Weekly Wrap | The Reiner Tragedy, Susie’s Plea Deal with History, & Can Dems Recover from ‘24?

Welcome to the Weekly Wrap, where you can catch up on all the best shows and interviews you may have missed on Lincoln Square.

Trump’s Vile Attacks on Rob Reiner | Susan Demas & Edwin Eisendrath LIVE

Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were murdered last week in a horrific act of violence that saw their son Nick Reiner arrested for the crime. The very next day, the President of the United States made a sadistic post on his social platform blaming Reiner’s political beliefs on his death. Susan and Edwin tackle this disgusting reaction and more in this Live.

Susan J. Demas: Well, I know this week our list of topics was particularly long – but I think we need to start with Trump managing to outdo himself in cruelty with his response to actor and director Rob Reiner’s death. I mean, this tweet was one for the books. As usual, it has to be all about him.

And you know, I just want to get real here. If you have a member of your family who has Alzheimer’s, you know this behavior and you don’t want that person having the keys to the car, much less having the nuclear codes. And this just strikes me as tirades that I have heard from folks in my life at family gatherings where you just have to sit there and endure it if you love this person. But as a country, I think we’re all tired of enduring this.

Edwin Eisendrath: Let’s start with this: Rob Reiner was a national treasure, and his wife. They have a family tragedy. They have a son with serious mental illness, a terrible tragedy, something that would be painful for any family and now terribly tragic with this kid at least charged with murdering his parents in a brutal way.

This is heartbreaking for anybody and shocking. And any reaction that’s different from that is not a normal human reaction. I mean, go back to Charlie Kirk. You know, I wrote a piece when he was shot about how much I hope he lived because that’s not how we want to do things, right?

And that’s not a guy I agree with about anything. Donald Trump’s reaction to this tragedy is: me, me, me, me, me. You just want to say, “We all know it’s about you, Donald.” I mean, there’s no news here, but you’re just showcasing what a terrible human being you are. I mean, every story we have has been about what a terrible human being he is. This one was just revolting. Just personally revolting. And I’m pleased that some of the Republicans said so. I mean, it’s nice to know – and we’re finding this inch by inch all over the country.

And I don’t want to give them more credit than they deserve, but now that his poll numbers are in the tank, we’re finding that people are willing to say, “oh, there are other things to value. You may not be the God we thought you were. Indiana said no. And I think Republicans, a couple of them have come out and said, “Yeah, no, we think this was a tragedy.”

See more of the discussion here.

Susie Wiles’ Plea Deal with History | The Strategy Session

Susie Wiles set the political world on fire with her Vanity Fair exclusive this week. From horrifying photos to accusations of the president having “an alcoholic’s personality,” Vanity Fair had it all. Rick Wilson, Stuart Stevens, and Joe Trippi spent this week’s episode of The Strategy Session discussing that and more.

Rick Wilson: Dan “Scam”-ino’s haircut screams torch-lit rally. The haircut was better in the original German.

Stuart Stevens: Yeah, that is a Nuremberg special.

Joe Trippi: They all look so happy.

Rick WIlson: And by the way, that Scavino thing, that’s not a coincidence. That is alt-right signaling bullshit. Stephen Miller, of course, looks like a man who just only found one dead girl in the trunk of his car when he expected two. It’s just that none of these people are happy warriors.

Stuart Stevens: You know, we talked about this in the big picture of what’s wrong with the Republican Party. I mean, just in a pure political sense – I don’t know what the messaging is that’s attracting people because they’re losing voters all the time. Here’s the West Wing, and I don’t know who the messengers are.

So here’s the West Wing. I don’t know if you have that opening montage as a piece of video, Sam, but it was modeled after these famous photographs taken of JFK (the Vanity Fair shoot).

Rick Wilson: Yep.

Stuart Stevens: When they’re looking out on the Rose Garden, they have the curtains with that swelling music.

Rick Wilson: Not YMCA.

Stuart Stevens: These are people you like when you’re 17,18,19, you’re interested in politics, you want to be one of these people.

Rick Wilson: Right. You admire them and you look at the purposefulness of the composition of the photographs.

Stuart Stevens: How lucky can you be to stand in the Oval Office? And then you look at these people and they’re just…

Joe Trippi: You know, it’s the opposite. I still get back to, we’ve all worked with chiefs of staff in the White House. Some of them have slipped up and, you know, add their share. But I don’t recall anything like this. I mean, not just the chief of staff, anybody in an administration. Can you imagine Leon Panetta or an Andy Card putting themselves in this position?

Stuart Stevens: I think she hates these people and she hates part of herself that goes along with it. And she wants to be able to say, “look, I did this. But, you know, I didn’t really believe in it and I thought they made mistakes.”

See more of the discussion here.

Can the Military Refuse a President’s ‘Illegal and Unconstitutional’ Orders? | Anchor Watch with Bobby Jones & West Point History Professor Terrence Goggin

Bobby Jones was joined by West Point History Professor, Terrence Goggin, to discuss how strategy fails fastest when loyalty is mistaken for competence. We are in a military reality where an un-Constitutional war with Venezuela is on the brink – Can the military refuse to take part in Trump’s potential illegal and Unconstitutional orders?

Bobby Jones: This is fascinating to me because we see military members already pushing back. You have of the books legal counsel that’s been made available to military members that are on active duty. You now have Admiral Alvin Halsey, who I got to know personally during my time in the Navy, stepping down because of what’s happening with the Venezuelan boat strikes. I think the public’s like, “well why doesn’t the military do something to stop him,” then the other think the military is flexing back as best they can right now without trying to be disruptive was your read of the situation.

Are you confident that if the military push comes to shove, it will in fact be that last wall against a tyrannical president that’s tyrannical based on what we’re seeing in 2025?

Terrence Goggin: Yes, I’m very confident of that. And the evidence is, to me at least, was clear as day at Quantico when the 800 combatant commanders and their command officer chiefs and command sergeants were in attendance. And I did a Substack on this with their pictures, and you never saw a larger group of determined individuals staring Hegseth and Trump down. There were very telling photographs of their faces. And I picked out one lieutenant general who had a particularly grim look. I’ve seen that look before.

He was obviously not going to put up with any nonsense. Now, these guys are combat veterans, all of them. You wouldn’t be a four-star general today if you hadn’t been in combat and had a good record and been a courageous leader. These guys don’t lack courage. So, their job is to protect the Republic.

The Army and the Navy were created by Congress. The Army in 1775, the Navy in 1776. And their sole purpose was to protect the Republic. They were created by the Continental Congress, which is the precedent for the United States Congress. And they are loyal to the Congress because the Congress funds them.

The general cannot be appointed or have to be confirmed by the Senate, and they report to the various committees for their budgets. They get all their money from Congress. They’re very loyal, and they know the congressmen and the senators very well because they live with them for years and years. I mean, a congressman may be there for a decade or two, and the officers will be there as colonels, and eventually be generals – and they’ve been working together.

Presidents come and go, four-year terms, eight-year terms – but these guys have been around each other for decades. They’re not going to put up with this. They’re not going to put up with withdrawal from NATO, that’s illegal. You can’t do that. And if you do that, then maybe we’ll have to put you under house arrest and turn your fate over to Congress. And in that event, I’ve thought this through and I’m going to write about it.

In that event, they could arrest him on the basis that he’s committing treason and this is unconstitutional. And it goes to the very nature and protection of the American people. Their job is to protect the American people. So, if the choice is between protecting the American people and arresting the president, they’ll arrest the president.

Then what do they do with him? Well, they’ll put him in a nice mansion in some fort somewhere in Washington and they’ll say, “Speaker and majority leader, this is your problem. This isn’t our problem. He’s the president of the United States. You can impeach him, but right now he is ordering us to do illegal and unconstitutional things and it’s up to you to make a decision on what you want to do.”

Now, can you imagine that in the front page of the New York Times? I mean, what happens? Well, the Congress, even this Congress (the Republican Congress), it’ll flip, I think. Because I was also a politician for 10 years, as an assemblyman in California, and I understand the power of a constituency. And the constituency determines what, at the end of the day, what the Representatives do, or the Senators. And in this situation if the country is shocked by this and on the military side, which they at least show in the polls, that the military is the only institution in this country that the people by a majority support and respect. Well, I think the Congress would even say, “well, since he’s under arrest, he can’t do very much harm to us anymore, so maybe Vance should just take over.”

So they’ll get Vance going. Well, now Vance comes into office and the boss, his boss has just been arrested, and the Congress is telling him, “Look, we’re having to deal with this madman so you’re the next guy up.”

But there’s a reason why he’s been arrested. He wanted to get out of NATO, he wanted to abandon our commitments in Europe. And you wouldn’t think of doing that, would you? And Vice President Vance would have to think long and hard before he said, “Oh, I think we should get out of Europe.” And if he did that, then they’d say, “Fine, you’re arrested too.” And the Speaker becomes President. I think Mike Johnson would probably go along with what the military wanted to do.

See more of the discussion here.

Can Democrats Recover from 2024? | Bestselling Author Amie Parnes Joins Susan J. Demas for First Draft

Lincoln Square Executive Editor Susan J. Demas is back with another edition of First Draft. In this episode she sat down with Amie Parnes, bestselling author and senior correspondent for The Hill. They discussed Trump’s second term, the upcoming midterms, and her latest book with Jonathan Allen, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House.

Susan J. Demas: I actually had on Biden’s former press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, not too long ago, and she obviously has her own book, Independent, and has said that she left the Democratic Party because she felt that her old boss, Joe Biden, was so badly mistreated by the party and shoving him out.

I think a lot of people expected that her book would be more of what your book is, an insider’s view as to what the White House was. Instead, she has continued to be a big defender of the president and said, sure he lost a little spring in his step, but he was fine and this was overblown and he was really done dirty by the party. So, I know there are obviously Biden loyalists who believe that. But, it seems like in reading your reporting that there is a consensus among a lot of Democrats that if Biden had decided to step aside and say, you know, he wasn’t going to run for reelection, allow there to be a primary and a convention process – instead of this kind of shotgun marriage 107 days before – where really, for so many reasons, Kamala Harris was kind of the only option that they feel like the election would have turned out differently.

And nobody knows. Obviously, there were so many factors. People were upset about the economy. Trump was very good at messaging on that, but there’s no doubt that it would have been an extremely different election if Biden had said in 2022, 2023, “I’m not going to run again.”

Amie Parnes: Oh, yeah. And the act of the matter is, even when things were going sideways for him, even after the debate, there were still people like Barack Obama, the former president, Nancy Pelosi, who were still trying to maybe finagle the idea of an open primary. And we report that for the first time in this book.

They thought – obviously they were kind of down on Kamala Harris – they didn’t think she could win. Nancy Pelosi would tell allies if he goes, she goes at one point. She really didn’t believe that Kamala Harris could win. And in the end, I think a lot of them were proven right. They think Kamala Harris did the best of what she could have done with a campaign that was not really hers to begin with. I mean, she was on the ticket, obviously, but a lot of Delaware where she had no connection – it really wasn’t her campaign.

I do think she did the best she could, given the circumstances. But it would have been a different, far from different election had Democrats like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi gotten their way. If there would have been an open primary, if Joe Biden would have gone out sooner… I think that’s why there is still a lot of animosity about that and there are very few people who defend Joe Biden at this point to me. I think, yeah, arrows aimed in that direction.

See more of the discussion here.

Rep. Jim Hines Joins Bobby Jones on his War Powers Resolution & the Fate of ACA Credits

Congressman Jim Himes (D-Conn.) issued a statement with five of his Democratic colleagues to question the ongoing lethal military strikes in the Caribbean. The Congressman joined Lincoln Square’s Bobby Jones to discuss what it actually means when Congress is cut out of life-and-death decisions that traditionally require debate, authorization, and accountability.

Bobby Jones: You bring up very prominent points, and there’s something I want to kind of anchor on. These actions now have been going on for weeks and months. Has the Trump administration or the Defense Department given you and that committee a brief that satisfies in your mind why they’re taking these actions?

Because we just woke up one day and we received Truth Social tweets talking about how we’ve struck these boats. And I’m thinking to myself, someone who was in charge of a Marine squadron, somebody had to approve this somewhere, and Congress knew.

Rep. Jim Himes: So you ask a really important question. The easy answer to your question is that we have not had the kind of transparency that we would like. These strikes have been going on for about 100 days, since September 2nd, when the first one was taken.

We started getting briefed by the Pentagon and by the Department of Justice. I’ll come back to why that’s important. About two, three weeks ago – and again, you don’t get more serious than the United States military taking people out abroad – and we should have been informed in advance. And belatedly, we’re starting to get operational briefings. The Pentagon’s coming forward and saying, “here’s what we’re doing.” And we’ve had access to, you asked about this, what the administration believes their legal authority is to take an activity that has always been a law enforcement activity. We’ve always arrested drug dealers and cartel members.

We’ve never used the full force and power of the United States military against them. And that is a huge step when you think about it. You know better than I do, that for 200 years, the United States military has gone out of its way and put people at risk in order not to harm civilians. Now we’re deliberately targeting civilians.

Now, look, America’s split on this. You may argue that these are really bad people and that they deserve that. But at a minimum, we ought to have that conversation and that debate in the United States Congress about the fact that our country is now in the business of killing civilians. Now maybe you believe that these civilians, when they’re actually trying to get drugs north to the United States, maybe you believe (and I’m not sold) but maybe you believe that they somehow are combatants when they’re doing that. This raises another question, which is that famous double tap strike, right?

When the boat was taken out and now you have two individuals basically clinging on to wreckage and we take them out after some period of time. I don’t need to tell you that in the Pentagon regulations that define what is legal and illegal. The example given of a shipwreck you cannot take is on a shipwrecked mariner. You may not like these guys, and I suspect these were bad guys, but that’s what the laws of war say.

And so I say all this because we should be having that debate in Congress. But the administration said, “Sorry, we’re not doing this.” We’re just going to put a good chunk of our biggest Navy force ever assembled in the Caribbean. We’re gonna kill up to 100 people and counting. We’re gonna do all these novel things, and sorry Congress, you don’t get a pine.

Whatever you think of this stuff, that’s just not right. As a after of right and wrong, and you know better than I do, Bobby, military activity tends to go in unpredictable ways. You know, what happens when some ba guy sends a motorboat laden with explosives into one of our assets in the region? Now, all of a sudden, we may find ourselves in a shooting war. So my point is we ought to be talking about this, debating it, understanding it. We’re not doing that right now.

See more of the discussion here.

Absurdity: Trump’s Forcing Toddlers to Be their Own Lawyers | First Draft with Susan J. Demas and Courier Newsroom’s Sahara Sajjadi

Immigration enforcement and the infrastructure development surrounding it have sought to impose complexity, delay relief, and let exhaustion do the work. Children are being separated from families and decision makers are insulated from consequence. Susan J. Demas and Shara Sajjadi discuss that and more in this episode of First Draft.

Susan Demas: I know you’re in the belly of the beast when it comes to immigration policy, being in Arizona, and this has been a huge issue in the state long before Donald Trump was ever elected the first time. You had Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and he made national headlines for his super aggressive policies outside Phoenix.

And you had John McCain, who was considered to be a moderate, obviously ran for president, but in order to keep a seat, was making ads saying, “We’ve got to build the dang fence.” This has been something that Arizonans have been grappling with for a long time. And the state is changing politically, we did see that the state went for Biden in 2020, flipped back to Trump in 2024. You do have two Democratic U.S. senators.

Talk to us about what exactly is going on, because it seems like when it comes to the issue of immigration, people aren’t satisfied with what’s going on. There are some people that would like stronger policies, but is that what they want? Do they want what the Trump administration is ultimately doing right now?

Sahara Sajjadi: Yeah, and from the conversations I’ve had over the past year, it does not seem like this is what people wanted, what people expected, and what people desire. Like you said, Arizona is a very unique state. We’re never, you know – sometimes people write us off as just red, but we’re extremely purple. We’re a battleground.

Like you said, President Trump won in 2024. So did Ruben Gallego. We also passed Prop 139 for abortion rights. So Arizonans vote depending on what’s happening in front of them. And this isn’t what anyone wants. President Trump said mass deportations. He said the worst of the worst. We’re going after kids. We’re going after longtime business owners. We’re going after a student. We’re going after people who have done nothing wrong and everything other than their immigration status, which some of them were kids who didn’t even know any better, or some of them came on a tourist visa and didn’t realize what went wrong.

These are not the people that they pledge to go after. And that is resonating with people. It’s, “you sold us a dream, and this is a nightmare.” And it’s false. It’s not what we voted for. It’s not what we expect. And you’re seeing Democrats make strides in that messaging, right?

Because people are seeing in real time, they don’t want SEAL Team 6 on the streets. They don’t want these masked guys with guns or masked officers, masked ICE agents masquerading as police officers to try and apprehend somebody. And one thing that really stood out to me, there was a reporting from 12 News (Arizona) about a woman, Kelly Yu, who was here undocumented. She was a business owner and she has children, she has a fiance and so on. And she was apprehended by ICE. She’s been here for 20 years. She’s now in detainment and the chair of the local Republican Party came with the Democrats to fundraise to get her out.

So, we’re seeing that this is a political issue that’s tugging people from the left and the right and from the middle. Because I don’t think people want this animosity within their communities. And this dishonest notion that President Trump and Stephen Miller are trying to sell us on, that they’re getting out the worst of the worst? They’re getting out our community members. They’re uprooting our communities. They’re targeting businesses that people know and trust and are familiar with.

I think that’s really going to resonate come 2026 and the midterms. And we’re already seeing it resonate in races across the country so far this year. I really think it’s going to stand out to Arizona voters.

See more of the discussion here.

Greg Bovino: Trump’s Mean Little Lieutenant | Michael Fanone & Maya May LIVE

Bite-size Greg Bovino is still terrorizing American city streets with his masked goon squads of ICE agents. He has become the tip of the spear for the test case of authoritarian policing in America. Michael Fanone and Maya May break down Greg’s childhood, his bitterness over being fired by Biden, and his villain comeback story under Trump.

Maya May: He puts his name on everything. So now we have Trump Rx. There’s going to be Trump accounts for child bank accounts. The man knows how to brand and unfortunately, low information voters, people who may not be paying attention as much as they need to be, see his name and go, “Oh, yes. My president is working for me, even though everything is exponentially more expensive.” I think that’s the thing to me. That’s why I’m out o fucks to give is because if we’re all being gaslit to the point that we can see the numbers, even Fox News is openly talking about the numbers. And then he can just turn around and address the nation with complete and total lies. And we’re all just like, “Oh, okay. That’s how we live now.”

Is this how we live now? Because again, I can’t imagine many more years of this.

Michael Fanone: I think we’ve always lived that way, Maya. I think that we just never had a president that was so open to politics and lying to the American people to benefit himself. To take advantage of every legal loophole that he can possibly find. And then when he can’t, just ignore the court rulings.

Again, this is the most corrupt and illegal administration we’ve ever seen in the 249 plus years that the country has existed.

Maya May: Which makes me go, why are we following any rules? You know, it’s tax time. Tax time’s coming up. You don’t have to, you know, you can’t file for free anymore because they took that tool away. And because they had a deal with the folks behind TurboTax, they’re like “well, screw it… Let’s not try to save the money of the American people at a time when they desperately need it. So, why are we following any rules at all?

Michael Fanone: That’s a good question. And I’m not going to sit here and advise people not to pay their taxes, though I think about it every single year myself, regardless of who’s the president, but I digress. I like the ideas coming from some of these governors who have said, “well, if we’re not going to benefit from the federal government services because we’re Democrats or we are opposed to the policies of this administration, we’re going to withhold our state income taxes and spend money on ourselves.” And I think that’s something that I would certainly support – withholding state money from the federal government. Hell yeah.

See more of the discussion here.

Donny Downfall | Behind the Numbers with Rick & Andrew Wilson

On this week’s Behind the Numbers, Rick and Andrew Wilson frame the data as something darker than a structural breakdown between narrative and household realities. It’s a governing failure that a culture war distraction can’t mask. Add on to that the collapse inside MAGA which threatens 2026 candidates along with the succession fantasy, and the Wilson’s had plenty to discuss.

Andrew Wilson: When the deficit balloons, with these tax cuts – and the savings that people see will be eaten into by their premiums going up – they’re not going to feel the tax cuts like they did in 2017.

Rick Wilson: Say more about that, because in 2017 we really did have a good overall economic situation.

Andrew Wilson: And that was a real boon for Trump. The Tax Cuts he managed to get through, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the TCA – you know it, it worked (it ballooned the deficit, of course – but it worked to put more money in people’s pockets and that was a boon for Trump and Republicans in a major way. This won’t be the same because it’s being offset by rising prices broadly, and healthcare costs – we’re probably underestimating how bad healthcare costs are going to be.

Chuck Schumer’s talking about “your bill will maybe go up $500 or a thousand,” but I think it’s going to be worse for most people.

Rick Wilson: Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at because there’s a lot of people already saying, “mine’s going from $569 or $595, to $2700.”

Andrew Wilson: Right and the down the track path of people jumping off healthcare is going to cause more government spending. None of this is going to be good for the deficit or the country in general.

See more of the discussion here.