Full Episode - The Rule Of Law Is Now Whatever Trump Says It Is + Boeing Promised To Do Better After Deadly Crashes… They Haven’t

Chuck Todd opens with the Greenland oil expedition, an episode so strange it borders on parody: an American oil company drilling in defiance of another country's laws, with Trump's blessing, and — the detail that breaks the brain — Dr. Phil hired to document the whole thing. It's a fitting overture for a week in which the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as Attorney General 50-49 at four in the morning before fleeing town for recess, with only Collins and Murkowski defecting. Chuck admits he was wrong; he never thought Blanche would actually get there. What galls him is the surrender it represents. Bill Cassidy's rationale — that Trump "needs someone to tell him no" — is laughable given that Blanche has said outright that the rule of law belongs to Trump and the DOJ won't be independent. John Cornyn's shrug that "there's nothing we can do to rein in the president" is, Chuck argues, the confession of a coward: senators possess the authority and simply refuse to use it, giving away what little leverage they had. The debate has now been reduced to whether the Attorney General is the people's lawyer or the president's.

Then takes on the question of why Democratic voters keep rewarding progressives whose politics they don't actually share, and his answer is that half the Democratic electorate did not suddenly become socialist — they're furious about 2024, and specifically about leadership deciding the nominee for them. They didn't dislike Harris; they wanted a choice, and they'd watched the establishment coalesce around Biden in 2020 to produce a presidency that ended with Trump's return. Progressives are the only Democrats willing to say the party screwed up, and voters will give you enormous latitude on the cure if they trust your diagnosis. Chuck illustrates it with a Washington Post story about the Conn brass instrument factory in Ohio, bought by Trump-supporting, tariff-championing investor John Paulson and now closing as production moves offshore — where the disillusioned employees don't plan to vote at all, because they feel the system has failed them for decades. He believes the opening in American politics right now isn't centrism, it's breaking up an establishment that voters believe is more worried about losing donors than losing their votes. He wonders aloud whether the answer is a military leader — he's intrigued by retired General Chris Donahue, essentially Captain America on paper, pushed out by Trump and Hegseth, with credibility across the aisle. Americans are exhausted by being told the other half of the country is the bad guy, they're desperate for honesty and a reboot of a captured government, and the space is wide open for someone to fill it. But Chuck’s closing caution matters: the system is badly screwed up, and that still isn't a reason to burn it all down.

Then, Oscar-nominated documentarian Rory Kennedy joins the Chuck Toddcast to discuss Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, her Netflix follow-up to 2022's Downfall premiering August 19th — a film built around the death of whistleblower John Barnett and the current and former employees who came forward after it. Kennedy's central finding is damning in its simplicity: at the end of Downfall, Boeing swore it had learned its lesson and changed its ways. It hadn't. More incidents followed, whistleblowers reached out to tell her conditions had actually gotten worse, and she says she believes Boeing bears responsibility for Barnett's death. Kennedy walks Chuck through the structural rot she sees behind the headlines — a near-total lack of competition, a revolving door between the FAA and the company it's supposed to regulate, a McDonnell Douglas merger that reoriented the entire culture around quarterly earnings instead of engineering excellence, and the decision to leave Seattle in search of a non-union workforce — which matters enormously, she notes, because unions are what give workers real whistleblower protection. Boeing is simultaneously one of the most heavily subsidized companies in American history and, right now, one that isn't being held accountable in any meaningful way.

Kennedy is unusually direct about the practical takeaway: she won't fly on a 737 MAX and actively chooses flights on other aircraft, pointing out the counterintuitive reality that older model planes are often the safer bet — a consumer shift that has hit budget airlines hardest. She and Chuck get into the incidents that never made national news, including oxygen masks that failed to work, and she's blunt that the Trump administration hasn't provided anything resembling adequate regulatory oversight while families of the 346 crash victims are still fighting to hold the company responsible. Kennedy sees this fall's elections as a genuine chance to put people in place who care about the flying public, and reflects candidly on how she's feeling about American politics generally — that this administration is making choices that are hurting a lot of people. There's also a lovely detour into Ethel, her documentary about her mother, which she says holds a special place in her heart, plus a look at what she's working on next.

Finally, Chuck hops into the ToddCast Time Machine to revisit two different but related events: the signing of the Social Security Act by FDR, and Richard Nixon announcing price and wage controls to combat inflation. Chuck argues that America has always flirted with socialism even if we call it by another name. He also answers listeners questions in the “Ask Chuck” segment. 

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Timeline:

00:00 Chuck Todd’s introduction

00:30 Trump’s crazy Greenland oil adventure 

01:15 Trump is just ignoring the laws of another country

01:45 Craziest detail is oil company hired Dr. Phil to document the expedition

02:15 Trump has gone out of his way to alienate European allies

02:45 Oprah gave us Dr. Oz & Dr. Phil… which is not a good thing

06:45 U.S. senate leaves town for recess after passing funding bill

07:15 Todd Blanche is now the confirmed AG for the United States

08:00 Republicans passed none of the things they