Trump's Texas-Sized Pardon Fail | The Weekly Assignment with Susan Demas, Sam Osterhout, & Brian Daitzman

• Trump’s pardons expose a governing style defined by pure transaction rather than any recognizable theory of justice.

• The administration’s retreat from global leadership signals a deliberate choice to shrink American influence in favor of personalist power.

• ICE’s escalating abuses—and the cruelty baked into the system—underscore how authoritarianism thrives through bureaucratic violence.

• Public fatigue has given way to public clarity: Americans now see the cost of a government that mistakes spectacle for strength.

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Susan Demas and Sam Osterhout open a conversation with The Intellectualist’s Brian Daitzman that refuses to accept numbness as the national mood, treating Trump’s latest pardon fiasco not as another headline but as a window into a presidency built on “loyalty” as currency. Their exchange makes plain how quickly corruption stops feeling theoretical once it collides with actual lives, and how the week’s absurdities—from MMA fantasies on the South Lawn to Trump-branded park passes—serve as accidental confessionals about a leader who can’t tell power from performance. What lands hardest is the way their dialogue strips the varnish off Trump’s self-mythology: the “dealmaker” who can’t close a deal, the “strongman” whose insecurity bleeds into every appointment, the “patriot” undermining the very institutions he claims to protect. And beneath the humor, the frustration, the disbelief, there’s a shared insistence that corruption isn’t inevitable—it’s visible, it’s traceable, and it’s beatable when people stay awake to the pattern instead of acclimating to it.

Tune in for a conversation that meets the chaos where it lives and refuses to let it define the country’s future. And subscribe to The Intellectualist today!

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