Transcript
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Today on the show, is the coup happening in slow motion? Congress is paralyzed. Trump is governing by decree. He's deploying troops, firing workers, spending taxpayer money with no authorization. We're going to talk about whether this is the coup rather than something we're waiting for. Donald Trump also has confirmed he received an MRI at Walter Reed, raising immediate questions. Why would someone in perfect health need an mri? We haven't been told. And the lack of transparency simply will not stop. Plus, what about the vaccine schedule? New recommendations emanating from people who have no idea about hepatitis, about chickenpox vaccines, dangerous medical advice being given by people who have no business giving it. And a CBS reporter stunned Donald Trump's treasury secretary with basic facts about grocery prices, of egg prices and more. And we will see a Border Patrol commander now facing a judge for allegedly violating court orders. We'll look at new midterm polling data. And finally, my follow up with Nathan Taylor from the Election Truth Alliance. What is my verdict about his claims? Finally, there is a campaign to hurt the podcast by leaving one star reviews on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I am asking you today with peace and love, leave us a rating, five stars on Apple podcasts and on Spotify. It's free, it costs nothing and it'll really help us. Just leave us a five star review. Spotify, Apple podcasts. I appreciate it. Onto the show. Finally, is Donald Trump's coup happening right now? What if we are living through the coup right now and nobody realizes it because the best evidence that Donald Trump would attempt a coup is that he already did? Think back to January 6, which was not a one off tantrum. It was really an organized attempt to stay in power after losing an election. It failed, but Donald Trump certainly learned from it. And so there's like a fun fact that isn't so fun. Studies show that the biggest predictor of doing a coup is having attempted a coup in the past. If you've done it before, you're more likely to try it again, especially if you didn't really face any consequences. And I think it's important for us to look honestly at what's happening today in 2025 and say, is there the possibility of a coup attempt sometime in the distant future over the horizon of our spherical Earth? Or could it be happening right now? You have a government that is officially shut down. Congress isn't passing laws, they're not swearing in. Adelita Grijalva. The Senate can't move anything. The House is barely functional. And somehow Donald Trump is still governing by decree. We're hearing talks about troops in Venezuela move, which under the Constitution, requires authorization from Congress, which obviously Donald Trump is not going to seek. We are seeing attempts at mass firings and layoffs of federal workers, tens of thousands, some reportedly escorted out without any kind of due process or proper termination, even though civil service laws are supposed to prevent political purges from federal employment. And while Congress is locked out, the Trump administration is spending taxpayer money like it's monopoly cash. Hundreds of millions of dollars for Kristi Noem's new private jets and executive orders rerouting agency budgets. We've got demolition happening at the White House that would normally need all sorts of approvals, never mind congressional approval. And the legal problem is the following. Congress holds the purse strings. Congress declares war. Congress oversees the executive branch. This is basic civics. But if Congress is paralyzed and Trump just keeps acting anyway, he is effectively ruling without checks or balances. That is arguably a form of a couple. Now, Trump's defense and the people around him's defenses are always the same. If Democrats would just reopen the government, then okay. And it sort of is the perfect setup, kind of the perfect foil. You create chaos, and then you say, things are so chaotic, I have to ignore the rules. And that is what makes all of this feel less like dysfunction and more like a strategy. Congress shut down. And so Trump has eliminated one, really, the major legislative body that could stop a lot of what he's doing. It's like a loophole. If no one else can act, the president just acts, and then the president is acting alone. And the country and legacy in corporate media, Republicans, certainly, everyone's mostly shrugging. This is not a coup with tanks in the streets. It's a paperwork couple of sorts. It's bureaucratic. It's. It's almost boring, until suddenly you realize, wait a second, the rule of law is gone. What do we do now? And this is how complacency can be such a dangerous thing. A new norm is broken, and then people adjust. They go, that's weird. But I guess, like, this is the way we do politics now. We've had 10 years of that to the point where we now have an administration denying people due process, not seeking authorization for military action. It's a very, very long list. And so we go from unprecedented to, it's kind of normal now, even though it really shouldn't be. And if you look at how democracies in the past have stopped being Democratic, it's rarely like a single dramatic moment where everyone goes. It's no longer a Democracy. It's these. It's a death of a thousand cuts, these little technical violations that get bigger and bigger and bigger. And this is how other countries have lost their democracies. Hungary did not collapse overnight. Erdogan didn't seize Turkey in a day. They chipped away at systems until there was nothing left to protect. And Trump is applying the same model, whether he knows it or not, with sort of better branding, red hats and Make America Great Again. And I know what you're suffering from, and only I can fix it. So I think we have to be open to the possibility that this is the coup. It's not a wild, violent one like we would have expected based on what happened on January 6th of 2021. It's a procedural coup. It's a paperwork coup. It's a quiet coup. And that may be the coup that works precisely because nobody recognizes it as a coup while it is happening. So we have sort of been asking, in a sense, the wrong question. We've been asking a lot of questions. But one of the questions that maybe is wrong or maybe misdirected is, is Trump going to try another January 6th? It kind of doesn't really seem like Trump needs another January six because he's figured out how he can do it slowly and in plain sight, a little ignoring of a court order here or whatever. And when people finally realize it, it won't be the start of the coup, it might be the end. And that should terrify every single one of us. What can you do? Stay engaged, obviously. Vote. Talk to people in your communities about what's going on. Get involved, either by running for a position or by doing media and content, making sure that if the time comes for the mass rallies and the protests, you're prepared, you're engaged, you know how far you're willing to go. We don't want to end up in a situation where we say, whoops, we missed the coup, and now we're at the end of it and they've completely taken irreversible control. That would be very, very bad. All right, I've got video of a reporter from CBS has Face the Nation playing the both sides game with Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. This is, you could say that this is the Bari Weiss effect, even though she hasn't yet really dug in at cbs. But they are now pretending that Trump isn't the only one who has tried to steal elections. Now, I'm going to play for you this line of questioning from Margaret Brennan on cbs. And I want to make it Clear. We are not like, oh, my goodness, Hakeem Jeffries is just so awesome and he's the perfect leader. We have been very critical on this show of Hakeem Jeffries, but in this particular instance, Jeffries is in the right and Margaret Brennan is desperately trying to do the both sides game when there is no both sides game to play.