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Speaker 15 Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is October 2nd, 2023. We actually made it through September.

Speaker 15 Hey, just a quick note: for those of you that are regular listeners of the podcast, if you actually want to see the podcast, if you actually want to watch, we are now on YouTube.

Speaker 15 And also, just in case you don't get enough morning shots, we also have a short shots that we're putting out on YouTube as well.

Speaker 15 Our shot on Friday was about the incredible clown car in a dumpster fire of the GOP impeachment hearing. And you can find that on YouTube as well.
So just check it out.

Speaker 15 Or you could just keep listening to us on the podcast. So because it's Monday, I'm joined by my colleague, Will Salatan.
Will, we have so much stuff to talk about today.

Speaker 16 We do have a lot to talk about. And it wasn't the stuff I thought we were going to be talking about.

Speaker 15 On my list, we have to get to what happened over the weekend, the shutdown that did not occur, the coup that is about to occur. Matt Gates has decided that he's going to go after Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 15 What a surprise. I mean, this is like the least shocking development of the year.
But it does occur to me, I mean, before we, we're going to get to that a little bit later.

Speaker 15 It does occur to me, we have a really bitterly divided Congress, don't we?

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 15 But there is one thing upon which there is general agreement, there is consensus, that everybody hates Matt Gates.

Speaker 15 Everybody hates Matt Gates. I mean, they just loathe him.
I mean, they loathe him on so many different levels. I mean, let's count the ways.

Speaker 15 His personality, his dishonesty, the way he blows up his own ideological side, didn't get any spending cuts, the fact that he's just kind of a creepy guy.

Speaker 15 It's kind of a kumbaya moment that you can see there's bipartisan agreement in all of that.

Speaker 16 So I totally thought you were going to say what Matt Gaetz said, which is everybody hates Kevin McCarthy. But no, in fact, your thesis is more true.

Speaker 15 Well, nobody necessarily respects or fears Kevin McCarthy. So we'll talk about

Speaker 15 the self-gelded speaker and what happened to him over the weekend where he had to go hat in hand to the Democrats. And, of course, I love the way he's spitting this, that I am the adult in the room.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I'm not sure that that's the tape. We're going to get to that.

Speaker 15 So one of the things, and we pass over some of these things too much, my newsletter today is about the banality of crazy, which is a phrase that I borrowed from Brian Klass, who basically says, look, we get numbed by how nuts a lot of this is.

Speaker 15 And the news media generally has a bias towards things that are new. And as a result, Donald Trump's crazy is not new, right?

Speaker 15 So Joe Biden slips and maybe falls or doesn't fall, and that's a big story. You know, Donald Trump then calls for the execution of a leading American general.

Speaker 15 And it's sort of like, yeah, well, that's Donald Trump. I mean, it's just more insanity.
So we actually don't treat the insanity as a big story. It's actually a really good point.

Speaker 15 So one of the big crazy stories from last week, and I just don't want to totally let it go, is his suggestion that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff be given the death penalty.

Speaker 15 This is Mark Milley.

Speaker 15 And over the weekend, Mark Milley appeared to, appeared to, appeared to, we have to pretend, answered Donald Trump when he had this to say about the oath that the men and women of the U.S.

Speaker 15 military take.

Speaker 17 We don't take an oath to a king, or a a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator and we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual.

Speaker 17 We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that it's America and we're willing to die to protect it.

Speaker 16 Hmm.

Speaker 15 Okay, so Will Salatan, I don't think that was particularly subtle on General Milley's part, who he was talking about, what he was talking about, your thoughts.

Speaker 16 Right. Well, a wannabe dictator, obviously, is a reference to the former president.

Speaker 16 But a couple of things about what Milley's, this was really remarkable, and I watched this at the time, and Joe Biden sat there stone-faced, Kamal Harris sat there, stone-faced, Lloyd Austin, but they all knew what was being said there.

Speaker 16 So it's a dig at Trump, but a couple of things.

Speaker 15 One,

Speaker 16 this is the difference between a real patriot and a fake one, right? Donald Trump is a fake patriot.

Speaker 16 He talks about America, but it's really all about him and what he can do for America and all the money he gets for the farmers and all that kind of thing. Mark Milley is a genuine patriot.

Speaker 16 And part of the way you can recognize that is that Mark Milley understands the difference between America.

Speaker 16 He's not America first. He's America as an idea.
He understands that America is a country built on a constitution. It's built around ideas of liberty and equality.
And it's not blood and soil.

Speaker 16 That's what Donald Trump doesn't understand. So when Milley talks about it, he says, we take an oath to the Constitution and to that word, the idea of America.

Speaker 16 The second thing that's important about this is Milley is correct that Trump is a wannabe dictator.

Speaker 16 And if he could, you know, control America the way that Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin controls their country, he would.

Speaker 16 And one reason why that hasn't happened, even though Donald Trump attempted it, is that the United States military didn't go along, right? Trump tried to co-opt the military.

Speaker 16 He tried to make the military, and he would, in a second term, try to make the military.

Speaker 15 Because he thinks of the military as being his personal possession, right?

Speaker 15 I mean, there is a philosophical issue here because Donald Trump clearly thinks of the commander-in-chief, the president of the United States, as being the man who has all of the power, can do anything he wants, and this is his military.

Speaker 15 And here you have Mark Milley saying, no, we don't pledge allegiance to the man. We pledge allegiance to the Constitution.
But look, there's a little bit of edginess here, isn't there?

Speaker 15 Because under our Constitution, the president is the commander-in-chief. You know, he issues orders, and those orders have to be obeyed.
Did you see the Wall Street Journal editorial?

Speaker 15 They actually took this whole episode and said, very disturbing that Mark Milley would himself, you know, say these disturbing things, implying that the military, you know, might not follow the lead of the elected civilian leadership.

Speaker 15 So, I mean, I think they got this thing absolutely upside down. But we're now having this rethinking.
The military does not work for the president.

Speaker 15 And there are some things the president might ask us to do that we are not going to follow. I mean, so this is not just boilerplate pokes at Donald Trump, is it?

Speaker 16 No, no, not at all. And let's all remember Donald Trump referring to my generals, right?

Speaker 16 Thinking that the generals work for him. But let's also remember Trump saying, I think it was in one of the debates with Hillary Clinton, or no, maybe it was in one of the Republican primary debates.

Speaker 16 In any event, it was in 2016.

Speaker 16 He said that he would order, you know, he was asked by Brett Baer in one of the debates, what happens if the military refuses to follow one of your orders to violate the Geneva Conventions, to violate human rights?

Speaker 16 Right. Because Trump said things like he would execute people.
I mean, he would order them to commit torture, for example.

Speaker 15 Well, and they would kill the families. Oh, yes.
They would also target the families. Right.

Speaker 16 Try to deliberately target, not accidentally as collateral damage, that the families of right,

Speaker 16 take them hostage and kill them. And so Brett Barrett says, what if the military refuses these orders? Because they're illegal orders.
And Trump says they won't refuse.

Speaker 16 Right. Trump says they won't refuse me.
Milley is saying we don't put one man who orders us to do illegal things over the Constitution, that the military would not follow those orders.

Speaker 16 And that is actually crucial. So the Wall Street Journal does have it upside down.

Speaker 16 And the reason that we still have a democracy, Charlie, is that the military doesn't follow such orders from a wannabe dictator. And if they ever did, we could lose our country.

Speaker 15 Okay, so the other thing over the weekend, I mean, this speech, going back to the banality of crazy, Donald Trump goes out to California and he delivers yet another deranged speech.

Speaker 15 But I think it's important to to note how he keeps escalating his rhetoric. Look, I've written before, you know, the brutality is the point.

Speaker 15 I mean, Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that he kind of likes shooting people. I mean, he wants to build a wall with, you know, razors on top.
He wants to shoot protesters in the legs.

Speaker 15 He said, you know, frequently that he wants to execute the drug dealers and human traffickers.

Speaker 15 You know, he quotes President Xi of China saying that they don't have a drug problem because they just execute them

Speaker 15 the day of the trial. So this is something that Donald Trump has been dining out on for some time and has been using as part of his stump speech.
But he escalated over the weekend, didn't he?

Speaker 15 I mean, he - where do you want to start? Let's start at the least significant things.

Speaker 15 I mean, it's interesting, the former president of the United States, who, of course, is running to be the leader of the party that is really, really concerned with what young people hear and read in schools, uses his best presidential words to call for the indictment of Joe Biden.

Speaker 15 Let's play this. Trigger warning, by the way.

Speaker 18 You become president president and you don't like somebody or if somebody's beating you by 10, 15 or 20 points like we're doing with crooked Joe Biden, let's indict the motherfucker.

Speaker 20 Let's indict.

Speaker 15 Okay, now actually, as I listen to that again, is the motherfucker referring to Biden or to himself?

Speaker 15 Is he trying to quote the crooked Joe Biden is saying, let's indict them.

Speaker 16 Yeah, right. So just to be fair to Donald Trump, he's suggesting that that's what the other side is doing, that they're saying of him.
Right.

Speaker 15 Okay, so he's the motherfucker. Yes.

Speaker 15 Now there's a twist people didn't see coming.

Speaker 16 Right.

Speaker 15 So he also mocks the hammer attack of Nancy Pelosi's husband, which is...

Speaker 15 So we're not even going to play it, but I mean, the crowd's laughing because, you know, there's really nothing funnier than making jokes about an 82-year-old man being beaten with hammers.

Speaker 15 And he also comes up with a new category for extrajudicial police killings. Now, I just want to back up a little bit.

Speaker 15 Earlier this year, I wrote that there's going to be a new litmus test in the Republican Party, which is that it's not just cruelty anymore.

Speaker 15 It's like who will be the most enthusiastic in terms of endorsing brutal policies?

Speaker 15 And you could tell that Ron DeSantis, who really, really thought that he could be the mini-me, the mini Trump me, he wants to participate in this Olympics brutality by laying out who he wants to kill.

Speaker 15 And remember what he said about killing folks stone cold dead at the border? This is Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 21 So we are going to authorize the use of deadly force against the cartels. If you have somebody coming in with the fentanyl in the backpack, they even break through the border wall where there is wall.

Speaker 21 If they're doing that,

Speaker 21 that's the last thing they're going to be able to do because we're going to leave them stone cold dead at the border. We're not putting up with it anymore.

Speaker 15 Now, Will, I know this is kind of a quibble, but I assume that they will check the backpacks afterwards to make sure that they have fentanyl Skittles in them, right?

Speaker 16 And if it doesn't have the fentanyl, you can be sure they will put the fentanyl in the backpack.

Speaker 15 I mean, this is the thing: you just sort of know it's like, we're going to kill them dead. We're not going to warn them.
We're not going to fire warning shots.

Speaker 15 We're not shooting, you know, all of this stuff. There's no arrest, there's no trial, there's no due process because the applause line is stone cold dead.

Speaker 15 And he thinks that he's going to show that, hey, I'm just as brutal as Donald Trump.

Speaker 15 But the problem with all of this is we've discovered over and over again and I'm sorry to repeat ourselves on this that for Republican voters why would they want a knockoff Donald Trump when they can have the real thing and over the weekend Donald Trump basically says yeah you just want to kill you know people coming across the border with fentanyl you want to kill them stolen coal dead I will see you and raise you so Here is Donald Trump saying that he, if he's president again, he will order law enforcement to go into cities and shoot shoplifters.

Speaker 16 Shoplifters. Listen to this.

Speaker 18 And we will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.

Speaker 18 Shot.

Speaker 16 Shot.

Speaker 15 Okay, again, no arrest, no trial, no due process. But I think it's worth spending a moment on this.
The crowd loves this.

Speaker 15 This is the hot moment. And you know that Donald Trump, with his reptilian instinct, in his mind, he'll play back what really hit the erogenous zones of that MAGA crowd.

Speaker 15 And this was, listen to the crowd. He's just said, we are going to shoot shoplifters coming out of a store.

Speaker 15 We're going to order to them, again, not arrest them, not try them, not go through due process. We're going to shoot them.
And the crowd just loses its mind.

Speaker 22 Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. And everything will immediately stop.

Speaker 20 You won't have any more of that.

Speaker 15 It's very simple. All you have to do is kill people.
Don't worry about any of this other process. And the crowd's reaction was, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.
We can't make this shit up, Will.

Speaker 16 I mean, I'm just, you know, I've seen rallies like this, but not in our country, right? I mean, you know, Trump keeps saying, you know, we're turning into a third world country.

Speaker 16 He's doing his best to make that true. And so is his party in general, right? As the DeSantis clip illustrates.
How do you become a third world? How do you lose your democracy?

Speaker 16 Well, one way is to corrupt the military, to make them an instrument of the current president. Another way is to overturn elections, to refuse to leave office when the people try to turn you out.

Speaker 16 Here's a third way, right? Which is to eliminate due process, to eliminate. I mean, remember, Trump, his previous applause line.
when he announced for president last year was one-day trials, right?

Speaker 16 We're going to have one-day trials for drug dealers, right? So one was apparently too many. Right, right, right.

Speaker 15 One was too many.

Speaker 16 So now we're turning up the dialogue a little bit. So the awkward phrases, obviously, in what we just heard, were DeSantis saying, we're gonna leave you stone cold dead at the border.

Speaker 16 We're gonna shoot you on site, right? And by the way, DeSantis, we don't even know if somebody has fentanyl on their backpack, are they a dealer? Are they a mule?

Speaker 16 Are they one of the people who like, you know, we're gonna make you carry drugs in in exchange for getting your child across the border?

Speaker 16 So we have no idea whether you're actually hitting somebody major. So if we actually did this, it would be absolutely barbaric.

Speaker 16 But Trump has won up that, as you point out, by on the border, the presumption is the person coming in is not an American.

Speaker 16 Not that we should disregard human rights, but now Trump is saying, our own people, Americans, in our own country,

Speaker 16 he says, we're going to shoot you, I believe his phrase was, as you're leaving the store. So there's no question about you undergoing any inspection, right?

Speaker 16 You're coming out of the building and we shoot you. Well,

Speaker 16 once we do that, what kind of country are we anymore, right?

Speaker 16 He says America first, but he's eliminating the difference between America and other countries that don't have any of our constitutional protections.

Speaker 15 I have a small quibble that I don't think you're going to quibble with is that you do talk about losing our democracy. When we use the word democracy, what we mean is a liberal constitutional order.

Speaker 15 Because in a democracy, the crowd can yell Trump, Trump, Trump. And what if a majority of Americans decide they support this and they love this?

Speaker 15 By the way, you know, that crowd that was chanting, Barabbas, Barabbas, Barabbas, that was pretty democratic, wasn't it? So the point here is not just democracy as in the rule of the majority.

Speaker 15 It is also the rule of law. It is the fact that the majority does not get to kill the minority.
It means that the majority cannot say, hey, you know what?

Speaker 15 We're going to do away with due process of law and trials and the presumption of innocent and everything.

Speaker 15 There are many, many things that are anti-democratic because we understand that a liberal democratic constitutional order relies on all of those elitist norms.

Speaker 15 I was reading, I think, the comment section, somebody was saying, well, you keep talking about democracy. So what if Donald Trump wins 51% of the vote? Isn't that a triumph of democracy?

Speaker 15 Well, if he then uses that democratic majority to destroy the constitutional order and the rule of law, that is not a win for democracy. And it shows a misunderstanding of what we mean by the term.

Speaker 15 So I think that there's a little bit more precision. But I know you don't disagree with me on this.

Speaker 16 No, I fully agree with you. But this is a paradox

Speaker 16 that you and I and other defenders of the constitutional system have to grapple with, because we believe in democracy. We also believe in the Constitution and its protections.

Speaker 16 And what do you do when we have this very large movement of people who are cheering the destruction of those principles, right?

Speaker 16 What if most Americans reject them? I don't have a simple answer to this, but my gut says we have to preserve America. And by that, I don't mean the blood and soil of America.

Speaker 16 I don't mean white people.

Speaker 16 I mean the ideas of America. What distinguishes America from countries like Russia or North Korea where human rights are disregarded, where there is no constitutional protection?

Speaker 16 And once we go with the mob, you know, I think we've lost that.

Speaker 15 Well, and also, I mean, there is always this long-running tension between security and freedom, right?

Speaker 15 And people are willing, and let's be honest about it, a lot of people are willing to make that trade-off, which is also why it is absolutely essential for whatever governing party there is to make sure that public safety is protected.

Speaker 15 Because otherwise, if the public decides that this party will not protect the border and or law and order, they will turn to the the extremists, to the trump, trump, trump, barabas crowd.

Speaker 16 I fully agree with that. And this is really important for you and me to express to people

Speaker 16 I think that too many leaders in the Democratic Party don't take security issues seriously enough, by which I mean a lot of the crime stuff is overblown.

Speaker 16 And statistically, it's not great, but the border situation is really bad. Okay, we have just a flood of people coming across the border.

Speaker 16 It's a giant business moving people up the Western Hemisphere using our asylum laws.

Speaker 16 And if the Democratic Party doesn't show the voters that we're taking this seriously and that we're going to restore some order in terms of people coming into our country.

Speaker 16 There is a significant danger of those people going over and supporting a wannabe dictator in Trump or DeSantis or somebody else.

Speaker 15 Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 15 We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more.

Speaker 15 And every day, we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So, why not head over to thebulwork.com and take a look around?

Speaker 15 Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact.

Speaker 15 To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebullwork.com/slash Charlie.

Speaker 15 That's thebulwork.com forward slash Charlie. We're going to get through this together.

Speaker 16 I promise.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming Manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 11 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 3 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 12 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

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

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Speaker 15 Okay, so let's talk about the very surprising developments over the weekend.

Speaker 15 I think that if you'd gone to the betting pools, the odds would have been very heavily against us avoiding a shutdown, mainly because nobody really expected that Kevin McCarthy would essentially give up this agenda.

Speaker 15 I mean, for weeks and months, he's been threatening to shut down the federal government unless he got massive domestic spending cuts and, you know,

Speaker 15 all of these tough on the border provisions. And then over the weekend, he looked around, realized there was no way he was going to get that from his own caucus.

Speaker 15 So he basically caved a clean CR, relied on Democratic votes. He did not get the spending cuts, did not get the border provisions.
He screwed over Ukraine, but we'll leave that aside for a second.

Speaker 15 So what happened here? Because he's out saying, I am the adult in the room.

Speaker 15 I mean, there are dueling headlines, you know, why Kevin McCarthy decided to defy and take on the right versus Kevin McCarthy surrenders. So which camp do you come down to?

Speaker 15 Will, I'm going to let you call the sound bites, okay?

Speaker 16 Because you were following this.

Speaker 15 I'm going to turn over. this to you now, what we should be listening to, okay, from the Sunday shows as they tried to spin this.

Speaker 16 Let me me just start with the general outline of this.

Speaker 16 As the pony guy, I'm very excited today because instead of having to look for the pony under the manure, you're going to have to look for the manure under the pony, right?

Speaker 16 Because the pony is right out there. We avoided this shutdown.
I got to admit, I did not expect that.

Speaker 16 So I'm just going to give you my optimistic spin, which today is merited by what happened. I think

Speaker 16 we certainly began to restore the proper incentives in this country. That is to say, what we want to do do is stop the crazy behavior from being rewarded, crazy political behavior.

Speaker 16 Shutting down the government is crazy behavior.

Speaker 16 It's crazy behavior to begin with because they're going to end up paying people for not having worked, you know, and they're going to, meanwhile, they're going to have put them through worrying about their paychecks.

Speaker 16 They're utterly pointless. Right.
They don't accomplish anything fiscally conservative or anything else. But Kevin McCarthy flinched.
He flinched away from that.

Speaker 16 He knew, I believe, he recognized that that was going to hurt his party.

Speaker 16 And if the Speaker of the House flinches because he recognizes the shutdown is going to hurt him, then we've begun to restore the incentives that will have... Now, it's only 45 days.

Speaker 16 I guess if you're looking for the pile under the pony, there it is. And we'll be back here again.
And I don't know if Kevin McCarthy can survive with a bunch of Matt Gaetzes in his conference.

Speaker 16 But for 45 days, I'm going to take a victory lap. So tell me what you think.

Speaker 15 It just seems premature at this point. I mean, I led with this quote from former House aide Brendan Buck, who used to be the spokesman for both John Boehner and for Paul Ryan.

Speaker 15 He says, I think the best way to understand what happened today is that this shutdown was simply too stupid, even for the House. People are like, it is nuts.

Speaker 15 But you do have Kevin McCarthy doing something that I think a lot of observers said would be political suicide. He went to the Democrats, cut a deal with them.

Speaker 15 The conservatives, as predicted, got absolutely nothing.

Speaker 15 And this is part of this, the genius of the Matt Gaetzes, that, you know, if they would have stuck together, they might have been able to get some modest cuts, not everything, but they were demanding, you know, these double-digit percentage cuts.

Speaker 15 And what did they get? Absolutely nothing. And they'll probably get absolutely nothing in 45 days.
So I really like this exchange with Matt Gates, who is universally loathed by everybody. And

Speaker 15 let's say not the big winner of the week.

Speaker 15 And Matt Gaetz is now, of course, pledging that he is going to try to oust Kevin McCarthy, which raises all kinds of interesting questions, which you and I will get to.

Speaker 15 And I want to hear your prediction. But let's play Jay Tapper and Matt Gaetz.

Speaker 22 Since the mid-90s, this country has been governed by either continuing resolution or omnibus spending. And you have voted for continuing resolution in the past.

Speaker 22 Well, I'm five years sober voting for continuing resolutions, and I should note that during those years, President Trump was growing the economy. But January marked a difference.

Speaker 22 Yeah, and you know what? Growing the deficits as well. I regret that.
Growing the deficits as well. But we were growing the economy.
And look, look, you're talking about the national debt.

Speaker 22 You were growing.

Speaker 22 What did he add? $7 trillion, $8 trillion to the national debt?

Speaker 22 And by the way, I voted against 10 continuing resolutions under Donald Trump. I did not stand with Donald Trump on all of his spending priorities.
I voted against way more than I was going to do.

Speaker 22 The point is, I don't know what this shutdown did to help the cause.

Speaker 22 What shutdown? The shutdown that almost happened. Okay, so there wasn't a shutdown.
So

Speaker 22 the threatened shutdown that you created. We have to break the fever.
We have to move to single subjects.

Speaker 22 You broke a fever? No, we didn't, unfortunately.

Speaker 22 That's why we have to now move to vacate, because we have to get a system where the House and Senate will negotiate over each of these agencies of government independently.

Speaker 22 And I understand that in divided government, that means that you have to take into account the views of Senate Democrats, the views of the White House. But what I want to do is do you understand that?

Speaker 22 Of course. Because you're on the corner panel talking about what Kevin McCarthy needs to do is to allow line-item vetoes by people like you,

Speaker 22 line-item votes against the salaries of people who are investigating Donald Trump, the salaries of individuals who are offering sweetheart deals to Hunter Biden.

Speaker 22 That, to me, is not the the language of somebody who understands the balance of power and House and the Senate and how all legislation actually functions.

Speaker 22 Well, I think that is that is that to me is the language of somebody who is looking for clicks and likes and fox hits, not somebody who actually is trying to reduce the debt.

Speaker 16 Oh,

Speaker 15 well, yes, Will, that does sound like the person who doesn't have the slightest fucking idea what he's talking about and has no interest in actually reducing the debt.

Speaker 16 Right. So, but back gates, is he's unserious about policy, right? Kevin McCarthy's line is: would you rather have 100% of nothing or, you know, 50% or 80% of something?

Speaker 16 Gates would rather have 100% of nothing because he's not about legislating. He's about, yes.

Speaker 16 And in that cliff, you can hear he's totally obsessed with his voting record, what I voted for, what I didn't vote for, as opposed to what got passed, right?

Speaker 16 Because what happened here is that because Matt Gates and a bunch of other crazies wouldn't accept Kevin McCarthy's version of a CR, McCarthy turned around.

Speaker 16 I give McCarthy some credit for this, right? He's a a weasel, but McCarthy then turned around and said, okay, if I can't get it from my right, I'll get it from my left. He goes to the Democrats.

Speaker 16 So Matt Gaetz got the opposite of what he wanted in terms of a legislation, but Matt Gaetz doesn't care because he doesn't care what the policy actually is.

Speaker 16 In fact, if the policy is bad from his point of view, if the government continues to run up more debt, that's great for Matt Gaetz because he's just about posturing and complaining about the system.

Speaker 16 They have given Matt Gaetz, the voters have given him a job with responsibility, but he doesn't want that job. He doesn't want to be a congressperson doing something, passing legislation.

Speaker 16 No, he's like doubling as a host on Newsmax, for God's sake, right? So Taffer has him dead to rights on what he's about.

Speaker 15 No, and I think that was really important. So I want to get to the substantive debate over Ukraine and where we're going on all of that.

Speaker 15 In the short term, we're about to have a little bit more theater. And again, Matt Gates, being performative, wants to have the show, and the show will be the motion to vacate.

Speaker 15 This is complicated, I think, objectively speaking, but in the context, it's really complicated.

Speaker 15 In order to be Speaker, you have to have a majority of elected members of the House, which is usually 218. I don't know what it is right now.

Speaker 15 So, Kevin McCarthy, I don't even think got 218 votes when he was elected after the 15 ballots, right? So, you have a motion to vacate. How will Democrats vote on this?

Speaker 15 This is the interesting question, that if Kevin McCarthy does not have 218 votes in the Republican caucus, and by the way, just so people know, members of the opposite party never vote for the speaker of the other party.

Speaker 15 It's just never never done. No Democrat voted for Kevin McCarthy.
So will any of that change? If Kevin McCarthy does not get 218 votes, what will the Democrats do?

Speaker 15 Will they vote to rescue Kevin McCarthy? Will they vote against Kevin McCarthy? Will they vote present? Will they just not show up in order to lower the threshold? What do you think?

Speaker 15 Will what is the calculation here?

Speaker 16 So this is somewhat complicated by the fact that this is a motion to vacate. It's an affirmative motion.

Speaker 16 So a Democrat doesn't have to vote for Kevin McCarthy to help sink this motion motion and bail out McCarthy. As you point out, they can vote present.

Speaker 16 They can do various other tricks to sort of lower the number.

Speaker 15 You need 218 votes to kick him out. Right.

Speaker 16 To me, Charlie, it depends on what is Kevin McCarthy's relationship with Hakeem Jeffries and what is McCarthy offering?

Speaker 16 Because, you know, AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was on CNN, I think, and was asked about this. What would she do and what would Democrats do? And she said they'll follow.

Speaker 16 Jeffries, but she said, we're not going to give our votes away for nothing. So McCarthy just had to drop in order to get the CR passed.

Speaker 16 He had to to drop a bunch of things that would have ticked off Democrats. So he made concessions.
What else is McCarthy willing to offer Democrats to save his skin?

Speaker 16 We don't know the answer to that yet.

Speaker 15 Not the bogus impeachment hearings.

Speaker 16 The fundamental thing about Kevin McCarthy is that he is a weasel.

Speaker 16 There's nothing he won't offer to save his skin if he needs to. And now we're just down to the question of to whom will he offer it?

Speaker 16 So Gates' argument is if McCarthy cuts a deal with Democrats to save his skin, to save his job,

Speaker 16 Gates says, I can't can't control that, but then he'll be owned by the Democrats. What if McCarthy does that? He could do that.

Speaker 16 He could make some concessions, and maybe he holds together some coalition of Democrats and Republicans. And then it's a really open question what the House looks like at that point.

Speaker 16 I assume there would be more motions on the right to take down McCarthy, but would they succeed?

Speaker 15 You're Hakeem Jeffries, and you're sitting in the room with Kevin McCarthy. And, you know, Kevin obviously now suddenly needs Democratic votes to survive.
So what's on the table?

Speaker 15 Ukraine's on the table. No massive cuts to domestic spending is on the table, right? I mean, those sorts of things.
No draconian border policy is on the table. The Biden impeachment.

Speaker 15 I mean, how do Democrats save Kevin McCarthy? I'm just trying to imagine how that negotiation goes.

Speaker 16 I don't know the answer to that. You know, and then there's the question of who comes in after McCarthy.
Like, you got to have an alternative.

Speaker 16 Because remember, McCarthy survived all of this in January because they didn't have an alternative, right? Scalise is sick. He's, you know, dealing with with blood cancer.

Speaker 16 He's going to have, you know, we'll see how he does. But other people didn't want the job.
We've had a series of other people decline, you know, to be the alternative to McCarthy.

Speaker 16 So McCarthy may just be figuring that they don't have anybody to replace him. And Charlie, that may be the bet that McCarthy has already made by cutting this deal on the CR.

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Speaker 15 Okay, so now the relatively bad news, because you know, you found the pony. Now I'm going to find the pile of manure.

Speaker 15 It was a couple of things that were very, very disturbing over the weekend, including the fact that for the first time, a majority of Republicans in the House voted against aid to Ukraine.

Speaker 15 And the one thing that was left out of this, of all of the things that Kevin McCarthy said, I'm going to stick with this, is let's screw over Ukraine, not include, is it what what are we talking about, $300 million?

Speaker 16 I think the Senate had $6 billion in there, in their version of the CR.

Speaker 15 The other really bad thing was that Mitch McConnell, who has been really a stand-up guy on the Ukraine stuff, like, don't DM me on this.

Speaker 15 He actually has said that he is not going to cut off aid to Ukraine. He went to his caucus and said, I think we ought to stand tough on the Ukraine aid.

Speaker 15 And a majority of Republicans in the Senate said, yeah, we're not backing you on this. We just want to go along with this deal.

Speaker 15 So Ukraine, and the supporters of Ukraine have to be a little bit concerned about this. Let's play Kevin McCarthy's justification for why he's holding Ukraine hostage in this deal.

Speaker 24 The American border matters, and

Speaker 24 more Americans are dying on our border than Americans are dying in Ukraine.

Speaker 25 So you are explicitly right now linking any Ukraine aid vote to a border belly walking standalone?

Speaker 24 I am telling you that the American border matters, and that is our priority to make sure we secure that.

Speaker 22 So that has to be

Speaker 24 going to make sure that the weapons are provided for Ukraine, but they're not going to get some big package if the border is not secure.

Speaker 25 But you haven't figured out yet the vehicle through which to move that Ukraine aid or a date by which to do it.

Speaker 24 We will work with people in need, but the one thing the White House has to understand, they better be prepared to secure American border.

Speaker 15 Okay, so Will.

Speaker 16 The big picture here is that the Republican Party, which was the party of Ronald Reagan, is no longer.

Speaker 16 So part of it is what you just identified, a majority of the House Republican Conference Conference voting against aid to Ukraine. The isolationists are taking control.

Speaker 16 But the other thing that happened here is Kevin McCarthy, who is nominally a defender of Ukraine, and he is sympathetic to supporting Ukraine, is now using Ukraine as a wedge issue against the Democrats.

Speaker 16 So McCarthy says there about the Democrats, they're not going to get some big package for Ukraine if the border is not secure.

Speaker 16 We want some border concessions from the Democrats, and we're going to give them concessions on Ukraine. McCarthy is disowning Ukraine as an issue.

Speaker 16 He's saying that to give money to defend Ukraine is a Democratic, not a Republican priority. It's something that the Republicans would do as a favor in exchange for border concessions.

Speaker 16 Now, I'm for some border concessions because it's completely out of control.

Speaker 16 But the idea that the Republican Party does this not because it believes in defending Ukraine, not because it believes in stopping Russian aggression, but because the Democratic Party believes in those things.

Speaker 16 The Democratic Party is the one that believes in defending a democracy against Russia. And that's a favor to the Democrats.

Speaker 16 That signals a complete realignment of the parties on foreign policy and on the role of America in the world.

Speaker 15 It is mind-blowing for those of us that remember what the political alignments were in the 1980s.

Speaker 15 Now, your good friend Lindsey Graham, who has been a very strong, staunch supporter of Ukraine, appears to be endorsing McCarthy's linkage of aid to Ukraine to the border.

Speaker 15 So here's Lindsay from yesterday morning. You're our Lindsay whisperer expert.

Speaker 26 He will help Ukraine, but he's telling everybody in the country, including me, you better send something over for the border for me to help Ukraine. And he's right to make that demand.

Speaker 15 I have the sense that there is a compromise that is possible here, which is the kind of thing that I'm probably going to regret saying.

Speaker 15 But going back to your previous points, it is in the Biden administration's interest to look like they're doing something on the border, right?

Speaker 15 And to get the aid for Ukraine. Is there any possible compromise that Republicans will say, okay,

Speaker 15 you've now done enough on the border to satisfy us to release Ukraine? I mean, you understand this is one of their main talking points, their main issues.

Speaker 15 Are they ever going to actually cut a deal with the Biden administration? It strikes me it's very much in the interest of the Biden administration to cut a deal, take the border issue.

Speaker 15 you know, water that down, get the aid for Ukraine. But can Republicans do that?

Speaker 15 Can they actually concede concede that, yeah, we're on the same page with you evil open-border Democrats who are bringing in the fentanyl and the rapists?

Speaker 16 I think they can cut a deal. And, you know, the only way out of this other than another shutdown is that they will cut some kind of a deal.
And it will involve both of those.

Speaker 15 But what's significant to me about the Lindsey Graham comment, it's not just Lindsey Graham.

Speaker 16 Mike Lawler, who's a Republican House member in a swing district, was on the floor during the debate over this CR.

Speaker 16 And he said to the Democrats, this is a quote from Lawler, are you telling me you would shut down the government if there is not Ukraine funding?

Speaker 16 So the point is, Lawler, he's also using Ukraine as a wedge issue. You Democrats are holding up everything else over money to Ukraine.
It's your issue, right?

Speaker 16 So we have a large percentage of isolationists now in the Republican Party, and those votes against Ukraine funding signify that, right?

Speaker 16 But beyond that, we now have Kevin McCarthy, the speaker who was nominally a supporter of Ukraine, using Ukraine funding as a wedge issue against the Democrats.

Speaker 16 Lindsey Graham, who is nominally one of the most stalwart Republicans on Ukraine, agreeing to hold the Ukraine money hostage for border concessions, right?

Speaker 16 Mike Lawler, who is a Republican in a swing district, who is not supposed to be one of the crazies. So this is now a party-wide capitulation on the right.

Speaker 16 The Republican Party is no longer the party of defending democracies against totalitarianism or against Putin.

Speaker 16 It is the party that is fundamentally isolationist or is willing to use isolationism in public opinion as a weapon against Democrats and as a weapon against Ukraine.

Speaker 15 Okay, so we haven't done any horse race punditry on today's show. And by the way, there's so much other stuff going on.

Speaker 15 I mean, it does seem to be relevant on Earth 2.0 that the former president's trial in New York about the fraud of his companies is starting today.

Speaker 15 And Donald Trump is saying that he's going to be in court, which will be very, very interesting. He's ranting and railing.

Speaker 15 The judge has essentially already ruled, yeah, you're a crook, you're a fraudster, and I'm taking away your business. So he's already lost this trial.

Speaker 15 Kind of an interesting calculation on his part to show up in New York.

Speaker 15 Although I think that he's not totally inaccurate in saying that, you know, simply because he's cheated and lied on his taxes and valuation, that's not going to budge Republican voters.

Speaker 15 Look, I mean, if they're willing to overlook the conspiracy, the insurrection, the rape, and all of that stuff, there's no primary voter that's going to go, oh, really?

Speaker 15 You overvalued Mar-a-Lago. I think he kind of knows that, right? That's not going to be a problem for him.

Speaker 16 I'm less concerned about the people's judgments about the particulars of a civil case than I am about the whole bizarre incentive system where a guy gets indicted four times and goes up in the polls in his party, right?

Speaker 16 So that's what's totally messed up. So if I can just return to what we talked about at the beginning, I think the goal here is to restore rational incentives, right? So don't shut down the government.

Speaker 16 That will hurt you.

Speaker 16 That seems to have had an effect. Kevin McCarthy is recognizing the rational incentive.
Here, the rational incentive to restore is don't commit crimes or it will hurt you politically.

Speaker 15 Yeah, that would be good.

Speaker 16 Right now, it's really bad that committing crimes and blaming the evil, you know, jack-booted thugs is helping Donald Trump in the Republican primary.

Speaker 16 So I will be happy if what comes out of this is gradually the trials begin, the evidence is presented, and if the it would be great if the initial reaction of Republicans, which was the evil government is out to take down Trump, they've weaponized law enforcement, changes to, oh, gosh, now that we see the evidence presented against him, some of us are not going to vote for him and that will hurt him.

Speaker 15 Well, I wouldn't hold my breath on that. So among the other news stories we got over the weekend, RFK Jr.

Speaker 15 is floating an independent bid. Of course, this leads to all sorts of predictive punditry about who does this hurt more? Does this hurt Trump?

Speaker 15 Okay, so you can make the case that RFK hurts Trump because

Speaker 15 he's clearly established himself as an anti-vax conspiracy theorist. He's been big on Fox.
Clearly, right now, his political appeal.

Speaker 15 I'm not convinced of that because I think there's a big swath of voters that think that he's still RFK Jr.

Speaker 15 And so that there might be some attrition of Democratic votes, particularly from, shall we say, elderly voters who think, I like that RFK Sr. He's he's a Kennedy.
I've always voted for Kennedy.

Speaker 15 So where do you come down on this? I mean, again, I don't know the answer. We'll have to get some more data on this.
And even when we get data, who knows knows when we get it to the ballot box?

Speaker 15 But RFK, Jr., running as an independent. You know where the money is going to come from.
The money's going to come from the right. He's going to get propped up by MAGA World.

Speaker 15 But does it hurt Trump more or does it hurt Biden more? Crystal ball, Will.

Speaker 16 RFK is running. He's been running in the horseshoe lane, right? The crazy part of the right and the crazy part of the left, and they all come together with the horseshoe.

Speaker 16 So I think Democrats have done a pretty good job of prying a lot of rational Democrats away from him. That is is showing he's an anti-baxer.
So there's various signifiers about RFK.

Speaker 16 He's not one of us. So he'll keep his crazies on the right.

Speaker 16 I don't think he's going to hurt Biden that much at this point because I think he's already lost a lot of the people who would vote for Biden. You know who I think he's going to hurt? Cornell West.

Speaker 16 I think that there's a pocket of people who are not going to vote for Trump or Biden. They're nuts.
And some of them would vote for Cornell West or Ralph Nader or Jill Stein or whoever. And RFK Jr.

Speaker 16 is going to pick up those people because he's got the name.

Speaker 15 We should devote a whole show to the explanation or try to understand this horseshoe theory where the far left and the far right have come together and in their sort of nuttiness and extremism are not that far apart.

Speaker 15 It really has become a thing, right? With people on the far left begin to make common cause with people on the far right. And it's not immediately obvious.

Speaker 15 I could engage in sheepshot punditry, which I'm going to just now. I mean, it's like nut cases and conspiracy theorists, you know, it's like a magnet.
Think of the horseshoe as a big magnet.

Speaker 15 You know, all the filings, you know, tend to go together, you know, it's like nutcase calls unto nutcase. But there's obviously something else.

Speaker 15 It's just sort of a, what, a disillusionment with the status quo, a deep distrust of any sort of conventional wisdom, any sort of elite, any sort of establishment, a belief that America and our systems are thoroughly corrupt and discredited.

Speaker 15 So at some point, they hate the same people. They hate the same things.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And especially the warmongers.

Speaker 16 They hate the warmongers, which is you and and me, anybody who believes in, you know, stopping Russian aggression. So can we call them their anti-warmonger mongers?

Speaker 16 They're sort of, they're hanging out together against the globalists and the warmongers and the elite. Yeah.

Speaker 15 He has to be pretty far right, though, to look at Vladimir Putin and say, hey, there's my champion of Western civilization.

Speaker 15 Okay, the other like mildly interesting development, and I say mildly because I do not want to encourage any irrational exuberance about what's happening in the Republican primaries, but Donald Trump has apparently decided that Nikki Haley is somebody that he can punch down on.

Speaker 15 So he's out there. There was this weird episode over the weekend.
Did you see this? Where she comes back to her hotel room and finds a birdcage from the Trump campaign.

Speaker 16 Everybody's going, what the hell is this about?

Speaker 15 And basically it's Donald Trump's jibe that she's a bird brain or something like that, which strikes me as one of his lamer sorts of things.

Speaker 15 And she's kind of shrugging, well, not kind of, she's definitely shrugging it off. And I think that her folks are going, see, you know, Donald Trump thinks that I'm the number two now.

Speaker 15 So where are we at with Nikki Haley? Because it sure seems that way.

Speaker 16 I thoroughly agree with that. I mean, Trump's been beating up on Ron DeSantis for months.
DeSantis has plummeted.

Speaker 16 I don't know if he's statistically still, I think nationally he's still in second, but he's on his way down. What's the point of continuing to kick him?

Speaker 16 So Trump's now kicking somebody who's on her way up, and that's Haley, right? And she may have stalled. She had a really good first debate.
Her second debate was okay,

Speaker 16 not amazing, right? But she had some momentum. So if you're Trump, because remember, Trump is like chronos, right? He's just in, he's just wanting to eat all the children, wants to kill everybody off.

Speaker 16 He's thoroughly consumed with self-preservation and with hurting anyone who gets near him. So, I think it's a compliment to Haley that his campaign is targeting her at this point.

Speaker 16 I think she's right about that.

Speaker 15 She's been sort of waffling back and forth in Trump's camp. Am I appeasing Trump? Am I Trump adjacent?

Speaker 15 Do I want to be vice president? Clearly, now she has decided that she's not running for vice president. She's running for president.
I don't think she's going to have a shot.

Speaker 15 But if you're looking at this, okay, the field coalesces around somebody. And by the way, I feel like we're back in 2015 all over again.
I don't think it's going to be Glenn Young.

Speaker 15 I think that's wish casting. It's obviously not going to be Ron DeSantis.
I'm sorry to all of our good friends over at National Review. I mean, they tried so hard to will him a personality.

Speaker 15 I mean, they really, really did. I mean, they tried all of the de-asshole programming they could possibly think of.
It failed. So, if it's not going to be Yunkin, if it's not going to be DeSantis,

Speaker 15 then is it going to be Nikki? Which on paper is not a crazy idea, right?

Speaker 16 Right. To her credit, look, a lot of us have criticized Ron DeSantis for not being different enough from Trump, right?

Speaker 16 He's running as a substitute for Trump, but he goes to the Trump audience and he tries to be Trumpy. And the whole we're going to shoot him at the border thing is part of that.

Speaker 15 Stone cold dead at the border.

Speaker 16 And as you point out, if people want that, they're going to go for Trump. So to Haley's credit, partially, she's not doing that, right?

Speaker 16 She's been different enough from Trump to sort of carve out an audience among the non-Trump voters, which is a substantial number of people in the Republican Party. Not enough, but it's substantial.

Speaker 16 And so I think that makes her a more viable alternative to Trump. And this birdcage thing and whatever, and his attacks on social media are probably part of him recognizing that.

Speaker 16 And his power to hurt her is less than his power to hurt DeSantis because the people

Speaker 15 because

Speaker 16 the audience she has targeted is not so thoroughly Trumpy, right?

Speaker 15 This is really a good point. So Ron DeSantis made himself vulnerable to Trump by basically saying, I am the successor for MAGA.
So I'm going to go as hard MAGA as I possibly can.

Speaker 15 So this is my constituency. When Donald Trump basically said, no, you're fake MAGA, that did go at his target audience.

Speaker 15 Haley is really been targeting the more rational, uncommitted Republicans who will all come back to Trump eventually. We

Speaker 15 know that. Yeah, these donors that are sitting around thinking, you know, who are we going to support now? What are we going to do?

Speaker 15 No one's going to say, we can't support Nikki Haley because Donald Trump says she's a bird brain. I mean, that's disqualifying, right?

Speaker 16 So you're right. Right.
I mean, Chris Christie has gone right at Trump.

Speaker 16 And while I applauded for that, and I think you do too, it may be that he has alienated a sort of middle audience in the Republican Party of people who don't really like Trump's personality, but they like Trump's policies.

Speaker 16 They don't like attacks on Trump. Haley has been kind of weasly.
She's navigated in between these. And I don't like it morally, but maybe it works better.

Speaker 16 So she has an audience of people who, as you just described, Trump can't take away from her so easily because

Speaker 16 they've already decided they're not going to vote for Trump. But there's also sort of a larger audience that she can reach in the party by being a little bit nicer.

Speaker 16 It may be the difference, Charlie, between New Jersey and South Carolina. You know, New Jersey is very blunt.
We say what we think, right?

Speaker 16 And South Carolina is more like, bless your heart. It's a subtler way of taking digs at people.

Speaker 16 And Haley has been doing, with the exception of her attacks on Vivek Ramaswamy, which I applaud, she has been subtler. And it may be that she has made herself more viable as a result of that.

Speaker 16 What she gets out of it, I don't know, because she's not going to be vice president.

Speaker 15 Okay, so what are you going to be looking at this week? What have we forgotten to talk about today? I just feel that things are rushing so quickly.

Speaker 16 I'm really kind of interested in these impeachment hearings, the impeachment inquiry hearings against Biden. Yeah, they're going to what they've found and not found on it.

Speaker 16 And I'm particularly interested in this complete lie that they're promoting about that Biden went to Ukraine and said that they should, you know, we're going to withhold a billion dollars unless you fire the prosecutor because the prosecutor is going after my son.

Speaker 15 That was debunked years ago.

Speaker 16 It was debunked years ago, but I see this everywhere now. The Republicans are relying because, of course, they don't have a quid pro quo.

Speaker 16 They have Hunter Biden as a sleazeball who tried to profit off his connection to his father. True.

Speaker 15 And they don't have anything on Joe Biden because he didn't do anything.

Speaker 16 So they're trying to turn this firing of the prosecutor into the quid pro quo. And I'm going to be writing something about that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, if that's their quid pro quo, they're not going to go anywhere.

Speaker 15 I mean, on the other hand, look, I do think that people need to recognize how sleazy some of the Hunter Biden, some of the family stuff was.

Speaker 15 This doesn't rise to the level of high crimes crimes and misdemeanors, but this wasn't an error in judgment. And maybe the error in judgment is that Joe Biden just loves his son too much.

Speaker 15 But I mean, clearly, you had these folks who were trading upon his name to make a lot of money.

Speaker 15 And the reason people were paying them a lot of money is because they thought that perhaps it was going to buy them some sort of influence. So it's the appearance of it.

Speaker 15 Again, it's depressing to read. But unless they can show that they actually got something for it, there's kind of a lot of nothing here, especially, and I hate the whataboutism card.

Speaker 15 I really, really do, but I just don't know how you can become really, really morally indignant.

Speaker 15 I mean, genuinely morally indignant, as opposed to pretending to be morally indignant, as opposed to the performative aspect.

Speaker 15 When you're looking at the Trump family and seeing, like, yeah, well, the Trumps would never trade upon their name in order to make money. We never heard of this Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump.
folks.

Speaker 15 I mean, what is that all about?

Speaker 16 I agree with that.

Speaker 16 And this is an area where I think the bulwark can play a useful role because there's too many people who are Democrats, who are progressives, who think that the way to oppose Republicans is to hold the party line and never acknowledge anything.

Speaker 16 This is a terrible, terrible mistake on their part. There is a serious problem at the border.
Republicans are right about that.

Speaker 16 And Democrats need to step up and deal with it or people will turn to the wannabe dictator to deal with it, right?

Speaker 16 And in the case of corruption and Hunter Biden, no, Joe Biden is not corrupt, but Hunter Biden absolutely used his father's name to make money.

Speaker 16 Joe Biden probably helped more than he should have in terms of like going to dinners with people and that kind of thing. He shouldn't have done that.

Speaker 16 And Democrats should be upfront about the corruption of what Hunter Biden did. It was certainly trading on his father's name and exploiting the appearance that he could get his father to do things.

Speaker 16 And that's just gross and wrong. And it hurt Joe Biden, and it'll hurt the whole party if we don't face it.

Speaker 15 That's right. And also, I mean, it is the problem for Joe Biden because he can't fire his son, right?

Speaker 15 I mean, it's like under normal circumstances, I mean, you can get rid of Bob Menendez, but you can't get rid of Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden's going to be there.

Speaker 15 And this is part of this culture of political denial where people say, well, you know, if you just don't talk about these things, they go away.

Speaker 15 And I'm sorry that, you know, and you're paying attention to this. It's like watching a prairie fire come toward you.
Okay.

Speaker 15 You're going to have to confront this and simply saying, there's no prairie fire. There's no fire.
I see no fire. If you see a fire, there's something wrong with you.

Speaker 15 Then you're not going to be able to engage in.

Speaker 15 So they're going to have to engage on all of these things that many of our commenters say, please don't talk about the fact that he's old because if you don't talk about it, nobody will notice.

Speaker 15 Please don't talk about inflation because otherwise people will think that it's gone away.

Speaker 15 Please don't talk about Hunter Biden because otherwise, you know, people will think that the Democrats have suddenly developed this incredible ethical compass.

Speaker 15 The problem with that line is that, boy, you know, we have this one corrupt party and Democrats are just the moral avatars.

Speaker 15 If you're not going to acknowledge that the Hunter thing is a problem, it's going to be hard to be taken seriously.

Speaker 15 This is part of the problem, I think, of our siloed world and punditry that doesn't actually deal with real people.

Speaker 15 That you go into a room with real voters in a swing state, and say a mythical state like Wisconsin, and say, Well, you know, what I really love is, you know, that there is no inflation anymore.

Speaker 15 There is no problem at the border, and you know, Hunter-Biden, it's all made up.

Speaker 16 People are going to go, okay, what?

Speaker 16 Right. I love what you said about silos.
That is the problem.

Speaker 16 So, to everybody out there who's like, you, Charlie and Willie, you and everybody, you should stop talking about these things because nobody, you know, you are living in a silo.

Speaker 16 You need to hear from more people who a broader cross-section of America.

Speaker 16 That doesn't have to be the people who are at the Trump rally, but like this guy, Trump is sitting at like, you know, even Stephen with Biden, a guy who tried to overthrow the government is sitting at even Stephen.

Speaker 16 You've got to get out there. You've got to talk to a broader cross-section of people.

Speaker 16 And I think that's part of your job and mind, Charlie, is to introduce the lefties who think that if we don't talk about this, nobody's talking about it to all the people who are talking about it, about inflation, about the border, about all of those things.

Speaker 15 I totally agree with you. And so, Will, we will continue talking about this and we will talk again next Monday because think how much smarter we'll be a week from today.

Speaker 15 And thank you all for listening to today's Bullwork podcast. I'm Charlie Sex.
Just a quick reminder, you can watch us on YouTube. This will be published later today.

Speaker 15 And keep an eye out for our very, very short morning shots. They're only about two or three minutes, but I think they carry kind of a punch.
We'll be back tomorrow. We will do this all over again.

Speaker 15 The Bulrock Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

Speaker 19 Howdy, partner. Next time you get chicken at McDonald's, you won't have to choose between the creamy flavors of Ranch and the tangy kick of buffalo any longer.

Speaker 19 This time, enjoy all the flavors you love all at once. Try new creamy and tangy Buffalo Ranch sauce.
I participate in McDonald's for a limited time.