So many “facts” behind the administration’s hammer blows to our democratic norms and judicial system are just plain fiction.
When Donald. Trump appeared before a joint session of Congress on March 4 to glorify himself and all his works, he wound up delivering a “manifesto of mistruths,” as Nancy Pelosi aptly described it.
Too bad she wasn’t close enough to the podium to tear up his script as she had done at a similar gathering in 2020.
With an audaciousness that was excessive even for him, Trump tried to gaslight all of us into accepting an utterly warped view of who we are as a nation, the virtues of his own policies, and what truth itself is.
Any other description of his speech merely perpetuates the con job it inflicted on us and which Trump repeats every time he gets near a camera or his Truth Social account.
If you wonder why so many Americans still side with him and treat his blatantly corrupt policies and deceitful ruminations about them as intimations of the Second Coming, it’s because there are no longer any “north stars” clearly visible through the fogbank of bullshit he has spread over the land.
And if you are counting on the Dems to call him out and make him pay for his falsehoods, remember: the best they could do during the speech itself was hold up little bingo paddles with the word “False” chalked on them.
Sad, to use a favorite Trumpian word.
That said, Elissa Slotkin, the former CIA officer-turned-Michigan senator who delivered the Democrats’ prerecorded rebuttal to the address, did a fair job of highlighting the damage Trump is doing to working class Americans.
And we can all take comfort from two federal court rulings handed down on March 13, which directed the administration to reinstate tens of thousands of civil servants ousted in Melon Musk’s bureaucratic purge. Taken together, these judgments “amounted to the most significant judicial pushback yet against the efforts by Mr. Trump and Elon Musk to slash the federal work force,” according to The New York Times.
The reprieve may only be temporary, of course, since the Justice Department will surely appeal the rulings. And whatever the outcome, we’re stuck with the perp for four more years. Through it all, his carefully choreographed lap dances will continue to mesmerize and beguile – and likely keep many of us blissfully detached from empathy, decency, provable reality and even a sense of decorum.
What is truly vexing about this is that his tricks aren’t all that difficult to discern.
“Trump doesn’t make a speech,” a journalist friend of mine remarked after his Congressional performance.
“He makes sentences and waits while slavering idiots in suits and a few dresses and one (Marjorie Green) in a MAGA hat, rise as one, shouting and clapping for ten to twenty seconds. When they sit down, he utters another at most two sentences, stops and watches them adore him again. The applause lasts even longer when he ends a sentence with “the greatest in the history of the country, or frankly, the world.” Vance and Johnson, standing behind him, also bob to their feet every eleven seconds, clapping like seals.”
Fact-checking the fabulist and his toadies isn’t unthinkable, given the predictability of their routines. But the sheer breadth of Trump’s dishonesty means that righting the scales isn’t a real-time possibility. There is no space or patience for it on social media. The best you can do is build a rebuttal piece by piece after each outrage, making the rejoinder as user-friendly as possible, as digestible as a soundbite and as click-worthy as Miley Cyrus’ latest costume malfunction.
Such a task is way beyond my faculties. But because none of us can afford a truth vacuum at this moment (or any other), please check out below some of the more cogent third-party postmortems on Trump’s double-talk dervish of March 2.
Better than any single critique available, these combined reality checks give measure to the extent of his mendacity – and provide an appropriately oversized fair warning.
Trump on the economy:
The following few paragraphs represent a distillation of comments drawn from various sources including MSNBC’s Morning Joe, March 5, 6, and 12. Though the editing is mine, the judgements are borrowed, and in the case of Morning Joe, belong unequivocally to Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, Willie Geist, Ali Vitali, Jonathan Lemire, Elise Jordon, Julia Ainsley, economics expert Steve Rattner, and Jeff Mason of Reuters, all of whom proved especially informative. I have included footnotes and links to deliver credit where credit is due.
Here goes:
In his outpouring to Congress Trump derided his predecessor’s economic policies as “the worst ever.” But the fact is that when Joe Biden left office America’s GDP “was set to grow faster” than that of every peer country and the US economy was the envy of the world, with inflation down to three per cent, lower than that of almost any of our allies. (1)
Trump claimed that his proposed new budget would usher in a “golden age” of economic growth. But his first weeks in office have been marked by social and political chaos, seesawing tariffs, a slowing economy, and shrinking consumer confidence, with Wall Streeters “too afraid of the unknown to move forward with mergers and acquisitions.” (2)
On top of this, the economic proposals Trump embraced would reward the rich through renewed tax breaks, among other things and kneecap just about everybody else by making it harder for the federal reserve to lower interest rates and help keep inflation in check. (3)
Trump reiterated a campaign promise to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent by ruling out taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits and by making interest payments deductible on loans for American-made cars. (4)
If you include a full deduction of state and local taxes, this would amount to almost $8 trillion in tax cuts. But the House budget committee has only allocated $4 ½ trillion for all tax cuts. So, Trump’s promise is an empty one. (5)
He also pledged to balance the budget, even though he had failed to make good on such a promise during his first term and instead added dramatically to the national debt.
Things won’t be any different this time. Indeed, if enacted, his budget plan would add twenty-two and a half trillion dollars to the national debt over the next ten years. (6)
He touted his ever-changing tariff proposals as beneficial to our auto industry, and claimed to have received upbeat preliminary reactions to them from three auto executives. (7)
But even before the speech, Ford’s CEO had warned that tariffs would blow a hole in American car sales. Afterwards, various US automakers called the White House to appeal for a tariff pause. (8)
In response, as The Wall Street Journal reported on March 6, the administration, “partially pulled back tariffs on some goods from Mexico and Canada after markets sank and companies lobbied President Trump, [and] as the administration’s swerving trade policy strained relations with allies and raised recession fears.”
At another point in his speech, Trump’s insisted that tariffs affecting farm commodities would enable US farmers to sell more at home by reducing competition from abroad. But such tariffs would, in practice, cause our farmers to lose huge markets overseas with little offset advantage domestically. (9)
Here’s why: The US routinely exports large amounts of soybeans and corn because American consumers already have enough on their plates. So, counting on them to make up for the lost sales of such commodities abroad isn’t realistic. (10)
It is well to remember that in 2018-19, the first Trump administration, while raking in $50 billion from tariffs on imports, had to funnel nearly half as much money to US farmers to compensate them for lost exports.
Combatting, waste, fraud and corruption (just kidding):
In a rare shoutout to someone other than himself, Trump lauded Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency for allegedly rooting out “hundreds of billions” of dollars in bureaucratic “fraud.”
But if you check out DOGE’s latest stats – a downward revision of the previous ones, — you’ll find that the agency has uncovered little more than $2.3 billion in terminated contracts and another $2.5 billion in still uncompleted work, for a total of $4.8 billion in supposed overruns – an amount that doesn’t even begin to qualify as proven or reasonably suspected fraud. (11)
Even if it did, it would constitute only a fraction of what Trump claimed has been uncovered.
In another nod to his Musketeers, the President declared straight-facedly, “We’re also identifying shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program” including evidence that millions of seniors over age 100 are collecting benefits.
Again, the facts are underwhelming. In December, 2024, according to official data, only 89,000 people over age 98 received Social Security checks.
Putting a final burnish on his tough-love persona, Trump congratulated himself for having ended “the rule of unelected bureaucrats” in Washington. But, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd pointed out, that statement reeks of irony, given that, even as Trump uttered it, “Musk –the most powerful chainsaw-wielding unelected government official in history — [was] basking in first lady’s box.”
One passage in Trump’s speech that was to make him look “tough” on fraudsters left many GOP lawmakers scratching their heads. It had to do with the so-called CHIPs and Science Act, which Trump denounced it as “a horrible, horrible thing,” a waste of money.
The law — passed by bipartisan majority in 2020 with Biden’s enthusiastic backing – strokes lots of scared cows on both sides of the aisle by funding semiconductor production in the US, underwriting related research and development and thus stimulating job creation right here at home.
Following the speech, a handful of Republican supporters of the bill expressed gentle consternation at the President’s negativity, especially since he had recently signaled a willingness to support further government investment in semiconductors.
Several reporters interpreted the mixed signals as proof of the administration’s inability to coordinate policy initiatives and messaging with Congress. A Reuters reporter speculated that Trump’s ambivalence is simply a token of a standing personal bias against anything with Biden’s fingerprints on it. (12)
Other Whoppers in the Word Sandwich:
Trump proudly announced to Congress that “for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction.”
His source: a Rasmussen poll taken in February. It did put 47 percent of the respondents in the “right direction category” as opposed to 46 percent saying the opposite — the first time this has happened in the poll’s twenty-year history.
But other contemporaneous polls flip the trend-line, giving the edge to the “wrong direction” folks: 55 percent in a Morning Consult poll, 48.9 percent in a YouGov/Economist poll and 62 percent in a Marquette University poll.
Currying favor with the cops (always a smart bet), Trump exhorted Congress and the American people to treat our men and women in blue more respectfully.
But wait. Isn’t this guy who just issued pardons to 1600 insurrectionists who bloodied and traumatized Capitol Hill police on January 6? Where’s the respect in that?
“Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States” Trump declared. “Many of them were murderers, human traffickers, gang members”
Both allegations figure prominently in his stock case against immigration. Both are inaccurate.
Under asylum rules during the COVID crisis, many people attempted multiple crossings from Mexico into the US, got arrested multiple times, and were often returned to Mexico without significant legal consequence.
As a result, arrest numbers exceeded the actual number of migrants involved.
Between January 2021 and December 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 10.8 million arrests for illegal crossings. That’s roughly half the number of people who Trump claims were “pouring” across the US southern border during the Biden years.
“There is no evidence other countries are sending their criminals or people with mental illness across the border, despite this frequent line from Trump,” according to Time magazine.
NBC Homeland Security correspondent Julia Ainsley recently brought new perspective to an under-reported aspect of immigration picture, the low number of deportations.
Trump, who likes to brag about throwing illegals out of the country and needs to show progress to keep his base happy, is allegedly distressed at the scarcity of deportations and has kept the stats under wraps.
His dissatisfaction explains some of the chaos within Homeland Security, including the recent demotion of the acting head of ICE and heated interagency directives to boost deportations.
The problem is essentially systemic. In June 2024 Biden issued an executive order limiting asylum opportunities for migrants crossing the border. This led to a decline in the number of asylum-seekers and hence a falloff in related deportations. Since Trump has essentially shut down the asylum system, these trends have accelerated.
It is a bad look for the administration. As a result, Ainsley reports, half of those recently deported were non-criminals despite Trump’s pledge to target “the worst of the worst.”
On Friday March 15, we learned the President has found yet another way to accelerate deportations without bothering with “due process” or pesky court hearings.
Reaching back to 1798 he invoked, through a presidential order, the Alien Enemies Act to justify expelling more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan prison gang who are neither US citizens nor lawful permanent residents.
Their pre-arranged destination: a prison in El Salvador of all places
He also threw into the mix a Lebanese medical specialist at Brown University who holds a valid visa but whose cell phone contained (in a “deleted” envelope) “sympathetic photos and videos” of prominent Hezbollah figures.
The law – this “Alien Enemies” thing — had been used in the War of 1812 and WWI to deport “suspect” foreigners. FDR cited it during WWII as a basis for interning Japanese living here without US citizenship. (He used executive orders to do the same to Japanese who were US citizens.)
Based on text and precedent, the law is reserved for wartime use. You can’t just stretch it to eject inconvenient aliens who have shown up here in peacetime. The law also contemplates “judicial review,” allowing imperiled individuals the right to defend their presence here before a judge.
Trump ignored these parameters and loaded the Venezuelan targets onto an aircraft without a court hearing and under a vague claim that national security interests are at stake.
A Federal judge in DC, James Boasberg, acting on a brief filed by individuals not aboard the flight, issued a temporary restraining order and directed the government to turn the plane around and bring the deportees back to the US for a proper hearing. Trump and the complicit president of El Salvador pretended not to have gotten the message in time. And before anyone could say Oops! twice, most of the unfortunates were dumped into a Salvadoran hell hole.
Justice Department lawyers argued to Boasberg that his order didn’t apply because those who brought the underlying complaint were not on the flight. As a backup, they claimed that the gang was like a wartime invader and thus fell within the scope of the law. As a third excuse, they maintained that the president under his plenary powers can damn well do whatever he pleases when it comes to foreign affairs.
As of this writing, the government’s refusal to comply with the judge’s ruling sets up a constitutional crisis, at the center of which are these questions: Who enforces a court order once a president digs in his heels? And, more broadly, can Trump rule as a dictator in defiance of legal precedent and judges?
My, my. And I thought this was just about salving Trump’s ego after deportation numbers fell below his pouty little preferences. Who knew the fate of US democracy hung in the balance?
Oh, and by the way, Trump has also resurrected the loathsome policy of family detention used by Bush II, Obama and Trump 1.0 to lock up entire households as they await deportation.
But enough with the sidebars.
Back to Trump’s lies to Congress, March 4.
The alleged drug epidemic:
Flogging one of his favorite hobgoblins, he claimed to the Joint Session that Fentanyl is entering the US illegally “at levels never seen before, killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens.”
The truth: For years the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tracked overdose fatalities caused by various drugs including Fentanyl and has found them to be on the decline — 87,000 during the latest clocked period, October 2023-September 2024, down from 114,000 the previous year, which itself represented the lowest annual tally since June 2020.
Fentanyl is listed as the primary killer in these cases, but other substances, notably methamphetamine and cocaine, are increasingly implicated.
The environment:
Trump assured us all that he is committed to removing toxins from the environment.
But, as Maureen Dowd noted in a recent column, he continues to wage war on all clean air-clean water regulations and has recently appointed two chemical executives to head the EPA.
When President Biden re-embraced the Climate Accord after the original Trump bailout, he pledged to contribute $ 11.4 billion annually by 2024, which was indeed more than anyone else’s aid commitment.
But there was a logic to this. The United States is the most prolific source of greenhouse gases. It had also reneged during Trump 1.0 on various financial pledges to help clean up the international environment.
Making common cause with the drill-baby-drill crowd, (what’s new?), Trump slammed the Biden administration for allegedly slashing oil and gas leases by ninety-five percent.
The truth: Biden did make big cuts in such leases in a bid to coax consumers away from of climate-toxic fossil fuels. But he also allowed companies to continue drilling on previously leased sites, including an $8 billion project in Alaska. As a result, oil and gas companies scored some of their highest profits in years, “and oil and gas production surged to record highs.”
Trump also faulted Biden for allegedly closing “more than 100 power plants,” the implication being that he had left us energy-starved.
The truth: Biden did cut to the number of coal-fired power facilities, from 284 to 227 during the only period (2023) for which stats are available from the Energy Department. But he also boosted the number of environment-friendly renewable energy plants from 5,918.to 7,684.
In another energy-related swipe at Uncle Joe, Trump claimed to have “ended the last administration’s insane electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto workers and companies from economic destruction.”
The Biden administration did tighten pricey pollution standards for gas-guzzlers to make electric vehicles seem a better buy for consumers. He also set 2025 as the date when half the new cars sold in the US would be EVs.
But it was never a mandate, only a non-binding objective.
Once in office, Trump promptly canceled it by executive order.
Coddling Robert F. Kennedy and the other drug nuts:
In what appears to have been an attempt to rationalize his new health secretary’s aversion to vaccines, Trump swooningly despaired over a supposed spike in number of children diagnosed with autism. By his count, the current rate is one in 36, as compared to a previous estimate (source unidentified) of one in 10,000.
The inference to be drawn from Trump’s figures is that too many inoculations (or too many other Democratic “mistakes”) are putting too many kids in the risk category.
The truth: Experts at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the number of autistic children 25 years ago at one in 150, much higher than Trump’s fake conservative figure.
The current ratio, as Trump alleged, is indeed one in 36.
But the expert consensus is that the upward spiral is due to a broadening of diagnostic criteria, not to any adverse effects of vaccinations.
Overreacting to “Diversity” and “Wokeism:”
Trump told Congress that among the seemingly misguided foreign aid projects he had uncovered and stopped was a $45 million scholarship fund for Burma.
The program, known as the Lincoln Scholarships fund, appears to have been part of the allegedly excessive foreign-aid spending that persuaded Trump to dismantle the US Agency for International Aid and Development (USAID) or gave him a rationale for doing so.
The truth: The modest stated purpose of the Scholarships fund was to educate young Burmese of “diverse backgrounds” struggling against the country’s military dictatorship.
It is unknown why Elon Musk’s waste-warriors initially tagged the project for elimination. But former Representative Tom Malinowski surmised that the problem may lie in the word “diverse,” which is a no-no in Trump’s universe, an algorithmic trigger that automatically conjures up imagined offenses against the administration’s new anti-DEI policies.
In a flourish of anti-wokeism, Trump insisted that a Florida mother had learned only belatedly that a local middle-school had socially transitioned her 13-year-old from female to non-binary.
The truth: Though the mother in question, a Tallahassee resident, filed her allegations in a lawsuit back in 2021, a federal judge ultimately dismissed them.
Emails obtained by a local newspaper showed that the mother, far from being ambushed, had notified a teacher at the school about her child’s desire to change pronouns, had consulted with the teacher on how to proceed, and had thanked the teacher for her help.
The fake warrior ascendant:
Despite being a draft avoider with contempt for war heroes killed or captured, Trump was “pleased to report” to Congress “that in January, the U.S. Army had its single best recruiting month in 15 years.”
This is a replay of his oft-stated claim that Army recruitment rebounded after his election.
The truth: According to Army records, recruitment rates accelerated all through 2024 and shot up in August—before the election. The spike coincided with the rollout of a new Army prep course that gives sub-par recruits ninety days of special academic and fitness training to help them get through boot camp.
Ukraine:
Trump wept crocodile tears over the bloodbath in Ukraine, claiming that “millions of Ukrainians and Russians have been needlessly killed or wounded in this horrific and brutal conflict, with no end in sight.”
Doubtless he was trying to create a justification for imposing “peace” on the Zelensky government.
The truth: both sides keep their casualty figures secret.
Western intelligence agencies calculate that the combined number of killed and wounded suffered by the two armies is “in the hundreds of thousands, not millions.”
As for civilian casualties, the United Nations estimated in October that about 11,700 had been killed on both sides “and another 24,600 had been wounded.”
Terrible though these numbers are, they do not add up to Trump’s “millions.
Needless to say, there would be no such casualties but for the Russian invasion itself.
Ever the non-statesman, Trump took a moment in his speech to castigate US allies for allegedly spending only $100 billion in aid to Ukraine while (supposedly) forcing the US to shoulder a disproportionate burden, which he alleged was $350 billion.
The truth: the European share of Ukraine’s military aid package is $138 billion while the U.S contribution is a lesser amount — $120 billion — in part because of GOP opposition in Congress.
Shortly after addressing the Joint Session, Trump paused all intel sharing with Ukraine. Russia promptly intensified its bombardment of Ukrainian cities. The President then shut off the US-to-Kyiv aid pipeline altogether, leaving Putin with an unparalleled military (and negotiating) advantage over President Zelensky and his valiant countrymen. Though the aid and intelligence spigots were reopened after Zelensky endorsed a US proposal for a temporary ceasefire, Putin conditioned his own acceptance on steep conditions that essentially envision capitulation to his most extreme demands.
Free speech or not:
In one of the most unabashedly hypocritical sections of his address, Trump congratulated himself for allegedly restoring our First Amendment rights. “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” he thundered. “It’s back.”
Well, not so much.
Since resuming office Trump “has consistently rewarded speech he likes while punishing speech he doesn’t,” according to recent Time magazine essay. He is particularly guilty of “viewpoint discrimination,” which “is exactly what the first amendment seeks to prevent,” Time reports.
Exhibit 1: Shortly after inauguration, Trump mandated by executive order that everybody start using “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press balked, arguing that as an international body of water this one should continue to be identified by its traditional name. AP reporters were promptly barred from most Presidential briefings.
A Trump-appointed Federal judge declined to reverse the shut-out order but cautioned White House officials ” to think about whether what they’re doing is really appropriate given the case law.” The controlling precedent is not a First Amendment case per se, but a narrower court ruling handed down in 2018, which restored CNN’s Jim Acosta to the White House press pool after he was bounced without “due process” for allegedly pummeling Trump with disrespectful questions.
Exhibit: 2: Trump has taken a second major swipe at the First amendment – this time its guarantee of peaceable assembly — by threatening to withhold federal funds from any university that condones or abets “illegal protest.” That threat was made good on March 7 when the White house cancelled $400 million in grants and contracts with my old alma mater, Columbia University, claiming it has not done enough to combat antisemitism on campus and “has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students.”
Though there had been extensive Gaza-related sit-ins at Columbia over the past year and a brief occupation of Hamilton Hall, the university’s threshold for impermissible “speech-related” activity had remained improvisatory, and so too the tolerance level of Biden’s Justice Department. It is well to remember that in 1977 the Supreme Court “stayed” a restrictive lower court order and allowed neo-Nazis to stage a self-celebratory march in Skokie, Illinois, which had a large Jewish community. One of the underlying rationales for the decision, articulated by many legal scholars, is that the First Amendment protects even speech we hate.
In variation on the Columbia funding freeze, Homeland Security officials have recently seized and detained a Palestinian graduate student who figured prominently in pro-Gaza demonstrations on and off campus. Though the subject is green-card holder and thus a legal resident, ICE claims the arrest is justified by a broad deportation clause in immigration law.
Never one for legal niceties, Trump immediately condemned the guy as a “radical foreign pro-Hamas student,” thus denying him any hope of an impartial administration of justice.
He also warned of many more such arrests to come.
I have no way of judging whether Mahmoud Khalil is a well-meaning agitator or something more nefarious as Trump alleges. But it stands to reason that using immigration law — or any other law — this way chills free speech right down to the bone. Gabriel Chin, an immigration law expert at UC Davis, told The Christian Science Monitor that expelling immigrants for “controversial political activity” has been a rarity since the McCarthy era precisely because it engages so many constitutional values.
Remember: Khalil has not been accused of breaking any specific criminal statute.
Nor has Trump had any second thoughts about coddling Neo-Nazi followers, like the Proud Boys or the Charlottesville marchers, whose expressed beliefs exude antisemitism. Selective prosecution is thus another of Trump’s offenses against Constitutional principle.
Exhibit 3: In a subtler but no less egregious affront to the First Amendment, the administration has, through executive order, revoked the security clearances of lawyers in private practice who dare to defend Trump critics. Without such clearances these attorneys cannot adequately represent any government worker or ex-bureaucrat who has ever had access to classified secrets or any sort of officially privileged information.
In a parallel action, Trump has also canceled the security clearances of former Biden bigwigs, including the ex-president himself, and prominent GOP detractors like John Bolton, making them ineligible for any further classified briefings.
Among the law firms that have felt the clearance squeeze are Perkins Coe, whose lawyers handled Democratic-funded opposition research in the 2016 elections, and Covington-Burling which has provided pro-bono legal services to Jack smith, the now former special council who charged Trump in two criminal cases (and dismissed both once the election upended the scales of justice).
The order targeting Perkins Coe reaches beyond the clearance issue and bars its attorneys from government buildings, implicitly including court houses “when such access would threaten the national security or otherwise be inconsistent with the interests of the United States.” The firm has also been relieved of its government contracts.
The hit on Covington-Burling, though slightly less sweeping, has special poignance for me. One of the firm’s senior partners, while previously employed by the ACLU, defended me in my First Amendment case before the Supreme Court in 1980 and later went to bat for me again before the nation’s highest tribunal. In both instances his security clearance enabled him to provide brilliant and informed legal counsel.
As someone who labors under perpetual CIA censorship rules, which require that I seek official approval before publishing anything about my CIA career, I tremble at the thought that this deeply knowledgeable lawyer might be handicapped in any future effort to defend me.
By making such counsel hostage to whimsical security clearances, Trump effectively cripples current and past employees of the intelligence community (including potential whistleblowers) – now millions of people — whose utterances are subject to government scrutiny and censorship under US v Snepp.
The only thing that redeems this ruling in First Amendment terms is the legally implicit proviso that I can seek judicial review (a second look from a judge) of any government censorship decision. But that precious safeguard works only if my lawyer has the security clearance needed to represent me.
Otherwise, the censors rule unchecked.
Notes:
- Brzezinski, Scarborough, Rattner, Lemire. Morning Joe, Podcast Republic EP1043 (-43:49/-40:41); See MSNBC SimpleCast File for audio, all episodes listed below. Also, Ref. Morning Star
- Scarborough, Morning Joe, Podcast Republic EP1043 (-42:11/-40:51).
- Rattner, Morning Joe, Pod. Republic EP1043 (-40:51/-39:20). Ref. MSN.
- Rattner, Morning Joe, Podcast Republic EP1044 (-18:21/-15:16).
- Rattner, Morning Joe, Podcast Republic EP1044 (-17:18/-16:35).
- Rattner, Morning Joe, Pod. Republic EP1044 (-15:50/-15:16). Ref. Hill
- Rattner, Morning Joe, Podcast Republic EP1044 (-15:16/-14:53).
- Rattner, Morning Joe, Podcast Republic EP1044 (-14:09/-13:54).
- Rattner, Morning Joe, Pod. Republic EP1044 (-13:20/-12:16). Ref. FP.
- Rattner, Morning Joe, Podcast Republic EP1044 (-13:20/-12:16).
- Rattner, Morning Joe, Pod. Republic EP1044 (-10:31/-09:13). Ref. Yahoo.
- Brzezinski, Rattner, Morning Joe, Pod. Republic EP1044 (-08:27/-04:50).