The iconic, the brilliant, and also the very charming Charlie Sykes.
Boy, you're putting a little pressure on today.
Well, now we're going to talk about the Nazi group chats.
You know, if you didn't know better, it's almost like it's a pattern, isn't it?
I mean, why does this keep happening to this nice bunch of guys?
But it is awfully interesting.
Okay, let's leave the YRs aside for the moment.
is Paul Ingrassia, who's the nominee to run the office of,
what, the office of, I mean, special counsel.
I mean, it's a big deal job.
It's not actually shocking, if you know anything about Paul Ingrassia,
that he writes stuff like this.
The fact that it hasn't been disqualifying yet,
that's what speaks volumes.
I mean, this is the key thing.
Guys go around, you know, I love Hitler, you know, I'm kind of a Nazi.
And it's like they are still in good standing in MAGA.
And I don't know, what do you think, Molly?
J.D. Vance going to come out and say, oh, come on, we got to stop this pearl clutching.
Tell us more about Paul Gracia, because I don't know who he is.
So it sounds like you have some experience with him.
I'm just actually curious.
Well, I don't have the notes in front of me, but but I will say that he's one of those guys,
you know, on the far edges of the fever swamps, who's been a troll for some time.
As the extremes have become the mainstream, he's sort of been dragged along with the tide.
And
can I just like this almost feels like a digression, because before we
started taping this, I'm lucky at Barry Weiss is the free press.
I was actually going to ask you about Barry Weiss. So go on. Yes.
Well, and they had they had this piece there. They're kind of now getting concerned about it.
It
kind of seems like something's happening on the right that they seem to
be, you know, being overrun by all these extremists, these conspiracy
theories and these nut jobs.
And it's like, huh, you know, how long has this been going on? Really?
You
know, and when you have the Nick Fuentes, who's basically a neo-Nazi
except for the neo part, sort of pounding on the door and going, OK, I'm
next.
I'm
next up, you know. And so some of us have been saying, you know, you
are perhaps identifying a pattern that has been right in front of your
face for the last 10 years.
And this, I think, is ultimately going to be Barry Weiss's problem.
And
it's a problem that a lot of Republicans have found themselves on,
which is there's not a wide lane in that party for socially liberal.
And right. Like you're gay, you're Zionist.
OK, a lot of conservatives are Zionist that that band diagram.
But then the Nazi stuff that kind of knocks you out of the contention there.
You would think so. You know, I would have to check back in about a month or so.
to find out what's acceptable and what's not. I mean, I think the extraordinary thing about last
week with the Hitler-standing young Republicans was that the Vice President of the United States
felt the need to step forward to minimize and defend them. Now, again, if they were just sort
of washed out, everybody said, OK, yeah, definitely that's a red line. Yeah, that's disqualifying.
You know, fine, let's move on. Embarrassing.
But
it is interesting that J.D. Vance had to come out and signal to them, I
got your back because most of the world sees that as an incredible
outrage.
J.D. Vance, and this is the key, this is why there's a little substance here.
He thinks those are his constituents.
Not necessarily the people on the chat, but the people who are adjacent to the chat.
And so all the rhetoric about pearl clutching and, you know, kids will be kids.
J.D. Vance does not want to be outflanked on the right.
So everybody is like, look, everybody knows Paul and Grazia is a complete nut.
I mean, they all know that.
I mean, look, we have Cash Patel and we have, you know, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.
But the thing is that right now it's not even about right left ideology.
It's about absolute slavish adoration and a refusal to break with MAGA in any way whatsoever.
And this is going to be the problem with, you know, the Barry Weiss, I think.
And by the way, I'm not as down on her as others.
I think she's going to be way out of her depth there, way out of her depth.
But the both sides thing becomes shakier as the Republican Party becomes more like North Korea.
You know what I mean? You know what I'm getting at here?
Yeah. And, you know, I want to just say this should be disqualifying on the left and the right.
And
look, Democrats, you know, can't get into the the loop of thinking,
well, if they're not going to disqualify anyone on their side, we have
to stick with them.
No, you know, again, that's the difference between the insane party and the sane party.
And also, this is one of those moments where Democrats, I think, have to.
Well, they're going to have to make this decision over and over again.
Do you want to go down in flames with your guy?
Do you want to scratch your ideological id?
Or are you going to do what it takes to win either the House or the Senate or both of them?
Because quite frankly, I mean, here's the thing.
No kings, great, fantastic, wonderful, successful beyond the wildest expectations.
And yet you're not going to have a meaningful resistance to Donald Trump unless you win the election.
That's going to require a certain ruthlessness.
Yeah, I didn't mean to step on your punchline there because it is important and you got to win those elections.
And you and you also got to run in this redistricting arms race.
The Supreme Court has this opportunity to shut down this redistricting arms race to say, like, no redistricting.
Maybe they get to even maybe they throw out the Voting Rights Act and the Republicans get 20 seats.
Either way, the founding fathers did not.
Like,
clearly, there was no textualist interpretation where, like, the
president wanted them to just cut, you know, like, talk us through how
insane this is.
Well, I mean, it is insane and it is dangerous and it will make absolutely everything worse.
It will become very, very difficult to unwind.
The Supreme Court opened the door to this.
I think it was involving the Wisconsin case where they basically said partisan gerrymandering is not a problem.
Look,
I agree with you. I would be glad to have them shut this down. I think
that in fact, though, they will show deference to the states. Look, you
want to talk about originalism in the Constitution? And I'm going off a
little bit of a tangent here.
The originalist interpretation of both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is no kings, right?
It
is the entire point of the original text of the Constitution was to
divide power so that you would not have an emperor who would be able to
dictate to the country.
That's
why you create three branches of government, why you create checks and
balances, why you create why you have a bill of rights, why you
enumerate the powers the government has and it doesn't have.
So you're looking at all this stuff that's going on right here.
And no, I think, Molly, I think it's safe to say that this is not what the founders said.
So the Supreme Court justices who say our job is to revive the original intent of the Constitution.
Look out of your fucking windows. Do you honestly think this is this what I mean?
And
I hope we talk about Donald Trump being, you know, the first president
to actually begin to destroy the White House at some point.
Because,
again, I the founding fathers that kind of probably remembered when the
British burned down everything probably had a different attitude toward
the vandalization of the White House right now.
But I'm sorry. Now I'm now I'm just now I'm wandering. Now I'm just I wonder if you.
could talk about the White House, those pictures of the White House ballroom, because I actually
think there are a couple of things this administration is doing that are like, I mean, small relative
to some of the other stuff they're doing, but I actually think are really going to hurt them
in profound ways. And I believe that what Donald Trump is doing to the East Wing right now,
those pictures that I saw, people are, I think, deeply affected by them. And I don't think that
this administration has like completely priced in how traumatic those pictures are.
I hope you're right about this, because you could certainly imagine, you know, on Earth 1.0,
somebody saying to the president, you know, at a time when the government is shut down,
when people are faced with massive increases in their health care prices and inflation is
resurging, you know, the optics of tearing down the White House to install a $250 million gold
festooned ballroom paid by your billionaire oligarch friends, that just wouldn't look right.
You know, it kind of cuts against your populist grain. And so you have, you know, the critics,
the Democrats have an opportunity to connect some dots here. You know, and by the way,
As I wrote in my newsletter, sometimes the symbolism is just too obvious.
Substack newsletter called, wait, just plug the substandard.
I actually led with this and I said, you know, sometimes the symbolism is just too on the nose.
Here's Donald Trump vandalizing the White House.
So I think people ought to be offended at the arrogance it shows.
But also how out of touch this, you know, the people's president really is.
Yeah. When you're talking about this gaudy ballroom that he's that he's doing this.
They can fit nine nine nine nine nine hundred ninety nine people, not a thousand. Go on.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I hope that they make that case. I mean, you know, we've
we've I don't want to be the 10 millionth person to comment on the
Democrats messaging issues.
But
I think that you can connect some dots to this this overriding thing
that, you know what, Donald Trump is really not on your side.
Donald Trump really doesn't give a shit about you.
Donald Trump will shit on you, but he really doesn't give a shit about the problems you have.
And because who is he for?
He's
for himself and his, you know, his age of graft, gilded age graft
friends creating this gilded age obscenity in the White House.
I wonder if you could talk about the House of Representatives.
Mike Johnson has sent them home.
I'm sure you've seen this graphic of a calendar.
Yeah. They've worked like an hour. I mean, basically, talk us through what you think about that.
Well,
it is interesting. I mean, here you have Mike Johnson, who's got plenty
of time to provide commentary about the No Kings rally, which you call
the Hate America rally.
And then he's actually defending the Trump's AI thing where he takes a dump on the pro-
He loves satire. Donald Trump loves satire.
And
yeah, Mike Johnson really is a student of satire. It's the kind of
thing you would find in Deuteronomy, right, or the Old Testament, that
kind of thing. But the larger point is that everything that's happening
is happening. Again, going back to the founders, the founders thought
that the Congress was the most powerful branch of government. Under Mike
Johnson, the Congress is gone. They're not just potted plants. They are
elsewhere.
You look at that calendar and he's basically shut them down.
They are taking a very, very, very, very long taxpayer funded vacation.
And
I think it's worth noting that one of the reasons they're doing that is
because he so desperately does not want to have a vote on the Epstein
files.
I
mean, coming back, those Epstein files have become so important, are so
sticky, that the Congress of the United States has essentially shut
down for the duration.
And Mike Johnson, again, is he's not even swearing in the new congressman.
I would urge people to look at that calendar because I think I'm trying to remember what I wrote about this.
I mean, what the numbers are.
I think they've been in session like, you know, what, you know, 16 days over the last six.
I mean, 20 days over the last 16 weeks or or something like that, something absolutely something absurd like that.
And they're being paid and they have staffs and they have the best health care in the world,
Which
is kind of amazing. So usually in a shutdown, what happens is that you
keep the branches in, even if they're not doing anything because they're
negotiating because it looks better.
You think Mike Johnson is making a mistake here?
I don't think Mike Johnson has any power. I mean, yes, I mean, yes, there's there's cascading mistakes.
But I mean, the fundamental thing is that and this is the sign of our times is that he's got a very, very narrow House majority.
He doesn't necessarily have complete control. And he is his entire function is to do what Donald Trump tells him to do.
I mean, there was once a time when the Speaker of the United States would be met with the president.
He would meet as a virtual co-equal, at least in terms of like what's going to happen next.
That's not the you know, that's not the situation right now.
So
Mike Johnson is Mike Johnson is willing to do something the founders
never imagined, surrender all of his clout, surrender all of his power,
go home in service of Donald Trump's demand that he cover up for
pedophiles and do whatever he wants him to do.
Yeah.
And it is just amazing. So one of the things when I've talked to people
about the shutdown in leadership, obviously not on the Republican side,
they say something to the effect of like this shutdown lasts until
Donald Trump wants it to end because they don't see likely that he's the
way out of this or they make some kind of deal.
But that if he wants to end it tomorrow, he can.
Well,
again, the Democrats have some agency. They have a little bit of clout.
I am a little concerned about what the Democrats endgame is. Do they
have an exit strategy? If Donald Trump does call them up and say, OK,
I'm going to give you the health care subsidies. Are we good? Are we
just going to go back? Are you going to sign on to a deal that you know
that they won't live up to? They've made it clear that there are more
rescissions.
How do you even sign a piece of paper with them when they've announced that they're going to ignore it?
Not to mention, like, everything else that's going on.
What
will the people that turned out for no kings feel when Hakeem Jeffries
and Chuck Schumer go to the White House and say, OK, we've decided to
reopen Donald Trump's government?
I mean, this is this is this is a problem.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, one, you know, one scenario that I certainly, you know,
I'm not looking forward to is that Republicans just simply basically
say, fuck it.
We're going to do away with the filibuster. We're going to pass this with our own votes.
We're
going to open the government, which has the advantage, at least short
term, of sparing the Democrats voting to refund Donald Trump's state.
That could really happen. I do think, though, there's a weakness in the Senate.
Like you could see a world where the Republicans peel off a few people.
But you have seen Republican appropriators saying this is nuts.
Don't make a deal with these people.
Yeah.
So, again, I think part of the part of the weird the weird dynamic of
this shutdown is that, frankly, nobody seems to be talking about it that
much.
You know, given the news cycle, have you noticed this?
All the conversations that you have with people?
You know, there are 20 things to talk about in any given day.
And it's certainly possible you won't get even to the shutdown until 18 or 19.
So the normal sort of pressure on the parties to settle like, oh, my God, this cannot go on.
And we haven't had the kind of pain.
You know, obviously, Social Security checks will go out.
The military is still being paid.
So, you know, until there is some irreversible pain, I don't know what what the pressure is going to be.
So, I mean, I see people now speculating that we might have a shutdown until Thanksgiving.
I don't think that that's out of the realm of possibility.
Charlie Sykes, thank you. Thank you.
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