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- [00:01]
Jonathan V. Last
Oh, the car from Carvana's here. Well, will you look at that. It's exactly what I ordered. Like precisely. It would be crazy if there were any catches.
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Tim Miller
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- [00:56]
Jonathan V. Last
Carvana. Pick up.
- [00:58]
Carvana Narrator
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- [01:00]
Tim Miller
Hey everybody, Tim Miller from the Bulwark here with my buddy jvl, author of the Triad newsletter, which you must read over@the bulwark.com I wanted to talk about some developing information about what Donald Trump plans for the Department of Justice. And he tried. He had a take, I guess, put it this way. He had a take on the NBA cheating scandal.
- [01:22]
Jonathan V. Last
I mean, I should hope so. He's the president. Doesn't he have to have takes on everything?
- [01:26]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I mean, surely he always has back on his Twitter feed. And he, I think he one time weighed in on the breakup between Robert.
- [01:34]
Jonathan V. Last
Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.
- [01:37]
Tim Miller
Yes. Good poll. So, yeah, so he's going to weigh in on everything. He's like the talk radio call in.
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Jonathan V. Last
Team Robert, if I'm remembering.
- [01:46]
Tim Miller
I mean, I'm Team Robert, so I don't really remember what the breakup was. I just find him handsome. Okay. So anyway, so I just hate for you to lump me in with Donald Trump. So he had a take on this. Many people have takes on this. Maybe there's too much gambling involved in sports. There's too little gambling. Like who cares? Is it poor Chauncey Billups, Mr. Big Shot? His legacy now seems to be in question because it seems like he was doing some pretty bad stuff. I'm sure you have some takes on it. His take was a little strange though, and I'd like to read it to you. It was a little bit of a kind of a right turn. It didn't seem like he was weighing in on the merits of what Terry Rozier was up to. He writes this. What's worse, the NBA players cheating at cards and probably much else. Black people must probably be doing. Other crimes we don't really know, but we can just assume there are other crimes happening.
- [02:34]
Jonathan V. Last
Wouldn't say that about golfers, would he?
- [02:36]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I don't think so. Or the Democrats cheating on elections. The 2020 presidential election being rigged and stolen is a far bigger scandal. Look what happened to our country. Da, da, da, da. And then we get to the policy portion of this bleat. I hope the DOJ pursues this with as much gusto as befitting the biggest scandal in American history. If not, it will happen again, including in the midterms. No mail in or early voting. Yes to voter idea. Watch how totally dishonest the California prop vote is. Et cetera, et cetera. Get smart Republicans before it's too late. A lot here, but the most notable thing to me is that Donald Trump is watching TV and live reacting to it as he does our president. He sees his handpicked FBI director Cash Patel all over the cameras, getting attention that he should be getting, talking about how the FBI has found cheating in the NBA. And his response to that is Cash. Priorities seem to be off here. Shouldn't you be focused on the biggest crime in history? When we pretended that I had lost the 2020 election?
- [03:43]
Jonathan V. Last
Yeah, it's. I mean, what, what's Cash doing? It's a funny thing though, because I mean, you hate to give it to the, the president, but he is right. If the 2020 election was stolen, then it means that we had an illegitimate president for four years and we were living under a coup. Right. I mean, this would be like the biggest story in Western civilization following World War II. Right. A major power history of the company.
- [04:18]
Tim Miller
Maybe going back to the Civil War in our case.
- [04:19]
Jonathan V. Last
Right. I mean, like kind of a really big deal. And this has always been the thing that, that didn't quite make sense about the Republicans. Because if they meant it seriously or if they meant it literally. Sorry, not seriously. Then you were like, well, I'm sorry, hold on. Like, don't you fight civil wars? Everything. Like if some, if somebody carried out a coup. Don't any.
- [04:43]
Tim Miller
Yes. And it's true. And I've been kind of making this point as a gag recently, like, and saying on podcast, it's just like, I thought this was the biggest scandal in American history. The election was stolen from Donald Trump. He has now all of the power and resources of the government at his hands. Shouldn't they be using that to go after the perpetrators and my gag comment, the President now is just expressly advocating that his DOJ does look into this.
- [05:11]
Jonathan V. Last
Like OJ he's searching for the real killers. And the funny thing here is, though, and I, I forget who made this point, it might have been Ann Applebaum. Might. Might have been somebody else. At the end of the day, in a weird way, the criminal justice system is probably the least subject to total corruption. Like, the prosecutorial side of it can be corrupted. The Department of Justice can be corrupted. The FBI can be corrupted. But at the end of the day, they do have to get like 12 normal Americans to sit together on a.
- [05:46]
Tim Miller
Local level in individual cases. You could have dirty cops planting on people, Right. But, like, at scale, very challenging.
- [05:54]
Jonathan V. Last
And we've seen this with just like grand juries and attempts to indict people in D.C. right, where the, you know, normal voters in D.C. who are sent to jury duty on this stuff look and say, f that, no, I'm not signing off on that.
- [06:08]
Tim Miller
And they haven't really shown that they, I mean, maybe this is doable, but, but it's just as worth noting that they haven't really shown that they have, like, the balls for a just full effort to. Oh, like we're going to totally co opt the criminal justice system by doing the things you would need to do, like, such as planting evidence, like using the.
- [06:26]
Jonathan V. Last
Fabricating evidence.
- [06:27]
Tim Miller
Fabricating evidence. They're doing some of the stuff again, like you're saying on the margins, which is like, Bill Pulte has been Googling every Democrat in the country's mortgage history. And we're going to see if anybody has been, you know, claiming their second house is their first. And then we'll take that to a grand jury. And most of the grand juries have been like, and we'll see how the, you know, James case ends up shaking out. Right? But like, that your heart's not really in the game if that's what you're doing. Like, if you really wanted to corrupt it, you got to be even more aggro. You got to give the same effort to it that Trump gave to the Stop the Steel effort. Really.
- [07:00]
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- [08:22]
Jonathan V. Last
This is one of the weaknesses of Trump's position, which is that he has found it hard to convince other people to break the law on his behalf.
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Tim Miller
Not impossible.
- [08:32]
Jonathan V. Last
He has found people to break the law on his behalf. He pardoned 1500 of them. Right. He had Bannon and Rudy and all sorts of people break the law on his behalf. But there's also been a class of people who, when, like, asked it, you know, Mike Pence is like, no, thank you. And to, to do, like, evidence, planting stuff, say to, to like, oh, Mr. Bolton, look at what we found here. It's a bag marked top secret. You know, to do that, sort of.
- [09:00]
Tim Miller
You need a real criminal enterprise. You need the mob. You need to actual mob boss instead of like a pretend one that he's trying to.
- [09:06]
Jonathan V. Last
And you do need people who are like, you need FBI agents who totally trust that if they get pinched, the President's going to pardon them.
- [09:15]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [09:16]
Jonathan V. Last
And I don't. I think those are harder to come by right now than the President would. Like, will they still be hard to come by in 24 months? I don't know. I mean, life is coming at us fast.
- [09:27]
Tim Miller
Yeah, right. Yeah, I agree with that. And so in that sense, that makes this, like, in the bucket of like, you know, the, the. What's it called where you have, like, a barrier between something that things can leak through, you know, Porous barrier, The brain blood barrier? Is that what you're thinking? Brain blood barrier? Yeah, porous barrier. It's kind of porous between these two buckets. But you've got the, like, absurd veep side of Trump's attempt to become an autocrat. And then you have, like, the, the scary, like, real threats of the ways in which Trump trying to become an autocrat. This, like, is mostly in the absurd veep side, right? Which is like, Mr. Patel, please investigate the person that stole the election from me. Because, like, nobody did steal the election from them. And there's, like, there's not a lot of reasons for anybody to have concerns. But, like, that is the kind of thing that, you know, if, if, as you're saying, over the next 24 months they find more and more accomplices for this effort and it becomes more urgent that they do this sort of thing because, you know, whatever, they have concerns that the law might come for them someday, like, there could be a lot of other, you know, reasons, then maybe that becomes more serious.
- [10:41]
Jonathan V. Last
I would say, though, it is important for people to understand that if you look at totalitarian regimes throughout all of modern history, almost all of them are a combination of veep plus Stalin, right? Even Stalin was a combination of Veep plus Stalin. You know, go back to Hugo Chavez, he was a preposterous figure. And he, you watch his, he was, you know, on TV constantly warning that the Americans were about to invade any minute when it was like the farthest thing from Barack Obama's mind, right? Barack Obama was not going to invade Venezuela. And yet, John, maybe he had a.
- [11:19]
Tim Miller
Time machine from the future, from the Trump 2.0.
- [11:22]
Jonathan V. Last
But this is, you know, it was true for Mussolini. It's true always. These dictators are always half figure of fun and half serious. And that's part of what makes them successful is because a lot of people can then get lured and saying, oh, well, this guy, look, look at what a buffoon he is. Don't, don't worry. It's going to be fine. And I, that's, that's dangerous.
- [11:46]
Tim Miller
Last thing that I just think bears mentioning this, because sometimes you just have to say these things explicitly. This person, the president, is mentally unwell. And again, this stuff just is now this water that we're swimming in, as Sarah likes to say. And so you get used to it at various times. But the idea that the President of the United States would watch the news story about how a couple of NBA players were betting on games and batting the under on their points and assists and our coaches were betting against their team and then deciding not to play their good players. Serious stuff. But like, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it's a sports betting scandal that goes back to the Black Sox. So you have this, that the president of the United States would watch the news about the fact that this was happening in the country. And the response to that is, I'm sorry, shouldn't my FBI director be focusing on the imagining, imagine imaginary crimes that happened to me instead? Like that is deranged. It's a delusional response. It's unclear. I guess it doesn't really matter whether he is actually that delusional and thinks that this crime happened against him or whether he continues to feel like he has to put on this performance. But it's just, it's just worth pointing out it is an unstable mind.
- [13:05]
Jonathan V. Last
It is. But what's dangerous is that he is also projecting forward to, I mean, we're now 12 months out from the 2026 elections. And he has said pretty clearly. It was, there was another, there was a, an interview he gave to somebody last week, I think it was, where he said, you know, it must never be allowed. What happened in 2020 must never be allowed to happen again. What does that mean? Right. Like, I mean, does he mean Democrats can't? Because according to Donald Trump, Democrats have only succeeded and won elections illegitimately since he appeared on, on the scene. So they've cheated every single time. Does that mean Democrats can, can't be allowed to win an election? It certainly seems like what he's saying.
- [13:49]
Tim Miller
And to that, to that point, he specifically mentions this year, he's already laying the groundwork for a stop the steel efforts of this year where he says the California prop vote is going to be. You're already seeing how it's dishonest, millions of ballots being shipped. So that's already happened. So he's already laying the groundwork because the polls are out there. It shows that the Gavin Newsom ballot issue is probably going to win. And so he's already out there saying.
- [14:11]
Jonathan V. Last
Now and so what's that going to look like? And the answer is none of us have any idea.
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Tim Miller
Right?
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Jonathan V. Last
I mean, at the very minimum, it'll be court litigation everywhere. But I don't know, like, Mike Johnson has been refusing to seat a new Democratic member of Congress for what, four weeks now. And I don't know, like, who, who's the police who's going to come in and force him to seat somebody that they say is illegitimate? Maybe he can get states to say, oh, you know, the great state of Mississippi, which has one Democrat, we think that that congressional district's election was really fishy. And so we're not going to certify that one. Right. I mean, there are, there are a dozen ways this could go down, and we are in a position of hoping that the judicial system will prevent those things from happening. We are far past the point of simply assuming as a matter of course that the president won't try to do those things.
- [15:05]
Tim Miller
Well, uplifting as usual, JVL as we at least have Jokic, who will be playing tonight. We know he doesn't cheat ethical basketball only from Nikola Jokic. The only gambling he's doing is on horse racing. And so we appreciate him for that very much. Jonathan V. Last we'll be talking to you soon.
- [15:23]
Jonathan V. Last
Yeah, good luck, America.
- [15:24]
Tim Miller
Subscribe to the feed. Everybody.