Weekly Wrap: The Insurrection Act in Play, a Healthcare Disaster & the Contagiousness of Cruelty

Welcome to the Weekly Wrap, where you can read highlights from Lincoln Square’s top interviews and shows from the last week.

N.Y. Lt. Antonio Delgado on Why the Status Quo is Failing Us

Antonio Delgado is a lot of things: Dad. Husband. Colgate & Harvard alum. New York’s lieutenant governor. But now, his resume includes one more title, gubernatorial candidate. New York’s new potential governor sat down with Lincoln Square’s Sam Osterhout to discuss him challenging Governor Kathy Hochul and why so many Democratic incumbents are being primaried. Delgado raises valid points of the party losing touch with working people, trading vision for survival, and a lack of inspiration.

Sam Osterhout: Trump right now is, sort of, desperately underwater. His polling is terrible. It’s bad, it’s really bad – and from job approval to his numbers on the economy to foreign policy – the only group that is somewhat less popular than Trump are the Democrats. And you have these insurgencies like your campaign, like Mamdani in the city [New York]. Why do you feel the Democrats are afraid of insurgencies like this – like yours, like [Zohran] Mamdani’s?

Antonio Delgado: Well, one, because the Democratic Party is fundamentally built around self-preservation. That’s how parties, I think, have worked for a long time, especially as they’ve grown with the amount of wealth and money that moves around political life. The conversation shifts away from protecting people and shifts towards protecting power.

We saw this, how it manifested with Biden in the last election. I was one of the few Democrats, one of a handful of statewide elected officials, that said he should step-down back in 2024, not because I was the only one thinking it, but because people were afraid to say something for fer that the party machinery would penalize them and punish them. So, there’s a self-preservation, self protection mode that I think has engulfed the Democratic Party, much the same way it has on the right.

The difference is Trump has sort of blown that whole model up – and he’s such a figure in his own that he’s kind of transcended all that and already exploited the realities of that. The Democratic Party through a version of that, hopefully with a far better outcome.

Read more of the interview here.

Trump’s Open to Invoking the Insurrection Act | LIVE with Edwin Eisendrath & Susan J. Demas

The president is attempting to bait American citizens into giving him the authority to invoke the insurrection act. As Edwin Eisendrath points out in this conversation with Lincoln Square Executive Editor Susan J. Demas, “If there’s a riot in Chicago, it’s a riot caused by the federal government.” This thirst for violence by the federal government along with Trump reviving Civil War logic of painting blue cities as enemy territory, Edwin and Susan examine the potential for the Insurrection Act being invoked.

Susan J. Demas: As we see in poll after poll, Trump doesn’t have this mandate. He doesn’t have majority support – and way back when, the news media made the decision that they wanted profitability, making sure they had as much money as possible. The way you would do that now is to cater to an audience of people who the majority of are not fans of what Donald Trump is doing. But the corporate ownership has gotten so consolidated and all they want to do is appease Trump, pay him bribes like CBS and ABC already have over stories that were completely legitimate, that were reported. And then they don’t (report them), suddenly us, the consumers, we’re not the top priority.

Edwin Eisendrath: This is the oligarchy they want to create. He gets to decide which of them becomes rich and powerful – and that depends on how they support him. And it’s not limited to the media. I mean, the board of Columbia University and the faculty had a different idea of what to do a few years ago and the board said, we are going to cave to the president and give him everything he wants. They took that once great university and sent it down its merry way. Harvard is fighting back. For how long, who knows?

It’s a tough fight because the president is weaponizing every piece of the federal government to go after anybody who has the courage and the spine to stand up. My city is there right now and we aren’t going to cave, no matter how many troops he sends – but it’s the same thing, right? For the glory of Donald Trump. May his statue and gold rise forever. But, that’s not us. And that’s not the people of Texas, it’s not the people of – you pick the red state. They don’t want it either. And Texas, again, I’m talking to you: lean on your house reps, will you? Just lean on them. Just a few of them to say enough is enough. This isn’t what we signed up for, and it’ll go away.

Read more of the interview here.

Trump’s False Flag Operation | The Strategy Session with Guest Miles Taylor

In this week’s strategy session, The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson was joined by Miles Taylor, former national security official under Presidents Trump and Bush. Miles is concerned about the violence Trump wants to provoke and using false flag theatrics to justify authoritarian rule. Rick and Miles dive deep into Trump’s deployment of Meal Team 6 and more in this week’s Strategy Session.

Rick Wilson: I’ve known Pam [Bondi] for 25 years. One thing about Pam Bondi, she’s not a particularly bright person – but she is an obedient person. And for that, for Trump, is something that she and her sponsors, her patrons in the lobbying firm she used to work for – they want her there for as long as humanly possible. They’re promising her already, I’m sure, “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll cover any legal fees down the line when the Democrats take power again. Don’t worry, Pam.” Although I did think she really screwed the pooch on today (congressional testimony). I think it’s going to get her in trouble with Trump. Holding the line on the Epstein files about the cover-up that she runs is not sufficient. When Sheldon Whitehouse asked her, “Have you found the pictures that Epstein claimed to have of Trump with little girls?” she had a smart comeback, but there was a beat.

There was a beat before she looked down to her notebook and immediately started launching an attack on Whitehouse. I mean, if she was going to make Trump happy, she should have said that no pictures ever existed. But she couldn’t and didn’t, which makes me feel like a lot of this theatricality was to not answer Epstein questions, and that was one she could have helped him on.

Miles Taylor: What she didn’t say is just as telling as what she did say, and I’ll tell folks why. It’s because right now, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department is trying to make a case against a former DOJ official, James Comey, about lying to Congress. She is very, very aware that in the future, because MAGA won’t be in power forever, you can bet every single time a Trump official went and testified before Congress, whether it made headline news or whether it was on C-SPAN 9 at 3 in the morning, it will get reviewed and assessed for actual instances of perjury. And this is one of those where we will be asking years from now, “What did Pam Bondi know and when did she know it – about one of the biggest cover ups, if not the biggest cover up, in presidential history. And this testimony is going to get scrutinized.

I almost think her aversion, like you said, Rick, to even defending the president on those questions is a signal of guilt. It’s at least smoke that could lead us to fire.

Read more of the interview here.

Is John Roberts the Worst Chief Justice in History? | First Draft with Susan J. Demas & Author Lisa Graves

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robers has led a court that has decided, and in some cases overturned, some of the most consequential cases in our nation’s history. Lisa Graves, author of the upcoming book, Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, joined executive editor, Susan J. Demas, to outline how decades of quiet maneuvering by conservatives led to a court openly enabling the executive overreach we are seeing from the Trump regime.

Susan J. Demas: I really feel like with the sheer number of decisions that have come out of the Roberts Court, especially with the shadow docket in Trump’s second term, that he’s really giving the Taney Court a run for its money. How do you feel like the Roberts Court stacks up against others in history? What will it be remembered for?

Lisa Graves: You know, Roger Taney’s decision in Dred Scott was a debacle. It’s just rife with racism. It is taking a stand, basically, to try to stop the effort to stop the expansion of slavery – and it was a terrible decision. As you said, it helped precipitate the civil war in the United States. But, what John Roberts has done is remake our American democracy on a broad scale. And that includes specifically that immunity decision to say that a president can act above the law – and Donald Trump has embraced that.

He has repeatedly said that because he’s president, he can do X or Y. He can send troops into Chicago. He can just somehow invoke the Insurrection Act regardless of its actual terms and the facts on the ground. He’s emboldened by this court, by the Roberts Court. And it’s not just that, the Constitutional crisis in many ways actually began years before this. Because John Roberts, after promising that he was going to just call balls and strikes, one of the first things [he] did when he had the chance was to decimate key enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

That was when I looked at John Roberts’ record in detail for this book beyond the look that I had taken. Two decades ago, what I realized was that when John Roberts was clerking for Bill Rehnquist, Congress was across the street trying to undo a decision that Rehnquist had joined that had taken key decisions. Basically, a key tool was taken out of the Voting Rights Act by changing the interpretation of Section 2. And then what happened was Bill Rehnquist called Ken Starr, who was a top advisor at the Justice Department, and asked him to hire John Roberts for the top of the Justice Department to advise the Attorney General.

And what job did John Roberts get? He got the job as the point person on the Voting Rights Act. He had no experience in voting rights at all. He wasn’t a voting rights lawyer. He was just two years out of law school. What he had was training at the foot, at the knee of one of the most anti-voting rights justices in American history, Bill Rehnquist – someone who had actually engaged in voter suppression before he got on the bench, when he was a lawyer in Phoenix.

Read more of the interview here.

The Coming Health Care Disaster | Drs. Farhan Bhatti & Christopher Ford

Susan J. Demas was joined by two doctors to discuss the coming healthcare crisis as millions risk losing their coverage with ACA subsidies set to expire – Dr. Chris Ford, an emergency physician who emphasized the situation as the difference between life and death and Dr. Farhan Bhatti, the Michigan state lead for the Committee to Protect Health Care who runs a clinic serving the working poor.

Susan J. Demas: Earlier this summer when Congress was debating the budget bill, there was a lot of focus on folks who get their healthcare via Medicaid and that they would be losing their coverage. Probably not quite as much focus on folks who get their coverage through the actual healthcare exchange for the ACA. But obviously everything is connected, in addition to that we’ve already started to see some rural hospitals across the country close or announce future closures. It seems to me that the overall healthcare system is under tremendous strain right now, and i was wondering, Dr. Bhatti, can you talk with us about that and what we will be looking at over the next couple of years?

Dr. Farhan Bhatti: That’s very true in the overwhelming majority of states, and we’ll talk about Michigan momentarily, but rural America in general is under attack. We’re going to create these healthcare deserts where there’s no hospitals within an hour radius and people are going to have to drive a long way to get the care that they need. It’s just really said that healthcare has become such a partisan issue. The politics really have nothing to do with the health and wellbeing of my patients and whether or not they live or die – because really, these medications that they’re getting are life saving.

And if they have to go without insurance because they can’t afford it and they make too much to qualify for Medicaid? They’re not going to be able to have a good quality of life. They’re going to have bad outcomes. We are fortunate here in Michigan that the budget that was just passed included full funding for Medicaid – so it has basically counteracted all of the cuts that came from the federal level. We met that challenge in Michigan and our legislature stepped up in a bipartisan way to secure Medicaid funding at current levels. But, that still doesn’t help these folks that we’re talking about here today, the people whose tax credits are going to expire at the end of the year if nothing’s done and that there are going to be really bad outcomes.

Susan J. Demas: And Dr. Ford, if you could talk with us a little bit – What does it mean if patients have to drive 50 miles away to seek emergency care if they’re in the midst of having a heart attack or a stroke, what will that mean for (potential) outcomes?

Dr. Chris Ford: To be honest with you, it’s the difference between life and death in a lot of situations. Just because some of these rural locations closed, doesn’t mean that those problems go away in that area. It doesn’t mean that the patients get any healthier. What’s going to be the reality is, especially here in the state of Wisconsin… you’re the only provider in 40 miles and it may be an hour to get to the next location. You’re gonna have these people who are very sick. You’re gonna have folks who are having precipitous labor, or complications of labor. You’re gonna have folks that are going to have to travel to the nearest ER, and in a lot of those cases, those are in urban centers which are already facing bed shortages.

Read more of the conversation here.

The Cruelty’s Contagious – Even on the Left | David Pepper & Lisa Senecal

David Pepper and Lisa Senecal brought the cost of inaction into focus: without the subsidies afforded to people by the Affordable Care Act, millions could lose coverage while premiums surge. Republicans haven’t operated in good faith during the government shutdown but we need to remember, the instinct to mock rural Republican pain is precisely what isolates Democrats. Empathy can help us reframe voters as participants in shared hope, not just demographics or grievances.

David Pepper: The powerful people who are basically at the top, the people leading the trickle down economics. They benefit in every way and the rest of us suffer. They need the people suffering to be disunited. They need us to be fighting. Us fighting about other issues that they foment is the way they can continue to divide and conquer. We get everything and the masses divide up crumbs. So when the Republican logger says to the Democrat, “hey, I’m suffering.” And the Democrat says back, “good.” The billionaires are winning. They are the ones who need that, they foment it.

It’s essential to their strategy that all those paying the price of higher health premiums and higher costs and energy costs spiking – they need us to stay divided so we don’t vote out what they’re doing.

Lisa Senecal: This has been going on forever. This is why you pit poor whites against poor Blacks in the South. You make Blacks having more rights be the bad guys who are the ones hurting the poor whites in the state – and that was never the case. It’s always bad. That’s why we see the Republicans vilifying immigrants. Because poor people can’t find good jobs. But the immigrants aren’t taking the jobs – they’re actually an important part of our economic growth, but they want us to fight about jobs with each other so we don’t look at them picking our pockets and say, “that’s why.”

Read more of the conversation here.

ICE Raids, a Government Shutdown, and Christian Nationalist Mayhem | The Tim & April Show

Christians in America have been baptized by fear, sanctified with “law and order”, and mock mercy as they cheer on ICE agents pepper-spraying ministers who dare to love their neighbor. In this week’s episode, Tim Whitaker and April Ajoy of The New Evangelicals tackle the myth of Antifa and how it has become one of the right’s most enduring magic tricks.

Tim Whitaker: The journalists in this wide shot (White House roundtable), those are all just right-wing influencers. One of them is Andy Ngo, who is incredibly disingenuous for so many reasons. These are not actual journalists who have gone to school to learn Journalism 101. That’s not what this is. These are right wing influencers who have every incentive to puppet the propaganda of the regime.

April Ajoy: There are no Antifa leaders, it’s not organized intentionally – I don’t know how to explain it to people other than it’s just not a thing. They’re just making stuff up.

Also, I want to point out that Trump appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray in his first term, because Trump also brought up Antifa then. The reasons, they were saying, were all these Black Lives Matter protests. But in 2020, Christopher Wray said that Antifa is an ideology, not an organization. [...] This isn’t some left-wing Marxist liberal. This is a Trump person.

Tim Whitaker: [...] “Black Lives Matter, it was so violent. They were literally burning cities down.” Okay, well if you look at the actual data, studies show that the Black Lives Matter protests were the largest national protests ever to happen in America. Tens of millions of people all across the nation, decentralized, but all doing the same thing. 95% of all protests they found were peaceful. They also found that the majority of the violence was started by either counter-protesters or the police, and the people who did commit violent acts were found and prosecuted.

So this narrative of Black Lives Matter was so violent is actually ridiculous. Now compare that to the January 6th insurrection. There was one insurrection with a couple thousand people and it was violent. That’s 100%. It was 100% violent. So it’s just very frustrating to hear the propaganda and the lies and how they use certain situations from the truth of who’s actually driving the violence. We know that right-wing violence in the past 30 years is overwhelmingly more consistent than it is on the left.

Read more of the conversation here.

Protect & Serve with Michael Fanone & Maya May | Trump’s Insurrection Act: The Blueprint for a Police State

We are living in fraught times where every day is a reminder of the police state that could be. Are these ICE tactics and crackdowns a new reality of American life for good? Where are the local leaders in this fight? And what do these tactics say about the goals of Trump’s private police force. There is no better duo to answer these questions than Michael Fanone and Maya May in this week’s episode of Protect & Serve.

Michael Fanone: I’ve never seen chemical agents deployed unless the crowd was actively resisting the law enforcement officers. Listen, there’s a protest every single day in Washington D.C. Most of them are completely peaceful. But, there are times in which individuals who engage in forms of protest and civil disobedience, the purpose is to get arrested. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to become actively resistant or assaultive – but they might just sit there and the officers have a responsibility to clear that area. And then the officers have to go in and affect an arrest. That doesn’t require pepper spray. It doesn’t require shooting pepper balls at people’s heads. That would be reserved for a situation in which officers go in, they’re trying to affect an arrest and people become actively resistant or even assaultive toward the officers. And so again, there’s no justification for this.

Maya May: [...] I didn’t know what was up, but I knew something was up. And it was a practice that they use called kettling – and kettling was not something I was familiar with. I was on a call with the mayor of Los Angeles, she hadn’t been aware of the term. I think now, in New York, they’re not even allowed to do it.

Michael, can you talk about what ‘kettling’ looks like in one of these situations?

Michael Fanone: Essentially, it’s containing, it’s using officers to contain protesters. I’ll give you probably the most infamous example of that, at least in my knowledge because it resulted in a number of court filings, was the Pershing Park protests or Pershing Park arrests in Washington D.C.

I want to say that this was during the Occupy movement, but there were a number of protesters in Pershing Park and the police officers used this technique – kettling. They lined up officers on all four sides of where these protesters were and the protesters, many of them in the crowd, were being assaulted – they were hurling bricks and things at officers. They moved in, they surrounded the group, and they ended up making all of these arrests.

Well, in addition to arresting the few handfuls of individuals that were breaking the law. They also arrested people that were just having lunch in the park. They arrested innocent bystanders. So, as a result of that, there were multiple million dollar lawsuits that the city had to settle. We had to create a policy that allowed for, and continues to this day, to allow for an avenue of escape – all the way up until the time of arrest.

So, once a scenario, or an assembly, or a group of individuals have been declared unlawful and the officers move in to make an arrest, essentially all the way up to the moment of arrest, those individuals have to be afforded the ability to leave of their own recognizance.

Read more of the conversation here.

Why your School Board Is a Battle Ground | Scott R. Levy Joins Susan Demas LIVE

School board member and lecturer at Harvard University, Scott R. Levy, sat down with Lincoln Square executive editor Susan J. Demas to discuss one of the current battlegrounds in our nation’s never ending culture wars. These meetings have become national news and protests against everything from pronouns to vaccinations.

Susan J. Demas: There were national groups that were playing in local school board elections and oftentimes these positions aren’t even paid. So what’s going on that suddenly you have very well-funded national groups that really care what’s going on in the school district that might only be a community of a few thousand people?

Scott R. Levy: For those of us that are parents, I think we can all say that regardless of what issues we care about as it relates to our kids – if we see something that isn’t right, if we see something that may not be consistent with our values, whatever our values are, we are animated about it and understandably concerned about it.

I think that it’s sort of activating to some extent. I think what politicians have realized across the board is that activated parents, regardless of what your politics are, means that you’re an engaged voter. So, I think there’s more recognition now, post-2020, with all the spotlight on these school board meetings, that if you’re a state politician or if you’re a national politician, maybe you should take note because this could be a source of support for you. It could be a source of galvanizing people that might be very active in various political races.

So, this line between our national politics and our local politics certainly has blurred. Of course, the internet helps that. I always like to say the internet has done two things: it’s made school board meetings go viral sometimes because you can have a clip that happens in a meeting somewhere and all of a sudden it could have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of hits. [...] And then you have the dynamic where if you’re a likeminded person, in New York or California, and you’re literally on opposite ends of the country and you can communicate through social media and apply the same tactics at a school board meeting.

[...] Now, in so many communities, you don’t even have a local newspaper or you might have a local newspaper without the same resources that it used to have and there’s a void. And it’s been taken up by social media. Having said that, even though our national politics have clearly come into the board room – I came to realize was in the age that we’re in with all our polarization and divisiveness, that these board meetings are actually places that I truly believe can be helpful to our democratic process and to try to reunite us because we’re actually there in person.

Read more of the conversation here.