The GOP Is a Failed State

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Speaker 12 Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Seyches.
It's October 23rd, 2023.

Speaker 12 And if you thought the chaos in the House couldn't get any worse, well, Republicans are saying hold our beer because it is going to be absolutely wild.

Speaker 12 So, Kevin McCarthy down, Steve Scalise, out, Jim Jordan rejected. And what do we have now? We have nine candidates running for the speakership, seven of whom are election denialists.
The other two,

Speaker 12 well, Tom Emmer, who is the apparently the normie great hope, Kevin McCarthy has endorsed him. He's a member of leadership.

Speaker 12 MAGA World is all aflame saying, you know, no, Tom Emmer cannot do this because he committed the unpardonable sin of acknowledging the reality of the 2020 election.

Speaker 12 The guy's got other baggage as well, but Donald Trump hates his guts. So what could possibly go wrong?

Speaker 12 Meanwhile, and you know, this is one of those moments, Will, it's Bill Crystal in today's Bulwer who says, sometimes like whole decades take place in a month.

Speaker 12 So, it's not just us that thinks that it just like is so much stuff happening.

Speaker 12 It just feels like we're being flooded in the Mideast, the various developments, the way the world is changing, the complexification of international relationships.

Speaker 12 I mean, October, we're not even done with October yet. And it's been a hell of a month.

Speaker 10 The crazy thing, Charlie, is in half of all respects, everything's happening, as Bill says.

Speaker 10 It's a decade happening in a short time. But meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, nothing is happening.

Speaker 10 It's the weird disjunction between the world's events and the complete absence of activity in the United States and the most important legislative body.

Speaker 12 Okay, so let's talk about last week, but you and I haven't spoken since the rise and fall of Jim Jordan. So many things have happened here.

Speaker 12 There was a moment in which people were saying, well, is the senator going to hold? I was actually going back and looking at my old newsletters. So on Monday it was, will the senator hold?

Speaker 12 Will there be enough Republicans who will say this is crazy and absurd? It's dangerous. The idea of Jim Jordan as speaker is completely ludicrous.
You know, are enough going to be able to say no?

Speaker 12 On Tuesday morning, at least for a while, it looked like the normies were doing what normies do, that they were all going to cave in.

Speaker 12 One after another, they were rationalizing, you know, why it wouldn't be so terrible to have Jim Jordan. And then they took the vote.

Speaker 12 And kind of amazingly, I think people were surprised on that first ballot, 20 said no. I think it rose to 22.

Speaker 12 And in the end, basically, there were enough, whatever you want to call them, normies, establishment types, the appropriators, the sane caucus, that little remnant who were able to say no to Jim Jordan.

Speaker 12 Just, you know, to catch everybody up.

Speaker 12 There was like for five minutes, a lot of buzz saying, hey, maybe we're going to have a compromise where we're going to empower the acting speaker, Patrick McHenry.

Speaker 12 And then they went into closed caucus, and everybody hated the idea.

Speaker 12 Jordan's people, I mean, the MAGA folks, hated the idea because that might involve a bipartisan compromise, which is the worst thing in the world, right?

Speaker 12 The people who basically wanted to keep their boot on Jim Jordan's neck kind of hated it because they didn't want him hanging around as speaker-designate, which is really not a thing.

Speaker 12 So that got voted down. Jim Jordan wants another vote, crashes and burns again on Friday morning.
By the end of the day, they had a secret ballot and decided that they were done with Jim Jordan.

Speaker 12 I think, by the way, it's worth noting, Will,

Speaker 12 that you had a lot of folks who were willing to go on the floor and publicly vote for Jim Jordan to be second in line to the presidency, but given a chance to vote in a secret ballot, said, absolutely not, we're done with this guy.

Speaker 12 So, anyway, just your thoughts on the whole up and down Jim Jordan, you know, bad news is he came close to being speaker. Good news is weirdly enough, sanity prevailed in the Republican Party.

Speaker 12 Just give me your narrative of the Jim Jordan saga.

Speaker 10 So let me take two separate things. One is what you said about the secret ballot, because, okay, just to remind everyone, I am a squish.

Speaker 10 It's my version of sanity with the people in the middle, the moderates, right?

Speaker 10 And our advantage is we're usually right because we're not crazy. We're not ideological.
We're not in some extreme. The downside, of course, Charlie, is that we're weak, right?

Speaker 10 Because what's, is it Yates or the best lack the

Speaker 12 are full of passion and intensity while the best lack all conviction. Yeah, right.
Well, the worst are full of passion.

Speaker 10 The best lack all conviction. Right, right.
So people like me, we think we're the best. Whether we are, set that aside.
But the point is, we certainly lack all conviction, right? And so we...

Speaker 10 What you figure is that the people, the squishes, the moderates are going to fold, right? That was the expectation.

Speaker 12 Plus the name squish.

Speaker 10 Yes, exactly. It is descriptive.
Squishes squish, right? But on the secret ballot, your point is correct, right?

Speaker 10 On the secret ballot, these squishes, they were afraid to cast votes against Jordan when their names were on it, but on the secret ballot, they voted against him. So they squished there.

Speaker 10 But in that meeting where Jordan meets with the 20 who are holding out against him, he's expecting and his right-wing supporters are expecting these moderates to fold, to fold to Jordan because we are the people.

Speaker 10 We crazies are the ones who insist on getting our way. You moderates will fold.
And they didn't. They didn't.

Speaker 10 And Charlie, I don't know if you talked about this last week, but there was that lovely meeting that was described in the tweet by Punch Bowl News where Jordan says, What do you guys want?

Speaker 10 He thinks he's going to cut a deal with them. And they're like, We don't want anything from you.
We just want you to know that you'll never be speaker. Wow.
You know, so the squishes really stood up.

Speaker 12 Very unsquishy. Very unsquishy.

Speaker 10 Very unsquishy.

Speaker 12 Good for them. Joe, Jim Jordan finally goes down.
But I have to tell you, and again, I think it's important to underline here that nobody really knows what's going to go on.

Speaker 12 I mean, even the people who are wired in do not know what's going to go on. So you have nine candidates.
They're going to have this. They will have some sort of a forum later today.
Is that right?

Speaker 12 Where they all get like about 30 seconds to explain how they will run the house, whatever.

Speaker 12 But I mean, the front runner is this guy, Tom Emmer. And like, I'm not going to claim to be an expert on on Tom Emmer.

Speaker 12 He's one of only two of the candidates who did not vote against certifying the election, which means that he has incurred the wrath of Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 12 So I just don't see how anybody whose name that you and I would recognize can get to 217.

Speaker 12 Does that mean there's going to be some dark horse that are just going to drop in at the last moment who becomes the consensus of exhaustion? You know, it's just like, okay, we're just exhausted.

Speaker 12 We're so embarrassed. We're humiliated.
We can't come up with anybody else because I can't see Emmer getting this if he needs to get 217. What do you think?

Speaker 10 Now, our colleague Tim Miller has previously listed four scenarios coming out of this, and I can't remember the exact names of them, but the one that I favor, the one that I believe will happen is the McHenry, Patrick McHenry Pro Tim gets.

Speaker 10 added powers and sort of.

Speaker 12 That's the kind of one I've been going just because I believe in inertia. Right.

Speaker 10 Inertia is correct. You're correct, Charlie.
And the reason why is ask yourself, what is the most cowardly thing that can be done? That is what the House Republicans will do.

Speaker 10 It's what they've done all along. And the most cowardly thing is they will just keep kicking the can down the road.
And you say to yourself, but they can't.

Speaker 10 They have to elect a speaker or nothing happens. Actually, the McHenry scenario is the one where they can kick the can down the road.

Speaker 10 Gates and his crazies and Nancy Mace and all the other, they can say to themselves, look, we're not choosing someone for speaker. We're just temporarily giving the pro tem more power to.

Speaker 10 And so we'll have essentially an acting speaker. I think that's the most plausible scenario.
What do you think?

Speaker 12 It may be the least bad. I'm trying to think of other scenarios.
I mean, there are some horrible scenarios. I think Jim Jordan would have been a horrible scenario.

Speaker 12 Any candidate backed by Matt Gates, horrible scenario. Somebody chosen by Mar-a-Lago, horrible scenario.
Going along with this sort of quasi-normie Patrick McHenry.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 12 Nobody gets what they want, which may be the best we can hope for. You know what I'm saying? Understand we keep lowering our standards here.

Speaker 10 Right. So, Charlie, we're talking about the vote to object to electors.
And I believe so. There are about 200 Republicans at the time.
About 120 Republicans voted to object and 80 didn't.

Speaker 10 So the problem is we're working with a very narrow universe of people who already didn't vote to overturn the election.

Speaker 10 And then within that, we have the people that Trump vetoes. But if you go with the McHenry route, then you can claim as a House Republican, I'm not actually voting for McHenry.

Speaker 10 I'm just voting to temporarily give the guy who's in there now a little bit more authority.

Speaker 12 I think that that's the likeliest scenario because other than that, you have to have the heavy lifting of getting to 217 votes for somebody else.

Speaker 12 Will, we've seen, you and I have been around for a while. We've seen divided political parties before.
I have to tell you.

Speaker 12 I don't remember a time when there was a political party where they hated each other with such intensity.

Speaker 12 I mean, we're not talking about guys who are going to disagree on policy and then go out and have a beer.

Speaker 12 We are talking about people who who loathe one another at a visceral level, who would kick each other's dogs. I mean, this is, by the way, I wish I had it in front of me.

Speaker 12 That letter from Tom McClintock, Republican from California, who wrote a thing of beauty. He wrote the satirical letter to Matt Gates, you know, oh, you brave patriots.
People should just look it up.

Speaker 12 Just do yourself a favor, go on social media, look up. Tom McClintock letter to Matt Gates and the others.
It is a class. But anyway, these people are having a hard time.

Speaker 12 I mean, they're at the point where it's hard for them to be in the room with each other. I mean, so there are political divisions, and then there are real political.

Speaker 12 I mean, this is a party that's not just in chaos. This is a party that is tearing each other apart.

Speaker 10 So sad.

Speaker 12 If only they had been warned.

Speaker 10 I'm sorry.

Speaker 10 So it's not just that they hate each other, although that's true. It's that they don't have anything to unite around.
They don't have an agenda. They don't, this is a party without a current platform.

Speaker 12 Orange God King.

Speaker 10 And that's exactly right. So some years ago, actually, it was 2016 when Trump was running for president.

Speaker 10 And I wrote a piece in Slate that said, the Republican Party is a failed state and Donald Trump is its warlord. And that's where we were.
And then he became president.

Speaker 10 And now that he's not president anymore, that's where we are. They don't have anything other than this guy, right?

Speaker 10 And so because they transformed themselves into a cult and they don't have a platform anymore, they don't really agree on things. In the absence of Trump, they can't pull together.

Speaker 10 I mean, Charlie, this is not the first party to have internal fratricide. No, absolutely not.
The Democrats in the 60s and whatnot. I mean, lots of infighting, but you have to believe in something.

Speaker 10 You have to have something that at the end of the day says, you know, folks, let's pull together. Let's choose a speaker because here's what we need to do.

Speaker 12 And they don't have that. No, they don't have it.
And I don't see any prospect for it. So I'm out of the prediction business, but at this point, I'm looking at the nine candidates.

Speaker 12 And apparently, there's been some flippings, you know, this this morning. Somebody dropped out, somebody else who I'd never heard of got in.
It doesn't matter. It's all white noise at this point.

Speaker 12 So at the end of the day, they're going to have many, many ballots going back and back and forth, and they're not going to be able to come to 207. Who knows?

Speaker 12 But again, going back to the Patrick McHenry thing, for those of us who are not in this conference, really the only real significance, well, there's a lot of things that are entertaining about it, but you don't want to shut down the federal government.

Speaker 12 So, you know, could Patrick McHenry be the human CR continuing resolution to keep the government open? Will they get a vote on aid to Ukraine and aid to Israel on the floor of the House?

Speaker 12 I don't expect they're going to get anything else done. Nobody else seems that concerned about all of this.

Speaker 12 By the way, I have to say, and I know that a lot of our listeners really, you know, hate Mitch McConnell, but doesn't Mitch McConnell kind of come off as this is what a grown-up looks like?

Speaker 12 I mean, the Senate Republicans have their own clown show,

Speaker 12 but boy, do they look better

Speaker 12 than the,

Speaker 12 And again, we are so lowering the bar here.

Speaker 10 So, this weekend, Mitch McConnell did a little PR tour. I don't know if you were doing this as a musical tour, I guess you would call it the I'm Still Alive tour, which is necessary for him.

Speaker 10 I'm going to say something very unkind. So, please forgive me, Mitch McConnell and your staff.

Speaker 10 So, they've scheduled interviews with two of the Sunday shows. Somebody has made up Mitch McConnell.
He looks like he has been made up in a funeral home. It is an atrocious look.

Speaker 12 I thought he looked natural.

Speaker 10 He looks so natural. So these are these open casket interviews of Mitch McConnell, right? And he looks terrible and he refuses to answer questions about his health.

Speaker 10 And for anyone who thought that Joe Biden looks like he can't speak, McConnell looks terrible. But, but, Charlie, you're right.

Speaker 10 What McConnell is actually saying, like what Biden is actually saying, is completely sane and sensible.

Speaker 10 McConnell was saying, was talking about, you know, there is an alignment of enemies against the United States in the world right now. That's what we need to focus on, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea.

Speaker 10 And he's making the case for funding Ukraine. And he's got a political party that's becoming isolationist.

Speaker 10 And McConnell is just, again, the guy looks like a cadaver, but he's completely coherent in what he is saying. He's talking about, you know, where the money is actually going.

Speaker 10 We're replenishing our own stockpiles. We're helping our own industrial base.
The Ukrainians are fighting and dying against our enemy, depleting the Russians.

Speaker 10 The Europeans are actually doing way more than Republican politicians generally are conceding they're doing. It's a good investment.
He's making a very sound case.

Speaker 10 And yeah, I got people responding to me on social media, basically saying, I don't agree with Mitch McCullough on anything, but I agree with him on this.

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Speaker 12 So do you know what movie we're all living through now?

Speaker 12 What is it? You know, you sometimes think, are we living through apocalypse now? Are we living through, are we living through Game of Thrones? Is this House of Cards? Is it Veep?

Speaker 12 You know what the reality is, Will?

Speaker 12 We are all living through weekend at Bernie's.

Speaker 10 I'm sorry.

Speaker 12 This is the weekend at Bernie's era.

Speaker 10 Okay,

Speaker 12 that was cruel, but I was playing off your mean comments. On the other end of the spectrum, though, Liz Cheney, who has been keeping kind of a low profile, was out and about yesterday morning.

Speaker 12 She had some interesting things to say. You were monitoring Liz Cheney yesterday.
Where do we want to start with Liz?

Speaker 10 Okay, I don't know what the correct order is because she's talking a lot of policy, but the thing that struck me most was Liz Cheney

Speaker 10 accidentally, at least not accidentally, as an aside, and she was on Face the Nation, speaking about the Republican Party and suddenly pausing to say, I don't know if I really am a Republican anymore.

Speaker 12 Let's play Liz, where she basically is like, and again, keeping in mind how many decades this woman has been, a stalwart Republican up until recently, was number three in the Republican leadership in the House.

Speaker 12 And here she was yesterday morning.

Speaker 14 We need much louder voices within both parties, within my own party. I don't even know how I should call it my own party.

Speaker 14 Within the Republican Party right now, the extent to which you're seeing people suggest that we should abandon Ukraine, which essentially is surrendering in this battle between freedom and tyranny.

Speaker 14 And that would be very dangerous for our security.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think she's realizing that something that a lot of us have realized realized at a certain point is that when you're in the wilderness this far, that maybe you're not going back home, that maybe you are a political orphan.

Speaker 12 She also had some things to say about the politics that's going on here.

Speaker 12 She talks with Margaret Brennan about the threats, because this was also one of the big themes of last week, Will, was all of the threats, the intimidation, the bullying aimed at Republicans, which again is very much part of the MAGA playbook.

Speaker 12 The interesting thing about last week, though, was it didn't work. That, I think, is significant.
Now, how significant it is, I don't know. I'm not going to get into irrational exuberance here.

Speaker 12 But, you know, folks like Steve Bannon, you know, had basically let loose the kraken of people who were inundating these congressmen and their wives with emails and voicemails and all of that bullshit.

Speaker 12 And because I think there was a critical mass, they basically said, yeah, we're not caving in. But this is Liz Cheney talking about those threats to the lawmakers.

Speaker 14 What do you think is driving the domestic threats against lawmakers within the Republican Party and also among some Democrats?

Speaker 14 The domestic threats are absolutely being driven by Donald Trump and unfortunately some of his supporters who, in fact, have encouraged and taken steps that have resulted in, as we saw on January 6th, political violence.

Speaker 14 When you have a member of Congress reportedly

Speaker 14 like Warren Davidson from Ohio who in the meeting with Jim Jordan last week, when some of the holdouts raised with Jordan the fact that they were getting death threats, one of them told me that in response, Congressman Davidson said, well, that's not Jim Jordan's fault.

Speaker 14 That's your fault for voting against him. That is the kind of encouragement and acceptance of violence that is absolutely has no place in this party, should have no place in our country.

Speaker 10 It is.

Speaker 12 Okay, I think that's an important point because if in fact you have members of Congress who basically look around and say, well, okay, you can't blame people for, you know, the death threats.

Speaker 12 This is what you get for going against the origin of God King and against MAGA.

Speaker 12 I'm sorry to use the word again, but this does seem like a rather significant indicator of the normalization of political violence.

Speaker 10 Aaron Ross Powell, okay, so this is a very serious topic.

Speaker 10 We're seeing actual violence over in Israel and Gaza. But what we have in the United States, we like to think we're above political violence.
We're not. We've had political violence before.

Speaker 10 But what we have now is what I, when I wrote about Lindsey Graham, I called this a symbiotic relationship between the Republican Party and the political violence of the MAGA Donald Trump extremists.

Speaker 10 The symbiotic relationship is that the politicians don't explicitly endorse the violence, but they use it.

Speaker 10 And now in Lindsey Graham's case, it was right after January 6th, and he said to the Democrats, don't impeach Trump, cancel your impeachment of Trump, because I'm afraid there will be more political violence.

Speaker 10 So we just had a mob attack the Capitol, and instead of saying, we're not going to accept the mob, we're going to do the right thing regardless of what the mob wants, Graham says, yield to the mob.

Speaker 10 What Cheney's talking about here, what Warren Davidson allegedly said in this meeting, is more than yielding to the mob. It is using the mob.

Speaker 10 These death threats against members who voted against Jordan.

Speaker 12 It's leverage. As January 6th was leverage, yes.

Speaker 10 Absolutely.

Speaker 10 Absolutely. He's saying, it's your fault.
And if you don't do what we want you to do, these people, oh, I'm not saying I support them, but they're going to hurt you or threaten you, right?

Speaker 10 So he's using that. And Charlie, let me just bring in one more example.
Donald Trump, on January 6th, when Kevin McCarthy is calling him and saying, please send people to help us. We're overrun.

Speaker 10 My office is overrun here.

Speaker 10 Trump says to him, according to McCarthy's account, this relayed to Jamie Herrera Butler, he says, well, Kevin, I guess those people just care more about the stolen election than you do, right?

Speaker 10 That's Trump explicitly using the violence.

Speaker 12 No, exactly. And the fact that Trump and people like Rudy Giuliani acting at his behalf were still making phone calls seven o'clock that night trying to get senators to delay the certification.

Speaker 12 I mean, they saw this as a way of advancing their political agenda. And I think you have to be just incredibly naive or delusional not to see the connection here.
Okay, so a little bit more Cheney.

Speaker 12 I want to hear some more Cheney here. So here's Liz Cheney on the importance of rejecting lies,

Speaker 12 which seems to be a theme these days.

Speaker 14 And we ought to reject the kind of attacks attacks that we're seeing, obviously, launched by Donald Trump, but also the kind of lies coming out of Jim Jordan and some other House Republicans, the notion that the entire judiciary system or the FBI is weaponized against us.

Speaker 14 And I would urge that people think about, as we look at the threats globally, the notion that we've got Republicans saying we're going to defund the FBI, we're going to defund the Department of Justice, Jim Jordan wants to stop a number of the programs that have kept us safe since 9-11.

Speaker 14 That is very dangerous.

Speaker 12 Okay, this seems to me to be an obvious issue. This seems to me to be an obvious vulnerability for the party of law and order.
And it's interesting that she's highlighting this.

Speaker 12 You know, Jim Jordan comes within, what, 20 votes of being elected Speaker, having called for dismantling much of the nation's federal law enforcement apparatus.

Speaker 10 Right. Well, to Jim Jordan and people like him, they just refer to this as the administrative state, right? The Republicans have always been an anti-government party in their rhetoric.

Speaker 12 But not anti-law and order.

Speaker 10 Yeah, but who does law and order? The government does. Part of the government does.

Speaker 10 So when Jordan and others call for defunding the FBI, Liz Cheney is reminding people, because Liz Cheney, remember, is a national security conservative. She's a hawk, right?

Speaker 10 And part of what she believes in is law enforcement in the military. And if you defund the FBI, a lot of what the FBI does is counterintelligence work.

Speaker 10 They do a lot of national security, anti-terrorism work. So here we have the United States facing a lot of foreign threats right now, and we're talking about Iran.
We're talking about Hamas.

Speaker 10 We're talking about terrorists. For God's sake, half of the Republican rhetoric, Charlie, about the border is that terrorists are going to come over the border, right?

Speaker 10 And meanwhile, you've got the House Republicans talking about defunding. the FBI, which works on this stuff.

Speaker 12 And shutting down the whole federal government, which would, of course, be

Speaker 12 part of the let's protect America and keep it working, right?

Speaker 10 Right. In the name of more funding for border security, let's shut down the government that does the border security.
It's completely insane.

Speaker 10 So, Cheney, because she believes in this stuff, is kind of heightening the contradictions. She's pointing out that the Republican Party is undermining the causes of security it claims to believe in.

Speaker 12 Okay, so she makes one other point here, and I want to get to her not closing the door and running for president because what's that all about?

Speaker 12 But she's only Jake Tapper yesterday and connects the dots between Donald Trump's loose lips with classified information and other world events. Let's listen to this point.

Speaker 14 He reportedly shared Israeli intelligence with the Russians very early in his term.

Speaker 14 He also, as we know now from the indictments that we've seen from Jack Smith, shared highly classified military documents apparently relating to military action potentially against Iran.

Speaker 14 He shared that with Mark Meadows' ghostwriters and political consultants, it seems, according to the indictments. So if you think about

Speaker 14 not only is he out there advocating for

Speaker 14 complementing America's adversaries and in fact terrorist organizations that slaughter innocents, he also seems to have shared very highly classified intelligence information, both ours and the Israelis.

Speaker 14 in fact with adversaries. So I think it's simply the latest example of why Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States.

Speaker 12 Now, I agree with everything you just said there, a little bit speculative, but this is an interesting point, that among the documents that he has allegedly been sharing were things like possible war plans against Iran at a time when Iran clearly is playing a malign role in the Middle East.

Speaker 12 What do you think? What do you make of this, Will?

Speaker 10 I mean, it's not just Iran, it's the Israel thing. She's pulling together current events, right, with Trump's behavior.

Speaker 10 And, you know, Charlie, sometimes we ask ourselves, what would the Republican Party be saying if it still believed anything that it claimed to believe in? And the answer is, watch Liz Cheney, right?

Speaker 10 So here she's talking about...

Speaker 10 She's the one who stood still.

Speaker 12 What would a rational Republican Party look like?

Speaker 10 Oh, wait. And let me clarify, there are a lot of things I disagree with.
Most things I disagree with Liz Cheney on, but at least she still believes what she used to believe.

Speaker 10 So she's talking about, a lot of people forgot this. 2017, May of 2017, right after Donald Trump has fired Jim Comey.

Speaker 12 The day after, right?

Speaker 10 Right, the day after. He's got the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office.
He just spills to this guy, the Russian foreign minister, what is highly secret Israeli intelligence, right?

Speaker 10 And the people around Trump are appalled. They're just shocked that he did this, right? Because Donald Trump doesn't care about Israel, right? He talks of it.
Right.

Speaker 10 And he's happy to betray them to his real friends, which is the Russian foreign minister. And then, as you point out, the Iran situation where Trump is...

Speaker 10 to anyone who will listen, obviously, taking out this document that is a war plan against Iran just because he wants to hurt Mark Milley, who apparently wrote this thing.

Speaker 10 And so we have the tape of him, of Trump sharing this with Mark Meadows' ghostwriters.

Speaker 10 Charlie, we have no idea who else Trump shared this with, because obviously he's been telling this story about Milley and saying, hey, let me show you this thing. So he's with Iran, with Russia.

Speaker 10 He's betraying our chief ally, Israel. In addition to which, what, a couple of weeks ago, he insults Netanyahu and the Israeli defense minister.
because Donald Trump doesn't care about any of this.

Speaker 10 And the Republican Party is talking about Israel and they're talking about Iran. Meanwhile, they're backing Donald Trump for president, who is undermining all of that.

Speaker 12 I think, by the way, I just want to make a correction here. It was not Mark Milley's ghostwriters.
It was Mark Meadows.

Speaker 10 Sorry, mark that out. Sorry.

Speaker 12 The documents were from Mark Milley.

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Speaker 12 And I wrote about this in morning shots, and I wanted to get your take on this, about the growing rift on the left.

Speaker 12 And by the way, I don't mean all of people on the left, and I'm not even saying the people who are sympathetic with Palestine, but there is an anti-Biden left when it comes to Israel policy.

Speaker 12 Now, the polls would suggest that the strong majority of Democrats back what Joe Biden is doing.

Speaker 12 I think there's overwhelming congressional support among Democrats for what Joe Biden is doing, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a problem because you have an activist left, including a real generation gap when it comes to sentiment on Israel and Palestine, where the numbers are very different or starkly different among Democratic voters who are over the age of 50 versus 18 to 34.

Speaker 12 So give me your take on this, because it does seem as if there is a ramping up of both anti-Israel rhetoric on the left and more specifically anti-Biden rhetoric on the left.

Speaker 12 Your take, Will, because this is your world.

Speaker 10 These are your folks.

Speaker 10 Okay, so here's where I am going to be the house lib. I'm going to disagree here.
There obviously is an anti-Israel left.

Speaker 10 I think it's relatively small, and it's certainly smaller today than it was before this horrendous attack on Israel.

Speaker 10 The other thing I want to know, Charlie, is anytime I see poll data separated by age, I want to see that poll data over time.

Speaker 10 Because what I want to know is, is it that today's generation, younger generation, is different and is going to be different from previous Democrats? Or is it that this is the way young people think?

Speaker 10 And as they age and have more experience, they change. What I see in the Democratic Party, Charlie, is tremendous unity, surprising degree of unity behind Biden as he stands with Israel.

Speaker 10 Now, it's an easy case, admittedly, because the Hamas attack on Israel was horrendous beyond any previous Hamas attacks on Israel. And it was absolutely vicious and it targeted civilians.

Speaker 10 And the magnitude of it was enormous. So that makes it relatively easy for Biden to unite the party.
But Charlie, I think he has united the party

Speaker 12 for now.

Speaker 10 I see across the spectrum, like Rashida Tlaib is like the only Democrat in Congress who's really still standing out there, maybe Omar, right? And that's it. Who else is out there?

Speaker 12 Yes, this is true. I am concerned, though, about what is happening among the activist left.
And keep in mind that Joe Biden can't really afford to lose to have demotivated younger voters.

Speaker 12 He can't afford to lose a significant number of votes to the Cornell West of the world. You have people like John Fetterman who have, you know, been absolute stars on this, calling out the squad.

Speaker 12 And yet, you had 400 congressional staffers, I'm assuming mostly Democrats, who signed a letter calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Speaker 12 Now, again, not necessarily a huge number of, you know, these are people who are not elected officials.

Speaker 12 But as Will Bunch said in the Philadelphia Inquirer, these folks have an outsized influence within liberal circles.

Speaker 12 I mean, I'm seeing headlines from the intercept, you know, Joe Biden funding genocide. I am seeing union leaders who have been at the White House.

Speaker 12 The guy who runs the Amazon union is tweeting one pro-Hamas Palestinian slogan after another.

Speaker 12 By the way, you and I agree completely on what happened in Israel on October 7th, but also we know that as of this week, we're going to see the narrative begin to focus on Israel's reaction.

Speaker 12 You already have AOC out saying that Israel is committing war crimes. You are going to have an increasing death toll.
You are going to see some really wrenching pictures.

Speaker 12 And I guess the question is, you know, which direction is public opinion going to go? You know that there will be more sympathy for the...

Speaker 12 Gazan civilian victims going forward. And the left, and I mean the pro-Hamas left, is going to blame Joe Biden for this.

Speaker 10 So for the first time, Charlie, I feel like I'm having a good old-fashioned conversation with a conservative radio host.

Speaker 10 So you're focusing on some people on the left, who I think are a relatively small number. I'll have to look at the polling on this.

Speaker 10 But Charlie, a week ago, when I looked at the polling on Israel, Democrats were more supportive of defending Israel than Republicans were by about 10 points.

Speaker 12 Well, look at this, though. Here, I'm showing you the CBS poll.
I hope you can see the problem.

Speaker 10 You probably can't see it.

Speaker 12 This is the CBS poll. Should U.S.
send weapons supplies to Israel? Democrats should, 47%, should not, 53%. Okay.
So a majority of Democrats were against sending weapons.

Speaker 12 Now, that may be an outlier, but I also think that it's

Speaker 12 point out that when you break down these numbers.

Speaker 10 What were the Republican numbers?

Speaker 12 The Republican numbers were 57% favored sending weapons. So that's a term.
So again, this is Will Bunch, who's a liberal.

Speaker 12 He He says, a poll conducted by CNN shortly after the attacks found that 81% of Americans over the age of 65, which would be Biden's silent generation, support Israel. They sympathize with him.

Speaker 12 But it is the 18 to 34 age bracket. This number drops from 81% to just 27%.

Speaker 12 And so, you know, he writes, look, these young D.C. power players are small in number, but they could exercise an outsized influence if they went public with criticism of Biden's policies, right?

Speaker 12 As he was struggling with other college-educated young voters like them.

Speaker 12 A lot could happen in 13 months, but even small movement toward a third-party candidate like Cornell West or a rise and stay-at-home apathy could be brutal for Biden. Now, again, here's Nick Catagio.

Speaker 12 I'm just talking about the trend lines, and I'm concerned about this because I think this is why centrists like us are going to be really crucial. in supporting what Joe Biden is doing here.

Speaker 12 He basically points out: look, with the bloodshed increasing in Gaza, left-wing outrage will grow day by day.

Speaker 12 The perception that Israel's operation to achieve nothing meaningful at great human cost will become leftist orthodoxy.

Speaker 12 And those leftists will blame Joe Biden, a president for whom they feel no special affection, for having taken moral ownership of the conflict preemptively and enthusiastically.

Speaker 10 Okay, a couple of things.

Speaker 10 First of all, this narrative that the left is rising in defense of Palestine and against Israel, I'm hearing it from the people who have an interest in saying it, which is, you know, Will Bunch and Nick Katashi.

Speaker 10 People on the left, on the left left, who want to have expressed that they have power are going to say, hey, look, Joe Biden can't afford to alienate us, right? They're going to play it up.

Speaker 10 And then on the right, you're going to have the people saying the left is the problem because that's what the people on the right like to believe, right? And what if the reality isn't that?

Speaker 10 What if the reality is that there's a lot of people who are in the middle, who are on the Democratic, you know, the center left, who just aren't represented in those numbers, who are not among the signers of those things.

Speaker 10 But I want to make one other point here, which is you were referring earlier to people who express a pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas line. I want to separate those two things.
And I want to know exactly.

Speaker 10 They do know that. I want to know exactly what the guy from Amazon, without the union or whatever, said,

Speaker 10 because there are ways in which I, who am not at all pro-Hamas, am pro-Palestinian rights. And I'm certainly against civilian casualties.

Speaker 10 And if there is a movement towards expressing concern about killing civilians in Gaza and the number who are being killed, number one, I share that. I don't think that's a left-wing position.

Speaker 10 It's not a pro-Hamas position. It's not an anti-Israel position.
It's a pro-civilian life position.

Speaker 10 And may I point out, Charlie, one of the entities calling on Israel to slow down and rethink a ground invasion of Gaza is the United States government, Joe Biden and his administration, because they recognize that the massive casualties aren't just morally bad, they're politically dangerous for Israel, that they can ignite the region against Israel and us.

Speaker 12 Right. The guy that I was quoting from Amazon was actually using the slogan, you know,

Speaker 12 from the river to the sea.

Speaker 10 Oh, that's an anti-Israel slogan. Let's be clear about that.
Yeah.

Speaker 12 Right. That's Hamas.
Right. And then when he got pushed back, he said, you know, viva Palestine, viva Cuba.

Speaker 12 Not sure what that was about.

Speaker 10 I need to know more about this guy. That is a far-left and terrorist-sympathetic position.
So I agree with that.

Speaker 12 So, no, but this is a distinction that is important.

Speaker 12 I do think that it is legitimate to say, okay, and the Biden administration, I think, is doing a pretty good job in trying to, look, we support your right of self-defense, but do not make the kind of mistakes we made after 9-11.

Speaker 12 Important point. Show restraint.
Do not lose the moral high ground. Very, very important point.
I also think it's legitimate to be concerned about the extent of civilian casualties.

Speaker 12 I don't have a problem with that. I don't refer to that when I'm talking about the pro-Hamas.

Speaker 12 I'm saying if you use a slogan, like, for example, from the river to the sea, that sort of thing, then you're using a Hamas slogan. And I think that there is a bright line there.

Speaker 10 So, okay,

Speaker 10 here I am definitely the House Lib.

Speaker 10 I'm hearing so many echoes, Charlie, in this discussion of the Defund the Police debate, where it was in the interest of the Republican Party and the right to portray Democrats as wanting to defund and abolish law enforcement, when in fact, a very small percentage of Democrats actually believed in abolishing law enforcement.

Speaker 10 That's still a very fringe minority position. And the people who were talking about defunding meant different things by it.
Not necessarily, you know, fewer cops, but like more mental health.

Speaker 10 You know, anyway, the point is I'm hearing a little bit of a caricature, what I think is a caricature of, in this case, the position of concern about Palestinian casualties, right?

Speaker 10 A position that I think is a mainstream concern. I agree.
And I believe it's important to embrace that, to acknowledge the morality of it, and to distinguish that from the people you're talking about.

Speaker 10 The from the river to the sea people are talking about you have to choose between the existence of Israel

Speaker 10 and the existence of Palestine. And that's the Hamas position.
It's constant warfare.

Speaker 12 It is constant warfare, and it is very, very, very dangerous. So where do you think we're going to go here? Because it does feel like we are right on the edge of a possibly widening conflict.

Speaker 12 I think one of the real tragedies of this particular moment is that Israel is led by somebody like a Benjamin Netanyahu, who frankly is a deeply unsympathetic character.

Speaker 12 And I believe, and I want to be really careful here. I mean, I think that his failure in protecting the nation, the role he played in dividing the country and making it weak, cannot be overstated.

Speaker 12 I hope he's politically dead. Seems to be a lot of indication that Israelis are sick of him.

Speaker 12 But I have to say that it worries me that somebody who has been as reckless and as extreme, weirdly enough, as Benjamin Netanyahu is right now in charge of deciding this.

Speaker 12 And if you're looking for a moment of nuance and restraint,

Speaker 12 is he the guy? So talk to me about that.

Speaker 10 Charlie, here's where I think there is unfortunately a parallel between our country and Israel. In our country, we've been talking about the crazies in the Republican Party.

Speaker 10 And every time we think someone's crazier, we find somebody crazier than the last guy, right? And so now clutching on to, you know, anybody, even people who voted against certifying the election.

Speaker 10 We're like, well, he's not as bad as Jim Jordan, right? They're way worse. So in Israel, we can talk about how bad Netanyahu is.
And Netanyahu absolutely failed.

Speaker 10 Netanyahu had one job that was supposed to make up for all his other flaws, and that was security. And he miserably failed, right? So he should be out on his butt for that reason alone.

Speaker 10 But, Charlie, it gets worse because what's going on in Israel right now, from what I've read, is Netanyahu is not the far right.

Speaker 10 His own defense minister wants to launch more aggressive Netanyahu is actually a restraining voice to possibly on the ground war in Gaza, but also in engaging Hezbollah because supposedly the Israeli defense minister wants to go engage Hezbollah, which is already involved.

Speaker 12 But the defense minister, I mean, he is a complete nut, right? And he's got a crig of...

Speaker 10 The Israeli cabinet is, if you think the House Republicans are bad,

Speaker 10 let me introduce you to the Israeli cabinet, right? Every right-wing party has somebody in there.

Speaker 10 But anyway, the danger, I fully agree with this, the danger in Israel right now is right now we're talking about what Israel is doing in Gaza. And Israel is the aggressor and we can debate that.

Speaker 10 But if Israel ends up, there are already engagements on the Lebanese border, in Syria, in the West Bank. So that's three other fronts that could open in addition to the one in the south, in Gaza.

Speaker 10 Let me tell you, Israel has been in wars with four fronts before. It's not good, right? And they've survived it.
But this could get much, much worse.

Speaker 10 And that's why I'm relieved to hear that Netanyahu is not the crazy one in terms of engaging Hezbollah.

Speaker 10 And I'm also relieved to hear that the United States is doing everything it can to try to avoid these other fronts becoming live action.

Speaker 12 It is worth pointing out, though, that Netanyahu did name these people to his cabinet. I mean, these people were empowered and enabled by him, but you were right.

Speaker 12 As far as I can tell, he's marginalized some of them with this war cabinet. I wish I had more confidence in his judgment and in his character, but I don't.
This is a cautionary note.

Speaker 12 What happens when you prioritize a culture war over actually doing the one job you're supposed to be doing? I hope that people are paying attention. I'm skeptical.

Speaker 12 So, Will, what are you going to be keeping your eye on this week other than the ongoing Goat Rodeo in the house? Which I must admit, I watch with a, I'm going to confess, a mixture of

Speaker 12 entertainment, Schaden Freud, and just pure dread, because you know that it can always get worse.

Speaker 10 Yeah, no, I expect more inertia in the house, and we'll have entertainment, but no action. We won't get any result there.

Speaker 10 The piece that I'm doing right now, and then I hope to be out tomorrow morning, is about the situation in Israel, and specifically about this strike on the hospital.

Speaker 10 Remember, the New York Times and everybody else portray it as an Israeli airstrike, and now it's been completely debunked.

Speaker 10 And we now have the Times itself publishing an editorial note saying, sorry, our bad.

Speaker 10 But the underlying problem is the so-called Ministry of Health in Gaza, which is, I've just been reading what they publish, and there's a reason why they put out this story and got it completely wrong.

Speaker 10 It is that they are fundamentally a propaganda outfit. And what they publish is propaganda.

Speaker 12 People need to keep that in mind every time they read these numbers, too.

Speaker 10 People think that the Gaza Health Ministry is like the World Health Organization or the CDC or something. It is not.

Speaker 10 It is a propaganda outfit. And I am seeing more references to the Hamas-run health ministry.
And that's good, because what people need to understand is this is Hamas talking.

Speaker 10 This is not just a bunch of doctors. That's why the numbers have been completely unreliable, and the allegations were false and were not retracted.
So that's my focus for the next couple of days.

Speaker 12 It's important to make this point because I think that the whole bombing of the hospital, you look back on it as an extraordinary success. for propaganda because they set the narrative.

Speaker 12 The narrative caught fire, set the world on fire, had tremendous consequences before the truth limped along and corrected the record.

Speaker 12 And this is the world we live in, where the instant takes, the hot takes, the power of AI, which is going to make all of this so much worse, the power of social media.

Speaker 12 You can get a lie out there that can actually change the world. I mean, think about the consequences of that.

Speaker 12 You had the President of the United States flying into Israel, had important meetings scheduled with leading Arabs, and none of that took place because of this false report about the hospital.

Speaker 12 In fact, you're still seeing the hospital being cited. There's some things that are apparently irrefutable, but this is an important case.
It's an important case to remember.

Speaker 12 This is certainly an important lesson for the media, which continues to report civilian deaths sourcing this health ministry when by now they ought to know better. So keep it up.

Speaker 12 Will, it is great talking with you. I appreciate it.
You too, too. We will do this again, of course, next week.
And thank you all for listening to this Monday edition of the Bullwork Podcast.

Speaker 12 I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow.
We will do this all over again.

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

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