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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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

Absolutely. He said that twice. They also are threatening, of course, Panama and Greenland. Trump said twice in the last two days, we're going to take it back, referring to the Panama Canal. We're going to take it back, okay? Greenland, lots of threats to Greenland. We're picking a war with Denmark, of all things. J.D.

Vance was on TV on Sunday saying that we're going to take more of a territorial interest in Greenland, a territorial interest. Basically, what we have is America first, Trump, Vance means that we are going to target all of our enemies. We're going to pick fights with all of our enemies. Remember, Trump said his whole shtick during the campaign was the other side Democrats are warmongers.

There were no wars. He said at every campaign stop. I never started a war. He's starting a war with our allies. It's an economic war in which you, Mr. and Mrs. America, are the soldiers because you're going to pay at the grocery store and you're going to pay when you buy appliances and cars. He's starting wars for no reason. He chose these wars.

And it's part of, you know, when I talk about Trump being a fascist or this being a fascist movement, people think, OK, that's extreme language. You know, let's not compare him to the Nazis and stuff like that. And, you know, look, we have we don't have people. in, you know, murder camps at this point. But part of fascism is ethnic demagoguery, ethnic scapegoating.

And that we're seeing lots of that already in the first couple of weeks of this administration. You mentioned Darren Beatty got fired before, you know, being a white supremacist, being friends with white supremacists, preaching that stuff. Yeah. That used to be too politically toxic for Trump. He thinks that's an advantage now. They're selling that now.

And Tim, a little bit back to your point about politics. It's still amazing to me that in the 2024 election, Trump got, I believe in the vote cast survey, he got 16% of the black vote and he got 43% of the Latino vote. And a lot of white liberals said, what the hell? I mean, how can you vote for someone who's so overtly bigoted?

And I would like to believe that at some point this will register and those numbers will start to return to recognizing that Donald Trump and his party are enemies of, threats to, insulters of, degraders of minority communities. I mean, this guy has an amazing history.

His campaign, remember the birtherism, Judge Curiel, a Latino judge, was like Mexican heritage, Kamala Harris being a DEI hire, all that stuff. At some point, this needs to register.

Well, you know, it's not clear to me what role little Marco had in this and whether this is sort of, you assume he had to okay it.

They're okaying anything Trump does at this point, right? And Tim, is this to balance things out? You know, we did appoint a Latino secretary of state, so let's balance it out with an anti-Latino, anti, you know, with a white racist.

Public diplomacy. So here we have not just that we have these bigots in office, but we put them in jobs where they're supposed to represent the United States overseas. So we're going to go to Africa. We're going to go to Asia. We're going to go to Latin America with these people. Here, let's put a bigot in charge of public diplomacy.

Let's put Kerry Lake, one of the best known liars, like recidivist liars in our country in charge of the voice of America. There couldn't be a bigger middle finger to the world. And we're basically saying, why should you trust us any more than you would trust the propaganda coming out of regimes in Russia or China?

This happens in other countries. This wasn't supposed to happen here, that a guy gets elected, puts his billionaire friend in charge of the government, gives him special access. I think in Russia, the oligarchs before some of them tangled with Putin had this kind of leverage. Scott Besson and these normies, though, they're no protection.

Because I mean, remember, Scott Besson got that job for one reason, which was that he claimed that that all the stock market increases under Joe Biden were because people expected Donald Trump to be president, right? And that was just, so he flattered his way into the job. He's a totally yes man, right? If Elon's goons, I don't know what to call these guys.

They may be not carrying cudgels, but they're, you know, they work for Elon. They come in and they say, we want to access to this stuff. Here, sign this piece of paper. Scott Besant, he's not in that job because he's brave. He's a coward like the rest of them. I mean, the entire party is populated with people who do bad things or people who are too weak to stand up to those who do bad things.

And Besant is one of those. So, of course, he's going to sign that.

Yeah, I don't even know how to distill this. It's amazing to me that There's a plane crash. Donald Trump steps up to a microphone, says without any evidence that this is, he blames DEI, says that the crash is all about being smart. Now, the obvious explanations were offered to Trump. Well, we have a shortage of air traffic controllers. There was technology. There was a question of that.

He dismissed the obvious explanation. He says, no, it's because we don't have smart enough people. And the reason we don't have smart enough people is because of DEI. And then when pressed for a little more detail, he starts talking about a lawsuit on the part of white applicants who didn't get jobs at FAA that they got discriminated against.

So basically, the very clear message is this plane crashed because we hired black and brown people at the FAA. Now, this is bullshit. There's no evidence for it. And statistically, the numbers have changed very little in the last several years.

But if you go into a situation where something bad happened and you say it is the fault of hiring black and brown people, which is the message here, and you have no evidence for that, That is straight up bigotry. And that is the kind of scapegoating that authoritarian fascist regimes do. He didn't say Jews. He didn't even say explicitly that we hired black people and they caused this.

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