If you haven't watched Trump's latest meltdown on Meet The Press, you should check it out because it's both painful to watch yet so enjoyable to watch this orange man baby crack under tough questioning from Kristen Welker. Trump reported by rehashing his lies about voter fraud, which he used in 2020 when discussing the results of California's election. It's important to remember that Trump is freaking out because his endorsed candidate for governor, Steve Hilton, might not make it into the top two spots in California's jungle primary once all of the votes are counted. This explains the rehashing of the Big Lie about massive voter fraud, especially heading into the 2026 midterm elections. It truly was a massive trainwreck for Trump.
Speaking of the 2026 midterm elections, we discuss whether we're still backing Graham Platner's U.S. Senate candidacy in Maine after a whole week's worth of controversial allegations. And while we're on the topic of trainwrecks, we'll also talk about Bari Weiss and Nick Bilton doing Larry and David Ellison's bidding to kill off all of CBS News' credibility while turning it into a MAGA propaganda machine.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome to the Find Out Podcast!
01:57 Trump's Meet the Press Meltdown
07:59 California's Jungle Primary Chaos
24:35 CBS News & the 60 Minutes Collapse
30:45 Graham Platner's Senate Race Scandal
39:05 Democrats: Stop Apologizing
46:30 Subscribe!
Pennsylvania saw a surge in mail-in ballots partly because of the coronavirus pandemic, of course, as anyone who was a sentient adult before 2020 should recognize. But it is also because, in 2019 — before the pandemic — the Republican-led legislature in the state passed Act 77, a law expanding the ability of residents to vote absentee.
As the election approached, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, responding to a lawsuit, released guidance that counties couldn't reject mail-in ballots on the basis of signature comparisons — a subjective and dubious means of validating ballots. In October 2020, the state Supreme Court upheld Boockvar's guidance, with two Republican justices joining the Democratic majority…
Ty Cobb, who once served as Trump's lawyer and whose views on the 14th Amendment the Trump campaign has recently highlighted, said he saw the recordings as "likely a violation" of the federal honest services fraud statute.
"Also, shows the depths to which Trump personally participated in fraudulently pimping the 'Big Lie,'" Cobb said. "McDaniel is equally exposed. Clearly, evidence going to the core conspiracies charged by the special prosecutor."…
"NAR adherents share goals with other conservative Christians—outlawing abortion, fighting marriage equality—and were especially instrumental in the movement to keep a defeated Trump in power. …15 charismatic leaders met with high-level Trump administration officials in the lead-up to January 6 to discuss "spiritual warfare strategies"; of the six protest permits issued that day, four went to NAR-affiliated charismatic church groups…"
How A Far-Right Zealot Got to be 2nd in Line for POTUS...Mike Johnson -- who helped coordinate the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election and promotes the Big Lie... extreme Christian culture war zealot... against funding for Ukraine...
The competition with the big lie is not just, or even primarily, about fact checking. It's a competition between different models of belonging: can we build alternative communities that are more benign and yet fulfilling than the ones offered by the conspiracy theorists?…
" I could trace all her zigs and zags since early 2016: her initially ardent opposition to Trump's candidacy, her speedy capitulation, her stint in his administration as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and so on. But they were covered in an excellent essay in The Times by Stuart Stevens early this year, and a span of mere months, from December 2020 to April 2021, tells the saga of her signature spinelessness just as well."
If a substantial portion of the American public comes to believe that the judges, juries and prosecutors seeking to hold Trump accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election are part of the same trumped-up plot to keep him from becoming president, the US's 244-year experiment in self-government is seriously jeopardized...
Is Carlson now lying on behalf of Trump again? Most assuredly he is. But, again, in a deeper sense it is not quite that simple. For he is serving a supposedly "higher truth," the MAGA "truth" that Democrats and liberals hate America, and so what they say cannot be true, and so it is necessary to reframe what took place and to furnish a more authentic, more patriotic counter-narrative which by definition is true or at least true enough. From this vantage point, the representation of January 6 as a moment of patriotic glory is not a lie—they were carrying American flags and chanting "Make America Great Again," right? But even if this framing ignores obvious evidence or shades the truth, this is all done in a noble cause, in service to a more essential "truth."…
We are now in the domain of magical thinking of the worst kind—the magical thinking of political actors in service of authoritarian ideologies, willing to abrogate norms and laws, and do whatever it takes to defeat their "enemies."…
"Here's the deal: comms is going to continue to fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election. We'll do whatever they need. Just be on standby if there's any stunts we need to pull," Iverson said…
The meeting showcases another juxtaposition of what Republican officials knew about the election results and what Trump and his closest allies were saying publicly as they pushed the lie of a stolen election. Trump was told by his own attorney general there was no sign of widespread fraud, and many within his own administration told the former president there was no substance to various claims of fraud or manipulation – advice Trump repeatedly ignored…
Fox News star Sean Hannity – one of former President Donald Trump's strongest allies on the air and one of his closest advisers off it – admitted under oath that he never believed the lie that Trump was cheated of victory in the 2020 presidential election by a voting tech company.
That stands in contrast to what played out on some of Fox's biggest shows – including Hannity's. On television, Fox News hosts, stars and guests amplified and embraced such wild and false claims, made by Trump, his campaign lawyers and surrogates, presenting them to millions of viewers…
Buehler stated that lots of people come up and tell him "thank you" and share feelings of anxiety around the election and the enormous numbers of voters who believe Trump's big lie that the election was stolen. "Someone told me, 'you hear about the big lie, but when you see how many people are spreading it, and on top of all the other lies Trump told, it hits you in a new way. You're not just reading it, it's visualized, that brings it to the forefront.'"…
