Tom Nichols: Our Surreal Moment

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

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

been a while. I'm good, but I'll thank you not to laugh at Professor Emeritus.
I know it's the

Emeritus thing. It's sort of like Professor old guy.
That's exactly what it means. Professor Crank.
Let me tell you what I was thinking this morning that I wanted to talk to you about. 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 looking around and going, yeah, this is the way things are.

I mean, you know, I mean, political parties can be, you know, political cults. 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.
And it's like this does happen on a regular basis, right? We have presidential debates and the front runner 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. 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.
I don't think we ever thought it was going to last this long. I don't think we ever thought the stupidity would seep so deeply into our culture.
I think once a day, once a day, I have to step back and say, this can't be happening. Yeah, right.
And it's going to keep going. 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.
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.
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? And I think that is, you know, the bad guys in the world, not just Donald Trump, but, you know, Vladimir Putin, right? 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, that Trump and his guys are being arraigned for racketeering charges, which John Eastman this morning, you know, we've crossed a Rubicon. I'm being prosecuted for my First Amendment.
I mean, there was a time, I think, a better, we always have to qualify when 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 and they would be ashamed sure not only do we live in a time where our politics have become so completely hallucinatory but we're living in a without shame. 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.
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, 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.
Well, I'm sorry to even go down 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. And I'm going to vote for him anyway.
And that's part of the culture of shamelessness, right? I mean, I guess part of it is that we've always had, you know, spasms of idiocy, of, you know, extremism, of crackpotism, of cruelty. But there's always been the correction there.
There's always been, you know, 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 like that right now. 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.

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.

The thing about adults in the room, because the other thing that I think really contributes

to this is the juvenileization of our culture.

Oh, yeah. And I don't mean a youth culture.
I mean a juvenile culture. I was thinking of this the other thing that I think really contributes to this is the juvenileization of our culture.

Oh, yeah.

And I don't mean a youth culture.

I mean a juvenile culture.

I was thinking of this the other day.

Of course, I worked on the Hill 30 years ago, and you've started in politics when men wouldn't leave the house without wearing a jacket.

You know, those days.

This is actually true.

I was thinking of this watching Cat Cammack, you know, jumping around barefoot on stage at some young Republican thing. My wife was looking at this and I, who's that? And I said, that is a member of Congress of the United States.
And by the way, Kamek was just the most recent version. 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? 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 like teenagers. 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, nobody gets really hurt, nothing can go wrong.
And 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. and so we have everybody else kind of crashing around

and making asses of themselves while you know there's this small handful of people who make

sure that you know the the airports are funded and that clean water comes out of your tap and

that your passport still works and i think people just don't understand that anymore they think

everything's just a big fucking joke at this point man we went dark fast we're not done yet

Thank you. And I think people just don't understand that anymore.
They think everything's just a big fucking joke at this point. Man, we went dark fast.
We're not done yet. We don't usually get this dark this fast this early, Charlie.
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. 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.
He wrote, again, this is 1995. 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 powers are 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.
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. Mr.
Nichols, I think we are there. But enough about Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
How can you not listen to that and think that? And I thought as well, and that brings us to Tommy Tuberville. Right? I mean, there are millions of Americans.
Marsha Blackburn, Carrie Lake. Right.
Marjorie Taylor Greene. 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.
I mean, there's a war going on in Europe. We're competing with China.
There's all kinds of bad things going on. And 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. The Naval War College reports right to the chief of naval operations.
In theory, they don't have one right now. 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.

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.
You know, what's the big deal? And I think we just don't understand that, you know, these consequences. And we have people running for office who are completely ridiculous that in an earlier time they would have been an asterisk 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.
I mean some of these people are complete crackpots. Before we move on from Tommy Tuberville, why is the rest of the Senate allowing him to do this? I understand that they have procedures and norms, but I mean, at some point, WTF, first of all, why is Chuck Schumer, who is the majority leader, why does this happen? Why does Mitch McConnell allow this to happen? 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, 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.
I mean, remember that every morning the Senate begins with, you know, the guy in the chair who has no power, by the way, the Senate president, unlike the speaker of the house, the Senate president's 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.
And every morning they start by saying, hearing no objections, so ordered. And all it takes to screw that all up is some senator saying, well, I object.
And then the day is shot. 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. 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 all, we're going to be in charge for all, we have to live together.
Unfortunately, they don't think that way anymore. 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, you know, they would 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? 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 before schumer even has to ever be involved in this say okay tommy this is bullshit yeah and you've had your fun and now it's time to take care of the national security of the united states you're going to cut this shit out but nobody's going to do that 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 all hell would break

loose.

The problem and the fundamental problem, and now I get to go dark, Charlie, is that Tommy

Tuberville can get away with this because the people of Alabama let him.

Because this is what a significant number of voters want. They want this chaos and hold up, and they don't care if the national security of the United States is endangered by it.
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, I'm not sure that this would be a winner for him, but maybe you are right.
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. And then I think it's going to be lasting for a long time is, you time.
We talk about the depression generation. Well, how long did the depression last? What years would you say, 1929 to, let's say 1940? What do you think? Yeah, 29 to 40, basically, or at least.
Okay. We talk about the impact of the 9-11 generation, which again, people who grew people who grew up and their entire world was shaped by that decade after the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, right? So you had the oppression 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. Now, there may be some positive developments, you know, young people may be permanently turned off to conservatism in the Republican Party for decades, 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.
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 of the left 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.
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. 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, 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, and they won't be the ones to vote against Trump and end his career.
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. 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 Taylor Greene. 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. 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. And so I think they're entering that period of that.
Once Trump is gone, they're also going to face the problem of no matter how many labels we put on this dog food, the dog doesn't like it. And I think that right now that's getting blocked out by a lot of noise generated by

Trump and his alleged crime spree that he's now under four indictments for. I do think if Trump loses, this is why I find it so maddening when people like Bill Barr sit there and say, well, you're a terrible guy and he did all these illegal things.
It was awful. But I'd still vote for him if I had to.
had to well at some point the way a party recovers itself is to say look i will not do this 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 gonna do this and until some of these people get to that point, we're not out of the woods.

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.
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 down in Georgia being booked,

had his mugshot taken, and then released on $200,000 bond. So let's talk about this.
You always watch these debates. Why are you tuning in? What are you looking for in this debate? 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. You know, it's like, yeah, I'm going to watch the debate in part because I'm going to write about it.
And, you know, like you, I'm a writer and a commenter and all of that. But also there's a part of me me that just, you've got to be kidding me, that we're going to have a debate between Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy, and 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? 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. 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.
It is a freak show, obviously. You know, 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. First of all, I am curious to see if someone solidifies, you know, if the excalibur of fighting directly with Trump gets passed to someone who will actually wield it.
Because every time I think of the debates, I think of Christine, Ramaswamy, and, you know, some of these other. has fallen out of all this is Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis was supposed to be the Trump slayer. He's barely, you posted that video the other day of him grinding his teeth.
Next to a picture of Homelander. And again, that's kind of a deep dive for some people because that is spooky.
It was creepy. Because once you see Ron DeSantis as Homelander and that's that's from the show the boys you're not going to be able to unsee it just trust me it's like homelander without the charisma or the superpowers but yeah 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 well yeah i just love reading these things you know that he needs to 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. Now there are people who are going to be staring at his jaw, but I think the question is if the sword is going to pass, you know, from him, where does it go? And also I'm fascinated to see who aligns with whom, but I'm glad Asa Hutchinson's going to be there.
I'm kind of hoping Hutchinson's the guy who just throws, he's kind of our surrogate there, right? The Charlie and Tom guy who throws up his hands and says, what are we doing here? What the hell is going on here? Because he's kind of been that guy. I'm just curious to see if there's any flicker of integrity or truth-telling or you know, there are still plenty of Republicans who don't want Donald Trump.
And I think, you know, it's kind of curious to see who picks up that torch. 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.
Number one, you know, how many people are actually going to be watching? I don't know. Number two, were there eight people on stage? 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 Burgum has to say.
I'm sorry. You know, if somebody asked me about him, you know, tomorrow, I'll just say, yeah, I wasn't paying any attention.
Sorry. But you're undercutting the possibility of Burgum-mentum.
Obviously, I want to watch Chris Christie, who is, I mean, Chris Christie, who has become, I think is, you know, sort of found his own rhythm to, you know, return to the, one of the most impressive performance artists in politics. And he has, he has no bleeps left to give.
I am interested to see whether they go after Vivek Ramaswamy, because I think that they will. 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, you know, 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.
I mean, you want to talk about the trivialization of our politics? Right. A guy who never voted and who I think crossed the line.
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, you know, I don't know a lot about all this crazy stuff you guys do. But I think he crossed the line with the 9-11 thing.
That is a sacred and horrible thing that Americans, you don't mess with 9-11. 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 a way as crackpots and conspiracy theorists.
That's not even a MAGA thing. 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 horseshit.
But when you start talking about 9-11, you've really crossed the line. And I'll be curious to see if anybody calls him out on it.
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.
Oh, he won't say it. 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. 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. I talked about this in our other podcast that I do with Mona Charan, and I could argue both sides of all of this.
You know, the conventional wisdom is that, you know, 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. 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, the new normal now. I sort of have this residual before times thought, though, that, 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.
I understand that cliche that, you is bad publicity. I don't know.
Some publicity is bad publicity. And if you're Ron DeSantis or you're Mike Pence or 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 to see his mugshot 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 i don't buy what the other cool kids are saying breaking with the cool kids i know it's kind of a to underestimate the maga MAGA base, you know, you can rarely go wrong on that.
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. Right.
But nobody likes that. 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.
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 before either Tanya Chutkin or the judge in Georgia is going to haul him in for threatening witnesses again.
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, like that line from Dr. Strange, while we're here chatting so amiably, 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? And I understand millions of people want this person, but it's time to speak truth to our own voters, even if we lose. And then for all the joking about somebody like Doug Burgum, you know, there are a lot of people who have the complete freedom to say this out loud in this debate.
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, and I think they're just really good about bamboozling the press into saying that it doesn't.

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. And, you know, we already saw it in 2020 that there were just millions of people.
So I can't go through this again. 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. Don't let anybody out there ever say, well, I didn't know that was happening or I't hear that, or I didn't see it happen.
Because I think by fall of 2024, people are like, look, I don't care if Joe Biden's old. I don't care if I don't particularly like Kamala Harris.
I can't live through more of this guy and his hijinks. It's embarrassing, it's humiliating, and it's dangerous.
I don't know that a majority of Republicans will think that way, but a significant enough minority to make a difference. To make a difference in the general.
I mean, keep in mind that this is on Fox. 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 Pence 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. 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.
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.
And that feels, I'm sorry, diminished. It's a diminishment for Tucker.
And it's a diminishment for Trump, who's then be doing you know what ought to be a walk of shame in atlanta so i'm just not sure that this is the genius move that everybody attributes uh to him 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. You know, I mean, it's like, oh, right.
It's not to get 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.
Tucker's 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, and 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. And people just, people don't watch Twitter.

They watch television.

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.

I don't know whether it's the drugs

or some sort of decomposition.

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. 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.
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? First all again it's the it's that morbid curiosity factor right that i'm sort of curious to watch um again kind of a dr strange love image i'm sort of curious to watch uh musk ride the um bomb all the way down to the end that's a great image that's a good one yeah you know with a hat whoo you know uh yeah like the rodeo clown going down on the bum. Oh, that's a great image.
That's a good one. Yeah.
You know, with a hat,

woo, you know,

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 service.

I'm just wondering

if anybody ever steps in

to return it to being

some sort of news source.

But I think what's really interesting

about it,

your point about him

vandalizing the site, I don't think that's it. 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 worth, what, 60% of what it was.
And that SpaceX is having all kinds of problems and, you know, that he's, he himself seems to be, as you pointed out, kind of decompensating somehow. I don't know that he set out to do that, but I think what you're really seeing and the Ronan Farrow piece that came out yesterday, I think was pretty damning in this regard.
You're seeing somebody who it's kind of like when Trump couldn't take being mocked by Obama, 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. And I think, you know, Musk comes across that way.
Well, you well you know these news sources they're not friendly to me so i'll throttle them 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 and he took sort of turns it back on then he says well i'm gonna eliminate blocking and everybody said i mean j Woods, he gets into a pissing match with James Woods, who has two and a half million followers. And in a fit of pique, he says, well, delete your account.
Well, okay, that's a great strategy. You know, tell the right wing influencers with two and a half million followers who have supported you up until now to go fuck right off.
You know'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 and i think that's what you're seeing and again i'm sort of watching it out of a kind of it's morbid fascination to see a 50 odd year old man. 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.
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 saying they get a lot less engagement. 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 DeSantis decided to basically run a Twitter campaign.
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? 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? I have to say one of the big failed predictions, I will totally own that I thought that Trump would not be able to resist coming back to Twitter.
I thought so too. And I agreed with you and who knows whether he will at some point.
And we'll see what his ongoing relationship with Fox, because very clearly, if he thinks going back onto Twitter will screw somebody that he doesn't like, he will do it. 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.
And that way, he doesn't have to put up any shit from people that own the platform. He doesn't have you know, people that run the trust section, if there are any left.
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 pique.
And I think that today, apparently, well, you know, today's Tuesday here in Radio radio world so zuckerberg and by the way what a rehabilitation of mark zuckerberg because of elon musk 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 you know he's got though. He's rolling up a desktop version today, apparently.
Okay, good, because it's not going to be a thing until there is something like that. Okay, so I want to get your take on another big, big mega issue here, okay? 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. 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 of the Constitution prohibits, clearly disqualifies Donald Trump from ever being president again and disqualifies him from being able to run.
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. 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.
What do you make of this? Where is this going? I think it was a marvelous um and thank you for you know reminding folks that they can read the tribe blooded piece in the atlantic um 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 i't think it matters at all. Unless, unless and until some group of secretaries of state who control the ballots, right? They, you know, 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.
And until somebody does that, it's a great talking point. Okay.
One share for the federal society. I'm sure that the writers, I don't know them personally.
So I'm going to say, I'm sure they were our men of probity who believe what they wrote. But I also think that there are a lot of guys, the federal society saying, you know, another four years of this, we might get some more judges.
And then the whole conservative movement is pretty much over. I mean, back in 2016, you and I were warning about this.
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. 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, 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.
He's not a Republican. He's, you know, Donald Trump.
He's a, he's a Caudillo. He's a buccaneer.
He's in it for himself. 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.
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.
I believe they understand, you know, 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.
Something has to happen. And short of a majority ruling by the US Supreme Court next week, however that happens, that in fact, Donald Trump is disqualified.
I don't see that this goes anywhere. 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.
And I guess I'm also concerned that this wish casting is going to lead people down some dangerous political paths. 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 three of the 14th amendment is disqualified from being president.
And therefore they are suing to have him excluded from the Wisconsin ballot in a swing state like Wisconsin. And let's say that the Wisconsin Supreme Court that is now dominated by liberals agrees with them.
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, this is going to be an on fire talking point on the right.
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.
You are taking him off the ballot. How is that not anti-democratic? 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.

There are reasons why we have the rule of law that basically says that, yeah, the majority doesn't get to do anything.

There is accountability.

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.
I think there's two problems. One is I disagree with you that there needs to be an official adjudication because giving aid and comfort to insurrectionists, there's no federal code about that.
The constitution put that in there in some sense that we would all know it when we saw it. Well, but there has to be a finding that it happened though, right? I mean, there has to be a finding that yes.
And somebody needs to make that finding. And of course, that somebody is probably Congress and that's not going to happen.
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, 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.
I have a question, Professor. My hand is up.
How many margaritas did you have to have to come up with that idea? Yeah, yeah. 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. 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.
But the saddest part of all this is that the real mechanism of enforcement for this kind of issue should be, and I'm going to go all James Madison here, should be the virtue and decency of the American public. Yeah.
Our constitution does not rely as much as people think it does on black letter law. We have learned this.
It relies on a basic decency. You know, I've been throwing this quote out over and over again with Madison talking about the constitution.
If there is no virtue among us, you know, if there is no virtue among us, then we're in a terrible place that no checks, no balances, no legal promises can solve the fix we're going to be in. 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. 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. It can't happen.
It's not allowable. And that circuit breaker is completely blown now by people who say, I don't care.
There was an interview that Jordan Klepper, the invaluable Jordan Klepper did with a Trump supporter, where she finally admitted, okay, he did it. 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. There was this long pause and she nodded and she said, I don't care.
There's nothing you can do. 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.
And I don't know what to do about that other than. And the founders didn't know either.
I mean, clearly James Madison was not naive about this. Remember, I mean, he wrote in the Federalist, you know, if men were angels, no government would be necessary.
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, no one imagined that someone like Donald Trump would ever be elected president.
Well,ilton kind of did you know he and others worried about it but john 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 a decent public this this whole thing you know our constitution was made for religious people you know it's um not this kind of, or not this kind of cultish, you know, sort of religion as my 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.
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.
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. 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 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? 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.
Absolutely. These are working guys who, you know, 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.
But when he does it from a stage, they say, that's my guy. Or 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. What parent would want Donald Trump to be a role model in terms of sportsmanship and all of those things? I guess it's the experiment, whether you can 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.
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.
Conservatives used to believe that. Right.
We used to talk about character, the character issue. that the thing that was more important than your position on any one issue was that you had the appropriate character to hold public office.
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.
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. 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. 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 Ohio? 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. And they write those checks with a smile on their face.
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? 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.
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 for the presidency of the United States that we would not apply to anything else in our life. The coaches, the people we hire, 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. 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.
We have to rebuild all of those qualities. And the institution that would be essential to doing that would be, I think, churches.
And wow, I'm cringing just 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. We've seen the complete corruption of the churches in this era of Trump as well.
So that also, I think, creates a long-term lingering problem. of that is alien to me i'm 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 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 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 you know that 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.
Of course, people, a lot better versed in this than me, have written great stuff about it. People like Pete Wehner and Russell Moore have written with great 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 restoring some sense of moral order and cooperation in small communities. how about instead of arguing about Donald Trump, you work with your neighbors to get the potholes filled, or that you have enough police in your community, or that you have a public park that's cleaned up? People don't do that.
Because of this narcissistic nationalization and heroic narrative, everybody wakes up in the morning and says, I'm going to save the world. Well, you know what? How about you save the park down the street? And I think that these small scale projects are places where state legislators, but again, 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. 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.
You've got to pick up the garbage, you know. 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, is that people aren't that divided.
Right. And they can work.
And then you begin to focus on actual real world things as opposed to your identity, 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.

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 is what it is. It's hard not to be.
We're not the crazy ones. 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.
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. 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, 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, kind of back to work, back to real life. Maybe I'm too optimistic about that.
We can't end on a total dark note, but I'm hoping that that's what happens. Well, there is a difference between hope and optimism, which we have discussed in the past.
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.

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.
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.