American Mythology: The Presidency of Donald Trump (Part One: Manufacturing the Carnage)

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The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Donald Trump is often portrayed as an aberration of U.S. history, an outsider who seized power and is intent on destroying democracy as we know it. In the premiere episode of American Mythology, we examine the ways that Trump has proven to be a particularly dangerous autocrat who doesn’t believe in any semblance of a democratic process. But that story cannot be told without also exploring how various U.S. systems and the policies of Trump’s predecessors carved the way for many of his most dangerous actions. Featuring interviews with lawmakers, journalists, activists and dissidents, world renowned historians, and constitutional scholars and lawyers on the front lines of scores of battles against the Trump administration, this episode offers an overview of how the Republican Party has embraced Trump as a Trojan horse to ram through its most extreme — and long-standing — policy agendas. It also probes the role of Democratic Party leaders in facilitating some of Trump and the GOP’s most dangerous policies and lays out the stakes of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump is already calling illegitimate.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is intercepted.
0:30.0	I'm Jeremy Skehill coming to you from New York City and this is part one of an
0:37.6	intercepted special American mythology the presidency of Donald Trump.
0:52.0	Where does the story of the presidency of Donald Trump begin?
0:56.4	Pennsylvania goes to Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the president of the United States.
1:03.5	In an electoral college victory that virtually no one saw coming a year ago a few months ago.
1:10.0	A week ago. Even a month ago. Even yesterday.
1:12.9	A complete earthquake. This was an earthquake unlike any earthquake I've really seen since Ronald
1:18.0	Reagan in 1980 it just came out of nowhere. Nobody expected I mean.
1:25.3	Technically the Trump presidency began on a dreary cold day January 20th 2017 when Trump gave his
1:32.8	infamous American carnage speech in front of the US Capitol in Washington DC.
1:38.3	This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
1:48.0	But the story of this presidency doesn't begin on that day or even with the 2016 campaign.
2:18.0	The story does not begin with Trump's offhand threats to run for president over the decades.
2:27.2	If you lost your fortune today what would you do tomorrow? Maybe I'd run for president.
2:31.8	I don't know. Somebody has to help this country and if they don't the country and the world are in big trouble.
2:39.0	This sounds like political presidential talk to me and I know people have talked to you about whether or not you want to run.
2:45.2	Would you ever? Donald Trump the multi-millionaire real estate developer is sounding more like a politician these days
2:51.0	than America's most grandiose and controversial builder. I just want to tell you that.
2:55.6	You act like you're running for something.
2:57.2	We'll do a commercial. We'll let him think some of these over.
3:10.0	There is value to exploring the specifics of Donald J. Trump's personal path to unprecedented power.
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