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Thank you, and enjoy the show. 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, joined this week as every week by Norm Ornstein's dogs in the background. How are you doing, Norm? About as well as could be expected, David. Every week it's the same. Well, it is every week it's the same, but one of these weeks we're going to expect you to be doing better. let me pick up with a story that's the lead story right now on the Washington Post site the Washington Post used to be a newspaper in New York in DC, it's now a penny saver run by a billionaire, but every once in a while there's a story, and today there's a story that says that there is a 17 page memo circulating, created by some right wing nut jobs that is supposed to serve as a kind of a framework for the White House for an executive order, which would assert that because there was foreign interference in a past election, remember the Tulsi Gabbard visit to Fulton County, Georgia, the assertion in this case is Chinese meddling in the 2020 election, that that creates an emergency which should allow the president to unilaterally ban mail-in balloting, take over, setting the rules for the elections, which of course the Constitution ascribes to the states. I don't believe the Constitution says, oh, but there is this one circumstance. And surely this will be contested. But the fact that it's out there and the fact that the White House is engaged with it. Is further evidence of your assertion or concern that the White House is going to try to find a way to meddle? And I'm just wondering how you read all this. I read it with much alarm, David. We've discussed this, of course, many times in the past. Donald Trump, whose approval rating has cratered with a disapproval now that's inching up towards two-thirds of Americans, instead of saying, maybe I should adjust my policies so that people feel a little bit better, instead, not only goes on his State of the Union two-hour rant to basically, this is what a malignant narcissist would do, just say lies over and over, believing that people will have to believe him because he's Donald Trump, and saying that the economy is just in fabulous shape over and over, which Americans don't believe. So instead of saying, I better make some changes, it is, I am going to look for more and more ways, no matter how illegal, how unconstitutional, how illegitimate, to make sure that the elections don't come out the way Americans want them to come out. And we feared, of course, that he would invoke the Insurrection Act, bring out the military, keep people from going to the polls. We had the Department of Homeland Security say today, without any believability, that they will not send ICE to polling places on election day in November. I don't believe that. And we also know that there's intense and growing pressure on John Thune to blow up the filibuster rules so they can enact their so-called SAVE Act, which you and I have talked about multiple times before, which is a fascistic attempt to take over elections. So invoking the foreign enemy, which is, of course, ironic because for all of the denials of Russian collusion, it was right out there in the open for all of us in the 2020 election, tilting the scales in favor of Donald Trump. This is a pretext to do something illegal and unconstitutional. You are absolutely right. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the president has no role in federal elections. They're run by the states, except that Congress can control the time, manner, and place of federal elections. The only role the president would have would be if Congress passed a bill and the president vetoed it. Other than that, no role. There is no foreign adversary exception to this. So this is just plain nonsense to try and come up with a pretext for what I believe they are going to try to do, David, which is to go to polling places after the votes have come in and seize the ballots before they're counted, take them away, say not to worry, we'll count them, And somehow a number of ballots get misplaced in the same way that people seized by ICE illegally, including citizens, have somehow been misplaced. They can't find them. Yeah, or the same way that Epstein evidence seems to be misplaced all the time. The assertion in this memo is that the Chinese meddled in the 2020 election. that was investigated by the way and the conclusion of the intelligence community was that the Chinese talked about it but they didn't actually do it I think the ultimate irony and kind of the end of the United States you know just be the curtain would fall on the country at this moment, would be for Trump to say, as you implied, there was a lot of talk about Russian interference in 2016. I can now admit to you there was Russian interference in 2016. I have immunity as president, however, but because of that interference, I'm now going to take over the elections. That would be the ultimate circular Trumpian mood. But we watched the SAVE Act. Trump made a very hard push for the SAVE Act, and all the little robot Republicans who were in the audience applauded enthusiastically when he did it. When are we going to know? When are we going and know whether that flies or not. So what we know is that John Thune at this point, along with a number of his colleagues who have talked to him privately, they don't want to come out publicly, don't want to change the filibuster rule because they know what the consequences of that could be down the road. Good for them on that front, but the pressure is going to grow, And it's going to grow more intense as Republicans lose special elections, as their standing falls. And as we've said before, the idea that's pushed by Trump, pushed by Mike Lee, pushed by Elon Musk and a whole host of others. Why do you oppose a voter ID law that 90% of Americans favor? This is not about a voter ID. And by the way, where we do have voter ID laws, take Texas as an example, just to show you why this is not about simply showing your identity. They will not allow a state created student ID as a voter ID, but they will allow a concealed weapon card as a voter ID. So it tells you where they've been on that. But put that aside, this is about a poll tax. It's about forcing people to get a passport or a passport card. Passport costs around $165. You can get one for $130, and then you have to get a photo, and then you have to go to a passport place, and they've taken away the ability of public libraries to be the place where you can fill out your application and put it in. You have to get not just any birth certificate, but a birth certificate that's embossed because the others won't count. As we know, if you're a woman who's changed your name when you got married, that won't do. You're going to need additional layers. and they're requiring everybody who's registered to vote to go in person to re-register with these documents. Now, that's horrible. But then we have the new kicker that they don't talk about at all, which is all the states would be required under this bill to send every part of their sensitive voter information on the rolls to the Department of Homeland Security under Kristi Noem We just learned today as an aside David that when her lover and presumed assistant Corey Lewandowski tried to fire her pilot because she left a blanket on the plane that it was not the blanket. It was a bag containing embarrassing information about Kristi Noem. So that's the person we're going to entrust all of our data to, which then would be shared with the Social Security Administration, already compromised by Doge, and large numbers of Social Security numbers and others have gone out in places where they're not supposed to go. And states would be required to use the software program that DHS has to purge voters who presumably are not citizens or not registered, which we already know when they've tried it before, has at minimum a 14% error rate. So we're talking millions of legitimate voters taken off the rolls because of faulty software, and we know what kind of voters those would be. That's what happens if John Thune, under immense pressure from the president and Musk and others, decides to blow up the filibuster, blow up the Senate to pass this horrific bill. Look, this is just the two of us talking here, so nobody else is listening. Well, okay, maybe there's 70,000 other people. But let me just ask you a question. Don't we want to get rid of the filibuster rule anyway? I mean, I don't want to, you know, I don't in this case. But I mean, when the Democrats come in, shouldn't they like dispose of that right away? starting a business can be overwhelming you're juggling multiple roles designer marketer logistics manager all while bringing your vision to life shopify helps millions of business sell online build fast with templates and ai descriptions and photos inventory and shipping sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl that's shopify.nl it's time to see what you can accomplish with shopify by your side Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. You know, I have long been in favor of altering the rule, not getting rid of it, but moving it from 60 required to end debate to 41 required to continue debate, putting the burden on the minority and it belongs on the minority. And if they do this for this bill, I will at one level say, okay, now it's gone and we can hope for a better day when we can actually do positive things without that minority obstruction. And maybe if they do it in the fashion that requires, as they've called it, the talking filibuster, Mike Lee, who was a contender for a Supreme Court seat, which tells you how low they've sunk. Mike Lee for the Supreme Court is about the equivalent of the quack they've nominated for Surgeon General. But he keeps saying, just do a talking filibuster as if you can force them to come to the floor and talk. under the rules the way they are now, there's no burden on the minority. It's all on the majority. You can have them say, you could say, okay, we're going to go around the clock. You should come and talk. The minority only has to keep one or two people there because it's still going to take 60, three-fifths of the whole Senate to deal with this issue of a cloture vote. So they'd have to change the rules to make that happen. And I would hate to see it happen now because this bill could end elections, period, and leave Republicans in permanent charge. Yeah, I would too. But I'd like to see it happen. Yeah, just in the interest of openness, though. I mean, this filibuster thing is a recent phenomenon. This is not grounded in 250 years of American history. It's grounded in 30 or 40 years of American history and really in the past 20 years of American history. And, you know, it has been used to great to damage us, I think, a lot. So but I accept your point. You know, I think we also have to look forward to the Supreme Court coming down with a decision that is going to undermine voting rights somewhat. Isn't that at the expectation? And very possibly any day now, we are going to see a ruling that will almost certainly say that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which enables individuals, agreed groups, or the government to file a lawsuit against a state that violates the Voting Rights Act by harming minority voters. When the Supreme Court did its Shelby County decision, John Roberts said that's Section 5, which was preclearance, where certain states and localities had to preclear with the Justice Department any changes in their voting alignments or laws or rules to make sure they weren't violating the Voting Rights Act. what Roberts did was to knock out the enforcement of Section 5 and say that, you know, Congress had no right to do this because after all, while there used to be discrimination, it's gone now. There's no more racism, which, of course, the next day, Texas enacted the most draconian Jim Crow law that we had seen since before the Voting Rights Act, proving that he was lying. but Roberts also indicated that section two, what's more cumbersome, you have to bring a lawsuit, was still in effect. Now they're about to basically do away with that and if they don't do away with it entirely, it'll be a sort of fig leaf saying, well, it's still there but the only ones who can bring a suit are the Justice Department officials, which of course means that will immediately see rampant Jim Crow laws that will take away minority representation in a host of Southern and Western states. Speaking of the Supreme Court, it may seem a long time ago, but on Tuesday, the president spoke at the State of the Union, first State of the Union address of his second term. And it was the usual shit show. It was a game show, actually. you know it was like you get a medal of honor and you get a medal of honor and come on down and you get to meet your uncle and it was it was ridiculous but there were a couple of little substantive points to it that you know stuck in my craw and in my mind one was this push for the save act one was a really really ugly racist set of slurs of Somalis which I just found disgusting. His general tenor was kind of disgusting. But the one I thought was most consequential was, you know, in the wake of the tariff decision, he came in, only four members of the Supreme Court showed up. Three of those members actually voted against him on the tariffs, only Kavanaugh who put it for him on the tariffs was there. And he sort of had a chilly moment with them. But then he got up on the stage and at a certain point in the speech, he said, well, this Supreme Court decision, you know, was disappointed. It was a bad decision, but it's actually given me more power. And I'm now going to put in place stronger tariffs, and I don't have to go to the United States Congress. And I thought, you know, this is constitutional crisis red line here, because they explicitly said in that decision, you do have to go to Congress and only Congress has the ability to, you know, levy tariffs, sort of raise funds, buy taxes. He actually also said in those remarks that the tariffs are paid by foreign governments, again, even though, you know, in the court, you know, acknowledged that the tariffs are paid by Americans. But it really does seem to be setting a standoff, particularly since the tariffs he has since imposed, first to be 15, then 10% tariffs using Section 122 of trade law, are posed completely under false circumstances, and illegally because Section 122 says that these emergency tariffs can only be put in place if the United States is having a severe balance of payments problem, which we do not have. And so this is one of those issues. And of course, there are a bunch of others where Trump has been like, oh, yes, Your Honor, we'll follow what you're saying, and then they don't do it. But this is one of those issues where if the court doesn't stand up for their decision, they might as well shut the building down. You know, I wouldn't be opposed to them shutting the building down, given this Supreme Court. But you're absolutely right. And I do think that some of the discussion, very likely among the justices behind closed doors, has been, how do we maintain any legitimacy if we rule against this guy and then he defies us because we have no power? But what Trump made clear and you absolutely right is that if and as he misapplies illegally Section 122 and it for a time limit of course, as you know, and then most likely, if it's still in effect, he'll redo it, which is illegal, this will come back to the court. And they're going to have to slap him down again. And that's why if you looked at all of the shots during that address of Chief Justice John Roberts He looked like he had just swallowed a giant shit sandwich. He had terrible heartburn. It was clear as he listened to Trump that some of the enormity of what he and this court have done to unleash this malignant, narcissistic, lawless psychopath is going to come back to haunt him and everybody else. And at some point... Don't leave Justice Barrett out of this. She was shooting daggers with her eyes. She was not happy. No. And I think, you know, her rationale when they issued the immunity decision, which was the rationale offered by Gorsuch during the oral arguments in that decision, we're ruling for the ages, he said. And she has said, I cannot look at what the immediate consequences are in the short term, because our decisions are supposed to last through generations. That she's now realizing that that's not going to work very well. And that if you really do, and I will give her this much credit. I think she actually does believe at some basic level in the rule of law, in the oath she took. She's smart enough to realize what they've unleashed here and what the consequences might be. Now, will that result in a turnaround in decisions? I doubt it very much. But they're going to have to confront this. And if they come back when the case comes forward on Section 122 or the other lawless ways in which Trump will misuse the tariff issue as a bully, which is basically what he's done, but also because his understanding of fundamental economics is one that is about at the level of the dog you heard barking in my background, Henry. he has no understanding of what tariffs are, what they do, and what the consequences are. They're going to have to rule again. And if they give him a pass on that one, they've made themselves irrelevant even more than they have already. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. By the way, I don't know, Henry. I've sort of seen him while doing our podcast. We've discussed him. But if he's anything like my dog, he actually probably does understand tariffs better because my dog knows that only certain things that I want him to do will happen if I pay him. He requires a treat to come in late at night, particularly if it's cold and raining. He needs a treat. He requires a treat. So the dog may get tariff economics better than you're giving him credit for. Let me ask you another question. Because every day, because of the nature of this presidency and the times in which we live, there are a hundred stories that would have stopped the presses back when there were presses. Right. And one that I just found mind-blowingly outrageous was Judge Eileen Cannon, the hackiest of all the hacks in the federal judiciary, put on by Donald Trump, despite her complete unfitness for the job, in order to just sort of look out for Trumpian interests, ruled that all the files associated with Jack Smith's case that Donald Trump stole national secrets have to remain under seal because letting them out would be damaging to Trump and the other defendants without any regard whatsoever for the national security of the United States. Now, Jack Smith has said, you know, he thought he had Trump dead to rights. All of us actually saw pictures, right, of stolen national security documents that would have had anybody else fired or in jail or both. and yet it seems that this judge is going to be able to bury them like the melted down reactor of Chernobyl and we're not going to see them and I get this feeling on the Epstein case too that they're pulling things out and they're hiding them and who knows, destroying them and that the sort of level of the enterprise of obstruction of justice across this administration and its supporters is unlike anything we've ever seen before, and it's profoundly damaging to the United States. And I don't understand why people aren't freaking out about it. You know, you're, of course, absolutely right. We can hope that the 11th Circuit, where a very conservative judge, Bill Pryor, has in the past at least shown some signs of integrity when it comes to things of this sort, will overrule canon despite, I'm sure, intense pressure from within the Trump administration. But I want to give you a reason why it's not creating the level of outrage that it should. Just look at the last few days. We have Kash Patel, who lied, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money so he could take a trip to the Olympics and swig beers in the locker room with the hockey team, saying it was official business, coming back, getting criticism, and fearing that Trump would be unhappy with him, firing another 10 FBI agents and support people who had been engaged in this effort at Mar-a-Lago. Utterly outrageous, but an attempt to curry favor with Trump. Story one. Story two, which ought to have been an even bigger headline. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, trying to bludgeon an American company which has put safeguards around its products so that they can't be used for domestic surveillance or that their deadly capacity with drones has to have human supervision so that it doesn't result in massive mayhem and deaths because it's done without the human involvement. And he wants to eliminate both of those, letting the Defense Department and the military have massive capacity for domestic surveillance and the ability to go out and kill innocent people because there's no control over the use of these deadly drones. That's hardly mentioned anywhere. Then we have the deposition going on now with Hillary Clinton, who had zero involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, but is now being deposed in private by the House Oversight Committee as a distraction from just what you said, which is that they have deep-sixed or hid or probably destroyed all of the evidence that was given by a credible young woman interviewed four times by the FBI who said that at the age of 13, Donald Trump raped her. Then we have another story from the Epstein files that mentions explicitly the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, not the suicide, and non-disclosure agreements by the coroner and others. This is textbook of what Steve Bannon talked about in 2015. There are so many outrageous stories out there that they all just wash past us and never get the traction that we need, much less all of the lies told, the divisiveness of Trump in his State of the Union message. I don't want to let this go by without mentioning one other thing. Trump bragged over and over about Trump accounts. I didn't name them, but they're Trump accounts. You're all going to get savings. You're going to be able to accumulate a lot of money by the time you're 18. Those were accounts created by Joe Biden, not by Donald Trump. And he basically hijacked them to name them Trump accounts. That's only one of the hundreds of lies he told during that address. That ought to be big news. Everybody shrugs because of course he lies. Yeah. Well, no, I was just thinking back, you know, I wrote a column about this for the Daily Beast and I don't want to pat myself on the back, but I led with the point you made here, which, and I said in the column, and I'm only paraphrasing myself, but if you took all the truth that Donald Trump told during the State of the Union and you tattooed it onto the genitalia of a flea, there would still be room for the Gettysburg Address. There'd still be room for war and peace. Exactly. I mean, it was an amazing, amazing group of lies. By the way, we have a weekly podcast on AI, which has done very well for the past couple of years It's called Civil Consciousness. And we devoted the podcast yesterday to this Pete Hegseth move with regard to Anthropic. And the subsequent move by Anthropic to at least say they're removing the safeguards. Now, it's unclear whether in doing that, it's all the safeguards or they're going along with everything. But it does show some capitulation. And you know once again we have big corporations being bludgeoned into you know following the Trump way you know because this government is more involved in, even though they don't understand the economy, they're more involved in it than your average communist government. You had at the State of the Union, David Ellison, who is buying up media companies so that they can shift them rightward, as they've done with CBS, and as they want to do with CNN. They're brought there by, you know, the president's lickspittle, as you would call him, Lindsey Graham. And you have the president pushing Netflix to kick Susan Rice, the former national security advisor, off of their board because he doesn't like her politics. I mean, this is something that would never have been done in the past. It's just inconceivable. And yet, it's part of that shit that is flooding our zone. And, you know, let's segue for a moment to some of the other horrible things happening. Look at what happened in Buffalo, where ICE, or the Border Patrol, picked up a Rohingya refugee. Remember that the Rohingyas have suffered genocide in their home country. This was a blind, in Myanmar, I'll call it Burma still, almost blind and was picked up because he was using a curtain rod for his walking stick as a, you know, functionally blind person. They picked him up. They rode him around. They found out that he was legal. They dumped him five miles from his home without a phone, blind, without a coat, and he died. This is murder by people who have no regard for human life. Then today, we have ICE illegally misrepresenting themselves at a Columbia University dormitory, saying they were searching for a missing person, which was a lie. They had no warrant. They went in and dragged a student who had done nothing except put posts on Instagram and hauled her out and detained her, arrested her. We have no idea where she is. utterly illegal after multiple judges have said you cannot do this sort of thing. And that's what we're dealing with. The law does not matter to Donald Trump, to Kristi Noem, to Pam Bondi, to much less Clarence Thomas or Sam Alito, or in far too many instances, Brett Kavanaugh, the law does not matter. The Constitution does not matter. And they're getting away with way too much of this stuff. We are moving in leaps and bounds away from any fundamental democracy or honesty and towards an authoritarian state. And far too many in our media and elsewhere are just still treating it as if it's normal business. Yeah, I got to tell you, everybody, we talk about this week in and week out, and you may just think, well, these curmudgeons are sitting there and we just can't be pleased by the news. And of course, there are moments where courts are standing up and so forth. And what the Trump administration does is it views those as challenges that have to be worked around. But the reality is this. We're not a functioning democracy right now. We are an authoritarian state right now. We are doing damage to our people and are standing in the world grievously right now. And our only hope of turning it around, not of remaining a democracy, but of ever getting back to being a democracy, is whether they're free and fair elections come this November. And as Norm said at the outset, that is by no means a given. We are hanging by a thread here. And I think it's really important that everybody understands that if the SAVE Act passes, everybody's going to have to mobilize to counter its provisions. If the president's able to get any piece of his intervention, illegal intervention in the elections, we're going to have to mobilize to counteract that. Because if the elections are lost, it's over. You know, two more years of Trump with a Congress on its knees before him, and the damage done will take generations to fix if it is fixable. Perhaps you think I'm overstating it, Norm, but I really feel, you know, the case you're making here when you list one thing after another like this, it supports just how grave the situation is. I'm afraid that's right. And among other things, we need governors in Democratic states, it would be nice if it happened in Republican states as well, to talk to their National Guards and their state patrols and say, we are going to need you to protect our polling places. We're going to need you to protect the ballots from being seized illegally by representatives of the president, whether they're the FBI or any other officials out there. And, you know, I'd mention one other thing before we go, David. The other element of the last couple of days was the hearing for the confirmation of a nominee for Surgeon General. A woman who graduated from Stanford Medical School, never practiced medicine, went out and became a snake oil salesman, saleswoman, basically promoting all kinds of supplements. Part of the testimony where she refused to say that everybody, given the measles outbreak, should have their kids vaccinated against measles. She refused to say that that's what should happen. She was told that she had lied on her forms when she said that she, well, she put out forms that said she'd received compensation from some of these supplement companies. But in the ads she did promoting them, she said, I'm doing this because I love these products. I'm not getting paid by anybody. So she lied and broke the rules and lied about breaking the rules. And the odds are better than 50-50 that she will be confirmed. And I mentioned this not only because of the outrage of it, but to circle back the main check and balance we ought to be having here, the House and Senate, the Congress, which is supposed to be the first branch, whether it's tariffs, ethical violations, constitutional violations, people being murdered on the streets, nothing, bupkis from them. Bupkis. And your point about this Surgeon General nominee is clear. She should, in a sane world, receive zero votes. She shouldn't have been nominated. She should receive zero votes to confirm, Just like RFK Jr. should have received zero votes to confer. Just like Pete Hanks should have received zero votes to confer. There are plenty of people where this Congress has not just capitulated, but collaborated actively in this attack on our democracy. And you saw it during the State of the Union. They were hooting and cheering and standing on cue in support of lies and racism and attacks on American institutions, just as lines and rows of people did at the Nuremberg rallies, just as people do when Kim Jong-un delivers a speech in North Korea. You don't have fascism without fascists. You don't have fascism without a significant number of people willing to go along with it. And, you know, it's not just them. You know, I just literally, and we have to wrap up here, but I literally just saw a story at the Washington Post, which used to be a newspaper, as I pointed out, is no longer. And it said, Justice Department to investigate disappearance of Epstein-Potts. And it treated that as though they would actually do it, and that this were actually a functioning democracy with functioning rule of law. And the reason they did it is because when the Justice Department said, no, everything's fine, it'll legitimize it. And that's their role. Their role is to pretend that they're doing journalism and to rubber stamp the activities of the administration, just like the role of Pravda or TASS was during the days of the Soviet Union. So true. And of course, the headline in this case should have been, Justice Department, which lost or deep-sixed these files, says it will investigate itself. Exactly right. It's ludicrous on its face. And it's where we are. Well, look, I don't know that it's... I like talking to you. I don't know that it's good to talk to you, but I like talking to you. And I think it's very important that people hear this and they'll continue to hear it. Next week, we'll have a guest on our show. We'll have a few guests going in the future. Our friend Mary Trump is going to join us on next week's show, so that should be fun. And there'll be more of that because, you know, why should we be the only sources of gloom and doom? We can invite others that agree with them. Anyway, thank you, Norm. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Go listen to that soul consciousness episode about the Hegseth move, which I think is super, super grim. And, you know, or listen to the podcast we did two days ago, A Need to Know with Jen Rubin, about where we are, because it echoes all of this too. Anyway, we'll see you around. Bye-bye.
