The Intersection with Michael Popok Full Episode - 8/26/2025

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0:30Michael Popok:We are at war. We are at war with the Trump administration, with his dictator policies, with his attempt to occupy democratic cities and states, his raids of political opponents through the FBI, his going after the independence of the Federal Reserve Bank, he's trying to destabilize everything around him in order for him to be the strongman dictator. He said it out loud during his own pressers where he mused to try to groom America into accepting a dictatorship by saying, I don't think all Americans think dictatorship is bad. We are at war. We're not just at war because Donald Trump is thinking about renaming the Department of Defense, the Department of War.

1:17Michael Popok:I don't like defense. It sounds weak. We should go back to Department of War. We are at war. Well, you're on the intersection with Michael Popak on the Midas Dutch Network. But on today's episode, we're at war. And I think the sooner we reorient our approach and reorganize our brain to that position of offense, not defense, and recognize that we are at war to save our democracy, the better off we're going to be and things will fall into place a lot better for us. Let's start with what I've said on my Substack Live for Legal AF just the other day, which I'm now developing more as my working theory, that Donald Trump is obviously grooming America for a number of things.

2:09Michael Popok:Predators groom, and he is grooming America and trying to socialize things like dictatorship is okay. It's okay to use the D word. the d word for us is not dictatorship it's democracy to have a president of the united states that occupies the oval office who so casually throws around the term i'm not a dictator but i'd like to be or i'd be one on day one or this is you know there's some polling out there that shows not everybody's upset about dictatorships while he hosts in the oval office the president of South Korea, at the same time in front of the guy, compliments the strongman dictator of North Korea.

2:52Michael Popok:And at the same time, here's my working theory. He's grooming America for a possible coup or takeover. See, you have to take over that which you do not currently occupy. So a president, we don't normally talk about a president having to occupy anything because that person is, by definition, the most powerful person in the world and the leader of our democracy and the leader of the free world, generally. So he doesn't have to worry about taking over states. The states all pledge allegiance to our constitutional republic and the leader of that being the president of the United States. That's not the world that we find ourselves in with Donald Trump.

3:36Michael Popok:He has split the country right down the middle. not quite down the middle 23 blue states or so 27 red i'm not talking population now i'm just talking headcount and because the democrats and the independents and the fair-minded people occupy one sphere that he's not in he sees it as a threat and so his number one goal is to destabilize not only democracy, but the Democrats' brand, trying to move to a one-party system, which is a playbook, page out of a playbook of dictatorship. And my working theory is that's the reason he needs to occupy with armed forces and our U.S. military states and cities.

4:27Michael Popok:And I just any, I mean, blue states and blue cities. It's occupation forces and threats of occupation forces, plain and simple. And he's being supported by what I refer to as the Red Army. The Red Army is the National Guard from red states being sent in to reinforce Donald Trump's assault on liberty, assault on states' rights, assault on sovereignty of the states and the Amendment. That's what we're watching. DC and LA, a dress rehearsal, dress rehearsal for a potential coup in the future. We are at war. And I don't say that either cavalierly or as if that's a bad thing, because this war, this dispute has been brought to our shores by Donald Trump and not the other way around.

5:20Michael Popok:We didn't ask for it. But now that we're here, we need to fight our way through it. I mean, one of the things I teach or had taught lawyers that worked for me about how to practice law, I would tell them, we are not going to be the first litigation team or the first side to drag a case into the gutter or the sewer. But by God, if we are dragged into the sewer or to the gutter. We are going to brass knuckle our way out. We're at the brass knuckle our way out moment, everybody. You've got occupation forces in D.C., reinforced in L.A., a threat against Chicago, a threat against Philadelphia. Four major cities are run by black Americans.

6:07Michael Popok:They are under assault. It's a war. Donald Trump is not only going after the Democratic brand, but he's going after the Democratic leadership, its icons, its idols, and a fair amount of Black leadership and Black female leadership. Does anybody think it's a shock that he's opened up federal probes as the chief law enforcement officer against Letitia James, the Black New York attorney general, who took him down a number of times, including for civil fraud? Or that he's going after Lisa Cook now. I'll talk about that in the next segment. The Federal Reserve governor who has her chair until 2038, also black.

6:48Michael Popok:Or Mayor Bowser in D.C., also black. The Atlanta mayor, black. Chicago, black. Los Angeles, black. And as I just outlined, many of them women. which is hopefully is a wake-up call for that particular community who doubled their turnout for Donald Trump. I mean, I'm not blaming anybody. There's many reasons that Kamala Harris did not win that election. We could do a whole show on it. We could do a whole seminar on it. But it didn't help that the black vote went 8 % to 16 % in favor of Donald Trump. I hope now seeing the attacks on these communities of color by Donald Trump, by his occupying forces and otherwise, will be that wake-up call, which will help us at the midterms.

7:45Michael Popok:So you have the working theory that we are at war, that Donald Trump is trying through occupation forces, reinforced by the Red Army of the National Guard of Red States, doing a test run in Democratic strongholds that he's aimed at, Chicago next on the list as a test case, as a dress rehearsal. It's a dry run to see how much, in terms of authoritarian abuse and how much of America he can put under his heel before he is stopped. We are at war. And again, I don't say that to make you feel bad, to make you feel like we're the victims. This is a war we can win, but this is a war we have to win. And I don't mean by taking up arms.

8:36Michael Popok:I'm not talking about a Second Amendment solution. I'm talking about at the ballot box, in the streets, in the marketplace of ideas, in the public square, in our resistance in every way, shape, or form. We shall overcome this administration, but we have to do it working together.

9:00Michael Popok:The socializing of dictatorship and normalizing of it has to stop as well. Mainstream media plays right into Donald Trump's hands because they, you know, in the middle of this long news feed, you just see, you know, that CNN or MSNBC or any of our competitors, I guess they're called, they'll, you know, they'll be like, well, this happened and this happened and this happened. And Donald Trump said a lot of Americans are okay with dictatorship and this happened and this happened, like, stop. Can we go back a few? That's how you report it? So they leave it to us on Legal AF and on Midas Touch to say our hair is on fire, say that we are at war.

9:42Michael Popok:And these were declarations of war by Donald Trump. I'm not saying he's a dictator, although I am, but I am saying that other dictators think he's a dictator. That's why Donald Trump's closest relationships are not with Europe, not with our allies, not with the president of Europe, as Donald Trump likes to call the head of the EU. It's with dictatorships. it's the Orbans of the world it's the it's the North Koreans of the world it's the China of the world and the Russia of the world I mean could he have boot licked Putin any harder during his last stop here in the United States from the military being forced the US military being forced to bend the knee in front of Putin as Donald Trump, like a four-year-old, applauded, apologies to four-year-olds, applauded for his enemy, his adversary, before a big meeting.

10:41Michael Popok:Okay, you know, what did Trump think? He was going to PowerPoint Putin to death? Is that how that was going to work? He was going to kiss his ass enough that Putin would say, okay, I'll stop bombing? I mean, a couple of days after the meeting, Putin bombed an American interest in Ukraine. Also on the way into Alaska, killed 11 Ukrainians in a bombing in Kiev, including a child. That's who we're dealing with. We're now two weeks out from the big meeting with Zelensky in the White House. Everybody, kumbaya. We're going to, where is it? Where's the ceasefire? There's no ceasefire. Where's the peace deal?

11:21Michael Popok:There's no peace deal. As Donald Trump muses about being put on Mount Rushmore. Not kidding. By the way, that's never happening. I know we're at war, but that's not one of it. That's not happening. Chisel his features, his fat jowly face into Mount Rushmore. Not happening. Not happening. But he muses about it, you know, among other weird, weird tics that Donald Trump has developed over the years that he says out loud. So we then watch, my other working theory as I move down the chain here, is that Donald Trump has on his shelf a whole bunch of things that he wants to release, but only at the right moment.

12:06Michael Popok:If he loses something big during the day, by the afternoon, he will take that thing off the shelf and he will announce it. So when he loses a Braygo Garcia's hearing, we'll talk about that, and is forced to keep a Braygo Garcia in America so that the judge, in the case Judge Zinnis, can conduct a petition for writ of habeas corpus hearing. And that's seen as a big loser. And he gets bad press about saying that Americans, some Americans are okay with dictatorship and complimenting dictators in front of the South Korean president all on the same day while he's hugging and almost French kissing the World Cup, the solid gold World Cup.

12:49Michael Popok:Again, you know, this is a weird stew of a brain and that's putting it mildly. What does he do in the late afternoon? He drops the bomb. I'm firing Lisa Cook. Federal Reserve, even though he can't do it the way he can't, certainly can't do it the way he's trying to do it. And that sucks the air out of the room on all the bad media reporting and the rest of it. A full frontal assault on the independence of the Federal Reserve. But he times these things. You watch it. If a bad news cycle hurts him, you know he'll try to change the news cycle with something on his shelf his his bag of dirty tricks it's just a bag filled with monkey wrenches he just pulls another monkey wrench out and throws it that's all that's all he's got the Ghislaine Maxwell release of the recordings of her interview is another prime example of my other working theory that Donald Trump times the release of new information or new executive orders or new lawsuits or new federal probes to step on stories that are bad for him.

13:58Michael Popok:Galeen Maxwell gave that interview more than three weeks ago to Todd Blanche, you know, about the Epstein child sex trafficking crimes. I won't go over the details. We did it on Legal AF this past Saturday, and I've done it in Substack Live. I encourage you to come over to Legal AF Substack Live as well. Great way to support what we're doing on Legal AF. We have about 80 ,000 people there now in less than a couple of months. And I'm doing these lives sort of like this, but I can do it at the minute, at the moment, at the market, pull everybody together, do a huddle, get 2 ,000, 3 ,000, 5 ,000 people together, and we talk about an issue.

14:36Michael Popok:And then I put the video up for everybody to see. During the day, I'm doing that two to three times a day, a day. And bringing on guests as well. and we did a good, I think, analysis of having read the 300 pages of what it showed. So I won't bore you with the details here other than to say what's 300 pages long and filled with crap, and that would be the Ghislaine Maxwell lies upon lies upon lies and denials upon denials. Not only did she not take responsibility for what she did, she said there was nothing to take responsibility for. Nothing happened. So how do you explain the thousands of victims, including that were girls that were raped at the time by you and Epstein.

15:18Michael Popok:How do you explain their existence? You can't. It's an inconvenient fact that she can't explain away. But that transcript was available the night of, I do this for a living, the court reporter will turn that over to you the night of. That was three weeks ago. They just dropped it two days ago? Yeah, They dropped it two days ago because they didn't like what was coming out of the oversight committee in Congress and bad news reports there against the Trump administration with them going after the Epstein files in the Department of Justice and the hearings and all of that. And they needed to step on that story.

15:56Michael Popok:Hence, Ghislaine Maxwell's transcript gets announced. So we're at war. And the way that we're going to win this war is to be together in community, in fellowship, because only together will we be able to defeat the Trump administration and overcome the Trump administration. It's the only way. And Trump knows that. And that's why he tries to tear us apart and put each of us at each other's throats in America, because he He needs a seething cauldron of people upset with their neighbors in order to succeed as president. He's not the great unifier. He's the great divider. His entire power grab and power network is based on division and the frission that's created by that and the energy that is created by that.

16:54Michael Popok:The heat that no light, but heat that is created by that. He needs it to fuel his dictatorial dictator-like conduct, plain and simple. We are at war. We're going to talk about his striking out against the Federal Reserve in a way that even shocked Wall Street. They thought he got off the kick of trying to get rid of Jay Powell. They didn't realize he was going to go after Lisa Cook and try to get rid of her and try to fire her and cause another constitutional crisis. And the markets responded. I'm going to cover that. The Abrego-Garcia developments, which are all bad for Donald Trump. A couple of other orders that we just got out, including kind of concerning Abrego-Garcia.

17:44Michael Popok:two more losses for the Trump administration, this time by a Trump-appointed judge and a Republican-appointed judge. I'll do all that when we come back from our first break, but let me just say this before we take the break. It's just an honor to be here with you on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. on the Midas Touch Network on the show called The Intersection. I can't think of a finer group of people for me to spend my time with, to do my work for. I was out today for lunch, got a lunch break, went to a restaurant, local restaurant. And one of the managers there kept kind of looking over at me. I kept looking over at him, smiling.

18:18Michael Popok:I thought he was just welcoming like a guest. Came over, he said, are you that guy that does that commentary on YouTube? I said, I am. And then he just had this warm embrace, warm handshake. He said, keep it up, man. Keep up what you do. And that fuels, in our audience, fuels what we do. I mean, from the time that the brothers get up and I get up, Katie Fang, we all get up in the morning, you know, say goodbye to our families, brush our teeth, start our day. All we're thinking about is the war and defending our democracy and putting and being the first responders with you into the burning building of our democracy and to save it from Donald Trump.

18:55Michael Popok:That's all literally I think about all day. And this gentleman was a Canadian of Jamaican descent living in this country for years and is scared. I can see it in his eyes and I appreciate it. I understand it. But we got to do this together. And the way to support us is let's keep the intersection moving up the charts, leave a comment here, pass this along to other people, ask them to watch it for views on YouTube. Then we're on audio. Yeah, some people don't know that. We're on audio podcast platforms. just plug in the intersection boom and my smiling where's that come from my smiling face will pop up and download that we could use more download love as they say in the business and then we've got a couple of a couple of different ways to consume and join and become uh and become a part of our audience for legal af which is where i do my my day job and legal af the youtube channel is growing by leaps and bounds.

19:55Michael Popok:We're going to hit a million before the new year. We've only been around for less than a year. But come over there. Hit the subscribe button. 12 amazing contributors. 10 videos a day. All about law and politics. And now more than ever, that's the break the glass place debate, right? And then we've got this new thing we started. I don't say it's not a new thing to us, but it's called Substack. And we're on Legal AF Substack. And we've only been there for two months. We're pushing 100 ,000 subscribers now on that. I figured out where the live plus button was, and I'm hitting that live plus button two, three times a day and doing a huddle with 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 people without any notice.

20:37Michael Popok:I mean, I'm trying to keep them around 11 o 'clock, maybe 8 or 9 o 'clock at night, 11 o 'clock in the morning kind of thing, Eastern time. But it's just so immediate. There's such an energy about bringing the audience together on Legal AF Substack. We've got other content up there as well. No doubt. But the lives, man, I'm living in the lives right now. And that's headquarters. That's HQ for the war, the war to save our democracy. So we have some, speaking of saving our democracy, we've got some amazing pro-democracy sponsors. And here's a word for them right now. Fall is planting season. But did you know that many plants and trees actually do better when planted this time of year?

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23:38Michael Popok:I want to cover a number of losses for the Trump administration in the last 48 hours. And let me see if I can do it in reverse order. Let's start with the case about Donald. Did you hear the one about Donald Trump suing all 12 federal judges in Maryland to disqualify them? Because he didn't like the chief judge's rule that he had to keep human beings in America for 48 hours and not send them to the torture prisons abroad. while a federal judge provided oversight over whether due process was being properly preserved? Did you hear that one? Well, we've got the ruling. Donald Trump had a number of ways to challenge the chief judge of Maryland's decision.

24:20Michael Popok:I call it the Abrego-Garcia rule to require that if a writ of habeas corpus petition is filed to get somebody sprung from jail or incarceration and bring them before a federal judge to make sure due process and habeas corpus rights were being preserved. There's a reason that the judge entered a local rule for all judges in Maryland. First of all, Judge Zinnis sits in Maryland. She was already handling the Abrego Garcia case, where he got sent illegally to El Salvador, where upon arrival he was tortured and then took months to bring him back and even then brought back in a manufactured indictment in Tennessee for human trafficking and thrown back into another hole.

25:04Michael Popok:So a pardon me if the chief judge looked at that and said, well, I don't want that to happen again with this Trump administration. So he already had a Brego Garcia. He also obviously had eyes and ears and could read and saw that in the case involving Judge Boesberg in D.C., 200 people not named a Brego Garcia were sent to El Salvador without any due process rights at all. So he said, taking a page from the appeals court. How about this? How about nobody goes anywhere for the first 48 hours while a federal judge determines whether the writ of habeas corpus petition is properly filed, has merit, makes a decision about due process.

25:46Michael Popok:How about that? And Donald Trump didn't want that. No, no, no. Donald Trump doesn't want that. On a hot take I did about this earlier today, I used my Willy Wonka, Veruca Salt voice. No, daddy wants it now. They must be removed immediately. No due process. How's that? So I'm a frustrated actor. so uh donald trump if he didn't like that local rule in federal court issued by a federal judge a chief judge there's a way around it in the fourth circuit which sits over maryland you file an objection with the council of the judicial council for the fourth circuit and they can strike it under a statute they can strike a local rule if it somehow violates like immigration law or some other law.

26:36Michael Popok:He doesn't do that. He files a motion, a complaint, and a petition to disqualify the entirety of the 12 members of the federal bench in Maryland. Okay, once you do that, those 12 members can't hear your case because you're challenging them, including Judge Zinnis. So the Fourth Circuit Chief Judge sends the case to Virginia, and it ends up in the lap of Judge Cullen. You could say he drew the short straw, but he is a Trump appointee from the first term. But I knew this was not going to go well for the Trump administration because at the oral argument, Cullen was like, this sounds like lawlessness.

27:14Michael Popok:This sounds like a constitutional catch me if you can. How can you possibly, if you don't like the rule, how can you possibly sue to disqualify all 12 members of the bench? It's just not the right way to do it. And now we got the ruling. And Judge Cullen said point blank A, because he could have just said, petition dismissed. You know, two lines be done with it. No, no. He spent 39 pages excoriating the Trump administration in a scorching opinion, but very diplomatic. I mean, you know, he's a good writer. He's more of a country club Republican than a MAGA, the way I'm reading it. But he dropped the footnote early on and he said, This is an administration that has unfortunately and wrongfully gone after and attacked members of the federal judiciary, creating an inter-branch, you know, the three branches, inter-branch conflict and crisis that's unnecessary.

28:11Michael Popok:He's called, and then he listed it, he's called federal judges, leftists, liberals, criminals, Marxists, and worse. He also quoted Harvey Wilkerson, the judge from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, who's very well respected in Republican circles, as saying we can't have, while some friction and tension between the branches is one thing, but we can't have out and out war. Here we go. There's that theme for me today. Out and out warfare waged by the executive branch against the judicial branch. And so the judge dismissed the petition. And in doing so, he also said, and you want me to dismiss this petition, Trump, effectively, because if you don't, it's going to open the door to depositions being taken against your Department of Justice, Pam Bondi, against Kristi Noem Homeland Security, and all the emails and all the information and letter writing correspondence between everybody and your executive branch is going to come flying out.

29:17Michael Popok:and we're going to have a fight over privilege. But is that what you want? If you don't like the rule, the judge reminded him, then take it up with the Fourth Circuit Judicial Council. That's your path. And if you don't like this ruling, the judge says, you can appeal it. But I am dismissing your case. And again, now, by the way, in the meantime, the judges have been ruling and presiding over Trump cases in Maryland. It hasn't affected that. But if this judge had ruled, whoop, you're all disqualified, then we'd have to bring in judges from Virginia and other places in the Fourth Circuit to handle these matters.