#1682 Looking Back to Trump 1.0 (Remix)
Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy
Jay Tomlinson
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Air Date: 1/11/2025
Today, we look back to the warnings we gave ourselves at the beginning of the first Trump administration. In 2017 there was concern about corruption and his business dealings, ethics around his nominees, and the inability of the media to cover him properly.
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KEY POINTS
KP 1: What should Trump do to resolve his conflicts of interest? - @DecodeDC - Air Date 1-11-17
KP 3: Zephyr Teachout on Trump and the emoluments clause - Amicus from @Slate - Air Date 12-24-16
KP 4: Trump's team exhibits classic abuser behavior - Bradcast from @TheBradBlog - Air Date 1-23-17
KP 6: A Taxonomy of Trump Tweets - On the Media - Air Date 1-13-17
KP 7: Masha Gessen on the rules for surviving autocracy - Trumpcast from @Slate - Air Date 11-14-16
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this remix edition of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, where we remember the past and choose to repeat it. |
| 0:10.3 | Today's episode is a mix of clips we originally published in episodes 1074 and 1077 back in the very first days of the first Trump administration. |
| 0:19.5 | We thought it would be useful to look back on the |
| 0:21.1 | concerns we had over his corruption and business dealings, ethics related to his cabinet |
| 0:26.5 | nominees, and the failure of the media to cover him properly to see if we've learned anything |
| 0:32.2 | over the past eight years. Sources today include Decode DC, The Majority Report, Amicus, the Bradcast, Jay Smooth, on the media, and the Trumpcast. |
| 0:49.2 | The emoluments clause, and joining us to help understand what it is, is Zephyr Teachout. She's an associate |
| 0:55.6 | professor at the Fordham School of Law. And she is the author of Corruption in America, a book that |
| 1:02.1 | actually discusses strange arcane things like the Amoluments Clause. Zephyr ran for a congressional |
| 1:08.3 | seat in New York's 19th district in the November election. |
| 1:12.7 | And last week, she joined a whole bunch of anti-corruption activists to deliver petitions to Trump Tower, asking him to divest or put his assets into a blind trust. |
| 1:24.9 | So Zephyr, welcome to Amicus. |
| 1:30.6 | Oh, well, I'm thrilled to be on. And I just want to actually clarify something because there's a lot of terms floating around. Trump has to divest. If he doesn't |
| 1:38.3 | divest, he's violating the Constitution. So there's a separate sort of a second step, which is after |
| 1:44.1 | divesting, it should be put into a blind trust. |
| 1:46.8 | But if you're asking yourself, you know, if you're walking along saying, is he violating the Constitution or not? |
| 1:51.4 | The simple question is, has he liquidated his assets? |
| 1:55.4 | If he hasn't, he's violating the Constitution. |
| 1:58.1 | Well, maybe let's just break it down then. |
| 2:01.3 | I'm going to read Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution so that our listeners know what we're talking about. |
| 2:08.9 | It says that no American officeholder shall, quote, without the consent of the Congress, except of any present emolument office or title of any kind, whatever from any |
| 2:20.0 | king, prince, or foreign state, end quote. |
... |
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