New Signs Epstein Uproar Is Damaging Trump With Base

22:51Gary Shteyngart:I will mention the administration has denied it. They've tried to claim, but lost on some court cases, that they're just enforcing immigration laws, which they can do. But there's strong evidence that they're using it to attack people's free speech and First Amendment rights. Students in this country are allowed to participate in the full life of this country. Your thoughts on that and Rogan hitting Trump on that? Well, I think that of all the things the president has done, I believe that if what happens, if what appears to be happening in the Mideast does happen and he brings about the expulsion of Hamas from Gaza, I think that he'll get the Nobel Peace Prize.

23:28But I also think that this is the most humiliating, harmful, racist government policy I've ever seen executed. The targeting of Latinos is something that is, Ari, it is absolutely appalling. They walk around now, the laborers on Long Island, worried that because they are Mexican, they're going to get scooped up and their lives are going to be ruined and they're going to be exported, deported to Africa someplace. I think it's really disgusting. It's lowbrow. It's something that I believe is shameful in every regard. These people, I mean, it's one thing to have a tough border. Stop them at the border.

24:11Again, all the rhetoric, I don't care, build a wall 100 miles high if you want to. But if people have been living here for some time in a peaceable way, in a way where the law and order, God fearing, you know, they love their families and they're working hard working. They're not part of the public. Why are you bothering these people? Why are you going after these people? Why are you targeting these people? I'm telling you, places like East LA, you know, very heavily, 10 % of LA is undocumented. East LA is probably 50%. East LA is going to build a wall around itself to keep the Migra out, to keep the immigration officers out.

24:49And why in the world are they wearing masks? Why are they wearing masks? The cops don't wear masks. FBI doesn't wear masks. Nobody wears masks. Nobody, because they're doing something honorable to protect the people. And yet only immigration officers wear masks. Yeah. It's because they're embarrassed by what they're doing. It's not for fear. It's for embarrassment that they are scooping up Juan and Maria, the meat packer and the poultry processor or the babysitter of a lawnmower and they're they're ruining their lives i think

25:19Gary Shteyngart:it's horrible yeah well you're speaking very clearly about it and it's i know you care about it and you of course know a lot of the folks involved in this including the president himself so i know they're listening uh you've agreed to stick around we have the novelist gary steingard coming up and i want to hear both your views about these attacks in the free press but before we do that you know i always like to have a little fun with you at the vault okay i've always and i'm not referring only to your experience. But me personally, I've always gotten along with and been curious about what people know after all of their life experience.

25:49Gary Shteyngart:So I'd be at a wedding and I'm talking to like the oldest grandma at the wedding. I don't know. That's just how I am. So whenever we get you, I think let's look back. Sure. Okay. This is Geraldo and J-Lo. And J-Lo. Oh my goodness. Last summer's 41st annual National Puerto Rican Day Parade was the sexiest, biggest outboring of power, politics, and pride. Older generation stars like Tito Puente and brand new superstars like Jennifer Lopez. How do you feel today? I don't know who's going to be the next president, but they're going to have to learn Spanish. And why this cycle, Senator, is the Latino vote being courted?

26:31It's a simple matter in many cases of demographics.

26:36Gary Shteyngart:25 years there, you're mixing the culture with the politics. What does that look like looking back on it? First of all, the Puerto Rican Day Parade is the biggest party in the country. It's the biggest parade in New York. A million people participate, a couple of million watch. Everybody's kissing everybody. It's a wonderful, wonderful experience. And it does go from J-Lo to, you know, to the whoever's running for office. This year I ran into, you know, Governor Cuomo. Eric Adams had chats with them. They all have to come. The Puerto Rican, I've been the grand marshal of that parade. This, I think, was my 25th appearance.

27:15It's a time where you really show that you belong, that you love people, that there's great affection, that it's sincere. And they give it back. They give it back. Yeah, and we need that.

27:27Gary Shteyngart:All right. You're sticking around. We have novelist Gary Steingart on. I mentioned this is on free speech in America these days and the backlash over some organizations folding to Trump. I have a word for them next.

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29:05Gary Shteyngart:There is plenty of discussion about Donald Trump's policies, his ideas. Do you agree with what he's trying to do for the country? And then there's a whole other category, which is the alleged and sometimes documented abuse of power, twisting the government against its actual goals, not for policy or even conservative ideology, but just for outlandish power grabs. Consider, for example, how a Trump ally with no expertise very publicly helped oust an FDA expert and an NSA lawyer, a national security official, just because of her close ties to the president. You wouldn't think it fair if at your job someone came in and just because they knew the CEO, they could get people fired for no reason.

29:45Gary Shteyngart:And these jobs are pretty high stakes. Then you have other loyalists going into the government. The Senate has now confirmed someone who is best known for being Donald Trump's criminal defense attorney. But now, instead of arguing for Trump to judges, he will be one. Lifetime tenure. In any other era, this would have been a very controversial appointment. It was close. But with three whistleblowers already issuing documented complaints about him, the Senate, instead of taking time to review that or take the process seriously, including the idea that he said in front of witnesses, they were going to defy court orders, tell the courts F you and see what happens.

30:22Gary Shteyngart:Instead of investigating that, the Senate just rubber stamped him on Republican votes. He's also accused of misleading lawmakers about the deal they struck in New York for Eric Adams. He has vaguely or sort of generally denied some of this. Here's what top Democrats are saying. The nominee so patently unfit to be a federal judge in the long history of our republic. Things like this haven't happened. There is yet another whistleblower about his prosecutorial misconduct, and the Republicans just don't want to hear it. To put someone on the bench that has shown such disrespect for the rule of law, for the ideas of justice, they're not worthy for that position.

31:08Gary Shteyngart:Now, those are specific examples involving individual people. And sometimes it's easier to kind of track what's going on with people rather than organizations, which are generally faceless. Most people, including Republicans, didn't vote for or think Laura Loomer would be calling the shots over a national security. And yet here we are. Then you have the concern as Trump targets those larger organizations and entities I mentioned. And that includes corporations, which is very anti-free market. Most honest free market pro-capitalist individuals don't think big government should be shaking down companies to change what they would otherwise do.

31:43Gary Shteyngart:We also see, of course, all the universities and then the law firms. Most of those law firms, by the way, are working on behalf of big corporate clients in Wall Street, but they're still getting the shakedown. And you have potentially a settlement with Harvard. That's been discussed. That's the potential amount. Big, larger than the other settlements you see. It's approaching a billion dollars. The Times, approaching a billion dollars when you put it all together. Columbia, 200 million. media companies paying out for lawsuits. And Trump is happy about the payouts. He's open to getting potentially money out of Harvard.

32:19Gary Shteyngart:That's the new headline today. And there, one of the universities has said they were fighting. But remember, we already have a lot of information about how this works. You can have a strategic debate if you're an organization or law firm thinking only about yourself. You can have a more ethical or public service debate about what this means for everyone touched by your organization in the country. Or you can just go back and read Sun Tzu, The Art of War, or Donald Rumsfeld, who said weakness is provocative, meaning be careful how often you show your weakness to a bully or a tyrant. Because after some of those law firms cut deals with Trump that were supposed to end the shakedown, the goalposts started moving.

32:57Gary Shteyngart:One professor knowingly observing that in the Times, they thought they made a one-shot deal, the administration, that's Trump, thinks they've subjected these firms to indentured servitude. There is very little evidence that buckling to these kind of shakedowns means they'll go away. Like anyone who's ever watched a mafia movie or dealt with the mob, if you start paying for protection, you very rarely are allowed to stop, which makes you wonder, who are you paying for protection from? I wanted to tell you that and give you that kind of peace of mind for anyone in any organization thinking about how to play this.

33:36Gary Shteyngart:We're going to fit in a break, but we come back. The anti-Putin, anti-Trump, brilliant novelist. Look at that headshot. Gary Steingart, back on the beat tonight.

33:51Gary Shteyngart:Donald Trump's government, the big government programs, are going after journalists, the press, and others who might just speak truth to power in ways that this government doesn't like. Trump has gone after public broadcasting funds and endangering the way local audiences might learn about things happening in their community. I think President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape. We're going to continue to see consequences over the coming months and years as this industry sees a pretty big reshuffle take place. The changes are expected to cause hundreds of local stations to significantly scale back or shutter, often in rural places where there isn't any other local news source, Axios reports.

34:35Gary Shteyngart:The White House says the whole system is rigged against them, so they're just rigging it back or making up for that. But the wider context is something that you might only learn about through news, which is a bit of a paradox if local news and other information is being pressed and squeezed, because what we understand about what's happening in our country does inform what we do about it. And this seems to be an effort to use big government to put a thumb on the scale. It's an attack on the First Amendment of the kind that some honest conservatives used to oppose. With that in mind, we've convened a special discussion Acclaimed novelist Gary Steingart has been a critic of Vladimir Putin Donald Trump knows a bit about censorship And is the kind of novelist who writes about sometimes controversial and hard subjects He has the acclaimed novels Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story He's a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in 2014 A Times profile notes he's eclipsed many of the supposedly more serious novelists who came of age when he did with that photo, which, quite a photo, Gary.

35:36Gary Shteyngart:I don't know what happened. Looks like you rolled right out of bed. Is that you? That's me. Right on the way to the writing desk. His new novel, Vera or Faith, is about a Korean American girl who grows up in a sort of not-so-distant, future, dystopian, negative America and really captures a childlike perspective in a way that many novels struggle to. As we all know, a lot of books live in the adult world. and guess who's Bazzac as Jay-Z and Scarface once said Geraldo second segment tonight television personality journalist spanning multiple networks if you don't like the media then you must really hate Geraldo because he's worked for them all every big network right every big show and we thought you would also be fitting to talk about this and also bring the perspective of your time of course in what I think were sometimes right of center outlets as well as others Welcome to both of you.

36:28Gary Shteyngart:You guys feel good together? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Easy. Gary, let's start with something you've been very vocal about, which is what you learned looking over at the Russian experience, not just Putin, but the history of it. What does that do to art and free speech? Well, it's incredible. I grew up in a system with a lot of censorship. There were very few books you could read from abroad. I remember the one book that I was allowed to read was Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, but it I had an introduction by one of Stalin's henchmen, which was a very fun introduction. Stalin wanted to purge all the, you know, whatever, Mark Twain, etc.

37:05But I'm very worried about the kind of confluence I see between America and Russia. One thing Russia has always done is create its own. It doesn't just want you not to know the truth, but it tries to create a kind of alternate reality. You mentioned earlier, of course, January 6th and the way Trump continues still to deny that. It also, you know, you think about Kash Patel's children's book, which also turned things upside down, obviously. So it's a very scary time. I mean, the book is set from a point of view of a 10-year-old, and I have an 11-year-old myself. And I think when you grow up in a totalitarian or authoritarian society, it stains you no matter what happens to you later on.

37:47I mean, I still have a sense of distrust, a sense of lack of belief in certain systems, because when you grow up without knowing what the truth is, you spend the rest of your life wondering who you are and how you belong in a society.

38:03Gary Shteyngart:Does that bread cynicism benefit the autocrat more? Absolutely. What's interesting is when I was growing up, I knew all the I was seven, eight years old. I knew all the members of the Politburo by name. You know, the politics were always around you. And my son, he's 11 years old, him and his friends, they talk about Trump all the time and about Trump's henchmen. It's almost like that's the idea is that they become ubiquitous. And that's the only reality, you know, even if you have parents who are saying, OK, this is not great. It's the only world, you know, because it finds its way, just like in the example I mentioned about Kash Patel writing children's literature about it.

38:38It finds its way into everything and it creates its own reality. And that, to me, is very worrisome. While at the same time, of course, censoring books like, for example, Toni Morrison, right, which is something a high schooler would read. But still, denying people the ability to read, you know, the truth about the African-American experience. That, to me, is shocking. And so Soviet at heart.

39:00Gary Shteyngart:And, Geraldo, some people make peace with this by saying it'll happen to them. And maybe they have some outlets they really don't like. but it's happening to Fox News' sister outlet, Wall Street Journal. It's happening to right-wing or conservative voices online or being attacked by the government power of Donald Trump. First of all, I have to say that it's freaking me out that I'm sitting next to the man. I just read an article where he opposes circumcision. So I have to get out of that particular framework. Yeah, please. I tell you one thing. Working for Fox was eye opening, Ari, in many ways, because what I saw were people who earnestly believe their their point of view about the world and public TV, which is alarming, of course, and and and I think will ultimately be harmful to America's right to know stuff.

39:59But when you look at PBS from the point of view of a Fox person, it's clear that PBS is of a certain mindset. And I don't care how liberal you are, how open minded you are or how right wing you are, whatever it is honestly viewed. PBS is an outlet that favors liberalism. Why? Because reporters are optimists. Reporters are, you know, people who have a heart, who want to be involved, the compassionate people. They want to change the world.

40:31Gary Shteyngart:But editorial freedom is going to land somewhere on the spectrum. The question today now is whether both PBS and The Wall Street Journal should be frivolously sued or attacked for that freedom. I am. I refuse to feel sorry for The Wall Street Journal. Why? Because The Wall Street Journal can take care of itself. You know, I'm not asking you to. The Burnax can take care of themselves. I'm not asking you to bake them a cake. You can save that for what he wrote about. But I'm saying that we have to, as both journalists and citizens, and here we have an artist, a writer, confront what's really happening.

41:03Gary Shteyngart:And by the way, if it works well enough, you won't hear about it in 10 years if it goes the other way. Personally, I am feeling very lucky that my former friend, the president of the United States, has not really been angry at me in a way that he manifested it in a public way. I've said things about him even today, earlier in the program. Yeah, you were strong today, but do you worry that he would abuse power against you? I absolutely was worried about it, and he has not in any way, shape, or form communicated to me, even through mutual friends, the Geraldo layoff or anything like that. I get to say what I get to say.

41:43Well, look, one of the things I've been doing in the last couple of weeks is frantically trying to find my certificate of naturalization because I feel I know how this story often works out. I've known friends in Russia who are completely silent on social media and every other mode that they can. There's a Russian term, a Soviet term, called writing into your desk, meaning that you know that what you write is going to offend the authorities, so you write into your desk so nobody else will see it. That's the danger that I think is a danger for any society.

42:13Gary Shteyngart:And it becomes a chilling self-censorship. It becomes a chilling self-censorship. And that's something that I am absolutely worried about. And I know that others are, too. You know, everyone I know who's an immigrant is searching for that. I think you should be. And I think that that therein lies the biggest sin of the Trump administration, how they have victimized a population that is so vulnerable and defamed them, libeled them, you know, made, you know, grotesque caricatures of them. But I still think that I'm glad that you're looking for your certificate of naturalization because I tell people that ask me, be afraid and lawyer up, you know, don't take anything.

42:59Right.

43:00Gary Shteyngart:And it's it's really striking to start with your memory of Soviet Russia and that oppression and hear you again, someone who has those credentials across the press, including Fox, join that concern. Before we go, I want to mention the book. You know, the Washington Post had this turn of phrase about another one of your great novels here. And I happen to be a reader and a fan of many of them. Thank you. That you allow us to feel the toothache under the laughter. Yeah, thank you. That's very sweet. So in this book, Vera, the title character, she is 10 years old, but she's growing up in a system where there's a constitutional amendment that gives certain people who are exceptional five-thirds of the vote.

43:36and they are people who can trace their heritage to the Revolutionary War. This book came out July 8th. July 9th, J.D. Vance gave a speech saying people who can trace their heritage to the Revolutionary War are exceptional Americans. He's not yet saying that he's going to give them five-thirds of a vote, but it's incredible. Usually, when I write dystopian fiction, it's set 10 years ahead. This took one day for it to come true. I know Usha Vance is a huge reader, so maybe it's a short book. Maybe she sped read through it and said, hey, J.D., I have an idea. You know, let's make them exceptional Americans.

44:07But the whole problem here is, and this has been the problem in America for a long time, is the way certain Americans are more American than others. That's why I wrote this book, because I have a son, and I want him to be, you know, respected for who he is, not based on where he can trace his heritage to. And that's, I think, what this whole administration is doing.

44:26Gary Shteyngart:Yeah, and I have 30 seconds voicing a child character with full complexity. How do you do it? You've got to have children. I never thought I'd have a kid. And I used to not like them, but now I really, really like them. How about that? There's such a great return on investment with kids because they say the most amazing things. I used to think kids were stupid, but they're really not. And now I find them much more interesting than a lot of my friends. So it's basically your kid is how you did it. Well, in a way, I also, I mean, it's not him. He's a boy. This character is a girl. But listening to some of his friends, especially the girls, girls mature much earlier.

44:59So there's more of a kind of emotional well to draw from. and also the book is a little bit about New York's educational system because it takes place here and as a survivor of Stuyvesant, I can talk about that.

45:10Gary Shteyngart:You've had several hits. When are you going to have a clunker? I feel like you've had several hit books in a row. I'm ready. I'm ready for it. I want to fail. I've got to figure this out. Failure. Well, hold on. You are known to some as little failure. Yes, my mom's nickname for me growing up. That tells us a lot. Gary Haraldo, thanks. The novel again. And in our faith, we'll be right back. That's hilarious. Thanks for spending time with us. Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie. And one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home. Because with every fix, update, and renovation, it becomes a little more your own.

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