We’re back after a week off from The BradCast, with a lot to catch up with, including some interesting observations over our week away. [Audio to full show follows this summary.]
The week away from the daily grind of the show was instructive. The helicopter view of events — while not looking at them too closely — revealed two unmistakable, and likely historic, central storylines now underway. They are storylines that I think we’ll be quite clear to see several years from now. But even now, they are unmistakable…
1) The President — and the presidency, specifically this one, along with it — are collapsing. Physically, emotionally, politically and, most importantly, legally in the courts.
2) The fight to prevent democracy — our version of it anyway — from collapsing along with Donald Trump‘s failing presidency is continuing and, arguably, succeeding. On that score, the small “d” democrats are doing well, given the circumstances.
On today’s show, we walk through the evidence in support of both of those parallel storylines. Among the evidence in support of the first…
- The “state fair” planned by Trump for the National Mall in D.C. next month, in celebration of America’s 250th birthday, is falling apart, as the headline acts book have almost entirely now dropped out.
- A federal judge has ordered that Trump’s name be removed from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts and that Trump’s planned two-year closure for supposed renovation (after all of the major acts refused to perform there with his name on it) be put on hold until a legitimate analysis is made by the Center’s Trump-appointed Board of Trustees. In response, Trump threw a social media temper tantrum, pretended he no longer wants anything to do with the Kennedy Center — because people will “DIE” if he’s not allowed to close it for two years — and that he will now work to let Congress look after it. For the record, while the Executive Branch appoints the Center’s Trustees, everything else — funding, all major construction and maintenance decisions, project management and security, is already all overseen by Congress.
- Trump’s fraudulent “settlement agreement” with his own DOJ, purportedly allowing him to hand out out $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars to any criminal he may like — and that indemnifies him, his family members and his companies from being audited or even questioned by the IRS — has been put on hold by a federal judge who is now investigating whether the entire scam was an unlawful fraud against the United States. Late this afternoon, reportedly, the entire thing was being put on ice after about a dozen Republicans in the Senate made clear they wouldn’t support or fund it.
- Trump’s War in Iran is not on the verge of ending and, apparently, never has been. Today, Tehran announced they were cutting off talks with the U.S. after new attacks by the U.S. in Iran and by Israel in Lebanon despite a supposed ceasefire.
- Also, both Trump’s physical health and approval ratings continue to plummet quickly.
- And, as Andrew Egger wrote at the Bulwark last week, after Trump’s endorsed candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, the indescribably corrupt Ken Paxton, defeated 4-term Republican Sen. John Cornyn: “If Donald Trump’s base is a cult, we’re rapidly approaching the Comet Hale–Bopp phase.”
There is more, but you get the idea. On the other critical, historic storyline underway, the fight to prevent democracy itself from collapsing under Trump’s wannabe-authoritarian weight, things are not easy, but are arguably holding up. Among just some of the evidence over the past week…
- A three-judge panel — comprised of two Trump appointed jurists — blocked Alabama‘s plan to erase a majority Black district from their U.S. House map, in the middle of the election, finding that the map written by state Republicans was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that discriminated against Black voters.
- After South Carolina Republicans in the state House voted to create a new U.S. House map erasing the district of the state’s only Black member of Congress (Rep. James Clyburn), enough Republicans in the state Senate voted with all of the Democrats to nix the new map.
All the good fights, on both scores, continue, even as the once popular Trump (or so he told us over the past 16 months — remember, more Americans voted against him than for him in 20224), is quickly becoming a pariah, even in his own party, amid one failure after another.
We will look back on these months as “the moment that it happened”, before millions of Americans who originally (and repeatedly) supported Trump begin claiming, some years from now, that they never actually liked the guy at all. Mark your calendars.
Finally, we close today with callers, ringing in on tomorrow’s somewhat bizarre, 50-candidate Gubernatorial top-two primary race here in California. We’ve got calls in support of Democrats Xavier Becerra, Tom Steyer and Katie Porter, even if nobody felt like ringing in for supposed Republican frontrunner and former Fox “News” Steve Hilton…
