Welcome back to Fast Politics, Josh Marshall.
The East Wing, home of Eleanor Roosevelt, now home of, he's basically Penn Stationing, the East Wing of the White House.
I mean, I actually just wrote a post about this that I think, you know, we had two things happen yesterday.
at that or like, you know, where the where the pictures which showed the totality of it came out.
And we also had this thing about how he's instructing his employees to cut him a check for 230 million dollars.
And and both of those are things that they're certainly not the worst things that have happened in the last nine months.
Yeah. But they have a an audacity and like a vulgarity.
How
do you escalate from like, yeah, the president had one of his cabinet
secretaries write him a check for two hundred thirty million dollars.
I like I don't know what where you go up from there.
So and both of those things.
And then he demolished a third of the White House complex.
Like, I didn't know that was going to happen.
So it's he's just amazing.
He's
fully in the Twilight Zone Anthony phase of his presidency where he's
just doing like totally crazy shit and crazy shit that isn't even like
key parts of the plan.
Just stuff he woke up one day and said, I want to build a ballroom.
Let's talk about that because I actually think it's not the Project 2025 that's going to unravel this thing if it does unravel.
It's the photos of the destruction of the East Wing that are going to do it.
Because it's hard to explain.
If you tried to legally destroy the East Wing of the White House, right, you wouldn't be able to get the permits.
You think you have zoning problems.
Like,
I mean, you couldn't get permits for what he did with the Rose Garden,
let alone where he paved the Rose Garden to make it the Rose Garden Club
TM.
But
what he's doing to the ballroom, I just wonder, you know, sometimes
with Trump world, there are second order effects that sink the whole
thing.
And
I just wonder if those visuals and then my favorite thing, the coup de
grace, is that their Treasury secretary employees stop sharing photos of
the demolition of the East Wing.
We know you can see it out your window.
less true. I actually think you are right. And I especially think you're right because I agree.
And I just wrote something kind of to this effect, like literally just to finish to the half hour
before we started. As we said at the beginning, these are far from the worst things that have
happened. In a way, they are almost trivial. Look, you can rebuild a building. You can replace it.
They just basically cut a check for $40 billion to that Javier Mille guy down in Argentina,
because they really like him.
And a lot of Scott Besson's hedge fund friends
are taking a bath on their investments.
Terrible bets on Argentina.
So in a way, to your point,
a lot of the Project 2025 stuff is very bad,
but they are things that are hard for people
who are not kind of drenched in politics
to kind of put together the significance
of why they're different, what they mean,
So I actually think what you're saying
You're
right. The other part of this is it is a truism now that we know he
came in in the second term without the semi-establishment people around
him who held certain things in check.
He came in with people who were 100% MAGA and wanted to do everything. That really changed the equation.
It
led us to where we are now. But I think what we're starting to see, and
it's really, again, it hit me in an epiphany yesterday with these two
stories.
but I think we've seen it over the last few weeks.
He's in the stage now where if you've,
once you've been living the impunity lifestyle for 10 months,
other things start to occur to you.
Things that are just so weird that even though you've got sycophants around you,
they might not have occurred to you before that.
And these are the things, you know, people see that.
No wonder they're telling the treasury people not to share the photos.
You see that and you say, what the actual fuck?
He's tearing down the White House.
How can that, you know, people see that like something's wrong.
So this is a theory of the case that has been sort of floated by a friend of mine who's a fancy socialite.
This is like the fall of the Roman Empire now.
Like we just, my man is drunk with power.
He's the oldest person to ever be president.
I know we're not allowed to talk about how old he is, but he is very old.
And he has just decided, like, you know, absolute power craves absolute whatever.
Yeah, no, these are these are, you know, sort of different metaphors and different prisms for saying the same thing.
He
is, you know, the Supreme Court lit this fire or maybe, you know, the
American people or a minority of the American people lit this fire back
in 2016.
But but it's the Supreme Court that really came with a couple of jerry cans of gasoline and poured it on.
And they did this and continue to do this.
And
at a certain point, you just start doing things like I'm going to bring
in a bulldozer and tear down the White House and create the sort of the
Trump imperial palace.
You
know, one thing that actually occurred to me, I don't know, you know,
everybody's kind of pointed to this, this little kind of meandering
moment he had in the Oval Office yesterday where someone asked him about
this.
If
you follow the actual course of the meanders, I think what is possible
here is that he may want to take the $230 million, which then becomes
his, and then he will pay for the ballroom.
He gave the people a new ballroom.
I was told corporate donors were going to pay for the ballroom, but it does seem like you're onto something here.
Again, people go back and find that video because he actually talks about, oh, I'll give it to charity in the ballroom.
And you know how his mind works after a certain point.
But, yeah, you just wake up and start doing completely crazy things.
And, you know, creating a private paramilitary slash secret police is another kind of bad thing.
But that at least is something like we know why the whole team wants to do that.
That is a sort of a cornerstone part of the whole project.
So
you're going to you're going to take some hits to be able to do that
because of all the positives in their mind for the sort of the the
conquest of the American Republic.
But these things and again, we're doing a bailout for 40 million, you know, 40 billion dollars of of Argentina.
And we're going to let them do their own bailout by cutting all of our farmers out of the soybean business.
You know, this is these are the kind of things you do if you just don't think there are any limits.
No one can't. Nothing bad. And at a certain level, you know, when you're 79, there are no limits.
Yeah. Is he is he is he not going to get a good job after this term?
I mean, why should he care?
The
one of the things that I've been on many television panel where we're
talking about these the hats, you know, he's going to run again.
He's going to run again. He's going to run again. I'm like, he's going to be 83.
I mean, look, he has the greatest Aryan genes ever known to man.
Yeah, he is. He has the purest, healthiest, whitest whatever.
But, you know, ultimately, you still you don't live forever.
Right. Unless we do. And I'm just missing something.
Most of us don't. But, you know, look, I don't think he's, you know, look,
My
man Bob Dylan is out there touring at 84. He does, you know, tours
nonstop. So people can live a long time and remain relatively spry. But
look, I just don't think for a variety of reasons. I've never thought
that is going to happen. He may think it's going to happen. But if he
doesn't do that, he'll get Don Jr. or JD nominated.
Or
maybe, you know, we've seen, you know, maybe Barron, I don't know, but
the other brother could be Eric. He's moved into being primary son. In
any case, what it all comes together is he is in a position kind of no
one in the world has ever been in.
When
you combine American primacy with the total primacy and restraint from
any law or any limit of corruption of the American presidency, and it's
going to his head.
It will be those things that will undo them.
So let's talk about Democrats.
There's been a lot of drama about the main senatorial primary over the last two days on the Internet.
We have Graham Plattner, Janet Mills. We have some Graham Plattner tattoo stuff.
Yeah. Graham Plattner comments. Some pretty not what I think of when I think of the Democratic Party comments.
We got Janet Mills is old. I mean, what do you think happens here?
You
know, I'm not really sure. You know, one thing that that I caught or
actually my colleague Kate Riga caught is that she, I guess, said in
that debate,
She wants to hold on to the filibuster. And for a lot of Democrats, rightly, I think that is disqualifying.
So there's a lot of things about her that would be good. I mean, she's a popular two term governor.
You can't take anything away from that. She's old. But like, you know, get the seat and then hand it off.
You know, we got to do what we can here. I don't really know with Plattner.
I
you know, this this tattoo thing has has has has just come up in the
last, you know, first you had the comments, then you had the tattoo.
And I'm still trying to kind of catch up here. I'm curious to see what the next poll is.
You know, I don't think people people I think Mainers thought he was a little wild.
It's
hard to give something like that up once you seem like you're the
winning insurgent candidate to possibly go right to the U.S. Senate.
So I'm kind of reserving judgment till I see what what voters actually think.
And there's something to be said for like, let Maine be Maine.
You know, they know what they're doing.
They'll pick who they want.
Yeah. And I'm not you know, I'm not someone who kind of falls hard for these kinds of candidates.
I'm very pragmatic about who seems like the best candidate.
But these are strange times.
And
I don't think it is right to get significantly ahead of the public in
Maine, both the primary public and the, you know, the general general
election public.
And,
you know, because a lot of these things, like if he has a Trey, you
know, kind of tattoo that white nationalists are crazy about, are the
Republicans going to attack him?
I mean, they're going to say he's reaching out to MAGA. Right. He's trying to be bipartisan.
You know, I so I don't know how this is going to play out.
This
gets to this question of like, how do you worry about problems in a
party when the party is facing off against a guy who is basically Nero?
How can you worry about anything when they are like, we don't want to have elections anymore?
And there's a number of different levels to answer that on.
I
do think to a great extent people are going to go into the you're going
to go into the ballot box in 2026 like you like this or you don't like
it.
You know, it's a very binary choice.
It's a certain kind of split ticket voting.
If you don't like what's happening in the country, you know there's one way to signal that.
And it's the non-Republican person.
And I do think that is going to, you know, make a lot of these things less important than they normally would be.
Obviously, you have to balance against that, that the stakes are pretty high.
You don't want to make it any harder than it has to be.
know, you had that thing, what, a few days ago where they had the text from the, you know,
New York Republicans or New York Young Republicans. I can't remember which.
You mean the first Nazi text chat, not the second one.
Yes, yes. Which was later.
But, but, and that kind, and that kind of thing is sort of like, wow, they, they, they talk in
private the way they talk on Twitter. I mean, okay, like, is that, was that, was that stunning?
So it's, again, on that specific, on that specific race, I really kind of reserve my judgment to
see what the voters in Maine make of all this.
It's
an interesting question, though, with that second Nazi group chat,
because the admin actually pulled the nominee, which, as you know, has
not happened so many times.
This is an administration that managed to get RFK Jr.
So my man who basically believes that circumcision and Tylenol cause autism.
But
yeah, I think there are some of these nominees that the people around
Trump or in some cases, maybe even Trump sometimes and some of these
like, I want this guy, Pete Hegseth.
Clearly, Trump was like, I want this guy.
I want this guy running the Pentagon.
Some of these guys, I think, are more kind of like, let's see what happens.
This will be, you know, it's sort of like shooting off a firework.
Let's just kind of see what happens.
If it's a dud, that's cool.
I think that's kind of where they were with this Ingrassia guy.
I mean, on the other hand, I do think we have seen a number of things over the last few weeks.
It's so much else is going on that it's gotten little attention.
You know, there was that thing where the Department of Education sent out that deal to, I think it was nine universities.
You know, you want to kind of sign on to the MAGA agenda.
I believe now all of them, even the more kind of right-leaning ones.
That's right. I think University of Texas at Suck Up may still be in the game, but everybody else has said no.
Yeah,
USC. And not that USC is like a MAGA university, but of the ones that
were sent it, they seemed like if anybody's going to sign on, it's going
to be them. And they didn't. And there are other.
And the Pentagon reporters left.
Yeah,
yeah. There's just things happening where they maybe they're getting to
some of the limits of their ability to impose things.
And more than 7 million people march to say they don't fucking like this.
And
if you think about it, 7 million people for a minute, like, you know,
if each of those people and maybe more, maybe eight and a half, if even
those people represent five people, which it's a pretty good bet they
do.
Right. Or maybe more. Yeah.
That's a pretty big part of the electorate that's fucking pissed.
No,
that's true. And I think I was actually talking to a friend of mine
about this yesterday, that there's the numbers, the numbers and the
visuals that really harden people and are a demonstration of numbers and
power. And that's really important.
But
where where protest movement and these kind of demonstrations actually
have the most impact is usually that, you know, you get everybody
together, you organize your event in the local area and then you head
out to get a beer after the protest and everybody says, hey, let's stay
in touch for the next election.
Let's
canvas together. I think, you know, one of the impacts of the whole no
kings thing is going to be to the extent that that happens going forward
over the next year or so.
Does
this become a coming together that ends up building organizational
muscle that accomplishes things going into the election next year?
Yeah, that's right. And I think that's a real question.
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