Will Saletan: The GOP Surrenders before 1st Vote

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast, and happy Monday. Happy Martin Luther King Junior Day. Happy Iowa caucus day. Welcome back, Will Saletan. How are you?

I’m doing great, Charlie. We have this stuff outside that’s white. It’s a little cold. I’m not sure what it is. Can you tell me?

Yeah. This is winter. So as you and I are speaking, we’re in the midst of the polar vortex here in Wisconsin. It is right now, minus eight degrees. That’s not windshield.

That’s minus eight degrees. So it was an eventful weekend. You know, as predicted, I spent much of it snow blowing multiple times. It was heavy. I know nobody wants to hear about the snow blowing.

I have to confess that I actually don’t mind snow blowing. I have a pretty big snow blower and Usually, I can, you know, you have a sense of accomplishment. It’s there and then it’s gone. So that’s okay. But because this was very, very heavy snow, very heavy wet snow.

We had massive power outages all over the area. And I was without power. We had a complete blackout here for twenty four hours. Starting Friday night till nine o’clock, Saturday night. Now, I mean, that’s bad enough, but because I have a well pump, That also means no power, no heat, no water.

Wow. Here’s a pro tip here. You can last a very long time without electricity. If the toilets don’t work, if the water’s gone, kind of problematic. So my wife and I went out and I will confess that dry January was, had a power outage on Saturday.

We had to go out, get a couple of beers. Download some stuff to watch at the local, you know, but we survived. So at

least we’re online now. You are hearty Midwestern folk, and we count on you for these things. By the way, Charlie, can I congratulate you on an American ritual? It’s not quite as regular as the Iowa caucuses, but every four or five years or so, the packers take the cowboys out of the NFL playoffs, including the last two times in Dallas, if I’m not mistaken. So Congratulations on that.

It’s an American thing, apparently.

Okay. So it is very, very cold here in Wisconsin, but it is made much more tolerable by that thumping last night, which by the way, nobody saw. I mean, all the smart kids in sports world, they all called. It was gonna be the Dallas Cowboys. They were at home.

They were It won, like, sixteen straight games. No seven seed had ever won. We had the youngest team in the NFL, and the Green Bay packers. Go down there. And they just, I mean, tear up the I’ve been watching Becker again for a long time.

I said to my wife, I said, you know, this is the most efficient packer team that I have ever seen in that score. You know, when you look at the score, you know, forty eight to thirty two, it wasn’t that close. It was it was way worse than that. There was a lot of garbage stuff.

One reason why I need to congratulate you is that I’m a Texan, so I was rooting for the cowboys. I’m also I still got the Texans they’re still in. Right? But this is a regular thing. And it’s kind of an American story because the packer’s being sort of the a different kind of in franchise.

Well, we are

we are the real Americas team. I don’t know what that that stuff is.

Yeah. So upsets do happen. And in this case, they happen for you, and I’m happy for you.

It was a good one. And you know what? It was really worthwhile. Just every once in a while, they would take that shot of Jerry Jones sitting up there in his skybox, looking all just scrambled and everything. Sad.

You know, thoughts and prayers, Jerry. I actually like Mike McCarthy, who used to be the packer coach

Oh, yeah.

I have no ill will to him whatsoever. There’s no rivalry and everything. The fact that Jerry Jones might fire him after back to back twelve wind seasons I mean, what an ass hat?

You know what I’m saying? So I don’t think he will. No. I don’t think he will. Okay.

Alright. So, I I’d actually given everything else that’s going on in the world, the dark timelines that are all around us. I I’d rather spend the entire podcast talking to you about last night’s game, but I We really can’t do this. So where do we start today? We’ll get to the Iowa caucus, in just a moment.

You know, as I warned in my newsletter this morning, brace yourself for board pundit syndrome because the the ratio of pundits and commentary to actual horse race news is growing exponentially. Means that we have to chew over less and less and less and less. We’re gonna have all kinds of creative scenarios and what if scenarios. And all of this, So take a deep breath about all of this. I’m gonna get to that in a moment.

But the other big development over the weekend, I think, is this continuing collapse of the Republican Party, the, you know, the bowing of the need of Donald Trump, which is not a new story, except the speed and the breadth of it is extraordinary. I mean, in twenty sixteen, where some of us watched this with growing horror, it took a while. They actually had to have some primary, some votes. So think about this before a single vote, has been cast in a primary or a caucus. You have one senator, one governor another, basically, saying, yeah, it’s it’s over.

We gotta endorse Donald Trump, including people like Mike Lee and Marco Rubio, who back in twenty sixteen were among Trump’s biggest critics warning the country about the danger of Donald Trump. They are not even waiting for the Iowa caucus to basically go, yeah. We wanna put this guy back in the Oval Office for another four years. So, Mike Lee, who’s become, you know, based Mike Lee, what can I say about him? Could we just play a little bit of, you know, that was then, and this is now this is Mike Lee from twenty sixteen.

Talking about Donald Trump.

It occurred to me on countless occasions today that if anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter or my mother or any of my five sisters the way mister Trump has spoken to women. I wouldn’t hire that person. I wouldn’t hire that person. Wouldn’t want to be associated with that person. And I certainly don’t think I’d feel comfortable hiring that person to be the leader of the free world.

Well, that was then. In the last eight years since then, what have we seen? Actually, Donald Trump has been found liable for actually raping a woman, but, Mike Lee, Let’s say Mike Lee has evolved. He hasn’t grown, but he has evolved. And then there’s Marco Rubio.

Marco Rubio who, I, hey, Will, I am old enough to remember. Sorry. I I need to retire that. But I’m old enough to remember. I actually have a picture.

In my newsletter, and I’m not proud of this at all. I’m just I’m just getting the embarrassment out. It’s got kinda cathartic where I’m sitting next to Marco Rubio back from twenty fifteen. When he was the hope and the future of the Republican Party. See, it turns out that Marco Rubio was, in fact, the future of the Republican Party.

Not the future any of us thought. Because back in twenty sixteen, Marco Rubio was, he held a lot back until the very end. And and then he warned America of what they would be getting if they were to elect Donald Trump, listen to Marco Rubio, twenty sixteen.

You compare Donald Trump to a third world dictator yesterday in an interview with the New York Times. How so? Well, I don’t know about a dictator. I said a third world strong man you know, he he’s running for president. So no matter what he won’t be a dictator, unless our republic complete the crumbles, which I don’t anticipate at will, But yeah, here’s what happens in many countries around the world.

You have a leader that emerges and basically says, forget, don’t put your faith in yourselves. Don’t put your faith in society. Put your faith in me. I’m a strong leader, and I’m gonna make things better. By all by myself.

This is very typical. You see it in the third world. You see it a lot in Latin America. For decades. It’s basically the argument he’s making that he single handedly is gonna turn the country around.

We’ve never been that kind of We have a president. The president is an American citizen who serves for a period of time constrained by the constitutions and the powers vested in that office The president works for the people, not the people for the president. And if you listen to the way he describes himself and what he’s going to do, he’s going to single handedly do this and do that. Without regard for whether it’s legal or not. Look, I think people are gonna have to make up their money.

I can tell you this, no matter what happens in this election, for years to come, There are many people on the right in the media and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump because this is not gonna end well one way or the other.

Oh, now, of course, he’s completely all in. So Mike Lee in particular distinguished himself, by putting out a tweet where he said, I just endorsed Donald Trump, whether you like Trump or not America faces a binary choice. No. It actually doesn’t face a binary choice. You still have DeSantis.

You have Haley. I mean, there are alternatives that goes on. Biden refuses, blah blah blah blah, because I’ll take the mean tweets as if these are mean tweets. So Philip Klein from NRO tweeted out. Aside from dismissing all of Trump’s conduct as mean tweets, including violating his constitutional oath because his ego is too fragile to admit he lost, It simply falls to say there’s a binary choice before a single Republican is voted in a primary caucus.

Jonah Golberg, also has some questions. For Senator Lee, but January sixth, the mean tweet was stripping a porn star while his third wife was nursing his newborn child a mean tweet. Was saying an eye for an eye was his favorite biblical passage a mean tweet. I’m just trying to understand what mean tweet actually means. So we’ll That was then.

This is now.

Well, I don’t know where to start with this. There’s so many ironies here. The statement from Marco Rubio that this won’t end well. Just reminds me so much of Lindsey Graham. And this teaser, they knew.

And I almost wrote, but when I wrote a long thing about Lindsey Graham, I almost I would have written one about Marco Rubio. He just didn’t talk enough, but it’s the same point. These guys all recognized the character of their party and what was happening and what and could happen, they just didn’t recognize or acknowledge that they were it. They were the people who were going to fold in the face of Trump. And in Rubio and in Mike Lee, you see two different versions of the same thing, which is so Lee’s point was about morals.

I could never support someone who talks about women treats women this way. Right? That was the moral pose of the pre Trump Republican Party, which has now been falsified by the fact that not only are Republicans all falling in line behind Trump, but evangelical republicans. Trump is doing gangbusters among people who say they believe in these values. They obviously don’t.

But the Rubio version is the other version. It’s the strong man version. Rubio was the hawk. Right? He was the guy who said in that quote from twenty sixteen, talking about Latin American strongman.

We know this type in in South Florida. We know the guy who says it’s all about him and the country all depends on him. And Trump emphatically is that person. He’s arguably even more that person today than

he was back then. Oh, much more. That’s the extraordinary thing is that given what they knew about him then. I mean, Marco Rubio has another rant race is what a con man he is. Given everything that we have seen in the last eight years, what there has mitigated their criticism.

Nothing. In fact, everything they said has been, you know, squared cued over and over and over again. Every single aspect of it has gotten worse. And yet, they’re all in, not even waiting for a single vote.

Let me come back to that point, which I think is the essential point. So we’re sitting here hours before the Iowa caucuses. As you’ve said, not a single vote has been cast. Right? So right now, just to be clear, we’re running the experiment.

Liz later on, they’re gonna say, well, it was choice between Biden and Trump, and we couldn’t have Biden. We couldn’t have the Democrats. Great. Where we are right now is the evidence that it didn’t matter It didn’t matter that as we sat here today, there were four or five alternatives to Trump. There were two former governors.

There were many exits. There are at this moment. And as we sit here, a majority of the Republicans in Congress have endorsed Donald Trump over, not Joe Biden, over these other Republican alternatives. This party has folded to Donald Trump before the binary choice, and that needs to stand as a record in history.

Now this is, rank speculation here. Why did they do it before the caucus? I mean, why now? They could’ve waited. Right?

Just a little while. And then he gave you my theory of Mike Lee, and then you do Marco Rubio. Okay. Mike Lee, I think at some level of his consciousness is gotta get in early if I wanna be a Supreme Court justice. Okay.

Now you go with Marco Rubio.

So I I think all these people are just racing to be the first They they wanna be first in line because they hope Trump will remember them. No one cares who Doug Bergam is other than his wife and possibly some people in North Dakota But Yeah. By getting out first. I mean, Doug Bergam just endorsed Trump at a rally. So he does it at a rally.

And Doug Bergam said Right. I’m the first. He literally says it out loud. None of the other candidates who ran against Trump in this primary.

Yeah.

But I have. Now the others are gonna fold. We may disagree on put down a bet on a cowboys packers game. But we’re not gonna bet, on on the question of what Nikki Haley is gonna do? I think in universal all the money goes down on she’s going to endorse Trump.

So they’re all gonna do it, but Bergam, he’s gonna be the first. And that counts because Trump is such an egomaniac, and they all know it. They all want favors. Bergam wants to be what? Secretary of Energy.

I don’t know. So by getting out in front, they want to be remembered. They’re all bandwagoners. They’re all looking at the polls in Iowa and the other states, and they all know Trump’s gonna win. But they wanna be first on the bandwagon.

Okay. But let’s go to Marco Rubio. Okay. Marco Rubio is the senator from Florida. The governor of Florida is on the ballot tonight.

The governor of Florida is still in the race. So how much does Marco Rubio Ron DeSantis? That he would do this before a single vote was cast. Look, I I I know that it’s not hard to dislike where I understand it. But, I mean, this is strikes me as one of these FUs for the ages.

Now Senator Scott has already endorsed Trump. Also, the other senator from Florida. I Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida. This is really kind of remarkable.

But Charlie, this isn’t about like. They don’t even like Trump. This is about respect and fear, and the essential lie about the Republican Party has been that it is the party of hawks. It is the party of people who stand for courage. Right?

What’s actually happened here is that they have responded to an aspiring authoritarian, a guy who has said would like to be a dictator and would be a dictator on day one. The way that they say that other people, the abusers respond to tired and abroad. Right? They’re afraid of Trump. That’s all it is.

Charlie, no one’s afraid of Ron DeSantis. He’s toast, and they all know it. So that’s why if you look at those two states, Florida and South Carolina, they both have a they have a governor and a former governor, who are in the race right now. And not a single one of those senators has endorsed their governor. Right?

Yes. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina has endorsed Donald Trump long ago. Right? Tim Scott, I think, hasn’t endorsed anyone at this point.

Give it a few minutes. Right. And both

of the Florida senators, both Ron DeSantis senators, And it’s because they’re afraid of Trump. I think that’s all it is. They’re afraid and they want to be on his good side.

The Iowa punditry boils down, I think, to three big questions. We’re doing this, of course, the morning before the primary. Number one, no, trump is going to win. Will he get fifty percent? All of the pundits need something to chew over and they’re gonna be focusing on that fifty percent threshold?

That’s number one. Number two, who finished the second? Does Nikki finish second? Does that give her big mo rolling into New Hampshire? Does it mean that we’re getting to a one on one race.

And, of course, then the question is if Ron DeSantis finishes third having been thrown under the bus by, you know, his fellow Floridians, is he gonna drop out? Is he gonna have that reality check and and say, okay. You know, that’s it. I’m gone. So what do you think?

Is there anything else you’re looking for from this?

If you look at the Iowa polls, it’s been extremely stable for the past month. Okay? This has basically been Trump around fifty points. Ron DeSantis and Haley around fifteen to twenty. It hasn’t changed much.

There’s a little shuffling going on. The Trump vote has hardly abated. Right? You said it’s minus eight up there. It’s gonna be like minus twenty in degrees tonight.

Unfortunately, for Nikki Hillian Ron DeSantis, the temperature is minus twenty eight. That is the margin. Between the closest person to Trump and trump himself. Right? So they’re they’re way under.

Charlie, there’s gonna be very cold weather, and some people are gonna stay home. Worst case scenario for Donald Trump, his thirty point margin dwindles to a twenty point margin. Yeah. I believe the highest percentage win in Iowa in a Republican primary before was was thirteen points for, like, George w Bush or something. So, like, this is gonna be a blowout regardless of what happens.

If it’s only twenty, but if it’s only twenty, because, of course, we have a lot of link to pick out of our neighbors on this. If there’s only twenty and it’s Nikki number two, Is that the story? Is the headline Trump wins butt Nikki surges? I mean, Nikki could be the headline out in the night.

Right? Here’s my pony. Here’s my pony. My pony is Yeah. And we’re talking horse race, but here’s why the horse race could matter.

It’s exactly the reason you’re talking about Charlie Sykes Ron DeSantis beats Nikki Haley, that is comes in ahead of Nikki Haley for second in Iowa. It could happen because although he’s trailing her a little in the in the final Des Moines register poll, so people know the math on this. The problem that Nikki Haley has in Iowa, and it was shown by the poll is that She has the least enthusiastic. She also has the least Republican supporters in the caucus. She got a lot of independents and Democrats voting for her, which is another story we can get to.

But she has the least enthusiastic. So if it’s really cold in Iowa, and if the cold keeps the unenthusiastic people home, I did look through the math on this. If half of them stay home, her four point lead over to Santa’s dwindles to one. If, like, three quarters of them stay Ron DeSantis comes in ahead of her. If DeSantis comes in ahead of Haley, that really kneecaps Haley.

And here’s why that matters, and here’s where my pony comes in. The only thing that matters in Iowa is can Haley come in ahead of DeSantis get in enough momentum that she could actually beat Donald Trump in New Hampshire. And she would need quite a shock because the rest of the primaries are not late. She’s got South Carolina coming, but Trump’s leading her there. Right?

Nikki Haley is the only one remaining who has even a long, long shot against Trump in the primary. DeSantis has no shot. And that’s why we need to keep her alive for another couple of weeks at least just to keep that little window of possibility open that somebody remains in the race who could beat Trump.

Okay. So you’ve been huffing the hoping to know there. I I understand. Here’s a question for you. If you lived in Iowa, would you go out and clock us tonight?

Yeah. You’re asking me though. I’m asking you. I absolutely would. I would do whatever I could to help this lady get enough votes that she could, you know

My first question would be, what time is the Steelers bills game on? Because if I had to choose between that and going to some church basement and standing up for somebody that does not know that slavery was the cause of the civil war? Not not sure that I would actually do this. Okay. So just a couple of things about this whole question.

Of enthusiasm because this is extraordinary. This Anne seltzer poll that came out over to the weekend was fascinating because this is the one shows Trump ahead But Nikki moving into second place, but she says the deep data on Haley suggests you look stronger in the poll than she could on caucus night. Adding that despite the headline of Haley’s second place, most of the rest of the data here is not good news, seltzer was particularly surprised at the enthusiasm gap between Haley’s voters and Trump voters, only thirty nine percent. Thirty nine percent of Haley’s voters were extremely enthusiastic or very enthusiastic. While the number was eighty nine percent for Trump voters.

Whoa. Seltzer said those enthusiasm numbers for Haley quote, are on the edge of jaw dropping, and at odds with a candidate moving up. Wow. So I disagree with Anne seltzer, and I

don’t and if I get in an argument with Anne seltzer, I’m gonna get in trouble. Right? But here’s my argument. My argument is this is not at all inconsistent with a candidate move Okay. Because the people Nikki Haley has acquired, the supporters she has acquired are late deciders.

They’re the people who weren’t sure they’re uncommitted people. Now they’re sort of thinking, okay, I’ll vote for Nikki Haley. Of course, they’re gonna be less enthusiastic because they’re not diehards. And so that, I think, explains why Haley has gained over DeSantis, but the people she has gained are the uncertain, unenthusiastic people. So if we had great weather in Iowa, then she could count on those people to show up and she would Ron DeSantis considerably.

And the sooner we knock that guy out of the race, the better. We want it to be a one on one. The other thing is when they looked at Haley supporters Steve Cornacki was saying this, and I hadn’t noticed it. He said half of Haley’s support in the Iowa poll comes from self described independence or self described Democrats who are voting in the caucuses. I don’t know how this is working exactly.

In other words, Nikki Haley has support, but it’s not support from Republicans and Charlie This is why Chris Christie had to get out of the race. It wasn’t that Chris Christie wasn’t telling the truth. He was telling the truth. It wasn’t that he didn’t have supporters. He does have supporters.

The problem is those people are sane people. Same people respond to the truth. And those people aren’t in the Republican primary. They’ve left or they’re not voting in the Republican primary. So You have a fundamentally diseased electorate in the Republican primary, and those hardcore people didn’t support Chris Christine had to leave, and not enough of them are supporting Nikki Haley.

She’s surviving on the sand.

So you would actually leave your house in minus twenty four degree weather. You you have seat warmers in your car?

Charlie, I’m gonna revoke your never trump card.

You wouldn’t show up. You got one

chance to vote against Donald and you wouldn’t do it?

For Nikki Haley? I would’ve maybe done it for Chris, Chris. You can’t okay. So you’re gonna then drive to some elementary school gym. You’re gonna stand, you know, in that.

You’ll be all drafty and weird with that weird lighting and everything. And you’re gonna be in a crowd of you know, be surrounded by mega hatted people. And you could be home. Not for Nikki. She’s not the one we’ve been waiting for.

Okay. More from these polls though, NBC poll, this for NBC News, majority of Iowa caucus goers say the Trump conviction wouldn’t affect their support. I’m sorry. This is Des Moines registered poll. More than six and ten likely Republican caucus goers say that it doesn’t matter to their support if former president Trump is convicted of a crime before the general election.

Whoa, not even a crime. This once again is this illustration that we do spend a lot of time talking about Donald Trump. Shift the lens to what Donald Trump has done to the culture of his party, the fact that the party of law and order has now decided voting for a convicted felon had no problem with that whatsoever. And I think that the delegitimization of the criminal justice system is gonna be one of those things that we’re going to have a hangover for a very, very long time because I think faith in institutions has been somewhat shaky and rocky, and Donald Trump has just taken a hatchet to the foundations of the legal system. Basically saying we don’t trust prosecutors.

We don’t trust judges. We don’t trust juries. We don’t trust any of that entire process. It is interesting how dramatically that has changed in the last few years. Oh, you got something there?

You got something good for me?

So we had the debate in Iowa this week. Trump didn’t show, obviously, her encounter program. So we had we had DeSantis versus Haley. So this is one of DeSantis’s statements in this debate with Nikki Haley. He says that Trump is going to face, quote, trial in front of a stacked left wing DC jury of all Democrats.

What are the odds that he’s gonna get through that. So this it’s not just Trump. It’s others in the Republican Party. I joined We’re running against him. Right.

They’re telling you So they said, don’t believe election results. Right? If our guy loses, they’re not real. Right? Don’t trust the courts.

The courts are stacked. Don’t trust law enforcement. Every prosecution is political. Right? And then we’re to the point of don’t trust the juries because if we lose the jury verdict, it’s because the jury was voting based on politics.

That sort of completes the cycle. In other words, if Trump gets convicted, it’ll be by a jury. The jury is a bunch of libs. So It is a party wide assault on faith in not just elections, but in the criminal justice system and in our own people.

We have one more really deeply pathetic Soundbite I’d like to play for you. This is Iowa Senator Joanie Ernst. Okay. Yeah. No.

I’m not saying that she’s, like, one of the great thinkers. I mean, when your main campaign team, when you’re running for US senators, that you can castrate pigs, You know? I mean, she kinda let us know where she was coming from because, of course, you know, castrating pigs is is essential to the business of governing. This is what the founding fathers, when they designed the US Senate, they were thinking, we want people who are capable of removing the testicles from pigs.

Right. I just wanna point out that in truth, in reality, the skill that makes one a Republican senator these days is being castrated by the pig. Namely the the normality for president. Go ahead.

Okay. That was not bad. That was pretty good. Okay. Anyway, this is Joan.

She’s on with Kristen Welker on the meet the president. And Kristen Wilker is pressing her on the question of pardoning the people who attacked the capital, beat up the cops, and engaged in insurrection. Now a little spoiler alert here, and this comes up here, Joanie Ernest wrote an op ed piece, you know, back in the before times after January six, where she specifically literally used the word insurrection to describe what happened. I just wanna mention this, but, again, that was then. This is now, and it’s really interesting how fuzzy political memory is.

Let’s play this sound, buddy.

And as you know, mister Trump is also talking about pardoning some of those who have been convicted. Would you advise him against that? Are you opposed to pardoning those who are serving time for January six?

Here it comes.

I am not opposed to that. That is a president’s prerogative. And so if former president Donald Trump is elected as our next president, he does have the right to do that. And I think we all need

But I mean, seven hundred of them have pled guilty to crimes related to storming the capital on January sixth, you would support pardoning them?

Well, again, I am not saying that I would support partnering them, but that is a president’s prerogative Yeah. To do so. We have seen many presidents through the years that have pardoned many others. And so if Donald Trump chooses to do that as our next president of the United States, Again, that will be his decision.

The the these are people though who attack the building that that you are in. You called them insurrectionists at the time. Would you not counsel mister Trump against part of

the home? I did not call them insurrectionists. I don’t remember using

that term.

I would say that they did break the law. They did break the law. And I am not excusing any of their behavior. But again, that’s up to the president.

That term was used in a in an op ed by you in the Des Moines register, but let me just do a quick rapid fire round

Okay. Alright. Will, I’m gonna struggle here. I’m looking fast. I’m gonna struggle getting through this without dropping more f bombs.

How pathetic that all is? You know, it’s like, well, it’s his prerogative. Yes. Well, the lot of things the president can do lot of things he has the right to do that are not the right thing to do, and she’s not able to make that particular distinction. And as I Insturrection.

Did I say insurrection? Really? Was that really an insurrection? What about, you know, the seditious conspiracy? Did I say all those things?

As I was listening to this, one of my thoughts, leaving aside all the f bombs, was if anyone thinks that there’s a chance that a Republican Senate would prove a break or a guardrail on a second Trump presidency. Forget it. They will roll over on each and every one of these things. There was nothing that required Joanie Ernst to essentially endorse or excuse pardoning the rioters who beat the living shit out of cops. There was nothing that required her to say that that, yes, if Donald Trump came in on day one and wiped away all of these seven hundred convictions that that would be a, you know, a really a dark day.

Nothing required her to have you even have a comment on it. And yet, she felt the need to embrace it. This ladies and gentlemen is the future of the Republican Party under Donald Trump. But I do think there’s some wishcasting out there. Like, well, you know what, you know, in Trump two point o, At least you have the senators and the senators would, you know, would resist the most extreme.

What bit of evidence do you have to back that up? Not even will has a pony that big.

I don’t have a pony for this one. So just to be clear for everyone, Ron DeSantis, I think, the number four Republican in the Senate. And the number three Republican John Barasso has already endorsed Trump. Again, before a single vote has been cast. All the top three Republicans in the house have endorsed Trump.

Right? Johnson, scalise, Emmett, and Stefan

What’s Mitch McConnell sitting there doing? I mean, Mitch McConnell, is he basically saying, fuck it. Go ahead, do it. But, you know, I’m old. I’m on the way out anyway.

But

The purge of Mitch McConnell is definitely coming, by the way. Yeah. But let’s come back to Ernst for a minute. So the first point is the distinction that you drew there. Tony Ernst says it’s the president’s prerogative and therefore I don’t oppose it.

And as you point out, it’s fine to say he has the right to do it under the constitution, but it’s wrong. No. She doesn’t say that. I’m not opposed to it. Yeah.

In addition, she comes up with an excuse for it. Oh, past presidents have have done pardon. So everybody does this. So we we can’t fault him. The third thing is her denying that, you know, I don’t remember having called them insurrectionists.

And how many times have we seen this now, Charlie? I’m trying to think of the other examples where The Republican politician is apologizing not for doing the wrong thing, but for having done the right thing, for having said that it was an insurrection. Anything that crossed Donald Trump, anything that could offend him, that’s what they’re apologizing for, right, not for the current cowardice. But the final point I wanna make here is the important one. It’s what you said about Republican senators rolling over for Trump.

So there was a phrase that that we’re all gonna remember now from the last week. And it was judge Pan, the DC circuit judge saying, what if the president ordered seal team six? To assassinate his political opponent. And Trump’s lawyer saying, well, could he be prosecuted for that? For murder, for murder, for walking out on Fifth Avenue and shooting somebody.

Right? And the answer was, yeah, but only if he’s impeached and convicted. And conviction as we know requires sixty seven senators. Right? So all you need in other words to commit murder, to order seal teams, sixty eight, is thirty four Republican senators.

Yeah. When you have people like, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee, and Joanie Ernst. When you’re counting on those people, what is your level of confidence that there are fewer than thirty four who would defend Donald Trump?

I think at this point, it is naive to think that they would draw the line. I mean, it it became kind of this old cliche that Donald Trump could shoot somebody in the middle of fifth avenue and not lose any votes. I think that’s now become obvious, and that includes, votes of the United States senators.

Yeah. At Christian Welker is saying to Joni Ernst. She’s asking the question three times because she can’t believe the answer. She’s saying, but Joni, these people literally physically attacked the building you are in, and she still can’t get an answer from her. So we’re inching closer To we’re not at seal team six yet, but we’re already at the point of political violence, of violence and violence committed against lawmakers.

And violence, it’s being excused.

Right. Not just violence, but excuse of violence. Okay. So on this Martin Luther King Junior We had some disturbing poll numbers, but also before we get to that, you are the piece about some things that, Donald Trump is is saying in case we missed it because Again, there is this fire hose of information. We don’t never slow down to go, wait.

What did he just say? He’s bringing back the Muslim ban and playing the birther card against Nikki Haley. And interestingly enough, that has barely raised a ripple. So we have a sound by of Donald Trump attacking Nikki Haley and calling, Barack Obama, Hussein, Obama. Let’s play that as well.

Nikki Haley opposed my Motorola. You know, she opposed the wall very strongly. She was totally against it, which tells you where she’s coming from. She condemned my strong border policy And in twenty sixteen, she stabbed the Republican Party in the back by siding with the gentleman named Barrack Hussein. Obama.

Remember Russia Ramon? Are you guys late as a gentleman? Is he rash? Yeah. Talking about Barack.

Who’s saying? Obama. Or a scientist owner who said, Obam, he was a piece of work. That’s that’s we gave him the presidential medal of freedom. Remember that?

It was very brave. He fought he fought a hard battle in the last couple of years. He fought a hard battle. But Barack, Alabama, against he want she sided with bureaucracy, a bomber against me on a thing called the Trump travel ban.

I think it goes on. He has tweeted. I don’t know if he’s actually talked about it. Maybe Nikki Haley is not eligible because her parents were not citizens. She was, in fact, born in this country.

Which means she is a natural born citizen in the in this country. Look, there’s nothing about Trump that is subtle at all. What’s interesting that you know, he wanted to use the Barack Hussein Obama, and he felt that people might think he was being too subtle. So he had to, like, really emphasize that in case Anybody missed the point. Okay.

So let let’s leave that aside. You know, his attacks on Nikki and his push for Muslim bands Again, this is gonna be part of the twenty twenty four campaign, isn’t it? Again?

It is. And to me, I’m surprised that that not more has been made of Trump’s revival of this Muslim ban. And here’s why I’m surprised and upset. The word fascism has increasingly been used to describe Donald Trump, and sometimes we feel that we’re going overboard. Okay.

He’s he wants to be a strong man. He wants to be sort of an authoritarian. But, look, this isn’t Nazi Germany. Right? This is America.

Right? That kind of thing can happen. It doesn’t happen. Let’s not go, you know, full god when, let’s not, you know, call this nazism. But Donald Trump, but let’s remember, first of all, in twenty fifteen, explicitly proposed to ban a religion, a religion from coming to the United States.

So we were already there in terms of targeting a religion. Okay? We’re not at the level of of concentration camps at this point, but we’re at that level. Alright. That happened in twenty fifteen.

By the way, of course, Trump had already at that point done his whole birther campaign against Obama. Right? So there was a lot of Muslim bashing going on.

Right.

We thought maybe that had passed. We thought maybe Donald Trump had cooled it. It has come back. What we have to remember about Donald Trump Muslims band is there were three versions of the travel band. The first one was I’m gonna ban on Muslims.

There were second versions in twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen, where Trump’s advisors, Rudy Giuliani, if you can believe it and other people got to Trump and said, they you can’t ban a religion. So let’s talk about banning people from certain terror infested countries from coming here. Nikki Haley opposed the first version, the Muslim ban. She said it’s un American, it’s unconstitutional. She supported the later versions, which were targeted at specific country.

She said, she said, I’m for keeping terrorists out, but we can’t ban a religion. Donald Trump is running TV ads right now against Nikki Haley for that position. He’s using quotes from her where she actually said drew that distinction. So he’s He’s in effect bringing back the Muslim ban. And for people who doubt that he’s serious about it and that he understands it, when he does that, Hussein Stick, and Charlie, this is at least the third time that I have heard him do that in the last week or so.

Okay. So it’s not an ad lib. He’s got it written down or he’s got it as part of his stump speech. Including the part where he hits the Hussein.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And as you point out, he’s going after Haley. He’s retweeting the thing about her parents being Indian immigrants. So she’s not So if this race actually were to get close, if I got my pony and we had a close Trump Haley race for a while, this is where it would go. He’s already signaled that he would go hard, ethnic, hard bigotry to take her down.

So I just wanna make it clear to everybody When we talk about fascism and we talk about comparisons to fascist countries and what they have done to minorities, this is not hypothetical. We are already there.

Yes. We are already there. And, of course, I also remember back in twenty fifteen when he first proposed the Muslim ban, that, there were a lot of Republicans that basically that, basically, the stood up and said, this is wrong. This is not who we are. You know, then speaker Paul Ryan, very specifically, denounced all of that.

Now not only is there no Republican pushback at all. It’s, like, treated as, like, okay, it’s Wednesday. Trump is doing this sort of thing. This is the challenge of covering this race. I should give credit where credit is due here.

I’m trying to think of who said this. We need to focus not on what is new, but with the stakes. And I think that that there is this bias that if somebody said something in the past, it’s no longer news. Well, Trump’s, you know, repetition of the guess, I’m gonna be a dictator for a day. And, you know, Barack, Saint Obama, and, you know, going, you know, the the racist, birther cards and everything.

He’s done that so many times in the past. So it’s not new. Okay. That’s not the point. The point is that this is hugely significant for the future of the country.

Now the really scary thing, and I mentioned this before, to bring this up on Martin Luther King Junior Day, this new CBS pull that I’m sure you have in front of you there. Let me pull it up here, which is really quite remarkable speaking of the, you know, worst possible timeline. Most Republicans agree with Donald Trump’s statement that immigrants illegally entering the country are, quote, poisoning the blood, unquote, of the country. This is poisoning the blood among Republican primary voters, eighty one percent. Of Republican voters believe that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country.

Also, kinda scary. Forty seven percent of all voters. Say. Only fifty three percent disagree with Trump, which is interesting when you add up these numbers because there’s no undecideds there at least in this particular poll. So here we are, all of these years after Martin Luther King Junior said I have seen the promised land.

And here we are in twenty twenty four with nearly half of Americans and eighty one percent of Republicans willing to No. Use the kind of rhetoric that was associated with, shall we say the most deplorable racist figures in world history about poisoning the blood? Damn, will.

Yeah. Well, the poisoning of the blood thing, they asked us in two different versions. One, where the where they told the response It’s that Trump had said it. And one where they didn’t, they just used a statement. I’m less horrified by the Republican numbers, which I expected, because this is a sick party than by the general numbers.

To be have that many Americans to have the electorate as a whole be that close to supporting that kind of thing is scary. And there are some numbers here that I’d like to talk about political violence in January sixth and democracy, because we you and I talked last week. There was another CBS poll at that point, and they’ve come back to ask more questions just to gauge the relative sickness of America as a whole at this point of the American population. But in terms of the Republican electorate, there were three numbers that I wanted to flag from this poll. First of all, they ask people if you had to choose which is the bigger concern for you right now, whether what America will have a strong economy or whether America will have a functioning democracy.

And the response from Republicans, sixty five percent said they’d rather have a strong economy than a functioning democracy. Alright. So the problem in the Republican Party isn’t that they’re anti democratic. It’s that they just don’t care enough about this issue. Like, they think they were better off And that’s why Christie couldn’t get any purchase.

Second finding from the poll, they asked people, if you had to choose, would you prefer to support a candidate for president who supports the people who entered the US capital on January sixth or criticizes them. Right?

Right.

Among voters as a whole, Fortunately, three to one said they’d rather have a candidate who criticize among Republicans. Among Republicans more republicans said they’d rather have a candidate who supports the people who went into the capital than one who criticizes them. Okay? Now it’s twenty four to fifteen. Most people said neither.

Okay. Good.

Right. But in other words, it’s a net loss for you. If you’re Chris Christie and you criticize the January sixth perpetrators. That’s a net loss for you inside the sick Republican electorate. Third thing, they ask people This is Republican Primary voters.

I would prefer to vote for a nominee who, and they had a list of options. The fourth most popular option was someone who would pardon those who were charged for January six, sixty seven percent of Republican primary voters said that was one of their top you know, that that was a candidate they would prefer.

Well, that explains Joanie Ernst, right? That explains these senators who are, like, put their finger up to the wind You know?

You don’t have to be crazy anymore. To be supporting the January six perpetrators inside a Republican primary, you just have to be craven. Right? You just have to be putting your finger in the wind and going with where the electorate is because thanks to Trump and thanks to the people who have collaborated with him, that is now a not just a majority, but a super majority position inside the Republican Party.

Okay. So we’re running out of time here. You know, with all of this focus, on, you know, illegal immigrants who are coming here and poisoning our blood, and this is the crisis. And this is why we need to abandon Ukraine. Is because we need to defend our own border.

The evidence is mounting today. The Republicans are completely uninterested in any kind of a border deal. That they have no interest whatsoever in actually fixing the problem that they themselves say is the most urgent crisis facing the country. Explain this to me well.

So there’s two different versions of how a conservative could approach this issue. Say you believe, as I do, that Joe Biden and the Democrats have not taken the border situation nearly as seriously as they should have. And say you believe that there’s a fundamental problem inside the Democrats party, which is if not a belief in open borders, there’s such so much sympathy for asylum seekers that even though the vast majority of them are not qualified and people are just coming in, we need to tighten things up. One approach is I’m a conservative country needs borders. Let’s tighten them up.

Let’s cut a deal with the Democrats. Let’s do what we can. The other approach is let’s be purists. We we must never have any kind of amnesty. We must we must never concede anything to the Democrats, and we get a political benefit out of that as Republicans because we keep the problem going.

As long as the border is bleeding, as long as people are flooding Yes.

Chaos is our frame.

Caravans. Remember, this has been a rep every election. It’s caravans. It’s the we need the problem. We need the problem to get our voters upset and get them coming out.

And that’s unfortunately where the House Republicans are. So they’re resisting a deal in part because they know that it is to their advantage to continue the problem.

No. I think that that is objectively true. Okay. So Today is Martin Luther King Junior Day. You know, this morning, I started very, very early during morning, Joe, and they played that sound bite.

Of the night of Martin Luther King Junior, the night before his assassination talking about, you know, that I have been to the mountaintop, and I have seen the promised land. Still get goosebumps when I listen to that. I mean, how prophetic that was, what an extraordinary speech. And yet after all of these years, that promised land. And I think for a long time, people thought, okay, we can see the promised land too.

We’re getting there. We’re moving there. We’re not the area, are we, Will? We’re not. I mean, it feels like there’s been a lot of, like, backsliding in ways that that are deeply demoralizing.

I what were your thought?

Have a couple of thoughts about this. So the first thing I wanna say is, in honor of Martin Luther King Day, I want, you know, all of you out there, go ask your Republican friends What was the cause of the civil rights movement since we already had this about the civil war? See if they answer the question without referring to discrimination or segregation. If they do, They could be a Republican candidate for president because you’re supposed to ignore the obvious now about American history. But, okay, setting that aside.

In terms of where America is, after all these years. Charlie, I think that we’re a lot better off in terms of our institutions. American institutions have gotten better. We have the voting rights act. We have the civil rights act.

We have a lot of other anti discrimination laws, and we try our best to enforce them. That’s at the institutional level. But the deeper question Charlie Sykes, are we better as people? Now if you look at polls, there has been a big shift. For example, if you take something as simple as interracial marriage, interracial dating.

There’s been a massive cultural shift in in what people say to pollsters about that. And I think there’s been a real shift. But racial resentment, right, racial fear and racial angst. I believe in the CBS poll, they ask people whether we had gone too far, not far enough or about right on anti discrimination, deI, that kind of stuff. I believe if I recall correctly that that more people in the polls said that we’d gone too far than that we’d gone not far enough.

There is always that racial resentment. And I’m not even saying that in terms of laws, you can’t point to things that have gone too far. There is some really stupid DEA training going on in this and that company. Right?

David French had a great column over the weekend saying opposing DEAI does not mean opposing diversity. Okay. Just wanna make that clear. Yeah. Okay.

Right.

I agree with it.

So you can point to that stuff, but I do believe that all the polls show and the and the politics shows that there is a lot of underlying resentment at the change that has happened since Martin Luther King. And that that remains a well of support, which you can go to you’re a politician and you want to appeal to those people. And one of the problems we have in our country is there’s a high concentration of that resentment now inside the Republican Party And I’ll say this as a former Texas Democrat. This used to be the what inside the the Democratic party in the South. Right?

And the the whole movement, they they took that away, the Southern strategy. And these people are now concentrated inside the Republican primary, and the Republican politicians have to ask themselves. Am I going to appeal to that, or am I going to try to tame that? Am I going to stand up against it? Am I gonna try to bring my voters along.

They’re not trying that, Charlie.

No. Not even trying. Okay. I agree with almost everything you said, but I wanna push back on one thing about the institution change. The one institution writ large that I think has failed really miserably has been, American education, including higher education.

I don’t think that they have figured out the way to handle all of this. The racial achievement gap in this country is a massive scandal. If we were not distracted by other things, we’d be focused on what is happening. So I think that Martin Luther King Junior would have seen successful education as the greatest instrument of racial equality of racial advancement, opportunity, all of those things. That has been unrealized.

American higher education has really, really struggled with the whole question of diversity and and how to do it. This pushback against DEA is really a pushback against this sort of, you know, attempt to impose this very rigid ideological agenda that it really does lead to, resentment. And Here’s a potentially unpopular opinion for some of our viewers. I think when you look back on the dream that Martin Luther King Junior had, you know, part of the reason that I think we went off course. Were policies like, for example, involving education, you know, compulsory busing?

Which may have been well intentioned, but has had a dramatic long term effect that has been positive neither for educational success or opportunity or for dealing with a question of racial resentment. And I think that sometimes the heavy handed use of, you know, mandatory policies, in fact, has backfired badly. But again, I don’t think that this country is now focused on how to fix this problem. In a good faith way. It feels as if the debate has been hijacked by some of the worst faith actors, and I’m peep there’s, like, about people like Christopher Ruffo, you know, who decided to demagogue this issue and throw all the the things that people find to be problematic in with things that that in fact are legitimate and confuse people so that they just don’t wanna deal with the issue at all.

I’ll agree with you. And I think Barack Obama was actually very attuned to the problem you’re talking about about not triggering the resentment, not being needlessly abrasive, although it didn’t help him in a lot of ways. Right. What really bothers me is the issues like critical race theory. Where people like Rufo, and Ron DeSantis who’s following him are gratuitously making they’re looking for wedge issues.

They’re looking to exacerbate this. And so they’re taking something like critical race there, which is a fringe thing that is taught in, generally, in, like, higher education. You go to some fancy private college, then they’re making it sort of

standing for everything. Right. Right.

Also, the transgender stuff where you take, like, the admittedly wrong situation of, like, a college swimmer who was born, you know, male and allowing that person to compete with women at a physical advantage. Again, I think the conservatives are right on the particular case But to pretend that this is the big problem for women, as Nikki Haley does, she says, like, this is what keeping girls down. Bulwark, absolute bullshit. Right?

There’s a lot of those things going on in the world there.

The search for these wedge issues and the inflation of relatively small racial or gender disputes to give the red meat to that Republican, that angry electorate that I hold the Republican Party responsible for.

No. And I think that that that’s part of the problem is is the these these bad faith actors who are willing to demagogue this who are willing to play on this resentment And I would like to say that that’s, you know, on the downslope, but I feel it’s actually, accelerating. One last comment. There’s been some other news in in the world, including the military against the Houthis in the Middle East, which, of course, threatens to widen the war. But it’s interesting how you had some progressive Democrats who’d rather valuable over the weekend in saying that, you know, the by the administration did not have the power to do that, which I’m sorry, Will.

They do have the power to do this. And, you know, watching some of the sympathy for the houthis who are engaging in this violent piracy and attacks on the United States. Do they honestly think that the United States should not react to all of this? So

Charlie, am I mistaken or didn’t or so Donald Trump truth or tweeted about this? I think he just truth about this, where The party line from Republicans about Joe Biden and the Middle East was that Joe Biden was sitting there. He was weak. We were being fired at by the Houthis for weeks and weeks, and he’s doing nothing. Yeah.

So Biden eventually says along with the Brits to hell with this, we shoot back. We shoot back in a controlled way. We’re not trying to kill their leaders. We’re trying to take out some places that they’re using to actually threaten the shipping lane. So we hit them.

And then Donald Trump goes after Joe Biden for doing this, Trump says Biden is, quote, dropping bombs all over the Middle East.

World War three.

Yeah. Right. So no matter what Joe Biden does, they’re gonna for it. I sort of, you know, rolled my eyes at this point, but there’s a larger question here, which is, is the Republican party going to be in the in its next incarnation? A fundamentally isolationist party.

Right? If you’re attacking Joe Biden for striking back at the Houthis who are attacking commercial shipping lanes and shooting back at our troops, Right? There we is we’re fortunate we haven’t had more killed at this point than you’re, you know, being in isolationist party. And one reason why to come back to Nikki Haley, and I one reason why, despite my contempt for Nikki Haley in many ways, why I want her to come out of this if she can. Is because she’s the only one left, Charlie.

She’s the only one left who’s an internationalist.

Well, I agree with her on these things.

Yeah. And in that debate, Ron DeSantis said about Nikki Haley, you can take the ambassador out of the United Nations, but you can’t take the United Nations out of the Ambassador. That was a big applause line. Right? It’s a big applause line because desantis, and Ramaswamy, and Trump, they’re all isolationists.

Christy’s gone. There’s only one person left in that Republican primary who still supports Ukraine. And that’s Nikki Haley.

Okay. So let’s get a little bit, wonky and geeky. As I I wrote this down when we were first talking about, you know, whether or not the Republican Party was going to have a hard turned isolationism This, in fact, is a watershed period for the Republican Party because you think back in modern political history or it’s used to be modern political history, two elections, nineteen forty and nineteen fifty two. In nineteen forty, Republicans could have nominated an isolationist who would have opposed Franklin Roosevelt policies that would support the allies against Adolf Hitler. Instead, In one of the great historical turning points, Republicans nominated Wendell Wilkey, who did not win that election, but in fact, helped turn the Republican Party into a reliable ally to FDR and to our our war effort.

Had they not done that? We might not have passed selective service. Who knows what American policy would have been. The Japanese probably would have attacked us anyway. So nineteen forty was one of the key inflection points when Republicans rejected isolationism and went with their nationalism.

Nineteen fifty two. Same challenge. Republicans could have gone with mister Republican, Senator Robert Taff from Ohio, a very hard line. Isolationist, instead, They nominated Dwight D eisenhower. And Dwight D eisenhower was, in fact, internationalist.

People like Arthur Vanderberg, see how wonky I’m getting here. Senator for Michigan who in fact was an isolationist in the late thirties, nineteen forties. Becomes chairman of the foreign relations committee and becomes one of the most important Republican voices for internationalism in the nineteen fifties. So, again, another inflection point, the Republicans could have taken a turn toward isolationism. In nineteen forty, with Wilkie, they didn’t in nineteen fifty two, with Dwight Eisenhower and Vanderberg, they didn’t.

Now in twenty twenty four, it appears as if they are going to take a rather incisive turn toward isolationism, which really you think about, you know, from nineteen fifty two until two thousand sixteen. Republican Party was a reliable internationalist party, and with massive consequences. Some of them negative, I will concede, but that is about to change And it’s hard to imagine at this point changing back. So nineteen forty, nineteen fifty two two thousand twenty four.

That’s an excellent historical survey. And the problem today, and I don’t know what’s the chicken and what’s the egg. But these candidates who are who are turning against Ukraine, like Ron DeSantis, they’re following the voters in the Republican primary. In the new CBS poll, they asked, would you prefer to vote for a Republican candidate who supports US aid to Ukraine was a losing position. Fifty seven percent against forty three percent for it takes some courage now in the Republican Party.

It takes some principle to stand up. And I will give Nikki Haley this. She is a coward. She is gutless on so many issues. But for some reason, this woman has decided she actually believes in allies, and she believes that it’s important to do.

It’s the only thing she’s not squishy on. You’re right. She’s not squishy on this. Yeah.

And it does matter. I mean, having a president who supports that all important. So that would make a huge difference. Obviously, I don’t think she’s gonna win, but you’re making a more important point, which is even if Joe Biden wins reelection, even if we avoid a second Trump presidency with all the hell that would unleash. Right?

What is the future of the Republican Party? And if we proceed with the scenario that’s unfolding now of Donald Trump being the Republican nominee, we will still have an isolationist party defined as such. Going into the next election. And looking at these polls, Charlie, I just don’t know how that party turns around and becomes internationalist again.

I don’t know either. I mean, you go back to nineteen forty, and there was a Republican establishment that did, in fact, have power and was willing to use its power It’s not the case anymore. To the extent there’s a Republican establishment, it’s now Donald Trump and Maga. Well, on that particular note,

It’s the winter of the Republican Party. That’s our note.

It is the winter of the Republican Party. So I appreciate you you joining me. I’m gonna spend the rest of the day watching replays of yesterday’s Pack or cowboy game, kind of on a YouTube, loop. So I’ll see you on the other side. 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. Bower podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by and brown.