Everyone Hates the State of the Union Address
The Mother Jones Podcast
Mother Jones
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2019
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The State of the Union address: What exactly is the point? On the one hand, Pelosi's Shutdown Smackdown put Trump in a corner by threatening to deny all that attention and adulation in a stately chamber during a primetime slot. On the other hand, maybe it's time to scrap this extravagant, over-baked format altogether? Host Jamilah King explores this time-honored presidential moment with two guests: James Fallows, staff writer at The Atlantic and former chief speech writer for President Jimmy Carter, and Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Rather than arguing the pros and cons, Fallows and Engel discuss what history can teach us about how to salvage the most important annual address of the presidency and turn it back into something both more traditional and more effective. But it wouldn't be possible to talk about any of this, of course, without assessing the lasting impact of Trump's extreme, norm-defying approach to presidential power.
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| 0:00.0 | This is a special breaking news edition of the Mother Jones podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm Jamila King in New York. |
| 0:06.0 | Happening today. happening today in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, under the pre-dawn cover of |
| 0:21.2 | darkness around a dozen agents wearing FBI emblazoned, bulletproof vests, |
| 0:26.8 | and other tactical gear wielded flashlights and firearms, and banged on the door of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. |
| 0:37.0 | That dramatic video was recorded by a CNN camera crew camped outside of Stone's home. |
| 0:48.0 | Special Counsel Robert Mueller snares another Trump world figure. Stone was arrested and indicted on seven |
| 0:55.2 | counts including obstruction and witness tampering. But just who is Roger Stone? |
| 1:01.2 | And how close does all of this get to the President of the United States? |
| 1:07.0 | Joining us to break all of this down for you is Mother Jones Washington DC Bureau Chief David Corn and Dan Friedman, the Mother Jones reporter |
| 1:15.8 | who has been down nearly every rabbit hole in the Russia investigation so far, and specifically Roger Stone's connections to it. |
| 1:24.8 | Welcome back to the show, David, Dan. |
| 1:26.7 | Good to be with you. |
| 1:28.9 | David Corn, who is Roger Stone? |
| 1:31.8 | Roger Stone is a self-described political trickster, |
| 1:36.7 | a conspiracy theorist who has written a book saying that |
| 1:39.5 | LBJ killed JFK, and a long time advisor to Donald Trump as well as being part of a lobbying |
| 1:48.3 | firm once upon a time in Washington with Paul Manafort that represented autocrats, thugs, and dictators around the world. |
| 1:57.8 | So he is not a guy who's on the nice list when you're talking about naughty and nice. In the beginning of the |
| 2:04.5 | Trump campaign he was paid officially by Trump to help get that campaign going |
| 2:09.4 | but he ended up leaving the campaign early on and acted as an informal advisor, a mixer, just |
| 2:17.5 | a provocateur who loves being in the middle of any story, particularly false stories, that he himself has generated. |
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