Politicus Pod

The Daily is journalism for people who care about democracy and freedom from outside the Beltway. Please consider supporting us by becoming a subscriber.The Trump presidency is really nothing more than a scheme to exploit the office to make as much money for Donald Trump and his associates as possible over the next four years.There is a level of corruption and grift from this guy. I will say the only time he manages to impress me is how greedy he is and how he doesn't care how things look to anybody. Here he is going take this $400 million “gift” from Qatar a foreign state, and he is doing it without congressional permission.And then this is a gift that he's going to charge the taxpayers to turn into Air Force One and then turn it back into a private jet after that, after he leaves office. The only good news I heard in there was that he was, is he really planning on leaving? Great. That was a moment of excitement.But other than that he's gonna charge the taxpayers twice for this on top of taking what is he giving them for this? What is he giving them? That is the question, and we're never gonna find that out. But, we did get Richie Torres requested, has formally requested an the Office of Inspector General to investigate the legality of this gift, and let's all remember that the Office of Inspector General is where they do actual independent audits, unlike DOGE, and they have experts who know what to look for and how to do a professional audit. That is very different than DOGE.The Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The United States has never seen a president blatantly monetize the presidency for their own gain. As Sen. Chris Murphy noted, Trump’s actions as president are about lining his own pockets. There are no actions that are in the best interests of the American people.The only interests that matter in the current administration are limited to Donald Trump and how he can corruptly twist the presidency into a personal cash machine. Donald Trump has been convicted of fraud in the state of New York. The current president is nearly a three dozen times over convicted felon.There is a desensitization and normalization that occurs in a country when a leader is consistently corrupt, but the $400 million plane for personal use is corruption taken to a new level.The American people should never sit back and accept Trump’s corruption. Public outrage and voting for candidates who vow to investigate and end corruption are the only ways to make it stop.What Trump is doing is definitely not corruption as usual, even by his low standards.What do you think about Trump’s latest corrupt plan? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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The Daily is journalism for the people, and you can support our work by becoming a subscriber.One of the most frequent questions that the American people are wrestling with is what can be realistically done about Donald Trump and his presidency. The secret to Trump’s power isn’t his willingness to ignore the law. The secret to Trump’s power isn’t that he appears to have no conscience and only thinks about himself. The real secret to Donald Trump’s power is that Republicans control the House and the Senate and they have chosen to not use their power to stand up to Trump. If Republicans in the House and Senate chose to act as an equal branch of government, they would move to hold Trump accountable. They would act as a check on Trump’s presidency and put a stop to his power grabs. The Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Republicans are so fearful of retribution and the hold that Trump has on the majority of the Republican Party that they refuse to use their power to check the president, as our system of checks and balances was designed to do.The way to disempower Trump and his presidency is to elect candidates that will pledge to assert the role of the legislative branch as a co-equal part of government. Once Republicans lose power in Congress, Trump will also lose power, because he is only taking the power that congressional Republicans are allowing him to have.The other way to disempower Trump is through protest. Protests shatter the administration’s propaganda about mandates and popularity. Mass protests are disempowering because they represent a public rejection by large groups of Americans of this president and his policies. It is impossible for a president to claim that they are doing what the American people want if the people are loudly sending the opposite message.America can’t get rid of Trump without Republicans in Congress voting for impeachment and conviction, but they can disempower the president right now and lay the groundwork for taking back power next year.What to do about Trump was just one part of our more extended discussion. Please watch the video above and share your thoughts in the comments below.Thank you Margit's Musings, Ellen Harrison, Angela Teiken Heitzman, David Weitzman, Maureen Spurr, and many others for tuning into my live via Sarah Jones and Jason Easley. Join me for my next live video in the app.

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The Daily is journalism for people, not the billionaires and corporations. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.Sarah Jones described Indiana, PA and the protest:Indiana, PA  is a little blue dot inside of that red county, but it is a very small town. It's called rural. So it is important to note that people are down here protesting. It's cold and rainy today, but there's a lot of people here. Not as many as we had at the protest last week. Sorry about that. And now they're chanting No. And I do wanna note before I go down here to show you who is out here that Donald Trump's support among his most loyal constituents of rural Americans is suffering significant erosion.Although the only group that Trump has seen a rise in support from is small-town voters. And this is a very small town. So now we are here in this small rural town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, where Trump came just a mile and a half away for a campaign rally. This is a mayday protest. They're protesting against oligarchy, protesting the Trump administration's autocracy attacks on fundamental freedoms like due process attacks on the social safety net.Skyrocketing prices and crumbling economy, widespread concerns over specific government policies, and a palpable sense of anxiety about where this country is going. Sarah also interviewed Indiana County Democratic Committee Chair Lynne Alvine who discussed the importance of rural Pennsylvania communities in winning the state for Democrats: I want people to know is that in Pennsylvania, it is the rural counties that keep us purple, keep us in the game in terms of the presidential of the statewide election.We have some big cities, and they are a wonderful good Democratic strongholds in some cases, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Erie, those are all cities. But if the rural voters come out, we can raise the margins so we can narrow the margins, I should say, just enough that we win the statewide elections, we can win the presidential election.Now, this last presidential election. I'm still having trouble believing that Pennsylvania did not go for Harris. We had such a strong, a strong campaign here and such, such good energy for her. Watch the full interview:Donald Trump and the Republicans seem to be taking rural and small-town America for granted.People in these communities are angry and they too are coming out to oppose changes that they did not want or vote for.What do you think about rural and small-town America coming out to protest? Share your thoughts in the comments below.Thank you to everyone who tuned in to my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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I hosted a Substack Live today where I spent a fair amount of time talking about impeachment. In the wake of reports that Democrats have very little interest in impeaching Trump, it is a fair question to ask: Is there any value left in impeaching Trump again if Democrats win back the House?Some of the reactions to my story for PoliticusUSA suggest that there might be a misunderstanding about the limits of impeachment.Impeachment only has one function, and that is to charge the president with high crimes and misdemeanors. If the president is impeached by the full House, a trial is held in the Senate, where it takes a two/thirds vote (67 votes) to convict and remove a president from office. An impeachment will not stop Trump from doing what he is doing. It will not limit his power or take power away from him in any way. All impeachment does is set the stage for the president to be tried, and the penalty for conviction is removal from office. The problem is that Democrats will never have enough votes in the Senate to convict and remove Trump.The American people have already demonstrated that they don’t care about impeachment. Is it worth impeaching a president who has no shame and can’t be publicly shamed?A Special Note: Thank you Dawn Marie Galtieri, Sandra Norris, Mrs.Liv, Rachel Hendricks, BARBARA FULLERTON, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for our next live video in the app.Would impeachment only serve to distract from what Trump has done in office by creating a process that would derail potential investigations by House Democrats into other areas?The Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The cold reality is that if Democrats win back the House, Trump will be a lame duck. The same collection of evidence against Trump could be done with high-level committee hearings.Democrats say that Republicans won’t do their jobs, so impeachment is pointless. Even if a future Democratic House majority convicted Trump, since Republicans control the Senate, there is no guarantee that there would be an impeachment trial.The Constitution only requires that a trial be held. It doesn’t say how long the trial has to be or specify what the trial must include. Senate Republicans could hold Trump’s trial for an hour on a Saturday, then vote to dismiss the charges. The way to hold Trump accountable and strip him of power is for Democrats to win elections. There is no magic remedy outside of the ballot box to fix this, and impeaching Trump again won’t accomplish anything.Sarah and I will be hosting another Substack Live on Tuesday at 11 AM, so please join us.What do you think? Is it worth impeaching Trump again? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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The Daily is journalism for the people that fights for democracy. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.After 60 Minutes went public with how they are being supervised by their corporate bosses and the threat to journalistic independence that they face, Sarah Jones was guest on WCPT’s Chew’s Views where she discussed the strategy of Trump appeasement: We have to have shared reality. If we are going to have elections, if we're gonna have a political. If we're gonna have a democracy, we actually have to have shared reality. Just this week two Scotland Yard detectives who were investigating the Murdoch tabloids said that the new evidence that was brought forth means they would've considered the man who is now chief executive and publisher of The Washington Post, Will Lewis to be a criminal suspect in covering up wrongdoing.Now, they knew about that. Those accusations have been around before they gave him that job. And I just wonder, why would you put that person in charge of one of the nation's leading papers before an election when one of the people running is an autocrat. That's troubling.And then also just to buttress this point, Bill Owens resigned from 60 Minutes on Tuesday, because of Paramount. Having kind of oversight into their stories and supervising the content in new ways. And he felt that he lost independence that he needed for honest journalism.And I think if people see like all that erosion coming from places, these pillars of our democracy that we used to be able to count on, and that's all, they make those choices. They can say, Donald Trump threatened us, or whatever. You know what? No, you made a choice because of your merger to appease this man.And there should be shame with those choices. The Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Appeasing An Autocrat Is StupidIn any part of society, appeasing an autocrat never works.   In journalism, holding people accountable is the job. And that whole kind of cowardice that we are seeing from so many people, where they, oh, I need to go down to Mar-a-Lago and kiss the ring, because we've gotta find a way to get along.. That does not work. And so that is a dumb thing to do. You cannot appease an autocrat. It is never going to work. So it is a stupid strategy. All it does is kick the can down the road a little bit.Those who put themselves ahead of their professional obligations and their country are betraying the American people. The corporate media seems to believe that their bending to Trump will all be washed away and forgotten, but they have damaged the ability of the free press to hold any president or person with power accountable today and in the future. There is shame in the damage that they are doing to the country, and it is up to the American people to make them feel it.What do you think about the stupid strategy of appeasement? Join the conversation in the comments below.

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The Daily is journalism for the people. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.The American people are relentlessly turning out to oppose Donald Trump and his policies. In a growing sign that there is no mandate for Trump, Sarah Jones visited a protest in the town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, where the estimated number of protesters doubled from two weeks ago in a place that Trump won by 39 points. Attendees showed up with their signs and anti-Trump t-shirts and lined the same streets that transform into a Bedford Falls in tribute to their most famous homegrown son, Jimmy Stewart, and his iconic Christmas film, It’s A Wonderful Life.Indiana, PA is one of those places in Western Pennsylvania that was once solidly Democratic, but since the year 2000, as years of economic struggle and population loss mounted, Republicans took over. By the time Donald Trump faced Kamala Harris in 2024, Indiana, PA supported Trump over Harris 69%-30%, so to see a protest in this part of America against Trump is telling.Local police on the scene told The Daily that the protest was very peaceful, which has been a trademark of the anti-Trump protests in 2025. What was even more revealing was the lack of support for Donald Trump in the streets. This isn’t to suggest that places like Indiana will suddenly swing back to being blue, but rather that on some level, there is discontent with the administration, even in the most supportive areas.The Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The American people are angry. One of Trump’s biggest allies in the House, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, represents this district. Reschenthaler is the deputy House Whip, and he is avoiding his constituents by not holding town halls.The anger is real, and real change comes when people join together in towns big and small to stand up for American values.What do you think of the protests against Trump in small-town America? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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The Daily is journalism for the people from outside the Beltway. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.In the micro sense, Donald Trump’s administration looks like chaos with no reasoning or rationale behind it, but when all of the pieces, from the breaking of alliances to the tariffs and trade wars, are put together, a pattern emerges.As Sarah said on the Chew’s Views radio show on Monday, which you can listen to above:  In my opinion about what Trump is doing. I would have to say that he is trying to destroy a lot of the pieces that make the United States that have made the United States the superpower that it was.And why is he doing that? I really couldn't say is he doing it on purpose? I don't know. But if you just look at what he's doing, that, that is what he's accomplishing. He's done it with these tariffs and he's doing it, this isolationist policy, his siding up with Russia that is what he is undermining the United States and we see all of the, we see Europe and Canada working together to cut the United States out of their supply chains and their responses to attacks on global democracy because they know they can't trust the United States. The Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.That's really what his tariffs did. They undermined the trust and respect that people from all countries around the globe had for the United States economy. I don't think there's a more effective way to destroy a country than to do that. All of the usual excuses don’t add up. Trump is crazy. Trump is erratic. Trump is cognitively declining. All of those ideas could be true, but they don’t explain why the overarching rationale for this administration seems to be weakening America while claiming to strengthen it.It could be because Trump and crew think that rich people make America great. Under Donald Trump, the United States is moving toward no longer being a superpower. The reality that Trump is triggering an American decline is something that the press and experts largely ignore.. Donald Trump is undermining the US economy, international relations, and the institutions that have made the United States a world leader. America is being destroyed and undermined by a man who has shown nothing but contempt for the country and the principles that it was built on.What do you think Trump is doing to America’s status as a superpower? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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The new big lie of Trump 2.0 is that tariffs are about jobs. The Trump administration is spreading the myth that tariffs will create jobs by bringing manufacturing back to the United States. All those people who said we are voting for him because of his economic policy and we're voting for him. All these business leaders we're voting for him because, he's going to make us a great economy. Well, here you go guys. Exactly what we all told you was gonna happen is happening now, and it isn't so great.I was recently on BBC Radio Wales discussing the difference betweenBiden and Trump’s policies: When we look at Trump's industrial policy, he doesn't have a policy for actually creating these jobs here.And if we look at what we just had with, uh, former President Joe Biden, he was trying to reinvigorate American manufacturing with the Chips and Science Act and, and other ways of bringing manufacturing here. Those are kind of a lot of clean energy manufacturing jobs that actually Trump has been killing.The Daily is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.So there's a disparity between what he hopes to achieve with these tariffs because even if the tariffs work that way, there's a lot of disagreement that they would actually work that way. They have to be met with an industrial policy that would encourage manufacturing here. But a lot of business leaders are saying, you know, hey, even if we made this stuff here, we get a lot of our supplies from countries that you're tariffing.So I'm not sure that this is a fully fleshed-out strategy.Biden understood a reality that Trump has refused to grasp. Trump’s administration is defined by looking backward. Trump thinks that he can force jobs to come back to the United States, which will never fully happen.The Biden administration looked forward and tried to create the jobs of the future, which is how Biden was able to reimagine and bring back manufacturing jobs that Trump killed during his first term.Biden caused a manufacturing boom in the United States. Things were already booming when Trump took office. All Trump had to do was leave it alone, but instead, he defunded Biden’s manufacturing jobs programs and launched a trade war.The Trump policy isn’t really about creating jobs or bringing jobs back. It is about Trump trying to build his legacy and not caring who he harms in the process.Trump has no policy. If he were serious about jobs and the economy, he would do what Biden did.What do you think about the difference between Trump and Biden on jobs? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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The Daily is a 100% reader-supported newsletter. We fight for democracy and freedom while discussing topics that big media often ignore. Please support our work by becoming a subscriber.Understanding Where The Presidential Election Stands Right NowThere is so much data flying around as the election is less than two months away that it is helpful to condense some of it and place it in a more understandable form.The video above is part of a series that we’ll be doing through election day titled Mapping It Out. The video contains some different points than this post, and you get to see the maps a little more easily so give it a look.Our first map shows why Pennsylvania is the key to this election. The map is not what I think will happen but what would happen if every state followed their historical pattern. Trump ends up leading in the Electoral College 262-257.That is the scenario that Trump is hoping for. (All maps done on 270toWin.com):Here is our map of the top three swing states, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona. A lot of other states get lumped into this category, but these three are the ones that are consistently the closest, and both campaigns have made Pennsylvania the epicenter of the race. Michigan wasn’t included because since Harris entered the race, the state has become a bigger challenge for Trump, so his campaign is putting more time into Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.Democrats lead 257-235 and need to win any one of those states to win the White House.This is closer to the reality of where the election is now.Our third map shows what would happen if each state followed its historical voting trend. Pennsylvania goes for Harris, and Democrats win the House with 276 Electoral College Votes. Most of the current swing states are not as swingy as the media likes to suggest. North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona have voted Democratic once since 2000. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin have voted Republican once since 2000. The nation is in the middle of a demographic shift, so things will change, but just looking strictly at history, states have been fairly consistent.Our last map is what I call our today most likely scenario, The Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan stays together as it has in every election since 1988. Georgia, where Trump has consistently led, and Republicans are doing everything to hand him the state, narrowly flips back to being red, but North Carolina, where there is a gubernatorial race that Democrats lead by double digits on this map, goes blue for the first time since 2008. Kari Lake and the Arizona Senate weigh Trump down a tad, and Harris narrowly keeps Arizona blue. After all of the twists and turns of the 2024 election, Democrats end up with roughly the same total of electoral college votes that they got in 2020 (303 vs 306 in 2020) and keep the White House.As new data comes in, I’ll be here to Map It Out and show you where this election is heading.What do you think of our new feature? If you have any questions, leave them in the comments, and I’ll answer them in a future episode.

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The Daily is a 100% reader-supported newsletter. We are less than 100 subscribers away from our goal of 1,000 paid subscribers. If you find our work valuable, please join our community by subscribing today.Excerpts from the podcast episode:The Importance Of The Taylor Swift EndorsementA lot of media are trying to downplay the Taylor Swift endorsement. They say celebrity endorsements don't mean anything. And I think that's usually true because there isn't this action, this call to action, and that people don't have the kind of sway that Taylor Swift has. But she's this global brand. And so we already saw by 11:00 this morning the General Services Administration spokesperson told NPR that by 11:00, they had 306,422 visitors to vote.gov from Taylor Swift's URL that she shared on Instagram. Now that's 11:00. So she made that endorsement, what, 1030 11:00 last night? So 12 hours overnight and two, you know, like that's overnight. I would imagine that number is going to grow during the day today probably quite a bit. That seems like a lot of people to be signing up to register to vote. It's a lot of people. And there's an exponential factor involved, because if this if her fans go to get their friends or family members also registered to vote, it kind of there's a there's a mushroom effect and it just keeps kind of building outward. So maybe 306,000 people visited, but. Each of those people, or even a 10th of those people, get somebody else to register to vote. That number goes up a lot more. I think it matters. It matters a great deal because of, and let's be honest, who her audience is, right? It isn't old white cable news viewers. Her audience is women. They're Gen Zs. It's a lot of people. A lot of young women are turning 18. 18 to 24. Women need to have autonomy over their bodies. That is an age where, you know, unfortunately, women are targeted for rape and for, for violent offenses that this is just a really dangerous age for women, and they need to have this autonomy. So I'm really glad that she's sending them to the register to vote. And you know, she urged. I thought the whole statement was great. I mean, everybody's kind of pointed out how well she laid that out. She didn't tell people who to support. She told them, you know, go do your research. This is what I think is important.The Unity Movement Around Kamala HarrisI don't remember which piece it was, but maybe the Taylor Swift piece, but a little bit of what makes me feel really positive as a woman is the Taylor Swift endorsement. She, as we all know, is a white woman. There has been such a failure on the part of white women to stand up for black women to include them in fights for justice efforts. It felt really good to see Taylor Swift, the pop princess, endorse Kamala Harris. And to see this, there is this coalition that's coming together. I think there's a call coming up next week or the week after that, which is rural voters with black women for Kamala. I mean, this is the kind of unity that we need in this country. If we are going to come back together and be the powerful country trying to live up to our ideals that we will never achieve but should always be aspiring to. And we have been divided by this man. I've been writing about that since the Obama era, so it did feel really good for me. She brought up that when she responded to the race question, she started talking about how Donald Trump brings up race to divide this country, and people are tired of it. I have been talking about race as used to divide people since President Obama when, you know, that was obviously what Republicans use.Donald Trump was the original birther. So it felt full circle to have this coalition is coming together to say, we are not going to believe we're not going to fall for this stuff. We're not going to let you destroy this country and our respect for one another, our humanity. And while I know not everyone is going to come together, and there are a lot of people that have been radicalized by Donald Trump and none of us seem to be coming together to make this a real stand and to hopefully win this election.I know it's going to be a super close election, but my faith in humanity the day that he won that election, I lost faith in my neighbors. I lost faith in so many people in this country I could not wrap my head around. How could you? How could you elect a man who was on tape admitting to serially sexually assaulting women? Is that what you guys think of us as, you know, to think of women? Kamala Harris and Tim Walz they do bring the joy.

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