Rick Wilson & Kai Bird

**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 Homeland Security is now using an obscure law to spy on journalists. We have such a great show for you today. The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson joins us to discuss how Trump's old tricks aren't working anymore. Then we'll talk to historian Kai Bird about his new book, American Scoundrel Roy Cohn Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. But first the news.

**Rick Wilson** (0:34)
So Molly, we're running a little dry over in defense land. Apparently, we need to replenish our missiles. They're plotting all sorts of ways to get the Pentagon more money. And Trump, in one of his sundowning rants, is talking about invading Micronesia in the Marshall Islands.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:51)
So Trump posted a picture on his true social account there was a night. Trump did, or Natalie Arp did, we don't know, right? Showing US territory, showing the flags of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands along with multiple US territories. And the image included a map of the Straits of Hormuz. The Straits, however, are closed by Iran because Donald Trump invaded Iran because of nukes, which we had a deal to prevent. I think that what's happening here is Donald Trump is trying to grasp with the many bad decisions that he has made that have brought him from as popular as he's ever been to as unpopular as he's ever been in less than two years. And that's what we're looking at here. So late at night when he's had multiple diet cokes and he's sitting with Natalie Harp staring at his phone, he is trying to make sense of all of his bad choices. Now here's the deal with the Straits. We are a country with a serious munition problem. We don't have the tankers. We don't have the ships. We don't have the munitions.
We don't have the will of the people and Donald Trump is trying to figure out how to get the Straits back open and he's just running through bad ideas and because he doesn't have people around him who are professionals who know what they're doing, it's just him and some reality TV hosts. And actually weekend TV news host, which I guess is a little different. You got reality TV, you got road rules.
The Sean Duffy's. And then you have like television hosts. You got the Fox News hosts, like the Judge Pirro and the Sean Parnells and the, you know, there's Pete Hegs's.

**Rick Wilson** (2:27)
Yeah. So interesting thing here. Judges are always the thing that gets in the way of Trump's. And free Trump appointed judges have delivered a major blow to Kalshi, which we know Trump Jr. has a big staking.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (2:41)
Kalshi wants to block the state of Nevada from regulating its platform. Here's a thought here. The state of Nevada, known to be a place where you can do gambling, prostitution. I mean, isn't everything legal in Nevada?

**Rick Wilson** (2:58)
That's the brand.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (2:59)
Right. So, but they want to put some regulation on Kalshi. And Kalshi's like, fuck you. We don't want to ever be regulated. This is such a sign of the many ways in which our federal government has let us down. Like, it's falling to the state of Nevada to try and regulate Kalshi. We have like a small and very fucked up gambling situation that is growing to eat us all. And if you have a teenage son, you know that a very large percentage of teenage boys are now addicted to gambling.

**Rick Wilson** (3:31)
I don't have a teenage son, and I know it because I simply talk to youth and I employ the youth, and I can't believe what I would see with people skipping meals for bets.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (3:41)
Oh, yeah, we really fucked ourselves with this.

**Rick Wilson** (3:45)
OK, so I'm actually curious what your hypothesis is here. So the Treasury is barring a bunch of New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reporters from the G20 finance meeting. This feels like, please don't see my corrupt ways to me.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:01)
It's so interesting what's happening right now with the mismanagement of our federal government in every which way. So specific reporters from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg were not granted credentials to cover the meeting of financial leaders this week in Asheville, North Carolina. The G20 is like this huge international meeting. I don't know how they cannot give credentials to certain journalists. I mean, I think it was a way of trying to stick it to them. It doesn't matter, because the reporting is going to come out. There are a gazillion journalists. I mean, this is a way of trying to punish people they don't like, which is like so this administration, so petty. Alan Rapp, a policy reporter who reports on the Treasury Department for the Times, he began covering this in 2017