Will Saletan

speaker

384 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2025 last heard 10 Nov

Will Saletan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Bulwark Daily · Will Saletan and Scott Lincicome: A Crime Boss Has Taken Over · 3 Feb 2025 podcast

And, you know, we'll make it we'll make an impact, I think, on perception. And at that point, you know, the polls start to decline and all that. And Republicans might might pay attention to that.

I would like to believe that, but I just want to put on the table, the dark theory that I have about all of this, which is maybe, maybe Donald Trump and his MAGA party are, are really bad at governing, but really good at winning elections. I don't think so. Part of how they're really good at doing it is blaming and scapegoating. And we saw that with COVID, right? We saw like this disaster happens.

Trump grossly mismanages. It leads to many more deaths than were necessary. But he talks about the China virus. He blames everybody else. But then he lost. Well, he lost that election, but then he won the next one.

Your pony is that things suck. That's not a pony.

So the big picture on this to me is, you and I are like trying to have a friendly conversation about this, but this is extremely serious. And what's basically happened is that A crime boss has taken over law enforcement. He's president of the United States. He's taken over the Justice Department. And he's putting his accomplices in charge of the Justice Department, the FBI.

Bandi Patel didn't get Gates, but he's replacing all these other officials. And this is just an extension of the January 6th pardon. So the pardons were... These thugs on Trump's behalf beat up cops to try to overthrow an election. So it's anti-democratic, it's fascist, it's a coup, but it's also an attack on law enforcement by criminals.

The guy who sent them there then becomes president and he pardons all of the thugs who beat up the cops, right? And then he goes into the FBI and and starts purging anybody. So they've demanded lists of anybody at the agency and anybody in the Justice Department, I believe, like thousands of people who were involved in any of the prosecutions of the criminals who worked for Trump.

So Trump's got this paramilitary organization, he's put them back on the street, and he's now going after, purging the law enforcement officials who prosecuted them successfully in front of juries, right? They were objectively convicted. It's not clear to me how far this goes.

And just to come back to our original question, Tim, it's not clear to me at what point the American public is going to care about this. If Trump is being Mr. Law and Order against immigrants, is the public going to care that he's letting these criminals out and prosecuting the prosecutors?

Now, in the context of violent crime, Trump's pose and the Republican pose is they're the party of law and order. They stand for the cops. They back the blue against the criminals. Now, we've established that's not true because of the January 6th pardons, the purge of the FBI. What's actually going on is Trump's and the Republican Party's distinction is between foreign and domestic, right?

We're against foreign lawbreakers. We're against people who entered this country illegally. We're against someone who steals a tube of toothpaste who came from overseas. But domestically, we're happy to pardon the people who committed violent crimes. Let me take this over to your point about Doge, though. So here we have a private organization. So you probably know this better than I do, Tim.

Doge's legal status, right? They're not a government department, right? None of this is authorized by Congress. This is one guy, Donald Trump, having won one election, basically usurping power, right? They're taking over. Congress appropriates, Congress establishes programs. The executive decides, no, you know what? I don't care what the Article Two branch, Article One branch did.

I'm gonna usurp this. I'm gonna end this program, cut off these funds. Not only am I gonna do it, I'm the elected guy. I'm gonna give my buddy, who's not even a government official, right, access. These people coming in from Musk, what authorization do they have? So Trump's basic position is,

Never mind all of the rules that were established about who has the right to have access to these payment systems, who established these programs. I won this one election and therefore anybody I choose, I can send in to run the government. So it's kind of democracy because he got elected, but it's illiberal democracy and it's anti-rule of law democracy.

It is authoritarianism with one election behind it.

Wait, can I pull on your thread there a minute about Hungary? Yeah. Because there's a direct connection here with USAID, right? The Orban regime and the Putin regime hate USAID and they've like spoken out against it and they don't like this whole, you know, what are you guys doing promoting civil society and other, you know, you're interfering in our internal affairs.

So undermining USAID in particular on Trump's part is part and parcel of his, you know, de facto alliance with the authoritarians of the world, right? Here's this annoying agency.

Yeah, right, right. There's an absolutely direct connection. I mean, USAID basically does, you know, good things liberals like. The whole idea of international development is like something. Trump's isolationism, America first, a lot of it is we're tired of being the good guys. We're tired of like giving things to other people. We're tired of helping other people.

We're just going to focus on helping ourselves. And while we're at it, we're going to dismantle this agency that annoys our authoritarian friends.

Yeah, absolutely. So let me just sort of sketch. I know you and Scott are going to do the economics of this. Just want to do the geopolitics at this. There's the NATO threatening to pull out of NATO, which is, you know, I'm abandoning Article 5. I won't defend you. There's the EU. Trump just said twice in the last like three days. He said, am I going to impose tariffs on the European Union?

Showing 321–340 of 384 · page 17 of 20