Susan Glasser

killed this tradition that I think needs to have.

There's no law that says this has to happen.

You know, at the very early years of the United States, presidents sent written messages to Congress.

And I just had this flash of like, if the Democrats were to take back the House and the Senate.

Why should they invite Donald Trump to come to Congress and lie to the country for two hours?

I'm not 100% advocating it, but I'm just saying it's weird that it's not being considered more because Trump has blown up so many norms and showed that unless it's really codified in law, he's going to go around it.

And you realize that

You know, OK, fine.

So the conventional explanation, Washington, for why Democrats don't blow things up is because when they get back in the White House, they don't want it to be taken away.

But frankly, it would not be a bad thing for a Democratic president if they didn't have to go speak in front of a future Republican Congress that was just going to boo them or sit on their hands.

Yeah, you know, I've seen how this happens because I lived in Russia and watched the oligarch wars and how the Kremlin interposed itself and was just a weapon in those wars.

And often, certainly in the 1990s, available to the highest bidder.

Susan Rice is correct.

We still have laws on the books in this country, and it is actually still illegal to bribe government officials and to extort other people using and misusing the power of your public office and your public trust.

You know, if we don't have a Justice Department or an FBI right now that is in the business of enforcing those laws, you know, one can still hope in that very American way that, you know, we hope even when things are dark that there will be a future Justice Department and FBI that gets back in the business of enforcing our laws against us.

So that's that's first of all.

Second of all, you know, the other thing that really resonates for me in the experience of looking at what happens in other countries, experiencing this kind of democratic rollback is the fact.

fact that it's media companies that Trump is intervening in these deals.

You know, there's a sort of formal term of art for this one.

You know, it's called media capture.