The Pro-Storming-the-Capitol Party

Welcome to Bags to Beg to Differ. The Bulwark Works weekly round table discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right I’m Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and policy editor at The Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars, Linda Chavez of The Independent Center, and Damon Ling who writes the Substack newsletter, eyes on the right. Another of our regulars, Bill Galston, is having some technical issues because he’s in a remote location. And hopefully will be able to join us, but we are also very happy to welcome back.

AB Stoddard as our guest this week, she’s associate editor in columnist at real clear politics. So welcome one and all. In the wake of the really devastating, damaging revelations in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News for defamation where all kinds of details of Fox News is Mendacity were revealed for the world to see what happens, but Tucker Carlson chooses this moment to begin the revisionist history about what happened on January sixth. He was given more than forty thousand hours of security tapes by none other than the speaker of the house. So I’m going to start with you, AB, because you had a piece this week talking about a related issue, which is how leading Republicans, especially those who are planning to or have already announced that they are running for president, how they are handling the question of where the party stands on January sixth.

Right.

Well, it’s clear from looking at the field of contenders, Nicky Haley is the only person who’s officially announced as a Republican running against Trump in the nominating contest, but there are others that we’re watching like Tim Scott and Chris and Newew and Mike Pence, some of Mike Pompeo, who are likely to enter and are doing all the things that you do before you do. And of course, Rhonda Santos, the governor of Florida. So looking at them, it’s clear that January six is a forbidden topic. They are not allowed to discuss it. This is universal across the field.

And if it was enough of an issue with swing voters, you would think that they would at least mention it here and there, but this is prohibited. So it is gonna be an alternate reality over there on the Republican side. I don’t know what that nominee whoever it is eventually will do when they make it to a general election, and God forbid, it’s Donald Trump. But then it’s official now that all these years later, January sixth is off the table for Republicans. What’s interesting about Fox and the timing of this.

To me is, I don’t think Fox cares about these embarrassing revelations happening at the same time that Tucker is releasing his revisionist history about it. I don’t think they care about Brett Bear trying to push back in this six o’clock hour. I think they’re hoping that people who watch Tucker don’t know much about the dominion deposition and all the revelations and all the embarrassing texts and emails. And I think that for Tucker, he is going to insist on giving the people what they want no matter what comes out of this lawsuit And this whole exchange has cemented his position as, you know, sort of the ultimate power player in the media for the nihilist in the House Republican caucus. And we have to remember that when we look at the speaker, Kevin McCarthy is a hostage.

And this was part of his ability to retain his job, which is probably only temporary. This idea that he would come up with the tapes he had no choice but to give them to Tucker. There was no way he could ever give them to anyone else at Fox like Shannon Breen or Brett Bear. And the fact that it’s boomerang, the fact that Republicans in the senate side and even some on the house have become so jittery and anxious about this, and pushing back, saying things like, you know, this is BS, and I was there, it was an interaction, makes it clear that this will be problematic for the Republican nominee once they approach the general election. But for now, most people are living in the House Republican conference, people who are running for president, and, of course, the House Republicans hoping that their viewers, they just have no idea about this tension in the party, about this division, about the revelations in the Dominican lawsuit.

And so we’re gonna live in this fiction because the House Republicans and Kevin McCarthy, you know, they require it to stay popular with the base.

Linda, I watched some of the Tucker show. So, of course, he, Jerry, picked a couple of images of people not rioting. And said, see, these were sight seers. These were an insurrectionist. They were orderly.

They were meek. Use the word meek. It reminded me of nothing so much as that often mocked clip from CNN during the summer of twenty twenty whenever border was standing in front of a burning building and saying these are mostly peaceful protests. I mean, this is the exact equivalent you know, Tucker’s saying, well, these people weren’t rioting, but it’s much worse than that. It’s much more sinister.

I mean, he’s saying you’ve been lied to they are misleading you. It’s all a huge scam by the powers that be. And it was outrageous enough. It was sort of nineteen eighty four ish enough that some Republicans, including you know, the usual suspects like Mitt Romney who can be relied upon to say the right thing, but also Tom TELUS of North Carolina called it Bulwark. Senator John Thune of South Dakota said that this was an attack on the capital and there were a lot of people he said who I think were scared for their lives and so on.

And Mitch McConnell said that what Fox did was a mistake, but he said I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the capital police. About what happened, and the chief of the capital police was extremely angry. So a little bit of Republican pushback. Not much. No.

And by the way, Tucker Carlson had forty thousand hours of video. What was he able to come up with? To be able to show his viewers about four minutes?

I

haven’t done the math on that. I think this is sort of beyond my math calculations. I don’t know how many zeros I’d have to put in to come up with the portion of eight percent. That that would equal. I mean, it is just quite shocking.

And, you know, it’s fine to say this is all aimed at the base etcetera. But this is the kind of propaganda that we used to see during the Stalin era. This is erasing people and events from history. This is not just merely ignoring a blatant fact. This is rewriting on an epic scale that is really quite shocking.

And by the way, it’s not gonna end with Tucker Carlson. And his little review of the tapes. Apparently, the new oversight committee is the one that is headed by James Comer and has Marjorie Taylor Green in it. They’re gonna head on out to visit those who are in jail, the January sixth prisoners who have admitted their guilt in many instant or been found guilty by their peers in a jury trial. And one of the things that Tucker is trying to push is that this footage was not provided to the defense councils in these cases.

And therefore, the people who are in jail ought to be freed. And I think he points to the so called shaman as one of the people because he was feature very prominently on Tucker’s show walking the halls of Congress with his horns on and looking like a rather bizarre visitor from, if not another planet, maybe from another century. Okay. And

that’s the new Republican base

that I I know. I mean, you know, we can laugh at it. We can say that, you know, surely nobody really believes this stuff. But there is a core within the Republican Party that does. And they are dangerous, and they are anti democratic.

And they continue to have a strangle hold on the party and the party leadership or we would not see Kevin McCarthy giving over this footage or James Comer leading a delegation to visit the prisoners who might think will now, they’ll try to portray them as political prisoners rather than the thugs. That they

were. Oh, yes. They are political prisoners now according to the former president. He put out a truth on his social network platform, truth social in all capital letters. Let the January sixth prisoners go.

They were convicted or are awaiting trial based on a giant lie, a radical left con job, Thank you to Tucker Carlson and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy for what you both have done. New video footage is irrefutable. So, Damon Linker, I’m going to quote my Bulwark colleague, Sunny Bunch, who has guest hosted Secret Podcast, and I’m sure Will Saletan. He said, quote, going to be kind of funny to watch GOP candidates to dance around acknowledging that the presidential front runner and the party’s semi official media organ are more or less pro storming the capital at this point. Yeah.

And the the the whole story is you wouldn’t believe it if you didn’t live through it. I mean, you have a channel that has news in the name that is really it is a kind of. I was gonna say Stalinist. I don’t wanna say that because it’s not kind of in the name of sending people to the gulag yet necessarily yet. It’s not, you know, backing up totalitarianism, but it it

is insane. A field team to the

Yeah. It kind of epistemologically — Yeah. — it is set up in exactly the same way where you have a machine that exists at every level in order to wander criminality and malfeasance of all kinds And not only longer that, but also to kind of spew out a constant stream of gaslighting BS. And it is so thorough that on most days, most months, most years, it sort of just kind of pollutes the ecosystem and you don’t actually see it because it’s so pervasive, but the Dominion lawsuit revelations have given us a glimpse behind that proverbial curtain and you have quotes of Parker Carlson admitting he hates Trump passionately. We’re pretending that we got a lot to show for Trump being president but come on.

There really isn’t an upside to Trump. Night, he says, no upside

to Trump. For his career.

Well, yes, of course, except for his own career acting as a kind of populist facilitator for chimp, including to this very day with the laundering of what took place on January sixth, And I remember back in the Bush administration era. It was very clear to me as a critic of Bush on a lot of things that Fox News was acting as a kind of propaganda arm of the Bush administration, and I don’t mean that in an insidious sounding way. I mean that it was very much wedded to what the Bush administration was trying to do, and it would give news reports from Iraq that would make the battle there looked like it was going a little better than it really was, and they wouldn’t report other things that would raise questions about whether it was going that well. And that’s what information ministries do. And there’s always been some of that kind of spin going on in politics.

It’s the way politics is. But now Fox News doesn’t really exist to just do that kind of spin. It exists to amplify and intensify the most rapid, prejudiced, bigoted, conspiratorial id eruptions from the Republican base. Right. And to empower them, we all know the party’s trying to ride this tiger of the base.

But this stuff isn’t just tying it firmly to the base. It’s also constantly making that tiger more rabbit, hungrier, more vicious and more pushed to the extremes of the right. Ron DeSantis actually an amplification mechanism now that is driving the party further and further away from liberal democracy in a way that is I find truly alarming. And the fact that this news of Tucker Carlson’s statements, which he hasn’t denied, they’re his statements in contextual transcripts of him speaking to other people who are also not denying their voracity. They come out the same week and no one anywhere.

Has even the slightest thought that, oh, this is gonna hurt him somehow. Oh, these videos he’s showing of January sixth. No one will take them seriously because they know that he just lies. No. No one thinks that that’s gonna be the problem.

Because the people who listen to him don’t care, they have reflexively will not. Believe if someone says he’s a liar, they will just believe what he says instead. And that’s a kind of closed loop of pure nonsense. And it’s hard to know how to break out of it. I have no ideas about how one might break out of it, but it is not good.

I mean, the last little point I’ll make is just to say that you know, how this is gonna play out on debate stages in the coming months when they start to hold Republican debates is really gonna be amazing to see because of the division that you noted in the party over what happened on January sixth, but also because of the fact that Trump is portraying himself is so far out on the edge of treating these insurctionists like national heroes. And you’re gonna have all these other candidates like Haley and presumably the scientists and maybe others on the debate stage with them And even if they don’t wanna respond, any journalist worth of salt is gonna say, yes, Nikki Haley, what do you think about what former president just said about what happened on January sixth, which is gonna force her either to embrace it to or reject it and get into a fist fight with the guy on national television or obfuscate like we’ve never seen anyone obfuscate in our lives. And it’s gonna be something. The Bulwark podcast focuses on political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalty. You know, I always try to break the hype from the reality, but this is a big deal.

Every Monday through Friday, Charlie Sykes speaks with guests about the latest stories from inside Washington and around the world. How do you spend seven years in this fever swab every single day and not lose your mind? Conservative, conscientious, and civil. There’s no such thing as risk free going to a war zone. The Bulwark podcast.

Wherever you listen.

A b, let’s well for a little longer on the role of Kevin McCarthy here. People have said several times that the whole reason that Tucker was given these security tapes is because of a deal that McCarthy made to become speaker. But with whom did he make the deal? Was it Marjorie Taylor Green? Did she demand this in exchange for her support?

Who was it? Who he was dealing with, if you know? First

of all, it’s not been made clear and not been made official. But between Tucker talking about this, during the time that McCarthy had not yet secured the speakership, that he should be forced to hand over the tapes. And then Marjorie Taylor Green sort of before we found out that the forty one thousand hours had been given to Tucker, she was tweeting about it. Just wait, just a couple days. And so because she is an ambassador, to the rest of the freaks, right, who held up the speaker vote.

So she was always at McCarthy’s side. She’s now his ally. She’s now a lieutenant of Kevin McCarthy’s but she was dealing with Warren Beaufort and Matt Gates and people who were opposing him. And so I feel like that was a part of the hostage situation and the

ransom the entire time was these tapes. Got it. Okay. Linda, one last thing as we contemplate these very important institutions in American society that seem to be teetering and to have lost a lot of integrity. It is worth noting that this week, one of the Trump lawyers, Jenna Ellis, pledge guilty in a administrative proceeding in Colorado to misrepresenting the outcome of the election, and she has been censored.

So she admitted that when she said on November twentieth twenty twenty that Trump’s team had evidence of a coordinated effort in all of these states to transfer votes either from Trump to Biden to manipulate the ballots, to count them in Secret Podcast, That was false. She admitted that it was false to say that Trump won in a landslide, and she admitted it was wrong to say that the Trump team had found five hundred thousand illegal votes had been cast in Arizona. So your comments.

Well, first of all, That’s all true, and I’m glad she’s been centered, but she should never be allowed to practice law again nor should any of the people that were involved in this charade, in my view. I mean, they should lose their law licenses. People have lost their licenses to practice law for less than

this.

I mean, this is an attack on the whole concept of the rule of law. So that is the first point. The second point is yes, she did admit it in order, I guess, to, you know, to try to mitigate whatever punishment they were gonna hand down. But she’s been all over I don’t know if it’s Twitter or truth, but she’s been all over so social media saying, well, it wasn’t really intentional, and this is being misrepresented. So she’s essentially backed tracking.

And it’s not surprising. These are people who say one thing when they’re forced to admit the truth and then they go right out and tell their followers exactly the opposite. I mean, it’s the same phenomena as Tucker Carlson. It just boggles the mind to see Tucker Carlson’s tweets, and then to see him in pictures with lone Bobart on one side and Donald Trump on the other, you know, yucking it up, down in Florida at some event. All these people.

I mean, Hippocrats that we got to come up with a different word because it just isn’t

strong enough to describe who these people are. You may have seen on social media. I’m sure you’ve all seen it that it’s got a lot of coverage that somebody pulled up footage of Tucker from, like, the two thousands. Where he was a journalist in good standing at the time. He had a good reputation.

And he had written something about Bill O’Reilly who was the star of Fox News at the time, and about what a phony he wants. I know well, did you ever think we would think, you

know, where is Bill O’Razi would we need? He was the nicest voice on that network in comparison to all of the cocool birds who are there now. Well, maybe slightly

less dangerous, phony than the ones we have now. I don’t know.

In a sexual predator base, people. Yes. Yes. There was math. But, you know, in in in terms of the politics, it’s just really quite astonishing.

The transformation of Fox News Channel. Because when it started, I’m sorry, it did provide a kind of antidote to the liberal bias. In the media. And it did have the voices of reason. You know, I was not ashamed to be associated with them in their early years.

And, you know, they fired me, but if they hadn’t fired me, I would have quit. A b was on for years

from the Brett Bear show? Correct. Right. A b? You still do that, Troy?

I

didn’t need anything to ask. I was on Fox two to four times a week for fifteen years and after January sixth. We parted ways. Got it.

Well, it’s pretty depressing. There’s no doubt about it. And some people are saying, well, this is gonna hurt Fox News because they’re either gonna have to trim their sales in order not to get sued or they’re gonna lose their viewers to competitors who are willing to dish out the falsehood in the red meat without fear of lawsuits. I don’t know. I think I’m in the Jonathan V last camp.

He wrote a piece this week saying, no, there will be no consequences. Fox will sail on, you know, they may have to pay fine. He didn’t go into that if they lose the lawsuit. But just in terms of their audience, their stature, he said politicians will still go on their air, journalists will still treat them as colleagues, etcetera. Does everyone agree with that?

Could I just say a word about that? Because I think a lot of people are ignoring the fact that this

is a public corporation. It has certain fiduciary responsibilities to its shareholders. And, you know, it isn’t just Paul Ryan. There were others on the board who were saying at the time you know, we shouldn’t be airing this stuff. And in fact, I think there’s a dereliction of duty.

And I am surprised that there are not stockholder suits against the corporation because what they were doing was malpractice. And they were hurting shareholders by their activity. Of course, if the shares go up, then it’s harder to make that case. But

Right. I mean, yeah, Linda, you know a lot about these corporate governance issues. I mean, you’re not allowed to lie to your board, but are you allowed to lie

to your customers? Well, you’re not allowed to lie to your shareholders. And if you have behavior that is going on, that threatens the brand. I mean, there’s a whole section when you do your reports every year to the FCC, you have to discuss risks and what they were doing were risky to the company. But maybe not, Maybe not.

Right?

I mean, they may not pay any price in terms of their audience. I mean yeah. I mean, I I I just as Linda was speaking, I’m like, alright, share price. Let’s check out Fox Corp. How are they doing?

Well, they’re doing okay. I mean, they’re down. Everything’s been down lately. And they’ve tanked a bit over the last few days because of these revelations. But they’re in about where they were like in January, And then if you go back to, like, January a year ago, you know, they were actually lower than they are now.

So they’re doing alright. I mean, obviously if the lawsuit gets decided, they get hit with a hundred million dollars that they have to pay, that could change things. I mean, I’ve long said, I totally agree with Jonathan last almost all the time remarkably. But on that particular piece that you mentioned, Mona. I agree with him on that.

Two, except for this consideration about money loss. If they do have to face. A genuinely painful financial penalty for having done that. I think that at least we will see that they will not repeat what they did the what the next time there’s another January sixth. So I guess, like, if those exact events are repeated and there’s a question about whether the voting machines were rigged, they they won’t quite go down that path quite so far.

But, you know, they’re only gonna do it in the past. I know exactly because there isn’t always going to be someone withstanding to sue for damages.

Yeah. You know, the sad fact is, I think what this whole episode underlines us, the wisdom of learned hand, that great jurist, who said Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. And, you know, that’s kinda where we are. Alright.

Let’s move on to a quick around the horn on Biden’s imminent announcement. Seems like based on what first lady Jill Biden said when she was in Africa and on the structure of the state of the Union address where Biden kept saying let’s finish the job and all of the scuttlebutt that we’re hearing. It looks like he’s running despite his advanced stage. So AB, you’ve been an outlier. Do you still think he won’t?

Or have you come around?

I am still that crazy person. Okay. I’m looking for tea leaves, and I noticed in his David Ware interview, just before Jill Biden did her rounds of interviews on our trip, he said, I still have a lot to do before a campaign. I’ve said I intend to run, but there’s still a lot to be done. And then Joe Biden said, look, it’s his decision if he wants to do it.

Of course, you know, we’re all in. And she used the word if. And I read into that that they’re trying to buy time. And I just think it’s absolute madness as I always have that he could run again. And it’s an untenable situation for his party and potentially, unfortunately, for the country.

And I don’t know how they’re gonna handle it. But I still am that weird person who is gonna keel over if there’s an announcement on the wire or on TV that he has announced he’s running again. I I I cannot believe it. Wow. Okay.

Could I actually though, I I maybe I’ve missed something AB, if I haven’t read something of yours, I apologize. But, like, what’s the other shoe? Why? I mean, just because of his age, is that

it? Yeah. I mean, I just think it is impossible for him to say that he can run this country until January of twenty twenty nine. He knew when he got into this that he was gonna be told for a second term. I understand the jam that he’s in politically with his vice president.

She was supposed to be the de no harm candidate. There are people who are democrats who could pick up the mantle and run against old crazy man Trump. Joe Biden is not the only one who can beat him to say that Joe Biden can run again when he’s visibly aged. He has just passed the two year mark on his first term. He’s not announcing it Easter and running in August.

This is way far off. He could go hang out with Chuck Grassley at age eighty nine. And do the job of senator, but saying that you can be president from eighty two to eighty six, I just think it’s ludicrous. Okay. Thanks.

Linda, in twenty nineteen, political asked a Biden aid about this question, and this person, an anonymous said, If Biden is elected, he’s going to be eighty two years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection. And there were similar quotes. And Biden himself used the term transitional president, but not lately. So what do you think of the Kamala issue? I mean, I know you’re not a fan, but I mean, any possible way around this or

does Biden just have to run? Well, I totally agree with AB. I’ve said this for a very long time, and I think I can say it. With a little authority as somebody who’ll turn seventy six in a couple of months, I just think he is too old. Obviously, Donald Trump is too old as well.

I mean, if I were writing the constitution today, I put not only a floor and how old you have to be in order to run, but a ceiling.

Yeah.

Yeah. There are the exceptional people. You know, Milton Friedman still had a very active mind in his nineties, but most people don’t. And so I don’t think he should run. But the problem is Kamala Harris.

If she were a true patriot and was willing to sacrifice herself for the go to the country, she would as soon as Joe Biden announced that he wasn’t running, decided that she wasn’t running either. But I think we all know that that’s not gonna happen. She’s very ambitious. That is the one thing that, you know, strikes one about her and has been for a very long time. And she has a very expansive view of her own capacity.

So I think it’s going to be a problem. Now, the biggest problem is going to be that on the other side of the aisle. At least right now, you know, it looks like Donald Trump may again get the nomination. Maybe he won’t. One get hope that he doesn’t.

But if it’s going to be, you know, a Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump, I don’t know. I think Trump might win. You know? And and that is a really horrifying, terrifying. Yeah.

Horrified. Kind of, you know, prediction. So what

do you think, Damon?

Well, lots of little things. First of all, I think the scenario that Trump could win against Harris is certainly true. I think it’s entirely possible he could win against anybody. I definitely don’t agree with pundits who are kind of cavalierly. Many of them Democrats are Democratic aligned who, like, very cavalierly are, like, oh, Trump can’t win.

He shows can’t win. Like, no. No. No. No.

Even in

Why

do I want the sense of deja vu?

It’s ridiculous. I mean, in twenty twenty, he lost by seven million votes. So everyone thinks, oh, he got his clock cleaned by Biden, but it was down to five digits in three to four states. That he’d lost by. And the electoral colleges switch about eighty thousand votes in three to four states, and Trump wins while losing the popular vote by seven million.

So, you know, the idea that it was some landslide and he totally lost in this huge way is just simply not true. So I think it’s extremely dangerous if he is the nominee no matter who he’s running against. Whether even if it’s you know, the great Biden who swayed him the last time. Then when it comes to the Paul Biden thing and whether he’s gonna run, I don’t know. All I know is that it is in his interest as the current president if he’s not going to run to wait as long as possible to announce.

Because the second he announces he’s not running, he becomes a lame duck and has no power. And so things like the budget that we’ll be talking about in a little while, you know, the whole dynamic over that and the game of chicken he’s playing with Republicans over the debt ceiling his hand becomes exponentially weaker if he’s a lame duck. So that’s playing into his thinking, I think. But then of course, the good of the country and the Democratic Party is that if he’s not gonna run, he should tell us as soon as possible because you wanna have an open primary where the party can decide. Do you really want Kamala Harris to be the nominee?

My instinct tells me that she is by no means a show in if there is a true open primary where they all come out and they go in the debate stage and they run and then you go through all the states with all the voting, I don’t see a scenario where Harris comes out of that. On top because she’s shown repeatedly how politically weak she is. She’s just not that good at it. She can win a statewide race in TrueBlue, California, but the country is not California. So that’s for me the kind of the big question mark right now, is this kind of the contrary interests right now?

Or that, again, if Biden’s not gonna run, he wants to wait as long as possible. But the party in the country, if he’s not gonna run needing to tell us as soon as possible, to set up a real decision tree. For democratic voters and the primaries coming up?

Well, that’s a perfect segue into our next topic about these budget battles that are coming up. But By way of introducing this subject, I would say, Damon, I begged to differ with you in one aspect of what you said, which is that the minute Biden says this, he’s going to be Elaine Duck, and therefore, it’s not in his interest to say it. You know, I think in light of the way the election in twenty twenty two went. He’s already a lame duck in the sense of legislation. Nothing is gonna pass Congress with his leadership.

This is all going to be about demonstration votes and posturing for the next election on the part of both parties. Now eventually, they will have to come to some sort of agreement on spending and on and the debt ceiling, I mean, there are things like that. But whether he runs or doesn’t run is immaterial to how those things come out, I think.

It could be. You you could be right. I mean, all I’m thinking of is, you know, every two term president I’ve ever seen in the last you know, eighteen to twenty four months basically after the midterms. It’s sort of like coast to the end. And — Yeah.

If we assume Biden is now in that kind of a chapter of his presidency, like now we imagine we’re in the seventh year of viden presidency rather than the beginning of the third year of it. I view him as in a pretty weak negotiating posture on pretty much everything.

Yeah. And those others were in week negotiating positions because I’m trying to think back, but I I can’t recall a time in recent history when president in the second half of his second term didn’t have a Congress controlled by the other party or at least one house. So, anyway, that’s where Biden is right now. And, you know, he’ll still have regulatory authority. He’ll still have you know, whatever influence, you know, he has as an executive and as commander in chief.

But in terms of legislation Alright. So he is proposing ABI, I’m gonna come to you first. He’s proposing things that he could not pass when his party controlled both houses. Right? I mean, he’s you know, the the the big increases in taxes on the rich and so forth, that didn’t pass much when he had full control.

So certainly not going to pass muster today, but let me pose this to you, AB. We are facing horrific deficits as a country. For some bad reasons, namely we have a bunch of children who cannot make trade offs and cannot accept limits governing us. And by the way, the American people are kind of that way as well. Many of them And then for some good reasons, like we had to spend a huge ton of money on the pandemic.

But for all those reasons, we face these awful deficits. And hand it to Biden that at least he is making a faint or a gesture in the direction of responsibility by saying, well, I’m going to raise taxes. Now admittedly, he wants to raise taxes in the most popular way, that is only on the very rich, But the Republicans, they have a very different idea, which we can get to in a minute, but they resist any effort to deal with budget deficits through taxation.

Because this budget blueprint is a campaign pamphlet or just a political agenda to help his party next year and to challenge the Republicans. It doesn’t matter what the numbers are. But it is politically smart to come in and say, I’m supporting a strong defense budget. I want to address our deficit and cut three trillion dollars I want, as you pointed out, Mona, to pursue the popular policy of taxing the wealthy and making them feel like pay their fair share, negotiating drug costs, all this stuff is very popular and he’s looking like trying to also be responsible and be more centrist than he was during the build back better. Negotiations where he was you know, with the left of the party pushing for an unrealistic, a deep social safety package that was not only unaffordable, but but they never had the math to pass.

He seems to be in a pretty good position because Republicans are so divided. They’re trying to look for a hundred and thirty billion in savings to get down to FY twenty twenty two spending levels. They won’t raise taxes. They don’t wanna touch the defense budget. They don’t wanna touch entitlements.

They’re gonna be scraping through, you know, whatever less than thirty percent of the budget in non defense discretionary. We’ve all seen that movie before. And so it’ll be really interesting. He’s saying, this is my budget. Show me yours.

And as they waste more time before we get to the fiscal cliff of the jet ceiling, the Republicans are gonna have to come up with the final plan. One that they’ve been talking about since January third or whenever McCarthy was elected speaker that week, but they haven’t produced. And I think it’s gonna be interesting to see the Republicans try to pull their act together. I’m not saying that Biden I mean, he couldn’t pass any of this. It’s all, you know, a joke.

But in terms of a campaign agenda and the political posturing that’s gonna be taking place before the death ceiling. I think Republicans are very uncomfortable right now about the weeks and months ahead.

Yeah. Linda, the I haven’t been able to get a real beat on where the Republicans are gonna come out on the matter of defense spending. They’re sending a lot of mixed signals for a while there. They were saying they were definitely going to urge a huge cut in defense spending. So that would be utterly a new set of close for the party that used to be all about.

A forceful American role in the world and strong defense. But in other respects, some of the things that are coming out of the Republican House are really like the snidely whiplash image of the cruel Republicans one outline that I saw calls for a forty five percent cut to foreign aid, three point four billion dollar cut in state department migration and refugee assistance. I thought you’d love that one, Linda. Adding a work requirement for food stamp and Medicaid beneficiaries, well, might be all. Right?

A forty three percent cut to housing programs, including phasing out section eight and that goes to low income people, cutting the FBI’s counterintelligence budget by half and eliminating Obamacare expansions to Medicaid.

What

do you think? Well, what I think is that Congress has not been very timely in passing appropriations bills has not, in fact, past budgets without extensions is mostly done reconciliations. And certainly, with the divided congress, the way it is, I think it’ll mostly be a stalemate. I mean, clearly most of the new programs that President Biden wants to see more spending on are not going to happen. I would love to see seven billion dollars more to go into refugee assistance and also into the kind of assistance that’s given to people who come here seeking asylum, but it’s not going to happen.

And I also think it’s going to be very difficult except for around the edges. I mean, I think negotiating deals on prescription drugs may help. I think they may be able try to push to get back money from Medicaid providers that basically built the government. There may be a few programs like that around the edges. But the fact is that entitlements are where the money is, and it’s not just the Democrats that don’t want it.

Touch entitlements. I think that, you know, president Biden was very clever in his state of the union in basically getting, you know, almost a standing ovation from the Republican to make sure we don’t touch Social Security, we’re not going to touch Medicare. Well, if you don’t touch those programs, if you don’t do something to fix them, in a way that’s going to make them sustainable. In the long term, you’re not going to be able to deal with the oversight deficits and with the death that the United States is accumulating. And the real problem is going to be that, you know, we’ve got to do something about raising the debt ceiling and they’ve done a lot of accounting tricks over the last few months to try to forestall us reaching that that ceiling, but it can’t be put off forever.

And there you’re talking about something that doesn’t just risk government programs. It risks ordinary Americans. It could in fact lead to not just a recession, but a major collapse of the US economy if we are in default on our debt. I mean, it just would be a catastrophe. So I don’t know what’s going to happen on Hill.

I think we’re going to see a lot of posturing but I don’t expect to see many of these new programs enacted nor do I imagine that the Republicans are going to come up with some sort of

alternative that they’re going to pass. Damon observers have noted that part of the problem here is that the Republicans are saying they will not raise the debt ceiling unless and then, they haven’t said what they want to cut. They haven’t said what their plan is. So that’s that’s one problem. But the second problem is that this crowd, the same crowd that is sending a delegation over to the prison in DC to visit political prisoners of January sixth, the same crowd that gets its information from Fox News, It’s possible they would let the nation default on its debt.

It’s possible. I guess I’m naive enough to think, you know, there’s always this there’s a dichotomy here. Our politics is now on the right, is always on two levels. And you saw that with the Dominion document release about Fox News, and there is a version in congress too, where people will say, like, oh, alright. With no blank check for Ukraine, you know, kind of parodying what they think the base wants them to say, but then you get them in a room and you actually say to Kevin McCarthy, like, you’re not really gonna cut aid to Ukraine dramatically.

Right? And he would be like, no. Of course not. We don’t wanna do that. We’re just saying it because we gotta say And so you have this kind of two track thing going on where, like, it’s very difficult from the outside to know what it is exactly the party cares about versus what it just says in order to play Kate.

The all powerful base. And the result is even during the Trump year is when Trump had total control of a government and other than the corporate tax cut, they couldn’t even pass anything else. Let alone in a situation like this where the party knows, yeah, we really have no power here. We don’t have the senate. We don’t have the presidency.

And so then everything just becomes these kind of symbolic statements. And I mean, listeners probably know the term messaging bill. You know, messaging bill is when the party is out of control of the presidency and so just kinda puts up a build that’s a notional, aspirational thing. Like, well, if I had all the power that I don’t actually have, I would do this. And then the voters go, yay, that’s what I want.

And then hopefully, they’ll show up and vote for you the next time. And Republicans have their version of it. And Now that has moved in, and so even these kind of budget statements are done as messaging bills. So you have the Republicans sort of gesturing toward wanting to cut all kinds of things. And in the end, no one really believes they wanna do it, but yes, they know that they have to pretend to do it.

And then even Biden’s budget, he knows he’s not gonna get any of this stuff. And so that becomes a messaging bill too. And so what will end up getting months from now right on the precipice of default? I I don’t know. It’s gonna be whatever’s left when you subtract each from the other, and then you end up with this tiny sliver of something.

Down there that probably will represent very little change from this year’s budget. It’s sort of the way it’s done now and it’s in an expression of the dysfunctionality of our politics more generally, I think.

Yeah, I tend to think that that image from the state of the union where both parties were keen to show that they are adamantly opposed to any cuts in Medicare or Social Security will not come down to us as a symbol of anything other than utter dysfunction.

Right? The Republicans would love to make cuts. It’s just that they feel trapped and can’t get away with it. And it’s the same thing with, you know, the democrats have their own versions of those things, things they would love to do, and they say they’ll do them, but they sort of know the political reality will keep it from ever happening. And and so we just sort of coast along with deficits getting bigger and

bigger and nothing really changing. So, you know, so far we’ve been able to skate because, you know, we have the world’s biggest economy and the reserve currency and everybody still wants to lend us money. Well,

let let’s see what happens when we start making calculations on the basis of five percent interest rate. Well, that’s right. That that’s absolutely

right. And we had Jerome Powell this week saying, Guys, prepare for higher interest rates because we are not finished fighting inflation by a lot. So we shall see. Alright. I’m sure we’ll come back to these topics again and again.

And in the next several weeks, we are going to be hearing from Maya McGinnis of the committee for a responsible federal budget who knows all of these things in granular detail. So we’ll get into this a little bit deeper. When she joins us. But for now, we’re going to turn to our highlight and low light of the week. We’re very sorry that Bill Galsons connection problems did not get fixed.

But let’s start with UAB.

Well, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there’s still good surprises or not bad surprises in our politics. And I’m gonna have to give credit to senator J. D. Vance for stepping into the fray and backing some additional regulations for rail safety, working on a bill with his Democratic delegation mate who’s running for reelection in the red state of Ohio Democrat Sharon Brown. He cannot yet convince his new Republican colleagues to come around, but he’s working on it with a democrat shared brown.

And I just think that with everything else that we are seeing, particularly on the house side, then, of course, in the presidential campaign and and with Trump. I am just glad to see that someone like JD Vance for whom I had very low expectations is actually trying to work across the aisle and take the political heat that he might, on the Republican side, to do something right. I’m not sure where it will go, but I give credit to both of them for working with each other, and I was glad to see it.

Okay. Good. Thank you for that. Linda

Chavez. Well, I’m gonna go in an entirely different direction. There were two pieces that ran back to back on Thursday and on Wednesday in the New York Times that were my low lights of the week. One was how to get kids to hate English by Pamela Paul and the other was I’m what’s wrong with the humanities by Ross doubt that. Both of them pointed to a new study that shows that English majors are disappearing off of campuses.

Nobody’s studying literature anymore. And apparently, a lot of people think that it’s a worthless thing to study. What are you gonna do with an English degree? Well, I’m here to tell you that I give my thanks to the nuns who taught me for twelve years and then to my degree in English, in college for my success such as it is in life because I think reading literature taught me how to think, how to analyze opened up new worlds to me, and I think it was a very beneficial degree. However, what miss Paul talks about is what’s happened to the English degree.

And apparently, the kind of degree I got in nineteen seventy from the University of Colorado where I read great books is not the kind of degree that most students who do study English or even in the high school level are taught in English classes. Apparently, people don’t read books anymore. Even Ross doubt that admits that he’s rarely reads full length books, and certainly nothing written in the nineteenth century in the wave, great literature. And I think a lot of it does have to do with changes in our culture. It has to do with our shortening attention spans, the way in which everybody is focused on blogs or on Twitter, but it also has to do with the kind of politics that has invaded the classroom over the years.

And so that instead of looking for great works of literature written by whomever we tend to categorize books by the race, the color, the national origin, and the sex. And the sexual orientation of the writers rather than looking for greatness. We’re busy dividing ourselves. And so I guess that’s why we are not seeing very many English majors anymore, but I think it’s a bad thing.

Yes. Hundred percent agree and poverty is the sole Damon Linker.

Well, I guess you could say that this is both a highlight and the low light depending on how you look at it. This is an article in the New Yorker that at least in my sort of circle online had everybody talking this week titled Agnes Callard’s Marriage of The Mines. Now Agnes Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. She’s a frequent Twitter and so I’m very much aware of her from that, but she also, you know, combines her academic study of philosophy with more journalistic intellectual writing in places like the New Yorker and the Point Magazine and and Harpers. And I’ve always appreciated her writing very clear and interesting and kind of deep.

But this piece, I don’t think portrays are very flateringly although again it certainly generated a lot of attention. It’s basically about how at some point a few years ago she fell in love with one of her graduate students who was about twenty seven, twenty eight years old, very quickly decided that she had to divorce her husband, told her husband this, they got divorced in three weeks. From the time she mentioned it to him to the finalized divorce. And eventually and and she they have kids too. And eventually, they set up a household where she and her new much younger husband is living with her kids and her ex husband all in the same house.

And the article is sort of about how she’s treating this whole experience as material for her study of philosophy. Like, my religious sexual experiences and let me reflect philosophically on them. As I said, it’s the kind of thing where you read it. You almost can’t believe what you’re reading and you can’t stop gossiping about it with your friends online. But all along, at least I end up, like, sort of stupefied thinking, like, isn’t this just a version of, like, what’s now called me search, which is what academics sometimes refer to as like what students these days do in lieu of research.

Like, everything that you do research on is just basically about me and my identity, my race, my gender where I come from, my background and then you’d look into that. But this is a kind of me search where instead of looking at your identity, you’re looking at your erotic experiences and then focusing on it. And then this very article in the New Yorker is itself an expression of that same impulse to kind of hold up this one woman’s, I think, sort of a wreck of a home life as a kind of, again, mix of gossip and intellectual titillation. So I don’t know what to say about it other than this doesn’t seem like the most health trend.

Wow, Damon. We could have many Secret Podcast on these kinds of issues, which I would love. Because this kind of vanity and preening and exhibitionism is just loaves them to me. I threely confessed to being completely bourgeois in my morality. I think people should put others before themselves.

They should that are their children. And I can be pretty judgmental, which is so totally out of fashion now. But but I would love to discuss these things further, and we’ll have to find a way.

Listener if you want some of that, you just let us know in the comments. And and Yeah. So maybe we’ll do a special episode sometime.

Can I just make a quick relate? Maybe I’ll make this my highlight or low light because it’s related. So we were at a conference, a bunch of us Bulwark people were at a conference last weekend, called principals first, and there were a lot of Bulwark fans there. It was wonderful, got to meet a lot of fantastic people. From all over the country, they came from foreign wide, and it was great.

But one of the house was Charlie Sykes interviewing John Bolton. And so I have been reading John Bolton’s book since that interview stimulated my interest. And You know, I’m struck by something that Bolton is guilty of, but it’s not limited to him. It is sort of the disease of our age, in particular, though, maybe it haunts every age, I’m sure it does. But, you know, it’s the Imperial Me.

It’s the Me Me Me Me Me Me. You know, why did he go to work for Trump knowing exactly what Trump is and so forth. It’s like, well, I had a very high opinion of my own abilities. And his sort of world revolved around being honored, being important, and so on. And people are willing to sacrifice their principles, their good judgment, and so on, and lots of other things for the sake of their ego.

And it’s not a pretty sight So I’m gonna leave it at that. I mean, there are many good things about John Bolton, I should add. He’s exceptionally bright, very accomplished, And, you know, he’s now saying that he’ll do anything to keep Trump from returning to the Oval Office. So great. But the Imperial Me is very present with him.

And with that, I want to thank our guest, A. B. Stoddart, and our sound engineer for today, Joe Armstrong, our producer is Katie Cooper. Of course, I want to thank all of our listeners, especially those that I got to meet last weekend hope to meet more of you in the coming months when the Bulwark will have more events. It’s always great to put actual humans to one’s audience.

So thank you very much, and we will return next week as of week.

We’re all done struggling life, a career, and trying to build a little bit of wealth. The Brown Ambition podcast with host Mandy and Tiffany the Budget Nees that can help. Randy and I are the same age, so she came out, she really popularized natural hair via braids. Until all of us had braids, it’s written into dress codes and like schools and even some workplaces where braids, locks, are not considered appropriate needs to be like written into the law. You cannot discriminate against us for hair, brown ambition, wherever you

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