The GOP’s Rubik’s Cube for Morons

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Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is Friday. Is it October 6th already, Tim? I mean, is it really? Are we into October already? No, I just can't accept it.
Luckily in New Orleans, it's just been summer and we're getting our first cold front this weekend. And I've got to go to Denver.
My father's getting an award. Hey, congratulations.
I got to go to Denver. And I looked at the temperature.
It's 59 today when I land in Denver. 59, it's fall.
It is fall outside of the South. We have so much to talk about.
You and I haven't spoken since the fall of Kevin McCarthy. Of course, now Donald Trump has decided that he doesn't want to be speaker, but he's going to endorse Jim Jordan.
So Trump, Jordan 2024, what could possibly go wrong? We'll talk about that. Interesting debate about whether the Democrats should have bailed out Kevin McCarthy.
Meanwhile, just so it doesn't get lost here, we had this amazing jobs report that came out. I think the economy creating twice the number of non-farm jobs expected, which means everybody's going to freak out in one way or another.
This ABC report that suggests that Donald Trump was shopping super secret sensitive information about nuclear submarines to Australian billionaires. I mean, what could possibly go wrong there? And it's not even like the top four news stories of the day.
But can we do something first, though, Tim? I forgot about it. Well, before you get to it, I just want to give you my one-sentence exciting thing about the jobs report.
Yeah. My one-sentence exciting thing is it showed that we are now back to pre-pandemic levels of hospitality jobs.
So I just want to say to all my fellow people who like to go out and drink and, you know, have a nice dinner, we did it. We did it.
We did it. We've come through.
We've fully recovered. And, you, and the bars are back at full strength.
So I thought that was good news. Speaking of a good timing for the bars to be back at strength, we just briefly mentioned that we're coming to your hometown of New Orleans.
We're coming later this month. And you are – we're having a special Bulwark event for Bulwark Plus members, actually anybody that wants to come to see us live.
Mona's going to be there. Sonny Bunch is going to be there.
Sarah is going to be there. You're going to be there.
And you have scored a one-on-one interview with Walter Isaacson. Just give us a little bit of details about the Big Easy, Bulwark and the Big Easy.
Yeah, he's the king of New Orleans. I'm so excited about that.
And hopefully he can give the people who are coming into town, fly on into town. It's beautiful in New Orleans in late October.
So he can give some people, you know, the expert recommendations on, you know, where to get a nice gumbo or jambalaya. And I'm going to interview him.
You know, he's been doing the Elon Musk tour. And I think that me and Walter have a little bit of a different view on Elon Musk.
So we might explore that a bit. But then I also want to just get into him with the media stuff.
I mean, he ran CNN and Aspen Fest, right? All of this change. Time magazine.
Yeah, Time. And so much to talk to Walter about.
So I'm super excited about that. And hopefully we can all have a daiquiri together in the French Quarter.
The venue is great, Le Petit Theater. It's right next to Jackson Square.
So people should come on down.

See, I'm looking forward to that moment

where you lean forward, you lean in,

and you say, Walter, okay, can we just cut it out here?

Isn't Elon Musk just a completely deranged,

narcissistic, fascist fuckwad?

I mean, you're going to ask him that, right?

I mean, it's like, come on. I've been already practicing that question, actually.
And I have a few different versions of it. That's a new proposal.
So I got a little notebook. And other ideas are welcome.
Yeah, something along those lines. For people who listen to this podcast on a regular basis, we're also now on YouTube.
So if you want to watch Tim and I doing all of this, we're on YouTube and you've been doing Tim's takes. I've been doing Charlie's shots.
So we're experimenting with this. And I think we're kind of bringing in a new audience.
It's a different thing. Yeah.
And the big thing, and we don't want you guys, we love the OGs. We don't want anybody to miss anything.
But like what we're finding is new people are finding us on YouTube. And that's like part of the mission here, right? Like, you know, you can't save democracy from behind a paywall, bringing new people in.
It's been the thing I like the most about the Snapchat show is that like I hear from young people who do not like watch Nicole Wallace all day. Love you, Nicole Wallace, everyday watchers.
But, you know, I like to talk to other people, too. And so it's been useful and that's why we're doing it.
And so go over and subscribe and, you teens or your grandchild, in maybe your case, to subscribe. That's right.
Yeah. Yeah.
No, you know, Elliot comes running down all the time and says, Tim's got a new video up on YouTube. And then you'll repeat what you said about Kevin McCarthy.
And I'm thinking, okay, this works. I actually see this.
He's not going to sit and necessarily read one of our 2,000-word essays on it, but he's there. So this, by the way, is how we save democracy.
Just one shot at a time. Okay, so let's start with Kevin McCarthy.
I have to say a couple of things. And I want to use the term that I used on television with you last night, that congressional Republican politics is now Rubik's Cubes for morons because there's just no way that it actually works.
I like how you're running of things to say on tv i was noticing you're like the crazed jackal caucus the taliban caucus the insane fuckwad caucus it's just like you know i'm just i'm just smiling over that i was not coming close to running out of things i mean this is like it is like a fire hose don't do not worry about this but let's talk about kevin mccarthy because and i want to get into this whole debate about whether Democrats should have bailed out because there has been this very radical defining deviancy down in terms of our politics. I actually heard commentators saying, you know, Kevin McCarthy was actually a much better speaker than we expected.
Like, wait, what were our expectations here? Here's a reality check from Liz Cheney. And we have a bunch of sound bites from Liz Cheney.
Liz Cheney, who reminds us who Kevin McCarthy was and why he was completely unfit to continue in office and why it would have been absolutely insane for the Democrats to have bailed him out. Here's Liz Cheney speaking at the University of Minnesota this week.
Kevin McCarthy at every Every moment over the course of the last two years, has done more to enable and collaborate with and apologize for Donald Trump. Kevin McCarthy stood on the House floor an hour after the Capitol had been cleared and said that the objections should continue.
He released security tapes to Tucker Carlson. He refused to abide by a subpoena that had been issued by the Select Committee and on and on and on.
So the Democrats made what is a principled and honorable and, in my view, the right decision to say we cannot abide by that. The Republicans need to choose their speaker.
They're in the majority. But we are not going to help to enable somebody who has done those things and who has apologized and appeased Donald Trump.
I think they did exactly the right thing. And it was a courageous show of leadership.
Okay. This will not be the first time that you and I have agreed with Liz Cheney, but you know, I mean, there, there, there, there was some, and you know, there was some pearl clutching.
You, you're not clutching your pearls on this, but it was like, Oh no, no, no. The, the Democrats should have been the grownups in the room.
They should have stepped forward and bailed out the Republicans from their dysfunction. I'm going to cut to the chase here.
I completely disagree with that. Your take, Tim.
Yeah, I'm a 98% no on that and a hard no on my 98%. The 2% is Ukraine in which we can get into.
I am a little bit, I'm a little worried about Ukraine. I think Kevin would have protected it.
And so I could hear an argument for somebody from the Ukraine perspective. Besides that, fuck guy every way till sunday i love that liz cheney was calling dems maybe whipping we don't really know whether she was like actually whipping votes to say no but i think maybe just giving them the cover right because sometimes the democrats do need a little bit of a buck up on on this sort of thing on their on having the spine because a lot of them are earnest and do care about this sort of stuff, right? And so I think that Liz Cheney calling Goldman and some of the others and being like, no, you know, shiv this guy, I think did help.
And I will also say, I heard from a couple of Democrats on the Hill, you know, this week, and I don't actually think that they needed to buck up, I guess is really where I'm getting to this. And this one, I think that Kevin McCarthy had been so deceitful to them.
You know, he'd rubbed it in their face on Brennan show, as everybody's discussed, but also, you know, they remember all this stuff. They remember the January 6th committee that he tried to sabotage person to person.
It was just kind of like throw them overboard, you know, tie a brick to his leg and, you know, we'll see what happens. And I think that that's basically right sure sure he kept the government open and we didn't default and that's not nothing but like you know had he done anything to demonstrate that he was going to act in good faith but be conservative that's one thing but he wasn't he was bad faith all the way down and so it's like but what so how much worse is it? Why don't we just remove the mask and see Jim Jordan as speaker? Because Jim Jordan was basically speaker anyway.
I do understand the concerns about Ukraine. But in terms of the dumbing down our standards, here is a guy who has been just a shameless shill for election denialism, ran down the Mar-a-Lago, threw a lifeline to Donald Trump, pushed ahead with this, the bogus evidence-free impeachment of Joe Biden.
And somehow Democrats were supposed to prop him up because why? Now, if there was a grand bargain out there, if he was willing, I mean, there was that other, and I've described this as rubric cues for morons, is that you either have to appease the lunatic caucus or you have to make a deal with the Democrats,

which of course will enrage the base.

But to make that deal with the Democrats,

you would have to, okay, say, what?

We're going to not do the impeachment bullshit.

We're not going to do some of these other things.

There was no way he was going to do that.

He announced right away,

I'm not going to deal with the Democrats.

And then everybody's like, whoa, wait,

why are the Democrats not lowering their standards

to the point where they're going to empower

this particular guy?

He didn't even call to ask.

He didn't even call to ask.

The other argument that is not totally baseless is Kevin McCarthy was the devil that you knew. And so now what you've done is you have empowered even worse people.
Whoever replaces him is going to be worse. It's going to be somebody like a Jim Jordan or a Steve Scalise, who again, playing this Rubik's Cube for morons, is going to have to either have to do the exact same thing that Kevin McCarthy did, which is make one concession after another to the bomb throwers.

Can I go through the jackal caucus, the crazed lunatic jackal caucus?

Or he's going to have to cut a deal with Democrats.

I don't see how any of that works. Right.

So so what about the argument that, OK, you're going to get somebody who is much, much, much worse? Again, I guess my thing is, are they going to be much, much, much worse? But this is still who they are. These guys controlled McCarthy.
He did the death-suing deal. That is good.
Would Jim Jordan have done it? Probably not. But here's the thing.
The Republican Party has been deteriorating slowly but surely in front of our eyes for 11 years now. When Norm Warnstein wrote that article in the about how the republicans are the problem when boehner was the speaker right it's like it went from boehner and then it went to you know paul ryan had to do it and then kevin and so like this is the inevitable end point and that's not new of getting to a jim jordan or someone even dumber than that speaker like we've been on this trajectory for a long time and the democrats were not going to stop that trajectory.
Like the Republicans need to stop their own, you know, debasement and they need to do it by taking a little pain. And they've never been willing to do it.
Right. And the pain being that like their base is going to be mad at them.
I think that this was the inevitable trajectory. Did the Democrats like press the gas pedal on it a little bit by voting for this? Yeah, they did.
But for how long? I mean, maybe they only sped it up by 45 days. Like could Kevin McCarthy have really survived the next government shutdown? Like probably not.
Like they probably would have thrown him over then, you know? So it's like the problem with the institution is the Republican Party and the Republican conference. Like that's the institution that is corrupt right now that needs to be dealt with.
Kevin McCarthy is very much a symbol of who the Republicans are in Congress. I mean, he was the face of all that, and that is not going to change.
So we may get Jim Jordan, Donald Trump, decided last night, to the surprise of some folks, that because I think when you and I were on television last night, there was this buzz about Donald Trump is thinking about going back to the Capitol and is offering himself as an interim speakership. Instead, apparently he's endorsing Jim Jordan.
And by the way, before we get to the Trump thing, let's just a reminder who Jim Jordan is. Let's just remind you.
Liz Cheney provides the public service by just saying, remember the Jim Jordan, the role that he played in January 6th. Let's play Liz Cheney.
Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6th than any other member of the House of Representatives. Jim Jordan was involved, was part of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged as he attempted to overturn the election.
Also relevant? Jim Jordan, if you think about the extent to which people have now said, well, it was Speaker Pelosi's fault that Donald Trump's mob invaded the Capitol, that the security wasn't sufficient enough. The person who knew, there were probably more than just Jim, but there was a handful of people of which he was the leader who knew what Donald Trump had planned.
Now, somebody needs to ask Jim Jordan, why didn't you report to the Capitol Police what you knew Donald Trump had planned? You were in those meetings at the White House. Somebody should ask that.
And if the Republicans decide that Jim Jordan should be the Speaker of the House, there will, and by the way, I don't think that's going to happen. I think he'll lose.
But if they were to decide that, there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution. Damn, there's a grim warning.
Okay, so Tim, you disagree? Okay, so Donald Trump is weighed in. Donald Trump is reasserting his control.
I mean, he is the big dog who is basically lifting his leg on the Capitol and says, I own this. Yeah, just I just want to add a little bit to what Liz said there, which was really right on.
Jim Jordan also spoke at a Stop the Steal rally in Pennsylvania after the election. I mean, I guess this is part of what she was alluding to, but just to be more specific, he participated in numerous post-election meetings in which Rudy Giuliani and others discussed strategies for challenging the election.
He was on a conference called Trump on January 2nd. So I mean he was part and parcel with the coup attempt and so I I do think that you know that this should be the Republicans need to like have this held around their neck and he needs to have to answer for it and these the quote-unquote normal Republicans are going to have to decide whether or not they want to completely own this here's the problem is they own it.
Like Donald Trump's going to be the nominee, right? And so when I just game this out, I would love to be wrong. I always want to caution this.
I would love to be wrong. When I game this out, I just see that the Jim Jordan, Jackal, Taliban, fuckwad caucus, whatever we're calling them, right? Those guys are not going to fold.
We've seen it already. You know, they are not going to you know they are not gonna seven or eight of them yeah yeah seven or eight of them right like at least some number probably maybe a little more i mean it was up to 15 20 in the first round of january there are other names you could throw in the mix you know so there's really about two dozen of them that kind of rotate through right that are crazy in various ways they're not going to go for a normal person? And so the question is, are there five Republicans in this conference who will say, no, I can't do an insurrectionist.
Let's try to cut a deal with Scalise. You don't think so? You don't think it's five? I don't know.
That's the big question, right? Are there five? Because he's going to be no on Ukraine. He's going to be $0 on Ukraine, pro-insurrection, pro-impeachment.
So there are five people, or there are just five Republicans who say, sorry, I can't do all three of those. This is the key question, isn't it? And this is where we get to the nub of this.
He has to get 218 votes. He can't just get a majority of the Republican caucus.
He's clearly Donald Trump's candidate. So, you know, there are members of the House who would like to be perhaps distance themselves a little bit from Donald Trump.
If Jim Jordan is elected, it becomes not just Donald Trump's Republican Party, but certainly Donald Trump's, you know, Republican Congress as well. There is no distancing whatsoever from him, right? So in many ways, this is, as you pointed out last night on television, this is Donald Trump reasserting his control over the party.
But this has got to be one of the worst nightmares for a lot of Republicans in swing districts or who are, say, quietly Trump skeptical or pro-Ukraine, all of that. It's also got to be a gift to the Democrats and to the Biden campaign who are thinking, boy, you know, we want 2024 to be a referendum on Trumpism.
And this just this just ratchets it up times 10. Yeah, it's a huge gift.
And that's, I think, the biggest threat to Jordan. Right.
I think that let's just go through and you did a little bit of this with Ben Wittes, but in order of probability, right? I would say that Jim Jordan, like if he comes out and he gets 150 members, it's like eventually kind of inertia takes hold, right? I think that's the most likely. Most likely, I don't think that's 100%.
I just think that's the most likely. Yeah, yeah.
The second most likely is that there are enough members that say, you know, I can't do it. It's just, it's too much Trumpism.
We're going to get crushed in the swing districts. Let's have Scalise inside.
We're throwing up Scalise or somebody else, right? Some other conservative guy. Now, most of us, you know, in the bulwark world or Democrat pro-democracy world would be like, is this really much better? I mean, Steve Scalise was also voted to overturn the election, but they might be able to tell themselves that it's like a consensus choice.
I think that's the next most likely. Yeah.
The third most likely, but I don't think is zero, is that five of them say, guys, I'm sorry, there's a reverse gates. I don't think that there are 50 of them, but are there five of them that can do the reverse gates and say, nope, we need somebody even more attuned to swing district voters' needs.
I think that's a low chance, but I think they should be pressured. So who? And all of those guys, Mike Gallagher, Don Bacon, Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, Valadao in California, go down the list.
They should be saying, are you going to vote for somebody that will not fund Ukraine, wants to impeach Joe Biden over nothing? And it was for the Donald Trump coup? Because those are going to be the three parts of your plank. And can five of them finally show balls for the first time since 2016? Well, unless you got our friend Adam and Liz, who already have done it.
But can five of them do it? I don't think so, but I don't think it's zero. I don't think it's totally fantasy.
I don't think it's zero at all. And by the way, could I just remind you, since we're adding to the Jim Jordan resume, remember when he was the ranking Republican member of the Judiciary Committee before he became chair? He was responsible for that legendary tweet.
What was it? Elon, Trump, and Kanye. Yeah, Elon, Kanye, Trump.
That's worked out. Yeah, so.
That's what he wants the party's brand to be. Right.
Is this the future of conservatives? I have to do a thing next week with some local university students students and i don't want to be too mean because they're these young republicans very very earnest and everything and i am tempted to to show up and say okay so let's talk about the state of modern conservatism is it elon trump and kanya discuss we just want to mention that that would be a good place to start i think it is definitely non-zero chance that people are going to go, no, this is nuts. We can't do this.
It's one thing. If Trump's going to be the nominee, we just need to keep our heads down and go in a different direction.
This is like all in, all in on all of this. And plus, it means that each and every one of them will be asked all the questions that you just raised.
You know, it's one thing to say, well, what do you think of Donald Trump's role in the insurrection? Now it's going to be, well, you voted for somebody who was one of the conspirators. So I actually think, and by the way, can I do something really profoundly stupid on this podcast? Let's do it.
And I want to signal it as something that is probably stupid and that I will almost certainly regret. Yeah, I'm ready.
I think that there is at least a 33% chance that six months from now, the speaker will be Patrick McHenry because he's there. Just inertia.
If everything goes to shit, what do you do? The guy who's there just stays there. Now, what I am very, very confident on, and I would strongly discourage any listeners from smoking any of the hopium, that there will be five Republicans who will switch parties and vote for Hakeem Jeffries.
That is just wish casting. That is just fantasizing.
I mean, look, it's one thing to fantasize that maybe wouldn't it be great to be with Taylor Swift. It's something else to get in a car and go to her house and hold up a sign saying, date me.
I mean, there's fantasy, and then there's crazy, stocky fantasy. I do want to say that seems dangerous.
Can I just say, I do think the problem might be Taylor. I know this isn't the point of this podcast, but once you've had 12 relationships go sour and you sing about all of them, I do think the problem might be her.

So maybe fantasize about somebody else that you can have a future with.

This is something else to think about for folks. I don't know.
Just one idea. So you're saying that there's a chance that Taylor Swift could be the next Speaker of the House.
I think it's higher than Hakeem Jeffries, but not much higher. We agree on that one.
I have one more Liz Cheney soundbite because because among the things that pass so quickly, and you know, we've talked about this, is that Donald Trump layers one outrage upon another to the point where we get what Brian Klass calls the banality of crazy, where the media goes, okay, so yeah, Donald Trump just gave another speech where he's endorsing extrajudicial murders.

He's mocking the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband. And it's kind of same old, same old, right? It's like, wait, no, he's a leading candidate for president who's calling for extrajudicial killings.
But the media is sort of locked into the novelty, and it's not new that Donald Trump is crazy. But we are still a few weeks out from the former and perhaps future president of the United States calling for the death penalty for one of the nation's leading generals, Mark Milley.
And as far as I know, Tim, no other Republican has denounced him for this. But Liz Cheney brought it up in Minnesota.
This is what Liz Cheney said about the death threat against Mark Milley. The leading presidential candidate, he's not just the former president, the leading presidential candidate called for the execution of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States of America.
Seems newsworthy. Every American, I don't care if you are a Republican or a Democrat, a defense hawk or a pacifist, an isolationist, or somebody who believes in a strong national defense.
Every American must condemn that. Every American must stand against that.
You'd think. But that's not happening, is it, Tim? No.
And not to get too repetitive, because I've done this before, but I am frustrated with the media on this. I am.
On the Millie thing, on these other items this is their job right like this is the nightly news's job to keep track of the insane like the extrajudicial killings about the shoplifters that even kind of swept over me over my head a little bit and i'm like obsessed with this stuff so i understand that there's a challenge here but you would think that that would be something that people would talk about this is what we did in 2016 i. I think we are over learning the lesson a little bit.
One thing that I'm frustrated with is, obviously, there's all this chaos in the House. And so that's the lead story.
But the Senate's doing nothing. And there was a period of time where we had the Hill reporters that would go up to every Senate Marco Rubio and be like, what do you think about the factald trump wants to deport elan omar what do you think about this and that right they don't even do that anymore right so when you say i haven't heard any republicans condemn they're not even being given the chance to condemn so his opponents in the primary aren't condemning i mean like this is the thing like everyone has just gotten so beaten down by this and i think it's really alarming i think the was the Washington Post article about this was very important and critical.
Shake people back awake. I hope they do.
And I understand how hard it is because there are people who are listening to us right now who are saying, you know, the answer is we should just not give him any oxygen. We shouldn't cover him.
We should ignore him. No, completely wrong.
You know, you need to know what he is saying, what he is promising, because he's being very, very clear and unambiguous about it.

So I reject that.

The other problem, though, is the media is there's just too much.

We can't spend this much time.

And it is repetitive.

But I think Brian Klass made the point that you need to stress the magnitude of his comments, not just the novelty.

When he says these things, we have to cover him.

So you mentioned the primary opponents and they're sort of, you know, doing the slap fighting with Donald Trump. So Ron DeSantis' folks are touting this.
Somebody I want to play here is like, now he's taking the gloves off. He's really going after Donald Trump.
This is after he's fallen to what? Third, fourth, fifth place in the polls. Here's Ron DeSantis' latest big attack on Donald Trump.
A voter that goes to 10 rallies, their vote counts the same as somebody that's unenthusiastic than then goes and votes. And we just have to understand that.
And people will act like 2020, they're like, Biden was such a disaster. But here's the thing.
I don't think anybody voted for Biden. Okay? I did.
They were voting against Trump. That was why they did it.
I mean, let's just be honest. He energized Democrats.
You could have John Kennedy walk through the door right now, and he wouldn't energize Democrats as much as Donald Trump does. That's just the reality.
What did we do in Florida with these Democrats? We defeated these Democrats. We left the Democratic Party in Florida in a pile of ruins.
He makes Democrats mad. That's the big hit.
That's kind of the point, actually, of Donald Trump. That was almost an ad for Donald Trump.
Yeah. So it seems the same old, same old.
I mean, you know, it's I'm sorry because I have run out of terms, you know, too little, too late. Tim, I want to turn over the wheel to you for just a second here because Fox News' Greg Gutfield.
Do you have to pee? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought maybe you had to run.
We're on camera now. I'm sticking around, at least for now.
Okay. Thank you for caring.
I feel the concern there. Greg Gutfield, who's an influential guy on Fox News.
By the way, is he supposed to be funny? Apparently, he's their late night man. His ratings are good, I guess.
Okay. So, up until about five minutes ago, conservatives would have denied that we are not anti-democracy.
We're not anti-elections. This is Trump derangement syndrome.
The reason we tried to burn down the Capitol was because we cared so deeply about democracy, because we are so concerned about the integrity of elections. And, you know, there's been kind of this slip slide.
So I want to play the, and this, you highlighted this. I would have missed this, Tim, if it wasn't for you.
You this uh little rant from greg gutford let's listen to this okay elections don't work we know that we know they don't work they do look what we have look what we have we had a moderate president and we have crime exploding everywhere we had a democrat president promised that he was going to be moderate promised that he was going to unite the country and now we have a terrible education system we have no border we have crime everywhere every facet of society is in peril and in chaos because our elections don't matter okay our elections don't matter and he goes on to say basically that's why we have to have a civil war i mean so tim what's going on there every facet of our society is in chaos this shit just pisses me off so much oh yeah like this guy was really ready for joe biden to unite the country the fox news guy with the five o'clock and the ten o'clock show on fox if you know he was certainly open to joe biden's efforts to you know provide an olive branch the thing is charlie like this stuff is really like it's mockable but it's also really dangerous like this guy is like a reasonable guy like the viewers there are a lot of unreasonable people view watching and they're looking at this and they're saying well this isn't you know this isn't judge box of wine like this is gutfeld like gutfeld's on the five o'clock show he's on the during the day right like and he's out there saying that elections don't matter. Our entire society is in chaos and we might need to resort to a civil war.
The rest of the clip, you know, he's talking about how, you know, this is the parallel between the situation that Republicans are in right now where they are persecuted by a group. And he, he somehow makes some tortured comparison to slavery about how the other side can't admit that they're wrong just like the slavers couldn't admit that they were wrong and so we had to go to war with them and kill them we had to go to war with them and kill them okay so this is this is the analogy yeah this is on corporate fox and it's just like greg gutfeld went to cal okay like he lives in soho one of my friends like texted us we were texting on this He's like,'ve been to his I've been to his flat okay he lives in Manhattan he's a very rich man he has two shows on primetime Fox I assume that he has some cats you know because he doesn't seem to have a family and like I assume that he has a driver that takes him to work like what is his life like his life is society is in chaos like we've got problems new york city is one of the safest cities in america right now it's not this is not it's not the 1980s it's not pre-rudi new york there's crime in new york yeah but like there's that it is not you know it is not a wasteland right like this is not a dystopian movie if you go to fucking fox this is kind of the essence of the authoritarian attack on liberal democracy, right? That liberal democracy does not keep you safe.
Liberal democracy does not keep order. Liberal democracy is going to lead to this chaos.
So therefore we need to move past those norms and elections are not the answer. And this is part of this moving of the Overton window of what, what is acceptable before Tucker Carlson, the idea of, you know, the great replacement theory, these brown people are coming in and these Jews, they're going to replace you.
This was fringe thought. Now it's mainstream.
Now you have Greg Gottfield talking about, yeah, elections don't work. Everything is complete chaos.
We need to have a civil war because the slavers weren't going to give up the slaves unless we went and shot them. And it's pretty much the same thing with these liberal progressive mayors.
And it's like, wait, so is this now moving this window of acceptability of Donald Trump talking about the border? By the way, there's legitimate concerns about the border. But his new rhetoric, by the way, speaking of new rhetoric and being numbed by it, he's now talking about these immigrants coming in and poisoning our blood.
Sure. Now, I understand that people think that it's Trump derangement syndrome to say this kind of sounds like that German guy who talked about, you know, aliens poisoning the pure Aryan blood.
But it's like, well, this is the kind of rhetoric that had no place in American politics just a few years ago. The authoritarian side of this is exactly what, right, the authoritarian threat against liberal democracy, because Greg Gutfeld is a five foot five little man with Napoleon syndrome.
That's what this is. It's like, we need a strong man.
Is he really five foot five? He might be five, six and a half. I don't know.
We need a conservative strong man man that is going to stop this and it ties directly to the shoplifters question right like the trump thing that we're talking about we need somebody that's going to say oh if you want to steal from the store we're not going to have a trial i'm going to assume that you stole from the store and i'm going to shoot you this is taliban style right like i'm going to decide by looking at you maybe you're black yeah like i'm going to look at you and decide, do you look like a thief? And then I'm just going to be able to shoot you. Now, is this going to happen in 2025? No, but these threats, like this is how, you know, A, over the long march, we get younger conservatives deciding that this is what conservatism means and how it becomes more and more authoritarian over time.
And this adds to the threats of these people that are unstable, that do not live in flats in Soho, that do not have, you know, riches unimaginable by everybody who in history who are struggling and who have guns and who might be like, you know, Greg Gutfeld's right. Maybe I should be the one to fire the first weapon because Greg's certainly not going to do it.
I can be even a little bit more dystopian here. Oh, great.
Donald Trump is clearly also sending a message to law enforcement. I mean, let's put this in some context.
Donald Trump has a kink for brutality and for bloodshed. He's been talking about it.
He's been talking about war crimes. He's been talking about pardoning.
On camera. He doesn't want to see blood.
He would start. Oh, my God.
You're right. But he has a kink about at least other people doing these sorts of things and he's made it clear that remember when he spoke to those cops and he says don't be so nice to those people maybe bump their heads and everything yeah look what he's also saying is that how dystopian do i want to be here russian that we're like five minutes away from him saying you know what if you're a cop and you shoot some thug out there i I'm going to pardon you.
Right. I'm going to use my pardon powers to pardon you.
Here's another context. It's 2023, right? We're only a few years out from the murder of George Floyd.
And think about, you know, the country was coming together. There was a moment we said we need to deal with the problem of police violence, Black Lives Matter.
Perhaps there were, you know, extreme things right there. But now, three years later, one of the central planks of the Republican nominee's platform is, yeah, we ought to shoot more people.
We ought to shoot people who committed nonviolent crimes. I understand that looting is terrible and the shoplifting is a real problem.
But this notion that I will order law enforcement officials or give them a green light to shoot to kill people, there are possible consequences to this. And there's no pushback.
Not only is no pushback, but Ron DeSantis is saying, well, yeah, I'm going to kill people at the border. We're going to shoot them stone cold dead too, because of what might be in their backpack.
And the people love this, Tim, and you know how this works. He's watching that crowd.
And that is, that's the ultimate erogenous zone for MAGA right now. I I agree with all that I just want to put a finer point on one thing the the pardon point that you made about the cops which is the article I wrote this week is some actual real life evidence for what you're saying that people are going to start thinking about this there's this guy Mike Davis who used to be an establishment Republican guys which which just shows you the radicalization of all this.
But Mike Davis talked about how he wants to be attorney general. Oh, yeah.
And he's going to have a reign of terror. And during the reign of terror, he described all the horrible things he's going to do, deportations and gulags and all this other fan fiction for demented people.
But the line in there that Bill Kristol actually pointed out to me after watching the clip that I wrote about, he was like, the line in here that's the most concerning is the pardon line. Because he lists all these horrible things he's going to do as attorney general.
And then he's like, and then I'm going to eventually get pushed out. But I know that Donald Trump will pardon me.
And all of Donald Trump's pardons of Manafort and Stone, he has set the tone for this, right? That if he gets in there again, that his people, quote unquote, can do whatever they want, and they will know that he will pardon them. And that is a threat.
People need to pay attention. Yes, this is a very, very real threat.
This is a very real threat. In fact, do you remember at one point Trump was suggesting when he was talking to border agents that if they violated people's rights, if they broke the law, don't worry about it because I will take care of you.
is a real danger when you when you think about okay so in our constitutional system we have that unlimited pardon power which i increasingly have come to think is it was a mistake by the founding fathers to give that sort of thing because they assume that nobody like donald trump would ever be president or that if someone did abuse it that the congress would exercise its impeachment that you know impeachment is now kind of a dead letter in terms of actually holding him accountable. He could actually do this.
Okay, so I want to come back to the border in a moment. But I'm sorry, this story today in ABC, holding this up to the screen.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, the nuclear subs.
Trump allegedly discussed U.S. nuclear subs with foreign national after leaving the White House.
See, the thing about the Mar-a-Lago document case is, you know, originally I think there might have been some thought, okay, maybe it's just trivial stuff. You know, it's just papers.
He's keeping them around as souvenirs. But it's hard to imagine if you and I were just gaming out this or if we were writing a script that it would be almost too much on the nose to say, what was the most sensitive possible thing you might leak out? How about the capabilities of American nuclear submarines? So here's the ABC report.
Months after leaving the White House, former President Donald Trump allegedly discussed potentially sensitive information about U.S. nuclear submarines with a member of his Mar-a-Lago club, an Australian billionaire, of course, who then allegedly shared the information with scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists, according to sources.
The potential disclosures were reported to Special Counsel Jack Smith's team, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Prosecutors have interviewed this guy.
His name is Anthony Pratt, who runs Pratt Industries. In those interviews, Pratt described how looking to make conversation with Trump, he brought up the American submarine fleet, which the two had discussed.
According to Pratt, as described by the sources, Pratt, the billionaire, told Trump that he believed Australia should start buying its submarines from the United the united states to which an excited trump leaning toward pratt as if to be discreet then told pratt so discreet of information about u.s submarines the supposed exact number of nuclear warheads they routinely carry and exactly how close they supposedly can get to a russian submarine without being detected. Nothing to see there, Tim.
There's another point of that story where this guy mentions the, you know, Mar-a-Lago male cougar, whatever the word is for a male cougar that is at Mar-a-Lago, that he mentions it to three... Jackal.
Yeah, Jackal, there you go. Three o ocelot three former prime ministers of australia again like this guy has been talking about it and chatting about it i don't this is not my area of expertise i don't know exactly how big of a threats are but again i think it showed the doesn't sound legitimate yeah it shows the legitimate concerns people had with the saudis like what what is jared whispering to the saudis if they're just whispering things to random australians at mar-a-lago i do want to find one other thing do you remember the story i'm not saying that there's a direct connection here but again i think it just shows the sensitivity of all this stuff and the recklessness which what trump was dealing with it here's a story from september 2021 australia bailed on a submarine contract with france worth 66 billion last week choosing instead to work with the united states outrage france recalled its ambassadors from the u.s and australia very well could be nothing to do with the story but i just think that that shows right that that was there that all of this stuff is very sensitive that there is a reason they call it diplomacy and like you know you just can't be just randomly going up to people at weddings at your club, like talking about nuclear subs.
Like that's just something you can't do. Okay.
So the fact that we know about this conversation, I mean, ought to at least suggest that maybe there were other conversations. Sure.
Maybe this was the chit chat around Mar-a-Lago. Yeah.
I mean, think about how much foreign foreign governments spend on espionage and yet the cheapest thing they could possibly do apparently is buy a membership to mar-a-lago and we already know that was happening we already know the chinese were doing that so i'm sure there are things we don't know and it's interesting remember all the outrage about the chinese balloon how dare we allow that chinese balloon and there's donald trump going hey yeah the nuk. You know they have like seven nukes and they can get within, you know,

100 feet of whatever. Okay, changing

gears because you can explain this to me.

Maybe you can explain this to me. Uh-oh, pressure.

I'm genuinely confused. This is not like

pretend confused.

What is going on with Joe Biden and the wall?

The border wall.

Do you know that you can you track that out

for me? I think I can answer this.

I was counting on you.

I'm sure we could bring on an immigration

reporter that could give you the nitty-gritty of this,

but I can

Thank you. I was counting on you.
Now, I mean, I'm sure we could bring on an immigration reporter that could give you the nitty gritty of this, but I can give you the broad strokes. Okay.
So the previous Congress, right, had funded certain amounts of the wall that Donald Trump didn't build. Right.
This is something we all know. You know, Mexico is going to pay for it.
No, it turns out they weren't. America is money paying for it.
Donald Trump, despite this being his top priority, only built like 1 19th of the law or something, 1 59th. And so there were at least, I think, 20 more miles that had been funded when Biden came in.
There was some legal wrangling over this, some fighting over this. But the parallel I can think of is when the Obamaama administration had to defend doma you know and they're obama's like i'm not for this but this is the law we live in a country with rules and laws and like you know the government if something has passed the congress and been signed the government you know there's only so much you can do and so the biden administration i think basically said okay well now this has been decided in the courts so now we got to build these 20 miles so there's already been the you know already been the funds for.
Okay. Now within the Biden administration, I think basically said, okay, well now this has been decided in the courts.
And now we've got to build these 20 miles. So there's already been the, you know, already been the funds for.
Okay. Now within the Biden administration, I think that there are competing views, right? There's some people that are like, this is really bad and terrible.
There are some people, apparently Mayorkas at a department of Homeland Security. They're like, actually, we could probably use 20 more miles.
Like I'm not for the full wall, but like this place is, you know, this is a high traffic place. And maybe President Biden disagrees with him, apparently, because during a comment yesterday, you know, Biden was like, no, this doesn't work.
So does it work? Does it not? I don't know. I think that that is like what is happening here, which is I think that they legally are obligated to do it.
And they have a differing views within the White House. And obviously, this is an ideal.
Usually, it's best for the White House to speak with one voice and have a clear message on things like this. And frankly, you could see some political advantage maybe to saying, hey, yeah.
Well, this is what I was going to get to because the Politico playbook, if I'm remembering this, seemed to suggest that this marked a little bit of a pivot, actually a rather dramatic pivot on Biden's part because they recognize this is a huge political liability. And so you're seeing a little bit of panic here.
Look, they're throwing something up against the border because this is going to be a big issue in 2024. You don't see it that way.
You see it as more of a bureaucratic working through as opposed to, guys, we got to do something at the border because whatever we've been doing isn't working. Yeah, I think it things i think that it's bureaucratic i do think that joe biden i know he gets no credit for this but has been like to my taste actually a little too cautious on yeah liberalizing immigration stuff i think that i don't know this but i think that it might help one thing that might help is expanding the amount of asylees we're expected you know and expanding a guest worker program so that might take some pressure off the border maybe that wouldn't help but that's i think that's one idea that's out there a lot of pro-immigration groups are pushing for he hasn't wanted to do that because he doesn't want to seem like too pro i think he's worried about that right and i think joe biden does come from this old union democratic you know mindset that was a little hostile to immigration right right? Because of wages and all that.
Right. I think that Biden has not been the liberal open borders president that the Fox wants him to be.
I think that the problem at the border is very real. I think that there's some people in the administration that are concerned that, you know, maybe they can do some things to alleviate that, you know, to make it less of a political problem.
I think that the real long and short of this is I don't think the Biden administration has a coherent view on immigration. I think there's a lot of staffers who are super liberal.
He's more cautious. There are a couple of Department of Homeland Security guys that are like, let's be tougher and end up with a policy that's kind of...
Okay. See, I think that's exactly right, is that you don't have a coherent policy.
You do have progressive elites who have a very outsized role in the Democratic Party. Rui Teixeira is absolutely right about this.
But I think that you're also right that Joe Biden has very different instincts. And so you get that push-pull and it's kind of messy.
Then they need to clean it up over the next couple of months. What are you going to be watching over the weekend? Tim, give me something to keep an eye on.
What am I going to be i gonna be watching over the weekend i mean i guess i'm gonna watch you to see if there's any actual momentum against jim jordan which we talked about at the top i'm gonna be going to the goose concert at red rocks in uh about uh 12 hours so i'll be watching goose uh i guess that's a more excellent micro answer to your question i hate that question i always as soon as we hang up hang up, I'll be like, oh, I'm going to be watching this other thing. So what we're all going to be watching is how deep the chaos is going to be in the Republican caucus.
I mean, it's like a euphemism. You know, the Republicans are now in uncharted territory, which means no one has any fucking idea what's going to happen right now.
And so it is going to be interesting to see what is the reaction to Trump's endorsement of Jordan? Do they just roll over as they are want to do as they usually do? Will there be some pushback? Are there five Republicans who are going to say, no, we don't want to go with the seditionists? Is there going to be any rallying around Scalise? Is this going to be one of those things where it's going to be next week where it's going to be 15, 20 ballots? And are they just going to say, okay, Patrick McHenry, we don't care. You just stay there.
You just keep doing that. As long as you keep expelling.
By the way, what do you make of the expelling of Nancy Pelosi from her Capitol office? It just seems like pettiness on steroids, but also an indication of this is our future. It's going to be about retribution and revenge from here on the nancy pelosi thing is is related to my answer to your other question which is who are we watching and we're watching the people um i don't want to pick on my my friend jonah who i agree with on a lot but they're this phrase called the closet normals they use so there's a lot of closet normals over there in the house republicans who are normal but they have to be in the closet about it deep and and and yeah they're deeply I know a lot about the closet, so I can talk to you about that, about the way that that warps one's brain.

But McHenry is like the poster boy for this group, right?

If you ask anybody who are the closet normals, McHenry is like the first name that comes up.

He looks like a normal, right?

He looks like it.

He's from the old Chamber of commerce wing of the party he's been

he's managed to survive you know by keeping his head down bow tie bow tie you can't be an authoritarian with a bow tie you know what i mean like you have to be a michael jay what was it an alex p keaton republican with a bow tie anyway well i mean tucker carlson lost the bow tie right about the time that he decided to go pure fascist right because hey you know you can't be mussolini in a poe tie. Great point.

Anyway,

I will be watching the McHenry's of the world to see if any of them actually let their normal out of the closet. And the Pelosi action leads me to expect that the answer is going to be no.
Because it's like, if this guy is the one that we're supposed to be like, oh, he's going to bring some, you know, just like take the temperature down. But then he's up there banging the gavel like an angry little elf and saying, I'm taking the keys to your office while you're at a funeral.
That leads me to believe that there just aren't that many people that are going to come out and, you know, there's no deep closet state here. It's we're really left with, you know, what degree of crazy are we going for? And considering the fact that people are going, you know, maybe we should have propped up Kevin McCarthy is an indication that it's just sort of like crazy, less crazy, sedition is crazy.
What? We're just constantly defining our deviancy down. Right.
So, hey, have a great weekend. It's always good to talk with you, Tim.
And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday and we'll do this all over again.
And by the way, if you are a regular listener to the podcast, you might want to check us out on YouTube as well. Tim's got his takes.
I've got my Charlie's takes. And this whole conversation is up on YouTube now.