← To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
All the Things That Didn’t Get Noem Fired (But Should Have)
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Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to this weekend's to the Contrary podcast and it's just me. This is a solo podcast. I do this once in a while because we have so many readers who have questions and I want to be able to cover all of these subjects. But a couple of quick housekeeping notes. First, please consider subscribing to my substack newsletter. To the contrary, almost all the subjects that we are in that newsletter. It is completely free. Many of you have been generous enough to become paid subscribers, but if you subscribe to the newsletter, you will be able to listen to this podcast or watch it on YouTube without any ads whatsoever. And also there needs to be a place where we can on a daily basis remind ourselves, which I'll remind you later that we are not the crazy one. So I have just a stack of questions here. Everything from Kristi Noem to Pete Hegseth to the war in Iran, the price of oil. Oil. The Epstein files, the midterm election. So we might as well dive in. All right, on this weekend's Podcast. Where should we begin? Okay. I cannot resist talking about the firing of Kristi Noem. Rather extraordinary, because as you know, Donald Trump has been extremely reluctant to give the libs or any of his critics a scalp. You know, and think about how bad you have to be to be too deplorable to be in the Trump cabinet. Cabinet, you know, to look around and go, yeah, Kristi Noem is worse than Cash Pateli. He's worse than Pete Hegseth or RFK Jr. But Kristi Noem managed to do that. And there are a lot of interesting questions about all this. You know, she was not. And these are the notes, and I mentioned this in my newsletter over the weekend. What she was not fired for. She was not fired for killing her puppy. In fact, that may be one of the reasons she got the job. She was not fired for the murders in Minneapolis or the way that she lied about it. She wasn't apparently fired for this fancy multimillion dollar plane, the, you know, the Gulfstream jet. You know, only Trump gets planes like that. But she wanted that. She may not have been fired for her Special advisor side piece, Corey Lewandowski, although that has been messy for so, so long. And then there was her terrible, terrible testimony before the United States Senate. It was too awful, apparently, even for Donald Trump. Look, Kristi Noem was not fired because she lies. Because that's not disqualifying in the era. You know that.
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Right.
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Charlie Sykes
But she lied about the wrong things. And most importantly, she made Donald Trump look bad. She was asked at the hearing about that $200 million ad campaign, you know, with all the sizzle reels, but mainly an ad campaign that promoted Christy Noem and all of her cosplaying. And she was asked by Senator John Kennedy about that. And we know whether Donald Trump had approved $200 million in this sort of Kristi Noem self promotion. And she said that he had. And apparently Don Trump was very unhappy with that, because the one thing you do not do is you cannot make Donald Trump look bad. You cannot take attention away from Donald Trump. So he dropped her from a very, very great height. And it's really kind of an extraordinary moment for this administration to admit that they have done anything. Now, many, many of you have asked the questions. Will Mark Wayne Mullen be even worse than Ice Barbie? Okay, here's the thing about Mark Wayne Mullen. Mark Wayne Mullen is a former mixed martial arts guy who is arguably, and bear with me here, arguably one of the dumbest members of the United States Senate and I say that knowing that Tommy Tuberville is in the United States Senate. But the other night, actually, Jimmy Kimmel devoted about a big chunk of his monologue. This is Wednesday night. Big chunk of his monologue to talking about how dumb Mark Wayne Mullen was, that he may have been the dumbest member of the Senate. And of course, because irony is dead, the very next day, Mark Wayne Mullen is named the Secretary of Homeland Security. But on Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel was highlighting the fact that Mark Wayne Mullen seemed a little vague on who exactly we were bombing. Let's play a little bit of that. And then we have Senator Mark Wayne Mullen from Oklahoma, who doesn't seem to know which country we bomb.
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Pete Hegseth
There's no question that Iraq or Iran. Iran clearly fits in that picture. It's up to the Iraqi people or, I'm sorry, the Iranian people declare war and ask for Congress to declare war on Iraq.
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Charlie Sykes
Oops. Has there ever been a Mark Wanier person than Mark Wain?
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Pete Hegseth
And fortunately, you have President Hegseth, or I say President Hegseth, Secretary Hegseth, that has got a great relationship with President Trump and President Hicks has been there.
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Charlie Sykes
Okay, so will Mark Wayne Mullen mean a kinder, gentler, more rational Department of Homeland Security? Not likely. And can I just remark, I mean, we're at a time of war where you would hope to have the most qualified, professional, sober, sane people in these key positions, whether it's national security or the CIA or the FBI or in the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. And yet who do we have? And now we bring in Mark Wayne Mullen. Now, he's going to be confirmed by the Senate because that's what the Senate does. But remember, he's the guy that actually just called Rand Paul. What? He called him a snake and suggested that he understood why his neighbor had come over and beat him up. I mean, this is not a guy who, if you are looking for the most professional, sober, sane guy that you would put in this particular profession. Okay. We have a lot of other things. A couple of people asking about Pete Hegseth and Iran. Let's talk about Iran for a moment. We could run through all of the various explanations that the administration has given for why we are at war with Iran. And to say they're mutually exclusive is really understating it. In the beginning, it was. Well, because we thought there would be an imminent attack. Well, apparently no imminent attack. There was a suggestion that they were just weeks or days away from being able to have nuclear weapons. Yeah, apparently not. Then they started talking about whether this was about regime change. What's really interesting to me about this is that normally in MAGA world, bear with me, there's a certain message discipline. Right? You know what they're saying what the argument is? Same thing with the Trump administration. I mean, they may be full of shit, but at least they're disciplined. There's no message discipline here at all. Because in this fog of war, the foggiest thing is like, what the hell are we doing there? What are our objectives? What have we got? And of course CNN put together a little mont of Republicans trying to figure out, do you call it a war or do you not call it a war? Something as basic as that. Let's play that then. We may have casualties. That often happens in war. We're doing very well on, on the war front. We set the terms of this war from start to finish. 9,000Americans have been able to leave the
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Pete Hegseth
region since the start of this war. Nobody should classify this as war. It is combat operations.
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Charlie Sykes
I wouldn't call this a war as much as I'd call it a conflict. That should be very short and sweet. I don't know if this is technically a war.
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Pete Hegseth
We have declared war. So if we haven't declared war, then I don't see that the President asked us to declare war yet, but they have declared war on us.
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Charlie Sykes
Do you consider it a war? It's a significant military operation. Strategic strikes are not war. They have declared war on us. I don't believe in the semantics. We've talked about the language this morning. We're not at war right now. If four days in to a very specific, clear mission and operation. Okay, really guys, you have to get your story straight here, right? It's either a war or it is not a war. Why are they so reluctant to call it a war? Well, maybe it was all that rhetoric about, you know, I will be the President of peace, we will not have endless wars, and yet what's the end in sight here? So, you know, a number of you have asked the question, you know, will there be a break, a MAGA breakup over this? Okay, we have to wait. We don't know. There are two questions here. Number one, about the MAGA influencers and there's clearly a lot of chatter going on about, you know, you know, going back and forth between, you know, some of, you know, the Tucker Carlson's versus the Sean Hadidings and everything. Much, much more important is what happens with the MAGA base. And I don't Know that this has played out yet, you know, wait until we see what the casualty rates are, how long this lasts, how wide it is, what effect it has on the markets, which have not been good so far, whether or not there is the growing disillusionment. And, you know, we've seen this in the past, right, where people start off either enthusiastic about it or willing to give the administration the benefit of the doubt. This is a very different war because the Trump administration never bothered to make the case. They never bothered to get people on board in the beginning. So we go into this war with very, very little enthusiasm. Lots of questions, growing questions, the inability of the administration to come up with a coherent explanation. Did Israel push us into the war, or did we push Israel into the war? What exactly is going on? Can this gang actually shoot straight? And then there's the problem. Okay, so on the issue of the MAGA base, you got a lot of questions here about Pete Hegseth. I think people sometimes underestimate how powerful an issue this was for many Trump voters. Going back to 2016, where Donald Trump broke with the Republican Party and the neoconservatives very, very decisively when he came out against the failed, endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I ought to note that he. He continued many of those wars in the Middle East. There was a lot of the rhetoric. He went to war with ISIS. He continued to bomb in Afghanistan. But in 2016, he convinced a lot of people that he was something different, that he was not the kind of guy who would attack a faraway country in order to change regime. And there were a lot of voters who believed that. Now, should they have believed it? Well, you know, should people believe a lot of things? But this feels like it has the potential to be a real betrayal of many of those voters. Now, what we've seen over and over again is that a lot of those voters claim to believe certain things. And if Donald Trump reverses position, they just go along and they believe what Donald Trump believes. We do not know that. So, again, I'm gonna wait and see. But this is an unpopular war and is not likely to get more popular. Let me put it that way. That. But this is one that. It's sort of like the, you know, the head of lettuce out there that is just. It's not getting better day by day. And particularly, I mean, you think about what we saw on Friday. We're seeing oil spike to, I think, $86 a barrel headed north toward $100 a barrel. The Straits of Hormuz appear to continue to be closed. The stock markets are really, really pretty shaky about that. That will have real effects on Donald Trump's popularity and the popularity of Republicans, especially when you think about the fact that he's had all these problems with affordability. And so what does Trump do? He goes and starts a war. Not just a trade war, but a hot war on top of the trade war, which will make everything more expensive. Also, this comes at a time and we didn't have many questions about it, but the jobs report that came in on Friday, not good news. The fact that the economy lost 96,000 jobs, all kinds of economic signals going out there. One other aspect, and a number of you have asked this, and I don't know which question to go to. Some people say, is Pete Hegseth still drinking? Is that what's going on here? Look, I don't know. I don't know whether Pete Hegseth is still drinking. Did Pete Hegseth ever stop drinking? What I know is that Pete Hegseth, and I'm sorry, this is a not safe for work thing. Pete Hegseth is a. He's. He is Pete Hegseth, I'm sorry, Pete is an asshole. Pete Hegseth, you know, comes out and he plays this sort of, I am this tough, macho adolescent guy, and he actually thinks this is like a video game. And so you have a lot of the, the blustering and the dick wagging. But also you have moments, like one we saw last week, which was genuinely breathtaking, where here you have the Secretary of Defense addressing the deaths of six US Servicemen. Now, this should be a moment of deep sobriety, of respect, of silence, if you don't have anything to say about it. Instead, and I know that many of you caught this, this is what Pete Hegseth said about this. He used this as an opportunity to whine about the media coverage.
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Charlie Sykes
The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. Now, after he said that, apparently there were sort of gasps of shock, the room went silent. Somebody said, according to an Atlantic reporter, that that was one of the most insulting things that he ever said. But again, this is the Trump playbook. You know, the war, the actual hot war, the life and death war in Iran may not be going well. So let's go to the playbook to fight the war that we're more comfortable with, that we've been doing, which is us against the media. But this is the kind of thing that, you know, if the country is watching, and I think the country is watching again, is not going to make the war more popular. All right. Oh, the Epstein files. Charlie, what do you make of the latest Epstein files release? Will this make a difference? Now the reference is to the documents that were released on Friday which talk about this woman who made these allegations of sexual assault against Donald Trump that apparently occurred when she was 13 years old. Will that make a difference? We've been doing this so long and we've seen so many things that won't make a difference. But a 13 year old girl. What I also think is significant is the way that this, that this cover up continues to show cracks. There's no question about it, that this Department of Justice, the Trump administration has been covering up the Epstein files. And the big question has been, okay, what is so bad in these files that you would be willing to spend this kind of political capital? Well, maybe it's this kind of thing. Maybe it's the fact that, that they suspect or at some level they think that MAGA voters or MAGA adjacent voters who are willing to put up with almost anything else might draw the line when it comes to a 13 year old girl. I do not know. I do not know. But again, we are having a conversation what in the second week of the Iran war, which a lot of people think was really Operation Epstein Fury and this wag the dog to distract attention from the Epstein files. And for a few days it does. But this is the remarkable thing. Everything that Trump has done to distract attention from the Epstein files has ultimately failed because here we are and the House Oversight Committee this week, this is run by Republicans. They voted to subpoena Pam Bonding to make her come back to talk about the botched release of the Epstein files. This is just not going away. It is really, truly, truly extraordinary. Okay, some of these, these other questions. Okay, Hi, Charlie, center left independent from Texas here that just voted for Talarico. How do you see him and what do you think his chances might be? Okay, as you know, I try to stay away from any sort of irrational exuberance or chuffing the Hopium, but clearly what's been playing out in Texas has been the best case scenario for the Democrats and in many ways the worst case scenario for the Republicans. I think that James Talarico is a, he's not that moderate. He's actually pretty progressive. And this is going to be an issue in the campaign. And normally I think that that would mean that we're probably gonna go through the normal Lucy with the football, with Texas. But Republicans are in the process of setting themselves on fire, aren't they? Ken Paxton, the incredibly deplorable, legally challenged Attorney general who, you know is in the runoff guy, has been, you know, has faced so many ethics allegations, criminal allegations, I think Ken Paxton would be pretty close to almost unelectable in any other time. Reminds me of the Roy Moore case in Alabama. Remember? I mean, think about a Democrat winning in Alabama, and yet the Republicans nominated Roy Moore, who had this thing for teenage girls and stalking them at malls too much even for Alabama voters. So he was defeated in that. Ken Paxton makes Roy Moore look like a choir master. But here's the problem. Ken Paxton is in a runoff with the incumbent, John Cornyn. It's going to be a messy campaign. It's gonna be a vicious campaign. Cornyn has dropped every napalm bomb he can on Paxton. He actually. Cornyn did much better in the primary than people thought he would. He actually came out ahead of Paxton. Donald Trump is making noise as if. And by the way, let's be honest about this, would be the smart move for Trump, right? If you want to keep that Senate seat, you do not want your buddy, your MAGA loyalist Ken Paxton on the November ballot. So what's Trump doing? He's actually trying to push him out of the race. And my guess is that he may endorse Cornyn, tell Paxton to get out of the race. Paxton may not do it, at least as. As we're talking right now. Who knows what might happen? I mean, everything is changeable, right? It's the expiration date on every one of my takes is about, what, about an hour and a half? But what if Paxton doesn't get out of that race? What if the MAGA base is. Wait, wait, wait, wait. We don't want this elderly establishment type guy like John Cornyn. So you have two things. You have the messy, messy, messy runoff primary, and then you have the possibility of a real split in the Republican vote. Democrats appear to be rallying around Talarico. I'm just curious, because I think Talarico is a quality candidate, but we've been here before where nationally, Democrats fall in love with a candidate, they convince themselves that they can win, and they don't win. I think that Talarico has a better shot than Beto o' Rourke in many ways. But again, the description of him as a moderate is a little bit overstated. And I have to say, though, that his victory in that Primary tells me that once again, Democratic primary voters are very, very pragmatic. They actually want to win elections. And look, Jasmine Crockett has many, many, many skills. She really is sort of the ID of the resistance. But Jasmine Crockett was not the kind of candidate who was going to win statewide in Texas. Now, could she have beaten Ken Paxton? I don't know. I don't know. We do know that, though, that I think Talarico has a better shot. So I'm sorry, that is a long answer. Okay. A lot of calls, questions about Mark Wayne Mullen. Okay, Charlie, is there any way to get Jimmy Kimmel to host the White House Correspondents Dinner, especially if Trump is attending? Okay, folks, I actually had to restrain myself from a rather considerable rant on Friday about this. Are y' all familiar with the White House Correspondents Dinner? They call it the nerd prom. People have hated this thing for years because this is where the White House correspondents, the media, get all dressed up in tuxedos and they suck up to celebrities and the beautiful people and the politicians. And it's just one of those inside the Beltway Washington thing, Washington type things that I think people have hated for a very, very long time. But this year, it is really about to descend into feculent farce. And I wrote about this in my newsletter, which I think I have here somewhere yesterday, because, you know, Donald Trump is now attending this event, despite everything that he has done. And the Correspondence association, remember, these are the reporters. They're very happy to have him because this is a dinner that's celebrating press freedom. It's celebrating the First Amendment. See, Donald Trump is going to be your honoree. He's going to be the guest of honor. This group is so cowardly, by the way, that they didn't even invite a comedian like Jimmy Kimmel who might make fun of the Orange God King. And we know that the one thing that Donald Trump really hates is anybody making fun of him. Even going back to, you know, that whole story about how Obama made fun of him and he's sitting there and that's what he decided, he's gonna run for president. Okay? So the Correspondence association not only happily, is going to host Donald Trump after a year of his vicious attacks, not just on the media, but on the whole concept of the First Amendment, they're going to host him and they're not going to have any comedian. That's. Instead, they had a. They have a mentalist. What the fuck? I have no idea what they're doing, except that the act of submission here is pretty basic. I mean, do we really need to run through all of the things that Donald Trump has done to the media here? I mean, again, because everybody has the memory of goldfish around here. This is the guy that pushed out the Associated Press out of the White House because they refused to call the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf of Mexico, America. He's filed lawsuits, legal warfare against cbs, Wall Street Journal, New York Times. His Justice Department has pursued leak investigations, including a search and seizure operation against the Washington Post reporter. They arrested Don Lemon. The FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, has publicly targeted broadcasters as well as Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. One story after another, we could go on and on and on. And yet what? All of these correspondents are going to be sitting there and laughing it up, drinking, rubbing shoulders with Trump and his folks, as if, hey, you know, this is all kind of kabuki dance theater. Well, screw that. The White House Correspondents association has utterly and totally beclowned itself. I have a longer piece in Friday's newsletter. Okay, so more stuff on Hegseth? No, I am actually pretty worked up about this dinner. Okay, Charlie, how does Article 5 of the NATO treaty work when one NATO member is the aggressor? Trick question, right? Because it does not work. Article 5 pledges members of NATO to go to the defense of any of the other members of NATO. But what if, for example, the United States was to attack Denmark or the United States was to attack Greenland? What is the Article 5? You know, when that happens, it's not about Article 5 anymore. NATO is done. NATO is completely done. So I think we can. We can pass that. Okay. Another question, Charlie. If the Democrats take over the House and Senate in November, would there be a possibility of finally getting the votes to impeach and remove Trump from office in 2027 and revive the cases for his crimes? 2. 2 separate question. I am sorry, because I know what you want me to say, but the answer is no, that is not going to happen. In order to impeach and remove Donald Trump, you would need a 2/3 vote. And there is not a single piece of evidence that suggests to me that Republicans in the Senate have learned anything from their world historical mistake back in 2021 in refusing to remove Donald Trump. I actually have mixed feelings, which we can discuss over the next couple of months over whether Democrats should spend time and effort impeaching Donald Trump again. There are so many grounds to impeach him. This would, of course, be his third impeachment. I think Democrats could impeach him in the House and then fail to convict him? Well, we've done that, and I think at some point, you have to go, all right, what are the tactics that are going to be the most effective, not the ones that feel the, you know, the best? Don't get me wrong, I would absolutely support the impeachment if they did it. But if someone asked me, is this the smartest and the best way to use political capital, I say, I don't know. Because one of the things that we've seen over and over again, and I've seen this in other contexts, is that sometimes the harder you push, the stronger the resistance is. By which I mean the. But from Trump's point of view, what does it take for him to rally the MAGA base around him, to rally the GOP around him? Well, the threat of impeachment. Because I think that the key is, and I've said this before, you know, the 2026 midterms are immensely important, but they are only the halftime game here. You have to run through the tape, because all of this is about 2028. And it is not clear to me that even if the Democrats win in 2026, that they have figured out that they have broken the code to win the presidency in 2028. So this is the key. So I guess in the roundabout way of saying the big question on impeachment is, does it help or hurt 2028? Okay, a lot of questions, Charlie. On a scale of 1 to 10, how concerned should we be that Trump will declare an emergency to try to take over the midterm elections? All right, I'm going to say 10. In fact, I heard myself saying the other day that in this era that we live in, paranoia is mental health. I'm not sure that I want to stick with that, but I think awareness of the threat is absolutely necessary. And it's really naive to think that he doesn't mean it. Look, he has been talking about it for years now, talking about the elections. And what he's done is he's successfully undermined faith and confidence in the electoral system. He has softened up the ground. Think about how much more dangerous the situation is in 2026 or 2028 even, than it was when he tried to overturn the 2020 election, because he's got an entire political party that is willing to go along with the big lie, willing to believe the conspiracy theories. And if you have tens of millions of people who don't believe that elections are fair and honest and reliable, then why would they defend the integrity of Those elections. So Donald Trump. And again, I wanna remind people, because for some reason this has fallen into the memory hole. Do you folks remember that during the interregnum he actually put out a post suggesting that elements of the Constitution should be suspended so that he could be restored to power before the 2024 election? This is somebody who has said this. The most dangerous words in the English language right now. Word in the English language right now is emergency. Because Donald Trump knows or thinks that the word emergency will unlock vast new powers. And we've seen that he's been toying around with that. Donald Trump wants a crisis so that he can declare an emergency, which gives him the ability to do things that I think will continue to shock most Americans and frankly was not, not part of, I think, the founders plans. I heard David Frum yesterday on television. I think he's written a piece in the Atlantic about it. That we are, there's a real danger of the sum of all fears that the worst case scenario is that we have Donald Trump in the midst of a war that includes terror attacks on the United States. Now, is there a real danger of Iranian terror attacks in the United States? Yes, there is. Absolutely. It is not made up. On the other hand, can we trust the administration to handle this in a prudent, professional, sane and sober way? Well, obviously not if we've been paying attention. Is this administration capable of exaggerating that threat, declaring emergencies that would let them use the FBI, the CIA, the US Military, the ICE brute squads in ways that that Donald Trump wants to use them and would he use them during the election to hold on to power? None of that seems implausible to me, which is one of the reasons why I've been very, very, very skeptical about this idea. I have some of, you know, supporting Donald Trump. You know, you go to war with the President. You have some of my neoconservative brethren who have been sort of lusting for Iranian regime change, which by the way, is not a bad willing to say, okay, you know, we don't like Trump. We don't like the way he's going about it. But sometimes you have to go to war with the army you have. Sometimes you have to go to war with the president you have. Okay, bullshit. The president we have is incredibly dangerous. And you know what profit profiteth us if we were to free the Iranian people at the price of stripping Americans of our own freedom. And I don't think that's hyperbole. I think that's exactly what we need to be on Watch for. So what is. There are two questions. I mean, there are two big questions. Number one, what is Donald Trump capable of and who is going to stop him? Well, it's the first one. We know what he's capable of, right? I mean, he's made it absolutely clear. This is a man who actually incited a mob to attack the Capitol. We've forgotten that. I mean, I understand that we suffer from national amnesia, but Donald Trump has made it absolutely clear that he is willing to use force to overthrow an election. And he's not acting like somebody that ever wants to voluntarily give up power. So that's number one. The question is, can he get away with it and who will stop him? This is the big question. This is the question we need to focus on. You know, will Congress will wake up from its slumber? Will they decide not to be potted plants? I don't know. What about the courts? Couple of questions here about the tariff ruling. And again, there are a lot of questions here about this. The Supreme Court. You know, this is the US Supreme Court that said that Donald Trump was essentially above the law. You know, back in 2024. I haven't gotten over that. I think history is going to remember that. Along the lines of the Dred Scott decision, one of the, you know, just inventing presidential immunity. This is the same Supreme Court. On the other hand, this is a court where the justices have been watching what's going on. John Roberts has been watching what's been going on. Neil Gorsuch has been watching what's going on. Amy Coney Barrett have been watching. And I can't get inside their minds, but they drew a very sharp, sharp red line when it came to Donald Trump's use of. And this is what's important about this, emergency powers to impose all of their tariffs. What they did was they said, look, we do have a divided government here. We do have a constitution that gives certain powers to Congress and certain powers to the president. And we're not going to just roll over on all of this. Now, I think that Decision should have been 9 0. There should have been no member of that Supreme Court that should have thought that there was any constitutional legal justification for Donald Trump to use those emergency powers to impose those tariffs. But unfortunately, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have gone off into sort of this judicial hackland where they're willing to give Donald Trump, you know, anything he wants. Brett Kavanaugh, I don't know. I was, you know, surprised that he went along with it. He seemed exceptionally concerned about whether Refunding all the tariffs would be messy. Well, of course it's going to be messy. But cleaning up an unconstitutional power grab is always going to be messy. And by the way, folks, just remind next time somebody mentions that a fish fryer or something like, well, it'd be really, really messy to refund all that money. The federal government refunds tax money every single year, billions of dollars. My guess is you've gotten a tax refund, right? I mean, this is not rocket science. This can be done. If the government takes money from you illegally, the government should give it back. If you were to take money illegally from the government, trust me, they would make you give it back. Principle is the same. But in any case, I have to say that I have a glimmer of optimism that I may come to regret that this court is looking at Donald Trump. And maybe there's some buyers regret. Maybe there's some sense that, hey, maybe telling Donald Trump that he's absolutely immune and then watching this cascade of abuse of power and corruption, maybe that's induced some of these justices to say poor. You know what is this going to be our legacy? Maybe it's time to rein it in. So there was some of that. Okay,
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- [38:20]
Charlie Sykes
Other questions here. Charlie, what's a good start to the list of constitutional amendments that a future ethical congress could make Abolish the now stained and abused pardon power. It has become a ticket to endless excusable crimes. Okay? Now, by the way, anytime people start talking about this, like abolish the, the electoral college, okay, that's fine. That's a great idea. That is just simply not going to happen. There's a glimmer of hope that at some point there might be a bipartisan movement to do something about the pardon power. Because the pardon power is so egregiously abusable and being abused. I mean, the fact that Donald Trump is almost openly selling pardons, I mean, profiting from pardons. If you wanted just to isolate one episode to talk about how the system is completely been corrupted. It's the way that Donald Trump has been handing out these pardons as skittles to his loyalists, to his friends, to crooked people who have been lining his own pockets. I mean, it is. The problem is that our zone is so flooded that we don't have the time to focus on that. If there's one big reform, one thing to get right, this would be the one that I would focus on, but also the one that I think there's possibility. I'm not saying it's probable, but there's a possibility. Okay, so pardon power. A couple of others. Yeah. Much more than people saying, you know, trashing the, the, the Electoral College. Again, that's, that's not. Okay, let's see here. Somebody does not want to talk about. Oh, yeah, what do you make of J.D. charlie, what do you make of J.D. vance? How is he handling this particular war? J.D. vance is in a tough position because he's been on the record, but we've seen this over and over again, that in our politics, we forget what somebody said last week, but JD Vance is clearly not a winner in all of this. If I had to say that there's anyone whose stature has risen within Republican Party circles, understand, is Marco Rubio. And by the way, I am not one of those who thinks that Marco Rubio is going to be the acceptable MAGA alternative. Can I just mention this? I was at a really good conference a couple of weeks ago in Washington, D.C. with a lot of rational Republicans. And I would say that I agreed with them on about 99% of all the issues. But there were a couple of people there saying, you know, maybe if we had, you know, somebody like a Marco Rubio on the ticket in 2028, maybe that would be, you know, not the worst thing in the world. I'm thinking, wait, we've gone through all of this We've gone through absolutely everything, and we're going to end up with Marco fucking Rubio. I'm sorry. Because what I can't forget is that Marco Rubio sat there and he went along with everything that's happened. I mean, think about everything that has happened in 2025 and 2026. Marco Rubio has been part of that domestically and internationally. All of the wars abroad and the wars domestically. You cannot be part of this particular criminal enterprise and then later say, yes, but I am the future. I am the acceptable alternative. I'm not going to buy that. Charlie, what is next? Is Donald Trump still serious about Greenland and what about Cuba? All right, I'm really glad you asked that question, because I don't want to forget about the Greenland thing for a moment. I mean, just let's talk about this. If you haven't heard it, go back and listen to my podcast with Ann Applebaum. She was in Europe recently and she was in Denmark. And she says that most Americans don't really understand how traumatic all of that was, the effect that that has had on Europeans. And she talks about, you know, in Denmark, they actually, for a while had to consider the possibility that they might go to war with the United States. The United States might invade Greenland. So they had to have Danish soldiers who would be willing to kill Americans. Now, I think a lot of Americans are like, well, this was never going to happen. Well, that's not the way a lot of the people in Europe processed that. And so that is going to have long, long term implications. And by the way, we need to have more podcasts and more articles about the many ways in which the rest of the world is thinking about, or now actually decoupling from the United States that basically, and I think it was Mark Kearney from Canada who talked about the weaponization of interdependence, or so I think that was his phrase, that we have become so interdependent economically, financially, technically, when the rest of the world thought that America shared their values. But what if they start thinking America does not share our values and might use this interdependence to bully us and to punish us. So, for example, even when it comes to credit cards or the transfer of money, a lot of Europeans are saying, if the Americans can hit the off button on anything, maybe we ought to have alternatives in weaponry, technology and finance. And that's what's happening. So we're having this massive decoupling from the rest of the world. The implications of that long term, I think, cannot be overstated. I'm glad you mentioned Cuba because Trump is now saying Cuba's next. He's now saying this. Cuba's next. We haven't even extracted ourselves from what's happening in Iran and he's already talking about regime change. The guy's got an itch to use this military. And do I think that he is going to. It's certainly possible. Did you catch, by the way, that it were actually involved in military operations in Ecuador this week? I mean, I understand lots going on there, but it's like the list of countries that the peace president has attacked or engaged in military operations continues, continues to grow. Look, I know that we like to evaluate all of these events in the news cycle, like who's winning and who's losing and what's going to move the needle and what's going to happen next month or what's going to happen next year. The things that are happening right now will have reverberations for decades. We have lost trust that took a century to build up. We have broken relationships that are 50, 60, 70 years old. We have made enemies with people who think in terms of decades and centuries. I think about the movie the Looming Tower, how long it took Al Qaeda to figure out how they were going to strike back at America. Now, I'm not trying to be alarmist here about the possibility of terrorism, but I think, again, it would be naive. And here's just a reminder, kind of circling back to where we began. The Department of Homeland Security was created after September 11, 2001. Why did we do that? Because we knew that the homeland needed to be protected against multiple threats. And yet look what we have done with it. Look what's become of the Department of Homeland Security, particularly when you have Mark Wayne Mullen now in charge of it and that he follows Kristi Noem, who's focused Homeland Security not on protecting us against these international threats, but to invade US Cities that think about. I mean, two things have happened that now become very, very relevant. Right. People and a couple of people have asked me about this, the FBI firings. And by the way, I'm sorry I didn't get to this a little bit earlier. We have been. Well, the two things. Number one, our focus has been turned internally. And this comes right down from Donald Trump. Remember when he spoke to all those generals and he said we might use the military in American cities as practice? Like, what the hell? What was he talking about? Well, we've seen that. So number one, instead of focusing on these, you know, the possibility of terror attacks, we've been chasing migrants. We've taken many of the people who would have focused on. On those international threats, and we've taken them off the desks. We've fired many of them, Right. And we put them in places like Portland and Minneapolis and in Chicago. And then that second thing. And a couple people have asked me about this, the stories this last week that Cash Patel gutted the unit in the FBI that was in charge of counterterrorism intelligence with Iran, and he gutted that unit right before we went to war with Iran. I want you to think about this, because I think that we're going to look back on this and go, you know, that a lot of the things that we may have thought of as, you know, the clowns with the flamethrowers, what were they using the flamethrowers on? They were using the flamethrowers on decades and decades of experience of people in the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, who would, you know, right now, we really need their expertise, their knowledge, their eyes, their ears. But they were fired by Keshe Patel because they were insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. And I think there's gonna be a hell of a story here. Do you remember after 9 11, there was this big debate about why did we miss all these signals because the FBI and the CIA were not talking to one another. That's gonna feel like child's play when we look back and think, okay, well, what was happening? Why were you dismantling the FBI's counterterrorism desk at the moment? We were about to go to war with that country. Now, by the way, there is an explanation for this. And again, this is my speculation. Okay, this is not reporting. This is my speculation. If you look at the timeline on all of this, Cash Patel, the head of the FBI, goes to Milan, says, you know, he's there for various meetings. Instead, he was there to go to watch the hockey game. Right? No, bear with me. I'm going to get back to this. He gets. He goes to the hockey game and he's, you know, shown guzzling beer, pouring beer all over himself ahead of the FBI on your taxpayer dime, you know, at the Olympic event, which, by the way, great moment in sports, terrible moment for the FBI. And there are reports, and again, I'm just passing this along, that Donald Trump, who, among all of his many sins, he does not drink. Don't ask. But he doesn't like. He didn't like it. He didn't like that scene. He didn't like the way Kash Patel was behaving. Now, for those of you wondering about that, sometimes when Donald Trump looks at something like a Kristi Noem and he says, I really don't like that he might fire her. So. So, okay, run the timeline back. Donald Trump mad at Cash Patel. Now, everybody knew that we're running up to a possible war with the ram. Cash Patel instead is focused on what do I do to get back into Donald Trump's favor? And the answer is always fire anyone who was involved in the investigation of Donald Trump. And so these agents that were fired were agents who had been involved at one time or another doing their job investigating Donald Trump were part of, for example, the Mar A Lago document investigation. And so he fired them. Why did he fire them last week right before going to war with Iran? Because Kash Patel's number one priority right now is protecting his own ass. And I think as you look back on all of this, you realize that we have had an administration that claims that it is making America strong, but which is really obsessed with loyalty over effectiveness. And I have to admit that it. I'm extremely concerned about all of this. Let's see. I'm not going to be able to get to all of the questions here. Let's see. I want to make sure that I get to some of these questions, a couple of them about the White House correspondence dinner, which I think that we have done. Kristi Noem, I have stories here. Government shutdown. Oh, okay. Here's an interesting question. I got one question about the fact that the Department of Homeland Security is actually still in a shutdown mode. Because, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when government shutdowns were kind of a big thing. Most of the government is open, but because of all of the ICE abuses, the Democrats are refusing to do it. People are saying, should Democrats now vote to reopen? No, absolutely not. It would be the most naive thing imaginable for Democrats to see the firing of Kristi Noem and the hiring of Mark Wayne Mullen as the signal to suddenly vote to support these policies. Because, again, this is just once again, defining deviancy down. The key thing is don't accept any promises or representations from the Trump administration. You have to get this into law. Basic things, basic fundamental legal rights. You know, the no masks, the use of the body cameras, the end of racial profiling. If Democrats aren't willing to stand on those issues, then what are they willing to stand on? I mean, this is the key thing. Democrats have to decide which fights to have. You can't have every single fight. You can't, you can't. It's not a matter of like, can you win this fight or not win this fight. There's just so much bandwidth and you have to decide this is one that is definitely worth fighting. And by the way, this was. This goes back to my entire question about the impeachment, whether or not we're going to do this. Okay. We do these solo podcasts occasionally. I try to get to as many questions as possible. Unfortunately, there are just so many issues going on simultaneously. And I have to admit that one of the things that I worry about on a regular basis is what are we missing? What are we not focusing on? What's happening right in front of us that we think, you know, I should talk about that, but I just don't have the time to get into it. So one of the things I'd like to invite listeners and readers of my newsletter, if you see things, feel free to pass them along. And I also want to know what is top of mind. We live in a world in which Donald Trump has proven to be a master of two things. And bear with me. Number one, distraction. Number two, numbing. Donald Trump knows that if you and people like Steve Bannon, you flood the zone with shit that you can't focus on it. You have a scandal, he'll give us 20 scandals. And at some level, in his reptilian mind, he understands that if you commit 20 outrageous acts, people don't know what to focus on as opposed to one outrageous act. So he's been a master of distraction, not that successful with the Epstein files. More significant has been the fact that he has numbed people, that he has normalized all of this. And by the way, I really do sympathize with this. I mean, if you are one of the people who say, you know, I just can't take it anymore. I can't watch anymore. I just need to look away. I get this. I actually think that that is a myth, mentally healthy thing to do. But when you've taken that break, you need to re engage. You need to come back. Because this is what Donald Trump really counts on. This is what all authoritarians count on, but particularly Donald Trump, that if you flood the zone, you basically make people feel that resistance is futile. It's never feudal. He is not forever. And when I see things like, and this is one of the reasons why I'm reacting to the correspondence dinner the way that I am, is that here's somebody who is waging one of the most aggressive attacks on press freedom that we've ever seen. Who is using the cudgel of the government in order to punish critics for their speech? And what does the White House correspondence dinner do they go back to some normal playbook? Well, we've done this every year. Let's, you know, let's see if we can all get along. This is again, the moment when we need to constantly remind ourselves this is not normal. If, in fact, you believe that our democracy and the rule of law is worth defending, and if you believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat, then act like it. Act like it. Don't party with him. Don't normalize it. And this is also why we need to continually, continually remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. So these times are tough. I understand it. I understand that it's overwhelming. And the important thing is to keep engaging, to keep recognizing what's crazy, to keep recognizing what's abnormal, to keep remembering who we are and what we are. So thank you for listening to this episode. If I didn't get to all your questions, I apologize. But at least you come out knowing that you're not the crazy one. Thank you. Par le tu
- [56:43]
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Parli Italiano. If you've used Babbel, you would Babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at Babbel Acast spelled B-A B-B-E-L.com Acast rules and restrictions may apply.
- [57:20]
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- [57:50]
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