Fascist + Feckless: "The Worst Cocktail in the World for Democracy" | Pivot

All this foreign policy chaos is conveniently distracting from the story Trump doesn't want to discuss, which again, is Jeffrey Epstein. [upbeat music] Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Scott Galloway.

How you doing, Scott?

I'm doing well.

How's it going?

How are you?

This has been quite a week. This, uh, what's going on in this country is really disturbing [chuckles] on so many levels, and-

Yeah.

It's been disturbing. Um, and, uh, I don't know what to say. I think we probably should just get to the news. First, very quickly, Donald Trump, uh, and I can't believe I'm saying this, is threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act as anti-ICE protests intensify in Minneapolis, largely because they've been egged on by ICE itself. The latest protests in the city began when a federal officer shot a man in the leg on Wednesday, just a week after an ICE agent fatally shot 37-year-old Rene Good. Uh, I, I, I don't quite know what to say. This is like, they are... From what- The, the word in Washington is Stephen Miller wants, uh, something that he can invoke the Insurrection Act and then declare martial law so they can't have l- midterm elections. That's the, that's the conspiracy theory running around Washington right now, and I got to say, this is- they are causing the problem, that you can look at these videos and see, like, absolutely pushing over old people, asking for people's papers. I feel like I'm, I'm in the middle of, like, a Nazi movie or something at this point. Thoughts?

Well, we talked about this last time. The very founding of America was meant to, uh, avoid this. The, uh... Not wanting a monarch that could have unilateral, unchecked power and start harassing and terrorizing the population is, [scoffs] is the basis of the founding of America. The question is, what do you do about it? And what's really disappointed me, and I've h- been on the phone with a couple Democrats, is I believe that, uh, people at ICE and the officials and administrators who have ordered them and created a context around this, I think that they potentially could be guilty of second or third-degree murder, of manslaughter, of criminally negligent homicide, and absolutely of assault. And what I would be doing very publicly in the Congress and Senate is passing two types of- or proposing two types of laws which will not pass now, but should we have the kind of a momentum we believe we're going to have in '26 and then in '28, make sure that these officials ordering this type of depraved behavior and the people executing it understand that this is absolutely a possibility, and those two bills are the following: One is criminal charges and resources will be allocated to and very, with a fine tooth and comb, go through all of this video and be willing to, to charge these individuals. And two, something that says potentially that for certain types of crimes, including anything with the word homicide in it, uh, that, uh, from this point forward, once the- it's- the pardons are no longer valid. There, there has to be... I do find that the Democrats, you know- The strongly worded letter kind of defines, in my opinion, and Democrats will say, "Well, look, there's very little we can do," and I'm sympathetic to that because they, they, they do not- They're the minority, uh, in, in all three houses. I get it, but these folks need to be reminded very swiftly that, okay, the same overrun of judicial power and co-equal branches of government that you've committed, we could do the same, but we're going to do it to, to [chuckles] quite frankly, go, uh, weaponize- not weaponize. We believe the law, just enforced as it is correctly, could put many of these people behind bars, or at a minimum, impair their careers, which would be-