← To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
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- [00:00]
Nicholas Grossman
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Charlie Sykes
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Nicholas Grossman
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Nicholas Grossman
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Charlie Sykes
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- [01:24]
Charlie Sykes
Welcome to the to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. After another amazing week. It's Sunday and I always try to sum things up. What was the most important thing? What should we be talking about? Look, I know you've heard this before. I know it feels like every single week we do the same thing, but this last week, it did feel as if something shifted. Now, whether it shifted in a positive direction or a negative direction, we're going to try to hash out. I'm going to try to hash that out with our guest today, Nicholas Grossman, who comes back. Nicholas, thank you. Thank you for joining me on the podcast today.
- [01:56]
Nicholas Grossman
My pleasure. Happy to be here.
- [01:58]
Charlie Sykes
Okay. Got a lot of heavy lifting, though. Gotta warn you here. So, a week ago today, the Charlie Kirk memorial, the I forgive you, I hate you memorial, the Stephen Miller, you are nothing rant, the press conference about vaccines between the President of the United States and RFK Jr. And by the way, on Friday morning, apparently Donald Trump went on an all caps rant about how evil Tylenol is because we need to take our medical advice from the guy that recommended injecting bleach. Okay, that just gets us through like a portion of the week. Then of course, we have the incredibly embarrassing, cringeworthy performance at the United Nations. Donald Trump's absolute obsession with who messed with the escalator. I mean, I just want to throw this out to people that if you live in the alternative reality of Fox News, this is actually a big story, that they keep focusing on the escalator that didn't go up and making this whatever. That same day, we had what appeared to be a complete reversal on Ukraine, where the president, who had been essentially kissing Vladimir Putin's toes, decided that maybe Russia was a paper tiger and that Ukraine could win after all, you know, more losing the football, we don't know. Again, middle of the week, Disney blinks, Jimmy Kimmel returns, gives a gracious but not groveling speech, I mean, monologue. And on Friday, we hear that Sinclair, the right wing station stations that Sinclair owns, they will start carrying Jimmy Kimmel again. They had been reluctant to do it until Friday. We had a shooting at an ice facility in Dallas. And then we get to the big stories of the week, the indictment of James Comey. Pete Hegseth orders all the generals, 800 generals and admirals to show up in Virginia for a meeting and nobody knows what it's about. We have Donald Trump's latest corporate cronyism with TikTok. And the government is headed toward an almost inevitable shut down. So, Nicholas, help me out here. Where do we start? What do you want to grab onto in this week? The acceleration of Trump's revenge campaign, the return of Jimmy Kimmel? I mean, just let's do a jump ball here. What do you want to start with?
- [04:40]
Nicholas Grossman
It's Sunday, so I think all of those are a very big deal and would like to get to them. But being an international relations professor, national security person, I'm going to go with both Hegseth and the UN in that the meeting of calling back admirals and generals from all around the world have an in person meeting is very odd that there's no precedent for that in modern US History outside of a major war. So, you know, there's a big meeting to fight World War II and figure that out, but not for at peacetime, certainly. And it is something that even without speculating anything negative about what might happen and at the actual meeting, what the purposes are, which I don't know, have no idea. But even that it is very expensive and logistically difficult and national security undermining to all of these people off of their posts.
- [05:30]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, I mean, it's expensive. These people are supposed to be on their post, you know, you mentioned World War II. I'm guessing the Franklin Roosevelt never ordered all of the generals to lead the battlefields, leave the fronts, leave their positions so you can have a meeting.
- [05:45]
Nicholas Grossman
So, so that is especially ridiculous in the Internet age because this can be a teleconference. You know, it's like this email could have been a phone call. This meeting could have been a teleconference. There's no reason to take, say, an admiral off an aircraft carrier in the Pacific near China and make him fly all the way back to Virginia to have some sort of meeting in person. They have secure teleconference sites at the, on the various, on the, on the boats, on the ships, on, I mean, at bases, you know, all over the place. This is something the US has been doing for a while and who knows how much is tied up in ego. If there's some sort of nefarious plan or. But I can't figure it out, but it is very strange and really stands out.
- [06:28]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, I mean, look, I don't want to necessarily speculate, although I will allow others to do it. I mean, there are some folks who are saying that maybe this is going to be the moment where Pete Hegseth looks them in the eye and says, okay, who's with us? Who's against us? Who's willing to raise their hand and say that they will obey any order that Donald Trump gives. If you raise your hand, you get to stay. If you don't raise your hand, you leave. Believe significant because you know, the generals, the military takes an oath of allegiance to the Constitution, not to the President of the United States. So you do wonder, given the fact that you have Donald Trump stripping the independence and obviously doesn't give a shit about the independence of, of the Department of Justice or any of the, you know, executive branch, but also one by one, has been destroying the independence of independent agencies. Does Donald Trump care about the non political, nonpartisan independence of the US Military? I doubt it. So we'll have to see what happens there.
- [07:25]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah. If anything, he and Hegseth and the rest seem to think it's bad that they have been acting to politicize the military and removing different people, some in part by things like race and gender, banning a lot of trans people who had served honorably, removing some senior leaders of the military that are black for no reason I can figure out except for their race or, or in their terminology, by, you know, their skin color makes them woke, I guess. And politicize the civilian control of the military and a non political military that Stays out of it. Is world historically important. It's the sort of thing that people take for granted because everyone in the United States grew up with it. But in the places where that's not the case, in Pakistan's the first one that comes to mind, it creates massive societal problems. And that can last a long time and be very hard to undo.
- [08:15]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, the United nations speech. Donald Trump goes in front of the United nations, gives this meandering, demented, deranged rant. You could see that most of the delegates are sitting there in stunned silence as he makes a pitch for the Nobel Prize, mocks climate change, tells them they're all going to hell, that he's right about everything. You know, one factual error after another. Goes after the mayor of London. What do you make of that? I mean, again, people in MAGA world are saying, you know, daddy's back. This was great. This was America first and everything. I think most of the delegates are like the guy that texted the Washington Post and said, this guy's stark raving mad. Do Americans know how embarrassing this guy is?
- [09:04]
Nicholas Grossman
That, I think, is the biggest story. So while a lot of American media, the American public discussion, normalizes this or whitewashes it or kind of sane washes it, or at least moves on from each thing as you know, or when he says a bunch of crazy stuff, respond, you know, it's like, oh, that's just Trump. Or of course he says that stuff. And the rest of the world isn't looking at it that way. So they see him reject all the cooperation and internationalism that the United nations stands for, all these things which the United States helps set up. It is not a coincidence that the UN Headquarters is in New York and the first one was originally built in San Francisco. It, in a way, is symbolically identifying the United States as the one who was setting up and is the premier guarantor of the United nations, and for rejecting not only things like climate change, which already, you know, is quite bad, but Trump did in his first term, but also to reject things like open trade and immigration so that all your countries are going to hell. Is that because you have immigrants or because people can move around the world? And that is just the. The open world that we celebrated in the aftermath of the Cold War. And that has brought America a lot of prosperity and a lot of power and has made it easier for us to work on joint projects together, deal with joint problems together. And this was Trump essentially giving the world a giant middle finger. And the. In seeing the combination of that with the Crazy with all the different. The up is down lies. You know, my poll numbers are up. They're actually down. The economy is growing at some number that is bigger than the entire economy, when of course, it's not. Not. And any of these that they look at that and see, at absolute best, the United States has incompetent, possibly insane leadership, one that is against pretty much all of them and the purpose of why they're meeting there and for long term plans. This likely helps solidify in their minds that the United States is at absolute best, unreliable going forward and possibly hostile because America and reelected it as opposed to just, you know, did it once on maybe a fluke.
- [11:14]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, that's the. I keep coming back to David Frum's analogy that, you know, the world is looking at the United States and going, okay, the first time you elected Donald Trump, you know, Donald Trump, it was like, yeah, you were mixing Quaaludes with tequila. Okay, you know, that's a bad, you know, bad thing. You did it once, okay, you learned your lesson. But problem is, when you reelect him, you're still mixing the Quaaludes with the tequila. If you do it once, it's a fluke, maybe, but twice you have a problem and you are unreliable. All right, what did you make of the flip flop on Ukraine? You know, part of me wants to think that this is good, at least he's not, he's not parroting Vladimir Putin's propaganda anymore. Where we've gone a long distance from when he was on the, you know, rolling out the red carpet for, for Putin in Alaska. But with Trump, who knows? I mean, are we like 24 hours away from Vladimir calling Trump up and going, donnie, Donnie, baby. You know, what happened to his. What? I mean, you know, we're buddies, we're friends.
- [12:14]
Nicholas Grossman
You know what, that's why I don't, I don't really take much of these shifts in rhetoric that anytime he does this, there's always this rush to proclaim a big pivot or a change in US Stance. And he's done this a bunch that he'll meet with somebody and he'll kind of say what he thinks sounds good in the moment or, you know, maybe what they want to hear. And then he'll come at it and say something like that, and then, you know, someone else meets with him or I guess then Putin meets with him and then he goes right back to it. And when it comes to, when it comes to war, it's. What matters most is the material conditions, is the hardware with weaponry, supplying intelligence, and especially one thing that Trump hasn't been doing of showing unqualified support for NATO allies. So while I guess it was a positive in that Trump has a few times been lately saying, you know, that the, the war is hard, he thought he's going to solve it right away, but it turns out to be hard. And, you know, maybe it turns out that Putin is not being, you know, totally helpful in this. And, I mean, I guess that's a positive. The answer to, you know, who could have known is everybody, just about everybody, including people who tried to tell him many different times that he and the people around him willfully reject it. So if he actually sticks to the claim that, you know, if he's actually dropped the claim that Ukraine, the Russia's invasion is Ukraine's fault and the way to solve it is to put pressure on the warmongering Ukrainians that are defending themselves to bow down to Putin and that then that will solve everything or maybe put pressure on the Europeans to solve it. And so if they're dropping that, I guess that's, you know, that is positive. I don't want just giving it a guess. That's. That's positive. But he also, in an interview with the UN Was asked about Russian incursion into NATO airspace, or there are some, both drones, even fighter jets made Polish airspace. And should they shoot them down? He said, yeah, yeah, they should. And then they asked, you know, would the United States be supporting, you know, European allies that did that? And he said, well, it depends. And, yeah, it's that exact attitude that undermines the confidence in NATO's deterrent. And the so much effort for decades has been to convince, especially Moscow and also the Europeans, really everybody, but especially them, that war with one NATO member means war with the United States. So don't do it. The whole point is to be a deterrent. And if that deterrent commitment wobbles, if people don't think the US Is going to be there, it makes the Europeans more nervous, it makes Moscow more tempted, and it makes them more interested in trying to test NATO and ultimately collapse it, which is how I read these air incursions. So because NATO is so much based on that reputation, the way to break NATO, and I don't feel like I'm breaking ground here, I'm confident Putin knows this, has been doing this. But the way to break NATO is to do just enough against one NATO member in Eastern Europe, Poland, Estonia, maybe, you know, one that was a former part of the Soviet Union to just enough that they say, we're being attacked, we need help. And then the United States says, well, I don't know if that's the case or. And Trump even said, well, maybe those flights were an accident and you don't know, and then that the United States is not going to be there. And once everybody thinks the United States is not coming, then NATO is effectively dead. And maybe there could be some sort of successor organization. But if they do not believe with a certainty that the US Will be there, then the deterrent doesn't really work.
- [15:29]
Charlie Sykes
Well, two things here, and you're right, the key word is deterrent. And remember when Trump was saying over and over and over again that if he'd been president, Vladimir Putin never would have gone into Ukraine because he would have been too afraid, he would have been deterred by Trump's presence. Well, what we've seen rather dramatically and may be irritating Trump is the Vladimir Putin is basically saying, I'm not determined, deterred by anything you're doing. In fact, all of these incursions into Europe, another one of the big stories of the week are signs that, I mean, he's not being deterred from going into Poland or Romania or over the Baltic states, maybe even Denmark. That's really the big middle finger to Donald Trump. And secondly, I think you're absolutely right. And again, I don't want to be too dark here, but I could certainly imagine him taking some action against like Estonia and Donald Trump coming out and saying, you know, protecting Vilnius is not worth a single American life. No, you know, they're part of NATO and we have for these Article 5. But you know what? I'm not going to trade New York for. I'm not going to trade New York for Helsinki. I'm not going to trade New York. And you know, that's what he's thinking, right? And Vladimir Putin knows that. Vladimir Putin knows that Donald Trump will not support NATO if he does it in that particular way. So that is kind of scary. Okay, so on a slightly brighter note, and we want to get to the Comey thing, because I do think that Comey was a red line. I mean, this feels different. It's not same old, same old. And I want to really emphasize that. But much of the week was taken up by this weird side. And I wonder how historians of the future are going to look at this. The President of the United States taking time out from all of these things that are going on in the world to obsessively focus on a comedian on late night television and celebrating his firing Everybody knows the backstory. The FCC chair says we can do this the easy way, we can do this the hard way. Very mafioso of him. And everybody came. Caves in, Disney caves in Sinclair, necstar say that they're not going to carry Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy Kimmel looks like he's been fired. He's been canceled. No, in terms in the annals of cancellation, perhaps the least successful of all time backfired bigly. Kimmel comes back on. Just give me your sense of how that has played out, because not only is Jimmy Kimmel not been canceled, Jimmy Kimmel is being bigger than ever. And Frank, I kind of feel that he's sparked a kind of an interesting discussion about free speech and what free speech means to Americans. What do you think?
- [18:23]
Nicholas Grossman
I think that it's. I agree and I think it's a really big deal. It's the sort of thing that I've also said to my wife about how I think this will end up in textbooks. You know, not a whole page, but a mention or two. Incidentally, George Clooney will probably get a mention in, you know, the 2024 election. Also. What do you think of where celebrities play a role? But this is not something asked for. But when it originally happened, I found it very unsettling that where the stuff with Colbert being pulled off the air or Colbert being canceled was pretty bad and sure looked politicized, but you know, they let him run out the contract and he's saying a lot of critical stuff about Trump on the air. Now they kind of have economic argument for it in that, you know, late night, it's not Johnny Carson era anymore. It's not that it's not a profitable part of their enterprise. And so, yeah, that one seemed pretty bad with Kimmel. It was yanked off the air. And in response to immediately in response to a specific comment that I didn't think was all that objectionable, even in the standards of.
- [19:27]
Charlie Sykes
Not mild.
- [19:28]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah, just even standards of late night comedy was not objectionable. And that, you know, it happened right away and was so clearly a government demand with the chair of the fcc, you know, making that mafia like demand and with Trump celebrating it. And he had telegraphed this earlier, you know, after Colbert, like Kimmel's next. So there was no doubt that this was something that had been planned for a while. And it seemed to be also MAGA really feeling itself with the Charlie Kirk murder and the Charlie Kirk killing of getting the sense that this is, you know, everybody agrees that this guy was a national hero and that this was Even though we don't know when we didn't have any idea who the killer was, immediately accusing a bunch of people they hate, trying to use it as an excuse to punish various people that they've hated for a long time. You know, falsely accusing the shooter of being trans, for example. I guess not even accusing is the right word. Just a saying, you know, that without knowing. Without knowing it. And it also turns out not to be true. But then. So this seemed to be part of that and perhaps a wave of censorship and other crackdowns coming in the aftermath of this. And instead what ended up happening was we got this big civil society reaction that, where I agree that the comey thing is a very big line, but so was this, that this was also a big line to do so blatant and to bring up immediately people thought of analogies of Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis kicking comedians off the air because they made fun of Hitler. And you had people from various parts of the political spectrum even say that. Unusual to see it. Even Ted Cruz, for example, said something about that.
- [21:06]
Charlie Sykes
Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Mitch McConnell.
- [21:09]
Nicholas Grossman
Sure. And so you had more people that it was something that. Where they actually would assert a principle rather than abandon. So I guess they won't abandon every single principle all the time just for Trump, just, you know, many of them a lot of the time. But still, that's definitely better. And Disney did what a lot of Americans, America's top echelon of elites have been doing, you know, think the heads of big corporations and media and, you know, a number of politicians and had been doing of the ones outside of government of very quickly bowing down in a way even seeming almost eager to do it, or for a lot of them, you know, as if the. This was just savvy, this is the way the country was going. As if there was consolidated authoritarianism already or if some of them seem to be treating the 2024 election as like it was a binding national referendum on the culture where, you know, now we're, now we're all anti. Woke, you know, are. That's just what the country is. And it's all, It's. We're all the manosphere and like that. That's just what everybody is. And they seem to be operating that way. And Disney got a strong backlash from consumers that they really felt it. So here they felt pressure from, from the president, from the fcc, and now there was a strong countervailing pressure. And granted, they are more in position to experience this than many others because in their case, they have Heavily dependent. So a lot of their revenue is on parks, is on parks and cruises. That's already under strain because of a lot of the way that Trump is turning off tourists. Flights from Canada to Florida, for example, are way down. So they're already under some pressure there. There are a number of hardcore customers. The Disney adults that spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and were canceling. One of the high profile ones I heard was someone had booked the magic kingdom for $150,000 wedding and canceled it. So they don't notice that. And also their dependence on some creatives, it's a franchise heavy model. So some directors and actors and producers that are very high up in their production chain said something about it. Either I won't work with Disney at all, or I'm considering it in one way or another. A good example of this is Pedro Pascal, who didn't outright say I won't work with them, but was very critical of it. And he's Mr. Fantastic and the Fantastic Four and Marvel depends on that. And he's the Mandalorian in a Star wars show and they're having a movie of that come out. And he's the sort of person who really has a, I don't know, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars of leverage over them in that regard. And so from all of these different reactions, then all of a sudden it became, if you think of the CEOs or corporate leadership as amoral, let's say just, you know, looking for money or looking to avoid problems, that then they're not on their own. But when they get a lot of pressure and it looks like they going to lose more money by doing something like say, cracking down on free speech at the government's behest, then they will change course. And since so much of what Trump and MAGA are trying to do is kind of bluff their way, or maybe better word is meme their way into authoritarianism to pretend they have a lot more power than they do. That Kimmel being back on the air showed that maybe they don't. Or at least, you know, they have more ability to abuse power than in previous American presidencies, previous administrations, but that ultimately they're pretty weak. So, you know, I made a Joseph Goebbels analogy earlier, and it's worth noting that the Nazis could get the comedians off the air. You know, the idea that Trump couldn't get one comedian that makes fun of him off television is quite limited in his authoritarian abilities. And while it's still very concerning, I don't Want to downplay it. It's also a lot weaker than people have been making it out to be.
- [24:48]
Charlie Sykes
I see. I think that's, I think one of the takeaways that people should have is that, is that this Trumpian juggernaut is not irresist. Everything is not inevitable. We are not alone. And because, you know, look, that, that, that sense of power is crucial. I mean, he, his power relies on people thinking he's powerful, but also that the opposition feels that they're weak and that opposition is pointless. I also thought that Jimmy Kimmel handled it awfully well. You know, this is, this talk about a lot of pressure. And I'll be honest with you, you know, I am, I'm, I don't stay up for late night shows. I don't watch late night shows. So I've been watching it on YouTube and I have to say, Kim, I'm watching, watching Kimmel for the very, very first time on a regular basis in a long time. And I really admire the way that he has been very, very direct. He's been very clear, he's spoken very, very clearly. Yes, he ridicules Trump, but also he's explaining the stakes. And so the country feels like it's having a discussion about free speech and about, and about, you know, why you can disagree, but still, you know, but, but, but still support someone's right to speak. You know, his line about this show is not important. What's important is that we live in a country that can have a show like this was pretty, pretty good. So this was one of those moments where Donald Trump stubbed his toe very, very badly. The fact that Sinclair has now decided to re air Kimmel. Look, I'm not saying that this fight is over. There's a long way. Donald Trump still has tremendous power. And as we saw near the end of the week, he intends to use every bit of it. He intends to press every red button on his desk, use every angle to hurt the people who he thinks have hurt him, to destroy the people he thinks have embarrassed him. Which is a nice segue into the flip side of this, the Comey indictment. Now, I wrote this morning that on one level, I wrote actually on Friday, on one level, it feels like, okay, you know, we knew this was coming, right? He's been telling the hit that this is coming. He said this was going to be a, a presidency of retribution. So we kind of knew that. But I do think it's important for people to realize, and I want your take on this as well, that this really did Feel like we crossed a red line, that things did shift this week and people know the facts, right? They know the backstory, where the very respected U.S. attorney in Virginia essentially said the law and the facts do not support criminal charges against James Comey or against Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York. I'm not bringing charges. Trump fires him, then issues this weird DM social media post to Pam Bondi, essentially ordering her to, in, you know, to, to go after these opponents to criminally charge them. He puts in place a ridiculously unqualified loyalist who's never prosecuted a case before. And then 48 hours later, after she's sworn in, she gets a grand jury to indict the former head of the FBI, clearly following the President's orders. And one more thing. And then of course, I'm sure that there are various toadies in maga. Media will say, well, no, this was the Department of Justice. This is not Donald. Donald Trump cannot help himself. He jumps in. He wants everyone to know I'm the one that did it. I put a hit on him. And can I just read you his tweet this morning? I mean, the fact that he has taken to social media to prejudge the case, this is extraordinary. I know we're all numbed by this. Let me just read this was Friday where he's calling Comey a dirty cop, demanding he pay a very big price. Whether you like corrupt James Comey or not. And I can't imagine too many people like him. He lied all in caps. It is not a complex lie. It's a very simple but important one, all in caps. There's no way he can explain his way out of it. He is a dirty cop and always has been. But he was just assigned a crooked Joe Biden appointed judge, so he's attacking the judges again. We're back to that. So he's off to a good start. Nevertheless, words are words and he wasn't hedging or in dispute. He was very positive. There is no. He's litigating the case on social. The President is prejudging the case. He left himself 0 in caps, margin of error on a big and important answer to a question. He just got unexpectedly caught. James, dirty cop. Comey was a destroyer of lives. He knew exactly what he was saying and that it was very serious and far reaching lie for which a very big price must be paid. President DJT so Donald Trump, judge, jury, executioner, prosecutor, wants everyone to know that he is at the heart of this campaign. It just feels as if it's naked. And that any pretense. The Justice Department head of independence is not eroded, it's been destroyed.
- [30:04]
Nicholas Grossman
I think that's right, which is very bad and very serious. And yet also at the same time, I think it shows limitations. So I agree that there is a clear line crossed here of that. These are. It's a selective, clearly politicized prosecution that, you know, is done just because the President doesn't like him, not because the law and the facts say that he should. The fact that it is the former head of an FBI, Former head of the FBI, you know, a senior national security law enforcement official makes it very serious and in part communicates this element of, you know, I can go after him. That means I can go after anybody, you know, can go after the big people. I mean, they're doing it in the open is partially maybe ego. You know, he just can't stand to have the idea, you know, people don't know that he did it. But also is a behavior of. Typical of authoritarians that a good analogy for this is. For a while I wondered, why would people like, say, Saddam Hussein or Bashar al Assad or something hold these elections and give themselves 99% of the vote? Like, couldn't you do something plausible, like, I don't know, 62 or whatever. You can still cheat, still hold power, but do that. And that when it clicked, is that part of that? It's a. It's a dominance display. It's. This is obviously false. I'm lying. You know I'm lying. I know you know I'm lying. And guess what? I'm doing it anyway. And you can't do anything about it. And so there's an additional element of doing it openly that is asserting more power. And yet at the same time, because we don't actually have any sort of consolidated authoritarianism, the charges themselves are very weak and very stretched where, you know, the. The supposed terrible crime that he did. The accusation is that he lied under oath before Congress in 2020 about whether he authorized a leak to the media about an FBI investigation in 2016. So already we're talking very minor. Then if you actually look at the details of the congressional transcript, it doesn't look like he actually did that. And this is why the prosecutor originally, you know, didn't think that there was a case to be brought. So Comey will likely beat the charges in court. And that doesn't make it not serious or not harassing, because just having to spend all the time and money and deal with the public pressure about it. That's not something that most people would be able to muster the resources to do. But James Comey can, and he seems, if anything, pretty, if anything, eager, maybe reveling to play this role in American history. Not that he wanted to be indicted, I assume, but the fact that he was, he's out there making statements about that, made a public statement about how he's innocent and extolling the virtues of impartial justice and how this isn't it and will fight it out in court. And so, speaking of, when we talked about the idea of the reputation, of Trump's perception of being more powerful than he actually is, the state capacity is quite limited. So we knew that his desire to abuse power and to violate all sorts of laws and norms to get personal revenge, all that, we knew that that desire was basically bottomless. And I thought that he was going to do it. So I guess if people didn't think this was going to happen, it would be jarring, you know, if they were saying, I don't know, he's just all talk would be jarring. I thought that this was basically locked in from once the election happened. Someone right after asked me, like, if I. If I knew Liz Cheney, would I advise her to leave the country? And I had to pause. As opposed to where, you know, under previous precedents, I would have said no, and actually think, in her case that she's also a. I'm gonna. If they come after me, I'm gonna fight it out and make a big show of it. But if we think of it as the. By the standards of constitutional democracy, rule of law, democracy, it's really, really bad. We think about it, by the standards of fight for, to consolidate authoritarianism or to take it down. It's actually not so bad in that they got rid of a career prosecutor who knows what he's doing and replaced him with someone that doesn't. They've already lost a lot of capacity at doj. The grand jury would not do indictments for the more serious charges. Comey will likely beat the charges in court and walk free. And so while that'll be a lot more costly than what happened to Kimmel, there's potential to show, again, that this is. You can get yelled at, you can maybe get forced to spend some money or spend some time, but if this were a real consolidated authoritarianism, Comey would just be disappeared or would be put on some show trial without the slightest chance of success of getting out of it. Sort of like, say, what Putin did with some powerful Russians when He was consolidating power. The difference, though, is that Putin waited years and got everything in place before he made this sort of move. And Trump and MAGA are jumping right into it very quickly. And so while I think it's simultaneously very bad and also that they've overplayed their hand and are going to get more of a negative reaction similar to like they did with gas.
- [34:48]
Charlie Sykes
I think that's possible. You know, you mentioned that people like Putin and orban had taken 15 years or more to consolidate their power. On another podcast, I said, you know, it is like the boiling frog, you know, in their countries. You know, the, you know, by turning up the pressure slowly. You know, by the time the frog realized that democracy was dead, you know, it was. The frog was already fried. Weirdly enough, in America, our frog is thrown into the scalding water and doesn't jump out. I mean, we didn't. We didn't respond. And that is. That is alarming. So, you know, the American frog has some. Something to answer for here. But I do, I do think that this is one of those overreaches. And again, you know, part of that, that, you know, authoritarian playbook is that authoritarian, you know, the overreach, you know, determines whether or not you're going to stay a made man. That you have to go along with these outrageous things that many times what you and I think of as something a bridge too far is just another way of solidifying your power. On the other hand, again, the nakedness of this makes the rationalizations more difficult. Now, look, you're going to still have, you know, the, you know, fucking Scott Jennings is going to go on CNN and he's going to spin this and he's going to defend it and all of that stuff. But, you know, every, you know, as he escalates, as the hubris becomes more out of control, it becomes harder to say, he doesn't mean it or he didn't do it, or this is not happening. It is happening now. The thing about the Department of Justice is there was a time not that long ago when, like, Trump's first term, when this wouldn't have happened because there were grownups in the White House and in the Department of Justice who would have told the president, you can't do this. This is a red line. If you do, I will resign. There would have been massive institutional disruption. There would have been statements of conscience. The legal community would have reacted to all of that. What I'm struck by is that so far, we haven't seen that. Now is that because those voices are all gone, they've already been disappeared or purged or are they just keeping their heads down? Because I'm guessing there are a lot of people right now in the Department of Justice who are still there who are evaluating whether or not they can stay. But you know, we're just going to have to see whether anybody cares about this. But to your point, look, Jim Comey is not the whole story. He's just the beginning of the story, you know, that he's going to go after others and one after another. My question, do we just get numbed by that? Does it become normalized that every week there's somebody else that gets charged or people realizing, you know, maybe the people who warned about this were not suffering from Trump derangement syndrome, maybe they were actually right. What do you think?
- [37:47]
Nicholas Grossman
I assume there'll be some of both and the, the normalization thing, you know, I, I really hope not. But we've seen it happen a number of times that I can't too many confidently say that it won't like that's just sort of something we, we do now, you know, even ones that are, that, that are impactful but not as, you know, not as serious of something like the tariffs that, that, you know, all these tariffs are passed illegally. They're under abusive emergency powers of claiming all sorts of non emergencies are emergencies. And because he did this, including in his first term and Congress didn't stop it and the courts didn't stop it and now that's just sort of the way we do things that the Constitution says Congress has power over this. Trump just started doing it, Congress didn't stop it. And so now the White House does it. And the President can personally tariff anything without legislation whenever he feels like it, that that's against, it's not the law, but it is how we're operating. So I suppose if this happens enough that it could numb people to it, that the initial shock though I don't think that's necessarily the case with a lot of people in the, in the legal profession, especially if it doesn't end up looking like a snowball rolling downhill, that, you know, it's just not going to be stopped. And so the smart thing to do is to not try to stand in its way, that there's a decent chance that it, you know, gets say dragged out more and that people who are in the Justice Department, that there are a number who have been pushed out already. This is partially what I'm getting at about state capacity, that yeah, they fired all the people that worked on the January 6th prosecutions. In fact, this is possibly one of the reasons why they did a poor job, why FBI did a poor job with the Charlie Kirk murder investigation.
- [39:27]
Charlie Sykes
It's very plausible.
- [39:29]
Nicholas Grossman
They had the, you know, video of him at this college event getting shot and a lot of different cell phone videos. And, you know, who had a lot of experience looking at a big event with a lot of different cell phone videos from many different angles, it was the January six investigators. So they got rid of all of those people. And when they tried, when they did cut a corrupt deal with New York Mayor Eric Adams, who they really had dead to rights on bribery charges, and then let it go on the grounds that he would support some of Trump's immigration policies. That's incredibly corrupt. But a lot of Justice Department that maybe I should say a lot up, I think it's about ended up or so, but ended up resigning. And they're not being replaced by people of equal skill or equal experience or equal stature.
- [40:11]
Charlie Sykes
Oh, no.
- [40:11]
Nicholas Grossman
And there are some who will. And we just saw with this, there are still a number of people there who will say that they won't do it. And so where the the guy who was it was a head of the attorney for the Eastern, Eastern District of Virginia, and he had been there since 2010. He was recommended to be the interim head by Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, who's a Republican. He was recommended to be permanent in the position by the two Virginia senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, who are Democrats. So it was a rare case where a lot of people respected him and thought that he would enforce the law. And now he's out. And that is simultaneously more dangerous authoritarianism, but also a sign that, that a lot of the professionals who know what they're doing don't want to be a part of this. And so while there are probably people in the Justice Department who don't like it but are keeping their heads down, that you know, a reasonable concern for somebody to want to keep their job, of course. And yet also, if they get really pushed to do something that they believe is illegal, they might not do it. And yeah, Trump can keep hammering at it and get some loyalists to do it, but that doesn't mean that that loyalist will be able to succeed in court or will manage to not embarrass themselves in the court of public opinion, of act in ways that galvanize more opposition. So when you talk about the legal profession, we have seen more judges that are more lower court judges that are willing to speak out, including more openly writing. I know the Hawaii court has been very open about writing about Supreme Court either bad faith or corruption or lawlessness. That a number of judges complaining about how they can't follow the law because the Supreme Court is just going to go and reverse it, that the law clearly says something, but they don't expect the Supreme Court to respect that. And so they have to negotiate that one way or another, that they just expect the court to side with Trump no matter what. You have a few big law firms that Trump bullied into doing pro bono work for him at the start, and there haven't been a flood of those in addition to that. No. And some of them, some of them lost business of. I don't. I mean, I can understand the logic. The business logic was we need to get government approval for some of our big corporate clients. And if the government won't talk to us, then we can't serve those clients. But at the same time, they effectively announced, we won't even stand up for ourselves. Now hire us to stand up for you. Which is really not a good long term.
- [42:32]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, there was a little bit of cognitive dissonance there. And some of the other law firms, I think, very intelligently stepped in and said, hey, you're looking for a lawyer that might actually stand up for you. Maybe don't go with those other guys. I do think that at some point you're going to have to see the kind of collective action in the legal community that we just saw in the entertainment community. Maybe it's a lot easier in the entertainment community to do it. But, you know, this unfortunately, you know, as we're talking about the overreach and the gutting of the Department of Justice, you know, I think about some of Hannah Arendt's studies of totalitarianism and how frankly, the elimination and the purges of qualified experts and their replacement by apparatchiks and loyalists and toadies is actually very much a marker of some of these authoritarian regimes. And they do it. And at least for a time, they get away with it. We don't know. But again, if there was any question about what the stakes are, weeks like the one we just had, it feels like it's like in bright neon lights universe saying, do you get it yet? Do you get what's going on? Okay, one last question. What do you make of the fact that with all the things that are going on right now, it seems inevitable that we're about to have a government shutdown? And so, as usual, we get this great game of Political chicken. The White House is putting out memos saying there'll be mass firing if we do it. The Democrats don't appear ready to blink again as they did earlier. What do you think? What is the smart play right now and how does it end?
- [44:26]
Nicholas Grossman
So for me, a lot of the shutdown talk has been mired in the old way of American politics that, you know, hear about who's going to win the shutdown or something like that. What do they actually mean, win the shutdown or lose the shutdown? To, to lose a shutdown in the past meant that the political pundits on television would say negative things about you and maybe some wealthy donors would say, you know, this is starting to make me lose money. You need to just drop it. And that that was it. And then they would drop it. It was never connection. Oh, loose shut down. Well then you lost the next election. That there hasn't. That doesn't fit in terms of the evidence or the pattern.
- [45:02]
Charlie Sykes
No, it doesn't.
- [45:03]
Nicholas Grossman
Outside of political junkies, people don't really vote in say the 2026 midterms on something that happens in the middle of 2025. And so I think that for Democrats at least and I don't that there's if anything overthinking that all this efforts come up with this game out this really savvy strategy. And for me, I think it's a simple matter of principle that the White House is acting lawlessly. They are usurping Congress's power of the purse. They are not respecting check checks and balances and they have shown that they will ignore budgetary laws. And so why would Democrats sign on to a budget that Republicans are first off could pass themselves if they actually, you know, say fought for it in Congress but because they have majorities involved. But why would Democrats sign on to that if they know that the White House is going to ignore it and where the White House threat to fire a lot of people of they've already been doing that. They've been yeah they try to massage it a little to make it spinning of calling it, you know, temporary furloughs that will all turn into firings later. But they've already wildly shattered both these laws and these norms where and a lot of the firings are probably illegal and maybe people will eventually get some sort of recourse for that. But they are out of the government and they're not there. And this simultaneously has reduced some of the state capacity and also made it that the I think added to with that we say the People waking up to it, of seeing, you know, what's actually going on, of all these people being removed. And once we start seeing the effects of that, of all the different valuable government agencies that aren't there and seeing the effects, more of the public will likely notice that and have negative reactions to it.
- [46:45]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, no, I agree with you. In fact, I was thinking back at some of the punditry surrounding some of the other shutdowns that this is going to hurt the Republican Party. They're going to lose the midterms right before they actually win the midterms after having shut down the government. My big question, though is, and I agree with you, I don't think the Democrats have any choice. I don't think I have any choice based on the substance of what the government is doing. I frankly don't think they have any political choice given what their base demands. They cannot cave in again. My problem is figuring out what is the end game. How do you end this? How do you get out of this? Someone has to blink without looking like they're blinking. You now have two political parties that are locked into we can never compromise, we can never give in. So once you do this, how does it stop? How does the government get back? How do the lights go back on?
- [47:42]
Nicholas Grossman
So I don't really have a good answer to that. I do think that having a kind of clear path, this is how it's going to happen, is the wrong way to strategize about it or think about it. And the reason why is because Democrats are in the minority. And not just in the minority, but also with a president who claims that everything that ever happens, or at least anything good that ever happens, is his doing and that he's in charge of everything and that he can snap his fingers and make anything happen. And under normal circumstances, I would be concerned about things like all the federal workers that would get screwed over in the process, all the different people that need federal agencies of ranging from things national parks to say, the Social Security Administration that might have trouble with it. But again, all of those things are currently under attack from the corrupt president already. And the. I don't think that the public, the political logic of the public will blame the party that is kind of being more intransigent or making more demands. I don't really see how that applies here. So that if we take the Democratic backsliding into authoritarianism seriously, if we take that as, and I do, and think that that is the overarching, most important thing going on, then I see only kind of two outlets. One is that Trump and the Republicans blink. They give Democrats things that Democrats want in some way or another enough that they. And then it looks like, you know, say Democratic win or it goes on for a prolonged period of time and causes more damage in various ways, which reflects, acts poorly on the President. That's just the, the idea of the voting public thinking that, oh, well, the minority party in Congress, when, you know, Congress, the president is basically ignoring Congress. Oh, this is all their fault. I'm so angry at them. I'm going to hold on to that anger for a year and a half and vote against them. Just seems ridiculous to me. That, that, that is not. Well, that's, you know, that's how pundits think or maybe political consultants sometimes. It's not how regular voters think. Especially not when we're in the current circumstance.
- [49:47]
Charlie Sykes
No, I tend, I tend to agree with you. And you know, you mentioned state capacity. One of the undercover underplayed stories of the week. And of course, everything is underplayed, you know, given this environment, was the testimony or the reports about the FEMA director being essentially AWOL, not available for, you know, crucial critical duties during that fatal flooding down in Texas. So when you begin gutting these various agencies, there are downstream effects. There'll be downstream effects for Social Security, downstream effects for fema. If there are government breakdowns like this, this will be on Donald Trump's watch. There's no question about it. And it perhaps will expose the recklessness with which they've gone about gutting the government. And, you know, we've seen this from the beginning of Doge. They didn't do it in a, in a, you know, coherent, systematic way that there was a lot of chainsawing. By the way, just connecting a few dots here. Do you remember that incident when Elon Musk. Remember Elon Musk, when Elon Musk was on the stage of CPAC with the chainsaw. Do you remember where he got the chainsaw from? You know what that story is? It's kind of interesting. It was, he was, it was with the new president of Argentina. He was the chainsaw guy. And so, you know, this guy from Argentina, he's the right wing libertarian guy, he's gonna cut all the government. And he did this, this was his, like, shtick down in Argentina. He brings it to the CPAC conference. Elon Musk, I don't know, borrows it from him. And here we are. And another one of the weird stories of the week is that apparently the Trump administration is going to Bail out Argentina. I mean America first we and if you would ask the average person who knows about this name, like five countries that have really, really bad economic track records, fiscal track records, I'm guessing that more knowledgeable people are going to come up with Argentina in the top five. Right. What are we going to do? We're going to bail them out.
- [51:56]
Nicholas Grossman
Yeah. So first they started right with the presenting this new economic plan for Argentina as if this was going to be so great. Just you watch how much prosperity this is going to bring. It's going to be a model for everybody else. Just you'll see. And then of course the opposite happened. It turns out that, you know, the economists have some sense of what they're talking about. But what I thought it really clarified in the US wanted to bailout Argentina is when you juxtapose it against these new tariffs against Brazil and against individuals in Brazil. And the reason why so tariffs, you know that ends up being taxes on Americans. It hurts the American economy. And so what is Trump doing? He's hurting the American economy to try to punish Brazil for enforcing rule of law in Brazil for Brazil having a democratic, you know, democracy and rule of law and because Trump's friend, I guess associate the Brazilian Trump. Yeah tried a, yeah tried a similar, you know that they're pretty similar. Tried a fairly similar style coup attempt. Somewhat similar to say what Trump tried different military elements in Brazil. And Brazil having been a military dictatorship up until about 1980, was not having any of it and has reacted I think a lot better, a lot stronger than the United States did actually can say similar for South Korea but what it shows is it's like a, I don't know some sort of like a fascist international or I don't know like a whatever the right wing version of a Comintern. Is that like. Yeah, but it's like with the French versus the enemies. But that it just shows how much the America first thing is such that it's they're, you know, it's very much an us versus them but US is right wing maga Americans and the various people around the world that they think agree with them in a kind of global struggle against liberalism, the left, openness, wokeness, pluralism, any version you want. But you've got got so Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, the, a few others, you know, Argentina. And they can't even really consolidate that one which is where a natural partner for that would have been Modi in India. And Trump went and stepped on that one really poorly. You know, also Just for his purposes of it. But so who do they see as us? It's clearly not the United States, the US and US allies. It's clearly not democracies. It is, you know, not all Americans. Who do they see as usual is these other kind of corrupt far right, often anti immigrant, often bigoted leaders that in or movements in other countries. I mean you can see this also with Elon Musk trying to he sucked his nose a lot into German politics and tried to get the afd, which is basically the neo Nazi party, a boost. He's been sticking his nose a lot into UK politics right now and trying to get into boost. It is this kind of transnational movement that we're dealing with that is seeing itself as in this grand struggle against people around the world, but against a lot of people in their own countries.
- [55:00]
Charlie Sykes
So I don't like to give Democrats advice and they don't like to take it. But honestly, if you cannot make the juxtaposition of bailing out Argentina while cutting health care here, you can't afford to do X, but you can afford to bail out Argentina. That strikes me as a really good talking point. I'm just saying that I think it's.
- [55:22]
Nicholas Grossman
Really in Democrats wheelhouse in that if they do any shutdown thing. One thing I would really, if they take advice from me that I would strongly recommend they don't do is do not make it about policy. Any old policy fight. That is not what this is about. Do not make it of. Oh, they have to include for example healthcare. Healthcare very important, affects a lot of people's lives. But it's a normal policy debate. It's that in the past that, that's where you had a minority loses the shutdown in which they say we will shut down the entire government, we're gonna hurt the whole country unless the minority gets to legislate, gets to pass its agenda and that people reject quite sensibly. But on the other hand it is unless you follow the Constitution that is a more I think sensible demand. But something like with Argentina, that's a great then perfect for health care. Democrats can talk all up about all the people suffering from the health care cuts and where is the money going to these foreigners who screwed up their own economy.
- [56:18]
Charlie Sykes
Well yes, making it about the Constitution is more sensible. However, that's one that I don't see Donald Trump or the Republicans giving up on. But this is the fight that I think that we need and this is the crucial fight and I think we're going to get it. One way or another. Nicholas Grossman, thank you so much for all your time today. Being very generous with your time. Appreciate it. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's edition of to the Contrary Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will continue to do this. It feels, it becomes more obvious every day that we have to continue having these conversations to remind ourselves we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
- [57:10]
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Nicholas Grossman
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Charlie Sykes
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Nicholas Grossman
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Nicholas Grossman
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Nicholas Grossman
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Nicholas Grossman
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