Jonathan Alter on Trump’s Authoritarian Police State

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Al Franken Podcast – Jonathan Alter on Trump’s Authoritarian Police State

Episode Information

• Title: Jonathan Alter on Trump’s Authoritarian Police State
• Release Date: August 3, 2025
• Host: The Al Franken Podcast
• Description: A dynamic conversation featuring Al Franken alongside notable guests, delving into public policy and political comedy with insights akin to “The Daily” but with a more intimate setup.

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Introduction to Jonathan Alter and Key Topics (01:04 – 03:30)

In this episode, Al Franken welcomes Jonathan Alter, a best-selling author, former Newsweek columnist, and editor, to discuss Alter’s compelling piece for the Washington Monthly. Alter argues that America is morphing into a police state, primarily due to the allocation of $100 billion in new funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection within the broader legislative framework, often overshadowed by other contentious aspects such as Medicaid and SNAP cuts.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Alter (01:32): "The $100 billion in new funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection is every bit as ugly."

The Rise of an Authoritarian Police State (03:30 – 14:24)

Alter delves deeper into the implications of the increased funding for ICE, highlighting the creation of a formidable law enforcement apparatus poised to exceed the size of other federal agencies and national militaries. He draws parallels to historical authoritarian regimes, emphasizing the dangers of arrest quotas and bureaucratic pressures that lead to abuses of power.

Key Points:

• Arrest Quotas: Alter explains how quotas compel ICE agents to prioritize meeting daily targets over lawful and humane enforcement, leading to arbitrary detentions.
• Impact on Immigrants: The discussion underscores the harsh realities faced by undocumented immigrants, including long-term residents who have contributed to society, now facing deportation despite having lived in the U.S. for decades.

Notable Quotes:

Jonathan Alter (05:59): "If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Jonathan Alter (09:23): "If you're undocumented, they will deport you. They want to meet their quota."

Public Resistance and Potential Political Shifts (14:24 – 17:27)

Al Franken and Alter explore the public’s growing discontent with aggressive immigration policies. They discuss grassroots resistance methods, such as early warning systems to alert communities about impending ICE raids. Alter emphasizes the importance of collective action and resilience within the Democratic Party to counteract these authoritarian measures.

Key Points:

• Community Organizing: Implementation of smartphone-based alert systems to protect undocumented individuals from ICE actions.
• Political Momentum: Historic voter turnout patterns suggest a favorable shift for Democrats in upcoming midterm elections, counteracting the redistricting efforts by Republicans in states like Texas.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Alter (16:12): "There’s a lot of resistance. We can make more headway than people assume."

Environmental Impacts of Legislative Changes (19:46 – 23:10)

The conversation transitions to the environmental repercussions of the "big ugly bill," particularly its detrimental effects on renewable energy initiatives established under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Alter shares personal anecdotes about seeking solar solutions amidst legislative setbacks, highlighting the resilience of the renewable energy sector despite financial and regulatory challenges.

Key Points:

• Renewable Energy Funding: Significant reductions in funding for wind and solar energy projects threaten the progress made in combating climate change.
• Industry Resilience: Despite cuts, many companies in the renewable sector remain optimistic, anticipating potential restoration of incentives with future political shifts.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Alter (20:26): "I have to hunker down, survive this terrible time for the environment and for energy, and get through it."

Humanitarian Issues and Foreign Policy (23:10 – 26:46)

The discussion shifts focus to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, critiquing both U.S. and Israeli responses. Alter criticizes Israel’s blockade and the ethical ramifications of using food as a weapon of war, while also acknowledging the complicity of Hamas in exacerbating civilian suffering.

Key Points:

• U.S. Aid to Gaza: President Trump’s allocation of $60 million in food aid met with criticism due to perceived lack of gratitude and effectiveness.
• Israeli Policies: Examination of Netanyahu’s administration policies obstructing humanitarian aid, contributing to famine conditions in Gaza.
• Hamas’s Role: Highlighting Hamas’s misuse of resources and refusal to protect civilians, escalating the humanitarian disaster.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Alter (25:18): "This is the first time in the history of modern warfare that a government has not taken measures to protect civilians from being killed."

Redistricting and the Midterm Election Outlook (26:46 – 49:55)

Al Franken and Alter analyze the recent redistricting in Texas, where Republicans have gained five new House seats. They debate the broader implications for the Democratic Party and the upcoming midterm elections, arguing that historical trends favor the opposition party during midterms, especially when the incumbent president is unpopular.

Key Points:

• Gerrymandering Concerns: Discussion on whether the new Texas maps constitute racial or partisan gerrymandering, and the potential for Democratic responses.
• Midterm Election Dynamics: Despite setbacks in Texas, there is optimism that high enthusiasm among Democrats will translate into significant gains in the House of Representatives.
• Voter Turnout: Emphasis on the reduced voter turnout typical of midterms, with a focus on motivated Democratic voters to offset potential losses.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Alter (30:09): "The physics strongly favor the Democrats taking the House of Representatives."

The Epstein Scandal and Its Political Ramifications (31:06 – 35:57)

The conversation touches upon the ongoing revelations from Michael Wolff’s interviews with Jeffrey Epstein, exploring the depth of Trump’s connections and potential implications for his political standing. Alter discusses the strategic manipulations and the chilling effects of Epstein’s tapes on Trump’s legacy.

Key Points:

• Epstein’s Tapes: Details about the extensive recordings that shed light on Trump’s long-standing friendship with Epstein, potentially undermining Trump’s denials of misconduct.
• Legal and Ethical Concerns: Analysis of the legal challenges and ethical dilemmas posed by the interactions between Trump and Epstein, including unresolved allegations from Jane Doe’s case.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Alter (33:56): "Immunity breeds impunity. That’s why Trump has been worse than expected."

Trump’s Autocratic Tendencies and Institutional Corruption (35:57 – 46:47)

Alter presents a critique of Trump’s authoritarian behaviors, comparing them unfavorably to Nixon’s presidency. He highlights the systematic undermining of democratic institutions, including the judiciary and law enforcement agencies, and the broader implications for American democracy.

Key Points:

• Comparative Analysis: Trump’s efforts to dismantle the rule of law surpass Nixon’s attempts, with a more consistent and pervasive assault on democratic norms.
• Institutional Resistance: Examination of how Trump’s administration manipulates federal agencies and legal institutions to maintain power and suppress opposition.
• Governing Through Fear: Discussion on the administration’s tactics of extortion and coercion against universities and law firms, threatening vital research and legal practices to achieve political ends.

Notable Quotes:

Jonathan Alter (38:26): "Immunity breeds impunity. And that's why Trump has been worse than expected."

Jonathan Alter (44:53): "Extortion is what this administration does, and it needs to be resisted."

The Democratic Party’s Challenges and Optimism for the Future (46:47 – 50:34)

Concluding the episode, Al Franken and Alter examine the current state of the Democratic Party, acknowledging poor polling numbers but maintaining a strategic optimism based on historical midterm trends and the passion of Democratic voters. They advocate for sustained resistance against authoritarian policies and emphasize the importance of voter mobilization.

Key Points:

• Poll Analysis: Despite low party identification and poor polling, Democratic enthusiasm remains high among committed voters.
• Historical Trends: Drawing on historical midterm election outcomes, they posit that Democrats are likely to regain the House of Representatives despite setbacks.
• Call to Action: Encouraging Democrats to resist defeatist attitudes and actively participate in electoral processes to safeguard democracy.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Alter (49:55): "I'm optimistic about retaking the House."

Conclusion and Final Thoughts (50:34 – 50:51)

The episode wraps up with a reaffirmation of the discussed themes, emphasizing the precarious state of American democracy and the necessity for vigilant, collective action to prevent further erosion of democratic institutions.

Notable Quote:

Jonathan Alter (50:40): "There's nothing inevitable about the decline into autocracy."

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Note: This summary excludes all advertisement segments, non-content interactions, and out-of-context exchanges to focus solely on the substantive discussions between Al Franken and Jonathan Alter.

Transcript

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Jonathan Alter]

Hey everybody, we got a great one today. You know, for a change, journalist Jonathan Alter joins me. Best selling author, former columnist and editor of Newsweek and he has a terrific substack called Old Goats. Jonathan wrote a great piece for the Washington Monthly. America is now a police state on a horrible part of the big beautiful bill that didn't get as much attention as the other terrible parts like, you.

[Unknown]

Know, the Medicaid and SNAP cuts.

[Jonathan Alter]

But the $100 billion in new funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection is every bit as ugly. And Americans are just beginning to get an idea of how much we hate it because so much is going to rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants who have done nothing illegal other than coming here illegally or overstaying a visa and have lived here and worked and contributed.

[Unknown]

To our our country.

[Jonathan Alter]

And in fact there are even 500,000 plus Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came here legally under a program that allowed them to stay in the US Provided they had a financial sponsor and met certain other criteria. However, the program has been terminated and those people who broke no laws now face deportation. And before we go to Jonathan, just a word about President Trump and the tragic situation in Gaza. So the United States sent $60 million of food and Trump is a little miffed that no one thanked us.

[Unknown]

We gave 60 million. Nobody said even thank you. You know, thanks. Somebody should say thank you.

[Jonathan Alter]

So I'll Say it. Thank you.

[Unknown]

Thank you, Mr. President.

[Jonathan Alter]

And if you like to help feed those in Gaza who desperately, desperately need it, you can send a contribution to World Central Kitchen. They're on the ground in Gaza cooking hot food for people. That's World Central Kitchen. You can give to them [e-mail] and we'll have that link in the description of the podcast.

[Unknown]

So thank you. Okay.

[Jonathan Alter]

We'll be right back with Jonathan Alter. It's a great one.

[Unknown]

You know, for a change, I want.

[Jonathan Alter]

To talk about your article in Washington Monthly. America is now a police state.

[Unknown]

And it was a very strong piece. You know, most people, when they think of the big, beautiful bill, they think of tax cuts benefiting those at the top and taking away Medicaid and SNAP or food stamps for people at the bottom. And what's gotten lost is the consequences on immigration. And that's what you write about.

Yeah. So I don't want to in any way minimize the damage of the big ugly bill, which goes across the board. But I think the absolute worst part of a horrible piece of legislation is the $75 billion that were authorized for just for ice.

Yeah.

You know, that is a tremendous amount of money, even over a period of years. It's not 75 billion a year, but it's a huge, huge amount of money. And the basic problem is that if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you have this money, the first law of bureaucracy is you spend what you got, otherwise you won't get it appropriated the next year. So ICE and the Department of Homeland Security has a very, very strong incentive to go on a crash program to create what would be bigger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined and bigger than the armies of most of the nations in the world. And essentially, Stephen Miller's private army is what we're talking about here. And we can already see some of the abuses of masked ICE agents grabbing people off the streets.

This is before that funding. Of course.

This is before the funding kicks in. That's the thing to understand. And the reason I call it a police state, and I don't do that lightly, is that if you look at police states. And when I was writing this piece originally for my substack Old Goats.

Right.

Substack newsletter, and I came across a really interesting video from Ronan Farrow, who, as we all know, is a very smart guy, and he reviewed the history of authoritarian regimes and how their secret police, whatever their agencies are for repressing the people operate. And one thing that they all have in common. And this goes back to, you know, into the early 20th century and other countries, including Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, but all sorts of other repressive regimes. One thing that they all have in common is that the secret police are given arrest quotas because that's because the people in charge understand the way bureaucracy works. If you don't meet your quota, you're in trouble as a bureaucrat. Right. Tom Homan, who is the head of ICE, ICE, his initial quota was 3,000 arrests a day. A day. Now in some accounts, they're shooting higher for 7,000 arrests a day. So let's say you're like the regional head of ICE in the, you know, in the Midwest, and you're, you're only at 200 arrests and you're not meeting your part of the national quota. Right. You're going to put a lot of pressure on your people. Look, we're falling behind. We're not going to get promoted. We're not going to, you know, we could get fired. In the current climate, we've got to up the arrest rate. And when bureaucrats are told to do something, if, if their existence in the bureaucracy depends on it, they do it. Now, just very quickly, let's go to who's getting arrested, who's going to get arrested. So if you're working in one of John Thune's friends, farms, undocumented, you know, that ICE is not going to be coming for those guys. In fact, Trump was even hinting that some of the agricultural and hospitality workers, like, who work would be exempted. Right. Will be exempted. So those people might get amnesty. Whereas if you work cutting grass or cleaning homes or, you know, child care, you're not only, you're not getting amnesty, you're going to jail and a really bad jail. And meanwhile, some of these people have been in this country for 30 years. And, and they're facing what Homan describes as a legitimate choice, where he says, well, these people face a choice. They can either bring their American citizen children who've been born here with them back to whatever country.

They may not even send them back to the country they came from.

Exactly. And these are countries that, let's say they do go back to the country they came from, Guatemala, whatever. These dreamers who were born here, they're going to a country they've never been to, and the person who's being deported is going to a country where they haven't been for 30 years and don't know anybody. And they're saying, okay, if you don't want to bring your family. If you want to leave your American born kids here, that's your choice. But you're going back. First you're going to jail, then you're going back. If you have a traffic ticket, you.

Don'T have to have a traffic ticket. You don't have to have anything. If you're undocumented, they will deport you. They want to meet their quota. And most Americans are now against that.

Right, but that doesn't matter because his base wants it, his base still likes it. And even if they're pissed off about Jeffrey Epstein, they still like it. And Trump understands that you can do things that are extremely unpopular, but they solidify your base. So he has never cared whether things were broadly popular. He hasn't cared whether he's popular. You know, there are polls showing him in the high 30s or low 40s. Those are terrible numbers for a president. He doesn't care six months in terrible numbers.

There are people that they're deporting now who actually came here legally. And these are Nicaraguans and Haitians and Cubans and Venezuelans. The Haitians came here under Biden and.

[Jonathan Alter]

They were legal, they were vetted.

[Unknown]

These are people who were vetted. And there's about 500,000 of them that they rescinded their employment authorizations. And this means that 500,000 people are going to be deported who came here illegally.

Yeah. So it goes back to, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, even things that aren't nails, like people legally. Right. But the key thing is they're going to have a lot more hands to make these arrests.

So Americans, let's look at what Americans feel about immigration. Has changed, hasn't it? Since we've seen what it is.

Yes. I mean, people are not responding well to this. And there's hope in that. So people want a secure border. And Democrats didn't get the memo for years. You know, they, they wanted their voters to believe certain things and they didn't meet their voters, all voters, where they were, which is part of what happened to the Democratic Party. And for a long time now, the American people have been shouting as loud as they could. The Biden administration didn't listen, that they wanted secure borders. They do not want this. They do not want these roundups. And the polls are very, very clear on this. So the question is, what will the effect of that be? Since Trump isn't likely to back off, you know, he only backs off if Wall street hates it, like interfering with the Fed or Something like that. That's when he backs off. And this taco thing, Trump always chickens out. Not really. Look at the new tariffs. We have 50% on Brazil.

And that's because they're prosecuting Bolsonaro.

Yes, because it's personal with him. So this whole Trump always chickens out and not so much. I don't think he's going to chicken out on immigration, since it's the issue that brought him to prominence from the time he came down the escalator. But what I do think is going to happen, what is really encouraging news, is that Americans are resisting. So you're. You're getting the development of early warning systems where if somebody sees a bunch of ICE agents outside the Home Depot, everybody's got a smartphone now, even the undocumented workers, and they're going to get the word pretty quickly.

Don't show up.

Don't show up at Home Depot. I've actually talked a few weeks ago to some undocumented workers who were willing to trust me to have an honest conversation. So I got a little bit of a sense of both the fear level, but also they understand. For instance, don't open the door. If anybody knocks on your door, you find out who it is before you answer the door. Because ICE does not have search warrants unless there's an outstanding felony warrant.

But what does this do to your ability to work and your ability to live?

It makes it. It makes it way harder. One piece of advice that I heard for people who are having their yard work done by people who might be undocumented is leave your house unlocked if you're not home, but the guy who's cutting your grass is there cutting your grass when you're not home, leaving. Leave your home unlocked so that if he sees the cars start to come out, he can run inside your house. And if you're indoors, they can't arrest you without a search warrant.

Well, that seems like a solution to the whole problem.

No, it's not. But I'm saying, I know that you're being facetious, but, like, I think people think that if there's certain, like I thought you were talking about, like that and the early warning system, you can't solve the whole problem with resistance, but you can make, I think, more headway than people assume. So I was sensing in your little joke there a little bit of something that I'm very conscious of now and want to also resist, which is defeatist thinking. There's a lot of it inside the Democratic Party where people, if they're not Curled up in the fetal position. They're like, oh my God, there's nothing we can do. I'm working on my passport to go live in another country. No, I, like, have no patience for people who want to leave the United States. No, stay here, resist, fight this. Eventually we're going to get past this and it's going to be seen as one of the worst moments in American history. But there's nothing inevitable about the decline into autocracy. And I just want to give you a statistic that I think is really important for people to keep in mind. So, you know, I wrote this biography of Jimmy Carter, who, whose Human rights.

It was great. I read that and it was a great book.

You know, it did a lot for human rights around the world. At the time Carter was president, every nation in South America was a dictatorship except for one Venezuela. Today, every nation in South America is.

A democracy except Venezuela.

Venezuela. So things can change. Just because you're going down toward autocracy doesn't mean it's a straight line. What was the difference in all of these cases? And there were a lot of Asian countries that moved from dictatorship to democracy. What was the difference in almost every case it was people power. You know, a lot of folks go, it doesn't matter. We go out and demonstrate. It matters. It matters whether you get involved in warning people about Home Depot.

Well, no Kings was how many people?

5 million people. It was the largest one day protest in American history by a lot. You can say, well, that didn't do any good. That didn't stop Trump. That ignores the history of, of people power. No single demonstration ever does anything but a movement was developed. Five million people is a huge number. The difference is in the old days, like the march on Washington, you know, Martin Luther King, everybody would go to Washington. Now these are local demonstrations. So it doesn't have the same like immediate impact. But we also don't have a monoculture, old style legacy media anymore. So you're. But these protests got a lot of local coverage. And if even one fifth of the people who showed up for the no Kings protest, 1 million people show up in 2026 to get out the vote on election day. It will be the largest get out the vote operation in American political history. It will exceed Obama's 2008 ground game if just one fifth of the people show up to get out the vote on election day.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back with Jonathan Alder. You know what doesn't belong in your.

[Jonathan Alter]

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[Unknown]

Since we're talking about, we talked about the big beautiful bill and what that did in terms of immigration. I want to talk a little bit about the environmental impact of, of that bill. You know, in Biden's inflation reduction act, the IRA, there was almost $400 billion put aside for climate. This bill actually attacks a lot of that does and especially on like wind and solar. Those were investments that they've taken back.

Yeah, so. And it's very depressing and disturbing and terrible for the planet. But I'm, I'm trying to, in the same way I talked about, you know, apps that tell you whether ICE is going to Home Depot. I'm trying to look at reasons for, if not hope, certainly not optimism, but if not hope, a sense that it might not be quite as bad as we fear. And here's where I'm finding it. So in the last few weeks I tried to look into solar for my home because these Biden tax credits are expiring at the end of the year instead of lasting for 10 years. It's one of the effects of the big ugly bill. So I said, I'll look for solar now. It turns out I have too much shade in my yard. I can't do it right. But I went through the whole process. I wanted to see whether it worked for my house. And I would say to these solar guys, so are you going to be out of business next year because of the big ugly bill? And they explained to me that, yes, there will be some solar companies that will go out of business, but a large number of other ones will not. And they, because the economy was already in this transition. And I talked to another guy who runs a large energy company and I said, okay, you're not going to get these credits for wind. They have a lot of wind in Texas, a lot of wind energy that they use there. In fact, there's more wind energy that comes out of Texas than from oil. And I said, so does this kill wind energy in Texas? And he goes, no, no way. We're not. You think that we're going to like, put some of it on the back burner, but do you think that we're going to like, stop all of our, our wind energy investments? Because three and a half years from now, the Democrats could be back and, you know, these credits could be restored. So we have to hunker down, survive this terrible time for the environment and for energy and, you know, get through it. And they, they had a big problem during COVID because, you know, energy use was so much different because companies weren't, you know, at work. So these recipients of some of these Biden tax credits and other ways of addressing climate change, they have certain abilities to hunker down. I'm not trying to gild the lily here and say that it's all going to be okay or that this isn't bad because it's really bad, but there's also ways of making it less bad than we fear.

Well, talking about really bad, let's transition to Gaza. So let me hear you put a bright spot on that. Trump gave, we gave. The United States gave $60 million worth of famine relief to Gaza. He complained because he said, no one thanked me. Yeah, no one thanked us.

It's the Zelensky model, right?

[Ryan Seacrest]

Right.

[Unknown]

So like a six year old in Gaza should have, you know, gone to a TV studio and thanked President Trump. That might have helped.

Now, Netanyahu denied until a few days ago actually that there was a famine in Gaza and Israel had cut off food aid for 60 days. Yeah, for that, you know, I blame, I blame Israel.

Yes, this, this is on Israel. I have an interview that's coming out on Old Goats on my substack newsletter in a day or two with somebody from the World Food Program with a lot of the specifics. But yes, this, this is very much Israel's fault. There's a lot of opposition to the Netanyahu policy on humanitarian aid within Israel. So people shouldn't assume that, like most of Israel agrees with using food as a weapon of war, but they're in the grips of a far right wing, immoral government. But it's also important to understand that this doesn't even begin to excuse the inhumanity of their policy. I didn't understand why right after, you know, in October, November of 2023, they didn't open up humanitarian corridors so that the wounded could be evacuated from Gaza to hospitals in Israel and gotten the Egyptians to allow them to be evacuated to Egyptian hospitals, which you never heard anything about Egypt's obstruction of this. But I just couldn't believe that Israel was acting in this fashion going back a couple of years. But it is important to understand that when they say that a certain amount of this food is stolen by Hamas and taken into the tunnel to feed militants instead of children, this is not something that you hear in the American debate, which tends to say to be, sure, Hamas is bad, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah about Israel. And they don't really oftentimes reckon with the depravity of Hamas, which not only steals food to give to militants, but won't let civilians take refuge from Israeli bombs in those 300 miles of tunnels. It's the first time in the history of modern warfare that a government has not taken measures to protect civilians from being killed. And they have all these tunnels where at least some of the time the civilians could have hid out and protected themselves from the Israeli bombs. And of course, they didn't let them do so because they want them to die on some level for propaganda purposes. So you have really, really horrible moral decisions that are being made on both sides of this intractable disaster.

Well, let's get to something that's a little bit better news. The new Texas maps. The Texas has created five new Republican House seats and they're redistricting.

Yep.

And it kind of calls the question whether Democratic states should do the same thing.

It does. And I have to admit to you, well, first of all, there will be.

Court challenges, but the Supreme Court ruled a long time ago that they will not overturn gerrymandering. That is partisan. They do racial gerrymandering, but not partisan gerrymandering.

Right. So the Democrats are getting set to argue that this is racial gerrymandering and know whether they're going to be able to make that argument. The initial indications are that the maps were drawn so cleverly that it'll be a hard argument for the Democrats to make. But that that's still a little bit unclear. It's likely that they'll get these five seats, Democrats, including people like Eric Holder, who have been arguing for ending gerrymandering. That's basically what he's been doing. And the year since he was attorney general, they are now saying, look, this is a crisis of democracy and we need to extract as many new Democratic seats with gerrymandering as possible. And I get that. I think it should be matched with some kind of agreement that the whole country will move toward some sort of commission style way of determining congressional district.

But Republicans won't agree to that. Their whole thing is manipulating the elections to win.

I know it's bad and the likelihood is that Republicans will get some new seats. But here's the thing people need to keep in mind. And this is not Pollyannish, it's history. Okay, so in the last hundred, I think it's the last 150 years, the first midterms in a new administration have gone against the party that holds the White House every time except three. 1934, when Franklin Roosevelt was coming off this enormously successful first hundred days and the Democrats were just trouncing everything. 1962, two weeks after Kennedy was able to resolve the Cuban missile crisis peacefully, voters went to the polls and they did not punish Democrats. And 2002, right after 9, 11, every other midterm, the party that is out of power picks up not one or two seats, but like 10, 15, 20 seats and all. And especially when the incumbent is not popular and Trump is not popular and he's not going to be on the ballot. So a lot of people in his base are not going to show up.

I mean, how much of that is Epstein now?

We don't know how much of an impact. It depends. Are there Epstein revelations right before the election? A lot of depends on what happens a year from this fall, you know, in terms of what the margin is for Democrats. But just in terms of the physics of American politics, the odds strongly favor the Democrats taking the House of Representatives. And that should be some comfort to Democrats as we look at losing these five seats in Texas.

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Well, speaking of of the Epstein thing, you spoke to Michael Wolf.

Yes.

Who has a hundred hours of tape recordings. He interviewed Epstein and got it on tape.

Yep, 100 hours. Quite a bit of that is about Trump. And I went from as I explained in Old Goats, I had a long feud with Michael Wolff that I won't bore you about, but we made up and he apologized and I actually, after having covered the Trump felony trial last year in Manhattan.

You were there every day?

I was there every day. I wrote a book about it called American Reckoning. It's also got a lot of other anti Trump stuff in it and a little bit of a memoir. But I got to know Michael much better at that trial and time after time he would tell me something that his Trump sources told him and it would turn out to be right. So I think the people who. A lot of people don't trust him. I completely understand that because to tell you the truth, I don't fully trust him either given what happened between us. But I don't think he's a pipe artist.

A pipe artist, that means some.

A journalist who makes stuff up. Right.

Okay, so.

And he actually, before the election last fall, it didn't get very much attention, but he played part an excerpt from the tape where Epstein says, Donald Trump was my best friend for 10 years. Everybody's heard that. Right. So it didn't get that much attention last fall. But, you know, there's, there's a lot in these tapes. And you understand why Trump and Epstein had their falling out and how Trump clearly knew what was going on at Epstein's place long before he dropped a dime on him. I mean, one of the ironic things is it was Trump who was so mad at Epstein for exposing Trump's role in Russian money laundering in this real estate deal, that when their relationship fell apart, it was Trump who dropped a dime on Epstein. And when he was arrested for the first time, you know, 20 years ago.

That suggests that he knew what was going on.

And Trump is now claiming, just the other day he said, well, you know, I didn't like that he stole employees from Mar A Lago.

Right.

But it was four years after that before he dropped a dime on him. It wasn't until 2004, I think. So clearly Trump had some idea of what was going on. He spent so much time with Epstein that even if he didn't have a taste for underage girls, which, by the way, is not established. I mean, you know about the Jane Doe case and Lisa Bloom, who's Gloria Allred's daughter, who's a, an attorney, and she was the attorney for Jane Doe. You know, she filed a criminal complaint against Trump with a lot of specifics about how they had had sex when she was underage. You can read it, her lawsuit. But then she dropped it. And Gloria Allred in 2015 or 16, and Gloria Allred said, you know, she's afraid she's not going to come forward. This is the last you're going to hear about this case. She's not suing Trump. She's not pursuing a criminal complaint. She's not doing anything. And it became a relatively brief story. But if you Google it, you can read some very, very, very explicit descriptions of what Trump allegedly, allegedly did to this underage woman.

Well, let's talk about Trump as an autocrat. You did on your substack on old goats, you do this thing called Then and Now, right?

Yeah. Julian Zelizer, this brilliant Princeton professor, he and I, every Friday, we do a five minute conversation we call Then and Now, where we try to put current news stories into historical context.

And one interesting one you did was comparing the CBS firing the Smothers Brothers with them ending the Colbert light show.

Yeah.

You said something interesting, which that Trump was, is a lot worse than Nixon.

Yeah. So first, some of the really interesting parallels. So, you know, I hadn't really remembered that when the Smothers Brothers were canceled in 1969 for talking too much about the Vietnam War, about racism, Remember they.

Had Pete Seeger on.

Yeah, they had him on a lot. That's the kind of guest that they would have. And so William Paley, the founder of CBS, he founded it in the 1920s. I won't tell the story, but he liked something that I wrote in Newsweek in 1986 and he had me over to lunch, one on one. BlackRock so I actually knew Paley when he was an old man. But he bent the knee in 1969. He didn't want to piss off Nixon. The FCC, in the same way right now is operating on behalf of Trump. It was operating on behalf of Nixon and. And Paley had these broadcast licenses that he needed approved, the owned and operated stations at the fcc. So he bent the knee to Nixon and he threw the Smothers Brothers under the bus. And that sounded very familiar to me, that an FCC matter, which is what was at issue here, where Sherry Redstone wanted her merger approved and she offered up Colbert's head on a platter. So there are these comparable situations, but Nixon, as bad as he was, and he also corrupted the IRS and other federal agents, the FBI, the Justice Department. There's a lot of echoes, but he didn't mount as consistent an effort, an assault on the rule of law as Trump is doing. And there was Democratic Congress to check Nixon in certain areas. In other areas, he operated secretly and they couldn't check him. But Trump is worse. They both believe if a president does it, it's not illegal. As Nixon told David Frost, well, the.

Supreme Court sort of made actually ruled in that way for him, for Trump.

Al, this is the key thing that people need to understand why we are where we are. That last year around this time, the Supreme Court granted the President immunity for anything connected to their official duties. So immunity breeds impunity. And that's why Trump has been worse than expected, is he feels completely unencumbered by anything because he thinks he can break the law, violate his oath of office, to uphold the law, and he will suffer no consequences. And what is depressing Democrats is that so far he's been right about that. The challenge is to not assume that just because he's gotten away with it so far, that we should all just wring our hands and go and get passports or decide that we're not going to be involved in resisting him. And we can.

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Let's point out some of the ways in which Trump has been worse than we may have expected, like going after the universities. Where'd that idea come from?

Well, that also has its, its origins, you know, in the Nixon administration where Nixon would rage on the tapes against Harvard even though he had all these Harvard men in his cabinet. You know, Joe McCarthy called Harvard the Kremlin on the Charles. So this, this. And they hauled a couple of Harvard professors before McCarthy's committee and harassed them because they wouldn't, you know, name names. So in the red scare, we saw some of this assault on institutions of higher education. The difference is nobody, I mean, look in, in American Reckoning, like, I do predict a lot of this stuff because I read Project 2025 and I knew that they were going to do a lot of this. But even I, last year when I was writing this book, didn't imagine they would hold cancer research hostage. Their agenda, that they would throw cancer.

Researchers, and this is at Harvard and Columbia, right all over the place.

Johns Hopkins, they have like an $800 million shortfall. And all the incredible medical research that they do, the cruelty of this, the, the number of people they are condemning to death by, by cutting off this research or using it for extortion purposes is just mind blowing. It's like when you see a cartoon villain and you can't believe the next unbelievably evil thing that they do. It just surprises you.

Harvard now says that it will give them $500 million. Is that right? Is that.

Well, that's not like, official the way the Columbia $200 million settlement is official. Brown just settled for 50 million.

But this is just a shakedown, Ben.

It's a total shakedown. But it's the same thing with the law firms. Extortion is what this administration does and it needs to be resisted. But you can understand why the college presidents are not in a position to resist because you have people's, not just the livelihoods of these cancer researchers, but the lives of cancer patients that are on the line. As a cancer survivor, like, I get the dilemma that these college Presidents are in. And also some of these colleges gave Trump ammunition by not doing enough to crack down on anti Semitism, particularly Columbia. But you could argue the same is true of Harvard. So while anti Semitism is a pretext now for Trump's extortion shakedown, there was an actual problem. And if you look at the Columbia settlement, a lot of it, if you look in the details, a lot of it is what a very rational common sense internal Columbia report task force on anti Semitism recommended like no bullhorns in classrooms and like suspend people if they take over administration when the building, like common sense stuff that these colleges should have done a long time ago. And so some of that is in the settlement. But, but the, the basic idea of holding what is not just the foundation of, of keeping us healthy, but are, you know, if you look at like the Research Triangle or, or you know, what's happened in, in New England around campuses and, or Silicon Valley, its connection to campuses in California. These campuses are the engine of our productivity and our technological prowess. And to say that they're the enemy, Higher ed is the enemy because starting with what happened in 1959, the federal government started funding all this research on campus that because of that you're going to use that thing that created all this prosperity, that alliance between higher ed and the federal government is the source of our economic success over the last 80 years. And that you're going to take that and like a mafia boss, use it as a source of extortion is just so appalling. And same thing with the law firms.

The law firms are doing better than the universities because law firms are law firms and Harvard takes foreign students.

And yeah, they're not doing cancer research. So the law firms that have capitulated, I have contempt for Paul Weiss and these other law firms.

Paul Weiss went first.

And fortunately there is a little justice here because they used to get the cream of the crop from the law review. No more. Paul Weiss is getting second rate applications now and it serves them right. A really smart first year law student at Georgetown did a matrix of all of the law firms and whether they bent the knee. And so now every law student has that and they're flooding the ones that are resisting with applications. And there's, you're saying fuck you to the ones that bent the knee. And that's the way it should be. You can't do that with the universities. Cause they had people's lives that were at stake. By the way, just one other thing on the big ugly bill, it's gonna cost lots of people their lives because.

Of the Medicaid cuts.

Yes, because what happens is if you're not on Medicaid, when you're not feeling.

Well, you don't have a doctor to.

Go to or you don't have preventive care. And so by the time you get into the system where they have to give you a bed in the hospital, it's too late. You're going to be dead of your cancer.

You have to go to the emergency room for any care.

Right. So we know that there's going to be thousands of lives that will be lost because of this bill. And as we know from the senator from Iowa, Joni Ernst, she doesn't care. In a moment of candor, she reflected.

What they all think like everybody dies. Right.

That gives you a sense of the so called heart and soul of the Republican Party.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Unknown]

When the news cycle gets busy, it can be tough to keep up with healthy habits. Thrive Market makes it easy to get high quality groceries delivered right to your door so you can focus on what matters. They carry trusted brands like Rouse and Chomps and every product is free from over 1000 stores. Sketchy ingredients With Thrive Market, you can restock your pantry with clean snacks and staples, all without leaving the couch. Go to thrivemarket.com podcast and get 30% off your first order and a free $60 gift.

Well, let's talk about the Democratic Party and the state of it. The party's polling numbers are as bad as as Trump's.

They're really bad.

So you have this confidence that the midterms will go according to history.

Yeah, and I'll tell you why. So if you look into what they call the internals of these polls, you find party ID with Democrats is really bad right now. It's as low as it's been in a very long time. But among Democrats, people who still describe themselves as Democrats, and by the way, the people who identify themselves as in either party associating with the party are the ones who dominate midterm elections, a lot of the independents don't show up.

Sure.

So among the people who describe themselves as Democrats and describe themselves as Republicans, there's a huge, I mean huge, like more than 20 point enthusiasm gap that favors the Democrats. Now you go, well, how about all the Trump voters? Well, they don't vote for Trump if he's not on the ballot. So the turnout is much lower in midterms. So in presidential years, about 160 million Americans cast ballots. In midterms, about 80 to 90 million cast ballots. So you're talking about a very different universe of voters. And enthusiasm becomes enormously important. Important. And when you marry that enthusiasm that Democrats have to get the House of Representatives back, they're not likely to get the Senate back, but the House back. When you marry that enthusiasm and that passion that Democrats feel with the physics of presidential elections that I was describing earlier of midterm elections, you have a very good outlook for Democrats, even if party ideas down.

So you're optimistic.

I am optimistic about retaking the House, yes. I'm not optimistic about surviving Trump without huge damage to our country. I'm not Pollyannish about anything. But on the narrow electoral question of even if you give them five seats in Texas so they have a nine seat advantage, optimistic about the Democrats carrying, you know, taking 15 to 20 seats in an anti Trump.

Yeah, it's a long way off.

It's a long way off. A lot can happen. I might not be optimistic, you know, closer to the election because shit happens.

Shit happens. And we went over a lot of, of today. We did, yeah. Thank you for doing that.

Yep, yep. I'll try to take a shower.

Well, I, I hope you enjoyed listening.

[Jonathan Alter]

That beautiful music is by Leo Kotke.

[Unknown]

The great Leo Kotke. I want to thank Peter Ogburn for producing this podcast. We'll talk again next sa.