Harry Litman [00:00:07]: Welcome to Talking Feds, a roundtable that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day. I'm Harry Litman.
Illegally commandeering the White House and the Washington mall, Donald Trump's Republican party this week rolled out a convention light on policy and heavy on apocalyptic rhetoric about the prospect of a Biden presidency. Trump family members and faithful alternated with culture warriors to serve up a series of dystopian claims about Biden, whose election they warned would mark the end of civil order, the abolition of the suburbs and the rationing of hamburgers.
The president himself closed out proceedings with a lengthy and oddly languid acceptance speech, in which he recycled a series of familiar fabrications and declared this election will decide whether we will defend the American way of life, or whether we allow a radical movement to completely dismantle and destroy it.
There followed a 4th of July style grand display of fireworks over the Washington monument for the 1500 guests — few of which were wearing masks — on the White House south lawn. The convention week was marred by unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after a video captured a police officer shooting an African-American man, Jacob Blake, seven times in the back at close range in front of his children.
Trump and Biden offered diametrically opposed reactions. Trump tweeting outrage at the looting and lawlessness and Biden disgust at the sight of “another black man shot by police in broad daylight,” and a 17 year old supporter of Trump crossed state lines with his AR-15 rifle to join the fray and shot and killed two of the protestors.
Bedlam and misery seemed to come from many corners in many forms. The virus daily death rate regularly eclipsed 1000 persons as the country overall approached 6 million cases and 200,000 deaths. The official report came out and showed the economy plunging at an annual rate of 31.7%. The sharpest quarterly drop on record, over 1 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits for the 22nd time in 23 weeks.
A record wave of evictions seemed imminent and unstoppable. And for good measure, one of the most powerful storms in US history laid waste to the southeast. To take stock of this baleful week and what it portends, we have a truly phenomenal group of guests. They're all first-timers to Talking Feds, and it's an honor to host each of them.
They are: Chris Hayes, the host of the Emmy award winning All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC — for my money, the gold standard of cable shows — as well as a weekly MSNBC podcast, Why is this Happening? Chris is also editor-at-large of The Nation magazine and a prolific author of articles and books, including the New York Times-bestseller, Colony in a Nation.
Chris, thank you so much for joining Talking Feds.
Chris Hayes [00:03:33]: Great to be here.
Harry Litman [00:03:35]: Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is serving her second term in Congress representing Washington's seventh district. She's a leader, in particular, on immigration issues as a member of the House Judiciary Committee and vice chair of the Immigration subcommittee.
Before coming to Congress, Congresswoman Jayapal was the founder and director of One America, one of the largest immigration advocacy organizations in the country. And like both of our other guests, she has authored two books: Pilgrimage to India: A Woman Revisits Her Homeland, and Use the Power You Have: a Brown Woman’s Guide to Politics and Political Change, published in June of this year. Congresswoman Jayapal, welcome to Talking Feds.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:04:24]: Thank you. Wonderful to be with you.
Harry Litman [00:04:26]: Finally, Jeff Toobin, the chief legal analyst at CNN as well as the staff writer and senior legal analyst at the New Yorker. Before that, Jeff served as an assistant United States attorney in Brooklyn, and as an associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel under Lawrence Walsh.
His eighth and latest book — unsurprisingly, a New York Times bestseller — is True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, just published this month. And you can hear a one-on-one discussion with me about the book on our Patreon site. Jeff, welcome
Jeff Toobin [00:04:58]: Hi Harry.
Harry Litman [00:05:00]: Alright. Hello, hello, hello, let's begin with the convention. Many speeches of course, with different tenors, but in some ways, after announcing that they were planning an “optimistic and upbeat convention,” I think the most memorable moments clearly were these dark dystopian mournings and not just by Trump, Pence and many others called Biden socialist, will fundamentally change the nation, law and order is on the ballot.
What does it say about who they were targeting to have such an emphasis on sort of dark and negative claims about Biden? What strategy do you perceive there?
Chris Hayes [00:05:39]: Well I think that it's the same strategy that they've had the whole time. I mean, I actually thought that the convention was more targeted towards possible swing and persuadable voters than I anticipated.
It was still very base-heavy, but someone noted there were more African-American speakers that have served in the top levels of the administration, which was notable to me. They were trying to talk to voters not already in the fold, to an extent I thought more than I anticipated. But the basic idea, which is like, you know, I thought that the first speech, which was, ‘he's the bodyguard for western civilization,’ with all the fraught meaning of what that is, it's like, this is it.
It's the mob, and you know what the mob means and what color they are and what background they come from. And the parts of the state that they live in, if you're talking about a certain state, versus you. And the you there is also heavily overdetermined when it's used on that stage.
And that's it, the mob versus you, they're going to come and get you. They, they, they, they, it's a very old American tradition, it's been very effective at certain moments. They, they do the kind of, I think one of the coarsest versions of it, it's, it's, it's largely unleavened by any kind of rhetorical deafness.
But, the demographic fact is that white voters without a college degree, a four year college degree, aren't remarkably distributed throughout America and remarkably overrepresented in the States that are the path to electoral victory. And they think that message is the way to get them back in the fold.
Particularly the marginal ones they've lost for the 3 to 4% they need to be within spitting distance if they cheat.
Harry Litman [00:07:06]: Well, let me ask that because, couple of questions that Chris brings up. The first is, there are echoes here of say Nixon in 1968, even Wallace, but is this really within the tradition of American political rhetoric, or in its darkness, did it go a little farther?
And second, you talk about the three or 4%, but I would have thought that the focus was be on the sort of 12 or 14% after the really hardcore base that, you might summarize them as suburban women voters who seem to have left the fold. But I was struck that at just how much he was speaking to people that if they're not locked up now, he's lost anyway.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:07:50]: Well for me, I think I definitely saw those two visions. One was directly to the base as Chris was talking about. That was clear. We knew that was going to happen. I think that there were these appeals at the white suburban women. You saw it with a number of women speakers that were scattered throughout, particularly on day one, but also on the last night.
Even if they were family members, these were all targeted white women to sort of deliver a slightly softer message. Certainly Melania Trump's message was directed at those white women. What I think though, is that it's almost impossible to reconcile those two things. Those two messages were completely different.
And so, I think it's incredibly difficult to have such a hard-hitting message to your base, but then to sort of throw in a little bit of fluff so that you try to get a few voters. It was a very, in my mind, not a very good attempt to try to convince those women to come along. And so at the end of the day, the question really is: those women, will they agree with the absolute lies that were painted, whether it's around COVID-19 — ‘there is no problem here don't you all know, we've already tackled COVID here there is no health pandemic, even though we're approaching, 6 million cases and, and 182,000 deaths today.’
But also these other issues of safety, I mean, to me it felt like this unbridled racism, xenophobia that we've seen throughout the campaign, but sort of at a new level. I mean, I'm thinking KKK in 1924, this real attempt to demarcate the future of the country as a white country versus everything else country.
And of course, our progressive cities like Seattle and other places were the full targets of that. So, is it effective? Really hard to know, but I think that women have been turned off of a lot of things. It's not that they agree with progressives or Democrats on everything, but I do think that there is this yearning for a return to stability that Trump does not provide. He may try to fearmonger and do all of those things, but he's not providing any return to stability.
Everyone knows it's chaos everywhere. It was effective in targeting his base, I'm not sure it was that effective in targeting the people they need to.
Jeff Toobin [00:10:19]: I was struck more by the pictures and the words, and especially last night.
Putting a thousand people in close proximity to each other, the vast majority of whom not wearing masks. I mean, what country are these people in? I mean, I just, are they all supporting Donald Trump that much, that they are willing to die for him?
Harry Litman [00:10:39]: “Virus? What Virus?”
Chris Hayes [00:10:40]: That’s how you show your loyalty, Jeff!
Jeff Toobin [00:10:43]: I guess, but I mean — you know, after 2016, I'm kind of out of the prediction business and out of like, you know, what suburban women, I don't know what anybody's gonna vote for, who they're going to vote for, but that picture to me struck me as a kind of mass insanity. What does that tell you about a political party that would put a thousand people — many of them on the older side — next to each other? No, not even the pretense of social distancing, with no masks? And that to me was the overwhelming message, regardless of what anybody said.
Chris Hayes [00:11:14]: You know, Thom Tillis got in trouble today, I thought it was so fascinating. So Tillis is there. He's not wearing a mask because obviously the cost of entry to that, the cost of loyalty is that you have to pretend COVID has gone. Ergo, you can't wear a mask because if you wear a mask, it reminds people that there's a deadly pandemic. So Thom Tillis goes and doesn't wear a mask.
And then he got, he got heat from local reporters today, because he's been telling people in North Carolina, ‘you got to wear a mask’. And he issued a statement saying, ‘I fell short of my own standard.’ So, he's in a contested race in North Carolina, which is interesting. That is an overlooked race, I didn't have as a top tier race.
He's been pulling consistently behind Cunningham who’s running against him. And to me, it just — Jeff, to your point, it's like, they keep thinking that they can just ignore it and it'll go away. And the craziest thing is, I looked back over the approval rating because one of the stories of the Trump era, to the congresswoman's point about people tuning him out, is that his approval rating has been remarkably steady to, to a shocking degree. I mean, if you went back and said, if you told me in January 200,000 Americans are going to die,and we’re going to enter into a great recession level crisis, and his approval rating will be the same. I would have been like, what? But, that's what happened.
And there's two ways to look at that. One is, he's near the bottom already. 42%, Hoover won 39 points, 75% of the vote in 1932, won 40% of the vote in 1932, the most iconic example of overseeing a catastrophe for an incumbent. So, 40% is basically the floor anyway, and he's been hovering around there for the entire presidency.
Right? So, there's a certain stability baked in, but the highest level that he ever pulled, his best polling were the two weeks in April where he pretended to take the COVID seriously. When he came out, and they had the projections about there's be 200,000 dead and we have to do this, and this is the right thing to do.
And he performed seriousness about COVID, and it was the best he's ever been in the polls. And then they're just like, and I agree with you, Jeff. I thought the image last night was just like, whatever they say, they're telling you, it's done. It's over. Well, and people know it's not over. I can't go to a funeral. I kept — my brother's wedding was supposed to be last week. We’re not having the wedding, like, I know it’s not over! Everyone knows it’s not over!
Harry Litman [00:13:10]: You know what, there were other gestures in that direction. I mean, in some ways they were offensive in the extreme, cause they were the, they were the complete opposite of the kind of president he's been. But the naturalization ceremony, I mean, there were a few moments of trying to be the softer tenor of Donald Trump, but I think the congresswoman's point is really salient. If you do both, what's going to emerge both in the headlines and be most memorable are these dark dystopian claims about the other guys. So in some ways that just gets sort of washed over. What about the general absence of substance. Am I, am I being too harsh on them? I mean, it really, you know, they have no platform.
Peter Baker in the New York Times asked Trump, ‘what are you running for in 2020?’ He says, ‘I think we'd have a very solid, uh, we'd continue. We'd solidify what we've done. We have other things on our plates.’ They did in 2016, at least talk immigration or abortion or judges. Whether it was the nice Donald Trump or the nasty, apocalyptic prophet of doom, what was missing were any sort of policy proposals, no?
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:14:17]: I don't know. I mean, I think their policy proposals are pretty clear. Let’s get rid of all immigrants, you know, let's cut taxes even though they don't say for the wealthiest. That's of course what it is, but people seem to believe that somehow they're going to remake the economy.
It's the one area where Trump still has a bit of an advantage, but the biggest policy proposal is, ‘I'm going to save you. I'm your savior. I'm going to save you from everything bad in the world.’ And all we need to do is paint these bad pictures, but you know, one of the things I was struck by was also who the Republican party is openly embracing.
So not just who was at the convention, but when Anne Coulter says, ‘Hey, I want this guy who shot people in Wisconsin to be my president.’ And people start defending him on Fox News, it is really stunning, right? It is really, really… it's so painful to watch because, there used to be even if there were differences between Republicans and Democrats, and I would argue that in the past, the old kinds of Republicans were actually better than some of the most conservative Democrats, right? There was a real overlap in politics.
Harry Litman [00:15:24]: For sure, it's only now for the first time that every Republican is right of every Democrat.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:15:29]: That's right, but when, when Jeffrey said, you know, these people are, I forget how you said it, Jeffrey, but I'm reminded of one of my Republican colleagues who said to me, who's a very conservative Republican who said, ‘Pramila, my constituents are telling me that if Donald Trump says jump off a cliff, I should go jump off the cliff, even if it means I'm going to die.’ So, I mean, that is how they are acting.
Jeff Toobin [00:15:50]: Harry, I don't actually think the absence of a platform… I mean, it's weird because political parties have platforms but I think I know what Donald Trump is going to do if he gets reelected. I, and I think most voters do. I know who's going to be on the Supreme Court if Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Brier are replaced. So I, I don't think that there's some mystery. I think there are certain areas that are problematic in that air. For example, I guess I have a particular obsession with this pre-existing condition thing, the way they are filing a lawsuit to get rid of protection for preexisting conditions. And they keep saying we're going to protect pre-existing conditions. I mean, I think the lying there is more egregious than in most areas, but I don't think there is a lot of mystery about what Donald Trump stands for or what kind of presidency this would be.
Chris Hayes [00:16:34]: I think that's true. But I also do think that there's a weird lacuna around the domestic legislative policy agenda, which has been fascinating because basically they come in and they, first they they have two bites of the apple of big domestic legislative policy.
One is something that Donald Trump clearly doesn't care about, but has to be done because of the coalitional imperatives, which is repeal Obamacare. It was present in Donald Trump's pitch, but It wasn't what made him stand out. I think we would all agree, right? But that's where the coalition is at, and they have to do it, and they take one run at it and fail, they take another run at it, they fail.
Then it's the one policy, the domestic policy agenda that brings the Republican coalition together in literally every presidency since Ronald Reagan, which are tax cuts for the top margin of people in corporations. And they push that through in December, 2017, right before it passes, Trump's at one of his lowest approval ratings ever, around 38 or 39%. And then they're done. They're out. They haven't done anything. They have no ideas left. There is no big legislation they want to push.
They want to get judges. They want judges, and that's what Mitch McConnell has done. In fact, part of the reason there's a relationship between the two, Mitch McConnell spends no time legislating, which frees up time to confirm judges. Like, Mitch McConnell's unburdened by the fact that there's no big piece of legislation Mitch McConnell wants to pass.
He wants to pass the approach bills to keep the government funded when he can. And he wants to get judges in. There is no domestic legislative agenda for the modern Republican party. There is an agenda. There's a policy agenda, there's things they want to do. They've basically shut down all immigration into this country.
Legal — not just unauthorized — authorized immigration has essentially been, the spigots have been turned off. They want to warp the state in certain ways at a regulatory level, but in terms of like, a signature bill, like you couldn't, I have no idea what the signature legislation of a Donald Trump — let's say he won the House and Senate, let's say they had the trifecta again. Could not tell you. I mean, it would be tax cuts, is the answer, because that’s always what it is.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:18:28]: It’s economic. It’s all the economic pieces.
Jeff Toobin [00:18:30]: Tax cuts, yeah. But I think that’s what it’ll be again.
Harry Litman [00:18:33]: That's what I meant to say that this cult of personality, ‘the wolf is at the door and I'll save you,’ is basically the whole pitch. It's to the exclusion of everything else. Dark days, civilization is going down, I'm sent by God to save you. That's all I got to say, basically they gamble that that's enough.
Chris Hayes [00:18:51]: What's funny about him too, as a performer, Trump is that like his evident interest in all this stuff. It's so obvious when he’s into it and when he’s not. He's into it when he's like, when he's talking about the thugs and when he's talking about how the toilets can't flush your bowel movements and, you know, everyone hates that. He loves that, but when he's like the right to try stuff, it's like watching a parent reading a child book for the thousandth time when they're trying to get to bed.
Harry Litman [00:19:15]: When he's reading anything, that's why it was languid. He actually read the speech.
Chris Hayes [00:19:18]: And all that’s — they don’t care! He doesn’t care!
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:19:21]: Or even when he was talking to the people in the White House, you could just see, he was trying so hard to be empathetic, but he had to ask the janitor, ‘what does that actually mean to be a custodian? What is it that you actually do?’ It was, it was very difficult. It was very difficult to watch the naturalization ceremony, given everything he has done.
And Chris is exactly right. I mean, I think the genius of this is that the Trump administration sort of made it sound like they're just about undocumented immigrants and people coming over the borders, but that was never the idea. It was always to shut down legal immigration as we know it and keep America white. No need to have immigrants from Africa or Asia or Latin America come in. It's not about whether you've come in legally, it's really no interest whatsoever in affirming the identity of America as a nation of immigrants. However flawed that may be in terms of who we've excluded and included and how people came over, but at least other Republican presidents have actually affirmed the identity of America as a nation of immigrants.
That has never been the case with Donald Trump. And so to have him put on a naturalization ceremony in the White House during a presidential campaign and film it for political reasons. It was just incredibly painful to watch.
Harry Litman [00:20:37]: With two of the new citizens not even knowing that they were being filmed for this photo op.
Jeff Toobin [00:20:42]: One thing I thought was interesting this week was about the chamber of commerce, which is sort of the traditional bailiwick of establishment Republicans, showing real signs of discomfort with the Trump agenda. And I think immigration is one area where the corporate Republican party has always been about, ow you can argue that their motives aren't exactly pure, but for whatever reason they believe in immigration, whether it's to get engineers into Amazon in your, in your district, or to get people to make the beds in Marriotts, they want immigration you're right. I did a profile of Tom Cotton early in the administration, and I was struck by how central the cutting of legal immigration was to his worldview. I mean, I, you know, we all know about the wall and illegal immigration, but legal immigration too is, is, is obviously a big target.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:21:33]: But the interesting thing about that is that the polling on immigration, for as much as Trump has attacked it, is actually stronger than it's ever been in part because immigrants now are scattered across rural districts.
And farmers need immigrants, right? They're essential to the food supply chain. They're essential to a whole bunch of different places. And to big corporations, let's be really clear, like the chamber reversed their position, just like the AFL CIO did, by the way, the AFL CIO was anti-immigrant until 2000. And that was the time when the AFL CIO reversed its position and became very much a proponent of comprehensive reform.
But that was around similar times, maybe 10 years later, that the chamber officially came on board and was with us every step of the way as we started to push for immigration reform, not just guest workers, but a path to citizenship and legalization. Now, they don't want those workers to have power, let's be really clear. But they do want the workers to be here, and so that is very important to the business angle of how to grow the economy and how to grow their businesses, even if we don't agree on what rights those workers should have. But you look at egg jobs, we passed a really good egg jobs bill with Republican support in the house.
It should be one of the first things that passes if we have a Biden administration, because there are a lot of Republicans who want to see immigration get resolved.
Chris Hayes [00:22:55]: The immigration point relates back to sort of where all of this started, which is the darkness and the sort of dystopia and the idea. Like, the central thing animating Trumpism and politics is, is, you know, this is everyone says it, right? Fear of demographic change, but more, more importantly that you have fundamentally a minoritarian political movement that has majority state power, and knows at some level that that's a disequilibrium that's going to be hard to maintain. And six out of the last seven presidential elections the Democrat has gotten more votes. They have only gotten to be president four of those seven times, and no one almost no one thinks that Trump would win more votes this time either. That would be, if he loses the popular vote again, that's the worst run for any party since 1820 when Jackson founds the Democratic party. And Mitch McConnell was very explicit about this in his very brief appearance when he talked about DC statehood, where he said, they'll have two more liberal senators and we'll never be able to control anything. They understand they're a minority of the country.
They understand that they have managed to pull off this trick in which, from behind a minority barricade, they're running the whole enterprise. And that is absolutely unsustainable. It's unsustainable from a democratic legitimacy standpoint, it's unsustainable at a constitutional level. Like, the whole thing's gonna blow up at a certain point.
I think we're facing the worst legitimacy crisis since the secession crisis. If we have another split between the electoral college and the popular vote this time around. But that view that we are never going to be able to have a majority of this country again, is what drives all of it. It’s what drives Cotton on immigration. It's what's driving all of the messaging from Trump the Republican.
Harry Litman [00:24:25]: Or at least to try to have four more years of it. Nate Silver, who now keeps me up at night and I go harken to 2016, puts it at 10% now this exact split coming up. I want to move a little bit to the Hatch Act, which is one of six things this week that could be topics in themselves. But it was stunning, the Congresswoman or all of us could say just how seriously it's taken. You can't make a phone call, a political phone call from your office. And this was like the communist party in red square, just a complete identification of the core symbols and property of the government with the president.
We're here, and they're not. In some ways the core statement of the whole convention. Now they're gambling, Chief of Staff Meadows who actually cared about it when he was in Congress is saying, ‘eh, nobody cares about this stuff.’ And people are not sophisticated on the ins and outs of the hatch act, but is it really accurate you think? Their calculation that people are indifferent to seeing such a political overlay to the Washington monument, the South lawn, is that something that is likely to backfire?
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:25:32]: I don't think we should talk about it as the Hatch Act when we're talking about it in public, because no one other than us and the people who follow it, know what the Hatch Act is. And the reality is that the Hatch Act has very few teeth. I mean, it's not, everyone used to follow it because it was the norm and the convention, but enforceability is not so great. And so we really need to redo the Hatch Act, is my belief, so that it actually has some teeth.
But I think we should talk about it the way you said it, which is about the symbols being for everybody, right? The symbol of the White House, a president for everybody, Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State is supposed to be the secretary of state for everybody. I think those are the terms in which we have to explain this because I don't think people are necessarily comfortable with it, but I also don't think they know why they're not comfortable with it.
And so I think we have to explain that, and give people a place to recognize the corruption of the administration and the self-dealings of the administration and the utilization of every lever of power in the administration for them and not for the people. That's the way I think we’ve got to get at it.
Harry Litman [00:26:37]: I mean, it is of a piece with the way they've governed. I think of your hearing last week, Congresswoman, and the revelations about the USPS or what we just learned about this CBC. I mean, it's the general theme of whatever policy there is being subordinated to crass political calculations. It’s always part of the equation but not to the exclusion of everything else.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:27:00]: Corruption. That’s right. corruption of power and using it for personal gain rather than for the country. I mean, I think that's gotta be the way we tie it.
Jeff Toobin [00:27:08]: Put me down as skeptical that this is a major issue at all, frankly. I mean, I think every incumbent president that runs for reelection has photographs in the White House and the power of incumbency and they used to call it the Rose Garden strategy for a reason.
I mean, I think, there are so many other issues that affect people's lives more, like, you know, the fact that 180,000 people are dead. The fact that this was held at the White House, I mean, I just. You know, yes I understand there was a violation of the Hatch Act, but I, it doesn't move me a great deal.
Chris Hayes [00:27:40]: I agree with that, in the sense of like even the Hatch Act itself, like there's a little bit of like the question of whether you can take the politics out of politics, but the bigger thing to me is just the people keep talking about this sort of, associating the leader with the state, and the kind of authoritarian. But there's also an American precedent here, which is the construction of one-party machine enterprises.
There's been a lot of those. I mean obviously the, the totalitarian regime of the Southern Democrats in Jim Crow South was a one party regime that functioned through white nationalism, explicit manipulation of law, and a spoil system in which the state and the party were essentially the same thing.
Also we've seen in the daily machine in Chicago, in which essentially the way you construct a one-party machine apparatus is that you use the state's mechanisms to the benefit of the party that's controlling it. And the incumbency advantage slides from an incumbency advantage to something that's anti-democratic and makes it impossible to have free and fair elections.
And that's what we're seeing, right? I mean, there's this concept that one foreign policy writer talks about, about having — about the idea of free, but unfair elections, which is increasingly what you see in a place like Turkey, right? Where it's like they have elections and like, the other party's allowed to run and they can take ads out, but they're not fair elections.
There's a fundamental unfairness that's because state brings its power down, to put it’s thumb on the scale, and that's what we're seeing. And that's the through line, that's what impeachment was all about, right? I mean, it's the use of the power of the state to essentially subvert the administration of free and fair elections, to move from an incumbency advantage, which is like on this side of the line of democracy, to a more authoritarian or machine driven model, which is on the other side of the line.
And that to me was what was so notable about last night, which I agree with Jeff at some level it's like there's a hundred thousand people dead, 180,000 people dead, like, Trump 2020, or the Washington monument’s like the least of my concern. But it's symbolic of something much deeper and much more dangerous in terms of this sort of twinning of the state function. And I'll just bring up this story that Ryan Riley had in HuffPo, which is the civil rights division of the DOJ, sending notices of investigation to a bunch of democratic governors about their management of nursing home populations during the epidemic in ways that DOJ civil rights division people say stinks to high heaven, is very clearly like a politically-motivated investigation, and that stuff is super dangerous.
Jeff Toobin [00:30:02]: And, and, just very quickly the Durham report when it comes out, will be another example.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:30:09]: But that's why I think that what they do is unfortunately brilliant in some ways, because there are so many things coming at us that we say, we make this tiering, right? We say, ‘we're not going to pay attention to this one because this one is so much more important.
This one is so much more egregious.’ And what I have seen through the judiciary committee and other committees on which I sit, is that there are a million of these small cuts that are not so small at all, and that really are about using levers of power in ways that you are not supposed to do in order to maintain control. Which is why I say, if we're going to talk about the Hatch Act, I don't think we should talk about the Hatch Act.
We should talk about corruption, and we should talk about the overtaking of political power in the ways that you talked about, Chris, but also tying it to the USPS, right? I mean, if somebody said 10 years ago, the way that Donald Trump or some dictator is going to win his next term is by taking out sorting machines in the postal service, everyone would have gone, ‘Oh, let's not waste time on that.’
Right? But look at what's happening. So, I really think like, this is the challenge when people say to me, well, you know that one's not that important. My only — I agree on some level, but my only caution is that if we allow any of these things to be normalized, they lay the path towards fascism to happen much more quickly.
I mean, the road to fascism is littered with moments where people didn't speak up or stand up against things that seemed small at the time. And they turned out to be parts of a much bigger plan. And I think Donald Trump has a lot of those things in play.
Harry Litman [00:31:40]: I totally agree. And I don't think it's unduly alarmist, there's a consensus here, but it's an interesting one because on the one hand, I think all of us see like a very deep symbolic representative moment in the fireworks over the Washington monument that's grave. But I also detect mostly everyone thinking, ‘yeah. But he's going to get away with this kind of thing clean.’ This tracing to broader principle will not be a part at least of the political dynamic in the six swing States that we're thinking about it. He’s here, they’re not.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:32:16]: I don't think we should think about it as getting away with it clean. I think we should think about it as, how do we build the narrative of what this means to a much bigger narrative. In and of itself, I completely agree. But how do we, even if it's not our focus, how do we use it as an example of exactly what it does mean? I think that's what Americans care about. That's what my constituents, and when I'm on zoom calls across the country, are talking to me about, is the multiple ways in which Donald Trump is taking this country towards dictatorship. That's really the concern here. And that's what we have to build the story and narrative around.
Chris Hayes [00:32:54]: First of all, I think there's a fascinating way in which that image of the Trump on the White House last night, like, it felt dystopian. It felt like it was out of a bad movie about some awful future.
But it also like, awakened a certain deep civic religion in me where I was like, ‘this is sacrilege.
Harry Litman [00:33:09]: Exactly! You can’t do that!
Chris Hayes [00:33:11]: I feel like I'm watching something wrong, very deeply wrong, like viscerally wrong. And I think that's, that's not a bad thing to keep in people's consciousness, this sort of, the defilement, but I also think that there's a little bit of, like elite Lincoln Project de-fetishization of how deep that civic religion stuff is, that I don't think has a ton of truck with a lot of marginal voters. It doesn't mean it's not important, it's just like, there is a certain kind of elite conversation you hear about this stuff that can start to feel a little detached from what I think is more animating.
Harry Litman [00:33:46]: All right. I wanna leave some time for Kenosha, and let’s move now to our Sidebar, which is an excellent transition to Kenosha. It is about the federal role in regulation of guns and firearms, and we’re really fortunate to have none other than Coach Steve Kerr to describe it to us. Kerr was a great NBA player of course, one of the top three-point shooters in the league. He hit 50% of his threes 4 times in his career, and has had an incredibly distinguished career since as a coach with the Warriors in particular, who he started coaching in 2014, and has led to 5 straight NBA finals. He’s going to discuss firearm regulation and the Kyle Rittenhouse assault in Kenosha is really a textbook example of the need for greater regulation, including at the federal level. So here is Steve Kerr.
Steve Kerr [00:34:49]: Every day, 300 people are shot in the United States, and over 100 people are killed. Americans own twice as many guns per capita as any other country, and our homicide rates are at least 25 times greater than those of other developed nations. Since 1968, more Americans have died from gunshots than have died in combat in all the wars in American history combined. The second amendment confers your right to bear arms, but the Supreme Court and other courts have made clear that while a complete ban on private gun ownership is unconstitutional, the state and federal governments clearly have authority to enact far broader regulations of the sale, possession, and use of guns.
The federal government already plays a major role in regulating firearm sales and possession. It places rules and restrictions on gun dealers, outlaws certain kinds of firearms (such as assault weapons), mandates background checks, and prevents certain people from buying and owning guns. Regulatory control of firearm sales allows federal law enforcement to bring special resources to bear in investigating crimes, including ballistic analysis. Where enforcement is concerned, federal criminal law imposes long sentences for certain crimes committed with guns, and makes it illegal to buy a gun to pass onto someone who isn’t eligible to own it.
Some joint federal-state programs have achieved dramatic reductions in gun violence in individual communities. These programs typically combine a sharp focus on the most likely violent criminals with community intervention strategies to counter the root causes of violence. But so much more could be done. Recent years have seen repeated efforts to pass firearms restrictions in the wake of tragic incidents such as the February 2018 shooting that killed 17 people at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Polls consistently show that the public wants such measures, but more often than not, efforts to put in place common sense restrictions die on the vine due to immense lobbying pressure from the NRA.
There are also serious challenges on the horizon: one is the manufacture of so-called ‘ghost guns.’ In other words, homemade guns with no serial numbers, assembled with do-it-yourself kits readily available on the internet. The other is 3D guns, which can now be manufactured at home on a 3D printer using open-source blueprints. Organizations like The Brady Campaign, to which both Harry Litman and I belong, are working to achieve common sense gun control measures. These include extending background checks to every gun sale and transfer, expanding the categories of persons banned from owning guns — for example, hate crimes perpetrators — banning military-style assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, and extending existing laws to reach 3D-printed firearms and ghost guns. For Talking Feds, I’m Steve Kerr.
Harry Litman [00:37:46]: Thanks very much, Coach Steve Kerr. You can hear him talking broader thoughts on social justice, including the decision of the NBA players in response to the Kenosha shooting, to postpone the playoffs, and their other efforts with respect to the election in a current podcast of Andy Slavitt, In the Bubble.
All right. But obviously it's completely germane to what happens in Kenosha. We have the shooting in the back of a African-American seven times in front of his children and it seemed to kind of, unlike the Floyd case in Minneapolis, which everyone, Rudy Giuliani at the convention, were quick to condemn.
This seemed a kind of Rorschach test, where Biden and others came out and expressed disgust, but Trump for instance, didn't mention Blake in talking about Kenosha, and there's even a sense in which this 17 year old radical is being quietly championed by Tucker Carlson and some folks among the Trump base, and he's going to go to trial on first degree murder. So it's going to be quite the royal trial and quite a lot of attention, how did the whole episode strike you?
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:39:05]: Well, I just think it was horrific. I mean, the whole scene was horrific on so many different levels. You've got a black man who's unarmed, kids in the car, and is shot seven times in the back. In the back, when there's three officers there. And then you have, a white, essentially militia man who comes over the border from Illinois, and is armed and kills, and actually is about to surrender to law enforcement and they go right by him. They go right by him. They don’t even go up and arrest him. And so I think for me, somebody who's worked on racial justice issues for 25 years now. I look at the murder of George Floyd and sort of an awakening of a lot of parts of America to something that other parts of America have known for such a long time.
And then the backing off, and even the conversation now around law enforcement that is about how do you protect a system that has protected some, and some feel very comfortable with, but others know that they have to run in the opposite direction. And I just hope that this conversation is going to be one of the hardest ones that we have to take on.
There are three supremacies I believe the United States has to deal with: white supremacy and anti-blackness, corporate supremacy, and individual supremacy. And if we don't attack all three of those, we are not going to be able to move forward, but certainly this one in particular puts us at the center of a conversation that is part of our founding that we have never dealt with.
And we won't, unless we are willing to actually talk about a process that allows us to dwell in what happened and how institutions were created, that's going to be a very — as we're seeing — a very difficult thing, because it makes a lot of people very, very uncomfortable.
Harry Litman [00:40:56]: What about, you know, so Biden actually comes out and more or less blames Trump for it, is that over the top?
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:41:03]: I don't think so. I mean, I think I had a tweet that equated what happened in Texas, right? When Trump unleashes his waves of racism and xenophobia, and a guy drives across the country to Texas and goes into a Walmart and starts shooting people up. Latinos. And now you've got this.
I mean, I think that you have to tie these things together because there is a power of the bully pulpit and the presidency that Trump has utilized to unleash forces that have been existent in our country and our world for a long time, but they've never been given this kind of space and time and energy and validation.
And therefore, he is responsible, in my mind, for many of these things that have happened. And in many cases, the people that commit these crimes actually use the same words that he has used, and have even in some cases like in Texas have a manifesto that is very much part and parcel of the Republican agenda.
Chris Hayes [00:42:02]: I would say one thing too, about all of this, which is just, how central guns and gun fetishism and gun culture is to this entire kind of conversation we're having. They kept doing this very insidious thing, the Republican party talking about the chaos and violence we're seeing on the streets.
And it's true. There has been, there are people who've been beaten up by people who are taking part in the protest or, or are adjacent to them. There have been stores that have been broken into, there's been property damage and fires, all of that's happened. I think all that's bad, I think that politicians condemning that as good and they should continue to do that.
The most egregious acts of violence have been committed by right wing, essentially accelerationist interlopers, militia members. And, thank God that the black lives matter protests are being undertaken by the one coalition in American politics that doesn't come armed to protest every time.
Think about the scene we saw in the Michigan state house, where you had masked gunmen with long guns, menacing members of the legislature inside the state Capitol, from a balcony, looking down on them. And think about this 17-year old showing up with his long gun at a protest. There’s these two ideas in the right wing imagination, one is Order Uber Alles, and the other is the second amendment exists to deny the state a monopoly on violence, and to give people the right to take it into their own hands. And those are incommensurable views, people with guns running around is disorder. And that is what you're seeing.
And that is what's so scary to me, honestly. That is what makes me feel very worried. It makes me feel worried about what the tea party movement of the Biden era, should he win, is gonna look like. And I think it's going to look a lot like that Michigan state house at a massive scale.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:43:40]: I think there's a third, which is that the treatment of those that are protesting is different. That was obviously my line of questioning of Bill Barr during the judiciary committee; this is how you treat the Michigan protesters who are armed and with Confederate flags. And this is how you treat protesters for black lives matter.
And he was very uncomfortable with that. I just think that is the third piece of this. It's also how those two things are treated.
Jeff Toobin [00:44:06]: When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, there was a famous incident where the Black Panthers came with rifles into the California state house.
And Ron Reagan supported gun control for a while as a result of that. And you're right, I mean, one of the fundamental distinctions of these past several months has been black lives matter is unarmed, and these militia type protests are armed. And I believe Congresswoman, you mentioned that unforgettable video of Rittenhouse trying to surrender, and the picture I had in my mind was, suppose there was a black guy there with an AK-47. You know, how long do you think he would have been standing? But the idea that it the police would ignore a guy — a kid, standing with an AK-47 is so insane to me. The fact that white militia protesters with guns is something that is, like, accepted in large parts of the country, it’s scary.
Harry Litman [00:45:00]: I mean, there's always the social media to go to. And when you go to this, kid's, he's got the AR-15 — which the NRA, by the way, calls America's rifle — but there's all this stuff, we see the picture of him in the front row of the Trump rally. He's look, he's a radical. And he's, he's radicalized, but if he were radicalized in favor of jihad, whatever, would be, there wouldn't be a, a divergence of views, but at the least when it's something like him, there's uncomfortable silence at best.
And then, I think people like Tucker Carlson were basically championing him and his thoughts about vigilantism.
Chris Hayes [00:45:36]: Let me, let me say one last thing on this. I grew up in New York City in the 1980s, and there was a very famous case of a man named Bernie Goetz, who was a white man who shot several black teenagers who approached him on the subway, who he thought were, he claimed, were attempting to mug him. And that's the fire in which Trump's politics were baked.
That moment, the certain kind of right-wing reaction of dangerous New York, eighties politics is the core of Donald Trump's sensibility. Outer-borough white people scared of black people, and crime and disorder in the city of New York, and the guardian angels, and Bernie Goetz and the Crown Heights riots, and the central park jogger, like that is the, the stuff out of which Trumpism is created.
Jeff Toobin [00:46:18]: And, the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani was created out of that, and the tie between Giuliani and Trump last night was, is only the latest example of the connection between the two.
Congresswoman Jayapal [00:46:30]: At the end of the day, I think the bigger question here is going to be, I think there was a set of norms that were expected of political leaders and even in the framing of the Constitution, I think there was an expectation that a party would not just go along with the dictator, that it would actually challenge somebody who was abusing power, corrupting power.
And I really do think we have to — and maybe this is because of my focus on judiciary — we have to think about all the ways in which we've got to strengthen our ability to hold people accountable once we have, once Trump is out, if Trump is out of the white house, because I do think that there are many, many gaps that have been highlighted with this administration who has no interest in political norms or conventions or anything else, and many of the restraints we have take tremendous amounts of time, and rely on a party not just following somebody over the cliff. And, and I know some of us on judiciary are trying to figure out all the time what those improvements need to be.
Harry Litman [00:47:35]: Thank you very much to Chris Hayes, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, and Jeff Toobin. And thank you very much, listeners, for tuning in to Talking Feds. If you like what you’ve heard, please tell a friend to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever they get their podcasts, and please take a moment to rate and review this podcast. You can follow us on Twitter @talkingfedspod , to find out about future episodes and other Feds-related content. You can check us out on the web, TalkingFeds.com , where we have full episode transcripts, and you can look to see our latest offerings on Patreon, where we post discussions about special topics exclusively for supporters. Submit your questions to questions@talkingfeds.com , whether it’s for Five Words or Fewer, or general questions about the inner-workings of the legal system for our Sidebar segments. Thanks for tuning in, and don’t worry: as long as you need answers, the Feds will keep talking.
Talking Feds is produced by Jennifer Bassett and Rebecca Lowe-Patton. Our editor is Justin Wright. David Lieberman and Rosie Don-Griffin are our contributing writers. Production assistance by Matt McArdle. Our consulting producer is Andrea Carla-Michaels. Thanks very much to Coach Steve Kerr for explaining federal laws and programs to regulate firearms. And our gratitude as always to the amazing Phillip Glass, who graciously lets us use his music. Talking Feds is a production of Doledo, LLC. I’m Harry Litman, see you next time.
