Vanity Projects and Construction Scandals

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Alex Wagner. I know some of you may be tuning in today expecting our conversation with the Michigan Senate candid ates on the Democratic side. Well, unfortunately, you're gonna have to wait just a little bit longer. We had to reschedule that conversation to accommodate for an unexpected change in candidate schedules. But do not worry . We are setting a new date and we will have more on that very, very soon. So stand by. Today, instead, I wanted to focus on the avalanche of corruption. Some folks might just call it theft, coming out of the White House, the $1.8 billion slush fund to pay off January 6th rioters, the announcement that the president and his family are now immune from IRS investigations, the ballroom/slash bunker slash m oney pit, the reflecting pool, the president's three thousand plus stock trades while in office. The self enrichment, the crony ism, the taxpayer abuse, all of it has hit new heights, or should I say, new lows. And I wanted to talk to someone who could help me make sense of all of this, but also about what Democrats in Congress and lawyers outside of it can do to fight back. Joining me for that conversation is the incredible Norma Eisen, founder of the Democracy Defenders Fund and former special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform in the Obama administration. There is truly no better expert in America on White House corruption than Normi zen. We are gonna get to that conversation in just a moment. But before we do, I wanna remind you that CrookedCon 2026 tickets are on sale now. Come hang with us November 5th through 7th in Washington, D.C. for live shows and panels and meetups and more. I will be there, and you should be there too. Get tickets at crookedcon.com and if you like what you hear today , please do check out my show, also on Crooked, called Runaway Country, where every week I talk to people at the center of the headlines. We just published, I think, a pretty awesome, if disconcerting episode where I talked to one of the police officers who was at the Capitol on January sixth about his reaction to the news that he will be funding payments to the people who beat him unconscious that day and gave him traumatic brain injury. Check it Okay , here is Norm Eisen . Norm, uh, thank you for doing this. I have so many questions. I think everybody has questions, but I have like many, many, many, many questions for someone who really knows what the hell is up with all of this. Or or has a sense of the law at least. Um let's just start at the beginning. Um, on Monday, the DOJ uh announced that it made a settlement agreement on Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, which he filed over the 2020 leak of his tax returns to the New York Times and ProPublica . As part of that settlement, the DOJ announced they would establish a $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund to compensate individuals who claim they were victims of government weaponization during the Biden administration. Um, Norm, was your the reac your reaction the same as mine, namely, what the fuck? Yes, uh, Alex, it might have uh e evenarned a what the double fuck uh technical legal term . You know, uh when I was the White House ethics czar, I would not even allow Barack Obama to refinance his mod est family home in Chicago because it was the Great Recession and he was regulating the banks. The thought that the President of the United States can, in essence, sue himself and throw that case out, set up by 1.$8 billion slush fund. It's an endowment uh for January 6th insurrectionists, including those who attacked the police and were convicted by juries . Uh it 's just inconceivable. Um, we fil ed uh an immediate legal objection on behalf of 93 members of Congress, the very first . Uh, and And there's been a tsunami of other um opposition that has developed since. And like the Epstein files, this is one that is not going away because also, like that scandal, it's such an outrageous corruption uh situation . And there's a paper trail explaining just how, first of all, utterly unnecessary and totally corrupt it is. With that paper trail exists within Trump's own administration. I was stunned by the reporting we got this week that IRS lawyers compiled a 2 5-page memo that was supposed to be sent to the Justice Department saying, hey guys, listen, um, Trump's lawsuit isn't gonna stand up in court. This is literally Treasury Department lawyers saying this whole thing is bogus. And yet , that notwithstanding, first of all, it's unclear if the DOJ ever read the memo, they felt the need to set make a settlement agreement with Trump nonetheless. I mean, there seems to be like, I mean, I have questions, Norm. Do you have questions about this? Uh I do. And you know who else has questions? It appears the top lawyer at the Treasury Department who quit in proximity to the establishment of this outrageous slush fund, taking $1.8 billion out of your and my in the American people's pockets uh in order to uh uh pay off uh Trump's cronies. Uh the um legal flaws were in the filing that we made with the court on behalf of those 93 members of the minority in the House of Representatives. There's no constitutional uh authority to do this, uh including because it creates an emoluments issue. There's no uh statutory authority. It's contrary to the rules governing the judgment fund, which is the pot of money that is going to be rated for this. I mean the illegalities are vast . And it's so bad that reportedly, dozens of members of the president's own party confronted Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, Donald Trump's former defense lawyer, and he's still behaving that way, uh, confronted him and they had to sh Alex had to shelve the reconciliation negotiations. It blew up the reconciliation package because it's these senators who are normally lapdogs, even they can't take it. So it's the worst corruption scandal in the history of the presidency. Yeah, let's okay, so let that is the breaking news of today. We're recording this on Thursday. So Republicans were all set, they were all teed up to pass a reconciliation bill before the imposed June 1st deadline set by Donald Trump. And that was going to give ICE up to $72 billion in funding, which was a tidy sum for a paramilitary organization that slaughtered American citizens, but I digress. That's neither here nor there in terms of this conversation. But as part of that reconciliation negotiation , senators and Republican senators apparently wanted to put some guardrails on the slush fund. According to the New York Times, Republicans were exploring adding a measure to the immigration bill, that's the ICE bill, to limit the slush fund. I'm the slush fund, that's my terminology, not the New York Times, in part, norm because leaders were worried that if they didn't, a democratic effort to kill the slush fund could draw enough Republican support to succeed. First of all, walk me through this. I mean, how are these two things related? Like you're talking about on one hand, reconciliation funding that would have given given money to DHS to ICE, but then you're also talking about a fund, a pot of money that exists at the DOJ that's already been allocated. Is that right? I mean, how do the how do they how can they use one to tackle the other? I guess is what I'm asking. Reconciliation is a budgeting process that um Congress uses that uh under the rules of the Senate, uh it's called the the Byrd rule, under the rules of the Senate is not subject to the usual proced ures for purely budgetary matters. Um you don't have to get uh 60 votes in order to move the bill. You can do it on a pure majority. But Alex , once you have that majority, you can put anything into that reconciliation package relating to how the federal government spends its money. And you do it on a simple majority. So that means if only a handful of Republican senators and members in the House were willing to agree , hey, we should not be cre ating a slush fund to compensate violent cop assaulters from January 6th or convicted by juries who had long jail terms until Donald Trump himself, a 34 times convicted felon, pardoned them on day one, in what was pre viously the greatest scandal in the history of the presidency, we should not be paying them uh out of a fund of $1.8 billion . That proposition might have garnered enough votes that this reconciliation bill would have been used to limit or shut down the slush fund. So leadership freaked out. Everybody go home. Funding ICE is on hold. And now we're gonna see what happens. And whether finally, finally, like with the Epstein files, but unfortunately unlike hundreds of other outrages where the president's party has caved, finally we're going to see if there's another example where there w uh a few of them are willing to stand up to him. Well, yeah, and we can talk about the new reality uh as of this week, where Trump is just saying off with their heads to any of his Republicans and critic Republican critics in the Senate, and effectively creating an anti-Trump coalition inside his own party. But just let's table that for a second. Because to your point about the reconciliation bill and the way in which this is such a fa-cocked up piece of political strategy. Here's Burgess Everett from Politico Reporting. Senator Kevin Kramer says it would have been a good idea for the Trump administration to announce the $1.8 billion fund after the reconciliation bill passed. Instead, it exposed the bill to all kinds of amendments because of its judiciary title. We can't help the president with the bucket budget reconciliation package with this hanging over us. Okay, can you unpack that for me? Like I just did the White House shoot itself in its in its own foot on this? And I obviously not in consultation with Senate Republicans. The um incompetence of this White House knows no bounds. Uh we see that I had to film my car uh uh gas to with gas today and you see that every American sees that when they go to the gas station or they drive by one. The uh so if they had just waited until this budget package were done, you wouldn't be able to peel off Republicans to attach a provision to shut down or slush fund. So it's an it's where would we be as a democracy if Donald Trump were not a dictator dudes. I mean, in some ways he is good. I'm gonna give him a little credit because he just I feel like I'm in living in a tyrannical moment, but in terms of the practical execution of tyrannical endeavors, he's not very good. Not only does he announce this slush fund before the reconciliation bill is passed, which throws the whole thing into doubt, he does it the same moment he's alienating members of his own party who he needs marching in lockstep to get this thing over the hump. I mean it's just a it's like it's pure own goal after own goal it from this administration. Yeah. And and we've seen a lot of that at Democracy Defenders Fund and Democracy Defenders Action, the organiz ations I co-founded where we have over 300 legal cases and matters. Again and again, Donald Trump has tried to break the law in the stupidest way possible and has been slapped down by the courts for doing it. But you also see it in his handling of the um uh other main job of a president, uh foreign policy and international relations. There has never been a bigger fiasco in the history of American war making. And we've had some fiascos, Vietnam, Iraq, we've never had a bigger one than Iran. He you want to talk about on goals. He handed the Strait of World Moose over to Iran . So this, but the slush fund, like the Epstein files , this really, and like the war, it's breaking through. And day after day, the country is saying, what? And you know, you are getting this pushback uh from Republicans in Congress. We'll see if that holds up when it's time for a vote. But it's a sign of just just how foolish, uh venal, corrupt, and wrong this uh $1.8 billion pot of cash for January 6th insurrectionists and others is. Can I ask a word about the money itself? Like we keep talking about slush fund , it's already been allocated. The Senate may try and put some guardrails on it post facto, but the reality is this money already exists somewhere at the DOJ . Can you explain? I mean, for people who don't understand how and where this money is pooled, can you shed some light on that? There's um a fund uh at the Department of Justice called the Judgment Fund. And uh typically it is used to pay judgments. You don't have to go back to Congress every time the United States government loses a case if you have to pay somebody or you have a legitimate settlement of a case, not a case where the president is suing himself, you use the judgment fund. But Alex, like all money spent by the United States, it is subject to uh uh congressional um uh uh guardrails. Congress establishes the rules on how money can be spent. And because here there never was a real case to be settled, the people who are benefiting from this were not a part of that phony tax case that was about to be perhaps thrown out in Florida . There's none of the triggers that under Article 1 of the Constitution, Congress passes the laws to govern the utilization of money, including the judgment fund. None of those triggers are implicated here. This would be an illegal disbursement of money. Anyone who took the money would be at risk of having it clawed back. Uh it's part of a uh, you know, a gigantic cash grab. It's as if the president wrote in his limo to the the Treasury Department, took bags of cash, just and and then went to a picnic of the insurrectionists and threw the money in the air. It's totally illegal in every way . So, you know, the the people who participated in January 6th, including violently assaulting cops, should not be too excited about the cash that they're about to collect. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Life is a lot sometimes, regardless of what's keeping you up at night or leaving you overwhelmed, it's easy to feel like you have to figure it out all on your own. 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There must be some part of it that that that that can't be provided by the proof. There has to be some assumption baked into it. And that's not solvable. It can't be solved. Yeah. Yeah. I got it. I nailed it. I nailed it. Uh I believe gra there was this is somehow ki tangentially connected to some there was uh uh two guys that wrote like a five hundred page um proof to just show that one plus one equal two. Really? Yeah. Things got things got pretty crazy in like the I think like nineteen twenties in math. But the yeah, anyway . Oh I'm the reading the ad. And here's something every parent needs to hear. The getting your kids to eat vegetables feels like an impossible daily battle. Highest new kids, daily greens plus superfood is a total game changer. It's a greens powder designed specifically for kids that's packed with 55 plus whole food source ingredients. 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Here's my question: Because they are public funds and because they are subject to some oversight, you know, the DOJ says, we wash our hands of this money. It's like we have nothing to do with it. Once it's given out, don't come to knocking on our door. But but that's not the end of this, right? The American there there can be FOIA requests to find out where this money went. I mean, there is , there are mechanisms by which whether the administration wants the public to or not, the public can find out how this money's been spent. Is that correct? To be sure, um the um government is still subject to congressional oversight. Members of Congress can demand that information should Congress change hands. Come January, uh the House and perhaps the Senate will have enforceable subpoena power to pursue those information , uh that information. But Alex, you and I also have the power to do it. Any journalist and any American through the Freedom of Information Act can file a request for this. We have filed hundreds of freedom of information requests over the years, including a large number at the Democracy Defenders Fund uh and Democracy Defenders Action. And then if we don't get the information we want, we go to court and the court forces the disclosure. So they should not think that uh at the Department of Justice that um they're gonna be able to hide this. But more to the point, I believe the litigation has already begun and there's going to be a very substantial uh court pushback on the first dollar ever going out the door at the fund because it's so blatantly illegal. Yes, going to a J6 picnic and throwing a bunch of cash up into the air doesn't seem like what the founding fathers intended. Uh let's talk about those lawsuits because you're party, your your organization, Democracy Defenders, filed a motion to block this use of taxpayer funds, and it was filed um in a co the coalition on the suit includes, as you mentioned, members of Congress, including Congress man Joe Nago ose and ranking member Jamie Raskin . Can you talk a little bit about your confidence that that can move forward? And then I also want to get your thoughts on other suits and who has standing here. Yeah. On behalf of those members of Congress. Got a whiff of this at the end of the week last weekend and worked through the weekend. The team pulled an all-nighter to get this together. the judge um uh in Florida who had the power to investigate and perhaps to block it did not exercise that power. That means that we and others now will go to court. We're gonna need to find new places to do that. Those lawsuits have started uh to pop . Um anybody who has uh an injury as a result of this misbegotten slush fund has the power to bring that case. People who are entitled to reparation for genuine uh abuses of the government. There have been so many over the past sixteen months who've been targeted uh by the administration. They're the real we uh victims of weaponization. Alex, it's dubious. You can tell from the context, that's not who's going to be getting money. And then others who are injured in various ways by the funds, including people who might have gotten under properly congressionally authorized disbursements from the judgment fund. That $1.8 billion has to come from somewhere. There's people who would have been able to recover that money is gone. So there's a huge number of folks uh who are injured in various ways by this. And the litigation uh is gonna be uh going on, I predict, uh for months and years to come. And if you liked our first brief on behalf of those 93 members of Congress where we laid out all the illegalities here, stay tuned. Much more ahead from us at uh democracy defenders action. What do you think about you mentioned there's an excess of lawsuits that are either uh being filed or that are coming down the pike, um, two officers who famously and publicly defended the Capitol on January 6th, Daniel Hodges and Harry Dunn sued the administration this week to try and stop the creation of the slush fund. Uh what do you think of that effort and where does it go? I think it's great effort. Hats off um to um Harry Um and to Daniel. I know them both. They're wonderful public servants uh for taking the leap. The Public Integrity Project and my friend Brendan Ballou, who brought that case, was uh pulling no punches. So I think you're gonna see that case unfold uh together with other litigation that is coming down the pike for all the different individuals or groups of individuals who've been injured by uh this uh terrible case. So I'm optimistic uh that the litigation front is gonna result uh in uh putting some uh limits um and even an injunction uh stopping the implementation of the fund to work together with Congress, where I think they're also gonna impose some limits. And that one two pun ch uh of the court of law and the court of public opinion, if you will, the public outrage is reflected in the even the Republican members' anger about this . Well, you you you know, i they've uh you won't lose money uh by uh betting um betting against their willingness to take on the president . But here you have um all of the cylinders uh of the scandal uh clicking. And it does remind me of the Epstein files where it became more and more intense. And finally the president's own party broke with him. There seemed to be, according to press reports, somewhat of a mutiny today when the president's former defense lawyer Todd Blanche tried to sell this to the Republicans in the Senate. Yeah, I mean, and by the way, Thomas Massey, who led the charge on Epstein, still in Congress. John Cornyn, who Trump basically sent , you know, to put on top of a door in the floor. He's still in the Senate. You know, these people who Trump has alienated are very much still there, still angry and I think ready to go out, Yosemite stand style, guns ablazin i i i want to ask you know your level about your level of alarm on the on the why so we we know that trump likes you know throwing bags of cash at people we know that he likes sort of mob style comeuppants . But I, you know, I wonder what it signals that he I mean, how worried are you about the midterms, that right now, as the polling shows Trump and Republicans on track to lose one or both houses of Congress, the strategy is not to pivot towards a better message, but to throw cash at a group of people who have pro ven themselves violent and willing to do anything to upend an election in Trump's favor? Like, does it make you worried about the levers Trump might pull as the sort of weather forecast gets worse and worse for him in the party ahead of November. Already are a sign that Donald Trump fears the will of the people . But based on the track record, I think voters can be confident that there will be free and fair voting no matter what he tries. Look, Alex, uh at Democracy Defenders Fund and Action , we litigated aga inst Donald Trump's election takeover executive order. He issued one last year. We went to court. We got a preliminary injunction. Then he pivoted to try to steal five seats through uh redistricting in Texas. We represented uh those Texas legislators who fled the state to sound the alarm on redistricting. The result was there was five seats added in California to cancel out Texas. We went to court, we defended, we won that. Prop 50. We helped defend it in court. We won it uh we um um one again at the supreme court the trial judgment was untouched on an emergency supreme court opinion without a single diss ent noted dissenting vote. Donald Trump has tried another elections takeover. Yo, we're in court on that. He's trying to do more redistricting in the South. In Florida, more seats being stolen. We're in court on that. And we've been winning these cases now since January 20th, 2025, plus a lot of others in our over 300 cases. So voters should know, and it's not just us, we're part of a very big coalition. Voters should know that uh we are gonna go to court, we are gonna fight for them, uh, and we are going to uh make su re uh no matter what Donald Trump and his cronies try , that voting is uh safe, free and fair. And and you know, to your point before, it's a it's a system wide, it's an attack on the the separation of powers. It's an executive branch attack on the legislative branch and potentially the judicial branch. And those two branches are potentially not going down without a fight, right? They're the lawsuits, and then there's also congress saying uh uh like this is actually i mean at least democrats and perhaps republicans join them this is our purview we are granted the authority uh we are granted the power of the purse. And you can't take that away from us. Because by the way, what does the appropriations process matter if a president can just come up with a fake lawsuit and then a fake settlement and give himself, you know, control effectively over billions of dollars. Like why bother having Congress if that's gonna be the new strategy? Republicans in Congress have been disappointing. That's Article One. Article II, the president uh has been outrageous, but thank heavens for our federal trial court judges uh and the um uh article three because they have been the guardrail but uh those cases don't start themselves you need groups like ours and our wonderful coal ition partners, hundreds of clients and partners who go to court who bring those cases. And that makes it possible to uh have these uh these many, many victories uh that have hemmed Donald Trump in. And the other good thing about that is each one of those court cases is an alarm bell and the American people have woken up they see what's going on and that's why the president has these histor ically low approval ratings so he's not coming from a place of strength he's coming from a place of weakness . Of course, that can be very dangerous. And that's why we are all on our guard. But there's a proven record of success in court over the past 16 months to build on in elections and more broadly. I gotta ask you about one last part of the slush fund, the settlement agreement, which is the provision that the DOJ added on Tuesday, that for that the that the IRS is forever barred and precluded from investigating Trump and his family on their taxes, making the first family effectively immune from audits from the IRS. Okay, Norm. I mean double what the fuck on this too. But like is this legal? Triple fuck? Triple what the fuck be a triple but like it's can you do this? You can't do this. You can't no . No . First of all, the transaction was already complete, so it's like, oh, we forgot we're gonna throw in a freebie. Secondly, they have no power on a uh this kind of a false and phony basis to get rid of the existing cases, much less as it appears to forgive future wrongdoing. It's like a uh preemptive pardon. It won't hold up in court. Uh, the whole uh sick uh uh she bang is gonna be flushed, but this is one of the worst parts, and it's like oops, we forgot one more freebie at the end. I mean, it's so transparent. We are still a government of laws, not of people. And in these many court cases we've brought in one , uh, we've seen again and again uh that our federal trial courts uh have stood up to Donald Trump and um i he's gonna fail uh in these uh in these efforts and you know we and many others are gonna fight him uh on uh this worst of all presidential corruption scandals in the history of our nation. Pot Save America is brought to you by Rocket Money. Thanks to the good people at Rocket Money, I realized that I had been upcharged by a streaming service for access to one show because it was a foreign thing that Hannah and I had watched during the pandemic one time, one episode of it, then abandoned it and then forgot to cancel it and we're getting charg ed like 10 bucks a month in perpetuity. 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That's Rocket Money.com slash crooked rocket money dot com slash crooked I'm dan Pfeiffer for years I've heard from candidates activists and political staffers who turn to pod safe america for political strategy and messaging advice because they don't have access to a political consultant or a pollster. That's flattering to hear, but it's a huge problem. If we're going to defeat MAGA and protect democracy, we need everyone to have access to the best information and advice possible. That's why I recently launched MessageBox Pro, a subscription consulting product for people working at every level of politics. Subscribers get weekly strategy memos, data-driven messaging insights and polling analysis. Plus you get access to an incredible community of smart, committed political pros. Whether you're running for office, staffing a politician, organizing your community, or working in communications at any level, MessageBox Pro is built for you. To learn more or sign up, go to messageboxpro.com . Have you heard? IT teams everywhere are leveling up their meeting room game with SHURE Video Conferencing. Easy integration, less work for IT, smoother meetings. Sure. Built for collaboration. Learn more at shure.com slash collab . Okay, so here's my segue. It doesn't end here. Like the corruption, the malfeasance, the self-enrich ment, the megalomania, it all continues. I mean, this is not the only scandal this week. Buried in all of this is the news that in the first quarter of this year, Trump made 3,700 trades, not himself, but his accounts. A managing director at a major Wall Street brokerage told Bloomberg, in the 40 plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of training trading by any standards. I mean, yes, okay, we all assume Trump was insider trading, but 3,700 trades norm. I mean, do you have a sense of the scale of this? I know you're not a Wall Street trader , but it seems eye-watering. Another trader said that it was insane to uh have this level of trades and the enormous dollar value , many of the equities uh being traded are companies uh like Nvidia or Intel . Um uh Uh where the president is involved in uh decision making, but given the presidency you're involved in decision making for uh every American company. Now, the Trump organization has said the president does not personally make these trades . Uh, and um Number one, you shouldn't have to ask the question. Number two, uh forgive me if I approach anything that they say with a bit of skepticism, given the over 30,000 lies that Donald Trump has told, according to Washington Post Tally . Um you know, the the like the slush fund scandal, Alex , the The American people elected Donald Trump to put money in their pockets to make their lives better, to make their lives more affordable. Not himself to um expand his wealth. So this stock trading scandal is another profoundly con cerning uh case of the president doing the opposite of what he was put in office to do. At the contrarian, where I'm the publisher, we included both the slush fund and the stock trading on our weekly top 10 list. It changes constantly. I started putting together this top 10 list and I had to revise it four or five times in the space of ho 48 urs because there were so many new corruption scandals. So how can you pick just 10? It's like Taylor Swift top single. There's just always another one. Singles. Uh I want to get the the language right from the Trump organization. A spokesperson from the Trump organization told Axios: President Trump's investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts, independently managed by third -party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions. Now let me read to you a list of all the companies that Trump traded whose CEOs also, Norm, happened to accompany Trip on his field trip, Trump to on his field trip to China. NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Broadcom, Goldman Sachs, Micron, and a handful more. I mean, are you buying? You don't, you're not buying. Are you I shouldn't put words in your mouth. The idea that a third party has exclusive authority over Trump's investment decisions and oh by the way, some of those big companies just happen to be my, you know travel buddies as I went to Beijing. No, it's just a co-winky dink. Um this is another matter that will be investigated . Um there's no um official immunity for doing personal uh stock trades to the benefit of her president's account. So should uh the House or the Senate, or for that matter, state security regulators or anybody else uh have the occasion, uh, they ought to check whether that's true. Um, and is it really the case that the president had no awareness? He now knows what's in his accounts. How does he build a wall in his brain so his decision making is not influenced by these stockholdings. I think we're entitled to ask uh highly skeptical questions about this whole pattern. And particularly given the amount of uh dishonesty and dissimulation on other topics in the past, not to accept at face value the statement, oh, the president had nothing to do with it. He's gonna build a wall in his brain that Mexico will pay for, Norm. Um I do wanna talk a little bit about as we talk about the megalomania and the corruption, uh some of the construction projects that so animate whatever part of Trump's brain has not yet been walled off. Where would you prefer to start? There's so many to choose from: the ballroom, the no-bid multi-million dollar reflecting pool contract, or the Trump Arch that the administration is now claiming they don't need congressional approval for because Congress approved a plan for the Arlington Memorial Bridge in the year 1924, 102 years ago, that contained an arch-like structure that was never built. For people who are unfamiliar with this now this absurd argument, uh the Washington Post reports that Congress formally ratified a report in 1925 that allowed for the building of Memorial Bridge. However, the columns that were part of that design were not actually constructed. And Trump officials today argue that in building the arch, they would be carrying out past lawmakers' wishes by building an arch that was maybe at one point part of a design a hundred and two years ago. Um let w where do you want to start, Norm ? All of these um projects um serve um the pres ident's uh personal ego, his whims, uh his uh desire for self aggrandizement, not the public interest. I think the uh granddaddy of them all, the thing that kicked us off was renaming the Kennedy Center . And then when artists and audiences fled uh pretextually shutting down the center, claiming it was necessary for repairs. We're litigating that case and others of the matters that you describe as are our wonderful partners and colleagues in the democracy movement. So it started with the Kennedy Center case. Then you have the destruction of the East Wing ballroom where there's a great legal team working on that. We also, um, we and colleagues also have a piece of that case, Alex, because it turns out that when you demolish that historic beautiful East Wing, um the debris has to go somewhere. Donald Trump trucked it to a public park and public golf course in DC where, he dumped it. Alex, it's full of toxins . Lead, chromium, asbestos, carcinogens, pardon me, arsenic, carcinogenic substances . Um and we're litigating that case of the toxic dumping coming out of the East Wing demolition. And then other folks are working on uh the reflecting pool, which uh should be called the fifty sh ades of blue case, because they can't even match the paint colors. It's so incompetent . Um, like uh the renaming of the Kennedy Center that caused all those names damage. We do that case for Congresswoman Joyce Beatty's our our client there. And then you have this arch case, uh, which another group of lawyers is litigating. So um the uh courts are looking a scance at these projects. We did get a temporary rest raining order to get inform ation about the Kennedy Center, what was going on here. Donald Trump had claimed there was a one-year review involving outside experts , when we got the documents pursuant to a temporary restraining order for Congresswoman Beatty to go into the White House for a Kennedy Center board meeting and confront the president, it turned out there had been no one-year review of the kind that was promised. So these whims are extremely expensive for the American people. They're extremely damaging to uh the histor ic uh environment or in the case of these tox this toxic dumping uh to the humans uh uh within the district of columbia. And um it is yet another corruption scandal. And this basket of uh horribles is uh also part of our contrarian top 10 list. Yeah, I mean again a top 10 list that has no um that that should probably be like a top 100 given the the the number of um the can the can the candidates you have to put on the list. Uh can we talk a little bit though specifically about the you know, we talked about the resistance inside Congress to the slush fund. There's real resistance to the ballroom. The the lawsuits could be a way to stop it, but it also again it's a legislative branch looking at this and saying this is totally corrupt and this is a vanity project. And even Senate Republicans, who I am loath to give any credit to, are are, it looks like, I mean, we know almost for certain that it's going to get dropped, that they're not gonna put it in the reconciliation package. The Senate parliamentarian has been like, nice try. That kind of shit doesn't belong in here. Um, do you I mean, yeah, what do you think? I mean, are you surprised that first of all there's even that resistance? And do you think that this dies in the legislative branch? Well, when we were talking earlier about the reconciliation um laws and how Congress uh allowed for uh purely budgetary matters to move with less than 60 votes. You can do it with a simple majority. They put in a rule that policy decisions can't be part of that. It has to be pure appropriations. Obviously it's a huge policy decision in our country to build this ballroom. Uh and the parliamentarian, she's a hero. She said no, the Senate parliamentarian, no, I'm not gonna let this through. This is not a purely budgetary matter. Donald Trump demanded she be fired to his credit. Uh, it's a pretty low standard, but uh majority leader John Thune has so far declined to fire her, and the Republicans do not seem to be overruling her. So they let the parliamentarian do their dirty work for them, but they're not pleased about building a golden ballroom in a time of tremendous uh fiscal challenge and a cost of living crisis for Americans that is exacerbated by this uh kind of corruption. So um um that is a positive sign that the system is holding, particularly that wonderful parliamentarian. Yeah, not all heroes wear capes. 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Don't miss out, visit Westfield Stratford City today. Terms and conditions apply . I mean I think you're so right to point out the sort of real uh economic climate in the country contributing to and really exacerbating the outrage over the corruption, right? The corruption on its own is eye-watering and historic. But the fact that it dovetails precisely with the moment when Americans can't afford hamburger meat and gas and air conditioning and you know health insurance, it makes it that much more galling. And I think when people just in in terms of the the political moment, people have said, oh well, the cor,ruption message hasn't stuck in the way that I think Democrats have wanted it to. Well, we're in a different moment right now. And as you point out, the dichotomy, the chasm that separates the corrupt activities of this president , the gilding of the ballroom, the arch, the the painting of the reflecting pool, many modeled shades of blue for multiple times what it was supposed to cost. All of this seems like the senseless , deeply cynical, completely self-absorbed behavior of someone who at the same time is asleep at the wheel when Americans need him the most to tackle the one issue he was elected to tackle, which is affordability. I mean it is, it's really giving uh Marie Antoinette vibes. You'd think they would have just point say, let one point say just like let them eat cake. Like that's that's kind of where we are. Where's your like he's building his And the American taxpayer sees what's happening here and they're outraged. And and I do think you see it reflected in polls. Americans say in poll after poll that corruption and fighting corruption in government is one of the most important issues for them. That the cost of living and the crisis around the costs of our everyday existence is a very important issue for them. Well he's basically applying a Trump tax to every American to pay for these construction projects, to pay for the $1.8 billion slush fund. And the people see the connection. They don't like it. And I think that the public opinion polling demonstrates that this corruption spree is a part of why we have uh the most unpopular president at this point uh in modern presidential history. As you say, that's not why the people put him there. And he has hemorrhaged independence. It's another form of corruption. It's corruption of the rule of law to um utilize ice the way he has to attack uh innocent people. He said he'd protect the border and arrest criminals. Not that he would tear uh mobs and dads and kids uh uh out of their homes, out of their communities, out of the American economy, or that he'd he'd his ICE agents would murder the Renee Goods and the Alex Pret is. That corruption of the rule of law also matters. And then you throw in the other scandal that has really broken through, like the slush fund or the ballroom or the Kennedy Center,. Um and that is the um it's broken even bigger, the Epstein files. That's a corruption story. I think the American people get it, and I think there's gonna be a very serious price to pay come November. I wonder, you know, uh you may uh I think a lot of people don't know about the garbage from the East Wing demolition being put onto uh a public park. I believe it is a public b golf course that was really inexpensive to play on. And so people from all over the city used to play on that course and now they can't because it's covered in toxic building materials that Trump unlawfully foisted on the park grounds. The reflecting pool is way over budget. It's not getting done on time. And the work, from the reporting we have, at least in the Washington Post, seems to be incredibly shoddy. There are holes in the waterproofing, there are bubbles , the blue, as you say, is 50 shades. Um the the even as a a construction magnate, he's failing at the job. He's failing politically in terms of strategy, he's failing the country in terms of being a leader and adhering to the principles of the Constitution or the letter of the law. And he's also failing at the one thing he's like kind of known for, which is the building part. I wonder, you know, first of all, do you think this stuff is going to get built? And if it does, what should Democrats do about it? First of all, it might be shoddy, dangerous construction. And second of all, like does anybody I mean, do do we need the Arctic Trump? Like, what what do you think should happen to this stuff if it exists once Trump leaves office? Um well, uh the we'll need to um take it on a case-by-case basis. Um, you know, the certainly the uh public park, uh the golf course that's for families and people of modest means, those should be reopened. We have to get rid of those toxic substances there. I think we'll accomplish that through our litigation. That's the point of doing it. And the um Kennedy Center needs to be reopened. Uh we need to protect the independence uh of the Kennedy Center. So you know it's very clear that it cannot be renamed for Donald Trump. Congress has said it must be named for John F. Kennedy. So uh we'll have a court order in place. I think on many of these projects, what you're gonna see is the courts are gonna step in. I don't think the arch is gonna be built that is being litigated but look um both with the built environment as as with our government in the post Trump era, we are gonna have to rebuild. Fortun ately, there are good examples the United States can learn from both domestically where uh and internationally where you've had authoritarian regimes replaced, and uh you were able to rebuild and reconstruct. Uh, in Hungary, um, you just had a supermajority coalition oust a far more entrenched autocrat than Donald Trump in the form of Victor Orban. After 14 years, they're embarking on a very bold rebuilding project in Brazil. Um the uh Bolsonaro regime was ousted. Lula has built a big tent coalition. He's a man of the left, he's built a larger coalition to do reconstruction there. And of course, we have the examples of uh of what uh happened uh in the former iron curtain countries after the end of the cold war they were able to rebuild after a much longer, more difficult uh struggle, the post-World War II rebuilding, uh, truth and reconciliation in South Africa. There's a lot of examples we can learn from. It will start with knocking down . Personally, I think some of these monuments to Trump need to be knocked down. But it's what comes after. And the most important rebuilding will be the rebuilding of our government and setting America back on our um uh uh on our course of uh fulfilling what Dr. King called the promissory note, not yet fully collected on, of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. We have to continue that work going forward . But dealing with some of these fiascos, domestic fiascos, is going to be a part of that as well, Alex. Well, I mean I think you're so right to suggest