Maggie Haberman & David Corn

Molly Jong-Fast (0:00)

Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Lauren Boper says, I am not a lesbian after an ethics complaint accuses her of having relationships with three different staffers, two females, one male. We have such a great show for you today, The New York Times, Maggie Haberman stops by to talk about Trump being tempted by the Insurrection Act. Then we'll talk to Mother Jones' own, David Corn, about his new book, How Russia Won, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America. But first, the news.

Jesse Cannon (0:37)

So, Molly, something I was thinking about the other day is a headline that the president was throwing a little hissy fit, like a little baby, is something that every president would dread having until we got Donald Trump. And now we see him banning news outlets from the White House.

Molly Jong-Fast (0:52)

Okay, so let's just talk about this for a second. Donald Trump is having a bad weekend, right? He's lost control of the midterm cycle. He has, we got diesel last week was the most expensive diesel has been in modern diesel history.

We have the Fed is going to raise interest rates. Donald Trump has lost control of the narrative. And so a very typically Donald Trumpian way, he has decided to reclaim control of the narrative by banning CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House. So what he's trying to do here, I believe pretty strongly, is reclaim this narrative that he's losing by giving his base another enemy. And that enemy is the fake news CNN. You'll remember that when Donald Trump was on the trail, he used to sort of like get everyone in his MAGA audience excited and start screaming fake news CNN, you don't hate journalists enough. It's very clear to me that this is a distraction, that this is a way that Donald Trump is trying to get everyone thinking about a common enemy. And for MAGA, the mainstream media is his common enemy. So there are going to be a lot of people who are going to be upset about this. And even like Trump said, I don't need to have them in my house. And then he corrected himself and said, the people's house, if they're not going to write nice things about me. But this is like the same narcissistic, ego-wounded, Trumpy thing forever. But I do think the redirect is what's important. Like Trump is really in a bad spot politically. And so he's decided to draw the focus onto someone else. And the mainstream media, he only has a few moves. And this is one of them.

Jesse Cannon (2:38)

Yep. One of his other moves, though, is redecorating everything. And I never thought about a triumphal arch in my life. But it turns out now that triumphal arch is also a military complex.

Molly Jong-Fast (2:49)

So Trump wants to build the triumphal arch, but it's also based on Napoleon's triumphal arch in France. And in fact, there's really good reporting in regime change about how Donald Trump actually called Macron to ask him how big the triumphal arch was so that he could build a bigger one.

Jesse Cannon (3:07)

You know how history has treated Napoleon so well. I mean, it's just going to be the same thing over again.

Molly Jong-Fast (3:11)

I would like to add that Napoleon famous for sort of overcalculating.

Jesse Cannon (3:17)

Really? That is the brand.

Molly Jong-Fast (3:20)

Right? This all makes a lot of sense. I want to also add that there's another triumphal arch in North Korea. The people who build this kind of stuff are not the people you want to be. There's no great president building this kind of thing. It's always the sort of petty dictators. But anyway, the point is Donald Trump has decided to add military stuff to it. Snipers, drones, and ammunition storage. By the way, the reason he wants to do this is because he thinks that maybe then he can use this national security excuse as a way to build it. And I want to point out that this is the same thing that they're trying to do with the East Wing, right? So Donald Trump demolishes the East Wing. Now he's rebuilding it with a little drone center and a bomb shelter and this and that to say that we need it for national security. So this is called bullshit. I want to point out, by the way, the Triumphal Arch, there's never going to be a Triumphal Arch, number one. Number two, the idea that you would then put snipers on top of it. What? And drones? What? And store ammunition in it? What? It's just so like this is what happens when you stay up late and you tell Natalie Harp all your ideas and she who believes you've saved her life from bone cancer has to agree with everything. And this is when you get tweets like this. This is the toxic sludge of brain worms and narcissism that creates sludge like a triumphal arch that houses ammunition.