Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Democrats have voted with the Republicans to pass a transgender sports fan Good work everyone, We have such a great show for you today. And by the way, I mean good work, bad work, don't do that. The New Yorkers Evan os Nos stops by to talk about where we are an American democracy. Spoiler no, We're good.
And then we'll talk to Slate's Dahlia Lettwick about Pam Bondi's confirmation hearing.
But first the News, Somali, As you stated at the top of the show of the News, it's just going great today. The confirmation hearings continue. But you know, there was a moment yesterday after retape with Mark Wayne Mullen defending peak takest that I think deserves a little more attention.
Republican Mark Wayne Mullen is from Oklahoma. He is very much the Marjorie Taylor Green of the Senate, taking any chance to defend one of Trump's people. He defended hegseeth against charge of drunkenness and womanizing by suggesting that his colleagues were equally culpable. How many Senators have shown up drunk to vote at night? Have any of you guys asked them to step down and resign from their job? By the way, as someone who's sober since they were nineteen, yes,
let's do it. Let's I'm happy. If you're an active alcoholic, perhaps you should not be running our government. And don't tell me you haven't seen it, because I know you have. And how many senators you know have gotten a divorce for cheating on their wives? Again, kick all those people out. But also, more importantly, the idea, you know, we've gone down this rabbit hole with Trump where since nothing is disqualifying for Trump, the thought process with a lot of
these Republicans is nothing is disqualifying for his nominees. Very annoying, very crazy, and also I might add just completely and disturbing. But this is where we are so welcome. That's pretty much how these hearings are going.
Yeah, speaking of other fun stuff, turns out that doing bad things in Magaworld gets you much bigger book deals.
This is Christy Noom from the Great State of South Dakota. She she had to file some financial disclosures because she is going to be Trump's pick for Homeland Security Secretary. She has confirmations coming on Friday. In her disclosures, she revealed that she made one hundred and thirty nine thousand dollars advance for her twenty twenty four book. That was the book where she talked a lot and in great detail about shooting her dog and burying it in the
gravel pick. Again, this continues to be a baffling kind of play. Why writing about you know, it was America. All we like are dogs, right, And I mean that's the one thing all Americans can agree on is that dogs are great. Except South Dakota Governor Christy Nome does not think that anyway.
The question really is is are there more secrets buried in this new book?
Yeah? And our first in the gravel pit.
Yes. On that note, I'll move to another subject to save us from our bad jokes. So let's see, we've seen merk Garland be quite toothless. We've talked that one to death. Hopefully we will not think about him much anymore in the next week. But the SEC is now going to demonstrate what their teeth look like as they sue Elon Musk over Twitter related securities violations for his forty four billion dollars.
Purchase, the purchase of Twitter now called X. What I think is interesting about this is we had wondered how Elan had gotten so maga and why he had gotten so maga, and this sort of provides a really interesting motivation. Right, So Elon knew that he was going to get sued by the securities regulators. He knew that was coming. He
probably has known this for a while. While this is going to be the final act of Gary Gensler, who he has a department chair, who he's been raging about forever, and he's saying that Mosk violated securities laws by amassing a large doc position in the social media company without
filing the proper notification. The complaint said he had waited eleven days before filing the required disclosures with the sec So this is this is really like the kind of thing that Martha Stewart went to jail over, right.
A lot of people have calling to jail over this.
Yeah, exactly.
So it's one of those administrations that really like said detail sewn up properly.
Yeah, that is where we are. It's incredibly unsurprising, perhaps.
But that's where we are, SAMAI. Mister Trump has done a lot of braggadocious things about getting the war in Israel to stop. But it's looking like there may be a ceasefire, right.
Yeah, So it looks like there's going to be a a ceasefire for Israel. I don't know what that looks like exactly. I don't know. We don't really know a lot of the details. This is sort of breaking news, but it looks like Biden world has negotiated seasfire right before the presidency ended a little too late for all of those people in Gaza and also many of the hostages, but it looks like we have.
Some kind of seasfire.
Evan Osnos is a writer for The New Yorker and the author of Wildland, The Making of America's Fury. Welcome to Fast Politics, Evan Osnos, thank.
You very much, Molly jump Past. I'm pleased to be here.
I am so excited to have you because I am a longtime listener of the New Yorker podcast, which is excellent, which has you.
Bless you, thank you.
I'm not even a listener, I'm like a super fan, and so I do things like write your boss emails about my hottest takes about what you guys should be doing, which I'm sure he loves.
We've gotten some of them. They've been on passed to use the term in the journalism business. And I don't mean to dangle something, but you might have some very cheap and disposable swag coming your way if this keeps up.
My god, you have never known anyone to be more impressed with free stuff than me. And you would think, as someone who is not you know, has not just fallen off the turnip truck, that I would be cynical about getting free stuff, but in fact, I am just so incredibly impressed by it. So send me free.
Step I'm with you. I'm sitting here taping in my closet wearing swag from an ungodly number of entities. That's just how I roll. I'm clad in swag. There we are so.
Just for the very few people who don't read The New Yorker but listen to this podcast, Evan is one of the smartest political writers I think, period paragraph and what I love about the podcast you're on, which if anyone is looking for another podcast after they've listened to
me four times a week. It's not you know that you and Jane Mayer, who is just a wonderful human being but also just have been doing this and gets the scoops, and Susan Glasser who really knows her stuff, and just to hear the three of you talk about stuff, you know, talk about things that are really important historical references that nobody else remembers.
Well, I thank you. You know those two are as we say national treasures, I might be a regional treasure, which is a less coveted title, but honestly, it is a genuine treat to get on there every week. And they, the three of us, if you put our meager brains together, you get some assemblage of memory of politics over the last generation or so, so that we try to talk about that a bit too.
Yeah, very smart stuff. So anyway, here we are in the middle of the confirmation hearings. I'm just going to read you the title of a email I got last night from Politico, which really, you know, I don't read every email I get when I get all of these emails, but this one it just I was somewhere and I just it stabbed me in the heart. The death of the Senate confirmation hearing. Yeah, discuss.
Look, I have to say I too have been known to miss the occasional email newsletter. However, that one did catch my attention to because I was listening yesterday to the Hegseth confirmation hearing, because I have a vibrant socialize, but also because there is something true in that description that there has always been something theatrical about the confirmation process.
But part of that theater has been at least the suggestion that the person who's testifying is going to try to answer the question, is going to try you know, of course they do the usual evasive historyonics, but that there will be some ultimate effort to try to satis by the public's expectation that information will be asked and answered. And I think we've just entered this phase now where it is like a series of parallel, non intersecting performances,
some of which I've found actually quite interesting. I mean to see Alyssa Slotkin or Tim Kaine, that was good hearing conduct. That's what you.
Do, Tim, and then Tammy Duckworth.
Tammy Duckworth I've been fascinated by for years. I mean, I started my career at the Chicago Tribune. So there's sort of some Illinois in the blood. And I think there's a way in which her life, the fact that she was injured while serving overseas during the American Wars of the twenty first century, makes her a uniquely powerful
voice in this moment. So I found that to be just sort of almost thinking as a playwright or something, as a novelist, there's something really extraordinary which ultimately drives home how frustrating it was to see heg Seth really not acknowledge the dignity of this process and to just say now I'm going to just kind of Fox and Friends my way through it.
Agreed. I also think like this is a moment where Democrats need to adapt. I say this as a partisan. One of the things I truly hate about this current reality is that there were people I knew who were like, this will be good for business, and I was like, it will be until there's the business is shut down, right, And I actually didn't even say that because I said, you know, you can't play chicken with things like American democracy.
And what I see as I'm watching this is like democrats need to adapt to whatever this is they're not going to necessarily be able. I mean, they have a math problem, right that Republicans have a hardened maga Senate with very few normal senators left.
Yeah, I have to tell you you've hit on one of the things that I have privately, I don't think I've talked about it, but privately been kind of enraged about, which is that there is a pretty sizable chunk of the business, the journalism business, that is actually eager for the fight to be back, for the Trump years, to allow the rage to get back into the news, meaning for readers and viewers and listeners to tune in out of sheer contempt. And I find that to be a
disastrous kind of cynicism. The idea that this is a good thing for us as an industry or as a country is a big piece of my fundamental beef with political journalism. You know, it's a business I'm in, but I find that piece of it to be kind of, in some ways the pure distillation of what it is that Americans actually really hate about us, and their right to hate that just because we talk about it as
a game sometimes doesn't mean that it should be. And I think that people pick up on how distasteful that is because it has real impact in their lives. So I'm with you on this one. I find that to be a real problem.
Yeah, I think it's really disgusting, and I also think it's really how wet here Like Elon Musk has a tweet that he loves I have not been subject to it yet, but it's coming where he says, you do not hate the mainstream media enough, right, Like, this is the fever dream of all of Silicon Valley is to get the people against the media because we are the you know, by reporting on the corruption, we are the corruption.
But the larger question is the gamification of what is happening to our federal government is real.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting I've been recently. I was going back and looking at a piece that I wrote some years ago about Mark Zuckerberg. I did a profile of him back in like twenty nineteen, and what's amazing to see now in contrast to where he is is At the time, he was still engaged in a pantomime of respect for the press that he was for one thing.
After much haranguing and harassment and stalking, he'd eventually agreed to this sit down to some interview and then ultimately but it was clear that he was sort of doing it through grated teeth. And now we're in an era where he and his cohort Elon Musk to some degree some of the others, that they just refuse to acknowledge that the press is a meaningful part of power and of conversation. What they do acknowledge of it is that
they have contempt for it. I remember actually a billionaire in Silicon Valley who said to me a couple of years ago, he said, do you think that anybody out here is ever going to agree to a New York or profile again? And I thought that was such an interesting tell, because they were beginning to back out of the existing call it, the existing apparatus of accountability, and the press is a part of that. And we now are living in the world in which they don't want
any part of that. And so they're actively as you described with Musk's tweet, you know, as he says, we are the media now. I mean that is their moment of feeling free, feeling that they've thrown off the yoke of that kind of visibility and scrutiny. I will say one thing, though, which is, you know, this is laying, but true history is long, and these periods don't tend to endure for very long. That they may find themselves under a new kind of scrutiny and they may not like that much.
Yeah, I mean, by the way we are the media now, it's like, you really want to be us because you don't want to be as you know, the billionaire on his jet, who's who is the richest man in the world, is like, I'm going to take down. It's like stepping on an ant.
Well, which is a fascinating kind of asymmetry of power. I mean, that's one of the things that drives them crazy, is this idea that somebody who makes in a lifetime what they'll make in a day now is able to be sort of nettlesome in the way that a kind of a gnat flies in the face. But I think it's a reality, and that's one of the things that they've gone after now in a profound way. And I'm not quite sure where that leads. I mean, I really don't.
I do think we're at a real moment of collision though, between what Politico discription today is the billionaire boys Club, the guys who are going to be attending the inauguration as part of the pro Trump team, and then and
the press. So that is one of the things I'm most conscious of over the next couple of months and then going into this administration is is how much does a musk or somebody like him, actually how much is he able to accommodate himself to the realities of politics, of the press, of things like that, or does he just end up getting self ejected and does he just go back and say the hell with this, I'm going back to my cars and my rockets.
I mean, that is I think the big question. And we see him sort of cycling through different countries, right like I thought, well, he's really invested now in Doge and then it's like and also German elections, and yeah, it's like and I sleep at night, so I don't know. But none of these men sleep at all. Trump doesn't sleep, Elon doesn't sleep. None of these people sleep. If I get less than six and a half hours, I'm like a zombie.
But can I give you a data point on this? A fascinating one from my you know, as you I spend part of my life thinking about China. And writing about China and so on. And there's a fabulous little detail from Chinese history that at this absolutely crucial moment in Chinese history when Mao Zedong undertook this massive purge that ended up being a signpost to catastrophe. Later followed all kinds of purges and led to the Culture Revolution
and so on. But when you later went back and looked at the transcript of what he said about his decisions, he said, I was tossing and turning all night. I couldn't decide what to do about this, and so I took a pill. And then I still couldn't sleep. So I took another pill, and I still couldn't sleep, So I took yet another pill. And what we discover is that like actually a fair piece of China's most terrible dialogebollical, kind of darkest moments of authoritarian madness, we're really the
product of pharmaceutical experimentation. Part of it insomniac.
I shouldn't laugh, Well, it.
Doesn't bode well for us. No, it's a I mean, you have to laugh in a dark way. That The reason I think that's interesting is that the interplay between the private idiosyncrasies or frailties or madnesses of these men at the top. They are men of our system. Will matter, they will shape the course. You know, human history is shaped partly by events and partly by human nature, something my dad often says, and I think he's right about that.
Yeah. I mean it's funny because sleep is such a trope in my life. Anyway. The point is, I'm about to like launch into stories for my memoir, which isn't out till June. So and the kennel does not like it.
So well, I'm excited for that, by the way, And I do think as an as a fellow insomniac, that's like hot content. I'm excited.
It's very short, you tell it's very Somebody said it's very quick read, but it has very dark topics like death and mostly deaths and people getting cancer, et cetera. And so they were saying it's like a Jewish beach read.
Well, I'm a fan of that type, and I will see that is I do think people want short right now, and along the lines of great short Jewish beach reads about death. Can I recommend Calvin Trillin's amazing book about Alice, which was about his beloved in ly wife. You know, it is one of the all time greats.
Calvin he was known bud right was exactly Yeah. Yeah, so but anyway, just back to the death of American democracy. Sure, so my theory of the case is that we need to see democrats adapt to this new trumpefied world. And so I think what should happen is And I was looking at the Tammy Duckworth conversation today because I thought it was well done, but there was an oppert tunity that she missed. So she asked him right here, she is blackhawk helicopter pilot lost her legs, she says to him,
and really knows. So shit says, can you name this is these Asian this association of Southern Asion. Yeah, and he says, I know, we have allies in South Korea and Japan.
Right, and Australia he named Australia. Also not a member of.
Australia the United Kingdom in the US. Okay, So none of that is.
Right, right, correct, You're right?
And more importantly, because I just looked this up, it's not even close, right, the countries in it are. I'm sure you know this. This is different between the New York But they are you know, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos.
Yeah, it's Southeast Asia essentially.
Right, it's the Philipines, function, Yeah, Vietnam, Thailand. So she says to him, none of those three countries are in it. And then she says, I suggest you do a little homework. Now, here's my question for you. In a previous world, you could have said that and it would have been like zing.
But my question now is should she have just kept pushing and trying to get him, trying to show how little he knew in order to sort of enter into the public record that he didn't really know what he was talking about.
It's true, I happen to say I loved that approach. It's what what I thought of as the sort of Katie Kirk Sarah Palin approach where you know, you got to hear Pete Hegsas say, I love all the all the all the aussion countries. You have any specific ways all of them?
I read?
You know. So in a way, that was she did real work on behalf of the American public there by exposing what he doesn't know. And you know, because he'll make reference to these aussion alliances or these these agreements without having the foggiest notion of the time. So I do think you're right it would have been productive to continue down this kind of essentially remedial education component of the hearing and to demonstrate what he how much has
slipped through his tender grasp. But I thought that was very smart, That was effective, and it'll reverberate in Asia. That will work. You know, that's going to play on all kinds of Asian programming for a while, particularly when he gets on a plane and flies over there. He's going to have to suit of practically really bone up, like Encyclopedia Brown on ossion time comes.
Clearly a lot of Democrats were mad about him saying that women can't serve as the daughter of a second wave feminist. I get their irritation. I mean, it's a very fucked up thing to say, But my question is more like, is yelling at him about that going to move the needle. I almost wonder if you had pushed harder on the timeline. And this was something I thought that was smart that we saw Senator Tim Kaine do.
Yeah, the once and future next Vice President United States.
Yes, yes, yeah, where he did more of a sort of adultery time table discussion. I thought they did better when they went in small and worse when they went in big.
Yeah. I thought that the one area that in some ways blended those two was when Elizabeth Warren asked if he would commit to not taking a job in the defense industry after serving as Secretary of Defense, which is something that he has called for among generals that he said they shouldn't be able to do it for ten years. And she hammered him on this, She said, yeah, though you called on this for generals, but what about for yourself?
And he refused to commit to that. He ended up saying, well, I'm not a general, which I thought it might have been useful to point out you certainly are not. And that also is a way of demonstrating whether he has enough history and stature and experience to be suited for this job. So I look, I think part of this gets back to what one of the early things you mentioned, which is this interesting question whether the structure and the
mechanics of the hearing process are collapsing. And part of going after him out adultery about his contempt for women in combat is, you know, some of this was about reminding people of the childless cat ladies stuff. That was quite effective, I think for a while in focusing on the vulnerabilities of this administration's ideas, and this is in
its way an extension of that. But ultimately I do think that the most durable revelations really were when Tammy Duckworth showed that this is a man who is really not at all prepared to even look up the right part of the encyclopedia when it comes to how to do this job.
Yeah, and it was really interesting because he was in some ways so well prepared.
Yeah, he's very smooth, you know. I interviewed him a couple years ago when I was doing a story about Dan Bongino, the right wing talker.
Everyone who listens to this podcast knows exactly who.
Yes, I know that, But as part of that I spoke to Hegseth and I remember at the time he was a TV host, and I just remember thinking, I
don't think I've heard the last of this guy. He's going to be back around, because it was there was a kind of confident smoothness about his contempt for so much of what actually is familiar about how power is held accountable in Washington, and he said to me at one point, he said, you know, look, I used to carry a weapon in the military, and now I'm involved in information warfare and correct he said, Bungino is one
of our generals. So there was that was the first hint that that was a world that I hadn't previously understood the terrain of and they but they were already in a way deployed on it.
Evan Osnos, I hope you will come.
Back, my pleasure, Molly, I'd love to come back.
Dahlia Luthwat is a senior editor at SLAT and the author of Lady Justice, Women, The Law, and the Battle to Save America. Welcome Back, Too Fast Politics, Dahlia.
I'm Molly.
I like I love you so much, and I listened to your podcast Amakis and I'm a special member. I listened to the special episodes too, so I really am both a you know whatever anyway, a superman.
My children's or Sadansha. Thanks you, and I'm very sorry because I feel like the show has taken a like really broken tigger turn in the last couple of weeks. But I think as have all the shows.
Yeah, yeah, I.
Think we all feel pretty much like that. So I'm hoping you could talk to Oz about we are in the middle of the hearing fiasco. Let's talk.
Yeah.
I made the mistake of watching Pete Hegseth yesterday, which just broke me because it was like Brett Cavanaugh two point zero right, it was pay no attention.
To Brett Kavanaugh. He actually got upset, whereas Hegsats was like, this is a speed bump by my way to better things.
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm just thinking of like the process problem, which is you have this quote unquote FBI report that doesn't quote unquote interview any of the alleged victims. And then you're like, I mean, he keeps saying this thing. I don't want to like perseverate on this, Molly. But he keeps saying that he was exonerated or somehow exculpated or cleared of the alleged sexual drunken sexual assault.
He was never.
Cleared of anything. They didn't The fact that you are not criminally prosecuted does not mean there was a legal process that cleared you. And I guess I just feel like I don't want to go down this rabbit hole. But like, oh my god, I was like, yes, I was a sinner, but saved by the love of a good woman. But also I will not tell you any of the things I ostensibly did wrong, like gaslight me harder.
Which good woman was that his wife, his wife who he hexeth, was like very very very effusive about the ways in which he has now redeemed, and he mentioned the Lord many many times. And then you know his wife, who he forgot to like say, is also like raising our blended marriage family and taking care of my children. But it's just this idea that women can't serve in the military, stipulated, and yet women's only job is to lift up, you know, alleged assaulters and abusers of alcohol
and runners of charitable veterans organization into the ground. And all you need to know is that my wife loves me.
And I don't know. I feel like I'm in.
Some weird like medieval you know, testimonial thing as opposed to are you fit to run the Pentagon? So that was crazy making, But that wasn't your question. You asked about Pambondi.
Right, well, it is fresh in our minds, that insane hearing. I did notice there was a lot of Christian There were a lot of Christian nationalist undertones yesterday, And in fact, he wanted to guard Biden's inauguration but wasn't allowed to because of his tattoo. That was a surprising I don't know how you fact check that, but I wondered I would have liked to have seen a fact check on that. And perhaps it is true, it seems bizarre.
I mean, I guess I just the last thing I could possibly say about Pete Hegseeth is that he is so manifestly unfit for this job and so unbelievably materially not in a position. I mean, you couldn't answer just simple questions about the job in the military, and yet
he is so certain of his entitlement to it. And to have that guy going on and on about wokeness and DEI and women in the military and lowered standards for minority it's just like utterly crazy making to hear a person simultaneously say this job is mine because I'm like a white Fox News guy.
And I want it.
And anyone else who has ever succeeded in the military as a person of color, or a gay service member or a woman only got it because standards were lowered. I want to live in his world like I just for five minutes, want to sit in that level of self regard and entitlement.
I'm going to read you a quote from the Financial Times, which I think speaks very much to what we witnessed. I feel liberated, said a top banker. We can say retard and pussy without the fear of getting canceled. Dot dot dot. It's a new dawn, right.
Anonymously, not courageous enough to say it. Listen, we are in some kind of crazy, upside downy world where as long as like Mark Zuckerberg feels liberated, it doesn't matter what happens to the rest of us. And I don't know, I mean, I you know.
It was.
It was very impressive, as it always is, to see extraordinary dams on that committee with Hegsaff and again today extraordinary deems on the Senate Judiciary Committee with Pam Bondy trying to kind of.
Center over and over and over again.
Look like these are the real stakes, Like stop saying woke and stop saying deep state, and like understand that the greatest threat to the United States of America is not wokeness in the military. And it is not, you know, all due respect to Pam Bondy the search of mar al Lago, uh, says Chuck Grassley of you know, for Donald Trump's papers that he.
Refused to turn over.
It's such a small, cramped vision of what actual existential threats are that it makes your head explode. And it is, nevertheless, I think, really pretty cool to watch Senate Democrats say over and over and over again like these are the stakes, these are the stakes. I don't know if it breaks through, I don't know.
I mean, I wish they would be a little more calculating about how they do it. There's only so much they can do, do you know what I mean?
Yes, And this has always been like my critique.
I've watched so many Judiciary committee hearings, and there's a way in which everybody is kind of free range, you know, freestyling, doing.
Their exactly and I don't think people should be doing that. I think they should stop and be like, we have a very small window here.
Correct.
And also, you know, always the problem always always in these hearings, you know. Or just an hour before you and I talked, BONDI was asked, what did you mean when you said you were going to prosecute the prosecutors, and she, you know, her first take is and she said this over and over again about cash Betel and you know, his claims that he was going to have an enemy's list and the FBI was going to go
after them. And there seems to be some kind of like television immunity, like something that was said on TV we're not supposed to take seriously. But then her answer to like prosecuting the prosecutors, which she said on television literally was well, the end of that quote was I will only prosecute the prosecutors if bad, as like the qualifier if bad makes it okay. And what made me nuts was the follow up question is please define bad, miss Bondi. And it didn't been for them, No, didn't happen.
Wasn't sad?
Like does bad mean somebody who doesn't believe?
As she that was the other thing.
Mollie, oh my god, straight up asked like, did Trump in fact win the twenty twenty election? She can't answer it. Her answer is Biden's president.
Yeah, I'm maysign Well, they're so brave, but they're really not very brave, are they?
Not so brave.
You and I have talked about this a million times, but I think we are in this like really frightening move from like the executive presidency.
You know that the immunity decision.
You know, Trump has all, you know, power to this really scary thing in both Hegseth's hearing and Bondi's, which is, Oh, I don't mean the executive I mean Donald Trump personally is perfect and like the degree to which they are willing to use these hearings to bend the knee to him. This isn't about the executive branch or the presidency. This is about Donald Trump. And if you can't say the sentence, yeah,
he lost the election. Of course she can't say it because she was part of the denialism right she was on the ground in Pennsylvania trying to steal the election. But I just think this is no longer about the office of the President of the United States. We are now seeing people Hegseth did it yesterday too, just effusively saying that if Trump wants to break the law, that would be okay.
I want to go back. So we got Bondie, We got lots of different hearings going. They have Russ Bott, who I actually think is probably the scariest of that crew, and he's going to sail right through.
Right, And maybe a good thing to say here is and we really saw this. I mean, I think like he is in fact terrifying. But I think what we saw with HEG. Sath was the template, which is he was supposed to be the guy who got the roughest ride.
HEG.
Sath right credibly accused of multiple abuses against women. You know, ran his charitable organizations financially into the ground. My friend Rebecca Traster and yours like wrote this week, you know he hasn't managed this staff the size of an Applebee's much less, you know, the size of the US military.
Why is he going to sail through?
And I think the answer is we were told right about Joni Ernst. We were told, like anybody who doesn't support him, Trump is going to call his friend Elon Musk and have that primary. And I think what you're saying about seeing people sail through, even people who look there was always this fanciful notion that like, only you know, they're only going to deffect on two or three people, right, That was the Matt Gates theory that, oh, we've only
got about three people they'll defect on. And I don't know where that came from, but I think the minute you're getting threatened with, you know, a high dollar account primary, everybody's falling in line for everyone. And what's really creepy about all of these hearings is that the truly terrifying ones like you know, Robert Kennedy and Tulsea Gabbard, and I would say Cash Patel and.
Cash Baatel I think is the scariest.
But yes, they're getting treated exactly the same as like Ron de Santis.
Yeah, I mean, so I would say that's why I think Democrats should try as much as possible to sort of make a play and figure out who sort of focus on who is the scariest and go for that, do you know what I mean?
And I think that some of these are existential. Right, You've got Cash Betel swanning around first of all, lying about things like Donald Trump declassified documents with his brain, right, like you've got like serious, serious problems, and I mean, Telsey Gabbert, you know these are existential. In my view, I think exp is existential and to have it all
sort of slopped together. As you know, we're going to go into every single hearing kind of sort of loaded for bear, but not making, as you said, a concerted, unified across the board's effort to disqualify somebody or to at least really make a point about what the stakes are. And I think that there's just again, I know you and I talk about this all the time, Molly, but there's this kind of reverter to businesses. You this is how we've always done hearings, and this is how we
will always do hearings. And it's not quite rising to the level of the sort of Tim Snyder anticipatory obedience.
Right.
It's not taking the knee. But what it's not is saying if I don't like, take the gloves off and go like crazy like animal on the Muppet Show. Right now, I am signaling this doesn't matter.
I really love Tim Snyder and think he's very very Tim Snyder is very, very, very smart. And I think the obeyon advance line has been used done every like everything right the in American media has been just completely done to death at this point. But that said, they certainly the Republican Senators are I mean, they're basically like I don't want any problems. I don't want them to
pay for extra security. It's not worth it to me to go up against this guy, right, I mean, that's what they're saying.
Plays in my head, like in the two hours of night that I sleep anymore. Molly. Is that Mitt Romney interview, you know in The Atlantic where he describes Republicans who all along knew that Donald Trump should be impeached, Like all along, you know, we're sniggering into their like you know, lattes on Capitol Hill about how ridiculous Trump was and who were just scared, like who are just like I don't want my kids to be threatened. I'm terrified, Like
there's crazy vigilantes out there. And what I keep thinking about is if everybody is afraid, right, if everybody is simply terrified, then I don't have a sense. It kind of goes back to your who's going to get roughed up in these hearings questions? But like, if everybody is afraid all the time, there is no reason they will ever defect on anything. And that's what we're starting to see.
I think, I mean yes, And also I might add and again I know because I listened to your podcast yesterday that you don't necessarily agree with this, but Mark Joseph Stern, who's your co host, who I feel like, I mean, we're all pessimistic, because pessimism in this moment is just accurate. But Donald Trump does not have the rubber stamp he thought he did with his Supreme Court right.
So Mark and I had a little, tiny, little slap fight on the show last week because, you know, by a narrow five to four margin, let the record reflect the Supreme Court. You know, in the wee hours of the night, right before Donald Trump was set to be sentenced in front of Judge Marshaan said yes, you actually
have to go ahead and be sentenced. And Mark saw that as evidence of oh, look at here's the Supreme Court blinking, or at minimum, here's Amy Cony Barrett and the chief right John Roberts joining with the three liberals and saying, like, dude, it's a zoom hearing. It's twenty minutes. Yes, you'll show up. And you know, that was one of the two bases for letting it go forward. The other one you have an appellate process, you can you know,
argue this out there. But the fact that there were four justices who were willing to have a like Donald Trump exclusively laws is one thing to like chill you to the bone. I think my point with Mark was, I just think the headline on every single story for
the next four years should start with the implicit. And John Roberts wrote the opinion that gave us the immunity, like I think, having done the truly heinous thing, not just in the immunity case right, but in Fisher, the case about the January sixth statutes, and in the Colorado right case about ballot removal, the insurrection clause case. John Roberts wrote all those opinions, and he wrote them in
the broadest way possible. And so for me to be like John Roberts is a hero of modern democracy because while he was willing to break everything, he forced Trump to like get sentenced to nothing.
By the way, No, I'm not there.
Oh I agree, I mean and oh yeah, but more just my no, no, this is how we got here, for sure. But I'm just more. The question is sort of he's not completely in the time for Trump, which is a pathetic, but at least it's something, though not much. Dahlia, please please please come back.
Always anytime, anytime. And I don't know about you, but I'm going to go back to watching Pam Bundy because man, she is I mean in all the ways that hag Seth was kind of like, man, how many push ups can you do? Like nobody's asked Pambundy that she's pretty impressive as a witness, but she is like man, like nailing jello to a tree.
It is it is good fun.
No, no moment second, Jesse Cannon.
My young fast. You know, there is performative people who really do drama in our governing body. But Nancy Mace, she's out that Oscar. She's going for Best Actress of the Year. Yesterday in the altercational Jasmine Crockett, she really was trying to show off her drama.
Yeah, so Nancy Mays is sort of trying to be Lauren Beaupert or Marjorie Taylor Green or one of those ladies. Her big thing now is fighting with Jasmine Crocket. Jasmine Crockett has become a real star. It almost feels to me like when Tommy Lauren was like fighting with people were much much more famous than she was. It almost
feels like cloud chasing. But Nancy mays she's obsessed with trans people and preventing them from using bathrooms and being in sports and whatever other terrible things she can do to trans people. So she had a sort of whole thing, a whole soliloquy for Jasmine about how terrible trans people are. Nancy mays, it's like, I feel like we're just watching the same you know. It's just someone who really, really really wants attention.
I like that. Jasmine called her out for trying to boost her fundraising with this, which it's both that and the cloud.
Yeah, that's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.