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Rick Wilson: Why Would MAGA Want Trump-Lite?

March 3, 2023
Notes
Transcript

The base wants the sugar, the fat, and the salt — not someone afraid to say how they’re different from Trump. Plus, DeSantis doesn’t want to face the CPAC straw poll, Trump attacks Fox, and Paul Ryan doesn’t see the world has moved on. Rick Wilson joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod.

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This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:08

    Welcome to the Bulwark Secret Podcast. I’m Shirley Sykes. It is March third two thousand twenty three, and we have a trifecta of things to talk about. We have the Ron DeSantis Shadow Candidacy for president is obviously ramping that up. We have the dominion lawsuit against Fox.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:26

    We keep learning so much that we kind of already knew about Fox News, but we’re getting it under oath now. And of course, this is the weekend of the annual festivists of crazy known as CPAC. And joining us on today’s podcast one of the premier speakers at CPAC. No. Not at Rick.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:48

    Rick Wilson. Time just again. When’s the last time you were at CPAC? Correct? Twenty sixteen, I was at CPAC.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:54

    That was
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:54

    there too. Yeah. The climate had become rather chilly by that point.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:59

    Well, I have a weird story. I wrote a piece about the temporary separation, clearly not divorced, but a temporary separation between the crazies and what I euphemistically call the normies who are not showing up there. Mhmm. And, you know, people, you know, wanting to draw, you know, large conclusions about, is this the end of Trumpism? What does this mean for for seatback?
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:18

    And I said, okay. Be cautious about this. Because just remember back in twenty sixteen, Donald Trump in a fit of peak refused to show up at CPAC. They said, hey, we have ground rules that you’re supposed to answer. Questions like everybody else, and he said, I’m Donald Trump, screw that.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:37

    And the folks who ran CPAC wouldn’t cave. And and do you know who the guy who wouldn’t cave to Donald Trump back then? Matt Schlap. Matt Schlap. I was actually standing in the hallway backstage with him and his — Mhmm.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:49

    — number one henchman. And they were, like, talking about, yeah, they, you know, they just they were kinda kinda pleased with themselves if they, you know, blew off Donald Trump. And now, What can we say about match lap? There’s
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:01

    no depth to which match. Won’t won’t dive to to please Donald Trump at some perverse level, not in that. There’s no place that Matt won’t reach around to to to make Donald Trump happy.
  • Speaker 1
    0:02:15

    Yeah. It’s it’s it’s it’s really been kind of extraordinary. I mean, it it it does feel like this alignment of the stars, doesn’t it, Rick? I mean, the guy’s fumbling with some guy’s junk and you have people quitting and you have Charlie Sykes was just locker room talk. Was grabbing by the penis.
  • Speaker 1
    0:02:31

    It’s just locker room talk, Charles. I mean, come on. We all here’s the dynamic. Right? I mean, let me bounce this off you.
  • Speaker 1
    0:02:38

    So he is more dependent on Donald Trump than ever because he is told if only Absolutely. Donald Trump even looks at him funny. Match slap and his wife, Mercedes, are just totally screwed. I mean, they’re just gone. So they have to up the package.
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:52

    At this point, Matt will be personally counting the ballots in the straw poll in a in a in a closed room to make sure that Donald Trump wins by a billion t trillion percent because he’s on life support right now. Matt’s DC lobbying business had already kind of fallen apart in the last couple of years. And now I think with this with this, Lawsuit he’s facing, and look, I was told when my own organization had a scandal that I didn’t know that the character of the person that was involved, and I know his private life. I was told that everybody involved in that completely had to know because it wasn’t miss Cedar Washington blah blah blah. Oh, really?
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:30

    Know from Red and Lynn in Washington? Hey, it might have been a secret, but apparently in Washington, Matt is not a secret. He’s in deep shit. His lobbying business has been sort of fallen apart because he has gone over the cliff with Trump and no major Corporation wants to say, yeah, we’re gonna hire X or Y to lobby for us with the overhang of Trump’s insanity. And so he’s been in trouble on that and he’s obviously having trouble in his personal life.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:56

    But so he’s gonna go and try to make c pack, you know, Trump pack once again. And it it looks to be much like the Republican Party, like the collapsing neutron star
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:07

    that it is. It’s it’s smaller and it’s hotter. It’s more intensely crazy. It is much more I mean, the fact that they have Kerry Lake being one of the premier speakers at their big dinner over the week, Kerry Lake. Right.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:19

    My pillow guy is there, but Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, all the congressional leadership had something more important to do. They couldn’t even get Rhonda McDaniel to come. Right. Ron DeSantis’ case? Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:32

    What’s that? So Ron DeSantis has this super carefully curated image right now. I’m the tough guy.
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:38

    I’m the bad ass. I’m the one who I’ll take on the lids and own them.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:42

    Yeah. This
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:42

    thing’s I never lose. I’m tough. I’m Ron DeSantis. He does not want to go to CPAC and do the straw poll and face up against Donald Trump where at the end of the day, the sort of grinding Trump affection that may have faded by a notch or two is still there. I mean, look, Trump’s approval numbers have gone in the Republican Party from the high nineties to only the high seventies.
  • Speaker 2
    0:05:11

    Yes, man. Pretty good. Yeah. It’s not too bad. Ron Ron does not wanna go in there and have a loss where and the grass roots where he has to go out now and ask all these major donors for money and say, hey, I can beat Trump in the primary.
  • Speaker 2
    0:05:23

    I can do this now because there’s an argument that he can’t. And I think it’s a very good argument that he is an overpriced political stock, and he does not wanna have a confrontation now with Donald Trump because if
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:38

    he does and loses, that’s the ball game. I think that’s exactly right. And, of course, he also could have been booed because who knows what this if if somebody’s paid, like, three hundred and fifty bucks to show up and see Matt Gates, Marjorie Taylor Green, Ronny Jackson, Lauren Bulwark. Right? Scott Perry, Right.
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:52

    Carrie Lake, my pillow guy, then who knows what they’re capable of doing? I mean, it’s just yeah. I don’t think there’s an upper limit. You don’t wanna be in in that room. Okay.
  • Speaker 1
    0:06:00

    So let’s just dive into this whole question about. So do you think that Ron DeSantis is an overpriced political stock at the moment? Give me your take on this because you’re a Florida
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:10

    man. Well, first off, I can tell you as I told the Rudy campaign back in the day, never invest in Florida as your winning strategy. I mean, remember, Jeb and Marco were favorite sons of Florida who came in well behind Donald Trump when he ran in the in the great state. Mhmm. But broadly speaking, it’s a twofold problem.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:28

    The first is the Donald Trump problem. And Donald Trump, even if you pause it, that Donald Trump only controls or retains the loyalty of, let’s say, twenty or twenty five percent of the GOP base. That means he goes into every single primary with a floor of twenty five percent. Right? And it’s gonna go up or down a little bit, but it’s probably gonna ratchet up.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:52

    Especially because It’s higher than that though. Right? What do you think? I’m being very conservative. Okay.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:55

    I’ll go very conservative. Okay. But once you get into that night and you’ve got Ron DeSantis and five six seven eight other candidates, they’re all sniping at DeSantis dragging his number down. And let’s say Ron DeSantis, you know, with a hardcore five or seven percent even. And I don’t even know that that exists.
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:12

    I’m just making that up. As they drag Ron down because they all think if I beat him, I can go after Trump just just like in twenty fifteen and sixteen by the way. So you end up with Trump with his large pad in the beginning, this ability to go in and watch the rest of them tear each other apart,
  • Speaker 1
    0:07:30

    and
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:30

    he’s gonna start winning primary and he only has to win the first two or three where the media narrative completely changes. Rupert wakes up one morning and says, oh my god, I’ve I’ve seen the lie. It’s Donald again. He’s fabulous. Fuck it.
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:42

    Get him on the ass. Don’t do it more. You know, he’s gonna do that. And on the other side of the equation, is is that Ron DeSantis as an overpriced stock. Look, Ron is the and I’ll use a baseball analogy so he can understand it.
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:54

    He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Okay? He grew into political power in Florida by facing two of the weakest conceivable opponents that you could I mean, if if you asked me to pick the worst people to run against him, it would have been Andrew Gillum and Charlie Sykes Crist. To completely terrible candidates loathsome in Charlie’s case, record in the state of Florida because he’s hated by the Republicans because he betrayed them in the Democrats because he sucked. And he was the inheritor of this gigantic political machine in the Republican Party of Florida that I used to work in for years and years and it helped to elect people from all over the state and statewide officials.
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:32

    And he he walked in and thought, oh, it’s all gonna be like this. This the presidential campaign will be just like this. It’ll be easy. Well, it’s not. The world of presidential politics as you well know is a brutal savage winnowing from the very first day.
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:47

    And the people who think that they are absolutely gonna be the ones, the people that the media declare of. This is the one, you know, ask again, as I’ve said before, Esk, President Scott Walker, President, tenth party, President, Jeff Bush, President, Rudy Giuliani, and on and on and on. Rick Perry. President Rick Perry. Sure.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:05

    And my favorite president, Fred Thompson. Hey, listen, I’m still a Fred Stanley. To this day, I liked Fred. I made a commercial with him one time, like a not political commercial one time. And he was, like, so fun to work with and such an easygoing guy.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:19

    He was, like, I love the sky.
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:21

    Well, that’s why everybody thought he was gonna be so so great. So the the questions about the sadness I think are pretty obvious right now is, will he be able to scale up to a presidential campaign. We have no idea. Will he be able to take a punch? Will he be able to deliver a punch?
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:35

    Okay. So let me ask you this. Because a lot of the cool kids in the room are saying, you know, he’s very smart not to engage Donald Trump. He doesn’t have to say anything about Donald Trump. He can run against Donald Trump without saying his name.
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:50

    Mhmm. How long does that last? That just seems to me to be in credibly naive to think that you can take out Donald Trump without ever actually taking out Donald Trump.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:01

    What happens to Ron DeSantis? Here’s an argue window kind of when I mister Ron DeSantis, the day that Donald Trump says, yeah, you know, screw this true social thing. I’m going back on Twitter. Mhmm. And I’m talking to my eighty five or eighty nine million followers.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:16

    And how many of those are real? It’s still a lot of people. Okay? And he says, I’m gonna go back on there, and I’m gonna f Ron DeSantis up every day. And I’m gonna punch him in the face, and I’m gonna say, the worst things in the world.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:29

    He’s a groomer. I’ve heard many things about him at that private school. You can’t tell. He may have been touching that girl. I’ve heard things.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:36

    My friend, Jim, tells me and he Will Saletan go out and do what Trump does. And he’ll say that he’s fat and he’s short and his wife killed, you know, somebody in. He’ll go through that Trumpian sort of thing. And, Rhonda Santos, for the first few days, we’ll be smug and I’m not responding to that provocation. And then finally, people will start saying, hey, did you really eat a dog?
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:58

    Hey, did is your wife really the leader of a of a cousin of which is? I mean, it’ll get crazy, but Trump will use that ability he has because, you know, there are millions of Americans who believe that Donald Trump is the legitimately the president of the United States to this day. No.
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:14

    Of course, he’s going to do that because he’s done that in the past. I mean, people, you know, remember what he did to Ted Cruz You know? And then, of course, you know, ten to fifteen degree. Yes. And then sad Ted Cruz came and came around on all of this.
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:27

    But the reason that your prediction is is rock solid, is because Donald Trump has to destroy Ron DeSantis. Rhonda Santis is you know, for in his mind, Rhonda Santis poses an existential Threat Tim and he’s right because Ron DeSantis eats into his base. Rhonda Sandes has MAGA Street Credit, which raises the question. And I guess this is again part of the you know, the conventional wisdom, is that because Ron DeSantis has bought up so much of Mago real estate, you know, he’s bought off him with the Christopher RoofOs of the world, you can see that he’s you know, plain footsy with the natcons and wink wink wink wink and all of those those folks. Right.
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:01

    The the conventional wisdom is that that when Trump begins during his trumpy and, you know, you’re a groomer and, you know, people come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, sir, I have to tell you about Ron DeSantis. And his short hands or whatever ago, that it will backfire on him. That people will go, okay, wait. He’s a good guy. We we like Ron DeSantis.
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:22

    And therefore, that the the attacks, the barbs, the zingers won’t land Ron DeSantis the way it landed on, all of those other pathetic guys in two thousand sixteen. You
  • Speaker 2
    0:12:33

    know, when you look at the the history of Donald Trump wrecking the mental reputational and moral characters of his opponents, he’s pretty much undefeated. Except for Joe Biden, he’s pretty much undefeated. And every Republican that talks smack and was, you know, what pretended to be, you know, go on stage and they’d have their three or four little zingers, their staff, had focus group for them, and then Trump would just relentlessly maul them and just go and go and go until they were reduced to seething pile of guts and and a Brooks Brothers suit. This guy is brittle. He does not stop.
  • Speaker 2
    0:13:11

    He has a I mean, look, I’m not a guy who, like, praises Trump very often, but Trump’s ability, that thorough ability he has to sniff out a one weakness in a person is is unparalleled. And what this is true? The and the hits don’t matter to the elite republican class. Look, the boys at national review they’ve already decided they would like They love Ron DeSantis more than their mothers. But when Donald Trump starts mauling Ron DeSantis with the base and he starts losing, which is the only thing in the end of the day, the
  • Speaker 1
    0:13:44

    only score that matters. Every one of them will break. Let me just read you something here. Okay? You mentioned Nashville.
  • Speaker 1
    0:13:50

    This is Rich Lowry, who’s writing in political magazine. And you can tell he’s starting to get a little nervous about Trump’s poll numbers, and and and the fact that Trump is still standing despite this. I mean, the guys, you know, called first, spending the con institution he faces criminal charges. He’s been dining out with neo Nazis every day he is
  • Speaker 2
    0:14:08

    The little things Charlie Sykes the little
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:10

    So he writes he said and he’s talking about the the this conventional wisdom smart kid idea that don’t engage him. Don’t make him mad. Don’t poke him. Right. He writes, yet the disinclination to engage with Trump at all brings back memories of twenty sixteen.
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:24

    If it’s a temporary dilemma, that’s one thing. If it’s another prisoner’s dilemma among the non Trump candidates waiting for someone else to take him on and hoping to emerge unscathed in the aftermath. It is repeating the same mistake and expecting a different result. If the current situation holds, there’s no way around Trump only through, and that will require making a case against him. I had to say, Rick, this is one of those rare moments where I
  • Speaker 2
    0:14:53

    he’s right. You know? So yeah. He’s right. Of course, he’s right.
  • Speaker 2
    0:14:58

    But what have you seen so far of the few people, Nikki Haley, you know, and and Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence who have sort of gently kinda sorta ease the foot into the water. Not one of them, not only will they not criticize Trump, because they know what the base will do. They won’t even say that they have a difference in policy with Trump. Right. They won’t even allude to a single tread of daylight between themselves and Donald Trump.
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:25

    And so the the question for the MEGA base becomes, why do you want diet Trump? If you’re a Trump consumer, you want the high salt, high fat, full caffeine, full sugar, Trump. You want all the show. And this idea that you can somehow bankshot your way past Trump or, like, have this sort of Pachinko machine strategy where the ball bounces past him somehow. He’s the gravitational field at the bottom of the whole thing that sucks every piece of reality into it.
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:53

    And when he doesn’t get his way, And that can mean any number of things. That can mean he doesn’t feel respected or that somebody owes him or or that he has some sort of beef with somebody. When that happens, he never lets it go. And right now, Ron DeSantis not engaging him to Trump. Is more of an insult than Ron DeSantis engaging him.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:16

    So they’re right, Lowry and those guys are right Ron DeSantis to realize that the old mistakes of twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen have or we’re iterating a second edition of those things. We’re a groundhog daying a second edition. But they’re wrong in thinking that there’s any solution other than nuclear war with the sky. That’s
  • Speaker 1
    0:16:34

    the only thing that’s never been tried against him, by the way. Chris Christie seems to be hinting that he would be the guy to do that, but whatever. So I’m
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:41

    gonna go back to the library. Charlie Sykes remember that scene in that one debate — Alright. — where during the break, Christy is there with his mouth open. He’s hugging Trump. It looks like a baby bird maybe to be fed by Donald Trump.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:52

    Mhmm. I mean, it’s just like I’m like, the guy is so cringe. Yeah. Don’t
  • Speaker 1
    0:16:57

    don’t get me started on this. So you and Larry are weirdly enough on the same vibe. He said, look, to be the man or the lady, as the immortal Rick flair said, you gotta beat the man. Mhmm. Trump may indeed be beatable, but the latest polling shows him squarely in the way of anyone who wants to take over the party that he’s dominated for seven years in County, so you Rick Will Saletan guy that I wanted to ask this question of.
  • Speaker 1
    0:17:20

    Okay. I know you are not advising doctor Ron DeSantis. I know that you would never vote for Rhonda Sandes. And I don’t want anyone to think that you will be within the zip code of Ron DeSantis’ campaign. But what does that nuclear strategy look like?
  • Speaker 1
    0:17:33

    Okay. At some point, you know, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis will be on a debate stage together. Mhmm. And you will have the fire hose of bullshit and misinformation and insults coming from from Donald Trump. What is the formula?
  • Speaker 1
    0:17:49

    For answering him. What is the scenario? I think it goes back to
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:54

    that what I identified as an absolutely crucial moment and look, Jeb Bush Markarouvie, were friends. Okay? They were friends back in the day. I I, you know, I’m a bush guy. When Donald Trump started making fun of Jeb’s wife on stage — Yeah.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:10

    — Jeb Bush needed to realize. And and he didn’t he just didn’t have the political acumen to do it. He needed to realize that this was Trump destroying his life forever. He should have walked over to Donald Trump and slapped him across the face and said you take my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth. And I’m not kidding.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:27

    It takes something shocking. No. It doesn’t. It takes something shocking. Something sounds good.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:33

    Transgressive
  • Speaker 1
    0:18:34

    because you’ve
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:35

    got you’ve gotta rattle this game that Trump is the most adept player in the political world at doing, which is his audience, they crave the bully. They crave
  • Speaker 1
    0:18:48

    the thug act. They crave short of slapping him. You know, you know, it’s interesting because the way you described that that scene with Jeb, you know. Mhmm. Please clap.
  • Speaker 1
    0:18:56

    Seems like a kind of apparel, the fact the fact that he had no affect and that he wasn’t able to react emotionally to the attack on on his weapon. And Ted Cruz same story. Oh, well, that’s even worse. I mean, so but this is basically a Republican Michael Ducachis who, you know, is famously asked, you know, what would you do if cadet Ducachis was raped and murdered and Why don’t you give that complete bland response? What you need to be is to show that you’re a real person.
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:18

    Does Ron DeSantis have that in him? I mean, I think that Rhonda Sandis is a pretty smart guy, but but a very wooden politician. I I don’t think he has a lot of range. I watched that debate with him and Charlie Crist where he performed fine. Except he did kinda look kinda like a mannequin, you know, and he’s,
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:34

    like, staring straight ahead of one. So how does But but remember, and I promise you Donald Trump was watching that debate. I promise you he was. Oh, sure. When he was asked by Charlie Chris, who is a guy I have had a twenty five year beef with even when he was a Republican.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:48

    Okay? Long story. A dislike the guy, he’s a sharp eyed sociopath. When Charlie looked at Ron DeSantis, and asked the most elementary one zero one question I’d ever heard. It’s a debate prep one zero one question.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:04

    And Ron DeSantis is right now, by the way, surrounded by a large number of extremely expensive consultants. And he said, Ron, are you gonna serve the people of Florida and serve out your full term as governor? Or are you just doing this to run for president? And DeSantis looked like Charlie had hit him in the head. Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:20:21

    With
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:22

    a two by forty standing there with his jaw hanging up and for about nine or ten seconds. You can see the gears Ron DeSantis is head going to trying to figure out an answer. Right? And Rose, it looked like it. I promise you.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:37

    Donald Trump saw that moment and said, I will rip out his liver on stage and eat it on the stage and every other candidate will say, okay, I’m done now. I’m not gonna fight him. Because there is nothing he’s better at than finding that one crack in somebody’s world. Especially for a guy like Ron DeSantis, who does not have a warm personal effect. Who can’t fall back on a smart ass remark?
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:03

    You know, Donald Trump has said that to me, about, I don’t know, anything. And I can come back with a dick joke or a smart remark or some counter info. Ron DeSantis will sit there and, like, with Charlie, he looked like he was trying to pass a a goddamn cinderblock in the bathroom. He said, we I’m not I’m only interested in one old out of democrat. I mean, he was so painfully bad.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:28

    And you can’t do that with Donald Trump. You gotta be on your game. You gotta be real. You gotta be big. You’ve gotta have a personality.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:35

    Because look, a celebrity beats a non celebrity almost every time. The one who becomes the happy celebrity tends to be the one that wins. And Trump is a celebrity no matter whether we like it or not. They may be the crappulous version of a celebrity. But he he may be fat elvis
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:52

    in the
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:52

    final years.
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:54

    Right. He’s the elvis. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:55

    Evoncull. Tullacullull bring him special bottoms. See, I crossover.
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:02

    So what do you think is going to happen? I mean, I I I don’t disagree with anything you just said there. And again, I just have no idea. No one has any idea how DeSantis is gonna do it, but he’s not going to be funny. He’s not gonna be likable.
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:14

    He’s not gonna be personable. He’s not witty. He doesn’t
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:16

    have zingers. Here’s here’s the other thing. Right now, the the Sam’s people are operating under one key predicate. And that is that every billionaire liberal Republican hedge fund guy in New York is beating Rhonda Sanchez’s door down. You know why?
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:32

    The the dirty little secret nope. Nobody’s figured this one out yet. The dirty little secret is all of their wives or partners hated Donald Trump aesthetically. Yeah. They don’t like his kind of person.
  • Speaker 2
    0:22:43

    And they thought, well, Rhonda said, he’s going to the I he’s got my the background. He’s got a beautiful wife. He seems like a like a but those guys are gonna give Rhonda Santos a lot of money. But here’s what happened in twenty sixteen. Gonna give you a hypothetical donor because I’ve literally sat in the room with these guys as they’re having this conversation with Jeb or Marco or whoever.
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:05

    I was with a donor who’d given Jeb and his prepack a lot of money in ‘sixteen. And I was trying to tell the guy, you know, if you don’t stop Trump now, you’re screwed. This is gonna go very wrong. And he’s makes the whole thing is, hey, you know, Jeb, you’re a young man. You’ve got time, you could run again, but I’m really concerned that if Trump does get elected, it’s gonna hurt our business and my partners are worried and we love you and I’m always gonna be your friend, but yeah, I’m gonna have to not give you any more money and then they hang up the phone and maybe it’s two minutes or maybe it’s two days or maybe it’s two weeks and they called Donald Trump’s campaign and go, where do I wire?
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:46

    And that money that Ron DeSantis, I’m done with seventy million bucks in the bank right now. They ain’t nothing like a campaign. To throw money on a bonfire and incinerate it. Jeb Bush, Jordi Giuliani, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz. I mean, I could add up in twenty sixteen.
  • Speaker 2
    0:24:03

    Over a half a billion dollars that went for nothing that got burned to the ground because they went out and ran conventional campaigns. Nicki Hayley is gonna go to Iowa and they’re gonna say, okay, you got to hire this guy and this guy and this guy and this woman here and the guy there and you got a you got pay for this and pay for that. And then you gotta do it in all these other states.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:25

    And
  • Speaker 2
    0:24:25

    you gotta do media buys and the money just goes. Mean, Rudy went from having two hundred million dollars in the bank to at the end they couldn’t pay the charter plan. How much money did Scott Walker burn through? And he was
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:35

    out of the race by like, August who took twenty fish Oh my
  • Speaker 2
    0:24:38

    god. I I think it was, like, ninety for Scott. Insperacy theories. Sarah Longwell, UFO’s. During the entire nineteen seventy one debacle of this red die number two, parents all around America were buying Frank and Berry, so only a few days after the cereal was released, kids all across the country.
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:02

    Started being rushed to hospitals. All of them had one symptom in common. Theories of the third kind on YouTube or wherever you listen
  • Speaker 1
    0:25:13

    Let us just go back to the Ron DeSantis Coalition because this is really interesting because you you know, obviously, you have an entire class of Republicans who are not necessarily into the culture war, but really kind of, you know, he kind of sends the tingle up there late. Tim Miller was talking to puck news, and he’s he’s talking about the DeSantis Florida coalition. I wanted to bounce this off you. So in state, Ron DeSantis pitches himself to the Jeb Bushwing of the party as somebody’s reforming the tax code, doing tort reform, Everglades restoration, teacher pay education reform, school choice, you know, that traditional stuff. You know, that’s not the kind of stuff that gets attention on Fox, but he’s doing that and they like him.
  • Speaker 1
    0:25:51

    Right. And then, of course, the culture wore stuff, you know, the gay stuff, you know, the the anti woke campaign, the, you know, the migrants done, the seizure of Disney World by the state, that kind that kind of stuff. But he says that a lot of the old school Republicans, the the hedge fund guys you’re talking about, they like this other stuff and they compartmentalize it. So they they like the old school stuff, but they kind of go, okay, this this other stuff is like performative Bulwark. Whatever.
  • Speaker 1
    0:26:18

    Sure. Maybe it’s what you had to do these days, so we’re kinda gonna look the other way. So they’re able to compartmentalize it. Does
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:26

    that sound right to you? They absolutely can for now for now. Okay. What happens? Yeah.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:31

    Hedge fund guys get to vote with money at first. But at the end of the day, the magma horde gets to vote on their thing. Let me tell you what the most poisoned thing for any Republican is right now in The most conceivably enormous setback of any Republican candidate is for the base to find out that you’re saying one thing to them and another thing to a bunch of guys, you know, at the Century Club in New York. If you thought the Mitt Romney, the forty seven percent moment was bad, wait until they find one piece of video of Ron DeSantis saying to some hedge fund bros or some tech guys, I’m gonna make sure I feed them enough red meat and I’m gonna, you know, I’m a normal guy. Trust me, I’m a normal guy.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:15

    I’m not gonna be a crazy president. They want the crazy. They want the transgressor. They want the insanity. They want the Trumpism.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:21

    And say what you will about Donald Trump. He doesn’t have a filter. He just is. He’s protean in that regard. And so, Ron DeSantis is a calibrator and a and a trimmer, and he’s gonna have trouble when the illusion present so much cognitive dissonance that the money people can’t be comfortable with it on the one hand or the MEGA base can’t be comfortable on the other.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:45

    Because if they say hey, Ron, you promised us, you were gonna get rid of all those gay things.
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:51

    And then
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:51

    he then goes into a room of major donors, by the way, who are one hundred and fifty percent in favor of gay marriage, gay adoption, trans kids, all that other stuff, and doesn’t have the same message and it gets out, it’s a nuclear bomb.
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:04

    That would be the end of him. No. Who knows that that’s what’s going on? I I don’t know.
  • Speaker 2
    0:28:09

    Interestingly enough Casey DeSantis while she is a a right winger. She’s also very smart. And I think she’s already seen the risk factors of that contradiction becoming public. Okay,
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:21

    William. He really comes down to sort of going back to our our first conversation about why Ron DeSantis is not at at CPAC. It seems as if the key moment is gonna happen very early on that if Donald Trump looks like he’s a loser, you know, the momentum picks up. If Donald Trump wins, if he continues to pull well, as we know, a lot of these guys are just gonna fall into line. And it will expose the hollowness of and I’m sorry to mention my my good, old friend, my former friend, Paul Ryan, who basically is, hey, I’m never again Trump wine.
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:54

    Is it because he’s a liar? Because he’s a racist? Because he tried to overthrow the government? No. Because he can’t win.
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:00

    Because he loses elections The problem with that
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:03

    rationale is that the moment he starts winning elections, your entire case evaporates. Precisely and just like Mitch McConnell when you if you held Mitch McConnell down under the hot lights and he could give you a hundred different reasons why Donald Trump is a terrible human being, but he will still say, well, I’ll still vote for him, of course, because the alternative is Joe Biden. That means communism. I can’t help communism. They always have a jump in their head where they can go from the absurd assertion of what the alternatives are to an excuse.
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:38

    The party’s very good, Charlie Sykes know this very well. And and by the way, your interview with Paul Ryan was brilliant. Well, thank you. And devastating and honestly tragic. I mean, I find Paul to be a tragic figure at this point.
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:51

    I think there’s like a moral blindness there that you really reveal in the interview because it’s just sad. Me. It’s just like, god, you know, you can be free of all this pain. You can just say the truth one time, nobody’s gonna
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:02

    get mad at you except people that you hate anyway. You know, this kept running through my head that we were having a conversation that I had had with him almost word for word. Twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, and he hasn’t moved on. He hasn’t recognized that the world that he is describing just does not exist anymore. It’s gone.
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:21

    And, I mean, there are no unicorns out there that are gonna become, you know, flouncing in post Trump, and let’s go back to talk about Medicare and Social Security again. I mean, that’s like, that’s gone. And given his prior status in the Republican Party, this sort of cute, you know, desire that, no, I still need to be in the room. I still need to be on the phone with Kevin McCarthy. I still need to do all of these things.
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:44

    It’s like, you know, have you learned nothing? You’ve been making this fussedian bargain for what six years and what has it gotten you and yet you’re still there on the Foxboard on the phone with his buddy, Kevin McCarthy. And he thinks that somehow that this is how we’re gonna move on from Donald Trump. I mean, Rick, it it does feel like the at the bottom of their great deep thought, but political genius and strategy is one idea. Maybe he Will Saletan that’s pretty much it.
  • Speaker 1
    0:31:16

    That’s the plan. Yes. Okay. Yes. They all go into this with
  • Speaker 2
    0:31:20

    the predicate that somehow some deus Ron DeSantis or some other bizarro thing Will Saletan, and Donald Trump will not be the nominee. Maybe he’ll insult a a beloved war veteran, or maybe he’ll talk about grabbing people by the pussy, or maybe or maybe maybe he’ll insult somebody’s wives, or or maybe he’ll say that the writers in Charlotte’s thought were good people or maybe I mean, all this wishful thinking. It’s all magical thinking. It’s all just this fantasy world they live in and they’re like, You know, well, after Ron DeSantis takes out Trump, then I’ll take out Nikki and then Mike Pompeo and it’s all this ridiculous bankshot bullshit and they can’t get it out of their heads. Either take him or you don’t.
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:03

    Okay. The indictment question. I feel like we’ve been waiting for Godoe for months and no years. I’m sorry. Years.
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:10

    And there is this this deep belief that the world are closing in on Donald Trump. Well, wait till this happens. So here we are in March of twenty twenty three. We have a crazy jury foreman down in Georgia. I don’t know whether that has any effect.
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:24

    And — Mhmm. — I have no idea what what’s happening with the Department of Justice. Like, as everyone else should admit, they don’t know what’s going on. Okay? So where do you come down are they going to indict Donald Trump?
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:36

    And will it make a difference? I will say this and I’ve told
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:40

    people this for months. Hoping my breath already. Stop hoping for a miracle. We must make our own. No one in the MEGA world will give a flip flying.
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:50

    You know what, when Donald Trump gets indicted. They will say, It’s the deep state. They’re trying to stop him because he’s our man. Oh my god. It’s the FBI again trying to betray our dear leader They have already priced it in.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:04

    They’ve already decided it doesn’t matter. They don’t care. They’re beyond caring. In fact, it probably makes Trump’s Republican support stronger. After the FBI raid on his house, Republican support for Trump went up.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:20

    Did not go down. It went up. There’s only been two big things that drove down support for Trump among Republican voters in the last seven years. Number one was the Dobbs decision, which in part reflects that about twenty to twenty five percent of Republican women are either softly or somewhat pro choice. And also, that Dobbs represented weirdly, Roe had become sort of part of the background noise.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:46

    For a lot of even for pro life Republicans. The shock of the change moved the numbers against Trump, with female Republican voters, particularly those who were slightly educated, slightly more affluent, tend to live more in in more affluent suburbs and excerpts. The second thing with January sixth, Mhmm. Which the violence and the crazies because look, that’s the Bourbon Republican who loves Trump,
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:09

    who does
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:10

    not wanna be associated with the guy with the Camp Auschwitz. Shirt. Does not want to be associated with the guy with the horns or the people shitting on the floor? Those
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:17

    guys are
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:18

    gonna be speaking at the RNC Convention, you know. Horn guy is gonna be the secretary of transportation someday. I’m pretty sure or or interior maybe. But all of these people, Charlie, they have this persistent illusion that the edge and the base of the party are subservient to the political class of the party. And that’s not the world anymore.
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:40

    That is not how it works anymore. You and I and the rest of our Republican elite friends were never coming back in the room. The mob runs the party. The base
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:50

    runs it. And I think that’s more, you know, more and more apparent, especially as you watch, you know, Kevin McCarthy’s Congress continue to be a I wanna I wanna find a better way of saying clown car because I think it’s much more despicable than that. You you saw that what was it? Congressman Comer Right. I was talking about, you know, why didn’t the Department of Justice bring criminal charges against Beau Biden, the dead
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:11

    son of president Biden. The dead son who died of cancer from his exposure to chemicals and rats. Who
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:16

    was a war hero who had awarded the bronze star. Okay. And I wonder I mean and it’s just like I was actually on the eleventh hour, you know, the other night, and I I came very close to dropping an f bomb on television. I’ve done comfortable doing it on a podcast. I’ve done
  • Speaker 2
    0:35:31

    it. I mean, you have. I got reprimanded.
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:35

    So is there a shift? Because here in Wisconsin, we have this this state supreme court elections coming up in April. Right. And these things are usually, you know, very, very close run of things. And right now, I have to tell you I think that the the liberal candidate who is quite liberal, has a tremendous advantage because every single ad I see on television here is about the abortion issue.
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:55

    I think that’s gonna be an interesting test case. About how the electorate has been affected post jobs because this is the first post jobs state supreme court election in Wisconsin where it’s a completely binary choice. It is up or down. There’s an eighteen forty nine law on the books that criminalizes abortion Right. If the liberal wins, that will be overturned, if the conservative wins, that will be upheld.
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:18

    No. There’s no doubt about it. There’s no ambiguity about it. So it’s a straight up referendum on abortion, and we are a key swing state. And so it will be interesting to see how that plays out, especially because I don’t I’m not seeing much evidence that Republicans have really figured out how to handle this or find a way to navigate compromises in
  • Speaker 2
    0:36:41

    a country that is at least sixty forty pro choice. I have thought about this problem a lot and I’ve written about a a good bit America had a kind of uncomfortable consensus on abortion. Nobody really was like a fan. I mean, it was like, yeah, yeah, abort. I mean, a few crazies, but but, you know, Most people were like, this is not a great thing.
  • Speaker 2
    0:37:01

    I don’t think enough people on the pro choice side looked at the moral implications, sometimes of a portion. And I don’t think enough of the her wife people looked at the actual moments where life of the mother was a real thing. But we had this kind of weirdly uncomfortable, but generally, you know, abortion with some guardrails view of it in the country. And it’s one of the most complicated social issues we’ve ever dealt within this country. And I I rank it literally as high as slavery in some ways because it is deeply, deeply personal, intercline with religion, intercline with free markets, intercline with every other thing in the world.
  • Speaker 2
    0:37:41

    But what I could tell you, it didn’t take a pollster to say, yeah, you know, no matter how you feel about abortion, nobody wants the government to have stitch clubs where you pay people money to report women getting abortions. Like Greg Abbott in Texas. Nobody wants to say a woman with an ectopic pregnancy has to die, which is, you know, gonna be the Missouri law. Because, you know, we’re we’re gonna ban it so thoroughly. Nobody wants women have to have their locations monitored by the government so they can’t cross state lines.
  • Speaker 2
    0:38:09

    And so in all these cases, the overshoot right now is in the hands of the Republicans. The and the overshoot, by the way, a few years ago, was when Democrats were, like, fuck you. Partial birth of abortion is fine and fun and funny and here you go and we’re gonna do it. And they should have had a moment where they realize you’re over the the extremism line a little bit. Where the Republicans right now are raising it over the cliff.
  • Speaker 2
    0:38:31

    And I think there will be a major implication in the twenty four election I think it is bound up in a lot of other opportunities for the Democrats to be smart and careful and grab some Republican and independent leaning voters who are not, they don’t wanna be part of like the Greg Abbott’s niche club. Yeah. My sense just talking to people, and this is the anecdotal, which
  • Speaker 1
    0:38:54

    is, of course, not data is that It’s anecdotal, Charlie Sykes what I call it. Yeah. Okay. I’m I will I’ll attend. So I was at this a hipster
  • Speaker 2
    0:39:02

    club. I heard these two women, a hipster coffee shop.
  • Speaker 1
    0:39:05

    Know a lot of people who were sort of that the Democrats were kind of ranking their votes very, very temporarily or willing to do it. You know, post dobs that feels more like a long term lease, if not a complete turnaround. I mean, the number of women that I have Republican women who are just like, you know, I I can’t see myself ever voting for Republicans again. And I’m I’m continually sort of surprised by the intensity of it, but it is real. It is happening.
  • Speaker 1
    0:39:28

    I actually think it’s going to be interesting to see what how Donald Trump handles this. Because, you know, he put out that one statement where he kinda blamed the mid term losses on on the abortion issue. Of course, you know, he’s a guy that’s — Mhmm. — you know, has not given five minutes thought to the entire issue, you know, except except did you pay the bill? Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:39:46

    Exactly. Some something like that. And and they not naive enough to think that it will split the base, but my guess is that you’ll have people in the room telling him, you know, you have to take the strongest possible position because Donald
  • Speaker 2
    0:39:59

    Trump — Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:40:00

    — is never outflanked on his right. I mean, this is though he and DeSantis are kind of doing that weird thing where neither one of them wants anyone to get to their right. Well, at a certain point, you get to one of the right, you fall off the edge. I’m not sure who goes first. Right.
  • Speaker 2
    0:40:13

    Hey, Charlie, I had a question for you. Sure. You’ve noticed I’m sure this break Trump is making with the rest of the party on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
  • Speaker 1
    0:40:22

    Yeah. I
  • Speaker 2
    0:40:23

    think it’s actually you know, I’m not a guy who gets Trump a lot of props. I think it’s actually politically brilliant. I think he knows where the base is.
  • Speaker 1
    0:40:29

    Are you seeing that sort of bubble up? I haven’t seen a bubble up yet because it hasn’t really been engaged. But, you know, that was something that he He demonstrated back in twenty sixteen that as soon as he, you know, pricked the the bubble of Republicans who claimed to be conservative and into entitlement work form. It just it vanished. Mhmm.
  • Speaker 1
    0:40:48

    And this was something else I was asking Ryan. No. He he’s back on you know, ideas that have been rejected, you know, a decade ago. And it’s like, okay. Were you watching, you know, the House Republicans yelling?
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:00

    We’re not touching anything. We’re not touching anything. You know, the leader of your party say we’re not touching anything. There’s no political will there. There was no none.
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:09

    Among the many ironies watching the, you know, the tea party movement, which really cared about you know, budgets and deficits and
  • Speaker 2
    0:41:17

    national
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:18

    that just basically flimped when it became MAGA in which they they cared absolutely nothing about all of that. So, yes, I think that gives an advantage. He’s going to pound Ron DeSantis with that. You supported those things — Oh, yeah. — and I don’t disagree with you at all.
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:33

    I think that particular fight is one where Trump is
  • Speaker 2
    0:41:36

    showing that sort of, like, cunning that he has.
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:39

    Okay. So where does the whole Dominion Fox story go? Fox News being exposed in so many different ways. Neither you or I are lawyers. You’re not lawyer.
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:47

    Right? No. No. I can’t figure out why they don’t settle this thing. I mean, there’s there’s what is the upside?
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:53

    I’m not just
  • Speaker 2
    0:41:53

    writing a check right now. In the end, they’re gonna settle this thing because they do not they do not want this to go in front of a jury. Clairelock is a superb defamation firm. They are the top of the gang. They are stacked top to bottom with a bunch of of train killers, and Travox has trained killers too.
  • Speaker 2
    0:42:14

    But Dominion and Clairelock have their receipts.
  • Speaker 1
    0:42:18

    Mhmm.
  • Speaker 2
    0:42:19

    Every one of these people knew what they were doing was bullshit. They knew that the harm they were causing to dominion was deliberate — Yeah. — and deceptive. It’s gonna cost Fox an awful lot of money. Now, rubber traditionally over time when these things happen in his organizations finds a sacrificial lamb and kills said sacrificial lamb in order to get the press off of him.
  • Speaker 2
    0:42:42

    It’s what he did during the taping scandal in the UK. It’s what he did during a scandal in Australia of a similar nature. It’s somebody is gonna die in the Fox World. Mhmm. And it’s not gonna be the talent.
  • Speaker 2
    0:42:53

    It’s not gonna be Tucker or Sean or Laura. It’s probably gonna be Suzanne Scott. It might be someone down the chain from her slightly in the legal side. I don’t see how that solves their problem though. Right.
  • Speaker 2
    0:43:04

    Those sacrifices, those play into the media narrative, but it doesn’t solve the legal problem. They will settle in the end. They will give it up in the end. They will they will roll over because the risk is so catastrophic for them. I also think there are two other big problems that people haven’t really thought through yet.
  • Speaker 2
    0:43:22

    One is
  • Speaker 1
    0:43:22

    shareholder lawsuits against Rupert and the family. I was just gonna mention this. In college.
  • Speaker 2
    0:43:26

    Rupert’s Scott, what do you think? Five, six, seven years left? I mean, evil people live a long time. Good people live a long time sometimes, but, you know, Rupert’s time is running out. He does not have much more on the clock.
  • Speaker 2
    0:43:38

    Mhmm. But for all that, he’s still in control of this organization. Does he want to spend his twilight years in the shareholder fights, which are even harder to prevail in sometimes than the legal fights. Those things become very personal. It reduces his range of action financially on all these other fronts.
  • Speaker 2
    0:43:56

    The other place I think Rupert Murdoch is in trouble is there is an element of the right wing that grew up believing that Fox was the word of God. That if it was on Fox, it was the one true piece of news they could find. It was the one thing that was real. It was the one thing they could rely on. Mhmm.
  • Speaker 2
    0:44:15

    And the rest of the news Bulwark were lying liberal communists, you know, pursuing a globalist agenda, what even make up whatever whatever the, you know, fantasy world of their brain is that day. Now they discovered that Fox was playing them, that Fox was treating them with contempt. And that Fox knew that their audience was so stupid they would believe anything. Mhmm. And a lot of that audience now is either insulted or they’re saying, well, you know, Trump could have won the election if only Fox stayed disciplined.
  • Speaker 2
    0:44:49

    If they stayed in line, we could have won this election. I just find it fascinating. The coming shipstorm from the right against Fox because there are other options now OAAN and NewsMax and God knows what else. I don’t think that
  • Speaker 1
    0:45:04

    they’re gonna suffer reputational damage with their audience for lying to them because I think their audience likes being lied to and and Right. But the lie they wanted them
  • Speaker 2
    0:45:11

    to keep telling. They wouldn’t keep telling. Right.
  • Speaker 1
    0:45:13

    And, of course, they won’t even hear about any of this if you watch Fox, you won’t know. Don’t even know that this is even going on. But to your point here, a lot of the story that we’re seeing about what happened after the election is the result of pure panic that they will lose their audience to the newsboxes to the OEM — Uh-huh. — who were serving a much richer, pure form of crack and meth on the street. Oh, yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:45:37

    And and they were really worried about that. I mean, you can see, you know, going back and forth, oh my god, there’s so mad at us for not giving us the big lie. We know we might lose these people. The stock price will go down. So right now, as you and I are speaking, down in Mar a Lago.
  • Speaker 1
    0:45:51

    The Orange God King is just firing off one shot. He’s melting down over this attacking Rupert Murdoch. So this is their worst fear. Right? That mama would turn on them.
  • Speaker 1
    0:46:03

    So how long is Rupert gonna be able to stand up against that? Because he’s got two different things. Right? I mean, he’s he’s caught here. He’s got this massive lawsuit and maybe others coming at him, which would say, you know, keep away from that stuff versus if Donald Trump keeps, you know, pumping up the megabase on all of his name.
  • Speaker 1
    0:46:21

    Who’s,
  • Speaker 2
    0:46:22

    share? What do you do? Which way are they gonna go? Let me tell you. Rupert Murdoch in twenty fourteen and fifteen was conflicted over where like the tea party side of the movement had become He was one of the people who after Todd Aiken and the disasters of twelve was like, no, we gotta win with good good candidates, good people.
  • Speaker 2
    0:46:44

    He was for his entire life pro immigration, did not like how the gang of eight had flopped on immigration, did not like the the nativeest turn that even his own people were taking, did not like Trump. It was contemptuous of Trump. I wrote about it in the first book, and he wisely as a player decided, well, my pride and my preferences are irrelevant to the success of my Bulwark. And if I don’t feed them Trump, they’ll go get their Trump somewhere else. And I think you’re exactly right, Jerome.
  • Speaker 2
    0:47:17

    I think they’re gonna for a few months, they’ll flirt with Ron DeSantis, and they’ll flirt with other candidates a little bit here and there. But at the end of the day, if Trump is even likely to prevail. They will not only switch to him. It will become a network that becomes twenty four seven about how no matter what the candidate is, we’ve got to take on communist heathen cannibal Joe Biden. Otherwise, our nation will be plunged into the eternal darkness pedophile Satanists.
  • Speaker 2
    0:47:49

    Right. Of pedophile Satanists, you
  • Speaker 1
    0:47:51

    know, goat worshipers, whatever. I think you’re right. The one question and I have is whether or not you have the countervailing pressures of these massive lawsuits that would slow that down. Because the moment that you do what you’re describing. Donald Trump begins showing up on the Bulwark, and it begins spewing the fire hose of bullshit on the Bulwark.
  • Speaker 1
    0:48:10

    Sean,
  • Speaker 2
    0:48:10

    I’m glad you’ve had me back to prove that my election was stolen from me. Well, exactly. You lied in the deposition, didn’t you, Sean? Well, okay. So that’s the awkward
  • Speaker 1
    0:48:19

    I mean, this is the way the discussion is going to be. Hey, look at this. We’re losing audience. We have to get Trump back on, then the lawyers will say, are you kidding me? We now have, you know, six billion dollars in lawsuits.
  • Speaker 1
    0:48:30

    We have this. We we have dominion. We have smart man. It’s
  • Speaker 2
    0:48:34

    a shame they’re in this position. I feel so bad for that.
  • Speaker 1
    0:48:38

    It’s going to be hell of a discussion. Mhmm. And I think that we can be absolutely certain that that whatever the principled stand is, forget it that they they won’t be taking. Okay. One last question I have for you because we really haven’t talked about the general election strategy at all, but How important is the Chicago mayor’s election for the Democrats?
  • Speaker 1
    0:49:01

    Have you thought about this?
  • Speaker 2
    0:49:02

    I have thought about this. I’ve been telling Democrats. I knew I take this crime shit seriously. Stop with this defund the police stuff. Mhmm.
  • Speaker 2
    0:49:09

    It’s the most weapons grade stupid thing I’ve ever heard. Not pretending it’s not happening. Right. Every human being knows this is going on. Everybody understands that this is a problem and the people who are most affected by crime are African Americans in major cities and essentially she gave them an out now.
  • Speaker 2
    0:49:29

    She gave them a pass. That economy isn’t abusive comps versus defund the police. The argument is defund the police versus constitutional sane trained legitimate law enforcement. Because the false decision there of, oh, well, if we fund the cops, that means that black kids are gonna die, it does a disservice to every single person in the equation. It also
  • Speaker 1
    0:49:55

    strikes me just this classic asymmetrical debate where People are saying, look, I don’t feel safe. The violent crime rate is people are moving. It’s clearly a massive issue in San Francisco and in New York and in Chicago. And you have a lot of Democrats that respond to that by bringing out charts and graphs saying, no, it’s not real, and then giving these wonky things. In some ways, it’s kind of a Michael Ducasse answer.
  • Speaker 1
    0:50:20

    People are saying we are scared. People are being murdered. They’re being raped. They’re being robbed. My house is broken into my car was broken.
  • Speaker 1
    0:50:26

    Right. I feel unsafe and you have people going to know. This is why you shouldn’t be concerned about it because this line is going down and say, people, you need to engage. You need to take this crime issue seriously. There was that headline weirdly.
  • Speaker 1
    0:50:40

    I thought it kind of framed it weird that You know, the Republicans looking to pounce on Democratic divisions in Chicago. Republicans are irrelevant. There are no significant numbers of Republicans in Chicago. This is whether or not Democrats want You could you could sit them all around the table at a waffle house. Exactly.
  • Speaker 1
    0:50:55

    The the real question is are Democrats going to set cells on fire and give them, you know, give a great talking point to Republicans. So it’s not Republicans gain influences in any way. It is the simplest thing in the world. You
  • Speaker 2
    0:51:07

    don’t want it be about the ideological predicates that you want to be true, but about the actual predicates of what is in the head of real voters all the time. I love San Francisco, Charlie Sykes one of my favorite cities in the world. I’m there a lot for business and I I love it, but I can’t go there in the same way that I used to because the streets are not full of people who are down on their luck. The streets are full of junkies who are being paid by the city to be fucking junkies. It’s not cool anymore.
  • Speaker 2
    0:51:36

    And it’s not solving their problems. It’s not helping them. And so you can help people. You can make cities cleaner and safer and better. And you don’t have to do it in an ideological framework that’s left or right.
  • Speaker 2
    0:51:50

    But that’s real. And too many of these people, like these public defenders and these prosecutors, that have got this, like, I’m gonna reduce everything that’s a felony that involves property crime down to a misdemeanor, if you have won a recipe to turn on a generation of people in the city, who will vote for the worst possible law and order message you can imagine. This is it. This is it. They’re gonna do
  • Speaker 1
    0:52:13

    it. It’s on Rudy one in ninety three. And just look at the way this is played out wherever you have these uber progressive prosecutors, whether it is San Francisco or or Chicago or Philadelphia. We’ve had big controversies here in Milwaukee, in New York. You you have the same sort of thing.
  • Speaker 1
    0:52:30

    It is And and, you know, my mentions are gonna get enough filled up with people saying, well, actually, just telling you, toxic politically, one of the reasons why Kevin McCarthy right now is speaker of the House of Representatives is because Republicans did so well in exploiting the crime issue in in New York. I mean — Mhmm. — New York’s still a Democratic state, but Republicans picked up a bunch of congressional seats on this issue and they picked up the congressional seats that gave them the majority without that issue. Nancy Pelosi with Soviet speaker, I think,
  • Speaker 2
    0:53:03

    what do you think? That issue was the one saving grace of the Republican Party in the last election cycle. The one saving grace. It was the one thing they had unequivocally on their side. And in New York, in particular, the anger that people were ignoring violent crime had become so palpable.
  • Speaker 2
    0:53:25

    And I talked to former Republican friend of mine who called me and said, you know, I just came out of a focus group up there. And a Democratic male voter, business owner, upstate said, you know what I’m pissed about? I’m pissed that Kathy Hockel talks about guns every five minutes, but doesn’t talk about crime at all. And it catalyzed it for me. I was like, that’s There it is.
  • Speaker 2
    0:53:48

    They look at the symptomatic part of it, and not at the part that affects everybody all the time at scale.
  • Speaker 1
    0:53:53

    They’re not dealing with the just the emotional reaction and the incandescent anger about all of this. And again, there is a certain denial. There’s a little bit of gas lighting. You know, the obsession with well, you know, these numbers are not a look, the perception is very real. It is very intense.
  • Speaker 1
    0:54:11

    Murderers may be down year to year, but violent crime, property crimes, when they are up, when people feel they cannot stay in their own homes, or when they’re scared about their children walking down the street, you cannot change their minds by showing them a whiteboard.
  • Speaker 2
    0:54:31

    Oh, a lot of the arguments about gun control. You know, a few years ago, we pulled the voter file in Florida. And then we matched it up against the concealed carry data that we had. It turned out that about thirty five percent, almost thirty six percent of the people getting a concealed carry permit in the State of Florida where African American. Now why is that?
  • Speaker 2
    0:54:50

    It’s not because they want to commit crimes. It’s because they don’t feel safe. Yeah. That differential is one that Democrats need to get up on quick.
  • Speaker 1
    0:54:58

    Well, I think there’s a little bit of an indication. Did did I see this correctly that Joe Biden is actually going to sign that congressional resolution would would override this bizarre new legislation in in Washington DC that that really lightened up on criminals and Republicans led the way pushing saying, this is crazy. This is not a time to make to go soft on crime. A whole lot of Democrats went along with that — Right. — not the majority.
  • Speaker 1
    0:55:24

    And it looks like Joe Biden, he’s gonna get just deflaid by the left of his party, but Oh, yeah. Good for Joe making a good call on this one. He did indeed. Alright, Rick Wilson. Thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.
  • Speaker 1
    0:55:38

    We really appreciate it, Rick. Anytime, my friend, anytime. And thank you for listening to this weekend’s Bulwark podcast time, Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday. We’ll do this all over again.
  • Speaker 1
    0:55:52

    The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Koopa and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.
  • Speaker 2
    0:56:07

    Former Navy SEAL Sean Ryan shares real stories from real people, from all walks of life. On the Sean Ryan show. This
  • Speaker 1
    0:56:15

    one’s about my friend call sign ninja. So there
  • Speaker 2
    0:56:18

    was all these things that I wanted to do in the army. He’s like, this is it in army, you do roads and airfields. And they say, well, look, they can test and see where you fall. I was like, yeah. But if I could do that and all this stuff too, Drive tanks, jump out of planes.
  • Speaker 2
    0:56:30

    Do you guys have a sampler platter? Right. The Sean Ryan show on YouTube or wherever you listen.
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