Trump Allies Continue to Detach as He Loses Power | Explainer

Added: 2026-05-04

[00:00:00]So, let's start here with the fact that the right-wing leader in Italy um uh has recently split from Trump. She was one of his biggest supporters, Maloney, um over the the the fact he presented himself as Jesus and has picked a fight with the pope. She is now, you know, moving away from him. But she's also doing that in part because you can tell that he is weakening and that he is weaker not only because of his mental acuity issues but also because of the war in Iran. So other things have happened though too. So the one of the big things that jumped out to me is that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the public investment fund, which is one of the sovereign wealth funds of the Saudis, which is overseen by Muhammad bin Salman, often known as MBS, who's been a really tight ally of Donald Trump, has been hurting that in he he has invested in a ton of stuff over the past 10 years and and they've known they had to to pull some stuff back. So it last fall I think it was or maybe it was even earlier than that. He made a lot of promises to invest. I believe it was up to a trillion dollars in the United States. There was a lot of hoopla around that from the Trump administration and there were already signs that they were going to be pulling back on those investments. But yesterday they released their new plans for the sovereign wealth fund. And one of the things that is on the chopping block, at least today, is the um I guess it's called the live, it's the LIV golf system that the Saudis constructed with Donald Trump to play on Trump's courses here in the United States. It seemed basically a way to funnel money to Donald Trump. And it looks like they're going to axe that.

[00:01:44]Well, they wouldn't be doing that if that wouldn't be one of the things they were going to ask if it looked like he was becoming more powerful, right? It's a sign he's becoming less powerful. But you can see um there's more ways in which um the administration seems to be weakening. So today the uh there was a vote in the House on war powers and that vote did in fact fail. It failed by the vote there was one Democrat who switched sides and that was Jared Golden of Maine. you asked me what to make of that and all I will say is Golden's a bit of a cipher. He's up there in district two.

[00:02:20]Um, you know, seems a good guy, but nobody, you know, he doesn't really um, communicate a lot with other members of the party, so they don't seem to know what he's doing, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to where he takes stands, although he is not running for reelection, so um, so who knows? he's had a lot of hard times with um you know attack uh verbal attacks on his family and so on. So he went ahead and voted for that. But while that is incredibly frustrating because Trump needs to be reigned back in Iran, um that that only veiled by one vote, which is uh a a big difference from where we were, you know, on the 29th, for example, of February. So you can see that weakening happening in very obvious ways in the um in things like votes, but there are other things that are happening as well. So we're starting to get more and more oversight. So first of all, there have been new and incredibly disturbing reports coming out of what are concentration camps. I cannot emphasize that enough under the Trump administration that really seem to be extraordinary violations of civil rights and of human rights in the United States of America. And those stories are back in the news and they're starting to get more traction, which they didn't for a while. Remember how upset I was that we weren't hearing about it. And I maintain when we do get the full scoop on those, Americans are all going to be horrified and say, "We didn't know this was happening on our watch." But I promise you it is happening on our watch right now and whatever you think is happening, it's at least that bad. Uh so you're starting to hear more about that. But you're also starting to see real push back at the state level. So the state of Maine recently um uh voted to stop the construction of data centers in this state and other states are following suit. You know that they don't want these large data centers. That's a real slap in the face to the uh administration that has been pushing them. But you also saw things like today uh Lena Khan and Lev Manard started a new antitrust center at Colombia Law School. And this is not just about this administration. This is about unraveling the entire neo um uh neoliberal movement from the Reagan on. And that's one of those words people throw around. And let me be really clear, the neoliberal movement is uh sort of Reaganism. And what they meant is I've talked a lot about how liberal meant the protection of the individual.

[00:04:59]And it meant the protection of the individual from a strong state until Theodore Roosevelt when it became the idea that the big government had to protect individuals from um industrialization and from pollution and so on. So the idea of liberalism got attached to a big state. Neoliberalism essentially just said, "No, we got to go back to that period before that." It was just a a way to try and grab the the word liberalism. Anyway, key to that was the idea that was prom was put forward first by um Robert Bourke, remember him?

[00:05:35]In the Department of Justice under Reagan, who took a look at antitrust laws, which have been around since 1890.

[00:05:42]That's when we first get the the first antitrust law. And I'm going to do you a favor and not go into that story. Um, killing me though it is. Um, but we've had them around since the 1890s. And the trick to our antitrust laws in the United States of America until the 1980s was they said that before two big companies can merge, the government needs to take a look at that and make sure it's good for the country. That makes sense, right? So, we need to see if it's okay for labor, for workers, is going to hurt workers. Is it going to hurt consumers? Is it going to hurt the environment? Is it going to hurt um you know the communities? Is it going to hurt the the way we want to live?

[00:06:23]That's the way we had always done antitrust. And Robert Bourke came in and said, "No, no, no, no, no. All we need to look at is whether it will lower prices in the short term. so long as it will lower prices and and theoretically make uh these corporations more efficient and therefore lower prices, mergers can go forward. And so you had these the growth of these extraordinary large organizations that in fact uh destroyed labor's wages and conditions and uh polluted the environment and you know might have lowered prices initially but then made them skyrocket later or destroyed local communities the way Walmart did and so on. Lena Khan, she's one of the people who interests me more than um almost anybody else working in anywhere today actually because she's she's really smart. I've interviewed her before and um and I've read a great deal of her stuff and what she has said, interestingly enough, is she said we need to go back to that older version of antitrust where we take a look where we recognize that the period from Reagan on was an aberration that that was not what antitrust was set out to do. We got to actually say, does this help the consumer? Does this help labor? Does this is this good for the environment?

[00:07:46]Is this good for communities? We need to take a look at all of those things before we um we agree to mergers. Now, she went to work after the Biden administration where she did all kinds of stuff again that she got very little press for after she was there. She now is working for Mayor Mumani in New York City. And as I say, just today started maybe not today, I just read about it today. Just started a new center at Colombia Law. Now, that's a good thing because they have really smart lawyers at Colombia Law um to re-examine antitrust law and the way we do antitrust. That's a really big deal and it's a really forwardlooking big deal and it kind of says we're not going to negotiate with MAGA Republicans anymore.

[00:08:33]We're going to take back our country.

[00:08:35]But that's not the only place you're seeing this sort of institutional push back that is outside of the normal ways we're doing business. So, another one that is fascinating to me is that there is a Democratic le corruption committee looking at corruption in the Trump administration out of the um out of the House, out of Democrats in the House led by Joe Morelli. And I will plug this later, but I'm actually I got an interview with him tomorrow at 11:30 because I'm really keen on hearing about this. They've been putting it together apparently for months now and thought this was a good time to announce it, but they literally are just going to hold hearings and look at the corruption of the Trump administration.

[00:09:26]You know, recognizing that the corruption of this administration is part and parcel of its destruction of democracy. Not least because as Vanessa Williamson was saying to us the other day, if Trump stops taxing rich people and just takes money on the side from them, we have no oversight and we also have no way to um no transparency to see who's paying him, where the money's going, you know, and so on. And we know things like for example um some of the money that he has raised for his library for example I believe it is there was a an organization that was collecting it disbanded. No one knows what happened to the money. We all have suspicions but you know they're trying to trace things like that. So that's an official but not I mean they've put together a new committee um to sort of the the majority doesn't want it. So, sort of an extra committee off on the side saying we're over here and we're you know we're taking names as it were and you know what the rest of that sentence is. But I'm not done yet. You asked about this as well and that is um the 25th amendment to the constitution says that if a majority of the cabinet and the vice president agree that the Trump that the president cannot fulfill his duties, it's not um to cannot fulfill his duties that they inform um certain members of the government that he can't and then it goes into this process of of saying he can't be president anymore because he can't fulfill the duties of the presidency.

[00:11:02]The 25th Amendment though, and I did this the other day, and there's shorts of it running around. The 25th Amendment says something else as well, though. It says not only um that a majority, you can do this through a majority of the cabinet and the vice president. It says you can do it with a majority of a committee set up by Congress, you know, a a a body to look into this set up by Congress.

[00:11:29]and the Democrats have introduced a bill to do that um to to set up that committee. Now, the Republicans largely are not going to sign on to that for a number of different reasons, but what this is going to do is keep that in front of the public mind and say, "We're watching you." Now, you also asked me about the um the International Criminal Court and whether any of these people could ever end up in front of the International Criminal Court. Um, the United States is not a signatory to the treaty that creates the that created the International Criminal Court in large part because we made the argument that we didn't need it because we had a a court system that was based in the rule of law in which nobody was above the law. Now, of course, the Trump v. United States decision of the Supreme Court of July 2024 says in fact one guy is above the law and that's the president of the United States. So our argument for not being part of that is now moot, right? So, you know, people could make an argument that we do in fact need to sign on to that.

[00:12:35]But before you think too much and and worry too much about what's going to happen there, be, you know, somebody asked me today about presidential pardon, said Trump's just going to pardon everybody. Again, that works in a system where you're considering that both parties are legitimate parties and you're working together to protect the country. What if the Democrats take power and say, "We don't consider the MAGA people legitimate." So, in fact, if the ICC is interested, maybe we could talk. You know, I I'm I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that the movement of a party outside of legitimacy changes the game in the United States in a way that we've never really seen it happen before. And I'm not suggesting necessarily that it will happen here.

[00:13:25]I'm suggesting that the Hungarians have set a bar to show how that could happen.

[00:13:33]So you're seeing this increasing push back of the um non-MAGA Republicans um everybody else against this group which seems to recognize that it's in pretty deep trouble. So, you're also, you know, you've also seen the NAACP is suing um Elon Musk over the Memphis Memphis data center, which is polluting so badly in Memphis. And you're also seeing the people in the Trump camp starting to freak out about what their future might look like. And what I mean by that is that um Russell Vote of the Office of Management and Budget testified both yesterday and today. yesterday in front of the House, today in front of the Senate. Um, and in those remarks, he denied um that he had ever impounded any of the funds that Congress had appropriated, which is a real about face from the way he was talking last year. And it also flies in the face of a number of court decisions that said, "Oh, yes, you did."

[00:14:42]But you can see there is this sense of uhoh maybe I can't act with the kind of impunity that I thought I could. And another place you're seeing this is with discussions after yesterday of taxation.

[00:14:55]I'm sorry this should have come before him. I didn't have the right set of notes in front of me. um where you had in uh the Guardian yesterday an op-ed by a number of economists and uh Zoran Mandani of New York City where they simply said, "Come on, you know, this is ridiculous. Rich people are paying less in 2026 in their taxes than they did in the 1950s. We need to fix this and here's ways we can do it." And pointed out the countries around the world are pushing back on that neoliberalism of the 1980s. So I think there is this moment that we're in where the the the landscape is changing and as that landscape changes one of the things that you're going to see is people trying to decide where their bread is buttered. You know that is who should they back where should they jump. And you can see, as I say, Maloney of Italy sort of saying, "Maybe not so much Trump and even the Saudis being like, h maybe we don't need to invest in golf to make that dude happy because he's really screwing a lot of stuff up." And it is possible that you're going to see more of a distance between Trump and all but his most loyal supporters as he gets more and more erratic.

[00:16:17]As they do that, the pressure to get rid of MAGA and to regroup the rest of the country against MAGA the way that uh Majara's party coalition really it's not a party join together to oust Orban and his people. And as they do that, the potential for changing the United States future in really dramatic ways. Not saying, "Oh, we got to make common cause. we got to figure out how we can get along. But simply saying you are not ill, you are not legitimate. We are more than happy to work with a center-right party. And and in fact, the center-left Democrats, which are they're not center left now at all. They're they're basically uh a center or even a slightly center right party because everything has moved so far right. But we could really have a center left party and a center right party that really could legitimately work together to some sort of uh progress.

[00:17:16]But instead, right now, you we've all moved so far right that we've got the Maggas who basically are not are an anti-democratic party now. And in terms of the their fear that you see right now, you asked I'm trying to get everything in here. You asked about uh Justice Clarence Thomas's speech the other day in which he characterized progressivism as anti-American and said that, you know, people like me have given up on the um Declaration of Independence and the values that made America great and so on. And that you just have to to to recognize as a far-right political statement. Um that that really is detached from reality and a reflection, I think, of real fear that they really are going to lose power after being able to concentrate it so fully for so long and certainly in this administration.

[00:18:08]Um so in this moment um the big story to me is first of all how incredibly unsettled things are how much is happening so fast and how it feels feels feels again that's really different than me being able to say look here's a document which is what I always like to do um as if you can see building opposition to MAGA as if it is an not a legitimate political party, which is fair because they actually don't want to govern. They want to destroy the government um quite I mean they actually take their pattern from um Victor Orban and his party. So the fact that the Hungarians have said we're really over you guys is a model for America. And it just feels since that election like you're starting to see that coalesce in the United States now.

[00:19:07]That doesn't mean the things are over at all. It's going to get worse before it gets better. Trump is sending more troops to the Middle East. Um, you know, we don't know what what's happening over there. Uh, there's going to be, as I say, the slash and grab is only starting. There'll be all kinds of stuff happening. Trump is more unstable than ever and so on. But what it does say is that as these organizations begin to coalesce um and as the push back starts to coalesce, speak up. Speak up. Speak up because you're seeing just how tight these votes are on things like the boundary waters.

[00:19:48]The votes still went the wrong way. But the more people hear about that and the more uh electeds see what people want and that they will not get reelected after a vote like that, the the faster things will change. And that's not only at the national level, which is incredibly important. It's also at the state and the local level. One of the things that I know national politicians are looking at really closely is that Moms of Liberty candidates are losing for schoolboard elections and they're losing in huge numbers. Now, think back to uh just a few years ago when Moms for Liberty was on the, you know, headline news. They were going to change American education and they were the ones who were going to purify society and all that. And now the majority got caught up and said, "No, we actually don't want some yahoo over there deciding what our kids can read and what our teachers can say in the classroom." And they're pushing back and they're reclaiming that space. And the more of that space that is reclaimed for community and for democratic values, the easier it will be to to to take back more and more of those spaces.

[00:21:01]So um unsettled for sure but uh but keep speaking up because it's working. I mean, if you look at where the momentum it is is, it is definitely in the United States on those people who are trying to protect our democracy.