USA News Hub

Sargent: Yes. I think we should talk about the vulnerable House Republicans who are up for reelection. There’s a number of them and they’ve already been trying to run away from Trump’s tariffs and put distance between themselves and Donald Trump on health care and on the expiring ACA subsidies and so forth.

The big tell is going to be what those House Republicans start saying about the war, presuming it’s still going on a couple of months after the primaries are over. What do you think is going to happen there?

Jacob: Well, I think we’ll have to see, first, whether there’s a vote in Congress — whether that happens this week or any time. My suspicion is Republicans will try to block it any way they can, just because they don’t want accountability. They just want everything to lay off on Trump. The Republican Party is really a bunch of cowards at this point. They want to make no decisions. They want to have no responsibility. They want to have no accountability. And we didn’t really elect people to show up in Washington and sit on their hands, but that’s what’s happening.

Here’s the scary thing: the worse Trump does in public opinion, the more dangerous he is at this point. And you’ve already started seeing these moves toward fiddling with the elections. One thing about having a big war in the Middle East is you can get a situation where the federal government—Trump’s government—declares that there’s a bunch of terrorist threats, so we have to really clamp down on security, and therefore we’ll declare an emergency, therefore invoke the Insurrection Act, and we will federalize our elections. He’s talking about that. And I’m just worried that the more unpopular he gets, the more likely that is to happen.

Sargent: Yeah, you’re talking about domestically—that Donald Trump is going to use any continuing war to sort of maximize his powers at home, emergency powers at home.

Jacob: Right. And also to say that there are Iranian sleeper cells—and I mean, all kinds of stuff. They’re really good at making up stuff. They may have no credibility, but they sure talk a lot.

Sargent: Well, the big through line with Trump, connecting all these different things, is that he feels zero need to explain himself to the public and just doesn’t think he’s bound by the law in any sense at all. This connects with what we’re seeing in Minneapolis, where his forces are killing U.S. citizens with no accountability. And he’s killing supposed drug runners who are civilians in the Caribbean, and much more.

He’s just bombing them. There again, it’s completely illegal. He didn’t go to Congress for any kind of justification or approval for that. You get at this kind of through line well in your piece. It seems to me like the public kind of gets that overall arc—the lawless arc. The CNN finding that 59 percent don’t trust Trump to make good decisions underscores that, I think. What do you think?

Jacob: Yeah, I think so. The main theme of what I was writing was that Trump is behaving like a king—with the power to decide life or death for people without asking anyone’s permission or explaining himself in any way — which is not the way that a president operates. That’s the way a king in ancient times operated.

The sad thing is that all of his abuses aren’t equally felt by the public. I think that at this point the war in Iran is still pretty distant to people. Now, once we start having identification of the Americans who were killed, and once — we had three planes shot down accidentally today — there’s going to be a big mess when you create a big war, and that’ll be more of an attention-getter for the American people.

But I feel like, as far as the killing of the alleged drug traffickers in the Pacific and the Caribbean—he didn’t present any evidence of that. Who knows whether those people are fishermen? He keeps making jokes about them being fishermen, which is crazy. And even if they were drug traffickers, that’s not a capital crime. Present evidence, arrest people, take them and put them in jail if they’re guilty. But this idea that the President of the United States can just decide we’re going to whack those people — that’s not the way this country operates.

But Greg, my main point here is that what’s happening with the war of choice that Trump has done in Iran, and what he’s done with killing people in boats around Venezuela, doesn’t have as much impact on American public opinion as what ICE and Border Patrol have been doing in this country, because that’s right at home. Nobody thinks that the people of Minneapolis deserve this. And we see every day, if you’re paying any attention, that they’re creating a system of concentration camps around the country.

So what are you going to do with those after you’ve deported all the immigrants? What are you going to do with all that empty space? I think that people are really scared about having an autocratic leader who has no regard for human life and is just abusive, illegal, corrupt, and has no ability to show any empathy toward people. You saw that today when he was talking about the drapes and the ballroom when he should have been talking about American deaths and deaths of other people. So this guy is a disaster, but he’s a disaster with a whole lot of power right now. And I think that the American people are starting to wake up to that. I hope they are.

Sargent: Well, just to circle back to where we started—if you compare this situation with the run-up to the Iraq War and the early days of the Iraq War, there’s a basic difference here as well. Not only is there no actual crisis in this particular case, no rationale whatsoever, but voters—to go back to your point about the illegal killings in the Caribbean mattering less to voters than the assassinations or executions of American citizens in Minneapolis — the American people have had many, many months of getting bombarded by this imagery of outright lawlessness, outright lawless violence, extralegal violence being inflicted on Americans. They’ve been exposed to that fairly relentlessly. And I really think that seems to be conditioning them to see what’s going on abroad as something more alarming and more lawless than they otherwise might. Is that too optimistic?

Jacob: No, I think you’re right. And another point related to that is that Homeland Security systematically lied about almost every clash it had with protesters, observers, or immigrants. I mean, I’m here in Chicago and we had the same thing before Minneapolis did — people were getting shot by ICE and they immediately lied about everything.

A federal judge here in Chicago called them out for their lies. So it’s not my opinion that they were lying. And now here we are in a time of war, when there’s a lot of uncertainty, and when your sons and daughters may be killed serving their country — people want the truth from their government and they know they’re not going to get it from this bunch. And so I think the lack of credibility that they have wasted in Minneapolis and Chicago and Los Angeles and Portland and everywhere else is coming home to roost here.

Sargent: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. And I think it’s an important point. In the run-up to Iraq, I think in the early days of Iraq, people were shocked at the official lying that was going on—especially when it emerged that there were no WMDs in Iraq. In this case, the public has seen years and years of official lying from this bunch, and a level of lying that is unprecedented for a public official in the United States in modern times. And so it looks to me like there’s going to be a much harsher public judgment on this stuff up front. Where do you see it unfolding in the end?

Jacob: Well, one other point on that is that it’s not just that the American people feel like they’re getting lied to—which they did after the invasion of Iraq—but they think that the Trump administration doesn’t know what it’s doing. They haven’t even come up with a good lie. I mean, this whole: well, we want regime change; no, we don’t want regime change; we want the people to maybe rise up, maybe not; or we want to knock down their defenses.

And this thing about them kind of admitting that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, but saying now that they’re building up their defenses so that we can’t attack their nuclear weapons if they ever build them—well, what that means is that Iran is not allowed to have a defense. That means that no military action by Iran, even defensive, is acceptable.