Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And after the Jacksonville shooting, Joe Biden says white supremacy has no place in America, a stark contrast to our previous president. We have such a show packed with amazing guests. New Yorker writer Susan Glasser joins us to talk about where Russia is headed after the
death of yet another Putin Foe. Then we'll talk to Strongman author Ruth ben Giatt and the Gopiece continued march towards authoritarianism. But first we have Washington Post columnist and close personal friend George Conway. Welcome back, Too Fast Politics, My friend George Conway.
How fast are your politics?
Lobely, They're very fast, and it'll be very fast if you listen to this at one point seven speed, which I highly recommend.
I listen to.
All my podcasts at one in seven five, which makes everyone sound like mini mouse.
But it's great, Gus exactly. Let's go. George Conway.
You're a lawyer, last night check, Yeah, I am, I gotta do. I gotta do my continuing legal education in the next like six days in order to maintain my bar membership. But you know, other than that, things are really well.
I know yesterday was like all mugshot. He really did plan this completely right. Nobody is talking about that GOP debate anymore. It's just mugshot. Mugshot, mudshot. If you were Donald Trump's lawyer, what would you tell him?
Who's lawyer?
Forty five forty known?
Oh no, no, you're referring to PO one one three five eighth nine. Yes. Yeah. If I were Bolton County Jail inmate number PO one one three five eight oh nines attorney, I would ask for a seven million dollars up retainer, and assuming I got that, I would I'd be happy to send him and give him lengal advice.
What would you tell him, though?
I would tell him to throw himself at the mercy of Jack Smith, Letitia, James Alvin Bragg and Fannie Willis and try to cut the best deal he can and promise to go away and never be heard from it again, because that, I think is the only There are only two ways that he could avoid dying in prison, and one would be to get himself elected president of the United States, which I think is a very low probability event, but would be calamitous or of the country and the planet,
and would only happen if some crazy third party candidate managed to siphen sufficient votes away from the principal major party candidate right p zero one, one, three, five, eight oh.
Nine aka no layables.
Yeah, the only other way he can get out of it is by cutting some kind of deal, and maywhell be too late to do that. He has very various new cards to play at this point. He can't really buy his way out, except maybe he could pay a tremendous tremendous buying buying like nobody has ever seen a fine that When people would say sir, they would say with tears in their eyes, they would say, sir, we
have never seen a colossal fine like that. It just we are in amazement of your ability to pay restitution. It's just awesome, sir. I don't think that's going to
be worth a lot here. I do think that one of the things that a criminal defendant who is in public life has as a chip to play, and I think there are numerous examples of this in history, and in fact, it's recognized in the Department of Justice is manual that one of the objects of prosecutions in the public corruption sphere is to get the corrupt people out
of office and out of public life. If he actually offered to leave public life and never be heard from again, I you know, maybe move to I mean, I'm sure Putin has a nice daha ready for him in the crimea.
But you think that if he did that he would get off.
I don't know that he can do that, and I don't know that he would get off, but it is I think other than destroying the world and getting himself elected president and destroying democracy and the constitution I think, which I don't think he's going to be able to do, because I think he's going to become increasingly unstable as
time goes on. And even though there's going to be half of the Republican Party at least that will voke for him, no matter what, I don't think there's going to be enough to win a general election unless something very very very very screwing happens in American politics, which could, which which could, but I think it's a likely I think that's his only play. The problem is he should have played that a long time ago. He wouldn't play that alone time ago because he's never going to play it.
He's not capable of it, because that would be an act of submission. And when narcissistic psychopaths megalomaniacs get past a certain point, they'll just try to take everyone down with them. I mean, our best ehiple of that is Hitler, who was kind of the quintessential narcissistic psychopath. In fact, he's the psychiatrist or psychologist Eric from, very famous writer.
Yeah, I know who is.
I think he was a survivor of the Holocaust and he's trying to figure out like, what is this? What is this mental disorder that causes people to be so destructive? And E coined the term liligant narcissism, and it reflects basically, you know, I mean, you don't have to be a mass murderer to be a milligan narcissist, right right, right, And this guy certainly is. And when they get past a certain point, when they achieve a certain amount of power, there's just no turning back. They can't let go and
they can't stop. They can't control themselves. And that's part of the reason why he's running he's just he just can't stop himself. And there's also a bit of rationality in there. He knows that his only ticket to freedom in deep Town. He knows his only ticket of freedom that he is willing to take is to get himself elected president, which has the added benefit of being able to allow him in his own line to seek vengeance upon all of us who are going to have to
move to Canada or New Zealand. I could take New Zealand. In Canada.
You said to me, this party is done, it's fucked, it's over. It's the Whigs. It's going to have to burn down in order to come back. And I was thinking about was watching that debate and watching Nikki Haley, who is on Earth One. I mean, the stuff she was saying. I was like, oh my god, there's a Republican saying stuff that is actually like, you know, she was saying, Trump can't get elected.
Watching that debate and I only made it through about two thirsty three quarters of it, after which I decided that I was losing too many brain cells, which is what happens when you heard on Fox News, so I turned it off. I was profoundly disoriented. Yeah, A Celestial Way because I was watching that and wondering what planet
and aisle and what planet are they? Because I started watching this and there was basically other than Nikki Haley taking a shot at Trump running up the nationals at which I really love.
Right, which I don't know who that's for, but I appreciated it too.
It is for George Conway, who actually cares about fiscal responsibility.
Only person.
Yeah, I'm like it, really, you know, like one of five people in the United States, you know, and Pete Peterson and has this group or somebody you know, Nobody ever listens to them, right, We all want to run, we all have credit cards that like to spend money. But anyway, so I'm watching this and for the first fifty seven minutes, literally fifty seven minutes I checked, there was virtually no mention of Donald Trump. And I'm watching this and I'm saying, yeah, and then there are a
couple of there's Salooney Tunes stuff going on. The vec is a nut.
Job for Veke it rhymes with cake.
Oh. I thought it was like the Veka is a Vivek section, which is what no Paley did to him later. But anyway, and we have DeSantis, who clearly has some I am not sure if he's human. I can't figure out exactly what species he is, or maybe he's just a bot.
His terrible can today.
Right, there's always weirdness in American politics. I'm back on old Earth. Even when the Republican Party was almost normal, we had strange politicians, and you know, Democrats had strange politicians, and we had strange into you know, we had Lyndon LaRouche out.
There, right, Lyndon Laruge I remember him.
You get the wackos. So it's fine. I could take that. But the rest of it was like, oh my god. They were talking about policy. Oh, we need to cut the budget, we need to reduce the size of government. And that's great. I love that stuff because you know that's I grew up on that stuff on Earth one and on Earth one. No, it's partly bullshit because nobody actually ever says what they want to cut. Because if you actually say what you want to cut, people get mad.
It's wildly unpopular.
Yeah, right, I like the sentiment. It's like it's like the old days. It made me feel like the Earth I grew up on, and it was actually sucking me in a letter. I'm saying, oh, this is so nice. They're speaking classic political platitudes about the need to cut government and so on and so forth. And then fifty seven minutes passes, and then the moderators finally decide we have to talk about Trump between now and the next
commercial break. In the next forty five seconds, What do you think of Donald Trump?
No?
And they asked the question, right, They asked that very good question. Would you support Donald Trump even if he were a convicted felon in somestance six and a half in Christie, I don't know what tell Christy was doing with his hand, said yes. And I'm like, and all of a sudden, it's like I'm looking at these people and they're no longer on this planet that I like, right back on Earth, the earth I grew up on. You don't vote for criminals.
Whose mugshot is being released the next day.
You don't vote for somebody who has been found by a judge and jury in a federal district court, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to be a rapist. You don't vote for that kind of person. You say, that's a bad person. And then the other people run ads say look at how bad my opponent is, and the guy gets trounced. That's what should happen on a nice planet. What planet are these people? And they realize they're on my planet. They
are on my planet, and that's the problem. This is the planet we have that they've created. And these people are actually going to the people who are out in the audience hooting and hollering for Trump and then booing anybody who says, you know, Trump may have done something wrong. I mean, those people they're insisting on making as their standard bearer in twenty twenty four a man who will
die in prison in all likelihood. After a bunch of that, I left and I was thinking, I don't know what planet and I'm on and I can't take any more of this.
There was some polling release today three and five say Trump's sensitive documents and twenty twenty elections subversion trial should happen before November twenty four, and of that sixty one percent of all Americans. I mean, that seems like bad news for the Republican nomine Yeah.
I really do not think it's possible for PO one one, three, five eighth nine to find himself back in the White House, with the exception that if you have some kind of a screwball no labels candidate that somehow manages to steal fifty thousand votes from Joe Biden or one hundred thousand votes in each of a certain number of particular states.
Swingy states, like it would be an electoral college.
When right, you could come in second in a popular vote and win two hundred and seventy one elector vote electural vote, in which case it's you know again, as I say, it's basically the end of the world. So that's the reason why I feel overall optimistic, is that I just think that, you know, he, as I said the other day on oneing Joe P three five eight oh nine is playing Russian Roulette with the law and
he's loading all the chambers. Is that there's just no way he should be able to get past all this, whether or not any of the trials occur before November twenty twenty four, but I do think at least one or two of them will, So I think he's got a big problem.
Yeah, besides having five indictments being highly stressful.
For where we're not a five yet, well.
Five because we have a superseding indictment.
So oh, we two federal, two state, and then the superseding.
Four and a half.
When I lived, the Trump World Tower was a seventy two story building, but they labeled the top floor ninety because he skipped a bunch of So I'm all four saying five indictments. In fact, I'll say seven.
Let's just say four and a half. But logistically this is a scheduling nightmare. Not for me, but I mean for the courts. The courts are not set up in a way.
But it's not courts problem.
Well, it is Donald Trump's problem. Yes, it's p O.
One, one, three, five, eight h Nine's problem because he's the one who has to defend all these cases. Okay, if I'm a judge, I can just order a trial date. And if somebody says, oh, I have to be in Iowa to you know, milk some cows, I'll just look at them and say, what.
Is your problem?
You know this defendant behind you in the next case, the robber, the suspect, I ain't letting him milk, no cows. He's over at the MCC you know, the county jail or whatever it is. I just don't see that. So who goes first? Do you think Jack Smith goes first? I think it will be one or both of the
federal trials are most likely to go first. In New York, DA Bragg has said that he will give up his trial date if necessary because he's he's willing to facilitate the other trials because he understands that his case isn't quite as significant from the historical or legal standpoint as the other cases. So that's very good of him. And you know, and the New York is slow anyway.
And it's the least sort of structural case, right, Judges are entitled to call each other. I usually it happens in a federal court house. But there's no reason why these things can't be scheduled so that they don't all conflict. Because yes, I mean, a criminal defendant does have the right, within certain limits, to be president a trial. In fact, it is required generally.
Now, you know, he's got these other cases, like the second civil trial in the rape case, which is now just the defamation case because he's already been found to be a rapist. Is this case is about the defamation that that he did after p one one three five to eight OHO nine committed when he was president p One one three five eight ZO nine. But he doesn't
have to show up for that. And I actually think there's a good chance that our friend Egene is going to get summary judgment on that and that there'll be no trial.
So what does that mean she just gets the money.
There will have to be a trial in damages, and I don't you know, he didn't show up for the first one where you was a used a rape sexual assault. He doesn't have anything to say about the damage to Jean's reputation that he caused when he was president of the United States and defends her, so he doesn't have
to go to that trial. The other trial that he's got coming up is another civil trial, which is a class action in the Southern District of New York for the Ponzi scheme that he participated in along with Monkey, where he basically ran these ads during the apprentice where you say, you send us money and you'll get money back, and it was this weird kind of thing it was, but it was basically what they call a multi level marketing scheme where you know, sooner or later somebody gets
holding the bag and they don't have any money and a la signor Ponzi is how you're saying in Italian.
I don't know, but George Conway, will you come back?
Yeah, I'd come back. I have a whole riffa I wanted to do.
Okay, you're coming back. I have a feeling Trump is going to have more legal troubles.
Susan Glasser is a writer The New Yorker and author of Divider Trump in the White House. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Susan Glasser.
Great to be with you, Mollie.
I'm so delighted to have you because everything that's happening falls into your skill set. First, I want to talk about what's happening in Russia. Because you lived in Moscow, you and Peter lived in Moscow. You have seen the rise of Putin, and now another chapter emerges.
What is happening over there?
Obviously you now have what appears to be the outright assassination of You have Guinny Progosian, who emerges in some ways the kind of most visible serious threat to the Kremlins monopoly on state power. You know, in the entire twenty years of Putin's time in office, and you know to me, it's all part of the spillover effect of this disastrous war in Ukraine that Putin has unleashed. And you know, I don't see think any of this would have been happening if it weren't for that Russia is
isolated in the world. It is absorbing, if you believe research reports in the New York Times, extraordinary amounts of casualties in this conflict, more than one hundred thousand dead and injured Russians. This is just an incredible number. By the way, at least officially, more than the number of Russian two were allegedly killed in the entire Soviet Afghan conflict, which lasted a decade.
Again, those are probably suspect numbers.
But the point, and I think that's a really important point, is that Vladimir Putin, almost single handedly, he had the power to do so on his own, made.
This decision to unleash the biggest.
Land war in Europe since the end of World War Two.
And it's not going well for Russia.
And so I think it's all in the context of that that this extraordinary PREGOTIONI saga played out.
It's such an interesting problem that Russia finds itself in do you think Russia is sort of the same as North Korea or China, Like we don't get really accurate reporting out of the country because there are so few members of the free press still there.
I think it's been very, very hard and very opaque to understand the kind of high politics of this era, right that what's really going on among Putin and his
ever shrinking inner circle. Right these are mostly people drawn from the security services by all accounts, and Western intelligence has been pretty public about this and seeing that they believe Putin has consulted with a smaller and smaller circle of advisors, especially during COVID, but not exclusively so and so you know, I think that the robustness of our interactions with this system have just atrophied over the years.
In some ways, we knew a lot more about the late Soviet era when when Gorbachev was in power, and where many were closer in some ways to senior officials in Gorbachev's Kremlin than we are, certainly to those in Putent's kremlin.
Number one.
Oh, yes, we don't really know what's going on. I think North Korea is a more extreme case still, But the fear is that Putin is hurtling Russia down the track of becoming a sort of European North Korea, which would be a disaster for so many reasons. It's a bigger, more significant country, and its role in the world supermanent member of the UN Security Council is a very different one.
It's just it's a disastrous scenario all around. But I do think I should say, you saw those images of that plane that purportedly had promotion on board, plummeting out of the sky.
Message sent message.
See the message is strength, and Putin is always believed in intimidating, unsettled, overwhelming displays of force and often went back into a corner. That's what he does, is he escalates, He looks for opportunities to send a message. And it's very interesting somebody I was on TV and somebody asked me this question, a very American kind of question in a way to this set of events in Russian said, well, you know, would Russians be upset if this action was
really pinned on the Kremlin? And I thought, you know, it's almost the exact opposite. I think by the logic of Putin's Russia, which is we want you to get the message that if you betray us, this is what will happen to you.
Yeah, and Progosian was a bad dude. He rose to power in this Putin world through really the most deplorable kind of stuff.
Absolutely, he was a murderer, He was a thug. He came out of a sort of criminal background in Saint Petersburg and was patronized by Vladimir Putin. His success was a result of the opportunities that came to him by being in Vladimir Putin's orbit. And it's the diffusion of the state and the sort of criminal elements surrounding it that has been one of the very negative, unfortunate aspects that defined the Putin era in Russia, and Progosian was
sort of a symbol of that. Of course, many Americans first heard of him not so much in the context of the Wagner Group as mercenary force that he created and led, but in the context of his role as Putin's chef quote unquote and the creation of the Internet
Research Agency that's documented in the famous Mueller Report. But he played a particularly pernicious role as a sort of executor and carrier out of schemes that Russia, for a variety of reasons, wanted to maintain plausible deniability for even though of course it wasn't all that plausible and all
that deniable. They used progosion and the Vagner Group as an unofficial arm of the Russian state, embroiled in conflicts in Africa, in Syria, Ukraine, and read my colleague Joshua Yafa, it did a terrific kind of after action, you know, history of progotion in the Vomitor group in the New York a few weeks ago. I highly recommend I.
Want to pull back for a minute on Russia, because there is this war in Ukraine.
It continues.
We don't know how well Russia is doing, though it certainly the sense is not that well. Russia is a problem if it remains under Putin, but it's also really a problem if it doesn't well.
And for many years Mali, for many years, that's what many Russia watchers heard, is like, oh, well, you know you don't like Putin, but it'll be even worse. So he's just holding back the really crazy extreme forces, the kind of people, the military bloggers who have.
Been demanding even more.
And brutal actions in Ukraine, for example, And so that for a long time was the weird argument that was advanced, kind of pro Putin argument in the West, with like after him the deluge. But of course now Putin has gone ahead and done, you know, pretty much the worst thing you can do. And you think about the millions of lives up ended and destroyed by this catastrophic war in Ukraine. You think of hundreds of thousands of casualties
on both sides. You think of mass roundups and deportations of Ukrainian children and families to Russia against their will. I mean, it's just it's criminality upon criminality. That the horrible tortures in Bhusa were not an exception, but you know, a part of the Russian playbook in this war of extermination. And so I think the question that many people have right now, and I think it's a very important one,
is a different question. It's not well, g well, there'd be some terrible person after Putin, which is certainly a very likely scenario, But because it's so associated with being Putin's war, is it's still nonetheless more possible to end the war, even if the person who follows Putin into the Kremlin is an extreme right wing National List he and it will be a he. There are basically no women in the upper echelons of power in Russia. Day he is nonetheless possibly could end the war if you look.
It's almost inconceivable, right that Ukraine, Vladimir Zelenski or any American president not named Donald Trump would actually make a deal with Putin that results in the end of the war. I feel that that's inconceivable. However, it often is the person who doesn't start the war who ends up having to end a war, whether that's in the Soviet Union, it was Brezhnev who and his colleagues who agreed to invade Afghanistan. It was Gorbatov who decided to end it.
It was Nixon, not LBJ who ended Vietnam. That's history strongly suggests that nobody's going to be sitting down in some parish peace talks with Vladimir Putin insign dot line.
Right.
It's also the question of instability, right, this is a huge country with nuclear weapons.
That could be anybody's guest.
What happens in Russia has been notoriously unable to has had trouble stabilizing itself.
Absolutely.
In fact, Maley One of the kind of periodive horribles that US and other Western officials have long worried about is the possibility of the disintegration of the Russian state, the fragmentation, the further fragmentation.
Of the Russian state.
In many ways, that was part of how Putin came to power by promising people that this era of instability and possible disintegration inside Russia was going to come to an end. That Russia fought not one but two wars with a breakaway province of Chechnya after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and there were constant, you know, kind of palpable fears played upon by Putin and other Russian
nationalists throughout the nineteen nineties. Things fall apart, right, you know that Boris Yelton had gone too far in encouraging individual regions in Russia to take autonomy and Putin that was what we witnessed when we were there in the early years of Vladimir Putin's tenure, as he was sort of consolidating power, and that was what he said to the Russian people, is like, I will stop this kind of civil war. So that's part of the fear scenario.
I think in Washington and other Western capitals. Is that a defeat in Ukraine or even a bad piece could lead to further fragmentation and destabilization of Russia.
Right, we have this pretty scary situation happening over seas, and the idea here is that it's the protection of NATO countries. I don't think anyone puts it past, putin to roll in past, you know, into Poland. I mean, it's not impossible, but we have in America it seems very much that the appetite for intervention is as low as I've ever seen it, and with Republican candidates it's even lower than that. Can you talk a little bit about this sea change?
Yeah, I think you're right. We have just moved into a different era. I don't know that we have a name for it yet. Very interesting because it's certainly a recognition. I think that the unipolar kind of single superpower moment in which the United States was this kind of dominant player on the world stage in the immediate aftermath of the collass suit Union, that that period is now definitively over, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan just basically sapped.
I think the interest across the political spectrum inside the United States in what people now perceive to be a kind of international adventurism. Certainly, the war in Iraq, even in Republican Party, is largely not supported as a decision. That being said, what's remarkable and enduring given all that has been this US both sympathy and support for Ukraine and a level of backing of Ukraine in its fight with Russia and beating back Russian aggression that almost has
no precedent in history. I don't know how much people really realize the billions I've done that the US is giving right now. I've just been been looking this up as part of a bigger piece. I'm ready for the New Yorker magazine, and we're running essentially in inflation adjusted terms head even of the extraordinary mounts that the US invested in the Marshall Plan in the three years following World War Two. That's how big of a commitment we've made to Ukraine. Now, of course, we're a huge and
rich country. We have an enormous defense budget. It's a very small overall percentage of that defense budget that we're spending on Ukraine. So it depends on how you look at it. But it's still a bigger commitment to Ukraine than any analogy you can think of in the last one hundred years, and I include Vietnam and all the others. So it's pretty amasy.
And when you look at this Republican field and you look at sort of Biden has stayed the course and been very steady, but you could see a Republican Party that, especially with the Senate map, that pushes against you know, and again I think we're about to see the government shut down on this very not sending aid to Ukraine. There will be come to Jesus moment here.
I think, well, Milly, I happen to agree with you, and I have been noting with great interests. How and perhaps they don't have any other choice. But the Biden administration has been pretty sanguine and confident that they could keep getting more funding and more support for the war in Ukraine, given that the overall deterioration of the politics. The ascended faction in the Republican Party to day, no question is the trumpest Magaist faction. It is not a majority, right.
I think what we saw we saw again the other night in the Republican debate is that the Republican Party is a party divided over Ukraine. It's in conflict over this issue. There are amazing strong voices who are now amplifying and echoing Trump's bizarre and inexplicable admiration for Vladimir Putin and by extension, adopting rumps and Russian talking points about the war. Ukraine isn't really a legitimate state, and you know, we shouldn't be investing in it. We're somehow
getting ripped off, et cetera, et cetera. That's real, and it's growing, and sure, the polls are sort of all over the map, but essentially show a kind of waning of support over time. For now, the Senate Republicans remain pretty strongly committed to this.
If anything, they.
Criticized Biden from the other direction not doing it not fast enough. I think the trend line is pretty clear and should be concerning for anyone who's realizing that the war is not going to magically be over on our political calendar here in the United States.
Yeah, it's so true. I listened to the podcast you guys do.
I'm a fan, but this moment that we're in, can you give me a sort of historical precedent for this, like or something.
It doesn't have to.
Match because obviously nothing matches this, but a moment where you feel like there's the same sort of Mesanzene, there's the same kind of feeling.
Well, by the way, thank you for listening, Molly, because you are the you know, sort of the definition of premium excellence in podcasting. But it's fun for me actually to talk each week with my colleagues Janewaere and Evan Aso's because they're like, they have so much incredible variety of experience, right It's like, you know, we'll be talking about something and Jane will be like, well, you know
when I was covering the Reagan White House. You know, there's like Evan at a moment when we're so interested in, you know, the rise of China as a you know.
Adversary and competitor of the United States. You know, he's he's just.
Happened to have lived there and written a National Book award winning book about China. But the question we often struggle with actually is this question of how to contextualize
and to understand this historical moment. You know, where are we kind of like maybe getting too amped up or too hysterical, and it falls within the realm of what's happened before in American politics and what's really unprecedented, right, like what's truly crazy, like dial it up to ten, like man the battle stations, like democracies at risk, and
what is kind of awful and annoying. And Ikeyan nonetheless resonates with other periods like the mccarsey era or god forbid, the eighteen fifties leaning up to a real rift in the country. I do think that, certainly in the foreign policy conversation we're having, there are some real echoes of that period leading up to World War II, or the interwar period from the end of World War One to
the beginning of US involvement in World War Two. Late the actual name America firstures by these debates about what kind of power we would be in the world. At that time, of course, in America was arising ascendant power economically, but hadn't yet fully really come to terms with what
that meant in terms of its geopolitical role. Now it's a different situation, but you know, I think we told ourselves a pretty compelling fairy tale about the end of the Cold war and the collapse of the sum Union and the march of history being towards democracy and interdependence.
And it didn't work out.
But that's not the story that Putin and those who brought him to power told the Russian people. It's not the story that Xi Jinping has for the Chinese people. So it's a hard moment, I think for us children of the seventies and eighties, Right, we grew up in a world that felt like, even when it was screwed up,
that was moving in the right direction eventually. I don't know, as the famous Nixon in China moment, right, and Joan Lie he's talking with and he brings up the French Revolution, and Chinese leader says, yeah, well it's a little bit too early to tell how it worked out.
Thank you, Susan Glasser.
Ruth ben Jiot is the author of Strong Men, Musolini to the Present and an MSNBC car mess Welcome to Fast Politics.
Ruth, Thank you delighted to be here.
It's nothing to talk about, Ray, I.
Mean, yeah, and especially not on the democracy beat. I long for the days of January twenty twenty one, when we had one and democracy was safe.
What happened January sixth was just this profoundly radicalizing event
for the GOP. And of course there were already numerous elites of the party who are willing to work since November to try and overturn the democracy in other ways, but breaking that taboo, having that rally transmute into violence, seeing the Capitol police have their heads bashed in and this is supposed to be the pro police, law and order party, all of that was this really a watershed moment where the unscrupulous, violent oriented people in the party
realized that anything was possible, and so the wavering that a few of them had on January seventh was swiftly replaced by we're going to go all in for this because anything is possible.
Right.
There was a moment, I feel like a conscious moment somewhere in January when Kevin McCarthy decided to go down to mow Lago and fundraised with trumpet Like, if we look back at one decision to another decision to another decision, to the end of democracy, at least a republican party that no longer believes in democratic values.
Yeah, Unfortunately, that's often how it happens, especially if it's nowadays or but also like that happened with Mussolini, who was prime minister in a democracy for three years, and people don't understand what this kind of leader is capable of. They think, okay, you know, he's done this, now going to be satisfied. They don't understand, or if they understand about examples abroad, they don't think it's going to happen to them. It's a lack of vision in a negative sense.
And because of the people I study and I'm in their heads, unfortunately, it was very clear to me what was going on. And also what you mentioned with Kevin McCarthy going to Mari Lago, this was the proverbial, you know, checking in with the cult leader and he got his instructions and then the party fell into line, and very soon there was an actual party line, and this sped up, you know, the kind of process of making the gop autocratics.
So in those months it's very interesting. I'm glad you took us back there because you know, Ted Cruz, for example, made a mistake where he said that January sixth had been a domestic terror operation. Well this wasn't what you're supposed to say, so Tucker Carlson hauled him on his
show and humiliated him. And I thought that was very interesting because it was a bad sign for the future because Ted Cruz's status as a senator had no interest or relevance for Tucker Carlson, who was the enforcer of the party line, And that showed me that they were all in for reinventing the narrative of January sixth, and they've been very successful two years later.
Yeah, let's talk about Mussolini.
Italy has been in some ways, even though it's very small and it's got an insane economy that's not so good, and they're an agent population, but they do have Burlasconi walked so Donald Trump could run talk to me about Mussolini and sort of what the kind of similarities they are.
So he was the one who wrote the template for
everybody else, including Hitler who was watching. And Mussolini is so relevant because when he came in as he was appointed as Prime Minister of democracy coalition government, and he spent the next three years trying to figure out how to expand his power and this had never been done, so you know, he attacked the press, he posed as a victim and again Hitler adored him and was watching to see if he could do the same thing, and that's partly why he did is beer Hawk putch in
nineteen twenty three. But the key thing is that Mussolini was very corrupt, and there was the Socialist leader of Italy, Mattiotti, was denouncing him in parliament. He was denouncing election fraud that they were trying to pull off, and so Mussoleni had him murdered and they opened an investigation, and there were calls for him to resign and he was probably going to go to prison, so he declared dictatorship to escape an investigation and be able to shut it down.
So this is all very relevant to started a series of a strongman some operating in democracy like Netta Nahou or bare Lusconi, where if you have problems, you run for office and you have to get more back into office so you can shut down down the investigation and you can make yourself feel safe forever.
One of the things I think about when I think about Mussolini is he was charismatic in a way that Hitler wasn't quite ascarse as will you talk about. Because one of the things with Trump and with the vague. Is there's a certain kind of huckster quality that I think is really how Donald Trump has gotten so far.
Well, yeah, in his case, he sees a con man and had a long history of dealing with criminals through his businesses. But a lot of these strong men who have success, it's very interesting that a lot of them come from a background of journalism or entertainment, and they know how to work a crowd. Indeed, they scan the political marketplace before venturing out, and they see what is lacking, what is needed, and then they address those needs and they will be whatever they need to be to get
to power. And so that's where they pick up endorsers and enablers along the way, and they often throw them under the bus when they don't need them anymore. But their charisma is extremely important in them being able to have these kind of this loyalty, this fanatic loyalty, but it's cultivated. So Trump knew he's a showman. He's very good at that, and he's superb propagandist. But he built up this loyalty very early on, having loyalty oaths as
early as twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. And so when we look back we see somebody who ceaselessly, relentlessly cultivated this kind of leader cult and used his charisma to build up his base. Here we are seven years later, and there's a recent poll that has people talking because it said that among the most fervent, they trust Trump more than they trust their family members.
Yeah, that was a really interesting and worrying Paul.
And that's why I've been saying for years that Trump is a cult leader. He has a leader cull and that's why he's in my book because there are things that are very different today. Right, we don't have as many one party states, we have social media. But the process of cultivating your followers and having a cult and using your machismo and being brutal and lawless and having that be glamorized, that's the same as Mussoline.
Right, but also the same as Berlsconi.
Yeah, and Berlisconi. He you know, he's not taken seriously. Oh, there's not much interest in him. But he's absolutely fundamental because he broke taboos in the nineteen nineties after you know, right after communism had fallen. He was the first to bring fascist into power into the government, and he broke that taboo for all of Europe, and he normalized neo fascism, and he normalized Mussolini.
And I actually had.
A full bright there during his first government, and I saw this happening. And I'd been going to Italy and I would go to the dry cleaner or wherever, and I would, you know, the woman would say, oh, your talent's so good when you studying, and I'd say fascism and there would be this embarrassed silence. After Breosconi had these three different, you know, center right governments with neo fascists, it became like the people could say what they previously
said only in private. So I heard Pauh Mussolini was such a good ruler, and one woman said he only harmed subversives and Jews, like, okay, that was fine, right, It's.
Only subversives and Jews.
So I lived through this normalization of neo fascism, and that experience of seeing how it changed among the general public allowed me to see very early that Trump was going to do the same thing with you. Signaling to extremists and calling neo Nazis very fine people. All of this was calculated to create an environment conducive to accepting him. As an authoritarian, accepting violence and all that goes with it.
Right, it's such an interesting, important piece of this puzzle. So let's talk about sort of authoritarianism as it is now. It's crisscross the globe in different places, but right now Italy has yet again a pretty scary government.
Will you talk about Maloney?
Jojo Maloney is the first prime minister to come from neo fascism, and she masquerades as a conservative and she is pro you know, helping Ukraine, that's kind of her alibi. But in her domestic policies she is a hardcore extremist
and she always has been. She insisted when she founded her brother's a Italy party, she insisted on leaving the frame in the party logo and that flame goes all the way back to the original neo fascist party that was founded after Mussolini's party died in nineteen forty five. The flame stands for keeping the spirit of Mussolinia alive. She is a creature of Mussolini, who is her spiritual leader, let's say, but also Berlusconi. Berlusconi was the first person
to make her a minister. She was very young and so all of that heritage of both ber Lusconi and Mussolini goes into her government, and it's important to know how extreme she is because she's covering it up very well now. So on the subject of great replacement theory, which is an international talking point that Gop shares with Orebon with her party, she doesn't just believe that Italy, being a white Christian nation, is threatened by demographic change.
She thinks there's a plot by George Soros, of course, by the by NATO, by the e to flood Italy with non white immigrants and thus make white Italians extinct. And she has a very scary phrase for this, called ethnic substitution. I'm focusing on this because she's getting a lot of press and she had a nice visit with Biden because of her stance on Ukraine. But that's allowing her to seem normal to the outside world, so that she can more easily be extreme at.
Home, and I think that is a really important data point. She's also made it harder for gay couples to adopt right.
Yeah, she's against same sex marriage, adopting against surrogacy, and so here we in Italy of course got the Vatican inside. It's its own state, of course, and the people she has in your government as ministers either come from the very far right Catholic. Her Minister of Family, who's in charge of a lot of this family policy that's that's courting LGBTQ people, is from that far right Catholics like or They were actually neo fascists like her in their youth.
I've analyzed all of her cabinet and it's basically neo fascist and fanatic Catholics.
So let's pull back and talk a little bit about Orbon. Orbon is a favorite, a GOP favorite. I was hoping you could just zoom in on where he is now and where the GOP.
Is with him.
Yeah.
One thing that we need to focus on a bit more is so, as you know, I consider the GOP and autocratic party now, it is a party with a leader cult. It is a party that is dependent on lying on corruption and election.
Denial as a form of corruption. It's not just.
A lie, it's on violence. Of course, the GOP has officially declared in twenty twenty two that January sixth was quote legitimate political discourse. Okay, So that's all of that and much more. They are an autocratic party, they're not interested in democracy. But ever free party, especially a huge party in a bipartisan country, has a kind of foreign policy stands. And the GOP, it's not known enough that it has very close relations with all kinds of autocracies.
And we see it in the talking points, whether it's on immigration or great Replacement theory or Ukraine where they circulate. And the one that's gotten the most attention is the GOP in Orbon because Tucker Carlson broadcast for a week there and Seatpack has its conferences there. So the GOP is seen by these people, including Maloney. Maloney right before she was elected, she said that she sees the GOP
as a kindred spirit. So I think Americans need to understand that the GOP is seen by these autocrats and neo fascists as one of their own, and Orbon is the mentor of in a way, because he's been so successful at what's called electoral autop. You keep the trappings of elections, but over time, and he's been there, you know, over a decade, so he's had time to do this. You rig this system by purging non loyalists not only from the election around apparatus, but the judiciary, you domesticate
the media. It's very hard for in the last election, the opposition coalition didn't get a lot of national media airtime because his cronies have taken over the media. So you do all these things so that the elections are weighted to come out the way you need them to. And the Republicans who go there and love him, that's one of the lessons that they're taking away.
One of the things you see again and again with Ron de Santis is like he's constantly targeting the media. And even when we saw that super Pack memo that was released, every bit of it was like, let's just go for the media. And even last night he was saying, this is really the fault of the media. This has nothing to do with anyone but the media. I mean, you really do see how hatred of the media is and shutting down the media itself is really a crucial aspect of this authoritarian regime.
Yeah, it is, and I talk about this in my book. That is absolutely essential. And the smart authoritarian starts this campaign against the media while they're still running for office and they have to build and Trump did this very effectively, and so DeSantis, of course being a mini Trump has
learned from this. So in Trump's case, for example, there were plenty of people who are already racists, plenty of people hated immigrants and so on, and there was a very robust tea party and other discourse against the quote mainstream media. Fine, but Trump was the first to truly focus on journalists as enemies and demonize them, and he did that spatially with his rallies. How he penned them up. So the reason they do this is they must become the only arbiter of truth. This is part of the
loyalty business. Also, more practically, they are all corrupt, and if their secrets come out, whether it's during the campaign or when they're elected, they need the public to already be turned against the media, to already believe that the media are partisan hacks. And so it's part of a process of cultivation and it's worked brilliantly. So Ronda Santis He's watched all this and he thinks he has to
do this too. He's also an unlikable, disagreeable person who has not had good media because of this and is just very bitter. But there's also a political strategy behind it.
So interesting Ruth, I hope you'll come back anytime.
Thank you.
They're as.
Jesse Cannon, Molly John Fast for vic Ramaswami cannot disappear fast enough. This fucking guy, Oh my god.
Vivek was on Dana Bashi's show, A State of the Union, and she asked him about his KKK comment that he compared Democrats to the KKK, and then instead of saying, you know, obviously Democrats are not members of the KKK, he instead just doubled down and he said something to the effect of Democrats judge people on their skin color, which there's no evidence to support this, and thus they
are the same as the KKK. I mean, I guess when everything is false equivalencies, then these two false equivalencies can be falsely equivalent. But for that the veak rhymes with cake is our moment of fuckery. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.