Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
A team of Donald Trump’s close allies—and their host of Washington think tanks and law firms—are drafting plans to completely remake the federal government in the former president’s image.
And the scariest thing about the whole situation is the way they’re going about it, says The New Abnormal host Andy Levy: completely out in the open. They even have a website chronicling their efforts.
“Trump and his cronies have, sort of like most Bond villains, mostly not gotten away with it because they talk too much,” Levy says. “But you can’t count on that and you certainly can’t count on it if they get elected and follow through on this project to make everyone in D.C. of any note a Trump crony.”
“I mean, this is straight-up fascist stuff,” he added.
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Then, Brian Kaylor, the president and editor-in-chief of the award-winning religion news website Word&Way, joins The New Abnormal to discuss new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA)—and why he thinks the longtime religious activist should be classified as a Christian nationalist.
“The real danger here is his vision of what America should be. It’s an inherently undemocratic, small-d undemocratic vision, because in a pluralistic society to decide that only one sliver of one faith gets to make all the rules and gets extra rights and privileges, that’s a significant problem,” he said. “And worse is based on false and sometimes made-up history to try to justify this political philosophy.”
Plus! A conversation with reporter Anat Rubin about her recent story in ProPublica about Louisiana's Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which for 13 years refused to consider petitions from prisoners representing themselves—many of whom could not afford an attorney to represent them while appealing their cases.
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.