Transcript
Ted Danson (0:01)
Hey friends, Ted Danson here and I want to let you know about my new podcast. It's called Where Everybody Knows yous Name with me, Ted Danson, and Woody Harrelson. Sometimes doing this podcast is a chance for me and my good bud Woody to reconnect after cheers wrapped 30 years ago. Plus, we're introducing each other to the friends we've met since, like Jane Fonda, Conan O'Brien, Eric Andre, Mary Steenburgen, my.
Woody Harrelson (0:26)
Wife and and flee from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Ted Danson (0:29)
And trust me, it's always a great hang when Woody's there, so why wait? Listen to where everybody knows your name. Wherever you get your podcasts, the last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options. Which is why with USAA Auto insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable, all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply.
Woody Harrelson (0:54)
Usaa really happy to have you here. You know. It was a tough inauguration, A really bad inauguration. The drunk Vice president inauguration was a really bad one. Abraham Lincoln was president. He'd just been reelected to his second term. Now, Abraham Lincoln had had a perfectly fine vice president in his first term. It was a guy from Maine who was an abolitionist. But when Lincoln was going to run for a second term, he decided it might be a good strategic decision to trade in the guy from Maine for a Southerner instead. And so Lincoln ran with a different vice president in his second term, and Lincoln won that election and he got himself a second term. But when it came time for Lincoln and his new running mate to be inaugurated for them to be sworn in, Lincoln's new vice president was almost too drunk to stand up at the inauguration. His name was Andrew Johnson. He apparently went to the outgoing vice president, the guy from Maine. He went to him on the day of the inauguration and begged him for a bottle of whiskey, please. The outgoing vice president fetched him a bottle of whiskey, and then Andrew Johnson apparently drank most of it that morning before the inauguration. Some accounts from the time suggest that Johnson had actually been drunk for the better part of two weeks by the time the inauguration rolled around. That morning, before he himself was due to be sworn in as the new vice president, Andrew Johnson gave a caterwauling, slurring, screaming speech that no one could understand. When it came time for him to put his hand on the Bible and swear the oath of office, he instead grabbed the Bible and swung it around over his head and then made a big show of kissing it. He kissed The Bible. It was expected that the newly inaugurated Vice President would finish out the day by swearing in all the new U.S. senators. But Andrew Johnson was so hammered, he couldn't do it. So he bailed in the middle of the inauguration and somebody else had to take over and swear in all the senators for him. But I gotta tell you, that wasn't even his worst inauguration. He had two. And that one where he was too drunk to stand up and kissed the bottom and had to bumble off before his job was done. That was actually the better of his two inaugurations. Because after that totally drunken debacle, Andrew Johnson, the new vice president, he basically fled the Capitol. He was so embarrassed. He was so humiliated by having been so drunk at the event. It was like the talk of the town. It was in every newspaper in the country. It was this huge humiliation. There were calls for him to resign. There were calls for Lincoln to fire him. Somehow, Johnson just slunk away from the Capitol immediately following the inauguration. He stayed away from the Capitol for about a month. He finally came back and saw President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. And of course, that night, President Lincoln was shot and killed, which is how Andrew Johnson became President of the United States. And in his term as president, he had a terrible time of it. You may recall that he was the first President to be impeached. When it came time for the next presidential election, in 1868, his own party dumped him and ran somebody else instead. Even though he was the incumbent President, Johnson was just terrible. But the new guy they picked to replace him, he lost the election anyway. Which meant that Andrew Johnson had to do another inauguration. Right? Because now he's the outgoing president. First inauguration he'd been part of, he humiliated himself by drinking himself into oblivion. At the second one, where he was supposed to hand over power to the new incoming president, Ulysses S. Grant. Andrew Johnson just decided that he couldn't do it, or he didn't want to do it, or he couldn't get it together. He refused to ride down to the Capitol with the new president. He refused to get into his own separate carriage and ride down to the Capitol to go to the inauguration alone. He eventually, without telling anybody in advance this is how he was going to handle it. He just refused to go altogether. And he stomped off in a huff. And that's how we had the transition of power that year. So all this to say we've had bad inaugurations before, but before Donald Trump, the last guy who didn't show up for the swearing in of his successor was Andrew Johnson in the 1860s, in his second terrible inauguration after the drunk one before Donald Trump. It had been that long since we'd had somebody else blow off his successor's inauguration the way that Donald Trump did in 2020 for Joe Biden. It had been that long. We apparently get one of these guys every 160 years or so, whether we need it or not. Except now we've had ours. We've had this one twice. And why do we deserve that? Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term as president today. He did not kiss the Bible a la drunk Andrew Johnson in 1865, but nor did he put his hand on the Bible as he was sworn in, which was odd. He just left his left hand dangling by his side while his wife held the Bible vaguely near to him. But he never touched it. Trump's transition into his second term in office has not been covered in the media broadly as a debacle, but I think objectively speaking, it has been a debacle. I mean, just describing what has happened in this transition, it's like no other transition we have seen other than the other bad Trump transitions in modern times. It's been error and humiliation upon error and humiliation. In this transition, Trump named an Attorney General nominee who was actively under investigation for statutory rape and prostitution. He got a whole bunch of Republican senators to endorse him. Then he pulled his nomination. Then he named a leader for the dea, the Drug Enforcement Agency. Then he pulled his nomination, too. Then he named a White House counsel. Then he pulled his nomination to be White House counsel. Then he scheduled nomination hearings for a whole bunch of the people who weren't polled as nominees. But his transition couldn't get itself together in time for many of those confirmation hearings they had scheduled themselves in coordination with the Senate, which their own party controls. And so a bunch of the early nomination hearings have had to be postponed. There so far is no nomination hearing set at all for his FBI director nominee, who is the author of a series of children's books about King Donald, and who has supported the QAnon conspiracy theory that says that Democrats are secretly subterranean cannibals and aliens. There is no nomination hearing scheduled yet for his Health Secretary nominee, who says HIV doesn't cause aids, who says WI fi causes something he calls leaky brain, and who says Covid was artificially engineered to spare the Jews. There's no confirmation hearing scheduled as yet for his Director of National Intelligence nominee, who is Tulsi Gabbard. Perhaps enough said, this is the transition where the incoming President sued a newspaper for publishing a poll he didn't like after he sued a news network for airing an interview with his opponent in the political campaign, which was followed by his pick for FCC chair, citing that grievance to threaten the parent company of that news network. This is the transition where he appointed his son's girlfriend, ex girlfriend, to be an ambassador to Greece. He tried to give his other son's wife a Senate seat before that, didn't work out. And he named a family member who's a convicted felon to be the ambassador to France. Bonjour. What's the cost of this stuff, right? Like, what's the matter with nepotism? Ask France, right? It means France is going to get a felon as their ambassador from the US Government, a felon who does not speak French. Trump was asked by a French newspaper why the French people and the French government shouldn't worry about this random pick for ambassador to one of what is supposedly one of our most important allies. Trump said in response, quote, he's a very good friend of mine. It's something he really wanted to do. He feels so strongly about it. This was his first choice by far. That sounds like an excellent reason to give somebody an ambassadorship to one of the most important countries in our global alliance. He wanted it so much more than the other stuff. He really. He wanted it, and I know him. So what's the matter with nepotism, right? I mean, the good friends and felons and family members of the leader, they get whatever they want, whatever job they feel strongly about. And that has a cost. It means that people who are qualified for a job like that, people who might do a good job at that kind of a job, they don't get the job. You extrapolate from that one kind of decision to a million decisions about staffing up the government. And once you're stuffing it with people who've paid for the privilege or who are related to you or who are ex felons who have reason to ask you for something that ultimately in total makes our government suck and makes it an embarrassment, right? These things have a cost to all of us and to our country. It's the same thing with Trump taking money from foreign interests and foreign governments, right? There's a reason that foreigners aren't allowed to make political campaign contributions in the United States, right? It's obvious to all of us. Foreign countries, foreign governments, foreign interests shouldn't get to put U.S. government officials or a U.S. president on their payroll, right? If they do, the U.S. government and the U.S. president will start serving those foreign interests they're getting paid to serve instead of doing stuff that is good for our country. So obviously we cannot have foreign donations to campaigns. That principle we all understand. We understand the cost to us as a country, why it would make our country kind of suck if other countries could pay our politicians to do stuff to serve other countries instead of serving us. We get that. That said, there are no restrictions on foreign citizens or foreign governments buying stock in Trump's media company, or buying up crates and crates of his hundred thousand dollars Trump branded watches, or approving and financing huge new Trump real estate projects like the ones that are going up in Oman and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and India. They just get to pay him. They just get to put him on their payroll while he's serving as president. There's no reason why foreign interests, even foreign governments, can't just put money directly in Trump's pocket by buying his new crypto coin. And yeah, that must be awesome if you are a foreign despot or an evil mustache twirling zillionaire, even in this country. And as of today, you're essentially, I mean, you essentially have an open invitation right now to get the US Government and the US President to do things that are good for you and things that are bad for the American people and the US Government. You essentially have an open invitation to do those things. And that might be great for you, but those things are bad for the American people. Right? It's not just a spectacle to behold. The President, you know, launching the things that he has been launching, right? The President launching his own meme, coin, currency, selling stuff with his brand on it, doing business deals with foreign governments while he's serving as president. It is, you know, one level that's a novel thing for us to see, huh? This is new, but it's also boring because this is the oldest story in the world because this is every other country on earth, right? This is the kind of corruption that is how most of the world works. This is the kind of corruption that explains why most government sucks around the world and why most countries aren't democracies, because this stuff has a cost. Why is bribery bad? Bribery is good for the people who are participating in the bribery, right? But bribery is bad for everybody else because it means anybody who doesn't pay a bribe doesn't get anything from the government. Once you can pay officials in the government to do things for you, the whole government quickly just turns into a system for extracting bribes and doing nothing. Else, why is corruption bad, like favoritism in government contracts? Why is that bad? It's bad not just because it sounds gross and it feels gross. It's bad because it makes the country suck. It means every government contract is more expensive for the taxpayers who pay for it. And that more expensive contract buys less corruption, means that bridges and roads and buildings get built by people who have criminal and corrupt means of getting those contracts. They're not getting those contracts because they know how to do the work well, or they'll be expected to do it well. Trump profiting from all these schemes in office, from the Middle east apartment towers to the trash coin Ponzi like schemes that he's launching even just days ahead of today's inauguration. All these things mean that he's effectively accepting cash tributes from people in this country and from people around the world. And once a political leader is accepting cash tributes from some people, what that tends to mean is that people who don't pay him tributes go to the back of the line and the only people who get served are the people who are putting money in his pocket. It means that American foreign policy, American tech policy, American immigration policy, eventually all American policies will all be tilted to the benefit of the people who are paying him. And that means that policy will get worse for everybody else. The executive director of the Campaign Legal center described Trump's new crypto coin that he created this weekend as, quote, literally cashing in on the presidency, creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the President's family in connection with his office. And woe be to you if you need something from the US Government and you haven't given him any cash. I mean, the exciting thing about having all the billionaires at the inauguration today is that it is new for us to see that. Wow, that's crazy. That's like Gilded Age stuff. Hmm.