9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23. This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our Super Secret Studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to DSR's Words Matter. I'm David Rothkoff and I'm joined as ever for a weekly therapy session with Dr. Norman Ornstein, famous psychotherapist. Well, maybe he's not a psychotherapist, but he is the source of our mental health here in the Words Matter universe. How are you doing today, Norman? Well, I'm not a psychotherapist, but I did spend the night at the Holiday Inn Express. I'm hanging in, David, but I must say I was a little gobsmacked to learn about your family's relationship with the late and remarkable Tom Stoppard. Can you elaborate a little bit? That's quite something. Well, thank you, but there's actually an interesting story, Vine. I will tell the interesting story. Many, many eons ago, before the beginning of the First World War, there was a Jewish boy in Cleveland, Ohio named Louis Cohn. Louis Cohn was like board in Cleveland, Ohio. What he did was he went to France and he tried to join the French army to join the Great War. They were like, well, what do we do with the Jew? We don't like Jews much. They said, okay, we'll make them into some kind of spy, forward observer. He joins the French army, supports the French general staff, actually wins the Quadigarra a couple of times. Decides, I like France better than Ohio. I'm going to try to figure out a way to stay here. Somehow in the midst of all this, he meets this woman who's my great aunt. They get married. He sets up a shop in Paris that sells rare books. The reason he does is that his friends in Paris are like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and so forth. When they write something, they'll give him a book. They'll sign the book. They even get Ernest Hemingway at one point, gave him a part of the manuscript that the sun also rises. He runs the store and then he dies and my aunt continues operating the store, House of Books, LTD. As a result, she's plugged into all these literary types. They become her friends. She's very charming and funny and spent a lot of time in England. In fact, T.S. Eliot used to come to our house in New Jersey. It's so ridiculous, right? The T.S. Eliot goes to Berkeley Heights, New Jersey to visit and like, oh, I'll read the kid's old Possums book, The Practical Cats. We would have Thanksgiving with T.S. Eliot's wife, Valerie, all the time. One of the friends who became a friend of my mother then was Tom Stoppard, who was obviously much younger than my great aunt, but was a couple years younger than my mother. They just became friends and did a variety of things together. He did things to commemorate the life of my great aunt. There were a number of encounters with him. They got to be quite friendly. He was very kind and warm and generous and has a fascinating story in and of itself, which was his family was one of the Jewish families that escaped Europe via China. They went through Shanghai. There was a bunch of Jewish families that did that and then came in his case. They went to the UK. It was just one of those. That's way longer answer than you want to know. No, it's not. I have to tell you, David, you should write this up. That is really, really interesting. How things that you wouldn't normally anticipate can result in relationships that you would never imagine happening. I think it's worth a piece. Well, perhaps at some time, but it's gratifying enough to know that when I write something on Blue Sky, you're there. Let me use that as a springboard because I was looking at Blue Sky as I do periodically because I'm off Twitter. I don't look at that stuff. I was looking at it last night and there was this election in Tennessee. During the afternoon, it was, oh, God, we're going to kick ass. We're going to beat that Republican and we're going to have essentially the majority in the house will go away in three days and it'll be fantastic. Then as the votes came in, it became more and more apparent that the Democrat was going to lose by, as it turned out, 9%, which is still better than the 22% Trump won the district. Blue Sky started to be like rationalizing it. We didn't want that cookie anyway. It didn't look too delicious. It's still good enough and we'll really get them the next time. The rationalizations were giving me a nosebleed. I just stopped. I just got off. It was like, oh, for God's sake, either you win or you lose. You lost. Was there a gain? Fine. There was a gain. The only way you actually reduced the number of seats the Republicans have in the house is by beating them. I don't know. You may be a little more optimistic than I am, and so you may share a better view on all this than I have. I do a regular conversation several times a day with some of my political science friends, Tom Mann, E.J. Dionne, Larry Sabato, Bruce Wolpe, Alan Abramowitz, all very smart guys. We talked amongst ourselves about this race. Nobody's saying the Democrat will win. You don't overcome 22 points in an election where there's a lot of money poured in. The only one that comes close was an Iowa State Senate race a while back that didn't get much attention. But our reaction going in was not to look at whether a Democrat was going to win in this case, but to look at the drop in Republican support and what was behind it. Because that can be a leading indicator of what might happen next year, assuming we even have an election next year. When you lose 13 points, that tells you something. What I can tell you is that there's conversation among Republicans in Congress and in the campaign circles that's pretty grim at this point. They know- Too bad. I'm feeling it. Yeah, I know. It's thoughts and prayers. What they know is that they've got a lot of districts that are not 22-point Republican victories, but 10-point Republican victories or 12-point Republican victories. And if some of those elections, if the dynamic doesn't shift, if what we get is a lot of depressed Republicans who are not going to vote for a Democrat, but just don't turn out because they're not happy with the way things are going, and you have a more aroused Democratic electorate in an off-year midterm election, they've got problems. And so there's significant- I'm going to lead a movement of aroused Democrats. I think that- Well, we know there are far too many aroused Republicans. Yeah, no, that's true. That's- Okay, I take it all back. Yeah, use a different term. That's what we have to do. So a sober analysis would say, yeah, it's pretty decent news for Democrats and pretty sobering news for Republicans at this point. But the people who said, oh, the Democrats are going to win, we're not very well grounded in reality. Well, that's a lot of blue sky. Let's be honest. Yeah. I mean, you sort of go there. It feels a little too comfortable sometimes. But something else happened today, which hasn't gotten a lot of news coverage. And I thought it was very significant in this context because, first of all, we saw that Marjorie Taylor-Green was going to quit, right? And so she's going to quit, and that's going to take one person out of their majority. There are two seats that are Democratic seats that are going to come up. That's going to take two more seats out of their majority, which brings the majority down to just a couple of seats. But there started to be talk of other Republicans who might just quit because they knew was heading in the wrong direction and they didn't like it. And I was like, well, what do you make of that? I don't know what to make of that. Maybe my MTG is the unique case. Then today, Elise Stefanik, who does not do anything without Donald Trump kissing it, saying it's okay, comes out and says, Mike Johnson is a terrible speaker. He couldn't get elected right now if he wanted to in the Republican caucus. And the Republicans were super unhappy. And I thought, wow, that's kind of interesting. So, Sensei, what do you make of that? You know, finally, something I could agree with Elise Stefanik on. What we know is over the last several days, Jake Sherman, who reports on Congress, had a comment a few days ago saying that a large number of House Republicans were considering leaving in the middle of the term because there is almost universal contempt for Mike Johnson, a belief that he doesn't listen to any of them, that he is not the speaker of the House or even the speaker of the Republicans in the House, but the Speaker of Donald Trump, the toadie of Donald Trump, and that they're doing nothing. And it's a question of why they're even there in the first place. So, the unhappiness with Johnson is very great. We have to go back, though, David, and remember a little bit of the history of this. The discontent with Kevin McCarthy was such that he got bounced from the speakership, partly because he had agreed to a provision that enabled five members to call for a vote on the speaker. And they had to go through not just multiple votes, but trying to find anybody who was going to be acceptable to them. And it was only out of fatigue that they landed on Mike Johnson. He is clearly incapable to performing any of the fundamental aspects of this job. And I think what Alisa Fanek was saying represents a lot of what the rest of the caucus believes, but it made me wonder one thing. She has announced she wants to run for governor of New York. Donald Trump screwed her over big time with his embrace of Mamdami. And she knows at this point that the likelihood of a Republican winning the governorship of New York is exceedingly small. So, she may be thinking, you know what, maybe I need a new plan. Maybe what I should be doing is circling back and saying, we need a change in leadership in the House. And so, I'm going to stay in the House and run against Mike Johnson to be the Republican leader. Now, there's nothing on the record that would point to that. It's just speculation on my part. But why she would say this out loud at this point beggars other interpretations. To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know, there's no better place than right here on the DSR network. And there's no better way to enjoy the DSR network than by becoming a member. Members enjoying ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR 2025 for a 25% off discount on sign up at the dsrnetwork.com slash by that's code DSR 2025 at the DSR network.com slash by thank you and enjoy the show. So, you want to start a business? You might think you need a team of people and fancy text kills, but you don't. You just need GoDaddy Arrow. I'm Walton Goggins and as an actor, I'm an expert in looking like I know what I'm doing. GoDaddy Arrow uses AI to create everything you need to grow a business. It'll make you a unique logo. It'll create a custom website. It'll write social posts for you and even set you up with a social media calendar. Get started at godaddy.com slash arrow. That's godaddy.com slash AIRO. But it's so satisfying and it's like, you know, we so many times we have downer conversations, but here's two things we know. The Republican Party is falling apart at the seams. And in June of next year, the White House is going to host WWE Cage matches on the South Lawn. Now, wouldn't it be, could you see Elise D'Fannic and Mike Johnson who are probably in the same weight class go at each other in a cage match on the South Lawn of the White House? That could be incredibly, I'd pay. I'd pay to watch that. I would pay for the pay per view. And I although she will, she would kick his ass. I think I think there's there's no doubt about that. But I can imagine a number of other good cage matches that would go on. Go on. But you know, that raises the specter of Pete Hakeseth. You may have noticed that one of the big stories of the last day is a raccoon that broke into a supermarket, a liquor store and got drunk and passed out on the floor. And my comment was, I don't know how Pete Hakeseth, Pete, Pet Raccoon escaped. Yeah, well, I'll tell you, Pete Hakeseth has picked the wrong people to fight with. Okay. Yeah. Because, you know, he thinks he's about to get into a war with Venezuela, which is an unfair fight because that's the kind of fight he likes. But by trying to throw the former Navy SEAL, a commanding officer of Special Operations Command under the bus, he's now picking a fight with the leadership of all the U.S. military who are like, okay, we're bringing this guy down. And, you know, I mean, I don't know who's getting in the cage with him. He, when that cage match happens in June, he's not going to be sick. Yeah. You know, we, there's more Hakeseth news, of course, the Inspector General at the Defense Department came out with a report, as you know, saying that Hakeseth risks our troops and their safety with his reckless use of signal to go after or to discuss the war that was taking place with Yemen. And of course, what we also saw was Mark Kelly commenting on a video of Hakeseth nine years ago, talking about how there's an ethos in the military that you don't obey in illegal order. So I think Hakeseth is not long for this role. Of course, he will then come back to his role at Fox, I don't call it news, Fox quote unquote news, and then probably be enabled to be a part of the press corps that's led in to interview and talk to the next secretary of defense. Well, you saw who that press corps included yesterday, right? You know, it was, it's like if you were the musicians in Star Wars, you would look at that and say, that is the ugliest, most disreputable group of aliens I have ever seen. Well, it's true. And like it included just to pick two towering journalists, Laura Loomer and Matt Gates, child molester Matt Gates. They're like, Yeah, no, that's better. Let's have Matt Gates ask like, whose idea was that? How does Matt Gates even have any continuing sort of capital in this group? But just I guess all of this points, well, you know what, I just have to say what would have made it better would be if Matt Gates were the correspondent for Teen Vogue. Oh, my God, I just apologize. What do you say? But, but, you know, I think we're actually getting at something with our lighthearted banter here, whether it's the Elise Stefano comment or, you know, Mike Johnson, who's clearly over his A.S. I was asked about the Hexeth thing and he's like, I'm very busy. I can't follow this stuff. Or it's Hexeth, you know, having three different stories, or it's Trump falling asleep. Oh, my God. In the middle of this cabinet meeting yesterday, where, where his DHS secretary was thanking him for there being no hurricanes, which was like, that's super and Lee Zeldin, speaking of the second most odious Republican to come out of New York, said you took a bullet for America, Mr. President. And then Marco Rubio started complimenting Trump and Trump fell asleep in the same shot next to Rubio. And, and Trump is, you know, the night before the reason he was asleep was that he was doing demented social media post. I mean, can we just like say that the Republican party is melting down before our eyes? This is not Democrats in disarray. This is MAGA on its last legs. Let's also note here, David, that in these lunatic posts, he is referring to Americans as vermin, garbage, and worse. This is the president of the United States using the most odious language to refer to groups of people as well as members and members of Congress. I mean, he referred to Ilan Omar as garbage as garbage. Yep. And I raise this because not a single Republican in Congress, so far as I can see, has said anything about this. But let's also give a shout out to of all people, George F. Will. Now, I had lots of disagreements with Will over the years. He is not liked a lot of what I stood for and said, but we've always had a very cordial relationship. And he sent me one of his books about term limits and said, you're not going to like the destination, but I hope you'll enjoy the journey. And when I see him, I make sure we only talk about baseball. But he wrote a column today about Hague Sith, war crimes, and the odious nature of this administration. And I raise this because Will is a classic conservative. A lot of what he stands for, including blowing up the rest of campaign finance regulation, I could not disagree more strongly with him on those things. But he has integrity. And the problem that exists now is this is not a conservative party. This is not an ultra conservative party. This is a radical cult that has no relationship to classic conservatism. And yet, there are some members of the Republican Party in Congress who in a different era would be behaving differently. But now they're all in on the odious nature and the corruption here. And that includes all these people I saw, Tom Cotton saying what they're doing, 400 people died of drug overdoses in Arkansas. What he's doing to these drug dealers is perfectly all right. This is a guy who was in the military who apparently forgot everything that he read in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But it's also, none of them have said anything about Trump's pardon of a narco-terrorist former president of Honduras who was bringing in 400 tons of deadly drugs. Instead, they're shooting fishermen, or let's even say they're petty drug people, in open boats that could not get to the United States without refueling 19 times. So it's an absolute farce. And they go along with the most outrageous behavior on the part of Trump to score their points and kiss the ass of a dear leader. No question about it. By the way, George Will's column, which I thought the headline was written by you, Norm, was a sickening moral slum of an administration, which for the Washington Post and for George Will is, that's a long way to go. By the way, since we're telling stories of my youth, I do want to say that I was born in Urbana, Illinois, and across the street from my parents' family in their house in Champaign, Illinois, was the Will family. And I was a little baby, and George Will grew up, part of his time, across the street. My mother always was very stimulated by the fact that George Will was the former across the street neighbor. Did he ever babysit for you? Well, no, I don't think. That would have been just too good a story, right? But no, it didn't happen. But I do want to say something that connects these stories, because I'm interested in your perspective on it. In the Hegseth debacle, the latest debacle, of course, there have been several. First of all, picking him. Secondly, signal gate. Thirdly, all of the people who worked for him quit. Fourthly, he alienated staff one by one, and then invited all the generals in and said, you can't be fat or have a beard and lectured them. And nobody liked that. Then he kicked out the Pentagon press corps. He's done all these horrible things that should lead to him being kicked out. But as you say, the Republicans don't have a lot of spine. But on this operation against this boat and sinking the boat, all of a sudden, there are a couple of Republicans saying we need to investigate this, including the powerful Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wickard of Mississippi. And so people out there might say, why is this happening? And my interpretation is that General X or Admiral Y, who Roger Wickard has to deal with on a regular basis, has said, enough's enough. He's not going to throw us under the bus. And you either make a move and end up on the right side of this thing, or we're going to take it our own way. Because as a Washington insider, when I see the Washington Post with two stories full of leaks from senior military officials going after Hegset and saying, you're not going to throw our guy, Bradley, the Admiral's, that of special operations going under the bus, I see generals and admirals on the move. And that is one of the few things that I think could move some Republicans. I think your interpretation is exactly right. You might also say that perhaps Roger Wickard is feeling some guilt over the fact that he single-handedly jammed through Pete Hegseth's confirmation by making sure that there were no tough questions asked and having only one round of seven minute questions on the committee, so that Hegseth could emerge unscathed. But I'm sure you're right. There are admirals and generals close to him, probably some from Mississippi, who have told him what's going on. Now, there's an interesting little sidebar here, and we'll see what happens. Congress should be able to get access to the video that we have not seen with reports now that there weren't just two strikes on this boat, but four. And let's even say there were two. And Hegseth's saying, well, it's a good thing we're not fighting a world-class navy, right? Because here's some guy out there in like a power boat that has a range of 150 miles with like three guys on it and a bunch of bales of something. And we couldn't take them out in one strike or two strikes? It's ridiculous on its face. But what we also know is the excuse that, well, there was a lot of smoke there and they didn't know what was going on. If there's a lot of smoke, you're not going to shoot four times at this little boat that could only go 150 miles. And most likely, even let's give them the benefit of the doubt that they were running some drugs, not to the United States, but from Venezuela to another South American or Central American country. And what we know is that oftentimes you're going to get poor farmers or fishermen who are having a real struggle with the Venezuelan economy in the dumper, told, we'll give you 500 bucks if you'll join us on this boat to take this 100 miles to drop the stuff off. So anyway, you look at it, this is outrageous. And these are by every standard and definition, war crimes and flat out murder. And you've got to believe, you know, what, of course, you've mentioned the press conference, the farcical press conference, all, you know, consisting of far right bloggers, along with embarrassments who are not journalists like Mad Gates or Laura Loomer. Well, the rest of the press corps, the normal Pentagon press corps has been shut out, including not having any of their office space in the Pentagon. They're in heaven right now, because the number of leaks coming to them from disgruntled military leaders, telling them stuff that in the past they probably would never have told them, leaves them in a position where they're getting scoop after scoop after scoop. Well, yeah, but they're not getting all the scoops, Norm. No. And, you know, they're missing some stories. And some of the stories I think we're missing. And, you know, we could go on and on every week. I find it very therapeutic. But let me just take this as one last story. And it's not one you expect. Today, there is a story in the financial times. And the story is this. Donald Trump Jr. backed startup scores $600 million U.S. federal government deal. And it's a deal with the DOD for a company that Don Jr. is the principal investor in. And there have been four or five other big deals like this, hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. government contracts going to businesses that are controlled by the president's family. Yesterday, who was sitting next to Steve Whitcoff, who's doing his own deals, with Vladimir Putin? Jared Kushner, who said, I'm not in this administration. Who was sitting next to Putin? Well, on one side, there was a foreign policy advisor. On the other side of Putin was the economic policy advisor, because they're clearly there doing deals. And I just, I gotta tell you, once upon a time, remember when, I don't know, Gary Hart couldn't be president because he dated the wrong woman, or Howard Dean couldn't be president because he made a funny sound that made everybody uncomfortable because when he squawked at one point, we right now have a president who, with his family, is conducting the most overt corruption. We wouldn't, in Venezuela, Maduro wouldn't do this. In Russia, Putin would try to hide this. And here in the United States, it's the front page of the FT going, oh, another $600 million deal for Don Jr.'s company. I just, I don't get it. Like, I don't get, Americans don't care. He deserves to make billions of dollars for the same reason Elon deserves a $1 trillion salary. Have we lost our bearings completely? We have. And let's come back to the American mainstream media shrugging their shoulders at all of this. Trump didn't just nod off for a minute in that cabinet meeting. He slept through a large portion of it. If, you know, we see this all over social media, we say it ourselves, but it can't be said enough. If Joe Biden had done that, you can bet that a dozen White House reporters would have gotten book contracts in a nanosecond and would have gone to DEF CON 1 over this. It gets nothing, no attention whatsoever. Rank corruption goes right by the boards. They know how to make a story into a big story and play it up in a big way. We know yet again Steve Bannon said, we can play with the media. We don't have to. All we have to do is flood the zone with so much shit that they won't be able to handle it. You handle it by focusing on an important story over and over again, and they don't do it. And they do not treat the White House press secretary the way they treated Biden's press secretary. They shouted at her. They screamed at her. They don't do any of that with the serial liar who is there now. And they don't run these stories the way they need to in huge print across the front pages, which signals to all the rest of the media, oh boy, this is big. And they're getting away with it. And by the way, it's not just Trump and the Trump family. The signal here is everybody should grift as much as they can. Byron Donalds is one of the more visible Republicans in Congress because he is a black right winger. His wife now has been implicated in a scandal that apparently has left all kinds of families with kids the worst off for it. And it's just always about the grift now. And they're all taken. A Democratic congressman got a pardon today. Henry Cuellar. Trump gave a pardon to a guy who stole $1.4 billion. And in the pardon to the guy who stole the $1.4 billion, it specifically said that there will be no settlements. Now, I don't know that actually a pardon can say that, but they are actually bending over backwards to go out of their way saying, if you're a grifter, you can make money. We'll shut down the part of the IRS that tracks you. We'll shut down the white collar crime part of the DOJ that tracks you. We will give you pardons. They have turned corruption into a major industry. Now, I got to tell you, I've been in DC less than you. I've only been in DC 35 years. I have watched it grow more corrupt with each passing year. Money is the toxin that has destroyed American democracy and the function of US government. And it's gotten worse year after year and still and all. After all of that, there has never been anything like this. No. I mean, if you want to find an analogy, what we saw in the past was the equivalent of Jay walking or maybe bank robbery. What we're seeing now is the equivalent of mass murder and sexual assault. It's unprecedented and they're getting away with it and they will get away with it. The only thing missing from this is if Trump University were still around, he would give all of these grifters honorary degrees because he pioneered in this kind of grift. But Trump, there are still people there waiting for their Trump phones that did not come. People lost 40 billion, some ridiculous amount of money this week in Trump crypto because they bought into that kind of ridiculousness. And it happened on every conceivable level. And I have to say, it boggles my mind and you're right. If you're a legitimate news organization, you should have a corruption beat. You should have an Epstein beat. You should have somebody on the war on science because they're killing people with the war on science. They took the New York Times 10 years of Trump to finally run a story yesterday regarding his attack on Somalis in which they said, yeah, he's a racist. Because people don't use the real words to describe what's really going on, this stuff gets normalized. And when it gets normalized, it has a cost. And the people who pay the cost are you and me, average Americans. Well, you're an above average American. No, we are going to pay an even bigger price because you get these kinds of contracts with the Defense Department and knowing what Pete Hegseth and his henchmen will do. And, you know, let's circle back. When the Russians went into Ukraine with their tanks and with all of the other equipment that completely fell apart, what became clear was that the grift and corruption in Russia was such that they were using inferior parts. You had oligarchs who were getting contracts there, who were screwing up in a way that was devastating to the Russian military. And you know that we're going to have damage to our national security because we're getting utterly incompetent people on the dole getting their corrupt contracts. And they're not going to do what they're supposed to do. So we're going to pay a bigger price. And we're going to pay the same kind of price with public safety and public health. So it's not just that they're stealing our taxpayer dollars. They're stealing our safety. Yeah, well, that's right. Because, you know, I mean, if you don't remember it, folks, at the beginning of the war where Russia invaded Ukraine, there were a lot of pictures of Russians leaving Ukraine trucks leaving with washing machines on them. And it wasn't just that they needed washing machines. It's that the chips in the washing machines were needed for their military technology because their system was so corrupt that they weren't actually manufacturing the things they needed to produce the military hardware they needed to defend themselves. And that's what happens in a corrupt system is the money gets funneled off into wasteful criminal uses, and it doesn't get applied to what needs to happen. And if you're an American who cringed when the Secretary of Agriculture said yesterday, hey, Mr. President, we're cutting back on snap coverage to everybody, and you're not going to get your dinner because of it. You got to ask yourself, well, where is the money going? And billions and billions of dollars are going into the pockets of Trump and his friends. And hundreds of billions of dollars are being cut out of our revenues because they are tax cuts that are benefiting billionaires and big corporations. And somebody pays the price, and it's a little kid who's going to bed hungry. And it's not an abstraction for them, and it's not a crime. It's just crying themselves to sleep. And that's where we are. And it's a hard place to end the conversation. But I know that next week we'll be back and we'll be able to continue the conversation. And if you like the conversation, you watch it on YouTube, then subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you like it and you're listening to it on a podcast, go to the DSR network, click on membership, and sign up. Be a member for a few dollars a month. There's no affordability crisis around supporting DSR, which is a little tiny media company that just puts expert perspectives like those of Norm, like those from our other podcasts in front of you, right when you need it. So try to support what we're doing. But for now, thank you, Norm. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And we'll be back with you each and every day. So until then, bye-bye.
