S2 Ep1007: Jeffrey Goldberg and Peter Wehner: What's Going on with Our National Security?

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 10 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 1 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes. Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 6 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 17 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We've got an Atlantic double bill today.

Speaker 17 First up, the head boss, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, host of Washington Week on PBS, and author of the biggest story in quite a while. The Trump team accidentally texted me its war plans.

Speaker 17 It's Jeffrey Goldberg. How are you doing, Jeff? I'm good.
Thanks for having me. I guess my first note here on the outline is, holy fuck,

Speaker 17 I want to know, like, just talk us through. You do this a little bit in the story, but where were you when the signal message from Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, came through?

Speaker 17 And walk me through how you kind of process what was happening as he invited the entire national security team onto the group text with you. Yeah.
Quite randomly, I was in Salzburg, Austria.

Speaker 17 Let's put that aside. Okay.
60th anniversary of the sound of music. That's all I'll say.
But I was in Salzburg. He invited me in to chat with him.

Speaker 17 I've met him like, I think, twice in my life, not recently, probably like a couple of years ago, but didn't strike me as a crazy thing. He's the national security advisor.

Speaker 17 I'm the editor editor of a magazine. I write about national security.
We probably agree on a lot of stuff too. At least all of Mike.
Yeah, well, that's the issue. Marco too, right?

Speaker 17 You know, I assume that things that come over the transom are fake, but there's no harm in saying to Mike Waltz, yeah, sure, here's my, I accept your message request, and I'll find out if it's the real Mike Waltz or not.

Speaker 17 That happens a couple of days later. I'm added to the Signal Chat Houthi PC small group with a bunch of names, most of which are, you know, spelled out.

Speaker 17 Some are not, some are just initials, but, you know, including the CIA director, the Secretary of Defense, et cetera. And then I'm 100% convinced it's a fake.
Right. 100%.

Speaker 17 Because that doesn't happen. Somebody's setting me up.
Well, couldn't you just check to see if it was Mike Waltz's phone number? Like, don't you have his phone? No, I don't want to press any buttons.

Speaker 17 Right. You don't want to accidentally leave the chat.
Well, no, I assume that this is a state actor or a non-state actor trying to, you know, I mean, and it's obviously more subtle than this is UPS.

Speaker 17 You have to give us your social security number or else we're not going to give you your packet.

Speaker 17 You know, this is some sophisticated thing going on, you know, and signal and the way it's designed, you can't very easily, from my limited skills here, very easily see what's going on.

Speaker 17 Or if the person in the group is not in your phone book, then you can't see who it is. So anyway,

Speaker 17 I just thought of some weird thing. I get a lot of weird things over the transom SDU every day.
It's like, all right, we're

Speaker 17 moving on. And then over the next couple of days, it gets very, very strange.
First, there's a,

Speaker 17 with a high degree of, you know, very similitude, there's a discussion about attacking Yemen and whether they should attack Yemen this weekend. You know, it was, this is already late in the week.

Speaker 17 And I'm like, well. Some AI is very clever at mimicking the policy positions or the ideological proclivities of JD vans.
That's That's interesting. Because J.D.

Speaker 17 was the one that was against in the text chain. JD was the one who articulated.
And by the way, I find this fascinating, and this is the stuff that interests me the most.

Speaker 17 I find it fascinating that JD Vance is in the chat, not only saying that he disagrees with the president, but that he doesn't think the president understands the ramifications of the policy.

Speaker 17 That's interesting.

Speaker 17 Well, it's newsworthy.

Speaker 18 I thought that was interesting, too.

Speaker 17 Trump doesn't understand it. He says that in a chain with 18 people and the editor of The Atlantic.
This is where it's kind of bold, right?

Speaker 17 I mean, he says it in a chain that includes half the cabinet.

Speaker 17 I'm exaggerating, but only slightly, maybe 30% of the cabinet, including, by the way, the senior-most cabinet departments, the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury are in there.

Speaker 17 And he's like, I don't think the president really gets what's going on here. And he's making strong arguments that this is just, we're just doing Europe another favor and screw the Europeans.

Speaker 17 And it's interesting, a conversation that's ostensibly about whether we start dropping serious bombs on the Houthis becomes more animated on the question of how bad the Europeans are.

Speaker 17 Really bad or super bad. You know, and that's where it goes.
That's the Friday, but on Saturday. Loaths.
Higsa said he loathes our Europeans. Yeah, no, and they did it all caps.

Speaker 17 Europeans are pathetic, all caps, whatever. I mean, they're all like sort of mimicking each other and mimicking the boss in that sense.
Saturday is when it becomes obviously totally bizarre.

Speaker 17 And I realize that I'm in something that,

Speaker 17 you know, as much as I enjoy national security investigative reporting, I don't need strike plans two hours before a launch. That's not, that should not be coming into my phone.

Speaker 17 I mean, I take this stuff very, very seriously, and

Speaker 17 I take the responsibility not to get Americans killed very, very seriously. And I'm sitting in a Safeway parking lot, and my phone contains now information that

Speaker 17 really

Speaker 17 four or five humans should know, right? Detailed plans, who they're going to kill, when, what weapons.

Speaker 17 When, yeah, the when and the where

Speaker 17 are what's interesting in the weapons packages because what I deduced, obviously what I deduced from this is that these are not uncrewed aircraft drones being used or missiles, standoff missile platforms.

Speaker 17 They're talking about

Speaker 17 all I am comfortable saying is that they're talking about crude aircraft being used in the coming hours to attack sites that I have to assume are protected by anti-aircraft batteries and other defensive weapon systems that I don't know.

Speaker 17 But it's like the thought is, if this is real,

Speaker 17 why the hell do I have this? And I'm serious. Like, I know it might go against people's perception of what a reporter wants to know.
I want to know the strategy. I want to know the arguments.

Speaker 17 I want to know our foreign policy posture. After action, I want to know if it worked or not, if they killed the right people or if they killed civilians by mistake.
I want to know how badly.

Speaker 17 I don't want to know what planes are flying when. It's not information I should have.

Speaker 17 Sorry, I just, I get very exercised about this because the White House is saying there is no classified information. Classification is a technical term, so put that aside.

Speaker 17 But the White House is now saying there was nothing in there that was sensitive. And it's like,

Speaker 17 yeah, let's get to that. Boys, what are you talking about here? Here is what the White House press secretary said just about an hour ago.
Jeffrey Goldberg is well known for his sensationalist spin.

Speaker 17 Here are the facts about his latest story. No war plans were discussed.
No classified material was sent to the thread.

Speaker 17 The White House Counsel's Office has provided guidance on a number of different platforms Trump's top officials can communicate on as safely and efficiently as possible. So what do you make of that?

Speaker 17 No classified material and no war plans, the White House says. I've detailed without including particulars or technical issues what was included.

Speaker 17 It was a timeline of coming attacks, the weapon systems used in these attacks, some very specific targeting information, who they are trying to kill. Okay, let me just state that.

Speaker 17 Who they are trying to kill in the next two hours. Are we going to split hairs here? To me, that sounds like an attack plan.
That sounds like a war plan.

Speaker 17 That sounds like this is what we're going to do, and we haven't done it yet. And literally,

Speaker 17 they are talking,

Speaker 17 you know, and I agree with this kind of language, you know, Godspeed to our men. Like they understand

Speaker 17 that they're about to send Americans into harm's way in order to achieve this national security goal. Classification is a very interesting subject.
I can't get into it. I don't.

Speaker 17 There's national defense information. There's classification.
Look, it's obviously material. There's a covert CIA CIA operative named on the thread, right? So, I mean, that is classified.

Speaker 17 Well, yes, and I withheld her name from this.

Speaker 17 They named somebody who's an active CIA officer in this thread, which is on Signal again, a commercial app in which I'm watching, you know, and I withheld it.

Speaker 17 I didn't put it in the story because she's under cover. But, I mean, the CIA director put it into the chat.
But so that's clearly classified information, though, like covert CIA operatives.

Speaker 17 By any standard of imagination, I mean, we're talking about, again,

Speaker 17 these are technical terms and there's many, many different layers and complexities. And I'm not a national security lawyer.
But look, I've been doing this for more than 30 years.

Speaker 17 I know what sensitive technical information looks like. Okay, that's all I'm going to say.

Speaker 17 So let's go to that national security lawyer question then, because now the Secretary of Defense and the White House press secretary have said you're lying. I've said there are no war plans there.

Speaker 17 I've said there's no classified information. So the obvious question is, shouldn't you now demonstrate it? Shouldn't you publish the text?

Speaker 17 No, because they're wrong. They're wrong.

Speaker 17 But how can you prove that you're wrong? Maybe could you, should you provide them to the House and Senate special committees on intelligence, maybe? I don't know. Wow.

Speaker 17 Well, you want to become my lawyer?

Speaker 17 I'm just, I'm throwing this out there, Jeff. I don't know.
I mean, look, the White House press secretary an hour ago said you're lying. Look, I feel like, let me just put it this way.

Speaker 17 My colleagues and I, and the people who are giving us advice on this, have some interesting conversations to have about this.

Speaker 17 But just because

Speaker 17 they're irresponsible with material doesn't mean that I'm going to be irresponsible with this material. And you know what? You've had a long history, as I have, with dealing with them.

Speaker 17 And at moments like this, when they're under pressure because they've been caught with their hand in the cookie jar or whatever, you know, they will just literally say anything.

Speaker 17 to get out of the moment, to get out of the jam. And that's okay.
I get it. I get the defensive reaction.
But here's the thing.

Speaker 17 My obligation, I feel, is to the idea that we take national security information seriously.

Speaker 17 Maybe in the coming days, I'll be able to let you know that, okay, I have a plan to have this material vetted publicly.

Speaker 17 But I'm not going to say that now because there's a lot of conversations that have to happen about that. Make sense.

Speaker 17 All of my inclinations, as you can tell, including withholding the name of the CIA undercover officer, all of my inclinations are I have a pretty clear standards in my own behavior of information that I consider to be in the public interest, even if it's technically classified or not, information that's in the public interest and information that's not in the public interest.

Speaker 17 And I'm just going to like, I'm sticking to my principles here.

Speaker 17 Understood.

Speaker 17 To this point, though, about the unauthorized release, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, just a couple of weeks ago, posted this, that any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.

Speaker 17 I mean,

Speaker 17 it seems like this was an unauthorized release of, right? You're not a lawyer, but what do you make of that?

Speaker 17 I mean, unauthorized release might not be technically the correct term for mistakenly inviting the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to your signal chat. I don't know what covered their.

Speaker 17 And it seems like they have standards. Usually, you know, with classified information, you have a skiff, you have, you know, devices that you're supposed to use this stuff on.

Speaker 17 I mean, if you could, even if you were using something where you could plausibly invite Jeff Goldberg, it seems like an unauthorized leak. Right.

Speaker 17 Although I have seen in some corners of the conversation, pro-Trump people saying that, oh, I'm sure he was invited on purpose in order to show that J.D. Vance was strong against Europe.

Speaker 17 And it's like, that's one way to show that. The other way is to just look on YouTube at his speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he was deeply critical of Europe.

Speaker 17 I mean, there's some 3D chess kind of thinking going on around this, which I find obviously amusing. Look, you know, here's the thing: You know, obviously, it's a very relatable screw-up, right?

Speaker 17 We've all sent texts to the wrong people. And there is something to be said for a White House just saying, oh, yeah, looks like we screwed that up.

Speaker 17 We are going to learn our lesson here and really police up the way we use commercial end-to-end encrypted apps for security communications. I mean, they could just say, yeah, well, that was a doozy.

Speaker 17 We're not going to do that again. Sorry.
And then move on. Yeah.
Just I want to blow your mind with one way to look at this because I was watching in a different interview.

Speaker 17 You said, What if they accidentally put a Houthi on there? And at some level, that sounds ridiculous until you think about it like this.

Speaker 17 I mean, the Secretary of Defense called you a deceitful and highly discredited journalist. The president's attacked you.
I mean, at some level, they kind of did put an adversary on our attack plan.

Speaker 17 I mean, they call you the enemy of the people. Like, you are an adversary.
Yeah, but I don't like the Houthis as much as they don't like the Houthis.

Speaker 17 You know, here's the thing. They're using an unclassified messaging system to share very sensitive information.
They mistakenly invited the editor of the Atlantic under the thing. Just say,

Speaker 17 I guess we screwed up, trying to learn from it. We'll do better next time.
I'm all for that. Everybody makes mistakes.
I mean, most of us don't invite people to Houthi PC small group.

Speaker 17 We just sort of invite them to a party that they shouldn't have been to. But I get that.

Speaker 17 But just deal with the reality of it, especially since they've taken such strong positions on classification and on the use of um unauthorized servers as a famous example but

Speaker 17 i this is the part that i just don't understand just deal with it well they're liars jeff and they've had a lot of success lying and so that's why they're lying i think on this kind of all right i you know i accept your expert judgment

Speaker 17 um all right so here's the last thing i'm just dying to know just on the human level so you're sitting there in the safe way

Speaker 17 You want to see if there's bombing that is actually real.

Speaker 17 Had you told other people, like, had you told your wife, like, are you carrying this alone? Like, what? No, I'm not carrying this alone.

Speaker 17 I have colleagues and trusted colleagues and advisors who I said, there's this weird thing going.

Speaker 17 Look, we were all, including my colleague Shane Harris, who's one of the great intelligence reporters, one of the great Intel community reporters.

Speaker 17 And we were both convinced that this was an elaborate deception campaign, elaborate disinformation campaign. And the reason we thought that is because

Speaker 17 it's too improbable.

Speaker 17 It's too improbable that, and by the way, it's too improbable, given my coverage history of these guys, the suckers and losers piece and other things, how did I get into this group?

Speaker 17 Therefore, since it made no sense, it had to be a deception campaign. Right.
Yeah, I mean, I guess the people are saying that I guess it was Jamison Greer, who's a U.S. trader up as JG.

Speaker 17 But then again, like, why is Mike Waltz? Like, are you guys on initial relationship? You know, JG, MW?

Speaker 17 You know,

Speaker 17 these are questions for Mike Waltz. Okay.
And I look forward to that. We'll try to get him on the pod.
I look forward to that podcast interview. All right.
Thank you so much.

Speaker 17 Jeff Goldberg, editor and chief of the Atlantic. What a week.
What a two weeks for you, I guess. It was March 11th you were first put on there.
Appreciate you coming on the pod this morning.

Speaker 17 Thank you. Thanks for having me.
All right. Up next, Pete Wayner.

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Speaker 1 Get ready for malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 10 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 13 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 6 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 17 All right, we are back. He's a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.

Speaker 17 He served in the the reagan bush and bush administrations he's a contributing writer at the new york times and the atlantic his latest piece for the atlantic is trump's appetite for revenge is insatiable it's pete woehner welcome back to the pop pete how you doing i'm doing great thanks for having me tim it's always a pleasure to be with you well i just talked to your boss the big boss at the atlantic uh jeff goldberg about his unbelievable scoop i'm just kind of wondering what your reaction was as you were seeing that come across the transome yesterday

Speaker 18 yeah I'd say stunning, but not shocked in a certain way. This is an incompetent crew.

Speaker 18 I think for Trump and his administration, you know, one day it's incompetence, the next day it's maliciousness, the third day it's a combination of both.

Speaker 18 And I think yesterday with that story, incompetence was the driving narrative.

Speaker 18 But I'd also say that for those of us who worked in the White House, that kind of security breach is probably more remarkable because you know how sensitive this information is.

Speaker 18 You're told so many different ways about how you can't do a fraction of

Speaker 18 what they did. So they were so loose with that information.
And it really could and may well have done tremendous damage to national security.

Speaker 18 I mean, if Jeff is on these calls, you got to assume that the Russians and the Chinese are probably listening to a lot as well. So it was kind of par for the course.

Speaker 18 And my guess is by the end of the week, there will be some new outrage that we'll be focusing on because that's the nature of this wrecking ball administration.

Speaker 17 Yeah, talk about that, your experience. And I assume you were a speechwriter in the White House and other roles.

Speaker 17 I assume you had a security clearance at times and had access to sensitive information.

Speaker 17 For people who that's not their world who are listening, like talk about what the process usually was like if you had to work with the national security team on a speech that potentially had sensitive information or I don't know about any other example where you had access to classified information.

Speaker 18 Yeah, well, if there was anything approaching what they were talking about on this unsecure signal chat group, you would have been in the SCIF, which is a sensitive compartmentalized information facility in the White House.

Speaker 18 If you go into the SCIF, you have to leave your cell phones out, and it is just tight as a drum because they don't want these kind of security secrets leaked.

Speaker 18 And then there are varying degrees of security clearance, too. And if you're at the top of the chain, you know, you're talking about things like war plans and that kind of thing.

Speaker 18 But what's really driven to you in a White House that has a normal culture is how sensitive you have to be with this stuff, that you're in a position of real responsibility and you should take that seriously, that people can die and the national security interests can be injured if you're not.

Speaker 18 And you can get in a lot of trouble. if you cross the lines.
And none of that was sent because the ethos of this administration, this White House, is kind of nihilistic and they don't really care.

Speaker 18 And we've seen it in the reaction to the story, right? Which is Pete Hagseth going after Jeff, who's a fantastic, one of the sort of great journalists of our era. And what do they do?

Speaker 17 It's a kind of Roy Gohan philosophy, right?

Speaker 18 Which is attack, smear. go on offense, never apologize.
But yeah, in answer to your question, if you've been in the White House to see something like this happen,

Speaker 18 it's almost unfathomable.

Speaker 17 I mean, it is unfathomable. I think it's why Jeff didn't believe it was real

Speaker 17 until he saw all the bombs dropping. He's just like, this could not be.

Speaker 17 I started to think it was real when the emoji started coming through. He's like, I don't think that the Russians would be doing the muscle prayer emoji.

Speaker 17 Anyway, I want to, this is almost too obvious of a hit to do at this point, but it just merits covering, which is, you know, the 2016 campaign was so

Speaker 17 focused on OPSEC, if you will, email security. And CNN put together a little package of the people who were on this signal chain talking about Hillary Clinton.
I want to play that for you.

Speaker 20 If there was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now. Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton, even though she thinks she is.

Speaker 20 Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the Espionage Act when you have the Clinton emails.

Speaker 20 On top of the fact that the sitting president of the United States admitted he had documents in his garage where they didn't prosecute, they didn't go after these folks.

Speaker 17 I forgot Joe Biden got thrown in there too. But again, the whole point of the Clinton scandal was that ostensibly because she had this private server, people, you know, foreign governments could

Speaker 17 have easier access to sensitive information. The second layer of the scandal was that it protected her from FOIA, right?

Speaker 17 That people couldn't, you know, that government records were removed, maybe that shouldn't have been. Both of those things are true in spades here.

Speaker 17 And this is a commercial app we're discussing a bombing, and I didn't get into this with Jeff, but on the signal chain, it says the messages are set to disappear.

Speaker 17 So these are not messages that are being preserved. Exactly.
So, anyway, talk about that.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I mean, it's rank hypocrisy. We've seen it for so many years that, in a sense, as you were suggesting earlier, you kind of shrug your shoulders because we've gotten used to it.

Speaker 18 I will say this, Tim, when I hear that kind of thing, it is to me me a kind of CAT scan into who these people are and what drives them and what a fraud so much of their lives have been.

Speaker 18 And in a sense, how much of a fraud a lot of Republican politics, a lot of Republican politicians have been.

Speaker 18 And I'm going to say this to somebody who obviously spent my life, you can tell from my biography, in the Republican Party. I entered politics because I had a pretty high view of politics.

Speaker 18 I felt like it was a noble profession. I still do.
But I had usually given the benefit of the doubt to people who got involved.

Speaker 18 I thought, well, you know, they're getting involved or they're trying to do the right thing. You know, liberals, conservatives have different views of how to get to the same end.

Speaker 18 But I think the Trump era has revealed to me a couple of things. One is that they really don't care about truth.
They don't really care about principles. What they care about is power.

Speaker 18 And so all of these things become instruments for power. This is what happens, you know, with a moral character with Bill Clinton.

Speaker 18 You use a figure of two by four every day to hit him upside the head because he has an affair with an intern.

Speaker 18 You get somebody like Donald Trump who makes Clinton look like a Boy Scout, and all of a sudden it doesn't matter. And you see this over and over and over again.

Speaker 18 And you say, oh, this is a window into the soul of these people. They really don't care.
And that's...

Speaker 18 That's discouraging. It's alarming, but it's the reality.

Speaker 18 And I think we have to acknowledge that the second thing I'll say, and we've seen this in terms of the collapse of a lot of institutions apart from the Republican Party and the Trump era, is how little genuine courage there is in life generally and in politics specifically.

Speaker 18 You know, JFK said that there's a reason that profiles and courage is a thin volume because it is a rare virtue.

Speaker 18 And the way in which these people, once they get close to power, will bend and then break, especially if they're under threat or under attack, is remarkable.

Speaker 18 There are a few shining lights like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and others, but they are rare.

Speaker 17 Yeah, that takes us well to your article about revenge and just our appetite for revenge. And it's interesting.
You go through a lot of the details of the people that Trump is going after.

Speaker 17 I want to talk about that.

Speaker 17 But the biggest picture related to what you just said, you quote Tocqueville, who says, if citizens in a democracy saw that unethical and corrupt behavior led to riches and power, this would not only normalize such behavior, it would validate and valorize it.

Speaker 17 And I do think that we are seeing that broadly, but particularly in this context of being able to use the government to get revenge on your foes or perceived foes.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, Tocqueville was such a great,

Speaker 18 had such great insights into the American character, as well as, I suppose, some of the gifts that people from foreign lands can bring when they come to America because they see things that maybe we don't.

Speaker 18 And Tocqueville, of course, did that in spades.

Speaker 17 But yeah,

Speaker 18 I have found myself thinking a lot during the Trump era of of a domain which conservatives used to care about, which is our civic and political culture.

Speaker 18 That is the intersection of of politics and how it plays out in broader society and how certain cultural norms and beliefs are changed.

Speaker 18 And I think what Trump has done is reshape the emotional wiring of a lot of otherwise good and decent people.

Speaker 18 And that is really in part the power of the presidency and the omnipresence of the president,

Speaker 18 if you will.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 when I look back at conversations I had with Republicans who were supporting Trump in 2016, I remember those conversations.

Speaker 18 And there was some skittishness about his moral failures and his moral corruptions. But they decided it was worth it in the end of the day.

Speaker 18 They felt like, well, his policies will advance the things we care about. But his corruptions were viewed as a bug.
I think they're now viewed as a feature. And there's something about

Speaker 18 what Trump has both tapped into and unleashed in people in terms of the darker parts of their nature.

Speaker 18 You you know i've the other day i was thinking of an analogy you know let's say you were brought up in a very say strict christian home homeschooling movement uh the purity culture and so forth and your parents were trying to shield you from the trappings of the world

Speaker 18 and then you graduate i know the type you know the type yeah and then you graduate from high school and you go to miami university of miami in south beach and your parents aren't there anymore and all of a sudden, it's like, wow, there's an entire world.

Speaker 18 And I've kind of been contained and constrained. And then you just let loose.

Speaker 18 And in a way, I think the Republican Party, which is the party of family values and morality and norms and civic culture, that's what they stood for. I think they believe they stood for that.

Speaker 18 And then Trump came along and turned all of that on its head and sort of gave a green light to all of these, you know, unchecked emotions and passions and anger.

Speaker 18 And it turned out that a lot of Republicans, the vast majority of the Republican Party, were thrilled by that.

Speaker 18 So I think he did that obviously to the Republican Party, but I think he's doing it more broadly to a lot of Americans, not all of them by any means, because there's obviously a big opposition to them, but enough that it's really doing injury to America.

Speaker 17 It's even a little bit...

Speaker 17 more dramatic than the homeschooler at Miami example, because at some level, I think that most of those homeschoolers at the University of Miami, like, kind of know that they're doing bad, but are just getting excited anyway.

Speaker 17 Like, it's weird. Trump has convinced these people, actually, that acting in vice is actually good.
Exactly. Right.
That doing the bad thing is the right thing to do. It's how you gain power.

Speaker 17 It's how you advance your objectives. And that the Democrats, like these school moms that want to rag their finger at you if you do the bad thing, they are the bad ones, actually.

Speaker 18 I mean, I would add to that. kind of a psychological insight to it, which is the emotional thrill of it all, right?

Speaker 18 There's just an awful lot of people who are Trump supporters in which his transgressions and his nihilism and his attacks and his vengeance and all of those things is almost life-giving to them.

Speaker 18 It's vivifying. It is as if they feel like they're part of a grand and great drama and they're kind of actors within it.
So,

Speaker 18 you know, if I step back from all of the injury that he's doing to America and it's hard to do. Just from a psychological standpoint, what's happening is really fascinating.

Speaker 18 And it is not unprecedented by any means in world history. It's rare in American history to see it to this degree.

Speaker 18 You know, Lincoln warned about it in his Young Men's Lyceum speech in 1830, I think, and Andrew Jackson. So there were.

Speaker 17 You got that Lincoln Lyceum speech poll quote in your head?

Speaker 18 Yeah, well, it's about what is it, free men die by suicide, right? Isn't that the main one? But Lincoln understood the dangers, like the founders of mob passions, right?

Speaker 18 The great concern that they had was demagogues because they could stoke up these unchecked unchecked passions.

Speaker 18 And I'll just add, as a person of the Christian faith, a certain painful irony, which is almost to a person, the founders, whether they were believers or not, believed religion was central to the American Republic because they thought that it would promote what they refer to as republican virtues, that religion would create the kind of moral infrastructure that would allow democracy to work.

Speaker 18 I don't think what they anticipated and what Tocqueville didn't anticipate is when religion does the opposite, which I think is happening in a lot of places right now with white evangelical movement fundamentalists, which is rather than creating a moral infrastructure for the citizenry, it's doing the opposite.

Speaker 18 It's validating and almost baptizing really immoral and unethical behavior.

Speaker 17 It's interesting you say that. I mean, at some level, look, there's always been pernicious elements of kind of the Christian right.

Speaker 17 There have been some bad actors, you know, throughout, but like the degree to it now and the all-consuming nature of it, right?

Speaker 17 The fact that you kind of have to be for these Trump's vices, not just go along with them, but like actively approve of them to be of Christian and good standing or whatever.

Speaker 17 It struck me, Kinzinger, who you referenced, you know, Adam Kinzinger sometimes submits to his own vices, which is quote tweeting the trolls, the random people on the internet that come after him, which, you know, maybe he shouldn't do.

Speaker 17 I also submit to that from time to time. But this woman, who I don't know, tweeted, you love to see it with a picture of this California couple that was deported after living in the U.S.
for 35 years.

Speaker 17 They lived here 35 years. And Kinzinger retweets this with, Christ is king in bio.
You know, she's like this woman that is like rubbing the face of these people that hadn't done anything wrong.

Speaker 17 They've been here for 35 years, that have family in America. They're being deported now.
She's rubbing their faces in it. She's dunking on them, criticizing them.
And Adam's like, this is Christ.

Speaker 17 This is what Christ would want. But the woman is more representative of the evangelical and of the Christian right than Adam at this point.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I mean, the way that it has spread and the layers of rationalization that have gone into it, that somehow you've inverted the Sermon on the Mount and the teachings of Jesus and celebrate the cruelty, celebrate the corruption, especially targeted to Jesus referred to as the least of these, is really, really remarkable.

Speaker 18 You know, not. all white evangelicals are in that category, of course.
I will tell you what I think a significant problem is, though.

Speaker 18 Those that aren't in that category have, for a variety of reasons, not really spoken out. And the people who are fully involved in MAGA World have.

Speaker 18 And so what you've created to a watching world is this narrative where they say, look, 82% of white evangelicals vote for Trump.

Speaker 18 You've got a whole series of important prominent figures, Eric Metaxas and Robert Jeffers and Franklin Graham.

Speaker 18 You go through the list who are speaking out, promoting it. And then an awful lot of people who who know better, who even feel some measure of shame at this, they're not really talking.

Speaker 18 So, you've got a few people here and there, you know, Russell Moore.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I was just going to say, then they get kind of pushed aside, like our friend Russell Moore.

Speaker 18 Exactly, exactly. Because institutionally, they're afraid, like a lot of institutions are afraid.
And here I'm speaking as a person who is a follower of Jesus, the Christian faith.

Speaker 18 The damage that that's doing to the Christian witness is extraordinary because it's essentially showing to the world this is a moral freak show. This is a game.
You guys talk it, you don't walk it.

Speaker 18 And when that happens, you know, people will turn and walk away from it. And I can't, you know, blame them for doing that.

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Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 6 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 17 I want to get into some of the specifics you talked about with this revenge and what is alarming you the most.

Speaker 17 You frame it up with this. It's a nice one.
Unfortunately, I have way too much of my brain space is used on things that Donald Trump has said and done.

Speaker 17 I wish I could remove some of that and replace it with some nutritious information in my brain. But even I had forgotten this one.

Speaker 17 In a 92 interview with Charlie Rose, Trump was asked if he had any regrets. Among them, he said,

Speaker 17 I would have wiped the floor with the guys who weren't loyal, which I will do now. I love getting even with people.
What a strange life regret.

Speaker 17 But I think that that is a telling way to frame up your article because that is really what he's doing now.

Speaker 18 It's one of the most revealing interviews that I think Trump had. So it was an hour on Charlie Roser, whatever, 15 minutes.
And a lot of it was actually focused in on the vengeance.

Speaker 18 I mean, that was a time in Trump's career where he had sort of been counted out, bankruptcies, and he was just coming back.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 18 that theme of vengeance just came through again and again. And it has been the through line in his life.

Speaker 18 You know, I imagine for him, it's a combination of factors. One is, I think he's clearly a person of sociopathic tendencies.
So that has to be taken into account.

Speaker 18 Second, it's his family of origin, the whole kind of complicated relationship with his parents, mother, and his father, and what his father really promoted in him at an early age, right?

Speaker 18 They sidelined the younger brother because the younger brother wasn't vicious, wasn't a kind of figurative killer in the same way.

Speaker 18 And then, of course, there was that moment in Trump's life early on where he met Roy Cohen, who was a very kind of nasty piece of work in terms of as a lawyer.

Speaker 18 But he really taught Trump at an early age: never apologize, always go on the attack, never settle, counter-sue.

Speaker 18 When you understand that history of Donald Trump, you see that this has been part of him from the beginning, and there was no reason to think it would ever change.

Speaker 18 And so when you combine that personality, that life experience, those mental disorders, and then give that person the power of the presidency.

Speaker 18 And then in addition to that, in Trump 2.0, get him surrounded by people who are all acolytes. You know, it's a really dangerous mix.
And we're seeing that play out now.

Speaker 17 Yeah, you've listed through all the various ways he's trying to get revenge on people. The law firms have been the most kind of striking example this week, but plenty of other examples out there.

Speaker 17 What has been the most alarming to you as you kind of project out what we're looking into for the next three plus years?

Speaker 18 Yeah, I mean, in that realm, I would say probably going after the law firms. It's so unprecedented to go after private law firms and then seeing how those law firms have have responded.

Speaker 18 I'd say to me, the one that was

Speaker 18 most unsettling emotionally was just stripping the security details from the people, like General Milley, who was a remarkable man of heroism and courage, served his country so well, is under threat from foreign countries.

Speaker 18 We know that.

Speaker 18 And to go through and strip his security clearance, as well as, you know, John Bolton and Pompeo and Liz Janey and others, it's an act of you know, of such pettiness, taking down Milley's portrait as a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs or Anthony Fauci's at NIH.

Speaker 18 Those kind of acts just underscore for me something I know, but every time you see it, I think it's just upsetting. But it tells you again and again and again that this is who he is.

Speaker 18 This is what drives him. You know, I think some things in politics he's indifferent to, especially on a lot of policy issues.
So I think you can flip around.

Speaker 18 But if he decides that he wants vengeance on somebody or there's some cause that matters to him,

Speaker 18 he won't let go. And the best illustration of that was January 6th.

Speaker 18 I mean, he took a situation that would have crippled any other political figure and ended up in some remarkable feat of leveraging it to his advantage and turning them into patriots in his own world.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 18 there are a lot of other things he's done in the first 65 days, but in the realm of vengeance, those are the things that kind of jump out at me.

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Speaker 17 The other one that we're seeing a lot of this week that I want to talk to you about, which you referenced, is the

Speaker 17 revenge on behalf of Elon. Now, we're not just doing revenge on behalf of Trump.
We're doing revenge on behalf of the co-president.

Speaker 17 I will say, I didn't get to this with Goldberg, but there was one silver lining for me of the signal text chain. Yeah, what's that? Elon wasn't on it.

Speaker 17 So it's like, okay, well, Elon isn't deciding everything. He's not involved in the bombing decisions.
So that was the only silver lining for me.

Speaker 17 But they have reoriented a lot around protecting him and going after his foes. You know, I've heard from people people inside the FBI saying that Cash and Dan Bongino are like putting

Speaker 17 agents that, you know, that should be focused on real crimes and refocusing them on whatever Tesla vandalism.

Speaker 17 Not that that's not a real crime, but that, you know, is that really the best use of time for the New York FBI agents?

Speaker 17 So that is happening. And we saw from the DOJ, I want to play you this clip.

Speaker 17 Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, she was on Hannity demanding that Jasmine Crockett, a congresswoman from Texas, apologize for some incendiary rhetoric she said around Elon.

Speaker 17 And here she is with Maria Bartromo about Jasmine Crockett's comments about Elon.

Speaker 22 And Maria, now you have this Congresswoman, Crockett, who is calling for attacks on Elon Musk on her birthday. Let's take him out on my birthday, she says.

Speaker 22 And yet she turns and says, oh, I'm not calling for violence. Well, she is an elected public official, and so she needs to tread very carefully.

Speaker 17 The attorney general saying you need to tread very carefully if you're criticizing Elon Musk too harshly.

Speaker 18 Yeah, well, that's basically her job description right there, right? Which is she is Trump's instrument, DOJ is his weapon, and that's what they're going to do. And

Speaker 18 Jon Stewart did a piece yesterday in The Daily Show, which is worth watching. And it was just on this hypocrisy of the free speech, right? Which is, you heard so much about the anger,

Speaker 18 some of it legit, you know, in terms of universities and the wokeness and all of that, about cancel culture. And of course, they're doing that, you know, 10 times beyond what the left was doing.

Speaker 18 But it is an illustration, again, of people, you know, in positions of enormous power targeting others, either to destroy them or to intimidate them into silence.

Speaker 18 And so far, it's working probably better than they would have imagined because you see so many people going sort of oce because they're afraid.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 The DOJ element is interesting to me. I mean, you were, were you in the White House when the Alberto Gonzalez kerfuffle was happening with the U.S.
attorneys? I think about that story, right? And

Speaker 17 without getting into all the details on it, like essentially the scandal there was that

Speaker 17 there was a politicization of the U.S. attorneys and removing some that weren't meeting the political objectives of Rove and Gonzalez.
And Gonzales ends up resigning over this.

Speaker 17 And to me, that is just like such small, when you compare that to now the sitting attorney general going on TV, threatening the political foes for speech, placing Trump's personal attorney as the U.S.

Speaker 17 Attorney in New Jersey that happened yesterday, Alina Haba, placing Ed Martin as the attorney general in Washington, D.C., people with no experience as prosecutors who are just political weapons.

Speaker 17 I just, I wonder what you make of it kind of with that backdrop of the context of living through the supposed

Speaker 17 very quote-unquote scandal around Alberto Gonzalez.

Speaker 18 The kind of things that pre-Trump era

Speaker 18 would have been considered scandalous and would have dominated the news cycle for weeks, would have caused people to resign or apologize to be reined in. I mean, those are like the good old days.

Speaker 18 And that really is what happens when you crash through the barriers, the norms, as relentlessly as Trump

Speaker 18 has done. And, you know, it's not just who he is, but it's his capacity to impart his ethic into the ethic of others.
And in this particular case, it is to target people and to never back up.

Speaker 18 The shamelessness is a key to understanding Trump. I think he really is shameless.
It doesn't come as naturally to most people who don't have his sociopathy, but they learn by watching.

Speaker 18 But yeah, to think about the kind of the norms and scandals that happened in the past.

Speaker 18 I mean, you think about, for example, you know, Gary Hart, who was forced out of presidential election in 1988 because of the picture on the monkey business, which was this yacht with Donna Rice.

Speaker 18 And you compare that to Trump's life, Elon Musk's life, is a different galaxy.

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Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 10 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 13 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 6 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 17 I wanted to go take us back to the old galaxy for a minute and just have a couple of issues I want to sort of group together as

Speaker 17 you know, the good parts of W's legacy and what the current Republicans are doing with that right now.

Speaker 17 USAID, PEPFAR, compassionate treatment of immigrants. I just want to take through them one at a time.
What do you make of what's been happening with USAID?

Speaker 18 Oh, that has really upset me. I think of all the things that have happened in the first part of the Trump presidency, the gutting of USAID has really been painful because

Speaker 18 the number of vulnerable innocent people who are going to die because of this. I mean, people just don't know really what USAID does.

Speaker 18 But then when they're told, they just ignore it or they've adapted this, you know, a lot of these horror stories, which a lot of them actually aren't attributable to USAID in terms of promoting woke programs and so forth.

Speaker 18 But you're talking about just an entire range from saving kids from malnutrition to different kinds of diseases and Ebola to starvation.

Speaker 18 And it's just extraordinary the damage that's being done.

Speaker 18 And there are plausible estimates that, you know, between maybe a million and two million people will die as a result of this, certainly in the hundreds of thousands, quite apart from just the human suffering.

Speaker 18 And it's so unnecessary and it's so capricious.

Speaker 18 And it is as if there is no

Speaker 18 human sympathy, not an ounce of it, no compassion, even a celebration of like destroying this program. Yeah.

Speaker 17 And it's not even like the Rubio, I know Rubio, who like quotes all the Bible verses, you don't even get a sense of, oh, we're trying to maximize our dollars.

Speaker 17 You know, we don't want to leave people out in the lurch. But, you know, there is some fraud.

Speaker 17 And some of that would be BS. But you could imagine a way they could talk about this that would express some of that human sympathy.
And there's zero.

Speaker 18 I think most people who are familiar with what USAID does would say that there are reforms that are needed. And so Manth Power, who was there during the Biden administration, I think, would say so.

Speaker 18 Others would as well. It's one thing, though, to say, look, a program needs reform.
Virtually every government program does.

Speaker 18 But the way that they did it, which is to decimate it, to gut it, and to catalyze.

Speaker 18 all of this human catastrophe, the suffering and the deaths that will emerge from this, and not caring a whit about it. And in fact,

Speaker 18 celebrating it and using it as a talking point for Doge and what they're doing to destroy the federal government. It's just, it's sick.

Speaker 18 And this is getting close to blood on your hand sort of stuff, because it was unnecessary. They have to know on some level what's happening, and they're doing it anyway.

Speaker 17 Talk about PEPFAR in particular. I mean, it's just such a point of pride for Bush administration folks.
And

Speaker 17 I guess it's the one thing that there's still some conversations potentially that it might be protected.

Speaker 17 But in the meantime, there are groups on the ground that are doing this work, NGOs, that are having to shutter. So some of the damage is already done.

Speaker 18 That's right. I mean, the PEPFAR was the Global AIDS Initiative, which was promoted by President Bush in the early 2000s.

Speaker 18 It was promoted by him, Josh Bolton, and Anthony Fauci and Mike Gerson and a number of others.

Speaker 18 And the latest figures are that it saved somewhere between 25 and 30 million people on the African continent from AIDS. There was also the Malaria Initiative.

Speaker 18 It was a source of pride for President Bush and his administration. It should have been.
It was one of the most remarkable humanitarian achievements in the history of this country.

Speaker 18 It had complete bipartisan support ever since it was started. Other presidents, Democratic presidents, Barack Obama, embraced it, built on it, and that was fantastic.

Speaker 18 But even PEPFAR, in the end, was put in the crosshairs. It started actually, I think it was a year ago, with the Heritage Foundation, which promoted a paper attacking PEPFAR.

Speaker 18 And that was the signal that we're going after that program.

Speaker 18 I think there's some effort to try and save it, to keep it from suffering the same fate as USAID, but that's a very open question right now.

Speaker 18 But it falls into the same category, which is these are life-saving, literally life-saving programs. And it is almost all good and no bad, and it's pennies on the dollar.

Speaker 18 It's one of the most effective things that you could do, both in terms of saving lives, but also America's image in the world. Yet they go after it, and they want to destroy it.

Speaker 18 That, I would say, Tim, is the nihilism that is part of this movement. It is destruction for destruction's sake.

Speaker 18 It is what I was referring to earlier, which is that the destruction is kind of vivifying and life-giving.

Speaker 18 So they're taking these wrecking balls to the load-bearing walls of democracy and programs that are saving millions of lives. And they're just having a jolly good time.

Speaker 17 I mean, look, I guess it's a complicated calculus because you don't want to trigger them into

Speaker 17 enjoying the destruction even more. But it does, at least with regards to PEPFAR, and we haven't heard from W, Condi, other types of people from that era.
What do you make of that?

Speaker 17 Like, why there's not been a more vigorous defense from Bush-era colleagues of yours?

Speaker 18 I don't know. I haven't had the conversations.
It wouldn't surprise me. I don't know this for a fact, if they're maybe working behind the scenes to try and salvage it.
I hope that's going on.

Speaker 18 PEPFAR does seem to be immune in some ways

Speaker 18 that other programs are not.

Speaker 17 And I should note Andy Natsios has spoken out, who was the head of SIT then, but some of the more prominent names.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah. So that may well be what's going on, but I'm not doing any behind-the-scenes work.
So I'm happy publicly to

Speaker 18 talk about it. I wrote actually a piece in the Atlantic on it last year when the Heritage Foundation decided to catalyze this movement within the Republican Party to go after it.

Speaker 18 And that was, you know, that was another straw in the wind.

Speaker 17 To the immigration side of it, you know,

Speaker 17 again,

Speaker 17 this is just another example on a theme of what we've been discussing. But it's not just the deportations.
It's like the glee at the suffering. You know, they've been putting out these snuff videos.

Speaker 17 You can hear the sound of the chains clinking. And they're gleefully sharing this, you know, these videos of the immigrants being sent to San Salvador, but then having their head shaved.

Speaker 17 They're putting all this out like it's a Michael Bay movie trailer, where they're bragging about the treatment of these people.

Speaker 17 And some of them are probably criminals that deserve poor treatment, but we don't know that. They haven't provided any evidence of it.

Speaker 17 I just, what do you make of like the not just the policy shift from quote-unquote compassionate conservatism on immigration, but just the manner in which they've dehumanized immigrants?

Speaker 18 Yeah, that's the key word, I'd say, is what comes to me, which is a dehumanization. I mean, that has been going on across the board.

Speaker 18 It's been going on ever since Trump really entered the national stage politically. And there's strangers in their own land politics, which I read that.
And the dehumanization of people, which leads to

Speaker 18 much, much darker and uglier and uglier things. And again, it is the joy and the delight and the thrill that people seem to get out of this.
It's a kind of MAGA ethic. It's a kind of hyper

Speaker 18 faux masculinity. I think what it's tied to in part, just in part, is

Speaker 18 decades of resentment and grievances, which had been building on the right,

Speaker 18 a feeling of being disrespected. It was interesting in 2016, I was at Stanford doing an event just before the election with Arlie Hothschild, who's a very esteemed historian.

Speaker 18 And I was on a cab ride with her.

Speaker 18 I think it was to the event.

Speaker 18 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 17 Yeah, right.

Speaker 18 Sort of in the bayou country in Louisiana,

Speaker 18 which you know about.

Speaker 18 And the thing that she told me as we were talking about Trump's take over the Republican Party again this 2016, she said, Pete, the thing you have to understand is that these people feel dishonored and they feel disrespected.

Speaker 18 And that led to a conversation about when people feel those emotions, what it stirs up in them, the anger and the lashing out.

Speaker 18 And I think a lot of that is is behind this which is these feelings that we haven't been respected that we've been patronized and then there is and this is particularly true but not exclusively true of the of the christian world which is this existential struggle like these are unusual times that the country is on the edge of the of the abyss and so we have to use uh

Speaker 18 means and politics that are not normal to get to get our way because because you know the survival of the country depends depends on it.

Speaker 18 So a lot of this roiling anger and resentment and rage has been building up. And Trump came in and tapped into it and accelerated it and then channeled it.

Speaker 18 And so, I think what has happened is that now a lot of people in his movement, people who support him, they look at what's happening. There's controlling the lips.
And so,

Speaker 18 they're delighting in this. Again,

Speaker 18 this is the psychology of mass movements and politics.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 it turns out that

Speaker 18 it's a lot trickier than maybe those of us in America who have been spared from this really understood. Where are we now? I think we're in the midst of an authoritarian takeover attempt.
And

Speaker 18 we're going to see how it unfolds.

Speaker 17 So I hate to then lower this to kind of rank politics, but I do wonder your thought on this.

Speaker 17 Is there any potential way, do you think, for Democrats to make inroads into Christian communities based on this?

Speaker 17 And I think about this from the standpoint of, like, obviously there are going to be some people that have just fully embraced the mega,

Speaker 17 you know, ethic

Speaker 17 and that are going to be unreachable. But you think about what Trump has been doing with like working class black voters, for example.

Speaker 17 You didn't win that group, but you tried hard, you make a message to them, you peel off a certain group of people. Do you think there's anything there that

Speaker 17 potentially Democrats could make this case to faithful Christians? That's just like, this is crazy. Just the obscenity of what they're doing is so extreme that

Speaker 17 maybe it could win them back. Or do you think the Democratic brand is just so toxic that that's probably

Speaker 18 wishful thinking?

Speaker 17 Toxic in that community at least.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I think right now it's too toxic, but it doesn't mean it can't change. I think it can change really two ways.

Speaker 18 One is as the Trump era unfolds and his policies and his presidency begins to cut in ways that they begin to feel and reality really begins to take over.

Speaker 18 And all of a sudden, this person that they've deified turns out to be

Speaker 18 a person of clay feet. So I do think it's going to take some time, but that is one thing that may well

Speaker 17 happen.

Speaker 18 Continuing these narratives about the human cost, I think is important too. I think it's right in its own right, but I think it's also important to make that.

Speaker 18 I do think that the Democrats may have a chance, but they have to get over a kind of an aversion

Speaker 18 toward Christians and religious faith more generally. Democratic Party is much more secular in general now than it was a generation or two ago.

Speaker 18 But even if you go back to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, I mean, they use from time to time religious language and it's a religious...

Speaker 17 I mean, Barack Obama was saying amazing grace in a church.

Speaker 18 Exactly, which was a moving moment.

Speaker 18 The Democratic Party is in a bad place, obviously. I'm sure you've talked to a lot of people about that.
So it needs to reform itself.

Speaker 18 It actually has to, in my estimation, make the decision to change before they're going to change in terms of their policies.

Speaker 18 They have to make that conscious decision that we're on the wrong track in some fundamental way, that our problem is not a communications problem. But it goes much deeper than that.

Speaker 18 And then I would say for Democrats, you know, look to models that you've had before: Bill Clinton, DLC, in the 90s, Tony Blair and the Labor Party in England in the 90s.

Speaker 18 And if they can go ahead and use those as models of how to reform, I think that'd be all to the good.

Speaker 17 All right. I want to end with one more heavy topic, just because it's been so light so far today.

Speaker 17 But you did an interview for the Times that was kind of moving. I just wanted to reference that for people.
It was with Nicholas Walderstorf, who's a professor of philosophical theology at Yale.

Speaker 17 He wrote a book about lament for his son, who was 25, who died in a climbing accident. And obviously, we have some listeners who've gone through that.

Speaker 17 And I've had David Fromm on, and we've talked about this. I'm just wondering if there are any parts of that conversation that struck you, left you with any wisdom for people dealing with grief?

Speaker 18 Yeah, thanks. You know, I first got to know Nick because I did an article on him, and I did an article on Lament for His Son, which was

Speaker 18 essentially a kind of fractured journal of his feelings after his son died in a climbing accident in the 1980s.

Speaker 18 And that book was so powerful to so many people because for one thing, he wasn't able to explain what had happened.

Speaker 18 He wasn't able to answer the question of theodicy, which is how does a good God allow evil to

Speaker 18 happen.

Speaker 18 But when I talked to him, he was able to give voice to why he didn't give up on his faith, but how his faith changed and how deep the wounds went.

Speaker 18 And he talks about the mystery of God and his ability to give voice to the pain that he went through created an enormous amount of solidarity with other people.

Speaker 18 And I know from what Nick has told me that over the years, people would actually travel to him and to talk to him because they felt like there was a solidarity in grief.

Speaker 18 And so Nick was very honest in that journey. His faith did change.
And he also talked to me about what it means to redeem grief.

Speaker 18 And what he means by that is to take that grief and to try and channel it in some kind of constructive way.

Speaker 18 He would never for a moment say that he would take the redemption of grief as something that was worth the death of his son. But his son died.

Speaker 18 And so that capacity to take grief and redeem it and not to be completely crushed by it is something that really moved me. And I think it spoke to a lot of other people.

Speaker 17 Pete, thanks as always. Always love talking to you.
I appreciate you coming on the podcast. It's not the best month for the country, but we soldier on.

Speaker 17 We'll try to redeem it and we'll be talking to you again sometime soon.

Speaker 18 Great. Thanks for speaking up, Tim.
It matters what you're doing and what your colleagues are doing. And, you know, we're going to play for the long game here.
And all we can do is be faithful.

Speaker 18 Whether it's successful or not, that's on its own time schedule. But you be faithful, and that's what you're trying to do.
And so we're grateful for that.

Speaker 17 We appreciate it, brother. Everybody else will be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork Podcast.
We'll see you all then. Peace.

Speaker 17 Feel like don't be

Speaker 17 down, let down by your bride. What's it become?

Speaker 17 What's it become?

Speaker 17 The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 17 What's it become?

Speaker 17 Looking for deep fence.

Speaker 17 Nothing left to do

Speaker 17 but hang my head and cry. What was the intense

Speaker 17 looking to prove

Speaker 17 this you is dignified

Speaker 17 if

Speaker 17 you got an alibi?

Speaker 17 Give me some

Speaker 17 Give

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