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- [00:00]
Nicholas Grossman
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- [00:05]
Charlie Sykes
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- [00:07]
Nicholas Grossman
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- [00:59]
Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to to the Contrary podcast. I am joined by Editor in Chief of Arc Digital, Nicholas Grossman to go through everything that's going on. So first of all, welcome back, Nicholas.
- [01:11]
Nicholas Grossman
Hi. Thanks for having me. Great to be back.
- [01:14]
Charlie Sykes
Okay. I mean, we obviously have to dive into a bunch of stuff including the Supreme Court, including the big beautiful Bill Thom Tillis. But in my newsletter yesterday I'm trying to slow things down and say don't forget these other stories because they are so significant and I think that's one of the challenges of our time. So I went through, I think, four or five things that I think are highly relevant, including the fact that over the weekend we had the funeral for the two people who were assassinated in Minnesota just a week ago. It seems so long ago. The the former speaker of the Minnesota House and her husband Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both showed up to pay their respect. Neither Donald Trump nor G.D. vance made an appearance in Donald Trump continues to say little or nothing about the assassinations except to insult Minnesota's Democratic Governor Tim Walz and say that he won't speak to him. Also, as Trump continues to say that his bombing obliterated the nuclear facilities in Iran, we now have another rather extraordinary leak. The Washington Post over the weekend reported that the US has obtained voice recordings of Iranian officials talking to one another saying that they were kind of surprised that the attack was not more devastating. Speaking of Iran and I really do think that this is a much bigger fucking deal than it's been played out. As far as I can tell, only Talking Points Memo has highlighted this story from the Washington Times of All places that suggests that Trump gave permission. Well, Trump says that he gave Iran permission to bomb a US Base in Qatar. And this hasn't become like a huge thing he said. So this is a direct quote that Trump revealed that he had given Iran permission to bomb the, the Al Udid air base in Qatar in retaliation for the American bombing. They said, we're going to shoot them. Is one o' clock okay? I said it's fine. Trump said, and everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn't get hurt except for the gunners. I mean, wow. I mean, if this is true, as TPM said, this would be the most shocking dereliction of duty one could imagine for the commander in chief. And you kind of wonder, I mean, you don't have to wonder very hard what the Republicans would do if a Democratic president had said that. And meanwhile, and this is also a big story, the president of the University of Virginia was forced to resign under pressure from the Trump administration, which is a real escalation of the Trump administration's assault on higher education. So I just putting that in the background not to get missed. So, Nicholas, where should we start? As you and I are speaking, they're doing the Votorama in the Senate. Thom Tillis has pulled the plug. Let's just talk about Thom Tillis for a moment. Senator from a swing state of North Carolina had been trying to go along with the Trump administration. I mean, trying so hard that he actually cast the decisive vote in favor of Pete Hegseth to be the Secretary of Defense. But he drew the line with the big, beautiful bill and its massive cuts to Medicaid and voted against moving it ahead. Trump threatened him. Tillis says, fuck it, I'm out. Your thoughts?
- [04:35]
Nicholas Grossman
Well, at one level, I can't really blame him. I mean, I guess maybe he should have seen something like that coming. But he is not in a position as, nor, you know, anyone else really in Congress to do legislation based on principle. That what this highlights is how the Republican Party is built around just, are you supporting or not supporting? Are you standing with or not standing with Trump at any given time? And is separate from all the normal considerations of things like the North Carolina Senate race is one of the most competitive ones in the upcoming election. And Tillis, by taking this stand, under normal circumstances, that would be something that party leadership would be saying, oh, well, if this is going to help you get reelected, we really want that seat. That's what's important to us. So that matters. Or if you're taking a stand on this, okay, you Know, we want the overall bill to pass. We're putting so much in this legislation that. But this one thing is not that important to us. If it really matters to your state, sure, we'll, you know, we'll do that for you. And that is not what matters to them. What is especially not what matters to the President, that it is loyalty, personal loyalty, and the show of loyalty above all else. So as soon as Tillis says that he can't go along with exactly what they want him to do, that he'll go along with most of it, but not that. And they start threatening to primary him. And he I guess said, you know, he doesn't want to deal with that, doesn't want that noise. And I'm almost surprised that more people haven't done that.
- [05:54]
Charlie Sykes
Well, a lot of people have. I mean, there's kind of a long parade of people who have self deported themselves from the Republican Party. You know, I was asked on Monday morning on Morning Joe, really kind of, I think a very interesting question, you know, should people like Thom Tillis stand and fight or should they run? And I mean, there's a school of thought that says, you know what, it's better if you stay and you fight Trumpism. You know, you go down in fire. And I really do get that. And of course, you know, in a perfect world, I wish people would stay in the United States Senate. I wish they would be voices of dissent. But the reality is, as you point out, Tom Till has just made the decision, you know what? Life is too short. I don't want to be doing this. There's no room for independence. Nobody really, you know, there's no room for compromise or public policy. And in fact, he has really become scathing about the advice that Donald Trump is getting, suggesting that, you know, he's listening to people who have no real world experience, who've written white papers, who have no experience governing. And at a certain point you go, you know what? I just, I can't survive in this. So he's made the decision that Mitt Romney has made and Jeff Flake has made and frankly Paul Ryan or people like Mike Gallagher, which is that there's no place for me. Now the downside is that means that every one of the quasi normies, that leaves means that the party becomes more intensely modified, more intense. And that's the way the Trump White House is celebrating. I mean, they're celebrating, they're spiking the football. This is great. We've just lost this Republican senator whose vote we might need because he Won't bend the knee, but bending the knee is basically the one thing that they want.
- [07:40]
Nicholas Grossman
Right.
- [07:40]
Charlie Sykes
The walls in general. Go ahead.
- [07:42]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah, just something you had said that stood out to me about where Tillis even where he said that Trump was getting bad advice or he blamed it on others, you know, it can't possibly be. Even though Tillis is on his way out, you know, he's not gonna seek reelection. He's already gotten the ire of the president. Still, still, he needs to do the thing of, oh, the poor innocent leader is just. No, the czar is betrayed by his advisor. It's never his fault. And that shows you the extent of the cult of.
- [08:12]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, now, I hope you can do this, because I do. It is interesting listening sometimes to Republicans, once they have pulled the plug, how suddenly they become unchained and are willing to give these rather remarkable speeches. And I don't know whether you caught it or not. He goes to the floor of the Senate afterwards and he essentially says, no, this bill is a political disaster and it breaks one of Trump's promises. As if anybody ever in the history of mankind has actually taken Trump's promises seriously. But here's a short excerpt. This is from. This is a montage put together by the Washington Post of some of the things that a newly liberated Senator, Thom Tillis, said in on the floor of the United States Senate.
- [08:53]
Nicholas Grossman
Mr. President, I come today to explain my vote yesterday for voting against the motion to proceed on this bill. What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding's not there anymore in the White House? Advising the president, are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise. And you know, the last time I saw a promise broken around health care with respect to my friends on the other side of the aisle, it's when somebody said, if you like your health care, you could keep it. If you like your doctor, you could keep it. We found out that wasn't true. That made me the second Republican speaker of the House since the Civil War, ladies and gentlemen, because we betrayed the promise to the American people. Now Republicans are about to make a mistake on health care and betraying a promise. It is inescapable that this bill in its current form will betray the very promise that Donald J. Trump made in the Oval Office or in the Cabinet Room when I was there with Finance, where he said, we can go after waste, fraud and abuse on any program.
- [10:23]
Charlie Sykes
I Mean, wow. I mean, good fertilis. You know, it would be better for them to say it. What I think is interesting is that, you know, that he's not alone in having all of these doubts. And I wanna talk to you just a little bit. And this may sound sort of wonky, but just the devolution of the legislative process, because this thing is the mother of all crap sandwiches. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that is gonna be popular, is going to be the goodies in there. No taxes on tips and all of that stuff that Republicans might like, the tax cuts. But they're being forced to vote for all of the horribles as well. They're being forced to vote for things that they would never vote for standalone. So this is not new. This is not new. Right, Nicholas? The omnibus, the chromibus. But was there once a time when you had committee hearings and votes and individual bills and people would vote for things that they agreed on and would vote against bills that they opposed, as opposed to being given one gigantic buffet and, like, you need to eat every single single thing on this buffet. So talk to me about the cramming in of all of this stuff into one vote.
- [11:34]
Nicholas Grossman
So that part is, I think, as you mentioned, something that is not new, or at least maybe they're doing it more than before. A little more than before, but is not new on its own. And this has been ongoing, I'd say, throughout the century, that one you have the degree to which politics is more nationalized. You don't have that politics is local. Just get stuff for your district. Instead it is show that you are supporting the national party or show that you are opposing the other party. And so you don't have those. They want more of the COVID for a lot of the specific legislation as opposed to you voted for this one specific bill, then that's potentially a ad against you or something can be used against. So there's been a lot of members of Congress abdicating individual responsibility. But also it's because of the gamesmanship in the Senate and with the filibuster and with the reconciliation rules. So with this Senate rule gimmick that says that you. So you have to have, you know, 50 votes. You need 50% plus a tiebreaker vice president to pass something. Except, you know, then somebody from the other party can just make it. No, we're just going to say there's a filibuster and you don't actually have to get up there and talk anymore. You just kind of say it and then they don't do the vote to cloture. And so then that would make it a 60 vote threshold. But then there's this other way that you can say okay, Instead of the 60 vote threshold we only need the 50 vote on this as long as it is budgetary and is not increasing a deficit. But so then they manipulate that with what window counts for it. And the one part though that is new is that I think it was just this morning that Republicans in the Senate are saying or indicating that they are going to disregard what the parliamentarian says about what can be used in reconciliation or not, where they're actually trying this gimmick where they kind of don't ask and you know, there or really avoid asking and therefore they can say well they didn't directly violate it. But you know, also everybody knows that the parliamentarian would say no and so they're pushing it forward anyway. And that part is new of you know, say some additional bad faith manipulation of the rules. But it has been trending this way for some time because they put all of their legislation into one or two large bills. You know, Biden, they called this build back better and eventually called it the Inflation Reduction act. The big Biden inflation on climate that is in the inflation.
- [13:52]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. The titles of the bills get worse and worse with every presidency it seems. I mean I always thought Build back Better and big beautiful bill. I mean it's like we're also seeing the dumbing down of titles.
- [14:05]
Nicholas Grossman
You know, I didn't even put it together until now.
- [14:07]
Charlie Sykes
1964.
- [14:08]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah. Is big beautiful bill, the BBB just to be like a reference to the Biden one is that I hadn't even put that together until now. It's like just you have to out brand Biden or something. I mean, I don't know if you want a worse one. I thought the forced acronyms of things like the USA Patriot act in which each of those has to stand for something were pretty bad too. So I don't know if legislation naming is something that's gotten appreciably worse, but they do avoid having all those individual debates and to putting their name onto any individual policy by cramming it all into these things together. And they also get to avoid the higher vote threshold, the Senate.
- [14:40]
Charlie Sykes
You know, I want to get to the Supreme Court, I want to get to Iran. But you and I had a brief conversation before we began. You were talking about the parameters of debates and the way that that has changed. Talk to me a little bit about what you were talking about. Because it was a very, very interesting way of looking at one of the ways in which the window of our political fights, struggles, debates have shifted.
- [15:03]
Nicholas Grossman
So I hinted at this a bit earlier. This is what I mean by things that are normal, as in the way that US Politics had gone for a long time and then the way under constitutional rules and the way that US Politics has at least partially gone since Trump took office now, which is the Democratic backsliding into authoritarianism and operating outside of the Constitution in various ways. And that it is important to think of those as separate, as different. So I think the line used for this normal parameters goes back to a line that P.J. o' Rourke, the conservative satirist, said in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton. This always stuck in my head because it was such a great endorsement, which was Hillary Clinton is wrong about everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters. And that was his endorsement for her. And I've thought about that a bunch because I'd say similarly that things like the debate that Congress is having over Medicaid, that Republicans want to cut a lot of funding for Medicaid and want to use a lot of that to pay for taxes for the rich. And also there will be, say, larger deficits also. But that's what they want to do. And that is a long running Republican priority. It is a redistribution of interest income. It is something that is within the authority of Congress. It is a particular policy that I disagree with, actually find a little sad almost at a personal level. Because before I was in academia, I had worked in healthcare IT and one of the projects I did was helping this rural hospital system in southern Indiana be able to take advantage of federal grants to upgrade its computer system. And that does all sorts of things like reduce medical errors and save a lot of time and is really a great way benefit for rural healthcare. And that could potentially collapse. And hospital systems like that, without a lot of the government funding it's being taken away, could collapse. I think that's bad. I think that is something that they shouldn't do, that it will hurt a lot of real people. And yet it is also a normal policy debate in the sense that that is something that Congress that, you know, Congress has the power to do and that we have always been debating over redistribution one direction or another, over spending, over regulations, things like that. Whereas something in the bill, on the other hand that is abnormal is the massive, massive increases in budget for ICE for deportations and for things like so under this budget, if it does pass, that the ICE would get A budget that is larger than the Marine Corps has, which and really will be building. Yes. And building these massive facilities all around the country that would house thousands of thousands, maybe millions of people. Under this provision, ICE would become the largest jailer in the country, and with a lot of private prison companies getting kickbacks on that. But it would greatly increase the amount of people that they would hire, which already they have low recruiting standards. And that would make them decently lower, probably effectively deputizing or empowering militias even to try to get close to it. That would greatly increase their quota of people to deport. And they're already doing a lot of deportations to go after non criminals, to in some cases even go after citizens. And this is after seeing the behavior of ICE and the different way that they've been violating people's rights or that they are refusing to identify themselves. And then other criminals are looking at what they're doing and taking that as, you know, an opportunity to just show up with a gun and with a face mask. And you say you're ice. And it's not like the ICE people are making any clear thing about that. And, I mean, we could go with a list of the different kind of different cruel things that they've been doing, but this level of funding is a sort of supercharge of that. And that is a. Like an American secret police force of something where I don't want to say this is identical, but it. It makes me think of the Gestapo. And that is something that is abnormal, that is undemocratic. It's a secret police force violating people's rights and punishing people without trial is un American. And so that is outside normal parameters and that sort of thing. It's valuable not to blur those two things together, that you have an old policy debate that people disagree with on the merits, but a new one that all Americans together should be disagreeing based on fundamental American values.
- [19:08]
Charlie Sykes
Well, it is interesting. You look at some of the more recent public opinion polls, and it does seem the American people are turning against many of the things that ICE is doing. ICE has a lower approval rating. I think it was in the Quinnipiac poll, a lower approval rating than Donald Trump. So there is something about the fact of, you know, masked agents in plain clothes arresting people off the street that is offending some sort of residual American sense of fairness and decency. I never like to cite polls to determine what is right or wrong, but it would suggest that there is a backlash against this. So I have one more random thought about this that is less optimistic we are seeing. And before I do that, I will do the optimistic one, which is that these stories, these pictures that you were sort of alluding to do seem to be changing public opinion, that when people see the actual identities and the faces and they hear the stories of the mothers and the grandmothers and the fathers who are being taken away, that they are reacting to all of that. So we live in an age where people who have cell phones record these, and it can change the entire political dynamic. And I think that is. That is continuing to happen. However, having done that, the one thing we have not heard or seen, and maybe I've missed it, we have not seen ICE agents or officials within the agencies who are pushing back against this or refusing to obey these orders. I think that there was a certain maybe delusion that, well, you know, Trump may order, you know, the National Guard to do X, Y or Z, or the military to do XYZ or ICE to do X, Y, Z, and people might refuse to obey those orders. There is no indication whatsoever that there is any pushback. So the one concern is that Trump is radical, not only expanding these agencies, but he is radicalizing them. And the kinds of people, to your point about the recruiting and once you make it bigger than the Marine Corps are, who is going to sign up for these jobs, who is going to be coming in and how magnified will they be? And I think that that answers itself. And that, I think, is even scarier.
- [21:19]
Nicholas Grossman
Functionally, that is the purpose that ICE serves. So the ones who are not going to in any way say no and in fact will be populated by people who are eager to do it, who are excited to do it, do it, who like that the state has authorized to let them do this, then where the additional line we talk also about outside normal parameters, additional very big line cross not only with a lot of the ICE raids in Los Angeles, but the additional participation of military forces. So we had one of National Guard that's being adjudicated in courts, but already National Guard being misused for something that was, you know, outside their purview. But National Guard are designed to partially operate on domestic soil. The Marines very much are not. And there were a few hundred Marines that were deployed into LA and into assisting law enforcement things, which is against Posse Comitas, which Comitatus, which is both a US law. They're still there from the 1900s, still on the books, and a very, very important civilian control of the military position. That one of the things about the US being a liberal democracy and being land of the free. Is that all the way back to, you can think, Bill of Rights of no quartering soldiers in your home? Just the general idea of our soldiers operating on our soil against our own people is not what we do. And I took part of that. It was, you know, it was a very small deployment, but that part of that was a test. Both it acclimates public, the media a little more to normalize it, and it also shows. And we didn't hear much about this, so this is just part of speculation. But who follows that and who doesn't, you know, so who criticizes it? Well, they can be a target for a purge. Does anybody say, I'm sorry, you know, that's an illegal order? I can't do that. Great. You know, that's who they are going to want to fire. Are there people who jumped at the opportunity? Oh, yes, absolutely. I'd love to, you know, go and participate in cracking down on people inside the United States that then they're more likely to do it again in the future, though, if ICE gets this giant expansion, then that makes it. They are less having those personnel that they would need to potentially deploy the military and military forces are still probably more likely, the individual members, more likely to hesitate to do something that they know is illegal or that would be against military code of conduct.
- [23:38]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, I mean, to your point about, you know, normalizing, numbing us, you know, to. To this sort of thing, those Marines are still deployed, Right? They're still there.
- [23:47]
Nicholas Grossman
The law, I think, also.
- [23:49]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, right. Okay. So Posse Comitas is still the law of the land. They are still there. And, like, what's being done about it? I think that there was this sense, well, it's so obviously illegal, the courts are going to have to rule on it. Okay, so let's shift to the courts, because this has been one of the big questions. And I'm going to admit that I had a rare moment of maybe hope that the court was going to draw some more red lines around the abuses of power that they wouldn't. Maybe they'd learned the lesson from last year's immunity decision. But then we had the decision that came down on Friday, written by Amy Coney Barrett on a birthright citizenship. Actually was not on birthright citizenship. It was on the jurisdiction of local courts. And there's a lot of. I think there's been some confusion on this. And this is. So I wanted to get your take on all this. They have not ruled on the merits of Trump's order eliminating birthright citizenship, which I think is clearly unconstitutional. What they did was basically saying individual federal judges should have limited power to issue universal injunctions. Now, there are some cases in which they will still be able to do it. But it did seem, I'm a non lawyer pulling the lens back, however you parse it, it seemed to empower and embolden the executive, Donald Trump, to think now that there are fewer checks and balances. How do you read what the Supreme Court is doing here?
- [25:24]
Nicholas Grossman
I read it the way that you did and if anything, more drastic. So I also am not a lawyer. And in fact, I think that the a lawyer way of thinking or the typical lawyer way of thinking about this is part of the problem and that where. Because what you said in the beginning is correct in that they did not rule on birthright citizenship, which is so unambiguously illegal, that clear in the Constitution that this one is, you know, it's a 14th amendment. It is very straightforward. You're born here, you're a citizen. And if we use the textualist interpretation, you know, that Antonin Scalia was fond of, there's no argument there. That's what the law says. And if they wanted it to say something else, well, they should have made it say something else. But if we do the original intent thing also, it is very clear there's a lot of documentation from around the time that what they were concerned about was people, especially Southern states doing a move of like, oh no, no, no, black person, you're not a citizen because your parents was a slave. And so they weren't citizens, so you don't get to be either. And they wanted to head off that bullshit move right at the start. And so they just said, you're born here, that's it, citizen. Doesn't matter if you can't prove your parentage or not. And so that part is very clear. And the Supreme Court could have decided to rule on that, but they didn't. And the point about so what they decided instead, remember, this is a choice. It's entirely arbitrary, entirely up to them. They can choose which cases they're going to take and they can at different times choose how they're going to rule. For example, you mentioned the immunity case and they decided to kind of wax historical about broad sweeping concepts of presidential powers. And they didn't have to. They could have ruled just on the case right in front of them like they did, you know, here in the technicalities. So that part's always a choice. And when they did do say with this technicality of I share the concerns about some of the universal injunctions that there have been times in U.S. history where policy ends up swinging back and forth wildly because you get, you know, one ideological district judge who says, no, you can't, and another idealist, remember that.
- [27:20]
Charlie Sykes
Majority, they found one guy down in Texas who decided that the abortion pill should be banned and he issued a nationwide injunction. I think all Democrats recognized that that didn't seem appropriate. So you've had Democratic presidents and Republican presidents complain about this particular issue. I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [27:41]
Nicholas Grossman
Right. No, and I agree with that. They are, I think, right in general to complain that national policy should be done primarily by the federal government, not by some people who shop around for the one judge somewhere in Texas that is willing to say, yes, I'll ban this nationwide. So there have always been problems with it, but it's noteworthy that the justices did not seem to have a problem with any of the universal injunctions in recent years that blocked Biden policies that they didn't like, or that things like such as student loans, I guess that then it didn't really matter to them. And then all of a sudden, when it comes to one of Trump's undemocratic abuses, then they just happen to say that this is the case where they're going to say, no, you can't stop it. He has to be allowed to go forward and violate people's rights. And maybe we'll get around to adjudicating on that sometime in the future. But in the meantime, the practical impact is that instead of saying, no, everybody has rights and you have to follow them. It says the government can violate a bunch of people's rights, and then if those people sue, each one can, in their own lawsuit, potentially win, get their rights upheld. But in the meantime, even if that happens over and over again, the government can still and go and violate other people's rights unless they get together to sue and win that lawsuit. So already it is putting.
- [29:01]
Charlie Sykes
So it has to be a. Yeah, it's got to be a class action.
- [29:04]
Nicholas Grossman
A class action oriented.
- [29:05]
Charlie Sykes
And I guess this is the big question. So if there is a class action lawsuit on the issue of birthright citizenship, they would win. And in some interpretations of this, the Supreme Court would uphold that. Which seems like a very technical analysis, because I think the practical analysis is it just made it harder to check the president, but not impossible. You just created. It also seems as if the Supreme Court's basically saying we're the only court that actually matters when it comes to these sorts of issues, which, again, was true. But it does seem a little bit of irrigation of power to them, makes them much more powerful. And I guess the disappointment was one would hope that in the context of all of this, leaving aside the technicalities, that the court watching what's going on, seeing the implications of their immunity decision, would be more cognitive and sensitive to the historical and political context of this moment and how dangerous it is to give green lights to Donald Trump at exactly this moment in history. And yet they didn't.
- [30:13]
Nicholas Grossman
I mean, perhaps if I could go maybe a little more pessimistic, an alternative explanation is they're not stupid. They do understand that and they're into it.
- [30:22]
Charlie Sykes
Okay.
- [30:22]
Nicholas Grossman
I mean, look, I suppose it's possible, especially when I start, you know, criticizing said lawyer brain, that they could be deeply invested in lawyer brain. And but at the, we saw just in the three dissents that all three of the dissenting justices, so all three of, you know, the Democrat nominated justices all talked about the bigger picture. So it's not that things like, you know, going to law school makes it that you are incapable of thinking about practical implications and larger picture or just at some level just calling bullshit, that there's a degree which is the same thing with the immunity decision of where the, I don't know, just it's time, way past time to call bullshit. Or I'll give you another one that I find very frustrating where the Roberts court made up this idea that they call the major questions doctrine, which is that when so overall, you know, judges are not supposed to. The whole point is that they're supposed to interpret the law and they're not supposed to legislate from the bench. This was something that conservatives, for example, argued for a long time. It's something that I largely agree with. And then the Roberts court, when it came up for the Civil Rights act renewal, which Congress had passed many times, which multiple supreme courts had confirmed as constitutional, then Congress reauthorized it again, normal vote in Congress law. And Roberts and company decided that they kind of didn't like the results of this. They didn't think the law was necessary. And so they said, well, this is a major question, which means we, the Supreme Court say it's a big deal and if we call it a big deal, then we get to have extra powers. And so, sure, Congress passed this in all legitimate ways, but, you know, we kind of don't think the law is necessary anymore. It looks like the Southern states are behaving themselves. And so, you know, they don't need this anymore. And I thought Ruth Bader Ginsburg pretty cleverly compared this to somebody who walks around in a rainstorm with an umbrella and then says, hey, look, I didn't get wet, so I don't need an umbrella when it rains next time. But the key point here is if somebody on somebody has an opinion on that policy one way or another, that opinion is up to them. That is, you know, legit, good, bad, whatever you think of that law, fine. But as courts, Congress passed it, so your job is to say constitutional or not. It's not supposed to say, well, we don't like the results and so we don't think it's kind of fair anym. And there were similar things in the immunity decision of just making up this idea of the core duties at which point the President was immune from criminal prosecution and then these other duties that maybe were in core, but he could be, they just made all this up and the result of it was to, I mean, really, that one should have been just laughed out of court. No, of course laws apply to the President. We've operated for 200 something years at laws apply to the President. We're not going to go here and say, you know, otherwise. But instead, what it boiled down to, and this is what I mean by, you know, sort of bigger picture and getting out of maybe the little intricacies of details in the law. But the bigger picture was, what with the immunity decision, the Supreme Court effectively said that George Washington and John Adams and the Constitutional Convention and Teddy Roosevelt with, you know, no man's above the law. Everybody, everybody in US History was wrong about the American presidency, except for Donald Trump and maybe Richard Nixon. They were the only people who got it right. And for some reason, you know, for 150, 200 years, we just didn't notice that. And that's bullshit. That's bullshit. And the result of it is in that case, putting him above the law. And they actually did that twice of the 14th amendment also says, or maybe it's 15th, but the civil War amendment about that Colorado said that insurrectionists can't run, that said that Trump couldn't run. What the law says, and it's clear about this, is that insurrectionists can't run unless Congress passes a special exemption for them. And what the Supreme Court turned that into was insurrectionists can run unless Congress passes a special law banning them or had impeached them. Yeah, passing a law banning them, but it's also just simply making up new law. All of these changes help Donald Trump's abuses of power and help his authoritarian project. And so while I don't think. I'm not gonna say that they are all maybe the biggest Trump fans, I think probably Sam Alito is. But otherwise, you know, they aren't personally maybe the biggest fans of him or his style. That they sure seem on board for the political project and for the anti Democratic aspects of it.
- [34:23]
Charlie Sykes
It's hard to argue against that right now. I guess one of the things that is striking to me is that usually there was a sense one of the arguments for prudence in both the law and in politics was, well, we're not always going to be in power. And if we establish a precedent that empowers us, what will happen when the other guy is in power? If we arrogate to ourselves this sort of power, what might the next guy do? What would a President Kamala Harris do? What would a president Bernie Sanders do? And that seems people seem to have decided, yeah, we don't care, maybe because they think they'll always be in power or whether it's become, you know, the dominance of now, the now power. There is just a complete lack of sort of historical, I would say the historical consequences of many of these decisions, which we don't know. Okay, let's switch, but let's switch gears because I did mention briefly, you know, the ongoing battle about bombing Iran, which, and again, you know, a week ago, that was dominating everything. And so, but, but let's go back to it. I had Tim o' Brien on the podcast over the weekend, and he made a really good point. It would have been very easy for Donald Trump to have finessed this issue in a way that kept all of his options open. But Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Donald Trump can never admit anything is anything less than a complete success. And he has dug himself. You know, he's digging in on this, the absolute obliteration of the nuclear program, even as we're getting more and more evidence that there was damage, but it did not destroy it, which means that we're still in a position where Iran could have a nuclear bomb. So give me your sense of where we are at and Donald Trump's insistence once again on having his own bespoke reality.
- [36:18]
Nicholas Grossman
So I think this is a good example of what you were talking about in the beginning of the really big issues. And maybe we aren't paying as much attention to, in part because, you know, there's so much going on. So it's not unreasonable. But the Iran nuclear issue and the broader question of nuclear proliferation is one of the single most important things in the world and is longer term and has been hanging over a lot of this. So part of the problem was that we did have Iran in a box, had gotten rid of most of their enriched uranium, had severely restricted their capacity to make more. And everybody who was monitoring this, the Pentagon, US Intelligence, Allied Intelligence, the International Atomic Energy Agency, all agreed that Iran was following it. And then in 2018, Trump broke the deal without cause and let Iran out of nuclear restrictions in exchange for nothing and did put sanctions back on them while saying that this was going to get a better deal. And it didn't. Because the thing that got Iran to make a deal in the first place was the whole world sanctioning them. And the world did not join in the new sanctions that Trump did because the deal they had was working and they were mad that it was the US had reneged on it without cause. So already the reason why we're in this in the first place is because of Trump making a major, very foreseeable error in his first term. But that I wrote at the time, and I was far from the only one, that it put us on a path to either a nuclear armed Iran or war. And both of which I think are very bad for a number of reasons that I'm guessing I don't need to elaborate to a lot of. But, but then that should be self evident. Yes. That both of those I think are bad and we do not want either of those.
- [37:52]
Charlie Sykes
Yes.
- [37:53]
Nicholas Grossman
Regime change, war, or. And that's pretty much the only way though, to get countries to not do nuclear weapons. They have to choose not to. And they can choose not to under a lot of international pressure that sanctions, threats of military action, that they're not just choosing it on their own, but so many countries that could build nukes don't. Germany, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea are all good examples of that. But Argentina, Brazil had given up some in the 20th century. I'd given up some programs in the 20th century. I could keep listing these. But so countries have to choose it because the technology is at this point, it's 80 years old. If anybody saw Oppenheimer, you know, the design to build a nuclear weapon, that, that really, that's really it there. It's not a secret. The thing that prevents people from getting it is always it's choosing not to. And having their uranium or in some cases plutonium under restriction that where they keep it at levels where it doesn't explode and everybody monitors that. And so we threw that away. And now with the latest bombing that Israel started bombing Iran for, you know, a number of complicated reasons, but in part because they had severely degraded Hezbollah, Iran's ally. It was in southern Leb, so there weren't rockets flying into Israel. And so they do these launches. And that was a surprise attack. And it looks like they did some pretty serious damage to Iran, at least at the start. And then Trump spent a week saying that, you know, maybe the US Would maybe not teasing it, almost like it was a TV show, they some sort of promo. And then, you know, had these bombs, and I suspected, and I think this one's really not going out on a limb here, that Iran probably moved a lot of the material, that there were satellite photos of trucks moving back and forth from the site sites. Everybody knew which sites. The Israelis didn't have the firepower to hit and needed the Americans to go in and do the damage underground, so they had ample time to move it. And then we can see from satellite photos that the bombs did hit their targets on the surface. But there are some real questions about how much damage they did underground. And it's possible even that the United States effectively demonstrated for the world what the limits of these bunker buster bombs are, how deep you need to dig if you want to survive an American attack. And there is likely damage, but the program is almost certainly surviving. There's even possibly another Iranian facility. They've been hinting at this other secret facility that they were maybe going to bring inspectors to, and they can just keep spreading it around and hardening it. And so when Trump originally claimed that it was obliterated, I knew immediately that it was a lie. Not because I have some sort of secret intelligence, but because I know that damage assessments don't happen that quickly, that there's just no way to know right away. At minimum, multiple military satellites need to fly over it and get really close photographs. And that already won't give you an idea of what's happening under the surface where they can't see. So it's going to take some time. But the indication right at the start, and then with additional the leaking of an intelligence report, and now with the report that some of these Iranians were talking, not in public, where they're putting on a show for their domestic audience, or where they're trying to look tough to foreigners, but in private, where they think people aren't listening and say, you know, I thought the US Was going to destroy more than that, I'm kind of surprised it didn't do more damage. And what that shows is the Iranian nuclear program is likely intact. The U.S. hey, let's just do one strike or, you know, two strikes we can destroy Card has been shown to ultimately not be enough. And Israeli tense, Israeli attack, not enough. And they now have an additional incentive, a really big incentive to get a bomb. Because if you notice, we talk to North Korea, we don't attack them. We, you know, us overthrew Saddam, helped overthrew Gaddafi in Libya. Neither of them had nukes. And so Iran now has this additional incentive, get a nuclear bomb, and then they won't attack you, won't invade you. Maybe next time they'll do regime change. And it was just all. It was all handled poorly. And it is both very frustrating to me of having followed closely and cared a lot about this issue for, at this point, you know, pretty much all century. And the legacy, a big legacy of Trump is nuclear proliferation, in part because of, with his first term of normalizing North Korea's nukes. And his goal has largely been lying to the American people. So North Korea, the first time he went and declared there's no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea, that's a blatant lie. Of course there is. They very much still have the bombs. Those bombs are in missiles pointed at the continental United States, where they can hit the west coast, where they can hit the east coast, we're not sure. But still, that that exists. And he just kept on lying to the American public and trying to put on this show for them and not caring about, or perhaps even maybe liking, I don't know, but praising Kim Jong Un like he worked in North Korea's PR department. And with Iran, he has also incentivized countries to get additional nuclear weapons. Because when you make a deal to give them up, well, then the US Is at most, now everybody knows, at most one election away from just reneging on that without cause. So why would you cut a deal? You can't really trust Americans with that. Pretty much the only way you can deter them is by getting nukes. And that's the message that he sent. And when he lies about it, that just gives them additional cover. Then the, okay, so the Iran nuclear program is not a problem anymore. And so effectively to sell his own lie to the American public, he is now providing cover for clandestine nuclear activities.
- [43:09]
Charlie Sykes
Right. This is a gift to the Iranians because he's. He basically is saying that, yeah, it's not something we should do. Something I agree with you completely on all this. That this, by doing it this way, he's actually made it much more dangerous. And you made an interesting point, and I'm not an expert in this. So this is more of a question, but as you pointed out, it is not a massive secret how you build the nuke, the atomic bomb. I mean, they've been around for a very, very long time. Right now, the Iranians are very smart people. They are very sophisticated people. So one of the questions we have to ask is, why haven't they developed the bomb? If India has the bomb, if Pakistan has the bomb, why does Iran not have a bomb? And I think the answer, you know, might be because at various points, they've chosen not to or been convinced it was not in their interest. And quite frankly, that's the only way to keep them denuclearized, because, as we're finding out, the military option might work, but it has not worked so far. And it's. And if it doesn't work, it makes the world more dangerous, because now it is very much a rational decision on their part because they have been incentivized to now have an Iranian nuclear bomb. So I was skeptical of the Iran deal that the Obama administration put together, but I think their insight was, if you don't do it diplomatically, if you don't make it in their interest to do it, there's no alternative that is not worse. And I think that that's kind of the point. So, you know, Trump throws it out, and where are we at now? So are we gonna go back and bomb again? The problem is if, in fact, let's say that we figured out that they still have the capacity to build a nuclear bomb and in fact, are in the process now of building it. If we go back, Donald Trump has to say, I was wrong. My first thing didn't work. He's not capable of saying that. So I wonder whether he's put himself in a box while providing cover for the Iranians at the moment. Which is. Which is why I would argue that, no, you do not need to go to war with the president. You have. There might have been other presidents who would have handled this, I think, more prudently. Making Trump a wartime president was a terrible idea. I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [45:31]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah, I caught the reference. The argument I liked better was Robert Kagan had one that amounted to. He has been a long opponent of the Iranian nuclear program, and Trump being the one to do this would make things worse. And, you know, that was the argument I shared in both internationally and also as an excuse for more power grabs at home.
- [45:51]
Charlie Sykes
No, I agree with that.
- [45:54]
Nicholas Grossman
You're very much right about. With. Yeah, with the proliferation that the Iranians, they know how to do it. The. When it comes to, you know, they don't need, say, like an Oppenheimer to invent something new. They have already proven that they can enrich uranium to bomb grade levels. And so they just need engineers that can repeat already existing tasks. They have the uranium mines in their country, so they don't need to import it. They have the centrifuges that they've built and set up in multiple locations to enrich it in their country. So there are only two paths. Either they choose not to because they have been incentivized in various ways not to, or somebody, namely the United States, would have to go in, do a regime change, war, overthrow the government, and install a new government that doesn't want to. And that has all sorts of possible chaotic implications, which I can probably explain as simply as Iran has twice the population and about three times the area as Iraq. So if the Iraq war was hard, a similar war in Iran, or for that matter, the US Overthrowing the governments and then say, just leaving and being like, okay, let's just leave this power vacuum in the Middle East. Both of those are really, really dangerous situations. And yet the only way to avoid a nuclear armed Iran is either they get a deal that they actually believe will matter for them. And I don't know how to convince them of that now since.
- [47:15]
Charlie Sykes
Not anymore. Not anymore. Right. And that was a really good point in a bind. Well, and we've. So we've precluded that as an option. So just one, one last thought. I think you made a very interesting point that the legacy of the Trump administration will be nuclear prol. You know, we often, I often think about, you know, because things are moving so fast, you know, how much of this actually matters. When we look back on this period, 50 years from now, what are we going to remember? What actually changed, what was significant? And that may be one of the great legacies that the rest of the world has suddenly realized they can no longer count on the United States. They can no longer trust the United States. They are no longer safe under the American nuclear umbrella. I thought it was fascinating watching that farce at the NATO summit where everybody's kissing Trump's ring like, this is your big win, Mr. Trump, because we are now all our military spending. Well, they're doing it not because Trump told them to do it, but because they realize they're on their own now. They cannot trust the United States to defend them. They're not even sure the United States is on the same side. So the whole rest of the world is now arming up because the Pax Americana is over with a lot of critiques of that period. But it did prevent nuclear war. And now, as you point out, I think every country is going, do you want to be, you know, do you want to be vulnerable or do you want to be protected? There is a reason why we're never going to bomb Pakistan, we're never going to bomb India, we're never going to bomb North Korea. Right. Donald Trump is constantly sucking up to Russia because Russia is a nuclear power and the Ukrainians are going, hey, remember when we had these nukes around here and we gave them up because everybody promised us that if we didn't have nukes, we would have all of these security promises. No country in the world is going to give up nukes in exchange for a promise from the United States ever again. And I think that's a great point, Nicholas.
- [49:05]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah. And there's an important aspect of that, that adding to the things I had said where I mentioned North Korea and Iran of rival US Rivals that would have it. But you hint at with the American nuclear umbrella that one of the biggest risks for nuclear proliferation are US Allies that are menaced by nuclear powers but have trusted the United States. We're talking about South Korea, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, I think are probably the biggest ones. And actually Poland, both Poles and South Koreans are already talking about. There's not that they're going to go all the way yet, but there are louder rumblings in both countries about how they need their own nuclear weapons because they need to be able to deter, in their case, either Russia or China or North Korea and that they can't rely on the US to do that anymore and that this in turn will make, if they actually do go for it, and it'll make Russia or China or North Korea, depending on the country, will make them more nervous and then possibly consider preemptive attack, not unlike what Israel tried against Iran. Or I guess, actually I need to be technical here, preventive attack preemption. I feel this is, you know, the international relations professor made preemption means an imminent attack you're stopping, right. A preventive attack. And so you have both all of these Democratic allies that longtime Democratic allies that can't rely on the US Anymore and they can't really trust the US and in fact, the US Is picking fights with them under Trump. And where you mentioned the NATO one, I think is a great example that the biggest thing that spurred more European defense spending was many American presidents have asked about it. But the big Thing that spurted. They first did a big increase under Obama and that was not because of something special that Obama did that previous US Presidents didn't figure out. That was because Russia took Crimea from Ukraine and the Europeans got more nervous and they were more afraid of Russia. And so it's a similar dynamic now that Russia, by attacking Ukraine and threatening them, they're more afraid there. And by the US Backing off and saying things about how, you know, NATO can, if Russia attacks a NATO country that they'll be on their own, that that is also spurring more defense spending in them. And the result of it is not going to be somebody saving the United States money. You'll notice that in Trump's budget proposal, it's not like the US Military has a big spending cut that from all this we've got a massive increase. Yes. So it's not like we're saving any money by doing this. We are the effect is just weakening the United States. I wrote two things early on in this that I'm proud of. The titles so I think apply to this a lot. One was you'll miss the Pax Americana when it's gone. Which similar to what you had said, but about how they're. Obviously there are a lot of downsides to it, but a lot of the upsides but people take for granted. And the other one that I called allies are assets, you idiots. And that where these are force multipliers that, you know, they are not burdens or we haven't mentioned Canada yet but you know, also as a NATO member and a G7 member, extremely valuable ally that the US has so much had gotten so much benefit from working with them together. And of course Canada also got so much benefit from it. Mutually beneficial thing. And that is gone. And not that Canada is going to rush for nuke, but they will even start thinking about that if the US really starts threatening them even more, they're going to start thinking about it more seriously. And all of that gets dangerous because the more nuclear weapons there are part of the reason why we've been so intent on we meaning the world on keeping a clamp on this stuff is because things like mutual assured destruction usually takes a while to settle in that there are a bunch of close calls even between the US and the USSR and then there are all the possibilities of, of somebody stealing one or somebody, you know, maybe a rogue general giving one to a terrorist or somebody becoming desperate and selling one on the black market or miscommunicating getting a reading that there are bombs headed your way. And then they launch, even though the reading is wrong, which almost happens.
- [52:52]
Charlie Sykes
Almost.
- [52:53]
Nicholas Grossman
Something called Abel Archer. Yeah. And so all those possibilities multiply. And that's the sort of thing you can't take back. You know, a even one nuclear explosion used to kill people, which we have not done since World War II. And then, I don't know, all bets are off. So this is more in the background. It's not. You know, I can understand why maybe people are paying attention to a lot of the domestic legislation or other things happening inside the United States. But this is a bigger picture, longer term and part of the legacy of the United States being less responsible.
- [53:25]
Charlie Sykes
And if we get this wrong, all the rest of it might not matter if we get this one thing wrong. Nicholas Grossman, once again, really smart conversation. Thanks for joining me. You can find Nicholas's work over at Arc Digital. Thank you for joining me, Nicholas.
- [53:40]
Nicholas Grossman
Sure, my pleasure. Great to be with you.
- [53:42]
Charlie Sykes
And thank you all for tuning into this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We're going to do this all summer because, as you know, it is more important than ever to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax. And let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts.
- [54:19]
Nicholas Grossman
In time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts.
- [54:23]
Charlie Sykes
Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe.
- [54:26]
Nicholas Grossman
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw.
- [54:28]
Charlie Sykes
The discount they gave me on my first order.
- [54:31]
Nicholas Grossman
Oh, sorry.
- [54:32]
Charlie Sykes
Namaste.
- [54:33]
Nicholas Grossman
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts. Say hello to Mia. Hey there. Mia runs a pet grooming service in Chicago. But getting new clients was rough until I started using Acast. I recorded my ad targeted pet owners in the area and let ACAST do the rest. Now people all over the city know about my grooming services. Mia's business is looking sharp. What's your secret for happy pets and happy clients? Clients. A fresh cut, a friendly vibe and a well placed podcast ad. Get the word out about your business through Acast. Visit go.acast.com advertise to get started. Running a business is hard work. Building your website shouldn't be. With wix, you can express your ideas, give direction, then leave the heavy lifting to AI. From site creation to branded content and images. Have fun with the details, customize what you want the way you want and manage your whole business from a centralized dashboard with expert AI tools. Build, scale, and enjoy the incredible results. You can do it all yourself on wix. Hey listeners, Meet Russell. Hey. Russell just launched a fitness app and he needed to get the word out to busy professionals looking to stay. So I turned to Acast. I used their Smart Recommendations feature to.
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Charlie Sykes
Easily find shows that talk about health and fitness.
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Nicholas Grossman
Booking sponsorships through their platform was a breeze, and just like that, my app.
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Charlie Sykes
Was in their ears during their morning run.
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Nicholas Grossman
Sounds like a smart move, Russell. How's business looking now? Sweat is pouring and so are the installs. Spread the word about your business with podcast ads on Acast. Start today@go.acast.com advertise.