Does America really "want a dictator"?

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. Not that I don't have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the President of the United States. If I think our country's in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it. But it would be nice if they'd call and they'd say, would you do it? That is Donald Trump. I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the President of the United States. No checks, no balances, no one saying, Donald, you can't do this. He thinks he is omnipotent, ubiquitous. The direction of travel is pretty clear. Trump wants control of everything, of institutions like the Fed, Harvard, the Smithsonian, and of anyone he perceives to be his enemy.

0:47The question is, is anyone actually stopping him? Welcome to the News Agents USA.

0:59It's John. It's Emily. And Lisa Cook may not be a name that is very familiar to you, but it's going to become more familiar because she is on the board of the Federal Reserve, an independent body that sets monetary policy for the US. Last week, at the end of last week, Donald Trump took it upon himself to fire her for grounds that are, well, let's say, dubious at the least and also raise questions over, does Donald Trump have the right to sack who is on the board of the Federal Reserve? She's the only black woman, the first black woman to be appointed to it. But Donald Trump says there are questions over something she did about mortgages and therefore she's not fit to be serving.

1:47There has been nothing proven against her whatsoever. And it looks like a naked power grab by Donald Trump to get rid of someone who'd been appointed by Joe Biden for a 14 year term to put someone in who will do his bidding so that Donald Trump will set the interest rates for the United States of America, not a bunch of independent minded officials, technocrats who've got America's best interests at heart. Yeah, as you say, she's one of seven governors who sits on the Federal Reserve Board. She was nominated by the Biden administration in 2022 and approved, confirmed by the Senate. And I guess the question is how she entered Trump's orbit.

2:30And this is where things get sublimely crazy as ever. It was a perfectly random tweet by somebody presumably desperate to placate Trump. His name is Bill Pult. He's Director of Federal Housing under Donald Trump. And he suddenly takes to social media and he posts that he's found evidence that Lisa Cook has committed mortgage fraud. Questions of the kind that we're pretty familiar with here. You know, whether you paid tax on your first property, your primary residence or your second. and he says that she got a more favorable rate from the bank. These are just his posts. There has been no evidence.

3:09There has been no investigation. There has been no charge against Lisa Cook. And what's kind of delightful in the middle of all this is that Lisa Cook just says, no, I'm not going. I'm not going anywhere. Trump has no right to fire me. And to be fair, the Federal Reserve Board is pretty well protected. They cannot just be fired by the president. And she said, I'm not going anywhere. I'll get lawyers in. I'll sue if needs be. And so far, the Fed have stayed behind her and said, yeah, she's still on. And I guess you have to put this in the context of the months of wrangling that Trump has been having with the Fed up till this point.

3:50All this noise about whether he's going to fire the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell. He wants Jerome Powell to cut interest rates. Jerome Powell is independent. He's an economist. He's saying, no, I'll do it when it's ready, when the economy demands. I won't do it on the say-so of a man who wants to be an autocrat. And so I guess in the last, what, 10 days, Trump has backed off firing the older white guy. He doesn't want to upset the markets. And he's fired the deputy, the board member, the black woman instead. And yes, you know, she's the first black woman on the Fed board, which might just be one big, huge coincidence or it might not.

4:31And so there you have this massive overreach where Trump is basically trying to control something that cannot be controlled, which is the state of the economy. Jerome Powell has been pretty outspoken. I mean, they have this big sort of central bankers meeting in Wyoming, in Jackson Hole. It's a big meeting where everyone comes together and they kind of talk about the state of the economy, the state of the world, the direction of travel. And it was just kind of around this time when all eyes of the world are on the central bankers that she suddenly finds that she's been fired. Jerome Powell had been very candid.

5:08He's one of the few people that stood up to Trump. There is a moment where Trump is being shown around the renovations of the Federal Reserve and he starts telling Jerome Powell that he's overspent, that the budget's overspent. And Jerome Powell goes, no, you're wrong. We haven't overspent. I think you're getting confused with a previous renovation, another building that happened five years ago. He stands up to Trump and essentially says he's wrong. And he's also been pretty clear about what he thinks Trump is doing to the economy. He said it, I mean, in very kind of neutral economic language.

5:41He's talked about the tariffs making things much harder for American businesses and American consumers. He's talked about the tightening of the labor market. In In other words, it's pretty hard to get people to work now because ISIS sort of fired and deported so many people. There aren't enough people in the labor market. And so he's kind of been pretty frank about where he thinks the economy is going. And as a result, Trump has kind of taken again him, can't fire him because he doesn't want to upset the markets. And so he goes, as ever, for the woman instead. At the moment, I mean, we're kind of looking at the bond markets and they are sort of muted but wary.

6:20You know, they're not reacting because she hasn't actually gone, but they're kind of saying, I'm not massively sure this is the trajectory we want to be on right now. But this is part of a piece, isn't it? Because we saw the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics being fired a couple of weeks ago. What was her crime? She published the Labour Statistics. you know pure and simple that was it she had come up she had produced the numbers that the labor statisticians had come up with which showed that there was a slowing in the labor market in the united states of america that was an uncomfortable truth for donald trump it gave him bad headlines so he said it was fake news it was a biden appointee she has to go as well and so what you are doing and this is the gamble that donald trump is taking the establishment of the Federal Reserve as this truly independent body was always at the outset viewed with suspicion.

7:16Which politician was going to give up control over the levers of the macroeconomic policy for a country? No one was. We can't believe that it would be truly independent. And it's been hard earned and hard won that the setting of interest rates in the United States is not being done for short-term political manipulation. It's being done for the long-term good of macroeconomic stability for the US. And in Britain, we've had something very similar in 1997 after Blair wins the election. Gordon Brown announces the operational independence of the Bank of England, where they are set targets for inflation and growth, but they are not told when to raise interest rates and when to cut them.

8:01Donald Trump clearly wants to scrap all of that. And that has profound consequences for the global economy. If you think that the numbers you are seeing coming out of the world's biggest economy, the United States of America, are bullshit. And that is the danger of what Donald Trump is doing now. And that is why everyone, as you say, Emily, is watching the bomb markets to see what he might do next, what the consequences will be. But there is a pattern, isn't there? I mean, as you say, when he doesn't like the economic numbers, he fires the woman at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When he doesn't like what's happening to interest rates, he fires the woman again at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

8:45And when he doesn't like somebody in political life, he goes after them. This is the week in which he suddenly sent FBI agents around to John Bolton's house. You will know John Bolton, the sort of mustachioed former NSA director who is now a very vocal critic of Trump and who has ironically accused Trump of retribution politics. Now, Trump comes out. Emily, Emily, you've got to stop you there. Donald Trump said he didn't know anything at all about the FBI action against John Bolton. Saw it on television at the same time as you did. So it's not Trump. It's not Kash Patel. It's just the independent working of the FBI agents who suddenly turn up at his Maryland home and start going through his papers.

9:34And the one thing Trump says is, oh, yeah, well, I know how that feels because it happened to me at Mar-a-Lago. So no retribution going on here at all. And I think the pick of John Bolton is quite a clever one because he's a man who, I mean, we've had him on the news agents before. He's quite irascible, but he's quite outspoken. And he's slightly, I guess, politically friendless. You know, he hasn't pleased the MAGA crowd because he's been a vocal critic of Trump. He hasn't pleased the Democrats because he is a neocon and he's always been staunchly against the Democrats, even at his most vocal criticism of Trump.

10:14And he hasn't really got a home, even with the sort of old school Republicans now who, I don't know, I mean, have kind of lost their voice and don't really see him as one of their own either. And so I think in going after Bolton, Trump has found somebody that nobody is vocally defending enough. And actually, at this point, we should just say, you do not have to like somebody's politics. You do not have to like what they stand for as a politician or as a political voice to say it is wrong to take your retribution out on people who criticize you. And it is very clear that is what Trump is doing right now.

10:58He's doing it with John Bolton. He's doing it with the Fed. He's even threatening to do it with Chris Christie, you know, former New Jersey governor, another one who stood against Trump this time around in 2024 and was very outspoken in his criticism. Trump is basically just ticking them off, trying to put heads on sticks and parade them around the town. It seems that he has control or he's getting control of the Fed. We've talked about what's happening at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He has absolute and total control over the Justice Department, where there always used to be the idea that the Attorney General was somehow separate from the President of the United States.

11:40Donald Trump is now going around and saying, I am the man who is in charge and responsible for law and order in this country. Well, then he is responsible for the knock on the door at John Bolton's home where the FBI swoop in and take away bags and bags of stuff belonging to Mr Bolton as part of an inquiry. John Bolton was appointed the national security adviser by Donald Trump in his first term. He was a Trump appointee and for a while he was very highly regarded. But John Bolton's always been where he's been, which is he is a hawk. He is a neocon. He is one of those people who has sort of aggressively believed that America should be a leader of policing the world.

12:24And as a consequence, you know, those are the views he's espoused for successive Republican presidents. He has been a public servant of the United States for kind of nearly 50 years. The other thing that Donald Trump did, and if you think that we're overdoing this kind of line of the politics of vengeance, there is a credible threat against John Bolton from the Iranians who John Bolton has advocated that America should attack and depose the people in charge in Tehran. there is a credible terrorist threat against John Bolton from the Iranian security people. Donald Trump stripped Bolton of his security detail so that Bolton has no security whatsoever now.

13:09And Donald Trump has followed that up via the attorney general to say, right, we're going to raid his home and see if he had documents that he shouldn't have had. I mean, he had nothing compared to what Donald Trump had squirreled away at Mar-a-Lago that was going to lead to a credible case against him, but for the intervention of the Supreme Court. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? There's always a story that takes you for a moment or two down a rabbit hole. So in John Bolton's case, it's about the book that he published, the memoir he published and whether he used information that was classified.

13:46John Bolton got his book signed off before it was published. That is just what you have to do before you release a book if you've been the head of the National Security Agency. And yet they have confected this argument that he's in possession of classified materials. Who else was accused of being in possession of classified materials? I mean, that's where it gets sort of silly. In this revenge politics, he couldn't even change the excuse. And it's the same thing that we do when it's Lisa Cook and we start going down this rabbit hole of, oh, well, was her mortgage wrong? Oh, well, did she not pay the tax on her primary residence?

14:23It's actually the same thing in a way. You were talking about the Maureen Dowd piece last week about crime on the streets of Washington. It's the same thing. It takes everyone down this rabbit hole. Yes, of course, there's crime in Washington. There is crime in many blue state cities of America. There's crime in many red state cities of America. But instead of actually saying what is at stake here is a power grab, it's a move to put soldiers, troops on the streets. It's not a move to solve crime. We start going down this kind of very whimsical, oh, well, we should just investigate and see whether there's a bit of truth in this.

15:00It's very tiring to keep doing that because actually there is always something that he wants to land as a grain of truth. And most of the time it's a diversion. It's a diversion so that the liberal media or the progressives or the people who call themselves good journalists and have to do a bit of on the one hand, on the other hand, investigate everything properly. Nobody wants to arrive at the conclusion that is almost inescapable right now, which is that Trump enjoys autocracy. He enjoys autocracy. He enjoys power. He wants to seize more and he will find whatever excuses he can to do it. I mean, we talk about John Bolton because he's a high profile figure, but it's not the first time.

15:41You know, we've seen what's happened to Miles Taylor, who wrote an op-ed that he objected to in his first term. We've seen what happened to Chris Krebs, who pronounced that Biden's election win was fair. Those two both got chased. Those two are both being investigated. it's happening all over the Justice Department. It's happening to lawyers who were actually the prosecutors of the January the 6th rioters. It's happening to lots of people a lot of the time. He's going after his enemies list. We know he has an enemies list because he told Kash Patel and Kash Patel put it in his book. This is what is being enacted now.

16:17If Trump doesn't like you because you've stood against him in any shape or form, he is now going after you. So let's go back to kind of how we started this episode where you raised the question, whatever happened to checks and balances in the United States? Because, you know, the US Constitution was very carefully drawn up by the founding fathers that there should be these three co-equal branches of government which keep each other in check so that nobody becomes over mighty. And, you know, you go back to one of the most fundamental ideas of the United States of America and why there is a Second Amendment, dare I say it, which is, you know, the right to bear arms, is that states should have the power to resist an overmighty federal government.

17:03And yet what are we seeing now as part of this trend where Donald Trump either wants to take over institutions or run them or intimidate those who are part of them? What are we seeing in Washington, D.C., with the National Guard coming in to take control and what we possibly are about to see in Chicago, where Donald Trump is saying, I don't care whether the people want me to send the National Guard into Chicago. I don't care whether the city elected officials don't want it. I don't care what the governor thinks. I am going to do it anyway. And it has brought this kind of, you know, pretty strong response.

17:44And J.B. Pritzker is the governor of Illinois, where Chicago is, has spoken out about what Donald Trump is proposing. Mr. President, do not come to Chicago.

18:01You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy. Most alarming, you seem to lack any appropriate concern as our commander-in-chief for the members of the military that you would so callously deploy as pawns in your ever more alarming grabs for power. Yeah. I mean, J.B. Pritzker is showing a little bit of muscle. I might even say machismo there. He joins Gavin Newsom, who we talked about last week, the governor of California. He possibly also joins Wes Brown, the governor of Maryland.

18:48These are three of the Democrats' potential hopes for the 2028 election, the presidential election. and each in their own way have decided that they've just had enough of taking this lying down. They're kicking back. Newsom is doing it with parody on Twitter. He's trolling Trump. He's using his block capitals. Wes Brown is inviting Trump to join him on the streets. Walk the streets of Baltimore with me if you want. I'll show you what goes on in the city, implying that Trump doesn't know. And Pritzker is doing the same thing. I mean, the jab about Trump's mental faculties is meant to make him go, ouch.

19:27It is a way of saying we've had enough. We're not going to take this lying down. And I think the fight back, yeah, is sort of starting there. I mean, it's definitely not starting with Republican lawmakers who don't seem to care what's going on. It definitely isn't really happening in the House of Representatives, in Congress in general. And maybe it is now the governors who are going to take this fight properly to Trump, Because, as you say, there is a sense of protecting your state. And that is a very, very strong sense of what America is about. You know, your statehood first. Yeah, absolutely.

20:05And you talked about the Republicans who aren't going to take the fight to Donald Trump. You know, going back into history, Abraham Lincoln, a Republican president, assembled after the Civil War, this cabinet around him, which was known as the team of rivals. They'd all opposed Abraham Lincoln, but for the sake of national unity, he wanted to bring together rival strands. Let no one say that Donald Trump has done that with the cabinet that he has assembled around him, because we can listen now to a little flavour of the cabinet meeting and the full and frank exchange of ideas and views. Mr. President, I invite you to see your big beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president of the American worker, along with the American flag and President Roosevelt.

20:58Working for this government, for you, is the greatest honor of my life. I tell it to everybody and I really do feel that way and I thank you. You have breathed life back into the profession of law enforcement. Your respect for law enforcement is so incredible. It's making a difference.

21:13Patrick Gaspard:This is just such a great opportunity really to recognize your leadership as a true champion for working people. Well, everyone knows there's no stronger advocate for hardworking American families than you. Mr. President, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to work for you. Our country has never been so secure thanks to you. You have brought us back from the edge. And there's only one thing I wish for, that that noble committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since the noble piece, this noble award. Oh, it's joyous, isn't it? Well, it is vomit-inducing, and it is also pretty damn scary, actually.

21:54I mean, Timothy Schneider, who wrote the whole book about autocracy, his first chapter is Do Not Obey. And actually, what we are hearing is person after person, sycophant after sycophant, around Trump who are just acquiescing to whatever he wants. And I think it leads us to a really big question. And it's really difficult not to sound like you're sort of hitting the nuclear button when you talk like this. But he has said that America would welcome a dictator. He said he didn't want to be a dictator, but he thinks America would welcome a dictator if he cleared up crime. He likes to take control of institutions.

22:39He likes to go after his enemies. He likes to send the FBI and the Justice Department in to arrest people. He likes to deport people with people wearing masks on their faces. At what point do we say, this isn't fascism? Oh, no, this is fine. This is okay. Don't be dramatic. Don't be silly. Don't reach for that stupid word the whole time. But I just don't know what it is. I mean, you know, maybe we should ask our listeners, what is it then? If it isn't dictatorship, if it isn't autocracy, if it isn't fascist, to go after your enemies, to arrest people without due process, to surround yourself with people who will never criticize and only flatter, to take control of institutions that have always been independent and always flourished as independent institutions.

23:32What is it then? What is the name for this, if it's not that? Well, next year, we have the midterm elections next November. And if the Democrats take control of a tightly balanced house, then, of course, things look very different for Donald Trump, because the inquiries that will be set up will be very, very unfavourable to him and focus much more on his behaviour. so we've seen what's been happening in texas with the attempt to redistrict to create an extra five republican seats we were talking a moment ago about the national guard going into illinois we've talked about the national guard being deployed to washington if you've got the national guard on the streets next november what happens to turnout in strong republican areas when you know that Donald Trump's police are on the streets at his behest answering to him?

24:30Will that increase turnout or will it suppress turnout in Democrat areas? If you're cynical you would absolutely alight on the question Emily that you have just raised. This isn't about cancelling elections but there again the really good political leaders never need to cancel elections. They carry on just on an uneven playing field. And in a moment, we'll be hearing from one of the key figures around Zoram Amdani as he runs to be New York mayor in November.

25:13The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. So November the 4th, no big presidential election this year, of course. no midterms, but there is one race that everyone is going to be watching very intently, and that is what happens in New York, where we have this extraordinary collection of characters, Zoran Mamdani, who is the man that Trump calls the communist, the socialist, Ugandan-born young man who really seems to have the young voters of New York on his side. He is a populist, an economic populist, very much of the left. And he's standing against the former disgraced governor, Andrew Cuomo, who was made to leave his job after sexual mismanagement allegations.

26:01I'm kind of going carefully here because he will say that nothing was proven. And they're both standing against Eric Adams, who is the incumbent mayor, but a man who also faces charges of corruption, and against Curtis Lewa, who is the de facto Republican candidate who no one really seems to be talking about very much. The Trump question is the one that is quite key here. Is he going to lend his backing to any of these candidates? To disgraced Eric Adams, to arguably disgraced Cuomo, or certainly not to Mamdani, who he loathes, does Trump have a role in this race at all well it's so interesting i mean cuomo is willing donald trump to come in on his side and they were absolute loggerheads during the whole covid period where cuomo was kind of you know taunting trump about how you should be running things when covid first started in 2020 i can't help thinking that the person that donald trump would most love to see win the New York mayoral contest is Zoramandani.

27:09It's a perfect foil for Donald Trump to have someone who is of the radical left, who is this new breed of Democrat, the first Muslim mayor of New York. I mean, we know what he thinks about the Muslim mayor of London for apparent reasons that I don't know whether it's anything to do with his religion, but he seems to have very firm views about Sadiq Khan. Donald Trump would love it to have Zoramandani as the mayor because that gives him a punch bag that he can hit hard. So I can't see. How quickly would troops be on the streets of New York if that happened? And there'll be troops on the streets of New York before you can say boo.