Olivia Nuzzi: Kari Lake Is No Meryl Streep

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. At long last, Olivia Knutzi, Washington correspondent for New York Magazine.
She just wrote Arizona split reality ground zero for the rigged election conspiracy. The border state could decide both the fate of the Senate and the presidency.
Great time we planned on this. And then the Arizona news gods gave us much more to talk about with the abortion ruling.
And we're bringing it back to 1864. So thanks, Olivia, for joining the podcast.
Thanks for having me. I was participating in some New Orleans victual rituals last night.
One of my favorite phrases from your piece. And so I'm moving a little slow this morning, so you're gonna have to carry the podcast.
I want to talk about the abortion ruling first, but just the biggest picture you spent a lot of time. We both have had to spend a lot of time in Arizona, but I think you even more than me.
I love it there. Yeah, it's kind of underrated, right? It's totally underrated.
Yeah. I could see myself in my 70s being a professor at Arizona and living in Tucson.
Yeah. I always figured I would retire to New Mexico to hunt UFOs or something like Shirley MacLaine.
Wear a lot of turquoise. A caftan.
Yeah, jewelry. I could wear a male caftan in Tucson and wouldn't get too many weird looks.
I think caftans are genderless at this point.

Not everywhere.

I don't know.

At the Vatican?

I don't think in Iowa.

I mean...

I don't think in Iowa they're genderless.

I think if I went to Council Bluffs and a caftan, I'd probably catch some stray looks.

Yeah, probably.

So Arizona's underrated.

We agree on that.

Maybe not so underrated are the types of people that you had to spend time with covering the campaign. What was your biggest takeaway from your various time with Ruben Gallego, the Democrat, Carrie Lake? Then we'll kind of get down into the details.
But what do you sense about the state of the world? I mean, Gallego is like a nice, normal man who's just like, he's a lot of fun.

He's very honest.

He's very, I was thinking about it.

I think I've seen Ruben Gallego cry more times than I've seen any other man in my life cry.

And I think he just has, his emotions are so close to the surface.

It's something very honest about him. I have a lot of follow-ups about them in your life.
On Reuben, what was the context of the tears? You know, a couple different interviews that either I've done or I've been present for that my fiancee Ryan has done. And I don't mean that to be like, oh, Reuben McGaigal cries.
But there's something just, there's something very honest about him. He's very in touch with his emotions and has had to deal with a lot of complicated, heavy shit as a veteran.
And seems like he, you know, to use like horrible therapy speak, like he like did the work, right? He's just very present. He's a very present person.
Got it. So the tears are kind of reflecting back on his time in service and the deaths of his fellows.
Yeah, or January 6th, I think, once I was interviewing him about that. So he's just, he's kind of an unusual cat.
It's not like a John Boehner situation where it's just like, you know, there's a cat stuck on the tree and he starts crying. Or somebody mentions the Jesuit school he went to.
He camel and uh drinking a cabernet no yeah he's just like a very present person and then how would you compare and contrast that to the other candidate in the race who carry like makes people cry that's the difference she's um i wanted so badly to find a there there with her you know you know when i announced that i was turning off my recorder at a certain point and i wanted her to do the same and stop filming me i tried all these different tricks to like get her to just be a person and nothing worked you know it's for the context so she's she films everything yeah like she films you back so that nothing can be taken out of context it's also kind of a power move sure it's a little bit of a power move how ostentatious it is yeah it's fine i guess she famously i guess maybe not that famously famously on this podcast not famously like justin bieber famously but famously among bulwark listeners she taped me interviewing her on something that was not going to be published because it just wasn't interesting enough to make the cut of the circus and put that out and it was like one of these weird moments where it kind of shows you why she does this the power dynamics is that like her people didn't really watch it like I was pretty mean to her in in the interview. Like I told her she was unpatriotic.
I blamed her for her loss that she won't accept. And yet she put it out and the people that follow her, her supporters were like, hell yeah, Carrie, you know, showing it to that lib media, never Trump or cuck, right? And it's like, that's what it is.
It's like less about the content and more about the dominance.

You know, she needs an endless stream of content, right?

But yeah, it's about this branding exercise,

this, you know, her endeavor to seem like a perfect mega candidate.

You know, she was very upset with me the day that the piece was published.

I think I shared with you that she thought that I had made her look like a fraud and a poser in her interpretation. Did you use the word poser in the piece? No, but I liked that word a lot.
When she said that, I was like, oh, I do really, I like the word. You kind of got it.
I'm glad the message of the piece got through, actually. You know, sometimes you worry that people aren't reading between the lines, getting the context clues, you know? Well, at first I sort of, I protested and I was like, no, I, you know, I wasn't implying that.

And then the more that I thought about it throughout the course of the day after she had like blocked me, I was like, no, I guess that is what I think of her.

I mean, she's just sort of like overperforming.

She's not a true believer, right?

And she really wants to be seen as a true believer.

And I think the result is that there's no nuance in her performance of this type of character that she's playing she's not sarah palin right in some ways she's like a perfected sarah palin right sarah palin was a true believer sarah palin was too human she didn't have what it what it took to succeed in in television as a sportscaster, right? She didn't have that type of shrewdness and ambition. And then she was too human and flawed to succeed as a politician.
But she wasn't your believer. You can't imagine, Carrie, for example, like that famous Sarah Palin video around Thanksgiving where they're like killing the turkey behind her.
She's like out in Alaska and she's trying to do do an interview you don't remember the dead turkey no interview anyway it's hard to imagine i do wonder though has carrie just embodied the character though maybe it is real now maybe it is her maybe she's fused with her character i wonder you and i are maybe more obsessed with this than anybody in the world and so i was hoping it was a wonderful profile for an accurate but i was hoping that you would be able to get underneath the skin in a way that I was unable to. I've said to her staff, I was like, I want to, I want to wake up and have breakfast with her.
Like I desperately want to, I want to have breakfast with her and I want to, I want to marry Carrie Lake. I just want to sleep in the guest room and I want to come downstairs in our PJs and have some bacon and have a cup of coffee and just see if she still is talking about the rigged election.
And the staffers tell me that I'm, A, I'm not invited into her home. And B, she would be talking about the rigged election.
And maybe, and maybe her text, do you have to article run is like, maybe that's just her. This is just it.
Like she's just become monomaniacal. She's been-pilled and she's become her character is that not possible i think it's possible i don't know i kind of she strikes me though as someone who's sort of like like if anyone was ever going to have like a lonesome roads moment it would be her you know if you've ever seen the movie a face in the crowd it's about this radio host who becomes this populist hero uh from prison and then he's on tour.
I've not watched this. I don't remember what year it is.
I think it's Andy Griffith. And he's on tour and he's commanding these big crowds.
And then he's caught on a hot mic referring to the idiots in his fan base. And everyone turns on him.
It's all too ironic with Trump for that to ever happen, I think. But I could see something like that happening with Kerry.
I could just, I don't know, it doesn't, it doesn't feel fully real. It just, it's a very good performance.
She's no Meryl Streep, you know? Yeah. Hmm.
I just want to say that I just, I just, I didn't dream or hallucinate the Sarah Palin thing. I have here CBS News headline, Palin interviewed as turkeys killed.
Wait, could you show this to me? That's the headline. Palin interviewed as turkeys killed.
I don't think, we weren't prepared to have it up live. It's interesting though.
I was thinking about this yesterday with the abortion stuff and with the video of her referring to this great law

from the 1800s. Actually, let's just pause.
You think about that. We're going to listen to

Carrie Lake from the debate because we do have that audio. Here's what Carrie Lake was talking

about. Carrie, we'll start with you on this one.
The new law banning abortion in Arizona after 15

weeks. There's that law and there's a territorial era law which bans all abortion, Zippo, over.
Which law do you think should take effect? My personal belief is that all life matters, all life counts, and all life is precious, and I don't believe in abortion. I think the older law is going to go into effect.
That's what I believe will happen.

Okay, but you approve of that.

What, at conception?

I believe life begins at conception.

Okay, what do we do about abortion pills?

What do we do about...

I don't think abortion pills should be legal.

Not in Arizona.

Pretty straightforward.

I don't know.

That character.

Before you could light a cigarette, there is a third person in that room.

Yeah, I mean, it's very straightforward. But I was thinking about it because now she says that she disagrees with that law.
She doesn't think that it should be the law of the land. Life no longer begins at conception.
No. It begins somewhere around 15 weeks.
Yeah. But I had seen her in Green Valley.
She was with Matt and Mercedes Schlapp who had come to town. They had never been to the border before and before this event.
It's nice that those two kids are still together. I know.
Those two crazy kids. They can make it.
What does that say about the rest of us? Love is real. After a pummeling, after a dick pummeling, still together.
After having to pay out. The insurance had to pay that out actually technically, technically.
I want to make sure that we have that right. It was Schlepp insurance.
Sexuality is the spectrum. But they had never been to the border before.
And for people who have never seen or met Matt and Mercedes Schlepp, there's this very goofy pair. And Matt is at the American Conservative Union, CPAC, which runs CPAC, Mercedes.
They both worked in the George W. Bush White House.
They became lobbyists. And they really profited in a literal sense during the Trump presidency.
Mercedes took a job in the Trump White House. Matt was sort of from his perch outside of the White House acting as part of the comms apparatus.
And now they're both part of Trump's reelectionelection effort. And they came to Arizona to try and help get Carrie Lake elected.
But they had never been to the border. And I ran into them at the beginning of this event, and they just got back.
We were about 40 miles from the border. And they were like, oh, we've never been to the border before.
It was amazing. It was so goofy.
And I just was thinking, they're part of this conservative movement that has been obsessed at the border for much of the last decade that has been animated by the immigration policy for longer than that.

And they've helped, you know, popularize this anti-immigrant rhetoric. And they had never been there before.
And I thought there was something so interesting about that. But they were on stage with Carrie Lake, and somebody in the crowd asked a question about inflation.
And Carrie sort of seized up. And she's very, she's a very good communicator, Carrie.
And she, it's unusual that it seems like she doesn't have something to say, something kind of canned and prepared to go. She has perfect diction.
She, you know, her 30 years in television really show most of the time. And she sort of seized up and kept looking over at Matt Schlapp as if to say, you take this question.
And eventually Matt seemed to kind of get the point and he took the question on inflation. He answered it, but it was as if she really had absolutely no fucking idea what to say in response to this and i just thought oh right she actually doesn't have any command of policy right it speaks to the character right if you get outside the lines right if you get outside the lines it becomes a little harder yeah and most of the time she can get by just with her very shallow understanding of policy and it's really just a shtick and performance and being a mega candidate does not require you to know a lot.
And I think maybe that's now changing with abortion. I don't know.
Yeah, because they don't care about the issues. Just a fun Mercedes slap aside, sometime between Election Day 2016 and around Christmas, I forget when it was, I was in a Fox news green room and she asked me how I was going to fix my personal brand.
I was like an exact question. She was like, I'm just, I'm concerned about your personal brand.
Have you been so out there? I'm never Trump. And I was wondering how you were going to fix it.
I think my, my brands are right. Actually Mercedes.
But thank you for your concern. They weren't Trump supporters.
know. They were not Trump supporters.
Like I remember pretty late in the game, in the primary in 2016, they were not Trump supporters. And then, you know, I think they saw once Trump's takeover of the Republican party became undeniable, they found God on MAGA pretty fast.
I think she was looking for tips, right? Cause she was trying to find God and she was like, how are you going to do it? Because I'm looking for some strategy. Anyway, it seemed to work out for her to a certain extent.
This phoniness is related to another character that I wanted to bring up, who's in your piece, who I've spent a lot of time with, Steve Bannon. And as it relates to this 1864 law, and I guess we've been a little discursive here in this conversation, but for people who have missed the news.
So in Arizona, there was a 15-week abortion ban passed under Doug Ducey prior to the 2022 midterm. There's a challenge to that, that that was not the law that should stand because of this previous 1864 law that banned all abortions except for in the case of the life of the mother.
Arizona was not a state yet in 1864, which was about to be relevant. And so that takes back to zero.
And the interesting thing to me is this kind of divide between the Arizona Freedom Caucus types who have been like, hell yeah, zero weeks. This is what we wanted, the people that really, that this was the true believers.
And the political class, which I think, including Lake, who backtracked on this, i want to play you an audio of yesterday's band in war room with steve talking to abe hamaday who is running for congress he was the one that was running for attorney general he also thought that his election was stolen he's kind of an affected maga himself a little bit um kind of like a who's the uh sidekick for laura ingram raymondroyo. He's kind of like a handsome Raymond Arroyo, kind of in his persona.
And so Steve is interviewing Abe. You'd think these guys would be very excited about the news, but let's listen to how it went.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Arizona made a state in 1910, 11, somewhere around there.
When did Arizona become a state? 1912. That's it.
1912. The territorial ban, you were a territorial.
The territorial ban is from 1864? That's correct. How do we, are they actually considering other Arizona law that laws made when you guys were, I the was the state capitol in prescott then or is it in was it in tucson steve also is usually pretty eloquent but you could see that this one kind of caught them off guard a little bit like you would imagine if it wasn't an act right if it wasn't a bit they'd be like hell yeah party like bit, they'd be like, hell yeah! Party like it's 1864, right? But they're struggling.
I feel like the National Republican Party is sort of like the dog that caught the car on abortion, right? Like, it was part of the shtick for so long to, you know, we want Roe to fall. And we agree with all these activists, these pro-life activists.
And now it's like, oh, shit, this is going to really hurt us potentially on the ballot. And yeah, they're all running away from it.
I had to laugh when I saw Mike Pence, his comment that it was a slap in the face that Trump was running away from, running away from this. I mean, one humiliation after another for Mike Pence.
Actually, I took the opposite view of this. I'm glad you brought this up because I looked at it and I was like, the fact that Mike Pence had the freedom to slap Trump on this, like the one issue that he cared about, ostensibly, shows the benefit.
It should be a lesson to the other Trumpers. Look at how good Mike Pence has it.
Because imagine the counter. If Mike Pence was still the VP, you know, if he had done the right thing to try to, you know, if Mike Pence had just had the courage to try to overturn the election, then he would be with Trump again, maybe running again on this joint, absurd, alternate realities, you described it, and he would have to pretend on his pro-life views, he would would have to go along and so now he's free to flap his wings and to be for the 1864 territorial ban that's nice for mike pence i think right i don't see it that way you don't see it that way no i think it's like he spent what five years in service of this man who didn't actually believe anything that he believed.
And you have to imagine Mike Pence is only vice president because he had his own presidential ambitions and he thought that he could advance his various ideological crusades, abortion being one of them. And it was just one humiliation after another.
it was it worth it in the end i mean they wanted to hang him everyone hates him who liked him before yeah but he's got his dignity back a little bit does he i mean i don't think that you get credit for finally allowing there to visibly be daylight between you and don Trump, only after a crowd of Donald Trump supporters threatened to hang you at the Capitol. I think you get credit.
I'm not impressed. Well, we're grading on a curve here.
I appreciate that point of view. I was happy for Mike Pence that he got to attack Donald Trump from the right on abortion.
And I feel like other people should learn from that.

They could also be their true selves if they just shed Donald Trump.

But I feel like he didn't attack him.

He just was like, you know.

I'm a little disappointed.

Oh no, I'm being humiliated again.

The border part of your piece,

I think was also just kind of interesting.

You mentioned earlier about how the Schlapps had made their first trip there. Carrie, it was a long period where Carrie wasn't there, though she's been back recently.
I was talking to Stephen Richard last week, and he said that people outside Arizona don't really understand kind of how serious it is, and that maybe Biden hasn't taken it seriously enough. It seems like Gallego was obviously trying to not make that mistake.
Like, what was your kind of experience there, kind of meeting the MAGA activists over at the border and like how the various parties are navigating that challenge? I mean, it's really two different interpretations of the border. I think I called it like the democratic border pastoral, which is where, you know, Gallego and people like Gallego emphasize the way that the border does work, the way that it functions effectively.
There are, you know, in Yuma County, for instance, 15,000 migrant workers who cross over legally every day and work on the fields. And I think something like 90% of the produce in the U.S.
that is available in the winter comes from Yuma County, which is 230,000 acres of farmland there. Then they cross back over at the end of the day.
And it does work for that purpose. And there are people who live on the border, and it is a normal place where life is, you know, unfurling in a normal way.
And I think the challenge for, you know, the Gallegos of the world is to be able to talk about that and acknowledge that, while also acknowledging that it is a big problem to have, you know, 10,000 people at least crossing over illegally a month right now.

And then on the right, I don't really understand why they exaggerated so much on the right

and why they spend so much time talking about pedophiles at the border

and kind of embellishing in really gruesome detail.

I was at this trucker convoy rally.

I called you, I think, helplessly from that rally rally you were waiting for the truckers you were bored i was waiting for the truckers and you told me not to leave yeah i was like stay you're like i'm done i'm not gonna wait for these truckers i had to drive to las vegas and it was like a five-hour drive i'd already driven two hours to the border that day but you were right it sounds like you got to meet a couple guys that volunteered themselves to interview you who had like been there on january 6th and stuff so that was good yeah yeah you know it was worth it um and uh i appreciate you were basically my therapist throughout the course of my reporting this piece so thank you very much i want to get into the therapy part of it next because i do want to hear about the republican kind I mean, isn't the simple answer that there's a real problem? You know, we're not able to manage the amount of people that want to come to the border. It's not really an American.
And Biden has made it worse. I mean, it's true that Biden has made it worse.
He exacerbated what was already a huge problem at the border. And I think he finally realizes that, right? He's talking about closing the border down to immigrants.
And it's been a problem, you know, for decades. It's not unique to Biden.
It's not unique to Democrats. And Trump did not fix it, contrary to what, you know, Carrie Lake might say.
It's like people memory hole so much. Trump had an Oval Office, like one of those times where, you know, he had know he had a address i think it was oval office it might have been one of the ones where he like weirdly walked down a room to a hallway i'd have to go back and find the video but like i'm pretty sure it was oval office address about the crisis at the border during his presidency before covet about how we you know when he was arguing for even more draconian crackdowns than the child separation yeah i mean so yeah, so yeah, no, I mean, there was, there were still problems then, but the policy changes, if it didn't exacerbate the problem, it certainly exacerbated just, just the raw numbers of people that are coming, which I guess is maybe the problem from some people's perspective.
The therapy of this is interesting. It's worth just talking about.
You have now been doing this for a long time. When was your first Donald Trump story? It was about Sam Nunberg in 2015.
Was Sam Nunberg a character in your first Trump story? I first interviewed Trump in 2014, actually. So that's 10 years.
Yeah, and I remember I asked, it was about something unrelated. It was about casinos in Atlantic City.
One of his last casinos there was shutting down, and I was covering Chris Christie at the time. and I had met Nunberg and Roger Stone because they were trying to kill off Christie because they perceived Christie to be in Trump's way politically.
And they were shopping some like deranged opposition research about Chris Christie. It was like, it was something like Chris Christie was a secret Muslim or something, or like something crazy.
And I remember I went to meet them at J.G. Mellon on the Upper East Side.
And I didn't really know who Roger Stone was, but my editor at the time, John Avalon, who's now running for Congress in the Hamptons, told me like, do not be alone with Roger Stone. Here, read this Matt Labash profile of Roger Stone from, I think, like the Weekly Standard from some years before.

We should put that in the show notes too.

Anytime you get to reread a Matt Labash profile, you should do it.

Oh, so good.

He's amazing.

Obviously, do not be alone with him.

Do not stand near him if you can help it.

And he was very panicked and I didn't understand why.

And then I met them and I understood why.

And Roger actually took off his shirt in the restaurant to show me his Richard Nixon tattoo that he has between his shoulder blades. But anyway, I met these goofy characters.
And then when I needed to talk to Trump sometime later, I asked number to set it up. And I remember I was in a cab and like a few minutes later, Trump Tower secretary was patching me through.
And at the end of the conversation, I sort of felt like he was waiting for me to ask him the question that everyone had always asked him, which is, are you going to run for president? And I didn't care. It didn't seem that relevant, but I felt like it was polite to ask.
And so I asked and he said, well, I'm certainly looking at it. And basically, if the country is still going to shit in a few months, then I might have to run for president.

And I remember my editor and I at the time, Jackie Kucinich, we were like, should we write it up?

I guess we should write it up.

And so we wrote the story about how Trump was like the boy who cried campaign and he was threatening to run again.

And it was all the whole premise was that it was very silly and nobody should take it seriously. Being in that brain for 10 years, it's just a long time.
And it's not that complicated either, right? And so you're writing profiles and you're trying to edit this. And the reality is that all of these people are lying to you all the time.
time they're all full of shit none of them really care about anybody or anything as evidenced by our earlier discussion about if there was anything that you would think they would care about it would be immigration and abortion and as just a couple of anecdotes as we've mentioned in this podcast they clearly don't they're completely nihilistic totally nihilistic in every sense right like at least there's something to be said for ideologues and so you kind of have to live in just this muck in meyer and and write about it and try to find it like i have to imagine it like makes you want to just fly to easter island sometimes and just be like fuck this all right i want to write about the indigenous tribes yeah i mean on the hand, I feel like I have, not to sound too ridiculous, but I really feel like a sense of mission about covering Trump. And I said that I would see it through.
I said that in 2015 and I meant it when I said it, I'm Italian American. I'm a woman of my word that That matters to me.
I always feel like Lady Gaga when I say I'm Italian American. But it really matters to me and to keep my word.
And that's what I said I would do. On the one hand, I feel like there is no universe in which I could, in good conscience, walk away from the story before it ends, however and whenever that may be.
On the other hand, I'm like, I have dreams. I have other things I want to do.
I can't talk to these people day in and day out anymore. And I don't talk to them day in and day out anymore.
I may go through long periods of time because I think I would kill myself otherwise, where I don't talk to these people. But there were years where I would, you know, wake up in the morning, I would go and I would get coffee.
And I would go take a really long walk. And I would make, you know, 15 phone calls in that time period and check in with all these insane people.
And you start to know them really well. It's like being part of a weird family, you know, their kids names names.
And you have to maintain this institutional knowledge of various feuds and who hates who and why do they hate them? And how does that minor petty thing factor into Trump's ability to staff his West Wing or his campaign? And part of me feels this responsibility to keep covering it because that institutional knowledge, as silly as it is, is really important to understanding Trump and Trump world and how it functions and how the campaign functions and how a White House might function. And I see sometimes newer reporters on the beat who don't understand those basic dynamics because you couldn't really understand it if you weren't there.

And I think, oh, well, that's probably not good. It's probably better to have Maggie Haberman or Jonathan Spahn or me or somebody who grasps all of that in the mix because you need to understand that shit to understand why Trump is doing or saying anything.
The hardest part about it, though, is that nobody ever goes away. And even if someone is fired or they quit or whatever, the ensemble just keeps growing and growing and growing.
And it's like this big bloated thing. And it feels heavy to contemplate it and i remember when trump won that night i went back

to my office after being at his victory party in midtown and my editor was like it's like you

climbed everest and you got to the top and then now there's another everest and it sort of has

felt like that i think that maybe the more analogy is that that it's Sisyphus, not Everest, because here's, this is from your article, but Bannon had a good argument to deter would be assassins. He said, assassins of Trump.
These guys are all paranoid that someone's going to assassinate Trump. And, you know, he goes, even if they did it, it wouldn't work.
Not really. You can't kill Trump.
The movement had already made him immortal. And you hate to hand it to Steve Bannon about anything.
But like, isn't that right? Isn't that right? Like, even if Trump had the hamburger from heaven tomorrow, you say you got to see it through. So maybe in Olivia Nitz's mind and the Italian mob mindset, you can be like, he is gone.
I can move forward. can find a new family you know maybe you could but like we're all the broader we it's it's over right like but like him winning like made this our permanent reality right i mean like these people aren't going away none of them are going away trump could die but it doesn't matter right it's already, he contaminated the water table.
Like the, this is now our permanent. And the interesting thing about, about that event where Bannon was saying that where he was talking to Charlie Kirk and they were, they were talking, I remember I saw you, you were right outside of that room.
I ran into you at America Fest. And it was kind of fun to read your article because there were like, there were multiple times was like, Oh, I was on the phone with her when that with her when that happened that's interesting now i get to see what it's kind of like a movie where you're like a character walking through and it's like oh now i know what happens in the other scene you know and uh because we were outside and then i was like oh that's what bannon and charlotte kirk she left me and i went downstairs to talk to some crazy christian nationalist and she walked inside and they fantasized about trump's assassination i remember i I said, are you going in there? You're like, no, I'm not going in there.
But they were talking. I mean, they really were enjoying talking about a potential Trump assassination.
And it was interesting then when I saw Carrie Lake in Green Valley sometime later, she brought up the prospect of her own assassination too. It's like the specter of violence.
Carried it? She did. She said, they will have to kill me to stop me.
And I think it got some applause. But the specter of violence is something that they're all talking about.
And you and I talked about this when we were there in Phoenix. There's very little coverage of these events.
There are very few reporters at these events now. I think part of it is that the mainstream media does not want to be accused of like platforming extremists and doesn't want to be perceived as making the same mistakes that they were perceived to have made in 2016.
And so there's just precious little coverage of this movement, really. It was like me and you and like one or two other reporters I saw there.
And I think the result is that you miss out on a lot of these nuances. Like, oh, they're talking about political violence and they're preparing their followers for a civil war.
It seems relevant and interesting. Yeah.
No, it does. And the darkness, you get the dark, like there's the dark element of it.
And this also relates to our therapy session. But like, simultaneously, you kind of are dealing with the pointlessness of these people, like the nihilism and the ridiculousness.
Because Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk and Carrie Laker aren't going to assassinate anybody. Like they're actors, right? They're putting on a performance.
Okay. But the listeners aren't.
And it doesn't take all of them. Like I had Dean Phillips on and Dean Phillipsips was like the people at the trump rally seem nice to me i was like yeah they are like i go to these things like there's some nice people like people are humans are complicated right like they're they're nice people that go to these things they're people that that i've had very interesting conversations with thoughtful but maybe the people that show up to events like this also over index on the sociability scale compared to some of the other people listening to the podcast.
They're just sitting alone in their homes. And if they're talking about assassinations all the time and how these other guys are going to assassinate us, if you suffer through Steve Bannon and Carrie Lake and Charlie and all these guys for long enough and you start to just take them seriously, it's not a big stretch to think that the natural consequence of that for some people would be like, oh my God need to take up arms like they these people are taking the country for me they're going to assassinate the person that's saving the country and i need to stop them i mean that is what they are priming people for they are priming them for a a battle i mean they used a language of war i mean everyone in politics and fairness uses the language of war that's a bipartisan exercise but you know the interesting thing about bannon is bannon is brilliant and bannon when he

is identifying the problems in the country he is often correct it's the conclusions that he comes

to that are are wildly wrong in my view and and i think in you know a lot of reasonable people's

views but he's a really smart guy well this is the power of him just really quick is that like he's not sean hannity he's not fucking he's on the idiot some of these other idiots right like who just are spouting team player jersey talking points like he's identified some underlying problems that people are really upset about and he's righteous on those points but then there's this whole other set of things that he's full shit on. Yeah.

Right?

And that's the fundamental conundrum.

Like the election fraud and them stealing the election.

Right?

And you can almost see it on his face if you watch him long enough. It goes back and forth between his genuine righteous anger and the smirking, smug, like bullshit.

Just like Trump, the thing to remember about Steve Bannon is that he was a Hollywood guy.

He wanted to be in the movie business. He loves drama.
I mean, he is a drama queen and he is biased towards drama and wants the most interesting outcome. And you can feel it when you listen to him talk, how much he wants it to be true that one side's going to win here and one side's going to lose and we're in a war because that's fascinating and interesting and compelling.
And he seems to be sort of just like on the molecular level, just like inclined to find the most dramatic, interesting outcome. Yeah.
Every podcast has to be Tennyson, you know, the charge of the light brigade, you know. Okay, we're running out of time.

I had so many things I want to talk to you about.

We just did all of this.

This is typical of us.

So maybe we might have to just do a two-hour marathon podcast next time when you're just in a dark place or, you know, in a contemplative place.

We can just do it on the fly and then do that.

But I did have a series of topics that I wanted to talk to you about.

And so I'm just going to list all of them.

And you can pick two because we have three minutes left.

So we have one minute on each.

Don't give me.

I don't like to pick.

You don't like to pick?

You want me to pick?

Thank you. of topics that I wanted to talk to you about.
And so I'm just going to list all of them. And you can pick two because we have three minutes left.
So we have one minute on each. Don't give me a, I don't like to pick.
You don't like to pick. You want me to pick? Yeah, you pick.
Okay. I want one minute from you on the music that Trump has started to play at the rallies.
What's going on with that? You mean like the Smiths? No, not the, not the playlist. Like at the end of his speeches now has like the orchestral music that comes on you know he's speaking and he has a soundtrack underneath him now yeah what's happening there yeah i don't i don't have a lot of i mean the rallies are interesting in the last like i don't know eight months or so a couple new things he's also been playing videos of elvis beforehand just like performance videos of elvis fat elvis or skinny elvis oh skinny elvis um skinny elvis but that i find fascinating if you're like waiting you know you should go into these rallies especially if you're not going in with the press if you're going in with the with the crowd you should get there pretty early and so you're you're there for two hours at least in the room beforehand.

And so you hear Tiny Dancer like 18 times, right?

But he started playing these Elvis performance videos,

which I just find really fascinating.

And it's like, oh, maybe he isn't in on the joke a little bit.

I don't think so.

He's also started playing a performance video

of Elton John doing the Who's Tommy.

You wrote the Norman Desmond piece. I think the last time you were on the Valk with Charlie was after that.
I don't think that he gets the check, actually. I don't think that he gets that he is Norman Desmond, that he is Fat Elvis.
No. The Elvis thing is fascinating.
I'm going to be your Simon editor for the last question. I want you on base John Fetterman.
Are you on that? Have you gotten there? I'm fascinated by it. Have you spent any time with him? No, I've never spent time with him.
What is with what is happening there do you think it's very interesting i mean october 7th shifted a lot of people politically i feel like a lot of politicians revealed themselves to be different than people thought that they were in the wake of that for sure you know and he's one of them if you had said to me on October 5th, there'll be a terrorist attack in Israel.

And then there'll be a prolonged fight where there's a lot of people on the left that are very unhappy with the tactics that Israel is using in the fight.

There will be one democratic politician that is stalwart in Israel's defense to a point of trolling the left-wing activists who, who criticize Israel's, you know, cause to release the hostages. I knew it would have let me pick 25 names of people.
I don't think John Fetterman would have been on my top 25. So it's interesting in that sense.
I mean, if you had told me John Fetterman was going to go to that Michelin starred vegan restaurant with a, yeah, John Levine, the New York post. Yeah.
If you told me that was going to happen, I mean, people should read this as well. Put it in the thing.
And honestly, people should do more of this. The Democrats should do more of this.
There's too much bubbling happening. And just in the same way, I think that it's important that you're reporting from these things.
And I know that there's mixed views on Maggie, but I think it's important that there are reporters that have inside sources. I always i'm on the couldn't be on the pro more i hate the mixed views on maggie maggie is the best reporter in america you can't not have access you can't not you need to know what's happening given the nature of like the potential power that is in play here so people don't people don't like it people don't like access journalism but much of the commentary about trump and the understanding of trump and trump's white house and how it functioned his campaign and how his campaigns function is because there are people who get access to the people around trump or to trump himself and report about what is happening and why it's happening and then other people get to righteously pop off on it and by the way both of those roles are important.
Both of those roles are important. But if you want to righteously pop off on what's happening, you need to first know what the fuck is happening.
So you do. Yeah.
And so you need to know what's happening and then you need to combat what they're saying. You need to understand the message that these folks are putting out.
And so that's why I think it's good that Mayor Pete goes on Fox. And I think it was interesting that John Fetterman went and did an interview with like one of the frankly one of the more trolley new york post reporters and that's pretty competitive category right like a more trolley right-wing new york post reporter and he goes and they have dinner together and like kind of seems like he wins him over i don't know it's interesting it's interesting uh people should read that i mean we're all biased towards as reporters people who give us access right you? You're biased towards people who make your life easier.
It hasn't worked for Carrie to bring us full circle. It hasn't worked for Carrie.
Both of us have had a lot of FaceTime with Carrie. We want more.
Maybe if she gave us the breakfast. Me and Olivia and Carrie, brunch.
We're in our PJs. There's no cameras.
The husband isn't taping us. Who knows what the coverage would look like after that if you're listening carrie lake's vaping staff team no no maybe consider that they like zen now yeah they said they're i kept thinking what would it require for carrie to break and i kept thinking maybe we would need to go on like a road trip or something we need to have car trouble a shaman yeah i mean we would need to be trapped somewhere together you know in a crisis situation we could fabricate a crisis of some kind we're on a road trip we pretend like the car breaks down yeah this is a pitch carrie lakes team we want to we want to hear it okay i'm way over olivia nutsy thank you we're gonna do this again we've got many ideas.
I've got many ideas. My whole list of topics, it's still, it's just scrolling down my page right now.
So we'll be seeing you soon. Okay.
Thanks for having me.

All right. Bye.
We'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the Bullard Podcast. Peace.
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The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brett.