charge a president with bribery.
And how would you gather evidence
if you're not allowed to get his,
everything's under executive privilege?
But the Constitution does make clear though,
there is a language in the Constitution does that
impeachment, that one of the crimes and misdemeanors
that you know, that you could be,
that could justify impeachment,
the word specifically bribery is there in the Constitution as grounds for an impeachment
proceeding.
Well, isn't it even the Emoluments Clause?
Isn't that, you know, doesn't that in and of itself justify not being able to take a
giant plane?
An Emoluments Clause woulduments clause could result in a civil suit
against the president that would require the president
to give back the emolument that he or she received
from the foreign government.
And it could also be the basis
of potentially an impeachment proceeding,
but it wouldn't be a criminal matter.
Let that be a lesson, by the way, the kids out there, never take an emolument.
If any of your classmates,
if anybody offers you an emolument,
tell them constitutionally.
Right.
All right, quick break, and then we shall be right back.
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Hey, everyone.
Jon Stewart here.
Do you guys get hungry?
I know I do.
And when I get hungry, I love to have a sandwich.
Sandwiches, I don't know if you've had them.
I've talked to people and they're like macaroni and cheese.
Yes, fine, you can eat that too in a bowl.
But a bowl is not how certainly lunch should occur.
So for me, the sandwich is the perfect choice.
You can take a variety of different breads
and a variety of different ingredients and combine them.
I'm telling you, the options are limitless.
So the next time you find yourselves hungry,
try a sandwich.
They're delicious.
We are back.
But the bottom line question that you ask is that over a series of things that have
happened over the last decade, it has made these questions much harder.
And it's also part of the reason that what's happening is a conflict of interest.
It is unethical.
It is unprecedented.
It is corrupting the government.
I agree with all those things.
But whether or not it is legally,
you know, he is acting corruptly,
I think that has become a harder question to answer.
But it almost doesn't matter.
These terms are important,
and we have to be careful with the words we use,
but it doesn't matter because what's happening
is unethical and wrong,
and it's just damaging to American history and to democracy.
And we are committed, and Susan is as well,
we're documenting this.
The thing that I think really matters is as a reporter
is that let's get the primary details,
the primary documents, the proof,
and let's bring that to the public.
And that's what we've been doing.
Transparency, it's the only thing you can do.
That's right.
We are the only thing left of accountability.
The Justice Department, the IGs have been fired.
Oh my God.
The Office of Government Ethics, the head has been fired.
Right.
The Speaker of the House today.
This was a great one today.
The Speaker of the House, I don't know
if you saw this, Mike Johnson.
So they asked him about these gifts that are coming.
To your point, Eric, of the unprecedented nature.
And he said, this is nothing like what the Biden crime
family did.
Trump is transparent.
And the reporter said, we don't know who these meme coin people are.
We don't have any information on that.
They're just putting money directly in.
And he goes, I don't know anything about that.
And the reporter goes,
isn't Congress the oversight body?
And he just goes, ah, we're good.
Susan, talk about how that's changed.
You were talking about, since you've been there,
you've seen the erosion of these barriers. How are you seeing that play out? Because it's definitely not just this administration.
Oh, no. I mean, this is the sort of the final death rattle of the post-Nixon era, you know,
post-Watergate reforms that were designed to protect the country in many ways and protect
our political system from the kind of abuses
that Richard Nixon envisioned.
Because it wasn't just, by the way,
his specific cover-up of Watergate.
There were a whole host of abuses of power
that Richard Nixon.
That's why Agnew went down, right?
Didn't Spiro Agnew.
Well, that's right.
So Vice President, that was actually
from corruption of a very old-fashioned, Menendendez like crying. He was literally getting bags of cash, predating his time in the
federal government as vice president. That's right. I believe Bibi Robozo had a slush fund
and they were all. That's right. Richard Nixon was seeking to weaponize the IRS against his
political opponents. I mean, there was a whole array of abuses of power that will be very familiar
to anybody who spent any time reading Eric's terrific coverage in the New York Times about his political opponents. I mean, there was a whole array of abuses of power that will be very familiar
to anybody who spent any time reading Eric's terrific coverage in the New York Times about
the Trump family and its essential use of the inner, basically the unclear barriers between
their personal financial interests, their personal political interests, and use of official government agencies and actions
to benefit themselves in a whole host of ways,
both personally, financially, and politically.
You know, that's what Donald Trump's 2019 impeachment
was over, was essentially seeking to take
hundreds of millions of dollars
in military and security assistance
that the United States Congress had authorized from Ukraine.
Quit pro quo.
And to say, I'm not going to give that to you unless you undertake this personal political
errand for me of investigating my political opponents.
So this is Donald Trump's playbook, his MO, and the scale and scope of it is frankly Richard
Nixon's fever dream.
I mean, the level of, of you know not only the dollar
signs but you know across such a wide array of fronts and the fact that Trump sort of does it
almost in in front of us flaunting us has served in a bizarre way to insulate him. But you're right
John I think to underscore that Trump is the beneficiary of this erosion over time of these laws and
institutions.
And by the way, one of the most important of the post-Watergate reforms was a level
of campaign finance limits, disclosure.
There was even a system of public financing that had previously collapsed for our presidential
general election nominees.
And the Supreme Court essentially dealt the final blow to those post-Watergate
campaign finance rules in its Citizens United thing.
And actually, last year when I went back and did a big piece for The New Yorker on the
kind of Republican fundraising in this post-Citizens United era and looking at basically the final co-opting
of the Republican establishment on behalf of Donald Trump
in the 2024 campaign,
the amount of money that was flowing
into Donald Trump's coffers in that campaign,
that should have been this incredible warning sign
for democracy.
And of course we all know now
that Elon Musk managed to spend at a minimum around
$300 million essentially to promote Trump and other Republican candidates and causes last year.
It's just an extraordinary amount. And I think it's the classic thing. The red lines were
crossed before people even understood that they were red lines. And now we're living in a world where
what really frightens me is, as Eric said,
that most of the watchdogs are gone,
most of the accountability that had been built
in our system is gone.
And even when journalists like Eric at the Times
are doing this great reporting,
the public is, even those people who don't like Trump,
I fear is supine, is overwhelmed, is unable.
No question.
To meaningfully process how serious a blow this is
to our democracy and actually what I'm worried about,
I don't know if both of you think this as well,
what I'm worried about right now is that we're actually
seeing corruption being institutionalized into our executive branch and Congress refusing to operate as any kind
of a check and balance in ways that will actually have long-term ramifications even beyond the
personal enrichment of Trump and his family.
I agree wholeheartedly.
And, Eric, I'll get to you on this because to that point Susan what I would say is right now the only
Check on any sort of corruption is
partisanship is
ideological opposition
The Republicans were very clear about going after the Joe Biden crime family
They wanted to impeach on that but even impeachment. I think has shown itself to be a feckless check on
whatever corruption that, the situation in Ukraine in terms of weapons shipments for investigations into
a political opponent is as clear cut as you can possibly believe, let alone the January
6th insurrection as clear cut and impeachment as it can be.
And it failed basically because at its heart,
it's a political process.
And if the political process is broken,
but I'll go further than that.
You know, Eric, I once asked Nancy Pelosi,
she was on the show, she was talking about,
we gotta get money out of politics.
It corrupts people.
And I said, well, you know,
you raised $32 million for your PAC
and she said, that's different.
And I said, well, why is that different?
And she said, because it doesn't corrupt us.
I said, well, you just said money corrupts, yes, them,
but what about you?
No.
And even when Ed Martin, when he took over for the DNC,
what did he say?
We need these billionaires out, they're billionaires,
not our billionaires, our billionaires are good. Their billionaires are bad. So the system I fear has surrendered. We've
already surrendered. Now it's just a question of how bad is this going to get, Eric?
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, unfortunately, campaign finance at this point, given the Supreme
Court actions is sort of a lost cause.
I don't really see, unless you kind of completely remake the Supreme Court, how we're ever going
back.
What we're seeing is the personal enrichment.
With Trump, he is both effectively the chief regulator of securities and exchange by pointing the head of the SEC.
His family now runs one of the world's largest cryptocurrency stablecoin issuers that is
regulated. He is both the regulator and the regulated. That's the threshold that we have
crossed that really has no precedent. Campaign finance and the corruption of government through
influence and access that comes with campaign donations has been something we have written precedent and that campaign finance and the corruption of government through influence
and access that comes with campaign donations has been something we have written about for
many years and tried to document.
But we just have never seen something where the elected official is personally benefiting
to the extent that Trump is through his family.
And that, and it just, so like the whole campaign finance debate is important,
but it's sort of like, it's like tangential to what's going on here, which is direct personal
enrichment. In a way, you know, the fact is that that like President Trump will benefit from there's
there's this legislation pending in Congress called the Genius Act that would, for the first time,
recognize the issuance of stable coins, which are a form of cryptocurrency as legally part of the financial system in the United States.
As a security or just as a?
As a form of currency, basically, as an alternative form of currency that in which you could,
you have a form of crypto that's worth a dollar consistently and it's backed up with treasuries
and it's constantly worth a dollar.
FDIC insured?
It's not insured.
OK.
But it would be recognized by the government
and it would be regulated by the government.
But once that happens, it does create a regulatory structure.
And to some extent, you think the industry doesn't want that.
But what the industry recognizes is as soon as that exists,
then banks and other financial institutions
will begin to embrace stablecoins.
And they will really become almost a competitor of credit cards and, you know,
and financial cash and my God.
And for the Trump family,
they are the seventh largest stable coin issuer in the United States now.
And so he is urging Congress to act.
They issue you issue stable coins.
You don't say it doesn't have to be created through mining or anything?
You just issue it?
You issue it and the Trump's got $2 billion
worth of stable coin deposits
from the government of UAE a few weeks ago,
just before Trump flew over there.
And now if they overnight,
they became one of the world's largest issuers
of stable coins.
And Trump is urging Congress to act on this legislation
and he's gonna sign it.
But his family is already profiting and he is profiting enormously off of the same industry
that he is giving birth to as the top regulator. It's like we've never seen anything like that.
That is such a blatant conflict of interest.
But isn't he just exploiting? Don't we owe him to some extent a debt of gratitude?
Is he not making explicit what is the operating system?
Oftentimes we like to pretend it's not of the world,
which is a pay to play system where the rich
and the powerful have an unusual back scratching relationship
and access to each other.
I'll give you an example.
So here's the small bore example of that.
Susan, you can talk to this.
Congressional members serve on committees
that regulate pharmaceuticals, other types of things.
They can also trade stocks.
And there are numerous examples of congressional leaders
being in meetings where they learn information
about what is going to happen
to a certain product that is going to have profound impact
on stocks and then making trades
that play upon that information
and nothing ever happens to them.
And how is that different other than the scale?
Isn't he just supersizing the corruption that we have allowed?
You know, I mean, I take the point,
but I think that we're capable of holding multiple different
levels of thoughts in our head.
And the difference between the petty crook
who keeps cash stashed in his freezer
and the most powerful man in the world
accepting billions of dollars in personal enrichment who keeps cash stashed in his freezer and the most powerful man in the world,
accepting billions of dollars in personal enrichment,
while at the same time negotiating
major international arrangements,
is so fundamentally different in scale, scope, and character
that it is, of course, a much greater thing.
I say scale and scope, but is it different in character?
There are sins and there are sins.
Is it different in, is insider trading
amongst congressional people really different in character?
Yes, it is.
By the way, it's interesting.
I think insider trading among members of Congress
is a good example of something that they may finally
be doing something about right now, which is something.
But it's like handing out traffic tickets when the head of the
city is a murderer. I mean, the scale of the actions that you're talking about are so vastly
different. And I think Eric is making a point here that, you know, imagine essentially if Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller was the
president of the United States, setting the rules by which he could have that railroad monopoly,
you know, in the end of the 19th century and, you know, disabling his competitors and, you know,
rigging the system in every possible way and performing both functions all at once.
All right, quick break and performing both functions all at once.
All right, quick break and then we shall be right back.
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We're back. On the crypto thing, by the way, it's not just Donald Trump and his sons who are now
in this business that the government is essentially going to determine
the future of at the same time they're earning money from it. Their partners in this business
are the sons of Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump's everything envoy who is – no, that's literally
true – and who is traveling the world going from Gaza and Hamas to meeting with Putin all by himself without a
translator to Iran. Witkoff and his two sons are the business partners of Donald Trump and his
two sons. Howard Lutnick is a huge proponent and investor in the crypto industry. Last summer,
I think one of the signal moments very overlooked, although covered in the Times
and the Journal and elsewhere,
was when Donald Trump took time out of the campaign trail
in 2024 and went to Nashville, Tennessee
for the annual National Crypto Conference.
He was cheered like a hero by the crypto industry
and he made promises that he is now fulfilling
to this industry to essentially help treat it like a
currency and to give it the status that will enable them to become even more wealthy. And he
followed that up in September, again, in the middle of this campaign by taking time out to
announce that they were going to get into the crypto business with the Witcoffs and his sons and
create this company called World Liberty Financial. There's a classic quote from Donald Trump because
he used to call crypto a quote scam. And then when he made this announcement in September of 2024,
he said, well, you know, I don't really know what it is, but everybody's got to get into it.
So we got to get in it. Everybody's in on it. Everybody says it's great.
So I'm going to do it.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, you're dead on right.
But you brought up a really interesting point, Susan,
which is you kind of reflected it back to imagine
if Andrew Carnegie or any of these guys was also president.
So there is a really unique situation here.
To Mike Johnson's point, which is, well,
the Biden crime family, they're not business people.
Trump is a business person. So why shouldn't he point, which is, well, the Biden crime family, they're not business people. Trump is a business person.
So why shouldn't he, rather than corruption,
isn't he just monetizing his brand?
Isn't that how he would view it?
How is that different from the Biden family, which is, what,
consultants and lawyers?
I don't know.
I think you can answer that question
by looking at the differences between the first term
and the second term. And in the first term and the second term.
And in the first term, the president and his family agreed to not do what they called new
international deals.
So they continued to run their real estate business.
To avoid the conflict.
Right, right.
And now we did all right about the Trump International Hotel in DC and how it became a den of lobbyists
and foreign diplomats that were buying $50
martinis or $100 Trump seafood towers at the Benjamin bar.
And Mar-a-Lago-
By the way, the crab was fantastic.
Yeah.
The Mar-a-Lago also became a magnet and he tried to bring the G7 or the G20, I forget
which, to Trump-Dorel.
But they were not, in in fact doing deals overseas announcing new
ones.
Still small ball, right.
But now not only are they doing new international deals, but they're actually doing new international
deals with foreign government entities.
So UAE is putting $2 billion into the World Liberty Financial and stable coins.
Qatar just a couple weeks ago signed a deal to do a $5 billion
real estate project that's going to have a Trump hotel.
Oman has a project, it's leasing the land for another project that's going to have a
Trump golf course.
The Saudis gave $2 billion to Jared Kushner to invest in.
And Serbia at the site that NATO bombed during the Clinton administration to stop the Balkans
war is now turning that same site over to Jared Kushner where there's going to be a that NATO bombed during the Clinton administration to stop the Balkans war,
is now turning that same site over to Jared Kushner
where there's gonna be a Trump hotel.
And Donald Trump Jr. was in Serbia
and having dinner with the president of Serbia.
And the president of Serbia was posted on Facebook
how I'm roasting a pig tonight to have dinner
with the son of the president of the United States
as he's trying to keep his job as president
because there's huge protests in Serbia.
Oh dear Lord.
And he's giving land to the family of the president
to build the Trump International Hotel.
So having that kind of interactions
with foreign governments at the same time
as you are directing foreign policy
and making decisions, for example,
should Saudi Arabia be able to get F35s?
Should the United States authorize the sale of advanced AI chips to Saudi Arabia or to,
you know, UAE, you know, Qatar, and what role is it, you know, the military presence in
Qatar and Serbia?
Should Serbia, should the United States help Serbia's effort to get into the EU?
I mean, these are all huge.
And how are those choices influenced by the fact that money is flowing from those governments
to the personally to the pockets of the president of the United States?
That creates an appearance of corruption that really undermines the legitimacy of government
in a way that is for any person would be disturbing.
And it's happening again and again and again in front of us at a scale that's totally,
it's much worse than the first term.
What you just said there, I thought,
was really the crucial point, which
is undermining the stability.
For those of us, and this part I think
it's important to get into, because all these ideas of,
well, they're going to benefit from this,
and they're going to benefit from that,
it's all sort of amorphous, right?
So let's get into what can be the real ramifications
of this, those systems that don't have the institutional
checks undergirding their financial situation
or any of those other things are less stable.
They are more, the governments that function in this way,
much more autocratically, much more, you know,
the kleptocracies, all those other things,
hollow out the civil institutions
that hold countries together in difficult times.
It's why you see those countries and systems
collapse violently.
Is that, when we talk about the ramifications of this
and we really wanna get into what are we risking,
is that something that comes to mind?
You know, John, right now, the United States of America
is the single largest source of
global instability.
That's bold.
Yeah.
I mean, there's no question about that.
When a superpower goes rogue, you have an enormous crisis for the world.
And the one element that we should add to Eric's already very daunting and distressing list of ways in which
the co-mingling of Trump's personal business
and America's foreign policy interests create a crisis
is of course Donald Trump's single-handed
upending of the world economy,
and by imposing quote unquote reciprocal tariffs
that aren't reciprocal on essentially
all of the world's major economies.
And in particular, targeting America's allies as much if not more so than most of her adversaries.
And the reason this matters is because this is the ultimate vehicle for conflicts of interest,
for ways in which the President of the United States personally is the decider on what happens to the fate of countries and companies. And that opens up corruption.
Every lobbyist in the world is busy investing, you know, and getting other companies to invest
in lobbyists who have direct connections to the Trump family here in Washington right
now. The reason for that is that Donald Trump has fundamentally shifted the balance of power
in our society to essentially,
instead of a rule of law society,
to essentially a personalist regime.
So he has become the kind of,
he's become the kind of instability
that you're talking about.
That was America's theory of the case
in what we saw in the 1990s
as kind of the democratizing world is like, you know,
democracies don't go to war against each other. You know, that this notion, call it the quaint
Washington consensus of the late Klitner, which was the notion that integrating countries who had
previously been outcast into the world economic and political order, drawing China
and Russia into the rule of law, to the web of institutions would lead to democratization,
to further stability and to further peace in the world.
It didn't work out that way.
And so now we have a situation where, you know, a quarter century later, it's the United
States that has gone rogue on the very institutions in the world that have actually secured and
maintained our power. So for example, Donald Trump is going after, he doesn't like the idea
that the US dollar is so strong. He wants to weaken the US dollar. He's risking
undermining the US dollar as the global reserve currency. And why does that matter? Because
that's one of the main reasons that we're all so rich and we enjoy this incredible lifestyle here in the world. When countries are making now a
determination that Donald Trump is not just some crazy four-year aberration in the world,
that he might actually be a long-term new direction for the United States and therefore the
world. They're making decisions in a way that I think they weren't,
they were avoiding making in Trump's first term
that really have the kind of consequences.
But yeah, I don't think it's overstating it.
Maybe you guys do, but in my view, we're the instability.
No, I think it's, I think changing it into a transaction
and I'll go further, Eric, you know,
maybe one of the reasons why Trump has a bigger
problem now with Canada and with the EU is that they still
operate through this system of democratic checks and
balances, it's a bit more bureaucratic.
It is not one man, one man sitting in a room,
shaking a hand going, I'll give you a jet and you'll
give me this.
It's not as transactional because it goes through the processes that are created by constitutional
stability. But if you remove that, you really are knocking away, you're hollowing something out
that has worked for us for a very long time. Yes?
Yeah, no, it's really interesting just because
this nation for decades now has been the promoter
of what's called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
I mean, we were effectively punishing companies
and governments in nations around the world
if there ever was any type of a government contract
that involved a payment to an executive, a bribe, basically.
And the United States was trying to enforce its value
system across the world for decades now,
in Africa and Europe.
And Trump has basically announced that FCPA,
which is the lingo in DC, that they're not really
going to do Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement anymore.
No, he said basically, you can,
if you can't bribe foreign leaders,
you are going to put American businesses at a disadvantage.
So we have to be able to bribe.
I guess the question is, is he just saying,
well, I'm gonna operate in the world as it is,
not in the world as we would like it to be.
I mean, I think the United States was successful in a way.
I mean, you know, there's still parts of, you know, particularly like, you know,
Democratic Republic of Congo, which I've spent some time writing about, and where it's still overt.
And companies, the American companies left DRC mining companies because they were so concerned
about the corruption and being accused of it. But the United States to some extent has succeeded in really discouraging that kind of corruption.
And so when you say Europe and Canada and other nations are like, they're, you know, they're
reacting like, how is this possible? Because the United States actually successfully created a norm
that now Trump is exploding.
And so, I mean, to some extent, he's benefiting.
And not just exploding, suggesting that creating that norm made us suckers and that we are
the big losers of the international order that we created.
That is such an important point.
Donald Trump sketches this American hellscape vision,
which is fascinating that, you know, for the guy who also-
A shining city on fire on a hill.
Yeah, exactly. You know, the dumpster fire vision of America is what he's been selling
to his base for, you know, essentially this whole almost decade that he's been in politics.
And it's completely at odds with the notion if America was getting ripped off and was
at a disadvantage because we wouldn't pay bribes and everybody else would then how come we were
the world's largest most successful economy? How come everybody from around the world wanted to
come here? How come our regulatory norms used to be the leading norms for people around the world?
Obviously since the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was passed, I believe, you know, in the
late 70s or early 80s, it was kind of one of the last gasps of that post-Watergate bout
of reforms.
The United States economy has only grown and grown and become more dominant and successful.
And so it's really about making war on the idea of America as being a kind of a value-based global superpower.
And, you know, in the past, right, you know, you look at other superpowers, other empires,
they were ethnic-based or they were nationalist at core.
And the United States was always about the notion of an idea.
Now, we didn't always live up to it.
And even the spreading of it caused instability.
I mean, you mentioned the past 20 years of war
to spread this stable system
that completely destabilized entire regions.
Yeah, and by the way,
that continues to fuel a lot of Donald Trump, right?
You can definitely continue to see him as a reaction
against the excesses of his predecessor's foreign policy
and activism in the world.
In fact, just in his Mideast tour this week,
you hear him complaining about neocons
and military adventures, and I'm not gonna lecture you,
and he's responding as much to George W. Bush's
Republican-led invasion of Iraq as he is to any acts by Democratic predecessors. So, you know,
it's a reaction. It's a reactionary movement that Trump has led of a minority of Americans,
by the way. You know, he won the popular vote. He came just short of a majority in the 2024 election.
But it's really the core of MAGA is a minority of Americans
that have passionately subscribed to Donald Trump's
essentially rejectionist view.
Somebody said to me, you know,
Donald Trump wants to repeal the 20th century.
Well, a lot of it came with all these rules
and norms and laws.
I mean, I think he goes by the great man theory,
the, you know, like you say, the Vanderbilts,
the the Carnegie's, the great men that created something
that wasn't stable though,
and it collapsed in the great depression
and we rebuilt something that had more stability.
And I think we're undervaluing, you know,
all those different institutions and checks and balances
as flawed as they may be
for holding the
world somewhat together financially at least over this time. Would that be fair?
Yeah I mean I think that if the United States is saying that it is okay to be
completely transactional and to be accepting multi-billion dollar payments
from foreign governments as you're making critical foreign policy decisions, it
just opens up the world to a kind of a,
a family oligarchical global governance
that isn't transparent,
that doesn't have any accountability,
that is profiting a very, very thin,
it's like the Turkey's government,
or the kind of, where the government,
we are both the financial leaders and the government leaders.
And it just the United States worked so hard for so many decades to create a world order where that was not, you know, we were trying to move beyond that.
And it's the consequences of this, you know, could last a really long time if the one nation that that just imposed this new value system globally, he
says, okay, we're done with that. We don't really agree. And we're going to start taking
payments and making decisions. So yeah, it's potentially enormously consequential to the
whole world order, honestly, unfortunately. His comfort in this trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE,
is obvious.
His comfort in a system of royalty,
he looks so much happier there than he ever does here.
The only moment that I saw that felt like the Donald Trump that we see
in the United States was, I think,
somebody from ABC News asked him about the plane
and he went, that's an embarrassing question.
But mostly, man, he's in his happy place.
Monarchy, I think, is his happy place.
I think, in some respects,. I think in some respects is America
this constitutional republic that has survived 250 years
and built itself up over myriad difficulties
and all these, the tumult of world wars and everything else.
Are we now just a subsidiary of the Trump organization?
You know, certainly in the Middle East,
he is in his preferred aesthetic. There is
enough gold everywhere to satisfy him. But I think you're right. You know, he essentially does not
subscribe to the basic principles in our Constitution. And in fact, he was directly asked about this in a
television interview a couple of weeks ago and meet the press,
Kristen Welker, and she said, aren't you supposed to uphold the Constitution? He paused and
he literally said, I don't know.
Right. He said, I'm not a lawyer. I mean, they were talking specifically, I think, about
due process for these immigration cases. And he said, I'm not a lawyer.
I think what he's shrewder than that.
I think what he is doing is doctor shopping lawyers.
If a lawyer says, well, this is the Constitution,
he goes, get rid of that lawyer.
And get me a lawyer who'll come in here and tell me,
you don't have to do due process.
I think you're right that, again, this
was a key shift from Trump's first term to Trump's
second term is understanding, especially in the key positions like attorney general, like
White House counsel, you want to have lawyers who are going to give you what you want.
And so he's taken the extraordinary step of appointing his multiple of his personal lawyers,
by the way.
So it's not just Pam Bondi, Todd Blanch, who's the deputy attorney general,
now also acting librarian of Congress,
because they fired the librarian of Congress.
She was making inappropriate books available to children.
And you're like, you can't just, that's not
what's happening at the library.
No, that is not what's happening at the library.
What are you talking about?
It's the personalization of power, which is so fundamentally at odds with and incompatible
with a system of constitutional checks and balances.
That's what Trump doesn't subscribe to.
This goes all the way back to his first term, by the way.
He said, you know, I have the power to do anything I want.
I'm the only one that matters in our system.
You know, he's long-
I along can fix it. Yeah. Exactly. I want. I'm the only one that matters in our system. You know, he, he's long exactly. He's
long betrayed sort of a, a complete, not just ignorance for the constitution, but you know,
a sort of rejection of its basic principles. So he goes to the Middle East, he's surrounded by
emirs and, uh, Kings. He's greeted with a monarchical rever it. This is what he wants to be. And this is who he is.
All right, quick break, and while we take the dog for a walk, or turn folding laundry into a comedy show.
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We're back. It's not an accident that since he stepped on the world stage, it's our allies, our democratic allies, he's consistently attacked and it's our adversaries that he's praised.
Just a point, it's not about lecturing, by the way. Human rights is not
some abstract construct. Saudi Arabia, it's not just that they took a bone saw to a critic of
theirs, Jamal Khashoggi, who was a columnist for the Washington Post. This is one of the most
unfree societies on the planet. This is a place where women don't have basic rights granted to others in the West centuries ago.
China, it's not just that Donald Trump wants to treat as an equal with Xi Jinping.
It's that he's been perfectly fine.
At times in his first term, he seemed to even, you know, wave away or to justify China's
human rights crackdown on the Uighurs putting a million people in
camps, not a big deal to Donald Trump.
Well, he says always, are we so good?
Are we so nice?
And in some respects, you know, look, we have oftentimes, as you said, failed to live up
to those higher ideals.
But I think this goes beyond the types of higher ideals of personal freedoms
and treating with equality and respect.
This is a whole other thing that you can back off
of personal criticism.
We do business with terrible regimes all the time
and they do business with us.
But this is very different in that we're throwing away
the system for the writ of one man.
That's the part that, and Eric, I'll ask you,
once you throw that away, do you know of a situation
where people have been able to get it back?
Once you go to a transactional strong man theory of he makes the decisions,
I don't know how you claw that back.
Unless he gets called on it and challenged,
particularly by his own party.
I was up on Capitol Hill last week.
Yeah, good luck with that.
And I was on the Senate side and I spent my entire day,
I spent like 10 hours know, 10 hours in right
at the where the senators walked out of the chambers.
I was focused almost entirely on Republicans and I ended up speaking to over 25 US senators
in the course of a day.
I just, you know, spent the whole day there as soon as they were walking out and pestering
them.
And I only found two.
I was asking each one of them about the Trump meme coin. And, and is it, you know, that he's selling access to a dinner with, with, for
220 buyers of his meme coin, whoever spends the most money on his meme coin,
they can have dinner with him and 25 of them can have a VIP reception and 25 of
them will get a White House tour.
And, and so, you know, was that, is that acceptable to you?
I was asking the US senators this,
and there was only two of them that were willing to give any,
most of them gave the answer, I don't know enough about it.
You know, the Republican, or I don't do walk and talks.
That was...
I don't do walk and talks,
but I will never sit down with you.
Right, yeah.
And yeah, so I think that what's the lasting
implication of this? I mean, I think it really is going to depend upon a kind of a, you know,
a rejection of this approach. And if that doesn't happen, then maybe it is normalized.
But so far, I mean, the, the, the, the, the, the cutter, you know, 747, you're, you're hearing
resistance from Republicans in the Senate, uh, in the Senate, in particular, and if it really
does start to go forward, there could be a significant backlash there. Each step that
seems more outrageous, there's a certain hint of maybe he's gone too far. And so to answer
your question, how normalized this becomes, it really depends upon if it becomes normal.
And if we, if as an American public, we begin to accept it.
And as Susan says, one of the challenges that we face
as reporters is that even when we write these stories
and we try to make sure that they're understandable
with plain language and that they're distinct,
they, they're not, they don't,
I don't sense that they're resonating as much.
I mean, the American public is sort of like,
well, there's nothing we can do about it.
This is, you know, and it's just,
I don't feel like the public is as engaged
or as outraged by some of the things that are happening.
And that's also part of the normalization.
So if both the Republicans in Congress
and the American public is just gonna sort of let this
become normal, then it does become normal.
Well, some of that I think is because, you know, the competing vision
that they're up against.
First of all, it's amazing how crazy shit has to get
for even a couple of Republicans to go.
Yeah, I might have to look into that.
Like it's bananas to me how far it goes.
And it just shows how fearful they are for their own political lives
over that, and you've seen people excommunicated
just for speaking out against that.
But the other side of it is, you know,
the corruption of it just gets embedded into it
and with no powerful alternative.
I mean, for God's sakes, on the Democratic side,
you've got Chuck Schumer going,
I'm gonna send a strongly worded letter
with eight pretty hard questions.
And you'll see, now maybe it's because
we're in an unusual situation of they control the Senate,
they control the House, they control the executive,
they mostly control the Supreme Court.
Maybe if that shifts, some of this begins
to get adjudicated in a different way, do you think, Susan? Yeah, I mean, the fear is that
an election is a long time away, first of all. Second of all, Democrats have a much harder
road ahead to actually win back control of the Senate. So that seems more unlikely.
The House is much more in reach in the midterm elections.
But it's not just about the partisan advantage, right?
The system is being changed right now in ways,
some of which will be quite hard to undo.
So that's first of all.
Second of all, I do think that the drama of Republicans
was the story of the first term and Trump won that battle.
That was a hostile takeover as he and his son-in-law Jared Kushner put it in the first
term and they succeeded in that hostile takeover.
And now you've essentially got Lisa Murkowski and a fully Trumpified GOP Senate.
So you know, I'm not wasting a lot of energy or breath
thinking that Republicans are going
to do anything other than the most mealy mouth of statements.
In fact, Mike Johnson, you referenced him earlier,
he also, I think, came out and said, oh, the plane?
Never mind.
Even though that emoluments clause in the Constitution
specifically says it would require congressional approval
for some kind of massive gift from a foreign government. But don't you think they would regain
their oversight immediately if a Democratic president was there? In other
words, will this just be... it's sort of in the way they look at the debt ceiling.
Like if it's a Republican, oh yeah, no, we're gonna lift the debt ceiling and
everybody's gonna do it and then a Democrat comes into office and say, aren't
we gonna be responsible here? Let's do that.
Is there a chance that we once again become a rules based responsible country,
as long as a Democrat's in charge of it, that this is a Trump phenomenon,
not a permanent
change in autocratic rule.
Well, remember that Democrats and Republican presidents
have participated in the creeping imperial presidency.
Right now, Republicans definitely subscribe
to much broader, more sweeping vision
of executive authority, but most presidents
wanna have more authority not left,
and the institutional shifts, like not just in foreign policy, but broadly speaking, toward
the presidency, there are a long-term trend that have happened under Democrats and Republicans
alike.
So I think you would see some, you know, reorientation where Democrats to regain control of one or
all of the branches of government.
But I think that it's really hard to see a meaningful way
where this is just gonna be wiped away
given that one of our two major political parties
has become completely all right with a series of things
that just don't check the box for basic democracy anymore.
And that's the part that is a long-term trend,
especially because we're in so much more
of a politically polarized system.
It is basically a fully partisan system now.
The idea of a nonpartisan civil service Trump is blowing up,
the idea that there's institutional imperatives
for Congress rather than just partisan imperatives.
That's all, I think, disappearing very quickly.
Do you see that, Eric, in any way
being a corrective once the cult of Trump is gone?
No, I think that the partisanship has really
undermined accountability.
It makes it hard to have accountability
when all of these investigations,
whether led by Democrats or Republicans,
that the other side is immediately
dismissing them as witch hunts that are politically driven.
And the Congress used to be made up of Democrats and Republicans, more so at least.
I mean, like a Frank Wolf as a Republican that I can remember, or Tom Davis as a Republican.
I mean, these were, you know, they're conservatives, but they-
Partisans, but not ideologues.
They were value based Republicans.
Even Aron Hatch was a value based Republican.
And, you know, Chuck Grassley is, you know, a value based Republican,
you know, to some extent.
And, you know, now it's just all investigations are so partisan
and even the way that the public reacts to them is so dismissive,
depending on which side you're on, that it empowers the executive, the president,
to just ignore them and to say,
oh, this is just political nonsense.
And I think that that feeds into this pursuit
of greater executive power and ignorance of red lines.
And I think it's unfortunate.
And I think social media is also a factor in this,
where the tribes are feeding each other
through tunnels of information that just backs up
their favored politician.
So I think all of this is becoming more normalized
in a way that is unfortunate and potentially long lasting.
But we'll see how it plays out.
And, you know, first of all, we've got to get through the Trump years and,
you know, we're just going to continue to, we're going to get.
Which by the way, may continue until we don't even know when it's going to end.
Right.
And by the way, the more power that the family amasses, Look, dynastic families in American politics
are not abnormal.
And the more power and influence that they amass,
the more likely a dynastic influence emerges through there.
I don't think that's any question.
I think this is going to be with us, depending,
for a very, very long time.
And I will end with this.
The fear for me is always the stability of these societies
demands the consent of the governed.
And if you don't have it,
things like martial law get declared,
or they pull all kinds of emergency powers
and crack down on certain things.
And it creates the volatile political cycles that you see in countries that don't have
the fealty not to a man, but to a constitution.
And that's my fear for the cycle that we're heading into.
I'm looking 70 years down the line, not just five. Would you guys comment
on that?
Yeah, I mean, rule of law, it's just, you know, the Republicans and the Democrats love
to use that term, but the rule of law is becoming less, you know, less real and less apparent
in society today. And, and, and that's, I mean, our country has, has really been, you
know, held up by that norm for centuries now,
and it's becoming less and less apparent,
and that's really problematic.
But Susan, what are your thoughts?
Last word, Susan, you got this.
Sum it up, bring us home, Susan.
Rule of law, you'll miss it when it's gone.
That's the bumper sticker you never see
at the rest area on the Jersey turnpike.
Thank you both very much, man.
Very enlightening conversation, very much appreciated.
Susan Glasser, staff writer at the New Yorker
and co-author of The Divider,
Trump and the White House 2017-2021.
And Eric Lipton, who is an investigative reporter
in the Washington Bureau of the New York Times.
Thank you both so much for enlightening us during this time.
Well, I didn't want it to end so dark. I didn't want it to end with, we are entering an 80-year
era of darkness and despair by which the rule of law shall be punished.
You thought a conversation about Trump's corruption would end on a glass half full moment?
I don't know.
I thought maybe they had some key to this.
I kept trying to throw in there like, what about when the Congress changes?
Hey, didn't we, what about insider trading?
They're like, you don't understand motherfucker.
How deep this goes. You don't understand, motherfucker.
How deep this goes. You don't get the, the, is that what you guys were thinking?
I mean, I was kind of focusing on, you said it a few times, I think about how crazy it is that
Trump is just like so comfortable on this trip. And of course he is because he's making lots of
money, but I just cannot imagine being in the same room as MBS and doing what he did, which was fall asleep.
Hey, listen, man.
Gotta keep one eye open.
Nap time.
Listen, man.
Yeah, they're not, listen,
that's not where they're taking the chainsaw,
that's for sure.
And, you know, listen, you guys know when you fly east,
much harder on the jet lag.
Absolutely.
And listen, I loved Susan's sort of the scope
of her knowledge I thought was really interesting.
And I also, I mean, I found the conversation just around
the use of the word corruption that you guys started with
very interesting because yes, the Supreme Court changed
what's considered to be bribery and corruption in government,
but the Supreme Court is corrupt.
Like they accept millions of dollars in gifts
and have made it easy for themselves to do that.
That's a great point.
So at what point do we stop using their definitions
and start using the definition
that you're just using your eyes and ears
to accurately describe a situation?
That's a fabulous point.
And I also think
anytime you get in on the idea that corruption is purely defined in the
legal arena you'll lose sight of what real corruption is. It's just corruption
to me is the erosion of those things that hold something up with integrity and
the minute you erode that whether it's the legal definition of it or not,
it is certainly corrupting of the tent posts
that we kind of relied on.
If you want a quote at this point,
like you're gonna have to pay up.
Oh, we're getting the quids, but I don't know about.
$1 million to the inaugural fund does not get you a quote.
Yeah, and also the idea like,
so they're gonna give them a $400 million jet
just because, just because, okay. They're just cool like that. Yeah. Yeah. They're the idea like, so they're going to give them a $400 million jet just because,
just because. Okay. They're just cool like that. Yeah. They're cool like that. Yeah. How about
Susan dropping bars on rule of law? Bars? I was like, okay, Susan. And by the way, gifts are
corrupt. Like, why do you think grandparents lavish grandkids with like, that's not like, oh, I gave
you a toy plane because I am buying your love.
I give my dog so many treats.
Right.
This is how I became the favorite.
Also the proving, I mean, I can't imagine trying to parse
through all of the companies and all of the shady movements
to prove.
You're not allowed access to the communications now.
The Supreme court has made it so you don't have it. You can not allowed access to the communications now. The Supreme Court has made it so you don't have it.
You can't have access to the communications.
You can't prove anything if the president is involved.
And do you think if he was just doing one of these things,
it would be easier to indict him on,
both literally and in the court of public opinion?
Because isn't that what the Biden crime family was?
Was it was just one thing that everybody could sort of focus on?
Look at how long it takes to investigate.
Like even just Hunter Biden,
the dude had like a laptop with images of him
like naked holding a gun.
And like that was a three year investigation.
Like imagine if you can't get access to anything.
And it's crazy.
Like you just had an hour long conversation.
You didn't touch on the media.
What about all of the money he's making there?
Like it really is endless.
Oh yeah, true social.
No.
$40 million for a documentary.
I'll get him back on the line.
I want to ask him more.
Now I feel terrible.
I've missed all these things.
No, there's not enough time, I think.
Whole another episode.
Yeah.
What about the listeners?
What do they want to know this week?
All right, we got a couple for you this week.
All right, what do we got?
Nowadays, what's the point of playing by the listeners? What do they want to know this week? All right, we got a couple for you this week. All right, what do we got?
Nowadays, what's the point of playing by the rules?
I don't know anymore because the system requires.
Yeah, I don't fucking know.
It's a great like I remember in the old days,
like if the president can get a blowjob from an intern,
what's keeping the earth on its axis?
Like we're so far beyond.
I think that's really where you get down to,
is he exploiting the system that we've all been operating in
but with rose colored glasses on and didn't recognize,
like, yeah, money talks, bullshit walks.
And that's kind of how it is.
And this dude's just ripped the bandaid off and said,
look at yourselves.
Like he's forcing us to view
how this whole thing really works.
Rules of a second.
That's what I'm saying kid.
What's the other one?
If you could only choose one,
would you advance or destroy AI?
Wait, I can only choose one?
That's correct.
No, but that's, no.
Keep in mind the AI is listening.
Hypotheses question.
It's like if if and butts are candy and nuts
every day would be Christmas.
Like, no, it doesn't work that way.
I refuse to answer your hypothetical on there.
It's like saying like, you know,
if we had never advanced, you know, physics,
well then there wouldn't have been an atomic bomb.
Like, you just can't work that way.
What I would choose to advance is humanity's understanding
of not having to do everything that they can do that
you don't always have to be in the meeting and go hey should we reanimate
the virus from 1919 that wiped out all those people and like somebody in the
office should be like I don't about reanimate is there something else is
there some way we could learn about it without unleashing it again? Is that something we could do? No, progress requires providence and caution.
And so you have to advance it, because it's going to anyway.
There's an inevitability to it.
But you also have to advance our ability
to understand how to mitigate.
It's like we've all talked about global warming
like this all the time.
I'm like, look, I don't care how many cop conferences they do.
I don't care how many times you tell people, what if you just got a smaller car?
Like that's not somehow we're going to have to figure out a way to mitigate.
Like somebody's going to have to clean this shit up if they're relying on humans to stop
being humans.
And that's I feel the same way about AI and everything else. This is the darkest
episode we've done. And on that note. But it's like saying like the wheel, would you go forward
with it? And you're like, yes, but that means that there will be, you know, trucks that
have missiles on the back of them. Like, yeah, every it's yin and yang baby, light and dark. We got to manage it. Got to manage the shadows.
Hell yeah.
Beacon of bars. All right.
How are the ways that they get a hold of us?
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subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel, the weekly
show with Jon Stewart.
Thank you once again, guys, fabulous.
And thank you for the conversation after that.
I thought that was very, very thoughtful of you guys.
Lead producer, Lauren Walker, producer, Brittany Mamedovic,
video editor and engineer, Robin Tolow,
audio editor and engineer, Nicole Boyce,
researcher and associate producer, Gillian Spear,
and our executive producers, Chris McShane, Katie Gray.
Come on, people, stand, stand in the light.
No, fuck, all right, we'll see you guys next time.
Bye bye.
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