Trump Ever After: Live from TribFest

Good morning and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
I'm hoping for a meaningful Yom Kippur for all of you who celebrate, but let's start with some relevant context on this day of atonement. Just put it in perspective, in the last few days, leading leading Republican candidate for president, the twice impeached, defeated former president, who's facing four separate criminal indictments, suggested the execution of General Mark Milling, demanded a federal shutdown unless the prosecutions against him are defunded, called on all Senate Democrats to resign.
Yeah, completely normal. And threatened to use the powers of the federal government to retaliate against news outlets like NBC that criticized him if and when he gets back into power.
Now, this is, for those of you who may have forgotten this, this is the same former president who's called for terminating provisions of the Constitution, orchestrated a coup to overturn the last presidential election, absconded with military secrets, and has also, for those of you keeping track, been found liable for rape, faces more than 90 felony accounts from paying off a porn star, among other things, conspiracy obstruction and defrauding the federal government. And just a few days ago, we got a new report reminding us of the depths of this guy's contempt for disabled and wounded veterans.
Again, I know we've been over this ground before, but for anyone else, that story alone about, you know, telling Mark Milley, you know, I don't want to see this wounded veteran ever again, that display of insensitivity would be enough to disqualify him. But of course, this is 2023, and the Republican Party is the Republican Party.
And so Trump's extending his lead in the polls, while even more Republicans, including Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, are explaining that even though they seem to know how deplorable he is, that they're going to support him next year, despite all of this stuff. And of course, this comes the week that the Republican Party in Congress seems to have given up any pretense of being a serious governing party as it lurches from one dysfunction to another.
This is the house that Kevin be clowned. So we are going to see a government shutdown and an impeachment inquiry in the same week.
What could possibly go wrong? So for today's podcast, we have something a little bit special. As some of you know, we spent the weekend in Austin, Texas at the Texas Tribune Festival, and we had several panels, including No Bull from the Bulwark, Standing Room Only Crowd.
And on Saturday, I moderated a panel with the kind of depressing title, Trump Ever After. It included New York Magazine's Olivia Nuzzi, New York Times columnist Brett Stevens, and the Washington Post's Ben Terras.
And it is a lively discussion, and we've turned it into today's podcast. So this is kind of a special Monday edition of the Bulwark podcast.
This is the discussion that we had Saturday morning in Austin, Texas. Good morning and welcome to this panel with the depressing title of Trump Ever After.
I'm Charlie Sykes. We have an all-star panel.
We have Olivia Nuzzi from New York Magazine,

Ben Terrace from The Washington Post, Brett Stevens from The New York Times. Just so you know, this may be repurposed for a Bulwark podcast on Monday morning.
If you don't subscribe, we do this every single day. So we're going to talk about the transformation.
Thank you. We're going to talk about the transformation of American politics under Donald Trump and whether or not it is Trump ever after, Trump forever.
Olivia, we can engage in the usual rank punditry about 2024, but that seems kind of boring. So let's engage in rank punditry about 2028.
Which Trump will be the Republican nominee?

Will it be Don Sr.? Running for his, what, third term?

Will it be Donald Jr.?

Will it be Ivanka?

Will we ever get past the Trump dynasty

in the Republican Party?

I think that we will.

I should note that I'm wrong about everything. I've never accurately predicted anything in American politics or anywhere else for that matter.
But I think that whatever the outcome of this election is, this boring election, as you say, I think that it's going to determine whether or not Trumpism lives or whether or not the Republican Party tries to sort of wish it away out of our memories like it never happened? Well, okay, they can wish all they want, but I mean, the reality is that we are now faced with the prospect of another Trump nomination. And I think that there was a lot of...
Well, things are going so well for him. Things are going so well.
I mean, there was a lot of wish casting among Republicans that you could have Trumpism without Trump, right? Wasn't that the whole, you know, I'm Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida. I have no personality, but I am Trump without the baggage.
That hasn't worked out.

So is Ron DeSantis' fate an indication that he's just a genuinely shitty candidate or does it tell you something about the Republican Party? The Republican Party right now is just not in the mood for anything other than pure, undiluted Trump. Well, so you don't like DeSantis, I'm getting it.
I was making no judgment. I was just asking.
Well, no one wearing a Cuban heel has ever succeeded in a Republican primary. So he should have taken a note from Marco Rubio.
But I don't know. I think that DeSantis, it's interesting watching him.
He's coming from such a place of negativity on the campaign trail and so much anger. And his audience really seems to crave that.
But he seems to really take Trump seriously. And I think that might be part of what his fatal flaw is as a candidate.
Trump says that he hates the media, which he doesn't.

He loves us and he needs us.

And Ron DeSantis sort of acted on that as if he should be,

I don't know, mimicking Trump and took it very seriously

and cut the press out from his early campaign.

And I think he really suffered.

As a candidate like that, you really need attention

and you sort of need to court the press.

And he's just not that impressive. And he's also impossible to listen to.
And I think that has, I mean, he is, and I think that has armed him. Well, he also missed the essence of Trumpism, which is that it's a show, right? He thought it was the policy that I can be a bigger jerk, I can be more cruel, I can ship immigrants around.
Yeah, he took him seriously. Yeah, I'm going to campaign against Wokas.
We took him seriously, as opposed to, because the least entertaining candidate in America right now is Ron DeSantis. I mean, would you agree? I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of competition for that.
I mean, there's a lot of competition for least entertaining, yeah. So we're going to get to what the future of the Republican Party is for people who think that the Republican Party is, okay, when Trump disappears, it will be 2015 all over again.
It will be zombie Reaganism. So Brett, you wrote that the trajectory of the Republican Party slash conservatism was innovation, imitation, idiocy.
And that's how you got Trump. So what's the fourth? If that's the trajectory, innovation, imitation, idiocy, what's next? First of all, the line I think belongs to Warren Buffett or maybe Charlie Munger about the investor class.
You start with the innovators who figure out something great. Then come the imitators and then the morons afterwards who then get fleeced.
I mean, I guess I have to keep with the letter I, right? Yes. So...
That'd be great. So think of the Stephen King film It.
Because what I'm thinking of is the clown who is... The reason I thought of that is because...
A very scary clown. there's a quality of both clownishness as well as a sinister quality and I think that I have to sort of back up a second I could not believe in 2016 that I pulled the lever for a democrat I couldn't believe it in 2020 that I did it again I have spent my entire life laboring in the vineyards of the conservative movement and still think of myself as a conservative.
But what I look at in terms of the GOP is some kind of, what's the clown's name, Pennywise version of a conservative party, which exists sort of on the one hand in a world of celebrity and also of aggressive fear-mongering and bigotry, which I think is just untrue to the best traditions of the party. And those actually exist.
You can see it now in what appears to be the looming government shutdown and the way in which a character like Matt Gaetz with allies like Lauren Boebert are holding the United States Congress and the entire machinery of the federal government, including the Defense Department, hostage for the sake of a, you know, in the words of Animal House, you know, a really stupid and futile gesture. You know, 400,000 DOD civilian employees are about to be furloughed because these two characters plus about five allies think that this is going to score points in terms of their celebrification.
And in fact, that's exactly what it is doing. You now have a governance structure in the Republican Party in which the clowns rule.
You know, that's, I think it's a tragedy for the country. It's a tragedy in particular for a conservative movement because every successful democracy needs a morally healthy conservative movement.
Some countries have it. You know, the CDU in Germany is a morally healthy conservative movement, right? We used to have it and now we don't.
So that's why I think we're at the it stage. Well, it's the iron law of podcasts that if you mention Lauren Boebert, we have to mention the Beetlejuice musical incident.
As an indication of what's happened to the conservative movement, which five minutes ago said character matters, and that if you actually gave a hand job to somebody in a

theater you would probably be canceled i mean peewee herman's you know did not the next week after his theater episode did not have the power to shut down the federal government um we we live in this moral free fire zone one point on this which is there was a moment i think it was a kind of a turning point in the story of the Republican Party, when Trump in 2015 attacked McCain for having been a prisoner of war. And he said, you know, I like guys who weren't taken prisoner.
He was enjoying his alleged bone spurs. But that was, to me, a moment of extraordinary shamelessness.
And he turned shamelessness into something like a kind of courage, right? Because he was going to say something and not give a damn about all of the tut and condemnation from, you know, the polite people like us, right? And that, in fact, was what happened to the Republican Party after that, which is that shamelessness became a virtue. Shamelessness became a way of signaling, I don't care that you self-righteous people are wagging your finger and saying, I'm bad for democracy.
So everything that really has followed in the Republican Party, the rise of people like Boebert, the shamelessness of those moments, the fact that she doesn't crawl into a hole and resign, that started in the summer of 2015 with Trump's comment on McCain. If I can cut in, you see that now in the Republican primary, where in Iowa this week, Ron DeSantis is attacking Trump from the right on abortion, because Trump is for exceptions for rape incest and the life of the mother.
And he is standing there with Kim Reynolds, the governor of Iowa, who signed the abortion ban. And Trump, meanwhile, is in another part of the state literally signing a woman's breast in a bar.
And his supporters love it. And they, I mean, that is what, he is their id.
And that has always been the case with Trump and his supporters, that he has no shame. He has insane appetites.
he will say anything that he wants to say, he will pretend to be wealthy, he will act in horrible ways and insult people, and people who cannot do that in their daily lives look at him and they say, well I wish I could behave that way, and I like that he's doing that, and there's some sort of catharsis in watching him act that way. That's absolutely true.
Okay, so Ben, who's written an absolutely hilarious book about post-Trump Washington, I think, speaking of hilarious, and I have to keep a sense of humor about this as this clown show is about to shut down the federal government, the quote from Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who had just been humiliated on the floor of the House, losing a rules vote on a major piece of legislation. I mean, look, Kevin McCarthy is used to humiliation, but this was sort of next level for him.
And this is, I think, just one of the great classic quotes. He's asked about, you know, why this was shot down.
He said, there's this whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down. Whole new concept.
Kevin looks around and he is shocked to find out that he is surrounded by bomb-throwing lunatics. Well, thanks for having me.
There's that famous meme of the guy dressed in the hot dog costume from I Think You Should Leave and a hot dog vehicle had crashed into a store and he comes out and he's like oh we're all looking for the guy who did this and it's like well this is a Kevin McCarthy problem right like he he is in the hot dog suit looking like you know like like a fool and it's partially because of like his people right he he became speaker by kind of making all these promises to people and he really have to, you know, have lived under a rock for the last 30 years to not see that there's always been some kind of bomb throwing, especially, you know, post-2010 when the Tea Party came to town. There's been a contingent in the House that their whole thing was to kind of act like congressional terrorists, to say we're going to hold things hostage and we don't really care if things work or not.
And he took those people and he made them part of his base and he got to be speaker because of it. And so it is a little silly to hear a guy say, like, oh, I can't believe this is happening when everybody paying attention to American politics for the last, you know, 10 years especially is not surprised by this at all.
Yeah, I mean, there's that other meme, you know, the leopards eating people's faces party,

you know, that they, he just never thought they would come and eat his face, right?

So he also seems to be one of these guys that seems to think that no matter how many of

the bomb throwers you empower, no matter how many of the lunatics you make concessions

to, no matter how many concessions you make to the Marjorie Taylor Greene's and everything,

that somehow things will revert to normal. And I guess that's the question, is will we ever see normal again? There are people in Washington who still seem to think that it will return to the old rules, the old ways.
Sure. Well, this is a big part of what the book project I set out on.
It's a book called The Big Break. You can buy it probably at the bookstore here.
And the idea was, you know, when Biden won, there was this idea that things might become normal again, right? Oh, the most normal-seeming politician in the world is going to be president. Maybe we can take a breath.
I've covered Washington for, you know, 10 years now with The Washington Post, and I looked around and I realized that, like, that nothing looked normal to me and I didn't see a way that things could get normal again quickly. And so I don't think you're going to see normal.
I mean, there's a new normal and some of it is really bad. Some of it is Trumpism and the idea that what matters most is getting attention, putting on the show, getting reelected by saying outrageous things.
The shamelessness is a big story. I mean, one of the first big stories I had at the Post was years ago now.
I stumbled into Aaron Shock's office, a congressman from Illinois, and noticed that it was decorated like a scene from Downton Abbey and talked to the person who was decorating, and she said that was the inspiration. I wrote story about it and within a year he was out of Congress.
Basically shamed out of Congress due to some financial stuff and also just maybe being embarrassed to have had his office written about that way. And that kind of scandal just couldn't exist now.
Well at least not for Republicans. Not for Republicans.
A little bit earlier we were talking about the name of the Democratic congresswoman who resigned because there were some nude pictures or something like that. What was her name? Katie Hill.
I mean, if Katie Hill was a Republican, she'd be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Yeah, I mean, a big part of it is because of this victimization, right, where you say, especially as a Republican, look, everyone's out to get me.

If I leave, I'm giving them what they want. If you say I have to leave, then you're giving them what they want.
You know, this is fake news. This is a media that's just out to get us.
Like, if they're going to come for me, eventually they're going to come for you. I mean, you know, Bob Menendez is being, you know, people are calling for him to resign right now.
And he's taking the same kind of approach by saying, look, people didn't want to see a Latino senator, you know, get as powerful as quickly as I have. And if it works, then maybe, you know, kind of Trumpism can work for both parties.
Does it work, though? Will it work? What do you think? I, like Olivia, I'm wrong about everything. So every prediction I make is wrong.
I don't think it will work. Yeah.
But, you know, I also didn't think Trump would be president. Yeah, no, I've been wrong so frequently.
I don't have the T-shirt saying I'm always right. But I think he's toast.
I would think so. Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of The Bulwark podcast.
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Okay, so on this theme of shamelessness, I mean, this has real consequences, Olivia. You know, and the obvious, you know, the elephant in the room here is that we're dealing with a former president of the United States, leading Republican candidate for president, who has 91 felony charges, four criminal trials coming up potentially in the next year, and it has not seemed to have affected him at all.
No, I mean, in fact, maybe he should get arrested again. It seems to really help his campaign.
Every time there's a new indictment, he grows stronger and stronger in the polls. Will the trials change that at all? I mean, I think there's been this wish casting.
There were folks in the DeSantis campaign that said, okay, so the early indictments didn't matter, but wait till we get those Fulton County indictments. Well, that hasn't mattered.
Now people are saying, well, wait till the trials, when people see the evidence. What do you think? Just anecdotally, it is the case outside of his, I feel like I'm following him on a great arrest tour of America or something.
It's like Sherrod's farewell tour. And every time I show up at one of these things and I talk to his supporters outside, they look at me like I'm crazy when I ask if they've read the indictment, because of course they haven't.
And they're not surprised at all when you ask about it, that he's being indicted again, because it's a witch hunt. Of course he's being indicted.
And it seems just impenetrable. I do think if it is being televised constantly and the details are sort of being forced in front of everyone's faces, perhaps it will change something.
But I think that there's just a faction of the Republican base, of his base, that would never care. I mean, he really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, and they would probably be pleased to hear about it.
So, yes, go ahead, Brad. I mean, I want to steer the conversation a little bit differently.
Look, Trumpism, I studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago, and we talked a lot about the word regime came up a lot. And we often sometimes use the word regime in terms of like rogue regimes, like Saddam Hussein's Iraq or North Korea.
But the word regime just means the kind of the entire system of governance, not just the structures and the institutions, but the spirit, the people who rule and the mentality they have. And Trumpism is a sustained assault on the American regime in that sense.
Everything that Trump represents, the fact that he's constantly going after what he calls the deep state, all of that, the questioning of the election, January 6th, but every aspect of his character is an assault on the regime, including what used to be our sense of political propriety. That's also part of the regime.
That's what Trump is attacking. That's why he uniquely gains the kind of support he does.

But that being said, part of the problem that we have

is that we have a regime, again, I'm using this word

in this kind of expansive sense,

we have a regime that lends itself to being mocked

and attacked by the kinds of mistakes that it makes. So, for instance, you mentioned the indictments.
Everyone says 91 indictments. Okay, let's be frank.
The first set of indictments, in my view, are BS indictments. They're BS indictments.
They should not have been brought. Hush money for the porn star.
This is the hush money for the porn star. Wait, I'm sorry.
You think that someone should be able to use campaign funds to pay off the porn star? No, I do not. I think it's disgraceful behavior, but this is a misdemeanor charge.
This is a misdemeanor charge, and this is why people we have to distinguish two things. Is it disgraceful? Should he be run out of polite society? It's unbelievable that a Republican conservative candidate was having an affair with a porn star, was paying hush money for it.
Normal conservatives, when I grew up, would say, well, this guy's patently disqualified for moral turpitude or whatever. But nobody else other than Donald Trump would have been indicted by the district attorney for that.
The only counts that are real, in my view, that are really gravely damaging is obstruction of justice in the Florida case. But that gets obscured by the fact that people are saying, well, 91 counts.
So the mentality of his supporters is it's all bullshit. It's all a political conspiracy, bipartisan district attorneys who came into office saying, I'm going to indict Trump, I'm going to indict Trump.
They did, right? And then people go, well, why is he gaining all this support? Because there is a perception that is not invalid. I'm not saying it's ludicrous, but it is not invalid that there is a political vendetta.
Part of the problem we have is we would not be having this conversation about the potential endless Trumpism, if an 80-year-old president had gracefully decided to step aside after what he said was his transitional period of office and someone like Gretchen Whitmer or some other strong and impressive Democrat were the front runner for the Democratic Party. So it is also our own, speaking, everyone in this room as part of quote that regime it is our own mistakes and our own overconfidence that contributes to the fact that he is as strong as he is he shouldn't be where he is I'm not sure I agree with that to be honest I think that you know Donald Trump supporters no matter what the charges, no matter how good they were or how bad they were, are so kind of, you know, dug in on him being a victim, on them feeling victimized, too, that even if there was just one indictment, one count on him, they would find ways to say, well, it's a witch hunt for this reason or that reason.
I mean, you know, look at the impeachments, right? The impeachments could have been solid impeachments, but because it's a political process, it gets called political, and everyone who wants to support Donald Trump says, you can't trust this. This isn't real.
And in terms of, you know, whether this has an impact or not, you know, everyone likes to call Donald Trump Teflon Don, but it's not true. I mean, he's not president, right? And these things do have an effect on his popularity.
He may have a hold on the majority of the Republican Party, and it may grow stronger and stronger with each arrest. But to become president, like, sometimes it's about these margins, right? And it's 5,000 votes here, 100,000 votes there, 10,000 votes here.
And you just don't know how these trials are going to play out for these people. He is not Teflon.
Everything has had a political impact on him, and I think it will continue to. Olivia? I do.
Obviously, you have to be able to accept that not all indictments are created equal, and some of these charges are much more serious than others. However, when you say that anyone else would not be indicted like this over hush money payments, to my knowledge there was no other candidate who used campaign funds to pay off a porn star.
This is a unique situation. So we don't really know whether or not someone else might have been indicted over this.
And I would also just point out that, where was I going with this? I had another point that I just completely forgot. Hmm.
This isn't good. John Edwards, yeah.
Yeah, John Edwards was indicted and acquitted. I feel like Rick Perry.
I can't remember my third point. I thought you guys might like that here.
Yeah. Oh, but here we go.
The idea that you just, one day you wake up and you decide to steal an election. I think first you commit a series of other lesser crimes.
So this is all part of this pattern of criminal behavior. And I think it's kind of ridiculous to say, oh, well, we shouldn't prosecute some things because his supporters might laugh it off.
I mean, to Ben's point, they would laugh off anything. I mean, he could have killed Mother Teresa and they would not care.

Which is also what makes Trump 2.0 so dangerous. I mean, the shamelessness, the fact that he's already tried to overthrow, you know, to overturn the election, that he was involved in, you know, this pattern of criminality, leaving aside the porn star.
And we could get into that. I mean, you know, when you describe, Brett, when you describe, you know, what Donald Trump represents, I mean, what a malign influence he has been.

I guess, and maybe we don't have time to get into this, but then how do we explain the fact that conservatives have embraced him so thoroughly? It's one thing for him to attack and undermine every conservative value. It's the conservative movement's complete embrace of him.
And you can push back on complete embrace for a moment. Because I think they're all...
You know what, I was going to say that we talk about what is the conservative movement, the classical liberal, the liberal philosophy wing of the party. It's you, me, David French.
I'm sure there's a couple other people in the room here. But that is, so there are people who will say that Donald Trump is just the logical outcome of conservatism, that there's a straight line between William F.
Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump, that it's always been this way.
And so I guess I wanted to get your take on this because I disagree with that take, but certainly understand, as you watch the entire Republican Party bend its knee to this guy, you say, well, this is who you always were, and you're just simply being revealed now.

What do you think?

I think it's a shoddy analysis. Yes, I agree.
Look, every party has a crap version of itself.

And those of you who are liberals in this room or progressives sort of understand that there are elements within the democratic party or the broadly left movement that doesn't really speak for who you are and it contains you know back in the back in the 1940s the communist party said well we're just liberals in a hurry no there were totalitarian fellow travelers with with joseph mean, that's the reality. And people like Harry Truman and the Americans, it was the ADA, right, with Arthur Schlesinger, fought hard to say there is an honorable liberal movement in the United States that stands with working rights, that stands with civil rights, that stands with expanding the circle of opportunity and equality, that has nothing to do with these totalitarians who are being inspired by what's happening in Moscow.
Now, unfortunately, the American conservative movement has exactly the same tendencies. American conservatism is a kind of an interesting beast, right? Because at its best, and it's not always or even often at its best, but at its best, the idea of an American conservative is to try to conserve what is fundamentally a liberal order.
The fundamentally liberal order is the declaration of independence, unalienable rights created equal. The liberal order is what Lincoln gave expression to at Gettysburg.
And our argument as conservatives was in order to preserve a liberal order, you actually need a set of institutions which in a sense are conservative, which is why we think families are important, right? Because we think that those, as Burke put it, those little platoons of society strengthen the ability to be responsible citizens in a democratic political order.

That's a high-level conservatism.

The lower-level conservatism is,

screw the Mexicans and screw anyone else who's not like us,

and the real Americans were born here,

and everyone else is a fake, and we want to kick them out.

And there has always been that kind of debased version of conservatism. It's why Patrick Buchanan had his big run back in 1992.
But it used to be that Patrick Buchanan would not be the candidate. I mean, even if George H.W.
Bush lost, people honored him and respected him. What happened with Trump was it was that great turning when that kind of more primordial blood and soil type of conservatism became the ascendant version of it and people like well you me and David French went into exile in you know somewhere so this raises the question though going forward that great turning point you know as Ben's Ben has pointed out we're not turning back again so what is future of the Republican Party? I think it's safe to say that it's not Mitt Romney who's leaving.
It's not Mike Pence who's making the Reaganist pitch. Is the future of the Republican Party people like Vivek? Is it? Is it? I mean, what is, where are we going? What is the trajectory? Yeah, I mean, a lot depends on what happens this election.
I think the kind of analysis on DeSantis was good because he was supposed to be Trump without the drama, but people love the drama. I mean, I watched the first debate.
I was writing a story about Senator Tim Scott, and so I was paying a lot of attention to Tim Scott while he was giving the debate, and nobody else was paying any attention to him at all. And afterwards, he tried to play it off as, nobody in America wants a food fight.
I'm the adult in the room. And I'm thinking, everybody loves a food fight.
Food fights are awesome. I mean, if you watch a movie about high school and there's a food fight, it's like, this is a fun scene.
And I think people might not admit it, but they like that food fight. And I think Trump is giving trump is giving them that and so you know vivek might be the guy who who offers that in a way right now and and so is lauren bobert sure i mean i don't think lauren bobert's about to be president um but but but maybe i mean maybe and so i never thought donald trump was going to be president yeah yeah and so i i think there will be a big entertainment factor for a long time.
So where are we going? What is the future? I mean, Mike Pence gave this very interesting speech, which was kind of a eulogy for a party that no longer exists. Now, whether he understands that, I don't know.
There's no going back to 2015. So let's say that you encountered my question about Trump forever, that Trump disappears tomorrow.
So what is the future of the party? I mean, the most normal future would be, say, Nikki Haley, right? But then there are the more bizarre, entertaining futures. What do you think? In the few cycles before Trump, I think it was the case that the stars of the Republican Party, the leaders of the conservative movement, were not the candidates for president.
They were really media stars, right? They were people like Glenn Beck, like Mark Levin, like Bill O'Reilly. Trump is really a media star.
It's not true, of course, when he says, I'm not a politician. He's been president.
He's certainly a politician now. But he is more a media star than he is a political star in the traditional sense.
And I do wonder if in the future, in a post-Trump future, if the focus returns to people like whoever it is who's Glenn Beck in the future or Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson. And we move away from expecting the Republican nominee to sort of satisfy the desire for both a political leader and an entertainment leader.

This is a really important point. I've talked about the entertainment wing of the Republican

Party being dominant. And you've seen this happening before Trump.
I mean, that famous

story that, you know, former Speaker John Boehner, you know, tells about when one of the

pre-Marjorie Taylor Greene nutjobs, you know, Michelle Bachman, remember when Michelle Bachman

was, you know, in that role. You Yeah, whatever happened to her? By the way...
My grandfather Bachman said it over again. By the way, with that digression, whatever happened to Ben Sasse? I mean, honestly, I'm asking for friends.
No, no, no, he's the president of the University of Florida under Ron DeSantis, where there's some issues involving higher education and free speech. And has anyone literally heard of Ben Sasse saying anything about...
Okay, I'm just... Okay.
So Michelle Bachman wants a key... Wait, sorry.
Where is Sharon Engel? Do you remember her? Nevada someplace. We should ask John Ralston.
So she's asking John Banner for this ridiculously important committee assignment. He thinks it's a complete joke, you know.
So, you know, he lights up a cigarette, pours himself a Cabernet and says, no, forget it. I'm not going to give you this job.
And she says, well, I'm going to go to my friends at Fox News and they're going to attack you for this. And at that moment, it feels, he recognized that the center of power had shifted from the governing sane part of the party to the entertainment wing of the party.
And we've seen how that has accelerated. And so it is hard to imagine going back to the, you know, yes, we're going to have policy wonks.
We're going to have Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan sitting around thinking about how are we going to reform entitlements? What are we going to do? That's never coming back. Well, I just think, was Mitt Romney really the leader of the Republican Party in 2012? Not in my memory.
I mean, in terms of who was having the most influence with his ideas and who was getting the most attention. It was a lot of him responding to an insurgent right.
And I just wonder... He was severely conservative.
Yeah, and I just wonder if that is really what we're going back to, where we of separate out who we consider to be the politicians the people who are acceptable to run and seek public office and seek the presidency and who people want to spend most of their time listening to so we're going to open up the floor for questions in about five six minutes okay so if you have any questions for the panel be thinking about it I'm going to do that in just a moment Ben yeah when you talked about Michelle Bachman it reminded me about the whole kind of media economy that existed around her for a while and then Sarah Palin and and whoever else which was if you wrote a story about Michelle Bachman on a website like Slate or Salon or even Washington Post it would get tons and tons of traffic and then there'd be more and more stories, and she became a star because of that, or she already was a star, but it helped build her up, and people would get angry at websites and newspapers for giving so much attention to someone, but also they'd eat it all up, and I think that's sort of one of the big things that's happening now, which is people say, why do you keep writing about this? I keep reading about it over and over and over again.

And it's like, well, that's what gives people power is Michelle Bachman, anytime she said anything, people would pay attention. And that is more powerful than even being a candidate for president sometimes if nobody pays attention to you.
I want to follow up on something Brett said. But before we do this, given the fact that we're in this news cycle, The Atlantic came out with this just blockbuster piece by Jeffrey Goldberg about General Mark Milley last week that included just some dazzling details about how concerned he was about a coup and nuclear war and all those things.
But the anecdote that really struck me was this story of the disabled veteran who had appeared in an event, You know, fought for his country, had suffered severe medical problems and wounding, and that Donald Trump's reaction was, I never want this guy to be in public again. This is consistent with what Donald Trump has said in the past.
It's consistent with when he said about John McCain that he doesn't like people who were captured. It's consistent with reports that he didn't want disabled veterans in his big military parade.
And yet, you know, for anybody else in American politics, particularly a conservative, a Republican, to show this disdain for a wounded, injured veteran would be disqualifying. And yet, is that umbrella of shamelessness so impenetrable that not even that makes a difference? I am a huge fan of Jeffrey Goldberg.
I didn't even hear about this until just now. So maybe, I mean, I think that there is a certain amount of Trump.
Maybe I'm the only person who did not hear about this because I was not on the Internet much last week. But I do think there's a certain amount of Trump fatigue.
Everyone knows exactly who this guy is. It's not surprising to hear that.
It's not surprising to hear that at all. Is there any new information, anything that we could hear about Donald Trump where you would say, oh, well, this changes my opinion on this guy? For me, the answer is certainly not.
Yeah, I mean, I hesitate to repeat what I said the other day on Nicole Wallace's show, but I mean, this is an example, and I was home with General Barry McCaffrey, who is almost just livid about this particular story and the contempt that Donald Trump has for the military, the fact he does not understand the military, that he embraces war criminals, and when they try to explain to him that there is such a thing as our war crimes and the ethics of war, Donald Trump doesn't understand this at all. And there is that grotesque kink that he has of not wanting to be around the people who have paid the greatest sacrifices.
And I don't know about the rest of you, but in the before times, I used to travel from the Midwest to Washington, D.C.

on honor flights with World War II veterans and Korean veterans and Vietnam veterans, many of whom were in pretty tough shape. I just can't even imagine a normal human being looking at them and saying, yeah, that's embarrassing.
I don't want to look at these guys, as opposed to saying, oh my God, we're so grateful for these guys. I mean, that is Donald Trump.
So, Brad, I want to go back to the point that you made before.

The reality is that Donald Trump, as grotesque as he is, with all of the things that we all know about him that don't need to be repeated necessarily, he is tied in the polls right now. He is, even with Joe Biden, there is a non-zero chance that he will be elected president again next year.
And you were suggesting that Democrats might be sleepwalking into this, that they underestimate him, and they underestimate how some of the things that they are doing outside of their bubble make Trumpism more likely. So are Democrats underestimating the threat of Donald Trump, do you think? This reminds me of the period before 2016 when the entire mentality of the Democratic Party is, we've got this in the bag.
And that's when Trump was well behind in the polls, not when he is polling even. A tremendous amount of energy is devoted in our pages in the media, media writ large, not just the Times, but also I think among Democrats to just pouring scorn and derision on Trump, all of it well justified.
But physician heal thyself. If you have a Democratic Party that for two and a half years ignored a crisis at the border, and now we are, you know, in a blink of an eye, and I say this, by the way, as a pro-immigration person who grew up in Mexico City, blink of an eye bringing in as many Venezuelans as there are people in the state of Vermont or something like that overnight, and don't have control of a basic border policy.
I mean, Barack Obama could do it. Why can't Joe Biden? Or have kind of consistently told a story about the American economy, which is at variance with the experience of most people living in the economy, or tell themselves fables about the state of urban decay in many major American cities.
that's a party that's going to lose. So what we're desperately in need of is leadership in the Democratic Party that is not simply mocking, guffawing, and rolling their eyes at the awfulness of the Trumpists, but is taking seriously a governance crisis in the United States.
I mean, I use this analogy, I probably shouldn't use this analogy, okay, but in 1933, a guy who was widely seen as a clown won an election in a European country, right? And you can look to many things that happened in the preceding decade that brought that about, including the evil and awfulness of his movement. But, you know, inflation and bad governance in what was called the Weimar Republic had something to do with it.
So we have a responsibility also to make sure that Trump doesn't have at least an argument with the American people, because if he does, the chances of him winning, as I see it, are 50-50. You know, I do worry about the bubble effect on, and I know that there are a lot of you who hate this phrase, on both sides, that there's got to be some middle ground between the media obsession with going to truck stops in western Pennsylvania and interviewing Trump voters endlessly versus, at the other end of the spectrum, the politics of contempt, and Arthur Brooks has written about this, that the one way to shut down any discussion, any possibility of persuasion, is to express contempt for the person you are dealing with.
That moment you roll the eyes, the moment that you say, you actually think that inflation is important, you're an idiot. Well, you're kind of done.
And so there is the danger of not understanding that something like inflation is a lived experience of Americans and to address it. Because if you are in denial about it, or the fact that, you know, I think literally it's not possible to have a conversation with any voter anywhere in America about the presidential race without Joe Biden's age coming up.
And I'll tell you that when I mention it on the bulwark, the reaction I get from a lot of people is stop talking about it. We need to stop talking about Joe Biden's age.
You need to stop talking about inflation. Well, here is the problem with that, is that simply not talking about something does not make the problem go away, if anybody wants to weigh in on that.
Yeah, I mean, there's always been this sense, I think, on the Democratic left since Joe Biden's election that he is sort of made of blown glass and that it was a fragile victory and that any criticism could sort of cause it to shatter, you know? And I think that's wrong. Don't be mean to Uncle Joe.
Yeah, and I think that's wrong. And I think the idea that criticism just immediately is going to destroy him is wrong in that criticism should theoretically make the party stronger.
It should make anything stronger, if it's thoughtful. And I think you should be able to talk about his age.
I mean, Donald Trump is not that different in age than Joe Biden. It's just that Joe Biden seems very old

and Donald Trump really just seems crazy.

And so we have these two elderly men

sort of hobbling towards the presidency

and we should be able to talk about that.

Yeah, the elderly versus the insane,

American 2023.

All right, let's open up the floor to questions.

We're gonna go back.

We have two microphones here.

Let's start over here. Okay, we perfectly did my question.
I'm here with No Labels. Been a grassroots volunteer with them for a long time.
So they are preparing just in case, looking at the options. But every time I've gotten up to talk, I've mentioned Nikki Haley.
I'm trying to make Nikki Haley happen. And I'm amazed how many people come up and say, I really like Nikki Haley.
So I'm kind of wondering, with me, I have 20 subscribers, how do we give voice to some of these normie Republicans that are out there, normie conservatives? And I want to challenge the media that there are really good Republicans out there, Spencer Cox and Chris Sununu and Brian Fitzpatrick and Todd Young. I would pay money to hear Olivia's take on Nikki Haley.
Well, you know, I've requested an interview with Nikki Haley, and I hope that they get back to me and they want to do it. But I've been told to not be very hopeful, and they don't do a lot of one-on-one.
So that's something where not to get into the very behind-the-scenes inside baseball type of thing. I think a lot of reporters probably make good faith overtures to these campaigns and want to give these candidates attention.
And we're not always successful in getting access to them. Well, I mean more for the media, for coverage of the good Republicans.
So kind of two questions. I mean, Nikki Haley needs to be focusing on the grassroots, not talking to you, obviously, because...
Oh, gosh, I didn't mean that insulting at all. I meant not talking to the media.
So this is the problem of the good in Normie, because I have been spending the last seven years looking for the good in Normie Republicans. I am desperate to find the good in Normie Republicans.
And I am willing to lower my standards all the time. I mean, honestly.

But the problem with the Nikki Haley's is that she has had a hard time deciding who she wants to be, you know, vis-a-vis Trump. Decided when she came to Milwaukee that she was going to be, you know, the tough Nikki.
And I think that she turned in, you know, a dominating debate performance. which he then followed up by explaining how she would support Donald Trump for president again

even if he was convicted of felonies and was in jail. I still want her to beat Trump in the primary.
Yeah, I get that. I think this is a problem with most of the Republican candidates, including Mike Pence, frankly, where a portion of Donald Trump supporters wanted to literally kill Mike Pence.
And it is still not enough for him to be out there sort of swinging at Trump every day. He's still very frightened, I think, of eliciting rage from him.
And I think everyone's just a little too frightened. And the problem is, if you're a Republican who's not as well known as Donald Trump, Donald Trump sucks up so much energy.
Everyone is obsessed with him. Everyone is interested in him.
He is the dominating force in our politics today and has been for many years now. And if you're a Republican, you don't want to get booked on cable news talking about Donald Trump's indictments or defining yourself in opposition to Donald Trump.
You're in a very tough spot right now. I think the problem is nobody's actually playing to win right now.
Nobody is trying to beat Donald Trump. Everybody's hoping that Donald Trump will be in jail or die or decide that he wants to go...
Something, something, unicorn, something, something, he dies. He's going to go on an eat, pray, love journey or whatever.
And so they all have to be both a fan of his and not. And if anybody actually was trying to beat Donald Trump, they would try.
And they would say, I don't think he should be president. But if you say, I think I'm a better candidate than this guy, but also I would vote for him, it makes him, you know, a valid candidate.
And you can't beat a guy unless you're actually trying to beat him. Brett, you've also been searching for the normies, right? To stick with my it metaphor, like, you gotta kill the clown.
And the only guy who actually has the correct theory of the race is Chris Christie. Unfortunately, he's a flawed vessel for that message.
But an awesome beast. He's been out of power for a while and he doesn't have, unfortunately, he's not in spear-throwing rage because Trump won't join the debates.
But the correct way to deal with Trump, if I were Nikki Haley, I would say at every stop, this guy is a loser. He's pathetic.
He's destroying the Republican Party.

Every candidate he picks loses elections. The reason we have Chuck Schumer, Senate Majority Leader, comes down to his disastrous endorsements in Georgia and Pennsylvania and Arizona and elsewhere.
And he's a disgrace and a running embarrassment. and people grow up that you are not going to win

and you are going to turn the Republican Party

into a kind of a running embarrassment, and people grow up that you are not going to win and you are going to turn the Republican Party into a kind of a rump faction. If a person can say that a little more eloquently than I did, then there's a chance of having a real Donnybrook in the Republican Party to establish its future.
And it might not work in 2024, but at least it sets up the possibility of a Republican Party post-Trump, post-Trumpism in 28. Well, that goes to Ben's point.
Are they actually running to win or have they already shifted to thinking about 2028? Okay, let's go over here. This is a wonderful panel.
Thank you very much. And when you're thinking about the future of a Republican Party or the Democratic Party, I think of follow the money and that corporations are people too.
So I just think that when you think about the future, I know Trump is doing it by getting lots of money. And he's like a big snowball that goes down.
It's huge. So I think where do you see money in the future and where it's going? I mean, money is hugely important, obviously.
And I think one of the things that Trump is doing is it's a lot of grassroots money, right? This is kind of where the entertainment value comes in. If people are paying attention to you and want to be a part of this movement, they're going to give lots and lots of money.
And so, you know, it is a money game. But at the same time, you know, some of these super PACs are not as powerful as they once were.
Between Jeb's super PAC and the hundreds of millions that were spent trying to beat Trump and having it go nowhere. And now DeSantis' campaign, which had tons and tons of money and burned through it because it turns out money does not actually.
Is it a Florida thing? Maybe it's a Florida thing. I don't agree that it's really money in the sense that you mean,

because Trump was able to become president with a much smaller budget, much smaller expenditures than Hillary Clinton. She was a machine of money.
However, the billions of dollars of free advertisement that he got, courtesy of his enemies, by the way. Now, I was a contributor on MSNBC for a number of years.
I can't remember of the hundreds of times I was on the show when we weren't talking about Donald Trump. Oh, he's so terrible.
How terrible is he? He's really terrible. You know, tell me, Nicole, bad, oh, it's worse.
It's so much worse than you think. Endless amounts of...
You've been watching me lately. Well, he commanded the attention economy, and by the way, it was impossible to get the executives at MSNBC to talk about something else.
If you want to kill this beast, starve it of its oxygen, and its oxygen is being supplied by us. I think that's a very...
Forgive me. I think that's a cheap applause line in a room where you know that people are on the left, I just think that he is the former president of the United States, he is under criminal indictment, he is on his way to be the Republican nominee and perhaps be president again we can put our heads in the sand and ignore that, just like we ignore Joe Biden's age or anything else that we don't like.
Or we could pay attention to it and assess it critically. But I don't think it's fair to say, oh, if you just don't cover this guy, then don't worry, nothing bad will happen.
I think what would happen is you would wake up one day and he would be the nominee and he would be polling perhaps ahead of Joe Biden. And then we would all be scrambling to figure out what the hell has he been doing for the last six months in this campaign? Oh, I don't know.
We haven't been covering it. We have a lot of financial documents to go through.
Ben. Just to play, you know, kind of middle ground here, I kind of think both sides are right in a way.
I think he deserves to be covered. I think there needs to be investigative stories and profiles and, you know, kind of feature enterprise important work done on him, I think the punditry could go away and we'd be better off.
And that's sort of what you're talking about is on TV, it's just constant pontificating about how bad this is or whatever. I'm right here.
I'm sitting right here. Sitting right here.
I can hear you. Are you well anyway other than present company but i would just say cable is not that important very few people actually no i'm sorry but very few people actually watch cable news uh it is a couple hundred thousand people each night it in no way even compares to the number of people who were watching the nightly news a few decades ago.
This is not an enormous audience. Most people are not getting their news from cable news.
So I think we have all of this focus on cable because it's glamorous and because we like to talk about television and celebrity. But it's not actually the most important thing.
Most people have a kind of choose-your-own-adventure approach to content now and are able to design their media world and how they consume media each day on the internet. So it's just not.
Let me agree in part and disagree in part. First of all, I think that the obsession with big money is like generals who fight the last war.
Because if money was as important as we all think that it is, then Jeb Bush would be president and Ron DeSantis would be a prohibitive favorite. There's a lot of money out there that is being wasted.

That's number one.

Number two, the locus of money power has shifted to the small donors.

It's no longer the Republican elite donor class that can determine.

If the donor class had its way, we would not be facing another Trump term.

The Marjorie Taylor Greene's and the Matt Gaetz of the world are shutting down the government, not because there's a billionaire writing out a big check, or there may be. It's because they know that the more they demagogue, the more outrageous they are, the more small donors they get.
So that's the way money has fundamentally shifted. So for those of you that think that everything flows from Citizen United, that was last decade.
Secondly, on the question of coverage, you can't ignore Donald Trump because he is the rampaging elephant. I mean, it's like being at the foot of a mountain and the avalanche is coming down.
And if we just don't look up, it's not going to be a problem. That doesn't work.
On the other hand, I don't think the media has figured out how to cover Donald Trump. The fact that they continue to platform him, the fact that they continue to turn over their airwaves for his fire hose of disinformation indicates that a lot of them have not learned since 2016.
And unfortunately, they still regard him as ratings crack. They still think that getting an interview with Donald Trump is the best way to introduce or launch a new show, not mentioning any, or to have a town hall meeting because that's going to juice your ratings.
As long as the media feels that way, it's not going to cover him in the aggressive way they do. The problem with the investigative reporting, and I agree with you completely, Ben, and I think it was a failure to not vet him in 2016, but I also remember back in the old days being on talk radio and trying to say, do you understand what the reporting about the frauds in his charities are and everything? Realizing that none of that broke through.
You can have the best journalism in the world and 45% of Americans will never hear it or will never believe it because we live in these alternative realities. And so I think that when we talk about some of this stuff, we're talking about categories that no longer exist.
So back to the audience. Yeah, thank you so much.
I follow you all, so I'm gritting my teeth more than others. But I've heard some great themes these past couple days, but there's a link here, and one of them was actually David French's panel yesterday.
There was one on the rise of right-wing media, Fox News. There was one on Christian nationalism that David French ran, and there was one on assault weapons.
And what we heard from all three of these folks, all these panels, was that it all started top-down. The Moral Majority, Tea Party, the NRA.
It's like they all squeezed a tube of toothpaste and

splattered it all over the bathroom mirror. And that's kind of what I'm getting here,

is that, you know, David French mentioned yesterday that pastors are leaving churches

because the congregations are kicking them out, that Fox News is scared of its viewers because

I don't know. You know, David French mentioned yesterday that pastors are leaving churches because the congregations are kicking them out, that Fox News is scared of its viewers because its viewers now are the ones with the power.
So I've heard discussion here about how to work from the top down to fix this conservative movement. But it sounds like that's not going to work.
So my question is, how do you get 74 million drops of toothpaste splattered all over the wall back into the tube? Because that sounds like the only way you're going to get a rational conservative party. Brett? Look, I think your analysis is spot on.
you know one of the things that is interesting to me is how if you look at any senatorial duo in a given state that's run where Republicans dominate, it is the junior senator who gets most of the airtime. In your fair state here, how many Americans can name the senior senator of the great state of Texas? Everyone can name the junior senator of Texas.
And this is, and by the way, look at the Congress today. Who is the most important member of Congress right now? It's Matt Gaetz, this schmendrick from Florida.
But this corresponds to not just a Republican problem in the Republican Party, although I think it's in some ways quite unique there, but it also has something to do with the diminishment of the concept of authority in American life. this by the way happens everywhere and you can think of a million reasons why this has happened we are so far from the america where walter cronkite said and that's the way it is this day of

you know march 30 30th 19th happened, we are so far from the America where Walter Cronkite said, and that's the way it is

this day of, you know, March 30th, 1966, and people went, uh-huh, right? The question you're posing is

one that I can't even begin to answer because it is a system-wide problem of profound loss of

confidence in institutions, in leadership, in anyone who says, trust me. Of course, we saw this

and then we'll see you next time. problem of profound loss of confidence in institutions, in leadership, in anyone who says, trust me.
Of course, we saw this in spades during the pandemic when the leaders that said, trust me, were widely distrusted. One point that I keep coming back to is this physician heal thyself.
That we in what I guess would be called the elites of American society, we have on a number of important occasions lost trust for reasons that I think are understandable. And if we don't begin to think about why that loss of trust happened, you know, I mean, look, this is maybe outside of my religious lane, but I sometimes hear Catholic priests on TV moralizing.
And I remember thinking, just watching this, like, you should think a little harder about why you have a problem in this respect. And I can, by the way, I'm mentioning them as an example, but there are many more institutions.
I would also speak about this in terms of my own institution, which is the media. I think we do a lot of amazing things.
I look at my colleagues in Ukraine and other far-flung regions of the world being extraordinary and courageous. I'm in awe of them.
But then I also look at a media institution and the levels of self-satisfaction and we are the bold truth tellers in society and people need to listen to us because we're the glue that holds democracy. And I kind of want to retch.
We are a deeply flawed institution that's made some profound mistakes in terms of the way in which we try to relate to the news. Just ending the plague of adjectives that bombards American news coverage would be a major step towards the restoration of trust, that we do not have to place adjectives in front of every person we happen politically to dislike.
That might be a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, we're out of time.
I want to thank all of our panelists, Olivia, Ben, and Brett, and all of you for coming today. I'm Charlie Sykes.
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.