Will Saletan: Punish the Vermin

Welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. Happy Monday.
I'm Charlie Sykes. First thing we have to do is we have to check in with my good friend, Will Salatan.
How are you taking the Tim Scott news? You okay? Are you okay with this? It's been rough. Been rough.
We're going to miss him. Kind of a shock.
Who would have imagined that Tim Scott's sunny, optimistic message wouldn't play, wouldn't get a lot of traction in the current Republican primary in the age of Trump? Huh. I don't know.
Well, at least he got a new girlfriend out of it. Right.
Do you have any comment on all of this? I mean, it's good for Nikki Haley, but... What I have, Charlie, is a confession.
So a couple of months ago, three months ago, I was the idiot who in the bulwark slack suggested that Tim Scott was going to be the Republican nominee for president. And of course, the reason why I said that, the reason why I said this was, Charlie, among all of the bulwark people, I have the least experience in the Republican Party.
So I naively thought that Tim Scott, because he was really good at doing town halls and talking with people and sounding like a real guy, that that was the guy they were going to choose. So I had a very warped understanding.
This is a brutal start to the week. So we're going to have to have that caveat every time you express an opinion about Republican politics.
We'll say, this is Will Salatin who actually believed that Tim Scott was going to be the Republican nominee. Okay.
Yes. Yes.
Okay. I admire your candor that you brought that up.
Okay. So that's not really why I wanted to begin today with the podcast because there's so much going on here.
First thing is happy Monday, fellow vermin. Vermin.
Remember back in 2020, it was scum, human scum. Donald Trump has said this stuff before.
And I know we'll be accused of the Trump derangement syndrome, but I think it's interesting that Trump once again gives a speech where he says, hey, the real enemies are right next to you. The real enemies are your fellow Americans, and we're coming for them.
They are vermin. So I don't think you need to really torture the he's sounding like Adolf Hitler type thing to say.
It's rather extraordinary rhetoric for a man that wants to be the leader of the free world to, on Veterans Day, say that we are going to hunt out and root out, you leftist vermin, right? Will, talk to me about,

because obviously he had you in mind and me in mind when he's talking about the vermin. So let's have a vermin chat here.
Okay. There's a lot to say about this Veterans Day message.
So I'm just going to start with one thing, which is Veterans Day is supposed to be about patriotism, people who serve the United States of America, you know, the country that you and I belong to, of which we're citizens.

And Trump's whole message here, his whole message is that the enemy is not Russia.

It's not China.

It's not Putin.

It's not Xi.

It's not North Korea.

It's not Iran.

It's Americans.

It's your fellow citizens.

Turn against them. They are the threat.
A horrifying message, particularly on this day. Well, it is.
And yet, in one way, he's right when he says the greatest threat to American democracy is coming from within. But it's like, look in the mirror, man.
Okay, just to reiterate your point here, here's President Biden's Veterans Day statement. Today, we honor the story of our veterans, the story of our nation at its best.
On Veterans Day, let us commit to fulfilling our one sacred obligation as a nation, to prepare those we send into harm's way and care for them and their families when they come home. Nice.
Here's Donald Trump's statement, okay? In honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country lie, steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible whether legally or illegally this is all one run on sentence to destroy America and the American dream the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the radical left lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will make America great again, apparently by, I don't know, what, weaponizing the federal government.
And so let's just play a couple of cuts from the president, because I want to make a point that I made on Morning Joe this morning about the verbal gas. Donald Trump has a fetish for proto-fascist strongmen like Viktor Orban from Hungary.
Increasingly, he's bringing up Orban's name. Listen to this context, though.
You know, we were respected when I was president. We were respected by China.
You know, one story, a quick story. You don't mind if I go off teleprompter like a lot, do you? So much more exciting.
So much more. But the head of Hungary, a very tough, strong guy, Victor Orban.
Did anybody ever hear of him? Probably, you know, considered very powerful, very powerful within his country and outside of his country. Not exactly loved by some of the European nations because he does his thing.
He didn't allow millions of people to invade his country. He allowed nobody to invade.
Zero. Zero.
He had nobody. So he doesn't have crime and he doesn't have the problems that they're having in other countries where millions of people are allowed to go in.
But they were interviewing him two weeks ago and they said, what would you advise President Obama? The whole world seems to be exploding and imploding. And he said, it's very simple.
He should immediately resign and they should replace him with President Trump, who kept the world safe. And I'm not just talking the United States.
Okay, so this, by the way, does seem to be a sort of a reflex now lately with Trump that he keeps forgetting that Biden is the president. I think this is like the seventh time in the last several weeks, somebody's been counting up, that he refers to President Obama, that he thinks that Obama is still in office.
He thinks that he beat President Obama. So your thoughts? So the Obama part is special because the Obama part, of course, is Trump doing what he accuses Biden of doing.
Now there is a difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And that is that when Joe Biden screws up, he catches himself.
He'll go back and try to get the sentence right. Donald Trump doesn't want to show anyone that he just screwed up.
So he just rolls right on as though Obama's the president, right? We're going to, obviously this is sort of a selective application of the claims of aging and senility, which is there's like three years apart between these two guys, right? Between Biden and Trump. Yeah.
So yeah, there's that part. But there's also this love of dictators that you hear in the speech.
So there's Orban. That's real.
Right. That's sincere.
He's praising Orban for his immigration policy, but he's praised Orban for a lot of other things. Orban is an authoritarian operating in Hungary.
Yeah, but he has this on a regular basis, you know, that he really admires the fact that Chinese, the Chinese leaders are strong, like Mao and Xi, and they have the death penalty, and therefore they have no problems. This, by the way, is something he brings up all the time, how much he wants America to be more like red China in terms of killing criminals.
Okay. Right.
That's real. Right.
And you heard him use the phrase very powerful, describing Orban. But he also in this speech, so he praised Xi, he also praised Kim Jong-un, said he was, you know, very smart.
And what he always praises is that these guys are in charge and they maintain order. Now, what they don't have, of course, is civil liberties.
And that's what he praises President Xi's drug policy, which is one day trial, immediate execution, right? We're going to get rid of

that civil liberty stuff. Meanwhile, of course, in that Veterans Day message, Charlie, what was that line? We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and radical left thugs.
Who is Donald Trump praising in this speech? Communists, Marxists, and fascists. That's who he's praising, but not Americans, foreign Marxist, communists, and fascists.
That would be ironic if irony wasn't dead when you think about it, right? And of course, you and I know this is his favorite line, communists, Marxists, and fascists, but he's talking about himself. He's talking about the dictators that he admires.
Projection is a thing. See, I think that it you know, it is very, very tempting to go down the rabbit hole of all of his gaffes and his stumbles and his blunders and all of that.
And, you know, and I'm not criticizing people who are holding his, you know, clear decomposition up against Joe Biden. But I also think it's like, this is one of those moments where we need to separate the white noise from the substance.
Because when you sweep out the actual gaffes, he is telling us who he is and what he intends to do. And the admiration for Victor Arbon is sincere.
The admiration for the lack of civil liberties in China is very, very real. So, you know, he will try to make a joke out of the near fatal hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband.
I mean, how sick is that?

But is that a gap?

Or is that just another indication that he's excited by violence?

And the violence and the brutality, and we keep talking about this,

is very much on brand here.

Again, the reason I wrote my newsletter this morning saying it's not the gaps, it's the plans.

Almost on a daily basis, we hear, or he tells tells us exactly what he intends to do as president. And so last week, we got that big Washington Post deep dive how he's going to weaponize the Department of Justice.
He's going to use the Department of Justice to go after his critics, his opponents, staffers who criticized him. Okay.
And then he confirms that. Then this weekend, we get the New York Times story that says his immigration plan includes mass arrests, huge deportations and camps.
OK, camps. He plans to scour the country for immigrants living here without legal permission and deport them by the millions.
Okay, following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. To help speed up the mass deportations, Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings, because due process are so cucks.
Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And Trump, in order to pay for this, you know, he doesn't need no stinking congressional authorization.
He will redirect money from the military budget, as he did in his first term, to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized. And the point is, he fully intends to do this.
And his team is working overtime. They're making no secret of this plan 2025.
The Heritage Foundation is cooking up to vet, you know, only the craziest, most, you know, avid, rabid loyalists to be in the government. And it's like, okay, we can make fun of the clown.
But I'm sorry to repeat myself, a clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower. And we could focus on the clown car, but we ought to focus on the fact that he's got a fucking neutron bomb in the trunk.
Right. And part of what he bragged about this immigration plan, there are actually elements of the Trump immigration plan that I agree with, but the ones I don't agree with are nuts.
They're just nuts. So the concentration camps.
No, he doesn't say actually concentration camps, but we're trying to end run due process, right? That's one thing. We're also trying to end run the constitution because this funding mechanism, the whole idea, remember, is he doesn't want to have to go through anybody else, like the people's representatives, right? I alone.
I alone will fix it. So it's an authoritarian model.
Now, the Constitution explicitly says, as you and I have discussed, that funds have to be appropriated by Congress. The president can't appropriate funds.
He doesn't care. We're going to go right around that.
We're going to take money from something else that Congress appropriated from the military budget. We're going to use it for this immigration plan.
Now, any other president, Charlie, would go through Congress, would say, here's my plan. I'm going to get Congress to pass it.
And this is what we're going to do. You would hope so.
So he's going to circumvent that. He's going to circumvent your process.

And now, how many million people do we think are in this country without illegally or without authorization? Like 10, 11? Maybe 10, 11. So I've heard estimates of 15 million.
The point is a lot of boxcars filled up. Sorry.
Okay. No boxcar jokes today.
But imagine how many, I don't want to say jackbooted thugs, but imagine how many law enforcement or military or National Guard, he would have to assign to do this and where they would have to go. Imagine the invasiveness and the prevalence of this force that he would be sending all over the country.
I mean, from the standpoint of a country that believes in freedom, this is pretty crazy. It's pretty crazy.
Well, okay, but there's a constituency for this, and there are millions of Americans that this is going to resonate with. And I say this because I remember having this discussion about mass deportations back in 2016, where I was making pretty much the exact same point you just made about what it would take to deport more than 10 million people.
And the reaction of, let's face it, his base was, yeah, we kind of like that. We kind of like the idea of the wall, even if we don't believe Mexico is going to pay for it.
We like the idea of at least saying that we're going to throw out all the illegal immigrants. It gives us that dopamine hit.
And so he has really cultivated this, we need to be strong, we need to be tough, we don't need to be bound by due process or the law, we need to be courageous, by which he means ignoring the constitutional provisions, and we need to actually fear the people who are living next door to us because it's one thing to say, you know, you're taking away the rights of law-abiding Americans. Quite another thing to say, you elect me and I'm going to clear the vermin out of the house.
I am going to exterminate the vermin. And this is the way he's rhetorically doing it.
These are the people who are rotting the country from the inside. And you need someone strong and tough, who's going to do something about it and solve these problems, which is why he admires these authoritarian dictators around the world.
I'm bringing this up because we've been doing this for so long that it's easy to go, same old, same old. Yeah, tell me something new.
Oh, the guy's such a joke. Well, there's a reason why he didn't give a speech praising democratic leaders in Sweden, why he doesn't talk about how wonderful the democracy of Great Britain is, which had, by the way, a very, very interesting cabinet shuffle today.
He doesn't talk about the French system. He doesn't talk about Greece being the cradle of democracy.
No, it's always North Korea, Hungary, and all of these other countries where, in fact, those civil liberties are eroded. So I guess this is one of those moments where it's like, guys, there's no secret or subtlety here about what he is saying.
And do you notice the number of Republicans who came out today, Will, and said, OK, I'm sorry. I want a Republican president, but this shit about Berman.
No, no. Did you notice that? Do we have some sound? We have sound? No, none.
There's actually none. Nobody.
Right. Okay, so I can see some folks responding to this thinking, well, Trump, of course, doesn't like the Europeans.
They're a bunch of liberals. But remember, this isn't just about left and right.
This is about freedom, right? None of what Trump is praising here is freedom. He's trying to erode freedom.
He wants a giant police force to go in and do this immigration crackdown. He wants, you know, in the name of controlling crime, to suspend civil liberties.
So Trump isn't about freedom. Trump is about order, right? And what I'm concerned about, Charlie, is one of the things that we may find out in the process of this Republican presidential primary and possibly the 2024 election is how many of the Republicans, how many of the conservatives who claim to believe in freedom really do? I think we've already found that out.
Will, I believe the answers are in. But I mean, to be fair, these are people who say, I don't want the government taking my guns.
We have a second amendment. These people don't even like speed cameras, right? We don't want a police state.
But what if they do? What if Trump's bet is that they do, and in fact, they nominate this guy and they elect this guy, essentially saying, we don't really care about all that stuff in the Constitution. We don't care about all the stuff Ronald Reagan said about freedom.
All we want is order and punishing the vermin. You mean they might actually be hypocrites about this?

Really?

Hypocrisy?

I, for one, am shocked to find this out.

Well, part of it is the freedom for us to be able to punish them is our freedom becomes,

why do I want the gun?

Well, I want to be free, but I also want to be able to shoot the vermin next door. Right.
Or to protect myself from the vermin. Right.
Can I, can I come back to the Pelosi thing for a minute? So he brings up the hammer attack, right? Let's play the audio of this because I don't want people to think that we're exaggerating. This is the former president of the United States joking about a hammer attack on an 80 plus year old man in his home easily could have been a

murder. Let's just play that.
We had no terror during my administration. The only terror we had

was Nancy Pelosi, who's a crazed lunatic. She's a lunatic.
She is a crazed lunatic. What the hell

was going on with her husband? Let's not ask. Let's not ask.
I'll withdraw that statement. By the way, she's got a wall around her house.
Obviously, in that case, it didn't work very well, did it? It didn't work. Hilarious.
So is he for walls or against walls? I am unclear there. Okay, sorry.
So among the hypocrisy that we're talking about here is crime, right? Trump's message is, okay, to hell with civil liberties. We need to crack down.
We need law and order because we need to control crime. But only some crime, right? And this comes back to your point about us and them.
Crime against them is okay. Crime against the Pelosi's.
And in fact, that line where Trump says, what was really going on there at the Pelosi's? That's, of course, not very subtle reference to the lie that Paul Pelosi and the attacker had some gay affair going on, right? This is just a complete fabrication of fantasy. But what he's essentially saying, what Trump is saying is that Paul Pelosi and Nancy Pelosi basically asked for it.
The crime against them is okay. It's their fault, right? And that's a way of basically conveying that none of this is really about controlling crime, about protecting the general public.
It's about the vermin. Pelosi and her husband are the vermin.
So crime against them is okay, and we can all laugh about it. One last soundbite before we move on, because I want to play this really interesting exchange from our colleague, Tim Miller and Carrie Lake, which people haven't seen, and I'm guessing most people haven't.
You know, he was working with the folks from the circus this weekend. It's pretty amazing.
Before we do that, though, Jonathan Karl is out with a new book about the Trump years. And he has a lot of stories that reflect how crazy they almost were, crazy they were, but the crazy things that almost happened.
For those of you that wonder, how separated from reality can Donald Trump actually get? And there's an interesting debate. Does he believe this? Does he not believe this? Does he know he lost? The story of Mo Brooks is awfully interesting, isn't it? Remember Mo Brooks? Mo Brooks being a, is it fair to say, super ultra MAGA congressman, you know, all in for Donald Trump.
I mean, really kind of on the real kind of the fringes of this, and he's running for U.S. Senate in Alabama.
They had a falling out. And he's told this story before, but it's worth remembering.
And again, I want to just underline the fact that Mo Brooks is not a normie. Mo Brooks is not a rhino, a squish, a moderate by any means, right? Well, okay.
How would you characterize him? I feel like I'm being unfair. He was hardcore, hardcore MAGA.
There was no question about it. So listen to Jonathan Karl talking about Mo Brooks.
In March of 2022, Trump called him with an extraordinary series of demands. Among them...
He asked me to publicly state that Donald Trump should be allowed to move back into the White House, reinstated as president. Brooks says he refused, telling the former president his demand was blatantly unconstitutional, and that then Trump retaliated, pulling his endorsement.
Brooks went on to lose the Republican primary. Do you think he really believed that he could be reinstated? I sure hope not, because if he truly believed that, then he was way outside the bounds of reality.
That's the very diplomatic way of putting it, I think, don't you? Totally. So the word there was reinstatement, right? Trump was demanding, and let's go back to the timing here.
Carl's story here is that Trump made this demand of Brooks in March of 2022. 2022.
He's been out of office for more than a year, but let's go back to earlier in 2021. Trump was talking from the day he left office about being quote reinstated, right? And many, many people, including Jenna Ellis, another Trump lackey who has since, you know, begun to do some reform and repentance, God knows what's sincere or not.
But the point is, in the summer of 2021, Jenna Ellis, who was basically functioning as a lawyer for Trump, and some others, said to Donald Trump, you can't be reinstated. You can't, there's no reinstatement in the Constitution.
There's one way to get a President Joe Biden out of office. That is impeachment.
There's nothing else constitutional, right? So the reinstatement demand is essentially a demand for a coup, right? Yeah. So he's told this in 2021.
In 2022, he's still at it and he's threatening Mo Brooks that he's got to support, quote, reinstating Donald Trump. He's demanding a coup.
And if you don't support it, he's going to oust you from the primary. Well, Brooks lost the primary.
But clearly the point is, no matter what people say to Donald Trump, he continues to try to undermine the Constitution and try to overturn the government. And that he will latch onto the most extreme, insane proposal.
I mean, you know, this has happened again and again. You'll hear that, well, you know, Donald Trump is going to try to get Mike Pence to not count the votes on January 6th.
Remember the first time you heard that? I remember the first time I heard that. I think it was when Paul Gosar in Arizona was talking about filing a suit.
And it's like, Paul Gosar, right, that's not going to happen. And of course, we now know that Donald Trump took that very, very seriously and was prepared to take a lot of various steps.
You know, you hear, well, maybe Donald Trump thinks he can be restored to the presidency, which is just batshit crazy stuff. And the former president United States apparently was kind of fixated on this and fixated to the presidency, which is just batshit crazy stuff.
And the former president of the United States apparently was kind of fixated on this and fixated to the point where he actually wanted to make this a litmus test for his loyalists. I suppose the good news in that story, or I don't know what it is, is that Mo Brooks, who is hardcore MAGA, even he wouldn't go along with that.
Even he said, no, okay, I am with you. I'm prepared to do all this other shit, but I am not going to say that.
So I suppose, I don't know. Is there a pony underneath that? Well, I, I, I'm going to try to come up with one, but before I get to the pony, let's go back and remember that the, the various points at which Trump lackeys have said to the rest of us he'll get over it he'll stop there's this point here's this point at which he'll stop so the first one was who was it mick mulvaney who was it who said what's the point in humoring him or just unnamed trump official we don't know who it was it may have been that was that famous anonymous quote in the washington post right after the election what's the downside of humoring him, right? So every other president concedes defeat, not Donald Trump.
But what's the point of humoring him? We'll just go until what? The Electoral College? Mike Johnson says to Liz Cheney, you know what? I'm going to support this crazy Texas lawsuit to try to overturn the election result. But we're going to do this because- That doesn't work.
Right. This will get him over it.
Trump will be done with it. Then we're going up to January 6th.
We're just going to have this proceeding at January 6th, then he'll be over it, right? No, he tries to overturn the election. He's still all the way through the time that he's in office, January 20th, trying to overturn it.
And then afterwards, he's out and he's still trying to overturn the election. He's still trying to engineer poll strings to get people like Mo Brooks to help him overturn the election.
There is no point at which Donald Trump will stop. Well, and this weekend, he's quoting Hungary's Viktor Orban saying he should be reinstated, which is like, oh, wow.
I mean, this is like cartoon stuff. Okay, but this is really, really a great point because this rationalization, oh, we will just go this far and we won't go any further and then they keep doing it or whatever.
Watch, that's going to happen over and over and over again in 2024 as Republicans go, okay, so if he just gets past the indictments or if he just gets the nomination or, okay, if he becomes president again, then we'll put those guardrails back up or maybe he will grow into office this time. Every illusion they've ever had about him has been destroyed.
And yet they cling to the illusions. Right.
This requires, I believe, a psychologist, not two political guys like you and me to figure out. You know, it's like you have these illusions.
You cling to these illusions. You know, you tell yourself a certain story that you go so far and no further.
and every single time they'll go along. They'll go beyond that.
No, no, absolutely. And just to be clear, the next stage of this is anytime that you or I think, well, it can't get worse.
We need to remember that. We need to remember this point because my version of it can't get worse has been, well, he's already been president for one term.
If he got in, he'd only have one more term and then he'd have to leave. Why? Why? Why? That's just what's in the constitution.
And I think that's just another reassurance that either people like me tell ourselves or that we've been told that we shouldn't count on. We shouldn't count on anything with this guy.
I think that's true. I actually said something on another podcast and I'm hesitating to say it again.
You know, if he loses this time, you know that he'll never graciously concede losing. He will never acknowledge his loss.
Oh yeah. And he'll run in 2028.
I mean, he'll be old, but this isn't going to stop him. So it's like, this never comes to an end.
And so look, Will, I'm just going to push back a little bit here. When I inserted the word he's going to create concentration camps, you said, well, no, not concentration camps.
Give it five minutes. He's going to say, okay, they're accusing me of wanting to have concentration camps for illegal immigrants for the vermin.
Damn right there are concentration camps for the vermin. The window will keep moving, and then you'll start to see normies who will go, well, no, the camps seem going too far.
But well, Lindsey Graham will explain what he really means by camps are just temporary settlements. And then it'll keep moving and moving and moving until it will be a litmus test.
And if any Republican says, I am against concentration camps for illegal immigrants, they'll get primaried. I'm sorry.
I'm so cynical. Speaking of somebody who has gone all the way, who has never hit a speed bump ever, ever, ever, Carrie Lake.
Is she still claiming she's the governor of Arizona? I'm not sure because that would be awkward for her. But she's going to be the Republican candidate for U.S.
Senate in Arizona. It is not an insane idea that she would be Donald Trump's running mate, except that she's running for U.S.
Senate. Our colleague, Tim Miller, caught up with her.
And Tim is doing this thing with the circus, Showtime Circus, and he actually sat down with Steve Bannon and Carrie Lake, and they had very, very interesting exchanges. And I think there's some chemistry between Tim and Carrie.
I'm just saying, well, there's some touching that goes on. Did you catch that part? Yes, yes.
Where Tim's going, why are you touching me? And she goes, well, I'm a mom. I said, well, I don't know.
It's one thing to have an interview. I guess this is something we learned about Tim is that when he's interviewing somebody, he doesn't want them to be touching him, which, okay, I agree with him on that.
This is one of the great things about doing this on Zoom is there's no touching, Will, but there's just no, I don't know about Thursday night when we're in DC, but I just don't think there's going to be a lot of touch. Anyway, I want to play this and I would like to credit, I think it's Ron Filipowski posted this on what used to be known as Twitter.
But here's a

short two minutes. Tim Miller actually having a conversation with Carrie Lake.
Let's listen.

Whatever you guys say on the circus, I want to be able to have conservative students not being

shamed on our universities. This is like a golden age for conservative student speech.

It's like, it's the best time ever. If you're a conservative student and you want to talk, you have huge

platforms. I went

to watch you speak at Turning Point USA.

All these kids have huge

audiences that come to see them, and that's great. That's fine.

They're all speaking. Their speech is another threat.

There weren't any cops coming to shut down

the Turning Point USA thing.

True. You say you care about the

fentanyl crisis and our kids. I care

deeply. So if you care so deeply

about this, couldn't you

actually do something about it if you stopped

Thank you. You say you care about the fentanyl crisis and our kids.
I care deeply. So if you care so deeply about this, couldn't you actually do something about it if you stopped the bullshit about the last election? If you had just acknowledged that Trump had lost and acknowledged that you had lost, you'd probably be in good shape to do something.
You probably would have won your governor's race had you just talked about things people cared about instead of the election fraud. So sometimes don't you ever think to yourself, I wish I could just stop talking about this fake thing that Donald Trump made me make up so that I could actually talk about the stuff that's important.
Because we agree about fentanyl. I agree.
I wish we could deal with that. I talked about that all the time at the campaign.
I'm sorry you weren't with me. I'm sorry you weren't with me every step of the way.
The people of Arizona understand me. And they know me.
And they care about me. And I care about them.
And I care about them. Getting them better.
Freeing the people who are held politically, political prisoners. Yeah.
Absolutely. I think you are still a little extreme.
That's okay though. It's good to see you again.
A little extreme? We can keep doing this. That's right.
I'd love to. We have some areas of agreement.
We agree on the fentanyl thing. Then you get into the other stuff.
I'm sorry I'm not making you happy. I don't know why you're touching me.
The other stuff is what you have to do to win. I'm a mom.
I'm sorry. I'm a mom.
I like to touch too, but in an interview setting it's a little uncomfortable. I'm sorry that we don't agree on everything, but what I am not sorry about is that I think that you I do believe that we can agree

that we both love America. We do.

Well, I know that I love America.

I do think that you're okay with Donald

Trump trying to end the American experiment

last time, so that makes me wonder how sincere

your love is. But I do appreciate it.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you for your time.

Okay. Masterclass.

Gotta say, despite the touching, it was very interesting.

What do you think about that?

God bless Tim.

I so admire Tim's ability to think on his feet and to have a, it's not a confrontational

interview.

He's talking to a crazy person, I think is a crazy person, but he manages to sort of

pull it up.

Without saying you're an effing crazy person.

Why am I talking to this crazy person?

Give up the crazy. Right.

But OK, can we can we pause on that for a second, Charlie?

Yeah. Give up the phrase.

Give up the crazy is really good.

That really crystallizes this thing is Carrie Lake.

And are people like Carrie Lake in the Republican Party?

Are they nuts or are they just pathologically dishonest?

Like, does Carrie Lake actually believe that she won the governor's race and that Donald Trump won the presidential race? In which case, why is Tim trying to reason with her? But you can't reason with, or is Tim basically betting that she knows, because it sounds like he's betting, that she knows it's all bullshit. I'm going to go in her case with the pathological liar, understanding that the crazy is a rational choice in this Republican field.
That make sense? Okay. Sounding crazy, not being crazy.
Yes. Right.
Because playing to the crazy, never admitting you lost, never saying it, it's a tactic. It's a choice.
And let's face's face it you know you could say that it's kind of worked for donald trump to a certain extent right right and you're looking around now i gotta bring out my pony okay this is from holly berkeley fletcher 40 minutes in we had to wait 40 minutes for the pony okay and folks this pony sucks but here's what the pony is the pony is that that I hope, Charlie, that you're right. I hope that all of these Republicans, most of them, know that it's bullshit.
Because if they don't know it's bullshit, we're in a hell of a lot more trouble, right? If they're really deluded. I mean, I think that Donald Trump is actually deluded about having won the 2020 election.
And that's part of why I'm even more scared of Trump. But if they know it's bullshit, if Carrie Lake knows it's bullshit, then imagine Carrie Lake getting elected, which could happen, right? You would certainly prefer to have a shameless liar elected who can be reasoned with, like Tim Miller's trying to do in that interview, on other issues, on fentanyl or other things, than to have someone who's genuinely nuts, wouldn't you?

Really?

I think we need to think this through.

I mean, I have some quick answers to that.

And here we are, in late 2023, debating, what would you rather have, a deeply committed,

pathological lying fascist, or someone who's actually insane?

Oh.

Huh.

Those are our choices.

Death by arsenic or death by woodchart.

I don't know.

I don't know.

All right.

So what else do you hear on the Sunday morning shows

that you want to talk about?

There was a lot of stuff about Gaza,

a lot of stuff about Israel and Gaza.

Benjamin Netanyahu did two interviews,

one on Meet the Press, one on CNN.

Yeah.

And it was interesting. He made actually a lot of interesting points, many of which were worthwhile.
So one of them is that he wants to set up field hospitals. And this is a really big deal that's going to be happening in Gaza.
The IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, have gone into Gaza and they've surrounded, they've already moved people, begun to move people out of two hospitals in Gaza.

There's a third hospital, the big one, al-Shifa, and the IDF has surrounded that. And there's a lot of people in there.
But basically, the Israelis have alleged, and American intelligence agrees with them, we don't have the details yet, that there are massive Hamas networks under these hospitals. Would be consistent with their pattern and practice.
Right. And the United States government, in the form of Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, was on TV saying, we don't want to have firefights in hospitals.
So we don't want the Israelis to go in there. But it's really hard to know how you're going to get at the Hamas tunnels unless you can get the patients and the staff out of the hospitals.
So Netanyahu is trying to get France, he's trying to get Qatar and others to the UAE, I think it was, to set up other places where these patients and these doctors can go. And some of them have moved out, a couple of the hospitals people have begun to move out.
If they can do this, and the Israelis can go in, then Charlie, we're going to get a moment of truth. Because if we can get under the hospitals, we will get an answer.
And there will be video, there will be evidence of the Hamas networks. And if this is true, this is horrific, right? Because above ground, we have normal human beings, normal Israeli parents, normal Palestinian parents trying to protect their children, parents who lie on top of their children to protect them.

Meanwhile, underground, we have these Hamas murderers literally lying under children, under them, under patients, under sick people, under doctors, so that they, the Hamas people, the combatants will be protected and the innocent people will be killed. It is a complete inversion of everything we believe morally.

And this is not about Jews versus Muslims or Arabs versus Israelis, right? This is about civilized people, whether Arab or Israeli, doing those people versus these pathological murderers, Hamas. Do you have any doubt that that's what we're going to find? I'm not going to say it until we find it.
The Israelis have produced some evidence. They have some intercepts.

They have some audio of the Palestinian, of the Hamas guys talking about this. Will the truth matter? Will the truth matter and to whom? I mean, we live in an age right now where there is so much disinformation.
There is so much skepticism. There will be so much pushback.
Right. Will the truth actually make a difference? I mean, you're suggesting that when they go down there with the cameras and they map it and we see the tunnels that, what, the rest of the world, the Columbia humanities faculty will go, wow, okay, so maybe it's not, you know, genocide.
So Charlie, my answer is, I probably am being a little bit naive here, but I think if I ask myself, in what way am I being naive? The answer is, what if we never get the answer? What if we never get it? And the reason is, what do the Hamas guys have in those tunnels under the hospitals, assuming this is true? They have a lot of rockets, they have fuel, they have explosives. Why should they allow the world to see this? If they don't care about the life above them, which they've already demonstrated by putting themselves under the hospital, I think they'll blow it up.
I mean, we already have a hospital where there was a tragedy because an Islamic Jihad rocket blew up. They will blow it up.
Right. And so they'll blow it up.
And then they will blame Israel for that. Exactly.
And in the process, trying to destroy the evidence. And they will have destroyed a lot of the evidence.
So that's my nightmare scenario. Oh, there are so many nightmare scenarios here.
Usually we leave when you found the pony. You've not given me the nightmare scenario.
I'm sorry. It's like, I don't have a good answer for this, but I will say this.
I don't think they'll be able to destroy all the evidence. If this is true, I do think that the Israelis or the Americans or somebody will be able to find enough forensic evidence, whether it will convince the world, I don't know.
And Charlie, even if they do, even if they do, think of the people in Al-Shifa hospital who don't leave. People who can't, you know, if they get blown up, they're dead anyway.
And that's a horrific tragedy, regardless of how you look at it.

It is horrific. It is such a tragedy on top of tragedies, and it's more than we can bear.
Over the weekend, we had these massive rallies around the world in Western Europe. Many of them took on a really disturbing pro-Hamas feeling.
And I've not had a chance to read in depth what's happened with the cabinet shakeup in Great Britain where the conservative government has sacked the Home Secretary.

They're moving folks around. The conservative government in Britain seems to be very, very divided.
But the country seems to have been really shocked by the intensity of the protests on their, what do they call it, commemoration day. And of course, in New York, we had those widely disseminated scenes of pro-Hamas demonstrators tearing down American flags on Veterans Day.
The wounds from this conflict, I think, are very deep, and I think they're going to be long lasting. Yeah, they are.
And speaking of long lasting, so one thing I think we do have is Netanyahu talking about the future of Gaza. I think we have the clip from CNN where he talks about what's going to happen after this.
And maybe we'll play that and listen, talk about that. The U.S.
also says that any post-war plan for Gaza must include Palestinian-led governance and Gaza unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority. You appeared to reject that yesterday.
You said Israel will not accept a, quote, civilian authority there that educates its children to hate Israel. So I just want to be clear.
Are you saying that Israel would not accept giving control of Gaza over to the Palestinian authority after the war? The first thing we have to do is destroy Hamas, because otherwise they'll do it again and again and again, and they've said so. So we'll destroy Hamas.
The second thing we have to do is destroy Hamas because otherwise they'll do it again and again and again, and they've said so.

So we'll destroy Hamas.

The second thing we have to understand is that there has to be an overriding, an overreaching Israeli military envelope

because we've seen any place that we leave, we just exit, give it to some other force.

Very soon terrorism resurges, so we've achieved nothing.

The third thing we have to understand is that a civilian authority has to cooperate in two goals. One is to demilitarize Gaza, and the second is to de-radicalize Gaza.
And I have to say that the Palestinian Authority has unfortunately failed on both counts. They don't demilitarize the West Bank, Judea and Samaria.
We have to do it. We have and fight the terrorists they don't de-radicalize they teach our children the hatred of Israel they do pay for slaying they pay for terrorist murderers and their families the more Jews they kill the more they pay they they refuse to this day 36 days after this savagery to condemn what Hamas did on November 7th.
Sorry? If not the PA, then who? Well, there has to be a reconstructed civilian authority. There has to be something else.
Otherwise, we're just falling into that same rabbit hole. And we're going to have the same result.
Remember, the PA was already in Gaza. When Israel left Gaza, it handed the keys over to the PA.
And what happened? Within a very short time, Hamas took over, kicked them out. They weren't willing to fight Hamas.
They're still not willing to fight Hamas. So you have to have some kind of authority, civilian Palestinian authority that is willing to fight the terrorists and educating and importantly, must educate their children for a future of peace, peace, cooperation, prosperity, cooperation with Israel, not the annihilation of Israel.
And so far that hasn't happened. The burden of proof is on the PA and they failed every single count.
Okay. So who, you know, going down the rabbit hole, I'm listening to that and going, okay, he's not wrong, but I don't hear an answer.
I don't know what happens the day after. It doesn't sound like this cycle is going to end anytime soon.
Will, what did you hear there? Yeah, the same thing. And Charlie, the problem is both are true.
Exactly what you said. He's not wrong.
He's not wrong about what's failed. And yet the upshot is there is no exit from this, right? He says, first of all, he talks about the military envelope.
Now that alone in any negotiation with a Palestinian, right? That's Israel. And this has happened before in peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
The Israelis have said, we don't trust you. We want to have our military in charge of security.
And the Palestinians said, no, no, we want our own security forces, right? Now, Netanyahu is talking about history and the failure of, you know, Hamas has obviously betrayed and attacked Israel and just murdered a bunch of people. The PA has failed to control Hamas.
They've failed before and they're, you know, they to this day will not condemn the October 7th attack as they should. But what he's talked himself into is he's just eliminated everybody, right? Hamas can't run Gaza.
The PA can't run Gaza, according to him. Who? Something else.
And the problem here is that it's not just that Netanyahu has described a future where there is no solution. It's that he's in the middle of a war right now.
And public support for the war around the world, to the extent there is any, depends on some kind of exit strategy and some kind of statehood, something positive in Gaza and Palestine. And he's not offering that.
The United States is trying to bridge that, is trying to tell the Palestinians there's a way out of here, but you're not going to have the world tolerating what's going on the next, the ground stage of the war. And there's just no way out without some kind of

positive offer at the end of it. You know, I'm just trying to think what a solution would even

look like. And it would have to be, you know, some sort of a two state solution

with a real commitment to somehow de-radicalizing the situation. And it's like, okay, that's where

you're kind of reaching for the unicorn. How you do that, it would take the Arab world coming together and saying, okay,

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okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, the situation and it's like okay that's where you're kind of reaching for the unicorn how you do that it would take the arab world coming together and saying okay we're going to put our support behind this solution but in return we have to dial down the kill all the jews rhetoric right you know in the other interview that netanyahu did on meet the press kristen welker asked him what about an international force right people reaching, people are trying to offer Netanyahu something other than Israel reoccupying Gaza. And he's rejecting all of that.
He's saying none of that will work, but they're going to need something. What is your read? I mean, does he survive after this? Because I mean, he screwed this up so badly.
He has divided the country. He's weakened the country.
He has embraced the most extreme destabilizing elements. Normally there's a rallying around the flag effect.
I don't sense that's happening in Israel because October 7th was such a complete failure. He survived a lot in the past.
Do you think he's going to survive? Will it be Netanyahu? Will it be his government that will decide what happens in the future? At the minute that Israel can get past this retribution, deterrence, go into Gaza phase, right? This guy had one job, which was security. He spectacularly failed.
He will absolutely be gone out of there. There were other reasons to get rid of him besides that.
Israel will be able to get rid of Netanyahu. The problem is the Palestinians, because nobody's been able, they've got to replace Hamas.
They've got to put, but they have in Mahmoud Abbas, a very old guy, like there's a lot of corruption in the PA. Netanyahu is not wrong about that.
And there's got to be a Palestinian government that's better than the one that they have now. And Charlie, I have no idea how the Palestinians are going to get there.
None. No.
So this story is not likely to have a pretty ending.