Susan Glasser: The Fever Won't Break

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

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

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 2 California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Speaker 6 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage.

Speaker 3 The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Speaker 9 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 10 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

Speaker 6 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

Speaker 12 Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes.
It is 2024, and I'm still getting my head around the fact that this is the year we've been waiting for this year. It is still January.

Speaker 12 It hasn't really snowed here in Wisconsin, so maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm having a little bit of cognitive dissonance.

Speaker 12 So to sort all of this out, we are joined once again by Susan Glasser, staff writer at the New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington.

Speaker 12 And she's also co-author most recently of The Divider. A history of Donald Trump in the White House, which he co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker.

Speaker 12 Probably going to need to update that, do you think?

Speaker 12 You and Peter ever talk about, hey, maybe when the paperback comes out, we're going to have to add like four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten chapters?

Speaker 11 You know, we weren't planning on doing a sequel, Charlie, and I'm sure a lot of people feel that way. It's only the beginning of January.
It's nowhere near Groundhog Day, but

Speaker 11 here we are in 2024. Ready or not, it's happening.

Speaker 12 So let's put this into historical context. Before 2024, what do you think the most interesting, eventful presidential election year in our lifetime has been.

Speaker 12 I have an answer, but I'm interested to know what you will say.

Speaker 11 Well, you know, I'm looking forward to hearing your answer. I know there were certainly a couple of really extraordinary presidential elections when I was basically too little to remember them.

Speaker 11 But, you know, you said in your lifetime. So I'm sure that 1976 or 1980 elections were definitely both consequential and kind of action-packed elections, right?

Speaker 11 There was the contested convention and the Republicans in 1976. In 1980, there was Ted Kennedy's challenge of Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan's victory and the hostages.

Speaker 11 I mean, that was an incredible election, but I was really just a kid in school and don't know if that counts.

Speaker 12 This is just an indication of your extreme youth here, because I think that the correct answer is 1968. See, this is why, because I'm so much older than you.

Speaker 12 Well, I was there. I actually remember that.
And that was the wildest presidential election year that I think we've had really in the last century.

Speaker 12 When you think about it, you had assassinations, you had riots, you had the incumbent president of the United States running for reelection, then dropping out.

Speaker 12 And again, I was in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention where there were the riots.

Speaker 12 We actually had the police riot led by the Chicago's Democratic mayor, Richard Daly, and of course the election of Richard Nixon. But what I was thinking about was that as wild as 1968 was,

Speaker 12 This year is going to be wilder. And we already know that.
Usually at the beginning of the year, you have no idea what's going to happen. You could never have predicted that Robert F.

Speaker 12 Kennedy was going to be assassinated or Martin Luther King would be assassinated. You could not have predicted the Chicago Riots.
You couldn't have predicted that Lyndon Johnson would drop out.

Speaker 12 But this year, there are going to be so many black swan events. Again, we don't know how it's going to play out.

Speaker 12 But it is going to be one of the most extraordinary elections, just in terms of the events, but also... in terms of the consequences, because it is a stark choice on the ballot in November.

Speaker 12 I mean, talk about two different realities and futures for America on the ballot in 2024. Trying to remember a year that we went into knowing it was going to be as consequential as this one.

Speaker 12 Sometimes we're taken by surprise. This one, you know, this is right in our face.

Speaker 11 Yeah, that's right. This is the election of what, you know, Donald Rumsfeld would call the known unknowns.

Speaker 11 It's not really a black swan in that sense, which is meant to be the sort of come from totally out of the blue.

Speaker 11 We know already that we are facing just a series of essentially unprecedented convergences between the courtroom and the campaign trail, the scrambling of the political primary process, essentially, in a way that we've never seen.

Speaker 11 It was your own news outlet just yesterday on the first workday of the new year, right, Charlie, that pointed out that Donald Trump looks to basically win the Iowa caucus by the largest margin a Republican has ever done so.

Speaker 11 And it could be that the primaries are over for all intents and purposes after Iowa and New Hampshire.

Speaker 12 And of course, you know, layering on that, the fact that the Republican nominee may show up here in my hometown of Milwaukee as a convicted felon. We don't know.

Speaker 12 We don't know what the Supreme Court is going to do. We don't know any of those things or how the electorate will react to it.

Speaker 12 What we do know, though, is that I think a lot of voters have this sort of sense of

Speaker 12 kind of doom because this is the election, quite frankly, that a lot of Americans don't want. They do not want a replay of Joe Biden versus Donald Trump.

Speaker 12 I think a lot of people are in denial about that, but that's what we're going to get.

Speaker 12 Before we get into that, though, and I wrote about this this morning in my newsletter, you know, I'm fascinated by that extraordinary evasion by Nikki Haley when she was asked a very, very simple question about the causes of the Civil War, which she botched in a really rather epic way.

Speaker 12 We are now in day seven of the news cycle about that faux pas, okay, that gap.

Speaker 12 And it struck me that, okay, and it was bad. It was really, really bad.
I mean, I compare it to, you know, Selena Meyer, Billy Madison, bad, Miss Teen, South Carolina.

Speaker 12 Do you remember Miss Teen South Carolina? People should look up the video on that. The Nikki Haley soundbite should go in the soundbite of great rhetoric from South Carolina.
But it is day seven.

Speaker 12 It feels like kind of a throwback to the before times back in before 2016, where gaffes actually mattered.

Speaker 12 Where if a politician said something stupid or offensive or ridiculous or untrue, that it would actually have real consequences because that no longer is the case.

Speaker 12 I mean, you know, there are some listeners who probably don't even remember when, if you said something insensitive about rape, you know, it might end your political career.

Speaker 12 If you talked about grabbing women, it might actually derail your candidacy. And so we've spent seven days talking about Nikki Haley, which has been, I'm not criticizing that, but

Speaker 12 there is Donald Trump sitting there. The great reality of our times is that Donald Trump says something outrageous, outlandish, untrue, inflammatory every single day.

Speaker 12 And it's become normalized. We've become numb to it.
I mean, this is what Brian Klass calls the banality of crazy. How do we cope with that?

Speaker 12 Because I'm just going through all the nutty things that Donald Trump has said in the last seven days, including telling people, you know, you should rot in hell, Merry Christmas, which barely registered like a shrug.

Speaker 12 And you were all obsessed about Nikki Haley. So this is going to be a hard year, isn't it, Susan?

Speaker 12 I mean, just to keep the focus on, to not be distracted by the squirrels when we have the orange wildebeest sitting right there. He's not going away.

Speaker 11 That metaphor is going to stick with me, Charlie.

Speaker 11 of course you're right you're right you're absolutely right this is an age and politics where there appear to be donald trump rules and then rules for everybody else and of course you know for republicans they've enabled it this is the mess that they have created they have climbed into that hole that turns out to be a bottomless pit with donald trump since we're doing metaphors and you know so that's the world that they're living in and uh you know in many ways there's been this sort of pretend campaign potemkin campaign aspect the republican race all along right you know there are all these candidates running except they're too afraid of the real candidate uh to even criticize him for the most part in fact they raised their hand and nikki haley was shooting right up uh there in the first debate to me that was the defining moment that told me way back in august of last year this isn't a real campaign and these folks aren't even competing to be number two they're not competing against trump he doesn't have to debate them.

Speaker 11 He doesn't have to follow the same rules as them. You know, the entire infrastructure of the party remains at his control.
It's essentially a two-incumbent race that we are looking at right now.

Speaker 12 No, it is a two-incumbent race. So let's talk about this, the Biden-Trump rematch.
Now, you've written about this extensively. You gave a very, very interesting.
So you were in Athens.

Speaker 12 recently and you gave an interview to a Greek newspaper, which I actually have here. So the two people who are going to be facing off, they're both elderly, but they could not be more different.

Speaker 12 So just talk to me about this contrast between Biden and Trump. You know, you talk about Biden, you know, being the creature of Washington.

Speaker 12 Trump's, you know, obviously a product of New York media and tabloid culture. Biden, deeply immersed in foreign policy, a very shrewd politician in many respects.

Speaker 12 But you said that Trump is astonishingly unaware of most things. So let's just talk about that.
Just to remind us that we're not talking about two parallel individuals here.

Speaker 12 What is Donald Trump, what is he astonishingly unaware of?

Speaker 11 Well, you know, it's very interesting.

Speaker 11 I was speaking with the

Speaker 11 writer for the main newspaper in Greece, and she asked me about, you know, what's it going to be like with Trump in the White House.

Speaker 11 And the thing that we've sort of forgotten or allowed ourselves to forget, or it's written out of the narrative, or we just can't handle it anymore. So we just kind of don't focus squarely on Trump.

Speaker 11 You know, Trump has been,

Speaker 11 in my view, like the, you know, kind of constant eclipse of the sun.

Speaker 11 And, you know, it seems that, you know, almost everybody, the voters, the, the media, the, you know, we're afraid to look at him squarely with our eyes because it's, you know, danger of blindness or something.

Speaker 11 But Donald Trump, when he came into the White House, that was a big takeaway Peter and I when we were writing The Divider and re-interviewing and talking to 300 plus people for that book.

Speaker 11 What did Trump's own appointees tell us? They told us he didn't know anything about most things. That's a quote from a senior White House official.

Speaker 11 That's a Republican folks, a senior White House official in the Trump. White House.
He didn't know anything about most things. He didn't know who started World War I.

Speaker 11 He didn't know how America's nuclear weapons work. He didn't know the difference between the Baltics and the Balkans.

Speaker 11 And by the way, he confused the two, two, the leaders of the three Baltic countries while they were sitting in the Oval Office with him.

Speaker 11 He was astonished and said publicly he was shocked to find out that Abraham Lincoln was actually a member of the Republican Party.

Speaker 11 I mean, you know, on and on the list goes, but it's important maybe to remind people of these basic facts.

Speaker 12 You know, I don't think of Donald Trump as a great thinker. I don't think he's particularly brilliant as, you know, the stable genius.

Speaker 12 As you point out, though, he is a very skilled and therefore very dangerous communicator. I think that a lot of folks have underestimated.
that ability.

Speaker 12 And again, it eludes me because I have a hard time, you know, listening to him.

Speaker 12 But talk to me a little bit about why you think that he is a dangerous communicator, a skilled and dangerous communicator.

Speaker 11 Absolutely. Absolutely.
I think Trump is best understood as a sort of hybrid media/slash/political figure. And in many ways, that was what he spent his time doing in the White House.

Speaker 11 That was another big and astonishing takeaway, I think, in going back and examining. Trump literally reimagined the job of president of the United States.
He didn't go to the office in the morning and

Speaker 11 do meetings and, you know, oversee processes across the U.S. government.
And he went and watched television. And then he tweeted about it and he talked to people about it.

Speaker 11 And he spent his days either up in the White House residence or in the small private dining room off the Oval Office where he had rigged up as his own sort of personal media center.

Speaker 11 He spent hours a day while he was president and of course afterwards as well watching television and reacting to that and seeking to create his own news cycle.

Speaker 11 One of the most, I think, important insights came from another Trump White House official who told me that, having thought a lot about Trump, they had come to the conclusion that Donald Trump most resembled, remember the character in Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory, the little American boy who wants to live inside the television, that

Speaker 11 is Donald Trump. And he's become very good at it.

Speaker 11 He is skilled at understanding a news cycle. Remember, he's a niche communicator.

Speaker 11 He doesn't care what you think about him. Or he does in the sense that he needs enemies to thrive off of.

Speaker 11 And so, to the extent you and those who subscribe to similar points of view are his enemy, sure, he cares what you think. But essentially, he's a niche communicator.

Speaker 11 So he doesn't care that to many Democratic suburban women, you know, the sound of his voice is the sound of, you know, nails on a chalkboard.

Speaker 11 He is communicating with his part of the American electorate, with his red America.

Speaker 11 And he correctly understood in a way that so many people here in Washington, Republicans especially, got wrong, got catastrophically wrong the idea that He wasn't going to be exiled and disgraced after January 6th.

Speaker 11 He was going to come back. And here he is, four years later, voiced to reconsolidate power and control over his party.

Speaker 12 Well, let me ask you that. I want to go back to his TV and radio listening habits, but part of me thinks that Donald Trump himself is surprised at his ability to come back from that.

Speaker 12 Because it is so unexpected when you think about it that even Trump, I think, looks in the mirror sometimes and says, I cannot believe I get away with this shit.

Speaker 12 I cannot believe that I've been able to pick this off.

Speaker 11 You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 12 When he first said that thing, I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue. He was kind of marveling at it.
I think he still probably marvels at his ability to pull this off.

Speaker 12 But let's go back to his TV habits.

Speaker 12 One of the things that he has, and I've described this as his reptilian instinct, he watches Fox News, he listens to talk radio, he listens to Newsmac, and he figures out what are the hot buttons, what actually gives people the dopamine hit, and then he feeds it back to them.

Speaker 12 There's a feedback loop. At his rallies, he figures out what are the lines that get the biggest applause.
And then those lines he repeats. And he keeps pushing the envelope to do it.

Speaker 12 And so if you don't listen to that media, if you are not deeply immersed in that media, sometimes it sounds like he's speaking a foreign language, but it is an emotionally attuned language to what the base is hearing and wants to hear.

Speaker 12 And he gives them what they want to hear. And this is one of his dangerous demagogic gifts, isn't it, Susan?

Speaker 11 Absolutely. I think that's a very important insight.
Charlie, he is both a creature of his electorate, you know, the avatar of the MAGA worldview and also to a certain extent, a prisoner of it.

Speaker 11 Remember when he mentioned the vaccine, which he was inclined to take great credit for, though he clearly personally had nothing much to do with it. He did take the vaccine.

Speaker 11 He understood it was the way out of the COVID pandemic. He mentioned it in 2021 at one of his early rallies, and there were booze.

Speaker 11 Donald Trump did not mention that vaccine afterwards, and he was afraid of alienating his base as well as responding to what it is they want to hear from him.

Speaker 11 So when he calls people vermin who are his enemies or immigrants coming into the country, when he says that he is willing to consider termination of the Constitution if he he doesn't get his way and that his campaign is about retribution and revenge.

Speaker 11 He's doing so and he can be and is fairly confident that his electorate will go with him.

Speaker 11 And, you know, for me, that's always been the scariest thing where others looked at January 6th and saw, oh my God, he's gone too far this time.

Speaker 11 And, you know, again and again and again, the sort of corrupt Republican establishment peddles this idea and it gets amplified in the political press. And it's just BS.

Speaker 11 You know, that January 6th moment was the shooting in Fifth Avenue moment.

Speaker 11 And, you know, or to pick a different metaphor, it was the moment when Trump showed that he could take the vast bulk of Republican electorate in the country over the cliff with him.

Speaker 11 And having done so, he sort of blew up all the previous rules and he bound them to him even more fully. And, you know, remember for me,

Speaker 11 the signal moment in that whole horrible, you know, 24-hour period was what happened, you know, I guess at about three o'clock the next morning, which is when they finally finished certifying Joe Biden's electoral victory.

Speaker 11 And two-thirds of the House Republican Conference went along with Trump's false, untrue, and really pernicious lies about the election and refused to certify it.

Speaker 11 Two-thirds of the House Republican Conference within hours of their capital being taken over. And so for me, I actually was under no illusions from then on.

Speaker 11 And I feel like it never got the proper attention at the moment.

Speaker 12 And also, it didn't happen immediately, though, because you had Mitch McConnell come out. You had Kevin McCarthy come out.

Speaker 12 What I think is really extraordinary, we're coming on the third anniversary now of January 6th.

Speaker 12 And you saw this new poll that came out, the Washington Post, University of Maryland poll, showing that Republicans now not only back Donald Trump, but they're very sympathetic to the rioters.

Speaker 12 And so this is like Barack Obama talked about the arc of history. Donald Trump has bent the arc of reality because we saw this in real time.
We saw it on television.

Speaker 12 And yet Donald Trump has been such an effective demagogue that he has convinced tens of millions of his supporters that what they saw didn't happen, that he wasn't involved.

Speaker 12 I mean, how did he pull that off?

Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, that's right out of the, you know, sort of Erwellian dictator handbook, right? Don't believe your own lying eyes. I am the only one you can trust.
Donald Trump has said that before.

Speaker 11 You know who else has said that? Vladimir Putin. I am the only one you can trust.
Don't believe your eyes. These are not traitors.
They're heroes. They're martyrs.

Speaker 11 I was just joking the other day, and yet it's really sort of not a joke that, you know, well, if Trump gets, you know, returned to office after four years, he's going to be passing a national holiday.

Speaker 11 You know, January 6th will be the day of the martyrs.

Speaker 12 I mean, I mean, he is making them, you know, into the martyrs, right? It's not just revisionist history. It is the complete retconning of what happened.
And you look at these numbers.

Speaker 12 People will say they were mostly peaceful. Look at the videotape that, you know, Republicans no longer believe that Donald Trump, you know, instigated it.

Speaker 12 When it's, you know, this has been documented. It's been laid out.
You have the words. They are ignoring the evidence of their own eyes.

Speaker 12 They're ignoring what Mitch McConnell said, what Kevin McCarthy said. All of the evidence is put out.
And I mean, this is the real danger.

Speaker 12 I want to talk about a dangerous communicator, that Donald Trump has managed to transform an historical event that everyone shared in and saw, and to distort it almost beyond reality.

Speaker 12 And I'm sure that he's internalized the fact that I can say anything.

Speaker 12 I can tell people that up is down, that red is blue, that black is white, and they will believe it if it comes from me.

Speaker 12 This is, I think, part of the challenge in 2024 is to keep reminding yourselves that if you're not believing this, you are not the crazy ones because it seems so insane.

Speaker 11 Yeah. And, you know, for that reason, though, I have to say, I understand the impulse, right? And we're in the quote-unquote primary season right now.

Speaker 11 Admiring the problem, as Barack Obama said, you know, is not necessarily getting us any closer to real insights about where this thing is headed.

Speaker 11 The Republican Party has been, for all intents and purposes, the party of Trump for quite some time, actually predating January 6th. And, you know, you can look at all the data points along the way.

Speaker 11 Remember that it was in the 2020 election that the Republican Party chose not to have any platform at all. It chose to be whatever Donald Trump said.

Speaker 11 And that was really, you know, for the first time that anyone could find. in its history.
There was no policy platform. There was just Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 So it's not really a revelation, although it's still shocking.

Speaker 11 And so we keep having to go back to this kind of foundational shock that the Republican Party is so debased and is pretend in all other aspects except in the mind of, you know, the man of Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 11 The real question, of course, for 2024 is,

Speaker 11 is there a scenario by which this conspiracy theory driven party of enablers of Donald Trump can win the presidency once again.

Speaker 11 He did so in a fluke in 2016 by losing the popular vote, but winning in just enough of the right states to be able to win the Electoral College. Can he repeat that feat? That is the question.

Speaker 12 Well, what do you think?

Speaker 11 You know, the general election is the whole ballgame here. There is no scenario by which the Republican Party saves us from this disaster that they have created, right?

Speaker 11 And I think that's part of the problem of even talking about the Republican primaries. And no, I don't have any good answers.

Speaker 11 It does appear once again to come down to a very small handful of American states that the election is going to be decided in.

Speaker 1 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 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close. Watch Malice.

Speaker 1 All episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 2 California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Speaker 6 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage.

Speaker 3 The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Speaker 9 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 10 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

Speaker 6 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

Speaker 12 I'm going to stick with this question of Trump as a communicator because you and Peter are real students of Donald Trump.

Speaker 12 And one of the extraordinary things that he does is, and I'm certainly not trying to praise him here, but his very transparent and cynical projection.

Speaker 12 When there's a term that's applied to him, he turns it around and accuses the other, his opponents, of doing what he did.

Speaker 12 I mean, he started off with taking fake news and turning that around against the media. He's using words like fascist and things like that.

Speaker 12 And I wanted to get your take on this because I'm watching the

Speaker 12 cases play out disqualifying him from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment. We have Colorado, we have Maine, we will have others.
It's going to go to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 12 I confess to having very, very mixed feelings about all of this because I'm very, very sympathetic to the arguments by people like Judge Ludig that the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from office, would apply to Donald Trump.

Speaker 12 I'm very, very skeptical about the way this is going to play out, both legally and politically.

Speaker 12 But what I wanted to ask you about was that I think one of the great ironies of 2024 is going to be that Donald Trump is going to, because this is his brand, he's going to recast himself as the champion of democracy.

Speaker 12 You have Democrats and progressives saying democracy's on the ballot. He is a threat to democracy.

Speaker 12 What you're going to see, I think, what I think the real danger is, particularly if more states try to kick him off the ballot, he is going to then take that mantle, not just of demagogic populism, but also of democracy, that it's anti-democratic to kick him off the ballot.

Speaker 12 And I think that you're going to see him use that kind of rhetoric.

Speaker 12 And I wonder how that plays out, particularly because I know that Joe Biden and the Democrats want to make democracy one of the cornerstones of their campaign.

Speaker 12 What happens if Donald Trump decides that I'm going to steal that, I'm going to project that, that I am the defender of democracy, and that you are assaulting democracy because you're trying to deny people a right to vote for me.

Speaker 12 It's almost too easy for him. And my prediction is he's going to do it.
What do you think?

Speaker 11 Absolutely. Of course.
I don't even think it's a prediction. I think it's reality already, Charlie.
He has very clearly signaled and already used this idea that it's Democrats.

Speaker 11 This is what he tells his audience. Democrats are stealing.

Speaker 11 your freedom, weaponizing the deep state against me, perverting the way the government is actually supposed to be run in favor of their own political interests, which, of course, is what Trump did when he was in office.

Speaker 11 And, you know, these tools of projection and appropriation are the tools that Trump favors in his political handbook.

Speaker 11 And, you know, remember that fake news, which was associated with him more than perhaps anyone else, he stole that.

Speaker 11 That was an act of larceny from Hillary Clinton and media analysts who used the term fake news in the aftermath of the 2016 election to point out how Trump and some of his enablers had functioned in the course of that 2016 campaign.

Speaker 11 Trump then very canly, I think, seized upon that phrase and now it's associated with him. He turned that on people, which by the way, step back and think about it.

Speaker 11 This is a guy who the Washington Post found made more than 30,000 lies, misleading statements, untruths in the course of his presidency. And he's the one accusing other people of fake news, right?

Speaker 11 And I, so of course, you're going to see him saying that he's a victim because he's always a victim of whatever.

Speaker 11 And this democracy narrative, I think it already plays into what the Republican electorate is predisposed to believe.

Speaker 11 Remember that it was Republicans and Fox News and, you know, they spent years saying that Barack Obama was some, you know, constitution constitution-destroying tyrant in the making.

Speaker 11 And so that created all these sort of awkward contortions in 2016, actually, when they then had to flip and have the party support Donald Trump, an actual constitution-denying autocrat in the making.

Speaker 11 So I think that rhetoric is going to be very powerful. And

Speaker 11 there's a big... gap, as you know, between the kind of legalistic world of the constitutional lawyers and what happens when that gets translated into the political world.

Speaker 11 And this whole year is going to be about that clash between our kind of legal culture with Trump in the courtroom and our political campaign culture.

Speaker 1 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 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 2 California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Speaker 6 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage.

Speaker 3 The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Speaker 9 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 10 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

Speaker 6 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

Speaker 12 So let's talk about Joe Biden, who is clearly struggling in the polls.

Speaker 12 His popularity is, well, I would say that he's polling below other presidents at this point in their presidency, and he's polling lower than that of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 12 So what is your read on why Joe Biden, his supporters and his defenders say he's been a really, really good president, or he has accomplished a lot, and yet he is going into 2024 with some of the lowest approval ratings we have seen?

Speaker 11 Well, that's right. I mean, look, Charlie, it's not simple.
We tend to contort ourselves. Joe Biden, I think many Democrats and independents are the reason for these

Speaker 11 less than stellar poll ratings. It's not Republicans.
They already weren't supporting Joe Biden. It's Democrats and Independents whom Biden needs in order to win re-election.
Why is that?

Speaker 11 Do they mostly dislike his policies? No, it's very simple.

Speaker 11 They believe he's too old or they're concerned about his ability to carry out a second term and he will be 86 years old at the end of that second term.

Speaker 11 And I think it's a lack of enthusiasm, a concern about his ability to take on Trump or Republicans.

Speaker 11 There's a variety of factors that add up, but really in the end, it's all under the simple umbrella of they're concerned about whether he should be president again for another term.

Speaker 12 Well, in your urine column, you pointed out that Biden's theory of the case is, or it seems seems to be, that only he, he's the only one that can defeat Trump.

Speaker 12 But obviously, that argument is harder and harder to sustain as the polling gets worse and worse. I guess the question is, though, does Donald Trump solve Joe Biden's problems?

Speaker 12 And by that, I mean, okay, so you have Democrats and young people, et cetera, who are not that enthusiastic because Biden is old.

Speaker 12 But when they are faced with the prospect of Donald Trump, does that re-energize the party? Does that turn this around? I mean, that's obviously what they're thinking in Wilmington. What do you think?

Speaker 11 Yeah, you just summed up, I think, what their strategy is, which is make it about Trump, make it a choice.

Speaker 11 Once it's a choice on Trump and not a referendum about Biden, Democrats will have no choice but to come home. to Biden and looking at the bigger threat of Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 I'm sure that's true for the overwhelming majority of Democrats.

Speaker 11 The question is, in the six or whatever key states, will enough Democrats Democrats or Independents stay home who he needs in order to win those states?

Speaker 11 And, you know, that's where the incredible risk factor I just keep coming back to of choosing to run again when you're 81 years old and anything can happen at any moment. There's a hubris in it.

Speaker 11 It's understandable. The office does that to most presidents of whatever party.

Speaker 11 And Joe Biden has spent essentially a large chunk of his adult lifetime seeking this office, only to become a very unlikely president late in life.

Speaker 11 And, you know, of course he convinces himself I am the only one who can do this because I'm the only one who's done it before. But I think it's an act of hubris.

Speaker 12 You said that this campaign is like Biden and Trump are competing in different elections. This is part of this post-truth world that we live in.
What do you mean by that?

Speaker 11 Well, you know, we've talked a little bit today already about the alternate realities for the Republican electorate in which January 6th was a you know day of peaceful protest and you know martyrs were arrested by the evil deep state in furtherance of the rigged election and the complicated conspiracy theory involving Venezuela etc etc etc often i found in recent years it's not just trump but many republican politicians speak in a kind of unintelligible code to those of us who do not spend our days marinating in the same media misinformation environment and you know joe biden meanwhile there's a very compelling narrative that his core party supporters hear from the white house about what a great president he's been and you know how responsible and the bipartisan infrastructure act and the you know this and that and and and my guess is if you offered that narrative to a garden variety, maybe not even a really partisan Republican voter in somewhere like Ohio or Montana, they literally would not know what you're talking about.

Speaker 11 They would be like, are you kidding me? There are actually people who think that Joe Biden has been this good, responsible, bipartisan, leaning centrist president. Like on what planet are you living?

Speaker 11 And so it's just taking

Speaker 11 this unfortunate political reality of two Americas, of blue America and red America, and, you know, putting it on, you know, kind of Trumpian steroids.

Speaker 12 I was listening to one of your podcasts recently, and you said, we've come a long way since Donald Trump rode down that escalator in 2015.

Speaker 12 And we thought that the first term was shambolic and dangerous. Talk to me a little bit because you have looked at this very carefully and you have studied it.

Speaker 12 How would Trump 2.0 be different than his first term as president?

Speaker 11 Yeah, imagine Trump without

Speaker 11 the constraints.

Speaker 11 Imagine Trump enabled, facilitated, and surrounded by not kind of representatives of the national security state seeking to constrain him, but cheerleaders like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the rest.

Speaker 11 I think it's Trump without the constraints.

Speaker 12 And radicalized. Well, he feels far more radicalized than he was back in 2016.

Speaker 12 I mean, there was a lot of bad, I mean, obviously, I have been arguing this, but it feels like here is somebody who is far more focused on what he will

Speaker 12 accomplish, the retribution, and that he won't take no for an answer.

Speaker 11 Yeah, termination and retribution, I think, are the key words for understanding both Trump's campaign message and his agenda.

Speaker 11 And I would just also point out that our theoretical scenarios here for Trump being in the White House again all involve in some way the resolution or not of these four criminal cases against him.

Speaker 11 So in our kind of mind game here of Donald Trump in the White House on January 20th, 2025, he's either been convicted of these very serious felonies and won election anyways, which again, whoa, so that's Trump without any fear of of the legal system because the people have spoken.

Speaker 11 Or he

Speaker 11 hasn't been convicted and still faces these court proceedings. And so we're starting office with a built-in, essentially constitutional crisis.

Speaker 11 Also, he, having survived not one, but two congressional impeachments, he will fear no. impeachment.

Speaker 11 He will not fear the thing that the founders envisioned as the main check and constraint on a rogue president, which was congressional impeachment and conviction.

Speaker 11 But with conviction, for all intents and purposes, impossible. That's not a constraint Trump would face.

Speaker 11 So you have no fear of Congress, no fear of the courts, and a new savviness and kind of cadre of experienced MAGA revolutionaries coming into office with him, which is a big difference from how he came into office after 2016.

Speaker 12 Would he pardon himself? And what happens if he does? Because there's a lot of legal scholars who believe that the pardon power is nearly absolute, but it does not extend to self-pardoning.

Speaker 12 We have a constitutional crisis right from

Speaker 12 day one.

Speaker 11 Yeah, right from day one. Absolutely.
Absolutely. And how can a president govern this whole country in such a circumstance?

Speaker 11 Already, I think one of the things that historians will look back on, the one Trump term that we've already had and say is that it was remarkable the extent to which Trump defined himself as the president for only a part of America,

Speaker 11 which is a real sharp break and departure from our previous presidencies and traditions.

Speaker 11 In other words, previous presidents weren't partisan or, you know, actually represented, you know, the interests of one faction of the country, but they at least aspired to rhetorically govern for the whole country.

Speaker 11 And Trump did not do that already. And I think that a second term for the reasons that you just stated would just be so clearly a challenge to

Speaker 12 half or more of the country that did not support donald trump it's a recipe for rift and disunion so for the last seven or eight years we've been asking ourselves well when does the fever break when do we return to normal i mean that was biden's promise right that we could go back to some sort of pre-trump status quo but even if biden wins again even if trump goes down what will it take for us to return to normal?

Speaker 12 Are we ever going to return to normal?

Speaker 11 No, this is our new normal, Charlie.

Speaker 11 We're not going back to the status quo, anti-Trump. And if anything, the persistence of that metaphor, I think, has been sort of...
crippling to the political discourse.

Speaker 11 And frankly, cynical Republicans have used that again and again here in Washington.

Speaker 11 You know, they sort of encourage the idea that there is going to be a moment of fever breaking or, you know, the other metaphor I heard a lot was the jailbreak.

Speaker 11 You know, when are Republicans, the presumption would be, oh, well, they really don't like Trump, but what are they going to do?

Speaker 11 You know, you and I are having this conversation on a day when the remaining holdouts on Capitol Hill among Republican leaders are endorsing Donald Trump one by one today.

Speaker 11 That's their very first act of the new year.

Speaker 12 Tom Emmer. whose bid to be speaker was derailed by vicious attacks from Donald Trump, then turns around and goes, Thank you, sir.
May I have some more? and endorses Trump. There's no line.

Speaker 11 Absolutely. What we have learned is we have got to let go of the fantasy of the fever breaking.

Speaker 11 We have to, you know, the story of the last year in Republican politics is not the story of challengers emerging to Donald Trump. It is the story of how he has re-cemented his power over this party.

Speaker 11 To be a Republican today is to be in a state of, you know, subservient and enabling of Donald Trump, who is truly a kind of generational figure for that party.

Speaker 12 I just want to read something that you said. The Trump experience is one that cannot simply be undone or attributed to a sort of four-year accident.

Speaker 12 It is a different country because it went through that. The Republican Party was radicalized, and all those people went along.
I watched it happen.

Speaker 12 People in Washington who were normal and said they would never go along, then they became Trumpified, and they are now going along with things that would have been unthinkable to those same people in 2015.

Speaker 12 I think they're going along with things that would have been unthinkable even in 2021.

Speaker 12 So, as you point out, you know, there are cycles of history, and I think you made a great point here: that the whole point of a democracy is that each generation has to make it its own.

Speaker 12 So, this is, you were talking to a Greek journalist about all of this. And again, in case we were under any illusions about the fragility of this liberal constitutional republic that we have.

Speaker 12 We've had it tested, but we're about to experience a test that I'm not sure we've experienced since, say, 1860, to go back to something that's actually older than me. I did find a date.

Speaker 11 Charlie, you know, for our first conversation of the new year, this is already, I feel like it's getting my blood pressure going.

Speaker 11 And I might need to actually just crawl back in the colors and pretend it's still 2023.

Speaker 11 Of course, you're right. Yeah, you're right.

Speaker 12 The fact that it's not normal, I mean, I keep thinking about, you know, going back to 1968, how sometimes there are periods that leave a hangover for generations.

Speaker 12 I mean, you could even argue that we are still in the shadow of the 1960s, fighting some of that out.

Speaker 12 There are people who came into politics in the late 1960s who had a dominant role, you know, until very, very recently.

Speaker 12 And unfortunately, you have people who are coming into politics thinking that this new abnormal is in fact the normal. And they're going to be in politics for the next 30 or 40 years.

Speaker 12 So, again, to your point, there's not going to be the fever breaking. There's not going to be the jailbreak.
And we're just going to have to deal with that. And that's kind of the

Speaker 12 disillusionment of this year. By disillusionment, I mean the illusions that perhaps this was temporary, they've all evaporated, haven't they?

Speaker 11 Well,

Speaker 11 we'll see.

Speaker 11 Our capacity for illusions, our capacity collectively for amnesia has always been one of the, you know, kind of signature aspects of American politics, and it's going to be fully tested this year.

Speaker 12 Susan Glasser is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington, also the co-author of The Divider, a history of Donald Trump in the White House, at least the early history, which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker.

Speaker 12 Susan, it is always great to talk with you. Thank Thank you so much, and Happy New Year.

Speaker 11 Well, Happy New Year to you, Charlie.

Speaker 11 It's been great to, you know, sort of get a reality check to start the year off. Thank you.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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