← To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
"Trump Is Losing Power and It’s Making Him More Malicious"
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- [00:00]
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- [01:41]
Charlie Sykes
Par le tu francais hablas espanol par l'. Italiano?
- [01:45]
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- [02:22]
Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. Trump backs off that slush fund. Sort of. Maybe CBS fires SC A hell of a beginning for the new executive producer, Maga. Loyal as Bill Pulte, a housing guy, has been named Director of National Intelligence. Amazingly, Trump has found somebody even less qualified than Tulsi Gabbard, and there's a bipartisan consensus about that. And Trump still cannot find a way out of the war of whim that he started with Iran. Let's try to get our heads around all of that. And joining me to discuss all this, our good friend Jonathan Rauch, who is a contributor to the Atlantic and author and all around member of the cognitive elite. Right, Jonathan? I mean, how else can I introduce you?
- [03:10]
Jonathan Rauch
That's me. Yeah,
- [03:13]
Charlie Sykes
we were talking about the cognitive elite, and I said, well, aren't we the cognitive elite? I mean, we should embrace that, shouldn't we? So where should we begin? There's so much. Let's talk about the slush fund. Because I still can't get over how egregiously corrupt the whole thing was. And the fact that it was so corrupt that people who have swallowed all of Donald Trump's other corruptions are going to. Yeah, man, this one's got bugs jumping off this. So yesterday we had Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General, tell Congress that we're not moving ahead with the slush fund, the goon squad slush fund that would give money to January six rioters, but they're leaving in place that sweeping immunity from any IRS audit. So give me your take on that, Jonathan. Is the slush fund gone or what?
- [04:01]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, I don't think we have a clue what's there and what's gone, Charlie, because they're not telling us. They're making these deals with themselves in the dark. They're highly irregular. There's no congressional oversight, there's no presumption of regularity. So what do we know? You know, they're making it up as they go along. So apparently they're not going to do the 1.776 billion dollar six. Yeah, yeah, right. Slush fund for, for January 6th rioters and others. I would guess that given the amount of pushback they've had, that at least for the time being, they're also not going to simply dip into the so called settlement that they've made. And now we've got a judge that put a spoke in the wheel of the whole idea that Trump administration can sue itself and settle with itself and then dip into its own pocket. So the whole thing got very politically hairy for them, as you point out. The other thing that they wanted out of this, a side deal, but maybe it's the main deal, is a declaration that Trump can never be investigated or prosecuted for tax fraud. Now, I don't know how that's legal either, because presumably the next Justice Department can say, or the next irs, when it's not under Trump's control, can say who made that rule. So I don't get how that's legal either, but they don't appear to be giving up on that. And Trump, of course, protecting himself and his family is his number one priority.
- [05:38]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah. Let me just read you how the New York Times describes that Mr. Blanche's directive left in place a staggering public benefit to the president, who has sought to bend the government toward his own financial. Financial interests. A host of thorny legal issues also remain. Trump's lawsuit against the IRS was revived last week by the judge. And I think the judge is gonna be asking a lot of those questions. Also. There is a law, actually that says the president cannot target individuals for IRS audits. So the question of legality. Can the president basically then cut a deal where he and his family and all of his entities are exempt forever from. I don't know. Does he ever have to pay taxes again? Does he have to file taxes? But here's the question that I have about the end of the slush fund. Number one. Blanche has not put that in writing yet. A lot of people have made that point over the last 48 hours. It is not in writing. We also have not heard from Donald Trump, have we? And I'm not clear at this point whether or not that $1.8 billion is still going to be paid out. They may not have a slush fund, but does Donald Trump get that money? Is it still part of the settlement? So, as you point out, there's a lot that is not transparent here, and I think that people need to be very, very, very skeptical about all of that. I mean, Andrew Weissman put out a post saying, hey, don't be fooled by this. He thinks there's still going to be a payout. And, of course, the immunity is, you know, I mean, to talk about, you know, off the charts corrupt. By the way, we're both old enough to remember when the emoluments clause was. Actually, people thought, you know, maybe we'll get Trump on the violation of the emoluments clause. That almost seems quaint now, doesn't it, given the degree of corruption in this administration?
- [07:23]
Jonathan Rauch
We're old enough to remember when a president was driven from office because, among other things, his White House was trying to order the IRS to audit his political opponents. The IRS didn't do it. They took those orders and put them in a drawer because the commissioner of the IRS was a person of integrity and didn't want that kind of legal trouble. But this, of course, this dwarfs anything like that.
- [07:51]
Charlie Sykes
No, this does. You know, go back to the New York Times. I mean, this could. This could save Donald Trump more than $100 million. Tax lawyers, former IRS officials said the protection for Mr. Trump was unprecedented in its scope and form, particularly since it extends to affiliates of Trump. So we will see. Okay. One of the other big stories, the Bill Pulte appointment to be the Director of National Intelligence. The guy has no qualifications whatsoever. He's 38 years old. He heads the housing agencies. He's the chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and all of those things where he's done a pretty shitty job. But give me your reaction to this, because what was striking was this kind of bipartisan reaction to all of that. John Cornyn, who has nothing left to lose, is going, I don't see that he has any qualifications whatsoever. John Th, who's apparently the Republican leader of the Senate, who appears to be kind of at a breaking point with Trump, says that we don't need a weaponized dni. But. So Steve Bannon, who I think was actually right about this, he loves this appointment. He says this is a big middle finger to the Senate. And so your thoughts about a guy with no discernible qualifications whatsoever being in charge of America's intelligence agencies?
- [09:10]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, we both know he's supremely well qualified by the qualification that counts for Donald Trump. So this is a guy whose claim to fame is he's appointed to. What is it, the mortgage agency. Remind me, Charlie.
- [09:25]
Charlie Sykes
You know, I actually had to write it down. It is the. He's the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
- [09:34]
Jonathan Rauch
Yeah. So these are agencies that ordinary Americans never have to hear about and never have to know about. So what's his significance? It's that he's sitting on a bunch of files that he can rummage through in order to find pretext to harass and prosecute people. So he's the guy who digs up claims that. I think it was Letitia James who prosecuted Trump in New York. Well, actually, it was a civil lawsuit, not a prosecution, that she had lied on a mortgage form. So that's what he's doing. He's trawling through records in order to find stuff that can be pretextual to legally harass Trump's opponent. Now, you take that guy and you put him in charge of the national intelligence establishment with all of the classified information on individuals that that implies. What are you actually doing there? Well, you're changing the job description. This is someone, presumably, whose job is going to be to look through highly classified and sensitive information and find stuff on Charlie Sykes. So if I were you, I would be worried about this guy's qualifications.
- [10:56]
Charlie Sykes
My only hope is that the fact that he is so unqualified that he will be, and he's such a mediocrity that he won't be able to be effective. But this is the important point. In fact, I think it was. I'm just going looking at my notes here. So Derek Thompson put out a post yesterday describing this as a sign of late kakistocracy. It's the phase in Democratic decline where the regime starts running out of people who will work for it. So the folks who are not qualified for their current positions are then promoted even larger positions for which they're even more unqualified. But I think you're making the key point here. It's not just that he's unqualified or that he's a loyalist. I mean, here's the twist. You know, it's not enough to be loyal to Trump. You have to show a willingness to use the levers of power to go after Donald Trump's enemies. Right. You know, one thing that Bill Pulte has made clear is that he's prepared to weaponize the government to go after. You mentioned Letitia James also going after Adam Schiff, going after, I think it was Lisa Cook on the Federal Reserve. None of those cases have gone anywhere. But at least he showed a willingness to do that kind of work. And now he's the acting director of dni, which means that even though Republicans in the Senate are going, this guy is a joke. He's not qualified. He doesn't need Senate confirmation. He can stay in there for the rest of the year. And apparently, because of the flaw in the law, he can stay there for quite a long time. And this is again one of the doors that was left open for Trump 2.0.
- [12:27]
Jonathan Rauch
Yeah. Trump is sending a message here, which is that if I don't like you, I can come after you, and I'm going to rummage through classified information if I have to do it. So this is a gangster play about making people scared and skittish, and it'll probably work.
- [12:46]
Charlie Sykes
It is a gangster play, and I know we've gone over this over and over and over again, is how to characterize this administration. You wrote a widely read and discussed piece saying, you know, let's call this fascism. It is fascism, but it's also a gangster regime. It's also a kakistocracy. And so it feels hard to describe exactly what's happening in the model because, you know, we've had kakistocracies, we've had gangster governments, we've had fascist governments, but it feels like we got the whole package going right now. What is your sense? How do you describe what we're seeing,
- [13:29]
Jonathan Rauch
oh, boy, what a challenge. So I've written a series of articles trying to get my hands around this. The one thing that we know Trump is, it's not controversial, is a patrimonialist. And a patrimonialist is a leader who believes that the government is the personal property of himself and his family. That's been his view from day one, and he doesn't deny it. He's. He's quite evident that he can do what he wants with the government. He can take gifts, he can take bribes, he can repurpose the government to go after his opponents, to shake down other countries. It all belongs to him. Then there's further questions about ideology, especially in the beginning of this year when we saw what happened in Minnesota. Of course you were there for that. We saw the emergence of something that looks a lot like a kind of modern American version of fascism. We saw mass agents on the street. We saw the dual state, which is where suddenly you can slip into a system where you have no rights. We saw Stephen Miller talking about the iron law of strength. We saw the rise of kind of paramilitary police forces. Now he seems to be going back to something more like the kind of random self enrichment and self aggrandizement that we were seeing earlier. I've also called it the psychotic state in a New York Times article with Pete Wehner, meaning, not that everyone in it is psychotic, Marco Rubio isn't, but that he's dismantled the orderly decision making processes that administrations rely on to keep themselves grounded in reality and making rational decisions. So, you know, a place like Iran, he decides, well, it worked in Venezuela, we'll do it in Iran. We won't bother to look into the possibility that the Strait of Hormuz might be closed. Or, you know, someone comes up with a brilliant idea, let's have a slush fund, let's just give it a shot. The boss might like it. So we're governed by whim. It's just very hard to characterize this, Charlie.
- [15:34]
Charlie Sykes
So why did you use the word psychotic? That is about the strongest word you could have possibly used. I mean, you know, we use words like crazy or unhinged or deranged, but psychotic. Just talk to me a little bit about that. Because you and Pete make the case for a government that's really lost its mind in the most fundamental sense.
- [15:55]
Jonathan Rauch
So psychosis, of course, we're using it as a metaphor of a whole administration can't literally be psychotic. But psychosis, you lose your grip on reality, you lose the ability to act in a coherent and consistent way. And that's what's happened in this administration. It's got lots of bureaucracies, it's got lots of policymaking processes that look more or less normal. But on any given day, any of those processes can be interrupted by a call from the White House saying, do X, Y or Z, make an announcement that pigs can fly, cancel all the grants to Harvard, start a war, do another war, stop the war, say that we're winning the war, then say that the war's already won, then say there is no war, and so forth. Say Iran's negotiating, then maybe Iran's not negotiating. So the absence of any reliable mechanism to ensure consistent reality based decision making across the administration, that's something that I don't think we've ever seen before. It's because the administration is a projection of the will of an individual and that individual is psychologically unbalanced.
- [17:14]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let's stick with this because, you know, the perfect example of all of this is the war of win with Iran. And I don't know whether you caught it the other day, Jon Stewart did a hilarious little bit where he went back through all of the times that Donald Trump says, we're very, very close to a deal, we're gonna have a deal, we're have a deal tomorrow. And for the last two months, he, you know, is trying to wipe this war off the bottom of his shoe and he cannot do it. So give me a sense of like, where we're at on all of this. I mean, again, over the weekend he's like, we have come up with a deal and everybody breathlessly goes with it. Obviously that's fallen apart as you and I are speaking, where, you know, missiles are flying back and forth. You know, give me your sense of, you know, Donald Trump clearly, at least it seems to me Donald Trump does not want to go back to war. He sends out Marco Rubio to say the war is over, but it's clearly not over. Now we're getting this report from Bloomberg that that in fact, Iran's nuclear capabilities are more dangerous than ever. So what, what's happening, John?
- [18:16]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, of course Iran gets a vote on whether the war is over. And as far as I know, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. So Iran has not yet voted to end the war. So this goes back to the point we were just making about the psychotic state. On any given day, we don't know where we are because the President doesn't know where he is. They never stated coherent war Aims for Iran, they didn't have coherent war aims. Was it regime change? Was it take the oil? Was it the Venezuelan model where you replace the top leadership with someone that you hope will be more pliable but without regime change? Was it about disarmament? Was it about the nuclear weapons? We never knew that. They still don't know that. When they say they've won or haven't won, we don't even know what they're talking about. And that puts you and me and the American public in the impossible position of trying to second guess a war. Right? So when you're dealing with a psychotic style of administration, we, you and I, being more or less sane individuals, we are not the crazy ones, as you've been known to say. We and our allies in Europe and scholars and journalists, we look for boxes to put this behavior in. We look, as you asked earlier. So what is this exactly? What's the guiding principle? How do we characterize this in our minds? But the answer is, you can't, because it's psychotic in that institutional sense. There's no guiding principle apart from the protection and enrichment of the president and his friends. And that means you and I will continue to be at sea wondering what the heck this war is about.
- [20:12]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, this is a good framing, because I think there are a lot of attempts to put a frame of rationality or coherence around something that is not rational and not coherent. But Donald Trump's handling of the war is actually rather consistent. But I think the war exposes it. So Donald Trump is a chronic liar. He's constantly claiming he won. He's constantly claiming that something coming in two weeks. His health care plan's gonna come in two weeks. You know, he's got the outline of a, of a concept or something. And I think, you know, at a certain point, that just becomes kind of just the noise. But with the war in Iran, you actually have a reality check and Iran has a vote. So he can come forward and say, yes, we've won, it's over, it's obliterated. And Iran says, no, we still have missiles, we're still here. We're gonna shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Or he'll say, we're very, very close to a deal. They're gonna come up with a deal. And Iran goes, no, we're not signing the deal, or here's the deal that you're never going to actually agree to. So we're kind of seeing Donald Trump's style of governance exposed by the war, but also what's Also interesting, Jonathan, is the amount of political capital he has squandered over just this one decision. I mean, not just the cost of living. But it does appear that the MAGA media universe has really shattered what, over this? Over this and his alliance with Israel. And clearly that has created just, you know, all sorts of unpredictable tensions. What did you make of Donald Trump? Basically, you know, swearing at Benjamin Netanyahu, telling, stop attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon? I mean, what's happening to that beautiful friendship?
- [21:56]
Jonathan Rauch
Yeah, if I were the Israelis, I'd be rather concerned right now. When we say the MAGA universe is cracking, that appears to be true. But let's just remind ourselves of the two words that we have heard very little about since the start of this war. And those two words are, of course, Jeffrey and Epstein. That's still there. But if Trump is good at anything, it is creating mental distraction. So perhaps from his point of view, this is at least serving that purpose. I'm not suggesting he went to war simply to distract from Jeffrey Epstein, but is it a win for him or a loss if the story shifts to a MAGA debate about the war? You tell me. Yeah. The Israelis launched this war with the expectation, or at least the strong hope, that they could replace the regime in Tehran. They could correctly assess that this Islamist fundamentalist, radical, revolutionary regime is bent on the destruction of Israel, and that remains an existential threat if it gets nuclear weapons for as long as it's there, and that Israel is not safe while it's in power and while its proxies in Lebanon and formerly still kind of in Gaza are still present. When Donald Trump went into this, he didn't seem to have a plan, and he clearly wasn't willing to go as far as the Israelis wanted to go in terms of doing whatever it takes to push that government out of power or to sow such an amount of chaos in Iran that it will be effectively debilitated for the near and medium term. He doesn't want that. So now he and the Israelis are in very different strategic situations. The Israelis want to continue. They want to push the fight into Lebanon. They think they have the military advantage. They don't want to squander it and give Lebanon, give, excuse me, Hezbollah the chance to regroup, as Hamas is already regrouping. As you say, Trump wants out. He wants to declare victory and go home. So now, because the Iranians are hinging their negotiation, if there is a negotiation on pulling the Israelis back in Lebanon, Trump wants to do that. Netanyahu doesn't want to do it. So the whole thing, you know, it was never thought through. It's coming apart at the seams. It's, to use a term of art, it's a frigging mess.
- [24:30]
Charlie Sykes
Well, one of the, I think you and I have talked about this before. You know, one of the most dramatic shifts in public opinion that I've seen over a short period of time has been the collapse of bipartisan support for that U. S. Israeli alliance. And Trump apparently understands this. I think, you know, in one of the, the accounts he tells Netanyahu, everybody hates you. Everybody hates you now. And so among Democrats, the support for Israel appears to be in free fall. And among Republicans, there are real divides. How long will it take for Israel to repair its relationship with the American public, which was once so incredibly solid? Or will they ever be able to do it?
- [25:15]
Jonathan Rauch
I don't know, Charlie. I'm a friend of Israel. I'm a Jewish Zionist. I'm also someone who's deeply concerned about some of the behaviors of the Netanyahu administration, especially in the west bank where we've seen some absolutely dreadful behavior which seems to be abetted by the government. Gaza, less so. Gaza is a harder situation because there you had a terrorist group with what, 20, 30,000 soldiers dedicated to the existential destruction of Israel, prepared to do whatever that takes, deliberately using the civilian population as shields. That's just an impossible situation for anyone. I'm not saying the IDF did a perfect job. No one could do a perfect job. What's happening on the west bank though, looks like just opportunistic pogroms by settlers with at least a wink and a nod, maybe more than that, from the Netanyahu. So all that's by way of saying, that's where I come from when I talk about this. Where to go to your question if you still want to go there. What we're seeing among Democrats, especially among younger democrats, is the formation of a consensus that Israel is an apartheid state or a genocide state or something in between. We just saw, I don't, I just saw the headline, you probably read the story. But New Jersey, the Democratic candidate just won a race for the House, who's very, very hard on Israel. And whenever I talk to someone, you know, in their 30s, in their 20s, including just yesterday, a mom was telling me that her 18 year old daughter was demanding to put a pro Palestinian bumper sticker on the car. We've got to show solidarity against the Israeli genocide. I don't know, how do you repair that when you've convinced a generation that's my question.
- [27:21]
Charlie Sykes
And you know, and I do think there are troubling things going on in the Democratic Party. You saw this in Michigan, where it's not just people who are hard on Israel. It's people who have been, you know, apologists for Hamas, who have been apologists for, you know, some of the most extreme elements out there, there. So I, I, I, and I do think that there is a there, there's an important distinction between being pro Palestinian and being pro Hamas. That's where the guys like Hassan Piker should not be described as a left wing pro Palestinian. He is, you know, he's been, he's been making excuses for, for Hamas and that element in the party is getting traction. So we know that there is a serious and yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.
- [28:03]
Jonathan Rauch
Yes, and, and we're seeing negative trends toward Israel in the Republican side as well.
- [28:10]
Charlie Sykes
Yes, we are.
- [28:11]
Jonathan Rauch
And you mentioned earlier. Yeah, you mentioned earlier, we're seeing that among thought leaders as well as the general public. So yeah, this is a sea change. And I don't think we know yet how it ramifies
- [28:27]
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- [29:52]
Charlie Sykes
When I was talking about the crackup of Maga, you know it's not showing up in necessarily the grassroots Poles. Although Donald Trump did lose a primary in Iowa earlier this week, has nothing to do with this. But I'm talking about among the influencers, among the media ecosystem. The collapse of Ben Shapiro is extraordinary. I don't want to spend a lot of time on Ben, what he did and the decisions he made and the choices he made and the agency and everything. But it does appear that it is his support for Israel that has caused a lot of people on the right to abandon him. And I think that's kind of a tell. I mean, you know, Ben Shapiro was as influential as any of the right wing media figures, and now he's imploding. And the one variable seems to be that his support for this war and for Israel is causing this massive exodus on the right. So if it's happening on the left and on the right, this is a moment of extreme peril, I would think, for pro Israeli Americans.
- [30:52]
Jonathan Rauch
Well, we'll see where it goes. But it's clearly not good. And a lot of Israelis are talking about. So is the cost worth it? Even if we get some strategic military advantage, even if we become the regional hegemon which they now are, and even if they succeed, as they haven't yet, but maybe we can hope that they will succeed in regime change in Iran. Is it worth it? It's a hard question.
- [31:20]
Charlie Sykes
It seems unlikely. Yeah, it seems very unlikely that we're even talking about regime change in Iran anymore. In fact, if anything, they seem to be more entrenched than ever. Okay, so since we're on the issue of war and peace, I mean, there's so much going on here, it is worth reminding people that, hey, there's some really major issues out there that let's not become distracted from. You know, we haven't talked about Russia and Ukraine for some time. What's happening in Ukraine? Ukraine. Over the weekend, Russia launched, you know, massive missile attack on Ukraine. But at least everything that I'm seeing is that, number one, Ukraine is more than holding its own, and number two, the cost to Russia is beginning to tell. There are people in Russia, in the government who are saying, you know, we can't afford this. We have lost too many men. The cost of this is draining us. Give me your sense of where we're at with Ukraine because, you know, sometimes we've, you know, taken our focus off of, you know, that major issue.
- [32:24]
Jonathan Rauch
Yes. And we focused on giant holes in the ground and where the East Wing was and triumphal arches and lots of stuff that Donald Trump wants. Yeah, lots of stuff that Donald Trump wants us to focus on. But to me, the most, possibly the most interesting single thing that's going on in the world right now is the Ukraine situation, in part because the US Is no longer paying as much attention to it. Ukraine has been going it not alone, but with significantly less US Help and support than it's gotten. That's because the US Is, of course, distracted in the Middle east, and it's also because Trump doesn't want to help Ukraine. So the situation is that Putin has gotten a significant boost out of the Iran war because oil prices are up, and that has significantly. That's put money in his pocket at a time when he was had been beginning to feel very serious financial economic strains, according to analysts who really know this stuff. I'm not one of them, so I'm just reading the papers, but I'll try to put the pieces together. So that's helped Putin. It's also helped Putin that the focus has moved elsewhere. But let's do a level set. Putin's strategy at this point consists of war crimes and effectively nothing but war crimes. This battlefield is now so heavily laden with drones and sensors that infantry cannot move forward. That, of course, that helps the defense, that helps Ukraine. It's become virtually impossible for Russia to take territory. And so that means Russia's strategy now is to launch missiles at civilian targets. Now, let's just remind ourselves that's an atrocity, that's a war crime. That's Russia's strategy. Let's also remind ourselves that they took out a lot of Ukraine's power grid during the winter and made that it was a particularly harsh winter. Ukraine got through situations in which you had below zero temperatures inside of buildings, in some cases below freezing. In many cases. Ukraine got through that. I don't think they're going to buckle as a result of Russia bombarding their civilian population. I think if anything, that further raises the stakes. Meanwhile, you've got the advantage moving to Ukraine because they're now the world's leading experts on drone warfare and drone defense.
- [35:01]
Charlie Sykes
Isn't that amazing?
- [35:03]
Jonathan Rauch
Suddenly they're getting on planes, going to places like the UAE and Oman and the Gulf. There in demand is the people who can help everyone else figure out the new style of warfare. They're now the most powerful military in Europe. So suddenly we're in this new geostrategic world where this war four years on is. But it's recalibrating how we have to
- [35:29]
Charlie Sykes
think about Europe and the way Europe thinks about itself. I mean, in terms of. Correct again, looking back 50 years from now, I think we will look back at the last two years as the breakup of NATO or the genuine transformation of the North Atlantic defense arrangements. How Europe feels about itself, how it feels about the United States. Because Europe, the Europeans seem to have recognized we can't count on the United States anymore. We can't trust the United States anymore. We're going to have to do this on our own. So that whole post war world order has cracked over the last year and a half.
- [36:13]
Jonathan Rauch
Yes. The Europeans clearly and rightly think that the United States is no longer a reliable partner. They are no longer at all certain that Article 5 of NATO, NATO will be honored. They now worry that the United States might actually become an aggressor against Europe. They're going to have to start spending more. All of those things are happening at the same time as they're looking as everyone else is at the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East. They're saying that with a $20,000 drone, you can take out a multi million dollar piece of equipment. They're saying it's silly to use multimillion dollar missiles to shoot down drones. And so they're looking at Ukraine and thinking maybe we've got to rethink the whole defense strategy. Maybe we've got to start from the bottom up. And I don't know, they might be able to do it. And Tim Miller, I don't know if you saw this, but he has a hilarious piece up this morning. The Trump administration sent an uninvited person to Greenland to participate.
- [37:21]
Charlie Sykes
Right. I follow that story.
- [37:23]
Jonathan Rauch
So this is hilarious.
- [37:24]
Charlie Sykes
The governor of Louisiana.
- [37:25]
Jonathan Rauch
Right, Louisiana, uninvited to Greenland to participate in a conference where he's not supposed to be. And he goes around giving bumbling talks in a Cajun drawl about chocolate chip cookies. And the Green Lanterns are like. And the Danes are like somewhere between baffled and in stitches of hilarity. This is the level at which the United States is operating. So that's how the world looks to Europe.
- [37:55]
Charlie Sykes
And didn't he like, run away because they were mean to him and, you know, they were not paying any attention to him and it was thoroughly embarrassing. But if anything, Donald Trump has made Greenland and Denmark reevaluate who they are and have a new sense of patriotism. So let's circle back to where we started. We've gone with some of the big issues, but you mentioned Donald Trump is interested in the holes in the ground. And maybe is this part of the patrimonial presidency that Donald Trump is intent on putting his mark on Washington, D.C. everywhere. Not just in shittifying the Oval Office, but building the architect, he put his name on the Kennedy Center. Judges ordered it off. Now, once the giant ballroom, is repainting the reflecting pond, is working on golf courses. Give me your sense, you know, the monumental nature of Donald Trump's ego, the sort of the endless need to create monuments to himself, which strikes me as politically absolutely tone deaf, but very much on brand for Donald Trump. Your thoughts? Oh, and putting his name on money and having concerts in his honor and all of those things.
- [39:16]
Jonathan Rauch
Don't forget the passport.
- [39:17]
Charlie Sykes
Oh, the passport. Oh, and you know, the park passes. And we haven't even gotten to the fact that he. That this big concert that fell apart and he's decided he's gonna turn into a MAGA rally because, you know, in case anybody was going to miss the fact that the 250th anniversary of America is really all about Donald, not to mention the UFC thing, I actually asked you to look at a picture of what he's done to the White House. I mean, you want to just get that massive metaphor. I'm really stuck on this, I admit it. For people who are hearing me repeat myself, you see the before picture of the White House, you see the after picture where you have the hole in the ground and you have this giant steel octagon going up on the South Lawn. It's like this is, you know, in one image what Donald Trump is really obsessed with, isn't it?
- [40:07]
Jonathan Rauch
You know, it defies my powers of analysis, Charlie, where we're dealing with a wannabe Lukashenko. Is that the guy in Belarus who, you know, put up the. Which. Which guy put up the, you know, million foot high gold statues of himself, but we don't know whether all of them.
- [40:28]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, all of them. Right. Ozymandias, Kim Jong Un, Saddam Hussein, the leaders of Kazakhstan, all the people who we're all going to forget about at some point.
- [40:38]
Jonathan Rauch
You know, Charlie, this is like the famous encounter between Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty in which Moriarty says, everything I have to say has no doubt already crossed your mind. And Holmes response. In that case, I imagine that my response has already crossed your. I have nothing to add at this point about the mad egotism of Donald J. Trump. This isn't new. We've known about it for 40 years. We knew about it when he campaigned. We know that with age he's getting more unstable. We know that he thinks his clock is running out. His term. He's an 80 year old guy, he's desperate to make a mark in the world in, in any way that he can. And at this point, all I can do is look on it, look upon it with my mouth agape, and feel sad because I feel that way every. Well, to get all, maybe sentimental and abstract for a minute, the founders had a vision of this country, which was that it would be a place in which the only thing that would be glorified would be the rule of law. You know, instead of Madison, the architect of the Constitution, you know, there's no formal museum for him. There's no monument on the Mall for James Madison, even though he's arguably the greatest and most important of the founders. And it's been said of Madison, if you want to see his monument, look around. The whole order of our constitutional system, the rule of law, the institutions behind that, the notion that the Justice Department, even though it's not written down, that it won't simply become an enforcement arm of the President and his cronies, the independence of the irs, and the fact that in a republic we don't erect gigantic monuments and statues to presidents who are meant to be servants of the public, who are functionaries. They're bureaucrats. They come and go. The notion of throwing all of that away, it's profoundly un American in the deepest sense of the word. It's the antithesis of what the founders called Republican virtue.
- [43:02]
Charlie Sykes
Republican virtue. It does seem as if. Small R, small R, small R. But, you know, and I hesitate to ask this question because I feel that we've asked it, you know, over and over and over again over the last 10 years. The polls would suggest that a lot of the American public are fed up with Trump, are not buying it, and that you're even seeing resistance among Republicans. And, you know, and I say this as somebody that was asked this question 500 times over the last few years, when are Republicans finally going to break with Donald Trump? And of course, my go to answer was, never. It's never gonna happen. It is a cult. And yet you are seeing now that Donald Trump has not only managed to squander his own coalition, but he seems very close to squandering his majorities in Congress because there are a lot of these Republican senators who've been willing to put up with a lot, but they're sitting there for the next seven months with the corpses, the carcasses of their colleagues who have been thrown under the bus by Donald Trump, to mix my metaphors. And, you know, when you even see Axio saying that maybe John Thune is reaching a breaking point.
- [44:14]
Jonathan Rauch
I don't know.
- [44:15]
Charlie Sykes
What do you sense? I mean, I do sense a certain exhaustion, a certain. Like, you can't be serious. You know, Donald Trump keeps pushing it and pushing it and pushing it, and he thinks there's no red line. Is there a red line, do you think?
- [44:29]
Jonathan Rauch
You know, the presidential historian Gil Troy once said the presidency is surrounded by invisible tripwires. And smart presidents have a feel for where those tripwires are. Now, he said that before Donald Trump became president and barged through every possible tripwire that we thought might exist and then kept going. And yet those political realities and tripwires are still out there. We know that he's getting politically weaker by the day. First, because he's a lame duck, second, because his approval is record low and only getting lower, low 30s. What we're seeing now is we're starting to see some shakiness in his numbers, even among Republicans now. They're still very high, don't get me wrong. And even Richard Nixon left office with 50% approval among Republicans after all of that. But we're seeing cracks. So what does that mean? I don't think it means that his power goes away. I do think it means his power diminishes. Politicians, as you know better than anyone, Charlie, politicians read those approval ratings and they worry about those approval ratings. And it means that Donald Trump desperation and maliciousness will probably increase. So we'll see two things happen. We'll see people who do threat analysis and foreign policy in places like the intelligence community say you have to analyze your adversary's two things. First, your adversary's intent, and second, your adversary's capability. And the president's intent is becoming more malicious as he becomes more desperate and more angry and also maybe more old and mentally unstable. You tell me. But that's kind of how it looks that way. His capacity is diminishing by the day now, that, of course, his capacity diminishes further. If the election results look as bad for Republicans in November as they seem to be shaping up to be. So now we're in this horse race for the next two and a half years. The occupant of the office becomes more malevolent. The powers of the office begin to diminish. You tell me how that comes out.
- [47:03]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, I do think it is. It can be a dangerous moment. A Donald Trump who has nothing to lose is a very dangerous Donald Trump, and I think that we are seeing all of that. Jonathan Rauch, thank you so much for all of your time and your insight. Like this morning. You know we have to keep doing this again and again and again, don't we?
- [47:26]
Jonathan Rauch
We have to remind ourselves we are not the crazy ones.
- [47:29]
Charlie Sykes
Thank you. I was hoping you were going to say that. Thanks for listening.
- [47:47]
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Charlie Sykes
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Charlie Sykes
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Jonathan Rauch
You did?
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