Will Saletan: The Politics of Atonement

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Speaker 12 Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Seitz.
It is September 26, 2023, and I am joined by my colleague, Will Salatan. One day late.
Happy Tuesday, Will. Thank you, Charlie.

Speaker 12 I was out yesterday for Yom Kippur, but I'm feeling all atoned, rested, and ready.

Speaker 12 I think a lot of us need a lot of atonement. I think America has a lot to atone for.
So I hope you carry the burden for us. Okay, so where do we start today?

Speaker 12 We have the president of the United States out on the picket line. We are headed toward a shutdown this week, also the beginning of the Biden impeachment hearings.
What could possibly go wrong?

Speaker 12 But I have to say that I am obsessed with two stories today, and I'm not sure which one I want to start with.

Speaker 12 Number one, a moment to reflect upon MAGA World's obsession with masculinity and masculine courage.

Speaker 12 And yet, when it comes down to masculine courage, when you compare all of the uber male members of the Praetorian Guard for the endomorphic Orange God King to 26-year-old Cassidy Hutchison, you get a really interesting contrast, don't you?

Speaker 12 I mean, you think of all these guys that kept their heads down, who came up with all the reasons why, oh, geez, I can't speak out or I'm afraid of this or that.

Speaker 12 And then you have this 26-year-old young woman of incredible poise who just comes out and says, you know what? This is wrong. I'm going to testify.

Speaker 12 And she knew the shitstorm that was coming down on her head and she did it anyway. I mean, it's impressive, Will.
You know, good for her.

Speaker 12 And I hope she's a model to other people who, Charlie, is it Mark Twain who said, if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything?

Speaker 12 There's this marvelous clarity that comes into your life. Everything comes together when you stop lying, when you stop excusing the inexcusable.

Speaker 12 And Cassidy Hutchinson obviously worked for Donald Trump, but when it came came time to tell the truth about January 6th, she's the one who did.

Speaker 12 And so she doesn't have to go through any of these gymnastics, the embarrassing gymnastics that other people are going through, that these men are going through, right?

Speaker 12 And of course, she's being attacked for it. But you can be under attack and you always have that inner solace that comes from knowing you did the right thing.
It's the looking in the mirror test.

Speaker 12 I think it was, you know, somebody that told her, you need to be able to look yourself in the mirror every single day.

Speaker 12 But it raises the question, why so many of the people that she worked with in that administration failed that same test? I mean, I don't think this is a political question.

Speaker 12 It feels like a psychological question, maybe a theological question, since you've spent the last couple of days doing atonement. You know, why do some people atone and some people refuse to atone?

Speaker 12 It's not just fear. There's something else there, right? It's some inner character.

Speaker 12 It's some perspective on life that, you know, I think Adam Kinzinger says that he keeps thinking about his kids and his grandkids reading the history books and not being embarrassed to see his name.

Speaker 12 And yet, there's a whole bunch of grown-ass men whose, you know, manhood was put to shame by Cassidy Hutchinson. What makes the difference?

Speaker 12 So the gender stuff we've just talked about, these men did not stand up and do the brave thing, and this woman did. Yeah.
Which I would make the same point about Liz Cheney, by the way. Yeah.

Speaker 12 But in addition to that, there's the factor of age, right? One of the things that happens to us as we age is we get kind of encrusted. We develop rationalizations for our predilections.

Speaker 12 We want to believe certain things. We tell ourselves they're true.
And then we build these rationales around them. And that's what these old men have done, right?

Speaker 12 And basically our government is run by old men. Here we have a young person, and part of the point of young people is to come into the world fresh.

Speaker 12 And, you know, as a baby, you're fairly genuine in the way you deal with other people, right? You're not accustomed to lying. You're trying to understand what is really true.

Speaker 12 And I think what Cassidy Hutchinson has demonstrated here is that having some young people in positions where they can at least expose the truth, tell the truth, is really important to our system of government.

Speaker 12 That was way more profound than I was expecting this early in the morning, Will. I mean, obviously, you picked up some stuff on the day of atonement.
I think you're right.

Speaker 12 I think that everybody goes through that phase of life where you go, okay,

Speaker 12 so what I am saying and doing is completely absurd. But you know what? I'm stuck.
This is the choice that I've right? I've invested 20 years or 30 years in all of this.

Speaker 12 And so they have the sunken costs. She obviously had some sunken costs as well.
I mean, she went into the Trump White House. You know, she adored the president for a while.

Speaker 12 She's looking back like, what the hell? But it is easier at that point when you haven't devoted decades of your life and built up all of this, this incrustation. But she was on MSNBC last night.

Speaker 12 And again, reminded us of rather the incredible poise that she brings to all of this. I'm not trying to gush about this.
I really am not.

Speaker 12 But it is the contrast between her and all the other toadies from the White House, you know, particularly the ones who are constantly talking about irradiating their testicles to make themselves more manly and everything.

Speaker 12 And then just watch her

Speaker 12 going out and putting them to shame. Okay, so here's one of the clips from Cassidy Hutchinson from last night.

Speaker 13 I can't speak to the psyche of my,

Speaker 13 I won't say my fellow Republicans because I do not think that we are a part of the same Republican Party.

Speaker 13 I still consider myself a Republican. I consider myself a Republican in the sense of Senator Mitt Romney and the Reagan Republican Party.

Speaker 13 I believe that the Republican Party needs a strong conservative party. I do not believe that Mr.

Speaker 13 Trump is a strong Republican, but in this next election cycle, it's, in my opinion, it's the make-or-break moment for the Republican Party.

Speaker 13 Now is the time if these politicians, these men and some women that are currently in Congress want to make the break and want to take the stand, they have to do it now.

Speaker 13 We can't wait any longer for them to do it. I don't know why they're so willing to support him.

Speaker 13 I think it's extremely disappointing and it is not a hard issue to take. We're talking about a man who, at the very essence of his being,

Speaker 13 almost destroyed democracy in one day and he wants to do it again. He wants to run for president to do it again.
He's been indicted four times since January 6th.

Speaker 13 I would not have a clear conscience and be able to sleep at night if I were a Republican in Congress that supported Donald Trump. And,

Speaker 13 you know, I think that if they're not willing to split with that, then we're in serious danger for the party.

Speaker 12 Part of me is hoping that there are some members of Republican members of Congress that watch that or hear about that and are actually embarrassed.

Speaker 12 I'm not going to name any names like Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin or anybody like that, but you would think they'd be a little bit embarrassed, like this young woman who is saying what they know is true.

Speaker 12 They all know it's true. You know, but having praised her poise, who's going to break the bad news to her? That, you know, the make or break moment has come and gone.

Speaker 12 The time for choosing has happened. The Republican Party has chosen all of this.
And the future of the Republican Party is,

Speaker 12 it's not going to be Mitt Romney. They're not going to go back to zombie Reaganism.

Speaker 12 I mean, I agree with everything she says, but I feel like we're seeing sort of a nascent never Trumper is like, welcome to this, but we've been been out here for seven years saying this sort of thing.

Speaker 12 And, you know,

Speaker 12 it's not just over the mountain. The unicorn is not coming over the hill to rescue us here.
But of course, we do have Will here who's always going to find the pony.

Speaker 12 The pony is, this is what old guys like us say, right? That it's over, that it's done. The Republican Party made its choice, right?

Speaker 12 And part of the point of Cassidy Hutchinson is to remind us, it's never over. It's never over.
There is always an opportunity to do the right thing, right?

Speaker 12 I'll just pull back and say, I just, you know, I was in Yom Kippur for 24 hours and, you know, you're thinking about all the things you this has been a good experience for you. Yeah.

Speaker 12 There's always a chance to repent and atone and redeem yourself.

Speaker 12 And I would point out that, you know, she starts off in that clip talking about the Reagan Republican Party, a party that you and I would say is gone, right?

Speaker 12 But it's not entirely gone.

Speaker 12 I mean, just to give an example, Mike Pence, the guy that you and I would say, you know, sold himself out for four or five years, Pence did give a few weeks ago a very good speech about the Reagan Republican Party and the Trump Party.

Speaker 12 Right, we've talked about that. He articulated, and others are articulating, some differences on policy that are also differences in character and principle.

Speaker 12 So there can be movement in that direction.

Speaker 12 It may be too late for some people to redeem themselves in the history books, but it's as long as there is a new generation coming along, a new generation of young conservatives who can look at this and say, you know, this was a terrible blot on the history of the movement, and we choose to go in a different direction.

Speaker 12 I don't know about the party, Charlie. I think you make a good point about the party, but the conservatism can redeem itself.
Well, we will have to see.

Speaker 12 But, you know, when you see somebody like a Cassidy Hutchinson coming out saying all of that, it has to give you a little bit of hope, but it's also worth remembering what an outlier she was.

Speaker 12 And you can sense in her tone of voice that she's kind of amazed. Like, why are other people not seeing what I am seeing?

Speaker 12 Why are other people not saying what i am saying well keep in mind that she was working in the trump white house she was working for donald j trump into january of 2021 so okay you know a lot of us have been asking this question for some time we have one more quote from uh cassidy hutchinson since she's out there doing all that you know what's coming her way i mean the new york times story you know talks about the the incredible flood of social media attacks on her that kind of forced her into being a hermit and you know that they're going to ramp up, but now that she has a book coming out, here's the second cut from Cassidy Hutchinson.

Speaker 13 Looking at the bigger picture here, bringing it back to next year's election, these people very well could be in power again.

Speaker 13 And do we want people who have already shown that they're willing and want to overthrow an election,

Speaker 13 duly elected, for a duly elected president,

Speaker 13 which is the pinnacle of our democracy. Do we want to put people like that back in power?

Speaker 13 Do we want to to put people back in power that have mishandled and have been showed to mishandle the most sensitive national security secrets that our nation has?

Speaker 13 You know, that's the question that we need to ask ourselves.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I'm willing to ask that question. Will, I wasn't planning on asking you about this because the polls were getting a little bit boring.

Speaker 12 But I mean, the polls are, let's leave aside the Washington Post. poll, right? I mean, the one that shows, you know, Trump ahead by nine points.
I think that was an outlier.

Speaker 12 But all the other polls are showing that this is going to be a close race, that Americans are kind of looking at these two guys and scratching their heads and going, yeah, maybe we got to give the guy another shot.

Speaker 12 So I'm sorry to use the phrase. People are saying, why do you keep using the phrase bedwetting? It doesn't seem like an appropriate, well, you know, okay, you know what I mean.

Speaker 12 There's a lot of Democratic bedwetting about this. What do you make of these polls? Joe Biden seems to be historically unpopular at this point.
Got a lot of negatives, a lot of angst out there.

Speaker 12 What's going on with you, Will? Here's where I really want to make a point to some of the progressives who respond to people like you and me on social media. Some are followers of this podcast.

Speaker 12 There's a lot of dismissal of the Washington Post poll. Now, the Washington Post poll is an outlier, right? Yeah.
It artificially inflates Trump's number to 51%.

Speaker 12 Trump is not up nine points on Biden, but he is running even with Biden. If you look at the average, that's what he's doing, right?

Speaker 12 It is not just the Post poll. The NBC just had a poll that just came out, right? And they show, again, Biden's approval is in the toilet.
Basically tied.

Speaker 12 And Biden has lost a lot. He's lost a lot with black voters, Latino voters, people with a high school education or less.
So it's not just about this poll and poll denialism.

Speaker 12 I'm starting to see not just criticism of this particular poll on the head-to-head number, but people are dismissing polls when they don't like the results. Okay, so this is a general problem.

Speaker 12 And And part of the sickness of Donald Trump is not accepting negative feedback, not accepting information that says, you lost an election, right? So a poll is not an election, but it is a warning.

Speaker 12 It is talking to Americans. It can be a quasi-reality check.
Absolutely. The question is, how do you respond to the reality checks? Do you go deeper into your bubble of denial?

Speaker 12 Or do you think, okay, we need to pay attention to this because we have time to address this and deal with it? Or should we pretend that if we don't talk about it, it will mysteriously go away?

Speaker 12 It's not going to go away. And if you retreat into your bubble, where all your friends on social media reject polls, you're going to be surprised when you lose an election.

Speaker 12 And we can't afford to be surprised this time, right? We can't afford to lose to this guy. No, we can't.

Speaker 12 And I know people don't like us talking about Joe Biden's age, but I did actually come out yesterday with a formula for Joe Biden, which deals with the problem of Donald Trump, but also, you know, Joe Biden, how do you address it?

Speaker 12 And my take is basically that Joe Biden needs to say something like, yes, I'm old, but he's crazy and he's dangerous. Okay, yes, I am old, but this guy is deranged.

Speaker 12 He's anti-democratic and he is fascist adjacent. Right.
You know, just like own it. Okay.
Okay. I'm the old guy.
This guy is the absolute menace. Just basically boil it down.
Okay.

Speaker 12 By the way, we were talking about Cassidy Hutchinson.

Speaker 12 And the reason you know that they're going to go crazy about her is because you know that there are certain targets for the MAGA world that they just cannot resist.

Speaker 12 And there's something about young women that apparently triggers them. Have you seen the latest MAGA jihad?

Speaker 12 They're going after Taylor Swift because she... No, seriously, I don't know whether you saw this.
I mean, you almost have to have visuals for all of this.

Speaker 12 So you have Sean Davis, one of the founders of the Federalist, saying, yeah, her music sucks because, of course, you know, she's woke now. And Roger Kimball.
He says, and she's homely too.

Speaker 12 Okay, so yeah, this is a great cause. This is a great fight for MAGA to pick.
Let's go after Taylor Swift because she's not popular or talented or anything.

Speaker 12 She's not influential or anything, but she's a young woman who's out of her lane. So I don't know.
At some point, you know, I know it's a cheap shot, but I am not better than doing the cheap shot.

Speaker 12 And by the way, I know Roger Kimball. I have had dealings with Roger Kimball.
He has blurbed my books. I want to do this.

Speaker 12 But I do think that it's worthwhile to put a picture of Roger Kimball next to Taylor Swift with his tweet. and she's homely too.
Really, really, Roger, you want to go there. Okay, really? All right.

Speaker 12 Before we move on, can we just dub this Taylor Swift insanity, TSDS, right? Taylor Swift derangement syndrome.

Speaker 12 I think there's a serious case of that going on on the right. Oh, that's pretty good.
You've already put that out on Twitter, haven't you?

Speaker 12 I have.

Speaker 12 Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast.

Speaker 12 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 12 And every day, we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebulwark.com and take a look around?

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Speaker 12 Okay, so the other story, which I think has its comic elements as well, even though it's also got its serious elements, is the Robert Menendez indictment.

Speaker 12 And I wrote about that in morning shots this morning.

Speaker 12 I mean, the thing about Robert Menendez, who is the former temporarily stepped down as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I mean, this guy is a big deal. He's been indicted before.

Speaker 12 He escaped that by having a hung jury. That apparently emboldened him because it certainly didn't make him more prudent or more cautious.

Speaker 12 Because we have this new indictment, you know, alleging that he and his heimmate and his wife were soliciting massive amounts of bribes from these Egyptian businessmen.

Speaker 12 And so, I mean, on one level, it's a pretty serious case because it sounds like he was accepting these bribes in order to protect the Egyptian government and help his crooked cronies.

Speaker 12 So that makes it a national security issue. This is not a trivial issue.
The comic opera part about all this is that it's like a throwback. It's old school crook.
I mean, the guy

Speaker 12 has cash. $100 bills stuffed into envelopes, stuffed into his clothing, gold bars lying around his house, a Mercedes-Benz.

Speaker 12 I mean, this is like, I wrote this morning, it's almost nostalgic, where you're not dealing with some, you know, esoteric, you you know, there's, there's some, you know, seven levels of separation, or, you know, here is this, you know, shell company where they transferred money.

Speaker 12 No, the guy was accepting envelopes of $100 bills in cash from his crooked friends, and he left it around the house.

Speaker 12 When the FBI raided his house, they found, and this is where it becomes almost cartoonishly corrupt, they found $480,000 in cash, which is, I don't know, do you have that around your house house well?

Speaker 12 I mean,

Speaker 12 you have like a little bit of mad money around your house. You're a little bit worried, right? You know, under your mattress.
$480,000. And by the way, so this is his explanation.

Speaker 12 Defiant Robert Menendez comes out. He's, you know, he's a Democratic senator from New Jersey.
He's up for re-election. He's not going anywhere.
And so all the headlines use the word defiant.

Speaker 12 This is his explanation. Let's play a little bit of this.

Speaker 15 For 30 years, I have withdrawn thousands of dollars in cash from my personal savings account, account

Speaker 15 which i have kept for emergencies and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in cuba

Speaker 15 now this may seem old-fashioned no but these were monies drawn from my personal savings account based on the income that i have lawfully derived over those 30 years

Speaker 12 oh my god i mean seriously okay he didn't mention the gold bars and he's been apparently drawing this out for 30 years even though apparently the bills that that they found have only been minted in the last 10 years.

Speaker 12 And little just dazzling detail, they have the DNA of the Egyptian bribers on it. I mean, that's like really, well, they use the word defiant, but it's just shameless.

Speaker 12 I mean, isn't Robert Menendez basically kind of testing the post-shame world that we live in right now, figuring, hey, in the era of Trump, you know, the evidence to your eyes doesn't matter.

Speaker 12 Accountability doesn't matter. I'm just going to brazen this out.
I'm going to play the victim card. And what? What do you make of this, Will? Okay, so first of all, I brought a prop with me.

Speaker 12 This is the Yom Kippur prayer book. I was reading this yesterday.
Okay. All right.

Speaker 12 So in the, in the Yom Kippur prayer book, we say there's a Jewish prayer where we ask forgiveness for a whole bunch of things we or others have done, not necessarily us.

Speaker 12 So this is an others thing, right? The list literally includes, Charlie, the ways speaking to God, the ways we have wronged you by offering or accepting bribes. That's literally in their prayer book.

Speaker 12 So, okay, that seems very specific. Yeah, there's a little problem though, though, Charlie, right after that, the harm we have caused in your world by profaning your name in public.

Speaker 12 So we'll set that'll be for you next week. But let's go back to the bribes.

Speaker 12 So the prayer book says, and the Christian tradition says, seek forgiveness for wrongs you have done, including bribes, if you've done bribes. Well, Robert Menendez has

Speaker 12 plainly done bribes. And instead of asking forgiveness, instead of apologizing or acknowledging, instead of showing the honesty that Cassidy Hutchinson did, he's lying, right?

Speaker 12 It's absolutely perfect that his excuse is the trauma of his families, you know, in Cuba, right?

Speaker 12 The government is, so I have done a little bit of research. I have investigated and found the exact village in Cuba where Robert Menendez was born.
It is called New York City.

Speaker 12 It is called New York City, New York, okay?

Speaker 12 He was born in this country. He has lived in this country in New York and New Jersey.

Speaker 12 And he's claiming that because his parents suffered under the Cuban government, that for 69 years he has been hoarding cash, right?

Speaker 12 As you point out, it's logically impossible because the bills aren't dated from that long ago. He's got the fingerprints on the envelopes.
I mean, Charlie, I was just watching.

Speaker 12 Literally, envelopes. I've been watching the Sopranos.
Like, I thought envelopes of cash, that's gone out. No, nope.
Menendez has them.

Speaker 12 The gold bars that he's got, the serial numbers are traced to the guy that he got the bribes, right?

Speaker 12 So he's dead to rights this guy it's bad yeah for him to come out and claim that he's being persecuted as a latino absolutely shameless it's disgusting it's disgusting because he's lying because he's a crook and it's also insulting to every person every latino and every minority who has legitimately been discriminated against for bob menendez to come in and use that excuse when he's a plain straight-up crook okay so just a kind of a weird footnote and i put this in my newsletter as well there is kind kind of a soulmate thing going on with him and Donald Trump, sort of, or at least Trump thinks so, because after he got off on his first felony charge because of the hung jury, this comedian, and this is, I said it was weird, this comedian pranks Donald Trump, who was then the president of the United States.

Speaker 12 Trump takes his call on Air Force One. The guy says, I'm Bob Menendez.
And so Trump is thinking that it is this Democratic senator who just got off on corruption charges.

Speaker 12 And he's saying, congratulations. We are so proud of you.
This is so wonderful. This was so so unfair of you.

Speaker 12 And I wonder whether or not Menendez kind of thinks that, okay, so Trump has been able to brazen out these indictments and actually becomes more popular.

Speaker 12 I'm going to try to see whether that works for me, even though I'm a Democrat. It won't.
But that's where I think the shamelessness comes in. Okay, so what about the Democratic response?

Speaker 12 The Democratic response seems very different than the Republican response to Donald Trump. There is no progressive liberal media defense or rationalization of Bob Menendez.

Speaker 12 You're not seeing pushback against the indictments. On the other hand, as you and I are speaking, only four Democratic senators, four, have called for Menendez to resign.

Speaker 12 Chuck Schumer is hiding in the cloakroom. Joe Biden kind of punted on all of this.
So what do you make of this? Why the reluctance? What's the dynamic here?

Speaker 12 Because I think it's premature to say that, hey, the Democrats have really learned their lesson on corruption. I mean, look how they're lining up behind him.

Speaker 12 I mean, they're doing much better than the Republicans are, but right now, only four. Why only four? Because as you point out, this is dead to rights.
This guy's old school crook.

Speaker 12 Why is this not an easy, you got to go?

Speaker 12 Well, mostly what I've seen is Democrats saying that he should go. The Senate, though, Charlie,

Speaker 12 some.

Speaker 12 It's a little bit complicated because, you know, the defense of I am, you know,

Speaker 12 until proven guilty,

Speaker 12 as you point out, the same defense that Trump is using, right? If you're going to accept it in one, you accept it in the other. The Senate is a particular kind of club.
Very clubby. Right.

Speaker 12 It is a big problem that senators tend to stick together. Now,

Speaker 12 in this case, you have the interim step that he was forced out as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Temporarily.
Right. And that's only by rule.
That's because the Senate has a rule.

Speaker 12 If you get indicted, you have to step down. He has suffered a consequence.
It's not quite the same as impeachment, but it's a political measure. It's not a legal measure.

Speaker 12 So, look, I don't want to make excuses for this. Menendez is a crook.
More Democratic senators should come out and say so. However, and they will, I think, yeah.
Right.

Speaker 12 But I would point out, Charlie, that at that press conference where Menendez came out and denied it, he had a bunch of people behind him and none of them, they were friends of his or people who had, he didn't have a single political figure behind him.

Speaker 12 Nobody came out and stood behind him the way that Lindsey Graham and other Republicans stand next to Donald Trump as he's under indictment four times. No, I think that's important.

Speaker 12 And I think that there's a lot of sort of like looking around who goes first in all of this.

Speaker 12 I think the four, what, John Fetterman, Tammy Baldwin from Wisconsin, the new senator from Vermont, and Sherrod Brown from Ohio.

Speaker 12 So, Sherrod Brown from Ohio and Tammy Baldwin are both up for re-election.

Speaker 12 In New Jersey, all the Democrats seem to, with the exception of Corey Booker, so far as of this taping, have said that he should step down because, you know, in New Jersey, they understand what a threat he poses.

Speaker 12 They have elections this year, right? There are off-year elections in New Jersey.

Speaker 12 You also have now,

Speaker 12 they will have an alternative. Andy Kim, who's a Democratic congressman, is announcing that he's running against Menendez.
So they still have a little bit of time to clean up this mess. Right.

Speaker 12 And I think they probably will, even though I don't expect that Menendez is going to do the right thing. There are people who are just arrogant and shameless, and I think he's one of the main.

Speaker 12 Okay, here's the thing that blows my mind about this. It is the stupidity of it.
He knows that he's under scrutiny. He's already faced a felony charge, right? He knows they're watching him.

Speaker 12 And he's stuffing $100 bills into his clothes, clothes with his name on it. You know, he has gold bars in his house.

Speaker 12 The recklessness, the arrogance of it, that also tells me that anyone is expecting that he's going to do the right thing is naive.

Speaker 12 Honestly, if I were Menendez's attorney, I would cite all of that behavior as compulsive. I would say it is irrational, right?

Speaker 12 So, like, he does have some kind of compulsion to like save money in case Fidel Castro comes to

Speaker 12 take his wealth.

Speaker 12 Look, it's totally ludicrous.

Speaker 12 By the way, we played the clip of Menendez saying, I hoarded all this money because I was afraid of my Cuban childhood.

Speaker 12 But the other thing is he has explicitly written two statements saying that he's being targeted as a Latino. One of them was this written statement from Menendez.

Speaker 12 It's not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat, right? And to the credit of some Democrats, I want to specifically call out AOC here.

Speaker 12 Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was asked about that specific statement on Face the Nation, and she said, yes, there's systemic bias. Yes, that happens.

Speaker 12 But I think what is here in this indictment is quite clear. And it's very important for Democrats to come out and say, just because he's a Democrat does not mean I'm going to defend this criminal.

Speaker 12 And for Latinos to say the same thing, just because he's playing the Latino card.

Speaker 12 And I would say the same thing about any Jewish person who was accused of a crime and had this kind of evidence against them. Don't come out and claim this is anti-Semitism.
You're a crook.

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Speaker 12 Okay, so let's switch to something a little bit more substantive because maybe we're become numbed by this: that the government is about to shut down on Saturday.

Speaker 12 Any doubt in your mind that we're going to have a government shutdown? No, we're going to have one. Nobody's even going through the motions of pretending.

Speaker 12 And of course, this comes after a week where Kevin McCarthy's, you know, self-gelded speakership turned out to be

Speaker 12 self-geld. I mean, the hollowness, the level of humiliation for Kevin McCarthy.
And none of that will is surprising, right?

Speaker 12 This was foretold from the moment that that he made concession after concession to one lunatic after another.

Speaker 12 He empowered the bomb-throwing caucus, and now he is shocked that they're blowing up the place.

Speaker 12 I mean, I love his quote where he says, this is a completely new thing, people that just want to burn the place down. Really, Kevin, a completely new thing.
Where has your head been the last 10 years?

Speaker 12 Interesting soundbite that I want to play for you from Neil Bradley, who is, I don't know this guy, okay. He's the executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce.

Speaker 12 Now, this, of course, is a republican leaning organization these are fiscal conservatives right i mean this is um we're not going to the progressive caucus here and neil bradley was on one of these shows and they're talking about this shutdown and how it's different from other shutdowns all of which by the way were pointless and stupid and failed.

Speaker 12 Okay. I mean, let's just like put that in some historical context.
But this one is in a category of itself. And Neil Bradley explains it.

Speaker 12 Again, the guy, the executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce. Let's play this guy.

Speaker 18 You think about this shutdown that could hit us on Saturday at midnight. It looks a little different than

Speaker 18 the three most recent shutdowns we've had, or even the five shutdowns we've had since 1995. All of them, you can point to something that people were specifically fighting over.

Speaker 18 Levels of deficit reduction, or defunding the Affordable Care Act, or the most recent one over the border wall and funding for it. Now, all of those shutdowns, none of them were successful.

Speaker 18 None of them resulted in policy changes. But at least least you knew what they were fighting over.
I've started calling this the Seinfeld shutdown.

Speaker 18 It's really not very clear what, if anything, that they're fighting over other than fighting. And

Speaker 18 that's what's really disappointing when you look at this and you realize they're going to make a choice here.

Speaker 18 And increasingly, I'm afraid they're going to make the wrong choice and shut down the government. And it's going to be American businesses and families who pay the prices.

Speaker 12 Well, the Seinfeld shutdown, because it's like, look, what is this actually about? What do they expect to accomplish? I thought that was a really interesting point. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 12 And you can see the illustration of that Seinfeld problem in McCarthy's response to these Republicans who want to burn down the government, right?

Speaker 12 They're trying to come up with, and the Senate Republicans are trying to come up with, what is it we can do?

Speaker 12 And they don't know exactly what they can put in there in a CR, a continuing resolution, to keep the government running. So one of them is like, well, what if we take the Ukraine money out?

Speaker 12 Well, that'll appease some people, right? But what about others? They want an 8% cut across the board. They want to cut the government generally, but there isn't.
Defund the Trump prosecution.

Speaker 12 Oh, my goodness. The defund, right.
That is the Trump agenda, because, of course, Trump has no agenda larger than himself, right? All he wants to do is defund the prosecutors, defund the FBI.

Speaker 12 And he's got plenty of House Republicans who are with him. Enough.
Yeah, I'm not right.

Speaker 12 So, of course, the problem mathematically is the original, what, 20 House Republicans who tried to block McCarthy as Speaker, they're still the problem, right?

Speaker 12 And without them, he can't move. But McCarthy has a choice.
He has options.

Speaker 12 So he has, as he described them, the Republicans, the House Republicans who want to burn it all down, burn down the government, burn down the country, right? He's got that option.

Speaker 12 Then he's got on the other side, Democrats. He just needs enough Democratic votes to combine with the constructive Republicans to pass something, right? Ah, but there's the rub, right? Right.

Speaker 12 And he is choosing to work with the burners instead of with the Democrats. And that's all on him.
Yeah, but does he have a choice here? And again, I don't think he has a good choice.

Speaker 12 I don't think there's a good option for him.

Speaker 12 Because, yeah, if he wants to actually govern, if he wants to keep the government open, which you would think is one of the fundamental first priorities of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, if he really wanted to do that, he would, in fact, work with some Democrats, find some moderate Democrats, put together a bipartisan coalition to, I don't know, run America.

Speaker 12 But if he did that, then he would be accused of betraying the Republican Party. He knows that he hangs by that thread of the favor of Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 12 He knows that Donald Trump is sitting on that golden toilet thinking, you know, I can end Speaker McCarthy anytime. And so he can't do it.

Speaker 12 So I love the one headline that says, Trump breaks with McCarthy, demands complete shutdown of government.

Speaker 12 And so here's McCarthy, who sold everything to curry favor with Donald Trump, every ounce of self-respect that he had left, and he didn't have that much left.

Speaker 12 And here's Donald Trump just basically throwing him, you know, under the bus again. But I don't know what he's going to do here.

Speaker 12 One reason I wanted to play that Neil Bradley phrase is he actually said something that I've said before: that at some point you ask, what are they fighting about?

Speaker 12 And you can't come up with a really good answer because we've reached the point where the fight is about the fight. It's not about winning something or accomplishing anything.
It's about fighting.

Speaker 12 And so you see from the point of view of the bomb throwers that there's no way that they're going to get what they want.

Speaker 12 And then there's no way to give them concessions to buy them back into rationality because really all they want is the chaos. They want the outrage.
This is their coin of the realm.

Speaker 12 Matt Gate knows that he is relevant. He's going to raise money.
He's going to get clicks. He's going to become more famous.

Speaker 12 The longer they fight, and it doesn't really matter what they're fighting about as long as they're fighting. I mean, I have seen this again and again and again.

Speaker 12 And when when you ask, well, boy, this seems irrational because they're going to cause all this damage and they're not going to get anything for it, you're missing the point for them just ginning up the outrage, ginning up that sense of betrayal on the part of the base and punching somebody in the face is really all that it's about.

Speaker 12 And in addition to that, this mentality of just wanting to cause chaos and be fighting all the time and to show your base that you're fighting does not depend on being in the majority.

Speaker 12 In fact, it's easier if you're not in the majority, right? So the normal political incentives don't work here.

Speaker 12 In a normal world, if you had people serving in Congress who actually wanted to govern and make policy, right, McCarthy could say to Matt Gaetz, look, if you shut down the government, we're going to lose Mike Lawler.

Speaker 12 We're going to lose, you know, Brian Fitzpatrick. We're going to lose a bunch of these other Republicans in swing districts.
And then we'll be back in the minority.

Speaker 12 Why should Matt Gaetz care about that? He's hosting Newsmax. You know, he's a pundit in training.
He's that seat that Matt Gates has is just a platform for him, like being a host on right-wing media.

Speaker 12 So if Lawler and those other guys go down in the election, yeah, Gates is fine. So McCarthy has no leverage over the burners.

Speaker 12 He has no leverage because they just don't care about being in the majority. This is very insightful.

Speaker 12 There's almost a certain, you can sense, a nostalgia for irrelevance, because when you are in the minority, you can do or say anything without any consequences at all, right? You are irrelevant.

Speaker 12 You can be as performative as you want. So there's something a little bit annoying about actually having the responsibility of governance.

Speaker 12 Some people like Matt Gates, you know, they're completely all right with not having any real power or responsibility because it's all the show.

Speaker 12 And this is part of this world that we live in, where if you understand that the dominant part of the Republican Party is the entertainment wing, all of this makes sense, as opposed to the governing wing, where people sit down and go, no, we want to have this policy and this policy and this policy.

Speaker 12 Okay, so

Speaker 12 can we move on to the picket line? Sure.

Speaker 12 This is an interesting moment, and this is historically significant: that the president of the United States is going to be flying an Air Force One to Michigan, and he's going to join the UAW picket line.

Speaker 12 This is, as far as anyone can tell, the first time a sitting president of the United States has joined strikers on the picket line.

Speaker 12 This strikes me as a little bit risky because if this strike spirals out of control or does damage, this could come back to Biden.

Speaker 12 On the other hand, without venturing an opinion on the merits of the strike or the issues here, it also strikes me as a risk worth taking for Joe Biden because, and we've talked about this before, I've talked about this with Rui Teixeira.

Speaker 12 The working class is now a political battleground. And Joe Biden Biden is signaling that he is not going to concede this populist working class agenda to Donald Trump, who is prepared to demagogue it.

Speaker 12 And so he of the golden toilets is going to be parachuting into Michigan as well, claiming that he is the champion of the working man. And Biden is saying, no, I'm not having it.

Speaker 12 So your thoughts on Joe Biden joining the picket line? I think it's very risky, but it's one of those risk-reward calculations. What do you think? How do you balance it out?

Speaker 12 Well, I think this is a straight-up trade of policy for politics. From a policy point of view,

Speaker 12 the White House should want the president from the policy standpoint to stay out of this. Send the labor secretary, to send somebody else, but have Joe Biden be available to broker something, right?

Speaker 12 But politically, you're exactly right. Biden needs to go there.
Michigan was not as close as some of the other states, not as close as Wisconsin, but it was close enough that he needs to be careful.

Speaker 12 And Biden won a majority, but not a very big majority, like 56% of the union vote against Trump.

Speaker 12 So Biden has problems among UAW workers, not the union itself so much as the workers, and among unions in general. He wants to show his solidarity.
He's right to go there in terms of shoring up

Speaker 12 politically. He's right to go there.

Speaker 12 It's interesting to me, Charlie, that they're both going to talk to the auto workers, but Biden is going to talk to unionized workers. And Trump's going to a non-union shop.

Speaker 12 He's going to an engine parts supplier nearby. So

Speaker 12 Trump is trying to circumvent the union and talk directly to the workers.

Speaker 12 And this raises a very big problem for the left, which is how do you connect with workers when the union you know, it used to be that if you had the union, the support of the union, the Democrat did, then that would bring the workers with them.

Speaker 12 That's not true anymore. And the UAW itself has not even endorsed Joe Biden.
He's holding back, although they're very critical of Trump.

Speaker 12 And I think part of the reason is their own workers, a lot of them are siding with Trump. And Democrats have to ask themselves why that is and how to bring them back.

Speaker 12 No, I mean, and this is something, again, that Rui has been talking about is like, look,

Speaker 12 the working class used to be a central part of the FDR Democratic coalition. And this is where you've seen a lot of erosion.
And a lot of it is cultural.

Speaker 12 There's a lot of other things that are going on here. It's not just about union versus anti-union.
It's about who who is in favor of the workers.

Speaker 12 And look, there are some policies that are in play here. I mean, there's a lot of performance art here.

Speaker 12 But also, one of the issues, and I know that some people aren't going to want to hear this, is there is tension between the green agenda and the working class agenda or even the UAW agenda.

Speaker 12 You know, the push to, you know, electric vehicles may be good for the environment. But let's leave that aside.

Speaker 12 But on the other hand, if you're a UAW member, you're looking at that and going, okay, but this makes me nervous because it's also going to mean fewer auto workers because the EVs take fewer workers and those jobs may be moving to non-union parts of the country.

Speaker 12 Donald Trump continues to lie about this, saying that all of the electric vehicles will be made in China, which is not true.

Speaker 12 But you can see how he's playing into the globalization, playing the populist card. Look, these environmental policies are going to take your job.

Speaker 12 They're going to destroy your job and they're going to empower the Chinese.

Speaker 12 Whatever we might think about the merits of it, and I think he's lying about it, it resonates with working class people in Ohio and Wisconsin and Michigan.

Speaker 12 So that's why I do think that it's the right thing for Joe Biden to do in the picket line, but that doesn't eliminate the tension between these agendas.

Speaker 12 And so he's going to have to do a better job of explaining how they are not irreconcilable. Your thoughts.
Right.

Speaker 12 And I would add to that, he's going to have to do something substantive because the criticism from the UAW of Joe Biden is that he's, as you say, he's pushing the green agenda, shifting to electric vehicles.

Speaker 12 The vehicles are made by automakers who are not unionized, or they're made in plants that are not unionized. So I think the underlying question for Biden on a policy level is what is he going to do?

Speaker 12 Is he going to do something from the position of government to help push unionization into the plants that are going to be making the electric cars?

Speaker 12 Because the unions have established themselves in the gas vehicles, right? Those plants plants they've unionized.

Speaker 12 And if Biden does something in that regard, then I think he'll win more of the union support. The transition is going to be unfolding over a decade, right? It's like 10 years from now.

Speaker 12 You're focusing on the union aspect of this. I'm focusing on the working class aspect of this.
So if you looked at, and I don't know the answer to this question, okay.

Speaker 12 So if you looked at the working class, the blue-collar working class in America, what percentage of them are unionized? Don't know.

Speaker 12 Okay, not a huge number. So it's not just union not union.
It's also this sense that Democrats have become the party of the elite, that Democrats have stopped talking to working class people.

Speaker 12 I mean, this is one of the things that, you know, we were talking about being in denial, not listening to criticism.

Speaker 12 I think the Democrats really do need to ask themselves: okay, why have we lost the white working class? What is going on? I know

Speaker 12 a lot of the arguments are going to be, well, it's about race, but globalization has been a real issue throughout the Midwest.

Speaker 12 And you know that Donald Trump, with his reptilian instinct, has exploited that.

Speaker 12 I think the strongest point that Joe Biden has is more than almost any of these other folks on the scene is I think he instinctively understands how to push back against that.

Speaker 12 Now, he has not always done that. I think that he has too often outsourced some of this policy to some of the activists.

Speaker 12 But I guess I'm encouraged that he's re-engaging, that he's basically going to say, okay, I am going to contest not just the union membership, but the working class in general.

Speaker 12 But that's, again, they're going to force him to address the questions of globalization, force him to address these things. And I think that's all healthy.
I think these are good things.

Speaker 12 So part of the underlying question here is, and I think you've just touched on it, to what extent have working class people left the Democratic Party over cultural issues, where Democrats are sort of locked in to a liberal point of view.

Speaker 12 And to what extent have they left over economic issues? So let's just say inflation, right? If you're a working class person, inflation bites harder than if you're a wealthier college educated person.

Speaker 12 So to the extent the Democrats can solve some of the economic problems, if they can bring inflation down, they will lose fewer of those working class people.

Speaker 12 I think that's true regardless of the cultural issues. And I think that's more of a problem for the Democrats.
So they got to work on that.

Speaker 12 But the larger theme for the Democrats has to be shared growth. The Democratic Party does well.
Let me go back to Bill Clinton, his hero, right?

Speaker 12 The Democratic Party does well when its position is we are for growth. We're not for stopping history, right? A prosperity agenda.
Right.

Speaker 12 We're going to do electric vehicles, but we're going to like encourage markets.

Speaker 12 And if we can build growth, economic growth, then we're the party that's going to make sure that that growth is fairly shared.

Speaker 12 So here we have automakers that are doing better than they were 10 or 15 years ago, right? They are profitable. And are they sharing sufficiently with the workers?

Speaker 12 If Democrats can position themselves there against Republicans who are pro-growth but not focusing on sharing it, then I think the Democratic Party is in a winning position.

Speaker 12 Okay, so we're a couple days late on this, but I did want to bounce this off you. I mean, over the weekend, we had this just extraordinary display of Trump's agenda.

Speaker 12 I'm asking this in the context of whether or not we have become numb to all of this. So in a very, very short period of time, Donald Trump suggested the death penalty for General Mark Milley,

Speaker 12 suggested using the power of the government to retaliate and maybe shut down news networks that had been critical of him, including NBC and MSNBC, suggested that all Democratic members of the U.S.

Speaker 12 Senate resign, and called for a complete shutdown of the federal government if it did not defund his prosecution.

Speaker 12 I guess one of the things that's notable about all of this is how completely unsubtle his agenda is. There's nothing hidden about it.
There's nothing stealthy about it.

Speaker 12 He is basically saying, you know, you put me in, I will be your retribution. I will use government as a hammer.

Speaker 12 And also, the escalation of the rhetoric of violence that has almost become normalized now. I mean, you can see there's almost no pushback.

Speaker 12 You and I are talking about this, and it feels like this was, you know, last week's news.

Speaker 12 But I mentioned yesterday, I think it was on the Nicole Wallace show, I said, think about, you know, we sometimes get into the trap like Donald Trump has always been like Donald Trump, which in many ways he has.

Speaker 12 But the way in which the rhetoric has escalated, so in 2016, it was lock her up, lock Hillary Clinton up. But that is morphed to hang Mike Pence,

Speaker 12 the death penalty for Mark Milley. The brutality is the point now.

Speaker 12 And the way in which this kind of rhetoric is now being repeated, the death penalty rhetoric has now become almost like, well, you follow social media, you know, the right on social media.

Speaker 12 It's almost become boilerplate. I kind of feel as if America is at the boiling frog stage, which is like, do you realize how much the temperature has been turned up?

Speaker 12 Have we really normalized this rhetoric of political violence and killing our opponents? I mean, we thought it was pretty radical.

Speaker 12 We were talking about locking up our political opponents, but now it's the firing squad for our political opponents. What do you think, Will?

Speaker 12 Okay, so first of all, it can't be good for Donald Trump to be saying that Mark Milley should be executed for sharing something with the Chinese.

Speaker 12 Donald Trump himself, we've discussed this before, is on tape showing a war plan, an American attack plan for Iran to people at Mar-a-Lago. So if we're going to start executing...

Speaker 12 After he leaves the presidency. After he's left the presidency.
So I don't think he wants to be encouraging harsh penalties for people who do stuff like that.

Speaker 12 But on this subject of retribution, you know, you and I have talked about Trump saying, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.
And we focused on the word retribution. This is disgusting.

Speaker 12 This is horrifying. This is dangerous.
What about the word your?

Speaker 12 What about the word your? Trump says, I am your retribution. He's not your retribution.
The items that we just listed, those are his retribution, right?

Speaker 12 Shut down the parts of the government that are investigating me. It's all about him, right? It's dangerous for the country, but it's not focused on any larger agenda.

Speaker 12 So I think that's more Republicans need to talk about that. But you raise the larger problem of desensitization, of normalization, right? We are the boiling frog.

Speaker 12 A guy who's running for president is the presumptive Republican.

Speaker 12 I mean, he has been president, has demonstrated that he's willing to attack democracy, is saying you know, he's going to destroy the civil service.

Speaker 12 He's going to go further in that direction, talking about killing people. And it just goes right off our backs.

Speaker 12 We've lost that. And it brings me back to what you said about Cassidy Hutchinson.
Cassidy Hutchinson is not numb. And her point is,

Speaker 12 this is bigger than a Trump problem.

Speaker 12 When an entire political party says this is okay, and we're going to re-nominate this guy for president after all the stuff he says while he's saying all this, that is disqualifying for the whole party.

Speaker 12 So that is a reason not just to make sure that Donald Trump can't be president, but for everybody out there to make sure that Republicans don't get elected to the House and the Senate and to governorships as long as this party is in line behind an authoritarian.

Speaker 12 If only they had been warned.

Speaker 12 If only somebody would have said, you know, This is dangerous. I don't know, Will.
Will, great talking with you. We will do this again next week.
All right, Will? All right, Charlie.

Speaker 12 And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
We'll be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again.

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

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