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The levels of corruption Americans are witnessing are both historic and astounding. This week, Alex speaks to ProPublica reporter Robert Faturechi, who broke the story that the Department of Defense gave a $620,000,000 loan to a company affiliated with Donald Trump Jr. Then she’s joined by Pod Save the World host Ben Rhodes to talk about how everything from the UFC cage match on the White House lawn, to Ivanka Trump’s island development in Albania are indicative of the unprecedented grift, and limitless appetite for self enrichment of the Trump family.

Be sure to pick up a copy of Ben’s new book, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History of the United States in 15 Speeches.

TRANSCRIPT

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: Hi, everyone. The war in Iran is back on again. Not that it was ever really off. Gas prices continue to climb. Healthcare costs are exploding. Wages are up, but not enough to outpace inflation. Is the Trump administration doing anything well? Anything at all? Well, turns out yes. Corruption. The Trump administration is doing corruption very, very well. Now, you already know about President Trump’s $1.8 million slush fund for rioters. And despite whatever swing state Senate Republicans might tell you, that has yet to be outlawed. Just don’t ask Trump about it. Like NBC’s Kristen Welker did on Meet the Press over the weekend.

[clip of Donald Trump]: I don’t know what’s gonna happen with the Weaponization Fund. I love the idea because people like you, the fake dirty press, the crooked press, people like Stupid Biden, he’s not smart enough to know what is going on, but people that surrounded him, surrounded his beautiful resolute desk in the Oval Office. What they did to the lives of people, they destroyed people, they sent people to jail who did nothing wrong.

[clip of Kristen Welker]: Just to be very clear, there’s no evidence of what you’re saying.

Alex Wagner: The slush fund is one of the more recent public examples of Trumpian corruption, but do not forget his pump-and-dump crypto scheme, the $400 million fake Air Force One gifted from the government of Qatar, the pardoning of money launderers and white-collar criminals who have donated to Trump’s campaigns, the millions of dollars that managed to disappear from Trump’s presidential library fund.

[news clip]: Donald Trump’s initial library fund, it disappeared, gone. So where did all those millions of dollars go? And how do we know that money isn’t sitting in Donald Trumps bank account?

Alex Wagner: Thousands of stock trades while in office, and the financing of a ballroom that nobody asked for with millions of dollars in private donations with strings very much attached. Here’s MS Now’s Ali Velshi.

[clip of Ali Velshi]: More than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion during the past six months.

Alex Wagner: But if you think the eye-watering corruption centers on only Trump himself, not so fast. Some of the most brazen examples of this particular form of Trump rot involve the Trump children. Yes, there is Ivanka’s wipeout of nature, her planned 10,000-room resort on an ecological preserve off the coast of Albania, which was likely greenlit because the Albanian Prime Minister wants to stay buddies with Donald Trump.

[clip of Ivanka Trump]: We were on a friend’s boat and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the islands. We went on a hike barefoot all the way up to the top and we were just captivated and it stayed with us ever since.

Alex Wagner: It’s all pretty bad. But the raid on the federal government, grabbing taxpayer money and stuffing it into the pockets of the Trump family, well, that is the thing we are gonna focus on this week. We now have very strong evidence that the White House, and specifically the Trump Family, has been using the Department of Defense as its own piggy bank. That would be the agency with the highest discretionary spending in the entire federal budget. A ProPublica investigation this month found that one of the president’s top aides, Peter Navarro, helped secure a $620 million Pentagon loan to Vulcan Elements, a startup that Donald Trump Jr. is heavily invested in. If you don’t remember who Peter Navarro is, the short answer is that Don Jr. calls him his bro.

[clip of Donald Trump Jr]: Hey, I saw you down there, man. You got pretty jacked in prison, though. I mean, you had the time. I was like, damn, Peter, I had to come visit my boy.

Alex Wagner: We see the destruction of the East Wing. We hear the announcements about the multi-billion dollar slush fund. But the corruption that is happening inside the guts of the federal government will astound you. For all the craven maneuvering that takes place in broad daylight. You better believe that the Trump’s real criming is going down behind closed doors. I’m Alex Wagner, and this week on Runaway Country, the Trump administration is reaching new lows on the corruption index, and we’re gonna get into it. We’re talking to the best of the best, my pal from Pod Save the World and author of the new book, All We Say, The Battle for American Identity, A History of the United States in 15 Speeches, the great Ben Rhodes. Ben is going to judge how Trump rot compares to corruption around the world and also what can be done to stop it. But first, the inside story on Vulcan Elements, the company now getting a $620 million loan from the Pentagon and making Donald Trump Jr. very rich in the process. I’m talking to Robert Faturechi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica reporter who broke that story. Here’s our conversation. Robert, I’m a huge fan of everything you guys are doing over there at ProPublica, and this story that you’re bylined on hit me like a ton of bricks. Before we get into the specifics of what’s going on at the Pentagon, let’s just talk about the key players. First of all, Peter Navarro. He is a Trump ally, remains one, is a White House advisor. He was… Incarcerated for not responding to a subpoena from the January 6 committee. I know from your reporting that he and Don Jr. have been quite close. Can you tell me a little bit more about their relationship?

Robert Faturechi: Yeah, so Don Jr. visited him in prison when he was doing time for failing to comply with that subpoena you mentioned. Navarro recently published a book, and Don Jr. was one of the small group of people he dedicated that book to. They have a very close rapport. In fact… Around the time that this deal was made, Navarro was a guest on Don Jr.’s streaming show, Triggered. And Don Jr. encouraged his nearly two million followers to buy the book. They’ve developed a close relationship over the years.

Alex Wagner: I think, was it in your story? I think it was your story. He’s like a fan of like, Don Jr’s commented on Pete Navarro’s jailhouse workout routine. Is that right?

Robert Faturechi: Yeah, he described his physique as being jacked. If I’m remembering correctly, you know, I think he made a joke about wanting to maybe do some time himself so he could develop as jacked of a physique.

Alex Wagner: That’s an interesting incentive structure. We’ll leave that for some other people to unpack. Okay, then there’s Vulcan Elements, which I was not aware of, but it’s a little known and little endowed, if you will, company that specializes in manufacturing rare earth magnets. What is the story behind Vulcan elements and how did Don Jr. come to be an investor in the company?

Robert Faturechi: So it’s a relatively new startup based out of North Carolina. At the time of this deal, it had fewer than 50 employees. It was started by a student at Harvard Business School while he was a student there. And last year, Donald Trump Junior’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, was one of the investors that participated in a round of investments for that company. And then about three months after that was announced, the Department of Defense made this massive $620 million loan to the same company.

Alex Wagner: Okay, can you give us the kind of TikTok on that? Like, how does that loan go down? And for people who haven’t read the story, how does Pete Navarro get involved in all this?

Robert Faturechi: Based on records we reviewed and sources, the way this happened is Peter Navarro originally pushed this deal to the Department of Defense. And of the dozens upon dozens of companies they were considering at the time, this was the only one that a top aide to the president originally pushed. And so, based on our reporting, what we discovered is that word comes down from Navarro. And then there is an understanding among Pentagon staff that this is a White House priority and this deal needs to get done. So usually these companies are vetted for months and months. This gets turned around in a matter of weeks. People are, you know, going as fast as they can, working on little sleep, that it’s all hands on deck. And that they’re moving as fast as possible, specifically because it’s a White House priority.

Alex Wagner: I mean, so they’re, they’re as you say, they are working on little sleep. They’re really expediting this to get $620 million to Vulcan, which is coincidentally a business that Don Jr. has invested in. You know, first of all, you talk to other businesses that are vying for some of this money. What was the attitude among, you know, other companies as they see what really looks like self-dealing on the outside.

Robert Faturechi: Yeah, so a lot of businesses are scrambling to try to figure out how they they can also get money from this unit within the defense department. It’s called the Office of Strategic Capital. They’re hiring lobbyists. They’re reaching out to contacts who know people who know people I talked to one mining CEO who is also hopeful that he would get some money. They hired a lobbyist who knew someone who knew someone. Um, but they were able to get in front of this division of the Pentagon. Um, and one of the things he said to me was, and this is before he you know, I learned that, uh, he had been rejected as he said, uh you know, I hope that you don’t have to be chums with Don Jr. to get this kind of money. So, of course, I mean, the flip side of this is that the Pentagon has said that they’re doing this purely based on merit, that the president’s son being involved in this way played no role in their decision-making process.

Alex Wagner: And yet it’s Peter Navarro, the president’s son’s very good friend, who’s calling to expedite it and getting them basically to hustle to get this money to Vulcan, where Don Jr.’s investment, I believe, has increased tenfold, is that right? The valuation of the company has gone up ten times?

Robert Faturechi: The estimates of the valuation from around the time that Don Jr’s company invested to soon after the government deal was announced, and that’s a matter of months, we’re talking about a 10-fold increase. So an incredible return.

Alex Wagner: An incredible return, a rocket ship. What a great bet, Don Jr. Who knew? I knew. I mean, to the person you spoke to from sort of a competitor to Vulcan, I sure hope you don’t have to be chums with Don Jr. to get money from the federal government. ProPublica has another article this week about another company that Don Jr. is an investor in, America First Refining, which is trying to build an oil refinery in Texas, something that hasn’t been done in, I think, half a century. And the Ambani’s, the richest family in Asia, recently made a nine-figure investment in that refining company, despite the fact that it has really questionable financials and really questionable future prospects. I mean, first of all, did that look unusual to you as someone who’s looking at the corruption and the self-enrichment that appears to be happening inside the federal government, thanks to Don Jr.?

Robert Faturechi: I mean, absolutely. And it’s it’s a pattern that we’ve seen. We have seen multiple instances now of the Trump administration taking actions that benefit companies that the Trump family hold stakes in or positions in, whether it be contracts or deregulation or in this case, a massive loan. There have been many instances at this point of this kind of thing happening.

Alex Wagner: I think the thing that is alarming is, you know, the public is aware of, I’m going to call it, grift, like the ballroom and the contracts going out to companies that work at Bedminster, federal contracts being lucrative for the people within Trump’s orbit. But the Department of Defense has vast resources and the oversight seems really compromised at best. From a repertorial standpoint, how much sunlight is it possible to get on the federal contracting process? Like how much can you get through public records? How much can actually get eyes on what’s happening?

Robert Faturechi: I have found that the most effective way to get that kind of sunlight and get those kinds of answers is through people who are involved in these deals and who may have concerns about them. That takes a lot of work and a lot of resources to. Get in touch with these people to make them feel comfortable about sharing the information they have. I mean, there has been a lot of reporting about how previous means of accountability and transparency have been weakened, whether we’re talking about inspectors general at these agencies, or Congress, which has, you know, some lawmakers have tried, but overall, Congress is Uh… Doing aggressive oversight just because, you know, the party that controls the White House is also controlling Congress at this point. So it takes a lot of hard work by reporters, and we’re still trying to do that. We are doing that actively, not just at ProPublica, but other outlets.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, of course. I just think you guys have been really tenacious in exposing what’s happening behind the scenes in a way that I think most people don’t, even as jaded as we are about Trump corruption, the scale of it in terms of the way in which the federal government is basically being used as a piggy bank for the Trump family, I think that that is staggering on a weekly basis when these ProPublica pieces come out. Do you? Get this sense when you talk to people inside these government agencies who are at least privy to these deals, if not part of them, do they sense that there’s something wrong? And is there concern that at some point there might be oversight if not a real investigation should the party in Congress change hands.

Robert Faturechi: If your question is, you know, the motivation of people who talk to us, that really varies by story, right? Sometimes people want accountability, sometimes people have been in the agency for years and years, and they feel like this is a break from the way things worked under other administrations, Republican or Democratic, and that gives them concerns. Sometimes they’re worried about their own involvement in something that they think is untoward. And sometimes they have motivations that might not be as noble, but all that matters for us is that their information is accurate, which we go to great lengths to verify. So really it spans the gamut.

Alex Wagner: Are you surprised at some of the scale of this stuff? I mean, just as someone who’s in the middle of it.

Robert Faturechi: Yeah, I mean, you know, so a good thing to compare it to the main self-enrichment concern during the first Trump administration was, you know, like the the real estate holdings, like our foreign governments and politically oriented groups spending at these hotels and other establishments. And is that allowing them to curry favor with the Trump administration? I forget what the dollar figure was on foreign government spending at the hotels, but I think it was a few million. So really, when we’re talking about total dollar amounts between the first Trump term and the second Trump term, the second term term eclipses what we saw in the first term term. So yes, it is a vast amount of money.

Alex Wagner: Yeah. And we still don’t really know what the sum total is. I mean, I think in December, Forbes estimated that Donald Trump Jr.’s net worth had gone from roughly $50 million to $300 million since the election. But that’s only on, those numbers are based on investments that have been publicly disclosed. So one would assume it’s actually considerably larger than that. Right?

Robert Faturechi: It’s hard to know. A lot of this is estimates. And yes, when you’re talking about the Trump sons, for example, they’re not filing federal disclosure forms about their financial information. So that’s a bit more of a black box.

Alex Wagner: How, I mean, how is it going for you? I know that someone, I understand from our producers that someone’s been impersonating you and sending foreign officials promises of various natures. Do you, can you elaborate on that? What’s going on there?

Robert Faturechi: I hope that they’ve stopped. But yeah, this was something that happened earlier this year. I was reached out to by a Canadian defense official who asked me if I had been trying to work him for information. I think it was via WhatsApp and I had not been. I didn’t really think much of it. And then a few weeks later, I heard from a Latvian businessman who is involved in drone companies in Ukraine who had a similar experience. Again, someone who was posing as me. We never figured out exactly who it was, but it was someone who seemed to have an interest in foreign militaries and possibly specifically in Ukraine. So, you know, unusual experience, particularly when I am reaching out to all sorts of government officials, you know via Signal and WhatsApp and other means trying to gain their trust. It creates a little bit of difficulty for that process when someone is out there also impersonating me. But we’ve published some best practices for potential sources on how to verify that we are who we say we are.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, do you think it was an attempt to discredit you?

Robert Faturechi: I think it was probably an attempt to trick foreign officials into giving them information. That’s my guess, but your guess is as good as mine.

Alex Wagner: No good deed goes unpunished. Well, Robert, you’ve been doing, like I said, some really great and essential reporting on a part of the Trump administration that doesn’t nearly get enough attention. So thank you for joining the podcast. Thanks for walking us through this latest piece. Please come back. I know that there’s a constant stream of reporting on the corruption inside the White House and outside of it. And we’re eager to hear as as you can give us whenever you can.

Robert Faturechi: Okay, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Alex Wagner: After the break, we’ll put this all into context with Pod Save the World’s Ben Rhodes.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: Okay, I’m thrilled to bring back to the show. [laughs]  I feel like a late night comic. Bring back to show the great and inimitable Ben Rhodes. Ben, you are now a member of the two or three timers club here on this program, I think. I think you’ve been on the show multiple times and we’re just so happy to have you back.

Ben Rhodes: Can I be like a correspondent or like a regular? Or is there some status?

Alex Wagner: There’s no payroll, but there is a t-shirt that you’ll get. Yeah, sure. We’ll give you whatever you want. Senior political analyst, we hand it out. We hand out the titles like candy. [laughter]

Ben Rhodes: I’m a Runway Country contributor.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, perfect. It’s official. Cue the, cue the bells and confetti. Um, okay. Uh, I’ve been, I know you are a busy man. You have a New York Times bestselling book that we just previewed in your intro and it’s coming out at just the right time. Our country is on the verge of celebrating its 250th anniversary, its birthday. Your book is about American history and also American identity and who gets to sort of tell the American story. And what is it? We started this episode and we’re focusing a lot on the breathtaking corruption that is part of our federal government shepherded by our corrupt president, Donald Trump. How is a country are we doing today, Ben, in your estimation?

Ben Rhodes: Well, it’s not great, Alex, and that would be, there are many things we could say about that. I think one thing that I would say is it’s important when we look at Trump, and I did this obviously in writing a book that covered Trump for years, and determining kind of what is not singular about Trump, like he emerges out of certain currents in history of xenophobia and isolationism and racism. But what is distinct and one of the things that is distinct is the scale of corruption that Donald Trump is not just someone who wanted to take office in order to impose an agenda. He’s someone who as, as a feature, not a bug, uh, clearly wants to enrich himself and his family and a set of people around him. And we’ve seen him use everything from American foreign policy to, you know, bizarre vanity architectural projects, to the whole approach to industries like crypto, he’s using – this is not just a guy that’s like taking a bribe. This is someone who is monetizing the power of the presidency. And I think that is at a scale that we’ve never seen before in our history.

Alex Wagner: Yeah. And what surprises me is to your point, it’s not like this is endemic to American governance. This is a relatively new thing that’s been turbocharged in the Trump years. And yet their desire to even paper over the grift is non-existent. The first interview of this podcast is with one of the reporters at ProPublica who broke this eye-popping story about the grift that’s happening at the Department of Defense, which is quite bad. The Pentagon gave a $620 million loan to a company called Vulcan Elements last year. And that is, surprise, Ben, a company that Don Jr. took a stake in three months before. The valuation of that company has skyrocketed to 10 times its initial value. And the loan was effectively expedited by White House advisor and Trump bro, Peter Navarro.

Ben Rhodes: And convicted felon.

Alex Wagner: And yes, convicted felons, right, who served jail time. I am stunned. And this is not the only example we have. This is one of the singular examples of the White House intervening on behalf of a Trump family member to gain that person a lot of cash. But it’s certainly not the one example. And we’ll talk about a few more coming up. But the fact that they don’t think they’re going to get called out for any of this is a distressing signal to me about how much corruption they think they can get away with. Do you think that, I mean are you surprised by it?

Ben Rhodes: I’m not, unfortunately, that surprised. I think in the first term, there was a little bit of a tentative approach to these types of things, right? And so the corruption was more adjacent. It was like, you know, Saudis paying top dollar for rooms at Trump hotels.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, it was emolument stuff.

Ben Rhodes: Yeah, yeah. Now, I think I’m glad you brought the defense budget. You know, I have a national security background. I don’t think we have our minds around the scale of this yet. They’ve proposed a $1.5 trillion budget. So that’s the pool that they can swim in for their corruption. And I think you have the most acute forms are things like this, where like all of a sudden Don Jr. is like a drone investor and oh at the same time that we’re like launching a war in Iran that has drones as a feature. We’re going to have this contract that Peter Navarro puts his thumb on the scale on through his contacts for Don Jr. But let’s take a step back and look at who’s benefiting from these new defense technologies. Because one thing that people don’t understand is that you have the traditional arms dealers, the Raytheons and Boeings, people make planes and tanks. But now there’s an entirely new industry that is Silicon Valley based. In which people are developing defense technology and defense artificial intelligence. And so you don’t just have like Don Jr. You’ve got, you know, how much money is Elon Musk getting from the defense budget for SpaceX, or how many, you now, Peter Thiel, another kind of right-wing oligarch, how many Peter Thiel-invested companies are at the trough of this defense budget? What kind of businesses might the Trump kids be doing with those people? That the corruption explodes exponentially when you consider the fact that the very tech oligarchs that are like paying for the ballroom or the America 250 celebrations or who paid for the inauguration are then getting defense contracts. And then those people might be in business with people that are either in the Trump family or adjacent to it. I think if Democrats can win back like, like, Congress. One of the lines of effort is going to have to be looking underneath the hood of all this contracting in the defense budget, because frankly, if a Democrat, knock on wood, is able to win the presidency, we’re going to have to pull, you know not mess around here. We’re going have to cancel contracts. We’re gonna have to definitively show Americans that we’re not only holding people accountable for corruption and finding if there were actually laws violated. But they were not going to allow the national security of this country to be subcontracted monetized to benefit like a clique of Trump oligarchs.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, the company that you’re talking about when we talk about drone technology is Power Us, which is, again, a Don Jr. affiliated company. Vulcan Enterprises or Vulcan Elements is a rare earth mineral company. And then there’s another company that’s trying to build a refinery in Texas that Don Jr. is a part of that just got a nine-figure investment from the Ambani’s. It’s technologies across the board, Ben. And the common thread is a Trump child is on the board and these companies are either explicitly told that being affiliated with the Trump will fast track approval or fast track access to the White House. Or they’re taking it upon themselves, and this is what I really worry about, to invite Trump children to be part of their projects because they know it will incentivize the federal government to do business with them, either that company or other companies in their portfolio. And that’s the thing that I think is completely worrisome, is that it’s now become part of America’s culture to have a Trump on board. In order to do a business in America, you need to get a Trump kid in your business portfolio. That is toxic.

Ben Rhodes: Yeah, and we’ve seen this. Okay, so you see it in the United States around these types of examples. You also see foreign governments who understand that, well, maybe the way to keep Trump off my back with terrorists or maybe the ways to get access to American technology is just to make a deal with Trump kids. And so, for instance, right now, some Americans may be wondering why Pakistan is hosting and mediating talks between the United States and Iran. It’s not exactly a normal diplomatic troubleshooter there. Well, Pakistan early in the Trump administration entered into a partnership with the Trump family crypto business. And it’s not just Trump, it’s Trump, Eric Trump and Steve Witkoff’s kid as well is involved in that in the same way that we saw the United Arab Emirates make a $2 billion investment in Trump’s crypto business and coincidentally, shortly thereafter, a bunch of export control restrictions on their capacity to access data centers and high end artificial intelligence technologies. Those were lifted and so the UAE got that technology. This is how other countries operate. You know, we’ve seen this out of Hungary or Turkey or Malaysia or certainly Russia. What’s different here is the scale because of the scale of America’s power. And so this is, this is you know, not just billions. I mean, this is going to enter into the tens of billions of dollars right quick, that is basically using. The leverage of American power or the American economy to self-enrich.

Alex Wagner: It’s literally using the federal government, well, it’s using the Federal Government and those as a private piggy bank for the Trump kids and or basically squeezing other governments to enrich the Trump kids or else. What I think distresses me is, and I feel like it’s a beautiful mind sort of scenario. It’s like, once you see the web of corruption and self-enrichment, there’s like no part of. Our foreign policy and our defense spending that seems untouched by it, which is incredibly alarming. And yet there’s no congressional oversight of this at all, in part because Democrats don’t have power and Republicans have decided they are laying in bed with Trump, even if they don’t get the money that he is rolling around in, they get the power. And so it’s left to like ProPublica and the New York Times? I mean, how In terms of revealing the corruption, I guess this is a question of having to wait till 2027 or 2029 when someone with some kind of ethics is back in government. Do you worry that’s too late?

Ben Rhodes: I mean, first of all, one of the things that’s been interesting about the Trump era and it’s particularly acute now, right, is you realize, I’m sure that, you know, frankly, if the right lawyers looked very carefully at some of these deals, they would find legal violations. But a lot of the reasons stuff like this doesn’t happen is that there’s a presumption, you know that if Malia Obama started a drone company and got a billion-dollar contract, that the outcry from Congress and the press and the public would be so extreme that that just kind of wouldn’t happen. That there was a norm in the case.

Alex Wagner: Oh my god, even saying it sounds absurd, like Malia Obama having a drone company, it sounds fucking insane. Yeah, Sasha Obama is really into refineries.

Ben Rhodes: Well, yeah. [laughter] And we had, you know, we had a multi-year scandal about Hunter Biden being on the board of a Ukrainian company and just being on a retainer that was like a tiny fraction, like a rounding. And I think that was wrong, by the way. But that was a tiny fraction, a rounding error of like what Eric Trump is making on a daily basis or Don Jr. Right. And so the utter failure of Congress and frankly, the media, with some exceptions like ProPublica and occasionally The Times,  to, you know, because Trump doesn’t feel shame and Trump can’t kind of be held accountable to the normal laws of political gravity. Because we’ve seen, particularly when it’s Democrats, huge scandals around Jimmy Carter’s brother or Bill Clinton’s brother or Hunter Biden, like, you now, Malia, you know, God bless her, did not have any scandals. Um, but like, like they, the, Trump just ignores the rules and the Republicans ignore the rules, and the media kind of… Just adjust to this reality. And so there’s not accountability. I think going forward, again, part of this is gonna be using the two years if you have a majority in one house of Congress to start to create the record so that the next president can come in and hold people accountable and kind of, you know, again, uproot some of this contracting that is just a piggy bank. But secondly, we need to pass laws. I mean, I think there should be a law. That no member of the president’s family should have any capacity to make any money off of federal government contracts. You know, like, I mean, things like that. And people need to be assured that we’ve learned from this and are taking steps to make sure that it never happens again.

Alex Wagner: Yeah. The sort of reliance on norms is not something we can ever do as a society and as a body politic ever again. It’s got to be lawmaking season when Democrats take control of Congress again. More from Ben Rhodes after the break.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: I gotta ask on the sort of like personal level and to get to some of the things that you’ve written about in the past and now with your new book. First of all, I wanna talk about the UFC cage match that our friend and colleague Jon Favreau was mistakenly invited to. He’s not going.

Ben Rhodes: I know. I was really hoping he’d go.

Alex Wagner: I’m assuming you didn’t get any invites. I certainly didn’t.

Ben Rhodes: Didn’t make the list man, didn’t make the list Alex.

Alex Wagner: Sadly, sadly, there’s a lawsuit that’s been filed against the government over the cage, which has been erected on the South Lawn to celebrate America’s birthday, I mean, Trump’s birthday. The Public Integrity Project has filed a lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of two plaintiffs named Susan Douglas, who’s an activist, and Paul Romano, who is a Vietnam War veteran. And the lawsuit says that the event is private and for profit. It is not a national celebration. It also says the claw, which is the thing that the fighters are gonna fight in, has been causing plaintiffs aesthetic and procedural harms. And that the people’s house in the Lincoln Memorial, where there are going to be weigh-ins, yes Ben, weigh-in for UFC fighters.

Ben Rhodes: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Alex Wagner: In the Lincoln memorial, that they are being used improperly and without congressional approval. Well, first of all… And I only had a few years going to the White House briefing room. How does it make you feel as someone who spent a lot of time in that building to see the East Wing demolished in the corner and a giant six-flag style amusement park being erected on the South Lawn that Trump this week suggested may stay there indefinitely? Cause I guess he just likes the look of a cage on the South Lawn of the White house. How does that make you to see these images?

Ben Rhodes: I have a lot of feelings. I remember when I first went to work in the White House, and I had an office in the West Wing, and I was a blue badge, which meant you could kind of walk anywhere in the white house. And it took me weeks to feel comfortable just walking in certain places, like walking into the residence, walking into East Wing, walking by the Rose Garden. And the reason why is because there’s so many ghosts there. You know, um, Abraham Lincoln lived in that house, you know, FDR was in that house during the depression and World War II, you know, Martin Luther King was welcomed into the East wing of the white house by Jackie Kennedy when she gave him a tour of how she’d renovated it. Like these are the people that have walked those grounds and the idea that you’re going to put up tacky, gold-lined Oval Office signs as if we need to identify the Oval Office like it’s the 19th hole bar at a cheesy country club, right? Or the idea that we’re going to deface that property with some Mar-a-Lago ballroom or some UFC steel cage is so offensive to the continuum of our history and to the care and the fact that that house I was very well aware Alex that I was a temporary employee. I maxed out. I did all eight years. That’s the max you can do, you know? And I was aware of that every day that I was there. I think the other thing, though, is that the crassness and crudeness with which they’re, you know, quote-unquote, “celebrating” Trump’s birthday or America’s birthday. I mean, a cage match, it’s kind of the worst form of a certain kind of virulent American nationalism. You know, it’s the nationalism of, you know. F-16s flying over football games on steroids, right? And there’s a whiff of corruption too, because Dana White, the guy who runs UFC, is like a big Trump supporter and been a Trump donor. And so he’s gonna get something out of the deal. Like it’s, everybody gets something except the American people, you know? And again, my book, I write about Lincoln’s second inaugural, which is carved onto the walls of that memorial. The meditation on the meaning of the Civil War and the moral necessity of abolition and you know words—

Alex Wagner: And calling for sacrifice and self-sacrifice in many cases.

Ben Rhodes: If if every drop of blood drawn by the lash must be paid for by a drop of blood drawn, by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous. In other words, if all these people had to die to atone for slavery, that’s just. And that gives us an opportunity to fulfill what this country is about. That’s the backdrop to a fucking weigh in for some UFC fighters to throw a big party for Trump and probably like raise money, have donors there and have Dana White pad his pockets. It’s just the expropriation of our national symbols and national story that is so offensive. And I hope people don’t accept that, that that’s not their memorial, it’s not their White House, it is ours. And frankly, they’re temporary too. And they try to create this sense of permanence, but those symbols and those places will be there long after they’re gone.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, I mean, and God knows what Lincoln would be thinking about UFC weigh-ins in the Lincoln Memorial, which was constructed, of course, after he died, but still. Why do fascists like spectacle so much? It all feels very like second millennium Mussolini. Is it just because of the monstrous egos? Is it because they’re overcompensating for some shortcoming that they have, some deep-seated shortcoming, that only they really know the truth about and spend their lives destroying those of others? In compensation for that. I mean, do you have a theory of the case why the tasteless over-the-top glitz that, you know, is a hallmark of fascists around the world is now a sort of calling card of the Trump administration.

Ben Rhodes: So I’ve had the, you know, misfortune of having to think about and write a lot about fascists, um, over the last decade.

Alex Wagner: Yes in your excellent second book also a New York Times bestseller, After the Fall.

Ben Rhodes: I think you put your finger on one of kind of two or three things I’d identify. One is all these people are men by and large, Putin, Trump, Mussolini, go down the roster. You know, and and there is clearly some deep seated toxic insecurity that is being addressed through the construction of like monuments to oneself, right? There’s some hole in you that you’re trying to fill with that. And that also leads you to like start wars too, which Trump has also followed suit in. I also think that the fascists almost never try to solve the actual problems that their constituents, including their supporters like, supported them to do, right? Like Trump ran promising to lower prices and, you know, bring back jobs and reverse the industrialization and end forever wars. Well, he’s not doing any of those things. So what you give people is spectacle, you know. You may be getting poorer, but you get to know that not only can you watch the UFC fight on the South Lawn, but, you that Ben Rhodes and Alex Wagner are upset about that. And we’re just sticking it to them. And in the same way that if you’re in Russia you know, you may not be able to eat what you want, but like you get to watch a big military parade and feel a part of some sense of greatness that is tied to the leader and if the leader is exalted somehow you, you too are exalted in that in that process um, and then I think we shouldn’t also shy away from the fact like that there is a kind of inherent violence to some of the symbolism like a UFC fight is a violent thing and frankly, an arch, which Trump also wants to build, has usually been a commemorative monument to war victories, right? There’s a kind of violence that permeates the society in these kind of fascistic moments that leaves behind, unfortunately, these constructed landmarks, as well as all the destruction rock.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, and so you mentioned the arch just it’s a 250 foot tall arch that is going to be erected theoretically on a memorial circle will be twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s also facing a lawsuit from Vietnam War veterans reporting tells us that the money to pay for it is being funded by taxpayers in part by the money we spend on national park passes. It gets at the question though, Ben, and you address this in your book of the way in history is constantly being written and rewritten and so much about narrative. History is defined by narrative in a lot of ways and I and as as clownish and as corrupt and as degraded as this president is. Do you ever worry that in the sort of muddy lens of history and certainly what will be a concerted effort on the part of everybody in trump’s party to whitewash the worst parts of his legacy, do you worry that these monuments could actually, in some perverted way, give Trump the sort of great man position that he’s so desperate to have a hundred years hence?

Ben Rhodes: I do, because they’re going to be, assuming that they get built, physical spaces. I think, though, we have to think about the contrast, because you talk about narrative, and my book is about words and the power of words to define American identity and direct American history, but actually, let’s talk about spaces for a moment. A lot of care was put into the area around the White House. So, the Vietnam Memorial. Deliberately sunken, if you’ve been there, you walk down, it’s under, underground level, because it’s a monument of some shame, you know, and a monument of almost apology to the names carved in the wall. The Arlington Cemetery that is gonna be totally disrupted by this arch, right, because the arch is gonna be crossed from Arlington National Cemetery where so many American service members are buried. That was deliberately built on a plot of land right by where Robert E. Lee lived. The unsubtle message was, you all created this Confederacy. You started this war. And so we’re going to put this someplace that kind of enters into the psychic reality of America, that the reason that there are all these crosses and other burial sites is because of the Civil War started. The Lincoln Memorial. People. And this does connect to my book, like the people that designed that memorial had the wisdom to carve the words of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural onto the wall. So that not only would people come and see a statue of Lincoln, but more powerfully that they could read his words and read what he said about America and American identity.

And slavery, and slavery. [both speaking] Which was the root of the Civil War. Because it’s being litigated once again.

Ben Rhodes: It’s right there, that’s Abraham Lincoln giving the most abolitionist speech ever delivered by an American president. And so if you introduce into that milieu, an arch, a ballroom, obviously you already have a cage fight, I worry that you are committing a kind of offense that will endure against the care with which we’ve sought to kind of curate. A better version of who we could be and what we choose to honor from the past. And I think the choices are interesting. Like, do you take these things down? Would that in some way would be disruptive. Can you convert them into different purposes? Like, is there a different use of the ballroom that becomes some kind of monument to democracy itself? So that the spaces are turned, and I know that might be difficult because it’s on White House grounds, but I think people need to get some thought into not only whether to keep these places, but whether to transform their purposes so that they cannot be seen as exalting Trump or enshrining him as a great man along, you know, the presence memorialized in the mall are like Jefferson and Lincoln and Washington, like he should not be in that company. And so at a minimum, those places should be for entirely different purposes.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, I think and soon, like don’t let it marinate. Don’t wait till 2080. The earth may have exploded by then anyway, given the trajectory we’re on, but don’t wait. Make haste on that. Don’t let him even, don’t a decade go by where a narrative begins to emerge that Trump was actually not so bad and then Trump was good and maybe even great.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: When we talk about like acts of corruption and hallmarks of sort of our dissent into authoritarianism and fascist full-blown fascism, I do have to talk to you about Trump’s attendance at the Knicks game on Monday. I know you’re a Knicks fan.

Ben Rhodes: The gravest offense, Alex, the gravest offense.

Alex Wagner: Maybe the gravest for this lifelong New Yorker. [laughter] I did see Knick’s fans burning sage out in front of Madison Square Garden. So hopefully we are recording this the night of game four. And hopefully the sort of stench of Trump will be gone by then. First of all, I’m sorry that he was there. I’m sure you believe, as most Knick’s fans do, that his presence was the reason they lost. But it is. Worth talking about the ways in which the obfuscation and the opacity that attends Trump and his health is also a hallmark of corruption, right? Like it’s very Kremlin. It’s very, it reminds me of like Castro in the 1960s, like the fact that Americans can’t get any real information about their dear leader and whether or not he’s actually cognizant of the decisions he’s making, whether or not our country actually has anyone with their hands on the captain’s wheel, it to me seems like a hallmark of autocracy. It’s what you see in North Korea, it’s what we see in Russia, it is what you in Cuba, it what you see in Burma, Myanmar. I wonder how you think of it because it’s clear the man isn’t well. It’s very hard to fall asleep at a sporting event setting aside the excitement of game three of the Knicks versus Spurs.

Ben Rhodes: Oh, it’s one of the loudest sporting events in recent memory too, you know?

Alex Wagner: And he’s, yeah.

Ben Rhodes: And I do just want to say, like, he just has to insert himself in everything. Like, it’s not, we can’t even enjoy the Knicks NBA playoff run without Trump inserting himself in the same way that we can even have an America 250 that isn’t all about him. So put that aside. Yeah. I, I do think it’s, um, it it’s like Putin, um. You know, would do these things. I don’t know if you remember this, Alex, like he would have these hockey games where he’d play hockey. And they let him score like 15 goals. And he’s playing against like great players, but like there’s this kind of comic performance of like, oh my gosh, look at how good a hockey player Putin is. And he skated down and nobody’s touching him—

Alex Wagner: Is this around the era of the shirtless, is this the era of the shirtless horseback riding pictures? Is that the era?

Ben Rhodes: It’s the same era. Now, as he’s gone into 70s, we get less of that. Or Kim Jong-un, like, we’re constantly, you know, North Korean propaganda is exalting his physical fitness, which if you have two eyes, Kim Jong Un has many things. A model of fitness is not one of them.

Alex Wagner: No.

Ben Rhodes: And I think that there’s two sides of this coin. Like one is the utter lack of transparency about really, you know, this man has the nuclear codes, right? This man is currently running at least one war, actually more than one war. The lack of transparencies is dangerous in that regard, in that we should know whether this person has health problems or, you know other kind of decline happening that would inform whether or not he’s fit to carry out the duties. But the second piece of it that connects him to those other people like Putin and Kim and others is the capacity to flagrantly ignore reality and put forward an alternate one is the point, right? I mean, you know, famously, you Adam Serwer said, cruelty is the point. Well, the the flagrant disregard for the truth is the points like they know. That it’s a joke. Like when they put out these statements of like, he’s in exceptional health and, you know, no man has ever been in better health. And, you know, Dr. Oz says, I don’t forget the line, but, you know, I’ve never seen anyone his age so fit, you know, like the the propagandizing is the they know it’s crazy and BS. And but that’s the point. They get to create reality, you know, and even if the reality isn’t what we see with our eyes, we’re just forced to, like, swallow that reality. I will say… To like step into the minefield, Alex, it would be better if Democrats had not defended the sharp mental acuity of Joe Biden until way too late. We’d have a little bit more leg to stand on on this, but this is.

Alex Wagner: Having said that though, Ben, I mean, the man’s falling asleep at Knick’s games.

Ben Rhodes: No, no. It’s qualitatively different. It’s, it’s qualitative—

Alex Wagner: He’s covered in like L’Oreal concealer from his head to his toes. He’s gone to Walter Reed multiple times in the last year when he has an entire White House office, a medical office in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Ben Rhodes: So yeah, so let me say something about that informed by experience I don’t I did not go to a doctor for eight years I was in the White House. You might say go Ben like that’s terrible view well, I know actually I got whatever I needed at the Whitehouse Medical Unit. You know, I could get a check I could check up for something. I get a prescription. I even had like procedures done.

Alex Wagner: Just, Alyssa Mastromonaco told me that she had a gyno exam at the White House. [laughter] With stirrups and everything. You wouldn’t, but, stirrups.

Ben Rhodes: I never had stirrups, but I wasn’t even the president. And so the only reason you have to go to Walter Reed is if, I don’t know, you need a very particular advanced scan that they don’t happen to have at the White House or there’s something really wrong. People need to understand to your point, there is a full medical facility there with what you need, you know, for any kind of routine checkup is at the White House. And so there’s something happening. And you see that with falling asleep too. And I’m not going to sit here and diagnose from afar. But, and I should, we should add too, by the way, Alex, like unlike Joe Biden or any other normal president, I don’t think the man is like burning the midnight oil reading documents either. So this is not a case of someone like working himself to exhaustion. This is a man that like watches some cable TV, has some press availabilities, assembles people behind them at a desk. You know, Truth Social posts, like he’s not like doing 4 a.m. meetings in  the situation room and then reading documents until three in the morning like Barack Obama used to do and and and so yeah, like they’re the lack of answers about this is, you know, both alarming, but it’s also just kind of again part of the parade of we control reality and you don’t get to even know what we know.

Alex Wagner: It’s corrupt. It’s corrupted in its own right. He has the constitution of an aging house cat, and maybe the mental faculties of one as well. Only, I guess, only Stephen Miller knows. I want to leave on an up note. I think it’s an up-note. Ben, I was reading Michelle Goldberg’s profile of Jon Ossoff, the Senate incumbent Democratic Senator, who some people are mentioning as a potential 2028 contender and. And he’s been relentless in banging the drum of corruption and talking about the ways in which this administration is failing the American people. But she quotes Stanford political scientist, Adam Bonica, who wrote in an essay last year, across decades and continents, corruption has been the fatal weakness of authoritarian regimes. And I kind of wonder if we should hold, I guess hope is the wrong word, but that all of this brazen corruption is actually the death knell, and the scheme of self-enrichment will be the downfall of the Trump family.

Ben Rhodes: So here’s the hope I have. It’s interesting to write a book where you relive the 250 years, because if there’s one era that felt familiar, the most familiar to our own, it was the Gilded Age. In the late 19th century, you had the backlash to Reconstruction and the re-institutionalization of segregation. You had runaway robber baron capitalism, totally totally unregulated, totally unbridled. You had a wealth gap that is on orders of our own, although we’re giving them a run for their money. Workers are being treated like garbage. A handful of people are getting fabulously rich. Government itself was becoming very corrupt, both at the national level where people were like selling patronage appointments, but also at the local level when you had these corrupt political machines. That era was followed by the progressive era. Where not only did they make policy reforms, like banning child labor and antitrust laws and beginnings of a social safety net, they instituted the direct election of senators. They finally passed women’s suffrage and the right for women to vote. They created new institutions like the Federal Reserve so that there was an independent body managing the financial system and not just some robber baron capitalists. I think we are ripe and this is what Ossoff is talking about. To realize that what comes next isn’t just like a healthcare plan. It’s a fundamental reorienting of how American government works to get rid of corruption. That if you don’t eliminate this massive role of money in politics, you won’t get healthcare. You won’t lower prices. That there’s not a democracy conversation and a quote unquote “kitchen table conversation,” that the reform of how the American government functions and operates and how it can be influenced by money. Is connected to any effort to pass a progressive policy agenda. And I have hope, not just because people like Ossoff are telling that story, which is hugely important, but because that’s what happened the last time we went through a Gilded Age, the last, literally a Gilded Age, like we have a gold White House now, right? And so we can learn, we’ve been here before and we’ve done things that appeared radical to get out of it. And I think that that’s exactly the moment we find ourselves in, and I think that what Ossoff is tapping into is that people understand this intuitively, and they want to hear people give speeches and tell stories about what is happening, but also the people who can make you believe that actually we can change this, that there is agency and that you can have a future that is different from this oligarchic, corrupt present.

Alex Wagner: When you are feeling bereft about this moment, it’s really helpful to have a piece of literature like yours, Ben, to give us context and remind us of our accomplishments as a society.

Ben Rhodes: And yeah, we’ve done great things. Yeah, we—

Alex Wagner: We have, we can do hard things and great things. And that also some of the people that now seem like, you know, establishment figures or figures that are just so well-worn in terms of the American story were actually radical thinkers, big picture thinkers, but really out of the box back in the day and really set the stage for many of the gains we’ve made as a society. But at the time, we’re really kind of out there. But it’s very perspective-bringing and it’s, Jon Favreau called it a balm. I refuse to call it that. Because it feels weird.

Ben Rhodes: Calls up some images.

Alex Wagner: But I find it soothing in a way, and also essential, much like a balm.

Ben Rhodes: Well, when there’s no hope in the present, we can tap it from the past. We really can. It’s right there for us.

Alex Wagner: We, Donald Trump wants to write the American story and tell us that we’re a country that prizes bloodlust, violence, and zero-sum politics. And we’re not that. And it’s a good reminder of who we actually are and have been. So congratulations on the book, buddy.

Ben Rhodes: Thanks, Alex.

Alex Wagner: Congratulations on the Book Tour. Thank you for helping me unpack the breathtaking corruption of this moment and reminding me that all is not lost. I’m going to take it as a W for the country. You are the best. [laughs]

Ben Rhodes: Well, the country may need sage. Maybe Knicks fans are on, maybe we need to do a sage all over the country, you know.

Alex Wagner: We need a gigantic handful of sage to burn on January 20th, 2029. Right? Start harvesting now.

Ben Rhodes: Yes.

Alex Wagner: Go Knicks, Knicks in five. That’s what we’re going to leave it at. Sorry to all the Texas fans. God bless, Ben. That is our show for this week. Please don’t forget to check out the show and our rapid response videos on our YouTube channel, Runaway Country with Alex Wagner. And if for some unknown reason you’re not sick of me yet, please take a look at my Substack How the Hell with Alex Wagner. Last but not least, if you’ve been impacted directly by the Trump administration or its policies, send us an email or a one minute voice note at runawaycountry@crooked.com and we may be in touch to feature your story. A sincere thank you to everyone who has written in already. Runaway Country is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alyona Minkovski. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Production support from Megan Larson and Lacy Roberts. The show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landes. Ben Hethcoat is our video producer and Matt DeGroot is our head of production. Audio support comes from Kyle Seglin. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Adriene Hill is our Head of News and Politics. Katie Long is our Executive Producer of Development. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writer’s Guild of America East.