Following his conviction on 34 felony counts, former President Donald Trump will be sentenced on July 11. While celebrated by many as an unprecedented example of legal accountability for elected officials, the Trump trial has also demonstrated a long-established truth: there are two justice systems in America—one for the rich, and one for the poor. Journalist Laura Flanders and historian Rick Perlstein join a special livestream discussion with the hosts of Police Accountability Report Taya Graham and Stephen Janis to discuss the inequality of the US criminal justice system, and how backlash to the trial could threaten the future of democracy.
Studio: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Production: Stephen Janis, Taya Graham, Maximillian Alvarez
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Taya Graham:
Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to our Trump conviction post-verdict livestream. For the next hour and a half, we will discuss the fallout and reaction to the 34 felony count verdict that was handed out by a jury two weeks ago. It was historic, of course. Never in our country has a former or current president been convicted of a crime, but it also elicited a very revealing type of pushback, from both the punditry and the political elites. And so in the grand tradition of The Real News, we are here to offer a counter to the mainstream media narrative and to provide a different perspective from which to view this momentous event.
To do so, I’m going to be of course joined by my reporting partner, Stephen Janis, who with me, will be breaking down some alternative ways of analyzing the jury’s decision. As two reporters who have covered the criminal justice system for nearly a decade, we both find the pushback against the verdict quite illuminating, a bit of a yet-to-be-told story about how the elites of this country perceive justice when it’s applied to one of their own.
But we will also be joined by other guests who will share their own unique insights into what this verdict means for us and our country. We’ll be joined by our two outstanding colleagues, Maximilian Alvarez, our editor-in-chief and champion of the podcast, Working People, and Marc Steiner, who of course hosts the incredible show, the eponymous Marc Steiner Show on The Real News, including a fantastic series focusing on the rise of the right, so be sure to check out those podcasts if you haven’t already.
We’ll also be joined by award-winning broadcast journalist, Laura Flanders of the Laura Flanders and Friends Show, and she’s the author of six books. In 2019, she was awarded an Izzy Award for excellence in independent media, as well as a Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center for Advancing Women and Girls Visibility and Power in Media. It’s an absolute pleasure to have her here.
And we will have the renowned author and historian, Rick Perlstein, author of the books, Reaganland and Nixonland, and he is the author of five bestselling books. Perlstein received the 2001 Los Angeles Time Books Prize for his very first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, and orgs like Politico have christened him the chronicler extraordinaire of the modern conservative movement. It is going to be such a pleasure to have such a nuanced conversation with these knowledgeable guests.
Also, just a note, I will be reading your comments from the live chat and posting them, and also if possible, at the end, posing some of the questions you ask. But first, I want to discuss with you, Stephen, some of what I want to call the fallout, so to speak, over Trump’s verdict.
Stephen Janis:
It’s been revealing.
Taya Graham:
As we all know, former President Donald J. Trump was found guilty by a New York City jury of falsifying business records to high payments of hush money to former adult film star, Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors allege Trump had done so to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. The trial spanned almost two months, but it took the jury two days to reach a verdict. Suffice it to say that the reaction has been fast and furious. Republicans have been calling it a weaponization of the justice system, or lawfare, and they’ve made the argument that the verdict only helps Trump in the upcoming presidential election and that the charges other result of a purely political vendetta against Trump.
Now to be clear, we are not weighing in on Trump’s pros or cons as a potential candidate or politician. We must remain agnostic. However, we can critique how his supporters have characterized the verdict and what that says about the criminal justice system.
So as we mentioned before, Trump supporters immediately criticized the verdict and the case as both unfair and the result of political persecution. But Stephen, I think there’s something interesting embedded in this critique, notably that the outrage seems to be that these charges were simply unwarranted. The facts surrounding the case have pretty much been ignored, which is why I think this criticism is premised upon an intriguing construction of our criminal justice system, which we will discuss extensively later.
I think the pushback implies that the system in this case didn’t work because the criminal justice system cannot charge the rich or powerful or otherwise privileged. In other words, it’s perfectly fine to prosecute working people for just about anything, no matter how trivial, but a former president and billionaire? Well, any attempt to ensnare him is simply unfair. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Stephen Janis:
Well, yeah, we were talking about when the verdict came out and the response and the immediate backlash, and we were both like, wow. So they finally got the religion of the problems with the criminal justice system. Suddenly, the criminal justice system is problematic, but I think for both of us, I think for both of us, this was revealing about a theme that we’ve talked about on our show consistently and that is the role of the criminal justice system in inequality. And the reason I think Republicans were pushing back is because they’re saying, “Well, the criminal justice system can’t prosecute the rich or the powerful. It only prosecutes poor people. It only prosecutes working people.”
Taya Graham:
Right.
Stephen Janis:
And I think also the fact that they ignored the facts is another part of that, because we talked about the way that this criminal justice system effectuates its power within the system, which is to police social boundaries in one sense and make sure that the working class political efficacy is dimmed, and also to a certain extent, to make facts irrational. You have a rational system and it makes it irrational, and especially in this case, by saying that there is no way, no way that any of the evidence or any of the facts matter in this case. All that matters is you tried to prosecute one of us and you successfully did it, and so therefore, it can only be a rational outcome. And it sows confusion and I think it also brings an irrational sense to a system that we want to be rational.
So it’s really a very complicated, but also quite, like you said, like you pointed out, and that’s very important. The minute we heard it, we were like, ah, okay. So they’re defending the system of inequality just as much as they’re defending the candidate, Trump, and they’re saying that the system is nothing but irrational. But that’s what we’ve been talking about when we talk about all the people on our show who were prosecuted for nothing.
Taya Graham:
Exactly. We’ve been saying that for years.
Stephen Janis:
Whose lives are destroyed over nothing. How rational is that? Well, now they’ve had a taste of their own medicine and it’s very revealing.
Taya Graham:
Absolutely. And once again, I want to reiterate that we remain agnostic about the parties of the elites or their political agendas. I think one could argue that these wealthy elites aren’t really team blue or red. The only color they really care about is green, and my point is that these elites, these multimillionaires, the billionaires who control the criminal justice system seem to react with outrage when it turns towards them. That holding the rich accountable is prima facie an abuse of the system they constructed, which is an easy argument to make when you consider how often the ultra wealthy skirt accountability. The former CEO of Boeing, CEO Calhoun, put lives at risk by sacrificing safety to cut costs, and yet he’s not prosecuted. Instead, he receives a $45 million parachute. Or take any executive from Purdue Pharma who addicted and killed hundreds of thousands, and walked away fabulously wealthy with barely a single executive prosecuted.
And perhaps what we’re seeing is an effort to distract from this imbalanced application of justice, because instead of addressing facts like these, they simply attack the entire system. However, when it comes to the relentless persecution of the working class, these same elites are effusive in their praise. I can’t even count the number of cases that we’ve covered that seem to be at the very least capricious, if not retaliatory against working people.
And when I say that, we see an entirely different dynamic than a billionaire complaining about not being able to write off his payment of an adult film star as a business expense, or the assertion that he’s under attack because of his power. No, we see people who are targets simply because they are essentially powerless, working class people who can’t afford lawyers and publicists or hold the attention of the nation. Stephen, why is it so important to remember this in the context of the verdict?
Stephen Janis:
Well, I like the point you made. It was a great point and it is an excellent point, which is that they effectively are arguing that a billionaire should be able to write off his payments to his mistress on his taxes. That’s an important thing to me, because that’s a very difficult argument to make in rational, fact-based land, to say, yeah, we need to tear down the justice system because a billionaire wants to write off a payment to his mistress.
Taya Graham:
Those aren’t even crimes most of us can imagine committing.
Stephen Janis:
Well, that’s the thing, and to a certain extent, it exposes the inequality of the system in and of itself because it really poses a crime that none of us would ever have… Well, at least I know personally. I can’t speak for you, but I don’t have the ability to participate in that kind of crime. But what it really shows is the irrationality of an unequal system and how it manifests every day. So they’re in this dilemma I think, where they seem to be being righteous about something that is really outlandish, and also at the same time, trying to defend a system that upholds their inequality and the inequality that we all suffer from.
Taya Graham:
Well, let’s remind our viewers of some of the cases that clearly emphasize this point that we’ve covered.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, sure.
Taya Graham:
There is a Texas first responder with 30 plus years as a career firefighter, Thomas C, who is falsely charged with a DWI. This case dragged through the courts for over two years, even though the police never turned in the toxicology evidence that proved his innocence. However, during that time, while the charges of a DWI hung over his head, he was forced to resign, literally a man who ran into burning buildings and saved lives as an EMT. Let’s just take a moment to listen to Thomas describe how this false DUI just nearly destroyed his career.
Now, despite the difficulty in being arrested, separated from your pet and having them taken to animal control, there were other consequences. You almost missed your father’s funeral because of this, and it cost you your job and impacted your finances, right?
Speaker 1:
I’d already been on light duty because of my eye. I would need a cornea transplant to get my eye fixed. The fire department only gives you so long to be on light duty before they turn you loose, no more pay. If they have another job, I believe they’re obligated to offer you another job, so they sent me to go work in communications as a dispatcher and I was in training to become a dispatcher at the time. Because of the DWI, I was no longer allowed on the floor of the dispatch center. Because I was no longer allowed on the floor of the dispatch center, they ended up giving me a letter, “You can retire now or go work in another department in the city.” Or by then, I already knew that once I’d been charged, I’d go to tell someone, “You wouldn’t believe what happened. I got charged with a DWI. I don’t even drink. I haven’t in 33 years.” Never heard of someone getting a DWI that doesn’t even drink.
Taya Graham:
This is just a heartbreaking case, to know that Thomas C, he thought of these firefighters as his family. It is absolutely a heartbreaking case.
Stephen Janis:
And even when we reached out to the union officials and the people who should be protecting him, they just turned their backs on him and he lost his job, his whole career, over nothing, over a crime he didn’t commit.
Taya Graham:
I know.
Stephen Janis:
But there was no backlash from conservatives on that, or anyone from… You can’t reach politicians about these cases. They don’t comment. I know because I’m a reporter, because I ask. And when these things occur, there’s just silence, deafening silence. So just keep that in mind when we’re support… When… Yes. Okay.
Taya Graham:
That’s an excellent point.
Stephen Janis:
I’m not going to go too deep in the-
Taya Graham:
No, no, that’s an excellent point. The silence is deafening.
Stephen Janis:
It is deafening.
Taya Graham:
And I want to give you all another example. Consider the case of Michelle Lucas. Now, this is a hardworking grandmother of four who was charged with passing counterfeit money, one counterfeit $100 bill. Lucas had been forced to plead guilty to two felony counts until we investigated and exposed the flaws in this case.
The case focuses on a person you might remember. Her name is Michelle Lucas and she was one of the stars of our documentary, the Friendliest Town, a film that recounts the firing of the first Black police chief of a small town on Maryland’s lower eastern shore called Pocomoke City. But the reason we reported on her a few months ago is because the hardworking grandmother of four and community activist was facing two felony counts of, wait for it, passing counterfeit bills.
So how did this happen? Well, because Michelle did a favor for coworker. She was delivering pizzas for a Pocomoke restaurant when a cook asked her to pick up a bottle of tequila. To pay for it, he handed her a $100 bill. On her way back from her delivery, she paid for the liquor, gave it to the cook, and went back to work. But two hours later when she returned to the restaurant, she was greeted by a parking lot full of cops. I’ll let Michelle explain.
Speaker 2:
Two hours later, I’m coming back to the restaurant and there’s three sheriffs and two Pocomoke cops, and then he will say, “Hun, you’re getting charged with a felony.” And then I was like, “What?” I have never in my whole life, whole life, not even as a teenager with my mom, been in any trouble. So when he’s telling me I’m getting charged with a felony, my mind, I blanked out.
Taya Graham:
Fortunately, after we published her story and after Stephen sent some very effective emails to the public defender’s office, she was assigned a new public defender who withdrew her plea and the charges were dropped. Stephen, what do these unjust arrests and the silence of the elites about them say to you about our criminal justice system? And to be fair, there were hundreds of thousands of illegal arrests made in our Democrat-run city, just to be fair.
Stephen Janis:
I don’t want to sound too complicated but it’s a way of rationalizing the irrational aspects of the system, that we all live with the inequality. It’s a way of saying the irrational aspects of inequality, like people go broke over a medical bill or whatever, or can’t make a living wage, is actually rational because the criminal justice becomes a social boundary enforcer that keeps people like Michelle and keeps people like Thomas C. lacking the political efficacy or agency to fight back.
That’s what’s so interesting about the Trump reaction, because suddenly, the criminal justice system is not rational. We know it’s not rational. We see it play out in the lives of people, of working class people all the time in irrational ways. But suddenly, suddenly the system that they will say is rational when poor people or working class people get caught up in it, suddenly is rational. So it shows, I think it exposes the underpinnings of the system, which is really the manufacturing of inequality and manufacturing the narrative of inequality to make sure that narrative is never really questioned by the people who are subject to it. So that’s what I think we see, and that’s why it’s important to remember these cases.
Of course, in the case of zero tolerance, the Democrats were in power and 700,000 people were arrested in a city of… Over the period of seven years, a hundred thousand people a year for five or six years, and Democrats were absolutely silent about it. No one said a word. Every time I’d write about it, no one wanted to comment. So again, you see these massive irrational inequalities, and yet, the only thing that elites right now are worried about, seem to be, is one man’s ability to take a deduction for his sex life, so, revealing.
Taya Graham:
It is revealing. It says to me that elites care about elite problems.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, of course.
Taya Graham:
Apparently.
Stephen Janis:
I guess that’s the way it works, right?
Taya Graham:
And not the rest of us, right?
Stephen Janis:
Yeah.
Taya Graham:
Now, to expand this discussion, we are going to turn to our colleagues and guests to get their individual takes on the verdict and its implications. I’m going to ask everyone to weigh in first on their general thoughts about the verdict’s implications and how they think it will impact the coming election and the politics of criminal justice. So first, let me turn to our esteemed editor, Max Alvarez. Max, let me know some of your thoughts.
Max Alvarez:
Stephen, Taya, thank you so much for having me on. As always, it’s an honor to go into battle with y’all and we know our audience have a lot of questions, and I am just truly honored to be on this incredible panel with everybody to do our best to answer them. So one thing I just wanted to add onto to the great intro that you guys gave, since another one of our colleagues, the great Mansa Musa, who hosts the show Rattling the Bars here at the Real News Network, Mansa himself was incarcerated for 48 years of his life and now hosts the show that Marshall Eddie Conway founded that focuses on the violence and victims of the prison industrial complex. So a year ago, Mansa did a great interview with Dyjuan Tatro when this trial began, and Dyjuan had a great quote that I just wanted to read because I think, again, we can learn a lot from your guys’ reporting, Mansa’s reporting, Mark’s reporting, that can inform the discussion today.
And Dyjuan said, quote, “There’s this idea that we have a fair justice system in this country, and anyone who pays attention to what happens in our courtrooms, who police arrest and don’t arrest, knows that we do not. Some people find it helpful to say that we have two systems of justice in America. I don’t take that view. We have one system of justice, the primary function of which is to incarcerate and oppress primarily Black and brown people to the benefit of wealthy elites, and so we have one system that’s doing exactly what it is meant to be doing. The same system that will coddle Donald Trump after he sought to overturn a legal and fair election on January 6th also put Crystal Mason in prison for five years for mistakenly casting a provisional ballot as someone who had a felony conviction.”
So again, just to really underscore the point that y’all were making about what this trial, before we even got a verdict, already said about our criminal justice system. The fact that Trump could have all of these charges against him, all of these crimes for which he has not been charged, while people who have never been convicted of anything are literally rotting and dying in Rikers Island right now.
So to sum up my preliminary thoughts on this conviction, I’m going to actually steal from the great writer and political analyst, Ed Burmila, whom we’ve interviewed at the Real News before. So Ed perfectly characterize, I think, the absurdity of the Trump era years ago during Trump’s first term by referring to what he calls the Air Bud syndrome. Air Bud, of course, is the classic 1997 Disney sports comedy in which a young boy befriends a golden retriever with the uncanny ability to ball out on the basketball court.
“Things will get worse,” Ed wrote in 2019, referring to the Trump era, because the then Democratic controlled House, as Ed wrote, quote, “Intends to hold endless hearings and point desperately to the Mueller report, like the losing coaches point to the rulebook in Air Bud, gesticulating wildly as the dog dunks on them over and over. And the crowd loves the dog with all its heart and looks at the losing team with the contempt reserved for such demonstrations of learned helplessness, while the very voters to whom Democrats most desperately want to appeal don’t know or care about rules, but sure do notice that one team managed to lose a basketball game to a fucking dog.” End quote.
So let us not forget that this was in essence what politics was during Trump’s first term, a feckless Democratic Party establishment, a ratings obsessed and out of touch corporate media apparatus, all perpetually caught in their own Air Bud rerun cycle of decrying the rule breaking and norm violating of the Trump administration, while Trump just kept dunking on them. Slashing taxes for corporations and the rich, stalking the Supreme Court and the judiciary writ large, issuing executive orders left and right, taking a battering ram to the Department of Education, the National Labor Relations Board, the post office, et cetera, et cetera. Let us not forget that the Democrats, outside of the Bernie Sanders led progressive wing, had no real answer to this. Trump was debilitatingly popular and leading Biden in the 2020 race just over four years ago, and it really took a deus ex machina pandemic and the Trump administration totally blowing the response to COVID-19, and for historic numbers of voters coming out to vote for Biden to actually overtake him and win the presidency in 2020.
But Biden did win. The January 6th insurrection at the Capitol did fail to overturn the election results. Trump got kicked off of Twitter, he temporarily fell out of the headlines, and so many people in this country breathed a sigh of relief and told themselves that the nightmare was over. But it wasn’t, and here we are again, and I just want to lay that out at the top because it really does feel like so much of the mainstream discourse around this trial and this election is unfolding as if we didn’t all live through the first Trump presidency. It feels like our media and political elites, and the people who still buy their narratives, learned nothing from that period. But there is no way that you can listen to our colleague, Marc Steiner’s vital long-standing reporting on Trump, his supporters, the rise of the right in the US and around the world, and not get the anxious sense that the verdict news is just the beginning of something, not the end.
There is no way that you can watch our long-standing coverage on America’s criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex through your guys’ great reporting, Mansa’s great reporting, and naively believe that Trump has any intentions of going quietly or that this system will treat him the same way it treats people like us. He doesn’t, and it won’t. As Trump immediately messaged to his supporters after the verdict, just like he did after the 2020 election results, he will deny, attack, and encourage others to deny and attack the legitimacy of any Democratic process or institution, including those designed to uphold the law and order that Trump claims to love so much that get in his way. We know this about Trump. We cannot pretend to and we cannot afford to pretend to not know this about Trump. So the real question is what is our plan?
And I’ll close by saying this. I don’t know what this means for all of us going forward. I can’t know that, none of us really can. But what I do know, as someone who is not only living through the Trump era of American decline like the rest of us but I’m trying to learn from it so that we don’t keep falling into the same stupid society-destroying traps, that the worst thing that we can do right now is just hold our breath and anxiously, passively watch to see if the system holds up. I think the most essential thing that any of us can do right now, and this cuts to the entire mission of everything we do at The Real News, is to understand ourselves and to help others understand that the answer to that if question, whether or not what remains of our democracy will hold, that ultimately depends on us, how prepared we are for whatever storm may be coming and how willing we are as people, as working people, as citizens, how willing we are to fight for our rights, our families, and our future.
Stephen Janis:
Well, thank you, Max Davis. That was great.
Taya Graham:
Powerfully said. And you know what? I know you have a question for Mark, but I just want to throw up just a couple of comments here. We have SarahLagger22 who says, “The Trump saga is stage drama, like the House of Cards from Netflix. It’s all a soap opera.” And NoNo38 said, “It’s all a script. Behind the scenes, the left and the right high-five each other and mock the peasants.” I have to concur that there’s a great deal…
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Taya Graham:
I have to concur that there’s a great deal of political theater here involved, and I think all of us know when we’re being given a show-
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, I wish I was-
Taya Graham:
So thank you so much for those comments.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, I wish I’m the one who wrote that script. That’s a good script. And so, Mark, let me move on to you. Mark, Mr. Rise of the Right, I’m sure you have a lot of thoughts on this, so if you don’t mind sharing your initial impressions of the verdict or what you thought in the context of your reporting, that would be great.
Mark:
I wasn’t surprised about the verdict. For all we blast certain parts of our establishment, certain parts of our court system do the job they’re supposed to do, and the jurors did the job they were supposed to do, and I think that’s something that has to be taken into account.
I think what we’re facing here though is, let’s look at America’s history. Now, I’m a student of the period between 1861 and 1890 and what happened during Reconstruction. After the Civil War was fought and Black folks were freed from enslavement and democracy tried to flourish through the South, the forces of the right and racists came barreling back, pushed everybody out of the way, had control. And because the North didn’t want to defend it, came barreling back and took control and created a system of segregation, where for 100 years, Black folks lived under absolute oppression in the South and segregation across the country.
So, it can happen again. We see that in the course of this 20th Century, that you’ve got everything from the battles of the unions and the left and others who put FDR into power, that whole legacy going up through the ’70s and the pushback from the right that took place. Now it’s all being eaten away. Some people may look at Trump as a buffoon, but he’s not a dumb buffoon, and he knew how to fill a political vacuum, and he stepped into it because he knows media and knows how to push himself and knows how to sell things. And that’s exactly what he did.
So he’s become the embodiment of everything that certain groups in America despise. And so we are now faced with the real chance is the Democrats cannot seem to get their act together, at least at this point. The race is neck-and-neck, and if the right wing wins, and if they control one or both houses, then all bets are off.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah.
Mark:
And what people have forgotten, I think, to do and how to do, that we don’t do enough, is A, how to organize, to build something that can fight back and build something to protect the future. Among all the many things I did in my life, I spent some years in advertising, when I was broke and needed to figure out something else to do. So I did that for a while, but I learned a lot in those years when I worked in advertising, and I’m always shocked how people cannot figure out how to make a message to the American people about what the future might hold and what has to be done now.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you, Mark. That is an excellent point. So Terry, you want to…
Taya Graham:
Well, I’d like to turn to Laura to get her thoughts. I’d love to know how you think this verdict impacts the moment we’re in and if you think there’s going to be fallout for the election or even for our criminal justice system.
Laura:
Well, thanks for that. And this has been an interesting conversation so far. I want to pick up on something that Mark said about those jurors. We love to talk about the man, not the movement. And likewise, we love to talk about, in this case, Donald Trump, and the prosecutor to some extent, Alvin Bragg. But let’s talk about those jurors, those 12 everyday folks, as DA Bragg called them, who sorted through those two months of testimony and documentation and a fairly complicated case and came up with a unanimous verdict. And I think that they did some complex thinking there, which is what we need to be doing in this moment. So inspired a little bit more by them than I am by the punditry.
I want to just lift up a couple of things. I’ve seen in the days since the verdict, a kind of declaration coming from people on the democratic progressive side, “Well, this shows how the system works.” It doesn’t. I doesn’t work for most people who would’ve been prosecuted, as you’ve said, on lesser charges years ago, and it hasn’t worked yet for Trump. Let’s not forget that he is trailing a trail of crimes for which he has not been brought to justice. Everything from rape and sexual abuse to meddling in election, insurrection, document abuse, document stealing, and well, the Georgia case has now been delayed, but conspiracy. So this language of, “Oh, the system works,” you’ve been saying, “Very well.” We know it doesn’t, not for most people and not yet for him.
The other thing I’ve heard that concerns me, if you want to talk about affecting our politics in this moment, is a lot of people on the democratic side, hanging their hopes on a prosecution, a criminal incarceration, an incarceration on these charges of Donald Trump. And I want us to just step back for a moment and say, we have just come off, especially since the murder of George Floyd, but not exclusively then, a movement calling for alternative approaches to justice in this country. Decarceration, abolition, not reaching for incarceration as our first solution to every problem. And I think the reality is that Donald Trump’s first time offense on a nonviolent crime will not be sent off to prison in handcuffs.
So New Yorker Magazine cover aside, this is a distraction. And if it becomes the question, does our system live or die by whether Donald Trump gets frog marched off to jail? I think that we will have spent a lot of time and a lot of hot air on a really useless conversation. Where I think we need to be focusing next in our thinking in a complicated way, is about this system of ours. Because fun as it is to point out the hypocrisy of the get tough on crime right wing, now saying, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute, we didn’t mean it.” We too, as critics of the criminal justice system, have to also consider our approach. So we are looking at decades of vilification of our systems of government, our institutions of government. And you’re right, they come from a place of white male privilege and power. They have been institutions to maintain that power and privilege and a white supremacist male patriarchy capitalist system.
But there are forces calling for chaos in this moment, chaos of the sort that I’m sure Mark has been reporting on, we’ve been reporting on in our reporting on the attacks on the energy system in North Carolina, the attacks on the capital. We can be complex, I think, and as subtle and nuanced as those jurors in realizing that while we criticize the system, that’s not to say we don’t believe there should be a system and that we are in very dangerous territory if we simply allow this election to accelerate the Accelerationist movement, actually, the movement that would like to see our country thrown into such chaos of violence that only people with the most violence win.
We don’t tend to be the winners in those equations. And I think that’s where my mind is going at this moment, is how can we think in as complicated a way as we must about the problems with our system, the need to create some new systems but not embrace the nihilistic, what the heck, pick up a gun solution, which is for the most part, what’s on offer right now.
Stephen Janis:
Well, Laura, I want to congratulate you. You answered all of our questions that we had planned for this. So in a single answer-
Laura:
Oh, good. I’ll go home.
Stephen Janis:
So, congratulations. We’ve got to take a break here to come up with some new questions.
Taya Graham:
Seriously.
Stephen Janis:
But moving on to Rick. Rick, no one knows this subject better than you and how the right responds to things. And was there anything that surprised you in the response to Trump’s verdict or was it kind of what you thought? And you also mentioned in your article about the cruelty that accompanied this response. Was there anything that really said, “Oh, I didn’t expect this to happen?”
Rick:
Well, it is truly, truly, truly an extraordinary hinge point in America’s history and the world’s history. There really, really are no simple answers. I think Max might’ve said, no one has any good solutions to this, except for maybe the Bernie wing of the Democratic party and they’re being ignored. Well, I live in Chicago and we elected a mayor from the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party, and they all fucked it up too. There’s no easy solutions to this. All of us who are trying to figure out what is going on, everyone kind of jumps onto what’s familiar to them. They try and ride the bicycle. No one forgets how to ride a bicycle. But this time, the gears have slipped off the chain and we’re peddling and peddling and peddling and not getting anywhere. It’s crazy. It’s a crazy, crazy time.
And I’m hearing, “Oh, the elites think they’re accomplishing something by convicting Donald Trump.” Who’s the elite? Who are the workers in this situation? I think all the categories are very scrambled. We have an outright fascist base for Donald Trump. A lot of them are blue collar folks, victimized by democratic policies, victimized by republican policies. And what I’ve been following, I went on a far right message board than I’ve been following for decades and decades. And yeah, basically, yeah, nothing surprising, particularly from them. I’ll just quote some of the things they’re saying. “Never forget May 30th, 2024, the date the leftist devils chose civil war for this nation. Trump will be my president by God.” Another guy is saying, “Elections will be conducted using 5.56 millimeter voting machines.” That refers to the 5.56 millimeter NATO round that’s used in an AR-15.
Now when the first guy says leftist devils chose civil war. Yeah, they mean Biden. They mean the intermention on the jury who are New Yorkers and probably are all communists anyway, but they also mean you and me. And the problem about unsurprising rhetoric like that, is how it was joined by relatively surprising rhetoric from the billionaire class that they don’t care about the rule of law. And anyone who knows how capitalism works, knows it’s important for people to have predictable contracts, predictable courts, right? One of the things I said in one of my articles is, trials themselves are on trial in Judge Merchant’s courtroom. That was vindicated because all of a sudden, all these people are saying, “We don’t care about the criminal justice system,” was not just people from Freerepublic.com, it was people like Marco Rubio.
I mean, they’re ready for war, right? They’re all ready for war. And unfortunately, I think the one answer we have to reach for, as tragic as it is, under Donald Trump as president, and this is something I’ve been studying very closely, studying the 2025 project. There’s all kinds of needles hidden in that haystack. One of the things they want to do is, make every school that takes federal funds, which means every school, every student, take the military entrance exam. That’s not even been reported. That’s 1000 pages, there’s a lot of crazy stuff in there.
Under Donald Trump, we are literally going to be in the sites of people from Free Republic and the officers of the state. I mean, under a democratic president, at least we’ll have a little bit of space to breathe, and as tragic as it is, but I’d rather be governed by a guy whose son gets convicted and says, “Okay, he’ll take his licks.” Don’t forget there’s another, when we talk about the elite putting people in jail, Democrats should not, Laura is absolutely correct, have this fantasy that the grownups will save us. The criminal justice system will save us, the institutions will save us. The institutionalism was what, I think, people were mocking in that ridiculous… That Bermila was mocking, the ridiculous, like the first impeachment. They kept on saying, “Oh, Donald Trump ignored the interagency. He didn’t follow the…” It was kind of like the bureaucratic version of, “He didn’t use the right salad fork.”
That’s not going to save us. That is not going to save us. A Democratic party, yes, that realigns itself along New deal style, populist terms, and Biden has taken the first steps. He’s also getting on the bicycle and doing all the familiar stuff. When Israel starts a war, you support them. That’s the familiar thing. But he’s finding that doesn’t work anymore. There might be political consequences to this.
So our first job really, really, really is to keep the fascists as far from the legitimate control of state violence as we possibly can. And I’m sorry, I’ll just go to my grave saying that. And then on January 20th, when the old man, if he makes it that long, is inaugurated for a second term, yeah, hit the bricks. Hit the bricks, maybe he’ll join us. He’s walking the picket line, supposedly. But it’s not just the elites against the masses, that’s our old way of thinking. We don’t know how to think right now. We’re on that bicycle too, and we just can’t keep pedaling and the chain is not meshing with the gears. And this is a very uncomfortable reality. It’s a very uncomfortable world to live in. My Man, Max once asked me, what’s my one word explanation about what we need to do in one sentence, we must love each other or die. Solidarity, respect. I didn’t come up with it, it’s W.H. Auden, so. Yeah, I wish I could claim the credit. It’s really easy.
Laura:
I came up and I had a good two-word answer the other day to that question. I was speaking to Maurice Mitchell from the Working Families Party, and he says their go-to approach is block and build. We have to block fascism, but blocking isn’t enough, we have to build the alternative. And I think that’s where we are. We’re just in pretty sad shape, I’d say, at this moment. There’s some interesting stuff on the horizon, I will say.
Stephen Janis:
It’s an excellent point because Clinton, in 2006, he relied upon the idea that Trump was just going to be unpalatable without thinking about policies that affected the working class. So I’m going to turn to Max and his great podcast, Working People. I mean, can we look at this through the… I mean, I think Rick raises some great points, that the working class has been victimized by Democrats just as much as Republicans. So can we look at this through the class prism in terms of analyzing this verdict and just analyzing the phenomena of Trump? Or do we fall into that same idea where somehow the Democrats are different, but they’re not really, in the neoliberal policy world that we live in right now? I mean, is that a good way or bad way of looking at it? Or is there a different way that Rick suggested?
Max Alvarez:
Well, I mean, class is everywhere, right? The specter of Marx haunts everything. And so my blunt answer is that, yes, class analysis and the sort of dynamics of capitalism that shape who we are, how we live, how we work through those kind of essential class dynamics does factor into everything that we’re talking about. But it is not prescriptive, right? I mean, because I think one of the taglines for what we do with The Real News, which is so basic, but it’s such a hard point for people to accept, is that it’s a big fucking country and there are a lot of people in it, and people are very complex. And as we ourselves have shown through the work that we do, even long before I ever got here at The Real News, but also, ever since. People are complex and people have many different reasons for voting the way they do, not voting, so on and so forth.
My show, the show that you mentioned, Working People, which I started years before I ever got to The Real News, the very first interview I ever did, as you guys know, was with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, a Mexican immigrant who grew up dirt poor in Tijuana, came over to this country, separated from his siblings, became a citizen, met my mom, built a family, bought a house, lost everything in the Great Recession, including the house I was raised in, felt under the Obama administration that our family, so many millions of others were totally left to flounder while the big banks and corporations got bailed out like that. But he had nowhere else to turn in 2016. And so he described voting for Trump to me, as voting for the devil. “I had a choice between the devil I knew and the devil I didn’t.”
And that is, I think, something that I’ve heard from a lot of different working people from around the country, who voted for Trump the first time, maybe voted for him even the second time, and are even still considering voting for him now. So we know that Trump voters can take many different forms. My own father is one of them. And that is why we’re so adamant about getting people to actually listen to their fellow workers, listen to their neighbors, go out beyond your own algorithmically sorted echo chamber, get off the old, the single circuit between you and the mainstream channels that you visit every single day. And because the farther away we are from actually knowing and seeing each other, the easier we are to exploit, to divide, and to convince that we are each other’s enemies.
Because that is also a factor too. We’ve mentioned the media, we’ve mentioned the media scape in the ways that corporate media responded to Trump. But while all of this is happening, while we are careening down the gullet of a 21st century in which big tech has achieved its signature goal of disrupting the world that we live in without any thought to the consequences, so many of us are not even operating on a shared basis of shared reality.
I mean, when I talk to some Trump voters, it’s like I say, “What’s important to you?” And their list of priorities is vastly different from what I’m hearing from other people. Because again, that’s not all a class determination. A lot of that is the media that they watch, a lot of it is the people that they talk to, the people they don’t talk to, in the ways that, again, those sorts of basic connections between working people and our basic understanding of what our fellow workers are going through is ripped apart and everything is mediated back to us through the internet and through mainstream media or through even, independent media.
But the point I’m making is that so many of us are seeing a different version of reality right now, and that is playing into the ways that people’s brains are poisoned in the ways that they think. But I’ll say this and I’ll shut up, is yes, there are tons of economic reasons for why people are feeling as despondent as they are, feeling as hopeless about the political establishment as they have been. Rick has covered this plenty, Laura’s covered this plenty, I mean, Thomas Frank has talked about this. I mean, a lot of it is not even hidden anymore, but we’re not doing fucking anything about it. We just keep telling our fellow workers that they’re idiots wanting to vote for this guy instead of doing anything to help them.
Like the Republican voters in East Palestine, who I know many of, we’ve reported on their struggle there, but Trump was the first one out there after the train derailed, Biden took a year to get there. That’s basically, that’s made the determination for a lot of people because they’re screwed either way. So which president actually got out there first to show that he cared? Sorry.
Taya Graham:
Wow. Max, that was really powerful. And I want to draw a little bit from what you just said and give that to Mark in this question I have for him, because I hope people have taken the opportunity to listen to your series on The Rise of the Right, where you explore and contextualize the MAGA movement. But Max brought up something interesting. How can working people overcome the movements that we’ve become a part of, whether it’s a left movement or a MAGA movement, and reach out to each other and realize, we have a lot more in common than we have different. I mean, I was just wondering, you’ve been part of a lot of movements to build solidarity. Maybe you could let us know if there’s any hope?
Mark:
Well, let me start this way. Hearing what everybody has just said, that people move politically for two very emotional reasons, fear and hope. And when people were in the civil rights movement, when we had our freedom rise, we were getting beaten and tortured and thrown into jail and people died, 36 people in Mississippi died in one summer fighting in the civil rights movement. But what drove them was hope. What drove them was hope that we could change something, that we could build a better America, that we could free people in this country.
And the other thing is fear. People now, especially voting for Trump, being pushed to the right, are moved out of fear. Their lives are unstable. They don’t know what’s coming next. And so neo-fascist and fascist demagogues always have, know that. Hitler Mussolini knew that. Bolsonaro knows that and knows how to play into it. So to get to the heart of what you just asked, given that, in terms of my analysis is a reality of what we face, nothing just happens. For things to change, people have to organize and be organized.
Let me give you an example. When I was an organizer in South Baltimore back in the early seventies, we organized an attendance union movement. Charles Street in South Baltimore was a dividing line between the black world in Sharp Leadenhall and the white world in South Baltimore, both working class communities. Many people working on the docks and they are always at each other’s throats. But there was one common enemy that we found, and the common enemy was the slumlords who affected both their lives. So we organized an interracial tenants movement that changed the laws in Baltimore and pushed and actually brought people together who-
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Mark:
Changed the laws in Baltimore and pushed, and actually brought people together who’d never come together before. It’s not just going to happen with people coming together. People have to work at bringing people together. You have to organize and build a movement that makes that change. That’s the only way it ever has happened. Only way it will happen. And I think that we have to remember our past. We have to remember what people did in the 30s and the 60s, what people did before that when they came together to fight for equal rights, to fight for their union movements, to fight for real wages.
It was people coming together because they had a common fight together and they also had people organizing that movement. Many of them came from those ranks. They weren’t outsiders, but people had to be organized. It’s the only way it happens. And I think that you see some of it, you see some of it in some of the reporting Max is doing, let’s say with workers around the country, unions that are coming up, and it is happening, but A, it’s invisible to most media, which doesn’t help. And B, it’s just beginning and the other side is fueled with billionaire money.
Stephen Janis:
It’s true.
Mark:
And they are highly organized.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. Well, thank you Mark. So let me move to Rick. Rick, I want to ask you a question that just came to me when I was listening to what you were saying. So let’s say the Democrats decide to just run some ad, a big ad campaign saying Trump convicted felon and focus on his criminality as a way to move voters. Do you think that’s a good strategy? Given what you were talking about, how chaotic things are now, kind of like that throwback to 2016. How could you vote for Trump? Is that actually a bad strategy?
Rick:
It’s so interesting. I’ve been working on this piece for weeks and weeks and I am trying to get it together because the conclusion of the piece is we don’t know what’s a good strategy, which is really tough. Really, really, really tough. I was listening to a certain mainstream media outlet that appears on the radio and they were interviewing young voters in Michigan. “Oh, are you going to support Trump? Are you going to support?” It was young African-American voters, “Are you going to support the Republicans? Are you going to support the Democrats?” And one of the young women said, “Well, I can’t support President Biden because I have all these student loans and he did nothing about it.” And those of you who have been following this issue know that actually he can’t do anything about it legislatively, for obvious reasons, the Republicans control the house and they don’t care anything about students anyway. So he did what he could. He thought he could legally using executive action and that was struck down by the Supreme Court.
So clearly just running on his accomplishments isn’t really working. It’s not even working with us. I mean, it’s like there was an article in the Washington Post yesterday, “The Biden Administration Tuesday will announce rules to block medical debt from being used to evaluate borrowers’ fitness for a mortgage and other types of loans.” If you don’t think that’s a big deal and you’re on the left, get the hell out of the library.
Stephen Janis:
Agreed.
Rick:
So what we have here is a left that wants to say they’re two wings of the same party. They’re both neoliberal. The problem with that is we all know that the Democrats haven’t done enough to basically make a moral repair for what they did in the 90s through things like NAFTA, what they did in the 2010s through not making people who had their homes stolen from them whole.
So here’s this guy Biden with all his flaws. He says, “I’m going to do this, this, and this. I’m going to nominate a national labor relations board members that are going to let people organize instead of letting companies break the rules. I’m going to appoint ahead to the Federal Trade Commission that’s going to break up monopolies.” And if they just hear the left say, “Well, these guys are both neoliberals.” Why should they even try?
Stephen Janis:
Can I just ask you a really quick question though? And you bring this up and it’s so important. Why don’t those policy, let’s say wins, ever permeate the consciousness of-
Rick:
That’s what I’ve been agonizing over the last few weeks. I think a lot of it is the 50-year history almost coming on 50 years of Ronald Reagan, the best rhetorician and best con man that we’ve ever had in the Oval Office, persuading people that I’m from the government and I’m here to help are the most dangerous words in the language. I think a lot of it is serial betrayals by the Democratic Party. You say you’re for us, but you’re not for us. A lot of it is the media where a young woman can be interviewed and say something that’s an outright falsehood and it’ll just be taken as a horse phrase comment about whether young people are for the Democrats or the Republicans.
It’s all these things put together and the project of making… And people don’t even really conceptualize that when they vote, they’re hiring someone who’s an administrator who has to be able to administrate. Donald Trump, there’s a study that said basically if America had had the same, and they had a conservative government too in Australia, if we had the same Covid policies that Australia had, we would’ve had 900,000 people alive today. That’s like genocide levels of death caused by Donald Trump’s incompetence. Well, it’s one of these bicycle chain things. It’s like none of the old stories signify anymore. We are in a moment of true, true centuries… Once every several centuries, historical chaos, confusion, system collapse.
So there’s no like, “Oh, I see… Joe Biden needs to say this. They need to run this commercial, they need to do this policy. They need to say this about the Republicans.” No, no, no. There’s no easy answers like this guys.
Stephen Janis:
I mean, to your point, a lot of legal experts said that Trump had a way to win that trial in the sense that there’s a serious level of incompetency there and they didn’t win it because they didn’t take a really good-
Rick:
And they’re bringing in the competent guys for the second term.
Stephen Janis:
Go ahead, Taya, sorry. Sorry, sorry. But thank you Rick. Thank you Rick, thank you. That was really…
Taya Graham:
No, that was terrific. I just wanted to give Laura a chance to jump in. I’ve been wondering, especially when Stephen was talking about that sort of tough on crime rhetoric that the Republican Party was known for. Just from your reporting, how do you think conservative folks are going to reconcile the sort of Back The Blue rhetoric now that some of the attacks coming from the Trump side are headed towards law enforcement? How do you think they’re going to handle that?
Laura:
Well, they haven’t been forced to address any of their hypocrisy.
Rick:
They’re fascists.
Laura:
They for the last many decades of running-
Rick:
Just doesn’t matter.
Laura:
Again, we’re kind of dreaming if we think that they’re going to be caught in a hypocrisy, they’re not. They’re just going to say both sides of their mouths work, right? And they speak out of both of them. And let’s not forget that Donald Trump called for the killing, the execution of the exonerated five Central Park jogger case.
Stephen Janis:
Very good point.
Laura:
He would be the first to be strung up, it seems to me if one, were actually to hang people for hypocrisy, but we don’t believe in that and we’re not going to do that.
We have two different scenarios going on, and I’m just going to say you were right Max, you mentioned at the very beginning that there was a danger that the Democrats, people called out the danger that the Democrats might spend their first term, Biden’s first term, simply focusing on Russian bots and the Russian threat and conspiracy and this and that and trials and hearings and all the rest of it. We’re still doing it. We’re still focusing on the legal proceedings against Donald Trump when what we need to be doing is expanding our lens. And as Rick just pointed out, looking at the historic moment that we are in, we are not an isolated country.
You just saw the European elections where the right made thumping gains. That right in Europe is working closely with the right in this country. We may talk internationalism, but the right practices it, I think a whole lot better than we do, in the same way we may talk intersectionalism, but that project 2025 project that Rick talked about, the plan of action from the Heritage Foundation, that will assure that whoever comes into office next on the right will have a plan of action for every department and some people ready to be employed to implement it on day one. We may talk intersectional, they practice life, they do intersectional politics, they plan, they think systemically.
What we need to do I think is step back and say, look, it may pain us, it pains us, probably to credit Joe Biden with anything vaguely progressive. We don’t have to, the gains that have been made in this country, the progressive initiatives that we have seen happen under a Biden administration, such as the one that Rick just mentioned about Medicare debt. But you can look at some of the others in the Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue and Recovery or Recovery and Reinvestment Act, that walking on the picket line with the autoworkers, what we’ve seen in the way of student debt relief, that didn’t come from no place, that came from that Bernie wing of the Democratic Party and the movement mobilized in that election.
Biden’s a politician, he read the writing on the wall and he ran on a platform that he thought he could get away with and then implemented a whole lot of policies that I think we have to give him some credit. But we can claim also for our movements as having pushed that to the front and to the fore. And we need to look at the way that we think about politics as again, not about the people, but about the movements, not about the individual man, but about the movements and the moment that we’re in and the scope of history. The changes we’re seeking don’t happen overnight with one administration or another.
So I don’t know, I spoke to Angela Davis about this election and she said, “Voting isn’t a valentine. It is an act on behalf of a class interest and an interest to be able to organize.”
And I think that where we are right now is a time when we have to really focus at what is at stake and be very, very clear. On the one hand is an anti-democratic rising on the right that is international, globally organized, strategic, ideologically driven and has a plan. And on the other hand, there’s us and there are some aspects of our movements that I think we are seeing in this moment have a real impact. And some of that is the class-based economy-based movements. Another part is the gender-based movements. And a third part, let’s just talk about, is the anti-colonial movements that we’ve seen mobilizing on campuses against US unconditional support of Israel. That movement, which we’ve seen as simply targeting Netanyahu and Biden’s support for Netanyahu, could be seen as an anti-authoritarian force as well, in the sense that apartheid in Israel is a ipso facto authoritarian thing.
The problem is we don’t have a media that covers politics this way. We have a media that looks at the top of the ticket, the individuals running and fails to communicate to most of us the importance of the power that we have and the many, many elections that are happening around the country that we can have way more impact on than that presidential one. I did a test the other day of asking Google how many people are running for office in this country right now? And the answer came back clearly two, not right.
Stephen Janis:
I really feel-
Laura:
435 seats of Congress, more than half of the Senate, 13 gubernatorial positions, get real folks. Whose interest is it for you to only be looking at those two top of the ticket races.
Taya Graham:
That is such an excellent point.
Stephen Janis:
I really feel like our guests, they’re talking about the irrational relationship between policy and actual voters perceptions is actually why Trump is so strong. Because the entirety of the premise of Trump is irrational in that sense. And he kind of feeds, as Rick and Laura both mentioned, feeds on and Mark too on the irrational injustices that have accumulated over time in this country that are completely at odds with sort of the underlying idea of this country. And so I think, listening to our guests, it’s really Trump’s verdict is part of that process of creating an irrational sense of what’s actually happening. And that disconnect between the voters and policy is probably one of the biggest problems, even though it’s not really sexy in the sense that you’re going to… Go ahead.
Rick:
I think… The social media piece is fascinating because it’s become such an accelerant for the forces of division, atomization. The kind of stuff people in mid-century America wrote books about, people feeling alone and alienated and the right knows that if they move people down Maslow’s hierarchy of Needs and turns them into creatures seeking survival in fight-or-flight mode, they do better. They’re the gun people. They’re the, “We’re our tribe. We’re going to protect ourselves.”
And one of the things that I’ve been saying in my columns, I think I mentioned in my last one, is some of this stuff, they’re only good words for it in the German language because they have the experience with this. When I say trials themselves are on trial, and if Trump wins, it’s a good trial and if Trump loses, it’s a bad trial. There’s a word for that, it’s Fuhrerprinzip. It’s the leadership principle and it’s very simple. Trump’s our guy, he’s good. Everyone else is not our guy, they’re bad. And unfortunately, because we are a movement that moves people up the hierarchy to self-actualization, to self-realization, to reason, to solidarity, to sacrifice on behalf of the common good, we have a harder road to hoe.
But I mean, the word I’m looking for is fascist, here. We are fighting fascists and this kind of derangement information, flood the zone with shit, this kind of thing where every institution that’s independent of the Fuhrer has to be degraded, whether it’s universities.
One of the things I’ve been pointing out, I did a column on the campus protests and I said, one of the things that’s really scary about the response to the protests is that it has joined all sorts of… This is one thing where all sorts of elites have joined together, whether it’s the White House talking about the danger that Jewish students feel, as if Palestinians didn’t feel danger. I interviewed a Palestinian student who had a childhood of basically having, she’d give a speech during high school Islam 101, a small town in Missouri, and people would show up with guns and point their guns at her. Safety, but the response to the protests that joined together, the White House, University presidents, fascist mobs, right? And people in the Senate like Stefanik who are continuing a project that was begun by William F. Buckley in 1950, in his book God and Man and Yale. And when she said, we need to turn universities over to the people who own them, the boards of trustees, and they should decide what gets taught there. This is the opera, is the operant result… They’re making that happen.
University of Indiana, before the protests, the faculty voted a vote of no confidence against the right-wing neoliberal anti-protest, president of that university, 92%. No, they’re saying “The university doesn’t belong to you, teachers.” Doesn’t belong to you people who are trying to raise the levels of humanity, it belongs to the owners. So this is fascism I’m talking about, and the people running the Democratic Party are probably not my favorite people to go in a foxhole with to fight fascism. But I’ve been quoting Frederick Douglas who told black brothers and sisters, it was actually all black brothers then who could vote in the 1880s, the Republican Party probably will sell us out in an instant, but they’re the boat and everything else is the sea.
Mark:
Right? That’s an important quote. It really is an important quote.
Rick:
Everything else is the sea. And let’s talk, like I say on January 20th, they’re hitting the bricks. But we really, really, really have to defeat these guys who talk all the time about physically eliminating us with their guns, which are, they say they have to fight tyranny, and we are the tyrants. They don’t say Biden is the tyrant, but Max Alvarez is okay, he’s a working-class guy. It’s all of us.
Laura:
And democracy itself.
Rick:
And democracy itself. They’re very explicit about that. Reagan was not explicit about that. He would talk in the American Argo, he would talk about how much he loved immigrants. He would talk about how much he loved democracy. He often acted anti-democratically. He acted terribly against all sorts of migrants and refugees. But he talked the talk, at least. These people are doing it with the bark off.
Taya Graham:
Wow. Rick, I actually wanted to hit you with another question. I wanted to make sure OG Skywatch came up here, but I’ll make sure to put their comment on the screen. They reminded me of the article you had done in the American Prospect where you really dug into a topic we wanted to explore, which was the rallying of the elites, in particular, some of the wealthiest elites around the cause of invalidating the jury’s verdict. I mean, you mentioned PayPal founder, David Sachs, Elon Musk, Sean McGuire, and that’s just the short version of the people you reference. I’m just curious-
Rick:
Jamie Dimon is now kind of in the Trump camp.
Stephen Janis:
Wow, really?
Rick:
Yeah.
Taya Graham:
Why do you think some of the wealthiest folks in the country, some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in our country are running to back him? Is it because on some level they want to make sure the criminal justice system doesn’t ever come for them? I’m just curious, why do you think they’re doing that?
Rick:
I mean, unfortunately, I’m not very big on historical parallels. They often don’t work as well as people think they do. But this is one that’s very, very close to what happened in Germany in the 1930s. There was a guy named Fritz Von Papen. He was the Vice Chancellor of Germany when Hitler got to be the Chancellor basically in this minority election, and they had [inaudible 01:07:24] a plurality of the votes and cut a deal and they had guns in the streets. Fritz von Papen said, “We’re going to have Hitler so far on the corner. We’re going to make him squeak.” I call it Von Papenism. Our modern Von Papens are the guys like Jamie Dimon, the guys like Elon Musk who think that they can control this guy, “Oh, he’s not smart. We’re smart.” Money is, every dollar you have is a smart point. I have the most smart points. I’m the smartest guy. And we know that everyone gets into bed with this guy, wakes up with fleas. I mean, ask the former attorney general, the former attorney generals, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, who are now going to be lined up against the wall with me and Max and Biden.
They think they’re smarter than they are. They’re idiots. You can’t have a functioning capitalist economy when you have one guy making all the decisions like a dictator. They’re wrong. They are wrong, but they also have a lot of money and they have a lot of power, and it’s a fucking tragedy.
Taya Graham:
You know what? You make such an excellent point. I love how you said, for every dollar they have, think they’re smarter than us. And you made an excellent point as well, that everyone who’s stepped up and thought, “I’m smarter than Trump, I’m going to control him,” has been-
Stephen Janis:
Has been burned.
Taya Graham:
Has been horribly burned. They have learned their lesson. So, let me… Oh, I’m sorry, go ahead.
Rick:
Some line up for another paddle on the ass. [inaudible 01:08:56] other.
Taya Graham:
Right? Mitt Romney. Ted Cruz.
Stephen Janis:
You can go on forever. No one ever comes out better.
Taya Graham:
Seriously, we could just list them forever.
Stephen Janis:
No one ever comes out better.
Laura:
Michael-
Rick:
[inaudible 01:09:07] Right? It’s kind of like, yeah, he’s a mafia Don, but I’m in the mafia with him. No, you’re not.
Stephen Janis:
For now.
Taya Graham:
Right?
Rick:
For now.
Taya Graham:
Until you’re taken out back.
Stephen Janis:
Right, exactly.
Taya Graham:
So I guess we should turn to Max. We were supposed to make sure to give Max another chance because I really wanted to know how he would react to this idea. There is this thesis from the Trump team that this conviction will actually help his election or even galvanize his supporters. I mean, for regular folks, for folks like us, if we get a felony charge, it affects our ability to get an apartment, to get a job. It hurts us to get a felony charge.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, it’s a badge of honor, now.
Taya Graham:
But for former President Trump, this could actually be a plus. I mean, is that possible?
Max Alvarez:
Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, but only with, again, the sort of de-fanging of the institution itself. If Trump went through what we went through, we’d be having a much different conversation. But the conversation we’ve been having is that he hasn’t and he’s not going to. And so it means something different for him than it means for any of us. As the cases y’all highlighted at the beginning of this live stream really showed.
I mean, every single one of us knows someone who’s been impacted by the criminal justice system, if we ourselves have not. We know how devastating this system can be and is on a daily basis for working people around the world, people who have their cars towed and are suddenly lose their livelihoods and live in a country that is so unkind and so brutal that so many of us are living so close to homelessness.
Right now, the key issue driving boaters and according to all the polls, is not this trial, it’s the cost of living and the availability of housing. And in fact, what we’re seeing, again, at least from political polling, which everyone should take with a pinch of salt, and for all the reasons that we and Rick and Laura have talked about should not take is just the diet. This is what America thinks, right? I mean, but what we are seeing, at least in that polling is that this is not changing people’s opinions about how they’re going to vote. People who feel like both parties have screwed them over and offer nothing for them, still think that way. People who believe in Trump, were going to vote for him anyway, do think that this increases his capital and it make them more likely to vote for him, but they were going to vote for him anyway.
I mean, that again speaks to the problem of, at the core of all this, which is we are not operating on a terrain of shared reality here. And that is why I think the references to Civil War are in fact quite-
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]
Max Alvarez:
References to Civil War are in fact quite apt, right? Because that is what happens when you have a people living within a geographic boundary who are not abiding by the same reality, and in fact, see the other’s reality as a threat to their own. You end up with conflict and violent conflict. That is the way that those things go.
I wanted to just make that point because sadly, a lot of the folks that I have asked, folks that we’ve interviewed who I know are Republican, I’ve just said, “Hey, what are you and your family and your neighbors talking about right now?” This is purely anecdotal. I just say it to say, these are folks who know me, know us, know our work, and I know them and I know their story.
They’re not changing. I mean, even if they know me, even if they know what we fight for, even if they agree with a lot of the economic and political arguments that we make, we have not fundamentally changed the economic and political reality that the rest of us are still living in.
It’s still an idea, whereas the bill that you have to pay at the end of the month, the rent that you have to pay at the beginning of the month, the childcare payments that you have to make, that is not an idea. That is a hard reality that people deal with every single day.
As we mentioned earlier, the more you keep people living close to the bone, close to poverty, close to homelessness in a country that criminalizes poverty, criminalizes homelessness, keeping people at that level is how you ensure that there will always be a right bed for fascistic thinking. It is the boss’s first tool to pitting workers against one another. That is still happening and it’s going to keep happening.
I think that, like Mark said earlier, the way to address that, that we know works, that we’ve seen work is people build solidarity. They get out of these cages in their heads. They stop seeing their fellow workers as their enemy when they are forced to engage in common struggle together and build a solidarity out of that where we are fighting together for something, not just constantly talking about ideas, but actually fight for something and improve each other’s lives and communicate to each other that we care about each other as people.
Because the flip side to what Rick said, about how the rich and powerful think that their dollars translate to smart points, which makes them smarter, is that working people feel the exact same way. Our lack of dollars, our lack of capital translates to a perennial sense that we are worthless, that people like Donald Trump are smarter than us and must know more than we do.
Even though I know by talking and interviewing workers all the time, that so many of them are smarter than Donald Trump. But we live in such a horrible capitalist system that trains us to believe we are worth as little as we are paid, and we deserve the treatment that we get in this unfeeling country. That also contributes to the sense of people wanting to believe in Trump or anyone like that. We need to address that with more than just good ideas. We got to be there where people are, help them fight for better and show them that they deserve more than that and we’re going to be there fighting with them for it.
Stephen Janis:
Now David’s just informed us that we have less than 15 minutes left.
Taya Graham:
Right, right.
Stephen Janis:
Do we want to move to the speed round, and…
Taya Graham:
We may have to take it to a speed round, unfortunately.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, and I think address this issue in terms of what would be the impact, or you go ahead and you do it, but let’s just make sure we get it in so we get everybody…
Taya Graham:
Well, here. Why don’t you start off for Laura?
Stephen Janis:
Well, for the speed, are we doing the speed round?
Taya Graham:
We’ve got to take it to the speed round because we were given our, from our delightful studio director, David Hebden, gave us the 15-minute warning.
Stephen Janis:
Well, so we can just ask, does anyone think that Donald Trump will serve a day in jail? If he does or if he doesn’t, we’ll start with Laura, does it matter and should he be sentenced to anything? Will it have any impact at all of what the criminal justice system actually ends up doing with him? If he gets community service, what should he do? Laura, we’ll start with you.
Laura:
Quick round, props to Alvin Bragg, who is the DA who brought the case against all the odds, was given a lot of grief and did a good job in my view. Now that having been said, no, he’s not going to serve a day in prison and we should stop talking about this case. The court is not going to save us. Organizing is what is required.
Taya Graham:
Preach.
Laura:
Politics, intergenerational, intersectional, long-term, politics is the point right now. Frankly, if I had a media team that had resources of the sort that our network friends have, I would stop covering the trials and start having somebody regularly on the campaign stops that Trump is making. Record what he’s saying, show who’s there, show what’s being sold outside in the parking lot. The public need to see what is being incited in this moment and whom. We need to start talking to some of the people Trump’s talking to. But first and foremost, we’ve got to start seeing one another in this picture instead of focusing simply on this court.
Taya Graham:
So well said.
Stephen Janis:
I mean, when we went to a Trump rally, we saw the militaristic Trump as Rambo, kind of iconic, iconography.
Taya Graham:
But the thing is, despite some of the iconography being a little odd, I actually had…
Stephen Janis:
Odd?
Taya Graham:
… some very nice conversations with the folks outside of the Trump rallies. Even though, let’s say our political viewpoints were different, I felt like we were really able to communicate and understand each other and I feel like I learned a lot. That’s one of the reasons that I’m really excited that we’re going to be going to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this July, because we want to do exactly what you said, Laura. We want to reach out to people, to understand what their concerns are. We’re not just going to be inside the RNC, we’re going to be outside the RNC. We’re going to be going to residents in Milwaukee and asking them their thoughts on the upcoming campaign.
Stephen Janis:
But I mean, Trump with a bazooka was burned into my consciousness.
Taya Graham:
Well, I mean the Rambo one was a little odd.
Stephen Janis:
Very interesting. So should we go?
Taya Graham:
Yes, we’ve got the lightning round. What kind of community service?
Stephen Janis:
Not just, we also been asking about the app, and I think Laura made an excellent point about we got to stop talking about it.
Taya Graham:
I completely agree.
Stephen Janis:
The mainstream media is obsessed with it. But let’s just get, so let’s go to Mark, I guess, and we’ll get Mark.
Taya Graham:
Let’s keep talking.
Stephen Janis:
Mark, so what do you think? Do you think Trump’s going to be sentenced anything? Should he be, should he spend any time in jail? Will that be a factor in the election?
Mark:
I mean, should he spend time in jail? Yes, but who cares because it’s not going to happen.
Stephen Janis:
Okay.
Taya Graham:
Fair enough.
Mark:
If he gets parole, send him to cleaning up all the dog shit in America, let him do that for a few months. Can’t talk to the media, has to pick up dog shit.
But beyond that, I think that the reality is that we face a very grim future if certain forces in America don’t come together and unite to stop it, and that’s the reality. It can happen, but will it happen? I mean, it’s like I said to somebody the other day who’s inside the Democratic Party who I’ve known for a long time. You should take some of those millions and millions of dollars, work with unions, work with communities, hire organizers, make a fight, and build a media campaign that attacks every word that sucker says, and put it out there wide.
You’ve got to take the fight to him, to them. If we don’t fight, we lose. I don’t see us fighting at the moment. That fighting doesn’t mean fighting in the street, but from where I come from, if that happens, it happens. I’m not joking. If it happens, it happens.
But what I’m saying is you take the fight, like in Mississippi when we had COFO and SNCC, you took the fight to the racists and the clan by organizing black people in Mississippi to register and vote and to go out there and walk to the polling places. No matter what the hell happens, you’re going to force them to let you vote or you’re going to go to jail.
Stephen Janis:
Let me ask you a really quick question…
Mark:
Yes.
Stephen Janis:
… Given your basic experience. One of the voters Trump has picked up with is African-American men and has been making these polls seem more favorable to Trump. Why do you think that’s happening?
Mark:
Well, it’s interesting. One of my closest friends in life who I was in the Boy Scouts with, which was a long time ago, when we still had segregation, and I was the white kid in an all black boy scout troop on the east side of Baltimore. This guy was a Black Panther and a leader of the auto workers, and he voted for Trump. We had these long conversations, “Well, why did you vote for Trump?” He’s passed away, it’s about six months ago, one of my closest friends. But he said, “Because the Democrats don’t do anything for us, because they’re not fighting for us, because they don’t care about what happens in our communities. They don’t create jobs. They’re not fighting to help the environment. Let’s get this guy in office, maybe he’ll make it so bad, we’ll get rid of him.” There’s a feeling of people who feel left out have no place else to turn.
Taya Graham:
Yes.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah. To Rick’s point on that.
Mark:
For the Democrats to do it, they’re going to have to come together with unions, community groups, as I just said, and really organize and fight. If we don’t take it to them, we’re going to lose.
Taya Graham:
Mark, I think you made an excellent point, and when you mentioned your friend, there are folks out there who take pretty much an accelerationist view to this, which is we have to show how bad the system is by putting the worst person in charge until people are ready to make a serious change. They’re pretty much on the, they’re beyond incremental change anymore, which unfortunately is what a lot of Democrats have promised. Let’s go to Rick.
Stephen Janis:
I’m afraid to ask him this question actually.
Taya Graham:
Yeah, I’m a little worried about asking Rick this question.
Rick:
I got a good answer. I got a good one.
Stephen Janis:
Okay.
Rick:
I think there’s a better chance than Trump going to jail, that the Governor of New York pardons him because there’s a tradition with the Democratic Party that the more polite we are to the other side, the nicer they’ll be to us.
Taya Graham:
Right.
Rick:
When they go low, we go high.
Stephen Janis:
Yeah, that works.
Rick:
Then also in the next issue of Baffler, me and the historian, Geraldo Cadava, have a piece coming out, interview between the two of us about why minority folks are voting for Republicans. He knows more about this than I do, especially Spanish surname folks. Accelerationists, that’s no way to go when the other side has the guns.
Taya Graham:
Right. I have to agree. I don’t want us to burn it down to make things better.
Stephen Janis:
It’s an interesting distinction. How do you fight without seeming as accelerationist as the Republicans when we fight?
Rick:
Well, you build, right?
Stephen Janis:
But that’s the thing, Rick, what we were talking about. I mean really if you look at the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s a lot of building going on, but people don’t perceive the Democrats as having done anything, or Biden.
Laura:
Biden didn’t sign the checks. Well, Trump signed the checks, the relief checks.
Rick:
Well, I mean, yeah.
Stephen Janis:
That’s right.
Rick:
There’s a shortage of welders now. It’s like if you want a job and you’re working class become a welder and they’re…
Stephen Janis:
And electricians.
Max Alvarez:
The federal government should be putting out job programs to train people to be welders, to take the jobs. They’re not doing it.
Laura:
Big signs that say project brought to you by… One thing I have for the old man as you called him Rick, was why is he up there campaigning on his own? He should be campaigning with his whole cabinet, show who it is that actually is brought into office when we cast a vote in an election. It’s not one person, it’s a whole administration. There may be some bums, may be some good people in there.
Rick:
How about we start a new generation of democratic leaders.
Laura:
Yeah, look at them. Lina Khan. I mean there’s a few good ones out there. There’s some good members of that administration who never get a say in these campaign stops.
Stephen Janis:
Good point.
Laura:
I think that’s what I wish I could see is a “we” campaign. It’s a whole bunch of people we bring into office when we cost that vote.
Stephen Janis:
Great point.
Taya Graham:
That’s an excellent point.
Stephen Janis:
The last person is Max on this lightning round. We mean lightning, Max, which means fast.
Max Alvarez:
I wholeheartedly agree with what everyone has said and I’ve talked enough, so I’ll see you tomorrow.
Taya Graham:
Oh, okay.
Stephen Janis:
Okay.
Taya Graham:
That was unexpected.
Stephen Janis:
That was interesting.
Taya Graham:
Well, on that note, I want to thank all of the wonderful guests.
Stephen Janis:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
For their insightful answers and critical context that they shared with us to understand this historic moment. Certainly I’ve learned a lot and the opinions offered during this live stream have prompted me to reconsider the verdict in ways that I hadn’t before.
Stephen Janis:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
That to me, this is what the Real News is all about, and that’s why we work so hard to produce these types of shows and feature these wonderful thinkers. Now Stephen, I’m going to give you one last chance to say something. Given some of the ideas raised in this discussion, what’s your big takeaway or final thoughts? Is there anything else you want to share?
Stephen Janis:
Well, we have to weaponize being rational as much as the right can weaponize fear. But I think one of the operative things you see in bad policing and bad law enforcement is that law enforcement has a rhetorical ability to appeal to fear and fear makes us irrational. I think all our guests pointed out how much the right and the Republicans have used fear and irrationality to be effectively politic.
What I would hope we would be able to do is somehow counter that. But it’s very hard to counter. It’s very hard to counter when, as Rick pointed out, you have someone fearful, isolated, lonely on their computer, feeling like no one cares about them. That’s a hard thing to fight in the political arena, especially when you have someone like Biden who’s not the greatest communicator in the world.
I think we should focus on that and coming up with a rhetorical platform to be able to see things are changing on some level and that has to be communicated and understood. That’s where I am.
Taya Graham:
Well, before I give my final thoughts, I just want to throw a few comments on the screen. I wanted to share Lori McNamara who said, “Not putting him in jail tells every other criminal politician that they can go right ahead and do exactly what he did. Take over your entire country by telling lies and lies and more lies.”
I also wanted to add Buckaroo Bonsai, I think who was responding to our talking about solidarity. He said, “All one or all none,” and that was on the Dr. Bronner’s soap bottles. I don’t know if you’ve ever used the Dr. Bronner’s soap.
Stephen Janis:
I have not.
Taya Graham:
I also just want to say hi to Nola D out there as well.
Stephen Janis:
Hi Nola. How are you?
Taya Graham:
Thank you. We appreciate you. All right, so now I’m going to get to some final thoughts and I also just want to thank everybody for being in the chat. It’s been very lively and I wish I could have put more of your comments on screen.
Let me share just a few things for all of us to consider. However, you feel about Trump, the fallout from his criminal conviction falls into the same pattern as his other legal troubles and predicament. It seems, regardless of what he does says or what norms he challenges, to put it mildly, there are always two camps of thought that are stubborn.
One camp that holds him infallible and the other camp that finds him irredeemable. What is lost in the conversation is us, the people who truly suffer the consequences of these flawed institutions. The problems with the system so to speak, always seem to center around him, his power, his ambition, and his efforts to save himself. That’s what troubles me about all the controversy over this conviction and what it says about our criminal justice system.
It’s a debate, if not a purposeful and divisive distraction that focuses on the fate of a single man, one individual, and one person who by most measures has been incredibly lucky and the beneficiary of a system that is often intrinsically unfair to the rest of us. I mean by his own account, he is a billionaire. He lives an incredibly lavish lifestyle. He’s afforded the best legal representation and has had the freedom to blast the judges and prosecutors like no other defendant I have covered.
He has been, up until this point, nearly untouchable. At the very least, a recipient of the generous varieties of material comfort and social capital afforded only the most elite of the elites. My thoughts about Trump have much to do with that aspect of his predicament. He’s an elite. He like his fellow billionaires, have been afforded an unjust share of the largesse of a decadent society.
With all that, he seems to be concerned about the criminal justice system only through the lens of his personal tribulations. I mean, he wants us to take to the streets to protect his right to take a business deduction for paying off a mistress the amount, nearly four times the yearly wage of the average working person. He wants us to tear apart the system so he can be exempt from it.
He’s not alone. I mean, isn’t this true with the rest of the elites in this country with their supersized yachts and private islands and underground survivalist bunkers? They have the extravagant lifestyles of literal kings and queens. Do they also want to be exempt from a predatory healthcare system? Do they worry that social security won’t be there for them when they retire? I don’t think so, but I do. I worry.
I mean, I guess the question would be, why can’t the elites get to experience the unfairness of the system and the injustice the rest of us live with every day? It might be good for them, make them a little less aloof and maybe the next time they would really hear us when we cry out for help or for justice. This goes for the system that bolsters the inequality, that makes them so powerful and so contemptuous of it. When that system bends and actually contorts towards them, they claim it’s unfair and biased. When it comes for us and the working class people we feature on our show, it’s just a result of a process that has rightly condemned, the least powerful among us.
I would offer this caveat when we think about the trial, the verdict, the fallout, and perhaps the impact on the election. Yes, the criminal justice system is flawed, in obvious and in some opaque ways. Yes, it can be capricious and used to retaliate and squash dissent. Yes, it is often more harmful than the crimes and transgressions it purports to redress. I mean, we have both witnessed its destructive tendencies firsthand.
But let’s just make sure that we’re fixing it for all of us and let’s focus on reforming it for the people who can’t hire expensive lawyers and have a pulpit surrounded by media. Let’s critique reform and overhaul the system for the people, not just the powerful. Let’s fix it for everyone, not so that a single individual can take a tax deduction that most of us could only dream of.
All right, that’s it. That’s it for me.
Stephen Janis:
Excellent. Thank you.
Taya Graham:
I want to thank our guests, Laura Flanders, for taking the time to speak with us. Thank you so much, Laura, and I hope everyone watching will take a moment and go to subscribe to the Laura Flanders and Friends channel…
Stephen Janis:
Absolutely.
Taya Graham:
… Which should be tagged in the description below. Of course, I want to thank Rick Perlstein for his time. I wish I had more time to draw on your experience from a historical perspective. I really appreciate you being here.
Of course, we’ve got to thank our Real News colleagues, Maximillian Alvarez and Mark Steiner for joining us. To everyone help make the stream possible, including David Hebden, Jocelyn, Kayla, Cameron, James and Ju-Hyun. Thank you so much for helping us keep it on track.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you.
Taya Graham:
Of course, I have to thank my colleague Stephen Janis.
Stephen Janis:
You’re welcome.
Taya Graham:
For hosting this live stream with me. It’s always great to get you off your investigative beat on the street.
Stephen Janis:
Yes.
Taya Graham:
And indoors to report.
Stephen Janis:
Grateful, I am grateful.
Taya Graham:
Thank you Stephen.
Stephen Janis:
Thank you and thanks to all the guests. They were wonderful.
Taya Graham:
I want to thank everyone who participated in today’s chat. Thank you for helping us have a productive conversation. I hope you’ll take a moment to leave a comment and a like, and we always appreciate hearing your thoughts. My name is Taya Graham, and thank you so much for joining me this evening. Take care.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
