The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Happy Monday, and for those of you who celebrate, happy Rosh Hashanah.
[1] I'm Charlie Sykes, and we are back.
[2] We spent the weekend in We, by that, I mean, Tim Miller and Menda Carpenter and I spent the weekend down in Austin, Texas at the Texas Tribune Festival.
[3] And we tape.
[4] I described it as a live podcast.
[5] Obviously, all podcasts are tape, but it was an in -person podcast with Tim on Friday, which you can check out online.
[6] And I wrote a little bit about some of the things that happened over the weekend.
[7] including what I thought was kind of an interesting moment with Liz Cheney on Saturday night.
[8] And another podcast, I was actually cheating on this podcast, another podcast I appeared on called Talking Feds, where we speculated about what the Department of Justice might do with Donald Trump.
[9] I was actually in the theater when Evan Smith was interviewing Liz Cheney and asked her the question whether or not she would actually vote for in campaign for, Democrats.
[10] And she said yes.
[11] And I have to admit, I was a little bit surprised.
[12] And I was kind of wondering whether or not that was, that was the first time that she'd ever said that.
[13] And I think it was.
[14] So I talk about that in our morning newsletter morning shots as well as something that I said about lawyers and democracy.
[15] So you can check that out on morning shots.
[16] So our guest today on this Monday, Tim O 'Brien, senior executive editor of Bloomberg opinion, political analyst at MSNBC, a former editor and reporter for the New York Times.
[17] And this is always going to be on your resume, Tim.
[18] Author of Trump Nation, The Art of Being the Donald.
[19] And the reason why that's so memorable and just sort of evergreen is that that book was published way back in the before Times in 205.
[20] But Trump filed a $5 billion lawsuit against him.
[21] Trump was actually seeking $2 .5 billion for compensatory damages, $2 .5 billion for punitive damages.
[22] And, of course, the suit was, like so many of Donald Trump's suits, was dismissed in 2009.
[23] So, Tim, happy Monday.
[24] Good to be here, Charlie.
[25] We got a lot to talk about, I think, today.
[26] I think we ought to start with the most important and relevant story of the day.
[27] The Green Bay Packers winning down in Tampa.
[28] That's so pathetic, Charlie.
[29] What is that?
[30] Charlie knows I'm a Chicago fan and I'm a Bears fan.
[31] And I, you know, I have residual fondness for the Packers because it's the Midwest, but I also find your kind of loyalty to the Brewers and the Packers to be disturbing.
[32] Well, no, of course, there is loyalty, although I have to say that my fandom for Aaron Rogers is being tested.
[33] It has been stressed.
[34] And I have to say, I kind of wonder about what they must be serving in the locker room to Packer quarterbacks, because this Brett Farve story has just gotten so toxic.
[35] I mean, I, you know.
[36] Well, it appears that they've been serving a big helping of fraud.
[37] Yeah, no kidding.
[38] Yeah, I mean, that's an amazingly kind of craven fraud if all the facts bear out according of the lawsuits.
[39] Well, and interesting, he's being dropped from local radio stations.
[40] I see Sirius XM is suspending his show.
[41] And after all, I mean, the guy survived the whole dick pics thing, you know, and he probably figured, hey, I'm, I'm Teflon.
[42] I can do any of this stuff, but this is very bad.
[43] I can channel money from the poor into my own speech payments.
[44] And then put it in text messages.
[45] And then put some of it into a biotech startup.
[46] It's like crazy.
[47] It is crazy.
[48] The other big story, more seriously, are these elections in Italy where the far right party appears to be poised to take power.
[49] I don't know that you could describe them as fascist, perhaps semi -fascist.
[50] Certainly the most far -right government in Italy since, I don't know, Benito Mussolini.
[51] Give me your sense of what's going on because it does seem as if the European right is resurgent at the moment.
[52] And we have to kind of connect the dots between what's been happening in places like Hungary and Poland and even Sweden.
[53] And Liz Trusses government in the UK.
[54] I would not call that a fascist government, but it's about as hard right as you can get.
[55] And I think to me, the big philosophic lens in all of this is the ongoing dislocation of post -industrial economies across the globe and working people feeling unrepresented.
[56] and disadvantaged, and that's playing out in unpredictable ways politically because I think blue -collar voters are leaving their traditional stewards in, you know, the Democratic Party in the United States and their equivalence elsewhere because no solutions are being offered.
[57] And, you know, my view of this is that conservatives have offered false solutions.
[58] They haven't really gotten at core programmatic economic policies that, that lift all boats.
[59] And I think that that's been decades in the making.
[60] And I think we see that channel through in the election of people like Donald Trump or Bolsonaro in Brazil or Victor Orban in Hungary.
[61] I think more recently, one of the interesting things to me is you had this massive COVID reliefs spend.
[62] And the ducks are coming home to roost from that.
[63] And inflation is spiking, and markets are becoming tremulous.
[64] And voters are electing politicians who essentially see government as part of the problem, if not the problem.
[65] So on the one hand, people want the government to enter into their lives in an emergency, support the bond market, support average working people with enhanced unemployment benefits.
[66] And then when the effects of that come home to roost, when the bills have to be paid, you get dislocation.
[67] And, And I think that it's very clear around issues like immigration and addressing the inflation scare and related matters that I think the right has been plucking more emotional heartstrings than the left has.
[68] And I think that's one reason you're seeing this insurgents.
[69] The problem with it is the politics where they exist of some of those candidates are in conflict with the needs of the economies and the needs of workers.
[70] And the U .K., I mean, the U .K. is a perfect example.
[71] Within days, I mean, within hours, frankly, on Friday, of Liz Truss laying out her tax and fiscal policies, UK markets when haywire and the pound crashed.
[72] It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in Italy.
[73] You mentioned immigration, and immigration seems to be a through line.
[74] One of the things that the far -right party in Italy was pushing was a, you know, a real hard crackdown on illegal immigration.
[75] And, you know, as I was, as I was reading a lot of the commentary about what's happened in Italy and these other countries, I keep coming back to something that David Frum wrote in the Atlantic where, and I don't know we stepped on some toes, he said, look, if we don't control immigration, if we don't control illegal immigration, then the voters are going to turn to the fascist to do it.
[76] And this does seem to be one of those issues where, you know, the far -right parties have grabbed onto this huge influx of refugees, immigrants into their country, they've weaponized it, and that the mainstream parties have not come up with a sufficient response to it.
[77] Well, you know, you mentioned Sweden.
[78] That's, I think, the far -right surge in Sweden has been fueled by that.
[79] It was obviously an issue that Donald Trump wrote into power on.
[80] And I think there are useful and unuseful ways to think about that.
[81] We do have to get, I think, our borders under control.
[82] I do think the borders have to be monitored and policed.
[83] Migrants who are refugees need to be properly supported.
[84] Migrants who we would want to come into our economy because they add value to the job market should be able to come into our economies.
[85] And I think you can't just turn your back on that problem and let it fester because it does.
[86] And I don't think Biden has fully addressed.
[87] that in the United States.
[88] I don't think Trump did.
[89] I think Trump exacerbated it.
[90] I think the Biden administration is hoping it will go away, I guess, because I think they haven't taken concrete steps to really tackle this.
[91] There's a policy construct around immigration.
[92] There's also a false flag, I think, discussion around immigration, which is that your economic woes voters come from the fact that immigrants are coming into your country.
[93] Right.
[94] And I think that's, I just don't think that's empirically true, but it is a very devastatingly effective campaign platform.
[95] But given how devastatingly effective, you know, demagoguing on immigration and refugees has been around the world, what do you make then of the calculation that Greg Abbott and Rhonda Sanders are making, that there are stunts shipping refugees off to so -called sanctuary cities might be a political winner for them, even though the evidence would suggest they're using human beings as pawns and that they defrauded them, speaking of big dollops of fraud, that they misled these immigrants.
[96] But still, they probably feel, don't they, that the wind is at their back, that this is something that is going to be politically potent for them.
[97] I mean, I think they must.
[98] DeSantis went as far as to ship migrants from Texas.
[99] They weren't even in his state to ship them north.
[100] That's how Craven Ron DeSantis is.
[101] But DeSantis has been very shrewd about what issues to land I think in furtherance of what's going to be a presidential campaign, it's not clear to me yet how the total political fall out of that is going to play, Charlie.
[102] You may have a clear sense with that I do, but I think, for example, Charlie Baker, Republican governor in Massachusetts brought the state apparatus to bear to support the migrants who's desantis shipped to Martha's Vineyard.
[103] And I do think it was a demonstration of the power of positive.
[104] policy when it doesn't break your budget and when it doesn't break the well -being of your local residents, which I think it was in that case.
[105] If this escalates, I think it could wind up having the kind of fault lines that Eastern European countries had around Syrian refugees.
[106] Yes, right.
[107] You know, there were gestures of welcoming refugees, and then when it became a tidal wave, there was backlash.
[108] You know, there's no indication yet that it's going to become a title wave yet with the numbers being shipped north.
[109] And there is evidence that voters are disgusted by what DeSantis is doing, but they're probably not his voters anyway.
[110] So one last comment on the election in Italy and watching their reaction here domestically.
[111] You know, you and I are both old enough to remember when American conservatism was very easily distinguished from European National Front type right -wing politics.
[112] Very, very different values, very different vibes.
[113] Very different very different use of language that American conservatism was about American exceptionalism, but it was also about limited government.
[114] It was more libertarian or, at least in the rhetoric, libertarian -oriented, whereas National Front conservatism was more blood and steel.
[115] And watching the enthusiastic support for the far -right victories in Italy among American conservatives, it underlines this evolution or devolution of the right in this country that really, you know, there is kind of a coming together of American right -wing politics and this European nativist hyper -nationalist politics.
[116] And you're seeing like the president of the Heritage Foundation and others saying how wonderful it is, you know, it's us versus them and it's the same, essentially saying it's the same sort of us versus them politics in the United States as it is in Italy.
[117] And some would go even further and say as in Hungary.
[118] I don't think you can discount the extent to which social media has also given global communities of all forms, left or right or interest groups around non -political issues.
[119] You know, social media is a great enabler of conversations.
[120] It's also a great enabler of fanaticism.
[121] And it's apparent, I think, you know, to anyone, anywhere now on the far right, what works in terms of cultivating power and building off of that.
[122] And it's, it's an expressly emotional, uh, and propagandic tilt.
[123] It isn't about policy.
[124] As you pointed out, it's not about cutting taxes and a more conservative Supreme Court and hawkish foreign policy.
[125] It's about the idea that that the other, however you wanted to find the other by race or gender, whatever it might be, is out to get you.
[126] And that, and that any form of sort of public involvement in our lives is is is bent and and you know if if you're a real i think craven policymaker so i would equate that with Mitch McConnell then you sort of say all of that's okay even if i've been a traditionally someone who supports a certain kind of policy platform maybe we need shock therapy to get government out of our lives and this is the price we pay or this is how it looks so you raise an interesting possibility that because because of social media that right -wing politics has been globalized, that they are all globalists now in terms of ideology.
[127] Absolutely.
[128] All right.
[129] So the reason I wanted to talk to you today is because you are demonstrably one of the world's leading experts on Donald Trump's decades -long grift in New York.
[130] So let's talk about the Letitia James lawsuit and where that's going.
[131] I mean, this is the lawsuit that accuses the Trump organization, Trump and his kids of financial fraud arguing.
[132] They had misled investors falsely inflated the values of their assets.
[133] I think people now know what that's about.
[134] You wrote Trump, a wildly insecure man, has spent most of his 76 years, inflating his wealth achievements and abilities.
[135] But Letitia James' civil lawsuit more than 280 pages long is the first time his carnivalesque business practices have exposed him to existential legal consequences.
[136] So let's talk about how big a threat this lawsuit does pose, what you mean by existential legal consequences.
[137] Well, I don't think her suit.
[138] It's a civil suit.
[139] So Trump and his children aren't going to wind up in jail because of this.
[140] But she has made two federal criminal referrals out of it to the IRS and to the U .S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York.
[141] So, you know, those will have to play out.
[142] But, you know, Donald Trump is a creature of the New York real estate market.
[143] father built a large fortune in the New York real estate market, and Donald inherited that and built his own persona and business dealings out of it.
[144] If not for that, Donald Trump wouldn't be in our lives.
[145] And there's a possibility now that Letitia James is going to shut down the Trump family operation in its entirety in New York, and that will be the end of that.
[146] most of his wealth is tied up in a handful of skyscrapers.
[147] I think about five of them, four of which are in New York City.
[148] She's seeking to revoke his business license for doing business in New York.
[149] If that happens, he's going to have to sell those buildings.
[150] And no one in the real estate market is going to think if this is anything other, I think, than a fire sale.
[151] So it's unlikely that he's going to get top dollar for those buildings.
[152] They're heavily mortgaged as all of his stuff is.
[153] he always has lots of debt.
[154] He's always been cash poor and property rich.
[155] So she could put him out of business in New York.
[156] His finances could get hobbled and then the family legacy gets blown up.
[157] And those are all very real things.
[158] However much Donald Trump says he doesn't care about that stuff, he cares about it deeply.
[159] And I think the other thing to bear in mind, however, is that she's got a tough case to make because she's going to have to prove that these poor bankers were so unsophisticated, they didn't know Donald Trump was trying to BS them.
[160] And that's a hard standard to overcome.
[161] I think it would be easier to say that about the tax authorities than it would about Wall Street bankers.
[162] Having said that, though, whether or not they knew they were being duped isn't the only evidentiary hurdle she needs to, you know, set down here.
[163] If the mere fact that Trump and his eldest, three eldest children contemplated trying to do that might be enough, but she's going to have to convince a jury of that.
[164] So this is one of the most interesting questions that you've raised, I think, because it is no secret that he has been lying about his wealth.
[165] He's been inflating his valuation for years.
[166] His lawsuit with you was exactly on the point where he had been claiming to be worth as much as $6 billion.
[167] And you were one of the first reporters who pointed out, no, not even close to all of that.
[168] And the evidence would suggest that you were right about this.
[169] But this has been going on for decades.
[170] So my first reaction was listening to Letitia James saying, you know, no one is above the law, et cetera.
[171] And yet for decades, hasn't Donald Trump been living proof that some people are above the law?
[172] Why was he able to get away with this sort of thing for years and years decades, lying about the taxes, engaging in these things?
[173] Just give me your sense of that.
[174] Is there a double standard or is this just the way business is done in New York?
[175] Well, I mean, most white -collar criminals in the United States never face the kind of consequences.
[176] Blue -collar criminals face.
[177] You know, a kid stealing candy out of a 7 -Eleven sometimes has a higher possibility of getting incarcerated than a white -collar criminal who steals millions because white -collar criminals can afford better lawyers.
[178] So that's been baked into things for a long time.
[179] In Trump's case, Charlie, you know, he's always had these sort of rings of fire around him that have protected him from the consequences of his own behavior.
[180] The first, obviously, was his family's wealth.
[181] His father just bailed him out of his academic snafus and his screw -ups in business because his father had the money to do that.
[182] And then Trump became a celebrity, and he had this insulation that comes with celebrity.
[183] He got away with behavior people might have otherwise scorned or dumped him for.
[184] And then, of course, he gets into the White House, and he gets all of the armor that comes with being President of the United States.
[185] And because of that, I think he's never had to deal again with the consequences of his own behavior.
[186] So essentially, Donald Trump is a seven -year -old grown old.
[187] And I think in the past, because he was just another real estate developer, a famous one, but just another one, people didn't see him as a threat to the well -being of American democracy in the Constitution.
[188] But they did as president.
[189] And I think that forced people to focus on him in a new way.
[190] So his relationship with the prosecutors, he gave an interview with, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong about this, one of the interviews he gave to Maggie Haberman when she was writing her book, where he's bragging about the close relationship that he used to have with the former Manhattan DA, Morgenthau, that he was his friend, that he never would have done anything like this.
[191] Well, but I don't remember that Donald Trump gave massive controversy.
[192] to the police athletic league, or say, let's say, large contributions to the police athletic league, which was one of Bob Morgenthau's, you know, core charities.
[193] And there had always been a question in Manhattan as to whether or not Bob Morgenthau, who was a great public servant and a very vigilant observer of financial fraud, went lightly on the real estate community because the real estate community helped get him elected.
[194] So as always with Trump, when he sort of says these people left me a lot of.
[195] alone, he's also exposing himself because the reason they left him alone is possibly because they were co -opted.
[196] And, you know, the reason he got through two impeachments was because he had co -opted the GOP.
[197] And what's happening now is there's a number of legal actions around him where he doesn't have leverage, whether it's in the state of Georgia or the feds looking at the documents at Marlago, Manhattan, DA, New York, AG, and possibly ultimately Merrick Garland, though, yet to be seen, but in all of those cases, he's got no leverage over them.
[198] So it's just so pathetic when he says, yeah, these other prosecutors didn't care.
[199] And, well, there's bad reasons for why they didn't care.
[200] So stick with the DA's office, because I mean, Robert Morgenthau is kind of a legendary figure.
[201] I mean, you know, former U .S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, you know, served like forever, 1975 until 2009 is New York, DA.
[202] He succeeded by Cyrus Vance, famous name, who began the grand jury investigation into Trump and then was succeeded by...
[203] Although Charlie, even Cy Vance let the Trumps go on something that was a pretty tough case where they were selling condominiums in one of the office tower and misrepresenting the sale price of previous condos and how briskly they had been sold.
[204] And there was a question as to whether or not they had defrauded prospective condo buyers by misrepresenting how well the building was selling.
[205] And there was an investigation.
[206] It was Ivanka, I think Don Jr. and Donald.
[207] And Cy Vance got heavily criticized for letting that one go in the years before Trump became president.
[208] Yeah.
[209] So there's a long pattern.
[210] And obviously, perhaps reasons for the Trumps to think that they were Teflon.
[211] So in the end, near the end of his career, Cy Vance sort of got religion and seemed to be moving, moving ahead.
[212] He retires.
[213] He's replaced by Alvin Bragg about him.
[214] whom I know virtually nothing.
[215] And yet Alvin Bragg has had a big question mark over his head because it certainly looked like he was going to take a dive on on this case as well.
[216] So what is what is going?
[217] I mean, yet prosecutors resigning from the office.
[218] So what is going on there?
[219] Well, look, the brag is it got a criminal prosecution of foot.
[220] It's a much tougher case to make than the civil prosecution that Tish James is overseeing.
[221] In a criminal prosecution, you have to prove intent.
[222] So you have to prove that the person you're prosecuting, knew that they were breaking the law, knew they were doing something wrong, and did it anyway.
[223] And so that's a very high standard.
[224] You need an evidentiary trail that's robust, and it has to be as airtight as possible, so a jury believes you.
[225] There was a sharp divide inside Bragg's office that he inherited, by the way, from Syvance.
[226] Syvance might have tried to resolve this himself before leaving office rather than leaving this big bad sandwich on Albin Bragg's desk, but he did it that way.
[227] But there was a split in that office, I think, among some prosecutors who felt the evidence hadn't risen high enough, but it was airtight enough to go after a former president on criminal charges.
[228] Others in the office thought there is enough there to indict, and we could use the indictment and the process itself to get further information to nail things down.
[229] And, you know, there's reasonable prosecutorial arguments to make on both sides of that.
[230] but the office itself wasn't unified.
[231] Bragg inherited that.
[232] Okay, Sam, one last question on these cases.
[233] So there was an ongoing case against the Trump organization.
[234] The guy that knows everything, Alan, was it Weisselberg?
[235] You know, has pled guilty.
[236] And he's going to get sentenced pending how much he cooperates with Alvin Bragg's office.
[237] This is Alvin Bragg's office that prosecuted Weisleberg.
[238] Okay, so my question about this was it's a plea deal.
[239] And the first reports that I saw about this was that he was pleading guilty as part of the plea deal, but that the deal did not require him to testify against Donald Trump.
[240] What kind of a deal was that?
[241] I actually think that misrepresents it a little because he has to, the judge said he would withhold the sentencing until he had made a determination about how effectively Weisselberg cooperated.
[242] So, of course, they're going to ask him questions about Trump.
[243] Nothing happened that—I