Loading summary
Transcript124 lines
- [00:00]
Rick Wilson
A text says you're on my mind. A bouquet from 1-800-FLowers says, you're my everything. Heartfelt moments belong in the real world, not just your phone. For 50 years, 1-800-Flowers has helped millions of people make memories that'll last a lifetime with gifts they'll cherish forever. Their expertly curated arrangements and gift baskets shipped nationwide with a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Don't wait for the next big moment. Make it when you visit 1-800-FLowers.com podcast. That's 1-800-FLowers.COM podcast.
- [00:36]
Amy McGrath
Welcome back, everyone, to an unfiltered edition of Truth in the Barrel. I'm your host, Amy McGrath. We've got a lot to get to this week. I can't do it alone. Today we're joined by our friend Rick Wilson from the Lincoln Project to talk through it all. Hey there, Rick.
- [00:51]
Rick Wilson
Hey, how are you?
- [00:52]
Amy McGrath
Hey, we're, we're good. I'm busy, as you probably can imagine. But it's really important to come back every week and do this show and talk about what's going on in the world. And I have amazing friends like you that can come on and make sense of it for all of us. I want to start out Rick and, and discuss with you what happened yesterday with the Supreme Court and the Voting Rights act, because I think a lot of people don't really know. What, what does this mean?
- [01:23]
Rick Wilson
Look, this was a long held, extremely high priority of the Leonard Leo Project to take over the courts, which was to kill the Voting Rights Act. They believe that there's a deep, long running philosophical belief inside the right that after 1964, by, by empowering African American districts and by redressing some of the harm that had been done before that time under Jim Crow, that you permanently gave the Democrats a mechanical and strategic advantage inside elections. Now, this is all bullshit, but they managed to get there. And the breadth of the court's decision yesterday and gutting the Voting Rights act cannot be overstated. And it is. Why earlier in the year when some Democrats were like, well, we can't imitate Texas. That's out of control. We shouldn't do that. I was screaming from the mountaintop, oh, yes, you should, because it will get worse and they will do worse. And sure enough, you know, they've done worse. And, and you are going to see Louisiana, Alabama's not doing it. Shockingly, K Ivey said, I'm not doing it. I, I don't know where that came from, but God bless her. Got to, got to call it when it's right. You know, Florida pass a redistricting bill yesterday. Desantis, I think he has already signed that. If he hasn't signed it yet, he'll sign it this morning. This entire thing is a big mess, Amy, in part because Republicans couldn't believe that California and couldn't believe that Virginia did what they said they were going to do and pass redistricting. Now, I will say this to my Democratic friends. I know people in New York like, no, we can't do it. It's too complicated. No, now is the time to call an emergency session. If this thing is going to be sauce for the goose, then it's sauce for the gander. And, and, and, and if, if you, if you want to play these games, then, then other Democratic states should go out right now and draw zero Republican maps. Draw them out. Just burn them out. Just say you, we're following your rules. We're just following the rules you guys have set. That's what we're doing.
- [03:47]
Amy McGrath
I think it's terrible for our democracy, but I hate it. I hate it. You have to. We have to fight fire with fire.
- [03:53]
Rick Wilson
Yeah.
- [03:53]
Amy McGrath
And, and enough is enough. And maybe, just maybe, we will get to a point in this country where everybody will say, enough is enough. We need to end gerrymandering. We need to stop this middle of the decade redrawing the lines because it ends up this way and it's hurting all of us. I would like to end gerrymandering across the board.
- [04:15]
Rick Wilson
I would like to adopt. I'm not much of a guy that says that says, let the algorithm do it, but I would like to adopt nonpartisan algorithmic voting distribution so that we're not drawing the maps based on some son of a. Who sits behind a door and draws a map. My ex wife drew redistrict maps one time for Florida, twice, actually, I think when she worked in that space. And, and it was a process back then that still had a little bit of bipartisan push and pull in it, but now, now even when you have states like Florida that has a, a constitutional state amendment that says you may not draw partisan maps, the, the government, the governor just this week said, yeah, screw you guys, we're doing it anyway. So, I mean, look, they may lose in court in Florida, but Democratic states can't play wait and see politics now. You can't play, okay, that. What they need to do is go forward right now in New York in particular, there are four Republican seats there. There don't need to be four Republican seats there if they're going to play this game.
- [05:21]
Amy McGrath
Yeah.
- [05:21]
Rick Wilson
And, and, and other states need to get serious about this as well. Washington and Oregon get to it. There are, there, this is, they have shown you what they're going to do. And real power politics is what they're playing. They're not concerned if you say, oh my God, how dare you violate this norm? They don't care.
- [05:41]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, yeah, they're, we gotta be, we gotta be ready to, to fight. The other thing about this Supreme Court ruling that worries me is, you know, after Roe v. Wade was overturned and now we get this, these sort of landmark rulings that we've all been, we grew up with, that we taught, I mean, I taught these rulings when I taught constitutional development at the Naval Academy. It taught what, what, you know, Miranda was, what the Brown versus Board of Education. Now we have, you know, marriage equality. And these are landmark rulings that, I mean, are they going to go away now?
- [06:24]
Rick Wilson
I promise you they're looking for an Obergefell hook before the election. They're going to try to make gay marriage into one of their final big culture war battles before the election. They're looking for a way to get it in there right now. And the idea that they're going to sprint for the finish line is something I think Democrats, they got comfortable thinking, okay, well, you know, how much damage can he do in four years? There is a system behind Trump, it's not just Trump. And these people are sprinting to the finish. They want to get rid of restrictions on prayer in schools. They want to get rid of gay marriage. They want to get rid of, in Florida, there's a guy who's going to propose a gay adoption bill next year to ban it. All these things are building up faster and faster because I think they know a lot of their, a lot of their, their, their ideas are so unpopular that they are now seeing the political damage of them. They know they're going to lose this fall in the House, at least. The Senate is starting to feel very dodgy for them as well. And we're getting to a point where their actions are going to be crazier and hotter and, and more reckless and more damaging to people. And I think it's really important just to keep in mind these folks don't care about being shamed or criticized and they don't care who they hurt in the process. They believe in power. That's the 14 core fundamental value. It's not a conservative party anymore. It's just about power to the detriment
- [07:56]
Amy McGrath
of our entire country. I Mean, I just never thought I would see some of these things. And just, you know, last weekend we had the White House correspondence dinner, which, you know, our current president didn't even go to many years and finally decided to go to, we all know, and this, this was a headline for what a day. But you know where there was a security checkpoint in this hotel and it was breached by a 31 year old man who had a shotgun. He was carrying a shotgun and a handgun and multiple knives and he was taken down. Of course, the president, Vice president, FBI director, they were hustled out of the Hilton Hotel with the Secret Service. And so this was a big deal, obviously politically motivated and we know there's rising political violence in our country, but the White House uses this as the justification for, oh, we got to have a taxpayer funded ballroom.
- [08:56]
Rick Wilson
Now listen, I, I, as I was saying facetiously, of course, you know that, that, that five and six dollar a gallon diesel y' all are paying for out there right now in the Midwest, the ballroom will fix all that. Those, those 10, grocery and food inflation, that'll fix the ballroom will fix all that. It's just so, it's so messed up and, and it's so wrong in the minds of 90% of Americans right now. 90% of Americans look at this and say, no, thank you, we're not playing this game. We know things are wrong. Even Republicans, even a majority of Republicans now say Trump's performance on the economy is not good.
- [09:39]
Amy McGrath
Yeah.
- [09:39]
Rick Wilson
And so it's a distraction. Just looking at this from a cold political guy perspective. If I'd been running their communications, we would have dragged this story out for a month. We would have talked about it every day and talked about how shocking it was and dragged it over and over and over again. But he changed the subject the next night on 60 Minutes by going out and starting to yell at Noro Donald, I'm not a pedophile. What it was an amazing example of he is uncontrolled and uncontrollable and that's not a good thing. That's not a compliment. This is a guy who can't even take advantage of a political moment that would have helped him. And, and now we're off, you know, in the weeds again on a million other things. It's, it's only Thursday.
- [10:25]
Amy McGrath
It reminds every time something like this happens and it, and it happens, it happens on both sides. This sort of anti government violence, we know right now it's hit a 30 year high. It hasn't been this high since 1994.
- [10:40]
Rick Wilson
Yep.
- [10:41]
Amy McGrath
And there are studies. One of the think tanks that I really like is the center for Strategic and International Studies. I think they do tremendous work. And they have been documenting this not just during the Trump era. They have been documenting political violence, domestic violence, domestic terrorism since, I guess, 9, 11. They started looking at all of this. And when you really look at the data, year after year after year, it's right wing violence that is way more than anything else. Although this year there's a switch, and now it's now more even.
- [11:20]
Rick Wilson
You know, I mean, it's one thing to remember that gets lost in the shuffle. The guy who shot Charlie Kirk was raised in a MAGA household. He is a Republican background. He's a conservative background. He was not at school to get radicalized. He was at an H Vac college for three years, which as far as I know, are not notorious hotbeds of wokeness. The kid that shot Trump at Butler was from a hardcore MAGA family. I don't think the categories that the Republicans would like to sell right now is that any criticism of the Trump presidency or of Donald Trump is an incitement to violence is something we should ever accept. This is a president who has been out inciting violence for 10 years. Enemies of the state. Liz Cheney should be in front of a tribunal. Adam Kinzinger should get the firing. So all these things that have piled up and piled up and piled up about his rhetoric have led some people in this country wrongly to think violence is part of a solution to Trump. And I tell people this a lot who are frustrated and feel like they're in a corner. The only solution in politics is to bring political pain to your opponent. If you want a democracy, if you want a republic, you cannot start shooting people. If you do, it's a slippery slope. It never gets better after that. You become a country at that point. Like Serbia. Yeah. Like Bosnia, where even though the shooting has stopped 30 years now, the scars are still there and they'll never. We're going to recover for two or three generations. We can't live in that world. There are a lot of people on the right who fantasize about that, who think that's the great way to, to, to finally exercise power against the woke. I, I got news for you guys. You do that and you, you, you will lose any sort of semblance of what we aspire to as a country on our 250th anniversary.
- [13:22]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. And political violence is never, ever the answer in the United States of America. But I think it's really important. What you just said is that the perpetrators many times do not fit into a neat category of oh, they're on the left or oh, they're on the right or oh, but we don't really know. I mean, what do we know about this particular man who did this? I mean, at least he's still living, so we could try to find out a little.
- [13:58]
Rick Wilson
We, what we do know, and I think it's important to remember is, and I, we were, we were not at the, the White House Correspondent Center. My wife and I were at a party in the, in the, on the Hilton complex at, with, at the Puck party right before. And I, A friend of mine who was going in texted me. It's like, what? Hey, do you have a ticket? Blah, blah, blah. I'm like, no, we're not going, we're going to do some other stuff. He goes, oh, I can just send you my QR code. Everybody's just getting right in. I'm like, no, what, What? And I'm literally at that moment texting with this buddy of mine. And I'd walked my wife over to this picture window in this. Where we were, and we were looking down into the portico where Reagan was shot in 1981. And I said, that's where it happened, in 81. And my buddy is texting me like he could just get us in. If you just want to come in, I'll send you my QR code. Nobody cares. They're all. Zipping people right through security is a big deal for the President. It should be taken seriously. It quite clearly was not taken seriously to the degree it was required this weekend.
- [15:06]
Amy McGrath
The other thing about this which is so striking is to me is this was, and you talked about it a little bit, this was like a 24 hour headline. I think the American people are so exhausted, burned out with this stuff.
- [15:21]
Rick Wilson
Completely correct.
- [15:23]
Amy McGrath
And, and also the immediate, immediate labeling of the perpetrator as somebody who was, you know, part of the left and all of that. I mean, we're just like, come on.
- [15:38]
Rick Wilson
Yeah. I mean, that, that, to me, it was such a giveaway in, in two fronts. The first was the ballroom, which made, which made you immediately understand they didn't care about this. They were trying to please the President on the thing he wants most of all, which is this stupid ballroom. And the other part of it was immediately linking any criticism of Trump with incitement to violence. That strategically, again, if I had been running it inside that world and had control the situation, you could change the direction of the country if you stuck with that message. But they can't, because he has no attention span. He's got the attention span of like a cricket, the guy just boom, boom, boom all over the place.
- [16:28]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. Well, at least we're all talking a little bit about some of this. And I do think we need to continue to talk about the war in Iran, though, because it's causing an economic crisis of global proportions. There are two stories that also kind of flew by, in my opinion, last week regarding that, and one of them is the military stockpiles being depleted, which I'll touch on in a minute. But the. The other one that just happened yesterday was when the Secretary of Defense, or war, whatever he wants to call himself now, test in front of the House Armed Services Committee. Now, this is the first time he's been on the Hill since the war, so there's a lot of questions. I didn't watch the whole thing. I watched some of it. And one of the things that stuck out, though, was when, you know, this administration has claimed that we, the United States, obliterated Iran's nuclear program last summer with attacks. Okay. And then when pressed during this hearing, Hegseth said, well, we went to war because Iran still had ambitions of a nuclear program. It was destroyed, but they still had the ambition to get it. I mean, my head exploded.
- [17:51]
Rick Wilson
I was like, I have an ambition to be 6ft 5 and 175 pounds, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
- [17:58]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, I was just thinking the lies here, Rick. I mean, Trump. Trump said right after we started this war that we had to do it because Iran was two weeks away from a bomb.
- [18:09]
Rick Wilson
So, you know, that's.
- [18:10]
Amy McGrath
That's a lie. A lot more lies.
- [18:12]
Rick Wilson
I look back on my time in the Defense Department. I remember we went one time for a congressional testimony on something, and the Secretary of the Air Force, in good. In good faith, had a mistaken statistic in his package that led to, like, this scramble the next day to make sure every member had known that it was 64.4.8%, not 64.2% or something. So it was so trivial. And I look at Hexeth just lying his ass off. This is a guy who represents the worst kind of example to not only the officer corps of the military, but. But enlisted folks as well, because everyone in that room knew Hegseth was blustering and lying over and over again, you know, especially on the force protection stuff, which really made me angry.
- [19:02]
Amy McGrath
I don't know about you. That was the other piece of that
- [19:05]
Rick Wilson
Watching Jason Crow just dismantle him and watching, watching Moulton. They just dismantled this guy. Because everyone knows that our force protection posture over there has led. Our terrible force protection posture has led to American civilian, casual or American military casualties over in the Gulf. And they don't want to talk about it. They don't, they want to pretend it doesn't exist. They have not reported it out. They have not told Congress candidly what's going on. And Hegseth continued that law yesterday. I thought it was absolutely obscene.
- [19:37]
Amy McGrath
Amy the forces over there, many of them were not prepared for this. They did not know it was happening. We had stranded merchant marines in the Gulf, you know, cadets that were there. We didn't coordinate. We have forces in different, different countries of the Middle east who don't have their, what I call battle rattle. They don't, they don't have their gear. They weren'. They weren't ready for it. They haven't, they haven't been briefed on it. And I mean, it's just, it's just a mess. And it, and it shows the lack of planning. And we all saw this from the outside, right, when, when all of these US Citizens were, were trapped and couldn't get out. And we didn't, we don't have any ambassadors to these, to our allies. We shot down our allies, shot down F15s on the first couple of days because we didn't coordinate with them.
- [20:28]
Rick Wilson
I mean, the, yeah, the, the, the absurdity of that. And here's the thing. We've been in the Gulf for a long time, since I was a young guy working in the Defense Department. And we had relationships all through Saudi and all through, well, through Saddam, out of Kuwait, which built a good relationship there, but all through the Emirates, all through the Gulf, and all of it was predicated in a lot in a big way on someday we're going to have a conflict with Iran. We better have our act together logistically and force protection wise and deployments into this region where people are, are ready to face up to something Iran will do. They did this thing on the back of an envelope. This was not built out with a real plan. They think that air power, and I love air power, but they think that air power changes regimes and it just doesn't. And so I just, I find the whole thing, it's sloppy and it's shocking and it puts men and women who, who are brave and skillful and talented and, and who are sacrificing for us in enormous physical danger right now. It's really Outrageous.
- [21:39]
Amy McGrath
I look at this whole thing as the military itself. I, I am pleased and, and not surprised that we did as well as we did. Given the lack of, of strategic thinking behind this and the lack of preparation that was given to them. It was almost like, hey, military, go, attack, go. And they didn't do their part at the higher level to coordinate with any of our partners or any of that stuff. And part of this now, the cost of this, which we're going to be seeing for years, is also in what appears to be the drastic depletion of US stockpiles, of missile stockpiles and weapon stockpiles, not to mention the destruction of aircraft, the destruction of bases. What I'm being told is almost every single base has been hit pretty significantly. I've heard told how much or what the consequences of that are. And I just, I'm like, hey, we're looking at some of our missile stockpiles or depleted over 50%.
- [22:50]
Rick Wilson
We build a very small number of PAC3 Patriot interceptor missiles every year. A few dozen was the old number. I think it got up to like 120 a year. We have fired off what I heard was over 50% of our global inventory of Patriot missiles against $80,000, $50,000, $20,000 drones. Those are about 4 million a piece. We have run through the Tomahawk missile inventory. I understand that we are under 50% on the Tomahawk missile inventory as well because we build very few of those every year, maybe a couple hundred tops every year. We are burning through precision precision munitions at a prodigious rate. The, the number of actual bunker busters like we use in, in Midnight Hammer that we have in the inventory is less than 100. And I, by my back of the envelope math, we've used about 40 of them so far. We're going through aircraft maintenance guys on these carriers, we're running cycles on these carriers. As you know this, every time you go and fly an F18 off a carrier and F35 off a carrier, they're on the back end of it for that two hour flight. There's 30 hours of maintenance and a whole ton of parts. We're burning through that stuff at a prodigious rate. And the whole, the whole system. There's a great article in the Times this morning, in the New York Times this morning, basically saying that, you know, the, the military was losing its edge in a lot of ways because we, we'd been out of the Gulf War for a long time, but we'd never quite in the war on terror for a while, we never quite done the training and sustainment of our people properly, but now we're burning through the inventory. And this is stuff that just does not get replaced quickly. No, I wish it did. We, I wish we had the industrial capacity in this country to say, hey, you know what we need? We need 5,000 Patriot missiles by the end of next week. That'd be great if we had that capacity. We just don't.
- [24:57]
Amy McGrath
Well, and also, let's talk about the fact of do we need it? I mean, we do now. You know, we need, we need to build this back up eventually.
- [25:06]
Rick Wilson
But, but the Ukrainians have figured out you kill a $20,000 drone with a $2,000 drone, not a $20,000 drone with A $4,000,000 missile.
- [25:14]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. And it's expensive. You know, the cost of this war is felt by the American people not only in gas and grocery prices, but also because we are going to have to pay to replenish these stockpiles. And, and you have to think about the values piece. I mean, folks can't afford health care right now. And in three weeks of this war, we could have funded universal pre k for, for all three and four year olds in this country.
- [25:42]
Rick Wilson
Yep.
- [25:42]
Amy McGrath
And, and instead we started a war that we didn't need to start.
- [25:50]
Rick Wilson
This war was absolutely, this war was absolutely without any actual predicate. Trump got talked into it by Netanyahu and Hegseth. He thought, I'm going to be a strong war leader and that'll offset the, the terrible economy that he caused by his tariff war. The first war he started. And nothing about it ever had a, There was never a logical predicate for this war. You think Iran is going to have nuclear weapons? Well, okay, why don't we build the international coalition to deal with it? You think Iran's going to have nuclear weapons? Well, maybe you stop treating the Russians like you're. They're your best friends who are helping empower that. Yeah, maybe you don't talk to Kim Jong Un about the lovely letters you sent him when there's a, some intelligence out there that the North Koreans are helping these people. None of this makes any sense as saying, okay, we're going to go have a large, loud kinetic war that kills a bunch of civilians in Tehran when you, when you don't have to do it that way. Yeah, and, and, and the, and the, the disconnect between intelligence strategy and warfare. You always want those things to be as closely bound together as you can. You want the intelligence to be right. We got it. Wrong in Iraq. But, but you want intelligence, the strategy and the military capabilities to all be bound together. They should be one tool. Right now. The intelligence is over here, the capability is over here, and the strategy is nowhere to be found.
- [27:26]
Amy McGrath
Right. No strategy at all. And I read an article in Foreign affairs yesterday about the fact that we made this Iranian regime, which was not in a good spot.
- [27:38]
Rick Wilson
No.
- [27:38]
Amy McGrath
I had an 85 year old leader who was about, was at the end of his lifetime. There was a possibility of a new leader who would be more moderate. They were, they were hurting. We, we, we made it worse. We got rid of the 85 year old leader, we replaced him with a more radical younger guy who lost his family because of us and is now killed.
- [28:03]
Rick Wilson
Dad, you killed the wife and you killed the kids. How do you think this guy's gonna act?
- [28:07]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, they're more hard work out. Yeah. And they, they've, they've, we, we gave them a new lifeline is what this article said.
- [28:16]
Rick Wilson
You know, and everybody, everybody who's been in that region who studied this, this, this regime understood one big thing. Amy. Iran is a young country now. The people who were around in 1979 for the revolution, they're gone. Mostly they were gone. They were dying out before all this. And that young country really, really, really, really has spent the last 20 years, let's say, wanting something different. The last 10 years, it's become even more acute. We didn't do what we should have done, which was help them with communication and information and moral support in the world and supporting the indigenous people who wanted to get out from under the moas. He said we did Midnight Hammer by which the, the, the MOAs were able to say, see the great Satan's coming for you. And, and in the months and weeks before this, we had a lot of protests in Iran. There were a lot of people who were watching the besiege, the, the, the sort of militia force fall apart, the IGRC force fall apart, the Quds force fall apart. And those things were getting close to a critical mass. And now we will never in our lifetimes see a free Iran. They have everything they need. And you know when Trump says, I'm going to bomb Iran into the Stone Age and we're going to kill their civilization, you know what the mullahs don't need, they don't need a modern civilization. They don't want one. They got, if they've got a Toyota Land Cruiser and a, and a truck full of AKs and a bunch of guys who don't Have a high school education, they're fine. They can control Iran for a thousand years that way.
- [30:05]
Amy McGrath
Yeah.
- [30:05]
Rick Wilson
The sad part is we were this close, really.
- [30:09]
Amy McGrath
I just. It's. It's terrible. And this war has made us less safe, more vulnerable.
- [30:17]
Rick Wilson
Everybody should understand. We're the bad guys in this story.
- [30:21]
Amy McGrath
We're. We're more vulnerable now because of the stockpiles going down. We're more vulnerable to China and Russia. You know, it's amazing to me to think about how this administration and Trump and guys like Hegseth always talk about, we rebuilt the military right? Now they're gutting the stockpiles for no geopolitical gain.
- [30:41]
Rick Wilson
Right. And look, they're also gutting the. They're also gutting leadership in the military at every level because they're not sufficiently A, white dudes or B, Trump supporters or both. And, and I think. I think the signal it's been sending through the military has been terrible that, that your. Your future promotion depends on your political persuasion. That is a really, really bad place, I think, for men and women who are serving this country. A bad lesson for them to see every day.
- [31:15]
Amy McGrath
It's also in antics like having the Secretary of Defense take Kid Rock.
- [31:25]
Rick Wilson
Oh, my God.
- [31:26]
Amy McGrath
In a helicopter. And, you know, when clearly US army pilots, you know, did this training mission around Kid Rock, you know, which, which I know, I was a pilot, you know, you don't do that. You don't do that kind of stuff. And, and so there was an investigation, and then the Secretary of Defense just stops it. I mean, what kind of message. You can get away with anything as long as you kiss of Donald Trump and these guys. That's, that's basically, if you do it for that, you can do anything.
- [31:58]
Rick Wilson
Yeah. And look, the, the, the flyover of Kid Rock's house, in many ways was like a perfect example of this stuff. Every pilot always wants more hours for training every pilot. And, and, and, you know, I know the Air Force side better, but army aviation, I'm sure, is the same way, and I'm sure Naval aviation, same way. These guys don't get enough hours per month right now as it is. And so jacking off, running around Kid Rock's house is not training you and, and tuning you up to go and fight a war in Iran or, or God forbid, in Europe or, God forbid, in Asia. It just. The unseriousness is a virus, and it's spreading very quickly, I think.
- [32:44]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. And the fact that the Secretary of Defense on a tweet would just, you know, change the Course of what the United States army is doing in terms of, you know, investigating something at a very low level. I mean, that, that is just like an all for political reasons.
- [33:04]
Rick Wilson
I mean, this is.
- [33:05]
Amy McGrath
We haven't even talked about the fact that, you know, oh, we don't need. The troops, don't need flu vaccines anymore because these guys are anti vaxxers, you know, I mean. Oh, the freedom of, of their, of the troops to control their own body. Well, I guess. Okay, except you're not talking about women, you know, and what, what they've done to our reproductive rights in the military. But. But okay. Yeah. I mean, I just. It's crazy.
- [33:30]
Rick Wilson
The Secretary of Defense is showing us that he's willing to reach down into something that should have been handled at like, I don't know, the battalion level at best to try to make a political outcome. The, the anti vax stuff. Political outcome, the LGBT stuff, political outcome. They're looking to wage culture war on a. On an organization that should be preparing to itself to wage actual war if we need it to. And I just, I find the whole thing as. As unshocking as it is disappointing.
- [34:04]
Amy McGrath
Unserious in the middle of a war.
- [34:06]
Rick Wilson
Yeah.
- [34:06]
Amy McGrath
You know, now we have the President talking about. Because he's angry at the President of Germany, the leader of Germany. He's saying, well, we might just pull our troops out of there. I mean, what are we doing?
- [34:22]
Rick Wilson
The old joke. The old joke back in the 80s was we're in NATO to keep the Russians out and the Germans down. If you want a resurgent German military force in Europe, guys, knock yourselves out. But it is a really telling thing that Trump can't disentangle his ego from our country's security. He can't unwind the knowledge that NATO has kept us safe for damn near 80 years and that the one time Article 5 had to be invoked, they came to help us.
- [35:01]
Amy McGrath
Yeah.
- [35:03]
Rick Wilson
After 9, 11.
- [35:04]
Amy McGrath
I was part of that twice.
- [35:05]
Rick Wilson
Yep.
- [35:06]
Amy McGrath
In Afghanistan.
- [35:07]
Rick Wilson
Yep.
- [35:07]
Amy McGrath
And the Germans were right there with us.
- [35:10]
Rick Wilson
They sure were.
- [35:11]
Amy McGrath
In fact, they. In Afghanistan in my second tour, they were in charge of a. Of a district of Afghanistan that was quite violent. And I just. Yeah. So many things. I can't believe. I want to get your take on something, Rick, because your. Your background with Republicans and kind of how they think right now. And again, this is. We have so much going on that all of a lot of this stuff is on, you know, page nine, if it's on any page at all.
- [35:42]
Rick Wilson
Right.
- [35:42]
Amy McGrath
But of the news. But the Trump administration is trying now to get rid of regulations, federal regulations on childcare facilities. So we have in our country some regulations, not actually that many at the federal level in my belief. A lot of the regulations come at the state level on what you can and can't do if you are a business taking care of kids. And what the Trump administration wants to do is they want to get rid of some of these federal rules. Now what does that mean? Rules, for example, that have a limit as to how many kids you can have per caregiver. They want to get rid of this stuff. I, I, and there, and I think it comes down to this kind of belief that child care is over regulated and that's why it's very expensive. I'm not sure like what Republicans, what, why, what's the deal here? What are they trying to get at?
- [36:48]
Rick Wilson
Look, they are doing their best to make child care so impossible and so, and to make it seem to make it more risky and more difficult because they want to drive the system back where women raise children in the home. That, I mean, never, never underestimate that as one of the through lines of this party these days where they're not joking about getting rid of the 19th amendment guys, they're just trying to shove the Overton window over a little more, A little more, a little more. And so I think that's where they're at on this. We spend a de minimis amount of federal money on child care. Clearly. Obviously, ask anyone who has children in childcare these days, folks in a lot of cities in this country, childcare is as much as their mortgage. It's madness. But I think this is what they're, they're doing a little social engineering here, Amy, more than anything else. That's my, that's my guess on it.
- [37:45]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. I mean, they've cut and freezed funding for Head Start. They've, they've, you know, they're, they're, they want to, they're proposed, it's full elimination of Head Start, which is a really important program in my mind. They call it radical. You know, taking care of kids is, I guess, radical.
- [38:01]
Rick Wilson
Right? Yeah. Making sure kids are taken care of is a radical decision.
- [38:04]
Amy McGrath
Yeah. And now they're, you know, Donald Trump is using the war as, oh, we can't, we have 50 states. We can't do childcare anymore because, you know, we're at war. I just, they don't do that much to begin with. But the federal regulations are really important. I mean, you, you want your building if it's a, if you're putting your Kid in a child care, you want that facility to pass fire and playground safety inspections. You know, I mean.
- [38:34]
Rick Wilson
Right.
- [38:34]
Amy McGrath
You want that the child care caregivers to have first aid and CPR and be somewhat, you know, educated. Background checks. I saw this firsthand when I was in the military. We had military daycare, but it wasn't always an option. It was full a lot and a lot of times you had to go what we call out in town to get daycare. And I was stationed in. Right, right. I was stationed in. My husband and I were stationed in Virginia at one point when we were stationed in the Pentagon and then we moved to Annapolis, Maryland. And the differences, Rick, between the states, Virginia, hardly any regulation.
- [39:20]
Rick Wilson
Right.
- [39:21]
Amy McGrath
And Maryland, lots of regulations. And, and I came to the conclusion at that point seeing the, you know, seeing different daycares and everything. Wow. There's a big difference. And I sort of like that. I know that there's background checks and higher regulations for, you know, my kids.
- [39:42]
Rick Wilson
Yeah. Call me crazy, but, I mean, call me crazy, but I, I think the idea that we're going to deregulate something that is in one of those few areas where I think everybody wants a little bit of regulation, everybody wants a little bit of oversight in that area. And, and again, there's an ideological through line here. I think that is really important that we gotta, we gotta never let your. Never take our eyes off of. Of what's happening there though.
- [40:12]
Amy McGrath
Most Americans, I think, want more help for child care. And the problem with child care isn't over regulation, it's lack of funding. You know, most Americans, whether, whether you're Republican or Democrat, they, they want universal pre K. They, you know, we like,
- [40:30]
Rick Wilson
like public schools through the roof now. You know, there's actually maybe another thing here that I'm missing. Just as they've taken charter schools and, and really in red states jab charter schools down people's throats, those charter schools have turned out not to be great for kids. They're okay for some cases. But the charter schools that are now being bundled up and purchased by private equity firms in Florida and elsewhere, they're doing that because that's a money making business for people who have the power to regulate certain things. I don't know, maybe that's part of this too. Maybe they're trying to, maybe they're trying to financialize childcare in such a way that it's not the local teacher or the local caregiver type and maybe they want to turn it into another private equity thing.
- [41:21]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, scary. I'm not sure I want that either.
- [41:26]
Rick Wilson
No, no, no.
- [41:27]
Amy McGrath
Taking over. Taking over childcare centers. But there's one more thing I want to ask you about. R. And I say this a lot when I go around Kentucky, and it gets a lot of head nods, but I feel like people really don't understand the magnitude of the grift that Donald Trump and his family have been able to do in the last year and a half off of the White House and his position. We're talking billions of dollars.
- [42:00]
Rick Wilson
Yep.
- [42:01]
Amy McGrath
With different things that he started World Liberty Financial, which is a crypto project that Trump and his sons did. The Trump theme, Minecoin, whatever it's called, the companies that he started, Rick, with True Social and Trump Media. And all of this is just. Have we ever seen anything like this?
- [42:23]
Rick Wilson
There is nothing even vaguely comparable to Trump's level of corruption. I include the Grant administration after the Civil War, which was considered to be quite lavishly corrupt. Nothing has ever come close to this. And I'll tell you, you know, you touched some of them. But 600,000 people ordered a Trump phone. They've never been delivered the meme coins. The crypto scams. The crypto exchange, USD1, which is a privately owned crypto exchange by the Trump family that is now they're trying to designate it as a Treasury settlement mechanism for our federal government. They've never had a better business than this. The, the, the, the, the construction business died out. Whether people know this or not. Trump didn't build office towers. After the early 2000s, that was over. And he only built about four of them his entire career. He's never the biggest real estate developer in New York. The golf course business, I guess it does okay, but it's not billion dollars.
- [43:27]
Amy McGrath
Right.
- [43:27]
Rick Wilson
Billion dollar business. It's tens of millions of dollars of business. They've never had a better business than this. Trump has increased his net worth to $6 billion in a year.
- [43:38]
Amy McGrath
Yeah.
- [43:39]
Rick Wilson
In a year. It is all driven by corruption. They're selling political pardons.
- [43:44]
Amy McGrath
Right.
- [43:45]
Rick Wilson
When those rich guys who are criminals get a. You send a million dollar check to the Trump super pac. It's not going to the super pac. Guys. Wake up and smell the corruption. It's going to Trump.
- [43:58]
Amy McGrath
It's going to the podcast.
- [44:00]
Rick Wilson
Yeah. None of this is normal. The, the level of, of malfeasance and corruption that they've engaged in is so high, Amy, that it's going to take us decades to unwind it all. And I got to tell you, any Democratic president who doesn't go in and Try to claw back the things they've stolen from the American people and the fraud that they've committed and prosecute the fraud they've committed is doing this country a disservice.
- [44:26]
Amy McGrath
We have to. Because it's not only, it's not only rich Americans that want to get, that have broken the law, that want to get burned it, Rick, it's, it's foreign
- [44:37]
Rick Wilson
countries that are running off.
- [44:41]
Amy McGrath
He's auctioning off access that's right to himself to the highest bidder. No transparency. You know, we don't, we don't know what's happening. We don't know what kind of national security secrets or, you know, he, he's doing the, he's done these, these tariffs for over a year and it seems like a lot of it is, you know, wow, if somebody can pay him
- [45:07]
Rick Wilson
off, it's the handout. Hey, pay me. Yeah, it's a nice economy you got there. It'd be a shame if there was a fire or something, you know.
- [45:14]
Amy McGrath
Well, Rick, what do you have to say about this? The governor in Louisiana coming in and suspending the primary.
- [45:20]
Rick Wilson
Listen, Jeff Landry is, is entering, I think, pretty deep constitutional water. I think every single member of Congress who's running in that primary has a cause of action against him. I don't think that this should be taken though lightly because this is what the Republicans are going to do, folks. They're going to cheat. They're going to push, they're going to try to run out the clock as best they can. There is no motivation on their part to play by the rules. So the response to this is for a Democratic state to say, go ahead, continue, because we're about to redistrict all the Republicans out of, of office. That's what we're going to do. And I, I, and again, like, you know, I said, it's bad for the republic. I hate it. I hate having to fight this way. I wish we were fighting about, like, should we have a 38.2% maximum tax marginal tax rate or a 39.1% marginal tax rate? I wish that was with a fight we were having. But unfortunately, these guys are going to play for existential stakes. They know they're going to lose this fall. And, and the, the other thing I would say about this that's really important is they're going to cheat as much as they can. This is one aspect of that. We have to win so big, it doesn't matter this fall.
- [46:38]
Amy McGrath
Yeah, I couldn't have said it better. We can't stop. I feel like we're in a death spiral right now with all the stuff that we're doing to our republic, but we can't. We can't look away. We have to fight back. And that's. I couldn't have said it better. I want to ask before we end, Rick, because this show is truth in the barrel and it's a key theme, and I do a lot of bourbon here in Kentucky.
- [47:03]
Rick Wilson
Right.
- [47:04]
Amy McGrath
What is your. Do you have a favorite whiskey or bourbon?
- [47:08]
Rick Wilson
You know, I, I have a sentimental favorite whiskey of mine. It's the Dalwinnie whiskey from Scotland. That is. Yeah, that is. That has always been a favorite of mine for a long time. For 30 plus years. So.
- [47:21]
Amy McGrath
How about that? And you've stayed the same. That's amazing.
- [47:24]
Rick Wilson
I, I stuck with it. I stuck. I'm 62 years old, so I don't drink as much as I did when I was younger because you just physically can't do that, but still like that from time to time.
- [47:37]
Amy McGrath
But it's selective. And if you're gonna do it, you want the right stuff.
- [47:41]
Rick Wilson
You got the thing. They got the thing that's got all the memories wired into it.
- [47:44]
Amy McGrath
My favorite scotch is, Is. Is a small. It's a smaller distillery called Arbiki Highland Rye, and it is phenomenal. And I, I asked my husband, you know, if, if, if you get that for me, it's not going to last long, so you don't buy too many of them because I love it so much.
- [48:08]
Rick Wilson
It's gone so good. Love it.
- [48:10]
Amy McGrath
Well, great to have you on the show. Rick. This is.
- [48:12]
Rick Wilson
Thank you, Amy. Great to be with you as always. Let's talk again soon.
- [48:15]
Amy McGrath
You bet. All right, everyone, Truth in the barrel, unfiltered. See you next week.