A Criminal Who Gets Away

In Conversation with Brian Karem

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

Mary Trump: I had a chance to sit down with my friend and fellow Nerd Avenger, Brian Karem, journalist and proprietor of the podcast Just Ask the Question. As you can imagine, we talked about journalism and corporate media in America, and how those two things are having a serious impact on where we are as a country. We also tried to game out the midterms a little bit. I hope you enjoy it.

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Brian Karem: Very happy to have one of my very favorite guests on this show. She’s got a great sense of humor, is a champion for justice, and is a lot of fun to be around. Mary Trump, thanks for being here for this very special occasion.

Mary Trump: This is a very special occasion. It’s a real achievement, given how much there is out there. I had nothing to do with it whatsoever, but I’m so happy, as you know, to be part of what you do. I love being on with you. We probably could talk about anything forever. Unfortunately, we usually have to talk about the horror.

Brian Karem: Well, you know you’re a fan of science fiction.

Mary Trump: I am.

Brian Karem: So I’ll say, after reading something that Elon Musk said, I think I figured out who he thinks he is in science fiction lore. If you remember Robert Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon, he thinks he’s D. D. Harriman. He thinks he’s the guy who can get us to Mars by selling his soul, sacrificing everything else, and screwing over the rest of us. I think that’s his hero.

Mary Trump: Elon Musk, try it. Please. Have fun on Mars.

Brian Karem: Go to Mars.

Mary Trump: Wow.

Brian Karem: Well, what do you think? That’s my stab in the dark with Elon.

Mary Trump: I like it, and I just think he needs to take some other people with him.

I think that makes sense. This is the thing that’s really important to know. These people don’t see themselves as heroes. They see themselves as supervillains, or they aspire to be supervillains, not heroes. That’s why, during COVID, everybody said, “All Donald had to do was do this, that, or the other, and he would’ve saved millions of people. He would’ve been a hero.”

Well, no, because that doesn’t work for him. One, he’s incapable of it. Two, that doesn’t give you street cred. What gives you street cred is being a criminal who gets away with your crimes.

Brian Karem: Yeah. Speaking of getting away with crimes, I think there’s nothing more apropos and more symbolic of who Donald Trump is than when he left Turkey. They had to sneak him out of Turkey in a bread truck because he’s such a coward.

Mary Trump: I love the specificity of the bread truck. Wonder Bread, by the way, not, like, Eli’s.

I think, up until now, the thing that’s been most emblematic of his regime and who he is as a person would be the reflecting pool. This very simple thing that he screwed up from the very beginning, made infinitely worse, stole lots of money, enriched other people at taxpayers’ expense, lied about it, broke the law to arrest innocent people. It’s just so emblematic of what a desperate little loser creep he is.

Now we have this.

On the one hand, it’s hysterical. Again, I don’t think people understand what a physical coward this person is.

Brian Karem: Well...

Mary Trump: I get it. I know you do. We can laugh at him being hunched over in the bread truck. Maybe they left a trail of McDonald’s French fries to get him into it. Who knows?

It’s funny because it reveals just how pathetic and cowardly he is. But in doing that, he left I don’t know how many people on Air Force One as targets because it’s not like it was announced to the world, “Donald is not on the plane anymore, so don’t bother blowing it up.” They still thought he was on the plane. Until two days ago, everybody thought he was on the plane.

So it’s not just the cowardice. It’s the cruelty and the sense that nobody else matters. I know there are going to be people out there saying, “Hey, he’s President of the United States. His life is more important than other people’s lives.” I personally dispute that idea, but we’re not talking about him needing to be moved because he’s more important because of his position.

We’re talking about his actively putting other people’s lives at risk unnecessarily.

Brian Karem: Yeah.

Mary Trump: It’s wild.

Brian Karem: Well, to your point, two things.

First, I also thought, until this incident, that the reflecting pool was the story everybody dismissed as just a sideshow. I said, “No, because what it shows more than anything else is that Donald Trump will go to any length to lie over even the smallest thing, and he will persecute people over even the smallest lie.”

The canoeist, Jeff Hearn, I think was his name, didn’t deserve any of what he got. They lied to us, saying they could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. They didn’t even investigate the case until after they indicted him. Then Janine Pirro, as dumb as she is, said, “I can’t take this to court.”

If she can’t take it to court, what does that tell you?

Mary Trump: Well, just really quickly, what it tells us is that she understands, because she was...

Brian Karem: ...a lawyer.

Mary Trump: She is a lawyer. She was a judge. I find that shocking.

She understands that if she had continued down this path, she would’ve been disbarred. Still might be. If her refusal to do that put her on the outs with Donald, it shows us, as if we needed more evidence, that he will reject you not because you broke the law, but because you refuse to.

Brian Karem: Yeah, I love that. That’s a very good point. That’s the exclamation point at the end of that sentence.

Then this comes along. To your point, again, I had friends who were on Air Force One in the reporting pool. There were other dignitaries, the pilots. There was more than Donnie on there. While I agree that you have to protect the President’s life, and maybe you don’t announce it publicly, what you could do, by the way, is empty the plane.

Mary Trump: Yes, you can.

Brian Karem: Without telling anybody why.

Mary Trump: They could have done that. Just say there are technical difficulties or some engine trouble. Who knows? It doesn’t matter.

They didn’t do it because nobody else matters. That’s the problem. It’s not just that nobody else matters to Donald. Think about how many people were involved in that decision and were like, “Oh yeah, just leave them on the plane. If it gets blown up, what difference does it make? Donald’s in the bread truck and he’ll be safe.”

As with the reflecting pool, it’s just another instance of the abuse of power. I think, in technical ways, the abuse of power with the reflecting pool thing is worse because it’s the President of the United States and his corrupt Justice Department using the rule of law to target innocent people to cover up for the president’s incompetence. That’s bad in a very specific way.

This is about endangering the lives of other human beings.

I think everybody who was investigated and indicted for the reflecting pool thing should be suing this administration for everything they can get. I think everybody on that plane should be suing Donald Trump personally, and anybody involved in this decision, for reckless endangerment because it’s absolutely insane. If they get away with this... Well, they get away with everything.

Brian Karem: Pretty much gotten away with everything so far. Good point.

I anticipate that he will try to. I don’t think that Donald will ever spend a day behind bars, but I think that Stephen Miller, particularly Stephen Miller, has an orange jumpsuit in his future. All the lawyers who have worked for him are going to end up disbarred.

Then there’s Michael Cohen scrambling to get back in.

Mary Trump: What a profile in courage that guy is. Who could have seen that coming?

Brian Karem: Who would’ve guessed it?

I did ask Michael, when I was putting together this documentary that people will see, back in January, if he had the opportunity, would he rejoin Donald? He did not say no then.

Mary Trump: Wow.

Brian Karem: It was readily apparent, when Donald was going back into office, that he was looking for a way back in.

Mary Trump: Yeah. Again, who couldn’t have seen that coming?

People like Michael Cohen are criminals and they are thugs. They’re only interested in their own bottom line, and they have absolutely no moral compass.

So there you go.

Brian Karem: Well, speaking of moral compasses, this is what I really wanted to talk about today.

We could start with Donald and his Patriot Games. I don’t even think he understands the Patriot Games that he’s going to in Ohio today. They’re calling it the Patriot Games, not even knowing that it’s a slur that comes from a song making fun of patriotism for hire. I’ll skip that one because it reminds me of The Hunger Games.

Let’s go to the fall election, the midterms.

Mary Trump: Yeah.

Brian Karem: I’ve listened for the last three weeks as Republicans have desperately tried to spin a yarn because Donald Trump and the Republicans are deeply in trouble.

I’ve always said we have two parties in this country. One has no heart, and one has no head. The Democrats can always snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Mary Trump: Always. It’s our brand.

Brian Karem: Yeah, that’s the brand.

But they’ve got a real good shot. James Talarico has a real good shot, even though Tim Scott thinks he’s running in Michigan against somebody else. He’s running against Ken Paxton, another friend of pedophiles in Texas.

Talarico is running a great campaign, and he’s got a real good shot because of who he’s running against. Democrats, even if they fall over their own feet, are in a good position to take the House and maybe the Senate.

According to the GOP, though, and let’s talk about Mike Johnson and Donald Trump, they’re telling us that jihadists and communists are running on the Democratic ticket and hold office. For the record, I don’t know of any jihadists or any communists who are in office anywhere. As Thomas Massie pointed out, they talk about one party rule. Well, they’re the party ruling.

I’ll forego all that, but the question is this. Do you think Democrats are as divided and divisive among themselves as Republicans paint them to be?

Mary Trump: No, I don’t. I think they’re more divided than they should be. Get it together, guys. Seriously. Keep your eyes on the ball here.

The infighting, to the extent that there is any, is not helpful. We can disagree that there are certain establishment Democrats in power who shouldn’t be anymore. We can disagree about that. We can disagree about some of the policies that progressives and democratic socialists are aspiring to implement.

What we cannot disagree about is that any Democrat is infinitely better than the Nazis destroying our country. That seems like a no-brainer to me.

As is often the case, though, I think the intraparty conflicts on the Democratic side are being overblown because corporate media continues to want to push the myth that...

Brian Karem: We need a narrative.

Mary Trump: We need a narrative where the media has a liberal bias, which is just the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard and continue to hear.

I think Democrats will get it together because, one, it’s a very big tent party. Two, it’s really a matter of understanding that certain Democrats can’t win in certain places, and other kinds of Democrats can win in those places. If you decide that the person who won the Democratic primary can’t win in a general election and you don’t support them, that’s a self fulfilling prophecy. So cut it out.

Abdul El Sayed should be getting the full backing of the DSCC and any other Democratic PACs out there. Any Democrat currently running for office should get the full support of the national Democratic Party, period, end of story, unless it’s somebody like a Ken Paxton.

The Republicans have so many problematic candidates who are worse than Graham Platner, and we don’t talk about that. Don’t get me wrong. Graham Platner should never have been the candidate. Once that Nazi tattoo came out, goodbye. They waited way too long.

Democrats typically get it right eventually when their preferred candidates are found to be seriously problematic. Republicans normalize all of it. Mike Johnson is fundraising for one of the most despicable misogynists. I couldn’t remember his name before. It’s Brandon Herrera down in Texas. There are so many of them. There’s one in Colorado. There are a couple in Texas. They’re everywhere.

We don’t hear about them. All we heard about for a month was Graham Platner. We hear about none of these people. The reason is because the Republican Party continues to fundraise for them, endorse them, and support them.

Brian Karem: That’s a good point.

I was talking to Fred Wellman, who won Missouri’s Second District, and he couldn’t get help out of the Democratic National Party. He raised funds by himself.

I was lamenting that I’ve covered some of these races. For example, the Talarico race. When I showed up for a press conference, the press team didn’t know how to set up a podium, didn’t know where to put a light, and was trying to put forty or fifty members of the press on a balcony the size of a postage stamp.

When I asked one of the staffers if it was their first race, they said, “No, it’s my second.”

That’s for a United States Senate race.

Wellman said something I’ll never forget. He said, “The problem with the Democratic Party is that we often send the Little League team to play in the World Series.”

I understand there are money problems and there are a lot of races, but Republicans always seem to circle the wagons and get the strongest people into the most important races. I don’t know that the DCCC or the DSCC does that, and I know that’s a problem.

Do you think, systemically, there has to be a change at the top with the Democrats, or is that not the problem? How do you see it?

Mary Trump: Oh, totally.

By the way, the guy in Texas I was talking about, that misogynistic, creepy gun influencer, as if that’s something anybody should aspire to be, is Brandon Herrera. He’s running in the Twenty Third Congressional District, and he’s vile. He’s violent. Mike Johnson, that holier than thou, pious little choir boy, is fundraising for him.

Hypocrisy is now the Republican brand.

As for the Democrats, there are a couple of things. Obviously, we need to revamp the leadership structure in the Democratic Party, but we also need to change the way we do things.

One of the problems is that the Democratic Party has failed to build infrastructure from the ground up so that every candidate doesn’t have to build the plane while they’re flying it.

It’s ridiculous that any Democratic candidate doesn’t have a toolkit that says, “Here’s the stuff you need, and we’ll provide it for you when you’re ready to run. Here’s how you get out the vote. Here’s a microphone. Here’s an AV system. Here’s a social media primer.”

Whatever it is.

Brian Karem: You’re someone who knows how to run it.

Mary Trump: Yeah. The fact that literally every candidate has to build all of that for themselves is insane. It’s a waste of time, money, and resources.

I don’t think it’s simply about the people who are in charge. It’s about envisioning how to build a party that can compete everywhere because all of the work has already been done.

Brian Karem: Here’s what gives me hope, and I wanted to get your take on this. I was talking to a woman who was all in on MAGA. She had voted for Donald Trump three times and told me she would never vote for him again because, in her words, he lied to us. He got us involved in wars when he said he wouldn’t. He said he would make life easier.

Now she claims Donald Trump is part of the deep state. When I asked her what she meant by the deep state, she said it was Donald Trump and Elon Musk wanting to replace white people with lesser species. I asked what she meant, and what she said next was so racist I’m not going to repeat it.

But here’s someone who was completely committed to Donald Trump and now says MAGA no longer supports him.

Mary Trump: Why should they? In addition to the horrific economy, there were two main things he promised them: no more wars and releasing the Epstein files. He’s done everything possible to prevent the release of the Epstein files.

Then, even though it wasn’t officially declared a war, there was the incursion into Venezuela to kidnap the Venezuelan president. The world essentially responded by saying, “Okay, whatever. It’s just Donald.”

He’s threatening the sovereignty of Greenland. He’s blowing up boats in the Caribbean Sea for no reason and with no evidence. He started an actual war against Iran, which is one of the most depraved and foolish things anybody could do because look how that’s turning out for us.

As a result, we’re weaker. Our military, which has a practically trillion dollar annual budget, has been shown to be a failure in this regard. And who has gotten stronger as a result of Donald’s illegal, unconstitutional war of choice? China, Russia, and Iran.

Brian Karem: To that point, little Marco Rubio, remember Little Marco, showed up in the briefing room while the press secretary was on paid maternity leave. Donald has assigned him so many jobs that I think he’s even Donald’s personal Uber driver at this point.

Marco came into the briefing room and said, “Look, all we want is things to be as they were.”

I thought to myself, they were as they were until you started the war.

Now they’re talking about blockades around blockades, defeating navies, and completely obliterating everything. None of it makes any sense. None of it has anything to do with reality.

I think Donald started the war to distract people from Epstein, and now he has to talk about Epstein to distract people from the war.

I hope the Democrats have themselves together enough to win back both the House and the Senate. I don’t think there’s going to be any meaningful move against Donald until then. You can see some Republicans beginning to push back, especially people like Thomas Massie, who has effectively lost his seat because he wasn’t far enough to the right for Donald. I think that pushback will only grow after the midterms, and I think that’s what Donald is really afraid of.

Mary Trump: Again, I don’t give Republicans much credit for having any spine, ethics, or morality at this point. They’re just vile. Even Thomas Massie voted with Donald the overwhelming majority of the time. The difference is that he wanted the Epstein files released, and the fact that Donald so desperately doesn’t should tell us something.

I actually think the turning point in the Senate came when Bill Cassidy lost his primary because Donald endorsed the candidate running against him. Good. Bill Cassidy is a medical doctor who voted to confirm Robert Kennedy, knowing that Kennedy wants children to die from easily preventable diseases.

Donald has now endorsed Ken Paxton instead of the incumbent, John Cornyn. You know better than most that the Senate is a club, which is why Senate Democrats are often so disappointing. They really do take care of their own.

Remember, every single Democrat voted to confirm Marco Rubio because he had once been one of them. Now he’s become a full fledged Nazi. Apparently, he also has enough free time to hold several full time jobs, including taking care of the Diet Coke button in the Oval Office.

Brian Karem: And serving as the presidential Uber driver. On weekends he’s probably the caddy.

I know we’re close to the end of our half hour and you have to go, so let me ask you for any final thoughts about this so called slush fund and what you see coming in November.

Mary Trump: I think we’re learning, as I said earlier, that our government is no longer functioning. I don’t think Senate Republicans are going to do anything, or even be able to do anything.

Let’s imagine they somehow got their act together and prohibited the Department of Justice from creating this fund. Donald and Todd Blanche are simply going to do whatever they want anyway.

I think we’re tragically about to witness people who committed serious crimes against our country receiving reparations with our tax dollars, even though we’ve never been willing to provide reparations to the descendants of people we enslaved for eight generations.

Brian Karem: We can’t even get tax relief. We can’t get decent education for our kids.

Mary Trump: There’s no Department of Education anymore.

Brian Karem: Exactly. We can’t even sell education anymore. Donald Trump couldn’t even pronounce the word vegans the other day. He called them “Vegans.” I was wondering whether they were from another planet.

Mary Trump: Isn’t Vega a planet in some other star system? Oh my God.

Brian Karem: With that said, what would you like to plug, Mary?

Mary Trump: I’d love for everybody to check out my newsletter on Substack. It’s called The Good in Us. We also have the Mary Trump Media YouTube channel, and we’re on all the social media platforms, barely hanging on by a thread thanks to the fascist takeover of every single one of them.

Brian Karem: Yes, but...

Mary Trump: At least it looks like Katie Miller, who has about 50,000 subscribers, which really isn’t that many, is apparently in talks with Paramount to get her own show.

Brian Karem: Well, you’ve got to love that.

Mary Trump: Oh, I do.

Brian Karem: She can attract enough people to fill my Cherokee Jeep.

With that said, I could do this all day. Thank you so much, Mary, for being here. I’m Brian Karem, and we’ll catch you next time.

Do NOT Feed the Don