Tom Nichols: Our Surreal Moment

Speaker 3 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 6 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny, infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 8 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 11 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 6 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 7 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

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

Speaker 13 We know no one's journey is the same. That's why Delta Sky Miles moves with you.

Speaker 13 From earning miles on reloads for coffee runs, shopping, and things you do every day to connecting you to new experiences.

Speaker 13 A Sky Miles membership fits into your lifestyle, letting you do more of what makes you you. It's more than travel, it's the membership that flies, dines, streams, rides, and arrives with you.

Speaker 13 Because when you have a membership that's as unique as you are, there's no telling where your journey will take you next. Learn more at delta.com/slash skymiles.

Speaker 15 Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is August 22nd, 2023.

Speaker 15 It is the day before the first Republican debate, two days before the former President of the United States does his fourth perp walk. And we are joined once again by Professor Emeritus.

Speaker 15 Tom Nichols. I'm sorry.
Tom Nichols, staff writer for The Atlantic. How are you doing, Tom?

Speaker 10 It's been a while. I'm good, but I'll thank you not to laugh at Professor Emeritus.

Speaker 15 I know it's the Emeritus thing. It's sort of like Professor Old Guy.

Speaker 10 Professor, that's exactly what it means. Professor Crank.

Speaker 15 Let me tell you what I was thinking this morning that I wanted to talk to you about.

Speaker 15 I wonder whether or not there are millions of people who maybe are much younger than us who do not realize how surreal our times are, who have grown up in this time of crazification and are looking around and going, yeah, this is the way things are.

Speaker 15 I mean, you know, I mean, political parties can be, you know, political cults.

Speaker 15 And yeah, you know, somebody who is being arraigned on racketeering charges and 91 felonies, of course, he's going to be surging in the polls.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 15 yeah, it's like this does happen on a regular basis, right?

Speaker 15 We have presidential debates and the frontrunner doesn't show up because he's in a jail down in Atlanta posting a $200,000 bail and the judge is warning him not to intimidate or threaten witnesses.

Speaker 15 I mean, Tom, even you and I, once in a while, we have to step back and go, okay, the full insanity of this moment. You and I have been doing this now for seven, eight years.

Speaker 15 I don't think we ever thought it was going to last this long. I don't think we ever thought that the stupidity would seep so deeply into our culture.

Speaker 10 I think once a day, once a day, I have to step back and say, this can't be happening. Yeah, right.

Speaker 15 And it's going to keep going.

Speaker 10 And you're right. You know, that for younger, of course, you know, being a professor emeritus, everyone is younger than I am and you.

Speaker 10 You know, if you're 25 or 30 years old, yeah, for most of the time that you've paid attention to politics, oh, this is just normal. This is just how it is that we don't flinch.

Speaker 10 And I think, you know, the phrase that I've used so often in writing and in discussions, you know, you and I have talked about it is, how have we just gotten used to it?

Speaker 10 And I think that is, you know, the bad guys in the world, not just Donald Trump, but, you know, Vladimir Putin, right?

Speaker 10 There's a huge war raging in the middle of Europe, something 30 years ago we would have thought of as an existential danger. And we've just gotten used to it.

Speaker 10 That Trump and his guys are being arraigned for racketeering charges, which

Speaker 10 John Eastman this morning, you know, we've crossed a Rubicon. I'm being prosecuted for my First Amendment right.
I mean, there was a time, I think, a better,

Speaker 10 we always have to qualify when a better time was, but a better time when people like this would have said, on advice of counsel, I am not saying anything.

Speaker 15 And they would be ashamed.

Speaker 10 Not only do we live in a time where our politics have become so completely hallucinatory, but we're living in a time without shame.

Speaker 10 What blows my mind about the current situation we're dealing with, you know, with Trump and all these other guys getting hauled up on charges, they're not really disputing that they did the things they did.

Speaker 10 They're just disputing that they're illegal. And again in a better time first of all in a better time there would have been somebody in the room to say

Speaker 10 you guys we cannot plot to overthrow an election in the united states you know it sucks we lost but we can't do this but also in a better time you know there would be people who would say hey you don't want to admit that you were part of a slate of fake electors You know, I actually think it's worse than that, though.

Speaker 15 I'm sorry to even go down to a darker road here, but there are millions of Americans who, according to the polls, are saying that, yes, it is illegal. Yes, there are crimes, and I'm okay with that.

Speaker 10 And I'm going to vote for them anyway.

Speaker 15 Anyway, and that's part of the culture of shamelessness, right? I mean, see, I guess part of it is that we've always had spasms of idiocy, of extremism, of crackpotism, of cruelty.

Speaker 15 But there's always been the correction there. There's always been

Speaker 15 saner voices. I won't use the term adults in the room anymore, but saner voices.
You know, the center will hold. It doesn't feel feel like that right now.

Speaker 15 It used to be that if you were caught committing a crime or a lie, there would be consequences because people would not tolerate it.

Speaker 15 Now, when you're caught committing a crime or telling a lie, it just doesn't matter. In fact, people like you even more because it's a fucking cult.

Speaker 10 The thing about adults in the room, because the other thing that I think really contributes to this is the juvenilization of our culture.

Speaker 15 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 10 And I don't mean a youth culture. I mean a juvenile culture.
I was thinking of this the other day.

Speaker 10 You know, of course, I worked on the Hill 30 years ago and you started in politics when, you know, men wouldn't leave the house without wearing a jacket.

Speaker 10 You know, those days. This is actually true.
I was thinking of this watching Kat Kamek, you know, jumping around barefoot on stage at some young Republican thing.

Speaker 10 My wife was looking at this and I and she said, who's that? And I said, that is a member of Congress.

Speaker 10 of the United States.

Speaker 10 And by the way, Kamek was just the most recent version.

Speaker 10 There are plenty of Democrats who do things where I just kind of put my hand to my temple and say, you understand that you're like a senator, right?

Speaker 10 That you're a member of Congress, that you're an adult, that you are a handful of the most important leaders in this country. And they're all, you know, like teenagers.

Speaker 10 And I think that reflects this juvenile culture we live in that says nothing matters, there are no consequences, nothing's really dangerous, no decisions really matter one way or another.

Speaker 10 Nobody gets really hurt. Nothing can go wrong.

Speaker 10 And, you know, I think part of it is that the small number of people who do make the country work on a day-to-day basis, it's kind of like putting toddler bumpers on all the sharp edges.

Speaker 10 You know, and so we have everybody else kind of crashing around and making asses of themselves.

Speaker 10 While, you know, there's this small handful of people who make sure that, you know, the airports are funded and that clean water comes out of your tap and that your passport still works.

Speaker 10 And I think people just don't understand that anymore. They think everything's just a big fucking joke at this point.

Speaker 10 Man, we went dark fast.

Speaker 15 We're not done yet.

Speaker 10 We don't usually get this dark this fast, this early, Charlie.

Speaker 15 I'm just saying. I woke up kind of dark today.
Every few years, people circulate this Carl Sagan quote from 1995, his rather uncanny prediction.

Speaker 15 It was in 1995 in the book called The Demon Haunted World. You're familiar with it.
It seems like it's like sort of ripped right from the pages of your death of expertise books.

Speaker 15 He wrote, again, again, this is 1995.

Speaker 15 I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time, when the United States is a service and information economy, when nearly all of the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological power is in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues, when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority, when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide almost without noticing back into superstition and darkness.

Speaker 15 The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second soundbites, now down to 10 seconds or less, the lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Speaker 15 Mr. Nichols, I think we are there.

Speaker 10 But enough about Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Speaker 15 How can you not listen to that and think that?

Speaker 10 And I thought as well. And that brings us to Tommy Tuberville, right? I mean, there are millions of Americans.

Speaker 15 Mr. Blackburn, Carrie Lake,

Speaker 15 Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Speaker 10 But that inability of the public to understand the problem. I mean, Tuberville is having the time of his life with this, and people don't understand that we now have several of our top military posts.

Speaker 10 I mean, there's a war going on in Europe. We're competing with China.
There's all kinds of bad things going on.

Speaker 10 And, you know, Tuberville has literally held up hundreds of these positions, including the first female chief of naval operations. My old job, right, at the Naval War College.

Speaker 10 But the Naval War College reports right to the chief of naval operations. In theory, they don't have one right now.

Speaker 10 They have an acting because Tommy Tuberville has decided that he's going to abuse the Senate hold power, which, you know, at this point should be trashed. That rule should be thrown out.

Speaker 10 And if Mitch McConnell were doing his job, this would have been stopped by now because he, you know, Tuberville is one of his guys. But the public's like, he was a football coach, right? He's cool.

Speaker 10 You know, what's the big deal? And I think we just don't understand that, you know, these consequences.

Speaker 10 And we have people running for office who are completely ridiculous that in an earlier time, they would have been an asterisk.

Speaker 10 But in the television age and the internet age, especially, where there's just so much bandwidth, that you can have Marianne Williamson and Vivek Ramaswamy and Robert Kennedy Jr.

Speaker 10 I mean, some of these people are complete crackpots.

Speaker 15 Before we move on from Tommy Tumberville, why is the rest of the Senate Senate allowing him to do this?

Speaker 15 I understand that they have procedures and norms, but I mean, at some point, you know, WTF, first of all, you know, why is Chuck Schumer, who is the majority leader, why does this happen?

Speaker 15 Why does Mitch McConnell allow this to happen?

Speaker 10 For two reasons. Until you've ever been inside that body, you don't realize how true this is.
But the Senate is very much a club and it operates.

Speaker 10 Everything operates on consent and collegiality, which means that any one senator who wants to be enough of a jerk can hijack almost any process.

Speaker 10 I mean, remember that every morning the Senate begins with, you know, the guy in the chair who has no power, by the way.

Speaker 10 The Senate president, unlike the Speaker of the House, the Senate president is just a traffic cop, which is why they always give that job to like the most junior senators so you can go learn parliamentary procedure.

Speaker 10 And every morning they start by saying, hearing no objection, so ordered. And all it takes to screw that all up is some senator saying, well, I object.
And then the day is shot.

Speaker 10 But the other reason, I think, Charlie, is because the Senate is so closely divided that neither of them, no side wants to trigger any nuclear options about stuff like this, because at any moment, the majority can be the minority again, and they have to keep flipping.

Speaker 10 Now, that was less of a problem when there was a little more trust and collegiality among the two parties to say, you know, we disagree about a lot of stuff, but you know, you're going to be in charge for a while.

Speaker 10 We're going to be in charge for all. We have to live together.
Unfortunately, they don't think that way anymore.

Speaker 15 I understand that they won't want to railroad it, but you would think that there would be a meeting between Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, who they would basically say,

Speaker 15 they would, you know, sit down in the room going, you know, Chuck would say to Mitch, like, this is bullshit. We're not going to let this happen.
I mean, how do we fix this? Right.

Speaker 10 Well, it would start by Mitch sitting down with, I'm from Massachusetts, so I don't know if it's Tuberville or Tuberville, and I don't really care, but sitting down with Senator Tommy and saying,

Speaker 10 before Schumer even has to ever be involved in this, say, okay, Tommy, this is bullshit. And you've had your fun, and now it's time to take care of the national security of the United States.

Speaker 10 You're going to cut this shit out. But nobody's going to do that.

Speaker 10 I mean, if McConnell sat down with Schumer to do this, the immediate howl from the GOP would be that McConnell's a traitor and he sold out his caucus and, you know, all hell would break loose.

Speaker 10 The problem and the fundamental problem, and now I get to go dark, Charlie, is that Tommy Tiberville can get away with this because the people of Alabama let him

Speaker 10 because this is what a significant number of voters want.

Speaker 10 They want this chaos and hold up and they don't care if the national security of the United States is endangered by it.

Speaker 15 I would normally completely agree with you. I'm just not sure that if they understood exactly what it meant to our national security, the attack on the military.

Speaker 15 I'm not sure that this would be a winner for him. But maybe you are right.

Speaker 15 Okay, so speaking of dark, I want to go back to how I started this entire podcast, which was my sense that I wonder whether people understand how surreal and bizarre the times are that we're living in, and also how thorough the transformation has been.

Speaker 15 And I think it's going to be lasting for a long time. You know, we talk about the Depression generation.
Well, how long did the Depression last?

Speaker 15 What years would you say, you know, 1929 to, let's just say 1940? What do you think?

Speaker 10 Yeah, 29 to 40, basically, or at least, you know. Okay.

Speaker 15 We talk about the impact of the 9-11 generation, which, again, you know, people who grew up and their entire world was shaped by that decade after the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, right?

Speaker 15 So you had the Depression generation, the 9-11 generation. There are other generations, obviously, we could throw in here.
I think now we're seeing the growth of the Trump generation.

Speaker 15 Now, there may be some positive developments. You know, young people may be permanently turned off to conservatism in the Republican Party for decades.

Speaker 15 But there's also going to be a class of people who have been formed in an era where insanity is the norm, where shamelessness is the norm.

Speaker 10 Well, I think shamelessness, and here I'm going to throw some shade at our friends on the left, because I think the emergence of shamelessness actually begins in kind of the moral relativism, you know, of the left,

Speaker 10 you know, 20, 30 years ago. The left may have pioneered it, but the Republicans have perfected it and they've weaponized it and turned it into a political movement.

Speaker 10 But I will look for one sliver of light here and say, I think if Donald Trump is decisively beaten and taken off the political board here as an option in the future, that this almost decade that we've been living with this madness can come to an end.

Speaker 10 Because I think, and I've been saying this now for a few weeks, watching the polls and watching, you know, how people are dealing with Trump.

Speaker 10 I think there are a lot of people who want to be let down off that cross, that they are up that tree. They don't know how to get down.
They don't know what to do.

Speaker 10 And they won't be the ones to vote against Trump and end his career.

Speaker 10 But if Trump would somehow lose without their hands on it, I think that there are people who would be just as happy to just let it go because I think he's exhausted them as well as... us.

Speaker 10 And I think that that could be the beginning of something different. Now, the one thing that I think you're right about, Trump will be gone, but there will always be a Marjorie Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Speaker 10 You know, there's going to be these other people in office who are going to be. But I really think that we're heading for a realignment.

Speaker 10 And I also think that that means that the Republicans basically become this kind of rump party in the South and the West and some pockets of upstate New York for a long time to come because they can't get people to buy what they're selling, either in terms of their candidates or in terms of their programs.

Speaker 10 And so I think they're entering that period of that, that once Trump is gone, they're also going to face the problem of, you know, no matter how many labels we put on this dog food, you know, the dog doesn't like it.

Speaker 10 And I think that right now that's getting blocked out by a lot of noise generated by, you know, Trump and his alleged crime spree that he's now under four indictments for.

Speaker 10 I do think if Trump loses, this is why I find it so maddening when people like Bill Barr, you know, sit there and say, well, you know, he's a terrible guy and he did all these illegal things.

Speaker 10 It was awful and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'd still vote for him if I had to.
Well, at some point, the way a party recovers itself is to say, look, I will not do this.

Speaker 10 There are things, you know, it's that old joke about lawyers and rats, right? That, you know, there are some things even rats won't do. And you just say, I'm not going to do this.

Speaker 10 And until some of these people get to that point, we're not out of the woods.

Speaker 10 And but I think the first step is that Trump has to be beaten and, you know, at the ballot box and just driven from our public life and I think that's within reach.

Speaker 16 Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again. I wanted the same edition back.
Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one. So I started searching.

Speaker 16 And that's when I found it on eBay. That's what I love about eBay.
It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live. Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.

Speaker 16 eBay, things people love.

Speaker 16 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 3 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 6 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 8 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 11 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 6 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 2 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried.

Speaker 9 So keep your enemies close.

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

Speaker 15 So let's talk about this week because since we're talking about the surreal nature of our politics, we have the first debate. Donald Trump will not be showing up because he's going to be

Speaker 15 down in Georgia being booked, had his his mugshot taken and then released on $200,000 bond. So let's talk about this.
Do you always watch these debates? Why are you tuning in?

Speaker 15 What are you looking for in this debate?

Speaker 10 Well, I was talking to Julie Mason yesterday, and I worked for years for the military, and I said, my feeling about the debate is like the joke officer evaluation that said his men would follow him anywhere, but mostly out of morbid curiosity.

Speaker 10 You know, it's like, yeah, I'm going to watch the debate in part because I'm going going to write about it. And, you know, like you, I'm a writer and a commenter and all of that.

Speaker 10 But also, there's a part of me that just, you got to be kidding me. That we're going to have a debate between Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy.
And

Speaker 10 how is this even possible? A lot of people, and I know Charlie, you and I have dealt with this for years. How could you guys have ever been Republicans and everybody knew? And the blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 10 There was a time when the Republican Party was the boring adult party that was all about, you know, the kind of the get things done party.

Speaker 10 I guess I'm going to tune in because I can't, I still can't accept that the Republican Party has turned into a freak show.

Speaker 15 It is a freak show, obviously.

Speaker 10 You know, I'm every now and then, even after all these years, after almost a decade, every now and then I'm kind of still in denial. I mean, let's be more practical about it.

Speaker 10 First of all, I am curious to see if someone solidifies, you know, if the excaliber of fighting directly with Trump gets passed to someone who will actually wield it.

Speaker 10 Because every time I think of the debates, I think of Christine and Ramaswamy and, you know, some of these other. But the person, you know, who has fallen out of all this is Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 10 You know, DeSantis was supposed to be the Trump slayer. He's barely, you posted that video the other day of him grinding his teeth.

Speaker 15 Next to a picture of Homelander. And again, that's kind of a deep dive for some people because that is spooky.

Speaker 10 It was creepy.

Speaker 15 Because once you see Ron DeSantis as Homelander, and that's from the show, The Boys, you're not going to be able to unsee it.

Speaker 10 Just trust me. It's like Homelander without the charisma or the superpowers, but yeah.

Speaker 15 So you said he was supposed to be the 10-foot-tall Trump slayer, and now he is walking with chunks of his campaign falling and burning globs out of the sky.

Speaker 10 Well, yeah.

Speaker 15 I just love reading these things, you know, that he needs to have a strong debate. He needs to hit it out of the park.
I just don't think that's going to be happening. I am sorry.

Speaker 10 Now people are going to be staring at his jaw, but I think the question is: if the sword is going to pass, you know, from from him, where does it go?

Speaker 10 And also, I'm fascinated to see who aligns with whom. And I'm glad Asa Hutchinson's going to be there.
I'm kind of hoping Hutchinson's the guy who just throws, it's kind of our surrogate there, right?

Speaker 10 The Charlie and Tom guy who throws up his hands and says, what are we doing here? You know, what the hell is going on here? Because he's kind of been that guy.

Speaker 10 I'm just curious to see if there's any flicker of integrity or truth-telling or honesty, because, you know, there are still plenty of Republicans who don't want Donald Trump.

Speaker 10 And I think, you know, it's kind of curious to see who picks up that torch.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And, you know, the problem is people to keep talking about, you know, the breakout moments.
I mean, there's a couple of problems with that.

Speaker 15 Number one, you know, how many people are actually going to be watching? I don't know. Number two, whether eight people on stage.

Speaker 15 And so I'll be honest, the way that I watch and listen is that I put it on mute when certain people are talking because I don't care what Doug Bergham has to say.

Speaker 10 I'm sorry.

Speaker 15 You know, if somebody asks me about him, you know, tomorrow, I'll just say, yeah, I wasn't paying any attention.

Speaker 10 Sorry.

Speaker 10 But you're undercutting the possibility of Bergamentum.

Speaker 15 But you say, I want to watch Chris Christie, who is, I mean, Chris Christie, who has become, I think, has, you know, sort of found his own rhythm to, you know, return to the one of the most impressive performance artists in politics.

Speaker 15 And he has, he has no bleeps left to give.

Speaker 15 I am interested to see whether they go after Vivek Ramaswamy because I think that they will.

Speaker 15 I think that he's going to be the punching bag because if you're Nikki Haley and you want to show that you can, you know, kick with those sharp heels, but you don't want to go after the MAGA Precious, you know, beat the crap out of Vivek, who every single day says something not just deplorable, but batshit crazy, whether it's about 9-11 or whether it's, I mean, he just, it is really a sign of the degradation of our politics that Vivek Ramaswamy, who is a complete fraud phony, is the hot new thing in our politics.

Speaker 15 I mean, you want to talk about the trivialization of our politics?

Speaker 10 Right. A guy who never voted and who I think crossed the line.

Speaker 10 I mean, you know, he could sell himself as I'm, you know, sort of charmingly naive, rich guy, you know, kind of the younger Ross Perot of, oh, you know, I don't know a lot about all this crazy stuff you guys do.

Speaker 10 But I think he crossed the line with the 9-11 thing. That is a sacred and horrible thing that Americans, you don't, you don't mess with 9-11.

Speaker 10 And the only people that can mess with 9-11 are people that, by definition, I think the vast majority of Americans have just defined away as crackpots and conspiracy theorists.

Speaker 15 That's not even a MAGA thing.

Speaker 10 Right. It's that even the MAGA folks, you don't go down that road about 9-11.
You can come up with all kinds of terrible things about COVID and vaccines and UFOs and all that other horse shit.

Speaker 10 But when you start talking about 9-11, you've really crossed the line. And I'll be curious to see if anybody calls them out on it.

Speaker 15 And then, of course, there's Mike Pence, and we don't know which Mike Pence will show up, whether it will be the guy that will take on Donald Trump or will forget to say his name.

Speaker 10 Oh, he won't say it.

Speaker 15 Nobody's going to beat up on Tim Scott, I'm guessing. So there's an advantage that he has, right? He's the one guy that nobody's going to say anything about.

Speaker 10 He'll be avuncular and charming and funny, and everyone will nod politely and say, you know, great guy. Too bad he has no chance at all.
I have a question for you.

Speaker 15 I talked about this in our other podcast that I do with Mona Charon, and I could argue both sides of all of this.

Speaker 15 The conventional wisdom is that part of Donald Trump's reptilian genius is knowing that being arrested the day after the debate will suck all the oxygen out of the room.

Speaker 15 And because he's such a genius, he knows that he will be able to knock down any bump that anybody gets out of the debate. I mean, that's the conventional wisdom, you know, the new normal now.

Speaker 15 I sort of have this residual before-times thought, though, that...

Speaker 15 you know, the split screen is going to be pretty stark where you have these candidates standing on stage running for president, some of them occasionally talking about things of substance versus Donald Trump walking into the Atlanta jail to be arrested and charged with 13 more felonies, including racketeering.

Speaker 15 I understand that cliché that no publicity is bad publicity. I don't know, some publicity is bad publicity.

Speaker 15 And if you're Ronda Santis or you're Mike Pence, Chris Christie, this split screen of, okay, Republicans, this is one future, these people who are alternatives versus this guy who is going to spend the next year and a half in and out of jails and courtrooms and arraignments, and you're going going to see his mugshot.

Speaker 15 I don't know that this is the genius move that some of the smart kid pundit class is saying it is. What do you think? You're one of the smart kid pundits.

Speaker 10 I don't buy what the other cool kids are saying.

Speaker 10 Breaking with the cool kids. I know it's kind of a

Speaker 10 to underestimate the MAGA base. You know, you can rarely go wrong on that.

Speaker 10 And they're going to say, they're going to tell pollsters and they're going to say, we like him more now that he's been indicted 100 million times. But nobody likes that.

Speaker 10 Trump doesn't like it by reports that we're seeing people near him. He's scared out of his mind.
If possible, he's become even crazier.

Speaker 10 I mean, at some point, he's just going to violate the terms of his release. I mean, that's going to take all of 10 minutes

Speaker 10 before either Tanya Chutkin or the judge in Georgia is going to haul him in for threatening witnesses again. Absolutely.

Speaker 10 I guess part of the reason I'm going to watch the debate is, wouldn't it be awesome? And this is just my wish casting. Wouldn't it be awesome if someone says, look, while we're here,

Speaker 10 like that line from Dr. Strange, while we're here chatting so amiably, you know,

Speaker 10 that Donald Trump is going to be arraigned. Is this our party? I want to know around this room, who of you, you know, why aren't we together?

Speaker 10 And I understand millions of people want this person, but it's time to speak truth to our own voters, even if we lose.

Speaker 10 And that, for all the joking about somebody like Doug Bergham, you know, there are a lot of people who have the complete freedom to say this out loud in this debate.

Speaker 10 But I think that that split screen, Charlie, you know, it's not just that it'll rattle, I think, MAGA world, because I think it does.

Speaker 10 And I think they're just really good about bamboozling the press into saying that it doesn't.

Speaker 10 But the more important point is that all of the other millions of people who are not Republicans, who are independents, who are Democrats, who could have been moved either to stay home or to kind of take a flyer the way they did in 2016.

Speaker 10 And, you know, we already saw it in 2020 that there were just millions of people. So I can't go through this again.

Speaker 10 And I think with this much drama, you know that I've been banging this gong for a while. Put Trump on TV 24-7.
Let people see exactly what they're getting. You know, make them have to listen to him.

Speaker 10 Don't let anybody out there ever say, well, I didn't know that was happening, or I didn't hear that, or I didn't see it happen.

Speaker 10 Because I think, you know, by fall of 2024, people are like, look, you know, I don't care if Joe Biden's old. I don't care if I don't particularly like Kamala Harris.

Speaker 10 I can't live through more of this guy and his hijinks. It's embarrassing, it's humiliating, and it's dangerous.

Speaker 15 I don't know that a majority of Republicans will think that way, but a significant enough minority to make a difference.

Speaker 10 To make a difference in the general.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, keep in mind that this is on Fox.

Speaker 15 So in terms of the hermetically sealed alternative reality silos, you know, when Chris Christie says something along those lines, when Asa Hutchinson calls him out or any of the other candidates, when Mike Penn says he was wrong, that is going to be beamed out to listeners of Fox, not to mention that Trump's whole deal here was basically to say, screw you, Fox.

Speaker 15 Now, look, he's got the experience of 2016, knowing that he can insult Fox, boycott Fox, and that they will come back, you know, like beat puppies to him.

Speaker 15 So, I mean, you know, he's got reason to believe that he's not going to pay a price. But it is interesting that his counter-programming is going to be this interview with Tucker Carlson on Twitter.

Speaker 15 And that feels, I'm sorry, diminished. It's a diminishment for

Speaker 15 Tucker, and it's a diminishment for Trump, who's then going to be doing, you know, what ought to be a walk of shame in Atlanta.

Speaker 15 So I'm just not sure that this is the genius move that everybody attributes to him.

Speaker 10 And the choice of Tucker is interesting because the minute he announced it, a lot of the stories about it and a lot of the social media announcements about it were prefaced with Tucker's immortal comment, I hate him passionately.

Speaker 10 You know, I mean, it's like, oh, right. Let's not forget that one.
You know, Trump is going to go to the guy who obviously hates him, but now they're going to pretend to like each other.

Speaker 10 Tucker is going to grovel because he has no choice now. Somebody in there can have a viral moment that will swamp this Tucker thing.
I mean, nobody, there's not going to be a lot of coverage, I think.

Speaker 10 And maybe I could be wrong about this, but because of the venue, because it's Tucker Carlson, not a lot of people are going to want to spend a lot of time trying to find stuff to pull out of that Tucker Carlson interview.

Speaker 10 And people just, people don't watch Twitter. They watch television.

Speaker 16 Some moments in your life stay with you forever. In a special segment of On Purpose, I share a story about a book that changed my life early in my journey.

Speaker 16 and how I was able to find the exact same edition on eBay years later. There are certain books that don't just give you information, they shift the way you see the world.

Speaker 16 I remember reading one when I was younger that completely changed me. Years later, I found myself thinking about that book again.
I wanted the same edition back.

Speaker 16 Not a reprint, not a different cover, that exact one. So I started searching, and that's when I found it on eBay.
That's what I love about eBay.

Speaker 16 It's not just a marketplace, it's a place where stories live. Shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story.
eBay, things people love.

Speaker 16 Listen to on purpose on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 3 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 6 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 8 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 11 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 6 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 2 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

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

Speaker 15 Let's spend about five minutes on this question of Twitter X and Elon Musk because you've been a dead ender on all of this, hanging on by your fingernails. I don't know what's going on with Elon Musk.

Speaker 15 I don't know whether it's the drugs or some sort of decomposition.

Speaker 15 I don't know what's happening, but it does appear that his business model is to vandalize the site to make it as unusable as possible.

Speaker 15 He's now saying that he's going to make it impossible to block people. He's going to eliminate headlines from articles.
I don't even know where these ideas come from.

Speaker 15 Now, you've been hanging in there, and you're a big user, but Twitter, it feels as if it is imploding in real time.

Speaker 10 First of all, again, it's that morbid curiosity factor, right? That I'm sort of curious to watch,

Speaker 10 again, kind of a Doctor Strange love image. I'm sort of curious to watch Musk ride the bomb all the way down to the end.
Oh, that's a great idea.

Speaker 10 That's a good one. Yeah.

Speaker 10 You know, with a hat, woo, you know,

Speaker 10 like the rodeo clown going down on the bomb. But I'm also curious to see if at some point, you know, Twitter is a valuable thing.
It's a valuable valuable service.

Speaker 10 I'm just wondering if anybody ever steps in to return it to being some sort of news source.

Speaker 10 But I think what's really interesting about it, your point about him vandalizing the site, I don't think that's it.

Speaker 10 Because if he really wanted to just trash it, he could have bought it, trashed it, sold off the parts, done what he could to recoup his money, and then gotten back to dealing with the problem that Twitter stock is like worth, what, you know, 60% of what it was.

Speaker 10 Yeah. And that SpaceX is having all kinds of of problems.
And, you know, that he himself seems to be, as you pointed out, kind of decompensating somehow.

Speaker 10 I don't know that he set out to do that, but I think what you're really seeing, and the Ronan Farrell piece that came out yesterday, I think was pretty damning in this regard.

Speaker 10 You're seeing somebody who, it's kind of like when Trump couldn't take being mocked by Obama.

Speaker 10 that we're now dealing with a whole group of politicians and rich guys who are just determined to punish everybody in some way because at some point in their lives, they got stuffed into a locker.

Speaker 10 And I think, you know, Musk comes across that way. Well, you know, these news sources, they're not friendly to me, so I'll throttle them.

Speaker 10 And nobody will leave because you people want to be with me because I'm the cool kid and I can do this. And of course, everybody says, what, what the fuck are you doing? And he goes, okay.

Speaker 10 And he sort of turns it back on. And he says, well, I'm going to eliminate blocking.

Speaker 10 And everybody said, I mean, James Woods, he gets into a pissing match with James Woods, who has two and a half million followers. And in a fit of peak, he says, well, delete your account.

Speaker 10 Well, okay, that's a great strategy. You know, tell tell the right-wing, tell the right-wing influencers with two and a half million followers who have supported you up until now to go fuck right off.

Speaker 10 You know, that's incredible. And I think, again, it's because he's such a fragile and immature guy.
He can't take anybody criticizing him. He just can't deal with it.
I think that's true.

Speaker 10 And I think that's what you're seeing. And again, I'm sort of watching it out of a kind of

Speaker 10 morbid fascination to see a 50-odd-year-old man.

Speaker 10 At one point, I tweeted something like, I wonder how everybody at Twitter feels that their salaries and their pensions and their futures are all dependent on what is, in effect, a nine-year-old billionaire.

Speaker 15 Well, I mean, the political significance is that as Twitter is kind of teetering on the edge, and I don't know about you, but I mean, a lot of people are, you know, saying they get a lot less engagement.

Speaker 15 It's a lot less influential, a lot less useful. I mean, there's a lot of problems with it.
But it was at this moment that Ron DeSandis decided to basically run a Twitter campaign.

Speaker 15 He announces with Elon Musk. And you can see that every one of his talking points is appealing to Twitter.
And where's Donald Trump?

Speaker 15 Donald Trump is back on Twitter with a guy that's been fired at the moment when people are going, this is hard to use. This is like what?

Speaker 10 I have to say, one of the big failed predictions, I will totally own that I thought that Trump would not be be able to resist coming back to Twitter.

Speaker 15 I thought so too. And I agreed with you.
And

Speaker 15 who knows whether he will at some point. Right.
And we'll see what his ongoing relationship is with Fox because

Speaker 15 very clearly, if he thinks going back onto Twitter will screw somebody that he doesn't like, he will do it.

Speaker 10 I mean, in a way, True Social is even better for him because he does it. And then people just put it on Twitter as a screenshot.

Speaker 10 And that way he doesn't have to put up with any shit from people that own the platform. He doesn't have to worry about people that run the trust section, if there are any left.

Speaker 10 But I think it's been a fascinating kind of dance here watching Musk really not understand any of this. And just, you know, like, this is what happens when you do things in a fit of peak.

Speaker 10 And I think that today, apparently, well, you know, today is Tuesday here in Radio World. So Zuckerberg.
And by the way, what a rehabilitation of Mark Zuckerberg because of Elon Musk.

Speaker 10 You know, up until now, Zuck was like the dark prince. You know, everybody hated Zuck.
And now they're going, hey, Zuck, if you get that cage match, kick his ass.

Speaker 15 You know, got to get threads up and running, though.

Speaker 10 He's rolling up a desktop version today, apparently.

Speaker 15 Okay, good, because it's not going to be a thing until there is something. Okay.
Okay, so I want to get your take on another big, big mega issue here. Okay.

Speaker 15 There is a huge amount of, shall we say, resistance wish casting. I'm kind of giving away where I'm going on this about the disqualification of Donald Trump.

Speaker 15 Now, I devoted an entire one of my Morning Shots newsletter to this original law review paper that says, that argues very, very forcefully and very persuasively, that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution prohibits, clearly disqualifies Donald Trump from ever being president again and disqualifies him from being able to run.

Speaker 15 And this was written by two very, very prominent conservative legal scholars, members of the Federalist Society. It is a very powerful argument.
I think that they are right on the Constitution.

Speaker 15 So does Judge Michael Ludig, conservative former federal judge, and Lawrence Tribe, Harvard law professor who write in your publication, The Atlantic, that they agree with this, that the Constitution bars Donald Trump from ever serving again and suggesting that there'd be legal action to kick him off the ballot or to go to the Supreme Court, whatever.

Speaker 15 What do you make of this? Where is this going?

Speaker 10 I think it was a marvelous,

Speaker 10 and thank you for, you know, reminding folks that they can read the tri-blooded piece in the Atlantic.

Speaker 10 I thought it was remarkable and heartening to see a very conservative and a very liberal jurist both agree that this is true, but I don't think it's going to mean a thing.

Speaker 10 I don't think it matters at all unless, unless and until some group of secretaries of state who control the ballots, right?

Speaker 10 They control ballot access basically go to federal court and then all the way to the Supreme Court in the next 10 minutes and say, we want a ruling on this 14th Amendment issue and that we want to be able to decide this.

Speaker 10 And until somebody does that, it's a great talking point. Okay, one share for the Federal Society.

Speaker 10 I'm sure that the writers, I don't know them personally, so I'm going to say I'm sure they are men of probity who believe what they wrote.

Speaker 10 But I also think that there are a lot of guys at the Federal Society saying, you know, another four years of this, we might get some more judges.

Speaker 10 And then the the whole conservative movement is pretty much over. I mean, back in 2016, you and I were warning about this.

Speaker 10 If you are a Republican, if you care about the conservative movement, if you care about conservative ideas at all, Donald Trump is going to end that.

Speaker 10 And I think we're seeing that right now, that the country is moving to the left. Some ways that I agree with, some ways that I don't.

Speaker 10 But I think that there are a lot of conservatives out there saying, you know, this guy has to be stopped before he completely destroys whatever was left of conservatism in America, because Donald Trump is not a conservative.

Speaker 10 He's not a Republican. He's, you know, Donald Trump.
He's a cadillo. He's a buccaneer.
He's in it for himself.

Speaker 10 And I think, you know, okay, it's great that it came from the Federalist Society, but thank you for the opinion. Now, tell us how to enforce it.
Tell us how you actually get this done.

Speaker 15 This is my problem. I want to make it very clear that I think this is a fantastic work of scholarship.
I think that they are right about this. I think that they are right on the law.

Speaker 15 I believe they understand

Speaker 15 the real meaning and the import of the 14th Amendment. But the key word is, okay, so what is the mechanism to enforce it? Because as we know, the Constitution does not enforce itself.

Speaker 15 Something has to happen. And short of a majority ruling by the U.S.
Supreme Court next week.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 15 You know, however that happens, that in fact Donald Trump is disqualified. I don't see that this goes anywhere.

Speaker 15 Also, I do think it's legitimate to say, how can he be disqualified before there's an adjudication that says that you committed these acts? I mean, I think that that's not a small detail.

Speaker 15 And I guess I'm also concerned that this wish casting is going to lead people down some dangerous political paths.

Speaker 15 So, for example, let's imagine that some progressive activists here in the state of Wisconsin bring suit against elections officials saying that Donald Trump, you know, because of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, is disqualified from being president.

Speaker 15 And therefore, they are suing to have him excluded from the Wisconsin ballot in a swing state like Wisconsin.

Speaker 15 And let's say that the Wisconsin Supreme Court that is now dominated by liberals agrees with them.

Speaker 15 Now, wait, you can see the backlash on this if it's a state-by-state thinking, particularly if we are arguing that we need to preserve democracy.

Speaker 15 This is going to be an on-fire talking point on the right. Now, I'm not endorsing it.
I'm just saying, you know, they're saying, wait, you are taking away our right to even vote for this candidate.

Speaker 15 You are taking him off the ballot. How is that not anti-democratic?

Speaker 15 So in some ways, that creates an issue that I think, now, look, I understand that we are not actual democracy, that there are reasons why we have the Constitution.

Speaker 15 There are reasons why we have the rule of law that basically says that, yeah.

Speaker 15 the majority doesn't get to do anything. There is accountability.

Speaker 15 And I understand all of those intellectual arguments, but the enforcement could be very messy and in some ways could be counterproductive. What do you think? I'm worried about that.

Speaker 10 I think there's two problems.

Speaker 10 One is I disagree with you that there needs to be an official adjudication because giving aid and comfort to insurrectionists, you know, there's no federal code about that.

Speaker 10 The Constitution put that in there in some sense that we would all know it when we saw it.

Speaker 15 Well, but there has to be a finding that it happened, though, right? I mean, there has to be a finding that you're saying. Yes.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 somebody needs to make that finding. And of course, that somebody is probably Congress, and that's not going to happen.
No.

Speaker 10 My wish casting, by the way, on this, when I had too many margaritas after the beach, is when I sit back and say, you know, a handful of Republicans join with the Democrats, impeach Trump again.

Speaker 10 It goes to the Senate. The Senate convicts and rules him ineligible for any further, you know, federal office.
And it's all done by the book.

Speaker 15 I have a question, Professor. My hand is up.
How many margaritas did you have to have to to come up with that idea?

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah, that's that's um, that's usually when I'm sitting there talking with Eleanor Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. I think, barring that, you're going to need the Supreme Court.

Speaker 10 Yeah, no, and you would need a bunch of secretaries of state, and you're right, because then the next move, if this actually happened, is that in 2028, you'd have a bunch of people saying, Well, we don't want Kamala Harris on the ballot or we don't want so-and-so on the ballot.

Speaker 10 But the saddest part of all this is that the real mechanism of enforcement for this kind of issue

Speaker 10 should be, and I'm going to go all James Madison here, should be the virtue and decency of the American public. Yeah.

Speaker 10 Our Constitution does not rely as much as people think it does on black letter law. We have learned that it relies on a basic decency.

Speaker 10 You know, I've been throwing this quote out over and over again when, with Madison talking about the Constitution, if there is no virtue among us, you know, if there is no virtue virtue among us, then we're in a terrible place.

Speaker 10 That no checks, no balances, no legal promises can solve the fix we're going to be in.

Speaker 10 And the problem is that millions of people who in an earlier and better time would have said, look, I don't agree with Joe Biden. I don't like, you know, I don't like abortion.

Speaker 10 I don't like big government, whatever it is. But a basic circuit breaker of decency would kick in to say, but no matter what, Donald Trump cannot be the nominee of a major party.

Speaker 10 It's just not, it can't happen. It's not allowable.
And that circuit breaker is completely blown now by people who say, you know, I don't care.

Speaker 10 There was an interview that Jordan Klepper, the invaluable Jordan Klepper, did with a Trump supporter, where she finally admitted, okay, he did it.

Speaker 10 And he said, if I could show you that he did these things, would it change your mind? And she said, sure. And so he says, well, here's what he did.
Here's what he did.

Speaker 10 There was this long pause and she nodded and she said, I don't care.

Speaker 10 There's nothing you can do.

Speaker 10 There is no legal decision or Supreme Court case that can restore a sense of fundamental decency to the voters until they make a decision that they don't want to be that kind of person anymore.

Speaker 10 And I don't know what to do about that other than.

Speaker 15 And the founders didn't know either. I mean, clearly, James Madison was not naive about this.

Speaker 15 Remember, I mean, he wrote in the federalists, you know, if men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Speaker 15 If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary, which is why you had all those external and internal controls. But even with that,

Speaker 15 no one imagined that someone like Donald Trump would ever be elected president.

Speaker 10 Well, Hamilton kind of did, you know, and he and others worried about it, but even John Adams was like, I wonder if we can hold this thing together for, you know, one or two more generations because without basically, you know, a decent public,

Speaker 10 this whole thing, you know, our Constitution was made for a religious people. You know, it's

Speaker 10 and not this kind of, not this kind of cultish, you know, sort of religion as when I cudgel to bash other people, but people have some sense of, you know, transcendence, of that some things are transcendentally important, that you are part of a community that where there are people who came before you, there are people who are going to come after you.

Speaker 10 We are the stewards of our institutions, we are the stewards of our government, that we inherit it and then we pass it on. That's gone.

Speaker 10 This is now in the hands of people that are like, look, I'm playing a, you know, it's a reality TV show and I'm playing a game and I don't care what happens, you know, 10 or 15 or 20 years from now.

Speaker 10 And I don't care about the Constitution because I've never read it. And I don't care about the law because I think, you know,

Speaker 10 everything's rigged against me. It's people who are just cosseted in this cocoon of rage, yelling, me, me, me, why doesn't anybody listen to me? when in fact they're being taken to the cleaners.

Speaker 10 And I was talking about this with somebody yesterday. I said, these people who love Donald Trump, if they knew someone like Donald Trump in their daily life, they would hate him.

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 10 These are working guys who, you know, if Trump walked in and said, hey, I'm stiffing you on your paycheck and I'm going to grab your sister. These guys would lose their mind.
They'd punch him out.

Speaker 10 But when he does it from a stage, they say, that's my guy.

Speaker 15 Well, all the soccer parents out there. We're hearing a lot about parents' rights and how hard it is to raise a kid these days.
You know, what parent would want Donald Trump to be a role model?

Speaker 15 I mean, in terms of sportsmanship and all of those things, I guess it's the experiment, whether you can sort of have a bifurcation, whether or not you can live lives of virtue and responsibility in your personal life and hope that your political positions don't leak out.

Speaker 10 The founders did not think so, Charlie. The founders made the argument that if you live an unvirtuous private life, you will eventually bleed into an unvirtuous public life.

Speaker 15 Conservatives used to believe that.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 10 We used to talk about character, the character issue, that, That, you know, the thing that was more important than your position on any one issue was that you had the appropriate character to hold public office.

Speaker 10 And they have completely thrown that out the window. I had hoped that any number of things would kind of snap us out of this narcissistic coma.

Speaker 10 But I think, again, to end on that same dark note, I think these are people who have just climbed way too far up that tree.

Speaker 10 The psychic cost of that climb down for them, they would rather watch the world burn than deal with the psychic cost of having to admit that they were taken.

Speaker 10 I mean, are their lives any better after four years of Trump? Did he change anything? Did he save their communities? Did he build factories in, you know, Ohio?

Speaker 10 He did none of that and still drains money out of their pockets. A billionaire, nominally a billionaire, draining money out of their pockets to pay his legal bills.

Speaker 10 And they write those checks with a smile on their face.

Speaker 15 Okay, so to your point before, in your personal life, you've known people who have lied to your face. This affects your relationship and you don't trust them, right?

Speaker 15 You probably terminate the relationship at a certain point. If somebody rips you off, if somebody cheats you out of money, you don't do business with them anymore.

Speaker 15 It is this weird thing that, and I wrote this for your publication, The Atlantic, that we right now, at this moment, have the lowest possible standards.

Speaker 15 for the presidency of the United States that we would not apply to anything else in our life.

Speaker 15 The coaches, the people we hired, the people we would hire to walk our dogs or look after our children or would run the local car wash. None of that would apply.

Speaker 15 So the problem is going to be long term, since we're now taking the long term here, is after Trump, after all of this is all done, we have to rebuild that civic virtue.

Speaker 15 We have to rebuild all of those qualities. And the institution that would be essential to doing that would be, I think, churches.

Speaker 15 And wow, I'm cringing to saying that because this one institution that we will ultimately have to look to, you know, to make people understand the difference between right and wrong and the importance of virtue and everything.

Speaker 15 We've seen the complete corruption of the churches in this era of Trump as well. So that also,

Speaker 15 I think, creates a long-term lingering problem.

Speaker 10 Some of that is alien to me. People that have followed us know that I'm Greek Orthodox.
And so, you know, I come from a religion that doesn't do a lot of politics from the pulpit.

Speaker 10 And in fact, we've been, I can remember even 30 years ago that my church was criticized for not being kind of more activist and, you know, good works out in the world and all that stuff.

Speaker 10 But I think there is something, you know, very American about this problem that religion gets turned on its head, that you go to church not because you believe in what's going on there, but you go for this sense of power of political, but you go there for worldly power instead of going there to let go of the world for an hour.

Speaker 10 You know, that you go there because it puts you even more in the world, that the sermons you're getting are about the world and not about, you know, being a good person and, you know, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and, you know, all of these other things.

Speaker 10 And, you know, of course, people a lot better versed in this than me have written great stuff about it. People like Pete Wayner and Russell Moore, you know, have written with great.

Speaker 10 passion and pain about this. But I think the other thing that can do it, Charlie, I think is people letting go of nationalizing everything and kind of

Speaker 10 restoring some sense of moral order and cooperation in small communities.

Speaker 10 How about instead of arguing about Donald Trump, you work with your neighbors to get the potholes filled or that, you know, that you have enough police in your community or that you have,

Speaker 10 you know, a public park that's cleaned up.

Speaker 10 People don't do that because of this narcissistic nationalization and heroic narrative, everybody wakes up in the morning and say, I'm going to save the world. Well, you know what?

Speaker 10 How about you save the park down the street? And I think that these small-scale projects are places where state legislators, but again,

Speaker 10 you know, I'm sorry, I was optimistic for a moment. Let me now remind you, however, that the state Republican parties have been completely captured by Trump and Trumpists.

Speaker 10 And, you know, maybe that's where you start is just flush out these, you know, there's no point in being a Trumpist on the city council because in the end, that doesn't matter.

Speaker 10 You've got to pick up the garbage, you know.

Speaker 15 This is a non-trivial point that you're making here, that if you take out some of the top line, you know, Trump versus or, you know, some of the cultural issues, the reality is that people aren't that divided.

Speaker 10 Right. And they can work.

Speaker 15 And then you begin to focus on actual real world things as opposed to your identity,

Speaker 15 the attitude that you strike. And I've noticed that you can have really interesting conversations with people who disagree with you on a lot of things, as long as you don't focus on those top lines.

Speaker 15 So anyway, Tom, it has been a great conversation. Hopefully it has not been too dark.
And if it was too dark, it was still pretty good, Tom. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, it is what it is.

Speaker 10 It's hard not to be.

Speaker 15 We're not the crazy ones.

Speaker 10 You know, part of the problem is that when things look this dark, it means you're absolutely and properly comprehending the current political situation.

Speaker 10 But, you know, we're still here and there's still that, you know, there's still a chance that this age of Trump ends sooner than we might think.

Speaker 10 I think, you know, I always hope that with a cult, the way cults often end is that the fever breaks. And I think that that's the hopeful thing is that somehow this ends.

Speaker 10 And rather than a kind of big reckoning and all that, that Trump just goes off and he deals with all his court cases and millions of Americans say, well, okay, you know, kind of back to work, back to real life.

Speaker 10 Maybe I'm too optimistic about that. We can't end on a total dark note, but I'm hoping that

Speaker 10 that's what happens.

Speaker 15 Well, there is a difference between hope and optimism, which we have discussed in the past.

Speaker 15 I'm not necessarily an optimist, but I am, you know, hope means that we will continue to work for a better future. And thank you so much for joining us today.
I appreciate it, Tom.

Speaker 15 My pleasure, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast.
I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back with the Trump trials tomorrow.

Speaker 15 We are scheduled to talk with former Congressman Adam Kinzinger on Thursday to recap Wednesday night's debate. And of course, Tim and I will wrap up the whole week on Friday.
Thanks for listening.

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

Speaker 10 I've been out here a while. Cast up to cast, and nothing's biting.
That's fishing for you.

Speaker 15 And honestly, that's what online fishing is like for hackers too, when Cisco Duo's on watch. With Duo's end-to-end fishing resistance, the waters always stay calm.

Speaker 15 No ripples, no splashes, just a hook that never gets a bite. Cisco Duo, fishing season is over.
Learn more at duo.com.

Speaker 15 What does Zinn really give you?

Speaker 10 Not just smoke-free nicotine satisfaction, but also real freedom to do more of what you love, when and where you want to do it.

Speaker 15 Why bring Zinn along for the ride? Because America's number one nicotine pouch opens up all the possibilities of right now.

Speaker 10 With Zinn, you don't just find freedom. You keep finding it.
Find your Zen.

Speaker 15 Learn more at Zinn.com.

Speaker 10 Warning, this product contains nicotine.

Speaker 15 Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Speaker 14 Big things are happening at your local CVS. Extra big.

Speaker 14 You don't want to miss these extra big deals. And more are coming every two weeks.
So keep coming back. Use your extra care card to unlock savings every time you shop.

Speaker 14 Extra care is the way to save at CVS. So if you're not a member yet, join for free online or in-store and start saving.

Speaker 14 Visit your local CBS store or cbs.com/slash extra big deals to shop this week's deals.