'The question for all of this - is there any institution left in our society that can check this?' [View all]

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Susan Glasser joins Tim Miller:

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(excerpts)

GLASSER: ...there's so much to unpack there. I mean first of all let's just say that Donald Trump the first convicted felon to serve as president. His conviction was recently upheld - although the enormous civil fine in a court was struck down. So it's really quite remarkable when he's accusing people of various crimes who have not been charged of them. And I know there's so much to be kind of overwhelmed by. We can tend to forget that.

I think the the throughline for me of a lot of these really eyepopping developments of August is this idea of making war on institutions and individuals that challenge Trump in any way and no longer even feeling the need to kind of obscure one's motives at all. Right. the the explicit link between defiance or political opposition or just simply saying stuff that Donald Trump doesn't like on TV and the idea that you're going to use whatever the powers of the federal government are against that opposition.

In this case, it strikes me that his opponent here is not (just) a woman. It's an institution. It's the Federal Reserve. Donald Trump is seeking to break this idea of its independence, as you know, gone after its chairman J.
Powell again and again and again, threatening but not yet actually following through on firing him.

And I wonder if this is a sort of a a creeping backdoor way into finally provoking that full-scale confrontation with the independence of the Fed. I mean it's a classic example of like, you know, the rule of law, you'll miss it when it's gone - a million tiny attacks on it, which is the one that really signals the absolute end of it?

And I think you've seen the Trump administration on a variety of fronts attacking this idea that there are rules of the road in our economy, in our civil society. And you know, many businesses, of course, that's part of what has powered the American economic engine over the last, you know, nearly a century since since the World War II. And you know, is this the moment? Is it some other moment?

We can't really say for sure. Hindsight will give us plenty of opportunity to say we knew when, but maybe we didn't. But I I have to say that it's the basic notion that the president is entitled to be the single decider of everything in this country that is so antithetical to, you know, what you and I saw as as a vision of an American democracy.

And this idea that you can just take literally a guy tweeting something, right? So you have an obscure political appointee, you know, tweeting something on a Wednesday, and you know, a few days later the president of the United States is firing you for for an investigation that has not yet occurred.

It's it's really a remarkable sign of the failure of process, institutions, laws, norms, any constraints on the presidency. That's that's what all these events have in common.

HOST: You mentioned the um the obscure government official that tweeted an attack on her (Cook). I just I do want to mention him briefly here because I think this is a I don't know what the right word is. He is certainly a very representative example of where I think where things are going in the Trump gangster government. The guy's name is Bill Pulte.

There's no reason anybody would have ever heard of him. He was a private equity executive before this that had gone MAGA. He was named as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which like usually just kind of oversees Fanny and Freddy. This is this is not a public figure that you would know about in another situation, but he apparently like I don't know if he's been given Cash Patel's enemies list or what exactly is happening, but this one guy has now publicly made accusations of mortgage fraud against Adam Schiff, Tish James, and now Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. He referred all three of these to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. I mean this is crazy.

Like a random bureaucrat that has that has oversight over one, you know, sort of element of the federal government like taking upon himself to do, I don't know, like a mini McCarthy campaign - like just like singularly targeting the president's political foes on the narrow question of whether they've filled out their housing paperwork correctly?

GLASSER: You know, I mean, it's a big country and I think the Trump years are giving us proof that, you know, somebody's going to find a way to market themselves, you know, into Donald Trump's inner circle. And essentially, that appears to be what the case is with this official.

There's a very interesting piece in Politico that your team flagged for me that talks about how he even got this job in the first place. Now, of course, there's the usual menu of voluminous contributions to Republican candidates and causes. But he came to Donald Trump's attention by quote unquote Twitter philanthropy.

Basically, he said, "I will give this person, you know, x thousands of dollars if Donald Trump retweets this or retruths this, or whatever.

You know, his social media platform now has something like 3 million followers on Twitter. And so he's he's a classic example of a non-entity perhaps in the broader spectrum of American politics. But in this niche world of far-right social media influencers, he's managed to parlay interaction with causes and themes that Trump likes into a large social media following. And then all of a sudden he's in charge of overseeing America's finance mortgage finance agencies.

And by the way, since he got into that post, what has he done? He's pulled a full Trump move and fired the entire boards, as I understand it, of both Fanny May and Freddy Mack and appointed himself as the chairman, which really seems literally ripped from Donald Trump's playbook.

We're living in a world where the director of the FBI wrote a children's book about Donald Trump as a poor, persecuted king, and that was enough to get him the job of the FBI director. So obviously we're living in a kind of crazy alt reality where you know individual, let's call them social media entrepreneurs, are finding a way to get to the king's attention and you know the more outlandish over the top and, you know, sort of slavish in defense of Trump or carrying out his feuds the more power you may acrue in this warped situation.

The question for all of this - and I last night I really was beside myself because there's so many examples in the last few weeks of Trump really going over the top in terms of challenging norms and rules. The question for all of this is not about the guys like Pulte who who exist, but is there any institution left in our society that can check this?

What has happened to our legal system? What has happened to Congress? What has happened to rational actors and I have to presume that some of them do exist inside the federal government inside the executive branch - like there's a rampage sort of going on here and the question I think is when it all shakes out, 'are there going to be any institutions to stand up and check this?'

And, you know, it's it's the events that pile on top of each other. We're only 200 something days into this administration. What are we going to look like when we're a year out, 18 months out, two years out?

And the escalation suggests we're going to be in a very different country by then.


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