Transcript: Trump Press Sec Goes Full Cult as Ballroom Fiasco Worsens

It belongs to the National Park Service because it’s a national heritage site. It’s a place of history; it’s a place of meaning. I don’t know how many of the listeners will have ever had the chance to tour it, but if you tour it, you do get the sense of the weight of America’s history when you walk through there.

And you might think, well, the East Wing is not the West Wing, it’s not the Oval Office, it’s not the Executive Mansion itself. But the recklessness with which he pursued this suggests that all that history could be at risk. There’s no evidence that he did any documentation, any cataloging, any preservation efforts whatsoever.

Sargent: Well, that gets to the core idea in your piece, which I want to talk about. It’s that appallingly corrupt self-dealing is at the very core of the Trump presidency. It’s like the throbbing lifeblood of this national moment. I think a lot of Trump voters tune this stuff out because they assume that whatever is good for the president is good for them. He’s masterfully seduced them into thinking that. But this looks like something different. What we’re seeing now is Trump directly taking their money, taxpayer money, putting it in his pocket, or at least trying to, and building a huge vanity project for himself. This is why I think we’re at a Rubicon crossing moment of sorts. How do we make that break through a bit more?

Ford: Well, I think that the American people are going to have to realize that this is not—I hate the phrase, ‘this is not normal’—but I feel like there’s a certain understanding among Americans of, I guess, a background radiation level of corruption in Washington.