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The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers
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who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations,
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from unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails. Amazon Music's got the most ad free Top podcasts included with prime because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today.
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It's Thursday, March 13, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and you know what I don't have as the host of a podcast and a guy who engages in media criticism? I don't have 11 active Navy aircraft carriers. I don't have F35 Lightning 2 or B2 Spirit stealth bombers. I don't have those things at my disposal. Pete Hegseth does. But it seems that what Pete Hegseth wants to do is not use those things to advance America's agenda, but to do what I do engage in media criticism from time to time. So early on, a couple days after the war in Iran started, he said to the media outlets and political left screaming, endless wars. Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. He later said subsequent news conference I think it's worth underscoring. I see in the media banners that say war expanding or War spread. It's actually the opposite. It's actually quite contained. Today he had some more advice or criticism of the media.
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Yet some in this crew in the press just can't stop. Allow me to make a few suggestions. People look up at the TV and they see banners, they see headlines. I used to be in that business and I know that everything is written intentionally. For example, a banner or a headline Mideast War Intensifies. Splashing on the screen the last couple of days alongside visuals of civilian or energy targets that Iran has hit. Because that's what they do. What should the banner read instead? How about Iran? Increasingly desperate because they are.
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So to Pete Hegseth, I say stop, not stop with your F35s or your GBU 57 bunker busters. Don't know how many they've used, but a few. I say don't worry about the media. You can convey media criticism by just presenting the facts rather than you using the words fake news or fighting with the people who come to photograph you. And if the angles aren't to your liking, banning them, which actually happened. Fight the actual war against a radical Islamic state that is using jihad drones to slam into the sides of US Installations and our allies and occasionally killing US Service members. Your war is not with those people in front of you scrolling into their notepads or clicking their cameras. On the show today we have an excellent well, I will actually do a spiel. I'll throw a spiel your way. It's been a while and I have some things I want to say about Trump's failed attempts to get people he wants as his US Attorneys rather than people who can be confirmed as as U.S. attorneys. But first, the Oscars are Sunday and I have a double nominee on the show today. Gita Ganbier has directed the documentary nominee the Perfect Neighbor. She is also nominated for her truly excellent short the Devil Is Busy. We'll have a full interview on the Perfect Neighbor, which is on Netflix. Devil is Busy, you can see on hbo or what's it called, Max Now Pesca plus subscribers will get that Gita Ganpir up next. Winter job sites do not mess around and March is winter and the snow is on the ground here in the northeast. Freezing mornings, wet conditions and the wind. Oh the wind. So that's why I wear True Work whenever I'm out shoveling or doing what I need to do in these terrible conditions. Founded by a trade for professional who is done with soaking wet heavy gear slowing them down, True Work set out to make workwear that keeps pros comfortable and they succeeded. And they keep me a decidedly non pro. But a guy who has to shovel a lot this winter keeps me comfortable too. So you know brands like Carhartt and Dickies. They are cotton based gear that gets heavy when wet. Not True Work. Advanced performance fabrics that really wear work moisture Wicking. Oh the wicking. Wind resistant and insulated. Every piece is tested on real job sites. Don't let cheap gear slow you down this winter. Upgrade your day with workwear built like it matters. Get 15% off your first order@truework.com with the code. The gist, that's T R u e w E-R-K.com ED can be really distressful. All these are distressful. It's right there in the word dysfunction. But with the E it's especially so. But I want you to know that ED is more common than you think and simpler to treat than you think. Through hims, you can connect online with a licensed provider to access personalized treatment options discreetly and on your terms. It's not a one size fits all care that forgets you in the waiting room. It's your health with real medical providers making sure you get what you need to get results. ED Treatment from hims Offering options ranging from personalized products to trusted generics that cost 95% less than brand names. To get simple online access to personalized affordable care for ed, hair loss, weight loss and more, visit hims.com the Gist that's hims.com the Gist for your free online visit, visit hims.com the gist Feature products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan. The Gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers
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who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
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The film the Perfect Neighbor, which is one of the best documentaries I've seen in a long, long time, examines a conflict between neighbors, though not neighborly neighbors. The woman who describes herself by the title phrase actually winds up gunning down her neighbor A.J. owens in a case that tested stand your ground laws and is told quite brilliantly through body cam footage, through ring doorbell footage, through dashcam footage. The director of this is Geeta Ganbier, and we had booked her on the show a couple of weeks ago because I was so excited to talk to the director of this film. And then I found out she was not just nominated for best Documentary feature for Perfect Neighbor, but also best Documentary Short. The Devil is busy. We'll talk about both. Geeta, welcome to the gist.
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E
Thank you so much for having me.
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A
So congratulations. Good year. Lots of nominations.
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E
Yes. This is apparently this is a first for women. Apparently I'm the first woman to be nominated as a director in two different categories for two different films.
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A
Oh, so not even the first for nonfiction? First period. Like short.
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B
Yeah, that's amazing.
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A
So. And luckily it's not both in the same category, so you could count. You won't cannibalize yourself or maybe I don't know.
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E
That would be possible. Right.
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A
Right. So this documentary, Perfect Neighbor, you had a personal connection to it and you I want you to tell the story, but you knew about it as a tragic event that happened before you considered it as a potential documentary, Is that right?
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E
Correct. So the this is one of those stories that came. Found us. Sometimes as a documentary filmmaker, you go looking, and sometimes the story finds you. And the way that it came to us was because Ajika Owens was a family friend, meaning she was my sister in law's best friend. And when I say sister in law, she's actually my cousin in law. But we don't have a cultural term for that. We just say sister in law.
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A
Okay.
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E
We are very close, like, you know, so that. But so my. The night that Ajika was murdered, we got a distress call from my family that lives in Florida. And they were, you know, again, they were just trying to figure out how to get Ajika's mother to Florida. And they had, you know, my sister in law had the children. And so we very quickly were on the ground trying to support, but really we became tasked with being a media liaison for the family. And when I say we, I'm referring to my husband, Nikan Kwantu, who's also a producer on this project, and my team at Message Pictures, which is my company, and that's my producing partners, Elisa Payne and Sam Pollard. We found that the story was not being covered by the national media. And, you know, with gun violence in this country, it's so common that to get real national media attention, you have to fight. And Susan Lawrence, the perpetrator, was not arrested immediately because there was a stand your ground investigation. So there was a lot of concern that, again, we have the precursor of Trayvon Martin in Florida, where George Zimmerman, the perpetrator, walked using stand you'd ground laws after stalking Trayvon and beginning an altercation with him. We were concerned, and we were. So we were able to. We filmed some things like the protest. There was a protest vigil and the funeral to share with the media. We were able to get the family on the view. They were very. Again, that was incredible. And Susan was eventually arrested. And then two months later, the body camera footage came to my team through the family lawyers, Benjamin Crump and Anthony Thomas. And they sent us a bunch of files. And they had used the Freedom of Information act to get all the police evidence from the sheriff's department in Marion County. And they were like, can you look through this? There's a ton of it. It was about 30 hours, which is very unusual with the crime. Usually it's maybe a couple hours when the police arrive on scene after the crime.
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A
Right. But with this, there was so much backstory with tensions between the neighbor and the murderer that they had all this tape.
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E
That's right. So I strung it out into. I used to be an editor. I strung it out into a timeline. Took me about two weeks and sunk it up and figured out the chronology of it. And when we watched it down, I was like, I can make a movie out of. I could make something out of this. There is a film here. And we could get this story out, you know, again, as a cautionary tale, maybe try to make change in Ajika's name. You know, we wanted more for her for this. You know, we wanted to put pain to purpose with this loss. And then we wanted for her death to be. To mean more than, you know, for her to just be like another victim of gun violence.
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A
So when you went down there as a media liaison tapping you because you have at least some expertise or the people close to the family thought of you as someone who maybe would be able to. And indeed you were, get some video images out, were you thinking, you must think as a documentarian, you must think in terms of story. Then, of course, there is the sensitivity. You're not going to do anything that the family doesn't want. But were you thinking of it? And when you were filming, were you conceiving there might be some sort of nonfiction use for this down the road?
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E
Yes, yes. You know, you always think that, like, okay, we're going to send this to the news, but maybe we can make a short out of it. But to be honest, I wasn't. I didn't see a pathway that wasn't something that we didn't already. I mean, that we didn't. Haven't already seen, unfortunately.
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A
Right.
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E
I mean, you didn't.
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A
Sorry to interrupt because you didn't know. You knew about the backstory, but it would be hard, you were probably thinking, to compellingly document the backstory before you had that body cam stuff.
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E
How do you recreate that? And also, it just seems. It's just like, here's another tragedy, here's another. And we have seen it on repeat in this country. The grieving family, you know, the aftermath, the app. Like, I didn't know that that would move the needle as far as making an impact. Right. Like, when I think about, like, why. Why would we make a film about this? What is the purpose? And also, I didn't want to re. Traumatize the family by, like, sitting them down for interviews and having a camera on their faces in the worst moment of their lives as far as, you know, the year after, because it would take that long. That was not appealing to me, you know, But I think with what was so compelling about Making something out of the body camera footage is it didn't require that. I didn't want to go back and re. Traumatize the community. And I using the material that we had, you know, we had detective interviews, so we didn't need to go back and make the community relive it.
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A
And so just to orient my audience, there is hours, as you say, of body cam footage. And also. And you could fill us in on how you got the ring doorbell footage is ubiquitous in America. Some dash cam footage where it shows an escalation and you get the character of all the people involved and you see this woman, Susan, I think for what she is and what she wound up being. And this is the central tension of the movie, wasn't a who done it, but will they be held accountable? And when you have that. So this is what my. My audience should know and everyone should see the movie. You see it ratcheting up and ratcheting it up and you get this pit in your stomach that you know is going to come to a horrible fru. Because we know it's a tragic story. But when that is presented to you, I suppose you say something along the lines of, before we had a cause, which is to think about this stand your ground law. We had a compelling and tragic figure, which is your friend AJ but maybe you weren't exactly sure you had a story. And here through your work and going through the footage, you realize this is actually a story. This fits the beats of a story.
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E
Yeah, I think too there were things in there that I had not would have been impossible for us to capture in the aftermath. You see that police. It was unintentional, but they captured this beautiful multiracial, intergenerational community as they were before. Like truly as they were before. And you get to witness them living together, kind of loving each other. This strong social network, raising kids. Kids together. It's kind of the American dream. They're the best of us. It's this working class community where the kids play freely in the streets. You know, in or in the street, they are supervised. The adults engage with them, play football with them. The neighbor whose yard the children played on allowed them to be there. Right. And it was just. And the kids. That neighborhood was so compelling. And then you see how this one outlier with a gun who kind of manifested all the ills that plague our society today and that come from the top down. She weaponized racism. There was manufactured fear involved in this. She was constantly was claiming fear, which is, as we know, a tool. It's used as a power tool, and particularly when it comes to race and issues that deal with racial biased. She tried to weaponize the police and didn't quite succeed, but managed to weaponize her privilege. So the police treated her like a client, and they come to the scene with their own biases. They treat her like a client and don't see the community as needing protection from her, really, even though she was a threat. And then she also had access to guns, easy access to guns, because in Florida, you can buy a gun like you can buy a toaster oven or a microwave. And then she was emboldened by stand your ground laws, which essentially, you know, tell people that they have the right to use deadly force with no duty to retreat if they feel it can be a perceived threat, that their life is in danger. And, you know, again, how do you. It is impossible not to bring your biases to a situation like that, you know, to any situation where. Because what is a. You know, again, what. What someone deems a threat is steeped in their biases. Right.
- [18:13]
A
And she. And she shoots your friend, AJ Shoots and kills her through a closed door and then tries to. Or talks to the police and emphasizes her fear. I think she's savvy. She has some savvy. And she was trying to, as best she could in that moment, establish a stand your ground defense. And then the question is, what would happen? Now, that was a question for you. So help me with the timeline. When you got the body cam footage, had the trial taken place yet?
- [18:46]
E
No. No.
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A
Okay.
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E
It was only two months after Susan was arrested.
- [18:50]
A
So you string together this whole backstory, and then you're reporting on or documenting the hinge of the dramatic turn of the story as it happens.
- [19:01]
E
Yes. Correct. So Susan was in prison at that time. She had been arrested. So she was awaiting trial when we got the footage. So the ring camera footage, everything you see was included, except for the things that we shot, which were the funeral. We shot the funeral. We shot some of the protests, the vigilant, and the B roll. There was B roll, like drone camera footage and some B roll of the neighborhood that we needed, essentially, because we used the detective interviews, which were audio only. You know, we needed something to give texture and to cover that material. So that's why we shot footage of the neighborhood. We also wanted people to have a sense of place, you know, and where this was. Right.
- [19:48]
A
You had to orient everyone. Of course.
- [19:49]
E
Yes. But essentially, the trial happened right around the time that we were submitting to the Sundance Film festival. So in 2024, we submitted to the Sundance Film Festival for 2025, and that's when the trial happened.
- [20:03]
A
Wait, you submitted it before it was done or you applied for?
- [20:06]
E
We submitted to the Sundance Film Festival. We never considered. We never factored in the trial as a critical piece of the film because we didn't know when it was going to happen. Right. So the trials. Trials get pushed. It did get pushed, I believe, once or twice, like it was supposed to happen on a certain date, and then it got moved. So this. And this is common with trials. So if you ever build. Try to build your film around a trial, it's like, you know, you almost have to wait till the day it starts. So we thought we would always, you know, really, we were going to end where we ended and have a card that said that the trial was pending, and that was that. Then, boom, the trial suddenly happens, as, you know, right around the time we were sending the footage to the film to the Sundance Film Festival to see if we could get in. And that is why you see the trial in the credits. We had to figure out a way to include it afterwards.
- [21:04]
A
Were you surprised by the verdict?
- [21:07]
E
Yes.
- [21:07]
A
I don't know. And do you think the film, up to that point tonally or through your editing choices, anticipated the verdict or did the verdict somewhat subvert what went on before?
- [21:22]
E
No, we were. We were completely. We were surprised, honestly, because it is Marion county where this. The trial took place in. In Marion county, which is where stand your ground was penned. So stand your ground comes from there. It was penned in 2005. Dennis Baxley, I believe his name is, Republican lawmaker, and with great support from the nra.
- [21:48]
A
It was basically written by one of the top NRA lobbyists in the world who was working in Florida.
- [21:54]
E
Yeah, that's right. So we see this, and then it was an all white jury. So again, we have, from people of color, we know the system does not usually favor us. So I think for us, we thought that she might walk away free or with a very light sentence. So it was, again, I do not wish for anyone to go to prison. I really do not. And I think believe the system failed, Susan, as well, 100%. The systems that were in place, had they seen her as the issue, you know, or as a threat, then they could have perhaps prevented what was going to happen. But they did not.
- [22:40]
A
Yes. Some earlier interventions, if there was a mechanism. And I realize we're talking about Florida taking away her firearms, for instance.
- [22:48]
E
Yeah. Or, you know, sending out a social worker, you know, mediator I don't know anything, but are just realizing by the third time she called that, you know, she was the problem. We had law enforcement in other states tell us that in where they were. By the third time she would've been called and she would have been ticketed for or at least given a warning, you know, about what she was doing.
- [23:13]
A
Now, I did want to ask you about the particular individuals who were police at the scene and I heard what you said here and I have listened to other interviews where you talk about body cam footage being used as a tool of the state and to dehumanize communities of color, as you put it. And I'm aware of all that and I'm not full scale disagreeing with you and maybe you won't disagree with me. But as I saw it, I thought these cops, given their restrictions and I understand the system is what we have to think about, not the individuals. I thought that they carried themselves as best they could have given the rules they were working with. Or do you know the footage much more than I do? What do you think of that?
- [23:59]
E
So I think it's interesting, I think depending different audiences have different responses to the police. And I think it again, depending on where you come from or who you are in the world. And it's interesting, I think audiences that are like people of color, often they feel that this police have failed oftentimes. And I think the. That for white audiences it sometimes different. But I think in general, our bar for the police, and my partner Nakan Kwan too says this, our bar for the police is so low that we mistake them being polite or kind for competence. And I think, I'm not saying the police were absolutely kind.
- [24:48]
A
They were polite and well intentioned.
- [24:51]
E
They were well intentioned.
- [24:52]
A
Maybe they were instructed by the system, by the dia, by people over them to make the choices they made, which was not the more forceful or impactful interventions.
- [25:06]
E
Yeah, but they also come to the scene with their own biases. I guarantee you, had Susan been a person of color, that would have gone very differently. I do not think if she had been a person of color, using hate speech against children, filming children, threatening them, cursing them, yelling at them like, like that would have not gone the same way. So. And you even see that in the scene where she won't get out of the chair. If that had been me or I think anyone, you know, like, I do not believe, I think some of her again because she was able to weaponize her privilege, you know, and she, she like again, as an older white woman, you Know, I think they. That it was. Again, their response to her was, she can't possibly be a threat, but she was doing things that should have signaled the community spoke about what she was doing repeatedly. They told the police what she was doing, but yet the police never saw them as needing protection from her and just saw her as a nuisance. And that is where I think therein lies the failure. When everyone has access to a gun, it might make you a threat. And they even had her. You know, they even had an encounter with her where she behaved very erratically, where she drove her truck into the wall, you know, a fence, Right. And then, you know, claimed she had taken medication. And then her backstory, you know, came up. And so after many, many, many calls from her, there should have been a flag, and there was not.
- [26:46]
A
Yeah. There are two unbelievably gutting moments in this film. I mean, obviously, the whole theme and story is gutting, but it's when the father of one of the children tells him, no, your mom's not coming back.
- [27:00]
F
Today has been a very bad day. There's something bad has happened. And all y' all seen it. Y' all understand it. Y' all experienced it, right? Okay. Y' all love me.
- [27:16]
E
Okay?
- [27:17]
F
Y' all love Mom. All right, well, I got some bad news to tell you. Mom is not coming back anymore. Come, come. No, no, no.
- [27:29]
A
Don't. Come here.
- [27:31]
F
Come over here. Listen to me. No, no.
- [27:35]
E
I know. Okay?
- [27:37]
F
It's okay. I know.
- [27:39]
A
And then when one of the kids at the funeral or a memorial service, well, just talks about their own essential guilt. And I was just thinking, you know, my observation is, sometimes in real life, when something shocking happens, I'll look to the left or look to the right and see how people are reacting. And they react often like cartoon versions of what you think people would react. Their mouths are literally agape. And I think often that actors, if actors were to do that, the director might tell them, you know, pull it back 20%. You're being a little cliche. But these two kids in your. In the movie, I couldn't think. I. You know, I can't equate that to anything I've ever seen on a fiction film.
- [28:27]
E
Now, it was probably the rawest moments that even I. One of the rawest moments I myself have ever seen. And it was incredibly painful to watch. And it was something that I actually questioned and spoke. You know, I left it in. My instinct was to leave it in. But then when I showed it to Ajika's mother, so Ajika's mother saw the film before it went to Sundance. And I was like, we can, you know, we can throw this film in the garbage. If you don't want to proceed like this is your call. What do you want to do? This is what I made. So if you hate it, it goes away. And that's, you know, it was just then it was just my process, my grief or therapy process. And she said, you know, then we talked about that at peace after she watched. And he said, no. She was like, you leave that in. She was like, I want that in. And she was like, my cringe. That is the true cost of gun violence and everybody needs to see what that looks like. She was like, everyone's used to seeing a dead body. Everyone's used to see unfortunate. But that is also why we didn't show, you know, we tried to be really careful around what we showed of Adjuka because people, we didn't recreate a shooting. We just kept it, you know,
- [29:44]
A
we
- [29:45]
E
kept it as was because we see violence against black bodies on repeat, you know, and have become numb to it in a way. And yet it re traumatizes the black community over and over again when there are these viral videos of shootings or beatings or anything. And so we tried to stay steer away from that. But the, she was like, the people aren't used to seeing the grief. Let them see it. Because if we, we, you know, she was like, I don't. They need to know if, if my grandchildren had to go through this, the world can bear witness because the shame belongs to this. You know, the shame is on us for allowing it to happen.
- [30:24]
A
And for Pesca plus subscribers we will now talk with Geeta a bit more about the Devil is Busy, her excellent documentary short about an abortion CL in Atlanta. To subscribe to Pesca go to subscribe.mikepeska.com for more of these great conversations with, I don't know, maybe future Oscar winners. Certainly fascinating documentarians. Subscribe.mike pesca.com. The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers
- [31:09]
B
who switch their car insurance to progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [31:22]
G
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- [31:55]
A
and now the spiel. Donald Trump suffered another legal setback in a string so predictable and so consistent that it barely even qualifies as news anymore. A federal judge a couple days ago disqualified the latest set of Trump aligned prosecutors running the U.S. attorney's office, this time in New Jersey. This is the office that was previously headed by Alina Haba, Trump's personal lawyer. Harbor herself had already been ruled unlawfully installed and that job after staying in the role beyond statutory limits. The third Circuit upheld the ruling and harbor stepped aside. But the administration did not take the hint. Instead, Attorney General Pam Bondi installed a kind of prosecutorial triumvirate. Three Justice Department officials were assigned to share the powers of the office. The idea appeared to be that if no single person held the title of U.S. attorney, maybe yet didn't work. Judge Matthew Brann was unimpressed. 130 pages of decision later, he ruled that the arrangement violated the Constitution's appointments clause, which requires Senate confirmation. This is a pattern. Take Virginia. Lindsey Halligan, another Trump aligned lawyer, served as acting U.S. attorney there until a federal judge concluded her appointment was unlawful. And that ruling was the reason why the case against James Comey fell apart. Of course, if that wasn't the reason, there would have been plenty other reasons. But it also hurt the case against Attorney General Letitia James. When the court ruled that Halligan, who brought the charges, lacked the lawful authority to hold the office, there was nothing else to decide. Let's now go to upstate New York. Pam Bondi appointed John Sarcon to serve as interim U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York. A U.S. interim attorney can only serve for 120 days. Sarcon's term expired. The district's federal judges declined to keep him in the position. He stayed anyway. Cut to eventually, U.S. district Judge Lorna Scofield blocking subpoenas into investigations he was running. Because he's not the lawful U.S. attorney, his actions were void or voidable. Next now to Nevada, their acting U.S. attorney, SIGA chatter. A lawyer who had previously run for the attorney general and lost was in place. During that campaign, she was accused of using racist language about her opponent, Aaron Ford, who is black. She was Repeatedly echoing Trump's claims that the 2020 election was stolen and previously represented churches challenging Nevada's Covid restrictions. Her eligibility to hold the federal prosecutor's post had been under review by the courts as well. So when you hear about these series of developments, you tend to hear a certain interpretation. They say this is all an example of Trump's lawlessness. Well, I would say, to use a legal phrase, attempted lawlessness. No, they say it's an example of his brazen attempts to circumvent the constitutional process. Yeah, he was trying to do that. They say it proves the law is hanging by a thread, but I don't think it is. Listen to what actually happened in all those cases I described. The courts looked at the appointments, the courts read the statutes, and the courts applied the Constitution. These weren't tough calls. You can add also failures like Jeanine Pirro's trying to get convictions or even indictments against senators and congressmen who put together a video that said, don't give up the ship. Loss after loss after loss after loss do not mean that the Constitution is hanging by a thread. It tells me that the Constitution is a fairly effective shield. If someone launched 100 arrows at us and all of them stuck in our giant plank of oak, I would not say that we should worry too much about the 100 arrows because we have harbor disqualified, her replacements disqualified, Sir Cohn disqualified, Halligan disqualified. Not a story of a system collapsing. It's a story of a system functioning exactly the way it's supposed to, except for the fact that the President of the United States is intent on thwarting the system, but it's not working. Now, none of these cases required the Supreme Court to step in, and yet there's little reason to think that the Court would rule differently on the basic constitutional question when they get a very straightforward constitutional question like the Appointments Clause, which isn't ambiguous. The Court rules as it must. Trump could nominate people who could get through the Senate, then he'd have his US Attorneys in place. But the Venn diagram between people who could get through the Senate and people who spent the last many years arguing that 2020 was stolen is no Venn diagram at all. Trump is. Trump, therefore, is trying these end arounds that get sniffed out by stalwart defensive backs. The administration keeps trying. The courts keep striking them down. If you're inclined to despair about what this says about the rule of law, I would advise you not to. You can despair about the President. I'm not happy with what he's trying to do. I'm not one for despairing, but the totality of what we've seen with all these failed attempts give me more sucker than desperation. Donald Trump tries and Donald Trump loses. It's not the system that looks weak. It's Donald Trump. It's his tactics. It's his strategy. He's trying to manufacture a constitutional crisis. I say we don't give it to him. The response from the judiciary has been there is no crisis. There are rules. The president did not follow the rules with these appointments. The appointments are invalid. There will be no fruit from these poisonous trees. Of course it's terrible that he tried, but the important thing is that he failed and failed repeatedly. If anything, these rulings serve as a warning to the next president tempting the same maneuver. The guardrails are structural. The Constitution is not hanging by a thread. It's being held together by steel cables, by belay lines, by pitons hammered deep into the rock. And every time one of these unlawful appointments comes before a court, the system simply clips in again and keeps climbing. That's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the Jesting. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list. Ben Astaire is our booking producer. Jeff Craig is in charge of all things video. Michelle Pesca is in charge of all things. All things improve. Thanks for listening.
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