Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Tim O’Brien & Jeet Heer

gas companies price gouging. Then we'll talk to Trump legal trouble expert Bloomberg's Tim O'Brien, who will fill us in on the aftermath of the Trump organization being convicted of tax fraud. But first we have Fast Politics, Faith and host of in the Time of Monsters, the nation's g tire. Welcome back to Fast Politics. GT here, good to be here as always. Well, I'm such a fan of yours. I love having you on the podcast. And now we must talk about very important things like I swear to God,

I feel like our country is getting stupider. Trump's Jewish allies are begging him to condemn Kanye. He's refusing. Yeah, but I mean that's not out of the norm. I mean, I think one thing that Trump realized early on is that apologies for losers and then he would look weak if he ever apologizes. Week that is to this, you know, the hardcore geop he based that loves them, so like you know, like going back to like you know, when you insulted John McCain or or did innumerable things, he

never apologizes, So that's not out of the ordinary. What's interesting is Trump's Jewish allies, like you know, that itself is a very oxymoronic at best. And it's a really great interview with I think the greatest living interviewer, Isaac Chutner in the New Yorker, with Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America, which is like you know,

unfortunately has some standing among the official Jewish organizations. It's part of a national commission, but it actually, you know, like it's far to the right and does not really represent like, you know, the seventy of American Jews who woted for Democrats, and they recently gave the Theatre Herzel

Prize to Donald Trump, their highest honor. And the interview is fascinating because he says, like, you know, I can't believe that like Trump would meet with Kanye and with Nick fluentez Uh and it's so disillusioning because we just gave him this a word a few weeks ago, and I know Donald Trump is not an anti Semite. What I'm sorry, my friend, I'm sorry. He just like you know, there's a numerous times are Trump you know, he hasn't said,

well he's he's yeah. Yeah, I mean going back to like Charlotte's vale of you know, good people on both sides. And Klein managed to find excuses for all that. And I mean his basic thing is, well Trump, you know, he loves Israel and he moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and one has to think about it as a sort of quid pro coal like Trump kind of made this overtures to sort of right wing Zionism, was very close to net and yahoo um. And for that, you know,

he was excused a lot of things. But even Trump has managed to do stuff that work Incline finds offensive, which is amazing because that is who like literally forgive almost anything, Like you literally have to have like dinner with an outright Holocaust denying Nazi like Nick Fluentez for him to get on your case if you support nothing out um. So so that's kind of so yeah, I

mean it is. Uh. Yeah, I don't know if the world is getting crazier or I think that I actually think that there's a sort of interesting fissure that's not opening up. I think Trump has gone so far that even very right wing Jews are sort of like, I don't know, I don't know, like this is I think that's actually very salutary. But I think let's the old joke, you know, like the woman who votes for Tiger's clawing out people's faces, a surprise that the tiger attacked her.

You know. I think some people in Trump's coalition are realizing that, you know, like Okay, we're next, you know, like he's so so Yeah. I think I think that's actually quite salutary. I mean, I don't know. I just watched a video of Kelly and Conway talking to Larry Cudlow about how they wished Trump would disavow white supremacists.

I was like, did they just don't know him? I don't think it's abe that they don't know him, but like those people, they're kind of role is to mediate between Trump and the more normal Republicans, and even beyond that, the more normal you know, parts of the media and the centrist world. I mean, like something like Kelly and Conway. Like she's you know, pretty close friends with a lot of people, say it Saturday the life, you know, which

has always been very kind to her. So for her, it's like a kind of marriage of convenience and and Trump is disrupting their ability to have plausible non i ability. But I mean, I think she knows Trump very well, and I think more to the point, Trump knows Trump very well, and Trump knows his base very well, and he knows if he ever apologizes, that would actually be a real problem for him. I think I think the base partially loves him because he refuses to apologize, because

they think apology is a sign of weakness. It's like that's what a sissy does. Excuse the archaic and offensive language. But that's what a penzy does, right, And you know, you're a real man, you don't apologize. I mean Obama went around the world and you know, trying to rebuild the alliances that Bush broken and apologize for some of the stuff in the war and terror, and that was hugely offensive. Like the idea that you know, like you

would ever apologize for a mistake, right exactly. I mean so let's talk about there's a lot of other weird ship going on. The January six Committee is going to make criminal referrals, but we don't know about Oh yeah, I mean do you feel like they should have said who they were going to refer about her? Now? Yeah? I mean on the whole, I feel like they should have been trying to be a bit more open about it.

And I mean my big concern is, like the Republicans are gonna take over the House and they're gonna like, you know, use it as a fishing expedition. So I wish all this stuff had been you know, done earlier and had been wrapped up. I mean, I think there were sort of political considerations, and to some degree they played good politics. I mean, I think the January six like commission was really useful for the Democrats and really useful in reminding people how dangerous, uh that you know,

the Trump Republicans have been. But yeah, I mean I wish a lot of this stuff had been done earlier and been a little bit more out in the open, whatever the political cost, because I actually think that like there's like, in terms of investigation, like we're going to see the GOP takeover and they're going to go on a fishing expedition to go through to find any little mistake to try to discredit what's been done so far. Yeah, that does seem very likely, right yeah. Yeah, And so

it's sort of I don't know. I mean, it's a tough call. I understand the timing of why they did it when they did, but in some ways it should have everything should have been done much earlier. There was just are in the Washington Post where it said Trump's lawyers found that he you know, vouched that he had no classified material. And then immediately after that there was a story in the New York Times that show the Trump had classified material in in these other storage areas.

I mean, that's I feel like that's how Trump plays it all the time, right, Oh yeah, I know absolutely. I mean this goes back to what you said earlier, like do we not know Trump? Do we not know that?

You know, this guy will like lie about anything. And I actually to tie you this in with like the earlier discussion about the Kanye you know, one of the things that came out was that Nick Flentes was able to have dinner with Trump because the Secret Service basically, let's Trump people run their own security at Mara Lego. It's it's a private club, which means that basically anyone the Trump like you know, is willing to see can

go in there. And you know, they have i know, the nuclear codes in a closet somewhere like I just does not seem a good situation, right for a good place to keep classified material. No, absolutely not. And I have always thought that this is something that could go somewhere.

It's gonna be a little bit trickier with like GFP control of the House, but still the National security state takes all this stuff very seriously, and it does seem like on the legal front, like we are start of seeing finally some accountability and some like you know, the inertia of the legal system being overcome. I mean, we saw that with like Cramp organization, and they're sort of

criminal liabilities that they're now facing. So hopefully this will this will actually be I mean I'm using not a person to say, you know, we should rely on the system to work, because the system doesn't work often. But I actually think that this is this stuff is like a gravity where even the sort of you know, difference that people give to a former President, I think even that can be overcome. Yeah, it does seem like their justice, whatever that means is is actually kind of grinding along.

In America. We have a very exciting phenomenon going on where people are shooting at the power grounds because we don't have enough guns and obviously we need to have more bonds. What do you think about this so far? I mean, I saw some stuff indicating that this might be related to the right wing terrorism, although I think the charges haven't been laid and so there's a lot

of like serve murkiness in the story. And part of the murkiness is that I think, unfortunately, like some of the sheriffs in these places might be sympathetic with the

people doing the shooting. So yeah, I mean, on a broader thing, like you know, like we know from the f V, I know, the source of right wing terrorism is a real thing, and it's a growing threat, and it does seem increasingly likely that if Republicans face defeat in the ballot boxes, as they you know, basically did in the mid terms and in the last election, and they have this sort of conspiratorial review to the system was rigged against them, you're going to see more and

more political violence coming from the right, and you're gonna see more more of this stuff. I mean, I just I just think it's like, you know, having said, you know, I want to be careful because charges haven't been laid, right, I mean, we don't know what it is, but certainly guns are involved. So I don't think it's planned parenthood that is going out and shooting the right, like I don't think it's the League of Women Borders that are but that league of conservation voters you have to keep

your eye on. We can draw, you know, reasonable differences. Are have our suspicions as to who's doing this. And I think the broader thing to keep in mind is that the radical right is becoming more violent as a natural outgrowth of this sort of propaganda that they're being fed, they're being told and they're not only in that they were robbed, that the political system doesn't work, and that you know, they're basically gonna lose their whole way of

life to these dictatorial democrats. Now, what happens when people feel that they can't express themselves politically, you know, they turn to violence. And and so the very messaging that Trump and a lot of elected Republicans are doing is sort of adding fuel to the fire of right wing violence. So I think it's a real problem. And I mean, all we can do is call them out on this and keep you know, saying this language, this politics is

getting people killed, which it is. Yeah. No, I mean I think that's really scary, and it does seem like we are just very lucky every day that there isn't violence. Yeah, I think it's good to have like a broad perspective on this right. So I actually think the number of people that are actually willing to go and commit like these violent acts are not like larger number, and I

think American society can handle that. The problem is really that while they're not larger number, they are a part of the GOP base, and Trump is legitimized them as a part of the GOP base. And this, you know, to circle back to what we were saying earlier about him not announcing white supremacy, you know, like that's part of the way that Trump made these people feel like they're part of the Republican coalition or the mega coalition that he denounced them, so, you know, feeling that they have.

I think the sense that these people have that they are powerful people that listen to them, and that these powerful people are also telling them that elections don't work is feeding into the violence. So we have to have like a clear picture of the server the ecosystem of violence that we're seeing. Yeah. No, I think it's really such an interesting and strange time to be living in America. I want to ask you one last question, which is

do you think American politics is getting better? Actually? I mean I'm pretty hopeful right now, just because of not just the mid terms, but also the runoff in Georgia. You know, like, Okay, I mean, you know, it's a class half full, half empty thing. You know, on the one hand, you know Warnock one. On the other hand, like crushal Walker, who in an ideal world should get

zero over some of the you ended up with. Like you know that to have a candidate that's so clearly unfit for Profice, whose own family you know, thinks he's unfit for Professe get for you for the vote, I mean, that's pretty scary. But I mean I do think that there's there's evidence that, you know, the good guys are winning, and also that the good guys are learning. I mean, I think the Democrats are figuring out how to navigate in this new environment and how to you know, win elections.

Not all of them. I mean in New York obviously the Democratic Party there that's a lot of trouble, and and in Florida as well, but I mean in a lot of places, the state Democratic parties are getting pretty good at figure out what they need to do, and they've gotten the message out about how dangerous Republicans are.

So I went out, like, you know, like you know, we're getting near the holiday season, and I want to leave people with a little bit of hope that yeah, I mean, I think there's there's ways in which politics is getting bigger better. I think that it's in terms of, like, you know, the big picture, it's gonna take a couple of cycles. Like I think you have to keep losing and losing and losing, and it's like you know, bashing

your head against the wall. If you do it once, okay, twice, Okay, if you bash your head against the wall ten times, maybe something will get through and they're like, hey, I have to stop bashing my head against the wall. So I actually think that like if maga Republicans, if you know that Trump has hiloritarian right. If they lose let's say four or five election cycles in a row, then maybe you know, the hope there's will bash your head against the wall so much that they realized we should

stop doing this. And that was actually going to be my last question. Do you think that will ever happen? Like they clearly people don't like it, right, Certainly swing state voters don't like it. They don't like this craziness. But it seems like Republicans don't care. Yeah, I mean, it's portually a matter that you know, sort of geographical sorting that, like there's enough places in red states that are so red that like a Marjorie Taylor Green or

Paul Gostars can get re elected again and again. But again I have to say, like over time it does have an impact. Like and I go back, I think the classic example is a broken party, you know, during the age of the New Deal, where they had Herbert Hoover and they had a lot of very right doing people who from the start we're saying, like the New Deal is communism and we have to get rid of

Social Security. And they lost, and they lost again and again and again, and you have like basically five presidential elections where they lost and then they realized, Okay, um, let's try something different. Let's let's get like Dwight Eisenhower. He's a popular general and he doesn't want to get rid of Social Security, and he likes unions, and he likes high taxes for the rich. And let's try him.

So I feel like if the Republicans, you think they're going to decide that they want jab or something, Yeah, if they lose like enough times, then one could imagine a more yeah, reasonable Republican getting in there. So I think that's the future one can maybe look forward to. Like they just keep losing, and that's they keep losing, and I mean it's it's the only way they learned, right, Like it's it's sad people don't learn except through adversity, right.

I mean, in this case, it's actually not sad. It's good because the candidates right showed the irony of what you were saying. But yes, Jeet here, please come back. You're always such a delight to have here talking to you. Sheldon white House is the junior Senator from Rhode Island. So welcome to Fast Politics. Senator white House, thank you, great to be with you. We're so excited to have you, and I wanted to talk to you about all senators

pretty cool, congratulations, I mean amazing stuff. It makes more than a two percent difference. I'll tell you. Talk to me about what, uh, what Democrats can do eight now in this lame duck period. Well, it depends on what the House will let us do, and it depends on what Republicans will let us do. Because there's still the

sixty vote culture requirement UM in the Senate. I would ordinarily say we should be crushing as many nominees through as we possibly can UM, but because we held the Senate, we actually have the ability to process nominees in the next Congress with the same pace as this congress, and with Rafael warnox win, actually at a slightly accelerated pace

because we don't have to worry about discharge petitions. If we can get Democrats voting for our own nominees, they go straight to the floor and tee up for the executive calendar. So I want to talk to you about your Windfall Profit Tax Act that you're working on with another favorite of this podcast, Representative Rocanna. Talk to us about what this would do and what this is the oil companies engage in international price manipulation through their cartel,

so they can jack up their prices pretty high. And we saw in the wake of the Putin invasion of Ukraine, oil prices get jacked up very high. And the result of that, of course, is that oil company profits soared and consumers got screwed at the pump. So what we would do, because we'd go back to a reasonable baseline of profit for these companies, and excess profit above that,

they'd have to cough up half of it. We'd caught back and then distribute that to American consumers to spend, you know, where they wish, at the grocery store, at the gas pump, at their favorite restaurant, whatever. This seems like a very new kind of bell. If it works, it would sort of be the beginning of a kind of taxation, you know, against corporate greed. It would be

a deterrent against corporate price gouging. And the Tory Party over in England the Conservatives have actually passed something rather like it. The difference, I think being in England the oil companies don't have the same control over the Conservative Party as they do over the Republican Party here. They're actually genuine conservatives in the UK. And we have fossil fuel functionaries here in the American Republican Party clearly fossil

fuel companies, but they're largely responsible for climate crisis. They have a certain amount of the United States politicians sort of under their thumbs. I mean, what could what could stop this terrible situation. I think it will take public pressure on Republican members. I suspect that if Chuck Schumer brought this to a vote, we'd get pretty much all of the Democratic senators. But that doesn't get you to sixty.

And so we need some Republicans to come over and agree that at least when your price gouging, share the wealth with consumers. It's actually a pretty moderate idea. We don't even take all the excess profits, we let them keep half. And even so, they've absolutely drawn a hard line in the sand that we were not going to negotiate. We're not going to talk. This is anathema to us

and we want no part of it. And of course we then refused to deliver our Republican fossil fuel functionaries with the inequalities the wealth inequalities in this country and the kind of corporate mouthfeasance on the part of corporations. We really do need the United States government to reign in capitalism. I mean, do you think that that can happen in our lifetime? I hope. So. I think that

the Biden administration is moving tentatively in that direction. Well, after Representative con and I filed this bill, the White House came around and said, actually, we sort liked this idea of excess profits clawback, and the President started talking about price gouging and a bill to clawback excess profits. So I think they're moving in that direction. But I think there's a lot more that can be done because the power of these corporations has gotten completely out of control.

I think the target should be the dark money operation rather than just corporate America. Generally, there are a lot of very decent, principled corporations that provide very good service to their customers, and then there's this pack of them that run a dark money operation to tell the Republican Party what to do and to use the US Chamber of Commerce as their bludgeon to impose policies that the

public doesn't want. It's that crew. I think that you can spotlight and put a lot of pressure on And that's what I've been encouraging the administration to do and what I've been doing myself. So let's talk for a minute about money. I feel like it's impossible to talk about dark money without talking about this very conservative Supreme Court. Yeah, the court that dark money built. Yeah. Is there anything that we can do? I mean, we have this embolden court.

They're listening to voting rights. I mean every session that this court is, you know, is on the benches is a bit scary. Yeah. And the stuff they get up to is pretty grim. I mean everybody knows, for instance, about the Dobbs decision, where they merrily took a constitutional right away from half of the American population. But less well known is that around the same time that they were doing that, they were adding for the big donors who got them onto the court, a constitutional right to

dark money. Can you talk a little more about that? And they actually set that up in the Americans for

Prosperity Foundation case. It was a nasty little case. It sat on the Supreme Court's docket waiting to be take it up for a long time for years, and um, they didn't Budge until they saw that they had Amy Conny Barrett to give them a sixth vote, and they didn't actually move on it until like two days after the January six riot actually took it up on the eighth, when the attention of the world was everywhere else but what the Supreme Court was up to without a whole

lot of fuss, but with an enormous armada of right wing front groups appearing in front of the court, they actually created the court. The dark money built, in turn, built a constitutional right to dark money. Is there anything that we can do, We could raise a lot of Hell. The other thing that we can do is past the Disclosed Act so that we maximize our ability to disclose.

They're a little bit stuck between two things. The plaintiff in the dark money constitutional right case was the corporate twin of the Koch Brothers biggest political battleship, the Americans for Prosperity organization, So that was there was a huge political overlay on that. But at the same time they also have the Citizens United decision, which acknowledges that dark money is corrupting and leaves a lane for Congress to required disclosure of dark money spent at least in elections.

So that's the frontier of these two battles. That you can be the appendage of a political operation and protect your dark money and then have a completely fake corporate veil between the two, a veil you could pierce with a banana, and then on the other side have a corporate operation that spends money and at least what it spends and ads would probably have to be disclosed if we passed the law requiring it. Do you think it's worth trying to get rid of the filibuster for these laws?

I would do that in a heartbeat. The only thing I'd suggest is that we're actually not getting rid of the filibuster. We're actually restoring the filibuster, which is everybody gets a chance to talk themselves out, and at the end of the day you vote to a simple majority. That's what the filibuster was. Then we got is weird

culture rule. To shortcut it, without touching the culture rule, you could actually make the Senate work again by changing other rules having to do with quorum calls and things like that. For instance, I have nothing against the Republicans slowing us down when we want to make a big change that they oppose for a month, but they need to be on the floor making their arguments. They can't just shut the sentate down and quorum calls and and burn time without actually standing up for the whatever it

is that they're arguing for. And once they're done with their arguments and they become dilatory, then the parliamentarian needs to be able to say, Okay, everybody said their piece, here we go, now we vote. It seems like the American people in this midterm have given that they really don't like all of this radical trumps um. Do you think Republicans will hear this message or do you think they're just going to do something? I mean, it doesn't seem to me like there's a whole lot of soul

searching going on. Well, there are two threads. There's the Maga thread with all of its sort of weird overlay of racial issues and lack of good temperament and all

of that. And then there's the really really steady economic power being deployed by huge special interests from behind the screen of the dark money that they used in politics, that they used to pack the court, that they used to hide their role in front groups around the country, and we had a lot of success pointing out the mega threat, and I think Americans really saw that that was just too much, That was just disgusting and and not something independent voters swung our way in this election

and kind of unprecedented fashion for a midterm. So you know, that worked. But we have not done is put enough attention on the bigger special interest influence operation that goes out of its way to work quietly and to obscure itself and to run like a covert opera ration. And that's where I think we can make the American people just as upset as they are with MAGA, only in this case they were fooled for a lot longer time. Yeah,

that's the thing that you know. I mean, when you think about John Roberts on the court with the Dobbs decision, he didn't want Dobbs decided. He didn't want row overturned because he believed that women should have choice. He wanted it that way because he knew that these conservative justices were giving up the game. Yeah, he wanted to move more slowly and obscure the kind of rough handling by the far right that was accomplished through Judge Alido in

that decision. Yeah, we're talking about voter suppression in Georgia. Normal voters, I think are more informed of the sort of nefarious nous of a lot of the Maga Republican Party. Now, yeah, and they they overlap a bit. I mean you mentioned voter suppression. To go back to the capture of the Supreme Court, one of the organizations that did that, called

the Judicial Crisis Network. They got checks as big as fifteen million dollars seventeen million dollars in individual donations without revealing who the donor was, spent it on the ads for the Supreme Court justices, and then they go running in through associated groups to argue to the Court that they spent money to put on the court without disclosing

any of that. And the voter suppression group, so called Honest Elections Project, is the group that just appeared where the arguments happened for mor v. Harper today and in the list of briefs is the Honest Elections Project, which doesn't bother to disclose that it's the corporate sibling of the Digital Crisis Network, which spent all this money on ads for the judges. The secrecy and the smarminess of

it is just really very wrong. So for someone listening to this right now, what would you tell them are the things they can do themselves to help? I think the number one thing is to make getting rid of dark money and politics a huge, huge priority, not only for the individual themselves, but also for groups that they mean may be involved with. So, labor unions have a huge stake in getting rid of dark money because the dark money forces go out and try to crush labor

in for instance, the Janis decision. The civil rights movement has a huge stake in protecting against dark money because dark money funds voter suppression. They've admitted it. The environmental movement has a huge stake in getting rid of dark money because of West Virginia versus e p A and the whole fake climate denial establishment that has been propped up.

And yet you can go through the interests that we fight for, and over and over and over again you find that the advocacy groups don't look beyond their immediate substantive purpose to how do you break the back of this group that is coming after us. How do you expose to the American public that this is a scam. How do you get after their operation. And that's what I think all of our democratic leaning advocacy groups need

to understand. They have a common cause in making sure that the public gets what is going on with these games that are being played in the dark. And if we can do that, I think that builds a lot of pressure. I mean, the public already hates this stuff. You really can't beat the polling on it. There's nothing we need to do to improve how much the public

hates dark money. We just need to hammer the issue until the Republicans yell buncle and give so interesting Sheldon white House, Um, we're just at a time, but I want to ask you one last question, because you are from this state that has been so affected by climate change, are you seeing anything that is giving you hope? Tell us something good about climate. Bad news is the Biden administration hasn't really done much on climate. The good news

is that gives them a lot left to do. And now with the Republican controlled House, there's no point in waiting around for legislation. They can move and accomplish a lot of executive climate stuff that is out there ready to be done. And they started in the methane regulation by baking in a pertend social cost of carbon, which is a really big deal and in time can be propagated through other agencies and other government decision making, and that I think will will markedly end up in significant

emission savings. And another big thing that they could do is to align with the European Union on their carbon border adjustment, which the EU is going forward with and rather than complain and you know, piss and moan about it, line up, sign up, join up, and try to build a multi economy platform of countries that will charge for carbon unfriendly products when they cross borders that there's a

tariff there. And I think the Biden administration is taking a new interest in looking at the carbon border adjustment as a as a really positive thing for American business, which it is. You put those two things together. You've got a big social cost of carbon inside and throughout the government, and you've got a carbon border adjustment on our on our borders as a tariff, and suddenly things start to look a lot better. Thank you so much. That was good, good, helpful, hopeful message to end on.

Thank you so much, Senator white House. Great to be with you, Molly. Thank you so much. Tim O'Brien is the opinion editor at Bloomberg. Welcome Too Fast Politics, Tim O'Brien Molly. I was excited to have you back on because besides being uh, the editor of Bloomberg Opinion and very smart writer, you are also the knower of all

things Trump related for a long long time. And I felt that we had to since we are on the Yesterday the Trump organization got uh found guilty, and we're in a It's been a bad couple days for Donald Trump. And and and the second you know, Domino to fall for him was herschel Walker losing the Senate race in Georgia, a guy that Trump hand picked to carry trump is um into the Senate. I think there's more to come for the Trump organization that could go well beyond what

happened with the Manhattander's charges yesterday. It's significant. It's the first time the Trump organ has been convicted of a

criminal fraud charge in a courtroom. It is not financially going to debilitate them, you know, the financial penalty is relatively modest, but reputationally it's an interesting verdict because Donald Trump has spent you know, more than fifty of his almost seventy seven years playing with toys that Fred Trump built and gave to him, and he has basically flushed a lot of that down the toilet through ineptitude and selfish is and and the organization now has a criminal

fraud charge against it. It's a blight on a family legacy that was never particularly first class or blue chick, even in the Fred era, but it didn't have this this taint hanging over over it. But I think I think the State Attorney General's case, Letitia James's case, is more existentially threatening to the business, and I think the Moral Lago investigation for espionage violations and the what might come out of the January six hearings are more personally

dangerous to Trump himself. So what do you think that looks like? Well, I mean, you know, this all depends on how steely prosecutors want to be. But you know, the Moral Lago case, so we're talking about Trump first and the Trump or Trump personally. The Moral Lago case is a very strong case. It certainly seems like he knowingly and willfully violated the law when he took classify documents out of the White House, violations of the Espionage

Act and then he obstructed justice. It would appear he and his team once the FBI began taking a closer look, that seems to be an open and shut case. So I don't know how he gets around that. One. The January six cases we've talked about before, Molly is really whether or not Garland at the d o J wants to crack down, and all indications are he's on that track, you know he is. He's appointed a special counsel. That special council's a bulldog. That special council is going to

examine the evidence. On the business side, if the Attorney General in New York finds Trump and his children and the and the business guilty of the fraud civil fraud charges she's brought, they can lose their license to do business in New York permanently. Means that the Trump work and related entities and Trump and his children can no longer do business in the state of New York, which is just a I think, an existential blow on the

business side. Does it seem to you like this whole thaying is like Trump is is on his way out or do you think we're just I mean, because remember two thousand and fifteen he was pulling at one percent. So I mean, are we just in another cycle of Trump being down and then up or do you think this is really the end? Well, I think there's there's you know, different categories here on the political side of it.

I don't think you can count them out. You know, he still has a I think a firm hold on the hearts and minds of of the Republican electorate, and that gives him enormous leverage in primary season and in keeping a certain kind of philosophy and candidate in play within the Republican Party, the pitchfork and torch carrying kind of candidate and who's modeled in the image of Donald Trump,

which is a ignorant person who is a flamethrower. But that's not a viable path to a national to national victories because independence and moderates and moderate Republicans have all decided that they don't like Trump or Trump is um and that's been proven now in three national elections in a row. So I don't think he's going to go away on the political front at all, And I don't think he really cares whether or not he can figure out a way a pout their president presidency for himself.

He'll be happy just to blow the shop up and blow the party up and stay in the in the spotlight in the courts. He's got real threats like he's never experienced before. And people have often spoken about how Donald Trump has always managed to get around the law and always managed to have a ninth life, But the reality is this is the first time in his life where there's been intense, purposeful law enforcement investigations with him

in the crosshairs. I mean, you've been dealing with this trumpy will he get away with the question since the eighties? I mean, does he always get away with it? But what are we saying that when we say get away

with it? Right? Like in the eighties, he got away with being a b S artist, and he got away with stretching the boundaries of his own prowess and lying about his business achievements and crafting this halo around himself as a can do entrepreneur when in fact he was an epic con man, grifter and screw up artists and

bankruptcy artists for that matter. And he parlayed that into The Apprentice, which was also pure kabuki, but that didn't involve at the time committing or being investigated for let me rephrase that, it didn't involve being an investigated for major frauds that could land you in an orange jumpsuit. You know, that wasn't part of his life then, So

this is really new. What he's gotten away with most of his life is conning people into believing he's was something he isn't, which is a super talented businessman and a brilliant politician and someone who's out to represent the little guy and the little gal. That's just not who he is. And he has gotten away with that for a long time. I think we're in a different place right now. Do you think this is the beginning of the end? I think it could be. It could be.

I think, you know, I think the issue is what law enforcement decides to do with what's on its plate. Do they really push this through? Do they seek putting him in jail? If Donald Trump goes to jail, that's certainly the end of a lot of things, including his freedom. If he gets charged with federal fraud charges and conspiracy to overthrow the government, etcetera, etcetera. That will be embarrassing to most people. Are concerning most people, but baby Hughie

doesn't get embarrassed. Baby Hue just shakes his rattle more loudly. Speaking of narcissistic billionaires, there's another narcissistic billionaire here. He wrote about who is really enjoying a trumping news cycle, and that narcissistic billionaire is Elon Musk. I tried to grapple with this at a piece I wrote yesterday. It does seem to me that we in the media are sort of primed for these news cycles of these crazy

narcissists taking as hostage. Well, we're also I think what Trump has done is he's made it okay for powerful, wealthy white men to peacock and strut their stuff and be as an inane or as destructive or as self absorbed as they want to be without worrying about consequence. And I think that Trump opened the door to that politically, and he's certainly opened the door to it in the business community. Would Elon Musk have rolled this way prior

to I'm not sure he would have. I think there's a lot in Musk himself that is about narcissism and unhinged behavior that's independent of Trump. But I think Trump has also taught people how to basically rule like you're in the fountain Head. And we also are in an era in which you can win over people and reached to people and run a media organization without having an old own and old fashioned newspaper, TV station, or radio station.

You could do it on the web. And the web has allowed a lot of different powerful people to go directly to people without the media interceding. And I think there's some upsides to that. The media is not always the best gatekeeper, but the downsides are we I do think we want some screens for value in our society and some gatekeeping, and that's not happening in a meaningful

way on social Well. It's interesting because I mean it does seem like to me that Elan's plan is that he's going to you know, he's going to create new media that he likes better. That's very wice and mad. Well. He can do that for as long as he has the funny money to be able to do that, because his wealth is predicated on two primary things, the public value of Tesla's stock and the private value of SpaceX.

Those are the two things that fund his shenanigans. And Tesla's doc has been massively battered over the last year. He can't keep pulling from that piggy bank indefinitely. He bought Twitter for forty four billion dollars, thirteen billion of it is borrowed from banks. They're not happy that they're stuck with Elon's lame m and a deal. And he does have to make a profit over time or he's not gonna be able to continue to play these kind

of games. Now. Tesla could continue to be a home run and SpaceX has been a, you know, a very notable achievement for him, but it's privately held. For him to pull money out of that, he'd have to sell the stake to the out to an outsider. I don't know that he'd want to do that. He does not have limitless funds forever to be able to blow tens of billions of dollars on a media investment that he does not know how to run properly. He's not a

media manager. He has taken a sledgehammer to the business foundations of Twitter, apart from the kind of crazy sensationalism and racism and anti semitism that's been allowed to flow back onto the platform. And that's not a viable strategy for long term success with that business. The one aspect of Trump is um that el Hahn seems to have picked up is this like, we're going to destroy the media.

We're going to create citizen journalists who will then I mean, I say, this is someone who has benefited a lot from social media, Well, you're a You're a representation of the upside of it. Right. It's like you got discovered and empowered through social and it's enabled more individuals to get that kind of visibility with which I think is awesome.

That's that's the upside. The downside is at their core, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are juvenile delinquents, and they are bros who are living in digital frat houses, and they are just reveling in b a in being able to sit around and make fart jokes or do chugging contests, or so you can jump off to the off the roof onto the front lawn without breaking their legs. And they have no real interest in the betterment of a broad swath of Americans, even though they both claim that

they are. We're going to see this Senate session is going to look at tech regulation again. We have a Republican House, a Democratic Senate, So who knows what that looks like, but there certainly is, especially after Crypto, the implosion of ft X, there is certainly a feeling that there's certainly a desire for regulation. I mean, do you think that comes and do you think that will have an effect on any of this? Well, I do think this is a place where there might be a bipartisan

union on regulating tech for entirely different reasons. I think the GOP doesn't care about bigness and companies being so large that they're unrestrained and too powerful. I think they care about tech because they see the tech companies as stewards of platforms that have a bias against conservatives, so they'll be up for like jumping into regulation on that side of it. And I think the Dems are concerned about classic anti trust fears of monopoly power and unfettered might.

But those are different in triests that could wind up in a place where there's a compromise bill that both sides get a little bit of what they want. So that is a threat to the tech industry. It's a threat to Elon must get, Twitter and Facebook, Google, Amazon, They're all threatened by this, and Europe has been very aggressive on this front. Europe is already talking about whether or not they're going to permit Twitter to continue to

operate over there because what they see is standard violation. Yes, so interesting. Thank you so much, Tim O'Brien, Thank you, Molly. It's always a treat, Molly john Fast, Jesse Cannon. It's Marjorie Taylor Green's party, and she's setting the agenda already. She's very obsessed with the idea of impeaching Biden because Trump was impeached and she wants to get back at Biden somehow for trumping impeached. I think ultimately she feels

that that's only fair. Marjorie Taylor Green wants to impeach Joe Biden for bringing Brittany Grinder home because she's stupid and also probably racist. I am just waiting for when somebody decides this is a great placement theory because they sent a white man back to Russia and brought a black woman home. Another reason to impeach Biden, says Marjorie Taylor Green. The president of the United States treated a

Russian terrorist arms dealer. By the way, they're like on the side of Russian terrorists, so you'd think they'd be happy Victor Boot left a US marine in Russian jail and bought home a professional basketball player. How many people will Victor Boot kill now? Because Biden said him she got the talking points this morning, and she's going to keep going with them. But let me just say, maybe she's just going to be our moment of fuer everything does We'll be our moment of AWA from now on. Well,

she is the leader of the party. She is the leader of the House Republican Party. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to your 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.