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- [00:01]
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Charlie Sykes
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Liv Albert / Molly Graham (Podcast Hosts)
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Charlie Sykes
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Tim O'Brien
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Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. Donald Trump returned from China and immediately turned to his favorite passions. I mean the things that he really, really cares about. Like his billion dollar ballroom, reflecting ponds, golf courses, his golden statues and golden arches, and his new garden of heroes and his awesome numbers on TikTok. But the biggest story of the week really was of course, the China Summit, including his trillion dollar entourage. And here's Stephen Colbert. Trump's not making this trip alone. He brought Tim Cook, Elon Musk and a dozen other CEOs. It is so satisfying to realize that no matter how rich or powerful you may be, there's a chance you might get stuck on a plane with Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [03:04]
Tim O'Brien
This is fun.
- [03:05]
Charlie Sykes
This is fun. Like, does anybody want my Sperm. So why are all the big money holes attending? Well, according to Trump, I will be asking President Xi to open up China so that these brilliant people can work their magic. Oh, yes, these people can work magic. They've already made their taxes disappear. I am going to miss that guy. So joining us to work through all of this is our good friend Tim o', Brien, senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion and author of the book Trump the Art of Being Donald. You've been a trumpologist for 30 years now, right? 30 years.
- [03:50]
Tim O'Brien
Unfortunately true, Charlie.
- [03:52]
Charlie Sykes
I know. So let's just start with, with, with that little, that little monologue there. What do you make of the optics and the substance of Donald Trump jetting off to Beijing with all of the titans of American industry and coming back with certainly looks like kind of meh business deals. Your thoughts on that?
- [04:16]
Tim O'Brien
Well, I mean, this is a desperate man. Desperate to show a competent nation, China, led by a confident leader Xi, that he's not mired in a war in Iran and that he's not suffering under plunging polling numbers because of his handling of the economy in the U.S. but in fact, he can get the leaders of several of the largest and most prosperous companies in the United States to join him on a reputation rehabilitation tour, coming at a time when he's not negotiating from a strong bargaining position. And China has essentially spent the last year either schooling him or watching him step on his own feet.
- [05:03]
Charlie Sykes
So was it a successful trip? Did he, did he successfully make himself look like a successful president?
- [05:12]
Tim O'Brien
Well, I think if we're in the context of extremely diminished expectations. Expectations. I, I don't think he should have done this summit at this time. I think the atmospherics were bad diplomatically for the United States economically and militarily as well, given that he plunged into it anyway because he can't resist going anywhere where they don't roll out or where they roll out a red carpet and have a parade with very rapid flag waving people in it. Yeah. You know, the standard probably was do no harm, and at least it appears there was no harm done. And we can get into some of the pieces of what occurred there.
- [05:51]
Charlie Sykes
But Taiwan, he didn't overtly throw Taiwan under the bus, at least not in public. Right. So there's a little bit of a win there, a little bit of good news.
- [06:02]
Tim O'Brien
But does Taiwan feel like they've got the full and unflagging backing of the United States should China invade? I don't think so. Was there the possibility that Trump would have traded off Taiwanese democracy and Taiwanese chip making prowess for a few hundred Boeing jet orders, there was that possibility. That didn't occur. But I don't think any of our partners in the Asia Pacific region feel that Trump's visit to China was a demonstration of US Support for them in the region. And then if the idea was to get some mutually beneficial deals, you know, arrange between China and the US Remember about a year ago, Trump stood in the Rose Garden and rolled out that inane half baked tariff policy. And one of the. And China obviously was a target of that and in very short order, targets. But remember, China said, we have rare earth metals that you need in aviation and military applications and everything, and you're going to have to back down. And the hope was that in this summit, as Trump has spent the last year trying to rescue himself from his own economic mistakes, maybe China was going to get breathing room on rare earths and open up the door to more of those exports. That doesn't appear to have occurred. There was a hope that China would import more beef and soybeans and other agricultural products from US Farmers or ranchers. That didn't appear to have occurred just yet. So this was a vanity trip by a man who is motivated by vanity every single day in office. But the fate of countries are in play in this one.
- [07:53]
Charlie Sykes
Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about, having written a book called the Art of Being Donald. And maybe this has become an old story right now. Obviously this was a vanity project. But explain the Art of Being Donald with President Xi, because here's Donald Trump, who always wants to be the alpha male and yet he's sucking up. What is the dynamic there between Donald Trump and President Xi and Vladimir Putin who he treats with infinitely more deference and respect than he shows any leader of the West. Were democratic nations?
- [08:27]
Tim O'Brien
Well, because leaders of the west ideally aren't authoritarians who have an army at their beck and call and an economy at their beck and call and don't respect voters or voting rights or their own populations. She and Putin have that in common. Trump aspires to that and he fawns over both of those men because they occupy a place in the world he would like to occupy himself. He looks down at the leaders of countries like France and the UK And Germany because they represent a hard won model that came out of centuries of struggles for the rule of law and democratic societies. And, and they can't just do what they want all the time. And he's been able to do what he wants all the time since he was 7 years old. And he wants to do that now on a global stage, and he admires and envies those who can do it. And specifically, I think Putin and Xi.
- [09:31]
Charlie Sykes
This may seem like an old story now, but. But really, you know, we need to, I think, sit on this just a moment. The implications of what you just said, that the President of the United States, the most powerful man in American politics, is emulating the world's dictators, that he has contempt for the nations that are ruled by the rule of law, democratic constitutional republics. And he really, you know, admires, you know, and he says it explicitly. He admires Yi because he rules China with an iron hand, an iron fist. And, you know, maybe we've gotten. Okay, you know, we know that story. But the implications are. Ought to be really deeply troubling. I mean, this is one of those. Let's go back to what we have known now for many, many years about Donald Trump and remind ourselves of what that means in real time and what it could mean going forward. It's pretty alarming, isn't it?
- [10:28]
Tim O'Brien
It's really alarming. I don't mean to get all literary on you right now, but there's this Auden poem that I just admire that I'm often reminded by with Trump. And it's very short and I'm sure I will blow some of it, but it essentially goes. Auden wrote it in the 1930s, and he was greatly interested in armies and fleets, and he knew human folly like the back of his hand. And when he laughed, respectable senators shook with laughter, and when he cried, little children died in the streets. This is the Trump era that we're living in right now. And I don't think the framers of the Constitution institution could have imagined someone would have come into the Oval Office so poorly suited in terms of depth, intellectual and emotional depth, completely lacking in rationality or rigorous thinking, and utterly unself disciplined, who essentially sees the office as an invitation for self aggrandizement and grifting and very little else, but has wrapped it in this, you know, mist of great leadership and consequential thinking. And he is just so shallow, and not for this moment, but he's defining the moment by his shallowness.
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Charlie Sykes
So what do the Chinese think of the United States and of Donald Trump? Those are two, maybe two slightly separate questions, because clearly he was very, very thin skinned about the suggestion that America, that China regarded America as declining power. You had President Xi referencing the Thucydides trap, which I'm sure that Donald Trump had never heard of before, which basically says that there's a risk of war if you have a rising power, you know, threatening to overtake a declining power. And Donald Trump was so triggered by that that he put out that lengthy post where he said, no, President Xi didn't mean me, he meant Joe Biden, because we are clearly not a declining power. But, you know, President Xi struck me as somebody who really does have the measure of the man. He really does understand what buttons to push with. Donald Trump doesn't.
- [12:37]
Tim O'Brien
Yeah, I think Trump thinks Thucydides is a Greek golf pro and he would like to get him over to Mar a Lago for a round. You know what? Xi and Putin, since we talked about them earlier, you know, they, they play long ball and the Chinese play very long ball. They have been a major force in the world for eons. And, and, and, and she specifically thinks in decades, I think. And he thinks with a long term strategy that, whether we agree with it or not, is geared towards a broadly based Chinese success story. And it is not short term self aggrandizement. And there's been ample reporting by my colleagues at Bloomberg News. The New York Times had an excellent story this week based on sourcing from within China, that the Chinese see the United States as a fading empire in sort of its last gasps of economic fruition, but diplomatic and military weakness and run by a court jester. And that has really changed, I think. You know, I think historically and certainly Since World War II, China saw the United States as in the vanguard of not just economic development and cultural robustness, but as something to emulate in certain ways and to see it as a north start at certain moments. I don't think that is true at all anymore. I think they see us as someone that they are contending with successfully. They think that we are lazy and undisciplined and sort of skating through our last gasps, and then eventually they'll lap us.
- [14:40]
Charlie Sykes
And where would they get that impression? So I know these things are very difficult to predict, but how worried should we be about Taiwan? How worried should Taiwan be about Donald Trump betraying another ally, which of course has kind of been his, his motif. We know what he's done with Ukraine. We just got the word in the last couple of days that they blocked a deployment of troops to our NATO ally in Poland. If you're Taiwan, what should you be thinking right now?
- [15:12]
Tim O'Brien
Again, I think two things. The first is that it is a democratic state. And historically, the United States has been a defender of democracy in the best cases at home and abroad. It obviously hasn't always done that in every case, but that at least, at least has been the goal. Secondly, tsmc, the largest semiconductor chip manufacturer on the planet, is based in Taiwan. It makes chips that go into automobile dashboards, into telephones, into every product imaginable. It is the product of, of inventiveness and hard work on the behalf of its founder and the Taiwanese people. And, well, we rely on those chips economically. I think China covets Taiwan for historical, diplomatic and economic reasons. And we know coming into this summit that, that she was hoping for a statement from Trump that would indicate the US Was no longer recognizing Taiwan as an independent entity. Because I think obviously China wants to do with Taiwan what it's done with Hong Kong, which is to reabsorb it into the mainland and into the greater empire.
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Charlie Sykes
Well, and did so bloodlessly. Okay, so let's move on to the other thing because, I mean, overshadowing all of this, of course, you know, the economy and we have what treasury, treasury notes are at a 30 year high. You know, inflation is rattling investors. The stock market is still doing quite well, but the price of oil is up. And a lot of it is everybody waiting for what's going to happen with Iran. And Donald Trump has not figured out a way out. Your news organization Bloomberg reports Trump says he wants Iran's uranium mostly for public relations. I just want to read this because this is one of these Is this real life stories. President Donald Trump said the US Objective of recovering highly enriched uranium from Iran was, quote, more for public relations than it is for anything else, while reiterating his commitment to removing the nuclear material. He's on Fox News and he says, look, we have nine cameras on the site, on those three sites, 24 hours a day. We know exactly what's happening. Nobody's even gotten close to it. Still, he wants to get the material out of the country. I just feel better if I got it, actually, Trump said, but it's, I think it's more for public relations than it is for anything else. Tim o' Brien make it make sense to me.
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Tim O'Brien
Oh, boy. Charlie. I'm amazed that we are in the moment. We are in right now. You could not write a movie script that had all of the various elements that surround this particular White House and the things that come out of the president's mouth on a routine basis and actually prior to this presidency make it seem like it had any credibility. And yet here we are. I think Trump is trying to lower expectations about how the Iran war will conclude because every one of the major Goals he put on the table after we took out Iran's senior leadership. Regime change, ending their nuclear program and limitless oil supplies through the Strait of Hormuz haven't come to pass. US Bases have been bombed in the region. The regime stands in place. The uranium has a lot of missiles, is still there. They still have a lot of missiles. And you know, when it comes to uranium, remember after we, we, we, we dropped all the bunker busters in Iran to wipe out their nuclear production facilities. Trump said at the time it was completely wiped out. He said that as a black and white 100% statement. So presumably there wouldn't be any uranium that we need to extricate. But that's also not the case as we now know. It's also not something we can get out of there without a land operation and the risk of American lives. And I think what Trump is facing now is such a diminished range of options and he's not really in control of it because the Iranians, like the Ukrainians vis a vis Russia, have proven to be more steadfast than a greater power than it attacked them. I'm not a fan of the Iranian regime. I think they've been a threat themselves to democracy and stability and human freedom. But dealing with that requires a lot more sophistication than Trump brought to the table. And now we have a Strait of Hormuz that's blockaded. A fifth of the world's oil supply transits through the Strait of Hormuz. The oil prices have spiked. That's caused a consequential jump in inflation across a number of products. The US Stock market has been kept aloft by the awesome and enviable profitability of U.S. corporations. But corporate profitability isn't eternal and those companies aren't invulnerable to some of the shocks that have been unleashed in Iran. And I think that's what you're starting to. And certainly today there was a global bond sell off. The stock market came down in a meaningful one day move. Whether or not that's longer, we'll wait and see. But it all is around this question of has the profitability machine been disrupted by Trump operating from the White House as if he was Yosemite Sam.
- [21:02]
Charlie Sykes
So explain the bond sell off to me. Just treat me like a six year old what that tells you because it was pretty significant.
- [21:11]
Tim O'Brien
So bonds are bets. Bonds are debts that have to be paid off at a future date. Companies borrow using bonds to fund their operations. Governments borrow using bonds to fund government services. When people have Confidence in your wherewithal as a corporation or a government, you pay a lower interest rate the same way the rest of us. If a bank has confidence in us as a borrower, gives us a lower interest loan than we might otherwise get. But when confidence lags, the interest rates go up and people sell off the underlying bond because they're worried about holding them. And we have a chain of Western nations, and especially the US that have massive, massive public debt tied to bonds, and then companies that have issued bonds with the possibility of their own profitability in question. Buyers of the bonds on both the private and public side are concerned about the future. They're concerned that economic weakening means those bonds may in the future not be as valuable.
- [22:19]
Charlie Sykes
So it's a big, so it's a big, it's a big vote. Yeah, Big vote of no confidence or lack of confidence or shadow fading confidence.
- [22:27]
Tim O'Brien
Yeah. Questioning the future at a minimum. And possibly that could become, you don't want it to become no confidence because, you know, on the other side of that economic doom lies. But, you know, we're in those oceans right now.
- [22:41]
Charlie Sykes
So, you know, you have written extensively for many, many years about sort of the, you know, Trump grift and the graft and his willingness to use public office to enrich himself, which is just, it's so extraordinary, it's hard to sort of get your head around. There's no historical, there's no historical parallels. To say that Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history implies that there's some sort of a continuum, which there is not. So let's just, can we just catch up a little bit on the various scams here? So Trump had sued the IRS for $10 billion for leaking his tax returns, a subject very near to your heart, Donald Trump's tax returns. And the report was earlier this week that there were talks between Donald Trump and the very independent Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on whether or not they were gonna loot the taxpayers for $10 billion. Now we get the story that he's willing to drop that case as long as he gets as massive billion dollar slush fund that he can use for his maga. Friends calls it the weaponization fund. And it would include possible payoffs to the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the January 6th Capitol attack. So your reaction to this? I mean, it's part of, it's just, it's just so incredibly blatant. Yes, okay, I won't steal $10 billion from the taxpayers, but you have to give me a billion Dollar slush fund to give some of the worst actors in American political history thoughts.
- [24:11]
Tim O'Brien
It is so craven. It is so utterly craven and is such a betrayal of the American taxpayer. And that is not an ideological or partisan observation. It is a flat out, factually based, evidentiary betrayal of the American people. And think about what set this in motion. Donald Trump sues a federal agency he oversees and is run by his appointee, the IRS, for $10 billion. And the Justice Department that he also oversees decides to settle with the other federal agency he oversees so he can get 10 billion of his own voters dollars into his pocket and then says, okay, I won't do that. I may not be that bad, even
- [24:59]
Charlie Sykes
too breathtaking for him, okay, yeah, but
- [25:03]
Tim O'Brien
I'll cut it by a fifth. And I'll use that money to try to rewrite the history of the January 6th insurrection when I got voted out of office and then tried to meddle with the Congress to stop them from approving, validating the results of an election. And the people who were prosecuted or tried or jailed as part of that effort are now going to get your money as a way to reputation launder my own involvement in one of the worst moments in American democracy. You know, there's nothing good about any of that. And the only reminder is that he's in a position where he can do this whenever he wants to.
- [25:57]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, and by the way, I need to correct myself. I said it was a billion dollar weaponization fund. It is, as you point out, more than that is $1.7 billion for his allies. Okay, my favorite story, maybe less significant in the great scheme of things, but the Trump phone scam, I'm sure you've been following this, where they were advertising a year ago, the golden Trump phone, and they got 590,000 people who paid $59 million for Trump's golden Phone, which turned out not to really exist. And so they didn't get any, was not shipped, and they kept changing the terms of the deal, saying, well, maybe you will get it, maybe you won't get it, or maybe your depos is not really a deposit. And, and it looked like, I mean, it looked like it was going to blow up. As of last week, not one phone had been shipped. And then they announced, was it yesterday, that they're going to start shipping the phones. But it turns out, and I'm sorry to read this for you, turns out that the phones they're shipping are actually some like, obsolete old phones that you could get for nothing. There's a tech guy writes this is an off the shelf rebrand. The phones are actually going to get, not the Golden Tromphone, off the shelf rebrand of a device made by Wingtech called the Revel 7 Pro 5G was available at T Mobile for $0. The 7 Pro has been replaced by the 8 Pro because this thing is over 18 months old. This is old stock they bought to avoid a lawsuit. And again, Tim, you've been writing about this for so long, but this feels like just like the quintessential Trump scam again. And I guess the question is why? I mean, with all the grift that they're getting, you know, why the fucking phone?
- [27:52]
Tim O'Brien
What? Because. Well, first, like father, like sons. So this phone, you know, farce, was Don Jr. And Eric's baby. And they have been able to engage in a number of different transactions that wouldn't have occurred but for their proximity to the White House and their father. Neither one of them were regarded as top tier business Personas prior to Donald Trump being elected president. Also remember that long before he became president, Trump put his name on almost everything imaginable in an effort to sell it. There was Trump underwear, Trump mattresses, Trump water, Trump stakes, a number of different buildings, casinos, ties, shirts. He's basically a human shingle. Donald Trump turned himself and the White House, you know, into a shingle. And the son sat at his knees and watched that. And, and then when he came into the White House, you know, they've set up, you know, a private club in Washington that trades off its proximity to the White House. They've launched a bunch of small and questionable penny stock operations that appear to be a little better than fly by net operations. And then of course you have this, this buy a phone from us, you can become part of, of the Trump commercial universe. And what's, you know, apart from how flagrantly shabby it is, it is another reminder how they disdain the people who support them, the roots in the way that they're marks. Right, yeah, they're marks. And, and, and you know, Donald Trump ran casinos. And casinos sell the idea of getting rich if you put enough quarters into a slot machine, even if they represent more than those quarters than you should be reliably spending on a given weekend, given your, and the astronomical impossibility of actually winning any money. This is in keeping with that. And Trump has said to his voters in both of his terms, I'm on the side of the average working person in America. I'm not on the side of the elite. So I'm going to give you economic salvation. And then he's done everything but do that for them and his sons are doing the same. And, and you know, the, the idea that that two young men who had never been in the telecommunications industry and had never run major publicly traded companies were suddenly going to have a mobile phone that beat Apple and also made you part of the Trump model universe at the same time? Come on.
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Charlie Sykes
Maybe they should throw in the Trump Bibles just as a freebie to make people feel a little bit better.
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Charlie Sykes
For plans starting at just $4.99 a month, go to HomeServe.com that's HomeServe.com not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month. Your first year terms apply on covered repairs. The risk of wildfire affects all of us, and protecting communities is everyone's priority. At Pacific Power, we may implement a public Safety power shutoff, or PSPs, which temporarily turns off power in areas where dry vegetation, low humidity and high winds meet. We understand the impact and difficulty of an outage. This step is taken to protect our neighbors, our communities, and the places we call home. Learn more about psps@pacificpower.net wildfire we, of course, also got the story about the Trump stock trading, which again, feels like, well, of course he was trading in stock and defense stocks and all of those things. But I want to go back to this larger point that you just made, because this is really fascinating to me that Donald Trump did run on this populist that the Democrats are for they and them, but, but President Trump is for you. I am the voice of the forgotten man. And then of course, we have the comment just the other day that, no, he doesn't think about the financial condition of Americans when he's thinking about Iran, but also the optics, not just of hanging out with the trillionaires and the billionaires, but his obsession with you. Talk about him as a shingle, the obsession that while people are worried about gas prices and inflation and the jobless rate and all this stuff, he is really obsessed with the ballroom, the arch, the new golf course. And again, it feels like there's a clear through line from the Donald Trump you wrote about, was it back in the 90s, but what is the stage right now? Some people have described it as he's at the YOLO phase of his presence. He just doesn't give a shit how he sounds, what he says. But I mean, you know, you're basically saying, I want the taxpayers to pay a billion dollars for my gold gilded ballroom. At a time when people are actually have economic anxiety, no normal politician would behave that way. And yet he is obsessed with the golden statues and the golf courses and all of this stuff.
- [33:27]
Tim O'Brien
So the triumphal arch on Memorial Bridge.
- [33:30]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, exactly. Repainting the reflecting pond. So give me your sense as somebody who's watched his mind work. I mean, is he at the I no longer give a shit phase or is the megalomania just completely unleashed now? I mean, it's always been there, but where are we at?
- [33:48]
Tim O'Brien
Yeah, I mean, I think this is, this is clearly Trump 2.0. I think, you know, he learned some of the rules of the road in his first term as president and realized if he pushed hard enough, there weren't any rules. And so he came roaring back into office, this time determined to simply treat the White House like a piggy bank and not to serve the American people. And there just isn't, in the modern era, any other president even comparable to this on either side of the political aisle. None. Zero. None. And his own party is not lifting a finger to stop it. If Barack Obama had scooped a five dollar bill off of a street corner and stuck it in his pocket, Republicans would have been on him as quickly as they were when he wore his beige suit. And Trump is unveiling, week after week, larger or smaller grips of varying sorts. And no one in his party says anything. None of the institutions in the federal government.
- [34:51]
Charlie Sykes
This feels like it's separate from. This feels like it's separate from the Griffs. It is this monumentalism here. I mean, we know.
- [34:57]
Tim O'Brien
I see what you're asking.
- [34:58]
Charlie Sykes
After the reflecting bond. I mean, is it that he just figures that this is how he cements his, his legacy? I mean, and I didn't even get to the fact that he's putting his face on US passports. He wants currency, he wants coins with his name on it. I mean, Kim Jong Un would be embarrassed at this much narcissism. But is this the way that he is putting his stamp, that he thinks that this is going to be his legacy, that he's gonna create this indelible mark on Washington D.C. and on the country by doing this? Or is this just his, you know, little boy ego unhinged. And by the way, speaking of poetry, since you did Auden, I urge people to go out and read Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias, because that whole Ozymandias thing seems to be. We're at the Ozymandias phase of the Trump presidency now, aren't we? I'm gonna have to write that down because that's a pretty good phrase.
- [35:54]
Tim O'Brien
I think we are. And I think both of what you said was true. I think this comes from two places. One is he obviously does want to build monuments to himself. He wants to try to find ways to make sure he's never erased, that his presence in Washington is eternal. It also explains why he wanted to etch his name on the walls of the Kennedy center. Anywhere he can do it.
- [36:18]
Charlie Sykes
Oh, yes, forgot that.
- [36:20]
Tim O'Brien
Yeah. And. But it is not new. And it does come from the fact that he has this deep, deep, unquenchable neediness to. Because he is so deeply insecure. You know, that is the, you know, irony of it, is the reason he brags about his intellect is because he's not that smart. The reason he brags about women being so attracted to him is that he is not a physical gemstone. The reason he talks about being popular or being a great student or a great athlete is because he falls short in his own mind and in reality. And so building these monuments for him and stamping his names on things is essentially trying to say, I am worthy and I'm eternal. And that's why his, you know, his. His. His last name was on the. On. On casinos and skyscrapers he built. He'd been at this for a very long time, you know, plastering on the side of jets, plastering on things he didn't even own. And he's essentially on the couch with the United States electorate as his analyst, and he is working through his emotional and psychological challenges in front of the
- [37:38]
Charlie Sykes
American electorate and apparently transferring them to us, unfortunately, because it feels like we are also being traumatized. And by the way, we just edit this out. Just the thing, that last little monologue, make sure we make into a clip, because that was brilliant. That was. That was Tim o', Brien, like, gold plated. So we're just going to, like, make sure. Make sure you mark that. That we just did. Okay. Okay, so back to it. Yeah, unfortunately, it does feel like we're in some sort of a, you know, psychological vortex involving Donald Trump. So let's talk about politics for a moment. I want to get Your sense of where we're at in the midterms because we've seen this, this mad redistricting frenzy that feels like it's become the gerrymandering has gone completely nuclear. Your sense of, have Republicans successfully, do they think they have successfully rigged the midterms, do you think that actually will enable them to hold the House of Representatives?
- [38:41]
Tim O'Brien
I don't think so. And I could be proven wrong. I think at least the litmus tests we've seen thus far on elections that have already happened. You have a very motivated Democratic base. Republicans who aren't likely to vote for Democrats also seem to be staying home as a form of protest. And then you see this big middle of independent voters, the expansion of the ranks of independent voters. And then, you know, in, in the Virginia government gubernatorial race, the New Jersey gubernatorial race, some of the special elections that have occurred, the numbers have very startling and, and you know, to the point that, you know, there, there, I, I don't, I don't see a Democrat being elected to the Texas, to, to the Senate from Texas, but that's certainly possibly in the cards in a way no one could have imagined a few years ago. And will redistricting chip away at that by the time the midterms run around, come around for sure, I think enough to blunt what appears to be a strong Democratic advantage? I don't think so, but I could be wrong. But there's a larger term issue here which it's also part and parcel of Trump's assault on democracy. Redistricting has historically been tied to a 10 year census and it's meant to be a tool and a non, again, a nonpartisan tool for simply organizing districts so the representatives of those districts know who their constituencies are and can serve them. And I don't think politicians of either party want to be in the position where every two years or so you're, you're undergoing a redistricting and, and that's been thrown into the mix now. And the Republicans won't like it when the Democrats, Democrats have the power to ram through districts that they prefer. In the same way the Democrats don't like it when Republicans do it and none of us should like it when either party does it because it essentially erodes democracy.
- [40:47]
Charlie Sykes
And yet neither party is going to unilaterally disarm until the other one. I mean, this is where you get into this incredible spiral. I think you've made a really interesting point here that there is a larger damage though, that if we get to the point where Americans are so polarized, that they no longer trust or respect the outcome of elections, then you have fundamentally knocked out some of the underpinnings that all democracies rely upon, which is a belief that the system is honest, is fair, and that it actually works. And to a certain extent, the damage that Donald Trump has done, I think is going to be measured in generations. And it is. And I also think that the redistricting frenzy is kind of a down payment, just a indication of what they are prepared to do in the future. I mean, I have kind of a dark view of, you know, we've seen what Donald Trump is prepared to do because we saw what happened on January 6th. But what we're watching now is the entire Republican Party falling into line. You know, if Donald Trump says, we want you to rig the election, and you know, back in 2020, Republican legislatures didn't go along with him. Right. They pushed back against him. That's no longer the case. So.
- [42:01]
Tim O'Brien
Well, you know, and I, the other thing I'm worried about in the midterms, Charlie, is Trump has set the stage for finding evidence of malfeasance at local polling booths around the country. And the federal government is allowed to seize ballot boxes in local and state elections where malfeasance is believed to have occurred. And I think that, that the redistricting battle has, has put that other reality in the back of people's minds. But the Trump pistas went in and they already took the Georgia voter rolls, you know, and we don't know how those are being used. But I, I really worry about just direct hands on election interference from the federal government in the processing of midterm election results if Trump fears it's going to be a big blue result.
- [43:00]
Charlie Sykes
I agree. And I think it would be just, it's incredibly naive not to be really concerned about that up to and including whether or not a Republican Congress might not seat some of the winners of the elections, although the, the margins are so thin. Okay, so one last thing, and I did a podcast with Molly Jong Fast and I confess that I'm embarrassed, I'm disappointed with myself that I have not focused on this story more. The single weirdest story of the week that did not get as much attention as it deserved was Donald Trump. Now he's trolling us.
- [43:32]
Tim O'Brien
I get it.
- [43:33]
Charlie Sykes
Although his people said he was serious when he proposed making Venezuela the 51st state. You saw that, right? That he actually bleeded out a picture of Venezuela with an American flag and he had spokesman say, no, he's serious because they got Like a gazillion trillion dollars worth of oil. And what I thought was really extraordinary was on my bingo card. There's a lot of things that I, that have not been on my bingo card for this year. But Donald Trump making a proposal that would add 30 million Hispanics to the voter rolls, make 30 million Hispanics automatic US citizens eligible for Social Security and Medicare. I mean, that would be a little bit off message, right? I mean, after all of this ICE stuff and building the wall and everything, suddenly the largest influx of Hispanics in American history, 30 million Venezuelans. He's not serious. It's not going to happen. But the fact that he would even roll that out and there would be people who would think, well, you know, if we can't get Greenland and we can't get Canada, why not Venezuela? She's. I don't know, guys, you know.
- [44:40]
Tim O'Brien
Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I was going to say, well, first off, he's going to have a processing problem because maybe Venezuela would have to be the third state after Canada and Greenland get their statehoods. Of course he's trolling us. Of course, that's ridiculous. But it also, it's so offensive to any country that he tags this way, whether it's Greenland or Canada or, and now Venezuela, regardless of the state of their own democracies or lack thereof. You know, we have a mess on our hands right now in Cuba.
- [45:20]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, it's going to be probably Cuba
- [45:22]
Tim O'Brien
will be 50 and, and, and we're still dealing with the ramifications of the, of him saying this about Greenland and Canada. You know, Canadian tourism to the United States is down. Canada is one of our largest trading partners. It's a democratic ally. It is a geographically, literally a next door neighbor with honorable enviable traditions. And, and Trump has just thrown this long term wrench into how Canadians feel about the US and the vitality of our connections with Canada. And yet he just keeps running roughshod over all those sorts of things.
- [45:57]
Charlie Sykes
This is such a good point because, you know, yes, obviously he's trolling us on Venezuel. And a lot of people just thought, okay, the Canada stuff is very funny and the Greenland stuff is funny. And yet as you point out, it's had real world consequences. I mean, there is a real breach. Canada has been one of the leading countries in basically saying, yeah, we're gonna kind of just decouple now from the United States. You know, generations of goodwill squandered overnight. His threats to invade Greenland I think had a much greater impact than most Americans realize at the time in terms of what the damage it did to NATO and to the trust of the Western leaders. I think that you look back on that as you know what really caused the breach. It was a long time coming, but there was no coming back after that. We're seeing the implications of America alone in Iran, so we should ignore it because it's trolling line doesn't really work because what we found is that these things have consequences. Tim o', Brien, thank you so much. Always great to talk with you and to tap into the decades of your Trumpology, which I'm sure is there part of you that thinks that dreams of that day when you won't have to think and talk about Donald Trump, when that part of your brain is free to, I don't know, go bird watching, start a garden or something. Do you dream of that the post Trump era will mean for you?
- [47:22]
Tim O'Brien
You know, it's a privilege to try to interpret him in a dangerous and confusing time. I honestly believe that. But there's a lot of other things.
- [47:33]
Charlie Sykes
A lot of other things. And maybe we can do that over the weekend. Again, thank you so much and thank you all for listening to the to the Contrary podcast. We do this and it is, I think, more important than ever because yeah, we are on the couch. Donald Trump is on on the couch. But we need to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts.
- [48:09]
Tim O'Brien
Here's a show that we recommend.
- [48:13]
Liv Albert / Molly Graham (Podcast Hosts)
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- [48:45]
Charlie Sykes
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Tim O'Brien
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