The One Big Thing We Need to Do to Save the Country

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, DC, and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to DSR's Words Matter. I'm David Rothkopf. I'm joined this week as every week by Norm Ornstein, who, like everybody here in Washington, has set aside worries about Greenland, Venezuela, Jack Smith's testimony on the Hill, the collapse of democracy, authoritarianism and Minneapolis, and is worried exclusively about whether or not to snow this weekend. Because when it snows in Washington, people's brains freeze and they can't think of anything else. Are you worried, Norm? Do you have a lot of milk? Gee, I will say, you know, the old saw about a snowballs chance in hell. Since Trump became president again, we're dealing with a snowball in hell possibly this weekend. Well, that's right. That's right. You know, your president doesn't look so good, Norm. I know you personally, you guys have always been close, but I'm looking at him in Davos. And literally, I mean, he gave a terrible speech. He insulted everybody. He destroyed the Atlantic Alliance. He totally caved at Greenland. But because he destroyed the Atlantic Alliance, it's not a wash. It was a real disaster. He's launched his Gaza bullboard of peace, which is intending essentially to get rid of the Gaza this magically and turn it all into Las Vegas. Well, it's also to get a billion dollars each from countries, which most of which will end up in another bank account and cutter, I'm sure. Well, for sure. Well, for sure. I mean, we had a New York Times article in the past 24 hours saying he's made $1.4 billion off the presidency in his first year. And somehow America's like, yeah, I'll come to that in a second. I'll come to all those things in a second. But he's got giant bruises on each hand. His face is yellow. His hands are rosy colored pink. The rest of him looks kind of grayish. His face is sort of disfigured, sort of slumped to one side. I mean, I mean, maybe I'm turning into like one of these conspiracy theorists or something. But dude does not look healthy to me, Norm. Now David, if you talk to any one of his physicians, Ronnie Jackson or the current one, nobody in the history of the country has been healthier than him. But I will say, looking at the bruises on his hands, my first reaction was, oh my God, internal bleeding, just like Jonathan Ross. And actually, I don't know if people can see this, my pinky finger here, that's internal bleeding. So, you know, it's devastating. I, you know, I can barely do this with my finger. I don't know how that could, and I didn't even run into a car. I want to talk about something that we're not allowed to talk about. Yeah. One of these subjects that is, there are a few subjects that are tabo in America today. This one is kind of tabo. So the other night, 11 o'clock at night, 12 o'clock at night, I wake up to pee, I'm sure. Oh, no, I'm sure it was something. I had to do some, I had to go to the gym and work out. But so I wake up and I look at my phone and I start scrolling and it's like, Trump's plane has had to turn around. There was an electrical thing. Trump has to come back. He has to go in another plane. We haven't seen Trump. Where is Trump? And then there's all these people going, oh my God, it's finally happening. I won't be able to sleep tonight. Oh my God. Trump's going to, somebody referred to the act, which I don't, I don't even feel comfortable talking about as the blessed event. And this, you know, the blessed event, is it? And I was like, have we ever in America had a situation where people in the country were at night in the morning, every day going, is this going to continue? Is there a break from this? Is it finally all going to be over? It's so weird what people are rooting for, what they're talking about. It's just, I've never seen anything alike it. And my guess is that there are some Republicans in Congress who continue to vote with him and protect him as best they can because of their moral cowardice, who privately were thinking some of the same things. But I will say, as you went through the litany of disasters, catastrophes, embarrassment, setbacks from Davos, I was thinking Trump's right about one thing when he says there's never been anything like this. In this case, he's right. We've had embarrassment as president. We've had presidents who've had scandals, war and harding comes to mind. But they're all like Abraham Lincoln compared to him. Of course, he also says that he is the best president, including Abraham Lincoln. But we have not seen anything like this. And I will say, as I watched him walk back from the military threats, again, Greenland, all we know for one reason, the stock market plummeted. And that's what he cares about. And then talk about the deal that they're working out. And I thought, you know, yet again, I've said this many times, this guy's never read the art of the deal, much less written it. But imagine the kind of deal where you're getting what you already had, which was Greenland saying, build all the military bases you want America in our country so we can be protected and the Arctic can be protected. And yes, we'll give you access to our rare minerals. And now we're going to get what we had. And the only price that we paid is we've blown up the alliance. We have destroyed any level of respect or confidence that our allies have had. They're saying openly, we can't trust the United States anymore. Who knows what this lunatic will do? Mark Carney, the truly impressive Prime Minister of Canada, did a speech unlike Trump where people were just cringing an embarrassment, although even at least his embarrassing was Howard Lutnik's speech that caused Christine Lagarde and many others to walk out, you know, tweeted many times, Howard Lutnik is the best of Trump's cabinet and he is an idiot. He is also a truly corrupt idiot. But Mark Carney talked about autocracy, democracy, about 80 years of what we'd experienced that's brought peace and prosperity across the West that has thwarted our enemies. The only thing that's really been of importance to Vladimir Putin and Xi is doing something to break up the alliance that has thwarted their own evil ambitions as much as possible. And they don't have to fire a shot or spend a dime anymore to make it happen, although Russia spent some money to spread their propaganda on X and on Facebook. And that's where we are. We've gained nothing except we've lost an enormous amount. And Trump is right. There's never been anything like this. 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. Newscode DSR26 for a 25% off discount on sign up at the DSR Network dot com. That's code DSR26 at the DSR Network dot com slash bye. Thank you and enjoy the show. 500 orders a month was manageable. 5,000 is my place. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with shipstation. The only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory returns and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, shipstation does in one. Got to shipstation.com and use code start to try shipstation free for 60 days. No, that really hasn't. I mean, another way to look at it is Trump said that we needed to have Greenland because there was a threat from Russia. And as it turned out, it was right about one thing. There was a threat from Russia and he was the threat from Russia because in bringing this up, he has destroyed NATO. He has done something that the Russian military, that Russian intelligence services that could not do that Putin has been working his whole life to do. But we've talked about it. We talked about it on our deep serenio podcast yesterday. We've talked about it elsewhere. And the reality is there's no coming back from this. If you think that the leaders of Europe who Trump serially offended over the course of the past few days. And has been serially offending since he returned to office are ever going to trust him, are going to trust the United States again, or at least are going to do it anytime soon. You are delusional because the reality is they know he's erratic and they know that even if he's replaced, somebody like him could come back in. And that somehow the United States is okay with that. And I was thinking about this today and it gets me to seeking a comment on something else because I was driving around doing Aaron after Aaron. And of course I have MS now on. And I'm listening to the Jack Smith hearings in front of the House. I guess it's the judiciary committee. And it's in some respects the typical, the Republicans are all like, oh, Jack Smith's terrible and Democrats are like, what were these indictments about? But the one thing that shines through from sort of mild mannered public servant Jack Smith is that Donald Trump is a crook. I mean, essentially what Jack Smith said is we had him dead to rights. We would convict him. We would convict him of mishandling top secret, state secrets. We would have convicted him of fomenting an insurrection. We would have convicted him of meddling in the elections. And somehow he got elected anyway. And this is, you know, Americans are like, well, the Europeans only have a draw problem with Trump. That's not true. The Europeans have a problem with the American electorate that knew this and elected Trump anyway and they know that that could happen again. So let's take this back one step which also was reflected in the hearing and the commentary about it. And the history is written and we're looking back at what could have caused not simply his election, but in the aftermath. Now probably a minimum of 700,000 people unnecessarily dead because of what Trump doge and Rubio did with AID, 400 to 500,000 of them children. We look at all the other devastation that exists out there, the disruption of the world order, the triumph of our enemies. And I want to mention the name Aileen Cannon. And then six Supreme Court justices led by the worst chief justice in the history of the country, which given slavery and segregation and previous chief justices like Roger Tani is truly saying something who basically thwarted any of the prosecutions that were in fact slam dunks for Jack Smith. Now, you know, as Carol Leonig, who's this great reporter now with MS now a long time with the Washington Post until Jeff Bezos and his cronies blew that up, noted that there was serious discord inside the Justice Department and Jack Smith team over whether to bring the charges involving the stolen classified documents in Florida. And many said, don't do that. If Aileen Cannon is the judge, it's dead. It doesn't matter what the evidence will be. And he still brought it in Florida. We got Aileen Cannon and that's why he died. And she of course, an utterly corrupt judge who took a case that was extraordinarily strong with video evidence, with other evidence, with the documents themselves there and did everything she could to make sure that there would not be a trial or a conviction and still has sealed a lot of the damning documents that are there. And then you have a Supreme Court that in an unprecedented way intervened to make sure that the charges against Trump involving the violent insurrection where he was clearly up to his eyeballs, infomenting it by giving him a free pass. Trump would not have been elected. The electorate is to blame on that front. He wouldn't have been able to run. And of course, I could take it back even further to Mitch McConnell who flatly said Trump did this and then made sure that after he was impeached for fomenting a violent insurrection to overturn an election, made sure that he was not convicted and prevented from running from office for office again. So we got a lot of people to blame out there, but it's not just an electorate that ignored or shrugged about what kind of a person we were dealing with. Yeah, it's not just them, but on the other hand, Donald Trump was elected twice. And I just find that history isn't, is not going to look back kindly on the United States of America despite all the perfectly good explanations that you're providing that sort of explain how we got there. But I also, again, it happens again today. I was listening to this testimony. And Jack Smith is low key prosecutor, public servant, super high integrity, not going to play pool and games, has worked for Republicans and Democrats, has dedicated his life to this country, could have made many, many, many times what he's made. Had he gone into the private sector. And the Democrats who wanted to do this, wanted to set this up, don't seem to know who he is. And so the way they question him is that they're sort of being sucked in by the Republicans into this. He said, she said accusation, and it's everything but the case. And the only times Jack Smith shines through is when a couple of the Democrats, other former prosecutors, have wisely said, so what was your evidence? Well, what, what, you know, and when Jack Smith is asked to recite the evidence and they say, do you think you would have found him guilty? And this and this and this. This is great. And it's super compelling. And it's just like, couldn't somebody get these guys in a room and snap them across the face and say, play it to who you've got, play to their strengths? I don't know, we keep getting sucked in. I've been frustrated for a long time with most of the Democrats, including those who ought to know better, unable to handle five minutes of questions in a way they need to be handled. And it's why for a long time, AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Katie Porter were master classes in what you could do with five minutes. If you do a little preparation and you know how to make a point and score a point with a witness, the thing about the Mar-a-Lago case is that Aileen Cannon found a way to do a way, even though the charges were ultimately dropped, to keep the file that includes the most compelling evidence sealed may stay sealed for a long time. But there's plenty of evidence on the public record that Democrats on that committee could have used to draw out Jack Smith. And you're right, not many of them did. They are more interested in scoring points against Republicans than using this opportunity to make this strong case. So that whenever you can counter the Republicans in a hearing, far better is when they go on social media or go on interview shows and say that it was a witch hunt where you have the goods that make it clear that he is a crook and that he stole classified documents and apparently if the reports are true, one of them just sold in somewhere in the Middle East and in auction for like a million dollars. So believe me, you believe me, those classified documents were being sold in the Middle East long before that. Oh yeah, and some of them were just given his gifts to Vladimir Putin, I'm sure. Well, you know, this, I mean, let's go to this other thing that's really gets me. So the New York Times, we don't have many newspapers left in America, but the New York Times is there for better or for worse. It's credible. It runs an article. Donald Trump has made $1.4 billion as president. You know, I remember, you know, people getting outraged, you know, not too long ago about Clarence Thomas getting on somebody's jet, right? Or, or, you know, people getting bump, I mean, Zoe Bair didn't get to be the, the attorney general in the United States because she didn't put on her taxes that she had paid her nanny, you know, a few hundred dollars a week. And these were big scandal, big, big scandals. And the American people have it every day, every week, but stories like this come out. Donald Trump is stealing money. Donald Trump, you know, you made reference. Five hundred million dollars comes from Venezuela and oil, which we stole like pirates. Five hundred million going to a private bank account in Qatar, controlled not by the US Treasury, not by the US government, but by Donald J Trump. And now we've got Donald Trump, the head in perpetuity of the peace board, which looks like James Bond's specter, you know, a bunch of villains were each kicking in a billion dollars because they want to implement the craziest fucking idea that we ever heard, Jared Kushner saying, let's take war torn Gaza, this place where there are two million suffering displaced citizens. And let's ignore all that and turn it into the Las Vegas strip with beachfront. And Trump's like, yeah, let's do that. Is he going to make money? Is Jared going to make money? Is Trump enterprise is going to make money? Oh boy, we know they are. What's going on? Why don't people care? Where is the outrage? I wish I could answer that in a better fashion because there is no outrage. And of course, what Trump has done is also to give a green light to everybody else around him from Scott Bessent to Howard Lutnik who is enriching his kids. Lutniks kids, Wiccofs kids, Trumps kids. They're all engaged in corruption on a level we've never seen before. Let's face it, one part of the problem here is to circle back to John Roberts and the Supreme Court, which have basically done a couple of things here that are relevant. John is, through many cases, they've redefined corruption down to include only, basically, if you take a direct quid pro quo and your caught on video doing it. And even that, as we've seen, it practically requires you to sign a document saying, I am taking this money and we'll give you this thing in exchange for it. Yep. From home and did that and still has gotten away with it. And I got to tell you, this was, of course, the famous $50,000 from the FBI, namely from taxpayers, in a cababag that he took in return for getting contracts from the Department of Homeland Security and ICE for the presumed clients of the shady people FBI undercover agents who are offering him the money. Since he's been in and he is now refused to even talk about it, dismisses the notion, but he was there caught, red handed, taking the $50,000. Does anybody think that Tom Homan is not taking more money now that he's in office? No. But along with that is another reality for which we can thank John Roberts in his Supreme Court. And his Justice Department, there are agencies or were in the federal government independently set up to deal with corruption. They have been dismantled the public integrity section in the Justice Department, the various entities that are a part of government ethics are gone now. And the Supreme Court basically, it's a unitary executive. The president can control anybody who would investigate him for corruption. And he can, you know, he would make the case when it comes to the Venezuelan oil money that he did this as an official act. So you got a court willing to give him a free pass. And what we both know, David, is that if somehow we skate through this and if somehow there is a Democratic president in 2029, and if we have a court just like this one, there's suddenly going to turn around and say, oops, we went too far and put handcuffs on that president. We have six partisan hacks, their own horrible ethics problems, which in some respects, the worst ethics problems you can have are with judges and especially justices, but basically turning a blind eye to the level of corruption in this White House that is far more than all previous corrupt acts by presidents or those around them in the history of the country combined. Even inflation adjusted. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Security and compliance done wrong is a headache, done right? You build trust and grow faster. That's Vanta. For startups, Vanta acts as your first security hire, using AI to get you compliant fast. For enterprises, it's your AI-powered hub for compliance, risk and automating workflows. From startups like Kerser to enterprises like Snowflake, top companies choose Vanta. Do security and compliance right? Get started today at Vanta.com. I was at my friends yesterday and we were talking about foreign policy and it was a room full of Democrats and people were really well-intentioned and there was a lot of really good stuff discussed. I'm not denigrating the conference. At some point, somebody was like, well, what are we going to do about replacing all the jobs that were lost in the State Department, getting all those civil servants back and all this stuff? I was like, we got to do a little tree out here. The issue in this country is we have a problem with power being abused. The first thing we have to do is win. Then we have to take actions that undo what's broken. One thing I specifically said was you have to increase the number of people on the Supreme Court. You have to get rid of filibuster. You have to change campaign finance laws. You have to do these things because if you don't do these things, everything else you do can be undone. I think people miss the point. The people love to talk about politics and some people, hoidy, toidy, Washington people and people with too much time on their hands in the weekend. They love to talk about policy. The issue in the United States is not politics and it's not policy. It's power and power is distributed inequitably based on the Constitution as you have so often pointed out to rural areas based on 250-year-old realities. The Republicans carefully turned that into other institutional changes which essentially lock them in a position of power forever unless we take these big bold changes. But in this is the end of my rant and you please take it for where you want to take it, where you want to go. I said the problem with Democrats is that every time they're entering into a discussion about these things, the first thing Democrats do is negotiate with themselves. By that I mean the first thing they do is they go well, we want this but the Republicans will come back with that. Why don't we meet the math way and we'll do our proposal minus 50% and we do that before we even go out. Before we even propose anything, where's the Republicans have the opposite approach? We want 100% we'll ask for 200%. It's just like what kind of suckers are we and is there any chance that we can find based on what we've just been through the insight to do the triage and to do the big changes we need to do to undo the damage that's occurred over the past 40 years? We can play a rant tag team here and I will take the rant baton. Yes sir. And say first of course you are right. Triage does mean planning to do those things. It means one other thing. It means we discard completely the Michelle Obama when they go low we go high and understand that from the experience of the Biden administration if you come in and think that you can now be a model of civil honest government putting in people who are a attorney general who's independent, basically just moving past it so that people can understand why it's good to have good government without having a Nuremberg type entity that will hold the people who have violated the law, violated the Constitution, murdered innocent people, terrorized citizens and legal immigrants, blown up the alliances and the economy. If you don't hold them accountable then they're just going to wait their turn and as soon as things turn bad again inflation rears its ugly head there's another pandemic that we can't deal with because they've blown up every element of dealing with it. There are natural disasters that occur because we no longer have the early warning system to know when the hurricanes or the floods are coming and FEMA can no longer act to do anything and they'll just basically say all right enough of these people who are in there will bring back the other guys and as we've seen with Trump memories are short and it's can't be that bad. How could it be worse than it is now if we don't prepare for that and act tough to bring justice then we're in for a longer nightmare that may be interrupted by an interlude of pleasant sleep or something close to it. So that's one part of the rant. The second part is Democrats in Congress still want to treat this as a halfway normal situation and do not have the spine in far too many instances to take the dramatic steps that are required now to jolt people into realizing what we're dealing with and to do whatever they can in the minority to block worse things from happening. Here's one good example of that. House Democrats are going to vote against an appropriations bill that gives even more money to ICE without any constraints whatsoever and as we know there's an internal document out from a whistleblower at ICE basically telling the agents you don't need a warrant a breakdown the door go into a house with guns drawn and drag people out which is completely contrary to the fourth amendment and to the law and to decency and it's wrong but it's out there. So they're going to vote against that bill and talk about not just defunding ICE but cutting their money significantly from the inflated amounts that were there in the big beautiful bill that they're now using to pay high school graduates with a history of violence $200,000 a year to go out there beat up people and to get a bounty for every arrest they make even if it's a citizen or a person here legally who they can then release they still get the money but also to put in conditions to put in limitations to what these thugs can do that are all keeping them within the law and I can tell you what's going to happen David. They will vote against the bills going to go through the house it will come to the Senate where they can block it with because of a filibuster that applies to appropriations bills the Republicans are going to put the bill giving funding to ICE and homeland security together with a couple of other appropriations bills and it's basically take it or leave it and Senate Democrats are going to take it instead of saying you know what if this means shutting down yet again some portion of the government so that at minimum over a few weeks we can alert Americans who still are paying close attention to this why we're doing this and what they're doing out there that is creating a war against Americans then what are they worth. You are so right. I think we're going to end on your rant because your rant is so good and I saw today that a bunch of Democrats handful but some are opposed to this idea of not funding ICE because they think it makes them look weak which is actually why we know they're weak they've got this exactly backward they will ensure it goes through the weak Democrats in the Senate will enable it. What the Democrats should do is say no to ICE you will not get funding unless Kristi-Nome is gone unless Bavino is gone unless new guidelines are accepted and if that means shutting down the government to stop the Gestapo in our streets then we will shut down the government because this is not Nazi Germany and we will oppose the Gestapo in our streets with every tool available at our disposal they don't understand what strength is and the price that is paid for that is a bunch of demented extremists people who are out their minds are getting their way because no one has the internal fortitude to stand up to them no one understands how this works you are so right I just hope everybody goes replays listens to what Norm just said about triage about the one big thing we need to do to save the country and about what we need to do right now about ICE because that's why we do this podcast so thank you Norm everybody as you're listening to this you know share it share it with your friends get them to sign up subscribe to our YouTube channel we're gonna put more and more of the content out there through that each and every passing day you want to support us by going to the DSR network.com and become a member great do that it's a few bucks a month but at the very least subscribe to the YouTube channel be there listen to this because we're gonna turn up the heat because this is far too dangerous this year matters far too much and you know you need more norm and more of the experts we've got and that's just what we're gonna give you for now thank you Norm thank you everybody bye bye