Trump Plagued by Gas Prices, War in Iran, Clash with Pope

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0:59Ty Cobb:Welcome to The Beat, everyone. We are prepping a lot tonight. Former Trump White House official, Counselor Ty Cobb on the Donald Trump DOJ overreach, plus questions about Trump's mental acuity. We are talking about someone who is as credible as they come and has been a straight talker. Ty Cobb coming up. By the end of the hour, famed New York novelist Jay McInerney is here. We begin with Trump's agenda swamped by blunders and an inability to message. There is a rolling backlash to Donald Trump posting that he is a type of Jesus, something that he lied about in a strange denial. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, also getting into the religious game now, he says that journalists who report on Trump's mistakes in Iran or the wider war are like biblical figures who betrayed, of course, because look at the comparison they keep trying to make, which their own supporters have called blasphemy.

1:52Ty Cobb:It's like betraying Jesus. Jesus entered a synagogue and healed a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees came to watch. Even though they witnessed a literal miracle, it didn't matter. The Pharisees went out and immediately held counsel against him. How to destroy him. Our press are just like these Pharisees. That's what's coming out of the Pentagon during a war on a week where the president has had to delete and backtrack from a post called Blasphemous. The vice president has sort of heckled the Pope, and on we go. About 30 minutes later, the Pope discussed figures who manipulate religion. Woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.

2:52The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants. It is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.

3:02Ty Cobb:The Pope there addressing the faithful amid this clash with Trump. The administration has now canceled millions in funding for a Catholic charity that shelters and cares for migrant children. J.D. Vance's attempt to get involved in this by pretending or suggesting that the United States government should issue orders to the Pope, something that manages to offend the Pope's followers and plenty of Americans who believe in the separation of church and state. Well, the Vance train has gotten its own treatment on late night. Let me remind you guys that what the Pope basically said was, war is bad.

3:43Ty Cobb:That's not controversial, all right? It's literally the Pope's job to say things like that. That's like if Miss America wished for world peace and J.D. Vance burst on stage and was like, oh, yeah, even with Hitler? Stay in your lane.

4:00Ty Cobb:These are problems of Trump's making from policy to messaging. A feud with the Pope is not something most politicians in any country would want to continue. The war is unpopular from the left to the right, from MAGA to the center. And the financial burdens are only increasing for all Americans. I want to get right to it because we have a lot coming up, including the stories and guests I mentioned. So our kickoff guest here is the great E.J. Dion, well known, of course, to our viewers. He is now a New York Times opinion writer and a Georgetown professor. He has many books, including sold out reclaiming faith and politics after the religious right, which is why we thought of you amidst this strange news cycle.

4:38Ty Cobb:What do you think is important here? First of all, thanks for having me on and listening to Hegseth at the beginning of the show attacking the press for asking questions, challenging accounts. I mean, Jesus did not get crucified because he supported the authorities. He challenged authorities. But I think it's really remarkable that J.D. Vance has a new book coming out about becoming Catholic, and he decided to pick a fight with the Pope over just war doctrine. He said the Pope doesn't understand just war doctrine. Now, first of all, the Pope was the leader of the Augustinian order, and St. Augustine was the originator of just war doctrine, so the Pope knows something about it.

5:21It was refined by Thomas Aquinas. If you look at the—he should have picked up the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which tells you what the church's doctrine is. And the first principle is that the damage inflicted by the oppressor must be lasting, grave, and certain. When this war began, Iran wasn't attacking us. Iran was negotiating with us. So by the first principle, you say, no, this war really didn't survive strictly by just war doctrine. The second is all other means of putting this problem to bed, that's not the word, but putting this problem aside should be shown to be impractical. But we didn't give the negotiations a chance.

6:07And so when the Pope says that this is an unjust war, the greatest irony here is that if you believe, which I do, the accounts that say J.D. Vance thought this war was unnecessary, advised Trump not to pursue it, He is absolutely justifying exactly what the Pope said in challenging the justice of this war. So it's very, very strict. And it may be, EJ, it may be the greatest irony.

6:34Ty Cobb:It's one of many competing ironies because the idea that injecting more religious interpretation or politicians doing theology into a Middle East battle that involves Iran, Israel, Hezbollah, feuding claims to supremacy by the Shia and Sunni factions, Christianity, Judaism. And that's just a quick tour. The idea that we need more half-baked theology is rich. What do you see as Trump's political... Go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, I oppose George W. Bush's policies in Iraq. But Bush was very careful in a lot of his speeches not to do what J.D. Vance did and what Pete Hegseth did. I think one of the things that set the Pope off was Hegseth asking all Americans to pray for our troops in the name of Jesus Christ.

7:29A couple of problems with that. One is we are all Americans, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, all kinds of, and atheists. You know, we pray, people should pray for the troops in their own tradition if they want, but we're not all going to pray in the name of Jesus Christ and shouldn't be asked to by a public official. Secondly, he combined that with this kind of blood-curdling language, you know, bring over—I've got the quote here— bring overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. That's not Christian language as traditionally understood. Maybe it's Christian nationalist language.

8:09And then on your point, it's absolutely right. We do not want religion to get mixed up in a situation where you have so much religious diversity and such a long tradition of fighting each other over religion.

8:25Ty Cobb:And that's where the foreign policy problem melds with this religious blasphemy political problem they have because they've offended a lot of people, including their supporters. But on the foreign policy level, there's still the open question of was this war about oil? Was it about disarming Iran? Was it about changing the hardline regime, which doesn't just mean moving from father to son, but some large regime change? Was it about liberating the Iranian people? A combination of those or something else. And so when you throw into there, maybe it's partly also religious war. You're not helping.

8:57Ty Cobb:I did want to get to you on the politics. A lot of our viewers know you for many years, E.J. as a real political expert who's clear, who I think is an empath and a passionate person. You can debate me on that if you want. When you look at the politics here of Trump's supporters saying, we don't want more people in an open-ended forever war. We're worried about the cost at home. It's not America first. And they don't want more of our folks at risk or dying over there for an undefined foreign policy. Where do you see the politics of that playing out? The politics of this war have been terrible for Trump.

9:31There was a CBS poll a couple of days ago, I think, that showed that even among white working class voters who were among Trump's strongest supporters, they approved him by two to one at the beginning of his term. They're now, you know, 52, 48 against him. If he's losing that core piece of his base, it's a signal of what's happening. And the fact that they have not explained this well at the beginning, in the middle or whatever point we're at now, I think leaves people asking, why did a guy who said no to Middle East wars in both of his presidential campaigns get us involved in a war which looked ill thought out at the beginning, the middle and right to the closing act, whenever we hit that?

10:17And among a lot of conservatives, Ross Douthat at the Times made the point that fighting with the pope on this is pretty dumb because a lot of conservative Catholics who might have voted for Trump don't like this war because they don't understand why we're fighting it. And so I think this war not only alienated all the people who never liked Trump in the first place, it alienated a lot of people who didn't elect him to do this. They elected him to do something else. By the way, They elected him to lower prices, and this is only making that problem worse.

10:50Ty Cobb:Yeah. E.J. Dionne, always great to see you. Thanks for coming back. And, of course, some of your scholarship is relevant tonight. Our thanks to E.J. Dionne. Coming up by the end of the hour, why the war problems Trump is facing echo his COVID failures for many voters. But next, the DOJ abuse of power. We have former Trump White House insider Ty Cobb. We're back together in 90 seconds.

11:19Ty Cobb:The Department of Justice is in a slow-rolling set of scandals. The Attorney General ousted. The Epstein files led to what looked like the DOJ breaking the law at the highest level. And now questions about who will run this place. Pam Bondi, of course, failed to carry out Trump's objective of punishing enemies by getting them prosecuted and jailed. None of those cases have actually gone anywhere. where now her replacement for now Acting Attorney General Blanche is a contender for the permanent post. And here's how he sounds. Every single person in this administration, me included, and obviously Attorney General Bondi as well, we serve at the pleasure of the president.

11:59Ty Cobb:And that's true of any administration. And so the president has the right and the duty and the obligation to make sure that he has folks that he wants. and the president may choose somebody besides me to be the attorney general today. I can't speak to his thinking. I can't speak to what happened the past year. All I can say is that we have a very defined mission that we've been trying to execute and will continue to execute. Parts of that mission might be non-controversial. They enforce federal law. So if you want to be as charitable as possible, okay, you have that mission. But the main stuff that Trump has been demanding and the public reason for firing Bondi has been the failure to carry out the personal vindictive partisan mission.

12:45Ty Cobb:Meanwhile, the director of National Intel, Tulsi Gabbard, has reportedly sent criminal referrals to the DOJ over two officials who testified, and by all public accounts we believe honestly, about Trump's past impeachable offenses. Gabbard might be doing that as a relatively quick way to try to show that she gets the memo about revenge prosecutions. Roger Stone has popped up again, and boy, we've been following him around Trump for decades, as a force here. People can decide whether they think that is a sign of a nonpartisan DOJ and DNI or something else. Beyond the revenge cases, you have Senator Thune, the leader, telling Trump, wrap up the discredited and so far failed effort to indict the chair of the Federal Reserve, Senator Tillis, holding the line.

13:36Ty Cobb:We hear about when Republicans will do that. Well, sometimes they do it. He says they won't even confirm Trump's new pick, not because there's necessarily a problem with that pick in the Republican senator's view, but because of the documented ongoing efforts to possibly illegally berate Chairman Powell. I'm joined by Ty Cobb, former White House attorney in the first Trump administration, who has been a straight talker and at times a critic. Welcome back. Hey, great to be with you, Ari. What do you think of what the attorney, the acting attorney, General Blanche, is saying? How much of what he's saying is within the bounds or out?

14:10Ty Cobb:And what is he getting at? What is he implying? I think the most accurate thing he said was he can't talk about what happened in the last year because everything that happened in the last year is an atrocity. and turns the Justice Department, which was a beacon of hope and protected civil rights, protected us from counterterrorism, and prosecuted real criminals into a completely partisan revenge squad, as you highlighted. They have tried to wipe out history, the history of the one time in American history when a president refused to honor the peaceful transfer of power and attempted a coup, threatening congressmen and a vice president.

14:59That's continuing now with efforts to reduce or eliminate convictions that have previously occurred with regard to some of the most violent and most seditious of the 1-6 protesters. And this is a man, Blanche, who was he was not a distinguished prosecutor, but he was a he was a good lawyer. He did a good job at the at the Justice Department when he was in the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District. People had some hope for him when he when he started to represent the president and that he would be helpful and provide some guardrails. But he's abandoned that out of pure ambition. He's moved his family into a conclave in Florida near Mar-a-Lago, where perhaps there are like-minded people.

15:43But his old friends in the U.S. Attorney's Office have given up on him. Yeah, and I'll jump in.

15:47Ty Cobb:I'll let you finish. But you're being fair and diplomatic. I cannot see someone with Mr. Blanche's background serving at this level as acting AG in any other Republican administration. Just didn't have the experience. It would seem, and you can give us your view, that the president prized his personal loyalty over any brief. And that's a difference from, say, Attorney General Barr. A hundred percent. And there was no leadership in his in his history. There are no history of of actually real real achievements beyond being a line prosecutor. You know, he I mean, and that's not to denigrate him. I mean, there are a lot of people like that that I admire, but he has no business being the acting attorney general.

16:30I mean, this is somebody whose transformation into a Trump sycophant is highlighted by the fact that he went and extorted a benign statement that we now know, based on the Epstein files that have been released, was a complete falsehood by Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for beneficial prison conditions and moving her. This is somebody who, along with Bondi, has refused to prosecute the agents who we've seen kill people like Renee Good and Alex Preddy. This is somebody who has tried to turn the January 6th coup and uprising into a non-event by pardoning people and eliminating not only the prosecutors, but the FBI agents.

17:15And now trying to who were involved in the investigations and prosecutions, but now trying to overturn the convictions. So this is not somebody with any character left and certainly somebody who has abandoned his oath. You know, after 250 years of the rule of law and the premise in America that no one was above the law, we now know that these people serve only Trump. And they're willing to carry out his revenge. They're willing to interfere with elections. They're willing to seize ballots. They're willing to lie to courts. They've been called on that many, many times. They have sacrificed the so-called rule of or the presumption of regularity, which attended representations by federal prosecutors in court because judges now know that they just lie.

18:03Right.

18:04Ty Cobb:And they have an oath that goes above and beyond their political party. That's different than someone who's working on the campaign. Ty, we've had a discourse here rooted in facts and evidence about the uncomfortable question of whether Donald Trump is in decline or losing it. And we look at the facts. I want to come back with you and show. And again, viewers make up their own mind things that sometimes aren't even on the news. They certainly aren't on Fox News for reasons people are about to see. So I'm talking about the unhinged remarks from the president. We have a special way to show them we haven't seen before.

18:37Ty Cobb:where I know you've agreed to stay. Ty stays, and we have that next.

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20:27Ty Cobb:Trump White House veteran Ty Cobb is with us. He has previously publicly warned about not only Trump's law listening but aspects of his observable mental state. That's now drawing more scrutiny. Ty is standing by, and I want to go through some reporting. There is documented erratic and odd behavior. The Times discussing these issues, concern among Trump vets. They discuss the social media posts, increasingly long tangents, lies, in fact, friendly claims that seem to show Trump as more confused than just the old lying. Allies rattled. Now, we know another aging president saw Americans reassess his capacity in real time.

21:07Ty Cobb:Then President Biden faced concerns at that now infamous debate. But Americans are seeing examples with Trump in a different way, more slowly over the past few months of diversions, inhibition and frequent episodes of confusion. To 25 million and it would be better. It would be better. See this pen right here? The stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland. So Iceland's already cost us a lot of money. So this pen is very inexpensive. But it writes well. I like it. I picked those drapes in my first term. I always liked gold. I love the government like I love myself economically.

21:48I got all you people looking and you're saying, there must be something wrong with Trump. You think Tom Tillis is going to give you a vote? Well, we're going to have to find out. He might not, but that's why Tom Tillis is no longer a senator. OK. On the on the on the. Tom Tillis is no longer a senator, right? Well, he's on his way out. Well, no, he quit, but he quit.

22:07Ty Cobb:Tom Tillis is a senator. He has not quit or resigned. Now, Trump has had to walk back some of his recent posts that's been in the news for days, including, of course, the Jesus posts. but also pretty recently those extremely abhorrent and racist attack on the Obamas, which he posted and then took down. There are other long rants that he stood by, which if you think about it would have anyone questioning how their grandpa was doing if they said stuff like this at the dinner table. I'm just showing one, but there are several, including some Allah praising, cursing, and genocidal rants towards Iran.

22:45Ty Cobb:Praise be to Allah, says the president, for no apparent reason. The Times also describing another element of the newer sign of decline, which is Trump has long joked about how he weaves from topic to topic. But some tangents suggest something else, a kind of loss of control or a sense of public confusion. In December, he went veering off topic at an event that was celebrating the holidays. And he went from the normal things you'd expect a politician to say in that venue to a ramble about poisonous snakes in Peru. Here's the thing. It lasted eight minutes. Eight minutes on the snakes. And here's why that might matter in how we learn things nowadays.