When you put the right things together, boom! Great things happen. It's like having a chat with the Cambridge Building Society. You'll always find us in Tune with You. The Cambridge Building Society. Mortgages and savings. We can work it out. 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 this week as every week by the man who knows what's going on in Washington, D.C. You didn't think it was possible. You thought it was all chaos. But to one person, it all makes perfect sense. And that's Norm Ornstein. Norm, is it all making sense today? It's all perfect nonsense. But it does hang together. Actually what's interesting, David, is there are very few anomalies now. It's not like you can find moments where you can say, ooh, they're actually doing something sensible. Or, ooh, there's actually somebody honest. Or, ooh, here's somebody with courage. It just doesn't happen. There's not even somebody out there with minimum degrees of politeness. And that's where I want to start. I literally just moments ago was watching a press conference that involved your Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, a man who when he was hired, the universe of pundits out there, said this is a grown-up. This is somebody who is going to at least ground what happens in this administration with some degree of normalcy. And he was so condescending and rude and disgusting. And when he was asked questions about perfectly normal things, things that he should be prepared for, he was calling people stupid. He was saying, I will not take questions on that. And there is this thing that has infused the Trump cabinet. It doesn't get talked about a lot, but it's everywhere these days. Contempt for the Congress, contempt for the voters, contempt for opposition, treating the opposition like they are criminals, literally and figuratively treating them like criminals. No concept of public service, no concept of humility, no concept that even the president works for somebody else. And I was just thinking, when they leave, it is going to be such a change of just the vibe of DC. Because right now, it's a horrible place. Nobody wants to deal with these people. I don't know if this gets to you, but to me, it makes me furious. They don't know what public service is about. It makes me furious with another twist to this, which is, I fear that none of these people will be held accountable. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is an authoritarian thug using his position to try to intimidate or punish anybody who criticizes Donald Trump and reward right-wing billionaires by waiving the FCC rules for how many broadcast stations an entity can own and giving an okay to mergers that he shouldn't. When he leaves, if I had to guess, I would guess he'll get a multi-million dollar sinecure at Wiley Rhyme, the law firm that takes all the communications people, the telecom people in, because they have no moral standards when it comes to any of this stuff. Todd Blanche, who we will get to in a bit, who is a fascist, not a term one wants to use lightly. This week, yesterday, we learned that the Justice Department is planning to bring criminal charges against Eugene Carroll for alleged perjury when she said that Donald Trump had assaulted her. All retribution, and Blanche announced he was recusing himself because he had been Trump's lawyer, he is still Trump's lawyer. Who ordered this? There's little doubt as to who ordered it, and my guess is that Todd Blanche, if he's not disbarred and nobody gives much credence to bar associations doing their jobs, will end up at Jones Day, the firm that takes in the people who have blown up campaign finance and other assorted thuggery, and give him a large sinecure. The same with Harmeet Dillon, who has blown up the Civil Rights Division, and we could go on and on. Scott Bassent was viewed in a positive light, I think for a couple of reasons. For many years, he was in charge of, or at least a major figure, at George Soros' investment fund. People assumed that even if he didn't buy into Soros' worldview, that he must have been a decent human being. At the same time, he's gay. I think people thought maybe he has a little bit of sensitivity to the problems of those who are discriminated against. It turns out that just like every other member of this cabinet, we saw it at the Cabinet meeting yesterday again, despite the fact that Donald Trump is clearly unhinged, suffering significant mental decline, at the Cabinet meeting yesterday, he went into a nine minute crazy exposition filled with lies about the reflecting pool, which he's now screwing up and spending huge amounts of taxpayer money with an outfit that was not competent to do it, but happened to be buddies of his. They all just sat there. They sat there either stone faced or trying to look intrigued. The New York Times pointed out in a terrific piece going into detail about how the Cabinet meetings are all about fawning over and giving outrageous praise to their dear leader. And with Scott Bassent now saying people are stupid, going after reporters for questions, there is no doubt in my mind that what he is doing is believing that Donald Trump watches TV all the time and watches them on TV. And of course, he picked half of his cabinet and the Dan Bonginos and Croshpatels and others for the Cabinet, Pete Hegsett, because he liked what they were saying on Fox News. So this is Scott Bassent trying to show Donald Trump that he is just like his dear leader, who of course calls reporter bitches and stupid and biased and well, the White House press court does nothing about it. The level of moral decay, the level of spinelessness, the level of cowardice of the Scott Bassents and Howard Lutnick, nutlick I call him, and worse maybe than any of the others because I believe really does know better, Marco Rubio, it just boggles the mind, Marco Rubio, just to pick one example following on their nihilistic policies is basically denying entry into the United States for anybody with Ebola, despite the fact that in the past what the United States would do because we have the most advanced facilities to be able to keep people from dying from Ebola, which they do not have in the Congo or Kenya or these other countries, means more people dying for performative reasons. The same guy who presided over the dismantlement and destruction of the Agency for International Development, AID, claimed after this began that he had issued a directive saying we're not going to take away any of the life-saving elements of the aid going to foreign countries, then they were all taken away and lied about whether he had followed every action that was taken and now probably at least a million people have died unnecessarily as a consequence and it's all to be sycophantic to Donald Trump and to preserve the possibility that maybe he can win the next Republican nomination. How can you have anything but utter contempt for these monstrous, cowardly human beings? 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 enjoy an ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on signup at thedsrnetwork.com. That's code DSR26 at the DSRnetwork.com slash bye. Thank you and enjoy the show. When you put the right things together, boom, great things happen. It's like having a chat with the Cambridge Building Society. You'll always find us in tune with you. The Cambridge Building Society. Mortgages and savings. We can work it out. Thank you and enjoy the show. Well, I have to say, contempt is one thing. The culture of this administration is one thing. You get to a more important point when it comes to accountability. Donald Trump is not the sole criminal in this administration. Donald Trump is not the only corrupt individual in this administration. His family are not the only ones who are shaking down the government today. There's a new story about somebody at the White House directed funds from the Department of Defense to a business run by one of Trump's sons, hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not just about the Trumps or even just the Trumps and the Whitcoffs and the Lutniks who are out there trying to profit from this. You would be hard pressed to find a member of the Cabinet of the Trump administration. You mentioned Rubio. You mentioned Besson. But we could just as easily talk about Pete Hagseth or we could talk about RFK Jr. or we could talk about, you mentioned that at the FCC. We could mention Russ Vaught of the OMB. We could talk about the people who had every Cabinet agency and every single one of them is not just kissing up to Trump. Not just saying outrageous and offensive things. They're committing crimes, wholesale crimes, ignoring the law, whether it's Besson saying, well, I just don't see any reason why we can't have Donald Trump on a $250 bill, except the law says he can't, right? Or we don't see any reason why we can't go and have vindictive prosecutions, except the law says you can't. And the point is, what we have had happen is that a mob, a criminal organization, the Trump crime family has seized power in the United States. And I don't think half of them know what fascism is, but I think all of them live to be corrupt, vindictive, mean-spirited, to take for themselves and their friends and those who support them and to punish everybody else in our society. They don't understand that they work for us. They don't understand that the laws apply to them. They think because of John Roberts and his pernicious activities at the court that they work for themselves and they don't answer to anybody. And we've never seen anything like this. No, you know, if you look at previous administrations that have had scandals, there may have been one or two. Occasionally something that we viewed as pretty big, the Teapot Dome, the Credit Mobilier scandal, all the way up to Bert Lance in the Carter administration and Iran Contra and Watergate, of course, put all of those and every other scandal together from every previous presidency. And that goes back to lots of scandals around Ulysses S. Grant's administration and Warren Harding's administration. Put them all together, they lag far behind in their blatant corruption of policy and of every value to what we're seeing in this current administration. And you're right, there isn't a single one immune from it. Many of them, of course, completely unqualified for the positions that they're holding and let's not leave out a Craven Republican Senate that has confirmed all of these people. And now, even when they're dealing with people they know are completely incompetent and doing unblocked confirmations of 50 to 100 at a time so they can sneak in one or two who would never make it on their own, the fact that the person in charge of trying to deal with a potential hundavirus epidemic, the same virus that we know now, can be transmitted from humans to humans that starts with exposure to rat theses that killed Gene Hackman's wife that potentially could become a big problem because it's fatal, they put in charge a guy who is a conspiracy theorist and a urologist known for his specialty, penile implants. Now, penile implants have nothing to do with the hundavirus and then we've got RFK Jr. speaking of the penile area saying that circumcision can cause autism, which I don't know if you're circumcised, David, but actually I do know that you're circumcised. How do you know? How do you know? How do you know? Yeah, I know. We're both Jewish. Yeah. Okay. I'm so glad that we finally arrived at a discussion about our foreskins here. But just returning it to your core point, which is penile implants and the penile focus of RFK Jr., related to that, what you're talking about is that all of these people belong in a penal institution. Yes. And the only way to get them into a penal institution is if there is actually an organized effort. And I think you are landing on something here that doesn't get talked about enough. And that is this is a crime family. It is a big organization conspiring to commit thousands of crimes using a host of techniques we've never seen before because we have never in the history of the United States seen criminals as empowered by the U.S. government as these criminals are. And in our history periodically during prohibition, there was Jed Gerhoover and Elliott Ness. And during the 50s, there were commissions going after the mafia. And there were many vaunted examples of people in the Department of Justice going after organized crime, the development of the RICO statutes and so forth. If we leave this to happenstance to the occasional U.S. attorney or the occasional attorney general going after the occasional person, we're not going to address the fact that the country is run by an organized crime family. We need to have an independent body, an independent individual, a commission, hundreds or thousands of people granted real investigative privileges, true independence for them, true non-political status for them to dive into the records of these agencies, to dive into. And this will not be divisive. And there will be, Lord knows, many of our beloved moderate Democratic friends who will start weeping crocodile tears and talking about how we must all get along and Jared Polis will throw himself in front of whatever we're doing because there are assholes in the Democratic Party too. And the reality is we need an organized effort with real strong leaders to go after the comprehensive criminal activities, really empowered to do it and to prosecute, or it's going to happen again. It's going to, you know, because Trump will be dead, but Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and each one of these cabinet people is going to get elected and, you know, or continue on in some job or work in some law firm, as you say, unless we say, no, you can't have a criminal takeover of the U.S. government. And I'm just, I have no confidence. I don't hear anybody talking about this kind of comprehensive, independent commission, independent group of prosecutors, something way beyond the special counsel statute that will enable us to deal with the sweeping scope of the criminality that is now part of the daily activities of the United States government. You are so on target there and maybe going circling back, what we need is to create the penal implant society so we can implant them in penal institutions where they all belong. But we have some challenges here that we need to reflect on. You know, there is a Jewish disorder. You have to, you know, you have to make a joke. There's there even little substance like something called Witzel's, which is, you know, people who feel obligated to turn everything into a pun. And, and beyond that, we just have to make a joke of everything. I totally get it. And yes, let's implant them all in penal institutions. But for Christ's sakes, we can't believe it's just going to happen. No, and but what we have to keep in mind is Trump will issue universal pardons for everybody in his administration. And we need now to figure out a way to make sure that people are in fact punished. And that might mean finding for many of them states that are willing to prosecute these crimes. Just to pick one example that may end up happening and to pick another cabinet member who in this instance is not only unqualified but dumb as a post. Mark Wayne Mullen, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, who is now floating the idea of blocking foreign international travel airplanes coming into states with sanctuary cities. No idea that this would not work, but also be incredibly disruptive of the economy. It's not you're not going to have an airline saying, well, I can't fly into Detroit. So instead, I'll fly into Dallas, even though people are going to Detroit. So if if that happens, and then it gets, you know, reversed because it obviously is going to blow up a lot of the economy. But if that happens and Detroit Airport, which is a hub for Delta and which has a lot of traffic coming in, oh, here, then Illinois and Michigan need to prosecute the people who implemented a policy that hurt them. So we've got to find a way there. The other thing is that if you're pardoned for criminal activity from being prosecuted. Can you have civil actions that attach large fines for people who have violated the law and at least hold people accountable in some fashion there. But I agree with you, we need an independent body. To my mind, we need the equivalent of an urnberg because the crimes that they're committing are so extensive and involve so many people. I want now just to pick one example of what should be done now. There is a story of an American citizen in Colorado picked up had his birth. He was born in Denver. Had his birth certificate had proof that he was a citizen. The agents laughed at it and deported him to Mexico to a part of Mexico where he had nobody there and no connections. And he is now suing to come back into the United States. That's not enough. Assuming he wins and they have to bring him back and even assuming that he gets a large settlement from the Department of Homeland Security from ICE and the Border Patrol, which is after all just taxpayer money. Colorado, the state, not that I would trust Jared Polis to do anything, but the county officials should find out which agents refused to take into account, look at or take six. Seriously, the documents that proved that this was an American citizen and charged them with kidnapping. World Britain. Gigaclear goes further than any other major provider to bring you fast, reliable, whole home coverage with free expert Wi-Fi installation. We come in. We set up. We do it all for you so you don't have to. It's not rocket science. It's installation science. Switch to Gigaclear from only 16 pounds a month. Faster rub them for World Britain. 18 month contract. Prices may vary. Verify at gigaclear.com. Yeah, you're right. And every single one of those. I heard Mark Wayne Wellin's repulsive remarks today. And, you know, he was saying, well, we're not running a holiday in and we give them the minimum calories and these are the worst of the worst. And the reality is 93% of the people who are currently held under detention by DHS and its various agencies are normal, hardworking people who have taxpaying and pay, you know, contributed to our society and were treated and received cruel and unusual punishment. And every single one of those people needs to sue the US government and where they can identify conspiracies to violate federal law in order to harm them to sue those individuals. And I would go a step further. And this goes into an area where you have sort of special expertise. And that is, you know, one of the questions that is going to be highly resonant is what should the Congress of the United States do by way of post Trump reforms. And I think that one is going to need a kind of omnibus package of reforms that have to do. We've talked about structural reforms in the past. Should the court be bigger or should there be additional states or should campaign finance law be changed? And so and I believe all those things are absolutely essential. But I think that it's also important that anti-corruption reforms, reforms against allowing people in the government to trade, participate in prediction markets, to trade stocks, to profit from work with the US government. But I think also we need to look at what limitations can be placed on presidential pardon power. And we need to challenge in court the idea that a president can pardon people in perpetuity for crimes, can pardon himself, can pardon his own family, can pardon people for crimes the president is complicit in. Because that is contrary clearly to the spirit in the letter. And believe me, the Supreme Court in the past has overturned things for less reason than that. And we need to, you know, go about this in a systematic way. Again, it can't be drip, drip, drip. And oh, yeah. Because if these things don't get passed in the first two years of the next administration and then one house or another goes back and becomes part of the, you know, the MAGA movement or the post MAGA Christian nationalist JD Vance, crazy, whatever the fuck movement it is, then these things are going to get undone. And so it is a huge job of work. And yet Norm, I've been at countless meetings with big, powerful Democrats that people see on TV all the time. And they're like, oh, no, no. What we've got to do is we've got to focus on kitchen table issues. And I got to tell you, if there has ever been an argument that this government needs how to walk and chew gum at the same time, this is the moment. You can't just deal with kitchen table issues and not deal with the kind of corruption that is harming every single individual by pro, you know, by making inequality worse, by launching illegal wars, by stealing money, by, you know, providing regulatory benefits for people who donate money to campaign. We've, there's a, this is a massive job. Is the Congress, is it possible that the Congress, as they did post Watergate, is up to this kind of reform task? I am nervous, even skeptical about that. It's why we need a much larger wave here. And we may get it. Although I'm still worried about how they'll blow up the election process or even move to martial law if they think they're going to lose. Because there are too many to use the cliche nervous nellees among Democrats or others who have their heads completely in the sand about the realities of what we have and what we're facing. Because we're going to need big stuff. I'll make a prediction here, which is that if Democrats win the House and Senate this time. And, you know, we wake up the morning after the election in the first week of November and say, wow, look at that. Between November 4th and January 20th, we will see Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito resign and have the Republican Senate still in place. Jam through two Republican nominees who are much younger than those two so that they can cement their hold on this Supreme Court for decades to come. And if that happens, then it becomes imperative that as soon as the opportunity avails itself, Democrats enlarge the court to 13 members. And impose term. And impose term limits, which are which affect the current members. And at the same time, I want a code of ethics that is that has teeth for the Supreme Court. But that code of ethics that has teeth cannot simply leave enforcement either up to the justices themselves or even the judicial conference of the United States representing the broader federal judiciary. Because I have no confidence that they can police themselves. Now you probably can't take the ability to patrol ethics and invoke penalties entirely away from the judiciary. What I want to see done is passing a law that creates an independent body comparable to what we have in the House, the Office of Congressional Ethics, consisting of former judges, federal judges, and legal ethics experts that takes every instance as you pass a tough code of a violation of that code and itself makes recommendations for the appropriate action to be taken. Maybe you have to give that to the judicial conference, but you require them to indicate why they are rejecting something coming from a blue ribbon group of honest people to, you know, basically whitewash the behavior of a justice. We need real ethics and we need to broaden the ethics reform so that a president can't just put in complete flunkies for inspectors general. The Inspector General of the Defense Department refuses to look at corruption by Pete Hakeseth and others around him and calls us the Department of War, which shows you that there is no independence here because it's not the Department of War. And he's fired the head of the Office of Governmental Ethics. You can't allow that stuff to happen. We have to find ways around it. No, that's right. And it's got look, if the Democrats take control of the Senate and they take control of the House, and that's we're a long way from there and you're absolutely right to warrant of martial law or every every other method they may try. But if they do, they should set up a joint Senate House special committee on government reform and fighting corruption that is led by a group of experienced prosecutors of the Jamie Raskin or Adam Schiff or, you know, some of the people that we've seen before types or constitutional scholars like Jamie Raskin. And it needs to be put in as a permanent functioning committee that this doesn't get left to one committee or another. And that from the beginning, they need to say your job is to identify corruption, to ensure it is prosecuted and to identify the reforms that are needed to make sure it doesn't happen again and that people are held accountable. And it should put out report after report after report and wherever possible, new laws should be passed starting in January of 2027. Now, I know that Donald Trump will seek to veto those laws. But the reality, of course, is if the laws are passed, and he vetoes them, we can get a second bite at them later on as he's, you know, signing up for the corruption. But secondly, if the laws are written properly, then you're going to have to have two, or, you know, more than a third of the Republicans in the United States Senate, for example, saying, oh, no, we're going to defend this baby. Yeah. And get them on the record. Get them on the record and make this a central issue for 2028. But this needs to be a grand national enterprise. And I, you know, I've read about bits and pieces of it. And mostly when I talk to people who are Democrats, I read about projects that are designed to ensure they get good jobs in the next Democratic administration. And frankly, Jaune, that's Washington as usual. There are still far too many who think that if you actually try to hold these people accountable, that you're just being just like them. And that's not the case. You are actually going after genuine open crimes. You're not doing this for retribution and rewarding criminals. You're not creating a $1.8 billion slush fund to give money to the criminals who work with you to try to overthrow the government and trash the capital and threaten the life of Mike Pence. You're not basically using the Justice Department to go after enemies for phony, trumped up crimes, not intended, but you're using it appropriately. What I fear is there are far too many who are going to say, you know, they've gone low, we'll go high, we'll demonstrate yet again what it is to have honest, decent government. And that's been demonstrated not to work. If you allow them to get away with this stuff, if they can do this amount of open criminal activity, of corruption, of incompetence, of having people die as a result of their sadistic incompetence, we may end up with lots of people dying of Ebola because of their sadistic income. Or whatever the next pandemic is. Whatever it is. Because you've got a lunatic who likes to play with raccoon penises and snakes and whale ads and dead bears surrounded by a bunch of conspiracy theorists who have blown up our ability to protect ourselves from illness. You know, and the reality is, I think it goes much deeper. And I have to say, I know a lot of people are skeptical about this. And if you want to hear more about it, go and listen to the Deep State Radio podcast we did this week with Max Booth and Rosa Brooks and others. But there are other kinds of crimes we're just not talking about. And some of them make people a little nervous. But for the entirety of Donald Trump's time in office as president, in 25 ways that I can name for you if you want me to. Donald Trump has weakened the United States and strengthened Russia, strengthened Russian oligarchs, strengthened Vladimir Putin, removed our defenses against Russian espionage, removed our defenses against Russian crime families, removed our defenses against Russian manipulation of our elections, removed or weakened alliances that have helped Russia. And there is a, not just a prima facie case, but there is a comprehensive case that Donald Trump betrayed the United States in ways that come very, very close to treason. They're not actually treason because Russia is not a declared enemy. And you can't actually call it treason if it's not against a declared enemy. But they are betrayal. Traitories. And they are traitorous. And that's why the book I wrote a few years ago is not called treason. It was called traitor for just that reason. Yes. But here, this is another part of this corruption. He has sold out the United States. He has gutted our national patrimony in area after area. And so this is not just small stuff. This is stuff that cuts directly to our national security, the health of our institutions, the future of our democracy, the future of global alliances, peace on earth. Okay. It's big, big, big stuff. And I just think, you know, we've got it. Look, everybody who listens to this podcast doesn't just have Adjada or, you know, wants to look at the equivalent of those two old Muppet guys sitting up there in the balcony talking about the U.S. government, which somebody once compared us to. What they want is change. And the only way change is going to happen is if everybody who listens to podcasts like this reaches out to the people who work for them in the United States government or who are running for office in their areas or who want them to donate money and say, Folks, this has got to be priority number one. You've got to fix this because if we don't fix this, if we don't hold them accountable, we can't fix the other stuff. You know, you don't get it. If we don't fix this, the billionaires stay in charge, keep siphoning off everything else for themselves, and everybody else gets left with less and less and less, a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. So I just, I just, this is a plea to everybody who's listening. Listen to Uncle Norm. He really knows what the fuck he's talking about. We need to do something here. And I want to add another message to those working in the executive branch. There's a word in the last couple of days that Trump, probably through Russell Vought, is planning to require everybody to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Now, why is he doing NDAs? Because getting back to what you were saying, we know that there are incredibly incriminating documents and other forms of evidence. Emails in throughout that point to the traitorous activities and the level of corruption here. You know, one example from today that we've just learned is that there's a company that Don Jr., the Trump kids invested in, that was seeking, that is seeking a, I think a $630 million loan from the Defense Department. And they were told to give that loan because the order came from the White House. Okay. We know that there's more there. We know that the relations that he's got with Russia, we have documents everywhere. We know that many of these corrupt acts we have, the Justice Department is probably filled with memos and other things, pointing out the vindictive prosecutions, the willingness to try and find ways to let off their buddies. And we know that if we win it all, if Democrats win it all in 2028, then from early November to late January, they will be in the process, busily, of destroying every bit of evidence. This is what Orban tried to do during the period after the Hungarian election before Magyar took over. And we know that there were many patriots inside the Hungarian bureaucracy who made a show of shredding documents. But before that, did thumb drives of them so that they could have the evidence. We need a signal. This is why I'm talking to those of you in the federal government. If you have the ability, the opportunity to make sure that incriminating documents that prove widespread corruption and horrible criminal activity, you've got to find a way to preserve them to make sure that we can hold them accountable. Destruction of evidence is itself a felony. But Trump will pardon people who do it, and we've got to have that stuff available. We have to find ways to make sure that they can be held accountable. Absolutely right. Trump's main thing that he does, other than stealing for himself and his friends and his family and trying to punish those who opposed him, is obstruct justice. And the Department of Justice obstructs justice. And that's why if there were any criminal investigation undergoing right now, the first thing that would go out is a letter saying, do not destroy the documents. You know, preserve all of the records that you've got. And people need to assume personal responsibility to do that, working within the law. If you're not sure what the law says, go see a lawyer. But by all means, it is only going to be through the independent action of courageous people in the federal government that these records will be preserved, these crimes will be identifiable, and we will be able to see the kind of accountability that we need, and we will also be able to understand what kind of reforms are essential. But look, you know, we've sitting here, we've talked out our whole time, we barely taken a breath, because this is so important. It's such a critical central job, and no doubt we will talk about it again. But we've got to stir up action on this one, because there is too high a chance that it will not be followed through on. And that the problems that exist within our society and within our government will remain alive, they will be allowed to fester, they will spread, they will take new forms. And we will be dealing with this throughout the period of the next several decades, which will definitely be, if we do not do this, a period of protracted and irreversible American decline. So we get to choose. Is that where we want to choose? Or do we want to use the fact that the U.S. Constitution has this brilliant quality within it, which is the ability to reinvent ourselves, to reinvent itself, to reinvent the country, to face the issues that we need to face. And we have to, this is the moment where we have to take advantage of that. To do that, you have to listen to Norm Ornstein. That's where it all starts. So Norm, do you want to have a last word here before I? My last word just to follow on what you said is, for those who say it's about kitchen table issues, your eloquent summary there makes it clear that if you care about kitchen table issues, you're going to do everything that David and I have talked about today. Because if you don't, their level of corrupt governance will destroy the economy, destroy your livelihoods, do more for billionaires while they take from you. And this is the kitchen table issue. It's not just what happens with inflation in the next couple of months or the next few months. It's about whether you have a functioning government that can make sure that the American economy and the global economy don't spin out of control. If you remember the way you felt the last time you paid your tax bill and how much money that was and how painful it was and how much you had to work to put that money into paying your taxes, and then you think that money went to pay for Don Jr.'s beach house. That money went to pay for Donald Sr.'s ballroom. That money went to pay for a slush fund to reward people who attacked the capital. That money went to billionaires who don't need a penny more. And it came out of your taxes, but also benefits that you expected to get like healthcare benefits or veterans benefits or other kinds of benefits that would benefit you or your families. And you have to realize corruption is a kitchen table issue. And it is time that we see it for what it is, see the scope of it, and do something about it. And it's going to take all of us. For now, thanks Norm. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye. When you put the right things together, boom. Great things happen. It's like having a chat with the Cambridge Building Society. You'll always find us in tune with you. The Cambridge Building Society. Mortgages and savings. We can work it out.
