broke the law by taking classified material out of the white house, defied a subpoena when he was asked to return it and then it turns out to be that those documents are highest security level, you had eric trump on tv saying my dad likes to keep scrap books, he keeps newspaper clippings. if he s holing on to the most sensitive secrets that the country has, i don t know how kevin mccarthys and steve scalises are going to be able to it is a kind of moment almost, you remember at the beginning of the ukraine war you had republicans who kind of raced out there and were almost on trump s side and then realized, wait, we can t be we can t be for russia here. we have to be with ukraine. i feel like that is another moment that could be coming here, where some of the republicans are going to go, we can t defend if this all turns out to be true. we can t defend the president. let s see if it does. we ll see, we ll see.
the steve scalises, the lindsey graham s, why are they behaving the way they re behaving? well, look, in part because when you are when you have a set of facts that is indefensible, it s a real pain in the nethers to defend it, and so what a lot of the republicans are doing is simply acknowledging, yeah, this is indefensible and then saying, but what about what they re doing? and i do think that there is some credence to charges that democrats are using january 6 in a political way. what i have no sympathy for are republicans who cannot concede that they gave this massive political issue for democrats to use, and if they had separated themselves, which both which their consciences and all facts should have dictated, if they had separated themselves in the days after january 6 from having
donald trump doesn t need to be appointed speaker if kevin mccarthy is because essentially donald trump will control whatever he does. the title of your book is how we almost lost our democracy and still could. but hasn t a lot already been lost? isn t it on the way to being lost if everything goes as you fear it might and as it looks like it might? i m going to ask that question because one thing i wanted to do in the book as well is show people the stories of courage of this period. a historian once said power doesn t corrupt as much as it reveals. it revealed kevin mccarthy and steve scalises and others, it also revealed people of great courage. liz cheney, of great courage. it revealed adam kinzinger to have great courage. it revealed dan coats and mitt romney and all kinds of people of conviction, who rose to the
here s how you know steve sclees knows. he could call on them to resign. because if those states were messed up, then they re not real congressmen, are they? why don t the republicans have the courage of their convictions to go all the way? it is such a terrifying time when donald trump continues to be the leader, not just the republican party but of plurality of folks across the country. polls show the folks who consider themselves to be republicans, who want to keep supporting not just the donald trumps of the world but the steve scalises and the chuck grassleys and the others who want to continue in that mold and the trumpian politics. to ben s point, it is infiltrating at the legislative level, something that republicans have been doing a long time.