Friday on the RealClearPolitics radio show — weeknights at 6:00 p.m. on SiriusXM’s POTUS Channel 124 and then on Apple, Spotify, and here on our website — Tom Bevan, Carl Cannon, and Sean Trende look at what’s happening in the world of politics today. *** First, New York Attorney General Letitia James is under criminal investigation. Famous for pursuing a case against Donald Trump for exaggerating the value of real estate, she is now accused of a very similar crime: submitting false information on a mortgage application. “It is almost a victimless crime, unless the bank is defrauded. There’s no evidence that Letitia James did that. But there was no evidence the banks were defrauded in Trump’s case, and she went after him and tried to take hundreds of millions of dollars from him because she said he’d inflated the value of his real estate holdings to get a favorable loan rate,” Carl Cannon explained. *** Starting at minute 6, more on President Trump’s relationship with the legal system. The president pulled Ed Martin’s troubled nomination to be the U.S. Attorney for D.C. and replaced him with Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro. “She ran for attorney general of New York, so she has the basic credentials,” Sean Trende allowed. “But Trump’s first term sort of fell apart because everyone was stabbing him in the back, in his view. All these people he appointed, especially the establishment types he had put in as olive branches, threw him overboard at the first chance they got. That is something he is trying to fix this time.” *** In the next segment, starting at minute 11, another of Trump’s nominations is making heads explode, this time among his supporters. Trump’s pick for Surgeon General, Dr. Casey Means, is controversial among Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s “MAHA” movement. “She promotes diet as a root cause of illness and chronic disease,” Carl Cannon said. “That very closely parallels Kennedy’s intense focus on nutrition. And the opposition to her seems to be that she’s not sufficiently anti-vax… I think some of these critics might be doing her a favor.” *** After that, at timestamp 17:30, Bill Gates has declared that he plans to give away all of his $ 200 billion fortune before he dies. “People will say a lot things about me when I die, but I am convinced ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them,” Gates wrote in a blog post this week. “A billion dollars is not what it was in the 1920s, but when Henry Ford made his first billion, he had 100,000 employees in plants all over the country,” Carl Cannon commented. “These 21st-century entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates made all of this money selling software. They have relatively few employees, so there’s this ethos now that if you make that kind of money, you’re almost obligated to give it back.” *** Next, starting at minute 23, the gang debates Chuck Todd’s pronouncement that the media was not to blame for “covering up” Biden’s decline. “He blames the Democrats and the pundits and people who carried Joe Biden’s water, but he says it wasn’t the media’s fault,” Tom Bevan explains. “He said on his podcast a year ago… that it was ‘an open secret in Washington,’ a conversation no one is having. That leads me to believe that yes, it was the media’s fault.” “Everybody saw on a regular basis, with their own eyes, Joe Biden stumbling over himself,” he continued. “And we were told it’s a stutter, cheap fakes, what you’re seeing is not what it seems, and he’s really sharp as a tack!” And after that, starting around minute 30, the guys pick their nominees for this week’s “You Cannot Be Serious” rundown of the most ridiculous stories of the week. *** Finally, at minute 34, Carl Cannon interviews RCP editor Anne Welty about a new Esquire Magazine profile of comedian Nate Bargatze, who has gone from relative obscurity to superstardom in the last few years: “Nate Bargatze Gets the Last Laugh” What’s his secret? Why does Middle America love this comedian so much? “He’s just like all of us, he’s an everyman,” Anne Welty explained. “In the last few years, we’ve all needed a palate cleanser. He’s just a funny guy with fun self-deprecating stories, and we don’t know his politics, and we don’t really need to. I think that’s refreshing.” *** Don’t miss a single episode of the RealClearPolitics weeknight radio show – subscribe at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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