62. The Truth Behind Putin’s Relationship With Trump

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Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics U.S.

with me, Katie Kay, in cold grey, Washington.

And me, Anthony Scaramucci, on the island of Grand Cayman.

It must be raining.

I'm so sorry that you've gone on holiday and it's raining.

That's so hard for you.

It's the pull fountain, Caddy.

I can't figure out a way to get the pull fountain off.

I don't know how to make coffee.

Most Italians are stereotyped as really good at being handy.

I am not handy.

No, I'm sorry.

It's just bad news here.

Oh, somebody's just turned it off.

Somebody just turned off the fountain.

In which case, let us begin.

So, today,

whilst you are dealing with your fountain and your swimming pool, we are looking at the potential.

Excuse me.

Excuse me, could you pass me the coffee?

Oh, thank you.

Yes, thank you for making it for me.

So, you get on with your coffee and the fountain and the pool and the sunshine, and we'll talk about the potential end of civilization and the collapse of the Western order.

No, we seriously, we're going to talk about what Donald Trump has said about Russia rewriting history, really, saying that the Ukrainians started this war.

That will be news to everybody in Ukraine and Europe and in America as we watched it with our own eyes as Russian troops rolled towards Kyiv.

But it's a very interesting moment in US-Russia relations, and we're going to get into that.

What does Russia have, or what does Vladimir Putin have, over Donald Trump?

And then we are going to look at the extraordinary story of of the New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has been indicted on corruption charges, has had those lifted for the moment at least by the president who would like him to enact his own immigration policies.

And what does that mean for America?

And is America actually becoming more like Russia?

We'll get into that in the second half.

By the way, Anthony, it is day 30 of the Trump administration, which means there are only 1,400 more to go.

I know you like your maths on that one.

So I don't know how your stamina is doing, but day 30 feels to me like we have had month 30.

I guess that my question to you, I've been thinking about this all morning, so I just got to ask you this question.

Why is anybody surprised, though?

Trump praised Putin for four years.

Trump said all kinds of nasty stuff about Ukraine and Europe during his 2024 campaign.

It's the 30th day in.

He's literally reciting Putin talking points at press conferences so badly, Caddy K, so badly that he says, well, that's me saying it, not them.

Meaning, he's like repeating their stuff about Zelensky having an election, et cetera.

So I guess, why are we surprised?

And then the second question is: should we be surprised that the Republicans in his own party, who vociferously disagree with him behind the scenes.

They disagree with him strongly.

Okay, we'll use the Trumpian word.

They disagree with me strongly.

You know, he talks about it like that, right?

And yet they won't say anything in public.

So, number one, are we surprised?

And why are so many people acting surprised?

And then, number two, why are the Republicans nowhere?

I mean, the Democrats at this point, I don't know what they're doing, so I just almost feel bad for them.

It's almost like they've got to like, it's almost like they've got to sell the team.

Like, it's like a football expression.

The team's not doing well.

You've got to trade out the players and recirculate.

The Democrats are out of it.

But why aren't the Republicans fighting back?

I would say that we're not surprised that Donald Trump is holding these talks with Russia without having the Ukrainians at the table.

We're not surprised that he is saying that Ukraine is not going to get into NATO, or he doesn't think they are.

We're not surprised that he's saying Ukraine's going to have to give up the territory that Russia is holding and won't go back to its pre-2014 borders.

I don't think any of that surprises us.

I was surprised when I heard the president on Tuesday night giving a press conference at which he said, basically blamed the Ukrainians for the war.

And this was the phrase, you should have never started it.

I mean, that is

a step beyond anything I would have expected, even from Donald Trump.

Yes, there are people in an administration, Tulsi Gabbard is one of them, for example, now the new head of intelligence, who has kind kind of tiptoed up to the idea that the war was somehow NATO's fault or the West's fault for pushing the bounds of NATO too close to Russia's border, and that then provoked the Russians to invade.

Actually, if you listen to speeches that Vladimir Putin has been given right back since the kind of early 90s, you know that he's had Ukraine in his sights.

But to hear the President of the United States turn black into white or white into black and say, you should have never started it when it was Ukraine that was invaded by Moscow is still I find pretty staggering and I think what struck me as well listening to that press conference is how angry he is with Zelensky he was really sounding pissed at the Ukrainian government and this proposal of elections I think is buying as you say the Russian talking points the Russians would love to put in a puppet government they think if they can have elections they can get in somebody who is basically a stooge of Vladimir Putin's.

The only thing I can think of that's changed in the last few days since we last spoke was how angry Donald Trump apparently is, I'm hearing, at the Ukrainians' rejection of the idea that America should get half of their rare earth minerals as some sort of payback.

And they didn't expect the Ukrainians to reject that so forcefully.

And with Donald Trump, things are personal very quickly.

Politics is personal for him.

And to have Zelensky turn down what he thought was a great negotiating bid, I guess he's pissed at that.

I mean, I think he thinks it's okay to negotiate with people and you start with a maximalist position, but he clearly in Ukraine's case, it has annoyed him.

And so he's now rewriting history and saying that the Ukrainians started this war, which is, as somebody I was on television with this morning said, this was a shameful day for the United States of America.

So shameful.

And I don't want to be histrionic, but it would be like Hitler coming into Czechoslovakia and Trump siding with him.

I mean, so he's basically ceded the idea that there can be a liberal democracy in the Ukraine.

He's basically saying that he wants it partitioned and he wants the Russians to take over, but he's saying something else, which is, I think, more

dangerous.

He's saying that the world order that was established at the end of the Second World War is now over.

I, Donald Trump, decree it over, and we're now going to move into what is a multipolar neo-nationalist world.

And so let me just define that for people.

What he is saying with Putin, Putin's got his territory of the world.

I, Donald Trump, not the United States, I, Donald Trump, have my territory in the world.

And of course, President Xi in China has his territory.

And so whatever's done in these respective backyards will be done by us.

So, I don't know.

Does that mean that we're going to invade Canada?

I mean, I don't think the United States is up for that.

But Trump is talking about it very seriously, about wanting them to be the 51st state.

So, the notion that we are now neo-nationalist, and the notion that the United States is going to forego all the systems that the United States architected over 80 years, which Caddy has led to great peace and great prosperity for the most part.

Now, certainly we have our problems, and Europe has its problems, but it's generally been peaceful and prosperous.

So, what's your reaction to that?

Am I wrong in saying that?

But

that's what I feel like he's doing.

Yeah, I think he's pushed us into this spheres of influence world.

It looks to me like Article 5 of NATO, which is really the bedrock of the NATO alliance, is pretty much over.

I don't think anyone is deluded in thinking that were Vladimir Putin to attack Poland or one of the Baltic states, that America would come to their defense.

I see that as incredibly unlikely.

And so we do have a new era.

And I think what Europe is now having to grapple with is the idea that, okay, we may be able to carve up something now for Ukraine.

But in three or four years' time, when Russia has rebuilt its military, this is certainly what the Ukrainians believe.

This is certainly what American intelligence believes.

Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine.

He wants the whole thing.

He wants Kyiv.

And this is what was so absurd about what the president said in that press conference.

Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine.

He wanted to be in Kyiv.

He would have taken the whole thing were it not for the effort that the West mounted against him, led by the United States of America.

And here is Donald Trump saying, you could have had peace immediately.

You didn't need to have this war.

Well, the only way for the Ukrainians not to have this war would have been to say to Vladimir Putin, we're opening the doors to our country here.

You can take it.

That was the only option they had.

And that seems to be what Donald Trump is now suggesting the Ukrainians should have done.

And I think Article 5, if I was in Poland right now, or if I was in Estonia, or if I was in Latvia, I would be feeling particularly nervous.

Wouldn't you?

I mean,

yeah, well, no, of course.

Well, the polls have said as much.

You know,

I don't know if you remember Ambassador Georgette Mosbacher.

She worked in the first Trump administration.

She worked with the American military to make sure that the 101st airborne was based in Poland.

And obviously, they sent more forces there after the invasion in 2022.

So they know, they know.

What do you think is behind Donald Trump sounding so angry at Ukraine last night that he's blaming them for the war?

What's the switch?

My silence is because what I really think is not in the mainstream.

And so what I really think, if I end up saying it on our podcast, people will say, okay,

I'm being absurd.

Okay, so

I think there's a hold on him.

I don't know why it's like this.

McMaster couldn't figure it out.

Mattis couldn't figure it out.

Kelly couldn't figure it out.

Did you guys used to speak about this during the last administration when you were there?

Yes,

interesting.

Yes.

Somebody last night from the former administration texted me.

It's weird, the relationship with Putin.

It's just weird.

Meaning, if you didn't know any better, right, let's say let's give President Trump the benefit of the doubt.

You would say, okay, he's obviously the American president.

He can't be in the tank for Vladimir Putin.

But then, as you know, from the KGB, they do everything out in the open.

Okay, so that's part of their technique, right?

And there's Occam's razor.

If we open up the window, you hear clippity-clop outside.

It's a horse caddy.

It's not a zebra.

You can't overthink it.

So this guy is repeating Kremlin talking points to the American media.

He's bullying his Republican friends.

You know, and I know that more than one senator has complained about credible death threats.

where the FBI has reported to them, hey, we've got some credible death threats on our hands.

And so I don't know.

I mean, again,

it's so obvious that it's probably not true.

But you tell me, have we ever seen the sitting president of the United States go through talking points?

Okay, Alexander Dugan,

who is a very famous inside of Russia philosopher, he wrote a piece which I sent to you this morning.

Yeah, and he basically said that

Lavrov is running Trump.

Lavrov will be briefing Trump on what to do here to establish this new world order, which is a post-Soviet but pro-Russian.

Russia controls the Eastern European theater.

I guess that means the reattachment of all of their republics and domination of Poland, I guess.

I don't know.

Am I being too aggressive by saying this, Caddy?

You got to tell me,

because I don't want people to say, oh, you know, he's got Trump derangement.

I don't have Trump derangement syndrome.

I have Trump reality syndrome.

I'm just telling you what we all saw, what we're all worried about.

The two tells are where he blatantly rewrites history saying that the Ukrainians started the war.

And the second tell is what you mentioned, calling for elections, which is straight out of Vladimir Putin's playbook.

That is exactly what Vladimir Putin wants to happen.

It is not what the Ukrainians want to happen.

Let me interrupt for a second.

He is also telling lies.

He said that we put more money into the war than the Europeans.

Did we, Caddy?

Of course we did.

We did not.

He's also saying that Vladimir Zelensky has an approval rating of 4%.

He has an approval rating of 52%.

I mean, it's not true.

Okay, yeah.

So he's just telling right out, flat-out lies, just like he does, you know, I got 36% more of the vote than Vice President Harris because of TikTok.

Actually, you didn't.

You lost the youth vote.

So this

manufactured reality.

You've got senators from the United United States government who have just gotten back from the Ukraine and they disagree with Donald Trump.

And some of them are saying it.

Okay, who?

Who's saying it, Gary?

Well, Wickler is saying it.

Collins has said it, but not enough of them are saying it out loud and forthrightly.

I mean, we know that the Republican Senate body, by and large, is in favor of supporting Ukraine.

And there are not enough of the voices.

There are not enough of them.

Where are the John McCains of the Republican Party?

So what happens?

Zelensky's not going to agree to anything that they're talking about.

The European leadership, Caddy, are they going to side with Zelensky and they're going to say, okay, I'm sorry, we have to make a stand here for democracy here in the Ukraine.

It's too close to our borders.

Or did they say, okay, you know what?

It's Czechoslovakia.

Let's let him have it.

He'll stop there.

He's not going to go any further.

I mean, it's literally a replay of history.

So go ahead.

What do we do?

It's a replay of history, and America is in the position, I guess, that it was before FDR was persuaded by Winston Churchill to jo and after Pearl Harbor to join the Allies, where the majority of the American public was saying, look, we are feeling more isolationist.

This is a long way away.

We've just been through one big war.

I mean, in that respect, the parallels in terms of the American public's feeling, the American President's feeling,

are pretty similar.

We've been through the wars in the Middle East.

We are not interested in getting involved in another war again.

And we're prepared to do what we think is in America's interests.

The trouble is that what's in America's short-term interest may not be in America's long-term interests.

By the way, it was Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana who have come out and

been more critical of the way that the administration is handling these negotiations.

One more thing.

I'm sorry.

One more thing.

One more thing.

Marco Rubio.

WTF, Caddy K.

WTF.

Tell me what's going on with Marco.

Marco's looking in the mirror right now.

Marco.

And what is he saying to himself, Marco?

If it's not me, it will be worse.

That's the most charitable explanation of what he's saying to himself.

In 2016, he gave an interview that predicted all of this while he was running for president.

And he said that this would be a disaster for the West.

And Trump was pro-Putin.

Now he's sitting there as this guy's Secretary of State enacting the things that he said was a disaster eight years ago.

Talking about the wonderful geoeconomic opportunities that there could be for the United States in a relationship with Russia, meanwhile ignoring the fact that Vladimir Putin has been accused of war crimes, rape, murder, kidnapping of children in Ukraine, let alone that they invaded another country.

And they would still like to, according to U.S.

intelligence, right now, all the reporting is that Vladimir Putin has not abandoned his maximalist aims on Ukraine and would still like to go for them.

And there is Marco Rubio, who was

once one of the more pro-transatlanticist senators.

Okay, here's a little twist for you that I heard this morning from a very smart American writer.

So, what this writer is arguing is that what is happening in Saudi Arabia and the peace talks around Ukraine at the moment is part of the Russification of the United States, where you have billionaires spending money, doling out flattery

to the President

to get access and potentially business contracts, and you also have increasingly

question marks over whether the US state is committed to neutrality, particularly when it comes to the issue of justice and the rule of law.

And that would bring us to the story of Eric Adams, which we are going to speak about in the second half of the programme.

We'll take a quick break, stay with us for that.

Hi, everybody.

Dominic Sambrook from the Rest is History here.

Now, as you can probably tell from the noise of the pool, I am joined by a friend of the show, Anthony Scaramucci.

And Anthony and I have a very special announcement.

On Sunday, the 30th of March, Anthony is over in the UK, and we have decided to do a live show together at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London.

Haven't we, Anthony?

We have.

You know, and thank God I'm not British because the Brits actually admire my American

reveste attitude about life.

Okay.

But in any event, okay, it'll be the first time on stage with Dominic.

I am very excited.

We're going to be doing a show on U.S.

political history called The Rest is Assassinations from Lincoln to JFK.

But Dominic and I both know on the 30th of March, 2025, it's the 44th anniversary of the attempted assassination on Ronald Reagan.

So there's not only assassinations here, which are terrible, but there's an attempted assassination, several of them, Dominic, right, throughout U.S.

history.

And so we're excited to go through this and what the impacts were on American history and global history.

Right.

And there's so many great stories.

So obviously JFK, you and I disagree about JFK because I, of course, think it was Lee Holvey Oswald acting alone and you think differently.

But there are other stories.

You mentioned attempted assassinations.

So for example, FDR.

FDR was almost shot before his inauguration in 1933.

And that's an attempted assassination that really could have changed the course of history because no FDR.

Does the United States still enter the Second World War?

Does the story of the 20th century play out completely differently?

So there is so much to talk about.

And I'm really, really looking forward to doing it.

What are you looking forward to most, Anthony?

Well, I mean, all of that, but

I want to delve into a little bit of the Secret Service and some of the men in that service.

Clint Hill is still alive.

He was riding alongside of Jackie and John Kennedy on the 22nd of November 1963.

And we'll talk about what he saw.

We'll talk about what other agents have written about recently.

And of course, now that Donald Trump is releasing the JFK assassination files, I think there'll be a lot to talk about there.

I think think people coming to the show are going to learn things that have never been said or heard before.

So, the listeners, if you're not excited by that, I don't know what would excite you, frankly.

Pre-sale tickets are available this Friday, the 21st of February at 10 a.m.

UK time for our founding members of the Rest is Politics U.S.

You'll get an email with the link before the sale begins.

If you're not a member, just go to the RestisPoliticsUS.com to sign up.

And if you're a subscriber on Apple Podcasts, send us an email on tripus, T-R-I-P-U-S at goalhanger.com to get your pre-sale link.

General sale for this event will be open to the public on Monday, the 24th of February at 10 a.m.

UK time.

We'll send out the link on the rest is history and the rest is Politics US's social media feeds.

We absolutely expect to see you there in the West End on Sunday, the 30th of March.

And to tell you the truth, what I'm really hoping is that on the night, Anthony will finally reveal the truth behind the JFK assassination.

Well, I'm probably going to Guantanamo for many reasons, Dominic, but that would be probably the top one.

But anyway, I think you'll learn a lot.

There'll be a lot of insight we'll provide and also provide great context on American and British and global history.

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Welcome back to The Rest is Politics US with me, Katy Kay, still in Washington, where it is still grey, still rainy.

And that was your weather forecast from the nation's capital.

How's your weather forecast, Anthony?

Could somebody pass me those Oakley sunglasses, please?

Okay, that's getting a little bit too bright here.

For those of you watching, if it is worth, guys, I know you are listening to this on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Just flip over to YouTube for one second and do yourself a favor.

Secrets are really something though, I mean, of Mr.

Scaramucci in the sunshine in the Caribbean.

We go on vacation.

When we go on vacation, we actually take.

Actually, I am going to take an

on vacation just to prove the point.

When we go on vacation, was on a yacht.

She's like, I don't want anybody to know I'm on the yacht.

She's like, hiding the camera.

It's like I'm on the bottom.

I have learned.

You have done.

You know, you've done me some favors.

You've done me some favors.

I will now

flash off the yacht next time around.

Okay, flash the yacht.

Even your British friends like it, okay?

Even they like it.

They don't care.

Talking of being flashy, I think it's worth putting the story that we're about to talk about, which might seem like a domestic New York City local government story, in the context of the extraordinary change that is taking place in America right now.

And as this journalist who I was on television with, writer I was on TV with today, was explaining it, he just put it so well, which is that America is becoming Russified.

And by that, he meant you've got these billionaires who are queuing up to try and buy influence, succeeding potentially in buying influence.

You've got a billionaire who has a sort of a government position, cutting areas of the government where he has direct conflicts of interest, and we're just told, being told to trust that he has his own conflicts of interest sorted out and that he won't do anything that puts himself in an advantageous position with no evidence given for us.

But in the case of Eric Adams, the mayor, and I want you to explain the story in a second, who had a very compelling indictment against him and has just had that lifted for political reasons, it gets to the question of what is the rule of law in the United States?

Is there still fair rule of law where nobody is above the law, where the state is acting in a way that is neutral?

Because the case of, I would argue that the case of the mayor of New York is the most obvious and egregious example of where America is becoming more like an oligarchy where the rule of law no longer applies and can no longer be counted on.

And I think that is what's critical here, that it can no longer be counted on to be applied neutrally.

So fill us in.

on the fate of Mr.

Adams.

I want to take it one more step, though.

Just think about this.

If Kathy Holkel goes to remove the mayor, she has

the governor of New York.

If if she goes to remove the mayor, will Trump's Department of Justice go after her and prosecute her for something?

I know they're already looking into Tish James because that's one of Trump's mortal enemies who prosecuted him here in New York and got the felony charges against him.

But in the case of Eric Adams, he is the former Brooklyn borough president.

I know Eric well.

I have been an Eric Adams supporter.

He was the best of the bunch that ran in 2022.

He's a former New York City police officer, officer, but it looks like he accepted some illegal gifts from Turkish businessmen, including hotel stays, flight upgrades.

He gave out some preferential treatment.

It's pretty well documented.

All of that stuff is illegal.

He took some illegal straw donations.

You're not allowed to take foreign money into our domestic campaigns.

Looks like he did that as well.

Of course, Caddy, all of these claims are alleged claims and the mayor is entitled to his day in court and he's innocent until proven guilty.

But those are the alleged claims that are being referenced by the prosecutors.

And they draw out these charges against him.

He then sent signals to Trump, and people should know this.

They probably don't.

He is a Democrat, Caddy, but he was a former Republican.

And he told people, I got to switch parties if I'm going to win the mayor's race in New York City.

And so he switched parties.

So he's really a right-of-center Democrat.

Sent smoked signals to to Donald Trump.

Help me, please.

Went down to Mar-a-Lago before the inauguration.

They did an obvious, they did an obvious quid pro quo.

And they said, hey, we're going to drop these charges.

You have a sanctuary city that you've been in support of, and the left supports these sanctuary cities.

What does that mean?

If you're an illegal immigrant, you can seek sanctuary in our city.

We're not going to sick ICE on you.

We're not going to sick our police force on you.

We're not going to work towards your deportation.

Tom Homan, who's now the head of ICE, has him over the barrel.

And he basically did it right on television in the Fox and Friends

stage.

He said, hey, we got an agreement.

If you break the agreement, you know, these charges are suspended.

They're not completely removed.

Lay out why the fact that, by the way, all of this

is as shocking as the tropical birds that are interrupting our podcast at the moment.

I'm going to let those slide because they are nice.

I shut the pole fountain off.

Give me some, give me credit.

Okay, I I was able to figure out how to do this.

I can't believe this is mid-February on the East Coast where it is freezing and I'm having to listen to tropical freaking birds.

My wife and family are sound asleep in there, and I'm just letting you know if I go in there.

And Katie, you know, I'm running for re-election in my marriage, Catty.

This is like part of my campaign to be out here, okay?

All our poor listeners in gray, rainy London right now, I apologize for the tropical bird sound.

Anyway.

The point being, they're breaking the law right in our faces.

They're breaking the law so much so that the prosecutors are all leaving the southern district of New York used to be called the sovereign district of New York.

You know why?

They didn't care about anything.

If you broke the law, we're coming after you.

They had a 98%

prosecution success rate if the case went to trial.

They were called the sovereign district of New York.

Trump is trying to dismantle it single-handedly.

And he's got lead prosecutors resigning over this.

And some of them have written excoriating letters.

If you can find a coward to do what Donald Trump would like me to do, good luck to you.

But I'm not going to do that.

I am not going to shame my family by disavowing the law in the way that Donald Trump would like me to.

Literally, that's what they're saying as they're leaving the southern district of New York.

This is real banana republic stuff that's happening up there.

And even the reason that it's important, Donald Trump didn't just drop all the charges against Eric Adams, but has basically postponed the implementation of them potentially, is that he's looking for a quid pro quo.

He wants Eric Adams to help him with his immigration policy.

He wants Eric Adams to give him access to the prisons in New York, to Riker's jail, so that he can go and round up illegal immigrants.

He wants to have access to schools in New York so he can go in and look for kids whose parents are undocumented.

And if Eric Adams does all that, then these charges against him won't be pushed, won't be enforced.

But he hasn't dropped the charges.

He hasn't pardoned Eric Adams, and he's still dangling over it.

It's like a sword of Damocles dangling over Eric Adams' head.

If you don't help me enough, if you don't let me into Rikers, if you don't let me into the schools, these charges are still there.

I can still bring them back again, which means that Eric Adams is now walking around dressed in a t-shirt that says property of the U.S.

government.

He is not property of the voters of New York at the moment.

He is fully owned by Donald Trump.

Terrible situation.

And while all this is happening, 30 days in, Trump's deportations are averaging 5,300 deportations a week.

And what was the average deportations per week for the Biden administration, Caddy?

15,000.

15,000.

So Trump is making a lot of noise, splashing a lot of water around.

He has one-third of the deportations of the Biden administration while he's clamoring for these deep deportations.

So again, it is noise, ineffectualness, disavowal of the rule of law.

And there are warning lights on everywhere, Caddy.

There's a danger signal everywhere.

And who's on watch?

Because the founders of this nation, the United States, they said, okay, if something's going wrong, there's checks and balances in the system.

There'll be reasonable, smart people on watch that will check and balance the system.

Is that happening, Katie?

Yeah, checks and balances.

Thank you, Congress, for those checks and balances.

I think the courts are trying to do their job of checks and balances.

You have the courts stepping in, but the courts operate at one speed, and Elon Musk and Donald Trump are operating at light speed, and the courts just can't keep up.

I mean, we've seen this happen just in the last day or two, where a judge in New York, who's actually a Democratic-appointed judge, had a suit filed by 14 different states, attorneys generals in 14 different states, saying saying Donald Trump can't send Elon Musk in to get all of the access to the computer systems and the information that he's getting in the different federal agencies.

And the judge came back and said, listen, I kind of basically said, I sympathize with you, but your case doesn't hold up.

You haven't produced enough evidence.

And they now need to go back and come up with a better case and a better injunction.

It takes time, as you know, as a lawyer, to draw up these injunctions.

And they don't have that much time when Donald Trump is moving that fast.

I want to ask you about one thing, and that's, because you're the lawyer on this podcast, as we have said many times, a very brilliant constitutional lawyer, you are quickly becoming in my book.

Oh my god.

The founding fathers and

the, more importantly, perhaps modern presidents, ever since Watergate, have recognized the need to insulate the Department of Justice from the White House, right?

To make it as protected as possible from the political machinations and desires of whoever is sitting in the Oval Office.

And they didn't always do it perfectly, but they always at least accepted in recent history that that was the aim of the DOJ, to make the DOJ as independent as possible.

Do you think Donald Trump accepts even the premise that the Justice Department should be independent?

No.

He's been very clear about it.

He, you know, remember in Project 2025, they want to take the FBI out of the Department of Justice and have it report directly to the White House, and they want Donald Trump to be the de facto FBI director.

Cash Patel, his designee to be the FBI director, has supported that.

He has said openly on podcasts that he'd like to turn the J.

Edgar Hoover building, the FBI building, into a museum of the deep state, a memorabilia museum of the catastrophe of what is known as the deep state.

The system has benefited every single one of these people: Cash Patel, Elon Musk, Donald Trump.

I'm not saying the system isn't flawed, but they want to end the system.

They've decided that the system is over.

Patel is on podcast saying he wants to turn the FBI building, the J.

Edgar Hoover building, into a deep state museum.

I mean, this stuff is crazy, but it's also dangerous because it's setting in.

And alongside of it is asymmetric free speech.

Praise Donald Trump, allowable.

Don't praise Donald Trump.

Robots come after you on social media saying, well, you know, you're going to get prosecuted.

We're coming after you next.

Can't wait to see you in Guantanamo Bay.

What kind of nonsense is that?

Yeah.

I mean, I think that is exactly what people had talked about.

You and I talked about before the election.

Donald Trump said he was not going to do it.

He was not going to go after his political adversaries.

Cash Patel has been on television before his confirmation hearings citing the names of the political adversaries, particularly of the journalists that he does want to go after.

And the way, and I think this is why we wanted to spend a bit of time on the Eric Adams Mayor of New York story today, because it really does, it is emblematic of the way that the White House has captured the Department of Justice.

And so now American law enforcement, which was meant to be neutral and just and fair, and nobody was above the law, and every citizen was treated treated equally,

if the Justice Department is basically a wing of the White House council's office,

then that premise is gone and the Justice Department will go after presumably whoever the White House would like them to go after.

And we know in the case of Eric Adams, Eric Adams's lawyers, who by the way happen to be Elon Musk's lawyers, went straight to the White House Council to have these conversations.

They didn't even go to the Justice Department.

They knew where to go.

They knew where the power was.

And that is the new system.

And don't think, if you are a Republican, if you are a Trump supporter, if you voted for Donald Trump, do not think that this system, which has just been set up under this president, will not be implemented by the next Democratic president who gets elected.

Once you've put this in place, we are now in a position where a Democrat will use the powers that Donald Trump has taken to seek retribution.

And then what?

That's a really good point.

Will MAGA be fine if a Democratic president forces the Justice Department to do his bidding against Donald Trump's allies?

I don't think so.

Listen, it's a really good point.

Harry Reed did this.

Remember?

He changed the rules in the Senate to make these votes 51.

And McConnell said, okay, you're going to make it 51% for a Supreme Court justice.

We're going to use it against you.

He popped three Supreme Court justices in one four-year term using the rules that Harry Reed decided to change.

McConnell warned them and said, Don't do it.

Newton's law, third law, action and reaction.

There will be reaction against all of this.

We will be back on Monday next week with a YouTube live stream for our founding members at 4:30 p.m.

UK time on Monday.

That's 11:30 a.m.

Eastern Time on Monday.

It'll be released on Tuesday as a podcast.

And of course, we'll be back on Sunday with our question and answer session.

Also for our founding members, do tune into that.

If you're not a founding member, please join us.

It's such a great club.

We're loving getting your questions.

When we do the YouTube, we ask everyone where you're dialing in from.

And

people are coming in from Vienna, Austria, New Zealand, Glasgow, Detroit, Michigan.

It's great to have you all all over the world.

And we love seeing where you come from.

So join us at therestispoliticsus.com.

You can sign up there and we'll answer your questions this Sunday morning.

I'll be back in the cold weather by then, Caddy.

Thank God.

For small mercies, I won't have to look at this view one more time.

We'll see you next week.

Thanks very much, everybody.

Thanks for joining us.