Will Saletan: The Dem’s RFK, Jr. Problem

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is June fifth two thousand twenty three. The anniversary of the infamous crackdown in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese. We should double back on this a little bit later because Donald Trump very famously praised that as a show of strength as what a strong country does.

In any case, because it is Monday, my colleague Will Saletan is back. Will?

Have a good weekend? I did, Charlie. I’ve got a couple of fewer teeth than I did last week because I had some interesting dental stuff going on, but, you know, hey, this is what happens.

But you’re hale and hearty other than that. I mean, it’s not like losing a vital organ.

That’s what you tell yourself, you’re like, you know, if it happens to your teeth, you got, you know, thirty one more of those.

You could say, hey, Charlie Sykes got one less lung than I did a week ago, and I would say, hey, so does the pope? So, you know, it’s it is a boy, this is an offensive beginning. Okay. So let’s just start with some of the the big news of the day. Donald Trump thinks it’s coming.

Donald Trump thinks he’s going to be indicted. He put out a true social bleat. Reports are that the marks a special prosecutor, DOJ, and FBI want to indite me on the all caps boxes hoax. Despite all of the wrongdoing, they have done for all caps seven years, including all caps spying on my campaign, which never happened. Period.

Biden crimes go unpunished, including that he had bought in Chinatown in his garage by the corvette and eighteen hundred and fifty boxes in Delaware that he won’t let anyone see, that is real All caps, obstruction exclamation point. They seek retribution for Republicans looking into Biden’s all caps crimes exclamation point I have done nothing wrong, period election interference exclamation point. So he thinks it’s coming, and this comes the day after we learn grand jury in the Trump classified documents case is expected to meet this coming week after a hiatus. And if you read one thing about this case, the New York Times has a fascinating piece over the weekend. Trump lawyer’s voice memo could be a key in the classified documents inquiry.

So well, Lordy, there are more tapes. Here’s this one one sentence here. In complete sentences, and a narrative tone that sounded as if it had been ripped from a novel, mister Corcoran recounted in detail a nearly month long period of the document’s investigation according to two people familiar with the matter. So he recorded it all. And now the special prosecutor has it all.

So if I’m reading this story about the lawyer’s testimony correctly, this is like a script that the lawyer wrote down to testify

I’m cool.

He’s being extremely careful to protect himself, the lawyer. But it appears Charlie that he is just a witness. He is the dupe. In this story, Trump, apparently, con him and other people about what documents were there or were not. And so it’s the misleading of the lawyer that’s part of the story.

But really kinda interesting the way when you drag a lawyer in to testify, which almost never happens. Am I right?

Very very

That’s extremely difficult. The lawyer goes in making sure that he is not under any legal threat. So he’s got his script down about what happened to him. And if somebody’s gonna go to jail for this, it’s not gonna be the lawyer. He’s gonna make sure that it’s gonna be Donald Trump.

No. That’s right. And this is an important point actually because a lot of the commentary out there is speculation. Right? Because we don’t know what the grand jury is going to do.

We don’t know what the special prosecutor is going to do. We don’t know if they’re I mean, with this, you know, make a long list of things that we don’t know. So, you know, this is why I’m very, very cautious about the whole walls closing in type thing. However, there are some things that we know including the fact that a federal judge ruled that in fact, Jack Smith could have access to the lawyer’s notes because he was piercing the attorney client privilege using the crime fraud exemption. In other words, this federal judge has formally ruled that yes, there is evidence that a crime was committed and therefore takes the extraordinary step of piercing that shield.

So that did happen. We do know that. Mhmm. Just laying that all out there. Okay.

So otherwise, over the weekend, I think everybody in the world by now has read Tim Alberto’s piece on I’m exaggerating only slightly. Tim Alberto’s piece in the Atlantic about Chris Licht, shall we say the besieged CEO of CNN. It was a thorough defenestration. He had complete access to the CNN boss. We thought this was a good idea to bring him along.

It’s quite an expose. And, you know, one passage that I excerpted in morning shots this morning, talks about what happened at the infamous Trump town hall meeting that went so well. It seems obvious, he writes, that CNN leaders had been contorting their coverage to keep Trump happy, perhaps to prevent him from walking off stage. At one point during the pregame show, when the words sexual abuse appeared on the CNN chiron. One of Lix’s lieutenants phoned the control room His instructions stunned everyone who overheard them.

The Kyron needed to come down immediately. And Tim Alberta, who wrote that, tweeted out this morning. Cannot overstate how shocked, shaken, CNN staffers were at the time of this episode, and how irate others have been as the story spread, justifiably so. If this decision was indeed made to appease of the Trump team to keep him from quitting the town hall, it is an absolute scandal. And that’s like only one of many, many details here.

So I don’t know what do you think the the over under whether Chris Lick survives? I’ll put five down and he doesn’t last a month. What do you think?

Yeah. I’m not selling Chris Lick any career insurance right now. Can I just pause on this story about the Trump town hall? This is kind of an interesting rebuttal, a refutation to some extent of the sort of right wing myth about the media. Now it is true that, you know, a lot of people in the media are liberal, and that’s the way they think.

But here we have a case where CNN, the ostensibly liberal Bulwark, is essentially self censoring. Right? They take this sexual abuse, Kyron, off the screen, and Trump’s about to go on. Why? Why would they do that?

That behavior on their part is not consistent with an ideological analysis of the news. It’s not like they’re fake news, they’re left wing, it’s that they’re a business, Charlie. Right? CNN is a business. It is has been losing viewers.

It is afraid apparently in this story that Trump is gonna, like, walk off set that there you know, this town hall will be a disaster. They need to keep this guy happy because he brings audience. He brings eyeballs and that’s good for their business. Right?

But was it good for their business? It seems like it was a sucky business decision.

It was bad journalism, but also not the savvy business move that they might have thought. You may be right about that, but that’s retrospective. Right? At the time, they were desperate to get him on. In fact — Right.

—

Trump bragged one of the hilarious things, the sadly hilarious things about that town hall was Trump just demeaning CNN about how they begged him to come on, and they desperately needed his viewers. Right? And at the time that that executive says pull down the the Kyron, that is a business decision. That is we’re afraid we’re gonna alienate Trump. We don’t want him to walk off.

And And so it’s the news business, that bias, that a lot that people should worry about.

Okay. I think that that is a legitimate point. I think people do need to understand what the incentive structures on all of these media, you know, operations are. On the other hand, as you read this account, you realize a couple of things, including the fact that some of the people who are making have the most power in the American media ecosystem. Are not deep thinkers.

I mean, you know, I mean, this is the thing is, Chris Lick thinks that he’s got this insight that we need to move back to the center, that we need to get the audience back. But he clearly hasn’t thought it out. And and Tim Gilbert does a really good job of pointing out that, okay, your analysis of your credibility issues has merit. But the execution was horrifically bad because you could not connect the dots. And he even has seen where Chris Lick is telling some college students.

You know, you know, he’s figured out how to handle Donald Trump. I’m not worried about it. We’ll just handle Donald Trump like any other candidate. Which shows that he clearly did not know what he was doing. I mean, that was that

was the flaw here. Just to follow-up on that, this is something that I have learned as I’ve gotten older. So when you’re a young person, you see people in positions of power, the political power economic power, CEOs. Right? And you think there must be some reason why this guy got there.

Right? He must be really smart. They must know some things. Yeah. As you get older, you begin to realize that they truly don’t know more than you.

I mean, you know, Chris Lake knows things about the media business, but they make mistakes, big mistakes all the time. And it certainly appears. One of the things that I love about this Tim Alberta piece is that Tim goes, you know, deep into this. With the reporting and essentially confirms that. Right?

Lict has made lots of mistakes. He just didn’t know things. A lot of times, companies bring in a CEO. He’s supposed to fix things. He has an idea, but the idea is bad.

It doesn’t work. And then they bring in another one and another one. But that doesn’t mean that there’s some genius to these people.

No. There’s there’s not. I wanna get to Jack Dorsey in a moment. I have to mention one of my tweets is actually quoted in this piece in the reaction to the town hall. It actually has, you know, tweets from Dan Rather, AOC, Adam Kinzinger, and me.

I wrote Chris Lick is rapidly becoming the Elon Musk of CNN. Right? Right? This has actually aged pretty well. Speaking of CEOs who you think are these great geniuses who understand things and clearly don’t.

What what is the report in the New York Times this morning that advertising revenue at Twitter is down by fifty nine percent. Good luck with that business model. Speaking of of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, the previous CEO of Twitter — Mhmm. — who we we sort of have had moments of, you know, nostalgic flashback. Hey, remember the good old days when before Elon Well, he tweeted out an endorsement, and I’m not kidding you.

He tweeted out an endorsement yesterday of r f k junior for president, that r f k junior can and Will Saletan Biden and Trump. An r f k junior is a I’m sorry, batshit crazy Grifter Vax conspiracy theorist who talk about a strange phenomenon right now. You have any thoughts about RFK junior? So, you

know, can it get worse than having a crazy Republican party? Yes. Yes. It can get worse. They can get worse by having a crazy Democratic party.

Let me take you back to twenty twenty. Right? Bernie Sanders starts to surge to the front of the Democratic party. Right? And there’s all of a sudden, a sudden movement of other Democrats in the race.

Pete Buttigieg and and Amy Klobuchar and a bunch of others. Right? All these guys, they’re like, this can’t happen. And we’re gonna pull out of the race and we’re gonna consolidate behind Joe Biden and bring our party back to sanity. So go forward now to the twenty twenty four race.

We don’t have that anymore because Biden kept everybody else out of the race. There isn’t a aggression with Marore, Jared Polis, or whoever in the race to do that. So Joe Biden’s gotta hold this down by himself. But there’s so many Democrats who don’t want Biden to be the nominee. I mean, they’ll vote for him in a general election, that there’s this huge pocket open for a nutcase like Robert f Kennedy Junior.

Right? So, I mean, among other things, we know about the crazy vaccine stuff mean, he’s got a whole bunch of other crazy ideas,

but there’s a lot of baggage there.

But the point is that if he starts to gain traction, what is the force that’s going to pull in the Democratic against him. I mean, I hope it is simply that Democrats look at his record and and say, you know, we can’t have this guy as our nominee, but there isn’t a consolidation that can happen. Because that’s already happened to the extent it will.

Well, and also, you know, there is this phenomenon that I think we need to constantly remind ourselves of that not everybody is as online as are. Not everybody pays attention to politics the way that we do. And that there are millions of people who probably looked at his name and go, Robert f Kennedy Junior. He’s a Kennedy. Wow.

You know, this is a return to camelot. And they don’t know any of this other stuff. So what a surprise that he’s pulling so well at least initially, it’s all name recognition. And then I think that there’s a certain cohort of a certain age that looks back nostalgically on on our f k. And, by the way, there’s his anniversary of his assassination as well coming up.

So there is that danger that unless people are informed, no, this is not that RfK this is the son who has gone through some things. Right. And he is weird, and he is dangerous. And there are questions about his ethics and his judgment and one would hope that the media would not make the same mistake with R f k junior that they made with Donald Trump back in twenty sixteen, which was they didn’t take him seriously enough to do the normal vetting and do the kind of investigative reporting that a leading presidential candidate needs to have.

Right. And on that point, I was very happy to see in the Washington Post today that there there is some of that digging now going into RFK junior. And so in addition to the vaccine stuff, I was not aware of this, Charlie Sykes. I don’t know if you were that RFK junior has his own election theft, myth. Yeah.

Right? So Trump has his about twenty sixteen twenty twenty, all that stuff And r f k junior has his about twenty o four. R f k junior claims that John Kerry won the election. So your point about media, it’s important for the post and others to dig into this. But meanwhile, they are up against Fox News and other folks in the the right wing media sphere.

Who are promoting Rf k junior. Right?

Of course, they are. They

just wanna take down Biden. So you can count on the right wing media sphere to be promoting Rf k junior throughout the Democratic primary such as they are in order to hurt the president.

Yeah. I mean, it’s one thing for Steve Bannett Tautom. I’m just wondering, you know, how many people who listen to and pay attention to and trustee Bannon will be voting in a democratic primary given what’s going on in the Republican side. I mean, who knows.

Well, that is the r f k model, though. He’s he’s saying that he’s gonna bring people into the party. He doesn’t say like Trump, but it is like Trump. He’s gonna bring in people who are, you know, part of that horseshoe of the far left and the far right.

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Okay. We need to parse out how significant the developments over the weekend were. I’m talking about the blowback about the Kim Jong Un. Praise from Donald O’Tump, if anybody is, you know, was like living their life or something or, you know, hanging out and, you know, spending time with their family as opposed to being online. Let me just get you up speed on all of this, for some bizarre reason the World Health Organization named North Korea to its executive board.

I mean, what the you know, I mean, w t f. Let’s start right there. Donald Trump reacts the way he always reacts when one of his murderous thug friends has a success. Tweeted out or bleed it out on true social. Congratulations to Kim Jong un, which he misspelled.

But anyway, you know, there was the exclamation point. Congratulations. Nobody apparently is walking around saying do not congratulate because he does this. There was immediate blowback to all of this. Okay?

So All of the leading Republican candidates, Nikki Haley, Ace Hutchinson, even Ron DeSantis, ripped him. Brian Kemp, who is not running for president. Governor of Georgia actually put out a statement interesting. He does not feel the need to comment on everything that Donald Trump does. Right?

But he put out a statement, taking our country back from Joe Biden does not start with congratulating North Korea’s murderous dictator. And here’s here’s Mike Pence who also had this teed up for him.

But look, whether it’s my former runnymede or anyone else, no one should be praising. The dictator in North Korea or or praising the the the the leader of Russia who has launched an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine. This is a time when we ought to make it clear to the world that we stand for freedom and we stand with those who stand for freedom.

Asa Hutchinson says Kim Jong Un, the tyrant dictator of North Korea should not be praised by Donald Trump for a leadership role in the health organization, we sanction leaders who oppress their people would do not elevate them on the world stage. Nikki Haley was pretty tough. Kim Jong Un is a thug and a tyrant. He has tested ballistic missiles against our allies. He has threatened us.

He’s terrible to America. We need to stop being nice to countries that hate America. Ron DeSantis said I was surprised to see it. I mean, Kim Jong Un is a murderous dictator. They, of course, built the need to attack the World Health Organization two.

So I guess the question is, what do you think about this? I mean, I I kinda speculated why is this happening now? This is not the first time that Trump has lavish praise on a you know, this particular brutal death bot. And this is not the only brutal death bot that Trump fawns over. Right?

I mean, he’s got a bro crush on murderers that’s pretty well known. I mean, everybody has to know this. So there’s a little bit of irony to the feigned outrage over the weekend, a little bit belated since he’s been doing this now for six or seven years. Maybe I’m gonna be the optimist here, I thought it was still welcome because it shows three things. Number one, a willingness to to punch Trump, which we hadn’t seen before.

Number two, the fact that he sucks up to people like Kim Jong Un. Does underscore his fundamental unfitness for office. And three, people like Kemp and others, I think sense that this might be a vulnerability because I don’t know about you, Will, but I’m guessing that the pro Kim Wing of the Republican electorate is pretty small. So what what do you what do you make of this that they’re willing to take shots or is this just too low hanging fruit to really read anything into? Where do you come down?

Charlie, I feel like you’re stealing my pony here.

Oh, I’m sorry. I think, yeah. Okay.

I am gonna do an optimistic take on this even though it’s not that different from yours. The First of all, Trump was praising dictators the whole time he was president. Right? Mhmm. And a bunch of Republicans who who believe dictators are bad, stood by Trump, looked the other way, defended him whatever, because he was the leader of the party.

He was the Republican president. Then He’s out of office. Right? At this point, you would hope that they would revert to their principles because they don’t need Trump anymore. They don’t have to stand behind him.

They could stand up for traditional conservative ideas about foreign policy. Charlie, I think that’s what is happening. And there is some opportunism involved because this is Iowa. Right? And all these guys are trying to take down Trump in Iowa.

And the way to do it is, apparently, they figured out that you can go at Donald Trump from the right on policy. On this issue. On this issue, but so COVID was one issue. Right? DeSantis is going after Trump as as too much in the pocket of Fauci and the medical establishment.

Ukraine is complicated because you got a question of American money going there, the whole America first movement, isolationism. So that’s not politically advantageous. But Kim Jong Un is kind of an easy hit.

Yeah. I

would say they are being somewhat opportunistic in terms of playing in Iowa opportunistic in terms of choosing North Korea to focus on instead of Ukraine, but it is encouraging.

Oh, good. Yeah.

Yeah. They’re reasserting a traditional Reaganite foreign policy. Against a president who claimed to be a Republican, but just loves dictators.

On this question running from the right, so you have that weird thing that DeSantis doing where he’s trying to run to the right on vaccines and a variety of other things, you know, saying that and Tim Miller has a great piece in the bulwark today that, you know, the argument that he he was not harsh enough on immigrants who were brought here as children. Donald Trump was too soft on crime. He said, you know, that he was too anxious to distribute a life saving vaccine. That’s kind of a weird running from the right, and I think it’s gonna hurt to Sanders even with college educated Republicans. But on this issue of saying, you should not be praising these murderous dictators.

That does seem like something is gonna have broad appeal in the Republican Party. It is a signal. This is what a normal Republican sounds This is what a normal non seditious Republican sounds like. And I thought it was interesting that they all jumped on it. I haven’t heard from Chris Christia, but you know, we’re gonna be getting him into the race tomorrow and I have a feeling that he’s gonna have some things to say.

So, on the issue, and I wanna talk about Nikki Haley because she had her town home meeting on CNN last night that I think eight people watched. Did you watch it?

I was one of the eight Charlie Sykes admit.

Did you really

Yes. I did. Sorry.

Okay. I was gonna I was just gonna blow past it, but so tell me about it.

Okay. So Nikki Haley to me is kind of a fascinating study in we can talk about her remarks about transgender and a few other things. I think we are in agreement. That Nikki Haley is just fantastically cynical about many of the things she talks about. She she says things that are just condescendingly untrue about a lot of cultural issues.

She’s just creating wedge issues everywhere she goes. She’s a little smarty and all that. And at the same time at the same time as I say that about her, I was really struck watching this town hall that on some really big issues, that are not necessarily advantageous for her in a Republican primary and could hurt her significantly, she held her ground. Such as. Okay.

Do you wanna start with the bad stuff first or the good stuff first?

No. No. No. I wanna hear the the good stuff.

There’s too much bad stuff here. Okay. There are a couple things that I’m remembering from the town hall that really stood out. One was about she starts off being asked about Ukraine. Right?

Ukraine is not an easy issue to talk about from sort of a Reaganite point of view in today’s Republican Party. You got a lot of people, obviously, who are with with the Trump position we don’t care about other countries, just bring everything home. She stood her ground, and she said, we have to defend Ukraine. It’s about freedom. And she said something else, Charlie Sykes Trump position is if we keep antagonizing Russia, we’re gonna end up in a world war.

Right? Which is sort of a traditional lefty point of view about, like, you know, strength through peace. And instead, Haley is a search, peace through strength, and she says to the audience twice, she said, We’re not gonna end up in a world war by standing up to Russia. We’re gonna end up in a world war if we don’t. Right?

She says, if Russia takes over, you They’re not stopping there. They’ve already threatened to go into Poland, to go into the Balkans. So you’re going to get a much larger war if you don’t stand up to aggression. All she’s doing is reasserting Reaganite foreign policy. But politically, that is that was a gutsy thing for her to do in today’s republican party.

So that’s one. You want me to tell you the second one or you wanna stop?

Let’s stop there because I wanna talk about because there is a substantive debate that is now broken out in the Republican primary about Ukraine and about foreign see. With the with, you know, some of the more normal candidates, you know, the the Nikki Haley’s, the Mike Pence’s, I’m guessing Chris Christie as well, you know, taking a more traditional point of view about the, you know, peace of the spring. And then, of course, you have the appeasement or Pro Putin wing of the party and, you know, led by Donald Trump. And they we had this weird moment yesterday you. Did you catch Vivek Ramaswamy?

Well, he was on this week a b c, and he went full appeasement and full reward Russia, give Putin everything. Is Jonah Goldberg tweeted out as a perfect mix of impressive verbiage and lowbrow thinking. I mean, this is a Republican candidate for president gets pinned down on how to end the Russian invasion. And he basically says his his idea just basically give Putin everything he wants. Let’s play a little bit of this because this is this is the other side of this equation going on in the Republican primary.

I don’t trust Putin, but I do trust Putin to follow his self interest. I don’t think he enjoys being the little brother in the relationship with Xi Jinping. And so what I think we need to do is end the Ukraine war on peaceful terms that, yes, do make some major concessions to Russia including freezing the current lines of control in a Korean war style from this disagree.

Ukraine really wouldn’t wanna

Ukraine wouldn’t wanna do and also a permanent commitment not to allow Ukraine to enter NATO.

Oh.

But in return, Russia has to leave its treaty and its joint military agreement with China, that better advances American interests and actually further deters China from going after Taiwan, which I think is a much higher priority for the

United States. And she goes on point out, they’re not going to do that. You know? I mean, Vladimir Putin is not going to cut his alliance with with China. I mean, that was you wanna talk about wishful thinking.

Will Saletan, whoa.

So let me take people back up a little context here. Remember that after Donald Trump got elected there was an assessment of the Russian campaign to elect him. And one of the things in that CIA assessment said that Putin likes Russia likes businessmen. They like Burlusconi. They like Trump.

Why do they like to help those people get elected in the West? They like them because businessmen are not really well versed in geopolitics. And they’re kinda ruthless about, you know, what whatever is good for my country economically. And they just sort of lack this traditional sort of ideology or morals about dictators. Right?

About somebody like Putin. So Ramaswamy comes along in sort of the Trump lane. Right? Trump was a businessman who runs for president. I mean, Ramaswani looks different from Donald Trump, and he’s younger.

But basically, he’s articulating the same kind of isolationist and the same kind of morals don’t matter foreign policy. And what he says there, Charlie, is really notable. Can I just pause on that? He says, let’s cut this deal with Putin Because I trust Putin to follow his self interest. What exactly is Putin’s self interest if Ramaswami were to offer him this deal?

Putin’s self interest is to take the deal. Right? To say, absolutely, thank you for ending aid to Ukraine. Thank you for killing off the Ukrainian resistance. We’ll take the Don boss, We’ll take the territory we have.

Right? And you make a commitment not to let Ukraine into NATO. And I agree to tear up my deal with China, my military agreement with China, And then after the that’s done, just go right back to the his deal with China. Right? He’ll do what Hitler did.

Right? This is what guys like Putin do. They do follow their self interest, and that includes that absolutely includes double crossing you. So Ramaswami is a fool, or he’s insulting the intelligence all his viewers?

I don’t think you need to choose between the two of them. I I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. So let’s go back to Nikki Haley because you actually spent a Sunday night in early June. Watching name, Nikki Haley. You know, you’re mentioning that she sometimes sounds a little bit clunky when it comes to the the culture where I think she’s got the same problem that Ron DeSantis has, that she feels that she needs to put on this mask.

I mean, she needs to be the the culture warrior And it doesn’t necessarily come completely naturally to her. So she has that feeling of inauthenticity. Like, this is what these people want me to say, therefore, I’m going to say it. Do you read it that way? Or

So there are certain people like Josh Holly or Haili, who when I watch them speak, and I listen to what they’re saying, and I compare it to the truth, I think of them as the picture of Nikki Haley is what you would put in the dictionary next to politician. Right? She’s saying what she thinks you want to hear. She’s sort of cynically manipulating an issue. And she does that, but she kinda does it selectively is what I’m learning about her.

She has certain issues where she is totally faking it, where she’s just saying what she thinks. Will Saletan her some votes. And then she has other issues where she draws the line. And she was at this roast and ride in Iowa on what Saturday, and then she does the town hall. And at both times, I sort of noticed this.

Mhmm. And so I’m reevaluating Nikki Haley that it wouldn’t be that bad to have Nikki Haley as the Republican nominee because it appears that there are certain issues and they are the big issues on which she is willing to be principled.

Okay. So she will lean very heavily into the trans issue over the weekend. She’s not alone among the Republicans, but this was Nikki Haley talking about the trans athlete issue.

I mean, all of these things that are pushing what a small minority want on the majority of Americans, it’s too much. It’s too much. I mean, the idea that we have biological boys playing in girl sports. It is the women’s issue of our time. My daughter ran track in high school.

I don’t even know how I would have that conversation with her. How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls Seriously contemplated suicide last year?

Okay. So I’m gonna confess here that she had me about halfway through when she’s saying, this is an issue. That is of concern to young women and girls. And I have heard this. And then she goes through that somehow linking suicide rates to trans athletes being seen in the bathrooms, which I’m guessing she doesn’t have a lot of data on.

I was like, oh, come on. It was sort of like she had this this mash of ideas that she wanted to cram in. And everybody has to say that if we follow your idea, people will die because that apparently is now the default setting that if you say this, people will go and kill themselves. I’m just willing to say willing to stake out of position that the genuine problem we have with teen suicide is not linked to the fact that young women are seeing trans people in bathrooms. I just don’t think that’s what’s doing it, but I could be wrong.

So I’m with you on that. Charlie, you and I disagree about this issue to some extent. We’ve talked about it, and we’ll talk about it some more. I’m sure. Nikki Haley loses me at the beginning.

She loses me at the beginning when she says, And she said it I don’t remember exactly the same way in at this roast and right in Iowa and at the town hall, but she basically says that the transgender, the, you know, girls, boys becoming girls, is the number one women’s issue. She says it’s the number one issue. As soon as I hear that from a politician, I know that I’m hearing bullshit. I’m hearing bullshit and it’s cynical bullshit because She literally, Charlie I I can’t remember which of these I might have been at the town hall. She goes on.

Her next topic is about women being raped on the way up the western hemisphere to cross the border. Like, maybe that’s a slightly larger women’s issue than how many, like, a half a dozen, you know, kids crossing over gender wise and youth sports, you’ve gotta be kidding me. You’ve gotta be kidding me. So it’s a fake issue. And then to draw a connection, to suicide, I think you and I would agree.

The problem on the left in transgender is a lack of data. Right? You were just talking about that. We don’t really know don’t have enough evidence, enough science about what the effects are of having all these kids physically, chemically, transition, much less surgeries and whatnot. And there’s gonna be a lot of debate about that in which way the presumption should go.

But for Nikki Haley, in the absence of almost any data, to suggest that having boys who became girls in girls locker rooms is the cause of suicide among girls absolutely outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. That’s where you you

get to that, the mad libs approach to politics, which is and and you see this with Rhonda Sanders where basically, Rhonda Sanders has a speech with, like, ten or twenty blanks in it and the word woke has to go into every single Bulwark. Just throwing the the word salad Okay. So let’s talk about other things that have happened over the last week since you and I spoke, the debt deal was sealed. Came as a surprise to a lot of people that they were able to do this. Democratic votes were needed, but Kevin McCarthy was on the shows yesterday, saying that he was very, very happy that sixty seven percent of Republicans in the house voted for the deal.

There’s still a lot of I would see a lot of heartburn still going on on the right realizing that they got pants on this particular deal. You wrote a very interesting piece late last week about the antagonism caucus, which, you know, basically, the negative tribalism that you see. So talk to me a little bit about this because you’re you’re seeing a lot of butthurt going on on on the right about how that vote turned out.

There’s a couple of interesting threads we could pursue here. The one about negative tribalism is that we now have a pretty significant number of members of the House Republican conference really members of the Freedom caucus who explicitly said they were gonna vote against the debt deal because the Democrats were voting for it. They have some policy objections, but if you are literally going to do the opposite of whatever the other party does, then by definition, you can’t get any unity. We’re in this kind of zero sum situation. And so it’s kind of no wonder that Kevin McCarthy had trouble rounding up more Republicans to vote for this thing because he needed Democrats to backstop him.

Right? And the Democrats did backstop him. The Democrats provided votes to make sure that the debt ceiling passed. But we’re gonna be in a really difficult position as a country if we need Congress to unite to do some very basic things like, you know, pay our debts, to support the defense of Europe against Russian aggression there. All of that’s gonna be much, much more difficult if one party refuses to do whatever the other party does.

Well, it is interesting that this has become kind of a a go to, you know, line about an a piece of legislation, not arguing this specific are making the case for it, but simply saying, well, if Democrats voted for it, it must be bad. Right? And so listen to senator Mike Lee who Back in the midst of time was regarded as one of the smart principled senators. Listen to this hackery from him.

More Democrats voted for it in the house than than Republicans, and more Democrats voted for it in the senate than Republicans. That tells you about something.

That’s exactly what you’re talking about here. Right? One one more. Okay. Kevin McCarthy goes on of all places.

Maria Barta Romo show. By the way, Maria Barta Romo still has a job, which is And he’s also talking about this must be good because Lookue voted against

Which Democrats voted against this? AOC. Bernie Sanders, the progressives. Why did they vote against it? Because we did get work requirements in welfare reform.

See, if if they hate it, it must be good if they like it. And Maria’s like, oh, yeah. Oh, Kevin. That’s good.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, McCarthy knows what motivates this faction of his party and he’s he’s giving it to them. Can I can I point out that Mike Lee’s statement is self fulfilling? Right?

First of all, the House Freedom caucus holds a press conference and they say, we’re gonna vote against this thing. There’s so many Democrats voting for it that shows it’s bad. Right? And then they do vote against it. And then Having voted against it and Mike Lee voted against it in the Senate.

Right? Mike Lee votes against it along with most of the other Republicans in the Senate. And having done that, he says, see more Democrats than Republicans voted for it, which means it’s bad. So it’s completely circular argument. Right?

I justified voting against it, then we voted against it. Then the fact that we voted against it means more Democrats did, and that makes it bad.

So let’s circle back to the presidential campaign because we are gonna have at least two more announcements this week. I’m not a surprise Christie is gonna be getting in, and then Mike Pence is going to be getting in. There’s a guy from North Dakota who’s getting in. Do I need to learn his name? Is it worth spending any time on that?

Yeah. It is. It’s Doug Bergam. Just just say it over and over again. Okay.

Doug. Okay. Why why is Doug Bergam running?

He’s running because North Dakota is very close to Iowa.

And? Sorry.

That’s the answer. Wow.

But it’s not that close. It’s not the border state. We also ought to remind people that Iowa has a somewhat shaky track record for picking the eventual nominee. I just wanna say that that doing well in Iowa does not necessarily translate into doing well in say, New Hampshire or South Carolina or someplace else. Do wanna mention that.

I think it’s important. I look at this and I’m thinking, okay. So there are a lot of reasons for people to run for president, including the fact they might wanna be vice president, or they might wanna write a book, or because they wanna get fifty thousand dollars of speech instead of just a mere twenty thousand dollars of speech. There’s lots of reasons And yet, there’s also the possibility that they are looking at the particular race, looking at Donald Trump who looks dominant right now, Did you see, by the way, what Ryan Spribus said? Talk about going to, you know, complete toe licker.

He says that Donald Trump is the Bruce Springstein and everyone else with the cover ban and the cover band. They’re gonna be standing up there. All these cover bands — Mhmm. — and he’s the Bruce Springsteen. But these other candidates are looking at this thing, okay, there’s these unknowns.

These indictments, which we’ve all told ourselves just make him stronger. They think something might happen. Right? And they want to be there. Do they see something we don’t see?

Yeah. No. I don’t think they know any more than we do about the chances of that happening. And in fact, if they think that Trump is gonna be brought down by an indictment. I agree with you, Charlie.

I think that inference is mistaken. Right? It’s not that Trump is gonna get hurt. If another prosecutor turns against him. That’s that just goes to his point about the deep state and the woke prosecutors are out to get me.

But I think it’s just opportunism. It is true that these minor candidates who are getting into the Republican side are not treating Donald Trump like he’s the incumbent. Right? In the case of Joe Biden, almost nobody is getting in the race against Joe Biden on the Democratic side because he’s the incumbent president. Trump wanted that to be the case running for his job another time, but they’re clearly betting that it is okay to oppose him.

As long as they oppose him on some grounds that the base will support.

Yeah. I I’m tempted to say and then I will regret having said it. You know, maybe it depends on what the specifics of the indictment are, but I think that that would be naive. I think the document case is going to be more so persuentive than I had originally thought it was going to be. In fact, I think I’m on on the record of saying at some point, well, you know, that’s probably not gonna be happening because of, you know, depends in the Biden stuff.

But I think it’s clearly differentiated enough. It’s a completely different story. It’s about obstruction. The folks had just secured I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see this folks had just security have done sort of a mock prosecutorial memo. Basically, the memo that prosecutors would use to decide whether to bring the charge, and it is impressive, it is detailed, and quite persuasive, whether it makes a difference politically, I don’t know, Because I got one more sound bite here.

This is Ken Buck, who is also on the Sunday shows. And he’s clearly very brand happy, by the way, with Kevin McCarthy in the way he handled this. Part of the problem that Kevin McCarthy has, we don’t know all the promises that he made to get the speakership, and there does seem to be a certain sort of grinding distrust. That that he might have reneged on some of his deals, but that’s not why I wanna play the Ken Buck. Ken Buck is asked about, would it be better if you didn’t have I don’t know.

A nominee wearing an ankle bracelet.

I don’t look at the actions that he has taken, that are being investigated as much as his his role as a former president and and what his policies were.

That wasn’t very smooth, was it? First of all, I mean, it’s I I don’t really care what he’s done or what laws he’s broken or his character. I just I just think he’s been such a great president and

Right.

And they’re gonna ride that pony all the way through twenty twenty four.

Yeah. I mean, Ken Buck is saying, basically, I don’t care. I I don’t care about any of that. All I care about is you know, policies? Did he make the trains run on time?

And from Buck’s point of view, Trump did that. And and Buck goes on to say in that interview, you know, that he doesn’t think if Trump gets indicted, that it’s gonna he says that could actually help Trump for the same reasons we were just discussing that it just shows everybody’s out to get Trump. So there’s just a general indifference in the party. So that that’s one reason why I think that these bets on on Trump on something materially happening. So I think that these republican candidates who are running against Trump.

If they think something bad is gonna happen to Trump indictment wise, that on the merits will hurt him, they’re wrong. But but caveat, they may be right that the whole image of Trump being saddled with stuff, you know, and just Trump fatigue and Trump losing that that will hurt because I see a lot of folks. I Ron DeSantis. I see Haley talking about Trump being a loser in the baggage and all that. And let’s move on.

That general feeling may work. I just don’t think it’s gonna work for the very small candidates. I think it’s gonna work if it works for someone like DeSantis.

That’s right. And of course, you know, DeSantis was void for months by the idea that he was going to be the Trump killer. They know that he’d won by nineteen points and he would roll into this presidential campaign and he would become the obvious alternative that would be acceptable to almost all the factions of the Republican Party. And, of course, that didn’t play out the way that it was planned. He had a very bad rollout.

He’s had a lot of questions about him. There’s a huge amount of investment out there in the punditocracy in trying to say, well, he can still come back. He still can be resilient, which is of course true But I don’t know, Will. I keep watching him and this is not a guy with top tier political skills. I don’t know how many ways to say this without being redundant.

I mean, he is not a gifted politician, and I’m not sure that his instincts are right at the moment and how he’s doing. And you’re already starting to see, you know, that his core base has been college educated republicans, and he’s starting to slip with them too. And apparently, he’s decided that he’s gonna go as crazy and right wing as possible in the primary, but I don’t know that that’s going to get him the Trump votes, and it may cost him his college educated support. How do you see that plan out?

No. I think that’s true. And look, among folks at the bulwark, I was more bullish on DeSantis than anyone else. And when he was in front, that was merited. He got a good record to run on in a Republican primary.

He’s a resume candidate. Right? The resume candidate when he’s ahead does well. A comeback is a completely different story. For someone to come out of the field from fifty points behind Donald Trump and take it from him.

The person who soars like that is not gonna be someone who has a strong resume but not very good retail skills. The person who does that is gonna be someone who just catches fire, who’s a really good speaker. And it’s pretty clear by now that that’s not Ron DeSantis. Right? We’ve seen lots of him with people.

Ron DeSantis is a young man, but he’s had lots of time to, like, experience other human beings and try to talk to them. And what we’ve seen so far is she’s not very good at it. So I think it’s extremely unlikely that DeSantis takes off based on anyone loving him or liking him He would only take off if he won at the beginning and began to develop some of that idea that if anyone’s gonna take out Trump, we need to get behind this guy to Santos.

Yeah. And the problem is that if DeSantis does stumble, they’re gonna need a plan b. The anti Trump Republicans need a plan b. Whether whether it’s Glen Youngen or whether it’s a Brian Kemp. But by the time they realized it is not going to be DeSantis, it may be too late.

It was one of the things that we We forget every four years and then we have to relearn is how fast this process goes.

Mhmm. The

you know, once it gets rolling, it becomes unstoppable very, very quickly The one exception to that was the Bernie Sanders rolling to the nomination in twenty twenty, and then Democrats realized, whoa, we really don’t wanna do that. We were, like, ten days away from Bernie Sanders as the nominee, and that didn’t happen. But I don’t know whether you’ll be able to stop this. When it comes to Donald Trump. Although, I just urge people to this seems unfair.

I’m trying to imagine anyone reading his truth social comments on a regular basis and not thinking, oh my god. I think I said this last week that if this was a coworker or a family member who is putting this stuff out on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, you would have a family meeting to talk about having an intervention. Or calling for a wellness check. I’m really not kidding here. You’d go, Grant is going through something.

We need the help

for Grand. Okay. Now, I feel like dragging the Charlie Sykes about a year or two ago back at into this conversation to remind the president Charlie Sykes. The we’ve been here before. Right?

Trump say, some crazy stuff that we thought would turn people against a minute. It didn’t happen.

But but

It never it

never does.

At some point, theoretically, we could get to a point where we’re starting to see signs that the behavior is changing. And so that’s why I’m really interested in what you flagged at the beginning. This tweet about Kim Jong Un. Yes. So this did not happen.

Right? We didn’t get to the stage where Pence and Haley and the sand and everybody was Brian Kemp, my god, people coming in from all over, recognizing, hey, Donald Trump went too far here, and we’re not afraid to say so.

That’s why it’s significant. Potentially significant.

Right. So we may be seeing a breakthrough. If it’s not this time, it may be the first sign of that there will be another one, and that may be a breakthrough. I don’t wanna hold out too much hope, but there are some signs.

Well, and because Donald Trump will do it again, I mean, there will be a moment in which he will say something about Vladimir Putin. Well, he will say something about President Xi. And this I think is a danger for him because it really cuts at his image of being, you know, the strong America first. When in fact as we know, because we’ve we’ve watched him for so long. The fact is that Donald Trump is purely transactional, and and there are other things perhaps going on as as well.

But the idea that he is a super Patriot that he embodies American values, has always been a fiction because he is fascinated by the use of force by the Chinese to put down the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, you know, his his admiration for Vladimir Putin. And the fact that other conservative Republicans are willing to call him out on that, there is a potential. And I wanna just stress potential. Not saying this is a game changer. But there’s a wedge between Donald Trump’s strength with the Republican electorate and the reality.

And this is one of the things that that I’ve long thought that if you wanna take somebody down, don’t go after just their weaknesses, go after their strength. And if Donald Trump is wrapping himself in the flag, while sucking up to murderous, you know, gelatinous gangsters like him, that’s going to erode that image that he has cultivated, and they relies on to keep the Republican base in line.

What’s interesting to me about this in part is you referred earlier to what Mike Pence said in response to this thing about Kim Jong un. And what’s interesting to me about Pence is he didn’t just go after Trump on the Kim Jong un.

He mentioned Putin. He

brought in Putin too. And so we’re starting to see the beginnings. This is just Mike Pence, but we’re seeing the beginnings of a general indictment of what you’re about. Donald Trump having no values not really standing up for America or just being a tool of dictators. And so one of the background questions for the twenty twenty four Republican primaries is is Reaganism dead.

And there are some people who believe the Republican Party will never go back to that. But I am seeing signs in Haley, in Pence, in some others that there is still a coherent reaganism, and that Trump’s positions on North Korea, on Ukraine, on Russia, and some other areas of the world, violated that and that there are politicians who are running for president, who are willing to stand up in a Republican primary and think that they can survive and possibly profit politically by hitting Trump on those issues. And if that is true, then racism is not dead. Reaganism can renew itself can return in the Republican Party. That would be really interesting.

I am actually more skeptical than you are about that. But these are vulnerabilities in public and primary. And there’s one other issue

that I’m gonna be very

interested to know whether anyone is going to do. So you’re pointing out that, you know, can you really put America first when you’re sucking up to Kim and when you’re sucking up to Vladimir Putin when you are lavishing, you know, the Chinese president with praise. I mean, that’s gonna be a legitimate question. But who will raise the question about whether or not Donald Trump is really a one order president whether he really backs the blue considering his enthusiasm for the January six rioters. Nikki Haley sort of edges toward it by saying, you know, well, Donald Trump says the January six was a beautiful day.

I think it was a terrible day. Mike Pence has clear thoughts about whether that was you know, violent riot. Chris Christie is going to bring this up. So that’s another point that I think erodes one of Donald Trump’s strength. And the most obvious one of all is that Donald Trump is the quintessential winner.

And that’s why I’m gonna be interested to see what Chris Chris does because Chris Christie is the one guy, I think, capable of saying to Donald Trump. And by the way, Donald Trump will never appear on a debate stage, so people eliminate that fantasy. It is not gonna happen. He’s never gonna debate these guys. But you can imagine Chris Christie, metaphorically, pointing a finger at Donald Trump and saying, Donald, the thing about it is you portray yourself as a winner, but you’re a loser.

You lost that election, you lost the presidency, and then you lied about it. And as a result of that, there was an attack on the capital. If you basically link together loser and liar, you might actually, you know, draw some blood. But again, you know, I mean, until that happens, it hasn’t happened. Right?

I’ll make

you the pony guy on this one. I will bet that that never happens. What? Laser and liar.

Somebody’s gotta say he’s a loser. See, this is the problem with DeSantis. His entire rationale is I can win. He’s a loser. We have to get rid of the culture of losing.

Well, I’m sorry. Ron, what are you talking about? Who is the loser we’re talking about? Say it. Say the word.

Right. He’s gonna wait. They’re all gonna wait and hope somebody else does it. I would love for it to be true, but I’m afraid the only person who’s gonna say that is you, Charlie.

I think there might be some other people on the Bulwark who might say something similar. Luis Cheney might say something like this. Adam Kinzinger’s gonna say something like this. There’s a small small group of us We few. We happy few.

It will be said, Will Saletan. Thank you so much. We will talk again next Monday looking forward to that.

Alright, Charlie. Take care. 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. Bohlberg podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.