The World Must Stand Up to Trump’s America
One of the most striking aspects of living under a dictatorship is how eerily normal life can appear on the surface. The sun still rises, children still play in parks. Yet, beneath this façade of normalcy, the foundations of democracy are being purged. Drug-fueled Nazi oligarchs, emboldened by their unchecked power, withhold critical funding, endanger lives, and proudly defy the courts. They destroy the rule of law and unleash a culture of corruption, all while the world watches America turn into a failed state.
Joining us to unpack this dystopian nightmare, as well as what must be done to overcome this global threat, is Elie Mystal, Justice Correspondent for The Nation and author of the new book Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. Mystal, a prophetic voice in the fight for democracy, breaks down what Biden and the Democrats should have done to curb Trump and MAGA extremism when they had the chance. (We’ll be shouting we told you so all the way to the gulag!) He explains why Merrick Garland was, as we warned, a threat to democracy, what actions Democrats and the people must take now in the limited time we have left, and why New York State Attorney General Tish James serves as a vital reminder of the importance of local resistance. Most importantly, Mystal calls on world leaders to divest from America, an urgent strategy that helped bring down apartheid.
This week’s bonus show is our live recording with Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman, who answers listener questions about combating the Russian-backed fascist threat of the Musk/Trump regime. We also discuss Trump and Russia’s attempts to strongarm Ukraine into a deal that would buy Russia time to continue its genocidal invasion. Don’t miss this special episode, coming to you on Friday.
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TRANSCRIPT
Letitia James (00:00):
In the past week, Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have accessed the personal private information of tens of millions of Americans and sensitive data about public and private entities. Social security numbers, addresses, tax returns and more. This unelected group led by the world's richest man is not authorized to have this information, and they explicitly sought this unauthorized access to illegally block payments that millions of Americans rely on payments for healthcare, childcare, and other essential programs. Today, democratic Attorneys General are taking action to keep Americans personal data secure. To keep sensitive information about Americans private and to uphold our constitution. We have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for giving unauthorized individuals access to these immensely sensitive records in violation of the law. President Trump does not have the power to give our private information away to whomever he wants, and he does not have the power to cut federal spending that Congress approved much less to do so by giving the richest man in the world the keys to all American’s most sensitive information. As Democratic Attorneys General, we are suing to stop this unprecedented and unauthorized attack and to protect your personal information. As I've said before, no one is above the law and I will not hesitate to uphold the rule of law and protect New Yorkers.
Andrea Chalupa (02:06):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host Andre Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. I'm here with Elie Mystal, the justice correspondent for the nation, and the author of the new book, "Bad Law, 10 Popular Laws That Are Ruining America." Welcome back to the show. First of all, did I say your name correctly? I forgot to check it with you.
Elie Mystal (02:33):
Yes. Ellie rhymes with jelly, Mystal rhymes with crystal -- one of those the kids made up for me and when I made up myself.
Andrea Chalupa (02:41):
Alright, so we need you. We love you. I'm so grateful to talk to you in this moment. When Trump, JD Vance, the whole crime squad is ignoring the courts just like they've been salivating to do, just like their dark lord guru Curtis Yarvin has been proclaiming on his substack or wherever that they have to do just toy the courts, establish a dictatorship, establish a king, force everyone else to become tattered barefoot peasants, and we're going to rule in our AI prison kingdom. So tell us about your new book.
Elie Mystal (03:20):
Well, I mean, before I go to the book, let's start with the courts, right? Because this is something that I've been talking about for a long time. What's really amazing about their defiance of the courts is that they control the courts. The courts want to help them. These are Republican courts picked by Republican presidents, including Trump himself, that fundamentally want to help him succeed. And so when you are talking about having policies, laws, executive orders that are so extreme that even the Republican courts are just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, there bro, slow down there, Haas. That is how far a field you are, right? That is how beyond the pale these laws are that they even have a problem marshaling their Republican courts behind their Republican agenda, right? So that's number one. But number two is that you people need to understand what the courts can and cannot do, right?
(04:16):
The courts do not have an enforcement wing. They rule by comedy, right? We all agree to follow what the courts do. The court has no army, has no police force has no way to enforce its laws. It's the executive that is supposed to enforce their laws. And what America did in its idiot wisdom is to elect an executive who has already shown no desire to follow the law. So what did people think was going to happen when a court told the executive Donald Trump that the executive Donald Trump was wrong and couldn't do something? One of the things I wrote about in the nation was that even if you think, and there's no reason for you to think this, but even if you think that Donald Trump is going to abide by a court ruling that slows his administration down in some way, what in the hell makes you think that Trump is going to enforce anything against his boy and co-president? Elon Musk?
(05:17):
You're just naive. If you think that Trump is going to enforce an adverse court ruling against his sugar daddy, Elon Musk, and we are already seeing that play out, right? Right now, enforcement of court orders against Trump and there are a lot of them. Make no mistake, the courts have said in fairly clearly over vast number of issues. You can't do that. You can't do that. You got to stop doing that. What is even that? That's not right. The court has issued temporary restraining orders and injunctions against many of Trump's executive orders, but we're on the trust me bro system. We're on the Elon Musk. Oh, sure, I'm going to follow that. Sure, no problem. You don't need to check because he's going to do the checking. Who's going to check to make, there's the big order with Elon Musk and he only has limited readonly access to everybody's tax information.
(06:12):
Even though he is not a government official, only two special employees can have read only access. Who's making sure that it's happening? Who's enforcing that? Anybody? Does anybody know if Musk only has read only access? There's been a court injunction stopping the funding freeze, right? This is saying that you can't turn off the money, but the money's turned off. ProPublica just went through 50 organizations. They still ain't got their checks. So who's going to turn the money back on? This is the problem with electing a dictator. This is the problem with electing an executive who has complete military and police and law enforcement control and expecting him to follow orders that he doesn't like. He just won't do it.
Andrea Chalupa (06:53):
So obviously we did everything we could to warn everyone about this. Both of us covered project 2025. We screamed from the mountaintops.
Elie Mystal (07:00):
They wrote it down.
Andrea Chalupa (07:02):
They wrote it down. They made it very convenient for us. So here we are and I'm just, they're very creative. Dictators are very fast and very creative with their criminal minds on how to break the law, purge, stay in power. What can we do? What is our levers? You see a mall cop blocking elected members of Congress, a mall cop, just this dude in a t-shirt saying, no, you can't go into this federal building. And I'm thinking, I would physically pick up this person and move him aside. I would push my weight past him like a church lady with a big old hat and handbag like hitting him with my handbag. Why aren't we seeing that when everything's being burned down?
Elie Mystal (07:50):
There are two things that need to happen. One is that the Democrats have to get on board, all the Democrats have to get on board in a unified fashion, and that's just not happening yet. We still got Democrats out here talking about how well we're going to work with Trump where we can, and that's one of the most insane things that you hear from the Democratic party. Understand when they say they're going to work with Trump where they can. What they're saying is that they're going to legitimize Donald Trump because that is the ballgame here. It is a binary situation. Either Trump is an illegitimate, illegal president who is trying to impose a dictatorship on America or he is not, and if you're going to work with him on the things you can work with him, then guess what? He's not. You don't get to call him fascist evil dictator man.
(08:36):
If you're going to work with him on healthcare, you just don't get to do that. So the Democrats who are saying they're going to work with him where they can, or also saying they are legitimizing all of the bad things and murderous things and awful things and atrocities that he commits, it's the same person. Amy Klobuchar needs to get that through her head somewhere. Democrats in Congress have to get that through their head. You work with this man, you legitimize all of it. If John Federman ever decides that he wants to join the rest of the free thinking peoples of the world and resist this man, the Democrats need to get all on board on the same page. Now, the Democrat. Now that brings us to the second problem. Democrats have no power. Americans gave them no power. They don't control the Senate, they don't control Congress.
(09:22):
They have no power, so all they can do is obstruct. Now, there was a former politician still currently in the Senate, I believe. I mean you have to kind of reboot him halfway through his speeches, but Mitch McConnell once had no power. Mitch McConnell once had no power and a black ass president that he didn't like, and Mitch McConnell got all of his Republicans on board to obstruct Barack Obama at every possible turn for eight years, two of which where he was down 60 40 where he didn't even have enough senators to filibuster the Democratic Party. And yet we got no public option with the a CA, didn't we? Right? Somehow McConnell found a way to obstruct the democratically elected president from the position of absolutely no power. So we need that kind of Mitch McConnell energy on our side. If you have everybody in line, you obstruct and you obstruct and you obstruct more, you're not going to help them pass a budget.
(10:26):
They're going to pass the budget with their three vote majority. Good luck to you. You're going to keep everybody together and you're going to obstruct this administration as much as possible. That's number one. Action. Item number two. It's like you were saying about the mall cop. Look, I resist telling people to put themselves in physical danger when I myself am sitting from behind the screen, behind the keyboard am not in physical danger. If I'm out there on the front lines, I'm going to be like, yo, Hakeem, you got my back? And then we're going to go. But if I'm going to be on a TV screen, it's hypocritical for me to tell anybody to put themselves in physical danger when I myself am not in physical danger. So I understand the limitations of that. However, on the obstruction thing, there are lots of things you can do as a member of Congress, as a member of the Senate, as a person who cannot be so easily disappeared, let's say, to obstruct these people physically.
(11:29):
One of the ideas that I keep bringing up is Ice is doing these raids. Every Congress person's and senator's house in DC should be a sanctuary city. Every single one of them should be hiding, and I wouldn't say hiding, right? You want to make the stunt out of it, right? Should be suborning illegal immigrants in danger of being deported from ice and the ice official who wants to come and take them away. So you got to switch the mall cop idea. You can't push your way past the mall cop. You got to get your own mall cops and force the Trump people to push their way past you because they will. And that will be a story, that will be a news story, that will be something that's covered on the news, that will be something that people will have to take notice of, right?
(12:16):
Don't put yourself in physical danger necessarily. I can't tell you to do that, but I can tell you to use all of your powers and all of your resources as elected representatives to make them come through. You don't got to go through them. You got to make them come through you. And that can, I think, generate a lot of public attention to this. But again, that requires Democrats to all get on board. That requires Democrats to get on board, not just at the federal level, but at all the state and local levels. And we just don't have that. We don't have a resistance party. Instead, I live in New York. Instead, I got Mayor Satchmo Adams out here shucking and jiving for a pardon that he basically just got when Trump's DOJ agreed to drop all charges in his obvious Turkish corruption scandal. And what's the deal for that? It's not that Trump was trying to wants to be friends with Eric. The deal is that Eric Adams, mayor of New York City is not going to stop ice in any way as ice comes through our city ripping people away from their families. That was the deal that we got for Eric Adams being able to beat the allegations and dodge the charges. So again, Democrats are not unified in this moment, and that lack of unity is why Democrats cannot effectively mount a political and social and cultural resistance to this.
Andrea Chalupa (13:39):
Well, we're not going to see Democratic party unity for the very reason you just pointed out, which is corruption. Many of these Democrats also in the mainstream who come across as Normie Dems are white people who feed from the same trough as the Republican colleagues. They're all getting donations from the same giant corporations and they don't want to be seen as rocking the boat. And then largely we have a democratic establishment that rewards the status quo and rewards people who want to maintain that status quo. And they haven't done much when it comes to addressing the growing crisis of voter suppression because let's be honest, if the Democratic Party fixed voter suppression that could elect an all new Democratic party. So we're not going to get any help from the Democrats. This is going to be something that I think the people are going to have to take care of. And so what course of action do we have? Can we ignore the courts just like Trump and Musk and JD Vance are ignoring the courts? What can we the people do in this moment?
Elie Mystal (14:44):
First of all, who's the we? Because I think one of the...
Andrea Chalupa (14:46):
You and I, the two of us, like a buddy comedy,
Elie Mystal (14:50):
One of the real sadnesses that I have in my life is that realization that there are far fewer of me than I thought. You always knew most people were tuned out, but you didn't fully realize how little most people care at all about any of this. And so when you're talking about the large scale social movements that are required to stop this, to stop the authoritarian takeover of America, you first got to get people to care that it's happening. And right now, most people don't. Trump's approval rating is as high as it's ever been. And while is not as high, Musk is underwater, people don't really think that he's a unique and dangerous threat. They just think that he is a rich guy with rich guy priorities and that's it, right? They don't understand, like myself, Elon Musk has all your tax information. They're like, well, somebody has all my tax information.
(15:48):
Why not Musk? Well, he's a private citizen. He has no, I'll be fine. Is the reaction that you get, right? So one of the only things that I can think of to do is try to get other people simply to notice and acknowledge what's going on in their own country because I do not have enough friends. You do not have enough friends to change the course of America with the 18 of us who understand what's going on here. We are too few. We are too small. As Kermit the frog would say in Muppets State, Manhattan, we need more dogs and cats and bears and chickens and things, and we just don't got the numbers right now. So we have to try to convince people just to pay attention to their own country, and that is the rock that I'm pushing relatively unsuccessfully, right? So that's big picture number one, smaller picture number two on the ground.
(16:42):
We have to start electing better Democrats. You can talk about third party, whatever. Whoever is the representative of the liberal wing needs to start being a different, better person than we have historically elected. We have to lean into the AOCs and the Jasmine Crocketts of the world and lean away from the Dick Durbins of the world and trying to just get Democrats to make that kind of understanding and shift in the primary process is again, the rock that always needs to be pushed because this, one of the reasons why this happens, one of the reasons why people think that it doesn't matter who gets elected because both parties are the same, is not because both parties are the same. I never go in for that nihilism bull crap of both parties are the same. They are very different, but they are similar. The politicians come from a similar class, they have a similar bearing, they have a similar thought on the way things are supposed to work.
(17:42):
And really a lot of it is putting an emphasis on a different salable between the parties. So those are really big, but still, you need to start getting a whole different class and quality of people running for office and a whole different class and quality of people that we put in position to be in office. And again, we're nowhere on that. So just to bring it back full circle, one of the ways that this could have been stopped, that Trump could have been stopped, is if the Biden administration was completely different. If the Biden administration had come in there on day one and understood that they had one job, they had one job, which was to make sure that Donald Trump could never be president again after the attempted coup on January 6th, they had one job and they failed miserably at that one job. And part of the failure at that one job was not understanding the assignment.
(18:36):
While I do think that Joe Biden gets credit for some of his policies and programs that were generally very good, they failed at their one job because they didn't even understand what the job was. That is a huge reason why we're here, right? The second reason you already brought up voting rights. The second job, if you were going to have two jobs, then the second job would've been to secure voting rights, to roll back the voting rights restrictions and implemented by John Roberts starting in 2013, understand people that the Republican response to the first black president in the first instance was to restrict voting rights, to understand that black people had gotten to the point where they had so much political power that we could even have a black president. The first thing they did was take away and restrict voting rights to make it harder for black people to vote, thus making it harder for there ever to be another.
(19:34):
Barack Obama. That was their first plan. And it's that plan fundamentally that led to Trump in the first place, voter suppression, voter depression, leading to Trump in the first place in 2016. So again, if you're the Biden administration, job one, make sure that Trump can't run again. Job two, make sure that everybody can vote as easily and fairly and seamlessly as possible. And then we want to be here. We are here because not only of the complete capitulation of the Republican party to an authoritarian cult of personality, we're here because of a series of failures by Democrats when they had power to secure the guardrails, if you will, to secure the fences, right? And now, as I keep writing, now, we're in a time of consequences. Now we have to pay for the failures of the past. And it's a question of how big that bill is going to be and how long before the authoritarians run out of steam. Historically speaking, it could be a very long time,
Andrea Chalupa (20:44):
Very long time. You can hear the Merrick Garland fans on social media saying, but Ellie, what did you want Biden to do? Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, they would refuse to nuke the filibuster. There was no chance the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. What did you want Biden to actually do? Give me the concrete legal examples.
Elie Mystal (21:06):
First of all, look at what Trump has done in his first three weeks. I don't think I've seen a single Senate vote on anything. Couple of cabinet confirmations. That's it. None. This that Trump is doing right now is through the Senate legislative process. He's doing it by fiat. And so then people will say like, oh, Ellie, if we use the tactics of our enemies, then we're no better than Shut up. Shut up with that. Miss me with that entirely. This is not little league baseball. This is the real world. If you have power, you use it maximally. So the concrete thing I wanted Democrats to do, the concrete thing I wanted Joe Biden and Merrick Garland to do, was to use power maximally at the DOJ level. That means you are charging Trump within months of you taking office, not years, where you can do all the delay and the distract and what you're charging him within months of taking office, and you're putting him on trial as quickly as possible, because I promise you, the immunity decision that comes out when Trump is already running for president happens a lot in 2024, happens a lot differently.
(22:20):
If you're asking the Supreme Court to declare Donald Trump immune from prosecution of all crimes in 2022 or 2021, when Democrats still control the White House, the Senate, and the House that just rolls off that Supreme Court docket in a whole different way, I believe. So that's number one. You use power maximally to prosecute Trump. Number two, in terms of Manchin and cinema, the screws were never fully put to either of those people, right? I would've threatened to turn West Virginia into Virginia again until Manchin got on board. Screw that in West Virginia. Democrats try to buy Manchin by turning West Virginia into Wakanda. I would've made it go the other way and seen how long Manchin would've wanted to hold out. The third thing is that, again, if you understand that your number one job is to prosecute Trump and make sure that you can never run again, and your number two job is to restore voting rights when the HR one fails, when you don't pass your massive voting restoration, election restoration, ethics, restoration reform, why do you pass anything else for me?
(23:32):
Everything would've stopped. Everything would've been like, no, no, no. This is so important that we are not doing a god damn thing, not a budget, until we get real ethics and electoral reform in this country. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I'm the President of the United States. Goodbye maximal uses of power. Would there have been complaints? Sure. Would people have in the short term suffered? Because as we are all seeing people really need government services and they really need a budget, and they really need things like the government to not be shut down, sure, there would've been pain. And every time I went out for my press conference and somebody said, oh my God, president Al, you're shutting down the government. Why? I was like, talk to your boy Joe Manchin. I got a bill that I need Joe Manchin to sign.
(24:20):
Go talk to your boy, Kristen Sinema. Ask her why she's willing to let all this pain happen just because she can't have basic ethics reform. And that's curb that question. I dunno why you're asking me. I got my healthcare. I'm the president. Ask her. I don't care if I'm a one term president at that point. Because fixing the electoral process is more important, was more important than any one president getting reelected. Biden didn't understand that. The Democrats never understand it. You watch Game of Thrones and the Good Seasons, and there's this great scene, ion and Denarius are talking, and Tarian is basically talking about how the wheel, the game, how the game works, how it's one house is up now, but later the house will be down and a different house will be up. And Dari says, I don't want to win the wheel. I want to break the wheel. That is the dog. The Democrats don't have. They're waiting for the wheel to turn around. You talk to Democrats right now, and they'll mainly talk about 2026. Oh, 2026. We only got to pick up three seats. They're just waiting for their turn at the top again. They think it's a big Ferris wheel. We need Democrats to understand that the wheel is broken for most people, and therefore should be broken for everybody until we fix it.
Andrea Chalupa (25:33):
So the Merrick Garland fans and social media that made our lives miserable for the entire Biden term, and the prosecutors on cable news will say, well, these cases take time. And you're up against powerful, rich people that throw a lot of money to buy all these delays, delays and appeals. As a lawyer. You're talking about Merrick Garland should have come with a case within months. Is something like that legally possible? Because our country was brainwashed to think the opposite.
Elie Mystal (26:02):
Trump committed a coup on television. On television. All your evidence was on tv. Is the case possible? Look, I always respond to that by looking at the January 6th select committee. The January 6th select committee started going right away as Congressional oversight. People need to understand the Congress had less power to do the investigation than the Department of Justice and the FBI would've had less power for subpoena, had less power to get court orders, basically could only get people to talk to them if they wanted to because we know, remember, we had the whole thing with Bannon not submitting for a subpoena and all these Trump lawyers not submitting meadows, not submitting for an opinion, a subpoena, and then what had to happened, they were held in contempt of Congress and then it had to go to the DOJ where Garland did nothing to bring those contempt charges against those people.
(27:00):
So just remember all that. And yet the January 6th select committee was out with its report by 2022, starting in 2021, the January 6th select committee was out with its report, which was basically a charging document by the end of 2022 before Republicans took that control of the house in 2022. So if the January 6th committee with, again, less power than the DOJ and FB, I would have had to put together this case. If the January 6th committee could do it in a year, almost two years, then yeah, I think the Department of Justice could have gotten that done in under a year. You want another example? Look at Jack Smith. Jack Smith brought charges within a year. Now, you can argue that Jack Smith had the benefit of previous years of work to start with, but fundamentally he brought it within a year. So you simply cannot tell me that there was no way to charge Trump quickly.
(28:02):
Sure. Maybe you couldn't have quite gotten it done in three months. Although again, when you look at the document stealing case, you could have done that almost immediately. As soon as, I mean, think about people forget, remember how much time the Garland DOJ spent asking Trump nicely to give the documents back, oh, Mr. President and Mr. Former President, I'm not sure that you know that you've stolen classified documents. Could we have them back please? Oh, maybe tomorrow, maybe on Wednesday. Could we have them back before Christmas? That was the, what was that? That's a case that could have been brought within a few months, right? So yes, the law moves slowly. Yes, you want to build a case. No, there was never an excuse for this thing to take until 2023 until we're filing charges. No reason ever for that to happen.
Andrea Chalupa (28:57):
Wow. Okay. So we're vindicated. We warned everyone that this was happening and we looked like a bunch of curmudgeons, but it was all happening
Elie Mystal (29:06):
That in $2 to buy a Coke sitting in the Gulag being like I told you. So
Andrea Chalupa (29:10):
I plan to do that. I don't give a shit. I'll be walking into my execution, be like my last words I told you so motherfuckers,
Elie Mystal (29:19):
It's sad that I don't want to be full Mark McGuire. I'm not here to talk about the past, but
Andrea Chalupa (29:24):
It feels good.
Elie Mystal (29:26):
That is a good segue into my book. So the point of my book then is 10 Popular Laws Ruining America is to remind people that there are actual laws and policies on the books right now that do bad things that we could just get rid of. And the scoping, as you know, there are lots of laws in this country. You could go in a lot of different directions with that. I'm focused on laws that we could just repeal. We don't need to reform it, we don't need to massage it. We don't need to have it out to a committee to consult. We could just repeal the law and things would get better, right? One of the laws that I talked about is the Protect Lawful Commerce and Arms Act, the P-L-C-A-A. This is the act that gives gun makers a liability shield when their guns are used in crimes.
(30:17):
No other industry has this liability shield, not car makers. Nobody has this liability shield except for gun manufacturers. And it's one of the reasons why we suffer so much gun violence in this country. It's one of the reasons why we suffer so many mass shootings in this country. Before the P-L-C-A-A was passed in the nineties, the Clinton administration, who I have no love for, I mean I voted for them, but we can talk about Neoliberals some other time. But the Clinton administration through neoliberal policies of market regulation and lawsuits, was actually getting the gun industry under control, was keeping some of the most dangerous weapons that are now sold at gun shows off the streets. And they passed the P-L-C-A-A in order to prevent the Clinton administration from doing that work, right? And now we live in hell. There are simple laws and principles that if we just stopped doing, would save lives and improve our country.
(31:19):
And so I wrote the book to try to get people to remember that this is not all theoretical pie in the sky, progressive woke bull crap. There's simple stuff we could just do, and we choose not to do it. And we choose not to elect the people with the strengths and vision and will to do it. And that's one of the reasons why our country is swirling down a dream because we don't elect people willing to do the hard things, right? We talk about the unequal representation in the Senate and the ridiculousness of the electoral college system, right? One way to fix that would be to expand the members of Congress. I talk about this in the book, right? You can't change the number of people in the Senate because the Constitution was written by slaves and they knew what they were doing with the Senate.
(32:07):
But there's no reason in the Constitution or elsewhere for the Congress to be locked at 435. And I make an argument in the book that if you look by how many people each Congress person represents now it's about 760,000 residents per Congress. People. That is the worst level of representation in the Western world, in the industrialized world, in the Democratic world. It is the worst level of representation anywhere. So if we just went back to what I call the Wyoming rule, Wyoming has about 560,000 people. So let's say every 560,000 people gets a congressperson that would increase Congress by over 700 people. Now, do your electoral college right now. Do it when you have 700 more congressmen, 700 more electoral college votes to get, which are going to be proportionately in the bigger states. California is going to get 28 more Congress people. If you add 700 more now to your electoral college and see if that's a little bit more representative, I promise you it will be. There are simple things we could do, but we choose not to do them.
Andrea Chalupa (33:20):
The book is Bad Law, 10 popular Laws that Are Ruining America, but who's supposed to do the work of repealing these laws? We have to elect the people that have the moral courage to repeal the laws in Congress.
Elie Mystal (33:32):
Yes, we have to elect people in Congress, and some of them are state laws. So it's also like you have to show up at every election and elect people, I think you said. Exactly. Rightly, people with moral courage. That is actually what is required. You have to pay attention, show up for every election, show up for every primary, do your research and elect people who actually have your interests at heart and not their corporate donors. And that is the entire ballgame.
Andrea Chalupa (34:00):
What if you lose a primary, you fight for a person that's the next A OC to add to the AOCs we have in Congress, and you lose that primary and you're stuck voting for the lesser evil and the general election. And let's say this person supports Israel, gungho Israel, and you care about Gaza, but they are the Democrat against the Republican. What would you say to someone that wants to protest vote by not voting, voting third party, and they can't bring themselves to vote for the lesser evil?
Elie Mystal (34:29):
It's a binary choice. It's always a binary choice, and we cannot like that. It's a binary choice. I do not like that. It's a binary choice. I think parliamentary systems are better than winner take all binary choice elections, but we have winner take all binary choice elections. And in that, once you understand that there's a binary choice, there is always a lesser evil. It might not be fun to vote for such a lesser evil, but there's always part of being an adult is being able to distinguish between two evils, right? Part of being an adult is being able to distinguish between, I don't want to do this, but I don't want to do that more, right? I don't want to wash the dishes, but I really don't like mice, so I'm going to wash the dishes even though I don't want to. Even though it's gross, right?
(35:17):
I'm going to take out the trash even though that's icky because the alternative in my binary choice of taking the trash out or not is worse. It's worse for me overall if I don't take the fricking trash out. So I'm going to take the trash out, I'm going to wash the dishes. I'm going to be a grown ass adult. And that is always the choice before us. Are we going to be adults or are we going to be children? Yeah, gang my ball and go home. And that's not a legitimate option. You fight like hell in the primaries. You fight like hell in the off season to promote your candidates, to promote people with more moral courage than the binary choices that you're getting. And when you elect, and here's the other, but here's the other part. When you elect some of these lesser evils, you stay on their ass.
(36:14):
That was my call with the Biden administration. Biden was not my first choice in the Democratic primary in 2020. I don't think he was in my top five choices. If I had had ranked voting, he was ahead of the coffee man. Okay? I would've, right? And he was ahead of Mike Bloomberg. But other than that, I mean, I was voting for the Castro brothers. Either one, just bring one to me, right? There were lots of different ways I was going to go, and I went in that primary, but Biden won the primary. And as between Biden and Trump, it was not hard to choose the lesser evil. But then when Biden got elected, I was not just like, oh, well Biden, when you won, great. I'm going to go home and watch football. No, I stayed on his behind. You stayed on his behind. I mean, obviously we're known as Garland haters.
(37:02):
Why? Because we kept engaged and trying to hold the administration, which was a lesser evil accountable. Your job is never to be. And I'm never asking anybody to be a cheerleader for the freaking weak sauce, milk toast, middle of the road, democratic party. That's like the worst thing. Don't be a cheerleader, right? Be a critic, be a person, be a heckler, but also be able to act like an adult. I don't know. Maybe it's because I'm a Met fan. It's really simple to me, right? I root for a generally bad baseball team. I pay my money. I go to the games sometimes sitting out in the right field. I'll yell at my own players, why do you suck today? Couldn't you be better today? That doesn't mean I'm going to root for the Phillies. I can make an adult choice and still be a critic of the choice that I made. I don't find that to be particularly intellectually challenging.
Andrea Chalupa (37:58):
Tish James is doing what black women have done throughout history. When America gets in these existential battles, she's stepping up. She had her statement that she released straight to social media saying, there's the law and I'm going to uphold it. What are your thoughts on her strategy? What power she has, what impact she can have in pumping the brakes on what they're doing to our government?
Elie Mystal (38:23):
No, as last time, the state attorney generals, the Democratic state Attorney generals are key in slowing down the onslaught of Trumpists, right? Just like Republican state attorney generals are very important when there's a democratic administration, democratic attorney generals, state attorney generals are super important. Now, actually, before the election, I wrote a whole piece about here's some really important Democrat state attorney generals who should be elected. And I think everybody I wrote about lost so yay. But yeah, these people like Tish James, people like Keith Ellison in Minnesota are incredibly important right now. But again, their power comes from a legal system that previously we expected presidents and executives to follow. And I just don't know that we can expect this president and this executive to follow those orders. So then the actual most important person becomes not even the Democratic State Attorney Generals, if we understand that Trump is in the position where he might violate court orders, it becomes governors.
(39:23):
It becomes people like Kathy Holle and Gavin Newsom, Jimmy Pritzker in Illinois. These people are in the who we have to rely on. These people are in the crosshairs, and Trump wants to fight these people, and many of these people want to be president someday. So the equities are aligned, right? You want to be President JB Pritzker, fight this one. You want to be President Gavin Newsom. Let's see how you fight this one. Because that's going to go a long way determining who I vote for in the next primary. And I don't think I'm alone in that. So yes, the state attorney generals are critical in terms of setting up the legal barriers to Trump, but that still exists in a world where we think Trump is going to abide by legal barriers. The governors are important because they have the physical ability to stop a lot of this, not all of it, obviously.
(40:12):
And as Trump voters, I'm sure, remember, there's only so much state militias can do against a unified federal force. That said, it's pretty hard for Trump to carry out some of his most disgusting, illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral orders without deputizing state and local law enforcement. If JB Pritzker of Gavin Newsom and Kathy Holle can tell him no and maintain the loyalty of their state and local law enforcement, it'll be much harder for Trump to execute some of what he's trying to do, at least in the blue states. And those will become the sites of resistance. The first time, again, living in New York, I used to joke about how I'm not a fighter, I'm not a military guy, but I can man a post on the George Washington Bridge, right? I can put down some orange cones on the GW and see what happens. And so those kinds of protests and fights, those are coming. If the governors have the will stand up to the man and we'll see.
Andrea Chalupa (41:16):
Thank God for New York State Attorney General to James. She's showing it how it's done. When she posted her video, my husband rushed to me like, did you see T Shame video just dropped. So where do you think things are with the big budget showdown that's coming up? Should Democrats refuse to join in with Republicans on the debt ceiling?
Elie Mystal (41:39):
I would say any Democrat that votes with any Republican should get their asses primary hard in 2026. Republicans have a majority in the house. Let them pass whatever the hell they want, let them pass their bills. They got the votes for it. Democrats should not lift a finger to help them. And any Democrat who does is legitimizing all the rest. Any Democrat who helps this administration is legitimizing all of the rest evil that this administration does. Do not give them a single vote. And I believe the Democrats who stay strong and do not vote for these people will be rewarded in 2026. And I believe the ones who do will be punished. But again, that requires voters and people paying attention. I feel like this is one of the real hidden stats for why this country sucks. If you look at any kind of polling about Congress, Congress's approval rating is always at or near the toilet.
(42:47):
But if you look at the polling for your individual congressmen, oh, people generally like their individual congressmen. And it's this myopic failure of people thinking that everybody else has voted incorrectly but me, right? Everybody else does something wrong but me. I'll have to change at all. I got a good one. The rest of you with the idiot Congress people, but I got a good one. That's how people actually think. What needs to happen is that the congresspeople who vote for the Trump administration that you thought was the good one, you have to be able to adjust your thinking and adjust your worldview and realize, actually no, you got a bad one. And you got to do everything you can to defeat that bad one in the next primary process. But that requires, again, voters paying attention. And that is, again, I go back to my sadness. The thing that I am most sad or depressed or cynical about post-Trump two is just that hardcore inescapable reality that most people aren't paying attention. And most people don't care.
Andrea Chalupa (43:55):
I'm not going to leave it there. I'm going to. So I want to ask, the rest of the world is watching this. There's a constitutional crisis. He's breaking laws left and right. There's no police force. You know how the law works. Is there not a police force that could go in and just say like, this is over. It's done. There's what leverage do we have?
Elie Mystal (44:20):
Globally speaking?
Andrea Chalupa (44:21):
That was my next question, but in the US, could you explain to a global audience, they're looking at this saying, why can't you just arrest him if he's openly breaking the law? Do we have any levers of power that could be sent in?
Elie Mystal (44:33):
For people who are not from America, who are watching and trying to figure out how this is happening? He was democratically elected. And our system is just not designed to stop a democratically elected president who wants to be anti-democratic. We're just not designed to do that. There is no law enforcement that he does not control. He is the executive. He controls the army. He controls all of the armed forces. He controls the Department of Justice. He controls the FBI, all of the structures that would hold him accountable. He is in control of. And the ones that are supposed to check and balance him are either too weak to do it, or as we've discussed repeatedly, he'll just ignore. So that's why we're in this situation. So the global audience, the point of arresting him is not now, it was four years ago. It was what Brazil did to Bolsonaro.
(45:26):
It is what South Korea is doing to its Prime Minister. It was when a different person was in power, was the opportune moment to arrest this orange madman. And we didn't do it for obviously terrible failure reasons. So to the international audience, that is why we suck. Why y'all suck is that y'all still invest with us. People need to understand America is now a rogue state. We are a failed state and a rogue nation on the international stage. And there is one. And there has always only been, well, there have been two ways to deal with rogue nations. One military conquest. Unfortunately we got a lot of guns, so that's probably not happening. But two divestment. You want to talk about divesting from Israel because of its actions in Gaza. America is Israel's bank. We're the ones that need to be divested from. We're the ones who need to be economically boycotted.
(46:35):
We're the ones who you need to stop trading with. And that is difficult because America's the largest economy on the second largest behind China on earth, and in Seattle. A lot of people make a lot of money here. I know it's hard, but if you want an international response to our bull crap, the appropriate international response to what we are doing is economic sanctions and divestment from America. And that is one of the only things that can help us. And it works. We know it works. Divestment ended apartheid in South Africa. We know economic sanctions work. We just need the global community to have the will to do it to us. And that will has to come from an understanding that again, we are a failed state and a rogue nation and need to be treated as such.
Andrea Chalupa (47:36):
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(48:44):
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