Will Saletan: Trolls and Liars

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Speaker 4 Hello and welcome to the Bloorg Podcast. I'm Tim Miller.
It's Will Salatin Mondays. They're back.
Happy Mother's Day weekend, all the mothers out there.

Speaker 4 I have the best mother, so I'm sorry for everybody else, but I'm sure your mothers are great too. Will, do you have any mothers you want to shout out?

Speaker 2 My mom is deceased, but I loved her very much. And like everyone else, I thought my mother was the best mother in the world.
We will eventually have to get together and debate this.

Speaker 4 I'm sorry. It's not probably not really that close, but I'm sure your wife is a wonderful mother as well.
And that your mother seemed to have done a very good job, I guess.

Speaker 4 So she's got that going going for her. We have a lot to discuss.
You know, there was a Nuggets masterclass last night. It means order has been restored in the NBA playoffs.

Speaker 4 Order is not restored in the presidential race. There's a terrible New York Times poll out today.
We'll get to inspiring protests in Georgia, the country. The Israel debate is still roiling.

Speaker 4 ESH, the actual Israel attacks are still roiling. Bob Menendez is on trial, so is Donald Trump.
Nikki Haley was voted as VP and then shot down.

Speaker 4 I mean, Will, we're not going to have enough time to get to everything, but I feel like it's Monday. We have to start with a little buffoonery.
Is that okay? Let's go for it.

Speaker 4 We have serious business to get to. We have sad polls.

Speaker 4 We have much to discuss in the Middle East, but we need to do a little buffoonery. Donald Trump on Saturday held a Jersey Shore Jim Tan Laundry rally.

Speaker 4 During the rally, he had some weird praise for Hannibal Elector. He mixed up Jimmy Carter for Jimmy Connors, the tennis star, and then he couldn't pull Jimmy Carter's name for a little while.

Speaker 4 But for all of those lowlights, I wanted to dial into

Speaker 4 this little clip.

Speaker 5 I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.

Speaker 4 So there you go, Will. Donald Trump won't give a penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.
Mr. Operation Warp Speed is now not just anti-COVID vacc, but any vax.

Speaker 4 And this is the degradation of the party. Feel free to take any of that.
If you had a Hannibal Elector Riff, that's fine too. But the vaccine thing is pretty alarming.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the vaccine thing is this whole other other dimension of Republican insanity.

Speaker 2 So normally we talk about like Trump and his authoritarianism and how Republicans will go to any length to excuse it.

Speaker 2 And the vaccine stuff is this kind of science denialism, which is another way in which the party has just descended into lunacy.

Speaker 2 And as you point out, like first it was masks, then it was COVID vaccines. And now it seems to be spreading to vaccines generally.
So you wonder what's next in the parade of anti-science garbage.

Speaker 2 But there seems to be just like a political competition within the party that the base is moving in that direction and that so, you know, Trump is going to follow it.

Speaker 4 Huge applause for that, by the way, you can hear. And this is another example that bottom up.
There's this debate that we have, right? Was he a cause or effect? You know, and he's both, right?

Speaker 4 On certain issues, he was cause. And on others, he's a fact.
This one, he's like, effect.

Speaker 4 Donald Trump, I think, would be happy to not, I mean, I guess he did dabble in some autism vaccine conspiracies back in the day.

Speaker 4 He kind of, he dabbles in all conspiracies, but like his heart isn't in this one. But the people, the people want this.

Speaker 4 I mean, overwhelming cheers there from the crowd that gathered on the Jersey shore. Hopefully nobody with measles, mumps, or rubella in the group because they weren't packed in kind of tightly.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Here, I would argue Trump is a follower, not a leader.

Speaker 2 And the reason Trump is following, the reason we know that is, what was the best thing that happened in the Trump administration? What was the best thing he did? It was Operation Warp Speed.

Speaker 4 It was the vaccine, right?

Speaker 2 And it wasn't him doing it, but at least he was in favor of it. He defended it.

Speaker 2 And then there was that moment when Candace Owens, who like confronted him, they had a conversation in a podcast, and there was something where he was on stage with Bill O'Reilly and says,

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 2 he gets booed by his crowd, and he realizes, wait, the party has moved outside of me on vaccines. I can't be out anti-vaxxed.
So, yeah, he's now saying at the rally what the base wants to hear.

Speaker 4 We're going to pop through just the greatest hits here of the crazy and just kind of slowly make our way towards seriousness.

Speaker 4 here's carrie lake there are a lot of things to pick from in the sunday shows this weekend and we're going to get into some of the substantive ones but maria barbart romo i don't know if you've noticed this this lady was on cnbc right and and she has now cornered the craziest of the crazies as now her little domain on sundays and so she had carrie lake and marjorie taylor green on this weekend let's let's listen to carrie lake first how confident are you then that we will have a fair election in November?

Speaker 7 If it were today, I wouldn't be all that confident, but I know we have a lot of people, including myself, fighting to improve the laws and make sure they're following the laws.

Speaker 7 We've got many lawsuits running, one of them in Arizona, fighting to make sure illegals aren't voting.

Speaker 4 Hmm.

Speaker 4 Not confident right now. They had four years to fix the laws, didn't they? The imaginary fraud? Couldn't they have come up with some imaginary laws in the meantime?

Speaker 2 What they have is, and this is an illustration of it, what Carrie Lake is saying, they have a laundry list of election integrity measures that they want to pass, right?

Speaker 2 And they're all, you know, stuff, some of which replicates current law, making sure, you know, illegal aliens can't vote, and some of which is like unnecessary and harmful.

Speaker 2 And they're going to either pass all of it or they're not. And if they don't, then that's their excuse for why they're not going to accept the election results.

Speaker 2 Oh, I would accept a free and fair election. I mean, even J.D.
Vance said that on Sunday, right? I'll accept a free and fair, but it's not free and fair unless we get all these measures passed.

Speaker 2 So that just gives them an out.

Speaker 4 Well, it's not free and fair unless we win. Right.
I think that's like really what this all is, right?

Speaker 4 Like, we're now in a situation where one of the parties just, they're just not going to accept elections unless they win, unless it's an absolute blowout.

Speaker 4 I mean, you know, Doug Mastriano ended up doing the right thing because he had no choice. He lost by like 100 points to Josh Shapiro, friend of the pot.

Speaker 4 But like with Trump on the ballot this time, and these guys all know that they are going to have full cover to like let their, you know, their freak flag fly as high as possible on on election fraud claims right like the midterm they didn't you know you weren't sure exactly how that was going to go but this time you know that if trump loses that he will shout fraud and so if you're on the ballot with him there's no downside to this except for the risk to the republic which they don't care about okay tim you're talking about the reality which is if trump doesn't win they'll won't accept the results so that's true but the cover story is we have a list of election integrity measures and including what's the one that johnson stood up and demanded you know we stood next to trump and said we're going to pass this and that and the other thing.

Speaker 2 And they're not going to get all of them. And that's the point.
The point is they can't get them all.

Speaker 2 So the cover story will be, we didn't get this or that measure passed, just like they did in 2020 when it was, they said some election laws were changed in some way we don't like.

Speaker 2 I mean, at least Stephaniek is out there saying if there's gerrymandering, that's, that's our out, you know, that's, that's election interference and that's, that makes the election illegitimate.

Speaker 2 They just need an excuse.

Speaker 4 They did change the laws in some places, Georgia. This is how you also know it's, it's all bullshit.
I mean, it is obviously bullshit, but it's nice to sniff out the specific ways, right?

Speaker 4 Like in a world where

Speaker 4 they had substantive critiques about election administration, you know, there would be, you know, in these sorts of interviews, you would hear somebody saying, well, you know, look, I'm feeling pretty good about Georgia, right?

Speaker 4 Because they did those election reforms that Democrats howled about, you know, sometimes a little bit overkill. There were some elements to the Georgia law I disagreed with.
Some elements were fine.

Speaker 4 But, you know, if there was a substantive debate here, then we could debate that. You never hear that.
I mean, you watch all all the Sunday shows.

Speaker 4 Do you ever hear any JD or Lindsay or any of these people say, well, you know, we're feeling good about the way that they've changed the rules in Georgia, but we're worried about that Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan?

Speaker 4 I mean, that would be bad faith too, but at least it would be like the premise of their complaint would be supported if they were saying that. But they don't do that.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And this just goes back to the larger point that today's Republican Party is not a governing party.

Speaker 2 It's not a party that has a problem and comes up with a solution and says, okay, we've solved that. They're a grievance party.
They're a trolling party.

Speaker 2 They propose things that are on that, like the Georgia thing. You and I, I think, would probably agree about the Georgia election reform law was actually fine.
It was completely reasonable, right?

Speaker 4 Mostly fine. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But then there's these other stuff that they want to put out there.

Speaker 4 My one complaint about the Georgia law is like it was reasonable, but the arguments for it were unreasonable.

Speaker 4 You know, I did not like the way in which it gave cover to the people who wanted to believe the fantasy about the election lie.

Speaker 4 Like, I felt like the election lie needed to be stamped out among the responsible Republicans and annoyed me a little bit that Brian Kemp was like, yeah, there were some problems we really did need to crack out.

Speaker 4 Like that, that was, I think, a fair complaint. Some of the Jim Crow stuff was a little overkill.

Speaker 2 The point of the freaking out about election fraud is the Republicans want it to be unfalsifiable. They don't want there to be some election measure that they actually pass.

Speaker 2 And then they go, okay, it's a clean election now.

Speaker 4 If we lose, we lose, right?

Speaker 2 So, yeah, they pass the Georgia one, and they've got to like pretend that, you know, there's this enduring problem that they haven't solved.

Speaker 4 Well, there might be one man that is aspiring to be part of a governing party within the Republican Party, strangely, the new

Speaker 4 favorite Republican on this podcast, Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson comes off looking good again.

Speaker 4 Here's later in the Maria Bart Romo crazy, crazy cuckoo power hour, she brought Marjorie Taylor Greene onto the show.

Speaker 4 Imagine sitting there on a Sunday morning and being like, you know what I need with my morning coffee before church? I need a one-hour show that has Carrie Lake and Marjorie Taylor Greene interviewed.

Speaker 4 Anyway, here's MTG talking about her negotiations with Mike Johnson.

Speaker 8 I asked Mike Johnson this week, I said, look, if you'll defund Jack Smith,

Speaker 8 then I'll reconsider this motion to vacate. And he told Playbook last week, no, he will not defund Jack Smith.
The weaponized government is one of the most terrifying things we're seeing.

Speaker 4 Well, how about that? One more cheer for Mike Johnson. I'm not exactly sure what's happening there.
Maybe it was just Marjorie Taylor Greene was like he just refused to give her anything.

Speaker 4 I knew this was more interpersonal than principled. But yeah, great.
We're not going to defund Jack Smith. I'll take it.
The tiniest of wins. The tiniest of wins, but I'll take it.

Speaker 4 Is that a pony for you, Will?

Speaker 2 So it is. But Tim, is there a term for this? So triangulation, when Bill Clinton did it, was an active thing.
You went out and found Sister Solgia and rebuked her, right?

Speaker 2 There's something going on with Mike Johnson that's like passive triangulation, where he doesn't even have to say anything. He just, Marjorie Taylor Greene goes on.

Speaker 2 By the way, Maria Bartaromo, a treasure, a national treasure. So what happened was Fox created the Fox News Sunday show, which they wanted to be like a normal network show.

Speaker 2 And then, of course, the crazies on the right were unhappy because like, what's this? You're like doing objective journalism.

Speaker 2 And that's what the Maria Bartaromo hour is, like complete lunacy, the craziest people. So here's Marjorie Taylor Green saying, you know, the government's being weaponized.
We have to defund it.

Speaker 2 People, the meaning of weaponized government, if it has any meaning at all, is that you're breaking the rules to serve a political purpose. Well, that's what defunding Jack Smith would be.

Speaker 2 That would be weaponization. So, you know, good for Mike Johnson.
It's a low bar, but good for him for rejecting that weaponization in the form of defunding Jack Smith.

Speaker 4 Speaking of weaponization of government, Bob Menendez on trial today. It's interesting.
He's a Democrat, right? Is he a Democrat? I get a check. Yes.
He's a Democrat.

Speaker 4 That's a Democratic government that's charging him? That's interesting. Well, Will, what do you want to do? I had a new segment.

Speaker 4 There's going to be a desire to fund segment, but I'm looking down at our show map here, and we've got to go to the New York Times poll first.

Speaker 4 Should we do the fun first or do you want to do the New York Times poll first? What do you want to do?

Speaker 2 The poll's dreadful, so we want to do that and then go to the fun or do you want to?

Speaker 4 Okay, yeah, we'll do the poll and then we'll go to the fun before we get, before we get to it. It's real.

Speaker 4 It is an extremely dreadful poll. Biden is just to run down the states really quick.
So the New York Times, Sienna. These people are going to be out there and be like, oh, this is crap.

Speaker 4 The New York Times, Sienna was pretty close, all right, in the midterms. It wasn't perfect.
You know, polls are not oracles.

Speaker 4 We're going to get to oracles in a second, but it was at least directionally close in most of the big Senate states in particular. Biden plus two in Wisconsin.
That's good.

Speaker 4 And then Trump plus three in Pennsylvania, plus seven in Arizona, plus seven in Michigan, plus ten in Georgia, plus 12 in Nevada. Woof.
Biden is doing better among likely voters.

Speaker 4 If it's just the likely voters that are registered voters, he's winning Michigan and Wisconsin. You need to win also Pennsylvania there to actually get to 270, but he'd get two of the three.

Speaker 4 Disengaged voters remain his weakness. He's essentially tied among 18 to 29 year olds and Hispanic voters.
He's down a bit with black voters.

Speaker 4 Will it kind of feel like our people, the RVAT folks, are pretty solid in most of these polls.

Speaker 4 Now, you can, you know, you can get into your colon a little bit going through these crosstabs, but directionally speaking, it's not like the Romney Biden voters that are the problem, at least at this point.

Speaker 4 It is part of the core Democratic coalition. And in some ways, you could see that as potentially a good thing, right? That those folks will get back in line.

Speaker 4 In other ways, you could see it as deeply concerning that we're in the midst of a realignment. Where do you fall on that question?

Speaker 2 Okay, so you've done the pony part of this. I'll do the anti-pony part of this.
Okay, great.

Speaker 2 There's been a debate about Joe Biden and whether Joe Biden is the best nominee the Democrats have come up with. We're going to stick with our guy.
He's the incumbent. Incumbency helps.

Speaker 2 We fracture the party, yada, yada. This poll is very ominous in part because let's say you don't like this poll.
You don't like the sample. You don't like something about it.

Speaker 2 You should worry about when you start rejecting polls. But in the same poll where Biden is trailing in these states, the Democrats running for the Senate are leading.

Speaker 4 I have those numbers in front of me here. Let's just pull that up.
So we've got Jackie Rosen plus two in Nevada. So remember, Biden's down 12.
Rosen is plus two. So it's a 14-point swing.

Speaker 4 Gallego plus four in Arizona. Biden's down seven.
So it's an 11-point swing. I'll just put a pin in that.
I do think Gallego will end up running quite a bit ahead of Biden for a couple of reasons.

Speaker 4 You got Casey plus five in Pennsylvania, whereas Biden's down there. So it's an eight-point swing.
And then you got Baldwin plus nine, where Biden's plus two. It's a seven-point swing.

Speaker 4 We don't have a Michigan head-to-head yet. So across the board, seven or more points, the Democratic Senate candidate is running ahead of Biden.
So talk to me about what that says to you.

Speaker 2 Well, it says it's not a Democratic problem. It's a Biden problem.
What is the distinction between him and these candidates? They're incumbents, aren't they, Tim?

Speaker 4 I mean, yeah, not Gallego, the other one. Casey, Baldwin.

Speaker 2 But Gallego is a congressman, and Carrie Lake's an outsider. So, like, even there, it's sort of so the incumbency is doing fine for them, but not for Biden.

Speaker 2 Is there something weird about Trump that Trump is a former incumbent and so he's benefiting in the way?

Speaker 2 I mean, if you look at who are these people, you know, Kerry Lake, Brown, McCormick, I don't know this guy, How Day. Is there something that Trump has that people trust him because he was president?

Speaker 2 Like, no matter how crazy he was as president, at least he did the job. I don't know what it is, but I think there is something about Biden.
I think Biden is not not presenting well.

Speaker 2 And we've had this debate at the bulwark about whether to stick with Joe or whether he needed to be abandoned. And Bill Crystal was on the other side of that.

Speaker 4 Maybe Bill's right.

Speaker 2 Maybe there's something about Biden that's just sinking him and going to sink him.

Speaker 4 The people were so excited that Bill Crystal was on vacation for one week, so they didn't have to hear that maybe he was right about Joe Biden's age.

Speaker 4 And there you go, just making the argument for him.

Speaker 4 I was always just neutral on this. I kind of felt that whole debate was kind of silly because it was hubristic.
It was like, we don't know. None None of us know.
Okay. None of us freaking know

Speaker 4 how that was going to shake out. Like we can all make our best guess.
I have some concerns about Biden's age and how he presents and health events, which I've talked about.

Speaker 4 On the other hand, you know, we always do this counterfactual where it's like, imagine where we are right now.

Speaker 4 If there was an open Democratic primary, Biden is the president, and we get into this Israel debate we'll get into later.

Speaker 4 Imagine just how toxic that would be right now with these candidates maybe trying to get to his left in certain ways.

Speaker 4 I think that the alternate option option also presented a lot of problems that people don't really think through. All that said, you can really look at the Democratic Senate numbers both ways, right?

Speaker 4 That there is this unique problem with Biden or that like the polls are really just people that are going to vote for Biden eventually just expressing frustration.

Speaker 4 And it's really kind of hard to know. And I think this is part of Sarah's work and the focus groups and part of, you know, what we're going to continue to learn more about over the year.

Speaker 4 But it is somewhat encouraging the people that are most engaged are Biden's best group, right? Because they're the most informed.

Speaker 4 And so other people, you presume, will get more informed, at least marginally, over the course of the year. And maybe that pushes them more towards Biden's camp.

Speaker 4 The abortion issue hangs over this stuff, I think, is really a huge issue for the generic Republicans in these states. The Trump thing, I think the main question is

Speaker 4 on the economy, are these voters like blaming Biden? and remembering pre-COVID Trump.

Speaker 4 And then the second level to that, are they not blaming Trump for the overturn of Roe and kind of seeing him as more of a moderate? You look at polls and people still do think that.

Speaker 4 Those are the two concerns. So if that's true, then the question is, can Biden untangle that, right?

Speaker 4 That there's some percentage of low-info voters or disengaged voters is maybe a less pejorative way to say that, disengaged voters who like, just blame him for the economy and don't blame Trump, blame the Republicans generally for the Roe, but don't blame Trump.

Speaker 4 And, you know, then it's the job of the campaign to kind of change those perceptions. Right.

Speaker 2 The abortion thing drives me crazy. And this goes back to your point about will voters come home or just basic information.
Will that move people?

Speaker 2 Because in this poll, they said almost 20% of the respondents blamed Biden more than they blamed Trump for overturning Roe v. Wade.

Speaker 2 So it's like how ill-informed these people are.

Speaker 2 So that's good news for the Democrats because you can just tell people. By the way, the guy who did that was Trump.

Speaker 2 It's why Democrats now show up better on election day than we expected in some of the polling.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I think that Trump,

Speaker 4 Trump has like some appeal to people who think that the system sucks, no matter what race, no matter what age.

Speaker 4 And like, these are the types of people that just by definition, you think the system sucks and you don't care about it, you're not likely to vote. Right.

Speaker 4 And Trump with his just nihilism and like just and his no bullshit, he's full of bullshit, but like that they perceive him to like say what he he really thinks because he says offensive things.

Speaker 4 And to them, that like codes is saying what he really thinks.

Speaker 4 There's this, there's something about, I got to find the right words for this, but like just a human character trait that if you like don't trust anybody, that like Trump is appealing.

Speaker 4 I think that is part of this too.

Speaker 2 Right. But that raises another problem, which is here we are out there telling people that Trump is going to destroy democracy.
Trump is a threat to everything.

Speaker 2 Institutions, right? We're institutionalists. Part of what this poll suggests, and they talk in the New York Times analysis about anti-system voters, voters who just want to tear down.

Speaker 2 They're like, the system's not working for me. The political system, the economic system, I want somebody to go in there and tear it down.

Speaker 2 And overwhelmingly, this poll shows these people support Trump. This is a major driver of Trumpism.
So here we are telling people Trump is going to destroy things. And these voters are like, yeah.

Speaker 2 That's exactly what we want. And this seems to be happening in other countries, right?

Speaker 2 In the West generally, like these populist anti-system candidates are thriving. And here we are feeding that.
Are we making a mistake?

Speaker 4 It's a good question within the context of the general election, because it's not a mistake for Democrats in every other election besides the presidential election, right?

Speaker 4 Like a big part of why you know, responsible, educated former Republicans have realigned towards Democrats like is because of this message, right?

Speaker 4 It's not because they changed their mind on healthcare policy or regular government regulations or whatever. And so it has benefited the Democrats.

Speaker 4 Like I always say, like in my mind's eye, when I think about, I wrote about the red dog Democrats, like the core red dog, it's like my high school buddies' wives who like go to the PTA meetings and like have kids and live in the suburbs and grew up Republican and like they're conscientious, right?

Speaker 4 They score highly on a conscientious scale, right? And now they've switched to Democrats. What do conscientious people do? They vote in school board elections.

Speaker 4 They vote in off-year state senate elections. You know what I mean? So it's been, I think, useful for Democrats to get to them.

Speaker 4 This year, in November, is it going to be useful to get to the people they need to get to? That's a good question. I think that's a real open question right now, because I think you're right.

Speaker 4 Like, if you just look at these polls, the people that Biden's struggling with, that's probably not going to resonate with them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We use this word conservative like it still means something, but these are radicals. These are people who like, they want to tear the system down.

Speaker 2 And Tim, are we going to end up with a very unhealthy, I think, a very unhealthy situation in which we have sort of an institutionalist party, a party that believes in rules and attracts the suburbanites and whatnot.

Speaker 2 And then we have a populist party that's just about tearing things down. I mean, that's kind of, if you look at the way Republicans behave in Congress, that's kind of what we have.

Speaker 2 And certainly nominating Trump and Trump's power in the Republican primary was he was, I mean, it was the cult, but also he was the guy who was going to most likely to tear things down.

Speaker 2 He's the guy who's violated laws or he's being persecuted by the system in four trials.

Speaker 4 And I mean, I think yes. And my answer to that is yes, right?

Speaker 4 Like the counteranswer to that is, could the Republicans reorient around, you know, being a party that is actually responsive to the needs of those types of folks, right?

Speaker 4 And so then they can be a governing party because they're meeting the needs of people that are, you know,

Speaker 4 not doing well in the globalized economy in various different ways. But like, these guys don't seem interested in that.
You know, so like that would be the healthiest.

Speaker 4 Now, that wouldn't have me going back to the Republican Party because that would, you know, it'd be a a protectionist party. Like, there'd be a lot of issues in which I'm still misaligned with them,

Speaker 4 but it would be healthier. But it's just hard to see that happening.
Okay, we can do deep talk on the future of the Republican Party later. We have too much stuff to get to.
And I've changed my mind.

Speaker 4 I'm saving the new segment for the very end. It's dessert.

Speaker 4 So, if people are like, I can't do any more of this, you know, you can just fast forward to the final segment for the newest edition to the Borg podcast.

Speaker 4 Something a little, something little fun for people, you know.

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Speaker 4 We have Michael Cohen also today. This is also kind of a deep question, you know, but just in a different

Speaker 4 manner. How do we deal with a guy like this? And he's advised by Lenny Davis.

Speaker 4 This guy sucks. Like, let's just be honest.
Like, Michael Cohen sucks.

Speaker 4 Like, the testimony from David Pecker of the work that he was doing with Michael Cohen was like as gross as anything I've ever seen. And I worked in opposition research.

Speaker 4 The types of stuff he used to do to vendors for Donald Trump, where he'd intimidate people, this like a fucking D-rate mafioso, like threatening people so that, you know, Trump got cheaper, you know, whatever, piping or whatever the fuck he was doing for them back when trump was just a real estate guy and not trying to ruin our democracy and michael cohen is not a great person and yet a lot of people that don't like donald trump are like really including maybe me i don't know are kind of rooting for him today like he's testifying today and and he needs to give a compelling testimony to the jury how do you process the michael cohen of it all well first of all if you're going to take down a crime boss the people who are going to flip on him are criminals that's the way it works.

Speaker 2 So hopefully the prosecution will just make that point. You know, you got to prepare the jury.
This guy is unlikable in a lot of ways because he was involved in the crimes.

Speaker 2 But also he wasn't given any deal. He wasn't given like a break in his sentence for this testimony.
He's doing it of his own volition. So at least he doesn't have that against him.

Speaker 2 And the other thing, Tim, is Cohen is just narrating. They have lots of records to show all the financial transactions that Trump did.
There's Cohen paying. There's Cohen being reimbursed.

Speaker 2 There's kind of an obvious chain of events, and he's the one who's going to say, yeah, I was told this and I did that.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 2 as a juror, I'm not going to look at Michael Cohen and say, well, he's not credible. He's a scumbag.
And therefore, I'm not going to accept this chain of records. The chain is there.

Speaker 2 So I don't think he's essential to the case in that way. I think he's going to be credible because he's describing something that's obvious.

Speaker 4 I guess. I think that is true in a narrowest case for the jury itself.
What about for the broader discussion here?

Speaker 4 Is it not a bad look that the resistance, that the people out there trying to stop Trump are

Speaker 4 championing this person? Maybe I'm just in my own head on this, but I do, I think that there is a category of people out there that think that Donald Trump's getting railroaded.

Speaker 4 And does Michael Cohen being front and center here contribute to that? Or no? And the other side of the story is Michael Cohen literally went to jail for this crime. So, you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Maybe that's the best way to frame him.

Speaker 2 Well, I would say that this concern about the appearance of Cohen and how it looks for Trump is just a species of the larger problem with this whole case, which is this is not a particularly Trumpy case.

Speaker 2 This is a case about a scummy politician who like cheated on his wife and then like paid paid it off to like hide it from the public.

Speaker 2 And a lot of voters are going to be like, okay, that's gross, but that's not a crime. And then, you know, Alvin Brad is going to be like, here's what the statute says.

Speaker 2 And they're going to be like, come on. So, I mean, on the other hand, I will say there can't be any doubt here about the scumminess.

Speaker 2 I mean, like, Trump's public position is that he never boinked Stormy Daniels, right? This never actually happened. And there she is in there describing the contents of his toiletry kit.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, he has like a gold manicure set or something like that. You can be sure that if anything she described was wrong, the Trumpers would have been out there with the attorneys like, oh,

Speaker 2 she's wrong, but she's got him dead to rights on. So he's a scumbag, but is that sufficiently criminal?

Speaker 4 I don't know. He's a scumbag.
And again, I think I've said this last week, but it's worth repeating. It's like kind kind of rape adjacent.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's not rape, but like he pressured her in a way that was very uncomfortable, you know, that if this was your sister or your mother, you're hearing this story.

Speaker 4 And it's like, she's in a bathroom. They come out.
A very powerful man is in his boxers. You know what I mean? A security guard's outside.
He's offering her work.

Speaker 4 I mean, you know, it was consensual, but it was just pathetic and gross and like very disgusting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but we already went through this with the Carroll verdict. I mean, here's like Trump, the jury says by a preponderance of evidence.
Trump stuck his finger in this woman against her will.

Speaker 4 Like, come on.

Speaker 2 It's like the Access Hollywood tape vindicated. It actually happened.
A jury found it. And voters seem not to care.
So I don't think they're going to care more about Stormy than they did about that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, maybe. I think they might.
I don't know.

Speaker 4 I think that there's been a really like a sense of fait accompli on all this because Trump won after the Access Hollywood tape and everybody's like, well, nobody cares. I don't know.

Speaker 4 I think that, again, you go back to this group that we were talking about, the Times Paul, the disengaged voters. Like, does everybody really know?

Speaker 4 Like, or do they just perceive him as like a cool playboy?

Speaker 4 You know, if there was a concerted effort to put these women front and center between now and November, might there be some people that are moved by that? I think maybe.

Speaker 4 I just, I think that throwing it away and saying no.

Speaker 4 I just, I hope it's not no, because that would say very bad things about the American people. But I think that a lot of people haven't really internalized.
I know it feels weird to us, right?

Speaker 4 Since we're just swimming and all this, but I think a lot of people haven't really internalized just how bad it was. One more thing in the Times probably forgot to mention.

Speaker 4 The person that's not here today, Bill Crystal.

Speaker 4 He also got another poll that he was looking at that didn't turn out as good as we hoped.

Speaker 4 He's on vacation in Greece, and he asked the Oracle at Delphi who our next president would be.

Speaker 4 She said he'll be of good age, will have lived in the House of White before, and of letters, his name has five.

Speaker 4 Now, you might say that could be either of them, but editor Adam Kuyper points out that in Greek, Donald Trump has five letters and not Joe Biden. So

Speaker 4 there's your other bad news sign besides the New York Times poll for the day.

Speaker 4 Lastly, about the court, Trump's family, which has not been with him throughout this case, he does finally have some loved ones there that are supporting him today. J.D.

Speaker 4 Vance and Tommy Tauberville will be joining Trump in court. This is weird, right? It's weird.
Like, this whole thing is weird, but it's pretty weird that

Speaker 4 Milani is not there. Ivank is not there.

Speaker 4 You know, he's on trial for 34 felony counts. The only people showing up are Rick Scott and J.D.
Vance and Tommy Tuberville.

Speaker 2 So correct me if I'm wrong. I'm going back to the Clinton years when Bill Clinton had to admit that he had sex with, or whatever he called it, with Monica Lewinsky.
He couldn't even get his wife.

Speaker 2 No one was standing beside Bill Clinton, were they?

Speaker 4 Right? That's true. This should be more you than me.
I'm going from memory. Hillary did do that joint interview with him, but that was during the accusation phase.

Speaker 4 Like that was during the campaign, right? That was like during Jennifer Flowers, I think, when Hillary was doing the joint interview. I can picture Hillary's haircut for some reason.
I just like that.

Speaker 4 This is like a very 90s image. I have it in my head.
Was it Diane Sawyer?

Speaker 2 I don't know. In Melania's defense, she's not there.
She's not standing next.

Speaker 2 So we have this weird thing where Melania will not go and be with Donald Trump when he's talking about and lying about his sexual escapades. But J.D.
Vance and Tommy Tuberville will.

Speaker 2 Part of the general thesis that these Republican politicians will do for Donald Trump what his own wife wife won't. I'll leave it there.
We'll leave it there, actually.

Speaker 4 I was about to say, and even Eric wouldn't, but you wouldn't.

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Speaker 4 Back to the Sunday shows. A lot of Israel discussion, of course.

Speaker 4 And, you know, the Republican senators, I don't know, you know, circling back to our original topic, like you would think that they would have some substantive critiques here, some governing critiques potentially of how Biden handled, you know, the discussion of whether he's providing offensive weapons to Israel if they go into Rafah.

Speaker 4 You know, it was a little strange. There's been some mixed messaging.
You can critique him on that.

Speaker 4 It's like Biden kind of offhandedly says it in an interview with CNN, and then Tony Blinken is giving some kind of hedged answers in a different interview.

Speaker 4 There are ways that you're supposed to be doing this as president, where you're, this is why you give speeches on matters such as this, where the text is written.

Speaker 4 So there's no openness to interpretation. And I would be open to some criticisms of Joe Biden on this that are substantive, even though I directionally basically agree with him.

Speaker 4 But But the Republicans, they don't like to deal with reality. Let's first listen to Lindsey Graham's discussion of what he thinks we should be using as a model for Gaza.

Speaker 10 So when we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons.

Speaker 10 That was the right decision. Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war they can't afford to lose and work with them to minimize casualties.
Well, can I say this? Why is it okay for America

Speaker 10 to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war? Why was it okay for us to do that? I thought it was okay.

Speaker 10 To Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state.

Speaker 4 Nuke Gaza?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I shouldn't laugh. I'm hoping this won't actually happen because Joe Biden is president.
It won't. First of all, Lindsey Graham is hyperventilating hyperventilating in this interview.

Speaker 2 He's not just casually invoking the Hiroshima model.

Speaker 2 He's hyperventilating, and you can hear him, Tim, he's pounding something on the table while he's like, he's really excited about this.

Speaker 2 And this is where the Republican Party has gone on this issue. Joe Biden, as you're pointing out, is taking the middle ground.

Speaker 2 And I think Chris Murphy, Senator Chris Murphy, was on TV saying, you know, this may be unpopular, what Biden is doing, but it's the right thing to do. We're standing by Israel.

Speaker 2 Israel is our ally, but there's a degree of going too far and killing civilians that we're not going to support. By the way, Ronald Reagan, Dick Nixon, all these other presidents did the same thing.

Speaker 2 That's the responsible thing. The Republican position is all in, no holds barred, Hiroshima as the model.
It's a crazy, crazy position. It's not humane, and it's extremely dangerous.

Speaker 2 I would be open to a Republican critique that says maybe do a little bit more, but this thing about Hamas is responsible for every death in Gaza, therefore Israel can do whatever the hell it wants.

Speaker 2 Hamas started it, therefore, Israel can do whatever they want. No amount of dumb bombs, 2,000-pound bombs with a thousand-foot blast radius being dropped on civilians is too many.

Speaker 2 It's a dangerous, unreasonable position.

Speaker 4 Does he have a post

Speaker 4 nuke plan for Gaza?

Speaker 4 We have diversity of views of the bulwark on several issues, maybe more than any others this one, wide range.

Speaker 4 I will say back last fall, the two of us held the most cautious view of Israel's offensive in Gaza.

Speaker 4 And we're wondering if maybe there wasn't exactly a plan here and there wasn't really an approach and there was going to be a lot of civilian death that was going to cause Israel a lot of medium to long-term problems as far as support from allies, support from the region.

Speaker 4 I don't know. I'm feeling pretty good about that position.
I don't know about you, Will.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so this conversation, just to be fair, is unrepresentative of the bulwark. You and I are.

Speaker 4 Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not saying anybody at the bulwark is on Nagasaki's view.
I'm just

Speaker 4 transitioning into it just by saying, just so I can be clear, I don't want anybody to feel like I was misrepresenting them. My main critique was that they have not offered a plan.

Speaker 4 Like, if you tell me we're going to eradicate Hamas and then, okay, we're going to work with Arab partners and we're doing this.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 But the problem is none of these guys seem to be offering that.

Speaker 4 And so anyway, I'm not saying that that's what the Bulwark folks are saying, but I think that none of the Republican senders seem to be offering anyone. But go ahead.

Speaker 2 No, I think your position is completely sensible. And look, honestly, you're younger than I am.
You got there earlier than I did.

Speaker 2 When I was younger, I tended to like trust the authorities, particularly on foreign policy. I was like, they probably know what they're doing.

Speaker 2 And the number one thing I have learned over the years is they don't know what they're doing. They don't.
This is not speculation.

Speaker 2 We had on TV Tony Blanken and other and various senators who have talked with the Israelis saying, I've talked with them and they don't know what they're doing.

Speaker 2 They don't have a plan for what comes after.

Speaker 4 It's an intra-Israel debate. Like within Israel.

Speaker 2 In Israel, they're doing this, but look at what's happening on the ground.

Speaker 2 Israel started from the north of Gaza and they moved south and they cleared areas and now they're in Rafah and like we're going to get the last bastion of Hamas.

Speaker 2 What is going on in North Gaza right now? They're back fighting.

Speaker 2 Hamas is reconstituted. Israel is back in there fighting.
There's a lot of evidence here that the Israeli strategy is not succeeding in the stated objective of wiping out Hamas.

Speaker 2 It is succeeding in killing more than 30,000 civilians. And to Israel's credit, it has slowed the pace of civilian death.
But the objective is not succeeding and there is no plan.

Speaker 4 We should say, and the UN came out this weekend and said that the Hamas numbers have been exaggerated, and there's still been just an unbelievable amount of civilian deaths, but not as many as has been claimed.

Speaker 2 Right. But Blinken and others have been very clear.
They've talked to the Israelis. The Israelis do not have a post-war plan, one that makes sense.

Speaker 4 This is why they're at Hiroshima. Like, honestly, isn't this why Republicans are like, we should just fucking bomb it all? Because that's the answer.
Like, that's their real solution.

Speaker 4 Like, they don't want to say that, really. Lindsey Graham will say that, but Bibi doesn't want to say that.

Speaker 4 And a lot of people that are on the sides of that are on the pro-eradicate Hamas side, it's hard to get them to say explicitly no, like really, we just want to level Gaza because that's the only way to do it.

Speaker 2 Right. We probably don't have time to play the clip, but Rick Scott was on one of the shows.

Speaker 4 Let's play Rick Scott. Let's play Rick Scott.
Let's do it right now.

Speaker 11 Israel has no choice but to destroy Rafah.

Speaker 11 I've always believed that Biden is unfortunately now part of the pro-Hamas wing of his party. That's all they're worried about is he's worried about winning the presidential election.

Speaker 11 Thank God for President Trump. He is one of the most pro-Israel presidents in our history, and I hope he wins so we can get somebody in there that's going to support Israel.
This is disgusting.

Speaker 11 If money that goes to Gaza is going to Hamas, whether we like it or not, it's not going to the Gazans. It's going to help Hamas.
Those tunnels were built with money from America.

Speaker 2 So at the end of that, you heard the part about if we send any money to Gaza, it doesn't go to the people, it goes to Hamas. Therefore, we're against aid to, I mean, people are starving.

Speaker 2 People are starving. And that's an argument against all the aid.
So that's inhumane. But the thing he said at the beginning, he literally said, Israel needs to destroy Rafah.

Speaker 2 Then later, he sort of screws it up. He's trying to say, destroy Hamas in Rafah, but he gets them confused.
And this is where the Republican mindset is. Destroy, destroy, destroy.

Speaker 2 And you just blurt out that you need to destroy the city. You know, that is what Biden is afraid of.

Speaker 2 He's afraid they're going to go in, drop the 2,000-pound bombs, kill some Hamas guys, kill a lot of civilians. Because what is it, one

Speaker 2 million and a half people who fled from other other parts of Gaza are down there concentrated. And if Israel goes in with a big operation, that's what's going to happen.

Speaker 4 Yeah, CBS had just this horrific, I mean, just very moving story. We'll put it in the show notes.
It's like 19 minutes, super long, of a mother whose sons are in America.

Speaker 4 She was living in Gaza, and her husband had died, and one of her sons in the military. And there was this ex-Fil group.

Speaker 4 God bless all of them. A lot of ex-military guys that came and got her out.
Anyway, listening to her talk about this, I just really put a lot of perspective on it for me.

Speaker 4 I just want to mention eradicating Hamas sounds great to me. I wish that there was a plan for it.
Joe Walsh is going to be on the podcast later this week, I think, who's more bullish on this.

Speaker 4 One more thing from the Sunday shows on this topic, just exposing the Republican lies. I think it's important to just be specific about this sort of stuff.

Speaker 4 And you wrote about this in morning shots in for Bill this morning. Here's Tom Cotton talking about the arms embargo, the supposed arms embargo.

Speaker 12 So, what Tony Blinken says on this show cannot be credited when Joe Biden is out there imposing a de facto arms embargo on Israel at the same time he's letting arms embargoes on Iran expire.

Speaker 13 You know, $26 billion in emergency funding was just approved by the president. And there is not an arms embargo on Israel and there is not a block on intelligence sharing with Israel.
You know that.

Speaker 12 Joe Biden said last week that he's going to stop supplying offensive weapons that can be used in an urban setting.

Speaker 4 That is the only setting in Gaza.

Speaker 12 That is the only setting in Gaza.

Speaker 2 And they have to go into Rafah.

Speaker 2 Tom Cotton is such a shameless liar. I mean,

Speaker 2 you didn't grow up a Democrat like me, Tim. This is just, it just drove me crazy how Republicans, there was nothing they wouldn't say.
They were on message about this stuff.

Speaker 2 It's not true that Biden's banned offensive weapons to Israel, specifically these 2,000-pound bombs. They held up one shipment temporarily.

Speaker 2 So the point is, it's a restriction on the size of the weapon, because these are weapons that kill too many civilians. It's on a particular location in Rafah.

Speaker 2 It's the manner in which it's done, that you can go into Rafah. You just can't drop these bombs.
And it's a temporary hold. It's not even a permanent thing.

Speaker 2 And for Tom Cotton to compare this to the arms embargo on Iran, which is comprehensive, is just a total outrage and an abuse of the term.

Speaker 4 Tom Cotton, full of shit, news at 11. Okay, we've got our exciting closing segment.
But before that, just really quick.

Speaker 4 Are you wearing those rosary beads, that a black pearl for people that are listening?

Speaker 4 You know, our YouTube crowd can see this, but for the pod listeners, can you explain to to us what you got on there?

Speaker 2 I wore these with Mona last week, but I wanted to say thank you to the person who gave them to me.

Speaker 2 My daughter was in Cameroon this semester, and she was in a village called Batufam, and the chief of the village, whose name is Roger, which is Roger, gave her these to bring to me.

Speaker 2 They're just black beads, a lovely necklace. So I wanted to say thank you to Roger and wear them in his honor.

Speaker 4 I love that. So is she back?

Speaker 2 She's back.

Speaker 4 That's great. Will she be at the Bulwark Live event on Wednesday?

Speaker 4 Go to thebulwark.com/slash events.

Speaker 4 I would love to meet her. Anyway, I'll be in DC later this week as well.

Speaker 4 Okay, here's our final bit. Do you know who Johnny McIntyre is? You know that name ring a bell, do you? Oh, yeah.
The body man.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you might remember him from my porn segment during the Kinzinger episode last week. If you guys missed that, you can go check it out.

Speaker 4 For people who don't know Johnny McIntyre, I just want to give you a little backstory here. He first gained fame when he was the backup quarterback at the University of Connecticut.

Speaker 4 He did a viral YouTube video where he did trick throws with MGMT's kids playing in the background.

Speaker 4 He copied this idea from the women's basketball team and ended up getting more views from it, which speaks to the patriarchy.

Speaker 4 He goes on after his failed football career to become Trump's body man, gains huge loyalty of Trump. He rises up the ranks quickly.

Speaker 4 He becomes the key man running the personnel office in the White House.

Speaker 4 He was the point person on vetting as the administration went on when they realized they had too many cucks in there and they wanted to get more serious about employing only loyalists because of his experience in doing a purge inside the White House.

Speaker 4 He is now a senior advisor to Project 2025.

Speaker 4 He was so influential in the White House, people began calling him deputy president. He flexed this influence in the lead up to January 6th.
Did you read the Jonathan Carl piece on this?

Speaker 4 This was an excerpt from Jonathan Carl's book. We'll put this in the show notes too.

Speaker 4 Johnny McAdie, who's like 29 or something at the time, wrote a memo to Trump about how he can remove cabinet secretaries.

Speaker 4 And that memo was one of the things that that sparked the removal of Mark Esper and other officials who weren't involved on board with the coup.

Speaker 4 So anyway, some of this is going to be funny, but it's serious that these are the kinds of bros that are going to be in the White House if Trump gets back in again. Fast forward to now.

Speaker 4 He started a dating app called The Right Stuff tagline, a dating app for the right wing, profiles, not pronouns. Now, this app has struggled to attract women.
Color me shocked about that.

Speaker 4 Buried in a nauseatingly fawning profile in the Washington Examiner, which will not be in the show notes, but if you're just a total sicko, you can Google it, was the fact that the site only has 60,000 members.

Speaker 4 Unclear how many of those are boys, but a vast majority. It has succeeded in one way, though.
It has 3 million followers on TikTok and Instagram.

Speaker 4 And let me tell you, Trump's deputy president's TikTok and Instagram is as gross as you could possibly imagine.

Speaker 4 So I want to share some of the content from his TikTok in our newest segment, The Right Stuff.

Speaker 4 Here's Johnny McIntye on the homeless.

Speaker 14 So I always keep this fake Hollywood money in my car. So when a homeless person asks for money, then I give them like a fake $5 bill.
So I feel good about myself. They feel good.

Speaker 14 And then when they go to use it, they get arrested. So I'm actually like helping clean up the community.
you know, getting them off the street.

Speaker 4 Boy, that would have been a funny joke if you're 15. That's like a 15-year-old rich kid prep school joke, but from somebody that's the deputy president.
Any thoughts about that gag?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I got one thought.

Speaker 2 First of all, it's disgusting, but pardon me, but didn't George Floyd die after he was confronted by police for passing a fake $20 bill at like a drugstore or someplace like that?

Speaker 2 I'm pretty sure it was the accusation was counterfeiting. So congratulations, Johnny McAtee.
You might get somebody else killed because of your bullshit money.

Speaker 4 Boy, that's dark. I do want to do a fact check really quick on going back through history.
It was 60 minutes. It was the Stand By My Man interview that I was mentioning earlier with Hillary Clinton.

Speaker 4 I like to close the loop when I mention stuff. Hillary Clinton and Bill, they sat down.
It was a post-Super Bowl interview with Mike Wallace.

Speaker 4 That's the one that I had in my mind, but that was not after Monica. That was 92.
I was Jennifer Flowers. Anyway, it's a history lesson for people who, like me, were 10 when that happened.

Speaker 4 Okay, we've got one more. Write stuff, viral.

Speaker 4 viral, I guess we call it viral, I don't know, right stuff video that's that's getting pretty good engagement on TikTok if you already weren't concerned enough about our youth.

Speaker 4 Here is Johnny McIntye on Mother's Day.

Speaker 14 Just a quick reminder, Mother's Day is for moms, not for men in dresses. Your day is April 1st.

Speaker 4 I mean, these people

Speaker 4 should probably come up with another joke at some point, but that was the Mother's Day message.

Speaker 4 Donald Trump's Mother's Day message was like some kind of Mother's Day message to the freaks that are ruining the country, and he hopes their moms treat them better. I don't know.

Speaker 4 At least that one had a little bit of Joie de Viv involved in it. What say you about the Mother's Day message from our deputy president?

Speaker 2 You know, this. There was a Republicans who spent decades going after gay people, and then the polls moved.
and that was no longer popular.

Speaker 2 And so now they've just transplanted all their bullshit, anti-gay stuff to anti-trans stuff.

Speaker 2 So, but the other thing is, if you're like dig at men is that it's only for mothers, then you're also making a dig at women who don't have babies,

Speaker 2 women who are single or women who are married and choose not to have kids. Like, please don't make Mother's Day an attack on people who are not pregnant or not having babies.

Speaker 4 Let's just let us all enjoy our mothers, you know? See, I feel like that's a nice contrast.

Speaker 4 You know, just arguing over who's got the best mom, that seems like a better way to celebrate Mother's Day than me than kicking trans people on TikTok.

Speaker 4 But hey, I never rose to the level of deputy president. That, Will Salatin, was our new segment.
The right stuff.

Speaker 4 I mean, this feed is going to give. I got to tell you, we need it, okay? We need it in our lives over the course of the year.

Speaker 4 It might be depressing, but we can also laugh and point as well while we get sad about the future MAGA Americans. Will Salatin, any final words of wisdom for us? Any final ponies?

Speaker 2 You know, the nuggets are back.

Speaker 4 Maybe all's right with the world in the end. Maybe all's right with with the world.
Amen, brother. God, just a beautiful game.
Ugh, I needed a cigarette after that first half.

Speaker 4 It was so good last night.

Speaker 4 All right, folks, we'll be back tomorrow with another episode of the Bulwark podcast. Thank you, Will Salatin.
Will Salatin Mondays as good as they ever were. We will see you all tomorrow.
Peace.

Speaker 4 loud.

Speaker 4 We like to watch you laughing.

Speaker 4 You pick the insects off plants.

Speaker 4 No time to think of consequences.

Speaker 4 Show yourself,

Speaker 4 take only what you need from it.

Speaker 4 A family of trees wanted

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Speaker 4 Show yourself,

Speaker 4 take only what you need from them.

Speaker 4 A family of trees wanted to be haunted.

Speaker 4 Show yourself,

Speaker 4 take only what you need from them.

Speaker 4 A family of trees.

Speaker 4 The Boar Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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