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Fast Politics w/ Molly Jong-Fast on YouTube
Fast Politics w/ Molly Jong-Fast
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Fast Politics w/ Molly Jong-Fast
66.7K subscribers
Transcript
Speaker 1: Welcome, welcome, Lawrence.
Speaker 1: I think of you as a person who understands the Senate for obvious reasons in ways that most people don't.
Speaker 1: There is a movement to impeach Kristi Noem.
Speaker 1: A lot like a third of House Democrats have signed on to this idea.
Speaker 1: Do you think it's a good idea?
Speaker 1: And I mean, structurally, does it mean accountability or am I just high on my own supply?
Speaker 2: That's too many questions, because if I go for the last one, you know, we'll be here for a while.
Speaker 2: So so here's here's the thing about this kind of analysis.
Speaker 2: It requires a humility that has been lost in our culture.
Speaker 2: People think they understand everything as soon as they've read two articles about it.
Speaker 2: And so then they can have an opinion and they say this is a good idea or a bad idea.
Speaker 2: Let me take you back to the ancient period of the 1990s.
Speaker 2: This is when Donald Trump was universally considered an idiot.
Speaker
2: And it was before any television network would ever dream of doing
business with him, as NBC sadly descended into in the 21st century.
Speaker
2: And so in those days, if you were to ask me if something was a good
idea or a bad idea as a vote in the House or the Senate, I could tell
you.
Speaker 2: And I could tell you why.
Speaker 2: And the reason is, it was a lot like meteorology.
Speaker 2: You know, we had seen a version of this play before.
Speaker 2: It was never the case that we could say, well, we've never seen anything like this before.
Speaker 2: We had seen everything and everything was then a variation on everything.
Speaker
2: OK, so so then people became people like me became very good at
predicting what was going to happen next, what was going to work, what
was going to win, what was going to lose.
Speaker 2: But I have to say, I did not consider it a very highly refined skill.
Speaker 2: It was just sort of a bunch of private information at the time.
Speaker 2: People, there was no American citizen who knew what budget reconciliation was.
Speaker 2: There was no American citizen who knew what a budget resolution is.
Speaker 2: There's no American citizen who knew what the word cloture meant.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 2: Everybody knows that now.
Speaker 2: And that's great, by the way, because I can now talk to civilians in a way that I couldn't
Speaker 2: before.
Speaker 2: But it doesn't mean you know what's going to happen next in a completely new environment.
Speaker 2: So the word impeachment, you know, has lost all of its meaning.
Speaker 2: It's lost its strategic meaning.
Speaker
2: It's lost its significance in so many ways that I have no idea
whether it is whether it is a good idea for House Republicans to say,
let's impeach Kristi Noem.
Speaker 2: I don't know. And I don't think people know.
Speaker
2: And so I think these are the moments where you sit back and you say,
I'm glad I don't have that job. Because if I had that job, it would be
hard for me to decide which way to go here. And oh, by the way, how do I
pick her? You know, out of the whole bunch, how is that the one I pick?
You know, and not the attorney general and not Donald Trump. And how do
you do that? And I have no idea. And no one should pretend that they
do.
Speaker
2: And so I respect the judgment of some of the people who are at the
forefront of this choice. And I certainly respect the judgment of people
who are hanging back going, wait a minute, I'm not sure we should make
this move.
Speaker 2: And, you know, we all know that there are not, you know, 67 votes in the Senate to convict anyone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't believe that that should be a determining factor in whether the House acts.
Speaker 2: I think the House, for example, in the Trump impeachments had a moral and historic obligation to act and impeach him.
Speaker 2: And if the Senate failed, the Senate failed.
Speaker 2: But the House had its own duty.
Speaker 2: And I never accepted the idea that, well, why are they doing this if they know they're going to lose in the Senate?
Speaker 2: There was an absolute correct mandate to do that, and they did it.
Speaker 2: This is the longest version of I don't know that you've ever heard on this program.
Speaker 1: I think the history of this is important, and the way the calculus has changed is also important, right?
Speaker 1: You have to make decisions in a different way.
Speaker
1: And I agree. And I also think that a trial in the Senate is
meaningful for any number of reasons, and the biggest of which is
accountability.
Speaker
2: Yeah. And it's certainly a way of getting in the way of a crazy
Republican Senate and basically taking up some of their calendar time to
prevent them from doing bad things on those days for those hours.
Speaker
2: And so, listen, I just don't know. I mean, look, when I was there,
it was stuff like, should we try to attach a minimum wage amendment to
this moving vehicle legislatively because we're not going to see another
one where it could be germane for the next year?
Speaker 2: You know, that was that was the stakes. So so this has to be respected as completely uncharted.
Speaker 2: We say it all the time. We say unprecedented. We say uncharted territory. And then as soon as the
Speaker 2: word unprecedented is said, someone then predicts for you what's going to happen next.
Speaker 2: Right. Well, that's pretty ridiculous. You know, that let's just admit it. Let's just live in the
Speaker 2: present tense. You know, we don't know. And oh, by the way, that's true of everything else in your
Speaker 1: life. True. I don't have a huge deal of respect for Mike Johnson, but the level in which discharge
Speaker 1: petitions have flown by his desk shows that his colleagues don't have a lot of respect for him
Speaker 2: either. Yeah. And it would create problems for him. It would create problems for, you know,
Speaker 2: other Republicans. So I don't know, is that what you do in this minority, in this House of
Speaker 2: representatives. You know, when I was there, when I was working in the Senate, the Republicans had
Speaker 2: not controlled the House of Representatives in my lifetime, literally in my lifetime. Okay.
Speaker 2: And so the House was like a Soviet institution. The minority had absolutely no rights. And here's
Speaker 2: the important thing about the minority, the Republican minority in the House. They had no
Speaker 2: expectations, none. They never expected to be allowed in the room where a governing decision
Speaker 2: would be made, and they never were in the House of Representatives. And some of them, you know,
Speaker 2: shared enough policy agreements with Democrats that they would join a lot of different kinds
Speaker 2: of legislation, especially, you know, defense funding and infrastructure spending was non-controversial
Speaker 2: in those days. It was a lot of stuff that was in the middle of the field, you know, that they got to
Speaker 2: participate in. But no House chairman ever put something in a bill because a Republican member
Speaker 2: wanted it, you know? And so, so they just got to vote on the product of the, that this other party
Speaker 2: was, was putting out. There is no such thing as a historical model for an effective running of a
Speaker 2: minority party in the house of representatives. It doesn't exist. And so when people complain about
Speaker 2: what are the Democrats doing in the house, I just kind of sit there and think, you know, that's like
Speaker 2: asking what the passengers on the F train are doing about how fast the train is going, you know,
Speaker 2: It's just like, what are you talking about?
Speaker
2: And what they're talking about is the expectation, understandably,
because they've been fundamentally lied to about this for a long time,
the expectation that their vote within a so-called democracy for their
local representative has some meaning in Washington when their local
representative shows up there.
Speaker
2: And that's just a little hunk of mythology that, you know, that this
place has been selling, you know, that has as much, you know, truth to
it as a Hallmark greeting card.
Speaker 1: For a party that is in the minority, I mean, I never thought any of that stuff would pass.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know how many discharge petitions passed when I was working there? Zero.
Speaker 2: I didn't know what a discharge petition was.
Speaker 2: OK, I worked in the Senate. It never happened. I didn't have to know what a discharge petition was.
Speaker
2: I was never sitting there in the Senate going, oh, they just passed a
discharge petition in the House in my jurisdiction in the Senate
Finance Committee.
Speaker 2: I have to we now have to act on it like like that never happened.
Speaker 2: So, yeah. So I'm sitting here kind of astounded at what they have accomplished.
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of in awe of it. Yeah. And I think that's a really good point.
Speaker
1: But the other thing I want to bring up is the reason that the House
had been controlled by Democrats for so long was really because of
Nixon, right?
Speaker 2: Oh, no.
Speaker 2: It way predates Nixon.
Speaker 1: Oh, we're talking about...
Speaker 1: Explain to us the story.
Speaker 2: Well, it's really because of Franklin Roosevelt, really.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's really what created the real functioning Democratic majority in government.
Speaker 2: And that carried over.
Speaker
2: You could switch back and forth a little bit, but basically once the
New Deal passed and Social Security was real and people were receiving
Social Security in the 1950s, you had recipients receiving it.
Speaker 2: That was a grateful country for what the Democratic Party had done.
Speaker 2: And also, by the way, the whole crossover interests of voters were kind of rational.
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, you were voting.
Speaker 2: People weren't voting on issues like abortion that didn't exist as an issue.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 2: And so they were voting on what what what do they think is beneficial to them?
Speaker 2: And most people needed Social Security.
Speaker 2: So they would be voting in that direction.
Speaker 1: Trump has really tried hard not to fire people or at least not to create the appearance of firing people.
Speaker 1: That's been you know, it's like he definitely saw the Mattow wall of fired people.
Speaker 1: Like, that's what I keep thinking about because he, you know, clearly that's a thing for him.
Speaker 1: But Greg Bovino is out.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I'll believe it when he's actually out.
Speaker 2: You know, the poor guy was going for a big career on Fox and in right wing media.
Speaker 2: That's why he wasn't wearing the mask.
Speaker 2: He wanted to be on TV.
Speaker 2: He wanted us to recognize his face because here's what he knew.
Speaker
2: If he makes it to the end of the Trump presidency, he's going to be
fired by the Democratic presidency on the first day.
Speaker 2: He's going to be fired from that job.
Speaker 2: OK, they don't have to have any kind of disciplinary procedure for him.
Speaker 2: Just fire him right on the spot, you know, because Trump has established that the president can fire anybody.
Speaker
2: And so that that guy would have been fired and then he would have
gone off into the heroism of right wing media with his recognizable
face.
Speaker
2: He may have created enough political problems for Trump and the
Republican Party that he won't be welcome in the lucrative area of
Republican propaganda.
Speaker
2: And, you know, we'll be, you know, kind of trying to scrape the
bottom of that barrel somehow, you know, with his podcast.
Speaker 2: Wait, wait, wait.
Speaker 2: I didn't just say podcast.
Speaker 2: Listen, man, there's money to be made here.
Speaker 1: There's money to be made here.
Speaker 1: And especially if you're on the right, for sure.
Speaker 1: And I do think it's a really good point, the idea that he's not wearing a mask and that
Speaker 1: he's sort of taking ownership of a lot of this.
Speaker 1: And we did see this, right, with Bongino, where Bongino...
Speaker 2: Yeah, didn't work out so well.
Speaker 2: You know, he was the shortest lived player.
Speaker 2: But, you know, yeah, sure.
Speaker 2: By the way, to get back to your point, Trump doesn't want to fire anybody.
Speaker 2: He wants to live by that thing of, I choose the best people.
Speaker 2: He knows he doesn't.
Speaker
2: He knows that every single one of his choices for this
administration, every one of them, was number one, number one, someone
who is so small and so weak that this person will never consider turning
against Donald Trump under any circumstances.
Speaker
2: And if you're one of the cabinet members who has a vote on the 25th
Amendment procedure, you got to make sure every one of them would never
consider the 25th Amendment.
Speaker 2: And he succeeded on that.
Speaker
2: The second thing that was almost equally important for every single
choice is Donald Trump sat there and he thought, what is the most
insulting choice I can give to this institution?
Speaker 2: How can I insult the FBI the most?
Speaker
2: And while I'm at it, how can I insult liberals? How can I insult
Democrats because I hate them and I want them to feel pain even by my
choices? And that's where every one of those choices came from. It was
he knew they're nuts. He knew Kash Patel's a joke, but he also knew
they, the people I hate, will hate this so much. I have to do it.
Speaker 2: And so that was driving every one of these choices all the way through.
Speaker 2: And that's why he doesn't want to let go of any one of them, no matter what they do.
Speaker 1: So there's like public Trump and he's doing stuff like that.
Speaker 1: And then there's this really good piece in New York Magazine by Ben Terrace, where Trump
Speaker 1: takes a call from Ari Emanuel about tax benefits for California for filming.
Speaker 1: And in it, he's very complimentary to Ari Emanuel.
Speaker
1: One of the ways that Trump has gotten so far, I think, in this
administration is that he's like outright does the white supremacist
stuff, but then will sometimes make deals with people because obviously,
you know, or people feel not even make deals.
Speaker 1: People feel that he may they could make a deal with him.
Speaker 1: And that's why Tim Cook is in the White House ruining himself.
Speaker
1: And that's why Jeff Bezos, you know, is killing The Washington Post,
because they think they can make it that there's some rational Trump.
Speaker 1: Talk me through this in any which way you want.
Speaker 2: I think those people are all talking to him because they know there is no rational Trump.
Speaker 2: There is absolutely no rational Trump.
Speaker
2: So if you're running Apple and you know that these iPhones cost what
they cost because they're made in China, and you know Donald Trump is
empowering himself illegally to create a tariff regime that is illegal
and unconstitutional, he can destroy your iPhone sales.
Speaker 2: He can take the price of an iPhone and double it instantaneously.
Speaker
2: So you're Tim Cook and you go in there and you're basically going in
there to stop this irrational madman from doubling the price of
iPhones.
Speaker 2: And you do it by giving him trinkets and gifts and just physically being there.
Speaker
2: Because, you know, Trump has always been in awe of these people who
are the real masters of business and the real richest people in the
world.
Speaker 2: He's always lived in awe of them.
Speaker 2: And even in Manhattan, where he wasn't close to the richest, nowhere close to it, as you know.
Speaker 2: And so there is no rational Trump.
Speaker 2: That's why they're in there trying to do that.
Speaker 2: Tim Cook knew that there wasn't a single day in which Joe Biden was ever going to interfere with his business.
Speaker 2: He knew he knew the president doesn't have a legal power to interfere with his business.
Speaker 2: There is no legal power to do it.
Speaker 2: He could ignore the president as you should be able to.
Speaker 2: Everyone in the country should be able to ignore the president.
Speaker
2: And so because there's an irrational madman there, you know, where
China is the worst thing in the world and we have to bring all the jobs
back here.
Speaker 2: The guy who's got the biggest money-making operation going in China, selling stuff in
Speaker 2: the United States is Tim Cook.
Speaker 2: And he went in and exempted it completely from everything Trump was trying to do.
Speaker 2: And so, no, the iPhone factories are not coming back to Montana.
Speaker 2: You know, that's not going to happen because the irrational madman was, you know, persuaded
Speaker 2: by the charm of a guy whose corporate duty, not necessarily civic duty or moral duty,
Speaker 2: is to shareholders.
Speaker
2: And he represented his shareholders well and basically, you know,
tricking the irrational madman into exempting the biggest thing, you
know, that we get from China in our lives.
Speaker
1: I just want you to talk about when we look at this polling and the
way people are speaking out, finally, it feels like killing two white
citizens may have been a tipping point for Americans at this moment.
Speaker
1: What do you think about this? And for them to just sort of lose the
support, I mean, they've really turned normies against this. Are you
surprised? What's your thoughts on this?
Speaker 2: These are the kinds of events that do change positions.
Speaker 2: They don't exactly change minds.
Speaker 2: What they do is they change the strength of a grip on a position.
Speaker 2: You know, I watched as a kid in the 1960s, you know,
Speaker 2: hardcore racists, you know, go from hardcore racists
Speaker 2: and using the N-word, you know, for everything
Speaker 2: to by 1975 not using that word anymore.
Speaker 2: you know, took maybe 15 years of trying to convince those people not to use that word.
Speaker 2: And what was happening was at first they were realizing, oh, I just can't get caught using
Speaker 2: that word. I can use it with some people, you know, but I actually watched it get to the point where
Speaker 2: it was extinguished from their vocabulary. And so what that was, was the loosening of the grip
Speaker 2: of the concept and protest did that and sacrifice did that and assassination did that. And so
Speaker 2: Martin Luther King's life was not lost in vain. And I wish I had it in front of me at the moment,
Speaker 2: but I read it in full last night on the show. And that is the parents' statement, Alex Preddy's
Speaker 2: parents' statement. And they have a sentence in the middle of it about the significance of Alex
Speaker 2: Freddie's contribution to where we are right now and what is possible from this point forward.
Speaker 2: And I think we are seeing that. I think we will see it for a very long time to come.
Speaker 2: And this is the way protest works. The history of protest just during my lifetime in this country
Speaker 2: and certainly before, the history of it is that if it's a serious protest about a serious thing,
Speaker 2: it takes a long time. It's not a quick action. It takes a long time. And if it's a serious protest
Speaker 2: about a serious thing, civil rights, Vietnam, and now Donald Trump's invasion of America,
Speaker 2: People will die in that protest.
Speaker 2: And those are the three characteristics of those kinds of protests.
Speaker 2: They take a long time.
Speaker 2: They are difficult.
Speaker 2: People will die.
Speaker 2: And the most important thing, they work.
Speaker 2: They succeed in the end.
Speaker 2: And there isn't one of those major protests that did not succeed in the end.
Speaker 2: And so we are headed for a different place on this subject of immigration, on this subject
Speaker 2: of border control.
Speaker 2: And it's not going to be next week.
Speaker 2: And it's not going to be because of anything Donald Trump does or doesn't do in Minneapolis.
Speaker 2: It's not going to be because Donald Trump takes his invasion forces out of Minneapolis.
Speaker 2: It's going to be because there's a president of a different party three years from now.
Speaker 2: And that will partially be because of what is happening in Minneapolis.
Speaker 2: This is part of what will drive the victory of the Democratic candidate in the next presidential
Speaker 2: election.
Speaker 2: And that is when the real work on the real solution to the new way we should live in relation
Speaker 2: to this subject will begin.
Speaker 2: It won't begin before that because of the Trump regime and because of the Republicans
Speaker 2: in Congress, but it will begin three years from now.
Speaker 2: It's not going to be quick.
Speaker 2: It's going to be long, but it is going to be successful.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Lawrence.
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