The Problem with CNN (with Sonny Bunch)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the next level.

I’m JBL here with my best friends Sarah Longwell and a very good acquaintance and colleague, Sonny Bunch, both of the bulwark. This is an inside joke because I’ve known Sonny since he was in high school. Thanks for being with us. Please go and hit the five stars, hit the subscribe, do the thumbs up. I saw somebody out there on Reddit complaining that I asked you people to do this.

And I thought that was really big of them since we don’t charge for this, we don’t put advertising on our website. They but they’re really pissed off that we take ten seconds the top of the show to ask people to support us in minimal ways.

You’re

gonna fight with a random commenter on Reddit.

Yes. I am.

This is why Gabriela is best when he’s not on Twitter, by the way.

JBL is a living version of that meme, that, like, cartoon, where the guy says to his wife, I can’t go to bed. Somebody on the Internet is wrong. Right?

Listen, why stay off of Twitter. And I do all that on my podcast where they can’t talk back to me. Okay. Guys, it’s a big morning. We woke up to news that Chris Licked I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly, because otherwise it’ll be awkward, is out as the CEO of CNN, this is amazing on a bunch of different levels because this is one of the rare cases where a journalist killed a guy’s career.

Doesn’t happen all that often. Tim Albert, a friend of the bulwarks, published a fifteen thousand word profile affliced in the Atlantic last week. And it was so devastating that it was clear from the outset, Lix would not be able to survive the publication of this thing. Let’s talk about it because most of my thoughts are about Tim Alberta. I would be curious as to what you guys think about Chris Licked and CNN and the direction of everything.

Sarah Longwell,

mean, I don’t wanna take anything away from the great Tim Alberta who I think is one of the great journalists of our time. However, I do not think it was his piece that killed Chris Licked.

Okay.

I

think it was all the things contained in the piece that had clearly been going on for some time that killed Chris Lacked. And what Alberta did was package them in an unreal way. And if you are the kind of person who is working out the gym, this is one of the most evocative scenes in the piece. You’re working out at the gym, and you’re lifting heavy things, and you go, let’s see Jeff Zucker do this.

Doing burpees. Look at that.

I think that maybe your head isn’t in the right place to be stewarding CNN on this mission. And I think that, like, that was obviously clear to everybody, and it’s why they were all willing to talk to Tim Alberta. Like, people don’t talk to Tim Alberta and say all of these things without, things already being sort of catastrophically wrong. So I think this was a big last drop in a bucket that put things over the edge.

How much do you think the Trump town hall contributed to this? Because I think it’s a very, very large part of it, which is, again, what all of us crazy people were saying when CNN announced that it was going to do a town hall. We said, this is a terrible thing. You shouldn’t do it. This is bad for America and it’s not journalism and people like, oh, you never Trump grifters.

Well, guess what? It was bad for everybody.

I actually totally mess through. I think it’s I think you have I think there’s no reason I I feel bad for Chris Licked because I think CNN is in a terrible business position right now in that it is By

the way, the most contrarian take you’ve ever posted. Sunny, team Licked.

It the the problem with CNN is that it is I think the best straight journalism outlet on cable news The problem is nobody actually wants straight journalism. They want teams. They want MSNBC on the left. They want Fox on the right. And there’s the airport crowd in the middle.

They’re being held captive in an airport.

They don’t they don’t show up for like regular viewing. Right? So they’re they’re in the airport they’re watching. And I feel bad about this because again, I like I like all the stuff on CNN. Again, when I watch cable news, I watch CNN, but I only very rarely watch CNN because I only watch during breaking news.

I watch during January six. When I’m like, wait, what’s happening? At the capitol, what’s going on there? I gotta I gotta check. I watch on election nights.

I don’t even watch the town halls because I I’m just gonna read about them the next morning.

But that being said,

I think it’s insane to say that CNN, the straight news network can’t talk to the presumptive front runner of the GOP in twenty twenty four. That’s an insane thing to say.

Like the idea that you can Did

I say that?

Well, I mean, you we’re talking about how

he shouldn’t have done the town hall and they shouldn’t

have they shouldn’t have given him access to live air with an audience stock full of Trump superfam.

Okay.

I think with a guy like Trump giving him access to live air, which is, by the way, something Fox doesn’t wanna do anymore because they’re worried that he’s gonna say something that’ll get them crosswise with defamation again. Right?

But this is cable news. Cable news, it, like, is at its best when it’s live, and that’s when it’s most interesting. And look, Again, I just don’t see how you can do a series of town halls with potential Republican nominees and not talk to Donald Trump. That’s like just is what it is. Now maybe you don’t put Caitlyn Collins in that situation you put Jake Tapper there.

I don’t know. But like I

Oh, why? Because he’s a man.

I mean, I’m just saying he’s got more experience

I don’t know. The idea that you can’t do that and again, as

Sarah says, it’s not so much the story itself that that killed him. It’s everything in it. I mean, I think his bigger mistake was putting Don Lemon in that ridiculous morning show. Like every every individual decision has been bad kind of. And that kind of accumulates to him getting fired, which again I think is bad and I don’t I don’t think that there’s anybody that is going to come into CNN and fix it in a way that allows CNN to maintain what it is, which is as the kind of straightforward, straight news, cable alternative to Fox and MSNBC.

I just don’t I don’t see how that works in this landscape.

This town hall thing. The town hall is like a what a a function of Lick’s fundamental misunderstanding of how he was going to approach this, and a fundamental misunderstanding of where the audience was. Right? So, listening to him, He has, like, a no label’s view of politics. Right?

He thinks, well, we’ve alienated these Republicans and there’s this audience that really I I move in these circles of elites where, you know, people, you know, he’s kept I just want they just want the truth And

We’re talking to John Malone just the other day.

Yeah. And he just when I was listening to him, I understood. I actually think that his heart was in kind of a good place of like, well, we can’t dismiss half the country. You can’t alienate half the country and treat them like idiots. And our coverage can’t be sort of knee jerk, reflexive, just sort of anti Trump, Trump beats, to sort gin up the same stuff that MSNBC does.

Like, we need to carve out this space in the center. As a theory, I understand why that’s attractive. As somebody who has also tried to think about how one executes in that space, it is deeply difficult. In large part because of the total capture of the Republican Party by Trump. And so you’re saying, well, we’ve got to have Republicans on the channel.

But we’re not going to put on anybody who puts forward lies about the election. It’s like, Boom. Ninety five percent of elected shenanigans I mean, not ninety five percent, but, like, a a huge swath of elected Republicans. So you find yourself in this Chris Sununu lane of cable news that doesn’t have an audience just like Sununu doesn’t have any voters. And like, that was his fundamental misconception, I think.

And

Yeah. No. I mean, he he was trying to create a

network that appeals to me. Mhmm. I am not a representative of anybody.

For me

and and this is what we don’t do, as you mentioned, You don’t watch a lot of cable news.

Well, I mean, here’s the thing. Cable news shouldn’t exist. Cable news is bad. And I don’t wanna sound like I’m I’m either pro or anti licked. I have no dog in this fight.

I wonder if the real villain here is in Jeffrey Zazlov. So Licked was a very, very odd choice for this job because he’s just a just a showrunner. Right? He’s an executive producer of scarborough and then of the the Colbert show. And going from that to running a gigantic sprawling news operation with you know, I it’s just it’s a category jump.

It’s like going and picking a barista at Starbucks, to be head of like the Fulger’s group or something, you know, with some gigantic coffee empire, which is, you know, sourcing from beans from fifty different countries and packaging and dealing with sales and marketing and all that. So Zastlev understood that because of the level of his debt load, that he was gonna have to make horrible cuts everywhere in the Warner Brothers discovery empire. Doing that is gonna make you massively unpopular why not just hire a guy who’s not really cut out for the job who’s basically an expendable expendable to be your patsy. And Chris licked as his patsy to go in and fire a bunch of people and make a bunch of changes. And then when when the hatred internally is at maximum, you can fire him.

Then at some point, he’d bring in somebody else. No? Is he the fall guy?

It’s what succession calls a pain sponge.

What is succession? Is that if I see people

mention this

title time?

It’s It’s a show that it’s a show that fewer people watch in CNN.

So much better than CMS.

You have a bunch of real questions, Sonny. Because you talked about succession the other day with somebody on one of your shows. And it’s a real question. How many people watch succession? Because I get the people talk about it like it’s girls, you know, which was was flooded the entire culture, but fifteen people watched.

Is that what they’ve touched on?

Listen to sunny, disparage, the succession in favor of, like, Yellowstone or something right now as a way to be on the side of the people.

Success is watched by about three million people live and seven to eight million people live plus which is which is about which is one one to two percent of the population at any given time is watching. It’s literally a show for the one percent. It’s fine, which is fine. That’s fine.

That is more than I thought. It’s more than girls

because girls

was definitely girls was to show that got watched by, like, fewer people as it went along.

And also, that comparison makes me want to reach the screen. Like, girls which I also watched and which actually was good a little bit and said something, but, like, nowhere close to as good as succession is. Success is a phenomenal television show.

Girls is actually the best show that HBO put on in the middle part of the the first twenty years of this the century. I mean, it’s it is the it is the defining look at a certain class of we’re we’re getting off track here. It is the it is the fighting show about a certain class of millennial, like, intellectual economy type and how miserable they were because they rejected tradition and embraced modernity. It’s like the most it’s the most radically traditionalist show on TV. That’s Thank

you, Ross Douthid. I appreciate that.

The Rossdothatian position on this show.

That’s great.

One of its star’s father was an n s n b c, an n b c anchor for a long time, and now we’re back to news. Go ahead. Okay. The transition for you, JBL.

Thank you. So here’s what I I what I really wanna talk about with the CNN stuff is Tim Albert.

K.

So here is a a peek behind the curtain about how journalism works. One of the difficulties of being a journalist who engages in profiling, which is when you go out and do deep dives and write a piece telling the story of a figure, is that you have to make your profiles worth it, but you also have to finish them in such a way that the next subject you approach will agree to sit with you. And Tim Alberta’s total balls out, like, I’m just gonna go for this one, and I don’t care if nobody else ever talked to me again was so impressive because the

impulse with people who write big profiles like this

is to add cover. You know, I don’t just mean be fair, but to tell maybe not all the story, but tell most the story, but then try to alibi the subject in the end a little bit, because you do have to think about the next one. And I gotta think that Tim Alberta is never gonna get anybody else to ever agree to cooperate with a profile with him ever again, and I respect the hell out of that.

I think this is misunderstanding how much subjects in the Chris Licked stratosphere like to have people follow them around and listen to their Bulwark.

I mean, I Did you like having their careers ruined?

If I was a very famous person reading this profile, I would just be saying, well, I would simply not let him come with me to the gym, and destroy myself.

Just

quick question. Do you know do you know what Tim Albert’s last profile was before this?

Was it Pete Mayer?

You know it might have been, but that’s not the one I’m thinking of. So he did one on Nikki Haley. He was with Nikki Haley.

Oh, yeah. That is more that is more recent.

And it was also devastating to her. It broke all the news about her flopping back and forth on Trump and made her look pathetic, and there was nothing good about it for her. Because he had her after January sixth. So, like, I don’t know. I agree with Sonny.

He he will live to profile again.

Here’s the difference. Nikie Haley, like all political narcissists, can tell herself that, oh, but at least, you know, at least they wanted to do it of me. And I’m still running, and my campaign is better for the exposure, and I didn’t like the way he treated me, but all Chris Lict has had his life ruined. This guy will never work again. Right?

I mean, he’s he’s unhirable. He’s publicly defenestrated. He’s humiliated. He can’t go to Mendez or whatever whatever. I don’t know where people like him dying.

The

Brown Derby. Is that

You know, without being laughed at. Right?

No. He’s he will never run a network again, but he’ll be he’ll he will run a show again. Some point. Somebody will hire him to be a showrunner.

Uh-uh.

And he’ll be able to he’ll be able to do the, you know, cold air, light sort of thing because I don’t know.

I think Also, I assume he won’t need to work again because his go away money is gonna be sufficient that he won’t need to worry about that.

Reading that profile, I felt a lot of empathy for licked, frankly. Because

I I I you look I

did too.

You look at a guy you look at a guy who’s in you look at a guy

who’s been put in an impossible situation And then there are these little anecdotes in it that I was like, that that is just like me. Like the the one where it’s the Christmas party at Cafe Malano or whatever, And he like

and he’s sitting in the corner not speaking anybody, just looking at Dylan Byers’ puck column

You’ve identified with that JBL?

That doesn’t mean Very briefly says

hi to everybody and then he goes, in the corner and looks at his phone about the me and stories about him. That’s me and that’s you, JBL. That’s you. That’s you at the Bulwark live event happy hour. We you were in the corner.

You were avoiding — I’m looking at my phone.

—

trying to just look at it looking at emails. Yeah. Come on. Come on. If you don’t feel a twin shook

view there there. Obsessing about what people were saying about me. No. No. I do not.

Anyway, Tim Alberta, great piece. And the the other thing he did is he really executed in the this is you know, I always tell young writers when I’m giving advice about this sort of thing. If you really wanna kill somebody, then you can’t kill them. Right? You can’t be intentional.

You know, the the real murders are all ones that are just very hands up being super fair and you know, given the guys that benefit the doubt. Because when it looks like you’re out to destroy somebody, then you always leave readers with a little, like, well, I don’t know. The author was kind of really gunning for him. You see this? It’s just ugh, homicide.

You did you think he was gunning for him? Because I I actually thought Tim Alberta went into this I bet the reason Lick did it. I bet Tim Albert went into this with genuine sympathy for the idea of trying to not engage in the outrage, the tribal outrage fast of the other two channels of that experiment, and probably wanting him to succeed, and then watching it up close and going, oh, this is all wrong. And I think that the CNN town hall was a culmination of watching the collision course between the decent intentions and, like, the horrible execution. Because I agree with Sunny that it is fair to do a town hall, with the person who is leading the Republican field.

And as a business matter as a way to kick off the idea that, like, you’re about to hold town halls with all the kids It’s like come to CNN, or the place who’s gonna hold the town hall. It was the audience that was the big misfire. Right? It was the stacking the audience, and it was there it was in the piece, so I didn’t know this. I think I one of the things that I thought like, man, you guys did know.

They knew how trumpy that audience was.

Yeah. Yep.

And that, I think, was unfair to Caitlyn Collins, and this is also in the piece. And I think it would have been as unfair to Jake Tapper anybody else, where it wasn’t like one on one with Trump. You were in Trump’s house Like, he wasn’t in your house, you were in his, and so like, that’s a programming misstep. That is a showrunner misstep. And so there was that execution that I think was the kind of thing that was like, he’s not doing this well.

He’s not he’s just not doing it right.

Totally agree. And I don’t think Alberta was out to get him. I think it is almost certainly right, as you say, that Tim was like there to do a profile of an interesting guy in an interesting position. You know, the piece was very fair.

There were clearly a lot of knives out for Lick, though. And and Alberta talked to all of those people, with their with their blades on cheese.

He did, but I don’t think Tim was using them as stand ins for what he was trying to do. He played this pretty well down the middle, and that’s in the end what makes it so devastating.

Get an inside look at Hollywood with Michael Rosenbaum. Actress Kristen Ritter.

Your parents let you travel by yourself. It was a different time. They just put you on a train as a fifteen year old girl you went to New York. Went on a bus, and I did get picked up at Port Authority. They thought it was a runaway.

What would they do? They detain you and, like, get people on the phone, and then they finally let you go to your modeling job. How many times do they Once or twice. It just seems like it wouldn’t happen. It happens.

Yeah.

Inside of you with Michael Rosenbaum. Wherever you listen.

Okay. Big, big week in our presidential primary. Chris Sununu is out Chris Christie is in. Mike Pence is on his way in. He’s in the middle of hopping over the fence.

I’m writing about Chris Christie today. I wrote about Chris Sununu yesterday. Sunny? What do you think? Are you are you happy with these guys?

Are they all making good choices? I don’t know. Does it matter?

I don’t I don’t think it I don’t think it matters is is the long and the short of it. I mean, I The person I still have the most contempt for in two thousand sixteen is Chris Christie and his whole tough guy. I’m I’m here to be the truth teller. I’m not gonna BS anybody and then caping for Donald Trump by attacking everybody else in the field, and then He’s

doing that again.

He’s gonna do it again. He’s gonna do it again. And this is the and this is why

this is why I really actually hate him more than And I I always used to be a modest Chris Christie fan. I like I like, you know, the idea. These are kinda republican. I like the idea of the liberal ish republican from New Jersey who likes Bruce Springstein and, you know, just says it how it is and shuts down Takes

on the teachers’ unions.

Shut down the bridges to hurt his enemies. I like that. I like that sort of thing. But the his utter cowardice in two thousand sixteen made me angry for a long time and I look at him now and I think you’re gonna do it again. You’re gonna you’re gonna screw us again and I know it.

I know it because you’re a coward, you’re not actually gonna take on Donald Trump like you say you’re going to, and the first time he makes fun of you, you’re going to collapse into a pool of jello. I’m more interested in your take on Kristen New New, JBL, because your whole newsletter yesterday was about Sunu knew lying to people based lieutenant lying and saying things that aren’t aren’t true to Republican voters and to to everybody else. Don’t you think it is actually more honest for him now to say, I’m getting out because we need to coalesce behind somebody. It can’t be me because I’m obviously not gonna win. Even though I had a clear path clear obvious path to victory.

He had a clear path to victory, Sonny. What are you talking about? He just chose not to because he thought he could do more good by working inside the system.

Makes a lot of sense to me.

I could beat Donald Trump by myself, but I’ve decided to just help somebody

else do.

Thanks, Chris.

I do think that’s actually probably true though. I mean, I think that, like, the the Christian News of the world is should not be in the race. Really? Like Chris Anunu, there’s no reason for Chris Sununu to be in this race. He has no chance to Will Saletan Youngkin might have more of a chance to win or who’s the your guy from Georgia?

Brian Kemp. Brian Kemp could theoretically at least has a path to victory. But guys like Kristen Nuneau or Chris Christie frankly don’t and should probably get out of the race as soon as possible. Now, am I wrong?

Sarah Longwell.

You’re right. I I actually agree with Sonny that sununu

so here’s

the thing. So I have let

let me unwrap my theory about this. But, like, I think that it was right of Sununu to recognize that this guy didn’t have a shot, and he should get out. JBL’s newsletter was really interesting. I read the whole thing every word.

Wow. Thank you.

And and

we can dig into it more on the secret on Friday because I I didn’t totally agree with your assessment of why Sununu has sort of decided now to get out, like, that, you know, he had been saying, Trump’s not gonna be the nominee, Trump’s not gonna be the nominee, and I think that for a while there, it was fair. For a bunch of these guys who were looking at the race to be like, you know, Trump’s really weak. Somebody can get after him. Sununu is a is a governor of Nature? Hates Ron DeSantis, I’m sure.

The way colleagues don’t like Ron DeSantis, and I bet he’s looking at Ron DeSantis being like, this guy is your number two choice? How is that possible? I can be the number two choice. And I can be the one, I can beat DeSantis, and if there’s that big open lane to defeat Trump, that’ll happen. So I could see him thinking that way.

And what’s happened over the last three, four months is not just Trump’s acceleration in the polls, but also sort of the collapse of DeSantis in a way, though, that doesn’t make it clear that, like, somebody else could fill that role against Trump. And I just think it’s totally fair to have looked at this thing and gone, does nobody any good for me to get in especially now the field’s gotten more crowded. I mean, you just said the three people we’re getting, you didn’t even mention the governor of North Dakota. Bergam?

Yeah. Bergam.

Bergam. Bergam.

Bergam. Bergam.

Begam. That’s not a real person.

Is this I get a call from reporters being like, what do you think of Bergo? And I was like, where’s North Dakota? Like, actually, I’m just kidding. I don’t mean that North Dakota is great. I’m sure Fargo is there, great movie.

Anyway, I think it’s fair for him to get out. I think that the weird one is actually pence. So, like, Christie’s got a theory of the case, which is, I wanna go to Story Trump. What if JBL you gave him a really charitable read? Or or sunny.

And he wanted to atone. Like, maybe he sits up at night and watches the videos of him in that hostage situation standing behind Trump, totally cucked and thinks, I gotta redeem myself from that haunts me forever, it haunts my dreams, and I’m gonna go, I’m gonna tell the truth and I’m gonna run a kamikaze campaign right at the guy, because I see in the market not a cohort of voters, but in the market a desperate need for somebody to go throw Hey makers at Donald Trump and, like, tell the truth about him. So if you give him that read, I like the idea of Chris Christie being in there because nobody else is doing that. Right?

I’ll I’ll tell you what. If he does that, I take it all back.

Did you watch his town hall? No.

I didn’t watch.

So he did this town hall in New Hampshire. It hits a little weird, but he is calling Trump’s family, like, the most corrupt grifters. He’s talking about the two billion of Saudi money. He’s talking about Trump running up the debt and he talks, you know, he’s really going after him, and I think the one thing in terms of critiques of Trump that has never really been tried, or at least hasn’t been tried for a long time since twenty sixteen, is actual Republicans talking to actual Republican voters in no uncertain terms, no shading, no I’m not even going to see his name straight after Trump. And I don’t know what effect that’s going to have, but I would like to see somebody do it and I’m going to applaud him getting in.

It’s the pences of the world, the pences of the world who are totally delusional about what their world could be. I don’t think Chris Christie thinks Maybe he does. Maybe there’s part of it that thinks, no, sure, sure, I could win this. People are here for me in my pre twenty sixteen, no chance. But Pence, they loathe.

So important note here, I think. Maggie Haberman’s piece about the Christi town hall, she was not able to locate any people present at that town hall, Hoover Republicans.

Yeah.

They were all independents and Democrats. And Chris Christie is gonna get a lot of time on CNN and MSNBC, true. Not sure he’ll be booked on booked on Fox very often. Not he’s not clear to me how Republican voters are going to Here Chris Christie’s barberic y’allop of truth.

We’ll see. Look, I agree with this.

And if he wants to have solution for his sins, he should have to go and buy an indulgence like everybody else. That’s how it works. I don’t know if you guys

knew that.

This is fine. This is fine for him.

No. It is fine. It is fine. So I here’s what I give you a little preview of the newsletter so that you don’t have to to read today’s. Thanks.

So my first Christie profile was in two thousand and nine. That’s how long I’ve been on this train. And this Christie, the Christie who showed up at the town hall yesterday. Was the two thousand and nine version of Christie who beat John Corzine, which is not the Christie Godzilla. Right?

The Christie Zillah, who went viral on YouTube, that was a creation that appeared after he had been in office for, like, eighteen months. His his original pitch against Corzine was that he was the totally competent reformer who just talked calmly and, you know, cogently about the world as it was, and there was no theatrics, there were no histrionics, He was not a divider at all. He was very much a uniter, and that’s what he showed off yesterday. And I thought that that was interesting cards on the table. I do not I do not care for for governor Christie.

But, you know, I I closed out the piece on Sununu by saying, you know, Tucker and his Twitter thing three weeks ago or whatever said, you know, you gotta just tell the truth, you know, quietly and and without embarrassment. And Chris and News is not willing to do that, or at least has not been willing to do that yet. That does seem to be what Christie is trying to do. That’s interesting. And if he can continue to do it, it’ll be interesting to see if it registers at all.

I think people are putting too much stock on the the idea of him on a debate stage destroying Trump. Trump can’t be destroyed on a debate stage because it’s all incoherent. Right? You get destroyed on a debate stage when somebody boxes you in with logic or something in your like, he just goes straight ahead, and it’s always incoherent. And it always is embarrassing.

It’s been that way since his first debate, you know, where he didn’t know what the nuclear triad was. It was like that in the debates against Hillary Clinton, which he lost all three debates. Terribly. It was like that in the do you remember the first Biden debate where he just was screaming? And her was like, what is this?

Chris Christie is not gonna destroy Trump and go commit causing a debate stage because that’s not how this works and that’s not how voters especially republican voters respond to Trump.

Also, the chances of there being a debate stage in which both of those men are on it is pretty low. Like, the threshold that Christie will have to clear to get on the debate stage might be tough for him. Maybe he’ll pull above one percent But also, Trump is probably not going to debate in those early days that has all those guys on it. Like, he’s going to — I think he already said he’s going to skip the first two. This is like an aside, but So Rana, and the R and C put out their their rules for the debates.

And it’s like everyone has to sign the pledge to support the nominee. Well, that’s idiotic. Like Donald Trump’s not gonna make a pledge to support the eventual nominee that’s on him, he never has.

Or he Will Saletan he’ll disregard it. Like, that’s, you know

Yep. It’s not real.

What are

you gonna do to throw him in jail?

Yeah. If he stays over fifty percent in the polls, like, there might not even be debates. There’s like a kid’s tape, maybe kids, some kid’s table debates, under card debates, but like, where did these indictments come down? And he gets really spooked? I don’t know.

Many things can happen, but I just think it’s unlikely that Chris Christie has the on stage debate shot at Trump that people imagine.

Pence. You guys are both totally dismissive? Or your son is dismissive, Pence. Are you dismissive also, Sarah?

I’ll only say this Jonathan Last I don’t know how many months that I’ve been doing focus groups, where I’ve been asking about potential their potential Republican field, nobody is held with more contempt among Republicans. Than Mike Pence, with Nikki Haley, with Tim Scott, they’re not that interested in voting for them, but they think they’re nice, they like them. With Mike Pence, people think that he is a traitor, He is disloyal, he’s boring, he’s milk toast, even the people who are like he is a very nice guy, he would make a great neighbor, but he should leave politics. Rrique Hopkins sat in on a couple. And he had called me and been like, have you done any with evangelicals with pence?

And I was like, you know, there’s lots of evangelicals generally in the groups, and I was like, I’ve got no takers on pets, but you’re welcome. We’ll do we’ll do a couple full groups of evangelicals, and feel free to watch. And, like, his piece ended up being titled nobody likes Mike Pence. And I was just like I told you. Like, he listened to them and it’s brutal.

What

is it?

I don’t understand why Mike Pence is doing this to himself. I don’t under like I don’t understand let’s try to decide the politics of it. I don’t understand the business of it. Like, is he is he trying to set himself up as a talking head? Because I don’t I just don’t I don’t understand any of it.

Is he trying to sell copies of his book? What is the point of what he is doing to himself? Is it self flagellation? Is he doing this as as penance? For for four years of being Donald Trump’s vice president, I just I don’t understand.

I don’t understand, and it’s too bad because Pence is look. On January sixth, Pence was the one guy who like, could have really fucked everything up. And was like, no, this is obviously wrong, I’m not doing it. Credit for that.

Well, he made a few phone calls to check with people to just double check that he couldn’t infect

over time.

I’m sorry. Point is point is

he didn’t But I

agree with you, Sonny. I agree

with you.

It’s too bad. I guess, but also like why why even apply to this? Why do this to yourself?

Did you guys ever read stranger in a strange land? It’s seventies, sci fi classic. Exactly. Yeah. For me, the big twist in it is that there is evangelical Christian character who is a pastor of, like, a futuristic version of a mega church, who is this giant Grifter and Befoon.

And midway through the book, this character dies, and our narrative viewpoint shifts to heaven. And this guy’s in heaven because he was right about everything. Like all the stuff he was saying was actually true and like half the book takes place in heaven and the rest of the book takes place back on earth. And it’s a very funny piece of business. But I think about that a lot with Mike Pence.

Like, maybe just really believes like, actually believes all this stuff. When, you know, when we hear talk about how Pence believes that God wants him to run for president that he just feels like, yeah. Is he like, he’s job? And he is being asked to do this thing, and he’s gonna go do it, and just trust it’ll all work out because the Lord provides. And God bless him, I don’t know.

I feel like a crazy person because I take the Mike Pence January sixth stuff really, really seriously. I give him way more credit for it than most Americans seem to. It does seem to me to have been tremendously brave and

unbelievably important, and he seems to be the only rep

I mean, here’s Here’s the thing. The number of Republicans who’ve been willing to blow up

their careers to stop Trump

is like eleven people long. It’s Kinsinger and Cheney and Gonzales. Right?

Romney, maybe.

Romney a little bit. And Mike Pence is on that list. And I understand that it was after he did all this other stuff. Yep. But he blew up his entire life for this country.

And Every else is like, what do you want? He didn’t break the law. He just, you know, do you wanna give him a cookie? And I yes. I want to give him a cookie because he didn’t destroy the republic, and he paid for that with, you know, this is a guy who’s been running for president since he was six years old, and he blew that up in order to protect American democracy.

And I would like to give him a cookie. Okay. Golf. We have to talk about golf because

This is the part where I go to sleep.

Well, maybe we won’t talk about that.

You should.

You guys had a very interesting conversation in which I learned a lot about You literally weren’t here.

You didn’t hear any of it. You were off

camera. I had my work I had my AirPods and I’d hear the whole conversation.

Alright. So short version. The PGA is like mask car or major league baseball or the ATP, it’s a a lousy monopolist. And couple years ago, the Saudis decided with their sovereign wealth fund to set up a competitor to it called Live Golf. I don’t understand what Live stands for.

I’d always thought it was a roman numeral, not not actual letters. And the two companies were embroiled in a little bit of court drama concerning antitrust law, live lured away some of the more craven and crass PGA players who are over the hill, like Phil Mickelson, And it looked like PGA had the whip hand in all of this, and that the PGA was going to succeed. And then all of a sudden yesterday, it was announced a merger, which in this case really means that Live Golf has purchased the PGA. And it feels weird to have an American sports league owned by Saudi Royals, and it feels weird because this seems to have come out of nowhere. You know, this is not like the Saudi’s coming and purchasing a franchise.

It’s it’s buying an entire league. And, Sunny, please go.

Part of what’s interesting here is that the PGA is not like the MLB or NFL. Right? In in so far as the PGA is essentially a union of the the actual players. Like it’s it’s set up in a very weird and different sort of way. So like in the I don’t know if you’ve talked about Blackberry on this show.

But we watch Blackberry, JBL, we talked about it, and one of the what there’s a subplot in that movie about how one of the owners of Blackberry wanted to buy the penguins and move them to Edmonton and blah blah blah. But the NHL could stop that because the owners could just come together and vote and say, no, you don’t get to be an owner, you don’t get to move the team. The PGA is different because it’s just made up of the players. So when the Saudis came in

and offered Phil Mickelson,

you know, three hundred million dollars or whatever obscene amount of money they threw at him, to get him to go to the Live, and Greg Norman and all of these other guys to set up this competitor league. All they had to do was pick off some top talents, again, and throw them just insane amounts of money. And you know what golfers like? Golfers like money.

I’ve heard

Golfers really really like money. They they like money in a way that I can only imagine liking money. I mean, I like money. But I don’t have the opportunity to sell myself to the salaries for three hundred million dollars

yet.

Is that because they wanna buy more golf clubs, like, why do they like money more than everybody else? You know

what you can do with money? You can buy giant houses. I don’t know. I don’t you can buy cars. Happyness.

You can buy your own golf carts. And play on it and keep the keep the rabble out and have I don’t know. Jack Nicholas coming in and design it for you.

Gotta have dreams.

So what they did was they just picked off some of the top players and the PGA got very, very protective of

it.

Has been top players. These are has been blank.

They picked up they picked up some good ones.

Great Norman are ninety thousand years old.

They picked up some good ones too. Again, I I haven’t been following this closely as as I probably should have been because like you, I assumed the p g the PGA had basically won, that they had fended off this challenge.

This was the NFL versus the USFL. To my mind

—

Yes. Exactly. — except then suddenly the USFL buys the NFL.

Again, it’s different than that because the NFL is a team sport. You have to have teams of people who can the PGA is very explicitly not think about this from a tennis perspective. Right? If the Saudis came to Novak Djkovic, And we’re like, we’re gonna give you a billion dollars to be in our Saudi tennis league and you won’t have to get that vaccine and you can just play in the domes of Dubai and will give you all this money and will get other people to come and play with you and it’ll be like, that would be an actual competitive challenge to, I don’t know, the ATP and and how that that is organized. But with teams, you can’t really do that.

You you just can’t you can’t buy enough people to create a good team.

Okay.

Anyway, as you say, I was kind of surprised that this happened because I mean, the PGA is really kind of screwing all of their members who said no to the Saudi money. You know, there were two ways to look at it. You could say, well, this was a principled stand. We’re not gonna take Saudi blood money to Or it was just like we like the PGA as it is and we want PGA to exist and we’re staying with the PGA for that reason. And the PGA just said, we’re gonna take money.

We’re gonna take the money and we’re gonna probably distribute it more or less evenly amongst everybody or at least amongst the winners, and that’s that’s all gonna work out. I don’t know. I’m surprised by this. For reasons, JBL that we were talking a little bit about before, we talked about CNN and CNN’s monetary difficulty. CNN is, you know, is in a weird position because the cable bundle collapsing and CNN gets a lot of its money from advertising, but also from being on every cable Bulwark.

They get what are called affiliate fees. They get The PGA is like the NFL or the NBA or the other sports leagues, in that they have a package, they have a product that they can sell at increasing levels every two years when rights deals come up. In theory, they are very well positioned to make more and more money for the league. They are not like CNN where they have a kind of a depreciating asset. They have an asset that should be appreciating.

And to make this deal now, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it. And if I was a PGA player who isn’t Phil Mickelson, I’d be furious. And I am very curious to see if regular Americans who watch the PGA tour care about this at all or if it’s just a thing that becomes background noise over the next six months to five years.

Yeah. I mean, I think they’ll just keep calling it the PBA.

They’ll just be the PBA.

But it’ll be on by the Saudis. Right? This is that’s great. Well, you know, there’s there’s no better class of people in the world than oil princes. They’re salt of the earth, and they’re they’re good people, They work hard, they’ve got good morals.

It’s I think I think those types of oligarchs are really, really in the up and up. That’s awesome. Sarah, you’re awake. Great job.

Yeah.

Alright. Very quickly, Margery Taylor Green, Do you wanna talk a little bit about this? Who’s on our map?

What is it? That that she’s getting in fights with the other lunatics? Because she’s she’s gone mega establishment.

Yeah. The other lunatics are unhappy because she’s on establishment. Do you have thoughts on that, Sarah?

It sort of goes back to the conversation we were having about the normalization of Marjorie Taylor, Green. And on the one hand, it has some affirmative value for things like the debt limit, fight. Having her be on McCarthy’s side and giving him cover for a certain, you know, a big part of what is, like, not particularly interested in governing performative wing of the party and saying, you know, she and Jim Jordan jumping in on his behalf, like, there’s elements of that that are good in moments where you really need Republicans to govern, a majority of them. On the flip side, the normalization of Marjorie green, and the mainstreaming of her and the party is a reflection of what a bad place the Republican party is in. And the fact that Kevin McCarthy needs her just as much she needs him, is also sort of a devastating indictment of the state of the party.

And, you know, I understand that the reason they’re mad at her though, is because She is the most high profile member of their, like, crazy cabal, and they need her to help drive attention for themselves as they try to have this insurrectionist swinging the party, and she’s basically robbing them of that opportunity, so it doesn’t surprise me that there’s bad blood there, but this is one of those things where everyone in this situation is bad, and there’s nothing good to say about any of them. So Well, Let’s hear the contrary position on Marjorie Taylor agree in being good.

I don’t know that I believe this. I’m I’m I am proposing it for us to discuss. I’m not I’m not I’m not gonna defend this position. I it’s like one of those resolutions in the Cambridge debate Oxford debating society. Right?

Proposed. Marjorie Taylor Green seems to honestly believe all the things she says, which automatically puts her in a better class of human being than ninety percent of the people who go along with the manga stuff even though they don’t believe in any of it. She seems to be a genuine kook, if that makes any sense. And if she is a genuine kook who is being co opted by the establishment and is slowly maybe turning into more of her grown up, who is gonna participate in governing with the seat that has been entrusted to her by the great good and wise people of Georgia. That’s a good thing.

Like, it’s not a perfect thing. Everybody wishes that it can be, you know, that she could be represented by by Will Heard. Right? It would be better if Will heard held that seat. But he doesn’t, and she does.

And all things being equal, like, it’s better that she’s riding with Kevin McCarthy than, you know, standing with Steve Bannon. Good for Marjorie Taylor Green. I’m Ron Burgundy.

It depends on whether or not you think it is better that now sort of, like, as opposed to her being a fringe element, she is, like, the mainstream sort of mean Republican elected official. If you’re cool at that, because I

think that says something very, very bad about where

we are. No doubt.

It’s not good. I’m just just saying that I think all three of us are basically institutionalists. Right?

Yeah. I think your point is, like, perfectly well taken. Just not gonna go around giving these people credit. I’ll give Mike Pence credit. I will give Mike Pence, but I’m not giving larger What is it?

You do not under any circumstances, gotta hand it to Marjorie Taylor Green.

We’ve been doing that on this show for three weeks.

Yeah. As JBL says, politics is the art of the possible. So you you got you do have to hand it to Kevin McCarthy for getting that deal done.

Know you don’t listen to this show.

No. I know. That’s what I’m saying, though. I’m I’m trying to break.

But on this show, we have been handing it to Kim McCarthy for three weeks. And we were a little concerned that we’re gonna get him in trouble by talking about how proud we are of the good job he’s doing as an institutionalist.

That’s what I’m saying, though. Like, it’s not you don’t have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Green for being slightly less insane, you do have to hand it to Kevin McCarthy for pulling together a coalition that got the thing done, even if it cost him the most important I I don’t care about the debt limit, not an interesting thing to me. It cost him the stove act. Yeah. It cost him the this they the the freedom caucus us tanked the gas stove protection

measures that were out of spite and that’s what really got to me.

That’s that’s what

You

sure it was out of spite, not because they’re concerned about the — Principal object.

—

environmental effects of gastroesto?

Hard to say hard to say. No. I’m just kidding.

You would have cared about the debt limit if they defaulted. Yeah.

I I I guess. I probably would have.

But, you

know, a a a fiscal economic collapse sounds bad, but also sounds bad. Take away my gas stove. I want I want the stove forever.

Sunny, so now that the Freedom caucus has tanked the stove thing. Yeah. Do we ever have to hear about this, the the great gas stove wars again? Because if it was serious, if this was a real thing and not a ginned up culture war, then the freedom caucus would have passed it. Right?

Just another strike against frame caucus in my book. I have enemies. And freedom caucus is high on that list. So

I’m gonna make a prediction. I will bet I’m not even a bet. I’m just gonna you don’t have to give anything I I am simply gonna say as a matter, of course, that if we are ever in a point where the government makes it impossible for you, Sonny Bunch, to own a gas stove, I will buy your induction stove for you

because I’m fairly confident that you are never going to have your gas

stove taken from it. It’s not I’m getting

this clip and I’m saving it because I’m gonna get a real nice induction stuff. I’m gonna send you the bill in five years when they’re when the, you know, the FBI comes to my house to rip out my gas stove. Alright.

It does sound like it would deploy the FBI. That’s not about it.

The the redditors are screaming right now me. They’re they are they are writing the angriest comments. Right wing, Kuke. They’re not coming to your house. I know.

That’s they’ll do that after the North Carolina participation trophy squad. It gets done, you know, going around, making sure nobody in Little league sports gets a participation trophy in North Carolina. Alright, guys. Good show. Long show.

Everybody thanks for being with us, Sunny. Thanks for sitting in for Tim. Hit subscribe, hit the thumbs up, give us a like, and a follow, leave a review, and then go to the bulwark dot com, sign up to get all of Sunny’s fantastic stuff. If I could just give a quick plug, I was catching up on Sunny Bunch Bulwark goes to Hollywood stuff. And your conversation with the Entertainment Strategy guy, was so good.

So good. It’s a real it’s a real good. It’s his first podcast. December does.

It’s fucking some like this anyway, If you care at all about, like, the business of Hollywood, you ought to be listening to Sunny’s stuff and reading everything he does. And you can get it all for free at the bower dot com. Alright, guys. We will see you on Sunday with the bonus show. Bye.

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