Tim Miller: Down to Clown

It is September 8th, 2023. Welcome to the Bulwark podcast.
This is our first Friday after Labor Day. I actually devoted my full newsletter to deplorable, deplorable, deplorables, kind of filled up the zone here.
Normally, Tim, I have this kind of, you know, if if you have a lifetime deplorable rating we don't include you in the weekly ratings but i bent the rules a little bit how can you do a deplorables of the week without jim jordan and the fact that he just got slapped down by fanny willis how do you do it without you know the latest george santos story or and i'm i'm sorry that i keep coming back to tommy tuberville you know we gotta put him you know on the shelf he's got to you know he's in the clubhouse don't want any of those f slurs and their poems in our military charlie don't want that only want men who can't read in the military well you know if literature breaks out among the ranks just who knows what could happen people start reading they start thinking and, you know, Tommy Tupper, I, you know, if literature breaks out among the ranks, who knows what could happen? People start reading, they start thinking. And, you know, Tommy Tupperberg, you know, look, I mean, Tommy Tupperberg as a coach probably realized, you know, the dangers of having football players read books and stuff like that.
So I'm pretty sure he's been consistent on all of that. So, yeah, I'm guessing a couple of his players read a few more poems than him.
But, you know, I don't know. OK, so we have a little bit of alignment of the stars here because in my deplorables of the week, I think my favorite item was the cool kid philosopher Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, who both got pooned by this guy named.
Well, I don't even want to take it away from you because you just destroyed him with it with a tweet yesterday this is this is the guy who is has the bombshell report that that barack obama was gay or whatever and and tucker carlson gave him airtime and i know that a lot of sort of same old. Do we call it airtime if he's got fired from TV? Stream time.
Okay, stream time. Thank you.
I stand corrected here. You know, part of me is like, okay, it's same old, same old.
Tucker Carlson, you know, is a fire hose of bullshit. But even by these standards, putting this guy, giving this guy any credibility

whatsoever.

So do your thing because you just utterly dismantled all of this.

It's a great moment in American journalism.

Thank you.

We were ahead of the curve last Friday talking about how when Candace Owens talked about

this, all the stuff bubbles up.

This is why, you know, we do this.

You don't have to suffer through the right wing media.

This stuff bubbles up and you think it might just be one person sending a weird tweet. It's not that.
No, like these narratives develop. And the narrative du jour was Obama being a secret gay and also doing crack smoking.
This story that Candace was talking about that we discussed last week, you know, was a rehash, you know, for people who have no memory, for people who weren't alive in 2008 and the before times or who, you know, were going about their lives and not worrying about the end of our democracy who didn't pay attention that closely. This was around in 2008 in the same fever swamps.
There was this guy, his name is Larry Sinclair. And actually, before I get into this, I just want to say, because some people are gonna be like, why the fuck are you talking about this? I do think it's important to just point out, Tucker Carlson is now on his live stream in the basement.
But Ben Shapiro, who just jumps on this, is the biggest right-wing podcaster. There's 40% of the country that is engaging in this sort of stuff.
And we learned in 2016 what putting our head in the sand does and where you end up. So anyway, people need to know how crazy these fuckers are, or else, who knows? We might end up with a President Tucker or Shapiro someday.

We tried that.

Like, let's ignore them.

Let's not give them oxygen. Let's pretend they don't exist.
Let's just treat them as clowns. And then all of a sudden they're like running the defense department and attempting a cure.
So, you know, we need to at least make sure people realize the extent of their clownitude. So this guy Larry Sinclair in 2008 came forward with a rather salacious story that in 1999,

he was in Chicago and, you know, he was looking for a night of fun. And he asked his limo driver, you know, if he might know a young gentleman that might be interested in, you know, maybe procuring his wares and having a night of, of debauched drugs and you know love making and uh the supposedly this this limo driver knew exactly the right person for this sure and he called up a local state senator named barack obama and so they drove from his comfort in hotel to some lounge downtown the guy can't remember the lounge's name.
And outside the lounge was a

strapping young man, skinny guy with a weird name. And he was like, he was down to clown.
And then it started from there. And then they had two nights of doing crack together, smoking crack, oral sex, oral sex in the limo, going back to the hotel.
He has this very long story that he tells and so uh he has this press conference in 2008 where he was going to share this and um you know the right-wing media at the time which was you know far less robust than it is now was all was into it though the alternative one fox not fox but the online right-wing media and he has this press conference where he rambles and rambles our friend dave weigel who's been on this podcast was there and at the end of the press conference he gets arrested by dc metropolitan police let larry sinclair gets arrested larry sinclair gets arrested by dc metropolitan police why did he get arrested well he had a warrant out for his arrest in delaware you come to find out ben smith reported on this in politico that larry sinclair has a lifetime as a con man and a fraudster he is. He had 16 years in jail in Colorado for fraud and credit card charges.
He had theft and forging a check in Florida, theft in Delaware, Colorado records listed with 13 aliases, including Larry, Vizcara, Avia, Mohamed, whatever. He lied to courts.
And four years prior to that press conference, he said he couldn't appear in Pueblo, Colorado on another theft charge because he was disabled with a severe spine injury and terminally ill. Somehow he miraculously rose like Lazarus and was able to walk into the press club in 2008.
After that, the website whitehouse.com offered to pay him $100,000 if he passed a lie detector test verifying these claims. He took the test and failed it.
Awkward. This is a preposterous.
If you look at this man, the barstool sports guy, who is not exactly Mr. Discretion, he was like, I met this person in Tucker's because I was also doing an interview with Tucker the same day.
And he's the least credible person I've ever met in my life. I give him a 0.0% chance of telling a true story.
If you just look at him, I don't want to be stereotypical, but he looks like the kind of person that would tell you anything that you need to hear for one more bump of cocaine. I mean, that's just exactly how he reads.
Any journalist, any newsroom knows guys like this who wander in, they've got the story and you look look at them, you spend about 15 seconds doing a background check, and you realize, this guy's a nut. We don't even want him around.
We're not going to talk to him. Tucker Carlson, despite everything that you just mentioned, all of the details that show that this guy's a complete fraud, devotes a whole interview to him.
So here's the tweet that got my attention. So Ben Shapiro, you know, the cool kid philosopher, but a major influencer.
Destroyer of bad arguments, right? Tweets out, serious question. After watching Tucker Carlson's interview with Larry Sinclair, why are his allegations significantly less credible than those of, say, E.
Jean Carroll or Christine Blasey Ford, to which you responded, Larry Sinclair had fraud charges in two states, went to jail in three, filed an affidavit 20 years ago saying he couldn't stand trial because he was terminally ill, seems to be alive now, Colorado records listed with 13 aliases, and he failed a polygraph test over these claims. Other serious questions? People need to understand that.
I mean, there are lies and there are bullshit, but then there's Tucker Carlson taking this guy and saying, I am so desperate. I am so thirsty for attention that I'm going to throw this guy up.
And Ben Shapiro's serious question, serious questions. Why would he be less credible than E.
Jean Carroll, who was, by the way, found credible by a federal jury and judge, et cetera? Not only was E. Jean Carroll found credible by a federal jury, but E.
Jean Carroll, at her defamation trial, in which the jury found that Donald Trump had raped her, provided 11 witnesses. She provided 11 witnesses at this trial.
Can I offer another reason, Ben Shapiro, why E. Jean Carroll is more credible than this lying, fraudulent crackhead? Yeah.
How about the 11 witnesses? That's what happened. When you make an accusation like this, you bring corroborating evidence.
You bring a diary. You bring the friend that you told in real time.
You bring something. Sinclair had nothing.
He didn't bring anything. He couldn't even remember the fucking name of the place where they met.
Okay. So serious question though.
Serious question. You would think that Tucker Carlson has some residual concern for his credibility or is that naive? I don't think so.
How does this help him? How does this advance any cause that he wants other than I'm going to do something outrageous? I'm going to see what shit I can throw against the wall and get away with. I mean, there is part of me that thinks that Tucker Carlson's kind of in the mode now saying, you know, it's like, how far can I push it? Can I do this? Can I do this? Can I do this? Will there be any consequences? Well, he's out on his ass at Fox News.
He's off in some corner of Elon Musk's basement now. But this is, holy crap.
I mean, even Elon Musk was saying, yeah, this doesn't sound like it's real to me. Yeah, I think that's it.
I think he wants to see what he can get away with. I think he thinks it's a big game now.
It's far beyond for me to psychoanalyze Tucker, but I think that he gets joy out of this and that he thinks it's funny. He thinks it's funny for people's hair to be on fire, and he thinks it's funny to do this sort of thing.
This story is ridiculous. I didn't even get into the fact that Larry, in this interview I'm watching, he talks about how Barack Obama was also involved in some murder of a gay choir director at choir director at his church because they might've had an affair.
And like, Tucker doesn't ask any of the obvious follow-up questions. Tucker's not an idiot.
He used to be a talented magazine writer. I just, I reread his 1999 Bush profile the other day.
It's really well done actually. I, you know, this is not a moron.
Like he, he knows how to ask follow-up questions. Which makes it actually worse, right? I mean, It makes it worse that he knows what he is doing.
He knows that he is engaging in defamation. He knows that Barack Obama is not going to be able to sue him for all this.
In our defense for spending time talking about this, because you know that we're going to get a little bit of, in the comments section, people saying, Tim and Charlie, why are you even talking about this? Then don't be surprised in the next couple of months when you see a poll showing that 40% of Americans actually believe that Barack Obama did blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, because this is the world we live in. Okay.
You have to debunk it and give people something to push back on. Is this a silver bullet? No, but ignoring it's not a silver bullet.
I swear to God, I was not, I sent that tweet that you just read. And then I was like, okay, I'm done with this.
And then, you know, you said in Slack, you need to'm done with this and then you know you said in slack you need to write an article i don't know if i should write an article about this it's like this fucking guy like really and then two minutes later i pop over to instagram stall a little minute as people do look through my stories and there it is like literally one of the first stories i clicked on is somebody that's not political old friend and you know it has a little thing that's kind of cheeky but kind of serious it's like so barack did you know gay sex and crack huh and i'm like this is how things happen this is how this stuff gets out this is how conspiracies spread and so like for people like that you have to give them a link that's like no okay now i can send this to you and is that going to convince the people in the deep MAGA world know that it's going to convince that guy on Instagram, right?

Who made... you have to give them a link that's like no okay now i can send this to you and is that going to convince the people in the deep maga world no that is going to convince that guy on instagram right who maybe was a little bit curious and does it really matter i guess not but i think that this is part of a broader project the flood the zone with shit project that steve bannon said that's like we are corrupted you know we are going to advance these lies we are going to advance these bigotedacies and corruption.
And as part of the strategy for that is we're going to bring everybody else down with us. We're going to smear them.
And so then you can't judge us. You can't judge Tucker on his lies and conspiracies and Donald Trump's.
If Barack Obama was hiding his secret life as a gay lover and crack addict, then how could you judge Donald Trump for his rapes and his coup, right? That is the strategy here. So it has to be pushed down.
It has to be pushed back upon. I agree with you completely.
I guess the question is whether you can push back and push down on it anymore. Because I remember, and we've talked about this, I remember back in the before times when you would get a crazy conspiracy theory like this, and somebody would forward it, and you would write back to them and say, okay, do you understand where this comes from? Here's why it's not true.
I would send them all the information about Larry Sinclair's frauds and aliases and arrests and everything. And they would say, okay, thanks.
I'm not going to forward Uncle Otto's emails like this anymore. But since 2016, when you do that, people go, well, you know, why am I going to believe anything from the Washington Post? Or, yeah, he was convicted by the deep state in Colorado.
It becomes irrefutable. And this is the world that Tucker has helped create in which he thinks he flourishes, which is that he's in these hermetically sealed alternative reality silos, and you just can't break in.
And this may be an example of it, but I do think you're right. We have to push back against all of it.
I do want to say it's sad. My final comment on that is I think Tucker's life is sad.
And I think he's projecting. He randomly went off on Bill Kristol recently and he was like, can you imagine what a dinner party is like at Bill Kristol's house? There has to be no joy there.
These people are joyless, these establishment types. And to me, that felt like a confession.
Yeah, you've never been invited to Bill's house? Me neither. But it felt like a confession.
It seems like somebody that I think would never admit it, but thrived on being invited to write profiles about George W. Bush for Talk Magazine, and now is pushed out to the edges with these weird freaks.
And I think he's probably somewhere deep inside his soul a little unhappy with himself, because this feels sad. I was watching the interview.
It seems sad. And again, you're Tucker Carlson, you couldn't do anything, and yet you choose to do this.
By the way, speaking of sad, and we don't have to spend a lot of time on this, Elon Musk, it feels like an old story that he has destroyed Twitter or whatever we're supposed to call it these days, Exeter or whatever. But this last week, it has just been, what do you start? The fact that he's pushing these anti-Semitic tropes about the anti-defamation league, that he's pushing this idea that, you know, Jews complaining about anti-Semitism causes more anti-Semitism, you know, that tired old thing.
I mean, he's, you know, here's the guy that opened up Twitter to Nazis and everything, and he's pushing out these things. And yet that's not the worst thing he did this week.
Now, basically, he's acknowledging that he shut off the startling communications to the Ukrainians when they were trying to disable the Russian fleet, the Russian fleet that that fired missiles that have killed civilians and children and bombed cities and everything. and you know this is in the new biography of elon musk but elon musk is not just a clown elon mus Musk is somebody that became a willing ally of the Russians and cut the Ukrainians off at the knees.
And there are some pretty significant issues here. You know, what role does Elon Musk, this fucking narcissistic crackpot, play in national security and issues of war and peace here? This is not a joke.
Yeah. No, it isn't.
And the excerpt was from Walter Isaacson's book, which I'm excited to read. And Walter is really unbelievably talented.
And the story is kind of crazy. He's like watching this Archman football game here right down the street from my house in New Orleans.
And like Elon's calling him talking about how he's going to shut off the Ukrainians. And that's just like, what a crazy scene, you know, for starters to write about and to think that this is what we are as a society, like the Ukrainians are begging Elon to keep these startling things open and working.
Though to me, reading the story, my big takeaway is like, it was really a mistake for everybody to let it get this far.

Boeing does not get to have a setting on their plane when you contract with Boeing that says,

oh, we're going to turn off the plane.

We're going to automatically turn this plane around if you get over Russian airspace.

Like, that's not how it works.

Like, when you contract with a government, the government is in charge of diplomacy,

of military operations. You are providing a service.
And I think think that the ukrainians obviously they're in desperate times and it seems like eon really did help them at the start but you get in bed with this mercurial figure and at some point i guess there was an offer for the u.s to pay and elon spitefully kind of said no and it was really at that point where i don't know what needed to happen a fucking a fucking summit at Elon's place in Austin with Tony Blinken and a Ukrainian official. I'm not sure, but you needed to get to a place where it's like, no, this guy doesn't get to decide, right? Like either he's going to contract with us and provide this.
If you were writing a movie about this dysfunctional world where this erratic billionaire is sitting there with top government officials making these life and death decisions. You know, somebody would say this is totally implausible.
There's no way that the U.S. government, the Ukrainian government would be held hostage by this.
Iron man. Literally out of iron man.
Just a reminder that we, we actually do kind of live in an oligarchy, but the worst, dumbest oligarchy you can imagine. Yeah, I mean, somebody was pointing out, and maybe this is true, that there's that Malaysian, and this is another reason why we got to monitor the crazy shit.
Like there's this Malaysian influencer, Ian Miles Chong. If you don't know about him, God bless you, don't learn it.
Don't learn another thing about him after this. But he is this far right MAGA type, but he doesn't even live in america but somehow he he got a twitter following and elon replies to him all the time and he was he initially people think suggested to elon via tweet that like he shut these things down he also has a russia today article right so like all this stuff is intertwined this is again, why like they needed to have cut a actual military contracting agreement or cut this guy off.

This situation is fucking nuts.

Otherwise.

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

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. And every day we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones.
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We're going to get through this together. I promise.
Another like bottom story of the day. I want to get to the more important stories of the day, but you slacked me this, this story about George Santos.
I kind of thought we were done with George Santos. I just started reading this and laughing in bed this morning.
And I was just like, we might just want to just give people a little taste. It turns out that there was, what do they call this thing? Like a vulnerability report.
Vulnerability study. Yeah.
So the campaigns commission a basically opera research on themselves to figure out, okay, what's the worst thing somebody can say about me? Right. I mean, you know, CBS news got their hands on this vulnerability report for George Santos.
This was by his own campaign, and this was widely circulated, and people like Elise Stefanik, who eventually endorsed and campaigned for George Santos, knew about this. I mean, she saw this.
And so let me see if I can do a little bit of a reading of the top things. Again, this is from the Santos campaign itself.
Before he was elected, saying, one victim of the company where Santos worked was an elderly woman living on Social Security who says she was told that if Donald Trump were elected, the stocks and bonds she was invested in would plummet. Santos worked for a Turkish-based company with a litany of customer complaints and scam allegations.
The complaints continue while Santos worked there. Santos, as his professional experience, is working in finance and helping wealth grow, but his personal financial disclosure filed with the clerk of the house shows no personal investments or assets.
Then it goes on and talks about Santos' driver's license. He's suspended in Florida.
He can't drive in Florida. Santos has had multiple civil judgments against him.
Santos is running for office in New York, but he registers a new company in Florida.

Santos says he is socially liberal.

To be clear, I am no right winger.

And it goes on to question details

about his marriage and things like that.

It's just, but it's all laid out here.

The marriage one was pretty good.

We just have to do this one.

While married to a woman,

I don't, I can't pronounce her name.

Social media posts indicate Santos dated

and lived with a man who was an illegal immigrant.

The man later said he was fearful of being deported once Trump got elected.

And then Santos began dating his current partner while he was also still married to Vieira.

I liked that.

And my other favorite one that you didn't mention was that he said he criticized the people storming the Capitol.

The campaign team was worried about that one. They were like, that might come back to hurt us in the primary.
I mean, he can't drive in Florida. He's secretly dating an illegal immigrant while married, a man while married to a woman.
His whole career is a lie and a Ponzi scheme. And Elise Stefanik is like, that's my fucking guy.
That's my man. Yeah, that's it.
Yes. Let's put him in the Congress of the United States.
Let's go ahead and support him. But of course, this is the Biden regime deep state smear of an American.
Wait, no, it's his own campaign. It comes from his own campaign.
Speaking of your own campaign and self-inflicted wounds, Tim, you were also ahead of the curve with a big piece about the complete uselessness of super PACs. They burn through tens of millions of dollars without moving anything, accomplishing anything.
I mean, really, it's quite extraordinary that you have these consultants that are running the super PACs and keep asking for more money, and they spend these just god-awful amounts of money accomplish nothing and just keep you know

stay in business but now there's uh there's more reporting that um that ronda sandus is disappointed in his super pack he was apoplectic about the release of the memo so your advice has been in donors instead of giving to these super packs why don't you just take your money and like set it on fire or like give it to some homeless people or what give it to somebody and so this is now just to be clear I think that there are certain situations or certain like kind of targeted PACs and stuff that do certain things motivate groups for various things you know reach one to two percent of voters on the margins in a general election I do think that matters it's these's these candidate packs. We learned in 2016, I was there with Jeb, where we had this hugely funded pack, and the campaign didn't have any money in the candidate.
I love Jeb, great one-on-one, but dynamism on stage wasn't like his strength, right? So we already did this. Yeah, really.
I know. We already did this eight years ago.
And the DeSantis campaign is like, let's set up the same program as Jeb had. But actually a little worse because Jeb at least had Mike Murphy, who he trusted on the Super PAC, and had known for 20 years.
We're going to hire this guy that is just a total stranger, right, but has a good reputation. Jeff Rowe.
We're going to hire somebody. Yeah, Jeff Rowe.
And we're going to put him over there. It's going to be illegal to talk to him.
We're going to give him all the money and let him come up with a strategy. And Ron is just going to try to win on the force of his personality.
I mean, the whole setup was preposterous from the start. And as I go in deep detail, I have a long rant about this that is maybe more for an insider's podcast than this one.
And the article, the short of it is like, these things maybe work in lower level races. in presidential races it just it defies obvious logic right it's like donald trump is a brand that all these voters know they have a deeply held view on him one way or the other maybe some of them are in the cult maybe some of them don't like him maybe some of them like him but are open to moving on but they all have deeply held beliefs about him running a 30 second tv ad or having a stranger knock on your door is not going to change your mind about donald trump and if you're going to do that the 30 second tv ad needs to be you know a fucking rip it off his face you know it needs to be a new piece of information something to change things up a generic cookie cutter ad like it obviously isn't going to work in this situation situation.
The analogy I gave in the article is like, imagine if you're RC Cola and you're a marketing guru, you're the Jeff Rowe of Cola selling. You go to the investors and you're like, if you give me 50 million, I'm going to run some ads in Iowa that say RC Cola is great and not mention Coke.
And then I'm going to send people to people's doors and I'm going to knock on them and say hey you should try rc cola instead of coke and then at the end of that rc cola is going to be the number one soda coke's going to be gone we're going to pass them investors would look at you like you're insane they'd be like that's fucking like that's not going to work and why would that work in this situation then so the whole thing is just preposterous and there's this other political story this morning that really ground my gears, Charlie. It was Jeff Rowe let people into their headquarters and let the reporter meet, a good reporter, Sasha Eisenberg, meet their data scientists.
And the data scientists are like, we've been testing. We tested one ad in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and another ad in Ottumwa, Iowa.
We tested mail in this part of New Hampshire. We tested text messages in the other part of new hampshire and we discovered if we do more text messages in this one ad instead of the other ad then six percent of our target voting audience will be more likely to vote for science science i'm like i'm going i'm reading this article and i'm like you're losing by 40 you're losing're losing by 40.
Okay. A 6% increase in favorability.
A, I think this is kind of voodoo science to begin with, but that's up for another topic. But even if you are right, it's like, you need to fucking change up the game.
You need to go attack Donald Trump. You got to do something.
You have a zero of a candidate who's lost 14%. Well, you've spent tens of millions of dollars from rich people.
And now you're bragging to Politico that you can move things 6% on the margins. And people are still giving this guy money.
Give me your money. Tell me, I'll tell you what to do with your money.
You know, we'll support local nonprofit organizations. You know, we'll have a foreign exchange program to bring more young French boys to Wisconsin.
We'll do things that are useful. We'll help underhoused people in northern Wisconsin.
Where can we spend this money instead of on Jeff Rose Beach Houses? I wish people would pay attention to you. There are, of course, the professional scammers out there who will continue to try to sell this.
Then there are people who are, some of the bad ideas are driven by donors. And this is kind of a digression because as you were talking, I was thinking back to a conversation I was part of reluctantly in the before times where people were talking about one of the campaigns we were having here in Wisconsin.
We used to have a campaign like every month. Remember, there was a period where we were recalling and doing all kinds of things here.
And the various ideas for, you know, motivating voters or turning out voters. And there was an older guy who was a major donor who said, well, let me tell you my idea.
My idea is we need to have more billboards. And then he pulls out this little thing with pictures of billboards that he had put in various locations around the community.
And it was like, I paid for these and look at these. And no one's going to say, are you kidding me? Like what a waste of money.
It's like yard signs or like handing out matchbooks or something like that. And yet because he was a donor, everybody was like, that's really a good idea.
You know, where else can we put these billboards? But I got to tell you, Charlie, if Ron DeSantis used all the money to buy every billboard in America and have them all say, Donald Trump didn't build the wall, he's a pussy. That probably would have been a better use of their $50 million.
I'm not sure it would have helped Ron DeSantis, but it couldn't have been any worse than what these gurus have been doing with the money. Ron DeSantis is Ron DeSantis and that's not going to change.
Okay, so this week, and I told you before we started this that I was bored talking about the polls and various things, but I think at the end of the week we have to talk about it. And you tell me whether you think I'm wrong about it.
This was the week of the Democratic panic about Joe Biden, probably a rather significant overreaction to a couple of polls, the CNN poll, the Wall Street Journal poll showing that Donald Trump is actually leading Joe Biden, that Joe Biden is just not doing well with non-white voters. And that when Democratic voters are asked, you know, what are you concerned about? Like overwhelmingly, like just off the charts, the age issue.
Really? And I know that there's this big back and forth. Stop talking about the age issue.
Okay. He's old.
He's getting. Okay.
So, and you had a interesting back and forth with the poker guru, formerly known as Nate Silver, about all of this. So give me your take on this, because, again, I understand people saying stop talking about it.
But, you know, it is the giant pink dirigible in the room that you can't have a conversation with voters without bringing up. So Tim, talk to me about Joe Biden's age.
Yeah, we hear you. We get the comments.
I get the emails. I get the replies on Twitter and on threads.
I understand people don't want to hear about the age thing, Joe Biden supporters, of which I count myself. But the CNN poll was not a poll of like podcasters and what you're worried about.
It was the number one issue by far that Joe Biden voters care about. And so on a political podcast, you know, you're kind of not doing your job if you don't talk about the top thing by far that voters care about.
It sort of would be like, what would be the point would be like turning into a Denverver broncos podcast and and having them never mention the fact that the quarterback russell wilson isn't any good anymore like it's kind of a big problem for the team so anyway it is something you have to discuss yeah the other thing though on that point about why we discuss it so much that i did want to just clarify i was thinking about it this week so you're like why don't you talk about trump's age more do you want me to tell you my answer to that charlie yeah because i want donald trump to die i hope donald trump dies i'm not worried about donald trump dying you said the best fucking thing so i so i'm not concerned about that i'm not concerned about so i don't need to talk about it that much because i'm not like i'm talking about things that i'm concerned about. I did.
I said it out loud. That would be great.
Yeah, he's also old, but like there's not a lot of Sturm and Drog among the pro-democracy crowd about like what would happen if Donald Trump fell over. Like that would be awesome.
So fingers crossed on that front. But there is some concerns about what can you do to mitigate the issues about Joe Biden's age.
And so maybe that's why there's a disproportionate conversation. But it's true that they're both old.
I discussed both. I had my Snapchat show.
You can watch it this week. It's about our gerontocracy.
And I give more detailed thoughts on that. Really quick on Nate Silver.
Can I just weigh in on you wanting Donald Trump to die? Because I wanted to distance myself and associate myself in some ways with all of this. I would rather say, okay, yes, he's 77 and clearly has cognitive issues.
Yes, there's no question about it. But you look at Donald Trump and it's like, he's a crook.
He's a seditionist. He is one of the most fundamentally odious figures ever to be in American politics.
He's a bigot. Yes, he's a bigot.
And by the way, he's 77. It's like in the list of awfulnesses, it's not in the top 10 because there's so much else.
It's like you look at Donald Trump and if you're going, you know, he's looking kind of wrinkly. It's like, no, no, no.
The point is he's a would-be autocrat. He is a serial liar.
He's a man with the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old. He is, I mean, whatever you want to say about him, you know, all of that, I think, comes before this.
You look at Joe Biden, and unfortunately, because- Thank you for advising and extending my remarks. Okay.
I mean, you look at Joe Biden, and you're going, I agree with him on, you know, policies. I agree with him on this.
I, you know, share these values. But I'm really worried that he looks like he's 100 years old.
So it is different. It's because that's a more prominent thing because there's not a lot of other baggage here.
But, of course, I do want to associate myself saying that I do find myself hoping occasionally for an errant meteorite. Okay, go on.
I'm sorry. Back to Nate Silver.
i just that's all i'm saying it'd be nice i can't really think of any person other person who i feel that way about so it's not like i'm just sending a lot of people into the sun just one orange person um i've just wrote finally on nate silver i because i'm stuck at talking about this yeah the whole thing is just the media and the meta media criticism narrative stuff is just really insane to me it's like oh any any Joe Biden supporter is like, all anybody can talk about is the age issue. All Donald Trump supporters talk about is how old Joe Biden is.
It's everywhere. It's all they talk about.
And then there's this small class of anti-anti-Trumpers, you know, the contrarian class. And they somehow have decided that the media doesn't talk about this.
And that the media is trying joe biden by not mentioning his age and nate was advancing this theory this week and on twitter i just had to be like what the fuck are you talking about do you turn on the tv ever like are you you're just playing poker stars all day online that's fine but then don't just make these vast claims but they're stubborn they're these stubborn egomaniacal contrarians can't just be like, you know what, Tim, you're right. People do talk about this.
That was a mistake. I missed takes.
I mentioned it. I've been wrong.
There's a lot, a lot of coverage of it. Yeah, anyway.
So you wanted to talk about this new Saudi deal. I feel a rant coming on about the Saudi deal.
Yeah, I'm concerned about it. Give people the background of it, what we're talking about.

I feel like this is the Tim Rant podcast. It's like, you know, some weeks it's kind of like Charlie's ranting and we have like a repartee going.
I think this week you're just like, you just want to wind me up and let me go, which is fine. I like ranting.
That was my game plan this week. Yeah, that was your notes this morning.
Wind him up, let him go. Okay, Saudi.
Yep. So obviously the Abraham Accords, which are these diplomatic deals that were negotiated during the Trump era between Israel and other Gulf states.
Saudi was not one of them. The Biden administration is now trying to expand on this with a mega Saudi deal that does not just include diplomatic relations with Israel, but also this is not finalized.
We don't exactly know all the details about you. So this is all reporting via leaks, etc.
But also on the table is allowing Saudi to develop a nuclear program and a security guarantee that is not in the same level of NATO, you know, but as some, again, not all the details are out. So we don't exactly know what it would be.
But, you know, some junior version, JV version of the NATO security guarantee, American backed, not Israeli backed, for Saudi. And this is fucking insane.
This is madness. And the Biden administration seems to be for this.
Lindsey Graham is for this. And Jared Kushner is for this.
And MBS is for this. And I just, I am.
Yeah. And yes, I mean, of course, Jared's for it.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Of course, Jared's for this.
Yeah. That's concerning to me just on anything that has that little trio of Lindsey, Jared and MBS all excited has me worried to begin with.
Another one of the axis of assholes. Another axis of evil, yeah.
So I just don't know.

It doesn't seem like there are a lot of voices speaking out about this, about concerns about this.

I have been reaching out to some folks from the Hill that I want to do something about this next week with other people who are concerned about this, elected officials, not just podcasts, ranters like me.

Just to put a finer point on this, in the past, I understood sometimes you know you got to make a deal with the devil over oil prices and you know saudi you know has always had a pretty questionable regime when it comes to morals and ethics and you know you got real politics i get all that mbs is a madman like they murdered somebody over a errant tweet sometime over the past two weeks he killed a journalist like he is trying to use his largesse to influence to get his like grubby hands into the western world in a lot of different ways and it's working and it's working it's working yeah he tried to murder not necessarily order kashoggi it isn't just kashoggigi. He tried to murder one of his former rivals who was exiled to Canada in Canada.
He sent a kill squad to Canada. They got waylaid.
There's a big 60 Minutes piece on this. So this guy is unstable.
He is not a friend. It is not like dealing with a king that maybe they have some social policies, some anti-gay policies I don't like.
They're generally rational. It's not like that.
This guy is a lunatic. Okay, but why is this happening? It's not 1975 anymore.
He doesn't have us by, you know, by the short hairs when it comes to oil. I mean, we, yes, he's got a lot of money, but there's a lot of money in the world.
What is the, what is the attraction here? Why do we have to suck up to him? yeah the best I understand it is that there is the oil side of this, and there's concerns about gas prices. I get that.
I wouldn't trust MBS as far as you could throw them. You sign this deal, he's still going to want Trump in there.
No matter how sweetheart of a deal you give him, he's still going to prefer Trump and Kushner. And so he's already shutting down the amount of oil production that's being pushed out of the middle east so gas prices are already going up because of that anyway that part doesn't make sense to me then there's another you know kind of the graybeards old wise men of you know national security apparatus that would argue and maybe we should have eric adelman or somebody smarter than me on to talk about this but like you know this would be a big step in peace in the Middle East, and it would reduce risks that there's a blowup in the Middle East if there are more agreements between the Gulf countries and Israel, and it also isolates Iran more.
There's some other geopolitical... That would be the best explanation, that somehow that you use this to triangulate against Iran, that you want to isolate them.
And so you're always playing those two poles off against one another. That seems like the most plausible.
Yeah. But that to me is more plausible when it was like, you go back 20 years and you had Ahmadinejad versus kind of a pliant king of saudi that you know didn't have global aspirations like are we sure that the iranian regime and saudi regime are materially different right now i i guess like on the margins and and we have a longer ties to saudi so i you know people are going to come on here and be like tim what are you talking about obviously iran iran's terrible this is not a defense of Iran, but it's just like MBS is fucking awful.
He is awful and he is dangerous and he is untrustworthy. And it is, it makes me very uncomfortable.
So that's my rant about this. Okay.
So let's get back to domestic politics and some rank punditry here. Okay.
Because I do think there's always that temptation to overanalyze the various blips in the presidential race. And, of course, I'm going to succumb to those temptations.
Is Vivek over? I'm saying this because he had a really genuinely shitty week. I mean, just one bad interview after another.
There's no indication that his debate performance has transformed his prospects. It feels as if that whole glow lasted about three or four days.
And then he went out and people realized he's kind of a smarmy, dishonest, disingenuous bullshitter. Was he ever under is the question.
Was he ever actually running for president or was he just trying to cement himself as a future MAGA star? And has he hurt himself with that? Maybe a little bit. I think he over.
I think he definitely is overshot. I mean, Medea-san just absolutely annihilated him.
That was kind of the type of thing that even a MAGA person watching this has to be like, bro, like how did you not come better prepared for this? So I do think he's hurt himself a little bit this week. I got to tell you, I would love, just like the political nerd in me, the political dork scientist in me would love for that thing I was wishing about earlier to have happened.
And for us to just have to look at what a Vivek DeSantis Haley race would look like, because I think that tell us a lot about the future of the party. I'm not convinced that Vivek's week was bad enough that that would eliminate him in that fantasy scenario.
I really do think there's like, about a third of the party that's, that would want somebody think there's like about a third of the party that's that would want somebody like vivek about a third of the party that's kind of like maga light that could go for vivek but could go for desantis and a third of the party that want hayley and boy i think we'd be having a lot more fun if that was what was happening right now rather than us having to stare down the fucking horror of a donald trump nomination but we're not. And so.
Okay. So speaking of, speaking of Haley, she's having her moment, maybe it will last just today that Polk out, I think it was the CNN poll, right? That shows that, well, Biden is behind pretty much everybody that Haley is the strongest Republican candidate.
So there are a lot of people, some of the anti-antes are going, Hey guys, you know, if you're Republicans, if you actually want to win, you should go with Haley. Haley is the most electable.
And obviously, in the before times, electability would have been a real asset. Does it matter anymore? I mean, how long is she going to have her moment? I just don't think it's going to ever amount to anything.
I mean, she has to survive enough to get to South Carolina. That's kind of like, how You know, if you finish distant third in the first two.
Yeah. And then what from there? So I don't think so.
I mean, she loses in South Carolina. I said in the age Snapchat, you know, one of my lines in this thing was, it would be great if we were staring down the barrel of a Haley Biden race.
And like, then the age issue, I feel like would also wouldn't be as acute, right? Because it'd be like, okay, worst case scenario. So Haley, I would love for Haley to be the nominee.
I probably wouldn't vote for her. I certainly wouldn't vote for her actually, given, you know, her Trump two-step is disqualifying for me, but she is that much better than the other ones.
But it's just like, if I feel that way, then what does that say about what the mega folks feel? They're not going to get there for her. And so I just don't, I don't see where she goes from here.
I think she's, it's been encouraging, you know, for her team, like her team feels buoyed. But to me, it feels like that eventually you just run into the brick wall of the reality that Republican voters aren't looking for this.
I mean, she's still, it's all this like, oh, this is so positive. You're still losing to Trump by 45.
You're losing to him by 45. So yeah, I mean, she's up in the general.
Just one other thing I thought on the general, that general poll. If you just run this out, if somehow Nikki won the nomination because Trump's in jail and she wins a delegate fight or whatever, and they steal it from, I don't know how she'd actually win.
Doesn't Donald Trump Jr. run his third party? I just, I don know that that's true.
Aren't there a lot of other things that happen? I find it very hard to believe that the Trump cult people just vote for. It's kind of magical thinking to imagine that you're going to have a Nikki Joe Biden one-on-one.
Okay. Unfortunately, this is almost too boring to talk about, but Mike Pence gave a big speech up in New Hampshire.
I actually had to write something about it, this speech at St. Anselm's College, which he clearly was billing as this is his major campaign reset.
He called it, you know, a time for choosing, which is the famous Ronald Reagan speech from 1964. And he laid out the contrast between populism and conservatism.
Have you read the speech? Because... Well, I haven't read the whole speech, but I saw the relevant clips.
It's kind of an amazing document because, I mean, it's got the boilerplate attacks on the Biden administration, set that aside. It's got a lot of the boilerplate nostalgia for Reagan, set that aside.
But then his critique of populism versus conservatism is really very, very pointed. It's very blunt.
He's got some

very strong language there. In fact, there are passages in there that could have been written by,

you know, a never-Trumper, which leads to, of course, the paradox of Mike Pence, because he said,

this is the time for choosing for the Republican Party. This is the big choice.
It's like,

Mike, have you noticed the Republican Party has already made the choice, and you were there standing by his side when they chose him? I mean, this is part of the problem. You know, how do you go from standing at Donald Trump's side for four years, supporting all of the anti-conservative populist policies and then say, yes, but this is the existential threat that we face.
we need to reject. There's not room in this party for populism and conservatism.
The whole fate of

the nation, you know, hangs in the balance. If we don't reject this Trumpian populism, which I supported until five minutes ago, then we will cease to be the conservative party.
We will be Republicans in name only. I mean, there's some really strong language in there that's hard to kind of reconcile with Mike Pence.
So what do you think? Yeah, I'm excited to see your article on that. Yeah, I'm excited to see that because like, when I saw that, I was like, these guys just don't want to accept the consequences of their own actions in supporting Trump.
And I chuckled to myself, but my thought was initially exactly what you just said. It's like, we have a battle for the soul of the party right now it's like no man we had that battle it was in 2016 i was on the field actually i was on i was on the side that you say you're on now yeah i was like i was charging you know i was the front line uh you know uh the light brigade you know charging to my death and and you were on the other side.
You shot me, actually. Our side that you want, you know, lost already.
It happened. Like, the battle's over.
And now you're kind of, like, running into the wreckage to extend his metaphor to death, right? Like, running back in being like, it's time to fight. And, like, their dead bodies strewn around everywhere.
It's like, sorry, bro. wrong side it's over the fight's over whoever wrote that for him i mean obviously i thought this was going to be the manifesto for restoring genuine conservative principles but you read it and you go this reads more like a eulogy because this party doesn't exist anymore it's like and i had the same experience when i was talking in February, when I was, you know, had that event with Paul Ryan, and he's talking about what the conservative was like.
Yeah, it's not 2015 anymore. There's a huge amount of denial about how this party has moved, what it actually cares about.
So Pence's critique of all the things that have been abandoned, you know, American leadership in the world, you know, concern about character, traditional values, all of that stuff. It's true.
But, you know, this time for choosing, they chose and they chose Donald Trump. They chose populism over conservatism, you know, and you ought to know that because you're sitting there as a former vice president of the United States at what, five to 7% of the polls, which ought to tell you something.

He managed to convince himself.

It really is amazing.

You know, there could be psychological studies done about this for centuries.

You know, just like that he managed to, and there are so many people like him.

He's just an avatar for this.

He managed to sit in the Oval Office as the next in line to the presidency and as the number one cheerleader for donald trump and yet still in his brain convinced himself that he hadn't really sold out his principles because he was still you know what i mean because he didn't when he disagreed with donald trump he said so yeah he said so behind the scenes and and you know and he's like actually you know we did the tax cuts that were very traditional. He convinced himself of all that bullshit that he was spreading.
He really did convince himself of it. There's this self-delusion.
The fact that that self-delusion is so powerful that it managed to persist even while being in the Trump White House is pretty remarkable. about jinx.
Jinx. Especially now that you read the speech where he's basically, they're sitting there and he is describing himself as the polar opposite.
And he says, it's time for choosing, that they are irreconcilable. The differences are unbridgeable between populism and conservatism.
You were on the side. And it's like- You were on the side, Trump pants.
You're sitting there in the same room.

And now he's saying, yes, we were partners

and we accomplished a lot.

And yet I represent a tradition

that is completely incompatible

with what Donald Trump is representing.

And he's trying to kind of have it both ways.

We accomplished a lot.

And he's saying, you know, in 2016,

Donald Trump promised to govern as a conservative,

but he and his imitators are not promising that anymore well where is your party going here um so it's kind of a sad i'm debating whether or not to call it your name's on the bumper sticker your name's on the bumper sticker trump pence it's right there water bottle off the table you took the water bottle off the table i mean you were like were like, you know, it's broad shoulder leadership. Like all this happened.
And, you know, it's almost like a multiple personality disorder. I mean, myself and Irene type situation.
Well, I know part of me is like, glad you're coming around. Glad you're laying out the distinctions.
We have been saying this for years now, you know, in opposition to people like you saying this is not conservatism. This is a betrayal of all of this.
And now you're coming around. Now you're seeing it.
And like, welcome to the party, sort of. Do you think there'll be a single person that when Donald Trump accepts that nomination in Milwaukee is like, Charlie, you know, turns out you were right.
You were really right about that. Do you think you'll get one, Mike Pence? Do you think you'll get one? Actually, I get that all the time, but they never say that in public.
Then they go out and they do something MAGA-like and it's just like, okay, this is like, this has become a cliche, what they say in private, what they say in public. And I'm, I'm, I'm a little tired of it.
So Tim, we made it to the weekend. So thanks for, thanks for joining me again.
And I hope that you have a great weekend. I'm planning a great weekend.
Happy to do it. We're going to see you in Austin.
We're going to be together in two weeks. Two weeks.
We're going to be in Austin. Bill's going to be down there.
Mona's going to be down there. We have panels and then we actually have a meet and greet.
So if you're down in Austin, you can, you know, just come in and say, stop talking about this stuff. You know, we're tired of you talking about it.
This is what you should be talking about. Yeah, give us some script.
You're saying things on your podcast that make us uncomfortable, and we don't want that anymore. We were proud.
No, I'm just kidding. So I will see you in two weeks.
And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes with Tim Miller.

And we will be back on Monday.

And we will do this all over again.