Weekly Wrap | Former Sen. Jon Tester, Vichy Dems & Nazi MAGA with Stuart & Wajahat Ali, a Rick Wilson AMA & More

Welcome to another edition of the Weekly Wrap, Lincoln Square’s guide to all the shows and interviews you might have missed throughout the week. From Lives with Rick Wilson to a sitdown from Stuart Stevens with Wajahat Ali, we’ve got it all right here in the Weekly Wrap:

Sen. Jon Tester & Maritsa Georgiou Join It’s the Democracy, Stupid with Edwin Eisendrath

Former United States Senator from Montana, Jon Tester and Maritsa Georgiou showed up to It’s the Democracy, Stupid with Edwin Eisendrath to discuss last week’s election results and what they mean going into the midterms along with the collapsing credibility of the MAGA movement throughout rural America.

Jon Tester: They’re [Senators from rural states] not advocating for policies that help rural America. They’re not advocating for the right to repair. They’re not advocating for enforcing the Packers and Stockyards Act. They’re not challenging the president on these tariffs, and they’re not challenging the president on healthcare.

Marista Georgiou: I’m glad you got it in. This will not be the first time you’ve heard him say this, if you listen to Grounded [podcast]. Tell people what ‘right to repair’ is, because a lot of people have no clue what that means.

Jon Tester: I will tell you, this happens in automobiles too, but I’m going to approach it from a farm equipment standpoint. You can go out and you can buy yourself a $500,000 combine or tractor – and these days, they have a lot of computers in them. When you buy those tractors, you would think that you would own the computer in that tractor so if something goes down in that tractor you could get the information you needed so that you could plug your computer in your ipad or iphone and take out the blocks of code, but no, that’s not the case. You have to call the dealer to come out and they plug your computer into your tractor, then they erase the codes that are screwing up and you’re ‘good to go’.

The problem with that is, that it all costs money. I actually started on Right to Repair before I bought a tractor that this happened to, and it’s a red tractor. I won’t throw anybody under the bus, but every once in a while it will lock itself in park. It starts fine. It runs fine. Everything works, except you can’t get it out of park so you can’t move it and the tractor is worthless. So, you call up your dealer and they come out. They plug their computer in, release the codes, and in my case – they charge you $750 for the trip.

What Right to Repair allows you to do is it allows a farmer to have that code to repair their computer.

Edwin Eisendrath: Makes sense, right? I mean, $750 is the money you shouldn’t have to spend. You’ve got a day and it’s not raining? You’ve got to get these crops in. Time is a killer.

[...]

You guys have watched this consolidation of news in America, what’s happened to CBS and the enormous amounts of propaganda that everyone gets. Yesterday, the president sat in the Oval Office and said, “prices are going down.” How is this disconnect between our lives and everything we see that calls itself news… what do we do to break through this moment?

Maritsa Georgiou: It’s tough. As you know, Edwin, you work in journalism – it’s a small community. I have friends who work all over the country and for a lot of these organizations – I have friends at CBS, ABC, NBC, all the big ones – what we’re seeing is really alarming. It’s discouraging. I have some friends who talk about being in editorial meetings and being told, ‘Don’t run it like that because even though those are the facts, we could make the administration mad.’ That is insane to me. That is insane that you would run your newsroom that way, but that’s where we are. And it’s really pay to play.

Read more of the discussion here.

Trump’s Attacks on Justice | Pulitzer Prize Winners Carol Leonnig & Aaron Davis Join Susan Demas

Lincoln Square’s guests keep getting better and better, and this week our Executive Editor, Susan J. Demas, was joined by Pulitzer Prize winners Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis. The Justice Department under the Trump regime has eroded with political pressure and the collapse of key norms.

Susan Demas: We’ve seen in recent weeks that the DOJ under Trump has indicted some of the president’s high profile adversaries: James Comey, Tish James, and John Bolton. The timing of your book is apt, but your story about the politicization of the Justice Department really begins a decade ago.

Can you take us back to Trump’s first term and how that laid the groundwork for what we’re seeing today?

Carol Leonnig: Aaron and I, in real time, were covering the way that Donald Trump’s first presidency came at the Justice Department. He tried to manipulate and bully that institution into doing what he wanted for his personal and political benefit. That included defending his allies and trying to dismiss the charges against Michael Flynn and reduce the penalties and sentencing risks for his longtime political confidant, Roger Stone, and pressuring his own government to stop investigating him and his campaign for its contacts with Russian operatives, and stop investigating him for obstruction of that probe. He worked really hard to push the Justice Department to do what he wanted in his first term.

But what we didn’t realize until we did this book reporting, Aaron and myself, was just how scarring and damaging the personalized attacks that Donald Trump landed on investigators and agents by name. How much that shook the firmament, so to speak, of the Justice Department. And though it has a long standing mantra of ‘without fear or favor’ it will pursue evidence of a crime. What Aaron and I learned was that fear was starting to creep in then. He may have failed to make the Justice Department his whipping boy in the first presidency, but he was extremely successful in destabilizing it.

Susan Demas: Aaron, I’d love to hear your perspective, as well.

Aaron Davis: Some of the reporting that we embarked on, part of the reason we got into this book was we have been working on everything after January 6th, but folks were saying ‘what’s happening now is so much a result of what happened before.’ And a big part of our reporting is about the delays and how slow people are. After January 6th, it really looks directly after Trump and I think it’s hard to put into words what the first Trump term was like.

When the sun came up on January 6th, it was a place that was beat down. It was a place where there were far fewer prosecutors doing the day-to-day work of public corruption work than there had been previously, and they weren’t in a good place to handle January 6th. So, they’re scrambling. They’re trying to bring in prosecutors and agents to handle all of that. It took a long time before anybody said, “woah, wait, how are we investigating January 6th?” Then, even after that, so much of everything we’ve experienced in the past 10 years really goes back to those first days.

Andrew McCabe. Remember Andrew McCabe’s story of deputy director? We’re inside at the very first pages of the book where the grand jury is hearing the testimony and they’re identifying more with the FBI agents under attack by the president than they are the folks saying something was done wrong here. The whole place was tipped on its head.

Susan Demas: I know that in the run up to January 6th and certainly afterward, there was a lot of criticism about the FBI and the Department of Justice for missing a lot of the run-up to this. Some independent journalists, high-profile journalists, political critics said the clues were everywhere, especially if you were on social media, that they were planning something big. It was out in the open, and how could the FBI have been caught so flat-footed? Your book really fills in a lot of those blanks about where these agencies were at going into January 6th and the legacy after, which I think is a really important part of the story.

Read more of the discussion here.

Rejecting Vichy Democrats and MAGA Nazis with Stuart Stevens & Wajahat Ali

THE LEFT HOOK’s Wajahat Ali joined Stuart Stevens to give the Lincoln Loyal a captivating conversation about power, cowardice, and conviction in modern American politics. As Waj frames it as a battle between ‘Vichy Democrats’ and ‘MAGA Nazi’s’, Waj and Stuart discuss the intricacies of what we’re seeing in politics and society.

Wajahat Ali: When I said the framing is no to Vichy Democrats and MAGA Nazis, I wasn’t being tongue-in-cheek, folks. Stuart’s right.

[...]

What Stuart was referring to was the Politico article that came out last month that had 2,900 pages of telegram texts between young Republican leaders in their 30s and late 20s, including state legislators. These kids that JD Vance talked about, saying things like the following: “I love Hitler.” “Rape is Epic.” “1488.” Imagining torture, violence against the rest of us, throwing us in the gas chamber.

Another reason why Jay Jones was helped and beat Miaris, even though he was behind by two or three points, is people are like, ‘I just saw republicans spend a month doing ads condemning Jay Jones for this stupid, violent text that he did as a state legislator, but then vice president is perfectly fine with young republican leaders throwing the rest of us in the gas chamber.’ I think being pro-Nazi is worse.

Stuart, I want to ask you this because you spent your life in the Republican Party. I predicted this. I hate predicting this. I said that Nick Fuentes would be the present and future of the GOP, what he represents, and I kept the receipts. I remember two and a half years ago, Donald Trump dined with Nick Fuentes and post-antisemitic Kanye West. I’ve been asking for two and a half years for reporters to ask Donald Trump, “Do you condemn Nick Fuentes?” I think he was asked once and he said, “Nick, huh? Who? I don’t know who that was?” Just like he did with (the crypto billionaire) he just pardoned. CZ, my business partner? Huh? Money laundering?

Marjorie Taylor Greene has supported Nick Fuentes, and now you see Tucker Carlson supporting Nick Fuentes. Talk to us about the Nick Fuentes Civil War that has ignited the conservative movement.

Stuart Stevens: I think this is really interesting. The Heritage Foundation has been corrupt for a long time, and the dirty little secret inside the Republican Party that I was a part of, we didn’t really care what the Heritage Foundation was saying. It was not some great engine of ideas.

It was really a fundraising mechanism that hired a bunch of people and paid themselves a lot of money, but we didn’t really pay attention to it. But, you look at where the party chose to go, it’s only going to accelerate that route. So I go back to this – I think in the post-World War II world, the Republican Party had two paths. One was Dwight Eisenhower – conservative, boring, governing, sane. And Joe McCarthy – conspiratorial, racist, xenophobic, non-governing.

A lot of us who worked for Bush — I mean me, Nicole Wallace, Matthew Dowd, Mark McKinnon, Pete Weiner — we still sit in the same office. I think it’s fair to say that we thought our side was the dominant gene of the party, if only because the country was changing so much, that the party would have to go more in our direction. I don’t know any honest conclusion, and this is what I had to come to grips with after Trump won, is we were wrong. We were the recessive gene. The party is what it wants to be. Nobody makes anybody vote for Donald Trump; that’s just what they want. And the degree to which the party has been compromised by Russia is a great underreported story.

The Russians helped elect Donald Trump. Causality is always difficult in politics. But there’s no question, ask Marco Rubio’s Senate Intelligence Committee, they wanted to elect Donald Trump. And what did they get? Well, it’s unimaginable what they got. And now you have all these Republican senators on an issue like Ukraine. They’re afraid to take Donald Trump on, and you saw that message across the board.

It’s this sort of moral collapse of the party. They talk about this split that real conservative Republicans don’t agree with ahead of Sunday – I don’t really know where these people are. Who are these people? I don’t hear a lot of Republican Senators attacking the Heritage Foundation, and I think silence is complicity. This party doesn’t have room for a (Liz) Cheney.

Read more of the discussion here.

Rick Wilson’s AMA | Where the Dems Went Wrong

Fearless leader of The Lincoln Project and the Lincoln Loyal, Rick Wilson, sat down for an ‘ask me anything’ after Senate Dems cut a deal to reopen the government. Rick went over the dangers of mistaking civility for strategy and underscored the importance of service to our country in a Veterans Day message.

Rick Wilson: The thing that Democrats thought they got out of it from the Senate is, ‘we’ve got a vote on restoring health care.’ Oh, you get a vote? Getting a vote is bullshit. Getting a vote is a joke. Getting a vote is a nothing burger. Folks, it doesn’t matter that you get a vote.

I know their pollsters were thinking this will be a great talking point on the stump this fall and we can make an ad about it. I fought for health care, and the evil Republicans stopped me. Well, how about you fucking stop the evil Republicans instead, dipshits?

Okay, got a question about the Epstein Files.

The clock is ticking. We’ll see if [Adelita] Grijalva is sworn in, which he’s still waiting on. I think it’s probably like 60 days now when Magic Mike Grindr Boy still hasn’t turned in his homework and sworn somebody in who the federal courts ordered him to do.

Look, the pressure has continued to bubble underneath Trump on the Epstein matter. I have a feeling that Congress has been very bad about this. I suspect that when this goes to them, Mike Johnson is going to find every possible way to delay it or obfuscate it or add some poison pill to it. I don’t know procedurally, but I know that once she’s sworn in, you’ve got 218 on the discharge petition.

Question: How many of these eight (that voted to open the government) are running again? Can we primary them?

Rick Wilson: I think three of them are on the way out the door. John Fetterman is going to become a Republican, just so you guys are aware of this. Just process this in your brains. John Fetterman is showing all the signs that I’ve seen before, of a guy who’s teeing himself up to convert.

I’ve seen it before at the state level, in a couple different states. I’ve been involved in these conversion stories where somebody comes to you a year or two years in advance and goes, “hey, I’m going to switch parties because you guys have all the power.” He is sending every signal in the world that he’s going to become a Republican. And he’ll say this, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” Okay.

Read more of the discussion here.

The Real Danger to Democracy | Joyce Vance & Stuart Stevens LIVE

Legal expert and former federal prosecutor, Joyce Vance, joined Lincoln Square’s Stuart Stevens to discuss current dangers to democracy. Vance’s Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy tells us that cynicism is a luxury no citizen can afford – her and Stuart discuss this idea and more.

Stuart Stevens: One of the things I really like about your book is the idea that institutions have failed us. And you have this whole section where you go, “Well, no. Actually, institutions can save us, not fail us.” Nothing is perfect, and I think that’s so important.

What are your thoughts on what happened last Tuesday night (Election Night)? How do you see that?

Joyce Vance: I was so glad it happened right when it did, right after my book came out. Before those elections on Tuesday, I was essentially pitching people to have faith, right? That if all of us did what we could do to support democracy, whether that was working in elections or writing songs that would inspire people to support democracy. I run through a laundry list of options because I don’t think it’s a one-size fits all proposition, saving democracy. I was telling people that if we do this, we really can come back to our senses. And of course, there’s a lot of pushback right now from the Trump is inevitable crowd.

What the country learned on Tuesday is that when Americans get pissed off and work together and understand what’s at stake in an election and insist on having the right to vote – that we can work together and create change. And we can do it rather quickly in the moment.

We have an election coming in 2026 and one third of the Senate and everybody in the House of Representatives, those folks are up for reelection, and perhaps even more importantly – as we are seeing right now, governors along with other leaders in states and mayors who have a tremendous impact on the course of democracy and our daily lives. Trump has made it clear that he intends to try to suppress the vote.

Voter fraud is a boogeyman, right?

Stuart Stevens: Voter fraud does not impact the election. I’ve seen more elephantitas than voter fraud.

Joyce Vance: My Republican predecessor spent eight years trying to find a voter fraud case to prosecute in the state of Alabama and came up empty handed, as did I, as did my Trump successor for four. You know, voter fraud is not a deal, but voter suppression is real.

I come from the land where Black voters were asked how many jelly beans are in this jar and they had to get that number right to be able to register. Donald Trump has made it clear he intends to suppress the vote. He’s going to claim that people who aren’t citizens are voting. That’s not true.

Conservative states that have looked for that, like Georgia, have found that people may try to register out of mistake, but trained state election officials catch that and people who aren’t qualified don’t get to vote. But for whatever reason, it’s going to become more difficult and we are all going to have to stay the course. Both individually, and working in our communities to make sure that people who can’t afford it have identification that proves they’re citizens and that everybody’s up to speed on what’s happening and that people are being responsible about educating themselves about candidates and issues on ballots.

Read more of the discussion here.

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling Joins Anchor Watch with Bobby Jones on Veterans Day

Lincoln Square’s resident expert on all things military, Mr. Bobby Jones was joined on his show Anchor Watch by distinguished Army veteran Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling to discuss the dismantling of military accountability under Trump as his regime makes a dangerous shift toward politicizing our troops.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mark Hertling: If I can, let me share something with your listeners, because they may not know this from the standpoint of three and four star generals. We are not selected for promotion, we are selected for a position. And you have to serve in that position for X amount of time in that rank in order to retire at that rank. So, Halsey was in his first four star billet, and serving there for nine months did not allow him to retire as a four star general. So he will retire as a three star. And from everybody I talked to in the navy, and you’re confirming this, he was literally one of the best and brightest they had.

Bobby Jones: Very much so, sir. And I’m glad you brought that up. For you to basically retire or rank less than what you properly earned says something. And here’s the other thing, sir, that we might want to highlight. A lot of the positions you mentioned: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Chief of Naval Operation Command, or the Coast Guard – those are not the ones that deal with operational forces, right? They do the man, train, equip. Southcom, Northcom, Centcom, Indo-paycom.

Those four stars are the ones who are responsible for the actual trigger pullers as they would say. All those ships that are amassed off the coast of Venezuela directly reported to Admiral Halsey. So this is a different aspect where he’s doing the actual kinetic war fighting in that position as opposed to the strategic dealing with Congress and administrative work. That’s why this is so shocking to me.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mark Hertling: And I’ll add one more to that. He’s not only in charge of the forces, but those South combatant commanders are responsible for their footprint, their area of operations for other governmental agencies that are inside.

The Admiral retired or said he was going to retire just a few days after the president announced the covert actions of the CIA inside of Venezuela, and Admiral Halsey is this outcome commander. That’s his footprint. So if things are happening with the CIA that he may or may not have known about, I’m sure he probably had the reaction of, “what am I, chopped liver?” I don’t know what’s happening here. Or better yet, I know what’s happening and you’re telling the world that this is happening.

Why don’t we kind of keep this in the classified realm if we’re going to do covert operations. All of these things, to me, signal some things that just aren’t supposed to happen.

Read more of the interview here.

A BIG Day for the Epstein Files | Rick Wilson & Katie Phang LIVE

Listen, we told you all that these guests we’re getting are good – and none better than Katie Phang joining Rick Wilson to discuss the chaos that ensued when the Epstein emails were released this week. Wilson and Phang delve into the stress test of whether American institutions will recognize a moral line when the stakes involve power, proximity, and the exploitation of children.

Rick Wilson: I’ve got to tell you, Katie. I don’t think that (we’re going to have) at the end of the release of these emails today, more Republicans will be skeptical of this – I think we’ll have fewer. I think you might end up with more as this percolates through Congress. These emails are damning, and this is not good for Trump. This does not look good. When Epstein says ‘the dog that didn’t bark’, when you read that email, you have to make an assumption that he is talking about Trump having knowledge of the situation during Epstein’s trial.

The dog that didn’t bark. He either flipped and confessed what he knew about Epstein – or did he, you know, change his behavior? The whole thing is just going to end up pissing off a lot of these Republicans who have been taking a lot of heat for Trump.

Katie Phang: Yeah, and listen – I want to focus on that 2011 email you just talked about, the dog that hasn’t barked, and that’s because what you don’t see is just as important as what you see. This is an email between Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, right? April 2, 2011, to which Ghislaine (Maxwell) responds, “I’ve been thinking about that,” meaning she’s been thinking about how Trump’s name hasn’t come up. And of course, at the end of Epstein’s email he’s like, “he’s(Trump) never once been mentioned. I’m 75% there.” I think it means, Rick, it means I’m 75% there to narc on Trump to the police chief.

But you know what Ghislaine Maxwell says? She says, “I have been thinking about that.”

A few notes. One, this was set with high importance, meaning they thought it was important enough to flag it. Number two, you know what she doesn’t say? She doesn’t say, “What are you talking about, Jeffrey? Trump’s never there.” “What are you talking about, Jeffrey? Trump never did anything.” “Donald who?” Right? None of that is there, which just goes to show there is something there. There is a measure of substance that creates compromise, as I’ve been calling it, that creates the foundational basis for extortion, blackmail, and other things.

We know that Michael Wolff talked to Jeffrey Epstein via email in 2015 about creating a debt or some type of sense of gratitude if he wins in 2016. I mean, who the hell has conversations about people unless there’s something there about which you can hang something over somebody’s head? It’s pretty obvious.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Read more of the discussion here.

ICE’s Fascist Theatrics | Protect & Serve with Michael Fanone & Maya May

Lincoln Square’s Protect & Serve is back this week as our hosts Maya May and Michael Fanone dive into the chaos we’ve seen lately. ICE leadership turning enforcement into a spectacle, Greg Bovino’s terror tactics in Chicago, and the mindset of the organization terrorizing the American people.

Michael Fanone: No Kings 2 on October 18th brought out more than 7 million Americans in protests against the administration. There was not a single arrest that was attributed to those protests that were made on that day – which is an incredible feat given the fact that it was a record breaking protest. It’s the largest protest ever in the history of this country, and nobody was arrested.

With the way that this administration loves to put together these little fetish films so that they can tout what their law enforcement is capable of – there would have been ample video of any type of property destruction or any type of assaults against police officers – and there was none. So, I think we’ve dispelled the narrative that the people who are standing up against this administration are anti-American or that they’re violent left radicalists.

Maya May: I think if anything, it’s fed up soccer moms, suburban moms, families, workers, and then a rapper.

Our weird news story of the day, the ‘Arrest Me Daddy’ protest rapper guy actually got arrested and he was detained briefly and released with no charges. But, if you haven’t seen the arrest me daddy [...] after this, you need to check out ‘Arrest Me Daddy’.

He’s a rapper in Chicago and he has built a following on TikTok and Instagram by going up to cops, bending over, and saying “arrest me, daddy.” And they finally did in Chicago. But I think this just goes to show, because everybody was actually fairly good humored about it in the arrest video and there were journalists there – I think the American people are fed up with the way the Trump administration is portraying their cities. These Chicago police officers, they live in the city, and I think it affects the morale of everybody in a city when you have the president calling it a war zone when it’s not.

I mean, these officers, they have children that go to these schools, that live in these communities. So, definitely go check out that video, it’s very funny. I wish there was a way to cover all this stuff that wasn’t so dark, because so much of it is very dark.

Read more of the discussion here.