Will Saletan: Erasing History

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is January 8th, 2024. Lots of anniversaries that we need to talk about.
I don't know whether you realize this, Will, but yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Bulwark as a full news site. Fifth anniversary.
Yep, you were there.

And of course, on Saturday, year three, which continues to be bizarre. I was thinking about this the other day, as extraordinary and soul crushing as the transformation of the Republican Party has been.
What's happened since January 6th is still remarkable. I mean, we were talking about invasion of the body snatchers, you know, and the cowardice of the Republican Party, you know, in 2017, 2018, 2019.
And this will maybe sound naive now in retrospect, but I don't think anything prepared us for exactly how far Republican leaders and Republican voters would go after January 6th in going along, not just with the big lie, but this aggressive historical revisionism, you and I were just talking about this CBS poll showing most Republicans think that the January 6th rioters, the people who went into the Capitol, beat the shit out of police officers, were patriots and they ought to be pardoned. I mean, this is really an extraordinary moment.
You know, we thought the party was Trumpified back in 2020. That feels like this is like a kinder,

gentler era compared to where we are right now. You know what I mean?

This is at the far end of the scenarios that I was prepared for a year ago, two years ago,

three years ago. I mean, it keeps getting worse and worse.
And the fact that it's not just Trump,

it's the Republican elite, it's the Republican voters, that it's not just denying the election,

but it's political violence itself. Everything has gotten so much worse.

Well, and you know who's surprised by it? Not just Democrats and the media and never

Trumpers. People like Ron DeSantis are completely gobsmacked by it because he thought, hey,

if I get into this race, you know, surely, yeah, surely Republican voters are not going to go along with all of this. And yet they have.
And I wonder how that happened. So I was thinking about this this morning when I was writing my Morning Shots newsletter.
Have you noticed that the anti-anti-Trumpers have decided to sort of adopt this sort of smirky scoff? You never Trumpers, you're exaggerating, you're dramatizing all of this. You suffer from Trump derangement syndrome.
I mean, really, how bad could it be? And I think, okay, let's just focus on what Donald Trump said this weekend, okay? He claimed, I'm not starting with the most important, okay? He claimed that magnets don't work if they get wet. Did you catch this? You know, magnets work, but if you give me a glass of water and I drop in magnets into a glass of water, that's the end of the magnets for you people at home.
No, that's not the end of the magnets. But put this in the box with what Trump doesn't know about, say, injecting bleach into people, windmills, etc.
Where hurricanes go.

Let's just put in magnets. I don't even know what that was about.
More seriously, he called the January 6th rioters and seditionists hostages and demanded their release. This, of course, comes at a time when there actually are real-life hostages in the world.
There are American citizens being held hostage. and yet Donald Trump once once again, hears a word, sees it, and figures, hey, I can seize upon that.
I can repurpose that word. In the same way, he's repurposing the word insurrectionist.
You know, I'm not the insurrectionist. You're the insurrectionist.
It's more than just projection. It's like you take the word and you bend it out of shape to use it as a weapon.
So he's not an insurrectionist. He's a patriot.
He's a champion of democracy, right? It's Joe Biden who's the insurrectionist because of what's happening at the border. So he did that.
He's repeating conspiracy theories, claiming that left-wing activists and government provocateurs were responsible for the breach of the Capitol, all complete bullshit.

It was like replaying all of his greatest hits. He once again mocked John McCain for the wound, the injuries he suffered as a POW, mocking him for his broken arm.
You know, he's saying, you know, we could have gotten rid of Obamacare except for John McCain. John McCain, for some reason, couldn't get his arm up that day.

Remember?

Yes.

Yeah.

And then... John McCarrick, except for John McCain, John McCain, for some reason, couldn't get his arm up that day.
Remember?

Yes.

Yeah.

And then, because we're not done yet.

That's right.

He blamed Abraham Lincoln for not negotiating the Civil War.

So many mistakes were made.

See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you, Trump said. I think you could have negotiated that all the people died, so many people died.
Liz Cheney, as usual, was the one who asked the most direct questions. Which part of the Civil War could have been negotiated? The slavery part? The secession part? Whether Lincoln should have preserved the Union? Interesting.
Now, you know that we spent what we spent about a month chewing over Nikki Haley's gaffe about the causes of it. You know, this is going to be about five minutes of the news cycle.
But I want to come back to this because we have some deep thoughts about this. So meanwhile, we're learning more details about this.
We have this ABC report that Trump's social media guru, Dan Scavino, told Jack Smith investigators that when the violence escalated on January 6th, Trump was just not interested in doing more to stop it. Apparently, another former top aide, Nick Luna, told investigators that when Trump was told that when then-Vice President Mike Pence was rushed to a secure location, Trump responded, so what? And in the undercover story of the day that may not actually mean that much, in Illinois, Trump refused to sign Illinois' loyalty oath that says he won't advocate for the overthrow of the government.
Now, Biden signed it. DeSantis signed it.
This has been around since the 50s. Trump signed it the last two times he ran for president.
For some reason this year, somebody looked at that and said, yeah, no. So where should we start, Will? Do you want to start with Elise Stefanik, though? it feels like low-hanging fruit but i mean there's so many ways that you can demonstrate how the

republican party has changed over the last few years right i mean you can talk about you know

the abandonment of Ukraine. You can talk about, you know, the fact that they don't even have a platform, the polls, the fact that all the Republican leaders have endorsed Donald Trump.
I mean, all of those things. But the transformation of Elise Stefanik from being an ambitious, rising normie Republican to being a human MAGA talking point soundtrack is really amazing.
And so she's on Meet the Press yesterday. And she basically, here's the spoiler alert.
I'm sorry. This woman is so thirsty to be vice president.
I mean, she is so, Donald, what do you want me to do? I will say every word you want. So she echoes and amplifies every word that Donald Trump says.
Listen to this, including the fact that the January 6th rioters are hostages. Let's play this.
On the issue of election integrity, though, as you know, Trump took his case to court more than 60 times that there was fraud. He didn't win.
But I want to get back to this key question. Do you still think it was a tragic day? Do you think that the people who stormed the Capitol should be held responsible to the full extent of the law? I have concerns about the treatment of January 6th hostages.
I have concerns. We have a role in Congress of oversight over our treatments of prisoners.
And I believe that we're seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but we're seeing it against conservatives. We're seeing it against Catholics.
Whoa. Let's just focus on the word hostages.
Now, I know a lot of people are ripping on Kristen Welker for not saying, you know, hostages. But, you know, when you're dealing with the fire holes of stuff like this, I want to focus on the fact that the number three Republican in the House of Representatives, the person that Republicans replaced Liz Cheney with, I can't get past that, uses the word hostages in a world in which there are real hostages.

Will, your thoughts?

Well, obviously, it's an offense against actual hostages.

But to me, the larger point here is that when you say that people prosecuted and convicted

by the United States government, particularly for political violence, are hostages rather

than convicts, prisoners, what you are saying is that the government of the united states and united states law enforcement are illegitimate they're either terrorists or they're kidnappers or they're other people committing a crime that they're being held for some sort of ransom or some sort of blackmail right so it is a completely illeg completely illegitimate. It's not about justice.
It's not about whether they committed a crime or they beat up cops. It's about what? About the weaponization.
At least defining. Right.
And now she uses in that quote, she talks about weaponization. And we know this is a Republican talking about it.
Yeah. The government of the United States is under the control of partisan Democrats, Joe Biden.
They have weaponized it. And you heard her talk about conservatives and Catholics, the FBI is coming after parents, all that stuff we've heard, right? So that was the talking point.
But it was about that stuff, the Catholics and the parents and all that. It's now expanded.
It's expanded to political violence, though the government is coming after people who practiced open political violence, as documented on video, trying to overthrow the government to keep Trump in power.

And those people, the people who did that, who did that violence, according to Elise Stefanik, are the good guys. Now, remember, this was a Trump position, the January 6th hostages.
It's now not just a Trump position. That is the number three Republican in the House, the chair of the House Republican Conference, saying that these people are the good guys, the people who attempted to overthrow the government.

This is now a party-wide crisis, and it's a nationwide crisis because this party could be in power again. When Donald Trump said, use the term hostages, I think that there was at least sort of, you know, a little bit of a gasp.

But it's also so much on brand for Donald Trump because, you know, the world is talking about the Israeli hostages, for example, in Gaza.

And Donald Trump hears these terms. And this is his lizard brain.
It's like, how can I find a way to diminish the experience, the real tragedy of the hostages, while glorifying thugs who used American flags to beat up police officers. As usual, Liz Cheney had one of the most forceful responses to this.
Let's play this. It sounds like you're saying you don't trust Republican leadership in the House and their conduct in the upcoming election.
Look, you've had two members of Republican leadership in the House on television this morning. You've had Mike on again claiming that he has the right individually to decide that he's going to throw out millions of votes and ignore the rulings of the courts.
You've had Elise Stefanik on this morning talking about the J6 hostages. I mean, you don't have to take my word for the fact that you can't count on these elected Republicans to defend the Constitution.
Every time they go out and give an interview, they demonstrate it themselves. Now, Elise Stefanik was on another network this morning.
You just mentioned her. The quote was, I have concerns about the treatment of the January 6th hostages.
Hostages is a very specific word. And there are well over 1,200 people in the U.S.
legal system going through legal proceedings right now for their role in the attack that day. That word she used is exactly the word that Donald Trump uses.
And that's why she's using it. And it's outrageous and it's disgusting.
And if you go and you look at what individuals have been convicted for who are incarcerated, you'll find extensively these are people who were involved in violence against police officers in the assault on the Capitol. And it is really disgraceful for Donald Trump to be saying what he's saying, and then for those who are attempting to enable him or attempting to further their own political careers to repeat it.

It's a disgrace. And you cannot say that you are a member of a party that believes in the rule of law.
You can't say that you're pro-law enforcement if you then go out and you say these people are, quote, hostages. It's disgraceful.
You know, I was tempted to say, well, five minutes ago, Republicans would have. But now it's once upon a time lost in the midst of time that Republican leaders would have run as far and fast as possible to not associate themselves with Donald Trump's use of the word hostages for people who beat up cops, who engage in seditious conspiracy, etc.
There once was a time when they would have said, well, OK, I didn't hear that. I don't know anything about that.
Those were the cowardly ones. Others would have actually actively pushed against it, saying, you know, this number one trivializes the experience of the real life hostages in the world.
And of course, it completely misstates what the criminal justice system is doing about the rioters of January 6th. But now, I mean, you know, as we've been talking about, there's no pushback at all.
I mean, I don't know of a single Republican leader with the possible exception of Liz Cheney. I can count them on one hand.
Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, both, of course, out of office. Liz Cheney replaced by Elise Stefanik.
Chris Christie, maybe Asa Hutchinson. But that's it.
Everybody else is like, OK, if that's the story, if that's the party line, if that is what the party is telling us we must believe, we're in. Right.
And it's remarkable to me that the Republican Party has gone beyond being the party of election denial to being the party of embracing the violence of January 6th. That's an amazing thing.
And God bless Liz Cheney for reminding people that the Republican party at the same time has claimed to stand for law enforcement. This is really an important point she's making because not enough Democrats make this point.
This whole pro-law enforcement thing is not viscerally in Democrats in the same way it's in Republicans. You know, Democrats will make the point about democracy and everyone's right to vote.
That's a very democratic talking point. But standing up for law enforcement was a Republican talking point.
And it's very important, even for people who've been kicked out of the party, for the Cheneys, for the Kinzingers, for the Christie's, to make the point that if you actually believe in law enforcement, you should be defending the law enforcement officers who defended our country on January 6th, and certainly not claiming that the people who violently assaulted them were and are hostages. Yeah.
Okay. So Elise Stefanik also, and by the way, I think this point about, you know, moving from election denialism to actually embracing violence is crucial.
And it's one of the things that's happened since January 7th and actually really accelerating in the last 12 months. Elise Stefanik also was asked, what should have been a very, very easy question.
Would you certify the 2024 election for people who think, oh, it's Trump derangement syndrome to think that they would do this all over again, or that January 6th and that whole attempt to overturn the election was just a rehearsal? Listen to this. Would you vote to certify and will you vote to certify the results of the 2024 election, no matter what they show? Well, I voted not to certify the state of Pennsylvania because, as we saw in Pennsylvania and other states across the country, that there was unconstitutional acts circumventing the state legislature and unilaterally changing election law.
What about 2024? What about 2024? We will see if this is a legal and valid election. What we're seeing so far is that Democrats are so desperate, they're trying to remove President Trump from the ballot.
That is a suppression of the American people. And the Supreme Court is taking that case up in February.
That should be a nine to zero to allow President Trump to appear on the ballot because that's the American people's decision to make this November. And the matter is course halted pending that appeal as you say but just to be very clear I don't hear you committed to certifying the election results.
Will you only commit to certify the results if the President Trump wins? Does that mean if the President Trump wins? No it means if they are constitutional. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution not going through state legislatures when it comes to changing election law.
And we're seeing this in my home state of New York, Kristen. We are seeing Democrats try to steal the election and illegally gerrymander congressional districts that we fairly won and are fair-lined.
So I see this at a very local level, as well as the unconstitutional overreach we saw at the national level in 2020. So I'm hearing not necessarily.
You want to vote to certify the election? Now, again, I think this is one of those you're not sufficiently alarmed moments because it was shocking and appalling and disgraceful that even after the attack on the Capitol, so many Republicans voted not to certify the 2020 election. I mean, we've talked about that, right? Think about what's happened to the Republican Party since that moment.
Think how the Republican Party has changed, what the Republican Party will look like in 2024, 2025, if in fact a Republican House of Representatives has to vote on this. And think about what you just heard from the number three member of Republican leadership, Mike Johnson, And of the williest of the election deniers, is Speaker of the House.
Look, anybody that thinks that we're not going to have a replay, I think just hasn't been paying attention. And I'm sorry, Will, I know you want to be the optimist, but Elise Stefanik is just signaling exactly, like, they're trying to steal it, they're doing this, and And I got my little pony here and I would love to be the optimist for you, Charlie, but this pony is going straight to the glue factory today because I am not at all an optimist about this.
I mean, I think you and I are laughing about this, but we're laughing and we're crying because this is, this is deadly serious. Remember Liz Cheney said in her comments about Elise Stefanik, she said the Republican leadership.
Liz Cheney is now talking about the Republican Party as a whole. It's Mike Johnson saying, defending the overturning the 2020 election.
It's Elise Stefanik here about the 2024 election. And to my mind, she's not just saying, oh, we'll see.
She's already laying the groundwork. She's laying the groundwork, Elise Stefanik is, for voting to reject electors in 2024.
So in this clip, she says, when she's asked whether she's

going to certify 2024, she says, well, I already voted in 2020 to throw out their Pennsylvania

electors. Why? Because they didn't go through the state legislatures when they changed their votes.

Now, all this went through courts. Elise Stefanik, Mike Johnson, they don't care.
The courts don't

get to decide this. We, the Congress, get to vote on January 6th to overturn the results because we think the courts were wrong and it was unconstitutional what the states did.
And Elise Stefanik is now specifying things that will justify, in her mind and the mind of her colleagues, voting again to throw out the electors. She names trying to take Trump off the ballot, the Colorado, the main case.
But setting that aside, when she says, I don't like the way that the Democrats in New York drew the districts, that that is illegal and unconstitutional. And she's citing that as a basis.
It's the court decision. Right.
You and I don't have to like this. I don't like gerrymandering.
No. But the notion that this warrants the Congress voting to throw out all the electors, what the people of New York voted for, just as they did with the voters of Pennsylvania, this is amazing.
And we should take it deadly seriously. I totally agree with you.
And just as a parenthetical point, I think I wrote a piece once about, you know, why do people believe these election lies that have been refuted? I mean, you have a conspiracy theory. It is completely refuted.
And yet people then move on to something else. It's like, what's going on here? It's because the big lie is a pretext.
There is a large part of the Republican Party that just thinks that the Democrats are so evil or so dangerous that they should never be allowed back in power. And we will come up with one pretext or another, and it will keep shifting.
These pretexts will keep shifting. By the way, here's the weirdest flex over the weekend too, which is again, hard to get your head around.
So Donald Trump in his lizard brain figures, I'm not the insurrectionist. You're the insurrectionist is his play.
Well, we've seen him do this over and over and over again. But here's the way it actually played out.
Okay, so he's talking about it, obviously, thinking about this Colorado case, you know, that says that because of the 14th Amendment, an insurrectionist cannot be on the ballot. Now, that's gone all the way to the Supreme Court.
I am not one of those who believe the Supreme Court is going to throw him off the ballot, but it is a legitimate legal issue. But that's the issue, right? An insurrectionist cannot be on the ballot.
So he's thinking, hmm, what if I say that Joe Biden's an insurrectionist? And you know, the first guy to pick up on that was Ron DeSantis, who allegedly is running against Donald Trump. And Ron DeSantis says over the weekend, well, we might have to consider kicking Joe Biden off of the Florida ballot because he's an insurrectionist for letting the border be wide open.
So watch how that goes, zero to 60 as a talking point. Well, if you're going to consider January 6th an insurrection and therefore disqualifying, we're going to make the border.

We're going to invent the border, maybe something else.

And we're going to kick Joe Biden off. I mean, this is a nightmare scenario where Joe Biden gets kicked off and say Florida and Texas.
And then, you know, Trump gets kicked off here. I mean, that's why the Supreme Court is going to have to do something about it.
But I think it was weird that Ron DeSantis still, at this late date, feels the need to come in and be the, you know, throw himself in front of the bullets, you know, aimed at Donald Trump. He's prepared to do this.
Remember when Donald Trump was indicted? One of the first indictments, I think, was out of New York, and Ron DeSantis' reaction was, well, you know, if they tried to extradite him from the state of Florida, we would fight that. You know, the free state of Florida, we would be a sanctuary state for Donald Trump.
It wasn't necessary. But when you write up your obituary for the DeSantis campaign, just make sure you have a little like note here on all of that.
One open question there, whether it is the obituary for the DeSantis campaign or whether there is the prescription for the DeSantis 2028 campaign. I think all these people, their craven behavior and DeSantis playing to the Trump voters here rather than confronting his opponent is symptomatic of the general idea that DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and others have been playing all along to inherit the Trump vote when Trump is gone by natural causes or Jack Smith or whatever.
Ron DeSantis is so effed. After he drops out, maybe next week.
The rest of the year is just going to be a humiliation tour. It's going to be the long march of Ron DeSantis' humiliation.
I was reading, I think it was in Semaphore, all the Trump people saying, well, he's going to have to crawl in his belly to Mar-a-Lago and beg forgiveness and endorse Donald Trump and stand that you know, all the Trump people saying, well, he's going to have to crawl in his belly to Mar-a-Lago

and beg forgiveness and endorse Donald Trump and stand at, you know, at the back of the stage, you know, looking, you know, with that frozen smile. And they're going to, they will find so many ways to humiliate him the way they humiliated Ted Cruz.
The guys like Ted Cruz figured, okay, I'm going to swallow this giant pile of dog shit because I will be a viable candidate in the future. And instead it's like, no man, you just diminished yourself.
You humiliated yourself and there's no future for you. I don't think it's going to happen for him in 2028.
Charlie, who is the poor sap in the DeSantis campaign who was going to have to break the news to Ron DeSantis? Because I'm sure he's already built his story about if I don't win, we screwed up this and that technical thing about the campaign. We'll come back and do it next time.
Who is going to have to break it to Ron DeSantis that the problem was Ron DeSantis and that he can't change himself and so he'll never be president? Nobody's ever going to tell him that, but I imagine it will be Casey DeSantis saying, okay, honey, let's just go home. Let's just go home.
That wasn't so bad. We'll turn things around when I run for governor in a couple of years.
I don't know. Okay, so let's get to one of the main events of the weekend, which I find incredibly interesting and puzzling at the same time.
And I guess I want to have the sort of the larger question. It was like, why is Donald Trump talking about the Civil War at all? I just think that of all the things you bring up, why are we talking about the Civil War? I mean, did we talk about the Civil War back in the 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012 election? I mean, did we? So Donald Trump, student of history, reader of books, has some deep thoughts, has some deep thoughts about the American Civil War and what a cuck apparently Abraham Lincoln was in comparison to the man who would have had the art of the deal.
You know, if Donald Trump had been president, you know, he would have sat down with Jefferson Davis and it would have been the art of the deal, right? Okay, so let's play this. The Civil War was so fascinating, so horrible.
It was so horrible, but so fascinating. It was, I don't know, it was just different.
I just find it. I'm so attracted to seeing it.
So many mistakes were made.

See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you.

I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died.
So many people died.

You know, that was the disaster. If you got hit by a bullet in the leg, you were essentially going to die or lose the leg.

That's why you had so many people, no legs, no arms.

If you got hit in the arm or the leg, it meant you were up because the infection, gangrene. It was just such a, you know, sort of a horrible time.
But that's, I was thinking to myself because I was reading something and I said, this is something that could have been negotiated, you know. Okay.
The least plausible part of all that is Donald Trump was reading a history of the war. I'm sorry.
I can't get past that. Donald Trump is reading something.
What? He's reading something on Twitter about the Civil War. So, Will, I guess, first of all, why are we even talking about this? Well, I'm sure you have probably on his mind because of Nikki Haley.
And my God, I thought what Nikki Haley said was bad, but I had nothing on this. Nothing.
And Charlie, did I hear him correctly that he said he was so attracted to the Civil War? Was that the, I believe that? So fascinating. So fascinated, so attracted.
And what is he attracted to? It's people losing legs, losing arms. It's the gangrene.
By the way, Trump constantly talks about people losing their limbs. I don't know if you've noticed this, but I love the whole thing about Trump thinks that the war should have been avoided through a compromise, a negotiation, right? There weren't compromises.
There was three-fifths of slaves counted as three-fifths of a person. How about that compromise? Is that what you have in mind? Or the Missouri Compromise.
We'll have more states come into the Union as slave states. Did Trump want that kind of a compromise? By the way, wouldn't you love to ask him about, Mr.
Trump, what did you think about the Missouri Compromise? No idea. And this is totally consistent, by the way, with what he says about Ukraine.
I'm going to get this war settled in 24 hours. We'll have a negotiation.
We'll have a compromise. It's easy.
Because Trump has no morals at all. So, hey, Putin, Zelensky, Russia, Ukraine, freedom, slavery, it's all a negotiation.
We give half to the slave states and half to the free states, and we're all good, right? We give half of Ukraine to Russia, we're all good. Well, let's go back to this compromise thing, because, I mean, first of all, what Donald Trump does not know about magnets in the Civil War would fill volumes here.
But he's talking about, you know, only Abraham Lincoln had compromise. One of the fascinating things about reading the history, the kind of the granular history, is how hard they tried to compromise on all of that.
First of all, the 1850s was an entire decade spent saying, hey, can we work out a compromise on this? Can we have free states? Can we have slave states? When Abraham Lincoln is elected president, he did not say, I am going to abolish slavery, did he? He was actually a rather cautious, prudent man, a man of deep principle. You actually had many people who said, let's just reassure the South that what we're going to do this, you know, in that interregnum period, there were all kinds of ways that they tried to avoid this, which goes back to Liz Cheney's question.
Okay, since all of these attempts to reassure the South, to come up with some kind of a deal, failed miserably, they decided to take up arms, they fired on Fort Sumter, if Abraham Lincoln was as smart as Donald Trump, which is what he's saying, what would she have done? She said, okay, we're going to guarantee that you can have slaves forever. Would he have let them go? Would he have what? What is the compromise that would have stopped the Civil War that was not considered? I mean, this is the thing.
Now, of course, this requires a knowledge of history. You know, one of the superpowers that Donald Trump has, and I regret using that phrase already, is that he can say this kind of bullshit, knowing, first of all, that there's so much bullshit out there that it's going, it won't even be one news cycle.
I mean, poor Nikki Haley got, you know, seven or eight days at it. And you and I even talked about it.
This will not get more than a couple of days. But also, he knows that his audience is not going to push back because, and I'm sorry to say this, his audience doesn't know much more about history than he does.
This is one of the consequences of the fact that we are a nation that is ahistorical, that has tremendous historical amnesia. I think you and I would both probably put our heads in buckets of water if we knew what percentage of the American people actually knew a lot about civil war.
So there is the ignorance speaking unto ignorance, knowing that he can get away with all this. But I have to ask you, well, is it just me or is it just weird that we are now relitigating the civil war and slavery and all of these things? Why is this happening? I mean, maybe on some level, Donald Trump just wants to say, and I'm a better president than George Washington, or I'm a better president than Abraham Lincoln.
I am the greatest president ever. If I'd been around, the British would not have screwed around with the T-Tex.
If I'd been around, we wouldn't have gotten into World War I, or that moron FDR. If I had been president, Hitler would have been afraid to declare war on us.
Is that what

he's doing? Or why the civil war? Well, to me, the common thread, Charlie, is rewriting history. So Trump is like trying to rewrite the history of the civil war.
You've just described the efforts that negotiation that went on. He's pretending it never happened, imagining it never, maybe believes it never happened because he doesn't know anything.
And of course he would have prevented it. But even go back three years to January 6th, 2021, what we have is a Republican party busy trying to rewrite the history of what happened, pushing out propaganda about what happened, that these were innocent people.
This is a party dedicated to erasing a history. And Chris Christie, God bless him, tried to remind them that about the founding of the Republican party as a reform party around the slavery that's being because, you know, we're the party of, as Nikki Haley says, it was tradition versus change.
And what do Republicans stand for? They stand for tradition. No, the Republican Party at its founding at that point stood for change.
Republicans used to be proud of being the party of Lincoln. Believe it or not.
Yeah. Honestly, this once was a thing.
Yeah. You were the party of change and it was a good thing.
Sometimes that's the right thing. There's one other term, Charlie, that I'd love to bring into this conversation.
The term is warmonger. Yeah.
So Donald Trump has built a whole isolationist wing, now isolationist column, the center of the Republican Party around the idea we're not going to be warmongers. And with good reason because of the Iraq war.
I mean, wars of choice, wars for their own sake. They're horrible.
It's harmful for everyone involved. And I understand the case against needless warmongering, thoughtless, reckless warmongering.
But the response to that ought to be balanced, ought to be measured about when to use force. What Trump is describing here about the civil war, that we should have negotiated our way out of it, that is a moral compromise of the rights, the liberties, the freedom of human beings, that it was not and is not morally acceptable.
But Trump, to my mind, is implying that it would be, that some kind of compromise, the kinds that were attempted, would have been justified to avoid the horrors of the Civil War. Sometimes, though, and the point of the Civil War is sometimes you do have to fight a war.
You have to fight a war there. You have to fight a war in Ukraine, or you have to support a war in Ukraine, because fundamental moral principles are at stake and preventing further harm to people, further tragedy is at stake.
Well, I agree with you, and I am still puzzled by all of this, because I know that there's a sort of a very small rump on the right that always thought that Abraham Lincoln was a bad guy. And we've seen this happen so often, how these fringe cranks suddenly find a way to the mainstream.
And I just wonder where we're going on all of this. Okay, so let's do a little bit of horse race politicking, which I'm becoming increasingly bored with.
But Nikki Haley is making her last stand. You can tell that Nikki Haley is kind of a real thing to the extent that anything is real these days, because Trump is dumping a lot of money aimed at her in the last few days.
You can sometimes tell, what does a candidate really think? Who do they really worry about? Well, it's like, well, who are they spending money on? And the Trump folks are going after Nikki Haley, saying she's not strong enough on the wall or on Muslim bands or whatever. So Nikki Haley talks about her strategy.
Of course, the big question is, what has to happen for you to actually dethrone someone who is leading you by 40 or 50 points in the polls? I keep track. It's just whatever it is.
That's like an F load of points there. So this is Nikki Haley explaining her electoral strategy.
We have an opportunity to get this right. And I know we'll get it right.
I trust you. I trust every single one of you.
You know how to do this. You know Iowa starts it.
You know that you correct it. You know that you continue to go.
Yeah. Okay.
A little pandering. Okay.
A little pandering later. And then my sweet state of South Carolina brings it home.
That's what we do. That's what we do.

Okay, so that's not much of a strategy.

So what?

It's like you do well in Iowa, you do well in New Hampshire,

and then this dramatic unicorn charge in her home state of South Carolina, right?

The context of this quote is she's talking to a town hall in New Hampshire.

She's telling the people of New Hampshire, Iowa votes one way and then you correct it. Now, of course, this quote has now been played in Iowa to show the Iowans that Nikki Haley is two-faced.
This statement from her just encapsulates, you know, there are certain gaffes a politician makes that are actually, they connect with what's really wrong with that person. And in Haley's case, this is it, right? She goes to Iowa and says, I'm all about Iowa.
And then she goes to New Hampshire and says, yeah, they screw it up and you correct it. And does she think no one's going to put the two together? For people who are thinking about Nikki Haley as the alternative to Trump, this puts a little doubt in their mind because they can see that she doesn't have a core, which I think has been established by this point.
Okay, so let's talk about Joe Biden's big speech over the weekend. Joe Biden really leaning into the fight for democracy, the threat of Donald Trump.
And it's, of course, become, you know, there's a lot of second guessing about it. But let's play a clip of joe biden who is laying out the stakes of the 2024 election this is the first national election since january 6th

insurrection placed a dagger at the throat of american democracy since that moment

we all know who donald trump is the question we have to answer is who are we that's what's at stake

who are we

Thank you. Trump is.
The question we have to answer is, who are we? That's what's at stake. Who are we? In the year ahead, as you talk to your family and friends, cast your ballots, the power is in your hands.
After all we've been through in our history, from independence to civil war, to two world wars, to a pandemic, to insurrection. I refuse to believe that in 2024, we Americans will choose to walk away from what's made

us the greatest nation in the history of the world.

Freedom, liberty, democracy is still a sacred cause.

Okay, so Mitt Romney, of all people, who has not carried any water for Donald Trump, says

Thank you. sacred cause.
Okay, so Mitt Romney, of all people, who has not carried any water for Donald Trump, says, yeah, Joe, you got to do better than just going after democracy. And I have to say, I disagree with Romney on this, because I think that this is what Joe Biden needs to say.
I think it's necessary. It's not sufficient.
He's going to have to do a lot more. I think that I hope that they repeat this message.
I was impressed with the detail that he brought in about Donald Trump, because people like you and me and people who listen to this podcast, we know all of all this stuff, even though it's kind of hard to sometimes keep it all in your head. We have tens of millions of voters that, you know, maybe you've forgotten about this, who don't know about his mocking of dead soldiers.
So tell me what you thought of that speech, Will. I loved the speech.
I mean, I wish I'd had somebody who could finish a sentence clearly actually delivering the speech, but the speech itself was really good and important. There are two scenarios here coming out of this that are bad, but I want to distinguish between them.
One is that Donald Trump wins reelection and becomes president of the United States again. It's horrifying, but you and I don't control that.
Joe Biden doesn't necessarily control that. Americans may decide to reelect him.
They may not care about democracy or the rule of law. But the second one is, and you and I do control this, does that proposition get tested? Is the choice made clear to Americans in the election that if you vote to bring Trump back to power, you are walking away from liberty and from democracy.
That we do have influence over. And it's our job and it's Joe Biden's job to make that choice clear.
And that's what Biden is doing in this speech. He's saying, who are we? We have to decide that.
That's something we get to control. That part sounds boilerplate to me.
I'm sorry. What I liked was when he went through the specifics of what Donald Trump said, who Donald Trump is, and he's being mocked for it.
A lot of the anti-Trump right and the New York Post is like, you know, once again, he's telling us Trump is bad, orange man bad, as if somehow it's absurd to be warning about the awfulness of Donald Trump. I don't think that either we or Biden ought to be dissuaded by all that.
But also, I do think there is a danger. And as I said, I disagree with Mitt Romney, but maybe he's making the point that the invocation of the word democracy is not going to be sufficient, in part because I think it's too abstract for a lot of voters.
and also, and I've said this before, and I apologize for people who think I'm repeating myself, but of course, we're going to repeat ourselves on this. In fact, I think we have a moral obligation to repeat ourselves a lot this year.
Watch the way that Donald Trump co-ops democracy, because tens of millions of his supporters actually do not think of themselves as anti-democratic. Bear with me.
They actually think that they are the defenders of democracy. And he is going to wrap himself in the mantle of genuine American democracy.
You Democrats are trying to kick me off the ballot. You are the anti-democratic ones.
You hear this already with his beginning to, he takes the word, remember he co-opted the term fake news. He's co-opted the term insurrectionist.
He's going to co-opt democracy. So if Democrats and never Trumpers believe that simply saying we need to defend democracy is sufficient, what we're going to see is tens of millions of voters who say, yes, absolutely right, which is why we are voting for Donald Trump.
Now, again, this is going to make our heads explode, but I'm telling you, this is what's going to happen this year. How do you break that pattern? Biden did all that in this speech.
He named all the specific things. He named Trump sitting there and watching the attack on the Capitol that's calling for suspending the Constitution, threatening the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, saying I'm going to be a dictator, threatening retribution.
I mean, the Insurrection Act. So Biden has his itemized list of his evidence against Trump.
Which is the best. and it's going to grow even over the next year.
So I wouldn't fault him for that. I don't think it's boilerplate, Charlie.
I just think that it's really important to elevate this and to clarify nobody but Joe Biden has the kind of pulpit that he has to declare to everyone in America that this is the central issue. I mean, look, Charlie, I'm not happy with Joe Biden's border policy.
I don't think Democrats are taking that issue seriously enough. I'm not happy about inflation.
There's a lot of things I'm not happy about with Joe Biden, but nothing, none of that compares to preserving the Republic. And I don't fault Biden at all for making that the central issue.
It is the central issue. Don't get me wrong.
I don't fault him for that. I'm not actually faulting him.
I'm just saying it's necessary. It's not sufficient.
And it's the way you phrase it, because I do think, I totally agree with you, obviously, on all of this, but I think that he needs to find a way to explain it to those swing voters in a way that will be extremely compelling. Like, for example, I will tell you that for me, the fact that Donald Trump and his supporters actually seriously wanted to wipe out the votes of millions of Wisconsinites, wanted to disenfranchise me, is one of the most outrageous things I've ever seen.
And so, you know, again, it's not the word democracy. It's like, go to Michigan, go to Pennsylvania, go to Arizona, go to Wisconsin and say, you know what they wanted to do? They wanted to take your votes and throw them in the shitter.
They wanted to disenfranchise. They wanted to say your votes did not count.
They wanted the legislature to overturn the election. You know what that is? When we talk about democracy, that's what we're talking about.
And it's not about me. It's about you and that you know that when you go and you vote, if you vote wrong in

Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, they're just going to overturn the election.

They're going to take away your vote.

I mean, I remember I was on a show once when somebody was saying, well, the Republican

Party wants to disenfranchise African-American voters in Wisconsin.

And I went, wait, wait, wait, understand that they want to disenfranchise African-American voters in Wisconsin. And I went, wait, wait, wait, understand that they want to disenfranchise all of the voters in Wisconsin.
You know, let's, let's make this a universal thing. So again, I don't disagree with you.
I do find it fascinating watching, again, our good friends in Inti Inti Trump, who've been basically saying the same thing we've been saying for, you know, about, you know, 10 minutes now when they thought Ron DeSantis was going to step in. Now going, oh, now you're talking about how he wants to be a dictator or he's going to be anti-democratic.
Where would you get this idea? I don't know, because we listen to what he says. We listen to what he says.
We watch what he's done. We look at the dead people, you know, people who were killed on January 6th and the fact that he's glorifying it.
I don't know. You tell me what would be alarming to you.
Right. A couple of things I want to follow up on.
One is in this speech, one of the things I really liked about it is there's an art in politics to framing an attack on your opponent, a criticism of your opponent, that is so true that the person cannot get out of it because it's in their nature. They're going to give you more evidence for it.
So in this speech, Biden says that Trump's campaign is all, he says it's all about him, that Trump is obsessed with the past, not the future, and that Trump can't stand that he was a loser in 2020. And you and I know Trump cannot stand this.
He cannot stand that he was a loser. He's going to keep talking about it.
He's going to talk about himself because he is a malignant narcissist. And he's going to keep talking about the past because of, you know, having to relitigate all that.
So this is an indictment of Trump, which is broader than the critique of democracy, that it's a narcissism obsessed with himself, not really about you, which hopefully will bring over some more voters and which Trump himself will provide further evidence of as the campaign goes on, because that's Donald Trump. He can't stop himself.
So I think that's really important. The other thing about this speech, Biden is, he talks about the democracy, but he goes beyond that to the point that we've been discussing about the violence.
And there's a part of it where he talks about how Trump laughed about the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband. Unbelievable.
Right. And Biden, he's furious.
For those of you who, you know, you might hear this speech, but you can watch it. He's just physically livid over.
And he talks about, he actually says about Trump at that point, what a sick, and then he can't finish the sentence, people start laughing, but everybody knows it, you know, that this is, Donald Trump believes in violence. And I believe, as we see more of this embrace of January 6th, the idea that these are people who committed violence, that they are hostages, you're going to see more of a definition of the Republican Party, not just around denying the election, not just about trying to overturn the election through Congress, but about the violence itself, and the defense of the people who committed the violence.
I am hopeful. I would like to believe that America will reject at least that.
Well, I share that hope, obviously. OK, one last little tidbit, though, at the end.
You know, as we watch what's happening to the Republican Party and Republicans are telling themselves that, OK, we've got the wind at our back in 2024. We're going to go with Donald Trump.
We're going to get power. Meanwhile, one state party after another seems to be eating itself alive.
And rather than do a tour of the whole country, well, let's talk about what just happened in Michigan, which is one of the key states. The Republican Party there has not only lost its mind, it appears to be just imploding.
I don't know. Can you implode and explode at the same time? What are we talking about here? What a shit show.
So in Michigan, we have an election denier who's in charge of the Republican Party, the chair of the Republican Party, Christine Karamo. This woman is now a threefer.
Okay. So she got her job as chair of the party by denying the 2020 election.
Right. And Trump loved that.
She then runs for secretary of state as the Republican nominee in 2022. And she loses Charlie by 14 points.
It's not a close election, 14 points. She denies to having lost that election.
Now she's screwed up the Michigan Republican party so bad. She's trying to literally trying to sell the headquarters.
That's how bad things are. That the committee that runs the party votes her out.
And she's rejecting that. She's saying it's not a legal vote.
It wasn't held in exactly the right way. So these are fellow Republicans who are probably pretty MAGA themselves going, yeah, we're MAGA, but she's malevolently MAGA or she's just.

So, I mean, it's a total civil war.

Speaking of civil wars.

She's denying the election that's throwing her out, which, of course, is totally consistent.

What did you people think?

What did Republicans who are half sane think when you bring these deniers, these lunatics into your party, when you make them chair of your party, and then you think you're going to get rid of them, they don't go quietly.

That's how they got where they are.

Well, I must admit, this is a moment where I think the schadenfreude is completely justified, and I don't feel bad about it at all. And this is happening all over the country.
People are going, well, so what did you think was going to happen when you brought these extremists, these nut jobs, these fanatics, these deniers into the fold, when you embrace the Cary Lakes of the world, you know, and things like that. How did you think this was going to play out? Did you really think that that alligator in the bathtub was not going to grow bigger and come out and try to eat you? And this has been happening in state after state.
So, you know, here in Wisconsin, we have a reasonably normal legislative leadership of the Republican Party, seriously, but they felt, you know what, let's, you know, hire this sort of demented former state Supreme Court justice, and we'll pay him a million dollars to do an investigation because that'll quiet the crazies. And of course it didn't, and this is happening in state after state where they're trying to appease the whack jobs, the whack jobs are never appeased, and they don't go away.
And so you have this kind of chaos being played out. So for the moment, I think that, you know, the normies have decided we're just going to surrender, we're going to keep our heads down.
A good chunk of the normies are leaving office, waiting until the storm passes. But Will, let's end on a bad note here.
The storm's not passing. And for all you Republicans that think, you know, if I just keep my head down, I endorse Donald Trump, I go along with all this stuff, someday I'll wake up and, you know, the sun will be shining and we'll have normal Republicans running again.
This is not going to be happening anytime soon, I don't think. Speaking of bad news, No, it's not going to pass.
And we have some new evidence of that this week, new poll out from CBS News, where they asked voters, well, they asked Americans about people, and just to be clear about the question, the question is about, quote, people who forced their way into the US Capitol on January 6. So this is not, again, peaceful protesters, not people who are at the ellipse.
This is people who literally forced their way. That's the framing of the U.S.
Capitol on January 6th. So this is not, again, peaceful protesters, not people who

are at the ellipse. This is people who literally forced their way.
That's the framing of the question. And among Republican respondents to this poll, 51% of those Republicans said that the people who forced their way in were patriots, that it was patriotism.
59% said those people were quote, defending freedom.

66% of Republicans said they would support pardons for the people.

Again. patriotism.
59% said those people were, quote, defending freedom. 66% of Republicans said they would support pardons for the people, again, who forced their way in.
So what we have here is new evidence of that it is not just a Trump position to deny the 2020 election or to support overturning it through Congress. It is a Republican position.
And it is not just a Republican position to do those things. It is now a Republican position to defend the actual violence of January 6th.
To me, this is an increasingly alarming sign of where this party is going, and the thought that people who support violence could be back in power in the House, the Senate, and the White House within a year is completely alarming to me. Well, it ought to be completely alarming, because this is also a generational shift.
I mean, we are going to have a hangover of this that will last us a very, very long time. People who are now getting into politics, who are looking around and seeing what is normal, what is acceptable, those folks are going to be around long after we are gone, 20, 30 years from now.
And this is a shift. And it's interesting just watching the sort of the transition from, okay, let's tolerate the guy.
We don't have to endorse it, but we'll enable the guy and we'll look the other way. And that shifted to, okay, we'll say these things because, you know, this is what we are required to say to actually having lots of people now believe these things.
I mean, there's a, you know, a different, sometimes, you know, politicians will say, look, this is what I have to say. I just have to say this to survive.
Now what you're seeing is that people actually do believe that the criminal justice system is completely illegitimate and that therefore people who are arrested for crimes are hostages. You do have people who now believe that what happened on January 6th was not what you saw with your own eyes or experience.
And by the way, you see that video of this congressman, Texas Congressman Troy Nels, who is actually confronted in the House chamber, protected by guys with guns, and he's yelling at the protesters, you know, you're

embarrassing, and they're talking about killing congressmen. And he knew at that time exactly how bad it was.
And now he says, yeah, Ashley Babbitt was murdered. So what you've had is people not only denying the evidence of their own eyes, what they saw on television, they're denying their actual own experience in this revisionist history.
And so if in fact, these people are really patriots, then the people who were trying to assault the House chamber in that video, and saying, if we have to kill a few crooked congressmen, you know, we will, that sort of thing, then that does become justified. So I am concerned about this.
And this transformation is amazing. Again, this is the thing about Trump.
And I've said this right almost from the beginning, that Trump is Trump. And Trump does what Trump does.
I think he's gotten a lot worse. But I think we need to sometimes turn the camera around to the people who are watching Trump.
The way that he has managed to transform the political culture and character of his party and much of the country is truly extraordinary. Maybe it was inevitable that if you embrace somebody who is that fundamentally a malignant narcissist and a liar, that fundamentally that's going to require you to internalize some of that corruption yourself.
And eight years on, we're seeing exactly what that means. And it is dangerous.
So can we end on a more positive note here? I feel like we ought to. I got nothing, but you know.
Well, I think the government's going to be operating for another year. My happy story is Kevin McCarthy managed to make it not quite a year, right? He managed to make it, what, eight, nine months by having to negotiate between crazy Republicans and fiscal reality and cutting the deal with Biden.
So the Republicans, House Republicans chucked him out. They bring in Mike Johnson.
And Mike Johnson is doing the same thing McCarthy did. He's cut another deal with Biden to extend the funding for the government.
Hopefully we'll avoid a shutdown. And this, of course, will run out when the patients of the Freedom Caucus has already said they don't like the deal because it doesn't cut enough, right? And it doesn't give them enough border concessions and all that.
So they're going to chuck Mike Johnson. But Mike Johnson, let's just hope, here's my little pony, will have served his purpose.
He will have got us through the next shutdown threshold and kick the can down the road. Are you saying he's not going to survive? Are you saying we're about to go into more

speaker revolving door? Not about to. I'm saying what is the lifespan of a Republican House speaker

with a 219 vote majority, right? It's whenever Matt Gaetz decides to get rid of you. And so

McCarthy made it like eight or nine months. And what Mike Johnson has going for him is that he's

the new guy. He hasn't yet had to tarnish himself, but he just did.
He just cut this deal with Biden and it's acceptable to Biden and it's not acceptable to Freedom Caucus. So at some point they will say, you're just like McCarthy and chuck him out.
But Charlie, I think that's another few months down the road. Let's stick with today.
Let's stick with today. An amazing outbreak of bipartisan compromise that does not actually shut down the United States of America.

I don't want to stop. Let's stick with today.
Let's stick with today. An amazing outbreak of bipartisan compromise that does not actually shut down the United

States of America. I want to stop right there before we keep going.
Okay. Thank you so much for another Monday.
Thank you, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast.
I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again.