Transcription
The people immediately around Trump are trying to grab as much as they can as quickly as they can. So, you're seeing, for example, um the the things I've talked about in the past, the um the ICE ramping things up, the the the grabs to try and get rid of business regulation and so on, the the tax cuts of course, but you're also seeing this sense of Trump that he's really not going to leave the White House. And this announcement today that he's going to build with private money um or so it they say this giant ballroom at the White House is um I think a sign that he is planning to stay forever. And here's a news flash. He ain't staying forever. He's 79 years old and not in good either physical or mental shape.
But it's also really interesting because does the White House need a ballroom? I mean, maybe it does, but there is quite a large, uh, public space at the State Department. So, um, you know, it's not something that that you've seen before where people said they had to have it. It's more sort of his maraagoizing of the White House, which is actually quite a small space. Um, it looks grand when you see it from the outside, but remember it was built a long time ago, and so it's the rooms are small and so on. Other more recent Washington buildings are larger. But there is this sense, I think, that he doesn't intend to leave. He intends to get as much out of it as he possibly can and then stay on.
But you're also seeing a number of his loyalists starting to explore the idea of running for governor in their home state or running for senators in their home state. So, uh, we saw yesterday that the defense secretary, he Pete Hegith, is talking about running for governor in Tennessee. Um, you're seeing a lot of people starting to to spin off and thinking maybe that they will be somewhere else. It's certainly an option to think that Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury, is angling to become the the head of the Federal Reserve, uh, with the expectation that Trump will get rid of Jerome Powell. The Jerome Pal says he's not going anywhere. You can see other people sort of starting to test the waters to move somewhere else.
Now, at the same time that you're seeing that though, you're also seeing Trump and the the MAGA people trying to lock in power forever. And you're seeing that in two major ways. You're seeing it first of all with the attempt to grab utter control of the judiciary. That was a a program that started in 1986 under Ronald Reagan when Ronald Reagan's attorney general because they were concerned that voters would turn against the Republicans in the future and against Reagan's tax cut policies that he intended to cement the Reagan revolution in the courts where it wouldn't matter what the voters did. And I think you're seeing that on steroids now as Trump is trying to put as many of his people into judicial appointments as he possibly can. Especially people like Emil Boie who whom the Senate confirmed uh either yesterday or the day before who's a real Trump loyalist and you know you know behind all of the sorts of things that Trump insisted on doing.
And now, although you may not have seen it, Trump is trying hard to get uh the head of the judiciary committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, um Iowa's Chuck Grassley to um to stop the system, what's what's called a blue slip system by which a senator from a state can object to a federal judge in that state um in so they can try and and make sure they don't put, you know, they have some control over what happens in their states. And that's been a system that's been in place since I think it's 1917, although boy, don't quote me on that one cuz that's off the top of my head. Um, it's been there a very long time. And the idea that suddenly it's got to change for Trump so he can shove anybody he wants in there is something that Grassly at least right now is pushing back on because the people like Boie um that they've put in place are people who have been quite open about the fact they don't believe in the rule of law which is a little bit of a problem if you're trying to have a country that's based in the rule of law.
So you're seeing it in the attempt to take over the legal system and you're also seeing it in uh the attempt to to redistrict the country in such a way that Democrats can never win. This too has been a long-standing program of the Republican party. Uh re uh redistricting I talked about before really took off in 2010 with the uh Operation Red Map, the Republican Redistricting Majority Project in which uh Republican operatives worked to get the Republicans to take over state houses, especially in purple states like North Carolina, Ohio, Kansas. Um who am I missing there? There were a lot of them. In order that they would be able to redistrict their states in such a way that they could crack Democratic constituencies, shoving them into Republican majority districts or pack them, take all the Democrats and squish them into one really into one district so they didn't actually have power in other districts, which is how you get the gerrymandering um districts like you see for Jim Jordan in Ohio who couldn't win if he was in a normal district.
So, uh, you're seeing that now in a really big way in Texas where there is a fight going on right now for a mid decade, that is right now instead of in in five years, a mid decade redistricting because Trump has quite literally and openly said to Texas, which is already gerrymandered dramatically to give to make sure Republicans can win, uh, to give five more seats to the Republicans, although it's not clear it's mathematically possible. Because it's already so gerrymandered that they can pull five more seats out of there. But Trump is saying he wants to pull five more seats out of Texas and other Republican dominated states are saying the same.
Now, one of the things that's interesting about that is that for a long time now, I have been saying, I think, but certainly it's been in my head, that it looks to me as if what the radical Republicans are trying now to do is to take the system that they set up in the reconstruction south and to make it all over the country, put it all across the country. And what happened in the re post reconstruction south was that there were still elections held, but the Democratic Party was going to win. The party that represented segregation, that represented the idea of a few people running the government and everybody else just doing what they were told. That system was in the American South from about 1874 until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act.
And we see the the attempt and have seen the attempt for a long time now to pair back the Voting Rights Act. Um, it's one of John Roberts's who's this the chief justice of the Supreme Court. One of his key issues and of course in 2013 with the Shelby County versus Holder decision we saw the gutting of the civil of the Voting Rights Act which um used to require states that had a history of racial discrimination to preclar any changes in their voting rules with the Department of Justice. In 2013, the Supreme Court said that that was out of dated, out ofd and thus unconstitutional. And then in 2021, they went further in the Bernovich VDNC decision in which they said that rules, voting rules that discriminated against minorities were not unconstitutional unless they were designed to be racially discriminatory, which is um and the bar was really quite high. That's a that's I mean it was it's voter suppression is what it is.
So what you're seeing right now is this attempt to pack our legal system and to pack our voting system so that essentially nobody who is not a Trumper, a mega Republican, can Quit.