George Conway: Crazy in a Bad Way

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Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 2 I'm excited to be here today with a contributor to The Atlantic, board president of the Society for the Rule of Law, co-host of a sister podcast here, George Conway Explains It All to Sarah Longwell, and now the president of a new political action committee, Anti-Psychopath PAC.

Speaker 2 It's the man, the myth, the legend, George Conway himself. How you doing, man?

Speaker 3 Good. How you doing, Tim? I'm doing wonderful.

Speaker 2 Thank you for doing this. Before we get down to business, I do have to ask you about the most important family member.

Speaker 2 You know, we stand Claudia here at the Bulwark Podcast, and I'm hoping that she can just take over our TikTok feed. And I'm just wondering if you think that's possible, how she's doing.

Speaker 2 Just a quick update.

Speaker 3 She would charge you exorbitant fees.

Speaker 3 What's her rate like? She's a capitalist through and through. I'm a capitalist.
That's right.

Speaker 3 She'll just basically say,

Speaker 3 no, you tell me how much you're willing to pay, and then she'll just say more. Okay.
And then more and more. I mean, you know, I mean, that's the technique she does with fathers.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Well, that's a sign of good parenting, probably.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You know, that you've given her this.
I'm not so sure about that, but right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, kind of self-starter.

Speaker 3 No, she was born with the self-starter in her.

Speaker 3 Okay, here's a story. You can cut it out if you don't like it.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Please tell us one story about Claudia. We can do that.

Speaker 3 She was two and a half, and Kellyanne and I took her to the Rye Playland. I don't know if you know the Rye Playland.
It's a public amusement park in Westchester County.

Speaker 3 And she and her twin brother, George, were with us, and they were our only kids at the time. And we sat down at one o'clock to have McDonald's at the concession there.

Speaker 3 And all of a sudden, George starts screaming,

Speaker 3 Claudia, hit me. Claudia, hit me.
It's like going, George, are you okay? Claudia, hit me. And I say to Claudia, Claudia, did you hit George? And she looks up at me with this look.

Speaker 3 Not yet.

Speaker 3 Two and a half.

Speaker 3 Okay, it was all there. It was all the programming was all there to begin with.
Okay.

Speaker 2 We'll send her our love. Big fans here.
All right. You've got some new ads out with your new group, this anti-psychopath pack.

Speaker 2 And I want to play those for people and talk about the strategy and what you're doing.

Speaker 2 But for folks who haven't kind of heard your bit on this, I sort of want to just go back to the real origin story about kind of identifying the oranges.

Speaker 2 The oranges story of identifying the malignant narcissism traits.

Speaker 2 Because it just, if you just think about him and what he's going to do purely within the context of what would a malignant narcissist do, it opens up a lot of doors for people. And so

Speaker 2 just talk about that part first, and then we'll get into the pack.

Speaker 3 Well, it was sort of a personal journey for me. I mean, mean, I didn't know anything about this.
I really, you know, I took a high school course in psychology.

Speaker 3 I don't consider myself to be an expert in any way, except now I kind of know a lot about a couple of different things.

Speaker 3 And the psychologists tell me and psychiatrists tell me, you explain it better than we do. It started with trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I thought going into 2016, like, okay, he's not my first choice. He's not even, he's pretty much my last choice.
And he'll have to learn.

Speaker 3 There'll be cringeworthy moments, but deep down, he wants to do the right thing by the country because that's what we all want.

Speaker 3 And he'll have people around him who are experts in things and he'll have a lot of help and he'll get the hang of it because, you know, obviously he's a successful guy.

Speaker 3 I might have to object to obviously on there, but you can continue. But no, that was, look,

Speaker 3 it was delusional. It was self-delusional on my part.

Speaker 3 It was like, it was wishful thinking because like, what else do we got? Yeah, sure.

Speaker 3 And my wife was running the campaign. So, why, well, you know, I mean, you know,

Speaker 3 I wanted it to all work.

Speaker 2 Rationalization is very powerful.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, some people are still doing it eight years later. But so

Speaker 3 he becomes president. And I'm wondering, like, what the fuck is his problem?

Speaker 3 Why does he keep saying stupid things? Why does he do this stupid stuff? I was lined up to be the head of the civil division of the U.S.

Speaker 3 Department of Justice, which is like the biggest law firm in the world.

Speaker 3 And I turned it down because I decided that this guy is just running a shit show and it's always going to be a shit show, but I couldn't quite figure out what was his problem.

Speaker 3 There was something wrong with him. And long story short, at some point,

Speaker 3 I read an article in Rolling Stone of all places.

Speaker 3 And it was written by a great writer named Alexa Morris, who basically says, does Donald Trump, the title of the article was, does Donald Trump have narcissistic personality disorder or something like that?

Speaker 3 Does it explain

Speaker 3 him?

Speaker 3 And I read this article and they went through, there's this thing called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that's put out by the American Psychiatric Association and we're on the fifth edition of it.

Speaker 3 And she went through the criteria for this disorder, this personality disorder called narcissistic personality disorder. And you go through all nine diagnostic criteria.

Speaker 3 And I think only like five or six of them, I forget how many, are required in order to have a diagnosis. And he's like, checks every box.

Speaker 3 And, you know, pathological narcissists, they don't care about anybody else. They don't believe in anybody else.

Speaker 3 They're only in it for themselves. They have no empathy.
I mean, he checked every single box. And I realized, okay, this is his problem.
And then I started reading more.

Speaker 3 And the people who had figured this all out,

Speaker 3 mostly and who had had the best handle on it in 2016, early on, were the historians, because the historians could tell tell you the kinds of personalities that led countries to ruin in the past.

Speaker 3 And the psychiatrists and the psychologists who basically knew this character. They both knew this character type because they see them either in their practices or they see them in the history books.

Speaker 2 Also, the third category, people that just know this fucking guy. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 Some of us just know this fucking guy in our lives. And maybe I didn't have to know Mussolini's characteristic traits or psychology.
It's just a sense, you know, the sixth sense. Yeah, no.

Speaker 2 And then, but it's nice to put some details around, or you know, some.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, no, no. But I mean, the other, the other people actually who did were people who are, who have been, you know, like spouses who have been abused by narcissistic spouses.

Speaker 3 They figured that out really quickly. Yeah, there you go.
Yeah. If you had a narcissist in your life, you can figure it out.
But anyway, so I started reading up more about it.

Speaker 3 And I read what all the shrinks said, and I read about sociopathy, the antisocial personality disorder part of the DSM. And he's a sociopath also.
He's a malignant narcissist.

Speaker 3 All of these things he is. And once you understand that, it explains everything about him.
He's a sociopath. He has no, no honesty, no ability to, he doesn't care about anybody else.

Speaker 3 He has no remorse. He has no conscience, no nothing.
He's a pathological liar. He checks all those boxes as well.
And you only need three out of the however many criteria there.

Speaker 3 He checks all of he is a quintessential narcissistic sociopath. And with that, basically you understand where everything about about him.
You understand his racism. You understand his misogyny.

Speaker 3 You understand his authoritarianism. You understand his criminality.
You understand his

Speaker 3 erraticness. You understand everything about him once you understand his personality type.
And that's the short version of the long story.

Speaker 3 I got so into reading about this once I kind of understood it and realized, okay, now I understand Donald Trump that I wrote an 11,000 word article.

Speaker 3 It was originally like 15,000 word for The Atlantic.

Speaker 2 I made it through about 3,200 words. And I was like, I was like, I got it, George.

Speaker 3 I got it. That's right.
I agree.

Speaker 2 If there's anything good in that last third, let me know. There's some good stuff.

Speaker 3 But no, I basically made the point that if somebody with these personality traits can't be president because the presidency is,

Speaker 3 it is what lawyers call a fiduciary position. Fiduciary is we think of people who trust accounts and who are managing money for somebody else, like their grandmother or whatever.

Speaker 3 But the biggest fiduciary position in the world is is that of president of the United States because you have, you are in charge with protecting the Constitution and laws, and you got the button.

Speaker 3 Okay, you've got a lot of stuff going on there and we have to be able to trust that person to do what's in our best interest and not his best interest, even though sometimes those might align because we will be nice to somebody who does the right thing by us as

Speaker 3 a people and historians will do that. And that's what I thought.
That's how I thought it normally worked for him.

Speaker 3 It's all about him his generals he thinks he can make the law up and applies only to people he doesn't like and not him everything everything about him can be explained through the narcissistic sociology reporters have to be nice to him can't ask him a mean question for me oh you you know you were asking me these questions and all they did was ask him things about things he actually said oh that's mean you know so I've realized that this guy is the last person you'd ever want to have as president.

Speaker 3 I came to that, I'm sure, a lot later than you did, but I came to it

Speaker 3 pretty clearly by 2018 and 2019. And I've been sort of banging that drum ever since.
And I think one of the problems that we have

Speaker 3 is that Trump is graded on this unique curve.

Speaker 3 I mean, he has such an advantage over other political figures that he, I think the perfect example was Biden in the weeks after the debate.

Speaker 3 Biden slurred words and he was slow and he said some things didn't quite make complete sense, but nothing like Trump. Trump is much worse.
He slurs his words all the time. He's completely incoherent.

Speaker 3 He just does it at a higher volume. And yet somehow there was this double standard being applied where, oh, Joe Biden is old.

Speaker 3 It was like, well, what about this 78-year-old guy who's talking about Hannibal Lecter and slurring, we would say, about Revolutionary War airports? Where have you been about his guy?

Speaker 3 And the answer is, he's so bizarre. He's so weird that they've accepted all this weirdness from him.

Speaker 3 And the most important aspect of the weirdness that they've accepted, that the media and frankly large segments of the American public have accepted is that he's psycho. He is psychologically unwell.

Speaker 3 He is psychologically unfit. And the fact is that the press will not talk about it for the most part.

Speaker 3 In fact, there's a book that I point to in our launch video written by Marty Barron, who was the executive editor of the Washington Post for many years.

Speaker 3 And he basically said that he made a conscious decision not to have his reporters write about Trump's obviously deranged mental condition because he didn't feel it was appropriate for the press to do that.

Speaker 3 You know, meanwhile, they can speculate all they want about whether President Biden has dementia.

Speaker 3 We can talk all we want about, you know, a singer gets laryngitis, or a football player breaks his leg, and we can talk about all that, but we can't talk about whether the guy with his finger on the button is a crackpot.

Speaker 3 That's the double standard that has arisen over the years. And the fact that we don't treat his, you know, Trump's obvious pathologies as pathologies means that we normalize it.

Speaker 3 We have normalized this. And what we're trying to do is to point out, it's like, this isn't just weird.
This is crazy in a bad way. It may be funny

Speaker 3 sometimes. It's clinical.
It's clinical. He is pathological, right?

Speaker 3 It's like, you know, and I think one of the advantages that Trump has had is that people think he's such a buffoon that he couldn't be that malicious. Right.

Speaker 3 It's like, yeah, he is a buffoon for a lot of the same reasons why why he's very malicious. Right.
Okay.

Speaker 3 And that doesn't make him not dangerous. Okay.

Speaker 3 And so anyway, that's the whole spiel and that's the whole shtick. And that's the reason why I formed Psycho Pack.

Speaker 3 And Psycho Pack, the object is to explain his pathologies, to explain why his pathologies are dangerous and why they matter, to get the press finally to talk about it.

Speaker 3 and to trigger him into displaying those tendencies.

Speaker 2 Kudos to Alex Morris, who I love. She wrote that first article.
I want to go find it, put it in the show notes, and get her on the podcast sometime soon.

Speaker 2 She's a really good journalist over at Rolling Stone. Okay, so the pack, I think there's another thing.
Even when it jumped out, you have to forgive me, George, because you're a troll.

Speaker 2 You know, you like trolling. We like trolling.
I say that as a compliment. We are the trolls of America.
Yeah, so it pops up on my feed. And I'm like, oh, this is fun.

Speaker 2 George is doing this fun thing to kind of trigger him online. And, you know, then I talk to our friend Sarah and others.
I was like, oh, wait, no, no, no. You're doing a real thing here, actually.

Speaker 2 This is a troll and a real thing. Real advertising, real money behind it.

Speaker 2 You're advertising in Palm Beach to get inside Trump's head, but now also in the swing states, it's up in Atlanta starting this weekend around his event.

Speaker 2 So let's just play one of the videos so folks can take a listen. Here's the most recent ad that's going to be up this weekend.

Speaker 6 I want anybody running for president to take an aptitude test, to take a cognitive test. I think it's a great idea.

Speaker 3 We agree because you're insane.

Speaker 6 She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a black person. Just to be clear.

Speaker 2 What does it mean to turn black?

Speaker 6 She failed her law exam. She didn't pass her law exams.
Mr.

Speaker 2 President, I was saying she went a path. Just to be clear.

Speaker 6 I'm just giving you the facts.

Speaker 2 He did crap the bed today. The only question is whether he's going to roll around in it or get up and change his sheets.

Speaker 6 Chuck Schumer has become a Palestinian. He's become a proud member of Hamas.

Speaker 2 He did crap the bed today.

Speaker 6 They couldn't get their equipment working or something. They have bad equipment.

Speaker 6 And the mics are really in lousy shape shape that happen to be taking black jobs you had the best what exactly is a black job sir a black job is anybody that has a job

Speaker 2 it goes on it does go on he does

Speaker 3 uh what so talk to us about the thinking behind that well i'd bother doing these ads because we we want to point out the weirdness and the abnormality and then we want to give people a framework in which to understand it and these particular ads but by airing them where he can see them

Speaker 3 leads him to respond.

Speaker 3 He trashed us the other day on Truth Social, and then at his rally the other night, he started talking about cognitive decline, which was the topic of the ad that he was mad about, and about Hannibal Lecter being a psycho.

Speaker 3 And of course, you know, our ad was psychopak ad. That's a good thing.

Speaker 2 Whenever he's talking about cognitive decline, that feels like a winner for those of us who want him to lose.

Speaker 3 Of course. And that's part of the object here, is the more you bait him with things, look, narcissists are

Speaker 3 insecure. They are the most insecure people in the world.
That's why they are narcissists. They have to pretend.
They put up this false bravado and false, I'm a stable genius.

Speaker 3 I am the most, I know everything.

Speaker 3 I am the smartest and the most powerful and the greatest. And that is overcompensation on a massive scale for deep insecurity for this kid who was just, you know,

Speaker 3 when he was a little kid, his father used to berate him for being incompetent, which he is. And so deep down, he bears those scars and he protects himself by putting out this image of invincibility.

Speaker 3 And when we show these ads, they get right under his skin. And he starts talking.
He wants to be defensive.

Speaker 3 He wants to explain that he's a stable genius, that he, that he can figure out what an elephant is on this senility test. And he gets crazier.
And we're just showing you.

Speaker 3 It's like, you don't want anybody this crazy and this insecure in a position of power over your life. So that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to provoke him to show him that.

Speaker 3 We're trying to explain to people what his problem is.

Speaker 3 And we're going to have fun doing it because, you know, mockery, I think, is the best thing that you can do to drive a narcissistic sociopath crazy.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And you can see it, I think, already.

Speaker 2 And I think maybe it ties a little bit to, you know, what's in the ads, a little bit to come, we're getting all this attention, a little bit to the next topic I want to get into, which is potential legal.

Speaker 2 Just over the last two weeks, like you can see

Speaker 2 how he lashes out in these situations and why it's important to provoke him so that people that aren't following this stuff obsessively get reminded of the worst elements of his narcissism.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. And it's just weird.
And that's the thing.

Speaker 3 We don't necessarily have to educate everybody into the myriad elements of the diagnostic criteria of cluster B personality disorders in the DSM, we just kind of point out, this is weird.

Speaker 3 Use your instincts. This is weird.
We just want to get the discussion, the public discussion into this territory. So the people start talking around the water cooler.

Speaker 3 It's like, I don't know about this guy. I've forgotten how crazy he was.
And hope that just sort of takes off. You know, and I think it dovetails with what the campaign is doing, talking about weird.

Speaker 3 They can't really go as hard as we can on this because they don't want to offend people, but we can create running space for them by

Speaker 3 going the whole nine yards and explaining this guy is

Speaker 3 unwell.

Speaker 2 Yeah, one more thing, I just want his psychopathy and what I think could be effective in talking about it just to get through to people.

Speaker 2 Because somehow around the January 6th hearings, you know, people were really engaged in this, but I do think there's a category of folks who are like, yeah, January 6th is bad, but like, just don't kind of think about it that deeply about what actually was happening.

Speaker 2 The level of sociopathy that you have to have to sit and watch it on TV and like be happy that these people are like fighting for you and not care about the suffering.

Speaker 2 I thought actually the most revealing part of that, the National Black Journalist interview was not the she turned black thing, which is, you knew he was going to play that card, but was when they asked him about how he's supposed to back the blue, but all these cops got injured at the Capitol.

Speaker 2 And his response to that was like, what about the limestone that got defaced? Like, this is somebody that has a personality disorder. He does not care about the suffering that he caused.

Speaker 2 He actually enjoyed watching it on TV, and he cares more about the limestone.

Speaker 3 Correct. No, and this is classic Trump.
I mean, there's a story I recount

Speaker 3 in the Atlantic article that I wrote five years ago where he's at some glitzy event. in his ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, and then some guy slips and falls and bangs his head.

Speaker 3 And there's just blood all over the parquet or whatever the fancy flooring he had.

Speaker 2 I think that's the Boston Guard and the parquet floors. I don't know if that's

Speaker 3 right, yeah, yeah. No, it's not Mar-a-Go.
I don't know, whatever.

Speaker 3 I'm not an interior decorator.

Speaker 3 And he was upset. He later admitted like he was upset about getting the blood cleaned up.
And he never called the guy. He says, I'm just not that kind of person.

Speaker 3 He didn't care about what happened to the guy who clearly was like stroking out or something on the floor. All he cared about was his floor.
And he admits that. He admits that.

Speaker 3 And then it's just like after 9-11. Do you ever watch the interview that he gave on 9-11? And they were basically asking him, did you see all the destruction?

Speaker 3 And he goes, I have the tallest building in Manhattan now. And that turned out that was a lie, too.

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Speaker 2 One of the other reasons why he's lashing out and what you talked about with Sarah over on the other podcast is the legal side of things. And so I just wanted to kind of pick your brain on this.

Speaker 2 I forget if it was in the interview or in the rally. Unfortunately, I've been watching too much Trump lately, and so that's turning me into a psychopath.
Yeah, that's hard.

Speaker 2 In one of his recent interviews, he kind of betrayed that he's thinking about jail again. He just kind of made a stray comment about how these people are trying to put me in jail.

Speaker 2 And there's just something about it that kind of hit the light bulb flickered for me that he really, I think, was freaked out about this for a while.

Speaker 2 And then immunity happened and Eileen Cannon happened. And then he's winning against Bayes.

Speaker 2 And all of a sudden, he's like, oh, great. I've already, I'm clear.
And now it feels like that's hanging over him again a little bit.

Speaker 2 So talk about what you think the kind of status is of the Jack Smith stuff, given the Supreme Court ruling.

Speaker 3 Well, let me just tell you. I mean, it is not new for him to be concerned about criminal liability.
I'm going to tell you a couple stories here real fast.

Speaker 3 One is I flew down with him and Kellyanne and Hope Hicks down to Washington two days before the inaugural on his plane. We were the only people on there.

Speaker 3 And what he wanted to ask me was, should I get rid of Preet Barr, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York? I had no idea.

Speaker 3 Why is he asking me about whether he should get rid of Preet Barr? But the reason was.

Speaker 3 He wanted to have his own prosecutor in there because he's afraid of prosecution. I figured that out years later.

Speaker 3 The other thing was in 2020, Maggie Haberman was reporting that one of the reasons why he decided to run for re-election in 2020 was he's afraid of being prosecuted. Okay.
In 2024, you mean? No, 2020.

Speaker 3 One of the reasons why he was running was because he wanted to keep control of the Justice Department so he wouldn't be prosecuted. This has been a continual thing.
This is about his freedom.

Speaker 3 He knows he's at grave risk here.

Speaker 3 And in terms of, you know, the immunity thing temporarily helps him because it slows things down. But the case is going to go back to Judge Chutkin in the next day or so, maybe today.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 she can basically go through the record and she can say under the Supreme Court's test, even though the Supreme Court's test is complicated and messy and stupid in a lot of ways, there's plenty of stuff he did, particularly with regard to the false elector certificates, that is chargeable.

Speaker 3 And so he's not going to be able to get off. I mean, maybe it'll take a few years, but he's not going to be able to get off on that.

Speaker 3 And then if you go back to the Mar-a-Lago documents case, I mean, he's dead to rights there.

Speaker 3 That's like a penny-anny drug bust. Okay.
They come in, they go into the crack den, and they go into the basement, and there's all the crack making equipment. Well, that's what he did.

Speaker 3 He had all the documents there. And he has no legal basis to avoid.

Speaker 3 There's no immunity for that because all the obstruction that he engaged in, the hiding of the documents, the lying about the documents, he wasn't president then. So he's got big problems.

Speaker 3 And, you know, he still has the conviction in New York that I don't think is going to be overturned because I don't think, even though there's a statement in the court's opinion about how evidence of official acts can't be used in any way, even if the charge doesn't involve official acts, none of this involved official acts because it involved his own personal funds and who he was directing checks to.

Speaker 3 You know, a payment of hush money that was paid before the election was designed to get him elected president and wasn't part of any official duty that he ever had.

Speaker 3 So he's got a lot of different problems.

Speaker 3 I think in the end, if he doesn't get elected president, I felt this for a long time, he's likely to spend a good chunk of the rest of his life in jail, if not the rest of his life in jail.

Speaker 3 And so he knows that, and he deeply is afraid of that. And that's why you hear him talking about that every so often.

Speaker 3 It weighs on his mind and it adds to the stress on his already beleaguered personality.

Speaker 2 Just crossing my fingers over here every time I hear you say that, George, I just hope you're right. I've never hoped you were right more.

Speaker 2 Just on the Supreme Court thing we were talking about, would you have any thoughts on the proposed Biden Supreme Court reforms?

Speaker 2 I mean, obviously, they're not going to come to pass, but I'm just curious what you think on the merits of them.

Speaker 3 On the merits of them, I mean, look, I'm absolutely for anything that tightens up the ethical standards.

Speaker 3 In terms of what people are calling term limits, but you can't really limit the terms of Supreme Court justices.

Speaker 3 It's complicated how they can do it, but they probably can do it.

Speaker 3 I've always thought that was a good idea, frankly, because I have always held the opinion for many, many years, and particularly long before Trump, that the Supreme Court is too powerful a body.

Speaker 3 And it has sort of accreted a lot of power because for lots of different reasons. One is Congress has

Speaker 3 doesn't want to be the decider. And also because they sort of got ahead of themselves.
I mean, like Roe v.

Speaker 3 Wade, I wouldn't have overruled it, but I thought it was wrongly decided to begin with because the court basically just got into a business that it didn't have any business getting into and then did it, created basically a statutory framework for all time and answered all sorts of questions that didn't have to answer at once.

Speaker 3 Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a great article once saying, you know, they should have just decided the case before them.

Speaker 3 But these people just think that they are so important that they have to set down a rule for the ages, to quote Justice Gorsuch at the argument on the immunity case.

Speaker 3 And so they decide, they're deciding all sorts of issues for all time that don't need to be decided. And they're not really behaving like judges.
They're behaving like legislators or gods.

Speaker 2 They should think of themselves more like glorified traffic court judges and less like gods.

Speaker 3 Yeah, somewhere in between.

Speaker 3 They can do better than traffic court judges, but they really, you know, they just really have to stick to calling balls and strikes and adjudicating the specific case in front of them instead of trying to figure out, you know, what the perfect world is going to look like, you know, and decide the next 50 cases instead of just deciding one.

Speaker 3 And I think part of that comes with the fact that

Speaker 3 you can get on the court at age 45 and be there till 90.

Speaker 3 I do think that having some system whereby presidents get to appoint more judges, a certain number of judges per term, justices, and then you basically have the panel, the Supreme Court sit in groups of nine, where you have the youngest nine sitting most of the time.

Speaker 3 I think there's some kind of play there that would actually improve the functioning of the Supreme Court and depoliticize confirmation hearings, which have gotten out of hand for 40 years.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm glad to hear you say that because I agree with that instinctively, instinctively, but I'm not a lawyer and wasn't schooled in the FedSock ways like you.

Speaker 2 So I was like, is this just me being a

Speaker 2 casual or a lib?

Speaker 3 It's out of control. It's been out of control for a long time.

Speaker 2 Pete put this out when he was first running, and I just thought the reforms people to judge. I just thought that they're reasonable.

Speaker 2 His point was like, we need more consensus choices, you know, shorter terms, consensus, like just figuring out a way to do that,

Speaker 2 which that I think is much more defensible and makes more sense than sometimes the people that are like, pack it. Like we need to rebalance it the other way.

Speaker 2 Like, the ideological arguments are less compelling. Right.

Speaker 3 That just makes the court into more of a political football than it already is, which is bad.

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Speaker 2 A new article this morning.

Speaker 2 I don't know, it's pretty long, so I don't expect us all to have read all of it this today, but I just think in the general, it's important to talk about a Washington Post piece.

Speaker 2 Carol Lennig is on a $10 million cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt. I'll just take the nut graph for you here.

Speaker 2 They learned through interviews with the candidate's closest advisors that they had pleaded with Trump to write a check to his campaign for a final blitz of TV ads.

Speaker 2 Trump repeatedly declined until October 28th, roughly five weeks after meeting with Cece, you know, autocrat in Egypt.

Speaker 2 He then announced that he would allow for a $10 million infusion of his own money into the campaign.

Speaker 2 In the context of the Egypt intelligence, investigators considered the amount of point of interest because they were looking into a withdrawal from a bank in Egypt of like 9.98 million, which is pretty close to 10 million.

Speaker 2 Investigation is ongoing.

Speaker 2 Mueller looked into it, but I wanted to get your take also because it reminded me of something that I think has been very undercovered, which was John Bolton during his book tour gave a private speech where he said that he thought Trump made decisions based on business interests, and he particularly cited Turkey, Saudi, and Egypt as the countries that he was interested in.

Speaker 2 And he was the fucking national security advisor. So I don't know.
Open room for thoughts on any of that.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, there's a really dramatic description in that Washington Post piece about people at an Egyptian bank loading up that cash into bags.

Speaker 3 It weighed about 200 pounds, supposedly, and it was consisted of a good chunk of Egypt's foreign reserve and U.S. dollars, reserve currency.
So, you have to wonder, where did that money go?

Speaker 3 I don't know that we'll ever know.

Speaker 3 I think there are going to be a lot of things that we're going to learn about the Trump years over the next many years that we're just going to keep learning stuff as the onion gets peeled back.

Speaker 3 And I mean, maybe someday we'll get to the bottom of this. It's certainly very strange.
But, you know, Bolton was right. I mean, Trump is a guy who basically didn't know what Pearl Harbor was, right?

Speaker 3 He had to have, remember that? John Kelly had to say, Pearl Harbor, that's where the Japanese bombed us in the surprise attack, and that's how World War II started. You know, that big war.

Speaker 3 You see it on TV. Sometimes there are movies.

Speaker 3 He literally had to fucking explain this to Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 Also, John Kelly was like his second chief of staff. So he's well into the presidency.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he's well into the presidency.

Speaker 2 This wasn't during the briefings in 2015.

Speaker 3 If Trump shows some special interest in Turkey, which he probably couldn't find on a marked map, you have to wonder, something's going on here.

Speaker 3 And you got 2 billion reasons why Jared Kushner was interested in Saudi Arabia. And we're going to be finding stuff out about this crew for a long time.

Speaker 3 As a sociopath, he has absolutely no moral compass whatsoever. If he could take cash, he would, if he can get away with it.
So the question is, does he think he can get away with it?

Speaker 3 And now he's pushing crypto. There's something going on there, right? He's pushing crypto the last few days.
There is something going on there.

Speaker 2 The crypto and the TikTok thing. Oh, yeah.
All those, these crypto VCs are on board. I've said this like three times recently.
I'm like, I want to do an episode on this.

Speaker 2 Unfortunately, there's been a lot of politics going on, so it hasn't been really appropriate for me to have a side episode about crypto, but I do want to bring in crypto people because it's eyebrow raising how quickly all of the top crypto people have just glommed on to Trump.

Speaker 2 And I think that, I mean, the answer is just basically that Trump's like, I'll let you do whatever you want. And I think that maybe there's some side money potentially involved there.

Speaker 2 Let's do a little Kamala talk. Not a psychopath.
You were at a fundraiser recently and maybe had a brief interaction.

Speaker 2 I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on the vice president, state of the race, and anything that comes to mind.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, I got into this fundraiser in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on Saturday, and she gave a great little stump speech, and it was very, she was great. She did a great job.

Speaker 3 And she has this wonderful riff that I hope she keeps. riffing on.
I think she will, and maybe it's even expanding on about how, you know, she was a prosecutor.

Speaker 3 She was a district attorney in San Francisco. She was attorney general of California and she prosecuted people who ran scam schools.
She prosecuted sexual predators and she prosecuted fraudsters.

Speaker 3 And, you know, Donald Trump is all of these things. So I know Donald Trump's type is the punchline.
And it's just, it's just terrific. I mean, the contrast between her and Trump.
It's great.

Speaker 3 And she's getting young people interested because they don't see two old guys running against each other that they've been sick of, that they've seen their entire lives.

Speaker 3 You know, she's really moved the needle.

Speaker 3 And I think that's one thing that the Democrats really have done really, really well over our lifetimes is that they are the best at rolling out bright and shiny and new. Remember John Kennedy.

Speaker 3 Jimmy Carter was bright and shiny and new. He was like nobody had ever heard of him.
He was like 40-something years old, 48, 50, 51. I don't know what he was.
Bill Clinton, of course, at 43.

Speaker 3 Barack Obama, I don't remember what his age was, but

Speaker 3 they really, these were people who had not been

Speaker 3 well known until they really ran for president. And they do this really well.
There's this excitement on the Democratic side now that we haven't seen in a long time.

Speaker 2 You know, these things, there's little photo lines. She's walking by, you shake hands.
You know, you had 15 seconds with Kamala. You want to tell her, give her a piece of advice.

Speaker 2 What kind of advice are you giving to her right now?

Speaker 3 I didn't. Here's the, well, I did meet, I did chat with her very like 15 seconds.
It was the photo line, in fact. And I walk up to her.
She's funny.

Speaker 3 She just smiles at me and she says, I'd never met her before. I've met Doug before.
And she smiles at me and say, Hey, you're famous. Look at her.
Look at her. And I say, not like you are.

Speaker 3 And then I just say, you know, just keep hammering them. Just don't let up.
Don't ever let up. And she said, as she did during her speech or some speech that, you know, we're the underdogs.

Speaker 3 I said, you know, that's good. Keep it like that.
Keep it like that. Being the underdog and feeling like you're the underdog with a chance to win is inspiring.
People love underdogs.

Speaker 3 And that's that kind of spirit that actually, you know, is infectious. It is absolutely infectious.
And she's bringing it with her. And she has great, great political skills.

Speaker 3 You know, she behaves the way she behaves, you know, because it's real.

Speaker 3 If she laughs, it's a real laugh. Trump can't laugh because he's a sociopath.

Speaker 3 If this is a real human being, she's been pitch perfect. I agree.

Speaker 2 And there's something about assuming the role of the top job.

Speaker 2 You know, my big piece of advice to her and people around her, which I gave privately, so I'm happy to give publicly back when she was on the VP ticket, was your advice.

Speaker 2 You just said right there, keep hammering him. I was like, I want the prosecutor.
I want you to hammer him more, to be unafraid. And there was something about being VP.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 I don't know whether it was not wanting to overshadow Biden or whether it was

Speaker 2 something about. You don't want the, you know, I have the black woman to be the tough one out there.
There was racial or identity kind of related stuff.

Speaker 2 I don't exactly know, but she, she felt a little bit cautious on that.

Speaker 3 And literally, since the moment that she's taken the top swat, like whatever caution that was has been totally gone and i think that she's been really strong on this stuff yeah no i think that's exactly right people understand they like authenticity in politicians and she's authentic i think she's she's she's truly authentic she's having a good time and if you know being the happy warrior can go such a long way in politics and if you can deliver the brutal punchline against your against your opponent, but then smile and look happy and you're telling the truth because because you're telling the truth and you know you're right.

Speaker 3 I mean, it just goes such a long way.

Speaker 2 Speaking of Happy Warriors, my final topic for you: I can't let you go without talking about Kelly Ann a little bit.

Speaker 2 We had an article in the Bulwark about how the people are mad at her on the campaign, Chris Loncevita, and them. They're blaming Kelly Ann for the JD Vance bad coverage.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Maybe you might have a conflict of interest here, but I blame J.D.
Vance for the bad J.D. Vance coverage, but that's just me.

Speaker 3 That's just my view. Like, you're going to blame her.
She just, you know, my view is: how do you not respond to anybody saying, what do you think of J.V. Devance without saying

Speaker 3 something

Speaker 3 not really positive?

Speaker 3 If you're being honest, that she, you know, she basically, I mean, I think at the bulwark piece, basically said, look, people are calling up and they're asking, what do you think of JD Vance?

Speaker 3 It's like, I'm not making those phone calls. Like, there's a reason why those people are asking.
The problem is J.D. Vance sucks.

Speaker 3 And I don't know why he should get in trouble for saying he sucks because he sucks. He sucks.
So, you know, I'm with Kellyanne on that one.

Speaker 2 A horrible pick. But just at the broader, without Kellyanne in particular, there is signs of fraying over there.
I mean, you have to notice this as somebody who's been in these fights before. The

Speaker 2 Las Avida, who's the top strategist over there, was tweeting out a picture of himself as Tony Soprano yesterday with a middle finger.

Speaker 2 You know, people are attacking each other. The leaks are happening.
Just the fact that 12 people leaked to the bulwark about Kellyanne, I think it's a sign that

Speaker 2 there's some concerns. you're not seeing that in the Kamala campaign.

Speaker 3 By the way,

Speaker 2 I know. I wonder.

Speaker 2 You're not seeing that in the Kamala campaign. You're not seeing any articles where it's like 12 Kamala staffers are pointing the finger at David Axelrod.

Speaker 3 Because they're too busy counting all the campaign contributions that are coming in like millions of dollars a second. So they got no time for backbiting.

Speaker 2 So there's some concerns down there, I think. And so

Speaker 2 I'm glad that the anti-psycho pack is continuing to drive that wedge in Mar-a-Lago. Any other final thoughts before we lose you for the weekend?

Speaker 3 No, no, I think we've covered everything. It's been fun.

Speaker 2 George Conway, I appreciate your work. Anti-psychopath pack.
Everybody go check it out online, all the social media feeds and donate. George is putting his own money in there.

Speaker 2 And we're just doing the work out here, brother. We're doing the work.
I appreciate you.

Speaker 3 Glad to be here.

Speaker 2 All right, we'll be back on Monday with Bill Crystal. If there is a Kamala VP leak this weekend, probably won't won't do a bonus podcast unless it's Pete.

Speaker 2 If it's Pete, I might have to do a special bonus podcast if it's Pete. But if it's anybody else that leaks this weekend, I might hop onto YouTube.
So check out the Bulwarks YouTube page and subscribe.

Speaker 2 George is on there sometimes too. Really appreciate y'all.
We'll see you on Monday with Bill Crystal. Thanks to George Conway.
Peace.

Speaker 3 life wire.

Speaker 3 Psycho killer,

Speaker 3 cascade.

Speaker 3 Run, run,

Speaker 3 run, run, run away.

Speaker 3 Psycho killer,

Speaker 3 cascade.

Speaker 3 Better.

Speaker 3 Run, run, run, run, run away.

Speaker 3 I passed out hours ago.

Speaker 3 I'm sadder than you'll ever know.

Speaker 3 I close my eyes on this sunny day.

Speaker 3 Say something once, before I say it again.

Speaker 3 Psycho killer, cascase.

Speaker 3 Fuck, far, fast, far, far, fast, far, far, far, far better.

Speaker 3 Run, run,

Speaker 3 run, run, run away.

Speaker 3 Psycho killer,

Speaker 3 cascade.

Speaker 3 Fuck, fall, fuck, fall, fuck, fuck, fall, fast, far, better.

Speaker 3 Run, run, run, run, run away.

Speaker 2 The Bullark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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Speaker 3 Que esperaban, la proxima vecel esti,