As former President Donald Trump endured one of his worst weeks yet, Republicans have been on our TV screens taking aim at everyone else—but themselves. On this episode of The New Abnormal, hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy talk Trump and the sentence Republicans need to stop repeating.
“Their big talking point that they all independently apparently came up with is… if they can do this to the president, think what they can do to you. First of all, he’s not the president,” Andy says.
“And it would be nice if they would stop saying, ‘If they can do this to the president.’ They didn’t do this to the president. They did this to a private citizen who happened to have been the president. So they’re not doing this to the president. The president is Joe Biden, right? The FBI did not execute a search warrant on the White House. Let’s get rid of that right away. And anyone who says that is completely foolish.”
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Molly agrees: “The fact that nothing has ever happened to him at all ever is a sign that actually this kind of thing almost never happens to wealthy white men. It’s certainly a sign that if you do a lot of very suspicious stuff, like leave with 15 boxes of classified information and you flout the law enough, sooner or later, someone might tell you, ‘You can’t do that anymore.’”
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Then, Tim O’Brien, senior executive editor of opinion at Bloomberg, joins the show and reveals what he finds most compelling in the “ridiculous sideshow” that’s emerged in the wake of the search, “which is that he’s being unfairly targeted and that this is political.”
“Of course no president and no U.S. citizen is above the law. And this is a common legal practice and a prosecutorial practice, and the Justice Department and the FBI are enforcing the law,” he says.
“The idea that somehow Trump shouldn’t be subjected to the same laws as everyone else is ridiculous.”
Also, Dr. Iman Alsaden, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood Great Plains, talks about what it’s like in post-Roe America.
“It’s pretty dystopian, except it’s reality,” she explains.
“I think we’re just allowing the government to step on our toes a little bit too much when we have the situation where people aren't treating ectopic pregnancies and people are hesitating about treating miscarriages and hesitating about delivering life-saving care. I mean, that's not a good look.”
Dr. Alsaden described her experience on the day of the Roe v. Wade decision.
“In Arkansas, we had to stop care that day. We had to reschedule all of these patients to Kansas or whatever their closest abortion clinic was. The staff was crying outside and vaping a lot. It’s hard to tell people that we can’t provide care to them. Like it’s hard to be the person that’s actually saying no. The staff was tasked with calling all the patients and telling them that, ‘Hey, we can’t provide your care. These are your options.’
“We’ve seen this sort of immediate change. And then, you know, it’s now normal to see multiple people from Texas every single day when I’m in whatever Kansas clinic I’m in, that have either driven 10-plus hours to get to us or have flown from Houston, Austin, Dallas. I mean, this is normal now, it’s the new abnormal.”
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