Susan Glasser: An Edifice of Lies

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Speaker 9 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 12 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 8 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 13 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 14 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 21 Hello, and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Tim Miller.

Speaker 21 I am here with the great Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker, also co-author of The Divider, a history of Donald Trump in the White House, which she co-wrote with her husband Peter Baker.

Speaker 21 Her latest, I listened to Trump's rambling, unhinged, vituperative Georgia rally, and so should you. Hey, Susan, thanks for doing this.

Speaker 22 Hey there, great to be with you.

Speaker 21 I have to tell you, I was at my brother's bachelor party this weekend.

Speaker 21 I was a little hungover on Sunday morning, and I was scrolling through the Sunday show clips, and I saw you going ham on the this week panel, and I was like, we have to get Susan.

Speaker 21 We have to get Susan to talk about this.

Speaker 21 And the context, I believe, was the bloodbath gate.

Speaker 21 And, you know, there's some back and forth in the panel about whether the media should be focused more on Trump's tariff policies or whether I think your view was that maybe the actual most important thing are the threats to democracy and the threats of violence.

Speaker 21 So talk about how you see that and what the media's role in all this should be.

Speaker 22 Yeah, well, to be clear, Tim,

Speaker 22 my point was actually, I wasn't talking about bloodbath.

Speaker 22 I was talking about, in a broad sense, Trump's challenges right now to the basic kind of pillars of democracy and how paradoxically impossible it seems to be for people to focus on it because it comes out and is spewed forth in this series of two-hour-long Saturday evening rambling rallies.

Speaker 22 And this was another great case in point. And people want to reduce it.
I understand the impulse, right?

Speaker 22 You know, obviously, it would be a terrible homework to inflict upon people to require them to watch Donald Trump for two hours every Saturday. I'm not recommending that.

Speaker 22 But in fact, once again, we see how the need to reduce it to a news cycle plays very much into Trump's favor.

Speaker 22 And so, you know, the entire performance, once again, in that Ohio rally, very comparable to the Georgia rally of the week before that I wrote about, in which our need to reduce it to one, well, he said bloodbath and it meant bloodbath for the country and violence, or it meant a bloodbath for the auto industry.

Speaker 22 What a ridiculous kind of non-story. And so I was trying to make the broader point.

Speaker 22 And one of the panelists who's very smart, very reasoned, not at all a fan of Donald Trump, but a Republican Sarah Isger says, well, no, he really is talking about the auto industry and tariffs.

Speaker 22 And I said, you know, I'm sorry, but I've been hearing this for eight years. No, he's not talking about tariffs.
That's not the reason why millions of Americans are supporting Donald Trump.

Speaker 22 And if you listen to what he's campaigning on, it's not some policy platform to differentiate himself from Democrats or from President Biden.

Speaker 22 It is the most authoritarian, dystopic vision of a really an anti-democratic system that you could imagine.

Speaker 21 I'm happy to complain about the Donald Trump tariffs, by the way, and I don't really love that Joe Biden kept them.

Speaker 21 You know, so we can talk about tariff policy, but that's not what's bringing the clicks. That's not what's bringing the clicks.
That's not what's bringing people to the rally. I agree with that.

Speaker 21 Just one more thing on the bloodbath that I want to talk about, Georgia, is this is why I resonated so much with your comments, was it isn't like this old school politics, right, where it's about the gaffe, right?

Speaker 21 Where somebody said something that revealed something accidentally true. And we're going to really focus on Mitt Romney saying biters full of women or 47%.

Speaker 21 It's not that. It's that this person, when he last lost an election, actually did spar a bloody riot at the Capitol.
And so when he's talking about...

Speaker 21 bloodbath in the context of these long speeches where he's also talking about election denialism and all of that. It comes in that context, right?

Speaker 21 It is not, nobody would get upset if Bill Cassidy running for Senate talked about how it would be a bloodbath for the auto industry if Joe Biden won, right?

Speaker 21 Because it's not within the context of what his career has been, about what he's talking about, and about his message at these rallies. Isn't that kind of what the point you were trying to get across?

Speaker 22 Yeah, I mean, that's an important point as well, is that this is not a theoretical threat of violence from Trump and his supporters, but an actual one.

Speaker 22 And once again, what you have is many Republicans, even those who don't particularly love Trump, they say, well, don't really pay attention to what he says. You know, his rhetoric is just overblown.

Speaker 22 It doesn't matter. It's really that Americans are upset at being left behind.
And he is so authentic in delivering this message of that, you know, enough, enough, right?

Speaker 22 The capacity to justify even the violent attack on the Capitol.

Speaker 22 And that was the other point I made because, in fact, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee was on ABC this week earlier, giving an interview in which he was talking about the bill to ban TikTok, which was something that he had supported and promoted.

Speaker 22 And he was asked about how January 6th has become not just another grievance for Donald Trump, but has become core to his campaign.

Speaker 22 And this is someone who clearly is not a big fan of that, but even the most mainstream Republicans at this point refuse to forthrightly condemn in explicit and clear terms because their leader, Donald Trump, has decided that the January 6th criminals, and they have been arrested, tried, and convicted as criminals for storming our own Capitol.

Speaker 22 That they are not criminals, but hostages, martyrs, victims.

Speaker 22 Trump began the Ohio rally, as he began the Georgia rally, as he is now beginning all his rallies with pledges not only to pardon these January 6th hostages, but singing of the January 6th choir from these arrested people, talking in elaborate and even grotesque terms.

Speaker 22 It's a direct challenge to the rule of law. And you can't even get a Republican who claims not to like Donald Trump to say in very explicit and forthright terms, this is wrong.

Speaker 21 We hear oftentimes like, oh, Donald Trump has serious advisors now and he's running a more serious campaign. And I guess that's true.

Speaker 21 But they're not so serious that they've been able to stop him from beginning his rallies with a salute to the January 6th criminals, right? And I think that that is something that you observed.

Speaker 21 And so, like, when you watch the Georgia rally, I assume the context of this is that, you know, everybody sees the clips. You know, we see little snippets.

Speaker 21 You know, looking at it as a complete event, a two-hour package, like what was your biggest takeaway?

Speaker 21 Was that like just the unabashed tributes to the January 6th rioters the biggest thing that you noticed? Or what else struck you?

Speaker 22 No, actually, it wasn't in part because the January 6th thing has been happening. It's another example of the sort of slowly boiling frog phenomenon of Donald Trump.

Speaker 22 He dips his toe in the water more than a year ago. It was in December of 2022, in fact, when he first started floating the idea of the pardons for the January 6th people.

Speaker 22 And he gets more and more extreme. And I would argue that now we're seeing a whole spade of news stories about January 6th and Trump and how it's at the heart of his campaign.

Speaker 22 If people were more focused on these rallies and on what he's actually saying over the last year, they would have caught on to this phenomenon a lot sooner.

Speaker 22 But, you know, many people pointed it out over the last year and a half, but I don't think it broke through. So that's one example.

Speaker 22 But to me, it was actually the new edifice of kind of lies and untruths about Biden and his record and his

Speaker 22 personal malfeasance that I think people have not fully paid attention to. It's not just the name-calling about crooked Joe, sleepy Joe, blah, blah, blah, Joe.

Speaker 22 It's a whole vision of the country that makes American carnage look positively upbeat.

Speaker 22 In contrast, he basically directly accuses Biden of unleashing gangs of marauding criminal murderers let loose in the country and says that Biden is directly responsible for murder.

Speaker 22 Things that had any presidential candidate of any party at any point in our lifetime said these things, obviously there would have been days and days worth of headlines about that.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I mean, a couple of them, you know, that you mentioned here, there's 50% inflation under Biden.

Speaker 21 Migrants are being let loose for prison in order to murder and steal jobs from native-born Americans. Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit.

Speaker 22 That's his slogan now, Tim. Everything Joe Biden touches turns to shit.

Speaker 21 That's something that you would have heard out of George H.W. Bush's mouth.
I don't think doomsday will come if Biden is re-elected.

Speaker 21 I do think that that is like what you're getting at is important because it's like this stuff washes over people, right?

Speaker 21 And it's this asymmetry that Trump has benefited from from day one, you know, as somebody that used to be in charge of having to do these things.

Speaker 21 Like if I was communications director of Jeb Bush and we had come out and said that, oh, whatever, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would lead to 50% inflation, you know, we would have had to deal with a spate of fact checks and every reporter at at our next gaggle would have just asked him to, you know, to support that, what the facts are.

Speaker 21 And we would have bungled it for a few days. And then eventually he would have apologized, right? Like that's what happens to normal candidates.
But this sort of stuff doesn't even get noticed, right?

Speaker 21 And I guess that does tie into the bloodbath-like kind of drama, right?

Speaker 21 Is that he just advances this whole river of lies and this picture of the country that is so bleak and dark that is not based on any fact. And yet, how do you deal with that?

Speaker 21 Like, what is the right way for the media to, and maybe the Biden campaign, to address like just all that intense amount of lies and deceptions in a single speech?

Speaker 22 Yeah, I mean, that is the dilemma, unfortunately, of our times, because I do think Trump's kind of taking it into individual clips has become kind of the background noise of our times.

Speaker 22 And it's very hard to, or, or conversely, there's also the permanent outrage machine that is generated by those clips.

Speaker 22 And in a weird way, then you have a status quo where both sides can generate a certain amount of anger, heat, excitement in their respective bases.

Speaker 22 And so I've noticed since the bloodbath controversy that both Biden and Trump are fundraising off of it. And so in a horrible way, there's a codependency around this.

Speaker 22 Donald Trump has turned it into the bloodbath hoax, you know, and he is now literally sending fundraising emails off of it.

Speaker 22 Meanwhile, Biden's campaign, newly, I would say, more aggressive since we've moved into the official general election phase of this endless race between the two of them, they cut an immediate, you know, kind of quickie social media ad with those comments and said, here, we'll give you the context.

Speaker 22 And they put it in the context of Charlottesville and both sides and January 6th and things like that. So, you know, they both get some advantage off the outrage.

Speaker 22 And of course, we are all the collective losers there.

Speaker 22 But I don't like the clip phenomenon because I think it just keeps us in a state of permanent agitation without really wrestling and coming to terms with the scale and enormity of the problem posed by Trump.

Speaker 22 And I don't have easy answers. We're eight years into this.

Speaker 22 And obviously, if somebody had a brilliant idea for how to cover this phenomenon, if somebody had a brilliant idea for how to counter it, it would have emerged by now.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I do think watching the whole two hours is important. And because it's just so weird.
You say it's homework, but it is.

Speaker 21 So maybe it shouldn't be homework for liberal listeners to this podcast resistance folks, but it is my homework for the quasi-normal Republicans, my former friends.

Speaker 21 And I think that a lot of times, jokingly,

Speaker 21 we were on a panel last year where I was on with you and Carl Rove and Mike Murphy. And, you know, Murphy does hacks on tap and it's very clear-eyed about this.

Speaker 21 But Rove and that crowd, I think, live in a world that is very, the Wall Street Journal Ed board. They hang out with rich friends that don't like this part of the Trump.

Speaker 21 And they sometimes see some of the clips when it pops up in their feed, but they don't really live it.

Speaker 21 And I do say to my friends in that world oftentimes that I'm like, I think you're protecting yourself from

Speaker 21 the craziness a little bit and that it is a good homework assignment to go to a Trump rally or to actually listen. And Trump people will say this too.

Speaker 21 You should go to a Trump rally and see that Trump people are great. And it's like, well, you know, there are some genuinely nice Trump people.

Speaker 21 But I think that most of the establishment Republican world, somehow they've managed to protect themselves from seeing the reality of what is happening in the base. I don't know.

Speaker 22 Tim, that is such an important point. Thank you for saying that.
I think that is an important point. And in some ways, it's what motivated my column the other day.

Speaker 22 You know, I did read a piece that Rove wrote, a column he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. I should say he is no fan of Donald Trump.
He has made that clear for the whole time.

Speaker 22 He is also absolutely not, you know, I don't mean to single him out in any way

Speaker 22 because

Speaker 22 he is completely

Speaker 22 consistent with what we're seeing of the kind of anti-anti-Trump Republicans. They focus on their policy differences with Democrats.

Speaker 22 They kind of avert their gaze from the unseemliness or they peddle, you know, essentially don't listen to what he says, just look at what his administration will do.

Speaker 22 At any rate, Roe's column was about Biden's State of the Union address, which had taken place just a few days before Trump's Georgia rally.

Speaker 22 And in that address, Biden, it was a very, I thought, partisan address.

Speaker 22 It was effective to a certain extent at shoring up uncertain, wavering Democrats who weren't looking for proof of Biden's ability to vigorously prosecute the campaign against Trump.

Speaker 22 And in the course of that, he made 13 references to Trump, not by name, only calling him my predecessor. This was seen as a big break with tradition.

Speaker 22 And, you know, there was much tutting about it in the Republican, you know, kind of commentariat, including in this column where Roe said that Biden lowered himself, essentially, and that he had sort of demeaned the presidency by lowering himself to, you know, criticize Trump and it wasn't, you know, worthy of him in the State of the Union address.

Speaker 22 And then you have just two days later, the Washington Post counted more than five dozen references to Biden in Trump's nearly two-hour Georgia rally.

Speaker 22 And I thought, well, wow, what if we had covered these two things side by side?

Speaker 22 What if this column in the Wall Street Journal, which was written after the Georgia rally, had made mention, he's criticizing 13 references to Donald Trump and says nothing about five dozen of the most grotesque.

Speaker 22 That's the thing. You know, it is outside any bounds of acceptable political rhetoric in a democracy to call your opponent a criminal, a crook, a killer, an idiot.

Speaker 22 You know, I mean, every kind of nasty one word in the English language.

Speaker 21 I agree. And I want Carl to come on this podcast for us to continue hashing it out.
So I don't think it's not a personal thing. I do, I think he's representative of a class of folks.

Speaker 21 And this is something that I disagree with him on, but maybe a couple other things we agree on, certainly with regards to Trump.

Speaker 21 And just one other note, I feel like I have to mention the Biden State of the Union was certainly anti-Trump, and it was partisan, I guess.

Speaker 21 He quoted Reagan, and he was pretty nice to Nikki Haley and the NATO folks. So it was partisan in the sense of his current political interests, right?

Speaker 21 And I guess that's my one more thing that I want to move on to Russia and some other topics.

Speaker 21 But the question for the Biden campaign, so when you were talking about how it's just getting noticed right now, you can sense the trend about all this January 6th apologia and apologia isn't even the right word, kind of promotion, frankly, of Trump.

Speaker 21 And I think part of it's related to the fact that the Biden campaign has been calling him out on it, right? And there is, I think, a sense among reporters that's like, oh, okay, right.

Speaker 21 Now, if Trump's getting criticized from this, then this is a trend and now we have to cover it.

Speaker 21 And I hate to put the onus on the Biden campaign, but I do wonder, you know, what your kind of thought about that is.

Speaker 21 Because I hear your point about how it's kind of like Bangadun fundraising on Bloodbath only exacerbates the problem of this clickbait kind of coverage.

Speaker 21 But on the other hand, aren't they responding to what the media incentives are, right? Like the more that they highlight random Trump craziness, the more the media will talk about it again?

Speaker 21 I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker 22 I think you're right about that. And by the way, it's not a criticism, at least on my part, it's an observation that this is the dynamic in our politics now.

Speaker 22 And certainly what we are seeing and hearing from the Biden campaign is a much more explicit joining of the battle with Trump right now.

Speaker 22 There was clearly a decision, okay, the state of the union and going forward now that they both locked up their respective parties' nominations.

Speaker 22 This is a new phase of the campaign, and we're seeing a new set of responses to that by the Biden campaign. I can't say whether it's more effective or less effective.

Speaker 22 I think it's now the reality that we're living in.

Speaker 22 And as always, you are right to, you know, you understand the dynamics, I think, of how these, you know, the kind of news cycle works where the White House or surrogates talking more about Trump or confronting him day in and day out in ways creates it back into a news cycle in a way that it hasn't been.

Speaker 22 And that was one of the things that was, I found, very eerie about the earlier parts of the Biden presidency is that there was all this kind of endless hand-wringing.

Speaker 22 Remember, oh, well, you know, now that Biden is in office and Trump is gone, we don't, you know, we shouldn't cover him. We shouldn't platform him.

Speaker 22 We're not going to put him on the front page anymore. We're not going to write about him.
He's done. And my point was,

Speaker 22 it doesn't matter if the New York Times puts him on the front page. He's still...

Speaker 22 got his constituency. He's still, in effect, the de facto leader of the Republican Party.
Now he's simply addressing his supporters without us listening in on it.

Speaker 22 And, you know, that that was a whole set of debates that to me missed the point.

Speaker 22 And I think it's why many people were very surprised to discover that Donald Trump was going to steamroll over the Republican field and, you know, once again, take the nomination.

Speaker 22 I don't think that was a surprise to anybody who had been kind of watching and paying attention to more right-leaning news outlets and what Trump was actually doing for the first couple of years that Biden was in office.

Speaker 22 But you get a sort of endless debates among ourselves, some of which aren't necessarily all that relevant to how politics is going to play out.

Speaker 21 I would be energetically snapping in agreement if I was a New York Times staffer to that.

Speaker 28 Visita tu Los Macercano in East Arcas Avenue in Sunnydale.

Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 9 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 12 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 8 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 13 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 14 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 28 Visita tu Los Macercano in East Arcas Avenue in Sunnyvale.

Speaker 5 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 9 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 12 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 8 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 13 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 14 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 21 Okay, a few other Trump news items.

Speaker 21 Donald Trump's efforts to secure a bond to cover the $454 million judgment in the New York civil fraud case has been rejected by 30 companies, his lawyers said on Monday, inching him closer to the possibility that he could have his properties seized by New York.

Speaker 21 I'm wondering your thoughts on that story, but I'm particularly interested in your thoughts on the national security implications of this.

Speaker 21 I mean, I do think that having a guy running for president that's struggling to pay his bonds and is getting national security security and is getting Secret Service detail and is getting national security briefings, this is unchartered territory.

Speaker 21 And I think that there should be some national security concerns. But I'm interested in any thoughts you have on that.

Speaker 22 Yeah, I mean, look, of course, it's a good point. You know, Donald Trump has always intertwined.

Speaker 22 For him, you know, the business and the politics are, there's no dividing line, there's no separation line.

Speaker 22 One of the most extraordinary aspects of his presidency that people somehow, you know, mostly just kind of moved on from was his refusal to disentangle himself fully and to obey the conflict of interest provisions that apply to every other official of the United States government except for the president.

Speaker 22 And, you know, so you had this remarkable, bizarre aspect of him owning a hotel in the, you know, blocks away from the White House that was used by foreign governments seeking to curry favor with him.

Speaker 22 You know, I know people like Congressman Jamie Raskin always very exercised over the Constitution's emoluments clause, which seems to explicitly prohibit behavior like that for exactly the kind of national security reasons that you're talking about.

Speaker 22 It didn't go anywhere in terms of a legal challenge, but I think the broad point certainly applies.

Speaker 22 And, you know, just the other day, terrific reporting in the New York Times about his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, seeking to, with along with Rick Rinnell, who has been tagged by many as a potential very senior diplomatic or national security official in a future Trump administration working on major real estate projects in the Balkans with officials who obviously would be very eager to curry favor with a future President Trump, especially one who is potentially enormously indebted and seeking to pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and judgments against him.

Speaker 21 Yes. And another example of intertwining business interests, I guess this one isn't Trump's business interest, but from Trump officials with the campaign.
We had Paul Manafort.

Speaker 21 I want to read a very good sentence by somebody that you know.

Speaker 21 Trump may bring in convicted tax cheat and fraudster Paul Manafort, who made a fortune working for pro-Kremlin interests to help run his convention. It's your husband, in the New York Times.

Speaker 21 I mean, again,

Speaker 21 I feel like every question I've asked you, every item on this podcast, it would be like, this would have been a week-long front page news story if it was any other politician in our lifetimes.

Speaker 21 But talk about the Manafort element of this.

Speaker 22 Yeah, I know to anybody who really cares about the rule of law, this is like, you know, do your deep breathing because it's hard to know where to start in this conversation.

Speaker 22 The Manafort thing, really, talk about a gut punch to people who care about the rule of law.

Speaker 22 I mean, this guy was flagrantly influence peddling in the most shameless sense of the word as an outgrowth of the Mueller investigation. He was arrested, tried, convicted, served time.

Speaker 22 You know, this is amazing for Donald Trump to say he wants to bring him back.

Speaker 22 And remember that it was Manafort who was a key conduit of information from the 2016 campaign, actually passing secret, internal, detailed polling information to Konstantin Kalimnik, identified by American officials as a Russian intelligence contact.

Speaker 22 What was Manafort doing in the 2016 campaign when the guy who is desperate for money, and he also was indebted in a very problematic way to a series of problematic foreign actors offering to work for Donald Trump for free, we all understand that, you know, if you are doing something for free, then perhaps you're the product, right?

Speaker 22 You're the thing being sold. And I found that to be just a gut punch and a real reminder of the stakes involved in Trump 2024.

Speaker 21 This is another thing that's kind of in memory hold, right?

Speaker 21 Because of all the controversy around the Mueller report, but there was a bipartisan Republican-led Senate intelligence report that identified Manafort as having been a conduit for Russian intelligence assets, right?

Speaker 21 Like, this wasn't resistance stuff. It was a court of law, it was a Republican Senate.
And then he gets pardoned.

Speaker 21 And now to bring him back in, and all this is happening, and this is obvious, but it just bears mentioning all this is happening amidst Russia attacking Hillary's campaign, right?

Speaker 21 And so it's just like, well,

Speaker 21 was Kalimnik and Dariponska? you know, you can get the whiteboard up where you have all the, you know, different pieces of ribbon, you know, connecting everything.

Speaker 21 Like, you know, were they connected to the Russian intelligence operation? It kind of doesn't matter, right?

Speaker 21 Like in the context to me, my view always was, was Trump and Manafort are condemned for going along with this while it was happening, right?

Speaker 21 Any other responsible campaign, any other patriotic campaign that cared about American interests would be absolutely condemning a hostile foreign power's effort to hack their opponent's campaign.

Speaker 21 And meanwhile, Trump is cheering it on. And Manafort, as the Republicans said, is actively working with Russian intelligence.

Speaker 22 Well, that's right. Look, I think the bottom line is it does matter in the sense that it has been absolutely established as a factual matter in a court of law, in investigations.
And

Speaker 22 yes, it is something that the American people should care about.

Speaker 22 Paul Manafort, the two politicians that he is most associated with in his career are Donald Trump and Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian-supported leader of Ukraine who had to flee and run away from his country of Ukraine and run to Russia because his corrupt regime toppled after he unleashed violence against his own citizens in a peaceful revolution in the Maidan.

Speaker 22 And he was Russia's proxy. in Ukraine, period, full stop.
That's just a factual matter. Those are the politicians that Paul Manafort worked with, supported, and promoted.

Speaker 21 Yeah, we had Trump people on the cable last night.

Speaker 21 I was watching, I forget which surrogate it was, so I don't want to quote them wrong, you know, saying, well, we don't really, he might not be part of the convention.

Speaker 21 We don't exactly know what his role is going to be. It's like Trump talking to this person, getting advice from this person at any level is an absolute scandal and an outrage.

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Speaker 21 Going back to Yanukovych takes us to the Russia element of it all, and I always want to get your take on this, having a lot of experience having lived over there.

Speaker 21 Kathy Young wrote for the bulwark this morning a fake vote for Putin that he won, I guess, 87% of the fake vote.

Speaker 21 But there were also these noon against Putin protests that, seem to, I guess, given the threats facing these folks, any sort of gathering of this nature is a huge risk.

Speaker 21 And so that was some sort of green shoot and encouraging. I'm wondering what your thoughts were on the news out of Russia.
And then I want to get into the Trump and Putin of it all.

Speaker 22 Yeah. I mean, well, so first of all, I think it's right not to call it a real presidential election in any conventional sense.

Speaker 22 You know, I saw one German expert was using the the phrase authoritarian plebiscite, and that seems to me to be possibly a better way of thinking of it, is a plebiscite in which you force as many of your people as possible to come out and essentially ratify your continued tenure in power.

Speaker 22 That's something more akin to North Korea or Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

Speaker 22 It's a form of legitimizing your regime, but it's not really an election if no one can even say who your opponents are and anyone who was an actual opponent is not allowed to run.

Speaker 22 Or, in the case of Alexei Navalny, the leading opposition politician in Russia over the last more than a decade, you know, he literally is essentially killed by the government in prison just weeks before the voting.

Speaker 22 And those protests you mentioned, those were basically Alexei Navalny's last will and testament.

Speaker 22 They were his last wish for the Russian people to come out at noon on the day of this plebiscite and at least show a certain solidarity in doing that.

Speaker 22 And, you know, it's an act of incredible bravery in ways that Americans might not fully appreciate.

Speaker 22 That in parallel and in tandem with Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he's used that as a cover for completing the authoritarian takeover of Russian society, the stifling of the remaining space for political debate and discourse, and has arrested thousands and thousands of Russians for the simple act of doing something like wearing a blue and yellow pin or sending a text message that was perceived as supporting Ukraine.

Speaker 22 You know, he is putting people in jail now for thought crimes in a way that even they didn't do in the later years of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 22 The dictatorship that Putin has now established is much more intrusive, fuller. It goes along with the militarization of Russian society that has occurred as a result of this invasion of Ukraine.

Speaker 22 And it means that it's hard to see, to be honest, Tim, any green shoots out of this election. And that in a way, it was the election that was meant to tell the Russian people that there is no hope.

Speaker 22 here for any kind of democratic small D overturning of the government. It means that the war will go on.

Speaker 22 It means that Putin has continued with his maximalist aims for the war in Ukraine, that he is continuing to press forward, not for some negotiated peace.

Speaker 22 That's a fantasy for right now, but he's still looking for a victory. He's still looking for a victory.

Speaker 22 And remember, he defines victory essentially as dismantling Ukraine as a viable independent state.

Speaker 21 Yeah, and Medvedev just called Latvia a fake country the other day, which gives you a sense for where the victory might go from there.

Speaker 21 You wrote recently about Trump's threat to NATO being the scariest kind of gaffe. Obviously, this is all related.

Speaker 21 I was talking to some senior administration officials that were in Munich, and the sense that I got was that there is just a very palpable concern and much higher even than it was during the Trump administration from European officials and allies about

Speaker 21 whether America will continue to be a reliable partner at all if Trump wins and what that means for Putin and what that means for threats. So I'm wondering how you kind of assess assess all that.

Speaker 22 Yeah, I think that's right. The level of shock, concern, dismay, and anxiety among European officials I've spoken with the last few months is really off the charts.

Speaker 22 One senior European official referred to it as the, quote, American scenario being grimly discussed and planned for in the bowels of their national security bureaucracy.

Speaker 22 And the idea of the United States as a national security threat to our allies in Europe is really something to process. It's kind of breathtaking.

Speaker 22 And I think in part it's because during Trump's four years in the White House, there was a view, and many Democrats had it as well, that it's problematic, it's regrettable, but it's very likely that the U.S.

Speaker 22 and its partnerships in the world can survive four years, but not eight.

Speaker 22 And I think with the Biden victory, but the dawning, the realization that not only was Trump not gone from the scene, but that there was no returning to the status quo ante.

Speaker 22 I think that this phenomenon has already kicked in, where European allies, Asian allies as well, have come to realize that there's no going back to America as the superpower that it used to be.

Speaker 22 And that, for example, when President Biden says America is going to be with Ukraine as long as it takes, that our sclerotic politics and the nature of the Republican Party today in the U.S.

Speaker 22 and its continued reliance on the cult of personality around Donald Trump means that no American president, no matter how responsible an actor or how committed to these alliances,

Speaker 22 can actually make a firm commitment that America will be with you as long as it takes because of our own extremely divided internal politics.

Speaker 21 I'm wondering, we've had a running kind of conversation on this podcast about the question of the specter of a Trump next term and the stakes and the threat.

Speaker 21 And you're just so well versed in kind of the examples of these regimes in other countries. Like, what do you see in the second Trump term?

Speaker 21 When you look at a model, and maybe if the range is from, I don't know, Berlusconi to Putin,

Speaker 21 like,

Speaker 21 where on the threat level are you on the threat assessment of the democratic backsliding if Trump was to win?

Speaker 22 Yeah, I mean, look, I think that because Trump is not a policy person, because he is highly manipulable, because he is not not a super organized and disciplined leader of a government.

Speaker 22 It really depends very much who is around him, who he's talking to, who he's relying upon, and the sort of constraints and guardrails that did come up, especially in terms of foreign policy and national security in the first term.

Speaker 22 Those people are simply not going to surround Donald Trump in a second term.

Speaker 22 And I think that's one reason that I and many others have said this would be a much more radical break and departure from kind of American policy than we saw in the first Trump term, number one.

Speaker 22 Number two, Trump's grievance, revenge, retribution campaign has really focused like a laser on making sure that he essentially takes over the American justice system and uses it to his own ends.

Speaker 22 And I think that that is the part that will be very personal for Donald Trump that he will be very focused on. And I think that you can do quite lasting damage.

Speaker 22 In my view, I know there's a kind of self-soothing that people have, and they say, well, the institution's held and it's okay.

Speaker 22 But I think a reasonable examination of the record of Trump in his first four years does not support that argument.

Speaker 22 In fact, what it supports is that there were vulnerabilities we didn't even know were vulnerabilities in the system.

Speaker 22 And that in many times, we were just one vice president, one chairman of the Joint Chiefs, one defense secretary away from really extreme and radical things happening that Donald Trump demanded.

Speaker 21 Yeah, well, this little dessert, one of the people that he said he's going to have around him, he floated yesterday, Vivek Ramaswamy, to head up the Department of Homeland Security.

Speaker 21 So that department would go from becoming a response to 9-11 to having a 9-11 truther in charge in one generation. It tells you a lot about the way that this thing is degraded.

Speaker 21 Susan Glasser, I really admire your work and I'm so grateful you took the time to come on. We will be reading you and hopefully we'll be talking again soon and maybe a little more cheerier.

Speaker 21 I'm going to try to come up with a cheerier topic for our next gathering, if that's okay with you.

Speaker 22 That sounds fantastic. Maybe I'll come down there to New Orleans and

Speaker 22 we can do it over a relaxed sending to him. But thank you for having me and congratulations on the podcast.
It's really a terrific contribution to have you doing this.

Speaker 21 Very much appreciated, Susan. We'll be back tomorrow.
We'll see you all then. Peace.

Speaker 17 Crazy guy with a matted beard.

Speaker 17 Standing on the corner.

Speaker 17 Shouting out in times are near.

Speaker 17 and nobody notices.

Speaker 17 But I can hear him loud and clear.

Speaker 17 She is gone now,

Speaker 17 and nowhere near.

Speaker 17 Seems like end times are here.

Speaker 17 I walk around the puddle in the street

Speaker 17 and head on home

Speaker 17 Outside my window there's a cat in it Shut up cat and leave me alone

Speaker 17 There ain't no heat around

Speaker 17 here

Speaker 17 I don't feel nothing now

Speaker 17 Not even fear

Speaker 17 Now that in times are here

Speaker 17 Everyone's crazy and lost their minds

Speaker 17 Just look at the world

Speaker 17 Could all be overhead in your time

Speaker 17 And I can hear it loud and clear

Speaker 17 The world is ending,

Speaker 17 and what do I care?

Speaker 21 She's gone, and times are here.

Speaker 21 The Bullard Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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