Will Saletan: Erasing History

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is January eighth two thousand twenty four. Lots of anniversaries we need to talk about. Don’t know whether you realize this, Will, but yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Bulwark as a full news site fifth anniversary.

Yep. You were there. And, of course, on Saturday, year three, which continues to be bizarre. I was thinking about this the other day. As extraordinary in soul crushing as, the transformation of the Republican Party has been.

What’s happened? Since January sixth, is still remarkable. I mean, we were talking about invasion of the body’s natures, you know, and the cowardice of the Republican Party, you know, in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. And this will maybe sound naive now in retrospect, but I don’t think anything prepared us for exactly how far Republican leaders and Republican voters would go. After January sixth in going along, not just with the big lie, but this aggressive historical revisionism.

You and I were just talking about this CBS poll showing most Republicans think that the January six riders, the people who went into the capitol beat the shit out of police officers, were patriots and the ought to be pardoned. I mean, this is really an extraordinary moment. You know, we thought the party was trumpified back in twenty twenty. That feels like this is, like, a kinder gentler era compared to where we are right now.

You know what

I mean? This is at the far end of the scenarios that I was prepared for a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. I mean, it keeps getting worse and worse. And the fact that it’s not just Trump. It’s the Republican elite.

It’s the Republican voters that it’s not just denying the election, but it’s political violence itself. Everything has gotten so much worse.

Well, and you know who’s surprised by not just Democrats and the media and never come to me. Like, Rhonda Sanders are completely gobsmacked by it because he thought, hey, if I get into this race, you know, surely, Yeah. Surely. Republican voters are not gonna go along with all of this and and yet they have. And I wonder how that happened.

So I was thinking about this this morning when I was writing my my morning shots newsletter. Have you noticed that the the anti anti trumpers have decided to sort of adopt this sort of murky scoff. You never trumpers. You’re exaggerating. You’re dramatizing all of this.

You you suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. I mean, really, how bad could it be? And I think, okay. Let’s just focus on what Donald Trump said this weekend. Okay?

He claimed I’m not starting with the most important. Okay? He claimed that magnets don’t work if they get wet. To catch this. You know, magnets work, but if you give me a glass of water, and I drop in magnets into a glass of water, that’s the end of the magnets for you people at home.

No. That that’s not the end of the magnets. But put this in the in the box with what Trump doesn’t know about, say, injecting bleach into people, windmills, etcetera. Where hurricanes go? Let’s just put in magnets.

I don’t even know what that was about. More seriously, he called the January six writers and seditionist hostages and demanded their release. This, of course, comes at a time when there actually are real life hostages in the world. There are American citizens being held hostage. And yet, Donald Trump, once again, here’s a word sees it and figures, hey, I can seize upon that.

I can repurpose that word in the same way. He’s repurposing the word insurrectionist. You know, I’m not the insurrectionist. You’re the insurrectionist. It’s more than just projection.

It’s like you take the word and you bend it out of shape to use it as a weapon. So he’s not an insurrectionist. He’s a patriot. He’s a champion of democracy. Right?

It’s Joe Biden, who’s the insurrectionist because of what’s happening at the border. So he he did that. He’s repeating conspiracy theories claiming that left wing activists and government provocateurs responsible for the breach of the capital, all complete bullshit. It was, like, replaying all of his greatest hits. He once again mocked John McCain for the wound, the injuries He suffered as a POW mocking him for his broken arm.

You know, he’s saying, you know, we could’ve gotten rid of Obamacare except for John McCain. John McCain, for some reason, couldn’t get his arm up that day. Remember? Yes. Yeah.

And then because we’re not done yet. That’s right. He blamed Abraham Lincoln for not negotiating the civil war. So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated to be honest with you.

Trump said, I think you could have negotiated that all the died so many people died. Liz Cheney, as usual, was the one who asked the most direct questions. Which part of the civil war could have been negotiated? The slavery part the secession part, whether Lincoln should have preserved the union, interesting. Now you know that we spent what we spent about a month chewing over Nikki Haley’s gaffe about the the the causes of it.

You know, this is gonna be about five minutes of the news cycle. But I wanna come back to this because we have some deep thoughts about this. So, and meanwhile, we’re learning more details about this. We have this ABC report that trump’s social media guru Dan Scavino told, Jack Smith investigators that when the violence escalated on January six Trump was just not interested in doing more to stop it. Apparently, another former top aide, Nick Luna, told investigators that when Trump was told that, when then vice president Mike Pence was rushed to a secure location.

Trump responded so what. And in the undercover story of the day, that may not actually mean that much. In Illinois, Trump refused to sign Illinois’s loyalty oath that says he won’t advocate for the overthrow of the government. Now Biden signed it. DeSantis signed it.

This has been around since the fifties. Trump signed it the last two times he ran for president. For some reason this year, Somebody looked at that and said, yeah. No. So where should we start, Will?

Do you wanna start with the least Defonic, though? It feels like low hanging fruit, but, I mean, there’s so many ways that you can demonstrate how the Republican party has changed over the last few years. Right? I mean, you can talk about know, the abandonment of Ukraine, you can talk about, you know, the the fact that they don’t even have a a platform, the polls, the fact that all the Republican leaders have endorsed Donald Trump. I mean, all of those things.

But the transformation of Elise Defonic from being a ambitious rising, normie Republican, to being, you know, Human Maga, you know, talking point soundtrack is really amazing. And so she’s on meet the press yesterday. And she basically I’m at here’s the spoiler alert. I’m sorry. This woman is so thirsty to be vice president.

I mean, she She is so. Donald, what do you want me to do? I will say every word you want. So she echoes and amplifies every word that Donald Trump says, listen to this, including the fact that the January sixth rioters are hostages. Let’s play this.

On the issue of election integrity, though, as you know, Trump took his case to court more than sixty times that there was fraud he didn’t win, but I wanna get back to this key question. Do you still think it was a tragic day? Do you think that the people who storm the capital should be held responsible to the full extent of fall.

I have concerns about the treatment of January six hostages. I have concerns. We have a role in Congress of oversight over our treatments of prisoners, and I believe that we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just president Trump, but we’re seeing it against conservatives. We’re seeing it against Catholics.

Whoa. Let’s just focus on the the word hostages. Now I know a lot of people are ripping on Kristen Welker for not saying, you know, hostages, but know, when you’re dealing with the fire holes of stuff like this, I I I wanna focus on the fact that the number three Republican of the House of Representatives, the person that Republicans replaced Liz Cheney with. I can’t get past that. Users the word hostages in a world in which there are real hostages will your thoughts?

Well, obviously, it’s an offense against actual hostages. But the to me, the larger point here is that When you say that people prosecuted and convicted by the United States government, particularly for political violence, are hostages rather than convicts, prisoners. What you are saying is that the government of the United States and United States law enforcement are illegitimate.

They’re either terrorists or they’re kidnappers or they’re other people committing a crime that they’re being held for some sort of ransom or some sort of blackmail. Right? So it is a completely illegitimate. It’s not about justice not about the way they committed a crime, where they beat up cops. It’s about, what, about the weaponization?

At least defining.

Right. And now uses in that quote. She talks about weaponization. And we we know this is a Republican talking at Boyter. Yeah.

Yeah. The government of the United States is con under the control of partisan Democrats, Joe Biden, they have weaponized it. And you heard her talk about conservatives and Catholics, the FBI’s coming after parents, all that stuff we’ve heard. Right? So that was the talking point, but it was about that stuff, the Catholics and the parents and all that.

It’s now expanded. It’s expanded to political violence. Though the government is coming after people who practiced open political violence as documented on video, trying to overthrow the government to keep trump in power And those people, the people who did that, who did that violence, according to Elise Defonic, are the good guys. Now remember, this was a Trump position, the January six hostages. It’s now not just a Trump position.

That is the number three Republican in the House, the Chair of the House Republican Conference saying that these people are the good guys, the people who attempted to overthrow the government. This is now a party wide crisis. And it’s a nationwide crisis because this party could be in power again.

When Donald Trump said use the term hostages, I think that there was at least sort of, you know, a little bit of a gasp, but it’s also so much on brand for Donald Trump because, you know, the world is talking about the Israeli for example, in Gaza. And Donald Trump hears these terms. And this is his lizard brain. It’s like, how can I find a way to diminish the experience, the the real tragedy of the hostages while glorifying thugs who used American flags to beat up police officers? As usual, Liz Cheney, had one of the most forceful responses to this.

Let’s play this.

It sounds like you’re saying you don’t trust Republican leadership in the house and their conduct in the upcoming election.

Look, they you’ve had two members of Republican leadership in the house. Television this morning. You’ve had Mike on again claiming that he has the right individually to decide that he’s gonna throw out millions of votes and ignore the rulings of the courts You’ve had a least defining on this morning talking about the J six hostages. I mean, you don’t have to take my word for the fact that you can’t count on these elected Republicans to defend the constitution. Every time they go out and give an interview, they demonstrate it themselves.

Now, at least Stephan was on another network this morning. You just mentioned her The quote was I have concerns about the treatment of the January sixth hostages. Hostiges is a very specific word. And there are well over twelve hundred people in the US legal system going through legal proceedings right now for their role in the attack that day. That word she used is exactly the word that Donald Trump uses.

And that’s why she’s using it, and it’s outrageous, and it’s disgusting. And if you if you go and you look at what individuals have been convicted for, who are incarcerated, you’ll find, you know, extensively. These are people who were involved in violence against police officers, in the assault on the Capitol and it is really, it’s disgraceful for Donald Trump to be saying what he’s saying. And then for those, who are attempting to enable him or attempting to further their own political careers to repeat it. It’s a disgrace.

And you cannot say that you are, a member of of a party that believes in the rule of law. You can’t say that you’re prolonged for if you then go out and you say these people are, quote, hostages. It’s it’s disgraceful.

You know, I attempted to say, will, five minutes ago, Republicans would have, but now it’s once upon a time lost in the in the midst of time that that Republican leaders would have run as far and fast as possible to not associate themselves with Donald Trump’s use of the word hostages for people who, beat up cops, who engage in seditious conspiracy, etcetera. There once was a time when they would have said, well, okay. I didn’t hear that. I don’t know anything about that. Those were the cowardly ones.

Others would have actually actively pushed against saying, you know, this number one trivializes the experience of the real life hostages in the world. And, of course, it completely misstates what the criminal justice system is doing about the riders of January sixth. But now, I mean, you know, as we’ve been talking about, there’s no pushback. At all. I mean, I don’t know of a single Republican leader with the possible exception of Liz Cheney.

I can get them on one hand. Liz Cheney Adam Kinzinger, we’re both, of course, out of office. Liz Cheney replaced by Elise Stephan. Chris Christie, maybe Acea Hutchinson, But that’s it. Everybody else is like, okay, if that’s the story, if that’s the party line, if that is what the party is telling us, we must believe we’re in.

Right. And it’s remarkable to me that the Republican Party has gone beyond being the party of election denial to being the party of embracing the the violence at January six. That’s that’s an amazing thing. And god bless Liz Cheney for reminding people you know, that the Republican Party at the same time has claimed to stand for law enforcement. This is really an important point she’s making because not enough Democrats make this point this whole pro law enforcement thing is not viscerally in Democrats in the same way it’s in Republicans.

You know, Democrats will make the point about democracy and everyone’s to vote. That’s a very democratic talking point. But standing up for a law enforcement was a Republican talking point, and it’s very important even for people who have been kicked out of the party. For the Chinese, for the Kenzingers, for the Christis, to make the point that if you actually believe in law enforcement, you should be defending the law enforcement officers who defended our country on January sixth and certainly not claiming that the people who violently assaulted them were and are hostages.

Yeah. Okay. So, Elise, also and by the way, I think this point about, you know, moving from election to nihilism to actually embracing violence is crucial. And it’s one of the things that’s happened. Since January seventh and actually really accelerating in the last twelve months.

At least Defonic also was asked, what should have been a very, very easy question? Would you certify the twenty twenty four election for people who think, oh, it’s trump derangement syndrome to think that they would do this all over again or the January sixth and that whole attempt overturned the election was just a rehearsal. Listen to this.

Would you vote to certify and will you vote to certify the results of the twenty twenty four election. No matter what they show.

Well, I voted not to certify the state of Pennsylvania because as we saw in Pennsylvania and other state across the country that there was unconstitutional acts circumventing the state legislature and unilaterally changing election laws. Twenty twenty four.

What about twenty twenty four?

We will see. If this is a legal and valid election, what we’re seeing so far is that Democrats are so desperate. They’re trying to remove president Trump from the ballot. That is the suppression of the American people, and the Supreme Court is taking that case up in February. That should be a nine to zero.

To allow president Trump to, appear on the ballot because that’s the American people’s decision to make this November.

And the matters, of course, halted pending that appeal as you say, but just to be very clear, I don’t hear you committed to certifying the election results. Will you only commit to certify the results? If they’re constitutional If they Is that if it is more presidential No.

It means if they are constitutional. What we saw in twenty twenty was unconstitutional circumventing of the of the constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law. And we’re seeing this in my home state of New York, Kristen. We are seeing Democrats try to steal the election and illegally gerrymander congressional districts that we fairly won and are fair lines. So I see this at a very local level as well as the unconstitutional overreach we saw at the national end of twenty twenty.

So I’m hearing not necessarily to certify the now, again, I think this is one of those. You’re not sufficiently alarmed moments because It was shocking and appalling and disgraceful that even after the attack on the capital, so many Republicans voted not to certify the twenty twenty election. I mean, we’ve talked about Right? Think about what what’s happened to the Republican Party since that moment. Think how the Republican Party has changed.

What the Republican Party will look like in twenty twenty four, twenty twenty five. If in fact a Republican House of Representatives has to vote on this. And think about what you just heard from the number three Member of Republican leadership, Mike Johnson, one of the williest of the election in ours is speaker of the house. Look, anybody that thinks, that we’re not gonna have a replay. I think just hasn’t been paying attention.

And I’m sorry. I well, I know you wanna be the optimist, though. At least Defonic is just signaling exactly. Like, they’re trying to steal it. They’re doing this.

And

I got my little pony here, and I would love to be the you, Charlie, but this pony is going straight to the glue factory today because I am not at all an optimist about this. I mean, I think you and I are laughing about this, but we’re laughing and we’re crying because this is

I’m not laughing.

This is deadly serious. Remember, this Cheney said in her comments about Elise Defonic, She said the Republican leadership. Liz Cheney is now talking about the Republican Party as a whole. It’s Mike Johnson saying defending the overturning the the twenty twenty election. It’s at least Defonic here about the twenty twenty four election.

And to my mind, she’s not just saying, oh, we’ll see. She’s already laying the groundwork. She’s laying the groundwork, at least Stefanik, is, for voting to reject electors in twenty twenty four. So in this clip, She says, when she’s asked whether she’s gonna certify twenty twenty four, she says, well, I already voted twenty twenty to throw out their Pennsylvania electors. Why?

Because they didn’t go through the state legislators when they changed their votes. Now all this went through courts. Elise Defonic, Mike Johnson, they don’t care. The courts don’t get to decide this. We, the Congress, get to vote on January sixth, to overturn the results because we think the courts were wrong, and it was unconstitutional what the states did.

And the least ofonic is now specifying things that will justify in her mind and the mind of her colleagues voting again to throw out the electors. She names trying to take Trump off the ballot, the Colorado, the main case, but setting that aside, when she says, I don’t like the way that the Democrats in New York drew the districts, that that is illegal and unconstitutional. And she’s citing that as a basis.

It’s a court decision.

Right. You and I don’t have to like this. I don’t like gerrymandering. No. But the notion that this warrants, the Congress, voting to throw out all the electors, what the people of New York voted for.

Just as they did with the voters of Pennsylvania, This is amazing. And we should take it deadly seriously.

I totally agree with you. And just as a parenthetical point, I think I wrote a piece once about, you know, why do people believe these election lies that have been refuted. I mean, you have a conspiracy theory. It is completely refuted, and yet people then move on to something else. It’s like, what’s going on here?

It’s because the big lie is a pretext. There is a large part of the Republican Party that just thinks that The Democrats are so evil or so dangerous that they should never be allowed back in power, and we will come up with one pretext or another, and it will keep shifting. These pretexts will keep shifting. By the way, here’s the weirdest flex over the weekend too, which is again hard to get your head around. So Donald Trump, in his lizard brain.

Figures I’m not the insurrectionist. You’re the insurrectionist, is his play. Well, we’ve seen him do this over and over and over again. But here’s the way it actually played out. Okay.

So He’s talking about it, obviously, thinking about this Colorado case, you know, that says that because of the fourteenth amendment, an insurrectionist cannot be on the ballot, That’s gone all the way to the Supreme Court. I am not one of those who believe the Supreme Court is going to throw him off the ballot, but it is a legitimate legal issue, but that’s the issue. Right? In insurrectionist cannot be on the ballot. So he’s thinking, what if I say that Joe Biden’s an insurrectionist.

And you know who the first guy to pick up on that was? Ron DeSantis, who allegedly is running against Donald Trump. And Ron DeSantis says over the weekend, well, we might have to consider kicking Joe Biden off of the Florida ballot because he’s an insurrectionist for letting the the the border be wide open. So watch how that goes zero to sixty as a talking point. Well, if you’re gonna consider January sixth an insurrection and therefore disqualify we’re gonna make the border.

We’re gonna invent the border maybe something else, and we’re gonna kick Joe Biden off. I mean, this is a nightmare scenario. Where Julyden gets kicked off in, say, Florida and Texas. And then, you know, Trump gets kicked off here. I mean, that’s why the Supreme Court is gonna have to do something about but I think it was weird that Ron DeSantis still at this late date, feels the need to come in and be the, you know, throw himself in front of the Bulwark, you know, aimed at Donald Trump.

He’s prepared to do this. Ma’am, remember when Donald Trump was indicted, one of the first indictments I think was out of New York, And Ron DeSantis’ reaction was well. You know, if they tried to extradite him from the state of Florida, we would fight that. You know? The free state of Florida.

We would be a sanctuary state for Donald Trump. It wasn’t necessary. But when you write up your, obituary for the DeSantis campaign, just make sure you have a little, like, like, note here on all of that.

One open question there, whether it is the obituary for the DeSantis campaign or whether there’s the prescription for the DeSantis twenty twenty eight campaign. I think all these people, their craven behavior Ron DeSantis playing to the Trump voters here rather than confronting his opponent. Is symptomatic of the general idea that DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and others have been playing all along to inherit the Trump vote when Trump is gone. By natural causes or Jack Smith or whatever. Rhonda Sanders is so effed after

he drops out maybe next week. The rest of the year is just gonna be a humiliation tour. It’s gonna be the long march of Ron DeSantis’ humiliation. I was reading, I think it was in Semaphore you know, the all the Trump people saying, Leli’s gonna have to crawl in his belly to Mar a lago and beg forgiveness and endorse Donald Trump. And stand at, you know, at the back of the stage, you know, you know, looking, you know, with that frozen smile, and they’re gonna They will find so many ways to humiliate him the way they humiliated Ted Cruz.

The guy’s like Ted Cruz figured. Okay. I’m gonna swallow. This giant pile of dog shit because I will be a viable candidate in the future. And instead, it’s like No man.

You just diminished yourself. You humiliated yourself. And there’s no future for you. I don’t think it’s gonna happen for him in twenty twenty eight.

Charlie, who is the poor sap in the DeSantis campaign who is gonna have to break the news to Ron DeSantis? Because I’m sure he’s already built his story about if I don’t win, We screwed up this and that technical thing about the campaign. We’ll come back and do it next time. Who was gonna have to break it to Ron DeSantis? That the problem was Ron DeSantis.

And that he can’t change himself and so he’ll never be president.

Nobody’s ever gonna tell him that, but I imagine it’ll be Casey Ron DeSantis saying, okay, honey. Let’s just go home. Let’s just go home. That wasn’t so bad. We’ll turn things around when I run for governor, and then I got a couple of hits.

I don’t know. Okay. So let’s get to one of the main events of the of the weekend, which I find incredibly interesting and puzzling at the same time. And I guess I I wanted to have the the sort of the larger question. It was like, why is Donald Trump talking about the civil war at all?

I just think that of all the things you bring up, why are we talking about the civil war? I mean, did we talk about the civil war back in the two thousand two thousand four, two thousand eight, two thousand twelve election. I mean, did we? So, Donald Trump, student of history, reader of books has some deep thoughts, has some deep thoughts about the American Civil War and what a cock. Apparently, Abraham Wilson was in comparison to the man who would have had the art of the deal.

You know, if Donald Trump had been president, there, you know, he would have sat down with Jefferson Davis, and it would have been the art of the deal. Right? Okay. So let’s play this.

The civil war was so fascinating, so horrible. Was so horrible, but so fascinating. It was Fascinating. I don’t know. It was just different.

I just find it. I’m so attracted to seeing it so many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died.

So many people died. You know, that was the disaster. If you got hit by a bullet in the leg, you were essentially going to die or lose the leg. That’s why you so many people, no legs, no arms. If you got hit in the arm or the leg, it meant you were up because the infection gangrene.

It was just such a you know, sort of a horrible time. But that’s, I was thinking to myself because I was, reading something and I said, this is something that could have been negotiated. You know?

Okay. The least plausible part of all that is Donald Trump was reading a history of the war. I’m sorry. I can’t get past that. Donald Trump is reading something while he’s reading something on Twitter about the civil war.

So will. I guess, first of all, why are we even talking about this?

Well, I’m sure you have probably on his mind because of Nikki Haley. And I my god, I thought when Haley said was bad. Nothing on this. Nothing. Charlie, did I did I hear him correctly that he said he was so attracted to the civil war?

Was that was that the I believe that Fascinating. Fascinating. So attracted. And what is he attracted to? It’s people losing legs, losing arms.

It’s the gangrene, by the way, Trump constantly talks about people losing their limbs. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I love the whole thing about Trump thinks that the war should have been avoided through a compromise, a negotiation. Right?

Right.

There weren’t compromises. There was three fifths of sleeves counted as three fifths of a person. How about that compromise? Is that what you have in mind? Or the Missouri compromise will will we’ll have more states come into the union as slave states.

Did Trump want that kind of a compromise?

By the way, wouldn’t you would love to ask him about mister Trump? What did you think about the Missouri compromise is right. No idea. No.

And this is totally consistent, by the way, with what he says about Ukraine. I’m gonna get this war settled in twenty four hours. Will we’ll have a negotiation. We’ll have a compromise. It’s easy because Trump has no morals at all.

So, hey, Putin, Zelensky, Russia, Ukraine, freedom, slavery. It’s all a negotiation. We give half to the slave states and half to the free states. And then we’re all we’re all good. Right?

We give half of Ukraine to Russia. We’re all good. Well, let’s go back

to this compromise thing because, I mean, you know, first of all, you know, what Donald Trump does not know about magnets in the civil war, you know, would fill volumes here. But he’s talking about, you know, only Abraham Lincoln had compromised. One of the fascinating things about reading the history, the the kind of the granular history, is how hard they tried to compromise on all that.

Right.

First of all, the eighteen fifties was an entire decade spent saying, hey, can we work out a compromise on this? Can we have free states? Can we have slave states? When Abraham Lincoln has elected president, he did not say I am gonna abolish slavery. Did he?

He was actually a rather cautious prudent man, a man of of deep principle. You actually had many, you know, people who said let’s just reassure the South that what we’re going to do this You know, in that interregnum period, there were all kinds of ways that they tried to avoid this, which goes back to Liz Cheney’s question. Okay. Since all of these attempts, to reassure this out, to come up with some kind of a deal, failed miserably, They decided to take up arms. They fired on Fort Sumter.

If Abraham Lincoln was the smartest Donald Trump, which is what he’s saying. What would should he have done? She said, okay, we’re gonna guarantee that you can have slaves forever. Would he have let them go? Would he have what what is the compromise that would have stopped the civil war that was not considered?

I mean, this is the thing. Now, of course, this requires a knowledge of history. You know, one of the superpowers that, Donald Trump has, and I regret using that phrase already, is that he can say this kind of bullshit knowing first of all that there’s so much bullshit out there that it’s going it wouldn’t even be one new cycle. I mean, poor Nikki Haley got, you know, seven or eight days at it, and you and I even talked about it. This will not get more than a couple of days, but also he knows that his audience is not going to push back because and I’m sorry to say this.

His audience doesn’t know much more about history than he does. This is one of the consequences of the fact that we are a nation that is ahistorical that has tremendous historical amnesia. I think you and I would both probably put our heads in buckets of water if we knew what percentage of the American people actually knew a lot about Civil War. So there is the ignorance speaking unto ignorance, knowing that he can get away with all of this. But I have to ask you, well, is it just me or is it just weird that we are now relitigating the civil war and slavery and all of these things?

Why is this happening? I mean, maybe on some little Donald Trump just wants to say, and I’m a better president than George Washington or I’m a better president than Abrahamling I am the greatest president ever. If I’d been around, the British would not have screwed around with the TTEC. If I’d been around, we wouldn’t have gotten into World War one. Or that moron FDR, if I had been president, Hitler would have been afraid to declare war on us.

Is that what he’s doing or by the civil war?

Well, to me, the common thread, Charlie, is rewriting history. So Trump is, like, trying to rewrite the history of the civil war. You’ve just described the efforts negotiation that went on. He’s pretending it never happened. Imagine it never.

Maybe believes it never happened because he doesn’t know anything. And of course, he would have prevented it. But even go back three years to January six twenty twenty one, what we have is a Republican Party busy trying to rewrite the history of what happened, pushing out propaganda about what happened that these were innocent people. This is a party dedicated to erasing a history. And Chris Christie god bless him, tried to remind them that we’re about the founding of the Republican Party as a reform party around the slavery, that’s being erased because, you know, we’re the party of it as Nikki Haley says, it was tradition versus change.

And what a Republican stand for, they stand for a tradition. No. The Republican Party get its founding at that point stood for change. Republicans used

to be proud of being the party of Lincoln. Believe it or not.

Yeah. But honestly, this once was the thing. Yeah. You were the party of change, and it was a good thing. Sometimes that’s the right thing.

There’s one other term, Charlie, that I’d love to bring into this conversation. The term is warmonger. Yeah. So Donald Trump, has, you know, built a whole isolationist wing. Now isolationist column, the the the center of the Republican party around the idea, we’re not gonna be warmongers.

And with good reason because of the Iraq war, I mean, wars of choice, wars for their own sake. They’re horrible. It’s harmful for everyone involved And I understand the case against needless warmongering, thoughtless reckless warmongering. But

Right.

The response to that ought to be balanced ought to be measured about when to use force. What Trump is describing here about the civil war that we should have negotiated our way out of it That is a moral compromise of the rights, the liberties, the freedom of human beings, that it was not and is not morally acceptable, Trump to my mind is implying that it would be that some kind of compromise, the kinds that were attempted would have been justified to avoid the horrors of the civil war. Sometimes, though, and the point of the civil war is sometimes you do have to fight a war. You have to fight a war there. You have to fight a war in Ukraine or you have to support a war in Ukraine.

Because fundamental moral principles are at stake and preventing further harm to people, further tragedy is at stake.

Well, I agree with you. And I’m I’m I am still puzzled by all of this because I I know that there’s a sort of a very small rump on the right that always thought that Abraham Lincoln was a bad guy. And we’ve seen this happen so often how these these fringe cranks suddenly find a way to the mainstream. I just wonder where we’re going on all of this Okay. So let’s do a little bit of horse race, politicking, which I’m becoming increasingly bored with.

But Nikki Haley is making her last stand tell that Nikki Haley is kind of a real thing to the extent that anything is real these days because Trump is dumping a lot of money aimed at her in the last few days. You can sometimes tell What does a candidate really think? Who do they really worry about? Well, it’s like, well, who are they spending money on? And the Trump folks are going after Nikki Haley saying she’s not strong enough on on the wall or in Muslim bands or whatever.

So Nikki Haley talks about her strategy. Of course, the big question is, What has to happen for you to actually dethrone someone who is leading you by forty or fifty points in the polls keep track. It’s just whatever it is that’s like an f load of points there. So this is Nikki Haley explaining her electoral strategy.

We have an opportunity to get this right, and I know we’ll get it right. I trust you. I trust every single one of you. You know how to do this. You know Iowa starts it?

You know that you correct it? You know that you continue. Okay.

Both Camry. Okay. Both Camry is it up.

And then my sweet state as South Carolina brings it home. That’s what we do. That’s what we do.

Okay. So that’s not much of a strategy. So what? It’s like you’ll You do well in Iowa. You do well in New Hampshire, and then this dramatic unicorn charge in her home state of South Carolina.

Right?

The context of this quote is she’s talking to a a town hall in New Hampshire. She’s telling the people of New Hampshire Iowa votes one way, and then you correct it. Now, of course, this quote has now been played in Iowa to show the Iowa ones that Nikki Haley is two faced. This statement from her just encapsulates. You know, there are certain gaps a politician makes that are actually they connect with what’s really wrong with that person.

And in Haley’s case, this is it. Right? She goes to Iowa and says, I’m all about Iowa, and then she goes to New Hampshire and says, yeah, they screw it up and you correct it. And still shaking. No one’s gonna no one’s gonna put the two together.

For people who are thinking about Nikki Haley as the alternative to Trump, this puts a little doubt in their mind because they can see that she doesn’t have a core.

Yeah. Which I think has been established by this point. Okay. So let’s talk about Joe Biden’s big speech over the weekend. Joe Biden really leaning into the the fight for democracy, the threat of Donald Trump.

And it’s course become, you know, there’s a lot of second guessing about it, but let’s play a little clip of Joe Biden who is laying out the stakes of the twenty twenty four election.

This is the first national election since January sixth, insurrection placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy since that moment. We all know who Donald Trump is. A question we have to answer is who are we? That’s what’s at stake. Who are we?

And the year ahead, as you talk to your family

and friends, cast your ballots, the powers in your hands. After all, we’ve been through in our history from independence to civil war to two world wars, to a pandemic, to insurrection, I refuse to believe that in twenty twenty four, we Americans will choose to walk away from what’s made us the greatest nation in the world. Freedom, liberty. Democracy is still a sacred cause.

Okay. So Mitt Romney of all people who has not carried any water for Donald Trump says, yeah, Joe, you gotta do better than just going after democracy. And I I have to say I I disagree with with Romney on this because I think that this is what Joe Biden needs to say. I think it’s necessary. It’s not sufficient.

He’s gonna have to do a lot more. I think that I hope that they repeat this message. I was impressed with the detail that he brought in. About Donald Trump because people like you and me and people listen to this podcast, we know all of all this stuff, even though it’s kinda hard to sometimes keep it all in your head. We have tens of millions of voters that you know, maybe forgotten about this who don’t know about his mocking of of dead soldiers.

So tell me what you thought of that speech, Will Saletan

the speech. I mean, I wish I’d had somebody who could finish a sentence clearly actually delivering the speech, but the speech itself was really good and important. There are two scenarios here coming out of this that are bad, but I wanna distinguish between them. One is that Donald Trump wins reelection and becomes president of the United States again. It’s horrifying, but you and I don’t control that.

Joe Biden doesn’t necessarily control that. Americans may decide to reelect him. They may not care about democracy or the rule of law.

Right.

But the second one is and you and I do control this, does that proposition get tested? Is the choice made clear to Americans in the election that if you vote to bring Trump back to power, you are walking away from liberty and from democracy. That, we do have influence over. And it’s our job and it’s Joe Biden’s job to make that choice clear. And that’s that’s what Biden is doing in this speech.

He’s saying, who are we? We have to decide that. That’s something we get to control.

That part sounds boilerplate to me. I’m sorry. You know? But what I liked was when he went through the specifics of what Donald Trump said, who Donald Trump is. And he’s being mocked for it.

A lot of the the anti Dante Trump, right, and You know, the New York Post is like, you know, once again, he’s telling us Trump is bad, orange man bad, as if somehow it’s absurd to be warning about the awfulness of Donald Trump. I don’t think that either we or Biden ought to be dissuaded by all that, but also I do think there is a danger. And I I, as I said, I disagree with with Mitt Romney, but maybe he’s making the point that the indication of the word democracy is not going to be sufficient. In part because I think it’s too abstract for a lot of voters. And also and I’ve said this before, and I apologize for people who think I’m repeating myself, but of course, we’re gonna repeat ourselves on this.

In fact, think we have a moral obligation to repeat ourselves a lot this year. Watch the way that Donald Trump co opts democracy because tens of millions of his supporters actually do not think that themselves as anti democratic. Bear with me. They actually think that they are the defenders of democracy, and he is going to wrap himself in the mantle of genuine American democracy. You Democrats are trying to kick me off the ballot.

You are the anti democratic ones. You hear this already with his beginning d. He takes the word. Number, he co opted the term fake news. He co opted the term insurrection.

He’s going to co opt democracy. So if Democrats and ever trumpers believe that simply saying, we need to defend democracy is sufficient, What we’re gonna see is tens of millions of voters who say, yes, absolutely right, which is why we are voting for Donald Trump. Now, again, this is gonna make our heads explode. But I’m telling you this is what’s gonna happen this year. How do

you break that pattern? Biden did all that in this speech. He named all the specific things. He named sitting there and watching the the attack on the Capitol that’s calling for suspending the Constitution, threatening the chairman of the joint chief saying I’m gonna be a dictator threatening retribution. I mean, the insurrection act.

So Biden has his itemized list of his evidence against Trump, which is the best And that’s gonna grow even over the next year. So I wouldn’t fault him for that. So I don’t think it’s boilerplate Charlie. I just think that it’s really important to elevate this and to clarify. Nobody, but Joe Biden has the kind of Hope that he has, to declare to everyone in America that this is the central issue.

I mean, look, Charlie, I’m not happy with Joe Biden’s border policy. I don’t Democrats are taking that issue seriously enough. I’m not happy about inflation. There’s a lot of things I’m not happy about with Joe Biden, but nothing. None of that compares to preserving the Republic, and I don’t fault Biden at all for making that the central issue.

It is the central issue.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t fault for that. I’m not actually faulting him. I’m just saying it’s necessary. It’s non sufficient.

And it’s the way you phrase it, because I do think I totally agree with you, obviously, on on all of this. But I think that he needs to find a way to explain it to those swing voters in a way that will be extremely compelling. Like, for example, I will tell you that for me, the fact that Donald Trump and his supporters actually seriously wanted to wipe out the votes of millions of Wisconsinites. Wanted to disenfranchise me is one of the most outrageous things I’ve ever seen. And so, you know, again, it’s not the word democracy.

It’s like, go to and go to Pennsylvania, go to Arizona, go to Wisconsin and say, you know what they wanted to do, they wanted to take your votes and throw them in the shitter. They wanted to disenfranch they wanted to say your votes did not count. They wanted the legislature to overturn the election. You know what that is? When we talk about democracy, that’s what we’re talking about.

And it’s not about me. It’s about you and that you know that when you go and you vote, if you vote wrong, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona. They’re just going to overturn the election. They’re gonna take away your vote. I mean, I remember I was on a show once when somebody was saying, well, the Republican Party wants to disenfranchise African American voters in Wisconsin, and I went, wait.

Wait. Wait. Understand that they want to disenfranchise all of the voters in Wisconsin. You know? Let’s let’s make this a universal thing.

So, again, I I don’t disagree with you. I do find it fascinating watching. Again, our good friends in anti anti trump who’ve been basically saying the same thing we’ve been saying for, you know, about know, ten minutes now when they thought Ron DeSantis was gonna step in now going, oh, now you’re talking about how he wants to be dictator or or or he’s going to be anti democratic, where would you get this idea? I don’t know because we listen to what he says, We listen to what he says. We watch what he’s done.

We look at the dead people, you know, people who are killed. On January sixth and the fact that he’s glorifying it, I don’t know. You tell me what would be alarming to you. Right.

A couple things on, but I wanna follow-up on. One is, in this speech, one of the things I really liked about it is there’s an art in politics to framing an attack on your opponent, a criticism of your opponent that is so true that the person cannot get out of it because it’s in their nature. They’re gonna give you more evidence for So in this speech, Biden says that Trump’s campaign is all he says it’s all about him that Trump is obsessed with the past, not the future. And that Trump can’t stand that he was a loser in twenty twenty.

User.

And you and I know, Trump cannot stand this. He cannot stand that he was a loser. He’s gonna keep talking about it. He’s gonna talk about himself because he is a malignant narcissist, and he’s gonna keep talking about the past because of, you know, having to relitigate all that. So this is an indictment of Trump.

Which is broader than the critique of democracy. That it’s a narcissism obsessed with himself, not really about you, which hopefully will bring over some more voters. And Trump himself will provide further evidence of as the campaign goes on because that’s Donald Trump. He can’t stop himself. So I think that’s really important.

The other thing about this speech Biden is he talks about the democracy, but he goes beyond that to the point of we’ve been discussing about the violence. And there’s a part of it where he talks about how Trump laughed about the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Unbelievable. Right. And Biden get he’s he’s furious for those of you who, you know, you might hear this speech, but you can watch it.

He’s He’s just physically livid over. And he talks about he actually says about Trump at that point. What a sick and then he came finish the sentence, people start laughing, but everybody knows it, you know, that this is Donald Trump believes in violence. And I believe as we see more of this embrace of January sixth, the idea that these are people who committed violence that they are hostages, you’re going to see more of a definition of the Republican party, not just around denying the election. Not just about trying to overturn the election through Congress, but about the violence itself and the defense of the people who committed the violence.

I am hopeful. I would like to believe that America will reject at least that.

Well, I share that hope, obviously. Okay. One one last little tidbit though at the end. You know, as we watch what’s happening to the Republican Party and Republicans are telling, you know, themselves that, okay, we’ve got the wind at our back in twenty twenty four. Gonna go with Donald Trump.

We’re gonna get, you know, power. Meanwhile, one state party after another seems to be eating itself alive. And rather than do a tour of the whole country, but let’s talk about what just happened in Michigan, which is one of the key states. The Republican Party there has not only lost its mind. It appears to be just imploding I don’t know.

Do you can you implode and explode at the same time? What are we talking about here?

What a shit show? So in Michigan, we have an election denier who’s in charge of the Republican Party, the the chair of the Republican Party, Christine Karamok. This woman is now a three fer. Okay. So she got her job as chair of the party by denying the twenty twenty election.

Right? And Trump love that. She then runs for Secret Podcast State as the Republican nominee in twenty twenty two, and she loses Mhmm. Charlie Sykes fourteen points. It’s not a close election, fourteen points.

She denies to having lost that election.

Right.

Now she’s screwed up the Michigan Republican Party so bad. Trying to literally trying to sell the headquarters. That’s how bad things are. That the committee of the that runs the party votes her out. And she’s rejecting that.

She’s saying it’s not a legal vote. It wasn’t held in exactly the right way. So she’s

fellow Republicans who are probably pretty moderate than Sells going, yeah, we’re Maga, but this she’s malignantly Maga, or she’s just so, I mean, it’s a total civil war, speaking of civil wars.

She’s denying the election that’s throwing her out, which, of course, is totally consistent. What did you people think? What did what did Republicans who are half sane think? When you bring these deniers, these lunatics into your party when you make them chair of your party, and then you think you’re gonna get rid of them. They don’t go quietly.

That’s how they got where they are.

Well, I I must admit this is a moment where I think the the shot in Freud is completely justified and it’ll feel bad about it at all. And this is happening all over the country. People are going Well, so what did you think was gonna happen? When you brought these extremists, these nut jobs, these fanatics, these deniers, into the fold when you embrace the carry lakes of the world, you know, and things like that. How do you think this was going to play out?

Did you really think that that alligator in the bathtub was not going to grow bigger and come out and try to eat you. And this has been happening in state after state. So, you know, you’re here in Wisconsin. We have a reasonably normal legislative leadership of the Republican Party seriously, but they felt, you know what, let’s, you know, hire this sort of demented former state Supreme Court justice and we’ll pay him a million dollars to do an investigation because that’ll quiet the crazies. And, of course, it didn’t.

And this is happening in state after state where they they’re trying to appease the whack jobs. The whack jobs are never appeased and they don’t go away. And so, you have this kind of chaos being played out. So for the moment, I think that, you know, the normies have decided we’re just gonna surrender. We’re gonna keep our heads down.

A good chunk of the normies are leaving office, waiting until the storm passes, but will, that’s end on a bad note here. The storm’s not passing. And for all you Republicans, I think, you know, if I just keep my head down, I endorse Donald Trump. I go along with all of this. Someday I’ll wake up and, you know, the sun will be shining and we’ll have normal Republicans running again.

This is not gonna be happening anytime soon. I don’t think. Speaking of bad news.

No. It’s not gonna pass.

Right.

And we have some new evidence of that this week. New poll out from CBS News, where they asked voters. They well, they asked Americans about people. And, just to be clear about the question, the question is about, quote, people who forced their way into the US capital on January six. So this is not, again, peaceful protesters, not people who are at the ellipse.

This is people who literally forced their way. That’s the framing of the question. And among Republican respondents to this poll, fifty one percent of those Republicans said that the people who forced their way in were patriots that it was patriotism. Fifty nine percent said those people were, quote, defending freedom. Sixty six percent of Republicans said they would support pardons for the people.

Again, who forced their way in. So what we have here is new evidence of that it is not just a Trump position to deny the twenty twenty election or to support overturning it through Congress. It is a Republican position, and it is not just a Republican position to do those things. It is now a Republican position to defend the actual violence of January sixth. To me, this is an increasingly alarming sign of where this party is going and the thought that people who support violence could be back in power in the house, the senate, and the White House within a year is completely alarming to me.

Well, it ought to be completely alarming. And this because this is also a generational shift. I mean, we are gonna have a hangover of this that will last us a very, very long time. People who are now getting into politics, who are looking around and seeing what is normal, what is acceptable, those folks are gonna be around, long after we are gone, twenty, thirty years from now. And this is a ship.

And it’s interesting just watching the the sort of the transition from okay. Let’s tolerate the guy. We don’t have to endorse it, but we’ll enable the guy, and we’ll look the other way. And that shifted to Okay. We’ll say these things because, you know, this is what we are required to say to actually having lots of people now believe these things.

I mean, there there’s a, you know, a different sometimes, you know, policies will say, look, this is what I have to say. I just have to say this to survive. Now what you’re seeing is that people actually do believe that the criminal justice system is completely illegitimate and that, therefore, people who are, you know, arrested for crimes are hostages. You do have people who now believe what happened on January six was not what you saw with your own eyes or experience. And by the way, you see that video of this congressman, Texas common, Troy Nells, who is actually confronted, you know, in the house chamber protected by guys with guns, and he’s yelling at the protesters You know, you’re, you know, you’re embarrassing, and they’re, and they’re talking about killing congressmen.

And he knew at that time, Exactly how bad it was. And now he says, yeah, Ashley Babot was murdered. So what you’ve had is people not only denying the evidence of their own eye when they saw on television. They’re denying their actual own experience in this revisionist history. And so if in fact, these people are really patriots, then the people who were trying to assault the house chamber in that video and saying if we have to kill a few crooked congressmen, you know, we will.

That sort of thing, then that does become justified. So I am concerned about this, and this transformation is amazing. Again, this is the thing about Trump. Now, and I’ve said this right almost from the beginning. That trump is Trump.

I mean, trump does what trump does. I think he’s gotten a lot worse, but I think we need to sometimes turn the camera around to the people who are watching Trump. The way that he has managed to transform the political culture and character of his party much of the country is truly extraordinary. And maybe it was inevitable that if you embrace somebody who is that fundamentally, a malignant narcissist and a liar, that fundamentally that’s gonna require you to internalize some of that corruption yourself. And eight years on, we’re seeing exactly what that means, and it is dangerous.

Can we end on a more positive note here? I I feel like we ought to.

I got nothing, but, you know, well, I think the government’s gonna be operating for another year. My happy story is Kevin McCarthy managed to make it well, not quite a year. Right? He managed to make it wet and I eight, nine months by, having to Yeah. Yeah.

Between crazy Republicans and fiscal reality and having the deal cutting the deal with Biden. So the Republicans, house Republicans, chucked him out. They bring in Mike Johnson, And Mike Johnson is doing the same thing McCarthy did. He’s cut another deal with Biden to extend the funding for the government. Hopefully, we’ll avoid a shutdown.

And this, of course, will run out when when the patients of the free the freedom caucus has already said they don’t like the deal because it doesn’t cut enough, right, and it doesn’t give them enough border concessions and all that. So they’re gonna chuck Mike Johnson, but Mike Johnson, let’s just hope. Here’s my little pony will have served his purpose. He will have got us through the next shutdown threshold and kick the can down the road. Okay.

Are you saying he’s not gonna survive? Are you saying we’re about to go into more speaker revolving door?

Not not about to. I’m saying what’s what is the lifespan of a of a Republican house speaker with a two hundred and team vote majority. Right? It it’s whenever Matt Gates decides to get rid of you. And so McCarthy made it like eight or nine months.

And what Mike Johnson has going for him is that he’s the new He hasn’t yet had to tarnish himself, but but he just did. He just cut this deal with Biden, and it’s acceptable to Biden. And it’s not acceptable to freedom caucus. So at some point, they will say, you’re just like McCarthy and Chuck him out. But Charlie, I think that’s another few months down the road.

Let’s stick with you today. Deal.

An amazing outbreak of bipartisan compromise that does not actually shut down the United States of America.

I’m not

I would wanna stop right there before we keep going. Okay. Thank you so much for another Monday. Thank you, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast.

I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again. Volebrook podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.