 American issues take one. I'm Tim Apatialio, your host, and today's title is Trump's plan for revenge if reelected. You might have heard it this week. I like to call, I should have changed the title of this show called Trump's veteran vermin speech. And I'm going to read a little bit from the speech that he gave. And it's a new, a new inflection point as Jay likes to say. And it's the following. He said, we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lies, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, destroy America and the American dream. To discuss Donald Trump, his plans to do what he's going to do when he's reelected, and the vermin speech, I'd like to introduce my co-host, Jay Fidel, and our special esteemed guest, Chuck Crumpton. Good morning, gentlemen. Good morning, Tim. May I say that neither of you guys look like vermin to me. Thank you, because I'm sure if Trump is reelected, he'll have an opinion about that, and he'll disagree with you. You know, Jay. Tim, real quick, I just have to ask, right? For somebody like Adolf Trump, I'm sorry, I mean, that's, he recently changed his name. For Adolf Trump, are there vermin or only vermin? Gotcha. That's a M-I-N. Play of words there, I think, Chuck. Thank you. Hey, Jay, another inflection point. Take this guy seriously, you deserve it. Yeah, yeah. You know, Rachel Maddow had a show, and she mentioned the book, Strongman by Ruth Ben Gatt, D-H-I-A-T. And in his book, he describes what Trump is doing, and we've known this for years. We've seen it before, but now he's putting a special twist on it. Page is right out of mind comp, almost, and that is to reduce the American's sensitivity to this kind of language, this kind of fascist language that dehumanizes human beings and allows Americans to consider taking potshots at human beings, violence. The idea is that you make it seem that violence in classifying people as non-human, as patriotic, it's justified, and it's morally righteous, and that is spelled out in this book called Strongman. Your thoughts about Donald Trump and his veteran days speech, well, let's call it the vermin speech. What do you think? It's fascist, or it's Nazi, or it's both. I think he's being more aggressive now in his language or aggressive in his promise to gain vengeance over people who have spoken against him. What I find interesting is that the list of people that he mentions, the ones he wants to have vengeance over, people in large part that he himself appointed and turned against them in one way or another, at least in his perception. And what is interesting about that is they're not around. They weren't at the speech. Nobody came, but still he has the base. So what you have is two lines on the chart. The ones he appointed, the ones who turned against him, they're on the downside. They're not interested in helping him anymore. But the base seems to be willing to help him. The base seems to agree with that. The base goes along with his greater suggestions of violence and his threats for vengeance. I'm going to find that very interesting because the base, while the guys who turned against him get to be smarter or seem to be smarter and not really smart, the people in the base seem to be at least steady and maybe increasing in their ardor and their affection for him. And the question is whether those polls are right. I mean, one of the points in the review of that book on Rachel Maddow is what are they thinking, those people? They are responding to his appeal for vengeance. They are responding to his appeal for violence. And so he's testing. He's testing to see whether they will come along with him. And the answer, although it's not quite clear yet, the answer is maybe they are. Maybe the wilder his rhetoric gets, the more support he gets from the base, which is really troubling. They're following the handwriting that says, let's do more violence and let's get vengeance. So this is troubling in the sense that there's polls out there. We don't really believe the polls, but maybe they're right that say that he could win or will win. And then the package includes the vermin speech. This is as scary as it gets. Great. Thank you very much, Jay, for that. Hey, Chuck, let's go with Jay's observation. That is, this speech, the vermin speech was directly intended for his base, but let's extrapolate that a little bit more. If it's just intended for the base, Trump mega followers, what does it say about the non-mega GOP and the independence not to raise criticism, not to speak out against this kind of speech, this kind of fascist, distinctly fascist kind of speech? Do they just lay in the weeds like a, you know, a bass in the weeds and say nothing as usual for the last seven years? Or do they spark up and say something? I haven't heard anything really. Not too much from the GOP and from the national Republican. They haven't said anything, that organization. And certainly independence really haven't sparked up your thoughts. Okay, so two things. One, I am truly inspired and impressed to see that Jay has regained his pinnacle of brilliance and inciteliness, which was woefully lacking just before the show and had me seriously concerned. Secondly, I know when not to respond, Chuck. There's a first time for everything, Jay. Okay, so second thing for your question. Jay is right, as usual on these shows. If Trump is the test door and if his base are the testees, you get what you pay for. Is it the base as the testees or is it the non-mega independence as the testees? This is a family show, so I'm not going to go there. I'm not going to talk about Speaker Johnson or about testees. I'm going to go back to the base. Experiment. You're doing the best you can to throw me off my base here. Yeah, Jay is having some muscles, but we'll get back to that. Let me say that when you're talking about the base or the people who are not in the base, independence, whatever, you're talking about the electorate. Whoever goes down to the polls that's what we're talking about. Let me add that that is a sliding scale. That is a moving target. Do not forget for one moment that he has been involved in an enormous initiative to try to screw up voting rights and suppress voting. Those steps that were taken a year or two ago are still in place in many states and so it's not clear who the electorate is. Furthermore, and they could vote for him, even though we don't anticipate that they would win in a given state, they might because of the suppression. The other thing, don't forget, and there was an article about this in opinion piece in The Times by David Ignatius this morning to the proposition that the month of October was Putin's best months. And one of the things in that argument, many things happen in October that Putin likes, it's a sad article actually. One of the things is the fact that Trump might be president that Trump has control through his fellow Johnson that Chuck continually refers to in affectionate terms. And so don't forget, Putin likes Trump. There is no question that Putin will try to help Trump. No question, as he did last time and a time before. He will be using social media with an AI spin approaching November. He will try to help Trump in social media and I'll go on record here. There are a lot of people in this country who are suggestible, completely suggestible to social media. They don't know the difference between right and wrong or truth and fiction. And they can get so confused. Look at the college campuses on the Middle East question. It's incredible. These kids are so ignorant and they have been made ignorant by social media. The population, the electorate will be made ignorant by social media driven by Putin. So Putin, Trump, they're still totally together. Putin will help Trump. Trump will help Putin. And the day that Trump takes office, the war in Ukraine will be lost finally, forever. It won't be a stalemate anymore. It'll be over. So all I'm saying is that they got a relationship, those two. And you got to factor that in to who will win and what Trump will do if and when he wins. Okay. Great. Good analysis on that. Chuck, I want to pinpoint a little bit on what Jay just said about Putin's influence on this 2024 election and certainly in previous elections, particularly just 2016. If that's true and Putin is encouraging Trump to take the pathway of the fascist, you know, I'm reminded and maybe you remember this, but remember a gentleman from Russia named the Nick Khrushchev, leader of Russia, Soviet Union. And he said to John F. Kennedy, he said, Russia will take you. I'm going to paraphrase. Russia will take you and not a shot will be fired. Are we there in those days of Khrushchev's prediction coming true with Putin's influence with Donald Trump and certainly influence in the pending 2024 election? Well, I think to respond to that, we need to focus on a truly brilliant insight that Jay's recovery has enabled him to share with us. And that is that when voters go into the voting booth, what they do and why they do it is completely different than when they respond to quite biased polls. They're selective in the demographics. They're selective in their wording. They're selective in their interpretation of it. I mean, free wrongs do not make a right. So that difference is critical. Putin and Adolf Trump, on the other hand, are peas in a pot. They are vultures of a feather. They will rise or fall together. Trump has attached himself to Putin because Putin has achieved that rise essentially unimpeded and unimpaired. Trump aspires to that. He is aspiring now by attacking his opponents exactly the same way that Putin attacks Ukraine and the West and the NATO alliance. That analogy, that simile, is apt and instructive and illuminating. And I think Jay has opened that to our understanding in ways that we really need to understand. So thank you, Jay. Thank you, Chuck. Nice comments. But let me add a couple of things. May I, Tim? Just a couple of things here. Number one is when Trump makes these statements threatening people who he hired and who served him. They were his acolytes sometimes for years. And later, and even now, they come out against him. Okay, they testify against him, and he's really ticked off about that. What does that mean in the next administration? If he is elected somehow, if he squeaks by somehow, then he's going to be selecting people again. And he is going to be selecting people who are not only acolytes, but perfect acolytes, people who are more loyal to him than ever before. In his bag of Teflon Don tricks, the guy has a way to corrupt everybody. I am reminded of the James Comey movie, Comey Rules, where they were these strange conversations between Trump and Comey, it's in Comey's book, where he undermined him and then fired him anyway. And the same thing with the successor. So what you get is the prospect of fantastic acolytes who are sworn to protect Trump, who are less likely to ever turn against Trump. Furthermore, part of what he's talking about here in this fascist speech he made is to completely corrupt and undermine our law enforcement agencies and our intelligence agencies, which he was doing for most of his term, think about it, even way back in Helsinki, he was undermining American intelligence. Okay, if he gets back in office, that's the first, you know, they say the first step, kill all the lawyers right now. The first step, kill all the intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies. And for that matter, tax collection agencies, he will wreck those organizations on day one, which means he's already promised, he already promised that he'll, he'll enact the Instruction Act on day one. That too, that's another thing. But in terms of the law enforcement, what he will do is he will turn them, he will weaponize them, he will use them against his adversaries. And in fact, he will put people in jail, you know, he will build a camp. He said that in the speech, he's going to build a camp for his enemies. And God knows who is going to be in that camp. And if he controls and reorganizes all the law enforcement agencies, which he can and probably knows well enough how to do, there'll be a lot of people in those camps. It will be, it will, it will take us right to 1939. I'm telling you. Well, let me suggest who he put in those camps. And he said in his, his vermin speech, the radical left, he called him radical left thugs, but anyone he deems as a radical left and who is that anyone who disagrees with him, anyone who criticizes him, that's the radical left. So that's the answer to your question. Let me, let me go to Chuck and Chuck, I want to talk about this point about weaponization of the FBI and the DOJ on Univision this week. He said the following. They've let the genie out of the box. You know, when you're the president and you've done a good job and you're popular, you don't go after them so that you can win an election. So by those words, he has rationalized weaponization of the law enforcement agencies because he feels that he has been the subject of weaponization, that these 91 indictments is a direct, direct correlation to the fact that he was a great president and the radical leftists don't like that. And they don't want quote unquote a great president to be president again. So can you see his, his rationalization and how far does that go? Well, it might not be expected in the response. I think we need to start with, again, the brilliant inferentially raised point from Jay that Trump need and may be jeopardizing by his fascist speeches and words, the evangelical. Trump needs them to see him as Christ. Truly. But if you look at how Trump has treated his disciple versus Christ, even Judas, who did much worse than any of the people Trump is attacking, Christ never said a bad word or took an adverse action against Judas ever. That is Christ. That is Christian. Trump is the antichrist. Well, we know that the evangelical movement has for many years now has compared him as some kind of not so much the Christ, but referenced in the Old Testament as a biblical savior. And I forgot exactly King can't remember exactly what King Trump is compared to, but to liberate liberate this country from forces that the evangelicals don't like. Yeah, I think it was King time. Well, I'm not going back that far. But, you know, here we are with now you're blending, of course, religion and politics. That's a dangerous thing to do. But there we are. Many of Trump's base is mega followers are exactly that. And remember, when you mix politics and religion, guess what you don't need? You don't need evidence. You don't need facts to support your claims. Why? Because religion is a faith based function. So why do you need facts and evidence when you're dealing with faith? And so the faithful of Donald Trump are just that faithful. They don't need anything other than what Donald Trump tells them what they need. And here we go. That's a big part of his 33% hold on the electorate. Now, what scares me is, where is the independence? Where are the non mega GOP to say, that's not how we run this country? Yet, cricket are heard. Now and then you'll hear, you know, Republicans spout out, but it, you know, it's all for one day news cycle, and then it goes away. Your thoughts about that blending of religion and Trump's support. Yeah, I think that's a great, very urgent question, Tim. And I think what we need to understand about that, again, is putting it back in the Trump versus Christ context, that there will be, there are now, and there will be possibly increasing real Christians with a glimmer, at least, at least, of conscience, of intelligence, of character, or morality, who will recognize, believe, and maybe even act once they're in that private voting booth, on the understanding that Trump is the opposite of Christ and Christianity and the core values. Is that wishful thinking on your part? Sorry to put it that way, but no, I don't, I don't think it is. I think if you could design a poll that would identify big column evangelical Christians, but devout Christians, and you, in a private, this is your vote, not in the poll, but this is your vote context, what would you choose as a matter of personal choice and conscience? I think if you could get honest answers to that honest question, I think you would see a shift in whatever portion of real Christians with real character, conscience, integrity, there may be among his base. Well, it'd be nice to know that these evangelicals would have in their voting booth, copy of the Old Testament, open to the page of the Ten Commandments thing, thou should not have false idols, which clearly Donald Trump is, but I don't think that's going to happen. Tim, let me jump in on this. This morning, I was watching something out of 1978 over ethics as applied to the military. And what's very interesting is that it had a bunch of people, some of whom were in the military and trained young recruits and all this. And the idea was that you built them to do your mission, whatever it was, including killing people. And you stripped off any kind of morality or religion, ethical principles they brought with them, and you taught them to obey your orders no matter what. Now, first of all, I want to say that what Trump is selling, in fact, what these evangelistic groups are selling, is not religion. It is not religion. You're making some kind of old-time statement about religion, about ethics and morality and religion in the Bible. God, what we have is a kind of army. And this is a Trump army. When he gives the commands, the stochastic commands, they follow. I don't know how that happened, but it's sort of like a military thing. They follow no matter what. Remember the Insurrection Act. Remember the fact that he has a lot of support in the military. We were lucky. They didn't turn in his favor actively during his administration, at the end of his administration. But I want to add this, we haven't really covered this, is we are walking around thinking that this is going to be a fair election. We are walking around thinking that somehow the suppression of boats, taking it on a racial basis, is not going to affect it that much, and that social media is not going to affect it from Putin, is not going to affect it that much. Well, even assuming that, let me ask you guys a rhetorical question and then I'll answer it. Do you think that Trump will accept a loss in 2024? Do you think that the answer is no? He'll be back. He'll be back saying that the other guys, it's a given and he will be better prepared. He will have more followers out there that agree with him and want to see him president even if he fared square lost. So I think we're going to have the same experience, but much worse in 2024. Either he wins, which actually I don't think he will. He wins the vote, or he loses the vote and then does a 2020 thing again in more aggressive form. Do you disagree? No, I don't. There's no way he's going to accept the election results, only if it clearly shows that he was the victor. And then of course, he'll say, yeah, it was a fair and square election, even with the mail-in ballots. Yeah, that's chilling. It's chilling, but I think when you shake it and bank it, that's what we have coming. That's what we have come. That's what we have to expect. And I hate to say it, but Americans and the federal government better be prepared for it, because I don't think it's going to be pretty. It's going to be far worse than the last time. I like to be proven wrong. That's the last thing I want to say. Well, don't forget the Insurrection Act. So he takes office physically. He gets into the White House. He corrupts the DOJ, the FBI, all the law enforcement and intelligence. He corrupts all the generals. I mean, let's say, if you're in charge of the military, who's going to oppose you? I mean, you have done a coup d'état. You have performed a successful coup d'état by taking over the military, and then no one will be able to to roost you from your position because you've now declared yourself a dictator, or a leader for the American people. However, he's going to put that. Hey, Chuck, let's go. We're running out of time here. In fact, we were almost out of time. I just want to touch on the last thing. And Donald Trump has promised deportation of illegal immigrants to the numbers greater, never seen in 150 years. Stephen Miller has commandant arms has proposed many, many warehouses in the Southwest near the border, and that will house, quote, unquote, millions of people for deportation. Are you buying that? Is this another, is this another build-the-wall kind of scenario? There's a problem for that, which Jay's brilliance in this episode at new height is helping us to understand. Look at the military leadership. His own appointed military leadership has almost to a man turned against him. Analogize that to the Christian evangelicals where the leaders have not spoken up. They don't have the spines, the consciences, the characters to speak of. But the military leaders, Millie and others have. If the leaders are doing that, and their men and women are looking at and listening to them for leadership, how extensive will the inroad on Trump's allegiance be among that rank and file with those leaders? So I think things are happening that are not going to show up in polls. Those are very private individuals. Okay. Let me ask you this final question and what conclude will go to final thoughts. And that is, what institution, other than, I hate to say it, wishful thinking that people change their minds once they're inside the voting booth, what institution, and this is what Rachel Maddow is trying to get at, what institution is going to be successful to cast a light on this newfound fascist speech or sarcastic fascist speech? And, well, stop it. Who's going to do that? What institution might do that? The other institution that ate off Trump and the Santas and Cruz and those guys are attacking. And that is higher education. That is generations. We don't have generations. We don't have time for it. Yeah. Then who? If higher education leadership, particularly charismatic leadership in higher education, stands up to ate off Trump. Yeah. I do with you wholeheartedly, but you don't need institutions to defeat ate off Trump. You need individuals in private confidential voting booth to defeat ate off Trump. It happened in 2020. It happened in 2016. We all know what a monster he was back in 2016. What happened then? It didn't happen then. Right. My point. But since then, every single national election and most of the major state elections 2020, 2022, 2023, it has happened. Expectations of Republicans and gains of Republicans have been eroded. Expectations of Democrats and gains of Democrats have been exceeded. That is now a three-year trend. Yeah. Because not the institutions, individuals in private confidential voting booths are exercising a degree of independence and conscience that no Republicans ever thought possible. They are going to use gerrymandering, voter roll, purging, elimination of access to and mail ballot. Every trick in the book to borrow from the song that they can to prevent those individual choices of conscience from happening or being counted. They will do anything they can, but that's the question. I hope you're right. I really do hope you're right. I am suspicious on that point, but I do hope you're right. Jay, if you go to the last thoughts, one institution, Rachel Mattel suggests there are no institutions out there except for one, and that's the GOP party itself to stand up against this. Your thoughts? Yeah. I heard her say that. I thought that was a pretty weak answer. She must be scrambling to come up with them because they've been busted. They're fragmented. They have no heart, no soul, no principles, no nothing. Honestly, I think the answer is there is none. It's certainly not the Supreme Court. It's not Congress. Maybe some group, a coalition of governors who are blue state governors. I don't know. There's nothing out there now, but I want to add one thing though, in talking before about what will happen if he loses. Well, he will claim to have won. He will say that Joe Biden did it to him again, and Joe Biden lied and stole the election yet again, and then he will have all his people join him, all his acolytes join him in the chorus. There will be a scramble for the White House. There will be all kinds of dirty tricks about letting the government continue. Tricks by the Republicans in the House and the Senate. No one will know who really won. Enter chaos, chaos. Enter the military. Don't forget Tommy Tuberville, who's been holding up virtually hundreds of promotions of senior officers. I think this is a long plan. Remember that Tuberville is a, aside from being a terrible coach, he is a Trumper completely, and he will follow whatever Trump tells him, like many others in the House and the Senate. Maybe just maybe this is a selection process. It's kind of an inverted selection process of what officers Trump would like to be promoted or not promoted. What he's doing is he's rebuilding the military in an image that he can rely on with human capital, human resources, senior officers that he can rely on when he pulls the plug on the military and says, I want you to enforce my election because I was the true winner. And they come along under the Insurrection Act or otherwise, and they put down Biden as the real winner. So I think this is part of Trump's plan, because his plan includes use of the military under the Insurrection Act. You know, it's a good thought, but I think as of yesterday, it passed the Senate to break the logjam of military appointments and promotions. Not all en masse. There's certain positions in the military that will require individual approval, but as far as the many of those, they can be done in groups. And I think that actually passed yesterday in the Senate. We're not out of the woods on that. So then Tuvaville's machinations may not have the same weight as I thought until you told me this, but nevertheless, let's assume that Trump has power over the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the leaders of the various branches of service. He has power over that as President. And he will try to create the military in his own image on a short leash basis right after Election Day, what have you, and use them. I mean, they have to be part of his plan. And I'm sure there are people who are advising him about this right now. I find it extraordinary, by the way, that Stephen Miller would be talking about camps and putting liberals in camps. Stephen Miller is the successor to a Holocaust family, isn't he? And it's extraordinary that he would come out. I guess not. How quickly we forget. They're also agreed to reinstate the zero tolerance policy in that separating infants and young children from their parents in order to be as a disincentive for people to come into the United States under legal assumption or asylum rules. Okay. Let me add one other last point though, Tim, and that's this. People can and should see these things. They can and should vote against him on this basis. But it's not clear to me that they will either see these things or vote against him. And I think it's really up for grabs about how well Biden does and Biden's big initiatives and how well social media does on Putin's initiatives. But I do not feel that rational decisions that a lot of people will be making rational decisions. I agree. That's why we're talking about it today. I couldn't agree with you more. Last thoughts, Chuck. So I want to again commend and admire Jay's brilliance. I just, Jay has been consistently at a very high level today. I think one of the best that we've seen. Two things. One, individual, independent, confidential choices of conscience inside the sanctity of a voting booth will make the difference or it won't. From your lips to God's ears, I hope so. No. And number two, everything that we can do, as Jay has done so eloquently in this session, to inspire, to instill, to activate, to not nurture, to cultivate those independent choices of conscience in the privacy of the voting booth is our responsibility. Okay. Thank you. Nicely stated. Amen. Jay, last thought. Yeah, I feel at one level, I feel very threatened by what is happening. You know, we've been talking about Trump since the days of Trump week and I mean, if you went back to him and you looked at our earlier shows where we discussed things you would say at the time, gee, is they're really taking a leap on this? It's not that bad. But you know what? We were pressured. It was that bad and it is that bad. And the question is whether in taking a leap on worrying about the election in 2024, we're overstating the risk. And I really don't have a clear answer on that. Maybe Chuck is right. Maybe the electorate will do the right thing. Maybe Trump will, maybe Trump's outrageous statements about vermin and the like will bounce back. Maybe all these trials will somehow affect the people in the voting booths. It's not clear. But maybe, maybe we'd be optimistic about that. So I'm really, I said this before, I'm on the edge on this. And I think the country is on the edge of this. I agree. To address your comment about seven years ago when we were talking about Trump, I think we knew the heart of a fascist back then and, gee, it hasn't changed. So I'd like to thank my co-host, Jay Fidel, and certainly our special esteemed guest, Chuck Crumpton, for their wise comments. And I'm hoping that their predictions will not come true and come true. So we'll see how that all shakes out. We'll hear more about Trump's vermin speech and more vermin speech to come. I'm sure of it in the next 12 months. And with that, I'd like to say thank you for joining us here at American Issues Take One. I'm Tim Apatel, your host. And until next week, aloha.