Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds.
Speaker 2: We're on vacation today, but that doesn't mean we don't
Speaker 2: have a great show for you. The Lever's David Sirota
Speaker 2: stuffs by to talk about his new book master Plan,
Speaker 2: The Hidden Plot to legalize Corruption in America. But first
Speaker 2: we'll talk to ABC News Jonathan Carl and he's going
Speaker 2: to tell us all about his new book, Retribution, Donald
Speaker 2: Trump and the campaign that changed America.
Speaker 1: Well, Hole's politics. How are you, young Carl?
Speaker 3: Doing great? Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited, so talk to me about this book.
Speaker 4: Look, as you know, and I never would have thought
Speaker 4: this would have been my destiny. But this is now
Speaker 4: the fourth book I've written on the Trump era, starting
Speaker 4: with when I was covering him the first time around,
Speaker 4: and I wrote Front, wrote The Trump Show, and it
Speaker 4: just keeps going. This, Molly, is the I think the
Speaker 4: most important of the books I've written, and certainly it
Speaker 4: was the most challenging. This is the longest book, it's
Speaker 4: the most heavily reported book, and I think it's you know,
Speaker 4: it's called Retribution. I chose that name the day after
Speaker 4: Donald Trump won in November last year. And I chose
Speaker 4: it for a reason. And you see it playing out
Speaker 4: right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's kind of shocking. My favorite thing
Speaker 1: on the campaign trail was where they'd be like, well,
Speaker 1: you don't really want to exact retribution on your enemies,
Speaker 1: and he'd be like, no.
Speaker 3: No, I do, I do.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 4: I mean we probably figured that out when he did
Speaker 4: his first official rally of the campaign in Waco, Texas.
Speaker 4: And at that rally, as you recall, he played on
Speaker 4: the big screens behind the stage those huge jumbotron's images
Speaker 4: of the January sixth attack on the Capitol, and of
Speaker 4: course played the J six choir singing the national anthem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would love you to just talk to us
Speaker 1: about like, why, what we can learn from this? We
Speaker 1: are watching retribution in real time, but what are the
Speaker 1: sort of lessons from this book?
Speaker 4: Well, there were two moments that really drove my desire
Speaker 4: to do another one of these books. The first was
Speaker 4: going to see Donald Trump on trial in New York
Speaker 4: in that dingy one hundred Center Street courtroom where he
Speaker 4: was forced to appear four days a week. Compelled to
Speaker 4: be there, had to sit silently while people on the
Speaker 4: stands said, you know, terrible things about him, embarrassing things
Speaker 4: about him, Stormy Daniels testifying about Trump wanting to spanker
Speaker 4: with a magazine with his face on the cover, and
Speaker 4: also being there as Joe Biden dropped out of the race,
Speaker 4: it just occurred to me that we were watching a campaign,
Speaker 4: a presidential campaign unlike any other that we have ever
Speaker 4: seen in American history. I mean, maybe you have to
Speaker 4: go back to like nineteen twelve to find something remotely
Speaker 4: as chaotic and unpredictable and also, in this case, something
Speaker 4: so high stated. So I started, you know, obviously I'm
Speaker 4: reporting day to day for ABC News, I'm doing my
Speaker 4: day job. But as I'm doing it, I was coming
Speaker 4: back to what I would want to try to tell
Speaker 4: the larger story of what was really happening in this campaign,
Speaker 4: with the benefit of a little bit of hindsight and
Speaker 4: the time to do some more in depth reporting about
Speaker 4: what was happening. And that's the product of this book.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's been frankly, it's been an working on.
Speaker 4: This has been an obsession of mine for over a year.
Speaker 4: There's a lot that It tells you about how Donald
Speaker 4: Trump came back to power and what his intention was
Speaker 4: from the start to do with that power, which is
Speaker 4: in large part to get even at all of those
Speaker 4: who he believes have wronged him.
Speaker 1: What does it end?
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know where it ends.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what all of us are thinking all
Speaker 1: the time.
Speaker 4: Right Yeah, And I you know, I feel like I've
Speaker 4: known Trump for more than thirty years. I've I've spent
Speaker 4: so much of my professional life now, you know, cross
Speaker 4: I'm ling him. I can tell you a lot about
Speaker 4: Trump how it ends. I can't really tell you obviously,
Speaker 4: you have all this talk now that he doesn't want
Speaker 4: to leave the White House, the abandon talking about, you know,
Speaker 4: him running again in twenty twenty eight. Donald Trump's not
Speaker 4: ruling out trying to I mean, constitution, what constitution? You know,
Speaker 4: staying in power. I don't really think that's where he's going.
Speaker 4: But here's the thing, Molly, how does he pass the baton?
Speaker 4: At what point does he stand up and make it official?
Speaker 4: I'm out, I'm not running JD. It's yours, Marco, it's yours,
Speaker 4: or you two get to fight it out and whoever else.
Speaker 1: But you know, RFK Junior r f K.
Speaker 4: Believe me, I don't know how that happens, because the
Speaker 4: minute that happens, he becomes a lame duck and the
Speaker 4: attention goes to somewhere else. I covered the Obama White House,
Speaker 4: and let me tell you, twenty fifteen twenty sixteen at
Speaker 4: the Obama White House was often like a ghost town.
Speaker 4: I mean, they were still doing things, but nobody was
Speaker 4: paying any attention. You know, poor Josh Ernest, who was
Speaker 4: the press secretary at the time, would have these hour
Speaker 4: and a half briefings. Hardly any of the regular correspondents
Speaker 4: were in there covering them, and they weren't really making
Speaker 4: any news because the attention was all on at first
Speaker 4: Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and the next you know
Speaker 4: who would be the next president, and then of course
Speaker 4: eventually Trump.
Speaker 1: That is attention, right if he admits he's not running again,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, the man behind the curtain, I
Speaker 1: mean that gone.
Speaker 4: I mean, look, what really drove the reporting in this
Speaker 4: book is seeing how Donald Trump left office disgraced a
Speaker 4: pria he was banished on social media. I mean, think
Speaker 4: about that. He was banished on social media and most
Speaker 4: of the major companies in this country announced that they
Speaker 4: would not be donating money, not just not to Trump,
Speaker 4: but to anybody who was aligned with Trump in challenging
Speaker 4: the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 3: He was gone. He was a pariah.
Speaker 4: This is why when Kevin McCarthy went to visit him
Speaker 4: shortly after he left office, it was such a huge story.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, God, what's Kevin McCarthy doing. And you know,
Speaker 4: he managed to recapture the Republican Party in a way
Speaker 4: that he had never captured it in the first place.
Speaker 4: This entirely, you know, he has this power, and you
Speaker 4: know how he managed to do that, and how he
Speaker 4: wants to use that power. I think points to a
Speaker 4: very different second term than what we saw on Trump's
Speaker 4: first term.
Speaker 1: Did he ever call you?
Speaker 5: He does?
Speaker 3: He calls me. I call him, I tell you.
Speaker 4: One of the strange things that I started to do
Speaker 4: during the campaign was during the fall campaign, I would
Speaker 4: sometimes call him every two or three days, and there
Speaker 4: was a much higher percentage chance of him answering the
Speaker 4: phone than say the deputy press secretary of the Kamala
Speaker 4: Harris campaign. Mostly it's me calling him, but there were occasions,
Speaker 4: and there are occasions where where he calls me, and
Speaker 4: it's a highly unusual thing.
Speaker 3: I want to go.
Speaker 1: Back to the sentence you just said that it's more
Speaker 1: likely to get down Trump on the phone that it
Speaker 1: was to get the deputy press secretary of the Kamala
Speaker 1: Harris campaign on the phone, because I think that is
Speaker 1: part of why come won.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't.
Speaker 4: I don't think there's any question. You know, we were
Speaker 4: talking about Jeb Bush a moment ago. It actually kind
Speaker 4: of brings back memories of Jeb Bush back when those
Speaker 4: in those salad days, when he was the Republican front runner.
Speaker 4: He was very hard to get through too, and it
Speaker 4: did precious few interviews. His campaign events were tightly choreographed,
Speaker 4: just like Hillary Clinton's were, And certainly I think Kamala
Speaker 4: Harris did that even more so than those. I mean,
Speaker 4: when you think about her, she and I tracked. Keep
Speaker 4: in mind that this book is about what happened to
Speaker 4: Biden and about and about Harris's quick rise and fall.
Speaker 4: And you know, Harris gives the sense that one hundred
Speaker 4: and seven days she ran out of time, she didn't
Speaker 4: have enough time. In fact, it was the reverse. In
Speaker 4: fact what happened is she was strongest during those first say,
Speaker 4: thirty to forty days, and then tapered off. And part
Speaker 4: of it was this intensely careful, precious few interviews, precious
Speaker 4: few interactions with the press when Trump was out there
Speaker 4: for everybody.
Speaker 1: And if you do that, if you do very few interviews,
Speaker 1: then every minute you talk to anyone is scrutinized within
Speaker 1: an inch of its life.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, I mean you remember the first interview, which was
Speaker 4: with Dana Bash, right, and it was she comes in,
Speaker 4: she effectively wins the nomination. You know, there's no convention yet,
Speaker 4: but she's effectively won the nomination and does absolutely nothing.
Speaker 4: And for a period of a couple of weeks. The
Speaker 4: best answer that I could get is that, you know,
Speaker 4: she was spending much of her time preparing for this
Speaker 4: big first scene in an interview.
Speaker 1: When she disappeared its August. I remember in August thinking
Speaker 1: where is she?
Speaker 5: Why?
Speaker 1: Why is she not out there? And you know what's
Speaker 1: so interesting is that Hillary Clinton had a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks too in August where she's effectively disappeared. You'll remember
Speaker 1: Hillary's house, yeah, right, And maybe she was sick, maybe
Speaker 1: she was not sick, but it didn't matter because if
Speaker 1: you create a vacuum, anyone who's around will fill it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, to be entirely fair here, Harris had
Speaker 4: a tremendous first couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: Tremendous.
Speaker 4: I mean it was people who had thought that she
Speaker 4: didn't have what it takes or was going to be
Speaker 4: a terrible candidate were like, wait a minute, where was
Speaker 4: this Kamala Harris.
Speaker 3: She's good, She's got it down, so.
Speaker 1: Uh and then it was disappearing at least and then it.
Speaker 4: Was disappearing, and that she does the CNN interview and
Speaker 4: because to your point, she hasn't been doing interviews, not
Speaker 4: just as a candidate, but really not even as vice president.
Speaker 4: I mean it was not a strong interview.
Speaker 1: Right, and picked apart within an inch of It's like
Speaker 1: because if you're Donald Trump and you're doing I mean,
Speaker 1: like I think about how much media Donald Trump does
Speaker 1: in a day when he's not calling journalists and you know,
Speaker 1: I mean three four hours a day, I mean full
Speaker 1: spray of this that a press conference, and then those
Speaker 1: like insane cabinet meetings that are televised, which are like
Speaker 1: you know a little North Korea, but you still have
Speaker 1: a visual of the guy out there. And so you
Speaker 1: say something crazy, if you've said seven thousand other things
Speaker 1: since then, it becomes sort of hard to keep trap.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's that, you know, it's that Bannon esque
Speaker 4: flood the zone. You know, he may do five things
Speaker 4: that are completely crazy and or you know, get would
Speaker 4: get picked apart and get hit, but he does twenty
Speaker 4: five other things, so you forget about those things he
Speaker 4: just did. I mean, and it's as a journalist, you're
Speaker 4: just you've got not just a fire hose coming at you,
Speaker 4: but you have ten fire hoses coming at you.
Speaker 3: By the way.
Speaker 4: Also, why to me it was so important to write
Speaker 4: this book is to try to get a little bit
Speaker 4: of a step back and what did we just go through?
Speaker 4: What did we just live through? And to go through
Speaker 4: and take the time and to pick apart the key
Speaker 4: moments that brought us to this point in American history,
Speaker 4: and to try to go back and see what was
Speaker 4: really happening behind the scenes. That's what I tried to
Speaker 4: do with this book.
Speaker 1: This is a very different white House than Trump one
Speaker 1: point zero, like, very different, different, priority is different, everything
Speaker 1: different on fetteredness. So explain to me what you see
Speaker 1: as the sort of main players in this White House.
Speaker 4: Well, the first thing that makes it entirely different is
Speaker 4: he is actually trying to fundamentally change things. He's going
Speaker 4: to have an impact on this country and by the way,
Speaker 4: also on the physical layout of the White House that
Speaker 4: he never had in the first term. You don't say,
Speaker 4: I mean, I mean the first term, all the chaos,
Speaker 4: all the attention, all that took place when he left office,
Speaker 4: he left office, it was ephemeral. There was not that
Speaker 4: much of a lasting impact. That is not the case already,
Speaker 4: just you know, less than a year into this White House.
Speaker 4: And the two other biggest factors are he comes in
Speaker 4: with an agenda that was part of what he was
Speaker 4: into last time, but it wasn't central really, which is
Speaker 4: to get back at the people that screwed him over
Speaker 4: in his minds. I mean, he faced an election where
Speaker 4: he was either going to maybe go to prison or
Speaker 4: become the most powerful president that we have seen in
Speaker 4: our lifetimes, thanks to a Supreme Court immunity decision, thanks
Speaker 4: to a Congress that is entirely obsequious, and going to
Speaker 4: do whatever he wants, the most powerful president of our lifetime.
Speaker 4: So he becomes that, and he's going to use that
Speaker 4: power to get back at everybody that investigated him, that
Speaker 4: attacked him, the Republicans who tried to rein him in.
Speaker 4: So not just this isn't just prosecutors and Democratic opponents
Speaker 4: who impeached him or any of that. This is also
Speaker 4: the Republicans that tried to rain him in enemies list.
Speaker 4: High on that enemy's list are people like well, Jim Comey.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't be surprised to see people like General Kelly
Speaker 4: on that list, Mark Milly on that list, people who
Speaker 4: served in his administration, Bill Barr. You had Bannon the
Speaker 4: other day saying that Barr should go to prison, that
Speaker 4: Bill Barr should be prosecuted. Is talk about that?
Speaker 1: No, I don't want to think about that. How much
Speaker 1: is Bannon world talking to Trump World?
Speaker 4: Well, I don't know about Bannon World or Trump World,
Speaker 4: but Bannon is talking to Trump absolutely?
Speaker 3: Wow, all right?
Speaker 4: And there is absolutely a you know, a line there.
Speaker 4: And also Bannon two things. One, he does have an
Speaker 4: influence on Trump. He makes sure that his show he's
Speaker 4: on for four hours.
Speaker 1: A day on the war and better him than May.
Speaker 4: And when he has the key messages that he wants,
Speaker 4: they go to Natalie Harp Trump's assistant and they go
Speaker 4: to Trump and Trump watches them and also.
Speaker 1: Natalie prints it out right.
Speaker 4: Well, these are video clips, so she she sets up
Speaker 4: the video clips the human prins.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But but I describe a scene in the book that
Speaker 4: is really kind of mind blowing that helps you understand
Speaker 4: what happened when Zelensky came to the White House in
Speaker 4: February and you had that big confrontation. Well, in advance
Speaker 4: of that, there was a National Security meeting with Vance
Speaker 4: heg Seth, Rubio, Waite, Coough, Besant, then the National Security
Speaker 4: Advisor Mike Waltz, and their meeting at the White House
Speaker 4: with Trump and they're going over that minerals deal that
Speaker 4: we're going to sign with the Ukraine, and Trump says,
Speaker 4: get Steve Bannon on the phone. Waltz calls Bannon. Anyway,
Speaker 4: they go back and forth. Bannon like puts Waltz to
Speaker 4: h to voicemail. Then Trump calls Bannon himself on his
Speaker 4: phone and Bannon takes the call and for the next
Speaker 4: half hour, Bannon is basically lecturing the National Security team
Speaker 4: on how they can't trust that punk Zelensky, which is
Speaker 4: what Bannon calls him, and how if you give him
Speaker 4: a you know, if you do a security he's gonna
Speaker 4: want he's gonna want a natural resources deal. He's going
Speaker 4: to want security guarantees. You cannot trust him, you cannot
Speaker 4: do him. And that really Again, this has never been
Speaker 4: reported before, but I think that that incident, and I've
Speaker 4: talked to many people that were involved in that set
Speaker 4: the stage for the confrontation with Zelenski. And that was Bannon.
Speaker 4: He's not in the White House, he's not on the
Speaker 4: National security team, but in that moment he had more
Speaker 4: influence than the national security advisor of the Secretary of.
Speaker 1: State John Carl Thank you, Malli, I.
Speaker 3: Love talking to you. Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 2: David Sirota is the founder of The Lever, the screenplay
Speaker 2: author of Don't Look Up, and the author of Master Planned,
Speaker 2: The Hidden Plot to Legalize Corruption in America.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Fast Politics, Dave, Thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I have so many places I want to start because
Speaker 1: it's so bad, but let's start with John Roberts, the
Speaker 1: man who just wants to cut away our freedoms versus
Speaker 1: he wants to use a scalpel rather than a chainsaw,
Speaker 1: but he'll use a chainsaw if he needs to.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean, we're on the twenty year anniversary now of
Speaker 6: John Roberts' takeover of the Supreme Court, which is that's
Speaker 6: really how you make yourself feel old is to realize
Speaker 6: it's been twenty years, and I think people have forgotten
Speaker 6: what that few month period was like in two thousand
Speaker 6: and five, where there was Sandra Day O'Connor and William
Speaker 6: Rehnquist were suddenly out of the picture and John Roberts
Speaker 6: and Sam Alito were installed very very quickly on that court.
Speaker 6: And soon after that, of course, came the Citizens United decision,
Speaker 6: which transformed American politics almost overnight. I mean, our book
Speaker 6: is about the master plan that conservatives hatched over fifty
Speaker 6: years to deregulate the campaign finance system, kill off anti
Speaker 6: corruption laws, anti bribery laws, and Citizens United was one
Speaker 6: of the big obviously earning points, again engineered by John Roberts.
Speaker 5: And the thing that drives me crazy.
Speaker 6: And probably drives anyone crazy who remembers back in two
Speaker 6: thousand and five was how he was presented as this reasonable,
Speaker 6: almost moderate candidate, and I remember distinctly sort of trying
Speaker 6: to sound the alarm in the position that I was
Speaker 6: in like, this guy is not some easy going moderate.
Speaker 6: This guy is a movement conservative. Arguably, I guess you'd
Speaker 6: call him that. Maybe the second movement conservative put on
Speaker 6: the court. I mean, you had Scalia, But this guy
Speaker 6: was sort of groomed by the conservative movement to be
Speaker 6: everything that he has come to be. And to my mind,
Speaker 6: there are three priorities when you look at John Roberts' career, right,
Speaker 6: I mean to really understand John Roberts passions. There is
Speaker 6: his passion to destroy and dismantle voting rights laws.
Speaker 1: We really dosate the voting rights law.
Speaker 5: Really that he's been working on it forever.
Speaker 6: There is his passion to close the courthouse doors to
Speaker 6: anyone who is inconvenient to political and corporate power. But
Speaker 6: by that I mean his war on what's known as standing.
Speaker 6: You are not allowed in this court. We won't even
Speaker 6: adjudicate your issue because you do not have standing. Again,
Speaker 6: that is a John Roberts passion. And then the other
Speaker 6: John Roberts passion is equating and enshrining the connection between
Speaker 6: money and free speech, the idea that money is a
Speaker 6: constitutionally protected form of speech, which was started before John Robertson.
Speaker 1: Right, it feels like a Mitch McConnell.
Speaker 6: Yes, Mitch McConnell, the Buckley case in the seventies. But
Speaker 6: John Roberts really has taken that the Roberts Court has
Speaker 6: to its logical extreme.
Speaker 1: In John Roberts defense, he has very rich donors.
Speaker 5: I guess that is it. In his defense, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, these guys need of ation every once in a while.
Speaker 1: And as Thomas has shown us, you know, those are
Speaker 1: re's are expensive. I know.
Speaker 5: And the thing, the thing that kind of blows me away.
Speaker 6: Although the Court, as we traced in our book, is
Speaker 6: is doing these rulings, deregulating.
Speaker 5: The campaign finance system.
Speaker 6: And narrowing the interpretation of anti bribery laws down the
Speaker 6: to the point where.
Speaker 1: Last se ribes are they bribed?
Speaker 5: No, they're protuities. Right.
Speaker 6: I have to say this out loud repeatedly because it's
Speaker 6: almost like people won't believe it. In the last court term,
Speaker 6: there was a case about a local official who had
Speaker 6: gotten a payment from a government contractor. After the local
Speaker 6: official delivered the government contract to this contractor gotten a payment,
Speaker 6: and the court ruled that that was not a bribe,
Speaker 6: that was a so called legal critulaluit.
Speaker 5: It's a tip, right.
Speaker 1: I just want to follow that up for one second
Speaker 1: because it comes back in season two, which is Tom
Speaker 1: Holman is wept up in an FBI investigation where he
Speaker 1: is not the target, right, he just wanders in and
Speaker 1: accepts a bag of fifty thousand dollars in cash, and
Speaker 1: they say this is the Biden Justice Department says, well,
Speaker 1: we may not even be able to prosecute this because
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court just ruled that bribes aren't bribes.
Speaker 6: I mean, that's the world we are living in now.
Speaker 6: And again, to underscore the point you alluded to, these
Speaker 6: rulings are coming down at the very time that some
Speaker 6: of these justices engineering them are accepting lavish gifts from
Speaker 6: billionaires who have business in some cases before the.
Speaker 1: Court in all cases right, or they're connected to someone
Speaker 1: who does right.
Speaker 5: While they are legalizing corruption.
Speaker 6: They are effectively engaging in the kinds of practices without,
Speaker 6: by the way, disclosure. We only know about that because
Speaker 6: of reporting. They weren't in Thomas's case, he didn't disclose it,
Speaker 6: et cetera, et cetera. So they are in an undisclosed
Speaker 6: way engaging in the kind of behavior that they are
Speaker 6: issuing rulings legalizing I mean it's mind blowing, yes it is.
Speaker 1: And yet it is also very much exactly what you
Speaker 1: think of when you think of these guys. Right. The
Speaker 1: thing that bothers me the most is the idea that
Speaker 1: they are like, well, this is textualism.
Speaker 5: Right, which is crazy to me. Right, I mean, that
Speaker 5: doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 6: The idea that the founders in the Constitution kind of
Speaker 6: legalized bribery or equated by the way money with speech,
Speaker 6: it's just severed from any textual reality. Frank, I'm not
Speaker 6: a constitutional scholar here, but like the idea that money
Speaker 6: is speech, the idea, by the way, that corporations have
Speaker 6: constitutional rights is simply not in the Constitution at all.
Speaker 6: And the court used to distinguish between sort of corporate
Speaker 6: speech and human speech. The Court used to distinguish between
Speaker 6: actual human beings and corporate persons. That's all been thrown out,
Speaker 6: and we have to ask the question of why has
Speaker 6: it been thrown out. It's because throwing it out provides
Speaker 6: disproportionate political power to essentially conservatives who know that they
Speaker 6: can't legislatively pass their unpopular agenda through democratic, small d
Speaker 6: democratic institutions. In other words. I think this is a
Speaker 6: missed point a lot like why is the conservative movement
Speaker 6: doing it this way? Why do they want to legalize corruption,
Speaker 6: Why do they want to deregulate the campaign finance system.
Speaker 6: It's because if you realize that your agenda tax cuts
Speaker 6: for the wealthy, et cetera, et cetera. If you realize
Speaker 6: your agenda is wildly unpopular among voters who were supposed
Speaker 6: to be in control of things in a democratic republic.
Speaker 6: If you realize it's unpopular, then you have to rig
Speaker 6: the game to make sure that those policies can go
Speaker 6: into effect, and that allow you to circumvent the democratic
Speaker 6: institutions that would say no to those policies.
Speaker 1: I think that's right. This court seems, especially the last
Speaker 1: couple shadow dock at rulings we've seen, they have been
Speaker 1: so blatantly partisan. It would be hard for me. And
Speaker 1: I am an optimist, a person who has lots of
Speaker 1: friends who used to be in the federal society, for
Speaker 1: whom they really want you to believe that Emmy is
Speaker 1: smart and Kavanaugh has some kind of ethos. But everything
Speaker 1: I've seen over in this term especially has just been partisan.
Speaker 6: Hacker right, agreed, and now we've got a term coming
Speaker 6: up talking about corruption, where jd Vance has quietly and
Speaker 6: deliberately given the Supreme Court an opportunity to go even
Speaker 6: beyond Citizens United and eliminate all of what's ever left
Speaker 6: of campaign finance rules. It's incredible that this case hasn't
Speaker 6: gotten more attention.
Speaker 1: What's the case.
Speaker 6: It's about the NRSC, the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee
Speaker 6: versus the f V.
Speaker 5: That's technically what it is.
Speaker 6: Essentially, jd Vance went into court and said that a
Speaker 6: prohibition or a limit on how much party committees can
Speaker 6: coordinate their spending with candidates. He's arguing that's unconstitutional. Now
Speaker 6: people hear that and they're like, oh, that's kind of esoteric.
Speaker 6: That's kind of like, what does that really mean. The
Speaker 6: point is it's a rule about how much donors can
Speaker 6: pass through their money to candidates through a party. The
Speaker 6: idea of the limits was to say you can't use
Speaker 6: a party committee to get around campaign contribution limits.
Speaker 5: That's what's at issue here, right.
Speaker 6: The Supreme Court has long held up that super PACs
Speaker 6: can spend what they want, but if you want to
Speaker 6: give money directly to a candidate, there are limits there
Speaker 6: because that can be a corrupting force. Vance's case is
Speaker 6: designed to give the court a way to do away
Speaker 6: with all of the remaining campaign finance limits, the remaining
Speaker 6: limitations on donations. This would essentially take Citizens United and
Speaker 6: put it on steroids at a time that polls tell
Speaker 6: us the public across the political spectrum, by the way,
Speaker 6: the public hates Citizens United. And so you have Dvance
Speaker 6: going into court at a moment when the public loathes
Speaker 6: Citizens United and is giving the now six to three
Speaker 6: court the chance to go way beyond Citizens United. And
Speaker 6: I don't know what's going to come in this case,
Speaker 6: but I'm not feeling all that optimistic because get this,
Speaker 6: the Biden administration was defending existing law. When Trump came in,
Speaker 6: Trump's Department of Justice switched sides and says it is
Speaker 6: refusing to defend the current law. And way it gets
Speaker 6: even more crazy. So then the Supreme Court has to
Speaker 6: appoint a lawyer to represent the FEC and they appoint
Speaker 6: a former John Roberts clerk who was clerking for Roberts
Speaker 6: during the original Citizens United decisions. So, in other words,
Speaker 6: the conservative movement has triangulated the entire case. They engineered
Speaker 6: the case they have the Supreme Court, and a conservative
Speaker 6: movement lawyer is now the defense lawyer for the existing law.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about where we go next. There's
Speaker 1: another case that's in front of the Supreme Court that
Speaker 1: I think is sort of my favorite case of this
Speaker 1: semester because it's the one where than the most conflicted,
Speaker 1: and that is the tariff case. So you've got Coke
Speaker 1: Brothers versus Trump, and this is I think my favorite
Speaker 1: case because this Supreme Court is so captured. It's a
Speaker 1: captured institution period paragraph it's owned by wealthy conservative donors,
Speaker 1: but it's also owned by Donald Trump. And here's a
Speaker 1: case where the wealthy conservative donors want the tariffs gone
Speaker 1: because the tariffs are terrible for business and make no sense.
Speaker 1: And Donald Trump wants ultimate power via the unitary executive theory.
Speaker 1: He is a god king and he can use these terriffs.
Speaker 1: And you know, the thing that I think Trump loves
Speaker 1: so much about tariffs is that it is really an
Speaker 1: opportunity to pick winners and losers. You know, It's one
Speaker 1: thing to do crony capitalism with our economy, but he
Speaker 1: can do crony capitalism now with other countries' economies. So
Speaker 1: how do you think this goes down.
Speaker 6: It's a great question, and I agree with you. Trump
Speaker 6: likes tariffs because it forces other countries. And by the way,
Speaker 6: big donors donor corporations to kiss his ring. There was
Speaker 6: a study that we reported on at the lever from
Speaker 6: the tariffs in the first term, in which it showed
Speaker 6: that the companies that donated money to Trump and the
Speaker 6: Republicans were more likely to get exemptions from the tariffs.
Speaker 5: In a sense, it's a corruption scheme. Now here's the thing.
Speaker 6: You're totally right to hone in on the fact that
Speaker 6: the Supreme Court, the conservative Supreme Court, is caught between
Speaker 6: always wanting to do what big money wants and always
Speaker 6: wanting to give Donald Trump, and not just Trump, but
Speaker 6: give the executive branch, certainly their executive branch when it's
Speaker 6: controlled by Republicans, always wanting to give the executive branch power.
Speaker 1: And also they don't want Trump to be mad at
Speaker 1: them totally. I mean, like this is an entire culture
Speaker 1: of Americans who are scared of Trump's tweets exactly.
Speaker 6: So you've got these two conflicting forces. And what's really
Speaker 6: interesting about the Supreme Court. Before we get to the
Speaker 6: tariff stuff is to look at what they've done with
Speaker 6: Trump's attempt to remove independent agency appointees the court. What's
Speaker 6: really fascinating here is that the court has allowed Trump
Speaker 6: to remove appointees at the agencies that are problematic to
Speaker 6: corporate power, the FTC, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but
Speaker 6: they have not allowed Trump to remove a member of
Speaker 6: the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 1: Board because that would be bad for the markets exactly.
Speaker 6: So what was fascinating was they somehow made up this
Speaker 6: idea that the FTC commissioners are not independent, so they
Speaker 6: can be thrown out ps they're annoying to corporations, but
Speaker 6: nobody on the Federal Reserve Board aka Wall.
Speaker 5: Streets Institution can be removed at all.
Speaker 6: So I wonder if they're going to try to creatively
Speaker 6: do something visa VI tariffs where they sort of say
Speaker 6: something like these specific tariffs are not allowed aka business
Speaker 6: doesn't like them, we can get rid of them, but
Speaker 6: the president.
Speaker 5: Still retains the power.
Speaker 6: Like I wonder if they're going to try to find
Speaker 6: some ridiculous middle ground in a binary situation.
Speaker 1: Tariff sybey INDs but not batteries or something.
Speaker 5: Something like that.
Speaker 6: I mean I think you're totally right that it is
Speaker 6: fascinating that they've built this machine and now the machine
Speaker 6: is like sort of in a sense, at war with itself.
Speaker 1: I mean, that is the one bright spot in this
Speaker 1: whole fucking disaster, is that you see MAGA is so
Speaker 1: drunk with power that they're coming after each other. I mean,
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal, the woke Wall Street Journal, perhaps
Speaker 1: you've heard of it, owned by Rupert Murdoch, had a
Speaker 1: piece today about Laura Lumer targeting MAGA.
Speaker 5: Trump like was a story for like three hours.
Speaker 6: But Trump going to war with Leonard Leo was like
Speaker 6: kind of blew my mind. And for those who don't,
Speaker 6: I know, Leonard Leo was the conservative activist.
Speaker 1: He's how we got here. Leonard Leo is how we
Speaker 1: have a court that rubber stamps everything Donald Trump wants
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 6: Exactly So, Leonard Leo is the conservative activist who packs
Speaker 6: the court. Over twenty twenty five years, Federalist Society guy,
Speaker 6: some of the Federalist Society judges at a certain point
Speaker 6: once in a while sort of said hey, Trump, you
Speaker 6: can't do this. Trump freaks out and essentially disavows. Leonard
Speaker 6: Leo says he's like a bad guy.
Speaker 5: Right. It's like I've used the example of the French
Speaker 5: Revolution dynamic.
Speaker 6: It feels like the Committee on Public Justice, right Like,
Speaker 6: Robespierre's running the Committee on Public Justice and he's getting
Speaker 6: his way. You know, they're doing the guillotine to everybody,
Speaker 6: and then all of a sudden, it accelerates, it accelerates,
Speaker 6: and then Robespierre's head is in the guillotine, right like,
Speaker 6: metaphorically speaking, like the revolution quote unquote is sort of
Speaker 6: accelerates so fast that it starts eating itself. And I
Speaker 6: feel like that's what's happening right now. I don't know,
Speaker 6: like we're in the abyss. I don't know where we
Speaker 6: go from here.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting because I feel like we agree on
Speaker 1: a lot of things about how we got here, and
Speaker 1: like the many ways in which Democrats were unable to
Speaker 1: bring a knife to a knife fight and brought a
Speaker 1: stuffed animal to a knife fight, and then we're like,
Speaker 1: just we're so disappointed by Republicans doing fascism. It does
Speaker 1: strike me though, that all this energy they had saved
Speaker 1: up for Dems and now Dems were like, we can't
Speaker 1: legislate this, and so now they're using it on each other.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, look the story of the Democrats. Let's
Speaker 6: go back to where we started, John Roberts twenty years ago.
Speaker 6: I'm old enough to remember that lots and lots of
Speaker 6: Democrats voted to put John Roberts.
Speaker 5: On that court.
Speaker 6: And I remember back then, and I was a much
Speaker 6: younger person. I was looking around being like what am
Speaker 6: I missing here? Like why are they saying such nice
Speaker 6: things about this person and helping the Republicans install him
Speaker 6: on the court. And I don't think that's like a
Speaker 6: historical anomaly. I think it was kind of emblematic of
Speaker 6: this idea that the party and its leaders believed that
Speaker 6: simply by adhering to so called norms, everything would at
Speaker 6: a certain point revert back to normal. At this point, clearly,
Speaker 6: that calculation, if you can call it, that was wrong.
Speaker 6: I do understand people say it wasn't that they were wrong,
Speaker 6: it's that they were a lot of them.
Speaker 1: Were complicit, right, I don't agree.
Speaker 5: Maybe not all of them were complicit.
Speaker 6: I think the term doesn't necessarily mean you were sort
Speaker 6: of deliberately in on it.
Speaker 5: It's that you were willing to tolerate it if you.
Speaker 6: Got to, For instance, keep your job in the Senate
Speaker 6: or keep your job in Congress. You're not willing to
Speaker 6: actually risk anything real to you yourself to stop this,
Speaker 6: That to me is a form of complicity. And I'm
Speaker 6: asking the question now I think everyone should be as like,
Speaker 6: when are Democrats going to actually risk something? And by that,
Speaker 6: I mean when are they going to actually really put
Speaker 6: themselves out there to risk their own political cares to actually,
Speaker 6: in a real sense, try to stop this. We've seen
Speaker 6: very very few efforts that rise to this level of
Speaker 6: an emergency.
Speaker 1: But I do want to just say, because I've been
Speaker 1: very hard on Democrats and everyone is mad at me,
Speaker 1: that the shutdown for them is a huge gamble and
Speaker 1: it seems to be for today getting people to talk
Speaker 1: about healthcare.
Speaker 5: Look, I hope you're right. I think it is.
Speaker 6: We haven't seen them do something like this in a
Speaker 6: very long time, and I think it's better late than never.
Speaker 6: But I would just tell you this, they're not doing
Speaker 6: that because they're nice. They're doing that because people are
Speaker 6: mad at them. The latest pupole shows that more Democratic
Speaker 6: voters are mad at their own party than we've seen
Speaker 6: in a generation or two. So that anger even if
Speaker 6: some of your listeners are like mad at you for
Speaker 6: being mad at Democrats. That wressure is actually necessary to
Speaker 6: get them to stand up.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. And quite frankly, Chuck Schumer saw the
Speaker 1: right on the wall and knew we had to do
Speaker 1: it from March. But let us give them a tiny
Speaker 1: bit of credit.
Speaker 5: I agree.
Speaker 6: And the healthcare stuff is a disaster if it is
Speaker 6: allowed to go into a fact like if those cuts happen,
Speaker 6: I mean we're talking about doubling people's healthcare premiums. That
Speaker 6: is something that I think is worth doing what they're doing.
Speaker 1: And Trump is not going to make the price of
Speaker 1: eggs any cheaper.
Speaker 5: No, He's making everything more expensive.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Dave Saroda, thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
Speaker 1: every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
Speaker 1: minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
Speaker 1: you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
Speaker 1: and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.