Episode 1: "America This Week," With Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi

Greetings, TK subscribers, and welcome to the inaugural episode of America This Week, with Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi. The show is designed as an offbeat rundown of the week in American news, complementing the written Friday rundown that we’ll continue to publish on this site.

The show should be self-explanatory, but if not, please don’t hesitate to leave questions below. We will likely add an interactive component to the show at some point, so if there’s something you’d like to ask Walter or me to comment upon, particularly with regard to next week’s news, we’d love to hear from you. This is our inaugural effort, so please forgive a rough edge, and please also note our luck: for a show conceived as a way to delve into the odd and the overlooked, we got hit on our first week with one historically massive story. We’re not going to lie, it threw us a little. But what a lot to talk about!

Here’s a transcript, edited for clarity, of our opening dialogue on the Trump raid:

Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: This is our first show, so we should introduce ourselves, Walter, who are you?

Walter Kirn: Well, I’m a novelist, I’m a memoirist. I’m a literary critic, I’ve written for magazines from Time to the New Republic. And I’m currently a disaffected independent journalist plying his trade without corporate sponsors and glad to be doing it that way.

Matt Taibbi: That feels strikingly familiar. We’re both news vets. I worked at Rolling Stone for many years, Walter paid dues in the straight news magazine industry for a long time. So this is intended to be a show that runs down the news of America for the entire week,where we go through a whole bunch of stories. But, we had the misfortune this first week of being hit with one of the biggest, and most consequential news stories in years, and that doesn’t exactly fit our format of what we’re trying to do, but we’re going to do the best we can…

Walter Kirn: Yeah. I mean, we’ll not only do our best, but we’ll deal with this asteroid hit of an FBI raid on Trump. That’s what it felt like. It felt like we were getting ready to do a weekly news wrap up, and Mars exploded.

Matt Taibbi: There is some other stuff we’re going to talk about. There was military contracting corruption, some financial shenanigans, there’s bug eating, I know you love.

Walter Kirn: Uh-huh.

Matt Taibbi: But the big story is Donald Trump, and I guess we should just jump right into it.

Walter Kirn: Let’s do it.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. Trump Home Raided. (Reads from America This Week) “Unless you spent the week in a disabled submarine at crushed depth, you already know that the Mar-a-Lago home of Donald John Trump was raided by the FBI Monday, reportedly over mishandling of classified material…” Then it goes on to talk about how Trump is the target of at least five inquiries. He’s got something going on in Georgia. New York is looking at his businesses. This raid on his home by the FBI is a paradigm shifting event. The progression of it as a news story I think fascinated both of us as, as news people. What was your take on that? Because it went through stages…

Walter Kirn: So, the first thing that happens is we have the first ever massive FBI raid on a former president’s home, who’s probably on the verge of announcing a campaign for his reelection. So, the first question was, what were they looking for? And what did they find? Within five minutes of reading the story or seeing the story, you asked that question? Apparently they had no answer the next day. And then the next day they had no answer. And not only that: it was unclear who had ordered the raid. The president supposedly wasn’t informed. There was some question about if FBI director may had just freelanced this one…

Matt Taibbi: That was reported in Newsweek.

Walter Kirn: Yes. It was reported in Newsweek. So here we are with the question of the hour unanswered for days, while they all point fingers. And then we get this weak, really complicated, nerdy thing about the National Archives. We don’t even know where they are, what they are exactly. They’re needing some stuff back… The whole sound of the story was like there were overdue library books at Mar-a-Lago, and they sent in the goon squad. Then, you turn around and they go from zero to 60, and it’s Merrick Garland standing up and saying, “I did it!” at the end of a –

Matt Taibbi: Unconvincingly, by the way.

Walter Kirn: Yes. Unconvincingly. He didn’t look like he wanted to be there. He looked like he put off having to say that for long as possible. It looked like there were machine guns off camera pointed at his head… So the buck stops at the guy with two last names. Then suddenly there’s a side leak to the Washington Post that they were looking for nuclear secrets. It was just like going from first to fifth gear without even using the clutch. You went, “Wait a second. We were talking about nuclear secrets this whole time?” Wray said Trump had overblown it, that he shouldn’t have drawn attention to on social media. It was just a little raid between gentlemen, why did he have to make such a big deal? The raid that the president had not been told about, the raid that no one would take responsibility for, was about nuclear secrets.

Dude, if I’m the guy who’s taking back, the nuclear secrets from a West Palm beach hotel, I want to take credit for it. They should have been fighting to take credit for saving the world.

Matt Taibbi: They should have been elbowing each other to get to the podium.

Walter Kirn: Exactly. They, you know, there should have been a secretary at DOJ running onto the podium and saying, “I wrote the memo!” So now we go into the weekend, unfortunately, and who knows for how much longer, because aren’t nuclear secrets secret for a reason? Are they going to divulge what they were? What is the nuclear secret? Presumably, having been president, he has a lot of nuclear secrets in his head. Are they gonna chop it off?

Matt Taibbi: Why not?

Walter Kirn: And indeed Matt, Michael Beschloss, presidential historian, he’s tweeting out pictures of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed for selling bomb secrets to the Russians, and suggests that this is a parallel situation, that Trump should be executed. Then General Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, gets on Twitter and quote-tweets this with the comment, “Sounds about right.” So, now the execution of the president for the nuclear secrets hidden in Melania’s underwear drawer is something that we are all supposed to walk around our daily lives with, contemplating in the back of our heads.

Matt Taibbi: You’ve obviously been involved in screenwriting and the production of Hollywood movies. If you were trying to come up with a scenario that would convince people to let go of their paranoia of the “deep state,” could you think of something worse than raiding the president’s house in a multi-agency raid – where it’s leaked out, by the way, that counterintelligence personnel are there – then not saying anything for a period of days, then having a sudden and bizarre press conference, then announce something about nuclear secrets, after which the former head of the CIA basically co-signs with a happy face emoji the idea, “Let’s execute Donald Trump.” It’s almost like they anti-wrote the whole thing to try to make a political problem worse for themselves, Am I missing something?

Walter Kirn: No, this feels like a reverse-engineered civil war. It really does. Because Wray last week was saying that the big problem here was all the violent rhetoric from Trump supporters in protest of the raid. So he wanted to soothe people and calm the waters, but then they bring out nuclear secrets and even the likes of the calm cool and collected Michael Beschloss are calling for the execution of a former president. Well, that wasn’t exactly nonviolent rhetoric. So, now both the left and the right seem to have the stuff of total war.

Matt Taibbi: Totaler Krieg!

Walter Kirn: Yeah. And, and you can imagine the people at Twitter HQ – you know in movies, they always have those underground bunkers where they have computer screens up and they’re following missiles or whatever it is

Matt Taibbi: Underneath Virginia. Or Colorado, sorry, that’s where NORAD is always pictured.

Walter Kirn: Imagine they have those for social media – and essentially they do – and intelligence has those and they put the word “nuclear” up on the screen. And they’re like looking in real time, seeing how many people are calling for Trump’s execution, how many people are blaming Putin, how many people say, “Let’s take down the White House!” or whatever. And they know, they know with a numerical specificity, what sort of conflict and what intensity of conflict, this stuff breeds. And not only don’t they seem to care, they seem to be rooting for it to get much more intense.

Matt Taibbi: I hope that there’s a camera somewhere on wherever that location is. So so when the Dr. Evil rocket shoots out of there, then we’ll know at least they’ve been tipped off that shit’s about to go down… They must be looking at this and wondering at what a gigantic mess has been made just in the last seven days or so.

Walter Kirn: I mean, the problem is, if you want, if you don’t want Trump to be president again, don’t create a situation of such chaos that America might think, “Dictators aren’t that bad.” Because they’re getting perilously close to creating that situation. This strong man politics that we want put behind us seems to be more ahead of us, after a week like this.

Thanks for listening. Many of the stories referenced in the show are in the America This Week article mentioned (and linked to) above, but here are some additional show notes and links to items mentioned in the podcast:

— Merrick Garland, offstage guns aimed at his sad head, delivers remarks on Mar-a-Lago raid:

— “People familiar with the investigation” say warrant related to “classified documents related to nuclear weapons,” per Washington Post

— White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre on the raid: “The president was not briefed, was not aware of it.”

— FBI Director Christopher Wray, focusing on the reaction to the raid while deflecting questions about it, denounces “deplorable and dangerous” threats after the Trump search warrant was executed, adding, “I’m always concerned about threats to law enforcement.”

— Some examples of press outlets citing random tweets and posts by anonymous people as real evidence of a threat, as Walter mentioned. NPR cited a Gab poster saying, “All it takes is one call. And millions will arm up and take back this country. It will be over in less than 2 weeks,” while NBC pointed to “bananaguard62” telling fellow Trumpers to “lock and load” for “cold civil war.” Here’s the MSNBC graphics package:

— Steven Colbert, seeming weeks away from wearing Prestige Media Epaulettes, elicits cheers by saying “we all got the present we wanted” following Trump raid, then delivers riotously funny “That’s right, he’s going to get taken down by the librarians!” joke:

— Noted left-leaning commentator Briahna Gray Joy kinda-sorta agrees with Marjorie Taylor Greene (with caveats!) about defunding the FBI.

— Michael Hayden and Michael Beschloss tweet-speculate about the execution of Trump:

— Time magazine quotes Rachel Kleinfeld, “political violence analyst” at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, saying the American heartland is like Northern Ireland back in the day: “Acceptance of violence for political ends in America is approaching the levels seen in Northern Ireland at the height of their Troubles.… fanning the flames of violence through incendiary language is the worst possible thing they could be doing.”

— Info on 233 million credit card accounts opened in second quarter, plus other horror-data about the economy.

— Memorandum from DOJ on creating new task forces for domestic terrorism enforcement, plus info on the new bill passed enhancing surveillance authority in the wake of the Buffalo shooting.

— Background on “Big short” mastermind Don Mullen.

— Ballistic missile nose-cones sent to Taiwan by mistake; nuclear warhead mistakenly flown from North Dakota to Louisiana in 2007; RFID technology put in nukes shortly after; Rolling Stone story on failed Pentagon audit.

— Shrew-delivered virus discovered in China.

— “They’re Healthy. They’re Sustainable. So Why Don’t Humans Eat More Bugs?” in Time, “The Future of Food is Insects” in The Guardian, and “Could Grasshoppers Replace Beef?” in the BBC.

More, including transcripts, to come. Thanks for tuning in!

Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.