The Jackpod: Throughline
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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. Okay, we are at episode 63, and your headline? Throughline. Throughline through what? Throughline through the efforts in 2020...

Trump's efforts to steal the election and now. Special Counsel Jack Smith's report to the Attorney General lights up what is unchanged since 2020 and what has since changed. I'm going to talk about what's unchanged in two examples and what has changed in two. So what's unchanged? Trump's character.

Let me quote from Jack Smith's report. The through line of all Mr. Trump's criminal efforts was deceit. One could go on and on about examples of this. But just looking through one lens, I went back and looked at the charging document that the Justice Department brought against Trump recently.

last year. And this is just through one lens of the inveteracy of his deceitfulness. And it's the way he dealt with questions of the states that could have decided the election. In Arizona, on November 13th, his campaign, 2020, his campaign manager told him,

that rumors about thousands of non-citizens and dead people voting in Arizona, that this was false. Just days later, Trump repeated that false statement to the Speaker of the Arizona House, who told him, no, no, that's not true, Mr. President. That's false. But on January 6th, speaking to the crowd at the Ellipse, the crowd he essentially called

sent to the Capitol to disrupt the transfer of power. He told the crowd that 36,000 non-citizens had voted in Arizona. A lie that he knew to be a lie. Georgia, on December 23rd, 2020, Trump's chief of staff,

told him that election workers in Cobb County who were verifying signatures on ballots, they were, quote, conducting themselves in an exemplary fashion, end quote. The next day, Trump tweeted that these workers were, quote, terrible people hiding evidence of voter fraud. Deceit. Lie. Michigan.

Trump tweeted that a vote dump of false ballots at a Detroit counting facility had essentially rigged the count against him. His attorney general...

Told him that was false. The next day, he tweeted, quote, at 630 in the morning, a vote dump of 149,772 votes, which he just must have pulled out of the air, came in. It's corrupt. Detroit is corrupt. He lied. He was told one day the truth. He lied the next day. Pennsylvania.

Trump claimed that there had been 205,000 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania. His acting attorney general told him that was not true. Days later, he publicly repeated his knowingly false claims that there had been more votes cast than voters in Pennsylvania. Wisconsin,

Trump claimed that there were more votes cast there than voters. His acting attorney general told him this was false. Days later, he told the public via tweet that there were more votes cast than voters in Wisconsin. His lying, his deceitfulness extended to even his allies.

They were trying to, as you remember, they were trying to recruit sort of alternate delegates or alternate electors. The fake elector scam. That was the scheme. Yes. And they went around to these states and said, will you sign on to be an alternate elector? Yes.

And to get some of them, especially in Pennsylvania, to do it, Trump lied to them and said, and we won't use this, your representation that I won the election unless I really win the election. They had no intention of doing that. They were going to use those affidavits or statements from the electors to prevent Biden from taking power. So he deceived Trump.

who were his allies and who could have been implicated in criminal prosecution indeed for what they did. Second, he deceived his own lawyers. This comes out strikingly in the Florida Documents case.

where on several occasions he told lawyer X, yes, we only have so many. We've made a systematic review. We only have so many documents that we've taken out of the White House. So you can sign a statement to the Justice Department to that effect.

And of course, that wasn't true. He did that at least on two occasions, creating ethical problems for his own attorneys. So that is a fixed – it's the vertebra of Trump's character. He is a deceitful man and he will deceive the country almost certainly, absolutely.

Again, perhaps not in this way, but in other ways, because he has no internal check, no effort, no, as it were, a sense of decency that prevents him from doing this. And as I say, he will even lie to his subordinates. So that's one of the things that is unchanged, Trump's character. And the other...

that has not changed is Trump's extraordinaryness comes out in the report strikingly. His willingness, indeed his relish, of threatening people to get his way, of using threats to advance his criminal ends.

Examples. Days after his arraignment on the Washington case, the case about the events surrounding the insurrection of January 6th, days after he was arraigned, he tweeted out, if you go after me, I'm coming after you.

Well, the judge in that case, Judge Chutkan, an African-American, by the way, received a communication to her office. Someone called in saying, hey, you stupid black blank. If Trump doesn't get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you. So tread lightly, blank.

You will be targeted personally, your family, all you know, all you are.

And this is Jack Smith's nice use of understatement. He quotes Trump saying, my supporters listen to me like no one else. And of course, this is an example of Trump's use of stochastic threats, stochastic terrorism. The use of threats that are a rhetorical device whereby you just sort of say,

Somebody, who will rid me of this troublesome priest? And someone takes you up on it. It is a surety that this sort of thing will happen again. And that's a vague threat. You know, if you come after me, I'll come after you. There were also threats with addresses and names and particulars on them.

Especially to Georgia election workers. One of them told the Smith inquiry, quote, when someone as powerful as the president of the United States eggs on a mob, that mob will come.

They came for us, that would be these two Georgia election workers, with their cruelty, their threats, their racism, and their hate. They haven't stopped even today. This was said last year to Jack Smith's people. And, of course, it isn't simply that he will threaten, you know, these are strangers. He just picked them out and sent out this message.

tweet that put targets on them. No, no. He threatened his own vice president. When Mr. Pence said, Mr. President, I can't go along with your scheme, Trump told him, well, Mike, I'm going to have to tell my people about this. I'm going to have to tell them about this. And when he said that,

Pence's chief of staff was in the room when he heard that, and he alerted the Secret Service. He basically said, the president has just essentially said he's going to target the vice president. Please beef up the protection. And we know that come January 6th,

Pence did not. The Secret Service wanted him to get back in a car and leave the Capitol. He refused because he wasn't sure that Trump wouldn't be, hadn't somehow influenced these Secret Service agents to deliver Pence to the crowd that was shouting, hang Mike Pence. Yeah.

You know, Jack, can I just jump in here? Because even after all these years now, right? I mean, we're basically 10 years from Trump's first burst onto the political scene in this country. I am astounded by how he can walk through this political life of his utterly unscathed,

by the deceit that you're talking about, by the use of threats against others, by this through line, as you're mentioning. To me, there's only one way that this continuous level of egregious manipulation of truth and reality goes unscathed or unpunished, if I can put it that way. And that is, A, someone, the person saying the falsehoods believes them so much

So thoroughly that they are permanently lodged in their own alternate reality and nothing can change that or be the people who follow this person who follow Trump don't care. And they and or they too are lodged in that same alternate reality.

There is a system of people and institutions around Donald Trump that have allowed this through line to persist. And that's what really, to me, that's the deeper maltransformation of America, I think, here in this through line that you're talking about.

Yes. And of course, this through line was in 2020, the social media companies were, if anything, on Biden's side. Now his threats can have a resonance and a reach. Essentially, he has the captains of consciousness in America on his side. They're going to be lined up.

on that inaugural dais. Yes, on the stage, exactly. When I read that headline, it was quite striking. But go ahead. And they're going to be able to give any threat that he wants legs,

and vicious tongue. I mean, it's already happened with Musk, who's targeted particular federal officials. This will be a staple. He now has the consciousness industry, the reality industry, the information people, the tech bros on his side. And then you raise the question, you know, did he know? Well, Smith gives at least three examples

where it comes out clearly that Trump knew he had lost. He's talking to General Milley right around the election. He said, it's too late for us. We're going to give that to the next guy about a particular problem. When he saw Biden on TV around this time, he said, quote, can you believe I lost to this guy?

And he mentioned to family members, several family members, that he had lost, that he knew he had lost. So he wasn't deluded. In other words, he's not a fool. He's a scoundrel. But, Jack, to the other point that I think you were getting to and that really resonated with me is that there's so many reasons why he's the first. But one of the major ones is that no one has tried to stop him. I mean, well, let me put it this way. The people who could stop him have not. Right.

And I think that's the thing that's changed. There has never been a, you know, have you no shame, sir, moment. Right? Yes. In Donald Trump's story. No, no. And, you know, people are blaming the Attorney General Garland that if he had, you know, set his, the Jack Smith special counsel case,

A year earlier, even months earlier, these cases might well have come to trial, and at least one of them, that is the Florida case where he was keeping documents, or the Washington case, which is about the events of January 6th.

These would have come to trial. Jack Smith says in the conclusion of his report that he's confident that if they had come to trial, Trump would have been convicted. And those were serious felonies, some of them carrying sentences of four or five years. In any case, he would be looking for probably the rest of his life in jail,

if what Jack Smith said had happened, if Smith was right that they had a substantial probability of conviction. So he got away with it by running out the clock. And that's one of the exasperations you can feel in Smith's report that each time things would be moving along, Trump would use his money to appeal again

And, you know, it's that line from King Lear, plate sin with gold and the lance of justice hurtless breaks. Well, it hurtless broke against Trump and nothing. This is now to what has changed since 2020 is the case that United States versus Trump, where he appealed to the Supreme Court claiming presidential immunity.

for the deeds that Jack Smith documents. And in the case, United States versus Trump, as we know, the United States lost. Smith quotes a passage from the dissent in that case. The dissent, there were three dissenters, Justice Kagan, Jackson, and Justice Sotomayor. And this is from her dissent. It's a lapidary formulation, I think, that people will be citing today.

for a long time to come. And she says of the case that found that a president has immunity for even criminal acts committed as part of his official duties. Unheard of. No one had ever thought this could be ruled. It was ruled. Okay, she said, the court effectively creates a law-free zone

around the president. This new official act immunity, immunity for official act, now lies about like a loaded weapon for any president that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, his own financial gain above the interests of the nation. And she concludes in a passage that I think will last forever.

When he uses his official powers in any way under the majority's reasoning, he will now be insulated from criminal prosecution. If he orders the Navy SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, immune. Orders a military coup to hold on to power, immune.

takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon, immune, immune, immune. That is a change in the whole scheme of American checks and balances. And it says, in effect...

that the executive is now unchained to do whatever he pleases, serene in the confidence that the court will say, no, you, yeah, you may have tried to kill somebody, but after all, that was part of your official business. And President Biden rightly said,

in his farewell address, called for a constitutional amendment, you know, to overthrow this terrible United States v. Trump so that the United States can win. That is the major change that essentially says Trump can do what he likes as president and through the pardon power, he can convey his immunity to his subordinates. They can do what they want, what he wants,

And he can say, if you get in trouble, I'll pardon you. So that's one of the big changes. It is a galvanic change. The second one is his people. For example, the new people versus the old people. He has now substituted Pete Hexdeth for Secretary of Defense to take the place of his last president.

genuine Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper. Now, remember, Mark Esper was fired for balking at Trump's orders to put the 82nd Airborne in the streets of Washington during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Esper refused. Trump fired him. Hexeth, Pete Hexeth, was asked if Trump would

gave him an illegal order, and this would appear to be an illegal order to put the army in the streets against demonstrators. There is the posse comitatus prohibition on using military force domestically, which can only be overthrown through the Insurrection Act, which wasn't part of this.

Hexeth said, oh, it's inconceivable that the president would give me an illegal order. Sorry, that is laughable. Yeah, it's totally laughable. So there's an example. But an even more, in a way, pernicious and likely recurring example is with the Justice Department. And this swaps Pam Bondi.

for William Barr. Now, Barr, Trump's last attorney general, he resigned after telling the media that there was no significant fraud in the election. He was summoned into the White House, in the White House dining room. He tells this in his memoir. And Trump lit into him for saying that there was no factual basis for Trump's attempts to overthrow the election.

And Barr says he told him, he says, I understand you're very frustrated with me, Mr. President, and I'm willing to submit my resignation. He said Trump slammed his hand on the table and said, accept it, accept it. So that's the attorney general he had nominated.

Actually, Jack, before you get to Pam Bondi, I just have to say, it's not as if Bill Barr covered himself in glory during his time as the attorney general of the United States in the Trump administration, right? Maybe we don't all, but we remember the Mueller report where Barr held back the Mueller report. Instead, the first thing that he released was his own one-page document summarizing all the reasons why he, as attorney general...

believe the Mueller report was incorrect and wrong, undermining the Justice Department's own special counsel. So that's one example. I just, you know...

When someone does the right thing, we applaud them. But that doesn't mean necessarily that we forget the rest of their history. No, no. There's no tabula rasa in this business. We remember. And, you know, sure. Again and again, he carried sordid water for Trump. I mean, let's just face it. Just...

Just terrible. Well, bad as he was, he looks like a statue of integrity next to Pam Bondi. Pam Bondi was asked...

who won the 2020 election? The very question that Barr dealt with when he said to President Trump, Mr. President, you lost the election. Biden won. She wouldn't answer it. He didn't give a straight answer. She is an election denier. That is a democracy denier. And she is a former lawyer for Mr. Trump. She worked for him in Pennsylvania and I think elsewhere to try to subvert the election.

And she would not commit to the proposition that Joe Biden won the election because, of course, if she had said that, Trump would probably have appointed somebody else for attorney general. She said, I will tell the president no if he wants to do something illegal. And yet it's clear that the post-Watergate campaign

norm of separating the Justice Department from the president, even as an elaborate procedure, the presidents even have to undergo or have undergone to communicate with the Justice Department. That's out the window. Trump is going to pick up the phone anytime he wants and call Pam Bondi and say, Pam,

I want this done. And if you don't think she's going to do it, then her past conduct argues the opposite. She'll do whatever it takes to please him. There's also been a substitution of Todd Blanche for Jeffrey Rosen. Jeffrey Rosen was the acting attorney general after Barr was fired. He told the president, there's no evidence here, Mr. President. This is

You lost the election as well. Todd Blanche is Trump's personal attorney in these criminal cases. He's going to be in the position of deputy attorney general. And then just for safety's sake—

The principal associate deputy attorney general is going to be—he's not going to be Richard Donahue, who was that person in 2020 and who said with Mr. Rosen, no, I'm afraid, Mr. President, there's no evidence for this. No, it's going to be another Trump lawyer, Emil Bova.

So the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the principal associate deputy attorney general are all Trump lawyers effectively in the Justice Department.

And there, and the, as I say, the norm, and it's only been a norm, it's only been something the president did because of the scandals of Watergate where Richard Nixon was, you know, his Justice Department was hand in glove with him. Now the hand is going to go back into the glove and it's going to be Trump's hand. Okay, folks. So Jack has laid out a lot of

I mean, it's more than just a trail of crumbs, right, in this through line for Donald Trump and his political impact on this country, as Jack says, is revealed by special counsel Jack Smith's report. So I guess what I want to hear from you, Jack Potters, is what else do you think has changed about this country today?

In terms of the things that have facilitated or are facilitating the kinds of behaviors and actions that Jack has laid out before us by Donald Trump, both before his return to office and now that he is going to be president of the United States again, following his return to office. So that's what we want to know. What else has changed in this situation?

country. And you know the routine. In order to do that, grab your phones and head over to the On Point VoxPop app. You can send us a very high quality message that way. Or if you don't already have it, just look for On Point VoxPop wherever you get your apps. Now we're going to take a quick break and listen to all the thoughts people had about last week's show. So Jack, just hang on for a second and we'll be right back.

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And we're back. And Jack, before we get to the thoughts from listeners regarding last week's show, I just have to say I wrote this down when you quoted Lear earlier. Sin with gold and the spear of justice heartless breaks.

Just genius. Okay. I didn't say it at the moment, but absolute genius. All right. Well, last week in the pod, you talked about the long line, speaking of through lines, of domestic casualties due to U.S. foreign wars or foreign interventions. And we got a lot of responses there.

So here's Ronald Dobrinio. He left us a message from Glen Burnie, Maryland, and he says it's a combination of ignorance and arrogance in American culture that's part of the problem. We have very little sense of what it's like to live in a foreign country and the intricacies of their cultures and politics and reactions to our actions.

If we were a little bit more humble, a little bit less prone to take action just because we see a reason to do so in the short term, we would be better off. Jack, what do you think? I think that's quite right, Ronald. And, you know, there's a good novel about this, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, where it's about our meddling in Vietnam very early on and how this...

you know, innocent American who just says, oh, no, we want to make you, everything's going to work out here fine, is able to do almost anything he wants in terms of starting up insurrections and toppling governments because, after all, he means to create democracy. It is a vicious, a scalding look at the hubris of

of American foreign policy abroad. And, you know, it comes out in little ways, in language. Remember when George Bush used the phrase crusade about intervening in the Middle East crusade. It comes out in all those ways. And when there's knowledge, it's so often disregarded by the people at the top. I

There were, you know, the State Department had prepared, the government, other parts of the government had prepared a detailed statement of all the bad things that could happen within Iraq because of the ethnic and religious schisms there. That was just thrown out. We don't need to look at that.

Because God has – and I do think there was a spiritual element to Bush's crusade. You know, we're going to create democracy in Mesopotamia. Yeah.

Well, let's hear now from Jeff from the Bridgewater Triangle area in Massachusetts. And this is what he thinks the first step must be to change the pattern, Jack, that you described. If we come right out in the beginning and say, and honestly say, OK, this is why we're going in. This is what we're hoping to achieve. This is the conditions we're going to exit under. This is the kind of aid you could expect, you know, before, during and after, etc. Because a lot of people think that,

oh, America's here to help us. And then America, like after all the, you know, the major fighting's done, America up and walks away. And they're like, where are you guys going? You just blew up everything and left. What are we supposed to do over here? Jack, what do you think? It sounds like Afghanistan. Sounds like, you know, Vietnam. I mean, yes, we leave. We get people excited. We're going to create a better...

A new heaven and a new earth for you. And then time runs out. Something like that's going to happen perhaps with Ukraine under Trump. Biden said, we're with you all the way. And it turns out all the way may just go to January 20th.

Here's what happens though, the idea of the simple, the Powell Doctrine, that's essentially what this would be. Powell said, you know, here's why we're going in, here's our exit strategy. He laid it out like, you know, this was before the Gulf War in 1990.

And indeed, that war followed the pattern that Powell had laid out. But what happened in the Iraq War under Bush Jr.,

is something that a scholar we quoted in an earlier program about the meddler's trap. Talking about McKinley's intervention in the Philippines, he said, what happens once you've intervened for reason X, and in the Philippines it was to defeat Spain in the War of 1898, Philippines being a Spanish colony, what sets in is an endowment effect. You're there,

You've taken risks. You may even have lost some lives. And now you find a new reason for being there. And the new reason was to essentially put down the rebellion of the Filipinos against our presence. And that this endowment effect, which is partly political, I don't want to be blamed for losing the Philippines. I don't want to be blamed for losing Vietnam. But it's partly just cognitive effect.

We have a stake there. We have people that find a new reason for us to be there. The endowment effect, that is like a chain binding American policymakers to error. Yeah. You know, it amuses me how much of a surprise this comes as to various American leaders, right? I think part of the problem is that

We don't read enough histories written by the people who have been on the receiving end of American invasions, right? Or the only true history that we know of people who launched a guerrilla war in response to a colonizing power is our own in the United States with the revolution. And in that case, it was, you know, the heroes of the revolution. And it's never...

It's just like it's just not a model that fits what the reality is in terms of how the U.S. has used its own military power subsequently in the subsequent 250 plus years.

But anyway— And the ignorance that Ronald mentioned earlier is salient in the case of the Philippines. At one point, McKinley said, well, we're going to intervene to Christianize the people. They had been a substantially Roman Catholic for 400 years. Yeah, amazing. It just doesn't surprise me that people on the receiving end of a vast military power eventually don't want to be—

on that receiving end for much longer. But anyway, that takes us down a different path. Let's get back to what our jackpotter said. And we had a couple of really interesting calls because really underneath all of this, a lot of jackpotters saw that what is required right now, what is really essential is for the United States to completely reframe the animating purpose of its foreign policy. So here's Joe Shadler from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

We need to resurrect Jimmy Carter's foreign policy emphasis on human rights as a leading goal of our foreign activities instead of falling back on the real politic of Kissinger and Reagan and regimes since Reagan. If we fail to uphold these three aspects of our efforts to cohabitate on the world with our neighbors, our society will be viewed

by elements abroad as a malevolent society that they will seek to harm. So that's Joe in Minneapolis. And here's one more. This is Kyle Pontieri in Aurora, Colorado. After decades of being the world's police, we can't just isolate ourselves. It would be trying to put the genie back in the bottle, which is impossible.

Politically, it would create a global power vacuum, which, based on American business interests, which is the primary function of our military, it seems, would not allow that and would not support that.

So we really need to look at it through the lens of our current alliances and really shifting from the world's policemen to the world's medics. Ah, interesting. What do you think about the idea of the world's medic, Jack? In his farewell speech to the nation, Jimmy Carter said,

spoke about the centrality of human rights in American foreign policy, and he also said that the enemies of America abroad should be ignorance, poverty, and disease. Essentially what Kyle is talking about. Those should be our enemies. Ignorance, poverty, and disease. And of course that echoes Martin Luther King as well and how the world would be so much better without

If we could do that, it would be, as it were, intervention, but intervention with things like, well, I think George Bush's PEPFAR, the really extraordinary effort against AIDS in Africa, that's an example of the immense good that can be done

abroad by American taxpayers, really, and a shred of something we can be proud of. And about Jimmy Carter's foreign policy and human rights that Joe brings up, I once was at a dinner party where a man from Argentina looked across the table at me and said, I'm alive because of Patricia Darien.

She was Carter's human rights person in the State Department.

And she had intervened in Argentina and essentially stood up for human rights in Argentina against the generals ruling it and had got Argentine nationals who were probably going to be tossed out of planes and disappeared, had got them freed from prison. I was never so proud of my country that when that man looked at me and said, I'm alive because essentially of Jimmy Carter.

Boy, human rights. Well, Jack, thank you as always. Thank you. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty, and this is The Jackpod from On Point.