Donald’s Catering Cart of Cowardice

In Conversation with Wajahat Ali

[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]

Mary: I got to chat with my friend and fellow nerd adventurer, Wajahat Ali. Here is the question we batted around: What does it mean if you are one of a handful of people who is invited to join Donald in a catering truck? And what does it mean if you were left on Air Force One potentially to be blown out of the sky? Here’s looking at you, Marco Rubio.

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Wajahat: Hey, everybody. It’s our favorite Mary Trump, the best Trump. She is on. We were just talking about our mutual appreciation for an outdated ’80s reference that I use called Blonde Ambition. There’s another one, a Highlander reference: There can be only one.

Wajahat: There can be only one alpha blonde in the Trump administration. We realized, as of yesterday, folks, Karoline Leavitt, this is me playing the world’s smallest violin for Karoline Leavitt. Oh, Karoline Leavitt, you joined the ranks of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Sean Spicer, Kayleigh McEnany, and so many others. History will not remember you well. In fact, history probably will not remember you at all. But now you are gone, and apparently there’s a new blonde, Mary, whom your uncle loves and who is by his side 24/7: Natalie Harp.

Wajahat: So it was a blonde-off, and in the blonde-off, this young, new, All About Eve blonde, Natalie Harp, took out Karoline Leavitt. To quote Highlander:

There can be only one.

Wajahat: Leavitt, she is not. Your response, first and foremost, to the story. The story will connect to the biggest story.

Mary: Yes. Now I just have all of these ’80s taglines going through my head. Nobody puts Baby in the corner. Where is this going to end? My goodness.

Wajahat: We can spend the entire 30 minutes doing that. It’s fine.

Mary: Let’s not, though. All right, where to start? One thing that constantly mystifies me is the extent to which people on the right overlook just how creepy his relationships with younger women, very young women, are. Why is that okay with people? It’s so dysfunctional, deviant, and disturbing that this extremely young woman is basically with him all the time. Why? And why is it that, out of the tiny number of people he decided not to have blown up, she was one of them?

Mary: There is so much wrong with him, obviously. There is so much about him that should have people in the streets. You can justify a lot of things if you want to. If you’re so averse to being shown that you were wrong, and you want to keep doubling down on things and say that he’s a tough guy, he’s good on foreign policy, and he’s great on the economy, all right, knock yourself out. But how do you spin this? There’s this really old man in physical, mental, and cognitive decline who has this woman, I don’t know how old she is, 20, 30, whatever, who could be his granddaughter, never out of his sight. How do you make that seem okay?

Wajahat: I’m glad you talked about it because we should talk about it. We are currently being led, and I use that word while really stretching it.

Mary: Led over a cliff, in the sense of the word.

Wajahat: Yes, exactly. We are being led by an 80-year-old man who was held liable for raping your friend E. Jean Carroll. There’s no differentiation between sexual assault or rape, according to even the judge, so I use the word rape. He was held liable for raping E. Jean Carroll.

Wajahat: This is a man with a history of more than two dozen women credibly accusing him of sexual assault. I’m taking my time deliberately and being very slow about this because it reveals so much about the insane country we live in. He partied with the world’s most notorious pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein is on audio that Michael Wolff released. Michael, maybe release the other hundred hours you have. Maybe.

Wajahat: Jeffrey Epstein said:

I was Donald Trump’s closest friend.

Wajahat: Donald has lied about the extent of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We know that they chased women, not women, but girls. I’ve asked Michael Wolff about this twice. He said the ages were 14 to 17. When he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein, they both started modeling agencies. When he was friends and partying with Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump took over Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA.

Wajahat: There are a couple of girls who are now women who said that this creepy old man entered the dressing room. I have daughters. I have kids over right now, like 400 kids. You can hear them. Why would any man voluntarily go into the dressing room of teenagers preparing for Miss Teen USA? Donald did all of that, Mary, and this country is like, did you see the latest tweet by Hasan Piker? Sorry, back to you.

Mary: To the extent Donald has done us any favors, he has revealed just how deeply misogynistic this country is in ways we can no longer ignore. He has also shown us that a not insignificant minority of men in this country aspire to get away with the kinds of crimes Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Tate got away with for a very long time.

Mary: There is this sense that men in America believe they are entitled to use women and young girls however they want to, with no consequences. Why should there be any consequences? Look who’s president of the United States of America. As you said, an adjudicated rapist, which means he’s a rapist. It’s just that they couldn’t bring criminal charges due to the statute of limitations. He is, as you said, credibly accused of sexual harassment, assault, and worse by over two dozen women.

Mary: Then there is his very open admission about how he would go in and just ogle these teenagers while they were changing and brag about it. Why? Because he could. Because he could. The things he has said about his own daughter are vile. He’s utterly vile, and it reveals something about us that we cannot look away from.

Wajahat: I’m so glad you went there because I was going to remind people that, if you look at the history of comments he has made publicly, he sexualized Ivanka, talked about her hotness, and asked people about her hotness. You don’t even have to have daughters to understand this.

Wajahat: During an appearance on Howard Stern’s show, Trump agreed when Stern referred to Ivanka as a piece of ass. In 2006, he commented on her being voluptuous. He joked on a program about a deal he made with 17-year-old Ivanka in which she made him swear never to date anyone younger than her. She was 17.

Wajahat: Donald said:

I don’t think Ivanka would do that inside of the magazine, although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her.

Wajahat: That was on The View in 2006. Each time I hear this, folks, I remember that he was open about it, Mary. Nothing was hidden.

Mary: He was asked what they have in common, and he said sex. She was very young when that happened. When his second wife, Marla Maples, was pregnant with Tiffany, he was asked what he hoped their daughter, if they had a daughter, would have in common with Marla. He said her breasts.

Wajahat: God. Folks, we have a rapist in the White House. He’s a rapist. I use the word rapist, and people are like, blah, blah, blah. No, rapist. Go read the judge. Rapist.

Mary: Rapist.

Wajahat: Maybe, allegedly, even a pedophile. Allegedly. This country is fine with it. You would think raping kids would be the final straw.

Mary: Waj, I think after Sandy Hook, I stopped believing that there are any lines for the right in this country, whether it’s gun violence against children or pedophilia. I don’t think they have a line. If they believe that ignoring the slaughter of six-year-olds in an elementary school isn’t important enough to get them to change their minds on gun safety because they think somehow they’ll lose power, then they will ignore the slaughter of six-year-olds in an elementary school.

Mary: If they think that somehow drawing the line at pedophilia is going to lose them support or get Donald to primary them, then guess what? Let’s not even bother seeing if anybody is mentioned in the Epstein files who should be brought to account.

Mary: It’s not just the voters who are to blame for this. We are now in a situation where Donald has basically completely dismantled the DOJ. It is his personal defense firm, and Todd Blanche is his personal defense attorney. The DOJ is entirely in service not just to going after Donald’s perceived political enemies, but to covering up potentially massive crimes that may have been committed by him or others in his circle, simply because they know that without him, they don’t have power. It’s absolutely gobsmacking.

Wajahat: If people think Mary and I are being hyperbolic, we’ll give you two examples. Mary just touched upon one. Todd Blanche was Donald Trump’s personal attorney. Todd Blanche is in direct violation of Congress, which passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Todd Blanche is the architect of the cover-up of the Epstein files.

Wajahat: Todd Blanche is the one who authorized the miraculous sweetheart deal that has been given to no other person, allowing Ghislaine Maxwell to be transferred to a minimum-security camp where she’s living her best life as an incarcerated person, with yoga and dogs, while openly asking for a pardon.

Wajahat: John Thune has nothing to lose. Thom Tillis has nothing to lose. Bill Cassidy will forever go down as being the doctor who sold out the Hippocratic oath by voting for RFK Jr. We always said he was going to kill people. He has killed people. Cassidy voted for RFK Jr., and he voted for Todd Blanche. These are complicit people in the cover-up of mass child rape. I just want to break it down for people because that’s literally what they’re doing right now. Donald is mentioned more than any other person in the Epstein files.

Mary: Except Jeffrey Epstein.

Wajahat: Yes.

Mary: But this is the thing, Waj. Bill Cassidy sold his soul, so there’s nothing else I can say about what a vile, despicable, weak little man he is. But I think Thune and Tillis actually do have a lot to lose, and it’s more important to them than justice, accountability, or protecting women and children from sex traffickers and rapists.

Mary: They have millions of dollars as lobbyists to lose. They have millions of dollars as people who are put on the boards of Fortune 500 companies, become Fox contributors, or what have you. They have a lot to lose, and they have made a very cold calculation about what’s more important to them. There’s no other way to look at it because, as you know, Tillis and Thune no longer have careers as senators of the United States of America because of the guy they continue to protect. It is quite something.

Wajahat: How far, absolutely. You had this one moment of courage where you did not have to vote for Todd Blanche. You did not have to support the ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files. They said:

Nah, we will protect the Epstein class. We will not give justice to these women. This is the price to pay so that we don’t get killed by our own base, and we can ensure, like Mary said, that we will have a lucrative life as a lobbyist or as a Fox commentator.

Wajahat: They chose that. There’s another story. My cat wants to leave. My cat came in, and my cat wanted to leave. If people think we’re crazy, there’s another story as of this week because you can’t make it up. No, not Hasan Piker and whatever he said, Francesca Hong’s six-year-old tweets on Turkey, or Abdul El-Sayed being a Muslim.

Wajahat: We’ll talk about it on the back end because it just shows you how the entire establishment, including Democrats, corporate media, and liberals, is broken. I would think a top-five story, a top-three story, if you’re really concerned about extremism in the political parties, would be Donald two days ago going all in for Max Miller, doubling down on his support for the Republican representative out of Ohio whose ex-wife has filed a restraining order against him.

Wajahat: There are credible accusations that he assaulted her, threw scalding water at her, and broke the collarbone of his own daughter. He has defiantly, like abusers we know or have seen, stayed in the race. Donald said:

Yeah, I like him. He’s a good guy. Yeah, he’s good, Max Miller.

Wajahat: Mike Johnson is with him. Even Bernie Moreno, who is his father-in-law, has had harsher words for Dr. Fauci than for the man who allegedly beat his own daughter and grandchild. I don’t know if you saw that, Mary.

Mary: What about Graham Platner, though? Max Miller may be the worst of them, but there are at least three other horrific candidates who are much worse than Graham Platner was. There’s Ken Paxton for Senate in Texas. I’m so sorry, I don’t remember their names. There’s a guy in Colorado who has performed exorcisms and made all sorts of weird, outrageous claims. Then there’s another guy running for Congress in Texas whose name I also can’t remember, who is a gun evangelist and says the most vile things about women and children. The guy is just a Nazi. He’s a straight-up Nazi.

Wajahat: Victor Marx.

Mary: You hear nothing. Think about the ink spilled. Look, Platner was terrible. I thought the Nazi tattoo should have been the end of it, but whatever. He wasn’t properly vetted. As soon as all of this other stuff came out, every single person who had endorsed or supported him told him to drop out and pressured him to drop out.

Mary: There is no way there is going to be the same kind of pressure for Max Miller or anybody else if Donald is going to continue to endorse them. The media seem not to give a shit because they’re Republicans. As we’ve learned, if you’re Donald, it’s baked in. Whatever, this is the kind of horrific stuff we expect. We expect you to be a misogynist. We expect you to be a racist. We expect you to be cruel and corrupt. We completely expect your fascism. What are you going to do about it?

Mary: What do you mean, what are you going to do about it? You’re going to stop it. You’re going to report on it. You’re going to tell people that, yes, Graham Platner was terrible, and he should have dropped out. He never should have been allowed to get as far as he did. However, the same rules should apply.

Mary: The stuff going on in the Republican Party is so infinitely worse. I continue to have trouble explaining why the media are so incapable of recognizing their own limitations and biases.

Wajahat: I think it’s because the media have Stockholm syndrome. I think they’ve fallen in love with their abuser. I also think maybe, and this is not fetish-shaming, their kink is S&M, specifically the M. They’re like the gimp from Pulp Fiction. They like being beaten and humiliated.

Wajahat: Furthermore, to your point, and I think it’s a very important point, we just gave four scandals off the top of our heads that should be top of the line. We have the media and the Democratic establishment. When I say the establishment, it’s not just Republicans. It’s Democrats, Republicans, and corporate media.

Wajahat: Look at how much ink has been spilled on Abdul El-Sayed being brown, Mamdani being asked to apologize for pro-Palestinian tweets he never tweeted, Graham Platner, all the ink spilled on Francesca Hong’s Thanksgiving tweet, and Hasan Piker. Hasan Piker, Hasan Piker.

Wajahat: You’ve got Max Miller still in the House. You have Nancy Mace, who less than a week ago tweeted:

All Muslims in public office are Trojan horses.

Wajahat: You have Donald Trump this week, again, doubling down. It was in the news for two and a half minutes. That’s it. Two and a half minutes of the media saying, Nancy, you silly girl, you go ahead and be Islamophobic.

Wajahat: Then Donald Trump said there are jihadists in America who got elected two days ago. No news. He called Somalis dumb, stupid, and low IQ. No news. Nothing. It’s all fine.

Wajahat: Ken Paxton released a pedophile. Adam Hoffman, a Republican, raped his best friend’s son for three years. Ken Paxton intervened. Instead of having a felony, he got him a misdemeanor. He spent a couple of days in jail, doesn’t have to register as a sex offender, and then moved states.

Wajahat: None of that is in the news, Mary. Going back to the media, which is why I say they should all be in Elon Musk’s rocket launched into space, Kristen Welker and CNN spent the entirety of the weekend news asking every progressive about Hasan Piker.

Wajahat: I’m not making this up, folks. As all this was happening, there was nothing on Nancy Mace, nothing on Max Miller, and nothing asking Republicans whether they support Todd Blanche violating their Congressional Epstein Files Transparency Act.

Wajahat: What about Donald Trump being a rapist? What about Donald Trump supporting Max Miller? What about Donald Trump saying all this racist shit? What about Nancy Mace being an openly Islamophobic bigot?

Wajahat: Speaking of Islamophobic bigots, Donald Trump went on yesterday for Randy Fine. You know, the representative who said that mainstream Muslims should be eradicated and compared us to dogs? Not a peep, Mary.

Wajahat: They still spend all their time, along with Democrats, going after Abdul, Mamdani, Hasan Piker, Mehdi Hasan, and Waj. What’s in common with all of us, Mary?

Mary: I still can’t put my finger on it. You asked me this before we started, and I don’t know. It’s such a random group of people with no one characteristic that jumps out at me. I’m left-handed. I know Mehdi’s not left-handed. I can’t help you get to the bottom of this.

Wajahat: Folks, is it lost? Abdul, he’s brown. He’s Arab.

Mary: Wait, does it start with an M?

Wajahat: I think so, yes. You’re men.

Mary: No.

Wajahat: We eat Metamucil. Correct. For fiber. You are correct. We all eat Metamucil.

Mary: More information than I needed, but thank you.

Wajahat: Brown Muslim men who are critical of billionaires and Israel. Got to crush them. Got to crush them. Spend all your time crushing them.

Wajahat: Francesca, did you know Francesca? Look how scary she is. Five years ago, she did a dumb tweet, and then she apologized for it. Isn’t she scary? Let’s talk about this for a week, Mary.

Mary: It is really fascinating because, look, I get it in primaries. You’re allowed to pick a side. You’re allowed to have a preferred candidate. I have to be honest, I became busy, so I’m not really going to get into the details of a Democratic primary in a state in which I don’t live because whoever wins needs to have the best chance in the general.

Mary: I don’t know. Obviously, it was very, very close, and I don’t know enough about it to say one way or the other. Wisconsin chose the other person, fine. Does that mean any Democrats should have been beating up Francesca Hong during the primary because she may well have won? She was well ahead in the polls. No, guys. We have to look at the bigger picture.

Mary: Was she flawed? Again, from what little I know, yes, she could have handled certain things better. I don’t mean her old tweets. I don’t care about those. I mean the way she talked about them. Maybe not the strongest. Who knows? But if she had won, there are a lot of Democrats out there who would have been responsible for helping make her a weaker general election candidate.

Wajahat: Absolutely.

Mary: Thanks, guys.

Wajahat: That’s it. They handicapped her with personal attacks. They’re the ones who led the framing. They’re the ones who helped Republicans with their framing.

Wajahat: I don’t care if you like Hong or not. What I’m talking about is this disproportionality, this double standard. Everything we spent the first 20 minutes discussing has not captured the news cycle as much as Francesca Hong being called unelectable, her scary tweet, Hasan Piker being a leftist Twitch streamer, or Abdul El-Sayed being a brown democratic socialist.

Wajahat: Meanwhile, the president of the United States just said racist shit against Somalis and Muslims and is supporting Max Miller. Capital One, a week and a half ago, said the president of the United States most likely committed money laundering, which is why they shut down his bank accounts. That was a news story for a day, Mary. That’s insane.

Mary: Yes. Gone.

Wajahat: Insane. Then this news story, going back full circle, is just chef’s kiss. It brings everything together. It brings Blonde Ambition together, brings the press together, brings Trump’s corruption together, and brings together the fact that he’s losing this war and is surrounded by dumbasses. The story goes like this for those who don’t know.

Mary: Please take a second to like, subscribe our Substack channel, and leave a comment below. It’s important that we keep using our voices and keep the conversation going.