Trump Made an Extraordinary Threat Against Jon Ossoff

Hey, everyone. I'm Kathryn Rampell, economics editor here at The Bulwark joined by my colleague and friend Andrew Egger to talk about the various ways that Donald Trump is now trying to extort the American voter and the politicians who are duly elected, democratically elected by American voters. You've heard about the $5,000 checks, right, that Donald Trump said will be coming if and only if Republicans retain control of the House and the Senate, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. We have a whole litany of carrots and sticks, I would say, that Donald Trump has been offering slash threatening if voters do or do not vote in favor of Republicans and keep them in power. As an example, he is offering a bounty to anyone who reports voter fraud in the past elections or the upcoming 2026 midterm election. He posted, they will be paid a million bucks upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the fraud, capitalized F. But it's not just that. It's also lots of payoffs for the, you know, to reward people for voting for him. And you let's go through some of the recent examples of Donald Trump offering rewards, monetary rewards of various kinds or punishments for those who do or do not vote for him. Let's hear about his deal for Kentucky ins. If the Republicans win, you better get out and run. This is the biggest one. This is the one that, oh, I tell you what, Andy Barr is going to be very happy when he is, but you have to win and the other ones forget it. If the Republicans win the Department of War, we'll be investing $100 million in the pharmaceutical company, anthea, to revitalize a gigantic drug manufacturing facility in Winchester, Kentucky. Okay. And now, let's hear about what he said in Kansas. We're tax on social security for our great seniors. And we gave you so much. My administration also announced the highest biofuel production targets in history, which will create $4 billion in new farm income for the farmers of a place called Kansas. And I also gave Kansas a waiver to sell E-15 all year round. And with Roger Marshall in the Senate, we will make year round E-15 permanent. But if Adam Hamilton is in, I'm not doing it. Now, we've got his offer or threat for the victims of Camp Lejeune. So if we don't win, there's no money. If we do win, you're getting it. It's going to be finally over with that nightmare that's been going on for so many years. We will never abandon the heroes who served America and that's what that's all about. All right. So Andrew, what do you make of these various threats and/or dangled goodies? >> So the main thing about all of these clips and it's these things and he does it again and again and again on the campaign trail. It's such a major feature of basically any one of his endless rallies these days is the way it kind of inverts the usual typical American political relationship here. Donald Trump is not saying that if you send good leaders to Washington, they will be good stewards of the nation's resources that they will be do right and just policy on behalf of the people because it's all the people's stuff, it's all the people's money to begin with. That's not the pitch he's making. The pitch he's making sort of assumes that this is all Donald Trump's stuff. Donald Trump's money, Donald Trump's government, Donald Trump's largest, that he can sort of divvy out, however he sees fit to punish and reward those who wrong him or do right by him. These are not, none of these things are connected to the actual sort of like reallocation of congressional political power in any way. You would presumably need legislation to divvy out different infrastructure projects in different places, but that's sort of normal cost of business. The Camp La June settlements, that's already a matter of law. That's already a matter of public justice where these cases have been winding through the courts and Congress passed a lot a couple of years ago to accelerate that, to accelerate the payouts to these veterans who are harmed by the carelessness of their own government. The idea that Trump would now come in and try to like tack an extra quid pro quo here on the end. It's really, really grotesque and chilling stuff, but it's not just that one, it's all kind of like this, right? I mean, if it's good policy for America, it isn't by the way, but if it were a good policy for America to lift the E15 waiver, to basically compel a bunch of ethanol in the nation's gasoline supply all year round, then presumably he would want to do that whether or not Kansas or whether or not Iowa sends a Republican or a Democrat to the Senate. And presumably, after the fact, he's not actually going to be kind of honoring or refusing to honor these commitments. Trump's not exactly the kind of guy who sticks to his own promises in this way. It is just openly this grotesque attempt to kind of twist people's arms and torque them a little bit and say, well, you know, I might not be that happy with this or that element of the administration, but I guess I have to go sign up just because of this like Pavlovian response to these promises of goodies. I mean, it's really astonishing how little he thinks of his own voters that he thinks they will be more juiced up, more excited about the prospect of these goodies than they are repulsed by what it says about how Donald Trump views his own role as president. Yeah, there's not even a pretense of public service here. He is very, very explicit about the quid pro quo. And I do wonder how voters interpret all of this because to some extent, I think that people are pretty cynical about politicians and they think that politicians are motivated by what's going to get them elected. So is this really a difference of type or a difference of scale, you know, is how different is this from how voters think about the motivations that politicians usually operate by, or the principles that they operate under? What are your thoughts on that? I do think, I mean, I get what you mean and there's always a certain amount of transactionalism in politics, but I really do think that there is something unique about the brain chemistry of Donald Trump, where it's the combination of shamelessness and artlessness and like his own just inability to communicate in a subtle way about anything ever, you know, throughout his life, that really adds up to something that is unique, that is uniquely toxic here. And just to circle back around, because I'll give you an example on this Camp Le Jun settlement stuff. There has been a, I guess, an intra right wing and intra mega fight about these settlements in particular, where you have commentators like Laura Lumer, you know, very, very controversial, very loyal to the president, very loved by the president, swashbuckling, right wing media figure, accusing people like Attorney General Todd Blanche of not getting these settlements out the door fast enough and sort of characterizing this as sort of bad, bad, lacky work on behalf of the Attorney General, not delivering for Trump's great veterans in this Camp Le Jun scandal. Blanche defending himself saying, you know, that they are, they are bending over backward to get these settlements out at the door, get this all done. You have that, that kind of controversy happening and then a couple of days later, you have Donald Trump come out and say this and it is so indefensible, even, even according to kind of like the internal rules of that, that intra mega debate, right? I mean, this, this debate is all about, you know, of course, Donald Trump. The, the great lover and defender of our vets, once these, once these settlement payments out there and it's actually Todd Blanche, who's a rhino, who's not sufficiently on the team, he's the impediment, but, but never in a million years would Todd Blanche have gotten up there and said something like this, right? I mean, it's, it's, it is genuinely only Donald Trump, who's, who's going to look veterans in the eye, disabled veterans, again, harmed by their own government decades ago, who have been fighting for years to get this money. It takes a remarkable hubris, a kind of ego on the scale of which we've barely ever seen to, to look at that thing and say, well, you know, if we win, you'll get it. But if you don't win, sorry, there's no money, so you better make sure we win. This message is brought to you by Sol. Now, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you already know how much I love Sol's out of office THC gummies and their sparkling beverages, but now get this, they've launched something new. It's called mood gummies. Sol's wellness brand that makes delicious hemp derived CBD and THC products that are designed to make feeling good, simple. Sol's new mood gummies have precise dosing, clean ingredients and formulations designed for predictable effects, so you can choose how you want to feel while staying in control. Now my schedule can be a bit all over the place. You got a pod, you got to edit, you got new videos, you got to write, and it can be hard to unwind on crazy days or it can be difficult just to get energy to socialize after a long week. Instead of grabbing a drink or two, I've been reaching for Sol's new mood gummies. If I need some more energy to mail out or just to find the right balance, there's a Sol mood gummy to match that need. Make today a good day and get yourself some Sol gummies. Right now, Sol's offering our audience 30% off their entire order, so go to getsol.com and use the code bullworktakes. That's getsol.com promo code bullworktakes for 30% off. I think that the transactionalism that we've kind of become a new or two, we've partly become a new or two it because of Donald Trump. Like if you think back to the first Trump impeachment, number one, that was about his demanding a quid pro quo. His offer to help, in that case, a foreign ally on condition of their providing him with some sort of material, you know, politically valuable information or action. And that was really striking at the time, that was shocking at the time. It was worth an impeachment at the time and I'm reminded fairly often of these comments that a Stanford law professor, Pamela Carlin, made during the impeachment hearings back at that time. Let's play that. Imagine living in a part of Louisiana or Texas that's prone to devastating hurricanes and flooding. What would you think if you lived there and your governor asked for a meeting with the president to discuss getting disaster aid that Congress has provided for? What would you think if that president said, "I would like to do you, I would like you to do us a favor, I'll meet with you and I'll send the disaster relief once you brand my opponent a criminal." >> I mean, this was shocking, this hypothetical was considered like so beyond the pale. It was hyperbolic. The idea that Donald Trump would hold up disaster aid on condition of somebody, you know, some politician paying political fealty or voters showing that they loved him enough. And now this is just expected of the president at the time. This was crazy and now again and again and again, we have these kinds of cases where Donald Trump is basically holding material benefits of various kinds or goodies or favors hostage unless voters personally do his bidding, which in this case means re-electing Republican control of the House and the Senate. And you know, we have a bunch of other examples of things like this as well. We have this Trump tweet about Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska, who had stood up for ranked choice elections in Alaska, which Donald Trump is unhappy with because there are too many dance elements on the ballot, even though he doesn't realize the ranked choice election, the ranked choice ballot design is probably best equipped to get his guy elected given that set of options. In any event, Donald Trump tweeted about Lisa Murkowski calling her Republicans were a senator and making this not so veiled threat about how he might withhold his favor and actually billions and billions of dollars in his words from the state of Alaska because, I don't know, he's mad about Lisa Murkowski and he's mad about how Alaskans might vote. You also have this example from George. I'll let's play that. You know, there's a big difference, right? You know what I'm going to say? There's a big difference when a president, president has a lot of power. A big difference when he likes the people representing a state like he could call me Collins, could call me anytime he wants. Mike, how you doing? You're going to help the farmers. Where are we talking about? George, he doesn't care about the other ones. Right? He'd call me a lot and this guy maybe is going to be worse, Jackson. It's made a fortune, but they do two guys are going to call me, but there's a big difference between that and and Peewee Herman calling Sir Peewee Herman, so that's John Oswald by the way. Tell him I'm not in. I'm not in, but he needs money for George. I don't give a damn what he wants. I'm not in. Again, this was supposed to be the hyperbolic hypothetical that was presented in whatever year that was 2019 when the first time Donald Trump was impeached. The idea that he would withhold money from states in dire need because he didn't like the people representing them or he didn't like the voters there. And here he's like, he's, it's just out in the open. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, not just even as far back as that, but even last year when it was repeatedly being reported that this was happening that FEMA requests for disaster aid were actually being slowed from democratic states and responded too much more quickly and with much more largest from Republican states. The whole MAGA ecosystem denied that was real. They denied it was happening. They called it fake news. And now here Donald Trump is openly copying to that in front of an audience of the entire country on the campaign trail. I mean, that 2019 clip you play, it really, it makes you like sad. I mean, it makes you sort of nostalgic is not the right word, but it really brings home how much we have all lost in terms of just our own baseline faith and understanding and how the country works. I think that some people sort of scoff or laugh at sort of the, the Trump one liberal mentality of this guy's just doing so many crimes against the way things are done. He's just committing so many, he's knocking over so many norms and so many walls that like presumably sometime repercussions have to befall him. You're just not allowed to behave in this way because this is America. We don't stand for that kind of thing. And it turned out America was fine with that kind of thing. And we did stand for that kind of thing and people lost a lot of those illusions. And that is such a sad thing for the country, how, how, how we actually had built a society where people by and large believed that it was true that the president couldn't do this kind of thing, couldn't be this shameless, this, this just sort of open with his, with his reduction of the, of his entire handling of the federal budget to rewarding handouts to friends and withholding them from enemies that that's not, you know, that's not free country stuff. That's not representative democracy stuff. That's not public service behavior. Of course, it's never going to happen here. We have all this accountability. We have all these democratic mechanisms. But no, it turns out that, that, that the only thing that you really have that is able to hopefully, potentially, eventually push back on that kind of thing is for everybody to get up and vote against it. So I guess we're going to see if that happens. But, but I don't know, so much goes under the radar, right? I mean, like, like, like, if, if gas prices were really low right now and the economy was just clicking along right now, like, would there be a, a real groundswell against this kind of thing? I'm not sure that that's true. And so it's just, it really is a, a real disenchantment, even though, even though it does appear that, that American voters are about ready to spit this out of their mouths. So we'll see what happens. But it just is amazing that with just days to go, this is the president's closing argument. At a time when basically every other politician in the entire country is trying to run as some kind of unifier or other trying to, you know, every Republican who can't afford to do so is running away from Donald Trump and, and, and holding themselves up as a representative of their own states, first and foremost, and the needs and the interests of their states, first and foremost, while being completely unable to separate themselves from this man who is so clear that he would cut any state loose if it didn't vote the way he wanted it to and basically any election. You said that back in the day, we thought these things couldn't happen, right? What we are learning now is that these like so many other things that went out the window were norms. It was a norm that presidents did not demand quid pro quo's from foreign leaders, from voters, from politicians around the country. It was a norm that the president would not weaponize his power to reward friends and punish enemies. And now that norm is gone. I don't know how we bring it back, but I do hope that one consequence of this election and, and hopefully potentially the 2028 election is that voters care about those norms. And even if they're not codified in law, that they demand leadership that abides by the norm of politicians should serve the public. But anyway, we shall see. We have another week left before voters render their verdict. Until then, Andrew and I and the rest of your friends here at the Bullwork will be paying attention to every quid pro quo that Donald Trump offers, as well as the threats and payoffs being offered by some of his quizzlings out there. And as well as the politicians who are offering more of an accountability-oriented agenda. Thanks so much for watching. You can find us on the bullwork.com YouTube Apple podcast Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. See you soon.