The Jackpod: Follow the frogs
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I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The JackPod, where On Point news analyst Jack Beattie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Meghna. Episode 73, what's your headline? Follow the frogs. The frogs. Okay. And tell me more.

Well, I'm being deliberately cryptic. And at the end, I'll return and package this up in a perfect way.

bouquet of scents. But right now, I just want to leave that tantalizingly out there. And I'm not referring to the French. I was going to say, this is... Making a slur against the great republic. So my subject is the third term. You know, it came up this weekend when Trump, with an interview with NBC, talked about...

You know, he's not joking, he said. And he said there are methods. And, you know, he's not overly concerned about it right now, but it's out there. Well, he has serpentine but surprising paths, it turns out, to a third term or to staying longer in office than the Constitution seems now to allow.

But let's follow this narrative. How did this all get lodged in the active brain of Mr. Trump? Where did this come from? And it seems, as far as we can find on the public record, this goes back to 2018. In China, President Xi was facing a term limit coming up, a constitutional term limit in 2023. I think it was that.

end of a second 10-year term or maybe one 10, whichever it was, it was coming up. And he had a People's Congress and he said they voted and two intrepid people voted no and thousands voted yes to make him, to throw over that constitutional term limit.

and to make President Xi president for life. And Donald Trump reacted to this idea. China's great, and Xi is a great gentleman. He's now president for life. President for life. No, he's great. Look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot someday. No.

So, Jack, this is an audio recording, right, that CNN obtained from a Trump fundraiser in 2018, which is why the audio is a little challenging to hear. But, yeah, he said at the end, Trump said at the end there, maybe we'll give it a shot someday. Yes. And later, at the Buenos Aires summit that year, in a private meeting, this is according to the Los Angeles Times, President Xi turned to Trump.

Instead, it was a shame that Trump couldn't stay in power beyond a third term. Trump agreed, writes Los Angeles Times. So this idea of sort of permanency, president for life, people laughed at.

And they're still laughing, but maybe not quite so authentically. Yeah. Jack, can I just jump in here for a second? Because before you describe more of what you see as the serpentine means by which Trump could extend his power, I do need to just ask you to school us all a little bit in history because—

In some of the vague, the dark recesses of my mind, I do remember that, like you said, there's a constitutional amendment preventing a third term for a president. But that happened after FDR won his third term? Give me the primer on that.

Well, actually, it was the fourth term. Oh, thank you. Okay. He made it to the 1944 election and then died in April of 1945. And, well, there was a Republican Congress and there was a sense that we couldn't do this again, that it was a breaking that what had been a norm—

presidents don't run for third terms, much less fourth, that what had been a norm should become an amendment banning it. And it was a reaction...

against the New Deal, partly, but also just simply, even for people that admired President Roosevelt and it was ratified by the states, a sense that, no, we need to observe the proprieties as, really, as established by George Washington, who could have been president for life, but who, you know, like Cincinnatus, uh, uh,

And went back to his plow. Yeah. Okay. So, Jack, I'm so glad. Thank you. Thank you for letting me press you to give us more historical background on this because I think you raised a really important point. It was a norm for what? Yes. Almost 200 years. That's right.

And in FDR's breaking of the norm, that's what inspired Congress to actually change the law in the Constitution. OK, I'm going to put that in my pocket because we're in another norm-breaking period of U.S. history right now, and I'll come back to that.

But now go ahead. And you had said that you talked about President Xi in China and that a another potential parallel for Trump to follow is with Vladimir Putin. So what are the U.S. constitutional ambiguities that make Putin an example for Trump?

Well, on that score, we have to go back to 2008. And here, Vladimir Putin faced term limits. He was going to be, you know, Russia had a constitution. He was up against the double. He'd done his two terms. And what was he going to do in 2008? Well, what he did was he formed what people have called a ten-democracy system.

with his assistant, with his man, Dmitry Medvedev. And basically, he said to Medvedev, you be president and run for president, and I will become prime minister, and we'll work it out from there. And their relationship, I think, was really caught in an open mic moment. You may remember this. When President Obama said to Medvedev when he was president,

quote, president of Russia, he said, tell Vladimir, not meaning Putin, tell Vladimir that I've got to, you know, basically he says, I've got to be tough on him, but after the election we'll do better business. I mean, it really, Mitt Romney had an issue there that he tried to run on. But that was the relationship. Everybody understood it. Putin, even though he was in the subordinate position, you might say he was the vice president, right?

He was calling the shots. The Los Angeles Times recently reporting on this talked to Fiona Hill. You remember her. We've had her on our program. She is the former Russian expert on the National Security Council, Trump's National Security Council, who testified in the Mueller investigation and in the congressional hearings about Trump's impeachment, first impeachment case.

And quite bravely testified telling what she knew of Trump's dealings with Ukraine. Well, she comments on this Putin, what's called the Putin parallel here.

And it would be, of course, that Trump would run as vice president or be somehow vice president and Vance would run as president. And over the weekend, this was the scenario, thinking of this scenario, NBC, Kristen Welker presented to Trump and said, what about that? You know, Vance will run for president. You'll be vice president. And then you'll switcheroo.

And Trump said, well, that's one way. There's another way. So Trump was thinking about that. Anyway, here's Fiona Hill. She said one of the reasons used to justify Putin's coming back to power in 2012, because there was the four-year term for Medvedev, 2008-2012.

2008 to 2012, why will, can we have Putin come back? I thought he was banned by the Constitution. Well, in the meantime, he had worked out a constitutional change allowing him to come back. And the argument in Russia was that the fallout, this is quoting Fiona Hill, the fallout from the world financial crisis and the world was becoming a more dangerous place for

And so there was a sense of emergency. And Fiona Hill continues, so you could imagine Trump taking a similar move. Already he's using all of these wartime statutes for deportations, revoking visas, et cetera, et cetera. You can see the line of travel there justifying something like a Putin parallel where Trump

Vance would run as president and his vice president would be Trump, and Trump after the election would assume office. But that would require J.D. Vance being on board with that idea, though. Yes, it would. Yes, it would. Yes, it would. And there is a, you know, we're talking, he has that lean and hungry look, as Caesar says about J.D.

Cassius, and we're going to touch on some of that. There's a barrier, though, to this, some people think. The barrier of Trump becoming vice president, that's the 12th Amendment passed in 1804. And that, quote, bars from the vice presidency, quote, those ineligible to the office of president. Journalists have said, well, that closes that book. Well, I've looked at some of the legal scholarship on this, and it doesn't close that book.

because the ineligible for the office is

It really says he's only disqualified from being elected and that the ineligibility only applies to a president. In other words, it has to do with are you a citizen? Are you past the age, 35? Those are the things the 12th Amendment refers to, not that you have served in the office of president before.

And the 22nd Amendment combined with that, that's the one that said presidents have two terms, that says that no person shall be elected to the office more than once. But one legal scholar says, well, it places no limits on how many terms someone may serve as president, only on how many times he can be elected. Mm-hmm.

So the 12th Amendment about the vice presidency can't be, if he's ineligible to be president, he can't be vice president. That wouldn't be a barrier. And the 22nd Amendment...

That says he can't be elected. It doesn't say he can't serve. Given how hard it is to amend the Constitution of the United States, I imagine that every word that was put into the 22nd Amendment was thought of carefully. And what I am seeing here now, given what you're shedding light on, is that –

Post-FDR, no one imagined, no one imagined that someone would try to find a way back into the presidency without running for election again, right? Like, that's how, that's how, what...

We're in such a spectacularly unimaginable time, right? Oh, yes, yes. And that word of norms. Well, of course, no norm has ever held Trump back. Even laws barely hold him back. So, yeah, norms are not going to—you know, I read a law professor saying, well, this is a longstanding norm. And, you know, presidents have mused about this. Here is Ike, of all people, sometime in his second term,

And he said at a press conference, you know, the only thing I know about the presidency is next time I can't run. But someone has raised the question.

Were I invited, could I constitutionally run for vice president? I don't know, like I said. Wow. So... Where do you dig these things up, Jack? You know, you look and you will find. I mean, it is just amazing how these things get out there. And things that you think are unthinkable, well, not in the age of Trump, that's for sure.

Now, Jack, there is something that I think you want to get to, and I want to hear your thoughts on it, because, look, if it were just Donald Trump saying, I don't know, maybe I'll serve another term or I like the idea of being president for life, that would be one thing. But we have a whole ecosystem of.

Right.

Oh, they are. And Mother Jones has some good reporting on this. They attended the CPAC conference in February. That's the Conservative Political Action Committee. They have these every year. And they ran into a couple of guys who were hawking posters showing Trump as Julius Caesar. And these fellows were running a—one of them was a co-host of a sort of—

neo-Nazi podcast called Blood, Soil, and Liberty. And they were pushing what they called the Third Term Project.

And here's some sound from one of these fellows. Well, we believe that, you know, Trump is the Caesar figure that America has needed. You know, Trump is the Napoleonic figure that has emerged to lead our country out of perdition and into greatness. So, you know, we're putting that out there. Trump as Caesar. We think it's a great, you know, great optics.

Jack, I've just got to blurt this out. They don't know history. It didn't end well for Napoleon and neither did it end well for many of the later Caesars, for sure. Not that it matters. Not that it matters? Go ahead. Go ahead. Well, you know, Mother Jones, as anyone would, scoffed at this as these guys are just, you know, eccentrics and weirdos. I'm sure there are more of such types hawking all kinds of merchandise. Yes.

They were hawking posters and coming up with this third term project. But in fact, there's a sort of, dare I use the word, intellectual pedigree here that goes to the influence on this administration, on a man named Michael Anton, who is high up in the State Department. He's the head of the policy planning department.

unit at the State Department. By the way, that's the position George Kennan had.

after the war. And it's another example of, you know, from Kennan to Arvin of refuting evolution, just as Trump, just as Roosevelt Trump throws evolution into the shade. So, so this, from George Kennan to this kook, Michael Anton. But let's get back to Michael Anton's

friend and colleague, Curtis Yarvin, you've had a whole program on him. And in January, The Guardian did a big takeout on his influence on the administration. He is often thought of as a neo-monarchist.

And he has talked about Caesarism in the United States. And he says, Caesarism, it's a form of one-man rule halfway between monarchy and tyranny. One wonders if, you know, which it's closer to. And he said...

You know, how could this come about? Well, and this is in a book of his. He said it would implement one-man rule by necessity. There'd be a breakdown of constitutional rule. And he writes, a nation no longer capable of ruling itself must yet be ruled.

He's positing that in a national emergency, and by the way, we have now, Trump has said there's an economic emergency, and under that rubric, he is now destroying the American economy.

With his tariffs. So the idea of another kind of emergency isn't too implausible. And what could be a pathway to that? Well, you know, the Democrats this weekend, we're going to have over a thousand demonstrations all around the country against Trump-Musk.

and all the depredations. And those demonstrations, maybe not those, but others in the future, may give Trump the opening to proclaiming that national emergency, to put these demonstrations down. Anyway, Yarvin and his friend Michael Anton have collaborated on a paper about this, talking about the things that would bring Caesarism closer here.

And Yarvin, even, you know, he had an idea of what would be a clock on making a president the new Caesar, seizing power. And he said, well, first of all, he could run on an authoritarian platform. Trump did. And he could take and he named a number of steps that Trump has since taken, persecuting his political enemies and so on.

And Yarvin says, he says, you can't continue to have a Harvard and a New York Times past, I don't know, maybe the 1st of April. Well, we still have Harvard, although Trump is talking about taking away billions from Harvard. And we still have the New York Times. And Yarvin said, if you're going to be Caesar and take power, you can't operate with someone else's department of reality.

operating around you. In other words, we've got to get rid of the Department of Reality constituted by institutions like Harvard and the New York Times. And we're past that time. It's past April, but we do see...

And the Times is still there, but Yarvin sees that they might go pretty quickly. So he's got this guy, Anton, a friend of his. They've had podcasts together. He's in the State Department policy planning department.

And he's got J.D. Vance, whom, as you pointed out in our program on Yarvin, is a disciple. And here's from a podcast with Vance several years ago. He says, there's this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who's written about some of these things. This is authoritarian takeover. And then Vance says, the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved

And then when the inevitable collapse comes, yes, you build the country back in a way that's actually better. And an early step is, on this building the country back, Vance said, is there's no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we strike at the heart of the beast, the universities. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So there is that whole sort of crazy, but how crazy can it be? If you have the vice president several years ago musing about this, if you've got this guy, Michael Anton, who worked with Yarvin on these question and answers on these issues,

You've got those things sort of out there, and whether anything will come of the new Caesarism, we don't know. But it's not just a joke. Yeah.

Well, Jack, if I could just add one little thing, because you did mention that we did a whole hour on Curtis Yarvin and the intellectual substructure that's being revealed here. You're exactly right. J.D. Vance has been following Curtis Yarvin for some time. Yarvin himself would say that he's not necessarily right wing or left wing. He's more of a...

He says he's more of sort of a technocratic purist and his problem is he doesn't think democracy is a terribly efficient way to achieve things for a nation quickly. And so therefore a more monarchical model is what a nation might need. And he calls himself a neo-monarchist. The connection between the two, by the way, Vance and Yarvin, is Peter Thiel.

So there is a sort of technocratic billionaire powerful absolutism binding all of this together. And by the way, Jackpotters, you really should listen to this hour that we did about Curtis Yarvin. It was about the new right. And actually, I'm just going to ask if we can put it right back up at the top of our podcast feed because it's in the feed you're in right now. It's an hour about the new right. So check it out.

The new rite that's also, you know, kind of appearing in a toga, right? Oh, God, yes. It's got this ancient world, Roman thing about it. Well, so, Jack, as you lay all of this out, oh, gosh, I'm just...

rapidly waning part of me still is just clinging on to this idea that, well, we have a constitution that says that you can't get elected more than two times. And so therefore, blah, blah, blah. But even as I say this, I'm thinking about those norms, those norms that have been destroyed because I want to believe.

that Donald Trump, or any president for that matter, serving a third term, is unthinkable. Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic had a good point about this, and it applies here. He says Trump has erased a series of norms by reimagining reality. First as a joke, oh, a third term, you've got to be kidding. But eventually, in earnest.

And Chait continues, the jokes allow Republican legislatures to keep their distance. Slowly, though, the unthinkable becomes normalized so that when the moment finally arrives, it feels inevitable.

Or as Steve Bannon put it, you know, people just get used to it. They get numb to it. As Trump puts more and more of what Jonathan last brilliantly in the bubble work called civic blasphemies in the air. I want to run for a third term. As we react to these civic blasphemies, we grow numb to them and we begin to think that, my gosh,

This could happen. And, of course, the metaphor people use is we'll be like the frogs boiling. Well, I've got news for that metaphor. And this is from Professor M.W. Feldman, a professor of biology at Stanford and founder of the, quote, Center for Computational Evolution and Human Genetics Institute.

He has a lifetime... He's won a lifetime award from the Evolution Society. And writing in the New York Review of Books a few years ago about this, he goes back to this metaphor about the frogs jumping. He says, the theory doesn't hold up. The frog, if intact and in a vessel it can escape, will actually jump out rather than be boiled alive. The question is...

Will we follow the frog and jump out before it's too late? Well, I'm glad of that, Jack. But also a frog is a singular organism that actually has the desire to survive, whereas the United States is a multifaceted organism that can't agree with itself on many a thing. But...

I I'm going to you know, my American optimism part, it's not dead yet. So I'm going to cling to the fact that we maybe we'll be a frog and jump out of the boiling water. Well, so with that, Jack Potters, here's what we want to know. Obviously, we want to know about your thoughts, whether you do you do align with Jack's analysis here and see enough constitutional ambiguities that

that the jokes about a third term could eventually become a serious effort.

Let us know, and you know how to do that. Grab your phone. Well, I guess you're probably already on your phone since you're listening to a podcast. And go to the On Point Vox Pop app and give us your thoughts there. And if you don't already have the app, go to wherever you get them and look for On Point Vox Pop. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say. And, Jack, you had previously mentioned tariffs. That was also what you talked about last week, and there have been many a development since then. So when we come back, we're going to hear more.

from jackpotters on their thoughts on President Trump's tariffs. That's just in a moment. Support for On Point comes from Indeed. You just realized that your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. There's no need to wait. You can speed up your hiring with Indeed. And On Point.

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Well, Jack, we are back. And last week on the jackpot, you talked about President Trump's tariffs. And after that, he unveiled them and they are more expensive than we even thought. And we asked jackpotters how tariffs might have an impact on them. And we got a lot of responses. Let's start with Casey McCoy in San Diego, California. And Casey shared a story about how expensive and confusing things will be to figure out.

I sent a belt to my friend in Canada and between the taxes and the other fees that ended up being about 60 bucks to send this belt, which I felt was pretty crazy. And it was also confusing because we had to figure out what category the belt fell under as far as imports go. Because if you just go belts, is it a belt for a machine, for a person?

Yep. Wow. So just a belt there, having an additional $60 just to send it to Canada. Interesting. Here's Nancy Fernandez in Buffalo, New York, and she wanted to talk about food prices. I was shopping at the big main supermarket around here, and I looked at avocados, which the week before had been 89 cents, and all of a sudden they were $1.79 each.

And I said to my niece, who was shopping with me, Wegmans is not stupid. They heard going to be tariffs. They thought, why wait? Let's just raise the price on the avocados now. So some anticipatory price raising there. Here's another one, Jack, before I turn it back over to you. This is Mary Beth, who is a U.S. citizen. She lives in a border city in Canada. And she had to say this. Oh.

All of my family and friends, we used to go to Michigan, Costco, to Meijer, Target, all kinds of shopping. And I didn't even think about it. And I went to Costco, came back, and there were tariffs there.

And now everybody here, we do not shop in Michigan. We are boycotting. And so his tariff war has made the border city very mad. And it's going to hurt Michigan economy. Jack, what do you think?

Yes, what Nancy said, that has happened. In fact, that's one of the phenomena under tariffs. The protected domestic producer hikes the price. And according to one study, 75% of companies surveyed said, yeah, they're going to pass along some or all of the tariff cost to the consumer. And the Wall Street Journal puts this in a headline in their editorial, quote,

Tariffs are taxes. And look at that way. Trump's tariff announcement was the largest tax increase in America since Bill Clinton in 1993. So that's a tough thing for Republicans to deal with, but there it is. He's raising all our taxes. It's just going to be the tax will be in our –

As Woodrow Wilson said, the tariff is the tax that's in your tea. You don't know it's there, but it's there. Until you can't afford the tea anymore. That's right. That's right. Yeah. I mean, this is...

President Trump keeps talking about bringing businesses and manufacturing back to the United States, but that's years off if it ever happens. And in the meantime, I mean, I don't – I cannot think of a U.S. business that wouldn't pass the cost of those importation tariffs on to America.

They're customers, but let's move on. This is Nat, who is in Leeds, Massachusetts, and he says the tariffs haven't had a direct impact or aren't having a direct impact on his household expenses yet. Wall Street has the jitters about the tariffs, and that trickles down to many. But expectations for the rise in prices, particularly energy prices here in New England, are going to hit me. But worse will harm those less fortunate than me, of which there are far too many.

So I guess I can say anxiety is how the tariffs are most immediately affecting me. Really good point, Nat, because everyone might have been freaking out over that 2% drop in the Dow the other day. But these long-term impacts are really the ones that I agree are causing a lot of anxiety. And on that point, here's Justin Skrinski, who's a physician in Detroit, Michigan. And he says what Nat's describing, that anxiety generated by uncertainty is being overlooked.

The uncertainty regarding tariffs, these politics of chaos, the madman thing,

theory of leadership. All these things are taking a huge toll on the mental health of our country. So even if there's not a direct economic impact from the tariffs, there's a pervasive sense of uneasiness right now that's certainly trickling down to the ground level and something that is clearly not being factored in by the administration. Jack, it's so interesting to me that Justin lives in Detroit, right? Because there's tariffs on cars coming.

Jack, go ahead. Oh, you know, Justin, as a doctor, he sees something there. It's a sort of variant of Trump derangement syndrome. Ha ha ha.

You know, that had meant it's liberals who are just snowflakes. They're just exaggerating. They're deranged by Trump. He owns them. He gets them. They just see a menace that isn't there. Well, this is a new kind, that we were all in a state of anxiety, as Nat puts it, waiting. And then the key word is yet. Yet. We haven't yet had to face the price onslaught, the retaliations yet.

the inflation, the taxes. And, you know, we talk about Trump in the third term, whether Republicans are going to want him anywhere near the White House after what he appears to be doing to our economy. That's another question entirely. Well, here's another one. This is Matthew. And Matthew, thank you, because you're one of those longtime jackpot listeners that just lurked

lurked quietly and did not join the active Jack Potter conversation until just now. So he's a first-time caller, Jack, long-time listener. And Matthew lives in Iowa, and he's worried about Trump's new tariffs on a big purchase that he now needs to make. I've worked for the federal government for about a decade.

and within the last year accepted a new position with the understanding of including remote work. Under return to office mandates, I now commute 90 miles daily to and from my office.

This has put me in the position of needing to purchase a new vehicle, which makes these new tariffs very concerning. I feel this is just another example of the current administration not connecting with the middle class and another reason to force current federal employees to resign. Oh, so Matthew's feeling that double whammy, Jack. Oh, my gosh. Gee, 90 miles. My gosh. He's got to get a good car.

And, you know, Trump has said, well, I don't care, but let them raise the prices of cars, meaning foreign cars, upon which all of them he's put a 25% tariff. Let him do it. Go ahead. He's left out something. And the Wall Street Journal in a brilliant video showing a disassembled American automobile. I forget what. I think it was a Ford pickup.

shows how many parts in that American car come from abroad. So all of them are subject to the tariff. They're going to add to the cost of that domestic automobile inevitably because those parts just can't be substituted overnight by domestic manufacturers.

So the idea that Trump is laughing, let them, I could care less whether they raise their prices. He's talking about all cars, all cars, not just foreign cars, because domestic manufacturers, you know, the supply chain goes all over the world for all kinds of parts. Okay, we have one more.

And this is really interesting. And Pete Kronberg, he called us back from Forbes, North Dakota. And Pete, thank you so much because I think we actually asked you to, so I appreciate this. Because last week, Jack, we played a comment from Pete who had discussed with us the things that his best friend says about Doge and about the Trump administration.

and that he was parroting talking points, essentially, that Pete's best friend was parroting those talking points.

We offered some theories about why Pete's friend might have been doing that. And he says actually our analysis was all wrong, that it wasn't just a sort of a unique Trump-related phenomenon. So Pete called back to tell us that his friend is really an example of the way conservative media is really or has for a while been – has overtaken low population density areas like North Dakota.

We've effectively been brainwashed and it's become so prevalent that there are few opinions other than those, you know, uttered on conservative media. And people just take it for granted because then they go to town and they hear the same thing back to them. And that's what happened with my friend. Plain and simple. He did not fall down the rabbit hole. He's too young. He was born in it.

Plain and simple.

Yes, and he's talking about people who were born in the rabbit hole. We can remember Walter Cronkite, the young person he's talking about. That's who? I mean, the idea when news was, quote, objective. I mean, please. And it gives Trump an echo chamber. It tests ideas that he can then—

They hear the idea on Fox, the phrasing, Trump the next day uses the phrasing. And so it seems natural, right? He's just repeating what they've already heard. It is a form of legitimation that is always legitimizing no matter anything he does.

And it's an ecosystem that, you know, it runs in its own way. And if you're born into it, that's reality. You know, someone said that the secret of politics is, you know, defining the issue, defining the language of the issue. All that conservative media does is just talk.

It does that. It says, here's what you should worry about. Trump the next day says, here's what you should worry about. And we're all in agreement and...

Rupert Murdoch and company. That was an evil day for the USA, I think, when he decided to set up shop over here. I don't mean he's evil, but just in the metaphoric sense of it was a bad day. Yeah. Jack, I appreciate your use of the word reality because I have to say, you know, like my personal politics are actually all over the map. I'm not a fire-breathing progressive and I've got

I've got a little bit of a libertarian streak in me, too. Like, it just depends on the issue. And there's actually a lot about classical conservatism that I don't have a problem with. My issue is what happened when powerful, quote-unquote, quote-unquote, conservative voices decided that their means to power was to reshape what people believed as reality.

That's – to me, that's the unforgivable issue. Now, you could call him that progressives did the same thing, and I absolutely will hear that argument.

But I think you actually mentioned this in a previous podcast from a while ago, the success with which the conservative media has been able to convince people to not believe what's happening in their own lives, right? Or not see the connections between those dire outcomes and policies that were passed by, let's say, Republican administrations. That's what I find to be like the lasting damage to the United States. Yeah.

It's a kind of sorcery, isn't it? I mean, it's a cult-like kind of sorcery, departing from reality. And it's very much Trump's own mode of thinking, you know. He...

Reality is what's in his head. He doesn't deal with the correspondence theory of reality at all. Look at this tariff business. Any sensible person would tell him this is insane. In his head, it isn't insane. In fact, at the White House, he said we had a tariff from 1789 to 1913, and then...

For some reason or other, they came up with an income tax. If only we could institute the tariff enough, get it high enough, we wouldn't need an income tax. And that gets back to Mitt Romney and the idea of, you know, the 47% of people who don't earn enough to pay income tax, let's get those suckers paying.

What better way than with a national sales tax through the tariff passed on to people? That's a continuity with the Romney party and the Trump party. Yeah, although my last thought is that

Trumpism is too much even for the former Senator Mitt Romney, right? Because he's one of those few Republicans of the old school who, you know, stood up for classical Republican values and, you know, spoke out in the Senate, paid the price, and ended up deciding not to run again. But with that note in mind, Jack, I just want to say thank you as always. Thank you. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpot from On Point.