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- [00:00]
Commercial Narrator
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- [01:03]
Jake Stauch
I'm Jake Stauch, co founder and CEO of Cervel. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding password resets, access to applications. My laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. It desperately wants to automate this work and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Servil what you want to automate in plain English and it's built. No drag and drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Cervel, it becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run it. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets and we'll prove it to you in a free four week pilot. Go to cerval.com acast that's S-E-R-V-A L.com acast.
- [02:05]
Charlie Sykes
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. We start the week with Donald Trump once again threatening to destroy Iran, although it's not clear if he's going to follow through on that. And he seems to be laying the groundwork for an attack on Cuba while he's also in slow motion way throwing Taiwan under the bus. And of course he is, as you all know, about to set up a $1.7 billion slush fund for his own personal goon squad. Meanwhile, new polls show the Trump's popularity hits new lows after the last new lows that he hit. So let's get into this sense of where we are at right now and joining me on the podcast this morning is our good friend Nicholas Grossman, who is a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois and the editor of Arc Digital, Nicholas. It's hard to know where to start. So let's just start with your sense of the China summit. Donald Trump returns. I think there was kind of a consensus that it was a meh summit, that it was not a big deal. On the other hand, if it turns out that this summit results in, you know, our betrayal of Taiwan, like our betrayal of Ukraine, it will be a very big deal indeed. So you your thoughts about what we saw in Beijing and what we didn't see?
- [03:30]
Nicholas Grossman
Well, it did look like nothing really happened, which is weird in its own right, that a American president traveling to China amidst a bunch of high stakes international issues, that should be a big deal. And it really wasn't. You know, they flattered him. He seemed really taken with the authoritarian pomp. And he kissed up to Xi and she talked about things like a Thucydides trap of the possibility of a rising power and an established power getting into a war. And I don't think Trump understood the reference, but that was more of a warning from China. But overall, it could look symbolically like America's decline and China's rise. China also has Putin coming there this week, and so she has America's president, Russia's president. And Trump was looking for deals and didn't really get any. Looking for maybe concessions on trade and didn't get any, looking for help on Iran, which was already a spot of weakness for the United States and didn't really get it. So while nothing happened, it also could look in hindsight like another watershed moment, or at least a symbolic moment in America's ongoing decline and China's ongoing rise, in part accelerated by Trump. And from China's perspective, if the United States is shooting itself in the foot in so many different places, just kind of standing out of the way and looking relatively stable is to their benefit.
- [04:51]
Charlie Sykes
Well, that certainly seems to be the way that China looked at it, that they are the rising power in the east while the United States is a doddering empire. Trump definitely did not get the reference to the Thucydides trap until somebody explained it to him that he was President Xi was kind of implying that you were declining. And I thought was kind of interesting that he was triggered. He had this long social media post that President Xi was not referring to me, he was referring to Joe Biden. But the fact that Trump immediately changed the subject when he came home I thought was kind of a tell, because if this was really a triumph, he'd be talking about that. But the other thing is you know, you listen to his interviews, some of the interviews that he's giving on Fox News, et cetera, where he's talking about Taiwan. It feels as if there is that slow motion preparing Republican public opinion, maga public opinion for abandoning Taiwan. You know, talking about what a tiny island it is, how close it is to China, you know, how they been greedy with the semiconductors. And this would be, I don't know whether it's a fait accompli or not, but President Xi did draw one red line, which was you need to abandon Taiwan. And the first thing. And Donald Trump doesn't do it in Beijing. And that's, I suppose that some of us thought that was good news at the time. But he comes home and when you listen to him, doesn't it sound like a guy who's talking himself and trying to talk others into betraying Taiwan the way he's already betrayed Ukraine?
- [06:20]
Nicholas Grossman
It does. Although also, I don't know who really thought that Trump would take action to defend Taiwan. We have Trump's first term in which he gave Xi a green light to crush democracy in Hong Kong. We have Trump kissing up to Putin and supporting or at least speaking favorably of Russia's attack on Ukraine and acting like Russia deserves to get something. And in negotiations trying to push the Ukrainians to surrender more than pushing Russia to withdraw. So I don't think anybody really thought that Trump was going to go to bat. We even have him threatening NATO allies, threatening Greenland, that Trump was going to, if China makes a move on Taiwan, Trump was going to commit the U.S. military enter into possibly World War Three. And I don't think anybody really thought that in the first place. So there is already that open question. It rests more with whether Xi really wants to take the risk, because of course, China can also see things like the Ukraine war and the Iran war and can see missiles and drones keeping a larger power at bay. And they might want to not want to take the risk. But whereas previous US Presidents would, while post Nixon not being explicitly in defense of Taiwan would still make it clear that it was very, very risky for China to try it because it could easily end up in a war with the United States that they really didn't want. And Trump has done nothing to try to convince China of that, to try to convince them that they would have more than Taiwan to deal with. They would have the US to deal with as well. And yes, now he seems like he's trying to get more of the American audience, or at least his supporters, to think that China doesn't matter. And it's really jarring in juxtaposition to what a lot of them said about Ukraine when they were arguing that Biden should not be sending Ukraine weapons. A lot of the argument was because we need those weapons to have preparation for war with China, just in case with Taiwan, at minimum, to defend Taiwan and therefore deter China. And now they are backing off that and looking as opposed to like China hawks. And actually, you know what? One that was even worse. Among a lot of the business leaders that he brought, one of them was the leader of Nvidia who makes AI chips. And those are exactly the sort of things we might want to keep out of China's hands. And instead, Trump was with the leader of Nvidia, trying to drum up business for them in China.
- [08:36]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, giving China access to some of these powerful chips was really extraordinary. Almost got lost. Okay, we'll get to Iran in a moment. But this was also one of those moments where a lot of the dots seem to connect. The stars align in terms of Donald Trump's foreign policy, but also this overarching theme of corruption. He goes to China and he flies Eric on the plane with him. And I kind of am old enough to remember when Republicans thought it was outrageous that Joe Biden's son went various places. So can we just talk about. Let's shift a little bit to the weak in corruption, because it feels at the moment that Donald, there's almost nothing that Trump does that does not have at least a sidecar of really festering kakistocracy. So talk to me about that, Nicholas.
- [09:32]
Nicholas Grossman
Just it's massive corruption and at a level that is so far bigger than anything in previous US History. So just to give a couple of examples, just this week with China, he has Elon Musk going with him, who was his biggest campaign donor and trying to get business help for his big campaign donor. And he brings his son, who is the official head of the Trump Organization, which is Trump's private business, which already the president having a private business, which he owns entirely still himself and is trying to drum up money for that already is wildly corrupt. But with Hunter Biden, the Republicans made such a big deal out of it. And it was always really more defense rather than offense. It was. They know that the involvement of Trump's children, including also son in law Jared Kushner, is wildly unethical, totally indefensible, and because they can't defend it on the merits, instead tried to generate this what about ISM with Hunter Biden? The idea that everybody does it? Which is not true. So with Hunter, he did some shady things. There was both. He committed crimes, things like drug offenses. There was a gun charge that they don't really charge anybody else for, but still, which he did do. And he tried trading on his father's name when Biden was vice president. This was not good. But also it is something that is relatively mild. It's more akin to, say, stuff we've seen before of shady presidential relatives, Don Nixon, Roger Clinton, Billy Carter, long history there, that try to trade on the family name. And as best we know from Republicans obsessively investigating this, Hunter didn't really gain anything from this. Maybe a board seat on a Ukrainian company. But it was mostly Hunter trying to say, I can get my dad to do stuff and then never actually doing it. Whereas here is Trump bringing his son on the trip and things like China's state media service put out a bunch of photos from the trip and they had things like the leaders walking together and the leaders shaking hands. And then there's one of a pose of Trump, his son Eric, Eric's wife, and she in front of Chinese and American flags. And that alone, just the effort to bring him along on a state visit is far bigger than anything that Hunter Biden was even accused of by Republicans. Once you got out of the crazy conspiracy theories that this drug addict was somehow a, I don't know, globe spanning gangster that they were totally making up. But so that alone is already way more corrupt. And you mentioned earlier the slush fund.
- [12:01]
Charlie Sykes
Well, let me get, let me go. I want to go back and push back a little bit because, you know, Hunter Biden, okay, I wouldn't use the word that is, you know, mild to describe what he, you can, you can, you can stipulate that Hunter Biden engaged in some sleazy stuff, but it is the scale and the scope of it, okay? So you don't have to minimize it to say, okay, there was once a time when this would have been a big deal. But it feels like here's the Hunter Biden thing and then you have the Trump crime family and it is so off the charts that you honestly cannot compare it to any other. I mean, what about ism is a powerful tool, but the scope and the scale of the scams and the ripoffs and the slush funds is so disproportionate, so rhetorically, you know, Hunter gives them the convenient what about ism? We don't have to defend or minimize what Hunter did except to say, but look at this, you know, and so I'm sorry, now let's, let's segue into the slush fund hunter really quick of where.
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Nicholas Grossman
Yeah, when I say mild, I just mean relatively, as in by comparison. So another good example of this was in 20, in 2016, I wrote something that said that the Clinton foundation should be shut down if Hillary got elected. And that was a charity. But the idea that somebody could donate money to a charity and then get on the phone with the president or get some sort of access, that's a conflict of interest. And so I objected to that and I objected to the Hunter stuff. And I think, you know, all that. Oh, when a hunter sold a piece of artwork for something like, I don't know, half a million dollars. Yeah, that was a really shady way of, like a foreign intelligence service to slip him some money, something like that. So that was bad. It's just that it is so dwarfed by the Trump stuff that it makes me feel almost, you know, naive for thinking that that stuff was really terrible when it was compared to this stuff.
- [13:49]
Charlie Sykes
So before we started taping, you had a really interesting little historic tidbit because. Talk to me about the Teapot Dome, because before the Trump era, you know, one of the biggest scandals in American history for you history buffs was under the Harding administration, Teapot Dome. And anytime you'd have a discussion of corruption and sleaze, people would say, well, you know, you know, let's. We got Watergate, we have the Teapot Dome. But put it in some perspective for me how big Teapot Dome was compared to what the Trump family is doing right now.
- [14:26]
Nicholas Grossman
Sure, right. Teapot Home scandal, something I remember from high school American history. I think it's one of those go tos you learn about beginning of the 20th century. Also the Smoot Hauley tariff, that's another one. But where Teapot's own, this big scandal, it's under Harding. And what happened was White House officials, not the president, but White House officials, took bribes to give companies special leases to land where they could drill for oil. And the amount of the bribes they took was at the time, $400,000. And when you translate that into current money, that is about $6.5 million total. 6.5 million. And even the entire oil deposit that they were able to get access to, just the value of the resources that they bribed their way into was worth about $100 million, or in current US dollars, would be something in the range of 1.6 billion. So that alone Teapot Home, the greatest buy, you know, this big corruption scandal in US History is less than the value of the slush fund that Trump is getting DOJ to give him, which he will then be able to take and put some in his own pocket and Pay some to January 6th attackers or other associates. And that was because he had been suing the United States government based on the lie that there was something wrong of the previous doj, enforcing the law against. When he. Against him and other people who very clearly committed serious crimes, and that they were prosecuting them with full due process, in fact, with even extra deference in some cases. And that amounts to 1.7 billion. So just that slush fund alone is larger than every bit of dollar involved in the entire Teapot Dome scandal, which really was only in modern terms, $6.5 million in bribery. So that one little bit of Trump's corruption dwarfs this great moment.
- [16:06]
Charlie Sykes
No, I mean, and again, and I want to spend more time on the slush fund, but this is just one little corner. And of course, what the other thing we saw is that he's engaging in thousands of insider trades, apparently tweets about some of the defense companies. I mean, it is so off the charts that. But, okay, let's go back to the slush fund, the $1.7 billion slush fund, which sounds like a lot of money. We thought that the worst story from last week was right in terms of Trump corruption, was the fact that he was gonna cut a sweet deal with his own Department of Justice to give him $10 billion in taxpayer money because of this bogus lawsuit against the irs. Now he's basically saying, I'll back off on that, but I have to create this Goon squad. I call it the Goon Squad. Unfortunately, the Goon Squad, a slush fund that would be used. What is your understanding of it? To pay off his MAGA friends, past, present, future, including the people who attack the Capitol, beat up the cops. That is not sufficient, apparently, to pardon them, but he's now going to lavish them with money from this. This slush fund, which will be funded with taxpayer dollars. I mean, this is like, you know, the script writers could. I think the producers would say, I'm sorry, this is a little over the top. I mean, not even the most corrupt politician in the world would think of this particular scam. Thoughts?
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Nicholas Grossman
Sure looks that way. And even since we're just quickly. Since we're talking about just corruption this week, there's also whatever's going on in the reflecting pool and cost overruns and possibility of kickbacks. There's the Ballroom and all the bribes that he's taking in building the ballroom, and now also saying that taxpayers have to build this vanity project for him and contribute $1 billion to it. So, yeah, I looked at with the idea of the slush fund. It was that he was suing his own Justice Department on an entirely frivolous lawsuit and demanding $10 billion into his own pocket from taxpayers. And it looks like that would be three thrown out in court. And so because it would be thrown out in court, he did something kind of like he would do in business of saying, you know, instead of, let's fight it out for a while and then we'll settle. And so he's trying to get the settlement to the Justice Department. And who are the people at the Justice Department who could approve it? It's his own personal attorneys that he has installed in senior positions. And so he has corruptly put allies in place to corruptly give him money, which he can then corruptly split between his own pocket. And it looks like some of these MAGA loyalists, including a number of the January 6th attackers of other coup conspirators, and what that communicates to them is not only a thank you for the effort the first time, but it's, hey, I will get you out of any sort of legal trouble with pardons if you commit crimes for me, and I will pay you. And so you have a greater incentive to try to. Whatever happens in 2028, who knows? Or even in anything to do with the 2026 midterms or, heck, any other crime along the way. And it's creating almost something that I keep on reaching in historical examples, but that the January 6th attackers are kind of like America's black shirts or brown shirts from fascist Italy and Germany, that not quite as numerous, but the role and more absurd in a way, almost comical, but still, they violently attacked America. And not only did he get him out of jail, he's now trying to get them paid.
- [19:28]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, I want to just underline how radically I agree with your analysis right now. I think it was a mistake to think of this as an historic. In terms of looking back on what happened on January 6th to reward for past behavior. I mean, that is bad enough. The point that I think cannot be made strongly enough is that he's also sending this signal that if, in fact, you commit crimes on my behalf, I will have your back in multiple ways. I will rhetorically call you patriots. I will pardon you. I can immunize you. You can go and beat up a cop. You can tase a Cop, you can pepper spray a cop, you can drive a flagpole into a cop, and I will give you a get out of jail free card. But beyond that, I've created a fund for you and for your family. So if you commit crimes on my behalf, I have your back. Now again, don't think of that as backward looking. Look at that as what signal is he sending to the future. And so right now you have a President of the United States who has very clearly, not subtly let people in his administration know, you know what, I'm immune. I can immunize you. And also we have this massive fund or access to these funds to take care of you if no matter what you do. So what is he expecting, you know, people who be influenced by this to do in the future? I mean, I think this is ominous when you think about it, that he really is setting up something that, you know, could have dire consequences in the future. And, you know, I mean, I don't want to go down the really paranoid rabbit hole except that right now paranoia seems to be kind of form of awareness and that if you don't think of it this way, then you're incredibly naive.
- [21:23]
Nicholas Grossman
Well, I have, I can tell you that the national security way of thinking about this is a lot of times, you know, I teach about terrorism and we call them low probability, high impact events. So, meaning it's so serious that even if you don't think it is especially likely, the fact that it is plausible that it's more, you know, if as long as it's like a 1 or 2% chance, that's very serious. You know, if there was a 1 or 2% chance that a plane would fall out of the sky, one out of every 100 airplanes is crashing. Would you get on a plane? I mean, most people probably wouldn't. And so, yeah, maybe it sounds a little paranoid, but it's the sort of thing that we should absolutely take seriously now. And especially because it would be so naive. We already saw them violently attack America and try to overthrow the Constitution and we see them dismantling the Constitution in various ways in office now. So yeah, it would be naive to think that they won't try to do so again and that paying off some of the thugs who tried to do it last time, that that is in any way not a signal to them to try to do it again.
- [22:18]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and also speaking of signals that they're sending, over the weekend we saw that Republican Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana not only lost his primary for reelection, but he finished third. I think he ended up getting something like 24% of the vote. And of course, his unforgivable sin was to vote to convict Donald Trump in the second impeachment for his role in, in January 6th. So not only do we have the immunity, not only do we have the slush fund, but the message is also going out to Republicans that if you stand against Donald Trump, if you stand against him on his attempt to overthrow the government, or you stand against him in his attempt to gerrymander districts, or you stand against him on the Epstein files, the entire weight of MAGA will be mobilized to destroy your career. And again, that's, that's a message that is going to resonate in 2026 and 2028. Right. If whatever Donald Trump tries, if you're a Republican and you resist this or want to hold him accountable for that, your political career will be over. I mean, that's a pretty unambiguous message so far, isn't it?
- [23:30]
Nicholas Grossman
Yes. And Cassidy tried to play ball in some ways. I think his egregious sin, not in MAGA world, but against America, against the world, was to confirm RFK Jr. So Cassidy is a physician, that there are many Republicans who have violated their oath of office. Cassidy violated his Hippocratic oath as well. He bears a significant amount of responsibility for the nightmare that RFK has been unleashing and dismantling American public health and vaccines. And so he's effectively a doctor who has been effectively pro measles. And even that was not able to. And then he did, you know, criticize it sometimes after. But he didn't stop it when he actually had a vote to try to stop it. And so then he got crushed. And you could also add the Republicans in Indiana running in a primary of where Republicans had rejected the demands to do a very aggressive gerrymander. Probably it was smart in a sense of, for state interests that they would have gotten rid of all Democrats. And for most states, it's good to have whoever is in power to have at least one member there who's doing the normal state, bring home the bacon, infrastructure spending type of thing. And so yet Trump went after them and almost all of them lost. I think there was one who managed to hold onto his seat and hold onto the nomination. So that does show that Trump both prioritizes personal loyalty, anti democracy action, any sort of support for, for his efforts, and also has a very tight grip on the Republican Party. I think the fortunate silver lining of that is that tight grip is something that is only maybe a third of the Electorate, not actually half. They need additional people to support them, additional independence. But it is clear that his grip on the Republican Party itself and on the Republican base is very tight and that all the Republican politicians see. We could add Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who is one of the few who seems to have really meant what he said about the Epstein files stuff and so hasn't let it go just because Trump has said it. And there are other problems with Massie you don't necessarily need to get into now, but where the Trump is going after him also. And we'll see if he can get rid of Massie, too. But, yes, clearly the message from the White House is Trump is the only thing that matters and the rest of the Republican Party serves him. And if you don't, if you don't simply do what he says, then he and MAGA will go after you.
- [25:50]
Charlie Sykes
Well, that's also, as you point out, you're talking about one third of the electorate. I mean, that will play an interesting role in the midterms because, you know, we have a new New York Times Siena poll out on Monday showing Donald Trump at his, you know, a new low after his last new low. And yet Republicans cannot distance themselves from Donald Trump. Right. They're going into a midterm. He is becoming increasingly politically radioactive. And yet the message within the Republican Party is, you know, don't even think of, you know, dissenting from Donald Trump. He may be going down, but you're gonna be going down with him. But let's take a moment. Just talk about the Faustian bargain of Senator Cassidy and maybe Thom Tillis as well. You know, here you have Cassidy, who is a serious person. I mean, he is a medical doctor. He understood who Robert F. Kennedy was. He said that he had deep concerns about Robert F. Kennedy. You know, he was concerned about what would happen to vaccines. He was concerned about what happened with science. And yet in that Faustian bargain that we've seen so many times, he rolls over at the last minute and votes to confirm Robert F. Kennedy pretends to believe certain things that Kennedy told him that turn out not to be true. Clearly, he regrets that right now. But in that Faustian bargain, you think that if I shave off, you know, just a little bit of my soul, I'm going to get certain things that I want. So there's kind of something pathetic about Cassidy and there's something naive about Cassidy that he thought that once having crossed Donald Trump, that if he voted for him and supported his policies and helped him pack his cabinet with, you know, all of these, you know, bizarre misfit toys that he would somehow survive. So he not only loses his soul, he loses his seat. Like, if only you had been warned. What did you think was going to happen, Senator Cassidy? Same thing with, kind of with Tom Tellis, don't you think?
- [27:42]
Nicholas Grossman
With pretty much all of them that I go back to when the way you were describing that of. I think maybe the earliest example of this was Chris Christie, that in 2016, Christie drops out, he endorses Trump. He says he can be part of the transition team. My guess is he was angling for attorney general. And Christie is the person who put Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner, Kushner's father, in jail, that Christie was prosecutor. And so then right after Trump wins, he knives Christine in the back and that's the end of his political career. And same thing. I wonder, you know, what were you thinking? That you were going to sell a bit of your soul? I think it's a really great way to put it. Sell a bit of your soul in exchange for what? And what did it end up being in exchange for? Nothing.
- [28:23]
Charlie Sykes
You get. You get nothing.
- [28:27]
Commercial Narrator
When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery. So you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [28:58]
Jake Stauch
I'm Jake Stauch, co founder and CEO of Cervel. We built Servl to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding password resets, access to applications. My laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work. And that's why they need Serval. You just tell Servil what you want to automate in plain English and it's built. No drag and drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Cerval, it becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run it. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets and we'll prove it to you in a free four week pilot. Go to serval.comacast that's S-R-V-A L.comacast.
- [30:00]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, so let's stick. We'll get to what ran in a little while. Let's just talk about the midterms and where we're at right now because of course, we've had some massively significant court decisions and also this display of the rather extraordinary willingness of many Southern legislatures to rush to eliminate these all black districts. So give me a send. Not all black, but minority districts. Give me your sense of where we are at in the midterms and the role that the courts have played and might play going forward. Seems like a big question.
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Nicholas Grossman
So I have two things at the same time, which is that I'm both very concerned and pretty optimistic. So the very concerned part is that a lot of the Supreme Court effort, the gerrymandering, a lot of other methods that Republicans seem to be doing to try to steal the midterms amount to a serious part of America's Democratic backsliding. And in a way that is contributing to the United States not really being a full democracy anymore, not really being constitutional democracy into something more like what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism, something where there are still elections, but they are not totally free and fair. This is something like what, say, Hungary experienced. So they were further down the line. That's also a big reason for optimism. Enough numbers, they were able to overcome it. But what has happened, if I can just say in plain language just with the cases, is that the Supreme Court decided that the Voting Rights act, even though it was renewed by overwhelming super majorities in Congress in 2006 and signed by the President, that they're going to get rid of its core provision because they don't really like it. And it's something that a lot of them have been going after for a while. And that the idea of the 15th Amendment, that was trying to guarantee political equality, which the Voting Rights act was reinforcing, because ever since Reconstruction there hadn't really been the 15th amendment in force all the way through Jim Crow wasn't in force. And so originally in the Shelby counter case. Shelby County. Shelby county, excuse me, in the Shelby county case that years ago where they had gotten rid of oversight for. For Southern states. And at the time it was. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a great analogy, which was that saying that we don't need an umbrella anymore because we're not getting wet when we're standing outside. And I just messed that up in terms of. She said it much more smoothly. But we put away our umbrella because we're standing outside in a rainstorm and not getting Wet, so it's still raining. And what they did this time was make it that they could do partisan gerrymandering unless it was clearly racial gerrymandering at a level that was impossible to prove and where that you could disenfranchise a lot of black voters as Democrats, because as long as you said you were doing it as Democrats and not as black voters, then it was fine. And that if anything, if you read what Sam Alito wrote, that if anything was almost taking the. You're noticing my racism is the real racism. Racism is I'm being colorblind by disenfranchising all the black people. And the only way that it could possibly satisfy their result, the court. Sorry, the court standard is if it was black people voting for Republicans would sort of be the only way they could be enfranchised. I think the best example of this was in Tennessee, where the city of Memphis has had somebody representing them. The city is over 60% black. It's overwhelmingly Democratic, and they've had a member of Congress. And Tennessee has been. It's a red state. Its delegation has been overwhelmingly Republican, but the people in Memphis got somebody to represent them in Congress. And what Republicans in Tennessee did now was carve Memphis up into three pieces, put those three pieces with enough rural white voters that they will guarantee that the. Almost guarantee that the entire state is Republican. And a lot of Republican states rush to do this with, in some cases where Louisiana and Alabama both are suspending primaries.
- [34:05]
Charlie Sykes
And which is pretty amazing, by the way. I mean, pretty amazing that they canceled
- [34:09]
Nicholas Grossman
an election so they could get their new map in there. And previously the Roberts court had said this was something that they called the Purcell Principle, that you couldn't do this because you couldn't change maps ahead of an election or any other election rules. And they said this when it was 15 weeks from an election in Texas. And that was because that map was going to. To the map that was being struck down was one that was drawn, gerrymandered to help Republicans. So 15 weeks before an election that's too close to an election to. You have to still keep a map that helps Republicans. But now all of a sudden, a primary voting is already underway, and yet they can then go stop it and change the maps. Florida is going to do it, even though Florida law says that they can't. And then on top of all of this, with this big rush that shows that maybe nothing is really changed since the Jim Crow era, maybe that really was the federal government that was forcing them to have representation in their states, something that was closer to the proportion of the people there, still majority Republicans, still more, way more white representation than black or other minorities, but that others still had a vote. And then the contrasting thing to this, when Democrats went to do a retaliatory gerrymander in Virginia to try to balance it out, there, you had four, three Republican justices who did say that they could stop a constitutional amendment, which, to be clear, in the Virginia state constitution, it says that the people have an inalienable right to amend their constitution, and that the rules say there that you have to pass the state legislature twice, then put it to the people, which Virginia did. And in the referendum, it passed. But the court decided that the second time it passed the legislature, that there was already some early voting going on for an election. And even though the law had always been understood as before, the election means before election Day, here, they were going to change it to say it was before because that early voting had started and therefore it didn't count. And so while there are, I'm sure, lawyers who can take various sides of this argument and come up with some argument for any of these positions, they could say in court, what it really seems like in plain language is justices, both at the Supreme Court level and the Virginia level, state legislatures in various states in the south, like Tennessee and Florida and Alabama and Louisiana, have all conspired to try to upend the law and get the type of people in Congress that they want, in part because they not unreasonably fear that Democrats are going to take back one house of, of Congress or more. Now, the optimistic part is I think that there is a good chance that there's such a wave that the Democrats do anyway, and that still doesn't make the principle okay. It still is going to be a long, ongoing problem that a lot of people in these Southern states, especially black Americans, have no representation in Congress. I don't think that can be reversed without a big change in national power possibly in the future. But Trump is so incredibly unpopular, and when we get to Iran, that's going to just make it even worse. Likely over time that there could be something overwhelming, kind of like in Hungary, where it took about a 20% margin for the just so clearly the writing to be on the wall, that even though Orban in Hungary had managed over the course of multiple elections to use gerrymandering and court manipulations to make it that he had a super majority in Parliament, despite getting like high 40s, maybe sometimes low 50s percent of the vote, had such a large majority that they changed the Constitution in their favor, that they took over a lot of the media, they forced over 90% of independent media to be run by a party lackey. There's some parallels to that with things like the Ellison's taking over Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery and parts of TikTok. But that shows that in Hungary, a deeper Democratic backsliding still, this overwhelming numbers overcame it. But the fact even that we're talking about that in the United States, that is something like that shows how much we've already lost the democracy that we had.
- [38:06]
Charlie Sykes
Okay, so I want to stick with the optimistic thing because I agree with you. I think that this could backfire in a couple of ways. Number one, I think it's going to fire up Democratic voters and black voters even more than they were already fired up. That's number one. Number two, there is always the danger that by breaking up these heavily Democratic districts, you're also then diluting the Republican margins in the surrounding districts. It's one of the reasons why in the past Republicans have been supportive of the Voting Rights act because they didn't really have an objection to the, you know, majority minority districts because they feel, felt that they were sort of caging in those, you know, hardcore Democratic votes so that they, you know, would have. Would not affect their margins. If there is this kind of a swing in this election, they might have made some of their seats more vulnerable. Okay, that's the good news. The bad news is, and your description of the courts raises the question about the damage that these decisions are doing in terms of public perception and the, the legitimacy of the courts. You know, this is the thing, you know, John Roberts is, you know, allegedly an institutionalist concerned about the image of the courts. You are. This is like an area I don't really want to go down. But you are seeing now more and more support for court packing or something like this. And also with the redistricting wars that we've seen around the country, it feels that we've gone into a kind of a total warfare that both parties have accepted, you know, by whatever means necessary. The warfare is total. We will accept any tactics whatsoever to win the elections. And you talk about what's already been broken. You have some of those democratic norms that have been badly eroded, if not destroyed. And also this question of the courts, if the courts continue to behave in this particular way, it will change public opinion of the courts, which has already been in decline. And the political dynamic, the Willingham. When Kamala Harris comes out in favor of court packing, you kind of realize that the window is moving. I'm not saying they're going to do this, but I mean, this feels as if the crisis of democracy, the crisis of legitimacy, has really escalated just in the last month. GRI a lot.
- [40:25]
Nicholas Grossman
And I think that's been. I think it's been imposed on us. Us, meaning pro democracy Americans. So I'll give you an example of where Virginia doing this heavily Democratic gerrymander is the sort of thing that I would have strongly opposed in past years of. I think that that rural conservative white Virginians deserve representation every bit as much as black urban Memphis Tennesseans. And so that would be bad. And yet when you have all of these aggressive Republican gerrymanders to try to unfairly keep national power, then the retaliation makes sense. And a similar thing with the courts that the decision that or the two really combined, that for me felt like just a big red line that the court had crossed was in 2024, first, where they took the part of the 14th amendment that says that insurrectionists can't hold office unless Congress passes something to give them special permission. And they just flipped it around to say insurrectionists, namely Donald Trump, can run for office unless Congress passes something new saying that they can't. And that the impeachment vote against Trump for inciting insurrection, which passed majorities in both House and Senate, but didn't get the 2/3 to convict in the Senate, that doesn't count. So that was one. And then was the immunity decision, where the court suddenly made up that there were all these ways that the president was above the law and that essentially everybody in American history, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, you name it, they were all wrong. And the only people have ever been right about this, the US Presidency, were Donald Trump and maybe Richard Nixon. And by putting him above the law and inverting that insurrection clause was already distorting the law a lot. And with the latest way of the Calais, I think you say it decision, it's funny, I've read it, haven't heard it out loud. But with that recent gerrymandering decision and Voting Rights act decision, that they essentially invert the 15th Amendment and its purpose of aiming for political equality and instead now aiming to use it as a way to enforce white and Republican dominance and to be able to disenfranchise others, and I don't know how far they can push this before I hear, I mean, already I hear myself talking about things that are more radical, that I'm more open to than I would before. I feel like I'VE been pushed to that position that essentially they are breaking these things and people are responding to them. As opposed to any of the many ways that we talk about court packing in the past, even fdr, it was still about policy where they were striking down a lot of New Deal stuff. And he raises court packing because that is about policy, fighting the depression, other things. And other times when Democrats started calling for Supreme Court changes or Supreme Court reform, a lot of times still it was about something that was fundamentally policy, that very high stakes affecting a lot of people, but still policy. And what they're going after now is the system itself is the Constitution, is the democracy. And it's a big red line. And I expect people have reaction. And I started even thinking about with the recent decision of how far can they push this before some people get violent, that get worried about political violence if there is no avenue for people to channel all of their anger about what's going on through political representation. If you essentially communicate to people, for example, throughout the south, no matter what you do with voting, you cannot possibly get representation in government and address any of the issues you care about, well, then you funnel people into potentially other means and it starts something I really, really don't want to see, but that I get more worried about it if they cut off all these avenues and seem like they're really going for it. And that Democrats then respond with their own version of trying to balance this out and that further escalates things. But the alternative to escalation in that case is appeasement. And that has never worked.
- [44:20]
Charlie Sykes
Yeah, but see, this is that vortex of violence does have its own logic. Right? No one wants to go there. And yet step by step you get there. And of course this is the nature of the divisions, the kind of rhetoric that we're seeing. But again, if you basically say that you can't, you know, there is no recourse to the ballot box and the courts are not going to help you, then, you know, again, this is another one of those things that erodes support for constitutional democracy. I mean, ultimately liberal democracy relies upon the faith of the people that it works. Right. I mean, it is not necessarily self enforcing. If people stop believing in that system, then it's very hard to put it back together again. The good news, of course is I think there's, you know, sort of deep sense of it and there's a long history and it's much more ingrained. Okay, so you mentioned something before that we, you know, haven't gotten to yet. You know, as you And I are speaking, by the time this airs, it will be, well, it's another Taco Tuesday, or maybe not. Donald Trump clearly desperately wants to extricate himself from Iran. And yet, you know, over the, over the weekend he posts once again that, you know, the clock is ticking on Iran, you know, there'll be nothing left of Iran. Problem is he's made these threats so often. I mean the problem with bluffing is you can't, you can't bluff an infinite number of times. But, but your sense of where we're at on that, on this, because public support is not rising, the negative consequences are growing and Donald Trump seems to have got himself into a sticky quagmire where give me your analysis of Trump's war of whim that he can't get out of.
- [46:12]
Nicholas Grossman
So I think he's badly stuck and that this is one of the worst geopolitical setbacks for the United States ever. That is poised to be perhaps one of America's worst losses in war ever. That you think of Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States withdraws and the people that you the US Was fighting take over, but that's it. The United States has no further loss beyond that, effectively can cut its losses and leave. And in the case of Iran, the US doesn't really have that option that by Iran seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz and being able to block all sorts of supplies, very important supplies coming out of the Gulf. There's about 20% of the world's oil and gas. There's a lot of fertilizer, additional things like the underrated of a methanol which is used in various plastics production, and helium, which liquid helium makes MRI machines run and graphite and sulfur and so many other things are effectively blocked that we are now headed for a supply crunch that is likely to be larger than the one in 1973 in response to the OPEC oil embargo, which set off a over year long range recession and stagflation and significant stock market declines. And you know, who knows how the stock market will react. But where with Iran? The United States seemed to try to first threaten and then just bomb from afar, expecting that the Iranians would capitulate. That the Trump team seemed to think would be sort of like Venezuela when the situation is extreme.
- [47:46]
Charlie Sykes
Yes.
- [47:47]
Nicholas Grossman
And bombing from afar has never won a war. And so as soon as, as the Iranians survived, I mean literally never, that won a war on its own, just bombing from afar. And so as soon as the Iranians managed to survive the initial assault that the regime held together, even though the US and Israel killed a lot of its senior leaders and now seems to have also killed some of the Iranian leaders that were at least open to negotiations and leaving a more hardline Revolutionary Guard faction in charge that it is quite easy for them to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. All they need to do is to threaten ships enough that it's too risky for the ships and for insurance companies to sail, which has been happening throughout. And so from Iran's perspective, it is virtually impossible to make a deal with Trump because his word is worthless. He has broken multiple deals with them in the past without cause. He cannot possibly be trusted to follow through. And so from an Iranian strategic perspective, they both got a really big prize in Hormuz and want to get something out the of it. And they want to make this go down as a cautionary tale. Don't attack Iran or Iran crashes the global economy. And Trump handed them that card. So they have no interest in handing him some sort of face saving win. And he seems to have a lot of difficulty accepting that he screwed up and that this is a pretty bad loss. So he is still making demands of Iran. Iran in response is making demands of the United States States. And Trump cycles through making these big over the top threats, sometimes even genocidal threats that who knows, maybe he'll end up bombing again, but that he has not followed through on any sort of ground invasion would be massively difficult. And Iran is about three times the size of Iraq to put that in perspective. And the US still currently has far fewer ground troops in the region than did when invading Iraq. And so for the Iranians, they want to kind of drag it out. And when Trump then flits back between making some claim of big progress in peace talks, which is consistently been a lie throughout, but that seems to jawbones markets and maybe gets him some positive headlines. But it also just strings things along as the economic damage mounts without the United States solving it. And I don't know how he can solve it because the only who pass from here are a humiliating surrender that gives Iran a decently stronger position than it had before the war. Asserting sovereignty over Hormuz and getting to charge tolls. They're talking 1, 2 million dollars worth of tolls. So that would mean Trump getting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a big new revenue stream as a result of this and asserting power over US Gulf partners like the UAE in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the US Fifth Fleet, the Navy's fifth Fleet is stationed at Bahrain. That means they go back and forth through the strait, and that is no longer freedom of navigation. That used to be there as hostile territory. We could connect this back with the China stuff of that. The United States, as global power, was guaranteeing open trade and freedom of navigation on the seas and has now lost that. And I don't know exactly how they're going to get it back. But Trump seems more interested in trying to either do a kind of display of bullying, as if that's gonna make the Iranians capitulate, which has never worked, or then lying to the American people that everything's fine, trying to attack the media for telling the truth about what's happening.
- [51:06]
Charlie Sykes
I think he's going with door number two because, I mean, he has that infinite confidence that he can call anything a success. Right. And change the subject. I just think he's looking for that one thing that he can claim is a win. But here's the. I guess part of the question is who's calling the shots here? Because, you know, obviously, he has tremendous agency. This war is taking place because of Donald Trump. But we know that he's not necessarily listening to Marco Rubio or J.D. vance or Pete Hegseth. We know he's listening to Benjamin Netanyahu. Clearly, the Pakistanis have a lot of influence. The Saudis have a lot of influence. I mean, we kind of got a little glimpse of that with this Project Freedom we were sending the troops through. And, you know, Marco Rubio comes out and does this big press conference about how, you know, the war is over and now we're all focused on Project Freedom. And like, five minutes later, Donald Trump says, yeah, forget about that, too, because apparently, you know, our allies in the Middle east said no. So, I mean, part of this is that it will be interesting to find out who really is calling the shots, who has the strings. And I think Trump is finding it. This is a very uncomfortable situation for him because unlike domestic politics, everybody is not simply just rolling over and acceding to his wishes. And, you know, the thing about Trump is that when he runs up against some actual resistance, you kind of realize he's not that good a negotiator and he's not that strong a figure.
- [52:34]
Nicholas Grossman
No. And there's. I really do think there's nothing he can do about it. That the. Where you mentioned who is really holding the strings here is unfortunately, Iran, that all others are acting in. They're just trying to pull their interest, acting different ways. As you mentioned with Project Freedom, that shows the U.S. navy can put U.S. navy destroyers through There they can shoot down the things that Iran shoots at them. I mean, if Iran gets a lucky shot in every time, there's a risk of that, but clearly that was impressive tactically. They could shoot all that stuff down, but that's not going to get the ships to move. And the economic damage is something that right now they're putting off. It's almost a shell game where the ships out of the strait have already reached their destinations and unloaded. Companies and countries are drawing down their petroleum reserves at record paces. That is going to run out possibly starting in June, some of it may be more in July, but a lot of it's going to run out over the summer. And then there just simply won't be enough stuff. And kind of like with COVID this is the sort of thing that is too big for him to lie about the, the economic damage. In fact, already it is with things like rising gas prices that people can't help but notice that it's on signs on a bunch of corners throughout the United States. And so he can't actually pretend that way. The Saudis, Emiratis, others are seeing problems of their loss of position possibly to Iran. The Pakistanis has been able to get the two sides to talk where effectively what the two sides say is they, they issue their competing demands and nobody seems to budge. The situation is totally out of his control and he keeps on going back to his old moves of either I make a bunch of threats and then you fold, which isn't working. I lied to the media and enough of my followers believe it and then people just kind of move on, which isn't working. If it was maybe use force again, but that isn't working. That there really is no way out that I can see and that even if say the United States tried a full on regime change war, we're talking about then much bigger economic damage at absolute minimum and that's even if it works. So the one I heard of him trying to get a win of some kind was floating an idea of a special operations mission to try to get Iran's uranium, which keep in mind he lied about, was totally obliterated previously. You shouldn't have to do it, but it's clearly still there. And let's just say that already the United States does this and it would almost certainly be bloody. It really would be difficult. The uranium and its containers are very heavy. They are deep in Iran. Trucking that out of the country would be impossible. Flying it out may be logistically impossible. But even if that works, it doesn't unblock Hormuz. It doesn't stop the economic damage, which is Iran's main source of leverage. So I don't know what he's going to do, but I cannot see any way out. And usually I'm able to say, even if they won't do this, I advise X, Y or Z. And I honestly do not know at this point what they could possibly do.
- [55:41]
Charlie Sykes
Well, I have a untested theory about what his next step is going to be. He's obviously bored with Iran. He's obviously moved on. And the fact that he almost never talks about it anymore, clearly, I think he is laying the groundwork for a takeover of Cuba, either violently or not violently. And so what he will do is how does he get out of Iran, create another war in Cuba? All these reports about the. I don't know what you thought about it, these reports that were credulously reported by some members of the US Media, that the Iranians were preparing a drone attack on Guantanamo Bay or Key west or something, which, I'm sorry, just set off all my bullshit meters that you're basically creating a pretext for a preemptive strike on Cuba. So in Donald Trump's mind, there's always the distraction. And how do you distract from a failed war? You move to a war that you think is going to be more successful, more defensible. So here's a president who may not be able to extract himself in any meaningful way from Iran, but I'm guessing that you go back to that playbook and you know, he's already ramping up on Cuba. So it's kind of weird because I'm just not sure that the America First MAGA voters really signed up for one endless war after another, one threat of war after another. And you think back to the beginning of the year, starting with Greenland. How many countries have we attacked or threatened to attack? And it's a pretty impressive list.
- [57:15]
Nicholas Grossman
I don't think they signed up for one endless war after the other, but a lot of them did sign up for kind of bullying dominance. That the vicarious pleasure of if we just act really tough and do this real shallow reality show display of strength and that the reason why these problems weren't solved was because of weakness, which just almost like a, again, reality show display. And that you just say the right things, you just sound, I don't know, you threaten people, then they do what you want. And in some cases, so they seem to supposedly anti war people, but seem to thrill to a lot of these Caribbean boat bombings which are legal under both US and international law. And also just not good strategy that don't really accomplish anything against the cartels to pick off some of their lowest level people. And some of them, a recent Financial Times investigation found, might not even have had any affiliation with drug traffickers. But a lot of maga seem to like that and they seem to get a big kick out of the Venezuela operation, which went smoothly. Some of that, you know, there's a luck factor, I think the Trump administration failed to appreciate. What if Maduro just happened to dodge it? You know, for example, he wasn't there, somebody tipped him off, who knows? And then we would have had to escalate. But they seem to really like that. They seem to enjoy the way that he talks down to and tries to bully the Europeans or bully Canada and ruin the relationship with Canada. So all of that they seem to like. And even at first, while some of them were maybe warier with Iran, where you didn't see more of the Republican base turning on, I guess they're more split is probably a better way to think of it with Iran.
- [58:55]
Charlie Sykes
Well, and I think that he's hoping that Cuba will be quick and easy like Venezuela, and so that it can get everybody to those folks to kind of like the fact that, you know, we solved that problem. I actually was kind of surprised, when you think about it, that Cuba would have been a much better political play than Iran. And you kind of wonder like, did anybody sit in the room like Marco Rubio and say, okay, you got a case for Iran, but you know, we have Cuba sitting right here. You know, this is a much more manageable situation. But, you know, who could possibly have guessed that this administration would make so many miscalculations? Nicholas Grossman, thank you so much for your time and all of your insights. What a fascinating time to be alive, right? What a stupid time to be alive. But at least it's never boring. May make you crazy, but at least it won't bore us to death. Thank you, Nicholas. Appreciate it very much.
- [59:50]
Nicholas Grossman
Thanks for having me. Yeah, there's like the curse. May you live in interesting times here coming back to bite us.
- [59:54]
Charlie Sykes
And we are freaking cursed. And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary podcast. I'm Charl Sikes, once again reminding you at the beginning of the week we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
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