Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast

“We're in like George W. Bush at his lowest ABB territory. And frankly, I think there's probably like 30 to 35 percent of Americans who are never going to abandon any Republican president ever. I should say, yeah, 30 to 35 percent of Americans who will not abandon a Republican president. He doesn't seem to care in many respects. I think, you know, that's because, like, I think he has made just so much money. There has been so much corruption and graft. ... He's losing support. I mean, if I was him, is I would be very worried about losing the Senate because it's one thing, it's not like he has an agenda.”

“The court, unlike other institutions, they finish up, you know, at the end of the school year, rise and leave, get rid of everything one way or another, and that'll be at the end of June. By the way, everyone will be watching close that day because that's the traditional time to announce retirements, and all eyes will be on Thomas and Alito. ... You couldn't write an opinion upholding this completely countertextual interpretation of the 14th Amendment. So it will continue to be the case, I think, that anyone born here, whoever their parents are, will be an American citizen.”

“There was a cohort of people who voted for him because they wanted a, an unnamed change to the system. And I think for part of that cohort, it has been immigration has appalled them, the immigration policies have appalled them. They didn't realize they were, they were, they were either going to be a target or just like how vicious it would be or that their friend would be a target or their parents or their, you know. And I think for another cohort, it's like inflation's not down. Wages are not up. Gas is now super expensive. I think they're like, what the hell? You're just like the rest of them.”

“To watch how much he is going to genuflect the Donald Trump, he has an audience of one. And I think people, you know, he has sold out even those completely perverse, and I think, and warped principles that he had. He has gone full mercenary now. And I think that's, I think for people who were one issue voters, like MAHA people, I think that they're done. They see Kennedy, you know, from their perspective, he, you know, the White Knight went into the city of sin, and he's now like become a swamp creature to mix many metaphors.”

“Even when you're not the second fiddle for a complete narcissistic sociopath, it's a bad job. Even when you're just the vice president for a normal president, it's not a good job unless you're Dick Cheney. But I think in this case, I think Vance has a number of problems. One is he has this humiliation tour. He's been tasked with bringing peace to the Middle East. ... Trump has really been trying to de-escalate the war in Iran. But the problem is that the Iranians are ideological in a way that I don't think Trump quite understands. So he's not able to back this train up.”

“It is a deeply intellectually dishonest case. So first of all, the wire fraud, the fraud here is supposed to be, and it's got to be all these, a lot of specifics against the donors. The theory of the case is that you went to the donors and said, please give us your money. We're working to fair it out, extremism. We have a great track record, including with the KKK. And a very important way to do it is the way law enforcement always does it. Infiltrate, get a confidential informant, pay them money. ... It's exactly as you say, Molly. If that's true, then the FBI forever has been promoting the mob.”

“The Department of Justice announced Friday that it will resurrect federal firing squads as part of its effort to implement Donald Trump's Day One Executive Order to revamp capital punishment. I hate capital punishment. ... Because it's terrible. It's killing people, and it is so terrible. But it's also very stupid. It's expensive. It is a really circuitous way to punish people. It's just so terrible. And like with everything in Trump world, when they've figured out something terrible, they want to make it even worse. So this would be a way to make capital punishment even worse than lethal injection.”

“What you're seeing, I think, in Virginia, is a recognition from the electorate that that no longer serves us. It does not serve democracy. It doesn't serve the people of Virginia. And it doesn't serve people in purple states across the country. What you're seeing in Virginia is that 51% of voters there see the world we're living in, don't like it, and want to do something about it. And they're doing that in a world where there's been rampant misinformation, where the information ecosystem about what's even happening is completely broken.”

“There has been a running critique at the Correspondents Center that it just shows the kind of coziness, the chumminess of Washington between reporters and the people that they cover, the people they're supposed to be holding accountable. And so a lot of people have criticized the dinner over the years. The guest of honor, a guy giving a speech, sitting up on this platform, who has undermined the press throughout his second term. That's why it's not normal.”

“Why is Donald Trump using our tax dollars to bail out Spirit Airlines? Earlier in this season of Donald Trump Destroys America, we saw him use some of that money to bail out Latin American countries. We've seen him use our tax dollars for any number of sordid things. But my big question is, what is he getting back? The deal will be $500 million for Spirit, equity warrants for the government, because what better business to spend tax payer dollars in than airlines notoriously stable?”

“Donald Trump has this guy, RFK Jr. He represents MAGA. He helped Donald Trump win. The anti-vax stuff, it's super unpopular. So what does Donald Trump do? He's got RFK Jr. out there doing a sort of, was I anti-vax? Maybe I wasn't anti-vax. And he's lying. These people really like to lie. But you've heard him under oath lying before. I mean, RFK Jr. has lied under oath. Pretty much that's sort of one of the central themes of this whole situation.”

“There is this man known as AL Yaakoby, who's been caught many times making pro-Israeli propaganda out of AI. So he today shared a meme that said, breaking the Islamic Republic is preparing to hang eight women. And people who are good at detecting AI are all dying laughing, saying this is the most AI that has ever AI imaged of all time. It seems that the consensus on the Internet as of now is that this was made up. And because the person who initially spread this has such a bad past, it is not seeming very likely.”

“David Ellison then bought the free press for $150 million and installed Barry Weiss. I think he's given her a lot of leeway. She has a lot of latitude to make changes, and she is. I think one of the issues with her early on was she abruptly pulled a CBS 60 Minutes segment, which was extremely unusual. It was hours before it was going to broadcast. It was after it was being promoted. I think one of the questions with her is she making some of these moves for political reasons.”

“Southern Poverty Law Center has paid informants the way the FBI does. They're called field sources. They engage in their informants, and they get paid, and they inform, and thus this organization learns about the KKK and stops them from doing crimes. Now, this administration doesn't like people to monitor the KKK. So they are going after the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is Todd Blanch trying to keep this job. This is Todd Blanch knowing that Pam Bondi got fired because she did not do the kind of witch hunts that Donald Trump wanted.”

“I think it was the most telling moment was on day one of this whole second term, when we saw Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, all standing there with other captains of industry in the tech world, in the media world. And so, yeah, I think it's imperative to look at ownership and what is there other business before government? If you're just an independent, rich person and you own a publication news site, you might end up in a different place than a bigger media apparatus that has to worry about the broadcast license.”

“Ken Martin has really one job, which is to raise money for the DNC. And so the fact that they have negative $4.4 million means that he's not raising money for the DNC. He is uniquely not the man for this moment. The question is, when does he resign and how can we speed this up?”

“The Iran war which Donald Trump caused for no reason. He caused it because Netanyahu told him to, tricked him into it basically. There is no other reason for this war. What happened when he went to war? The most predictable thing in the world. The Iranians went after the Straits of Hormuz.”

“And really this is kind of echoes what we talked about last time, which is the Christian nationalism of it all, where he's making this very overtly about Christianity. And his reasons for leaving his following of Donald Trump and his support of Donald Trump is because of Christianity and his love for his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. That is the reason that he is leaving.”

“But now Donald Trump is on True Social, saying how terrible Tucker Carlson is, and basically taking a flame throw to all of these people, these right and far right people now. Candice, Alex Jones. He comes after Alex Jones for being a Sandy Hook truther. He was a Sandy Hook truther when you went on his show.”

“This is Colorado's 8th Congressional District. It is the only purple district in the state of Colorado. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by two points in the 2024 election. This is a new district that was drawn for Colorado after the last census. So it remains very much in play.”

“I'm hearing from our farmers and ranchers that they are so concerned about tariffs and then reciprocal tariffs, export wars, trade wars that have hurt their markets. Notably, they are looking for solutions and people who will fight for them. In fact, I was just endorsed for the primary by the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union.”

“People are increasingly afraid of losing access to health care. In this district, we know one in three families and Colorado's eighth depend upon Medicaid to go see the doctor. So there's a lot of fear there. Our health clinics are in jeopardy. A lot of them are worried about cutting back services.”

“Jody Cantor and Adam Liptak have these secret memos obtained by the New York Times, illuminate the origins of the court's now routine shadow docket, which basically just shows how they started. It shows how the Supreme Court is able to bend the laws in a way that is and not have to show their thinking.”

“But it turned out that there are places where even the president doesn't get to go when the military doesn't want him to... What's the word I'm looking for? Leak shit from the most classified possible operation they could be conducting. Or have him in the room acting like a crazy motherfucker. Those are why they kept him out of the room.”

“They were not going to let even the president of the United States mess it up because there was a real belief that he would do something to either order them to do something stupid or leak it. And either one of those scenarios would have resulted in that that F-15 backseater either being dead or being an Iranian hostage. And they realized that it should tell you a lot that the people who actually are on the pointy end of the stick with our military do not trust their commander in chief.”

“So now, we have Energy Secretary Chris Wright, one of the many people who likes to go on a Sunday show and really fuck things up, saying that gas may stay above $3 into 2027 Great stuff. Love it. The Arap war has driven up prices as we were told. None of this is a surprise in any which way, and Wright is just trying to defend it.”

“JD Vance is running for president in 2028 And I don't think he fired Buckley just because Tucker's saying shit about Donald Trump. I think he fired Buckley because he recognizes that when he wants to run for president, Tucker is one of those people who could be a potential candidate in a primary against JD Vance. And that makes JD Vance extremely no bueno.”

“Alex Jones is out like completely fireballing Trump now and says that Americans should hang their flags upside down, which is the universal symbol of distress. I'm like, Alex Jones? Gay frog, Alex Jones? ... This is not Alex Jones talking to the deep state. This is Alex Jones talking to MAGA base. It's a seismic shift and it continues on.”

“Who is the dissident? The dissident is the person who says, I'm not moving. You're in the way of me living my normal life, right? You're going to have to move. I'm not moving out of the way. The pre-political are all of these sort of conditions of life that we take to be sort of normal. Like, you want to be, it's not political to want to be a good neighbor, to see somebody's rights being violated and acting on it.”

“Cash Patel is increasingly seen inside the FBI and the administration as somebody with a drinking problem. He is not going to win this fight because he has over a dozen sources who said, He drinking. This isn't good. Cash Patel's security detail needs to get the jaws of life to pry open his hotel room door so they can get him because he won't respond otherwise.”

“He's engaging in market manipulation on a daily basis, whether it's by going on Fox or putting out a social post or talking to a reporter who happens to call him at Monday morning at 7:45 AM, before the market's open. It's pretty clear what's going on here. I think the events are just going to take care of themselves here. The Iranians still apparently have the ability to wreak havoc in the region, and Trump still has the ability to post things like, I'm going to wipe out your civilization and then bond their Navy and so on.”

“There was this terrible piece of legislation that was passed last year called the Genius Act. And knowing this Congress, if it's called the Genius Act, it's got to be stupid. It's really bad. It allows corporations to issue their own currency, their own money in the form of a stable coin, which is a crypto that's supposedly tied to the dollar. So it's literal corporate money. It allows corporations to issue their own money. If you think that's a good idea, first of all, it's a question whether you're a Democrat or not.”

“Discharge petitions are not supposed to be the way we make laws. Discharge petitions are supposed to be sort of a last ditch effort. Nancy Pelosi never had a discharge petition get through past her. That's when the party that's not in power gets to bring things to the floor. And believe it or not, we've had numerous discharge petitions. That's because Mike Johnson is not in control. And what we have right now is a Congress that is basically being run by whoever is sort of in the mood at the moment.”

“Crypto doesn't have a product, right? It's a security without a product. What are they selling you? They're selling you lines of code on a blockchain that bear no relation to any real world asset. So what is that in sort of the basic economic, an investment scheme with no product is a Ponzi scheme. I do not know what to tell you. Yes, this one has gone on a very long time. Yes, it has gone up and down and it was up and now it's down a bit, but it's still up from where it was in 2022, sort of barely.”

“The rest of the world is frankly terrified of how completely incapable we are, like, you know, aggressively criticizing and covering what is basically a president of the United States who is losing his mind in real time. It seems to me. Oh, yes. It is also my opinion that he's losing his mind in real time. I have no medical opinion here to offer, but it's just my opinion. I'm just here offering my take, you know. And if you watch the UK Parliament, it happens to be almost all the British politicians take too.”

“The Clarity Act is going to put crypto under the supervision of the CFTC. This weak agency that has historically been much more favorable to crypto. It's going to treat it as a commodity rather than a security. The reason that crypto doesn't want to be treated like a security is that securities laws are predicated on disclosure. You have to disclose who you're giving your money to, what they're doing with that money. Crypto doesn't want that, right? If you knew who owned all of the Bitcoin, the whole thing might fall apart yet again.”

“Molly, so we keep seeing immigrant deaths in ICE facilities. So in the most Trumpian policy decision possible, you know what they've decided? We're going to just try to hide those statistics from you. Yeah. There are definitely people dying in ICE facilities. We just don't know. We just don't have transparency on it. We just don't. That's it. There are people dying in ICE detention centers. We know this to be true. We've seen some reporting on this, but really, we don't know. And we don't know who's dying.”