What Trump’s Alleged Crimes and Costco Have in Common
Eric Swalwell weighs in on the Don Jr. texts, and Planned Parenthood CA’s chief explains what happened with the Texas woman held on $500K bail for having an abortion.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
Co-host of The New Abnormal podcast Andy Levy has a request for conservatives: Stop pretending former President Donald Trump is clueless.
“He knew everything that was going on the day of Jan. 6, he knew everything and was part of everything that was going on in the days following Election Day. Regarding what his son was doing, all of that stuff, he was part of it. He was in it up to his eyeballs and it’s absolutely ridiculous to try to pretend that he wasn’t,” Levy tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast, referring to recently surfaced texts that Donald Trump Jr. sent to Trump’s then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about having enough “control” to ensure daddy a second term.
“It’s not about who actually won the election and who more Americans voted for, who won the electoral college,” says Levy. “It’s about keeping his family in power. That’s all they care about. That’s all they've ever cared about.”
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Eric Swalwell (D-CA) also weighs in on Junior's texts, which he tells Molly are important because “if we don't understand he and his family's corruption and expose it, we’ll regret it.”
But, he adds, the more bad stuff the Trump family does the less impact each bad act seems to have.
“When I was a prosecutor, I would call it the Costco Effect, where a defense attorney would bring me a case. Someone has like maybe five or six DUIs spread out over a year and the defense attorney will say to me, ‘Well, maybe we can just plead him out for one of these DUIs and dismiss the rest,’” he recalls.
“I would always push back and say, look, this isn’t Costco. It’s not ‘You buy 10 paper towels and you pay the cost of just two’ and with Donald Trump, it feels like we have somebody who’s committed an insane amount of crimes in front of us and we just are so numb to it. More, in a weird way, becomes less.”
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Also on the pod: Jodi Hicks, CEO & president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, talks about where a post-Roe America could be headed—and “the appetite is for criminalizing pregnant people for making decisions about their own health care.”
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