Wade Stotts of The Wade Show joins me to talk about all the madness going on with Trump, the indictments, the court cases, the trials, and everything else going on in Washington. We talk about how the two processes are designed to distract us from the real issues at hand.
00:01:10.040But joining me to talk about all the madness with Trump, the mugshots, the indictments, the trials, everything going on is Wade Stotts from The Wade Show.
00:02:00.680Well, last week was pretty wild because we had, I think on Tuesday, we had the arrest of like Rudy Giuliani and like eight other people, Jenna Ellis and several other folks got their mugshots taken.
00:02:11.980And then the next day we had Trump getting arrested and getting his mugshot taken.
00:02:18.080And then between those two events, we had the GOP debate where everybody got to get on stage and talk about the issues and talk about when the whether the Social Security age should be raised or, you know.
00:02:29.480How much money are we getting to Ukraine and Israel?
00:02:35.440So they're all competing for this sort of prize while at the same time, again, the actual political opposition is getting treated this way.
00:02:44.460So the way that things are going, yeah, we've got this kind of real thing.
00:02:48.400We've got people getting prosecuted, getting indicted, legal warfare going on.
00:02:52.800And then at the same time, we've got, you know, Black Rifle Coffee ads and on Rumble and we've got all this this kind of stuff going on simultaneously while and both of them are pretending to be where the real resistance lies.
00:03:07.720So the guys on the stage really want to present themselves as the resistance, as we're going to dismantle the system, we're going to take it down.
00:03:17.240And the system itself is acting like that's not true.
00:03:21.220You know, whether whether it's true or not, they're at least acting like somebody else is more of a threat.
00:03:26.480So, yeah, that that's that was basically my take is we've got two processes.
00:03:30.240One process is real. One process is theatrical, sort of like my pastor said something about it being like Lexington and Concord reenactments, like where everybody everybody gets to put on their costumes and present pretend that, you know, we're actually doing a battle here.
00:03:43.740But but the outcome is, you know, sort of decided for us whether we have debates or not.
00:03:57.000Like, I think a lot of people know that I'm generally well, well, I think that democracy is is wildly fake and and it really doesn't get the job done.
00:04:10.140But but but while they know that this is the case, you know, I do think that that Trump is a more effective kind of tool to shake up the system.
00:04:18.780I'm not so much excited about the Trump governance.
00:04:21.240You know, I don't don't really expect his really important white paper outlines for, you know, trade with whoever more about the way that that Trump impacts the system.
00:04:31.360So so when I when people say, oh, you're a Trump supporter, it's like, well, in the sense that I think he's you know, he's more disruptive to the system.
00:04:38.360Not not that I'm super excited about his ability to rule, but but but, you know, a lot of people who aren't Trump fans, you know, they look at this and they say, oh, well, you know, framing it the way you just did is a is a coronation of Trump.
00:04:52.280Right. It's is exactly what the system wants.
00:04:55.460They know that someone like DeSantis or Nikki Haley or somebody would be like way more dangerous.
00:05:00.960And so they're trying to they're way more electable.
00:05:03.960And so they're trying to force Trump on us.
00:05:06.040There's especially a lot of mainstream pundits who kind of push this idea that like the key is getting, you know, him him like, you know, out there.
00:05:13.700And so they don't they don't like this framing because like obviously it just sidelines of all the other candidates.
00:05:19.320We're like, well, by by stepping in this, you're stepping into the leftist frame.
00:05:22.800You're accepting the candidate that they're making specifically kind of unelectable.
00:05:27.380And so therefore, like you're playing into their game.
00:05:29.600Well, I would I would think that that were the case if they were if the left were treating it that way.
00:05:36.420So if if I think that the left was going after Trump and has been going after Trump for a long time, not not just I think that they've been going after him for a long time before DeSantis was some kind of national figure.
00:05:49.520And so people weren't they weren't trying to get us away from DeSantis during the Russia collusion stuff.
00:05:54.860And I think that thinking that there has been a huge pivot from for the reason why they're going after Trump is is sort of odd without a bunch of evidence about it.
00:06:04.280And yeah, I mean, like Nikki Haley, of course, wants to say like, oh, they're really scared of me because I'm a woman and I'm a child of immigrants.
00:06:10.200And and that again, they they're they're not prosecuting you.
00:06:13.380And so it doesn't at least seem that way.
00:06:15.860Again, we're we can only look at it from the outside.
00:06:18.400And I don't want to, again, read people's minds that at some level they've they've now shifted their reasoning for doing the exact same thing they've been doing since 2015.
00:06:30.080It's you can see how unhinged these people have been the whole time about him and how, you know, ravenously they've kind of gone after him after trying to get him into the spot because they thought he would be unelectable, which is kind of the funny part.
00:06:44.720So even if you're trying to make that point, I'm not sure why it wouldn't backfire again.
00:06:48.180But either way, the point is, like, it's very clear that the press believes that this guy is a really dangerous threat on some level.
00:06:56.160Interesting thing, though, you know, in 2015, obviously, he got a lot of free press for just being who he was.
00:07:03.280Right. A lot of like he's on Morning Joe all the time and that kind of thing.
00:07:06.300A lot of people speculated that the, you know, the liberal media basically nominated this guy because they gave him, you know, in-kind donations out the wazoo by plastering him everywhere and telling everybody to be scared of him.
00:07:18.560But in 2020, they kind of dialed that back.
00:07:21.160Right. They kind of knew that putting Trump in front of cameras, especially with a opposition, was a dangerous thing.
00:07:28.520Right. And it feels like with Trump out of office for a few years, they forgot that lesson.
00:07:33.780Right. Like like we saw him in the CNN town hall debate and you could almost see like the rejuvenation of Donald Trump Trump live there on stage as he got to once again, you know, you know, destroy gladiators for the amusement of the crowd.
00:07:46.860And then, you know, and now they've just kind of ramped this up.
00:07:50.320And with this, you know, throwing out his mugshot there, it's more like they're trying to turn him into Jesse James than they're trying to, you know.
00:07:56.640And so it feels like they forgot that lesson and they're buying right back into Trump's strength, which is putting him in this adversarial process where he gets to vest his enemies for his supporters.
00:08:08.140Yeah. And it would also all of that kind of way of thinking would depend on somebody's thinking that the left thinking that Trump isn't popular enough.
00:08:16.000Like people don't love Trump enough. We've got to make sure that they love him even more.
00:08:20.700It seems it seems, again, like an odd, odd thing. But again, it's not that they were really nice to Trump until DeSantis came along and then all of a sudden, oh, well, man, we got to get we got to make sure to get people away from this this real threat.
00:08:33.800And most of the way of thinking about that, where, oh, we've got to make Trump unelectable, we've got to we've got to make Trump popular.
00:08:40.780And then because we know that we can win is is all dependent on also believing, you know, we all know that 2020 was the freest and the fairest, right?
00:08:51.860Most free, most fair, the freest and the fairest.
00:08:53.900And in 2024, we can assume that it will be even more free and even more fair.
00:08:59.500But if if we're if we act as if the freeness and the fairness will not be turned up, as if we think it'll just sort of stop at some level at some point, then, yeah, we can't really talk about electability.
00:09:10.720Like all of those all those free and fair, all those, you know, whatever fortifying, you know, all the election fortification measures are, you know, sort of again, it's sort of buying into the the populist kind of delusion where you're like, OK, well, he's he's not popular enough.
00:09:27.400We've got to make him more popular. And you're all steering popular opinion, which is something that you don't have that have to do that.
00:09:34.240They understand how power works a lot better than we like analysts out here sort of guessing at their motives.
00:09:40.720Yeah, I kind of made a point similar on Twitter yesterday that there's a lot of people, of course, and I get it, like people want to believe that the process is still going forward.
00:09:52.800Right. Like we this is this is the ritual. This is what we do. This is how we transfer our legitimacy to our government.
00:09:59.980Like, obviously, like this is kind of core to much of our identity.
00:10:03.780And so you can't like it. And of course, there's a lot of machinery.
00:10:07.080There's a lot of people making money. There's a lot of political consultants.
00:10:12.120There's a lot of media officials like you need to have the conversation about the horse race.
00:10:16.340And, you know, what are we going to debate about and who's who's winning in what state and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:10:21.700You know, you got to do all this polling and, you know, like all these things need to get done.
00:10:25.160All these pockets need to get in line. And so the media apparatus isn't going to want to like shift off of this normal routine of having basically like prefabricated content.
00:10:34.880And it's weird. Like once you've been in the content, the content business, you can see how much of this is just like Domino's pizza showing up to your door because it's Tuesday.
00:10:43.480And it's and you and you're just like, oh, man, OK, well, that's not good because we're talking about like the actual continue constitutional continuance of our government.
00:10:53.720So we probably shouldn't just like roll this stuff off the assembly line.
00:10:58.480But but but but it feels like there's so much of that that has to continue.
00:11:02.720So we can't have the conversation about like how this is all being disrupted because that might disrupt like our regularly scheduled media narrative.
00:11:10.380Yeah. And if they didn't do the day after the debate show where everybody talks about who won and then you get on different people, you get the callers to come in and they debate.
00:11:18.420And we debate the on air personalities and everybody gets their paycheck and everything's fine.
00:11:22.900But, yeah, you can't you can't do that if that's not actually the issue.
00:11:26.040And, you know, everybody on that stage wanted to make sure that they were talking.
00:11:30.640You know, they wanted to frame everything in terms of these are the issues that are facing America.
00:11:34.600This is this is the most important stuff.
00:11:41.260But the actual issue that everybody that will affect the most Americans and every election going forward is elections themselves.
00:11:50.540And so that wasn't part of the debate.
00:11:53.000Not anybody, not not a single person talking about ballot harvesting, not a single question about, like, how we're going to change our strategy to get, you know, to the same day voting, reduce mail in fraud.
00:12:06.040And the only person who is talking about that is the guy who's getting arrested.
00:12:10.740And so we all see what happens to people who do talk that way.
00:12:15.220And so, yeah, we start to get signals.
00:12:17.360We were talking earlier about, like, people wanting the process to continue because that's the way that it can.
00:12:22.400I mean, we all we all grew up in a sort of system where, like, the first time I voted, I went online and I found an online quiz that would go through and I could answer multiple choice questions.
00:12:33.520And I would be able to, at the end of it, find out who my candidate was because, oh, 87 percent of my views are aligned with candidate X.
00:12:42.160Great. That's my candidate. I'll vote for that person.
00:12:44.620And that's really just not the way anything ever worked.
00:12:47.820And so at least when I thought when I thought it was working that way and we could all just sort of like maintain our ideological purity, it's it's not the way things actually are.
00:12:59.460I was thinking I went to Walmart the other day.
00:13:21.700And when he was explaining this to me, I was going, oh, this is crazy.
00:13:25.740And then the other day I went to Walmart and just thought, like, everybody here, this whole system is really dependent on everybody trying their hardest to do the right thing.
00:13:35.520Despite the inconvenience and all of that.
00:13:37.760So I've got to go get my toothpaste and I've got to go to the front of the thing.
00:13:52.780You know, it's the same kind of thing with, you know, getting off of airplanes.
00:13:56.340You know, everybody gets off of airplanes and like one.
00:13:59.000Oh, well, if I if I get off first, the whole system doesn't break down.
00:14:02.840But if enough people sort of catch on to, oh, well, this I can operate.
00:14:07.440I can be the exception in the high trust thing.
00:14:10.260And then enough people sort of do that.
00:14:13.160And I think I think that the candidates who are on the stage are people who are like in a like post apocalyptic world where there's nobody.
00:14:20.520Like nobody's in the store and they're like walking up to the front with their toothpaste.
00:14:24.060And like looking around for a clerk, like ringing the bell, you know, and and hoping, wishing that this system was still going so that everything could be back to normal.
00:14:34.940They could pretend that we live in high trust, that all of the rules that we were taught about how life works can continue on.
00:14:44.620And I'm not, you know, obviously, we're not living in post apocalyptic world.
00:14:47.380But as soon as those first signs, like the longer people hold on to the idea that we aren't headed there or at least going to where we're going to a low trust society, the longer their illusions are going to be intact.
00:14:59.440So like the longer you hold on to it, the harder it is to let go of it.
00:15:37.040You hope that your society doesn't doesn't end up there.
00:15:39.120But you're a fool to stand, you know, to keep standing at the counter while the other guy just runs out the door continuously.
00:15:45.460But, yeah, no, I think it's very interesting that the one guy at the debate, like the one guy who's broken through, I think everybody kind of knew everyone else is a known quantity.
00:15:55.220Right. You've got Nikki Haley and stuff like that, you know, who are just kind of the most obvious candidates in the world.
00:16:02.720Mike Pence, people who just were always going to be kind of embarrassing the establishment.
00:16:07.400We have Ron DeSantis, who's like, you know, he's somewhere in the middle.
00:16:11.220He's competent. He knows what he's doing.
00:16:13.620He clearly brushes the establishment the wrong way on certain things.
00:16:19.100Like, and people know that, like he is he's he is the I want somebody who seems like they're pushing back the against the establishment, but isn't Trump guy.
00:16:29.500He kind of came out of nowhere for a lot of people.
00:16:32.480And Vivek is the only one who's really seen, I think, significant poll movement in the forward direction, at least, because he's kind of out there doing like Trump light, I think, in a lot of ways.
00:16:44.400And so I wonder what you think about that.
00:16:47.300Do you do you know a lot of people have said he's a plant by by the by the Trump campaign to blow up DeSantis?
00:16:54.080Other people think he's just running for like, you know, a cabinet position or maybe even vice president.
00:16:59.700If he's very lucky, it's not like Pence is going back in that slot.
00:17:02.600So what do you think about Vivek? Is he really on the outside?
00:17:05.800Is he really think he's running? Is he looking for a position in a possible Trump situation?
00:17:09.280Seems dangerous to run for a cabinet position in a White House where people are going to jail right now.
00:17:15.100Yeah, well, and I like Vivek. I like I like what he says.
00:17:19.400I think that people are also refreshed that he.
00:17:21.980Yeah. So the reasons they like Trump was because it sounded like he was saying what he thought and not what somebody else cooked up for him.
00:17:28.620I think that's exactly why people are flocking to Vivek.
00:17:30.780Obviously, he's saying the same points.
00:17:54.580And just because they like DeSantis's policies a little bit more or or they just want him or think that he'd be more of a threat.
00:18:00.400But you can't really downplay his, again, ability to communicate clearly, his ability to show up on any show and be able to again, he shows up on CNN and they try to play a clip out of context.
00:18:16.280I mean, I again, I won't speculate about whether he's a plant or whatever, but he is certainly, you know, he is better suited to be VP than Pence's or at least at least he's is he understands kind of what's going on.
00:18:34.580So he understands that everybody there is kind of competing for the second spot and everybody who's trying to counter signal Trump is doing the opposite of that.
00:18:44.900And yeah, so it's I think it's good for Vivek to do.
00:19:07.880But you can't vote for Trump right now because whatever reason.
00:19:11.100So, which is a good thing to do, because I think one of the delusions that the Republican Party had was that Trump had, you know, that Trump, their base temporarily supported Trump.
00:19:23.220When the truth is, Trump had a base and the Republican Party didn't have one anymore.
00:19:28.720And so they're very confused that like, oh, you just take Trump out of this equation.
00:19:32.600And then everything kind of goes back to normal.
00:19:58.540And everybody else there is under the impression Nikki Haley and Tim Scott and Doug Bergman is under the impression that we're all here to try to get our poll numbers up.
00:20:09.660Because when our poll numbers go up, then we become president.
00:20:13.000And like that's that's just not what's happening there.
00:20:15.480And I appreciate at least I'm assuming, again, that Vivek understands that.
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00:20:52.620So before we get to the Trump shot, the Trump mug shot, I do want to talk to you about what you mentioned before, which a lot of people aren't focusing on, which is the 10 other people who were arrested in this, right?
00:21:07.780Like most specifically, a lot of lawyers, people who advise Trump.
00:21:12.500We've already seen this a lot, a number of obviously Trump cabinet officials and other people connected to the Trump campaign have been arrested or investigated, had their lives destroyed, kind of due to their connection.
00:21:29.180Of course, from one side, the left will just say, oh, that's because they're all corrupt.
00:21:32.740It just so happens that all of our political enemies happen to be corrupt.
00:21:37.440Anyone who has any kind of real threat to us just happens to be a criminal.
00:21:42.080Man, that's how amazingly convenient that just, you know, if we lock them away, it's totally justified.
00:21:46.680But for anybody who's, you know, not complete slobbering idiot, like, obviously, like, it seems like there's a very real, you know, effort to criminalize any real opposition.
00:21:58.860And especially when you start going after people's lawyers, like, now you just don't have Sixth Amendment, right?
00:22:03.700Like, we've lost so many other amendments.
00:22:06.340But now we're getting rid of, like, even the illusion that you're allowed to have an attorney represent you because any attorney who represents you is literally putting their freedom on the line.
00:22:17.520Like, anybody who works for Trump advises him in any capacity could very well end up being, you know, criminally prosecuted for daring to be a part of this.
00:22:25.920And we live in a regime, whether we like it or not, which is based on complex technical managerialism, which means you need to have tons of lawyers, tons of experts, cabinet officials, highly educated and credentialed people need to be part of basically everything you do every step of the way.
00:22:42.520If you don't do this, you're going to get crushed by the procedure.
00:22:44.420If anybody who works for you, anybody who has put all their time and all their effort and still managed to get out through all of these incredibly progressive educational systems and DA's offices and everything else and still be willing to work for a Republican, if they know that going and working for these people will immediately get them arrested or end up putting them through a process that kind of cost them a million or more dollars in attorney fees for themselves, who's ever going to defend this person?
00:23:12.460Who's ever going to work for a Republican that actually threatens the system again?
00:23:16.340Yeah. And the most recent case is all about lying.
00:23:34.780And then so he brings in other people to give him legal advice.
00:23:38.340And so, number one, they have to prove that Trump thought something.
00:23:43.160So they have to mind read him or find some kind of private conversation where he said something that is obviously saying that what I'm doing out here is lying.
00:23:51.320And he's also got to talk, you know, also got to talk about the lawyers and the lawyers don't have to agree with their client.
00:23:59.820Like they can't, the lawyer can see, oh, well, I, you know, whether I think this person's guilty, innocent, whatever, or whether I think that this election was the freest and the fairest, or they believe some crazy lie.
00:24:10.180You know, if whatever they think they're there to help their client, and if whatever their private beliefs are, that's the worst thing that they can say, is that they were acting on something that they didn't believe.
00:24:22.200They were giving him the best advice that they could.
00:24:28.580We'll see if that is enough, you know, believing something and helping your client to attain X is, again, here I go trying to apply general principles to this case.