Donald Trump Is a Terrorist Attack on America
As Trump continues to threaten public officials and attempt to overturn the election results, he puts at stake not only our nation’s political future, but the literal survival of its citizens. More Americans are projected to die from the Covid-19 pandemic than died during World War II. The majority of those deaths were preventable. Americans are not dying: they are being killed by the malice and failures of their own government.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling books; The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
We are so excited about Georgia because we have an extremely good chance of taking back the Senate and liberating our country from Mitch McConnell, and therefore building and strengthening the democracy we all so desperately need in this moment of several crises, from climate change to an income inequality hitting us at once. So, please, understand that we don't turn Georgia blue unless we show up for each other and do the work, and I'm asking you to please join me, join my dad [laughs], in making phone calls to get out the vote in Georgia because it is that time.
Andrea Chalupa:
We have two very different futures standing before us and we need to seize the one that's going to create a freer and fairer democracy for all. So, fight like hell. What you need to do is go to the official websites of Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock, donate what you can, please sign up to make phone calls and send text messages to get out to vote in Georgia. You can do that by going to the very top link we're going to share in the show notes for this episode on our weekly Patreon page, where we publish every episode that comes out.
Andrea Chalupa:
Please join us in doing the Save Humanity From Mitch McConnell Gaslit Nation Challenge, where we're asking you to make 1,000 calls, 1,000 texts to Georgia by January 5th, Election Day, tell us on Twitter @gaslitnation—tweet at us—about how you're getting out to vote for Georgia, and we're going to select three winners from the submissions we get, and those three winners will be invited on the show in the new year, and you'll also each get a signed copy of Sarah's book, Hiding in Plain Sight, and a movie poster of Mr. Jones signed by me.
Andrea Chalupa:
Understand that if you are new to making phone calls or sending texts, that can seem daunting. What grounds me every morning when I show up to make my calls for Georgia is that I think about love. I focus on love. In every intimidating situation I've ever entered, I've always grounded myself in love. Love is the mantra in my head. And I think, what do I love? I love democracy. I love human rights. I love environmental justice. So, I'm coming to this with love, and I'm full of love and my voice is going to exude love, and that's what I do. It's a meditation of love.
Andrea Chalupa:
You turn around an intimidating situation into a positive, an inspired and uplifting one, that gives you energy for the rest of the day. I promise you, join us in this meditation of love, and you're connecting with so many people across the country right now, and so many Georgians across their state fighting like hell to preserve and strengthen our democracy and we can do it; we can sideline Mitch McConnell. And how glorious will that feel for all the world?
Andrea Chalupa:
All right, please be like this woman who Sarah discovered on Twitter, she goes by @Afrosabi on Twitter. That's her account. She went door knocking in Georgia and this is what she discovered from that experience.
@Afrosabi:
Okay, so yeah, I'm out here canvassing today with the Yang gang. They cut me some ultra white turf. I'm not used to talking to all these white people out here, but I'm giving it my best try, and a couple of people I talked to were Republicans, and they're voting for Ossoff and Warnock. What's getting them is the corruption, and they feel like... one said Loeffler is so rich, why does she even want to be a senator? I'm not going to argue with them, because I'm like, yeah, vote for Warnock and Ossoff. But, maybe to get some of these Republicans to vote for our guys, we're going to have to hammer that corruption angle, because that's what's really getting them mad. So, let me go knock on these rest of these doors.
Andrea Chalupa:
Corruption, fighting corruption, confronting it, is the name of the game. Of course, Georgia is a key battleground state of fighting corruption. As we were reminded in the recent senate debates on Sunday night—which got quite weird—Jon Ossoff debated an empty podium when David Perdue refused to debate after the humiliation Ossoff put him through the last time. Here's a clip of Jon Ossoff literally debating an empty podium.
Russ Spencer:
Perdue declined to participate. Jon Ossoff, you may now ask the question that you would have asked him and answer that question yourself. You have 90 seconds.
Jon Ossoff:
I appreciate that. Well, it's a strange situation to be asking a question of a sitting United States senator, who is not here to debate as he asks for the votes of the people to be reelected. Senator Perdue, I suppose, doesn't feel that he can handle himself in debate, or perhaps he’s concerned that he may incriminate himself in debate, both of which, in my opinion, are disqualifying for a US senator seeking reelection. He may not wish to be asked questions, for example, about his trades in Regions Bank while he championed legislation to benefit the firm, or his trading of defense contractor stocks while he directed taxpayer dollars to them.
Jon Ossoff:
But whatever the reason that Senator Perdue is not with us today, I think what I would ask him is, why he continues to oppose $1,200 stimulus checks for the American people at this moment of crisis, why he fought against them in the first place, and why he isn't in Washington right now championing direct financial relief—stimulus checks—directly for an American people who are suffering? If I had the opportunity to ask the senator a question, if the senator were not too much of a coward to debate in public, then that's what I'd ask him.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, we have Reverend Raphael Warnock who debated a mannequin, as Kelly Loeffler—the richest person in the senate±spent the debate with a blank look on her face and repeating a series of Fox News buzzwords, like “socialism” and “radical”, over and over again. Here's a clip of Raphael Warnock doing his best to debate a mannequin.
Raphael Warnock:
Regarding the coronavirus pandemic, you dumped millions of dollars of stock in order to protect your own investments, and then weeks later, when there came an opportunity to give ordinary Georgians an extra $600 of relief, you said you saw no need and called it counterproductive. Why do you think it's counterproductive to help ordinary Georgians in the middle of a pandemic?
Andrea Chalupa:
We want to remind you that both Perdue and Loeffler should be under investigation for insider trading. They both dumped a bunch of stock when they had a privileged, private briefing on the coming COVID pandemic, and this is corruption, plain and simple. They should not be in the US Senate. They do not represent the everyday American people. They are criminally corrupt, and we need to remove them from power. We absolutely do. And it's the people, it's us making these phone calls, who are going to hold them accountable. So, please join us in doing that.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right. Well, thank you for that update, Andrea, and now we are back to the coup. We are now on week five of the attempted coup. I remember when I used to say this at the beginning of our coronavirus episodes, we would begin a show saying we were on week five of the coronavirus crisis until coronavirus became a thing that was just not going away, and in fact went on to restructure our daily lives.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm worried to some extent that the same will happen with the attempted coup. People keep asking if Trump is winning or losing the coup. It's become a normal question to ask, a question that is as much a sign of these American times as it is the potential answer. Ironically, it's become a normal question from the very same people who initially denied the possibility of Trump not conceding, who insisted that such a thing could never happen in America, that surely shame or facts or protocol would constrain him, but of course it doesn't.
Sarah Kendzior:
Some officials have managed to constrain him and to honor the will of the voters. Trump has lost nearly all 50 court battles that he's pursued, and bureaucrats, like Emily Murphy, ultimately stopped blocking Biden's transition. But you should take this moment in history very seriously, not only for what may happen, but for what has already happened. The United States will never again be able to say that it is a country that always practices the peaceful transfer of power. It will never again be able to say that its candidates concede when they are defeated, and that they do not resort to tactics of violence and intimidation to harness an illegitimate takeover. Americans will never be able to look at attempted coups in other countries and say, “That can't happen here.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Americans should have never said that in the first place. So what does lie ahead? We don't know. Gaslit Nation is known for predicting the future, but the reason we are able to do that is because Trump follows a standard autocratic playbook. He also announces his moves in advance. He announced he would not accept the results of the 2020 election for months before the election took place—that is, accept them if he lost—and he said in 2016 that he would not accept a loss in that election either. That is how he operates.
Sarah Kendzior:
In my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, I described Trump's earliest presidential run in 1988 and how he refused to stay in the race for president unless he believed his win was preordained. Trump has always been the same person, and one of the biggest mysteries remains why officials did not speak out against this obvious national security threat when they had the chance.
Sarah Kendzior:
An aspiring autocrat’s tactics are easy to predict, particularly one who has been in the public eye for 40 years. What is far more difficult to predict is how ordinary people react to the aspiring autocrat. So far, we've seen a wide range of reactions; the horrifying acquiescence of the GOP, who have largely refused to acknowledge Biden's win, and who have in some cases encouraged violence in Trump's name. The Republican Party of Arizona, for example, was doing that this morning, on Tuesday morning. Their rabid obedience should frighten you.
Sarah Kendzior:
We've also seen a lot of strange activity involving the military, from firings at the DoD and strange activity in the Middle East (which we covered on past recent episodes of Gaslit Nation) to new forms of sabotage at the Pentagon. Last week, Trump refused to allow members of Biden's transition team to meet with officials at Pentagon-controlled US intelligence agencies. The Washington Post has described the sabotage, which seems both an indicator that Trump has no intention of handing over power and may attempt to use the military to hold on to that power, as “a national security threat”.
Sarah Kendzior:
Even assuming that Biden takes over in January, the Trump blockade leaves the Biden team unprepared to handle threats from hostile states, which are of course watching this play out with great interest. But the news isn't entirely grim. We've seen a number of officials fighting back in courts where judges have rejected Trump's baseless claims. We've seen bureaucrats in states like Georgia and Michigan fighting back, even though Trump's goon squad is trying to threaten them into submission.
Sarah Kendzior:
It is good to see people doing their job, but that job should not come at the cost of threats to their lives, and that sacrifice should never be minimized. The threat will grow more intense as Trump's court losses continue to mount and his violent lackeys, like Michael Flynn, spread conspiracy theories and encourage vengeance, an occult of victimhood. Trump's base has been fairly quiet, and here I want to make a firm distinction between his fanatical base and his voters.
Sarah Kendzior:
According to polls, the vast majority of the people who voted for Trump recognize that he lost, but the base may resort to different tactics as Trump's odds of retaining the White House get smaller and their feeling of desperation grows. Adding to this crisis is a culture of timidity among the Democrats, who largely refuse to discuss what's happening in plain terms. The Democrats’ initial approach was to ignore Trump's attempted coup and to concentrate on cabinet picks, policies, and presenting Biden to the public as President-elect.
Sarah Kendzior:
This was not a bad move, and it was the right thing to do at the time to allow the public to adjust to the new reality. But when public officials are being routinely threatened with violence, elected officials need to do more than look the other way. We can all see this happening. People do not feel safe, and the lack of leadership from the Democrats opens a chasm for Trump to insert his vicious demagoguery and to contort the narrative, taking advantage of their timidity to speak the truth just as he has done over the past four years.
Sarah Kendzior:
Democrats need to talk with the American public about what is happening and establish that it is not normal or acceptable, and say that they are going to fight back. Trump's actions are putting American lives at risk. This is not something that can be dismissed as a partisan game or as a private grift. This goes so far beyond politics. It is about survival, particularly in a time of the pandemic, and that is what people must stress in plain terms. Trump's lawlessness is and always was a threat to American survival.
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Andrea Chalupa:
Which brings us to the COVID pandemic, where it's projected that around 400,000 Americans will die from COVID-19 by the end of January. That's around the same number of Americans total that were killed in World War II. So I guess the Nazi analogy is fitting.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now we have a horrific story out of Florida (of course, where else?)—the aspiring autocracy of Florida—where Rebekah Jones, the former Florida Department of Health data scientist who refused to cover up the COVID outbreak data in Florida was raided by Florida State Police under Governor DeSantis on Monday morning. Here's her Twitter thread followed by audio of a video she posted of the raid. I'm going to read from this now.
Andrea Chalupa:
“At 8:30 AM this morning, State Police came into my house and took all my hardware and tech. They were serving a warrant on my computer after the Department of Health filed a complaint. They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids. They took my phone and the computer I use every day to post the case numbers in Florida and school cases for the entire country. They took evidence of corruption at the state level, they claimed it was about a security breach. This was DeSantis. He sent the Gestapo.
Andrea Chalupa:
“This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly. This is what happens to people who speak truth to power. I tell them my husband, my two children, are upstairs, and then one of them draws his gun on my children. This is DeSantis's Florida. If DeSantis thought pointing a gun in my face was a good way to get me to shut up, he's about to learn just how wrong he was. I'll have a new computer tomorrow, and then I'm going to get back to work. If you want to help, my website is still at floridacovidaction.com.”
Andrea Chalupa:
What she's been accused of by officials in Florida is essentially hacking into a government system, and she's claiming that's a false allegation, and that she's being framed, and what they're really after in seizing her phone and laptop were the sources, the names of the state government workers who are whistleblowers, who are privately sending her information about how truly bad it is, the COVID outbreak in Florida. This is classic Gestapo tactics. Officials showing up at an activist's house—an independent journalist's house—is common practice in Putin's Russia.
Andrea Chalupa:
Coming in and demanding to know who else are you working with, or demanding to get a list of names that that activist or that independent journalist may be working with, that's classic Gestapo, right? They want to map the resistance. They want to know who's who, because that's how you take down the solidarity network. What this was, was a Gestapo-like harassment tactic that's attempting to take down the solidarity network in Florida that is confronting government corruption and criminal negligence. This is extraordinarily dangerous. As I said, home raids are a tactic used in Russia to harass journalists and Kremlin critics. One journalist was harassed so often she finally committed suicide. From Reuters: “Russian rights groups called on authorities to stop using home searches as a tactic to intimidate opponents after a journalist set herself on fire, following a police raid of her apartment.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Irina Slavina, Editor in Chief at a small news outlet in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, self-immolated in front of the local branch of the Interior Ministry in Nizhny Novgorod last Friday after blaming Russian authorities for her death in a Facebook post. A day before her death, investigators and police had searched her apartment for materials linked to the open Russia opposition group which is financed by Kremlin critic, Michael Kotowski.
Andrea Chalupa:
Obviously, Rebekah Jones has a lot more recourse here than those like her in Russia. She's a regular on TV News shows, for instance, where she can share her story. She did so on Chris Cuomo's show on CNN that night of the police raid. What's clearly disturbing here is that the growing autocracy of the Republican Party, along with the white supremacy terrorism found in the Republican base, is the greatest threat to our democracy. Putin's aggression is only taking advantage of a homegrown threat. There's a reason why Putin's Kremlin and Trump's Republican Party are such a great fit; they share the same values, the same materialism and the same contempt for democracy and truth.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, exactly. There's been this temptation throughout both the attempted coup and through the handling of the pandemic to say, “Oh, Trump is just pulling a grift, oh, he's just doing a heist”, as if that's normal, as if that's acceptable. I remember early in the pandemic, the argument was, “They're going to let grandma die for the stock market”, and it was meant to show, to some extent, their cruelty, but with this element of pragmatism to it. They're so committed to the free market. They're so committed to a booming economy that they put it above human life.
Sarah Kendzior:
But what that was, was a cover for the death cult, for the absolute annihilatory goals that they have for this country. We are not just trying to survive the pandemic, we are trying to survive Trump. We are trying to survive the GOP. We are trying to survive people who have attacked anybody who tries to preserve the life and the health and prevent the suffering of American people, whether it's researchers like Jones, whether it's doctors and nurses who have been attacked. This is...
Sarah Kendzior:
I sometimes lose the words to describe what I'm feeling, because it is just so incredibly painful and cruel, and it is so immediate. Where I am in St. Louis, the hospitals are basically at capacity. They've filled the children's hospital with adults, which they've never had to do before in the long history of that hospital. The ICUs are filled. They are filled largely by people from surrounding counties where there is no mask mandate, because we are one of 13 states that doesn't have a mask mandate. We have a GOP governor who just does Trump's bidding.
Sarah Kendzior:
Where I live in St. Louis County, there has been a mandate since March and they've handled things differently. I don't resent those people being sick in the hospital in my county. I feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for their families. I sometimes see this really spiteful behavior on social media and elsewhere, they'll find somebody who denied that COVID exists, said it was a hoax, and then they'll find a post a couple of months later where they're in the hospital, and then they'll announce that they died.
Sarah Kendzior:
They do it with a spiteful glee, like that's what you get. But this is not what anyone deserves. There's no one who deserves this. Everyone has dependents. Everyone has people who love them. Everyone is a human being. It's not for us to decide who stays or goes and it is not for Trump and his apocalyptic death squad to decide who stays or goes either. But that's the condition that we're in. When you don't fight this on the political basis—when you don't fight the aspiring autocracy, the mafia state tactics, the just brutality of it—what you end up with is a public health crisis of a catastrophic level that we have simply never seen in this country.
Sarah Kendzior:
An example of this from yesterday, this is just the breaking news alert from the New York Times who broke this story: “Trump administration officials passed when Pfizer offered in the summer to sell the US more coronavirus vaccine doses. People familiar with the matter said now Pfizer may not be able to provide more doses to the United States until June.” Just to flesh this out a little: I still refuse to subscribe to the Times because they are high brow Breitbart. This is from the Philadelphia Inquirer, who I like: “The Trump administration”—it repeats this—”opted last summer not to lock into a chance to buy millions of additional doses of one of the leading coronavirus vaccine contenders, a decision that could delay the delivery of a second batch of doses until manufacturer, Pfizer, fulfills other international contracts.
Sarah Kendzior:
“The revelation, confirmed Monday, came a day before Trump aimed to take credit for the speedy development of forthcoming coronavirus vaccines at a White House Summit on Tuesday. Pfizer's vaccine is expected to be endorsed by the FDA, advisors as soon as this week, with delivery of 100 million doses enough for 50 million Americans expected in coming months. Under its contract with Pfizer, the Trump administration committed to buy an initial 100 million doses with an option to purchase as many as five times more, which they refuse to do.”
Sarah Kendzior:
You guys know that Andrea and I are both mothers. Andrea has been recording this podcast with the toddler by her side. So, give her credit for that. And I've been recording this as my children go to Zoom school, as my children exist in an online reality, as they have since March. Yesterday, my son, who’s almost 10 years old, he saw that headline. He saw that Pfizer headline pop up as an alert.
Sarah Kendzior:
He knows what Trump's about, in part because I'm his mother, but in part because it's just so incredibly obvious that a 10-year-old can figure out that this is an aspiring autocrat, and a 10-year-old could figure out that this is a sociopath. But what he was holding onto was the hope of this vaccine. He knows that it's not coming immediately, and he knows that the priority should be first responders; doctors, teachers, people working in grocery stores, postal workers, everybody who has had to deal with the trauma and the threat to their health firsthand.
Sarah Kendzior:
He knows it would be a while for anyone in our immediate family to get this anyway. But the fact that his own president—the only president he can ever remember, he's ever known as an American child—would turn away the vaccine, would turn it away, so that so fewer people have the chance to be protected, that so many more people will die at a time where people are already dying... It's a hard thing. It's a hard thing to discuss with your children.
Sarah Kendzior:
Children are resilient people and I think a child born in the Trump era is particularly resilient. I think a child born in St. Louis is particularly resilient. But there's only so much you can take as a kid, as a mother, and I'm also seeing just people, they've hit the end of the line. I see doctors on Twitter struggling as the hospitals reach capacity, as they have to pronounce so many people dead every day, and people refusing to comply with just the most rudimentary precautions, like wearing a mask.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm just... I don't know. I know I'm going on and on, but I just want to say this, like as a Missourian, I live in a state where people don't want to wear masks, and I live in a state where they say they don't want to wear masks because they're afraid of fascism. It's the most ironic position because I, too, am very afraid of fascism. I'm afraid of government control. I'm afraid of a vaccine that's not implemented with proper safety precautions. I'm afraid of being tracked. I'm afraid of having my health data made public. I think all those concerns that people are bringing up are rational and I think that a way to get people to comply with public health initiatives is not to laugh at them or dismiss them, and certainly not to mock their death when they don't comply, but to take on those concerns and debunk the ones that are fatuous, that have no basis in reality.
Sarah Kendzior:
Of course, one of the main ones is wearing a mask. It's a piece of cloth over your face. It's factual, it keeps germs from coming out of your mouth. It keeps germs from coming out of other people's mouth, therefore, you don't spread the germs. I blame everyone for this. I obviously blame President Let's Drink Bleach, but I also blame Fauci, who initially said not to wear masks. I blame Democratic officials, who have often refused to wear masks in public, obviously, the GOP for not wearing their mask, for not modeling behavior, for acting as if they're above it all, having their little fancy dinners, going out and getting their hair done, whatever it is they're doing. I mean, it's just shameful.
Sarah Kendzior:
We're losing so many lives. It's just overwhelming. It's overwhelming for anyone's heart to take. It breaks you at a point, and I'll just end it there.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, it's the deaths and it's also the long term damage that COVID does to the survivors. I was talking to a woman today who got it back in March. She's in her '60s and she's still to this day, all these months later, seeing a neurologist and seeing a pulmonologist for all of the lingering conditions. She said to me, she's like, "I'm never going to get better. I'm going to be living with this for the rest of my life." COVID is ravaging our country and it continues to ravage the survivors of it. So, take this extremely seriously. Be hyper vigilant. Be overly cautious, especially in these coming months. It's going to be a while. 2021 will still be an incredibly rough year, and we just have to hold on to each other the best we can, even if it's socially distanced, and supporting one another and working within our communities and doing what we can to stay engaged, and staying healthy.
Andrea Chalupa:
We've got a lot on the Gaslit Nation Action Guide that's just about feeling connected to one another, and books to read to help uplift each other. So, please check that out for some hope during what's going to be still a darker, darker period to come. I want everyone to remember as this plays out, don't lose sight of the fact that Donald Trump is a terrorist attack against our nation. If you look at how staggeringly disrespectful Trump is to practically everyone, everyone, leading experts, leading experts like Dr. Fauci, who are on the front line of keeping Americans safe. This man is an assault on basic decency.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yet, when you saw him walking to the podium and speaking at the podium with a mass murderer, Vladimir Putin, I've never ever seen Trump so deferential to anyone, where he felt... He looked to Putin as though he was like a baby at the bosom, like he was finally in the presence of somebody he felt safe with, that he felt protected by.
Andrea Chalupa:
Image speaks so much louder than words, and we know from their own admission, from the Trump kids telling us that they’ve relied, all these years, on Russian money. When you see the Mueller Report, which is a giant map of all of these Kremlin cutouts and these Trump lackeys moving around in this network of plausible deniability, where they worked together to engineer a hijacking of our democracy in 2016: Donald Trump is a terrorist attack. What he is doing is what he intended to do all along. He was never a president for America.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you wonder how so many people can follow him, it's the same answer to how so many Russians can follow Putin. It's been propaganda and disinformation all along. Russia, under Putin, is a dying country. It is a dying country, and yet Russians continue—many of them—continue to support Putin and they're brainwashed. When I talk to Russian opposition activists, and I look at them, I'm like... Obviously, this is before Trump, before we had our own wannabe mini mini Putin, but for years; 2013 2014, I'd ask my Russian friends, what's going on with your country? How do so many people fall under Putin's spell? They just say, "They're brainwashed.” You would not imagine the level of propaganda and how inescapable it is inside Russia, and how it’s just permeated the country and turned people against each other.
Andrea Chalupa:
They really believe all the threats of the United States and of so called fascists in Ukraine and so on, that they get pumped full of, just like they do with Fox News and One America Network and Newsmax and Breitbart, and all of it. Disinformation, propaganda, it brainwashes. It creates a cult. And now you have the Facebook cult of social media brainwashing through QAnon and others.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's a very dangerous time where the worst of America is being weaponized against those just trying to live in a free and safe country. We're not out of the woods, even when Biden comes in. What's really terrifying to me is how Trump, in his vicious narcissism, is going to do all he can to set up Biden to fail, and that's the big risk here is like, how much destruction is he still going to create on the way out, especially when it comes to this vaccine? How hard is he going to make it for Biden to go out there and finally save American lives? That's a big, big, big nuclear bomb here that he's going to lob at us.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I had notes as you were talking and you just basically read my mind, read my notes, but that is one of the reasons that I am very worried about this attempted coup, not just for the threat to democracy, not just for the precedent that it creates, but because of the implementation of the vaccine, because that is a core existential question. Who do you want administering this vaccine? The Biden administration or the Trump administration?
Sarah Kendzior:
You can dislike Biden, dislike his administration as much as you want (and I know that there are plenty of valid critiques of this), but when it comes down to it, what you have is one administration that wants to kill you and profit off of your death, and another one that is attempting to cure you and is attempting to prevent a catastrophe that has cost us hundreds of thousands of lives, has destroyed our economy, has struck fear and trauma into all of us. We would have no chance to heal, in any sense; physically, psychologically, spiritually, anything, if Trump remains in power.
Sarah Kendzior:
We still, even as you said, If Biden gets in, we'll have him at our back. As you said, Trump is a terrorist attack on America, and he needs to be treated as a terrorist attack. You do not ignore a terrorist attack when it happens, you prepare for one and you prepare to protect people. So one thing I am worried about is not just the disinformation aspect of the vaccine, because as I said, I think people are not crazy to be worried about the safety of it, to be worried about side effects, to be worried about trusting the government.
Sarah Kendzior:
You see all sorts of different groups, a lot of black doctors have brought this up, of how there's this long history in the United States of medical maltreatment, from extreme examples like Tuskegee, but just to things like Black women going to a hospital to deliver a baby, having their pain dismissed, having their symptoms dismissed. The same thing happens with Black women and heart attacks. The same thing happens with Black people and health in general, there's medical racism. You see the same racism aimed at Native Americans, another group that has been targeted historically by the US government for medical malice, medical experimentation.
Sarah Kendzior:
You see Latino communities treated often terribly in these situations. It's systemic. And so what people might dismiss as paranoia is actually vigilance. Then on top of that, you have people from states like mine, from Missouri, who are conservatives, Republicans, often unaffiliated, but who tend towards what people would think of as conspiracy theories.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'll just say that part of the reason for that is mistreatment in the medical centers here, not necessarily because doctors have cruel aims towards the white folks of Missouri, but because so many of our hospitals have closed. Rural hospitals have been decimated, so you often get substandard medical care. You often can barely pay for the medical care you have, so by the time you get to the hospital, by the time you go into some sort of emergency room, it's often when the disease got so bad that the idea of “oh my God, I'm going to have to pay for this”, you finally just give in and say, well, my money or my life, I guess it's going to be my money.
Sarah Kendzior:
There's so much resentment built up against our healthcare system that is grounded in rational thinking, not conspiratorial thinking. I recommend you listen to our interview with Timothy Snyder, the author of Our Malady, where he discusses healthcare and freedom, and how the denial of health care has led to the denial of freedom. But it's also led to an attitude towards things like vaccines that it's grown. The less competence and compassion we've seen from our government over the last 20 years or so, and the more that the cost of medical care has risen, the more you see conspiracy theories revolving around things like vaccines. You see the anti-vaxxer movement grow.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, a lot of that comes from purposeful disinformation operations, whether put through by the GOP or conservatives or libertarians in the United States, whether put through by Russia, and agents there. But what I remember, I remember this from when I had kids in the 2000s, and there was so much debate, like, do you give your kids vaccines, or will they get autism? Of course, scientific studies say no, they will not get autism, you should, of course, vaccinate your children, otherwise, you might contribute to a public health crisis, and I vaccinated my children.
Sarah Kendzior:
But I did feel some sympathy for the women who were just sincerely scared. They were not trying to be propagandists. They were not trying to be part of some sort of disinformation operation. They were just genuinely frightened that this one decision of giving your kid a vaccine was going to affect their whole life and they would be to blame. It's a mother's worst nightmare.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so I hope that when people are dealing with relaying information about the vaccines that are coming—and I just pray to God that they're coming, and Trump didn't sell them all off—that they do so with compassion, and understanding, and listening to where different groups are coming from, and acknowledging this horrible history, because too often, we see from Biden (and this is, of course, a holdover from the Obama administration) this assumption that everyone is just rational, scientifically based, full of logic, and that those kind of assurances—the cold logical assurances—will be the ones to convince people. In reality, that's not the case, not when it comes to something this emotional, not when it comes to something that seems to be laden with risk, and that's already tainted with fear, and trauma. So I hope that people take all of that into account.
Andrea Chalupa:
I just wanted to remind people, I know we are living in an age of ramped up disinformation, the age of deep fakes are upon us, all these things. It's a growing age of spiraling confusion. Just remember, no matter what science fiction dystopia we may be headed towards, the truth is always knowable. The truth exists. Believe in truth. You can know what is true. The big bullet of disinformation is that it exhausts your reasoning abilities and makes you just think to give up in wanting to know which side to believe, and you “both sides” real crises issues.
Andrea Chalupa:
There is no “both sides” here. The truth is, this pandemic could have been contained. It's been contained in other countries. The Obama White House contained the Ebola pandemic. All of these hundreds of thousands of people could still be alive today, and countless others would not be living with pre-existing conditions now because of having gone through suffering COVID themselves. So please know that this was done on Trump's watch. This was corruption. This was negligence, criminal negligence. This was greed and this was all what he intended to do when he came into power.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is how he's built his entire career, and he's gaslit Americans with the help of Mark Burnett and Jeff Zucker, with their big hit, The Apprentice, fooling many Americans into thinking he was just some glitzy New York character, when really the guy was mobbed up this entire time, and a criminal, and corrupt. The other thing is, I just find it astounding that here we are in 2020 fighting Nazis on our own soil now and the death count is comparable to World War II.
Andrea Chalupa:
That just bears repeating. Trump has come out saying “Proud Boys, stand by”. His base are actual Nazis. These guys that went on the streets creating all sorts of violence when Trump lost. They did that throughout his four years. They showed up at a Michigan official's house with guns when she was making Christmas decorations with her kids. These people are his stormtroopers.
Andrea Chalupa:
According to his first wife, Ivana, he studied and kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed. Hitler, being a trained propagandists from World War I, who turned that experience into writing the ultimate propaganda manual, Mein Kampf, and then using propaganda to dismantle democracy in Germany, and murder millions—millions—of Jewish people. Don't get used to any of this. Don't fall for the normalization. Everybody should have their hair on fire about what a national emergency this is for our country. This is a form of civil war being waged against us.
Andrea Chalupa:
Don't listen to this hyper-partisanism, like, “h, both sides”. No, one side is brainwashed and one side is working against its own interest, and the other side is fighting back to refuse to allow this, to refuse to be complicit in the dismantling of our democracy. As Martha Gellhorn, the great journalist who wrote about the discovery of the concentration camps of wider audience, as she said, “fuck that objectivity bullshit”. It's bullshit.
Andrea Chalupa:
When it comes to good and evil, there is good and that is truth, and truth does exist. Whether you're a person of faith or not, have faith in the truth because the truth is knowable, and just stay grounded in the truth as we go through these days of horror and all the necessary rebuilding that needs to come.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, agree, and just I made this point before and I feel like I'm going to be making it for several years: there needs to be accountability for the COVID-19 crime cult, which is the team that has put into place this profiting off death. They are death merchants. By that, I mean Trump, Jared Kushner, Steve Mnuchin, Kelly Loeffler or any other senator who engaged in insider trading, Ivanka Trump investing in coffins, I believe. It's disgusting.
Sarah Kendzior:
We know that they knew. We knew. We knew it was coming because we could see doctors from China and Iran and other countries that were affected early on clips that they posted on social media, often risking their lives to do so, because they too live in an environment where the government will persecute you for telling people just how bad it is.
Sarah Kendzior:
Think about that, by the way, when you think about Rebekah Jones and what she just went through, about how basic medical information that's meant to serve the public good is considered an act of warfare or dissidence against your government. We are now heading on that road. But anyway, I remember watching those videos knowing that this was coming. We did our own little coronavirus bonus special, all the way back at the end of January because we were concerned. And Trump knew. He got on record with Bob Woodward and like so many Trump's stories, it dissipated. People were briefly outraged and then they moved on to the next thing. This is a huge deal.
Sarah Kendzior:
There's been talk of, “oh, we need to move on, let history judge them”. Well, a lot of people who would like to judge them are dead. They died because of Trump. They're not around to judge them. It doesn't just fall on the survivors, either, it falls on people who have positions of power, who can prevent another atrocity from happening again. And that is why Trump, Kushner, Pence, everybody who was in that coronavirus team, that is why they need to be held accountable for their actions, and I think that is the place to begin, when we start looking at prosecutions.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's a lot less controversial in a way than, say, prosecution for treason, for being a Kremlin asset, even for things like obstruction of justice, which Mueller detailed so much in in his report. We've been through the wringer on that we had. Well, we had impeachment hearings where the Speaker of the House blocked discussion of the broader context of this. But nonetheless, we've been discussing Trump and Russia for four years. I do think that that also needs to be fully investigated and indicted where necessary. Those topics have this ring of partisanship that they shouldn't. Coronavirus has destroyed our country, it has affected everyone, and as you said, it was preventable, we could have gone in a completely different direction. These people were not destined to die, they were killed. They were killed by their government.
Andrea Chalupa:
There's a hailstorm of news, just like there always is, and I want to point out that the Pentagon purge is ongoing with all these loyalists lackeys being shoved in, more run of the mill folks being pushed out or resigning. What you have is Trump shoving through, dangerously, all these big US military moves. You might be in favor of reducing troops in Afghanistan, but there's a way to do it. What he's doing is he's pulling a massive amount of troops out of Afghanistan, and also Somalia.
Andrea Chalupa:
This, you could argue, would be part of Putin's wish list. As we know from the reporting, Putin put a bounty on the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan for the Taliban to kill. Also, there's been reporting for years that Trump's State Department has been pulling the US out of Africa, and that Putin and China—Russia and China—have been filling the vacuum across Africa. So, the shrinking of a US presence there of course, would be something that Putin would appreciate.
Andrea Chalupa:
There's a way to do troop reductions. You don't rush them. I remember when Bush was invading Iraq, I launched an anti-war initiative, and I was passing out cards to promote it. One journalist stopped me and said, with his eyes popping out of his head, he's like, "My wife's family is in Iraq. If US soldiers leave, they're dead." These situations are complicated, and there is a way to do troop withdrawals, and Trump is showing how not to do them. That's also a big danger that's going to have dangerous repercussions to come as well.
Sarah Kendzior:
I just want to have everybody draw their attention to some dates coming up. We're about halfway through the transition process. So, yay, we've survived thus far. December 14th is a big one. That is when the members of the electoral college are going to be casting their ballots for president. Just to review, since some people don't know this (since in the past there was not such a need to know every little detail, now we'll never forget), in our system, the winner of each state's popular vote earns that state's electoral votes, which are apportioned by population.
Sarah Kendzior:
Of course, the candidate who receives the majority of the 538 electoral votes (or 270) wins the presidency. That is Joe Biden, but they actually need to cast their votes on this date. What we're seeing already is the mafia tactics that Trump has used throughout his presidency being aimed at electors, being aimed at secretaries of state. He is going to try to get states whose population voted for Joe Biden—and they have now recounted these votes multiple times, and we are quite sure of this—to cast their votes for Trump anyway. This is the next phase of the coup.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think first, they may have attempted... Well, we know they attempted to rig the election, through things like voter suppression, destroying the Postal Service equipment, putting mailboxes in the wrong locations purposefully, delaying the mail. They did whatever they could. It didn't work. They went to court 50 times. It didn't work.
Sarah Kendzior:
So then now we are at this stage with the Electoral College. The next major day after that is January 5th, where we're going to have the end of voting in the Georgia Senate race runoff. That's going to be very significant. If the Democrats win, of course, we have a complete rebalance of power in our government. We have the Democrats holding the House, the Senate and the presidency. With that, they can get an enormous amount done. They can actually undo quite a bit of the damage that Trump has done and we could feel much more secure in things like how the vaccine is going to be implemented, how coronavirus is going to be handled. As Andrea has said ceaselessly and as we've posted on our website, please do what you can for that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Immediately after that, on January 6, Congress is going to meet at 1:00 PM in Washington to count the electoral votes and declare a winner. So, that is another big day. I have apprehension about that day, that I don't completely want to go into. But I've just been noticing what some of Trump's former lackeys, people who are very close to him, who know his thought process have been saying. Michael Cohen, for example, he of course predicted that Trump would not concede. He said that under oath in his February 2019 testimony and he was correct. We were also saying that, and though I have zero respect for Michael Cohen, it was a relief to see somebody say that in such a public forum and get that idea into people's minds, even though they didn't believe it.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, my point is, Michael Cohen knows Trump pretty well. He's predicting that Trump is going to go to Mar-a-Lago, and then he said, very pointedly, Trump doesn't want to go back on the 6th, he wants to be away from D.C. on the 6th, usually he comes back that day, he's going to stay out of there. So Michael Cohen has also said that Trump taught him to speak in code. I'm not trying to decode Michael Cohen, necessarily, but I am noticing that the White House is fortified.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is another one of these things that is just batshit insane, but people have gotten used to it, that the White House is now a fortress. And there aren't people trying to break down the barricades. We aren't engorged in violence or anything like that, yet, but they are acting as if we're going to. There's also been just a number of very strange comments over the last couple of years from officials. Pelosi, in 2018, said when she was at a summit with Haim Saban, the major democratic donor:
Nancy Pelosi:
I have said to people when they asked me, if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid... and I don't even call it aid, our cooperation with Israel, because that's fundamental.
Sarah Kendzior:
There are a million things to take from that, in particular that her loyalty, should America be attacked, should the Capitol crumble, is to a foreign country. I found that gravely concerning then and I still do, but why are they talking about the Capitol crumbling at all? Is that something we're supposed to expect? That's a very strange phrase. We'll put a link to that in the show notes, because whenever I bring this up, people don't believe me, but there's video of it.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, I have some apprehension about things to come because as we've discussed in previous episodes (like the one called Reichstag Fire), one tactic of a flailing aspiring autocrat is to either encourage violence among their own base, try to get them to carry out acts of violence, or to stage an act of violence themselves. I'm sorry to even raise this prospect. It sounds crazy. It's the kind of thing you get called a conspiracy theorist if you bring up, but we've seen it happen in other countries. We saw it happen in Russia, and we know that Russia is a foremost influence on Trump.
Sarah Kendzior:
With the Trump administration, just don't put anything past them. There is no bottom. There's nothing that they look at and say, “oh, no, we have gone too far. People may die. We may look ridiculous, we may look ashamed.” There's nothing there. They will keep going because all they care about is power and retaining power. So yes, I'm worried about that day.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then, of course, the day that hopefully will be a day of splendor and wonder is January 20th, which is Biden's Inauguration Day. The best case scenario there, of course, is Biden is inaugurated and we begin a new chapter, our long national nightmare will have ended and a new national nightmare will begin with Trump lurking in the background trying to sabotage the Biden administration at every turn. But that's still a better case, obviously, than having this administration with executive power. Yeah, those are just some dates to watch as the clock ticks down. What do you want to talk about? We have Barr, we have Ivanka and we have UFOs, you want to pick one?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, we have a new Secretary of Defense who will hopefully tell us all about the UFOs when he comes into office. Biden picked retired Army General Lloyd Austin. He would be the first Black person to be Secretary of Defense, but his appointment would require a Congressional waiver. Yet again, this has only been done twice before; once under Truman, and then again, of course, under Trump who chose Mad Dog Mattis out of Apprentice central casting. He liked the part.
Sarah Kendzior:
He liked the nickname. I don't think he knew who he was. I think he was just like Mad Dog. Ooo. That guy, right? He casts. He doesn't appoint, he casts.
Andrea Chalupa:
He's like, welcome to The Apprentice, which Mattis, of course, failed out of. As Matt Cooper, a journalist with a long history in Washington, he points out, “his isn't a small thing. It's happened two administrations in a row. Remember all that talk about norms? This is a big one. The Secretary of Defense shouldn't be a recent general. Libs and conservatives got lulled into this because Mattis was. Like, among the few sane people, what's the excuse now?”
Andrea Chalupa:
Then, also, people point out that Austin went from serving in the military to joining the board of Raytheon, a major player in the military industrial complex who's also one of the largest contractors to the Pentagon. There's issues there, of course. We just want to make the point that diversity is great. Diversity is necessary because when you build visibility, you're helping the next generation of women, you're helping the next generation of girls and Black and brown girls and boys see themselves out in the world and internalize what is possible for them.
Andrea Chalupa:
Diversity is an essential part of the solution of building a fairer, more empathetic country, without question. But understand, guys, there's a world of difference between a Condoleezza Rice and a Congresswoman Barbara Lee, a world of difference. It's not just enough to have diversity for diversity's sake. You must have people that represent the moral courage we desperately need to confront the several existential crises that we're up against.
Andrea Chalupa:
But what is interesting about this pick is it gives us interesting insight into Biden, or rather confirms what we already know about Biden, is that he needs a genuine connection. He needs to be surrounded by people that he could feel familiar with. There's a story of how Biden, when he first became vice president, traveled over to Iraq, it was Austin who was one of the people that he worked with there on the ground. One of the first questions Austin asked him was about Biden's own son, Beau, who was serving in Iraq, and that left a lasting impression and reinforced to him that he needed someone in this position who had that human quality, who would never forget that they're human beings, that these soldiers' lives matter, that these soldiers have families.
Andrea Chalupa:
He was very touched with that. I think what we've seen a lot of with Biden, who is choosing to surround himself with, is people that he has that genuine connection with. He is somebody that really makes you feel like family from all the stories we've seen of regular people, including that little boy who had a stutter to overcome that Biden was really inspirational helping him deal with. It is interesting to be reminded of that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Also, when PBS NewsHour did a massive investigation—a massive investigation—into the Tara Reade allegations, where they interviewed several dozens of people that had worked for Biden over the years. One thing that kept coming up from all of the interviews was how he created this culture of inclusiveness, and a culture of fairness—especially for women—and that a lot of the things that terror Reid was saying about what an oppressive and hostile environment it was for her was not at all the shared experience of all these women that have worked provided over the years. They always felt that they were getting taken very seriously and given leadership roles and that they were allowed that culture of fairness.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think it's really important that Biden is building a strong team overall. A lot of comments are how he's pulling from the A-list. It's this A-team, and that they are people of substance—not only in their expertise, but also in their character—who are going to have that comfort and that culture of fairness and including the protection of being able to speak the truth to the commander in chief, and to see all of the people that they have power over in their new positions as human beings with families.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think that's the big overarching theme here in how Biden has been putting together his cabinet so far. It's not just on his commitment to try and to create a cabinet that looks like America with all this diversity, but also a team that he could feel like family, because that's really how we've sort of seen him, what's been revealed of him during this election with all these testimonies of regular supporters and family and friends who've come out to talk about him. We saw the bromance, the very real friendship, between him and Obama over those eight years, and what that meant for Black voters across America who understood how real and genuine that was and how rare of a quality that was in a white supremacist country like America.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, it's interesting that we're going to be going from a nepotistic mafia family to a feels like family, we got along, we trust each other kind of administration. [laughs] A very different sort of family relationship, much healthier for the country. I was going to say, I hope, but it's like Jesus Christ, nothing compares. It's obviously going to be.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think I'm going to talk just briefly about what Barr is up to so we can remember what we're getting rid of here, and then let's talk about the UFOs, because I know everyone's waiting for that, and then we'll close it out. Just a couple weird things going on with Barr. This broke last week right after we recorded so we hadn't commented on it yet. We have two-faced Barr. We have, on one hand, the DOJ finding no evidence of fraud in the presidential election, which basically means that Barr and the DOJ are rejecting all of these claims that Trump is clinging to/is bringing to courts.
Sarah Kendzior:
There's allegedly a feud going on between Barr and Trump about this. I don't entirely believe it. I'm also not sure how much weight these words have, because at the same time, as he's doing this, we have learned that Barr installed a special prosecutor to investigate the investigators (as we predicted), and Barr kept this fact a secret for six weeks. He appointed the special prosecutor in October to look into this and only announced it last week.
Sarah Kendzior:
This has left a lot of people thinking, what the hell is he doing now? I don't entirely know, but one thing that's important for people to remember is that the inner players in this GOP crime cult never really leave. You saw this with Manafort, with Stone, with Bannon, with other people who officially left their positions but continued to influence it from behind the scenes. In several cases, they claimed to now be working for the other side.
Sarah Kendzior:
We had Manafort faking his compliance with the Mueller investigation—and Stone, too, to some degree—where they never had any intention of doing that. We see people like mercenary Erik Prince, who was never officially in the Trump administration, but still influenced it and had an inroad through his sister, Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos. To Andrea's point before about improper military operations, Prince is another example because Trump is basically farming out some of the jobs that the US military should be doing to Prince's paramilitary groups. We'll maybe get into that next episode because it's such a shitshow that I don't have the time for it.
Sarah Kendzior:
But anyway, this is a WWE administration. It is just endless kayfabe fights between various members. The bottom line of what Barr is doing is making sure that the broader GOP crime cult agenda will continue, regardless whether Barr is there, regardless whether Trump is there as president. You saw this immediately. After the announcement of the special prosecutor, Lindsey Graham was just jubilant over this prospect of hunting down all of the people who are trying to bring the revelations of Trump and his illicit dealings with the Kremlin to light. They are both playing the odds and they're playing the long game and that is how they operate. That's how Barr has operated for 35 or more years.
Sarah Kendzior:
Keep an eye on that. Don't assume, especially based on this rejection of electoral fraud, that Barr has suddenly seen the light or is on our side. These are very intelligent people. These are very evil people, but they are intelligent. They're skilled. They've been working toward this goal for decades on end and they're not going to be making decisions lightly, and they're certainly not going to be making decisions out of some sort of obligation toward the public good. That does not ever even enter their minds.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right, so I know the big story that everyone really wants to hear is, of course, about aliens. Sarah and I are going to indulge ourselves and you on that and this week's bonus episode available for Patreon subscribers. So, please tune in there for that big story. In the meantime, do what you can to help Georgia. Fight like hell, leave it all out on the field for our democracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Direct Relief at directrelief.org, which is supplying much needed protective gear to first responders working on the frontlines.
Andrea Chalupa:
We encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org, and if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to The Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior, and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners and check out our Patreon, it keeps us going, and subscribe to us on YouTube.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
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Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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