While Donald Trump is busy threatening millions with deportation, he takes a moment to weigh in on the debate over reparations and doesn’t “see it happening.” This week on Intercepted: The House Judiciary Committee holds a historic hearing discussing the lingering effects of slavery and what reparations might look like. Rutgers professor and “Uncivil” podcast co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika argues that demands for reparations should include challenging the driving forces behind slavery: capitalism and imperialism. The Intercept’s Ryan Devereaux gives an update on the trial for humanitarian aid worker Scott Warren and discusses the dehumanization that has allowed the war on immigrants to continue for decades. Artist and musician Nakhane reflects on growing up queer in South Africa and talks about their new record, “You Will Not Die.”

This is our last episode of the season. Intercepted is going on hiatus for the summer and will return with new episodes in September 2019.

Chuck Todd: Mr. President, welcome back to Meet the Press.

Donald J. Trump: Thank you.

CT: Let me start right in.

Bruce Willis as Malcolm Crowe [in The Sixth Sense]: You have a secret but you don’t want to tell me.

DJT: Chuck, look, dead people —

BW: I don’t see anything.

DJT: Chuck, just listen for one second —

BW: Are you sure they’re there?

DJT: I speak to Bush, John McCain. I think he’s real. I don’t think, I know.

BW: I think that they know that you’re one of these very rare people who can see them so you need to help them.

DJT: No, they’re stone-cold crazy.

Announcer: Not every gift is a blessing. The Sixth Sense.

DJT: Uh, Chuck —

BW: I’m working on it.

[Music interlude.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

[Music interlude.]

JS: I’m Jeremy Scahill, coming to you from the offices of The Intercept in New York City. And this is episode 99 of Intercepted.

Reporter: Do you have an exit strategy for Iran if war does break out?

DJT: Uh, you’re not going to need an exit strategy. I don’t need exit strategies.

Reporter: Mr. President, can you tell us about your letter to Chairman Kim?

DJT: Just a nice letter back and forth. He wrote me a beautiful letter on my birthday. It was my birthday.

JS: If there has been one overarching theme to the often vile rhetoric emanating from Donald Trump and his administration, it has been violent gaslighting. The whole Make America Great Again framing, it’s an umbrella under which a seemingly endless series of lies and historical revisionism reside. We see this on issues of race, economics, gender, climate, women’s health, war, even history itself.

This whitewashing of U.S. history, the reverence for slave owners who served as president of this country, it’s not an invention of Donald Trump. Almost all politicians in this country throughout history have engaged in this revisionism masquerading as patriotism. But under this administration, under Donald Trump, it is out there in the extreme open. It is a source of pride.

Last week, the author and intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates testified in front of the U.S. Congress on the issue of reparations for Black Americans. And I hope everyone listening to this show has taken the time to watch that testimony.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: For a century after the Civil War black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror. A campaign that extended well into the lifetime of majority leader McConnell. It is tempting to divorce this modern campaign of terror, of plunder from enslavement, but the logic of enslavement, of white supremacy respects no such borders. And the god of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs: coup d’etats and convict leasing, vagrancy laws and debt peonage, redlining and racist G.I. bills, poll taxes and state-sponsored terrorism.

We grant that Mr. McConnell was not alive for Appomattox. But he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney. He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodard. He was alive to witness kleptocracy in his native Alabama and a regime premised on electoral theft. Majority Leader McConnell cited civil-rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion.

Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader……more here