Höre PROOF: A Pre-Election Special

Seth and Thomas offer an up-to-the minute analysis of the pre-election turmoil dominating the American news cycle in the final days of the 2020 general election, from a second major coronavirus outbreak in the White House to the dramatic collapse of Trump’s would-be game-changing narrative about Joe and Hunter Biden, from the fallout of the third presidential debate in Tennessee to dramatic developments in voting trends across the United States, including historic turnout among Black voters in Georgia and voters of several key demographics in Texas. This discussion of transient breaking news ultimately turns to a broader consideration of the future of Trumpism and various figures in Trumpworld and a spirited rumination on the lessons that Americans—and American journalists in particular—should be taking from the political, legal, and cultural upheavals of the Trump era.

Seth and Thomas take listeners on a bracing, globe-hopping tour of Trump’s most egregious clandestine international dealings—all of them threatening to U.S. national security and undertaken under color of Trump’s authority as President of the United States. Included in the tour are harrowing new details about the actions of Trump and his aides, allies, advisers, agents, and associates in Egypt, Venezuela, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. The wide-ranging, fast-paced discussion in this episode also includes new details and developments related to Trump’s collusive activities in Russia, Ukraine, China, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Seth and Thomas unpack the geopolitical conspiracy at the heart of Seth’s 2019 New York Times-bestselling book Proof of Conspiracy—a pre- and post-election course of collusion between Donald Trump and his political team and the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, and Bahrain. Drawing solely from major-media investigative reporting, this episode explains in stunning detail how Trump replaced U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East with a transnational “grand bargain” aimed at benefiting exclusively the Trump Organization, the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaigns, and foreign nations with geopolitical ambitions hostile to America and its allies’ long-term national security.

Seth and Thomas unpack, in excruciating detail, the stunningly plausible yet still somehow unthinkable nightmare scenario: an incumbent president who loses his re-election bid in November but finds a way to stay in power with the implicit blessing of partisan state elections officials, a conveniently hands-off 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and a compliant network of state congressional delegations in the House of Representatives. The first stages of this scheme have already been fully and successfully executed, and the whole of the plot is not just legal but has already been telegraphed as palatable to those who’d be responsible for carrying it out, so hold onto your hats—this may be exactly where we’re headed.

Seth and Thomas discuss the “October surprises” Trump hopes will hand him victory in November 2020, including those would-be game-changers that turned out to be duds (e.g., the Durham Report and the Trump-Biden debate); those we now know to be scams (e.g., a tranche of declassified ODNI documents involving Clinton and Obama, an imminent Saudi-Israeli “peace deal,” and Mike Pompeo’s attempted reigniting of the 2016 Clinton email case); and those that are exactly the sort of surprises Trump may have been hoping to avoid (among them, his own contraction of COVID-19 and the publication of a slew of stories about his tax returns). Few general election campaigns have seen this many dramatic attempts to entirely redraw the political landscape.