Jonathan V. Last: Bullet Train to the Dark Place

Impolitic with John Heilemann

Audacy | Puck

News, Politics

4.8 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John is joined by Jonathan V. Last to discuss The Bulwark editor's contention that, less than three weeks into Trump 2.0, “we are in a constitutional crisis already.” JVL argues that the new administration’s early moves reflect a strategy of subjugating the legislative branch and daring the courts to stop it, then raises the question of whether the White House will comply with the judiciary’s rulings in any case. He also defends his position Democrats should expend no political capital to protect voters from Trump’s worst policy excesses—and explains why The New York Times is utterly unsuited to the meeting the moment in which our democracy now finds itself. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:35.1	Aloha and namaste everyone and welcome to Impolitic with John Heilman, a pocket
0:39.2	Odyssey joint featuring lively, in-depth, and sometimes ever so slightly profane conversations
0:44.4	with the people who roam the quarters of power and influence in America, weaving the
0:49.0	warp and weft of our politics and culture. Last week, the bulwarks Jonathan V. Last, aka JVL, published a piece that grabbed me by the
0:59.7	lapels and gave me a good hard shake. Entitled, It's Not Business, It's Personal. The piece argued
1:05.8	that the buyout plan offered to more than two million federal employees by Donald Trump's
1:10.3	new administration
1:11.0	wasn't merely idiotic or unsettling or even illegal, but was more than that one manifestation
1:17.6	of a multifaceted constitutional crisis that Trump's administration has already set in motion.
1:24.2	In the piece, JBL went on to argue that Trump is serially attempting to subjugate
1:29.2	the legislative branch and daring the courts to stop him and then painted an ominous picture of
1:33.8	what's likely to happen when the inevitable mass protests of Trump's actions start to take place.
1:40.3	That story at the bulwark was the proximate cause of bringing up JBL and inviting him on this episode of the podcast, but it wasn't the only reason that he's here.
1:48.9	Among the many voices of opposition that have emerged during the Trump era, few have proven to be as consistently compelling, persuasive, and right on the money as JVL.
1:57.2	Just before the election, we did an episode of this show featuring Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell,
2:02.1	Bill Crystal, and George Conway, all of the bulwark. I referred to them as the Fab Four of that
2:08.0	illustrious institution and almost immediately took some crap from people for not inviting JVL
	...

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