This Week in Politics | Explainer

So, you asked a lot of questions. I'm going to see if I can pull them all together today. Um, but I wanted to start in a different place than you asked about because you may have not seen this. Uh, President Donald J. Trump spoke today to the House of Representatives, which is back in session for a really long time. And he was all over the map. But he did say something that really jumped out to me. He said, and I quote, "They say that when you win the presidency, you lose the midterm." And then he said to the people to whom he was speaking, "I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy. Excuse me. Because we have the right policy." They, meaning the Democrats, don't. They have horrible policy. They do stick together. They're violent. They're vicious. They're vicious people. They have the worst policy. How we have to even run against these people. I won't say cancel the election. They they should cancel the election because the fake news will say he wants the elections canled. He's a dictator. They always call me a dictator. Nobody is worse than Obama and the people that surrounded Biden.

There's an important rhetorical piece there in uh what Trump was saying that I think explains an awful lot of what's going on in his administration. And that is for uh 40 years now, since the 1980s, the Republicans have insisted that their policies are the only ones that will work. And that the Democratic policies, which are actually really quite popular if you strip away the parties, people like what the Democrats do. If you strip away the names, the the polls show they like the kinds of policies that Democrats embrace. Republicans have insisted that those policies are socialism, that they are handing money from the uh hardworking white taxpayer to uh undeserving minorities and so on. Even though since 1981 um actually I think it's since 1976 uh more than $50 trillion has moved from the bottom 90% of Americans up to the top 1%. So they have really pushed this rhetoric, the idea that any democratic policy is by definition bad and that the people who vote for it, often women, people of color, black Americans, are either illegitimate voters. They talk a lot about voter fraud, although there's never been any evidence um that they're of anything other than a few odd ducks um voting twice or whatever, never anything to change an election. um that they that they either insist that there has been voter fraud or that the people who are voting for Democratic policies are illegitimate. They shouldn't vote. They should lose their vote. And this is what's behind voter suppression. Well, the logic of that says that uh Republicans should win all the elections, that Democrats should never win an election. And that really jumped out to me in this moment, of course, when we're looking at a president who is extraordinarily unpopular. He's in at historic levels of unpopularity, facing a midterm election, which most pundits think the de the Democrats are really going to romp the Republicans in that election. And here he is saying, "Well, maybe we shouldn't even have elections because um you know the our policies are so much better than the Democrats are." And I want to chase that down a little bit before I actually talk about the difference in those policies.

So if you think about this idea that the Democratic policies are terrible and only the Republicans know how to rule, then you can see the logic behind January 6, 2021. Uh an election an attempt to overturn the election of November 2020 in which Democrat uh Joe Biden won election by more than seven million votes. The election was not close. It was not close in the electoral college either. In fact, somewhat ironically, um, uh, Biden won that election in the electoral college by the same margin that Trump won it in 2016 over Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate. Although Trump in 2016 did not win the majority of the vote, you'll remember that's one of those occasions on which more people voted for the person who did not end up in the White House. Um, so the um the uh that idea that a Democrat could not be legitimately elected, all evidence to the contrary, is something that Trump has increasingly latched on to. And one of the things that came out today was an attempt of the official White House website to insist that January 6 was caused not by Trump, not by the Republicans who were trying to destroy our uh peaceful transfer of power and the election of Democrat Joe Biden, but rather it blames the Democrats by saying that they refused to recognize that Trump had been the the true winner in that election by definition and that is going to be a really important frame I think going forward.

It's also an important way to think about what Trump and his cronies people like Russell vote at the office of management and budget and uh Steven Miller as the deputy white house chief of staff have done since they've been in power because what they are doing is they are erasing the US government that has been in place since World War II. uh a time when you started to see the democratization not only of um domestic policy but also of world policy. They're trying to get get rid of all that alto together because those policies, those incredibly popular policies that seek to restrain power and use it in fact to deter wars rather than cause them and seek to use power domestically in such a way that people create laws that that create um systems in which people have a say in their government and have equal access to resources. They're trying to get rid of all that to go back before we had that system, arguing that that system is in fact no good, as Trump said. But I've pulled for fun um a quote from um Peter Baker of the New York Times when um Joe Biden took office after Trump had been in office before. On January 5th of 20 um 25, Peter Baker wrote that um the the US that Biden was leaving was in better shape than the US had been since at least 2020. I'm sorry, since at least 20 2000. And he explained why. He said, "There are no US troops fighting in foreign wars. Murders have plummeted. Deaths from drug overdoses have dropped sharply. Undocumented immigration is below where it was when Trump left office. Stocks have just had their best two years since the last century. The economy is growing. Real wages are rising. Inflation has fallen close to its normal range. Unemployment is at historic uh near historic lows. Energy production is at historic highs. The economy has added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs among the 16 million total created since 2020. Uh the chief economist of Moody's Analytics, Mark Xandandy, said quote, "President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets."

that is the system of government that um the United States really pioneered under Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, although it had its roots in the progressive era under people like Republican President Theodore Roosevelt. Uses the power of the federal government to as I say restrain power internationally and at the same time um uses the power of the federal government to make sure that people have equal access to resources. They have things like education. They have health care. They have decent roads. They have opportunities to um to get an education. They have opportunities to uh to be entrepreneurs. They have opportunities to buy houses. That sort of an economy uh benefits the most people. It creates a roaring economy. It always has for all the rhetoric to the contrary. So Trump has this idea that if only people like him can be in power, everything is going to be great. America is going to be great again. And that means erasing everything that Democrats have done.

So, where has that gotten us of late? And I I may not have the time to go into domestic policy now, but I very well might do it with uh with Jim in a little bit, but um but the the obvious place to start here is with what whatever is happening in Venezuela. And I will get there in just a second. I want to start by saying a lot of you asked about the 25th amendment and its policies for removing the president of the United States in case that person is incapacitated and the answer to that is it's really quite complicated. Uh you have to have a majority of the cabinet. Um there's a a number of different places that the 25th is a problem and yet one of the things that we are not talking about enough is the fact that the president of the United States does not appear to be mentally competent. He cannot keep an a a solid idea in his head. He's flitting all over the place. He is falling asleep at meetings. Uh he looked the other day at the announcement of the Venezuela strikes as if he were going to fall asleep standing up. And remember we and he's his behavior is enormously erratic. It is sometimes um unusually aggressive. So when he went after that journalist by calling her piggy, uh if you notice the next day he was all happy and jolly and and touching MBS, uh the the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. And he's not a touchy kind of guy, but he was no, you know, he was happy and jolly and touching him. And the next day he did the same thing with Zoran Mandani, the now mayor of New York City. And I looked at that and I am a thousand% not a doctor, at least not a a medical doctor. And um and I thought this looks medically induced to me. Um this extraordinary aggression followed by, you know, the laughter and the he's a nice guy and and the touching seemed to me to be an indication that there is a real struggle behind the scenes to keep Trump able to function. um at least enough for the cameras because remember when we see him we see him at his best and and a lot of people said well isn't JD Vance gonna be worse and the answer to that is under zero circumstances do you ever want to have the leader of a country who appears not to be in control of his mental facilities mental faculties um you just you just don't know what he's going to do and you don't know if people are going to stop him. So, no matter what else happens, uh, keep a watch on Trump's mental ability. The fact that this is not headline news every minute of the day is simply beyond me. Um, the the things that people seem in the media to be shrugging off that if any other president had done them would have been headline news for weeks is is sort of mind-boggling. But there we are.

So when you look at what happened in Venezuela, I will emphasize Trump's mental uh acuity, but I will also emphasize the fact that under this administration, it is extremely difficult to tell what is happening. Um that is normally in an administration and the Biden administration was like this. Um you you can't really shut them up. They they they want everyone to know what they're doing except when they don't. And that's when you uh look at the public announcements and you have to to have sources within an administration or make guesses about what's really going on. And that's kind of what people like me are trained to do. Now, in this administration, they've made it a point to make sure we don't know what's going on. The White House is not reprinting Trump's speeches. Um he they're putting up videos for when he he seems like he's saying, you know, they they clip them so that he sounds like he's better than he really is. One of the reasons I print his speeches in full uh is that people understand what they're really seeing here is not the clips that you're getting in places like the White House um uh website. So um the at the same time, you know, we just don't know what's going on. So what has happened in Venezuela seems to me and and I am prefacing this by saying listen I read all the stuff that comes out everything I can get my hands on and I cannot give you a definitive account of what just happened behind the scenes on the way to American strikes against the uh president of Venezuela uh Nicolas Maduro. Um, I can tell you what I have read and I have a much clearer picture, I think, of what's happened with the small boats. But in terms of that strike, here's what it looks like to me. And again, please recognize that I'm telling you what I've seen in the reports, but I would expect a lot of this will be revised. It appears, emphasize on appears. Again, historians hate to do this. I mean, I would never put this in print because you want to make sure you got a footnote for everything. And in this case, I can give you footnotes for everything I'm going to say, but a lot of it's going to turn out to be, "Oops, we were wrong." There's one piece of information that appeared, then got retracted, and I showed it, and then retracted it, and now it's back on the table again. And at this point, I'm like, "Okay, I'm I'm out until we have a better a better idea." Anyway, I'll stop putting up hedges around what I'm going to say.

It appears that what happened is this. the Trump administration um under Secretary of State Marco Rubio um and under um Deputy White House Chief of Staff Steven Miller have been putting real pressure on Maduro in Venezuela because they wanted him to step down. They wanted uh that to put somebody in place there who was going to be more malleable, somebody who was more likely to permit American oil interests to have better um access to the Venezuelan oil fields which are uh very valuable oil fields although they produce quite a crude form of oil. So, they were putting pressure on him and Trump moved down uh huge amounts of American military forces. And the one thing I would like to see, I do know it costs about $6.5 million a day to um deploy a carrier group. Um that's just to deploy it. Um, I would love to know how much this escapade has cost us because one of the things again that we're not talking about is that the US uh deficit and debt has skyrocketed under Trump for all the idea that uh the Department of Government Efficiency was supposed to cut our costs. They're going through the roof and that's just going to get worse now that those tax cuts have been extended in the the July budget recon uh um uh budget reconciliation bill. Um anyway, um it appears what happened is they were putting pressure on Maduro to step down so that they could have somebody who's more malleable. And when he didn't do that, it got personal for Trump. And so they decided to make this strike, this lightning strike that would just grab Maduro and his wife. Uh leaving in place Maduro's vice president who has now taken the oath of the presidency. a woman who's last. It's Delsey Rodriguez. Um, but what's really interesting about that is that happened. That's what they did. And then the the next day, uh, Trump told the had that press conference. First, he called into the Fox News Channel and then he had that press conference. And at the press conference, he said, "We're going to be running Venezuela." And that apparently was news to Secretary of State um Marco Rubio and possibly to Defense Secretary Pete Hexith. It was maybe not such a surprise to Steven Miller and who is angling to become the person in charge of Venezuela in part because he wants to deport a lot of Venezuelans. Right. So, it appears that that was a surprise. And so, on Sunday, you had Marco Rubio walking all that back and saying, "No, no, no, no. We're just going to pressure Venezuela by continuing our capture of oil uh tankers that are sanctioned and and that's that, you know, that's actually legal. What a when an oil tanker is sanctioned and doing something it shouldn't be, countries can grab it." So, that was a real walk back. But at the same time, it appears appears from where I sit that this was actually um somewhat of a work of genius uh in the on the part of uh the Venezuelan ruling party and on the part of um perhaps Cuba and quite possibly on the part of Russia in the sense that of this anybody knows even if you don't study foreign affairs, if you know anything about the American Civil War, for example, you know that the best way to unify a population behind you is to have someone attack you. Look at Netanyahu after October 7th. Uh look at the American um uh war effort in the Civil War when the Confederacy invaded Gettysburg um invaded Pennsylvania. You know, once somebody is on your turf, it changes the equation. So what has happened since the US grabbed Maduro is that his vice president who was not popular. Remember they lost the election in 2024 um has cracked down on the opposition and has um taken the oath of office and when doing so she embraced the foreign ambassadors from Russia, Iran and Cuba uh if I recall correctly. So what we managed to have done is to solidify the power of that group that Trump theoretically was going to weaken. And that's put him in the position of going, "Oh, well, you know, we might do a second strike against whom?" I mean, who if the idea was that this was a a law enforcement operation, which is the fig leaf that um Marco Rubio is using. Who's next? I mean, what are we going to do, right? I mean I it just that it there is just a complete fog over everything that's happening there. At the same time that Trump has this fantasy that the oil companies are going to want to rebuild the Venezuelan oil um oil uh facilities and they don't uh they uh the the facilities have been degrading now for at least 20 years. They don't know what they're getting into and they don't know who's going to be running the country. So why would you want to invest a hundred billion dollars into bringing those back online in a way that they in the way that they could be at the and and now you've got Trump saying, "Well, maybe the US will um will subsidize that." And and that's simply not going to fly. All right.

So So we don't really know what's going on there. But at the same time, it certainly appears that Trump perhaps and maybe um maybe with the pushing of Steven Miller, who's been the the face of this out in the media, is really really pushing the idea of overturning the rules-based international order, which is what I spoke about last Saturday when we had first uh gotten the news about Venezuela. And that is uh fitting for somebody like Miller who uh is all about power, is all about um you know he seems quite a disturbed individual and really is pushing the idea that the with the might of the United States, the people in charge can do anything they want. apparently not recognizing that the real power of the American uh uh country has always been in um in its restraint and in its deterrence and in its trade and its soft power, its welcoming of other people and its work around the world through things like the Voice of America, for example, which Trump has gotten rid of, or through the um you know, public broadcasting system, which uh they've also gotten rid of. So, uh, Steven Miller seems to think that the way to go is for the United States to stop being the global power that it always was, uh since World War II, which has been, uh, you know, it's been a huge boon to the United States. It's also been not a bad boon for the world. We've done a lot of, uh, things that we are not proud of, and as a historian, that's the kind of thing that I focus on. But one of the things that a lot of people focus on is the fact that the rules-based international order has lifted more than a billion people out of poverty um since it went into place. And that's everybody. That's not just um people in the Western Hemisphere or in the United States of America and so on. It is the fact that countries like China with the freedom of the seas that is protected by the rules-based international order were able to increase their trade dramatically and that did wonders for Asia among other places. So he wants to get rid of that and get rid of the American power around the world and instead reduce us to being a regional power taking over the western hemisphere. And this is why there is now all this talk from Trump of attacking Cuba, attacking Colombia. Um and and Trump, I think, doesn't really understand what's at stake. He thinks the United States military can continue to do these kind of strikes, which the US military probably can, but um but it's not at all. And Trump is saying, well, you know, we we don't care about, you know, we'll do regime change. It's okay with us to have people there. probably not going to fly in the United States to have more forever wars.

But what a lot of people asked about was um the um the attack the the rhetorical attacks on Greenland. Those are really interesting because remember Greenland is an autonomous territory that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Um, and Denmark and the United States were two of the original signitories to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO. We've been allies since NATO began in I'm going to go with 1949 off the top of my head. Um, we've been allies. Greenland is our ally. We have a base on Greenland. So, if the United States really wanted to beef up our presence in Greenland, the way to do that would be for the president to pick up the phone and say, "Hey guys, we'd like to increase our our footprint in Greenland." And Denmark would almost certainly say, "Sure, come on over." Because that's the relationship that we have had now for 80 years. But Trump doesn't want that. He wants control of Greenland. And that's a different thing. And that I think goes back to where I started here. The idea that what Trump is really looking for is a world where a very few people who make all the right decisions, right, can simply take the resources of other countries. They can take Venezuelan oil. They can take the rare earth minerals in Greenland. They can and and mind you, Canada is also very much something he wants. Um whereas the rest of us recognized that the real power of America was was global because what we were doing was we were facilitating trade. We were facilitating the exchange of ideas. We were facilitating uh the ability of populations to avoid disease which we destroyed with when we pulled out of US aid. we at USAD, you know, we were we were the the anchor, the backs stop of the rules-based international order. Again, not to say that we didn't screw that up on more than one occasion, but what Trump is saying is, I want to get rid of all of that. Anything that involves the voices of people who I consider Democrats, because any Republican who opposes him, he promptly just calls a Democrat, is is going to be erased. We want to get rid of all that because we're the only ones who know how to run a society.

When he does that, what he is doing is he is echoing people like Vladimir Putin and he is believing that it's better for him to be in a position of extracting the resources from places like Venezuela for himself and his friends than he is being part of a system that forces him to share with women and people of color and other countries. And the thing about that is twofold. Let me start small and go big. The first piece of that is Trump's attack on Venezuela and his statement that he's going to take it over is again was apparently news to a lot of the people around him, but it's not news to somebody like Vladimir Putin. And there's been a lot of discussion lately of the fact that Putin had made a suggestion that Trump could have Venezuela if he could simply take over Ukraine. That idea that big countries can take smaller countries is what got us into World Wars one and two. And what happens when you do that, of course, is that smaller countries need to take protection from the bigger countries, but they also start to band together in order to protect themselves against those bigger countries and other countries nearby. And pretty soon, people are using their power not for deterrence, which is what NATO is about. You t attack us, you're going to get all of these countries coming back at you. And that's really worked incredibly well. We will lose that and that will give us a world that that led to World Wars one and World War II with the addition now of nuclear weapons. And I talked about that last Saturday.

So there's that, but there's also something that just is so stupid. I can't even believe I have to say this. If the United States takes over the Venezuelan oil fields, yeah, it gets a lot of crude oil. Um, oil is the technology of the 19th century and the 20th century. It's it's done. I mean, I know we use it still, but but it is not the the the technology of the future. But if we do that, we essentially give Xi Jinping the green light to take over Taiwan. Guess what's in Taiwan? 60% of the semiconductors in the world. That's the technology of the 21st and the 22nd se century. And so by giving Trump this little here you can have a lollipop. Those people interested in grabbing the resources of other countries have given themselves the fig leaf to take over the future. And Trump doesn't even appear to understand that. And that that is the the the other major piece of this. But then there is the larger piece of it. If we give up the rules-based international order, we are giving up what has kept the world at relative peace and relative prosperity since the 1940s. And even those people who aren't paying attention to that don't want us to take over Venezuela. This is enormously unpopular.

So when I look at today with January 6th and the the attempted takeover of uh Venezuela and the destruction of the rules-based international order, what I see is first of all a president who is demented, who is in who does not have the facilities he needs to be in that position, but also somebody who has so internalized the idea that only people like him have the answers that he is no longer operating in reality. You know, it is just a fact. If you have a healthy population, the country does better. So what are they doing? They're getting rid of health care and they're getting rid of our vaccine schedules. You know, not getting rid of, but significantly trimming them down. Um, that sort of magical thinking that I'm the only one who knows how to do anything strikes me as being very much a hallmark of this moment. And it is long past time for the American people to say we are not going to follow grandpa down this road. And part of that, of course, is that he is 100% responsible. He's the president of the United States. But if your grandfather were driving a car and repeatedly ran over toddlers, at some point it would be your responsibility to take those keys away. And this is where I wanted to end today. The Republican party owns this at this point. They need to stop this from happening. And the way that that's going to happen is not for them suddenly to get touched by an angel and rethink the way that they are proceeding. The way for them to recognize that the American people don't want this is for us to speak up more and more. Talk about the Epstein files because Trump is blatantly breaking the law on that front. Talk about the fact that things you care about have been cut because those are things Congress voted for and the administration just decided it was going to stop. Uh talk about tariffs. those tariffs are illegal and it looks as if the Supreme Court is going to decide against him. Talk about the deployment of troops in the United States, which again looks as if the Supreme Court is not going to stand behind. and then say to your Republican representatives, you're never going to see our votes again, and we're going to make sure that our neighbors don't vote for you either. Because it's going to take a huge push among everybody in the United States, the same way we pushed during the American Revolution, to say, "You are leading us to destruction, and you must stop."

So, a lot of people are frustrated with the Democrats. Yeah, they should speak up more than they are. Um, but there are times when the political parties because of the way they're constructed, because of the way that uh their leaders have been chosen over time, parties have um have uh come and go, not come and go. Parties uh change like everything else does. There are times when the American people have to be the ones to step up and make demands. And I think you could see this today um when today I don't know if you saw George Conway, the former um Republican um ran is running for Congress in New York as a Democrat. And he's like, I'm a new kind of Democrat man. I'm taking Trump down and I'm going to destroy everything he's doing because I love America. And um uh and I thought that was a really that was really interesting. The same sort of thing pattern that we saw in the 1850s. So uh Americans hate this. There's there the the numbers for Trump and for what he is doing are, as I say, historically low. But we got to bring that home to those people still supporting him to say, listen, you might not like what the Democrats do. You might not like um some of the democratic policies, but what you are doing is you are voting to get rid of a government that has provided your social security, your Medicare, that has made sure that we could actually have products from around the world, that has kept us out of foreign wars. You're voting for all of those things so long as you support this Republican party. And the minute MAGA actually gets isolated, the minute MAGA becomes, you know, you can see they're going down the not Nazi rabbit hole as it is. The minute they get isolated, the Republican party could and should return to its historic roots, which was as a centerright normal party. And so you really kind of have to think of this as getting the car back on the road from the ditch that it has been in for so long now. Thank you for being here and uh and we'll keep doing this, man. You know, this is it. As I said, this is this is our time and um and your voices matter so much. um both in terms of pushing back on electeds but also saying to your neighbors, you know, uh a rules-based international order is what's kept Americans from uh facing another world war. And actually, uh we're about to run uh the uh the history of the Battle of the Bulge. You know, we don't want to do that again.