Why Are People Still Sticking With Trump After All This?

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The online MBA from Geese College of Business at the University of Illinois is an empowering experience. A global community, extraordinary supportive colleagues, and top faculty.
To learn more, go to OnlineMBA.Illinois.edu. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Miller. Charlie will be back from vacation, thank God, next week.
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We talk about his crusade against crypto and also what it was like to be Ryan Atwood. So that is that on today's pod.
You can hear a giggling already. I have my friend, Alyssa Farah, longtime Republican operative, Trump comms director, boo, host of The View and fresh off our star term being profiled and why we did it.
Alyssa, thank you for doing this. Yeah, you mentioned the most important biographical note last there.
I'm one of the many stars of your excellent book. Oh, well, thank you.
I want to do some news stuff with you. And I want to do a little just like a politics check.
But for people who didn't read the book or who don't know your full story and who are like, Tim, why are you having the former Trump White House comes director on the Bulwark podcast?

We don't like Trump here. If we could just revisit a few things that we've covered a couple times first.
And I want to start in Charlie's spirit by asking the same question he asked Chris Christie a couple weeks ago, which was, what in the hell were you thinking? Well, I spend a lot of time still asking myself that.

On a personal note, I think that everyone's a work in progress. And I think I still ask myself the question of specifically the move I made going from my role at the Department of Defense to the Trump White House, kind of high to COVID, March 2020.
And I don't know, like I could spend the rest of my life debating, should I have made that move? Should I have not? Should I have gone into the administration in the first place? I did working for Vice President Pence. And I still kind of have the same conclusion I gave you in your book, which I knew you found unsatisfactory, which is you can't give up on the American presidency.
He was at that point, like he was going to be there until he lost the election.

So I think people of good faith need to go in.

And I say that now, I think it's even more pressing because there's, you know, not a

zero chance he's going to be president again.

I would never work for him again.

A lot of us who have spoken out would never work for him again.

But I hope, man, that there's some good people on the margins who are going to try to get

into that administration, both to keep it on course, but also to be the whistleblowers after the fact, because you know, we're going to need them. Really? So we're a year out.
This was where I was going. We've argued about this probably five times over the course of interviewing you for the book, and then a couple after, but we haven't talked about it in a year.
And you know, you have a little bit of distance. So for people who don't get the crux of our argument was basically, I was on the side of going into the Trump administration ended up only corrupting people.
And it didn't make that big of a difference in the grand scheme of things. And it only kind of served to protect Trump.
And they ended up getting tarred, you know, rather than on balance doing more to contain him. I think there are a couple of exceptions to that.
Obviously, national security, I don't begrudge somebody becoming the national, you know, HR McMaster, I don't begrudge. Though I do kind of begrudge the fact that he hasn't seemed to endorse Joe Biden since then.
That's for another day. But Alyssa came down on the side of no, you know, government still needs to work.
We need people to be in there. Here we are now, we're in year eight of Trump.
He's about to be the nominee again, it seems like.

We can punt it on that at the end if you want.

Maybe that's not true.

But do you not look at it now and start to think, man, honestly, maybe there were some

other off-ramps here.

Oh, well, that for sure.

I've talked about a number of different times.

I thought about resigning during my time with him.

But what I think you have to understand with me, Tim, is I didn't get to kind of where you are until really January of 2021, which I know for a lot of your listeners is unacceptable. How did you believe this for so long? How are you complicit with it? I genuinely thought that there was something worth saving there until I saw that there wasn't.
So for me on the personal side, this was a bit of a journey. And to be honest, even where I am ideologically, politically, and in a partisan matter now is defined by a lot of what I saw.
And not to get deep, I'm kind of grateful for the journey. Like my time- Let's get deep.
No, let's get deep. Like my time at DOD made me realize, you know, we're one team, one fight.
The jerseys we wear, the partisan politics genuinely don't matter when like world affairs are at stake. The future of democracy is at stake.
So I think that period really was changing how I viewed government politics and public service, and then to be thrust into the Trump West Wing, which is chaos and worse than you even imagine from the books. It was an instructive time to be there to realize how off the rails things can get when you don't have people with that mindset.
What I'm dedicated to is making sure that man is never president again. I worry that he could be.
Listen, I've said this to my liberal friends and I say, I'll say it to my bulwark friends. Y'all are staking the future of US democracy on the back of 80-old Joe Biden, who has had a largely successful presidency in terms of legislation, in terms of supporting Ukraine.

But God forbid anything happened, and I think it's a very strong chance Donald Trump's president again. Yeah, I want to get to 80-year-old Joe Biden with you towards the end.
But now that you have come around to the perspective of there isn't anything

savable there, why then do you think that so many people continue to enable it? I mean, that's the hardest part for me. And we discussed this a little bit in the book.
It was like, you bail at the end after the election during the Stop the Steal stuff on the administration. My editor wanted me to end with you because you were kind of the optimistic part of the book.
It's like, see, people can turn. People can see the light.
You know, we can. And I was like, no, no, no, no.
We're going to end with Caroline who doesn't see the light because that's where we are. And like, because that's the reality, right? Is that you bail.
And I want to talk about a couple other people who bailed with you. But like, really, most people have all come back into some level of accommodation with him.
I don't know. You were closer than me.
I was too far out at this point. Like, why is that? Like, like, why are so many people not, you know, why are you on the outs now? Shouldn't everybody be speaking from Alyssa's in book? Isn't it just that obvious at this point? One would think, and there was about a three week period there in like January, February of 2021, where it sort of felt like there was going to be a page turn.
You know, Nikki Haley took a bold stance at the winter RNC meeting, but everyone flocked back. Listen, there's the cultish side of Trump that is the explanation for the hold he has on voters.
And there's a lot you can unpack there, But the industry of politics is something very different.

The people who are with him, the Caroline Runs of the world,

the whoever of the world, they're in it for money.

There's a whole cottage industry around Trump

that's a billion dollar plus industry.

When you think of the media apparatus, Fox, OAN, Newsmax,

you think of the consulting apparatus,

the many different PACs, super PACs, LLCs, things making money off of, you know, America first in the Trump name. People are not turning on him because they're like, oh, I really believe in this guy and I just can't shake him.
He has become the establishment of the Republican Party. And it's become something where you will lose opportunities if you walk away from and may I just say as a point of personal privilege, those of us like Cassidy, Sarah Matthews, myself who speak out, Olivia Troy, we all get called grifters.
And I was like, I didn't work for like a year. I was taking the most random clients to even make ends meet.
The grifters are the ones who stay by, don't tell the truth so they can be on Fox News and get the big consulting contracts. But neither here nor there.
I obviously agree with that, though. This is the thing that frustrates me.
I just think that this is like accepted. Oh, these people are in for money.
Oh, it's like, well, you weren't in it for money. Like we talked about this.
Like you weren't in it for money. Like you were in it because there's a combination of factors of, oh, I think we should have good people in there.
And oh, there are some ideological factors. And oh, a little bit, maybe a little bit of ego.
Like the job is good, right? Like there's a combination of different factors, but it wasn't money. He didn't get rich working for Mike Esper.
And so still there are other people with other motivations. Like I look back to the sin of where we are right now.
And I want to get your take on this. Of that conviction vote in the Senate.
Were you talking to anybody around that time? Like we wouldn't have to be, this is the thing that frustrates me. Like I want to call Josh Holmes and just be like, you could have made a ton of money.
If Mitch McConnell just convicted this guy and you guys anointed Ron DeSantis, maybe he wouldn't have stuck because he's not a good campaigner. We'll talk about that.
But you could have anointed somebody more normal and you could have gone back to the money machine. Why didn't they do that? Do you talk to any of those people? Yeah.
I mean, I was in those articles of the impeachment. My words were, and I was calling around staff.
I don't know if I talked to any senators at that period, but staff level people you would know, like, what are we doing? And everyone was like convinced the Democrats were going to get enough votes and enough Republicans would go over. I don't know to convict, but that's the area where I'll always have a tremendous amount of respect for Mitch McConnell.
But like you could have helped turn the page on this too. Yes.
Yeah. Not a lot of heroes there.
And the funny thing is a lot of people in those worlds would have loved nothing more than for Donald Trump to go on the ash heap of history and never have to deal with him again. But then as soon as he came back, they were like, oh, we're back.
We're with you. It's a kind of an exercise in political cowardice.
So are you still talking to does any does that world? Because I'm out like none of these people call me anymore. Like when you're talking to folks who are still in like, what are they saying to you? Like, are they just like, oh, listen, we're gonna have to ride this thing out for four more? Yeah, we're going to ride it out.
He's, you know, he's brings money into the party. There's a lot of justifying if he's better than Biden.
And like, you'll remember, I was, I was on the Hill working with a lot of oversight members, Freedom Caucus in the Obama era. And we realized he tried a coup.
Yes. Back then, I genuinely believed that what we were doing, whether it was, you know, stopping certain spending bills or blocking nominees or trying to hold people accountable, like that to me, I was like, this is so important.
Nothing matters more. I'm like, I don't know how you possibly transplant that mindset to be like, Joe Biden is so much worse when you're dealing with Donald Trump.
Like it doesn't compute. And I think a lot of my friends on the right know that, but they can't say it.
But they could have done it during that period. And they could have done it during that period in January and February, right? And they just didn't.
This takes me to the Sarah and Cassidy. You worked with Sarah and Cassidy a little bit, talked to them, helped them through their testimony, which I thought was so important to the January 6th committee.
And I just unbelievably feels weird to say I to say I'm proud of them. It feels condescending, but like, it makes me feel pride.
Maybe it's a better way to put it that they did it. Why do you think, did they gather the gumption that all of these grown ass men couldn't? That's the right way to say it.
It fills me with so much pride and I'm like in awe of both of them. I mean, listen, maybe we need to start electing more women because in the aftermath of January 6, I saw it was, frankly, young women who were the people willing to stand up and have way more courage than men, you know, three times their age.
But listen, they still have the moral clarity that maybe a lot of folks who've been in DC too long and kind of sold their souls don't have. Sarah and Cassie are two of my best friends and, you know, not speaking for them, they would never make a decision based on, oh, I know this is wrong, but what doors might it open in the future or what money might be there in the future.
And it was just tremendous moral clarity, but also a feeling of duty to the nation. They did get to serve in that White House.
That's something it's a once in a lifetime experience that, you know, many people won't ever have. And they know that they have a duty to the public.
Are they mad at their bosses? Are you mad at your bosses? How do you feel like, where's Mark Meadows? You can pick on a few on or you don't have to, but like, where are these people, the people that hired you all that you worked for? I've come up with, if you stay in DC long enough, all your political heroes will disappoint you and all your favorite bars will close. I mean, Mark Meadows was like a second father to me.
I attribute a lot of success that I had to his trust in me and opportunities he gave me. But when the rubber met the road, this man that I had chosen to believe was a leader and was trying to do the right thing turned out to be the worst version of what everyone had told me about him for many years, which was the loyalty was to Trump, to the future that it might bring to him, not to the country, not to the constitution.
I do think he's cooperating with DOJ. I think that he has so much legal exposure.
He doesn't have a choice not to. So I think that's why we're not hearing from him.
But to allow Cassidy to go up there, tell the truth that he knew when he was unwilling to take what that did. I mean, that turned her life upside down.
She was 26 years old. What's she doing now? I don't even know.
I mean, she's laying low. She does have a book coming out though, which she was very hesitant to do.
And I'm glad she did because I think it's a story that needs to be told. But he allowed her to basically take all the flack, the death threats, the, you know, invasions of her privacy that he was unwilling to take.
I mean, that just fills me with rage. It's like, what a P word.
How are Cassidy and Sarah, like not just filled with anger about that? You said something interesting to me. You were like, when I finally decided to go speak out, right, in about two weeks before, three weeks, whenever it was, you remember six weeks before the insurrection, like, I thought there's gonna be a line of people behind me.
And you said something, I don't have to quote in front of me, there was something that was like, that was like, that was the last moment of naivete that I showed. Like, I had some naivete about how I could make a difference with Trump.
And then the naivete continued all the way up through thinking that people would follow my lead. They have got to have felt that way too, right? Like once they said that they would do it, that some of their bosses...
There aren't words to express the frustration. And I think I'm past the place of anger with it.
It's more just not even disappointment. It's like, I'm embarrassed for the men who didn't speak out, for the adults who were there and it was happening and still haven't.

We'll get there. But it kind of brings me to this primary season of none of the people in this race, with maybe one or two exceptions, see Donald Trump any differently than you, Tim Miller and Melissa Farah Griffin, see him.
But they're not saying it. They're not challenging him.
They're not telling the public what they actually think. So it's an issue that runs, you know, even higher up than the Mark Meadows of the world, because the biggest joke in the Republican Party is pretty much everyone has Trump's number.
They know that he's unfit. He is morally, mentally incapable of being the president of the United States.
He doesn't have the character or the integrity, and he's a threat to democracy. Just there's not many people who are willing to say it.
My last question on this is, I wonder now with a little bit of distance from everything, you know, you were earlier, you said, I want to get deep on it. And you're kind of glad that you went through the journey.
I get calls fewer and fewer by the years now, because I'm just so far away. So I'm sure you get these calls from people who are trying to decide, oh, should I work for DeSantis? Oh, should I, should I work for Trump even? Like, oh, should I work for, like, oh, should I think, how should I think about this? Should I speak out? Should I say things? I'm just wondering, like, what is the lesson that you learned from your experience? And is there anything that you kind of regret that you look back on that you sort of offer to them as a word of caution? I regret not speaking out sooner about Trump's unfitness.
I think that the line I should have drawn was June of 2020, during the social justice protests around George Floyd's murder, he demonstrated just tremendous unfitness at every turn, statements he wanted to put out, moments that called for peace and unity, putting out, you know, vitriolic rhetoric that was only going to increase the violence and the protest. That I think would have been a very logical moment to leave.
I recently caught up with my friend, Dr. Fauci.
He spoke for a brief moment about that period. And he did say, you know, he's like, I was grateful you stayed because there was an effort by many, and this was in the back of my head.
I was like, who's going to look out for Dr. Birx, Dr.
Fauci, and these doctors who pretty much every day were wrestling with making sure Trump didn't fire them on the spot and hire some sort of lunatic with no infectious disease background. So that gives me a little bit of pause, and at least in retrospective clarity, that I'm like, okay, someone was grateful I was there.
For people who are in those boats, because I do still talk to a number and I have friends on nearly every campaign I think right now or people I still talk to. And the advice I give them is the sooner the better.
Like my biggest regret is that I didn't speak out sooner. And you're going to look back and it's more things you have to try to explain away or take accountability for.
So you set it up. So I have to do one follow up on the looking back.
It's the before the election. I mean, say all the other stuff about the Trump stuff, but that's the thing.
Like if I, you know, we've now had this conversation a million times. I'm not like wagging my finger at you.
But if I'm like, I look at this and I'm like, we're desperate for people. And like, would Alyssa Fair have been the person that made the difference in Pennsylvania? Probably not.
And this was the argument you made to me. But still, if there was a critical mass of people who were like, we were in here, we saw this, he's bad, we have to stop it.
You have to suck it up and vote for Joe Biden. I'm going to vote for a Republican again next time.
I'm not a Democrat. You know what I mean? And we couldn't get anybody to do that.
It was Olivia and Elizabeth. God love them.
But we were trying to recruit everybody. I was trying to get John Kelly and HR.
And anyway, so that's the thing I just look back on. Yeah, no, I think that's fair.
And listen, like, you know, I did vote for him in 2016. I'm still a Republican.
Like, I figured you'd ask me this question. 2024, assuming it's Biden versus Trump, I'm writing in.
Now, would my answer to that question be different if i lived in bucks county pennsylvania probably i'm a republican voting in manhattan probably probably no fundamentally be different if i was in a swing state where i thought it was a critical vote but i am dissatisfied with what both parties are putting up i do believe trump is 10 times more dangerous for the future of America, may even be here, than obviously Joe Biden. But I don't want to fall into sort of this binary that's been constructed for us that I don't agree with.
But if I was like the life or death vote, of course I would vote for Biden over Trump. Hey folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of The Bulwark podcast.
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That's thebullwork.com forward slash Charlie. We're going to get through this together.
I promise. We have some real news to get to, but just a little palate cleanser after that conversation.
It's about the most disgusting palate cleanser you can get. Actually, so reverse palate cleanser for us first.
Let's listen to our friend Charlie Kirk on his podcast yesterday. If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Katanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called the racist.
But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us. They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action.
Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.
You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously. Yeah, I saw what you mouthed there.
It was a curse word. I know that I cuss on this podcast, no pressure on you two.
What the fuck is right? We don't need to do that. That's racist because that's racist thing.
Everybody, though, what I want to ask you about is going to Charlie Kirk's, not everybody, but Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, even Asa Hutchinson, are going to Charlie Kirk's TPUSA thing this weekend. Even the people who aren't going, nobody is going to speak out about that.
Like, doesn't that give you pause about the whole party? Like that a guy can be as influential as Charlie Kirk and nobody is like, no, we can't go to this fucking conference. We can't go to a conference with a guy who's out there saying that black women are taking white people's jobs.
Well, a couple of things. I mean, it says so much about the state of the party that our intellectual leaders, in quotes, are Charlie Kirk, who I don't even believe graduated college, which is fine if he seemed to have the intellect that would require leadership.
Well, this isn't a Goodwill hunting situation. We didn't go to college and he was like reading a bunch of books in the library on the side.
I don't think that's what we're talking about. Aside from being racist, it's such an intellectually shallow and cheap point that he's trying to make.
He's misunderstanding what the and I have my issues with affirmative action. My general take is that I think there should be it should account for all aspects of diversity, socioeconomic race, obviously, is a factor.
But I think that, you know, the poor kid from

Appalachia also is going to need a leg up if they're the first person in their family to go to college. But he's not understanding that the barriers that were there were because of race.
It's not like they got the spot because they were inferior to a white person and they had to take it. It's about overcoming every aspect of barriers to get to the place, but neither here nor there.
No, listen, we're screwed in this moment.

I mean, when Benny freaking Johnson and Charlie... It's about overcoming every aspect of barriers to get to the place, but neither here nor there.
No, listen, we're screwed in this moment.

I mean, when Benny frickin Johnson and Charlie Kirk are intellectual leaders, it's a really dark place for the party.

I'm not prepared to give up on it.

I appreciate that we've got, you know, a Chris Christie in the race who's telling the truth.

We've got a Will Hurd who's telling the truth and talking about the future.

And by the way, acknowledging that the Republican Party does have a race issue. And As issue and asa to some degree though i'm disappointed he's going at this platform let's do what he says let's do what he says i didn't mean to single out asa i didn't mean to but like it was more of a point that like it's just accepted to go to this thing but like my point in bringing up asa was not really to condemn him but so much to be like even the people that are acting in good faith about donald trump nobody's still willing to go there right like there's nobody that's like standing up and saying guys i'm still conservative but i'm not going to go along with this racist shit i'm not going to go along with the election fraud shit and christy's starting to try to do that but but man you know there's it feels like people run up to the ceiling even when they try to say the right thing and they're like well i still gotta i still gotta stay in good with charlie kirk or else the tp usa kids won't like me god forbid forbid by the way half of those kids you'll remember this is a young activist mark my words half of the turning point kids in 10 years are going to be liberals they're figuring out who they are they don't they're not driven by anything but like the sort of social aspect of what they're at but um there's also the tucker event in that I have a hard time.
Everyone's going to. Your man, Mike Pence, is going to.
Why is Mike Pence going to that? Well, and you know he's not going to give you a fair shake. Like everyone knows where Tucker is on issues from Ukraine to Trump to the election of January 6th.
Why even subject yourself? I don't really understand. Why do you think Pence is in there? Let's do the 2024 primary, and then I want to get to some of the military stuff that's happening too with Tuberville and then DAA before I lose you.
But what's your sense of, like, why is Pence in this race? What are they seeing? Like, why do this to yourself? I'm going to go up to Tucker Carlson. I think both you and I think that Pence would be in a 10 times stronger place if post January 6, he took the actions he did and then repeatedly, continuously condemned Trump and talked about his unfitness.
And by the way, you can do that while talking about the policy you agree with under Trump, because he needs to understand he's never getting the core 30 percent diehard ultra MAGA. So you've got to get the normie Republicans.
You've got to get the true evangelical voting bloc, which he has strong ties to. But I think his struggle that he's seeing, and I've shared as much with his team, who I'm still very close with, is the wishy-washy and being on both sides, you alienate the Trump people, and then you also alienate the normie, you know, Republicans that they're still left.
So he's a politically talented person. He's extremely knowledgeable.
I think he'd be probably the most ready on day one to be president, having been vice president. But it's hard to see the lane here.
I had really hoped he might run for the Indiana Senate seat when it was open. But I think once you've been vice president, it's hard to not see yourself as the president.
I get the ego side of it, but maybe you have a more optimistic view about this than me. So I don't want to jaundice you, but I look at Tim Scott and I look at Mike Pence and Nikki Haley and it's just like, it's not happening for you.
It's not happening. And I think that there are reasons to run for president that are not necessarily about winning, right? Particularly in primaries.
It's a good opportunity to get a message out, to make a point, right? Whatever. But I don't see any of them really doing that.
Hence a little bit on the January 6th stuff, but I don't see any of them really doing that. And it's like, if you're the three of them, to me, it's like, oh, I'm going to go to the Tucker event in Iowa.
That says to me that, oh, I'm not trying to make a point. I'm deluding myself into thinking that I can win.
Do you think that the three of them think they can win and that's their strategy? What do you think is happening with those camps? I think all of them think they maybe could and they could catch lightning in a bottle. And they have consultants in their ears who are telling them hitting Donald Trump is a mistake, which goes against the first rule of politics of running.
You have to define your opponent and you have to chip away at their favorability, which they're not willing to do. So then they're just waiting as though they're going to release some policy proposal or have some media moment that is going to skyrocket them up.
And I love Tim Scott. We had him on The View.
I thought he was excellent. I'd vote for Tim Scott if he got the nomination.
I'd love to support him. I think he's waiting in the wings for either something to take Trump out of the race, which I don't think any of these investigations will move quickly enough to.
He wants us to do the dirty work. These people want the libs and the never Trumpers and the elites that they all pretend to hate in the legal system.
They all want us to do the dirty work and then they will be able to reap the rewards. That's not how life works.
That's not how life works. You got to take out your own trash.
I'm sorry. They're waiting for DeSantis to keep plummeting to then be the number two.
But it's like, to what end? So long as Trump is, you know, pulling double digits ahead of the next guy, that's where I am completely lost by what some of these folks are doing. And I mean it when I say, like, I have some grievances with Nikki Haley, but I think she's probably one of the most politically talented people.
She's incredibly knowledgeable. And I just wish she would be the like bold Nikki Haley that she's at times shown she can be.
Confederate flag moment. Yeah.
I don't agree with it. I want to get your take on DeSantis next.
If DeSantis' strategy was, I'm going to wait and attack Trump later while I build up support, I would at least understand that. If you're Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, Donald Trump's beating you by 52 points.
Okay, you can't look at me in the face and say you're running a serious campaign and be not unwilling to criticize a person beating you by 52 points. Like that's not a campaign.
To me, that reads like, they want to be in the Trump administration 2.0, which is really cringe. Do you think that that is, do you think that's what Tim Scott and Nikki Ailey are thinking about? I'm trying to not be that cynical.
Listen, Tim Scott is everyone's dream VP pick. I think Trump would consider him.
I think everyone else in the race, if they're thinking they could get the nomination, because he's a genuinely smart, savvy person, deep ties in South Carolina, great personal story. But Tim Scott should reject that.
He's somebody who should stand on his own two feet and say, I'm nobody's number two. I think there's a lot of positioning for the inevitable of Trump and potential cabinet appointments, ambassadorships, all of the above.
With that scenario, what I don't get is like, what do these people think will be different about the second Trump term? Like, do they think it'll be less chaotic? It'll be worse. It'll be worse.
And God forbid, I mean, they tried to kill Mike Pence. You want the, you want the job when they tried to assassinate the guy? That's the job you're angling for.
Right. And not to mention if he gets the nomination and then loses to Joe Biden or, you know, presumably to Joe Biden, he's going to January 6th it up again.
Like he's going to do something to create, you know, civil disruption. And do you really want to tie yourself to that again? It seems like maybe is the answer, which is bad enough.
Actually, you might not have to be cynical. You would have to agree with me.
Maybe I have more TDS than you. But even if the answer is maybe, that's kind of bad enough for Tim Scott and Nikki Haley.
Yes, but I will say I do talk to both Tim Scott and Nikki Haley's teams, and they swear they're in it to win it. They have strategies, but they're narrow, and they're banking on catching lightning in a bottle, so we'll see.
Okay. They're welcome to call me, and we can talk off the record.
I still got some pals over there that don't call me anymore because they're scared that I'm going to burn them or whatever. I'm happy to talk to them and hear them out, but I don't see don't see it.
It just doesn't see it. You said something interesting this week, it looks like, about how you're just out on DeSantis, the anti-gay shit.
Yeah. Just give me your personal view and his strategy.
So I've kind of said DeSantis was actually super overhyped for some time. I knew him in the house.
Smart guy, kind of was an old school Republican, foreign policy hawk. As governor, you will recall, he came out and he said, I'm not going to get into like the bathroom bills and this kind of culture war issues.
And I would attribute like the success of his first term to being, you know, I've got some issues on COVID, but the free state of Florida, businesses blocking, there are people wanting to live there. And rather than talking about economics and kitchen table issues, he's decided to go full culture warrior.
And like, to me, I can't even support someone who kind of dabbles into that. I mean, not supporting the LGBTQ community is a deal breaker for me, but he's gone like scary extreme.
The ad that went out a week or two ago was the like end of pride ad was literally the most homophobic ad I've ever seen and the most homoerotic ad you've ever seen at the same time a very strange combo it's a strange combo he's getting bad and bad i sent this tweet yesterday i was just like so you look at donald trump and you're like my issues with him isn't the coup that he tried but that he's too nice to homosexuals like that's an insane position. Primary voters also don't see it, right? It's not just an insane position for those of us who are urban, whatever, anti-Trump people.
Primary voters look at you and you're like, they're like, no, this is wrong. No, I was in Wolfborough, New Hampshire, which was kind of a Trump-Pence stronghold and DeSantis happened to be there for the parade.
And he got shouted down with a We Say Gay chant. He forgets that there are gay Republicans, there are Republicans with gay children, with trans kids.
Why are you thinking that this is a community that's only on the left and not tens of millions of people whose votes you should want and not try to alienate? I'm wondering your thought on the foreign policy stuff, just on 2024, and then we'll get to what's happening in Congress right now. But JVL has a newsletter out today.
And if you look at the field, if just ballpark, let's say you got Trump at 50 and DeSantis at 15 and Ramaswamy at 10-ish. So you got about three quarters of the party that is running to Biden's left on Ukraine.
I know that you're against that from your position,

but how do you analyze that?

It's different on the Hill, right?

It's more maybe flipped, actually, probably inverse that.

What does that say about the Republican Party voters,

like where things are going on foreign policy?

And how much does that concern you,

that really like the three leading contenders

are basically riding to the isolationist left of Biden

in this primary?

The current Republican Party, I would say, is a nationalist populist party, not a conservative party. It really, I mean, not to date myself, but it's kind of like the Pat Buchanan party, who basically ran on isolationism, anti even legal immigration, you know, any sort of aid to foreign nations was something that we oppose, pro-tariffs, anti-free trade, super anti-LGBTQ and so on.
It's a very odd moment. And you're against the party on all of those.
So immigration, trade, isolationism, gay stuff, you're on the other side on all that. I'm a Paul Ryan Mitt Romney kind of Republican.
And I actually think that's where the vast majority of the party probably is. But the national party is trending otherwise.
I mean, DeSantis, he's getting advised by, frankly, what I think is a very junior team in Florida that's reading Twitter sentiment rather than national sentiment. The country is united behind what Biden's doing in Ukraine, and they would be united behind a Republican wanting to continue and potentially give more aid to Ukraine.
I'm to the right of Biden on how much we're assisting our allies in Ukraine. And I want to believe that there's going to be a course correction and a change, and it would be the result of losing another national election that would make us wake up and say we're alienating every major people group that we need to be a national party.
But who knows? Though for somebody like you, it's got to give you a little pause, though, about like, maybe that's not true about the party, right? I don't think voters vote just on Ukraine. But it's a little concerning that three quarters of the Republican Party is with a candidate that at some level wants us to dial back our Ukraine involvement.
Yeah, although I read it a little different with regard to Trump. I think

that there are people who are supporting Trump who are actually have bought into him saying he could solve this and Ukraine could have peace and Russia could. I actually think the vast majority of this country wants to see Ukraine victorious.
It's how the politicians sell it that maybe they're disagreeing on. I've been dying to hear your opinion about the Tuberville thing, because you of these conflicting things within you,

the two wolves inside of you,

your pro-life, right?

So his hold, for people who haven't fallen closely, Tuberville is holding all these military promotions because DOD is paying for women who need to travel to have a divorce and they're paying reimbursements. And Tuberville is holding these promotions.
Even the commandant of the Marine Corps is being held. Some very serious promotions are being held up.
He is refusing the call of the Secretary of Defense this weekend, apparently, refusing to talk to him. How do you hash out that story? Well, first and foremost, this is Tommy Tuberville, who Donald Trump was trying to reach on the Senate floor on January 6th, thinking that he would

help vote to overturn the election. He's also the person who disgraced himself by going on

Caitlin Collins' new primetime show on CNN and basically defending white nationalism. So this is

not neither the brightest bulb nor probably one of our finest leaders. So I am pro-life and I

strongly support the Hyde Amendment, which blocks federal funds from going to abortion.

What he's doing would be the biggest stretch of an interpretation of what the Hyde Amendment does. I think it's totally inaccurate.
What the Pentagon is doing is purely providing PTO, paid time off. They are not covering the cost of the abortion procedure.
But I also think it's our military readiness is something that Republicans generally were like, we will not touch. We're not ever going to tie the hands of the Department of Defense, especially at a time when we're, you know, we forget we still have troops in Syria, we still have troops in Iraq, but we're also heavily supporting our allies in Ukraine.
This is not a time for us to not be ready, not be investing, not have a commandant of the Marine Corps for the first time in 164 years.

So I think it's foolish. I think that the House needs to reconcile it.
And this is going to be challenging for McCarthy because Democrats aren't going to support an NDAA that has this carve out on the abortion issue. It's another example of the Charlie Kirk thing though, right? And the Senate conviction vote, right? It's like the people that know better still in the Senate, I mean, it doesn't feel like they're putting a ton of pressure on them.
I mean, when Mitch McConnell wants to put pressure on somebody, he's demonstrated that he's good at it. And like, this has gone on for a while now.

Well, he and Senator Cassidy both spoke out that they strongly oppose it, but it needs to be ramped up pressure. I mean, this, by the way, it goes back to like the Republican Party flipping on some of our principles.
So now we're holding up DOD appointments and funding. We're supposed to be the pro defense party.
And this week, our friends in the house did this anti DOJ. We hate the FBI.
We don't trust our, our law enforcement, which I'm like that. Defund the FBI.
Defund the FBI. I was like, because defund the police worked so well for Democrats.
Let's, let's go even further and go after federal law enforcement. It's cuckoo.
It's like flipping everything on its head. Let's talk about our friends in the House.
Here's another area where you're probably a little cross-pressured. I mentioned in your view, there's both on the merits of what they're doing and on the strategy.
So in the House, I believe it was a 58 to 1 pass of the National Defense Authorization Act in a committee. And so it was a bipartisan passage, comes to the floor.
McCarthy's allowing a lot of amendments. And there have been a lot of culture war amendments put in.
No DEI, no paying for gender affirmative care or transition surgeries, no paying for abortion PTO, as you just mentioned. All this sort of stuff has now been put into this bill.
I think probably the Republicans still have the votes to get it passed. We might know by the time this podcast is up.
We should know on Friday. It's kind of similar to your old Freedom Caucus buddies strategies, but on like culture rather than on financial, right? It's not like they're trying to stop the spending.
It's like, oh no, in order to do the spending, you got to check all of these culture war boxes for us. Right.
And that's the problem is the GOP in this iteration is making the culture wars basically their whole personality because we don't have any credibility on spending, by the way. Donald Trump spent, you know, an absurd amount in office as president.
But yeah, back in the day, I mean, even in the Freedom Caucus days when we were, you know, holding up legislation primarily on like fiscal issues, we didn't really touch defense bills. That was something that was sort of like our national defense is too important.
We're not going to try to do these kind of things in the NDA, at least the best of my recollection. It's absurd.
I quote this stat constantly because I think there's a big disconnect from Republicans in the country and elected Republicans in Washington. But 67% of Republicans in the country want more protections for the LGBTQ plus community against discrimination.
And meanwhile, you've got our folks in Washington who seem to want to make their whole personality going after trans kids or making it more difficult for people to just live their lives. I think it's absurd.
It's backward. You're going to lose a whole generation of voters if you keep going that way.
And it's not like we haven't tried this in the past, but the country's moved forward. All right.
I want to close out here. We've argued about the past.
I want to argue about the present a little bit. Are you ready? We can just have a little bit of a fun disagreement.
You're more than ready now. You're daily arguing with VU.
Actually, before we argue, what's being on the Vue like? I meant to ask. I forgot to ask.
What's Whoopi like? How's Joy? How much slander do you take in your Twitter mentions? What's life like in the conservative chair? I love it. The good always outweighs the bad.
The hosts are pretty close to what you see is what you get. Whoopi, I love.
I pinch myself every day that I'm like, Holy shit. I'm sitting across the table from like an EGOT.
She's won every award imaginable and she's just an amazing person. Were you a sister act fan as a kid? Sister act two is like my favorite movie of all time.
So I keep pitching her on letting me do a cameo. Cause she wants to do a sister act three.
And she's like, no, you're not doing a cameo. um joy's hilarious we both kind of have gallows humor and the other day on air i said like something along the lines of like well i i plan to be in heaven and she's like oh that's a bold assumption and so of course then everything online is like joy bayhardt tells elissa she's going to hell you have to have like skin to be in that seat i like probably take things too unpersonpersonally, but it's fun.
I enjoy it. It's a huge platform.
And I don't think our viewers are, they're left of center, but I don't think they're as in a box as people think. So I think it's a cool place to try to like change hearts and minds and educate people on issues they might not, you know, think about that much.
So. So you're not just scrolling through, like searching your name on Twitter and on YouTube comments and just like going down a rabbit hole of spiraling over the negative feedback you're seeing from the random liberals on the internet? I'm guilty of it a little bit, but actually Whoopi is instrumental in telling me she's like, you are going to drive yourself insane if you read your mentions.
You don't know those people, like just tune it out. So I've been like proactively notactively not really reading mentions but also by the way i get it more from the right than the left now which is interesting like the left i'll still get the like you're complicit you don't deserve to ever have a voice occasionally but i think most have kind of been like whatever oh because the right does the oh you're a sellout yeah and you're just doing this for an act and this is a grift and that's what they're giving you.
People that are just like, oh, you're phony. You never were MAGA.
Well, I'm more conservative than Donald Trump's ever been. The day, yesterday, and the day before, the only oath I ever took was to the Constitution of the United States, not to any president.
But by the way, I also don't feel bad about the fact that I'm more moderate as a, God, I'm 34, Tim, as a 34-year-old woman than I was as a 25-year-old Freedom Caucus staffer. And I believe in a lot of stuff that we argued for then, but I would think, I think that life experience, policy, learning, studying, it's okay to evolve on your viewpoints over time.
I think it's a healthy thing. Yeah, we are so aligned on that.
I'm like, there's this view amongst some in the conservative Never Trump side that I get into a tiff with that they're like, oh, you have to have maintained every principle that you had before Donald Trump came in. And my view is kind of like, I don't know.
If you had a worldview, and that worldview is aligned with a political party, and that political party was overtaken by a racist idiot, and you didn't reassess a single thing that you had supported beforehand, to me, that seems incurious and unreflective. I'm not saying you have to completely switch everything and go, you know, become a Democratic Party party way, or, you know, a liberal all down the line, but like, but maybe you'd miss some things.
Maybe there were some things to reflect on. That's all.
Right. Exactly.
Like nuance is not a bad thing either. Like I even think about that with like something like affirmative action.
My answer is not black or white. It's like a little bit somewhere in between.
And I think that that's, I think probably more of our country is like that than we realize. For sure.
Okay. Let's argue about Joe Biden.
I think Joe Biden's been pretty damn good. Afghanistan was a botch.
A really bad one, frankly. I disagreed with him on the student loan thing.
Supreme Court ended up overruling it, so a little bit of a no harm, no foul there. Besides that, he's tried really hard to bridge the divide.
He gets no credit for that. They've done a lot of bipartisan stuff in Congress.
He's been president. Nobody thought that he could do that.
Most of the bipartisan stuff has been really good chips, infrastructure, codifying gay marriage. I mean, it hasn't been an A++ for me.
He's not been, you know, the magic, you know, John Huntsman, moderate rhino, classically liberal Republican of my dreams or anything. But like, I's been pretty darn good and yet a lot of people that are like a step to my right like are really nasty about joe biden and and like very critical of him and and talking about how poorly he's done so you know you have to fight this fight on the view every day like where how do you how do you grade joe biden i would give Joe Biden probably, I'd probably have to break into issues like a C.

Just really quick before you get into specifics on Joe Biden, let's level set.

Okay.

You give Joe Biden a C.

Let's go back.

Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush.

But Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush.

What do you give those three?

Well, okay.

So this is the moderate self.

I'd probably give George Bush a C.

I'd probably give Obama a C minus and i'd probably give obama a c minus and donald trump in retrospect like md this is what i'm saying okay you're making my point it's like joe biden's been the best president of our life i think maybe hw but a bit that we were kids i know right actually best no i think bush i'm overwhelmed but i think we have the retrospective of iraq now that we didn't have at that time but i do think post 9 11 leadership was incredible i think that economy and he reflects my viewpoints the most of anyone in my lifetime same but iraq was such a fuck-up me and jord w are probably better if you went down a checklist of policies between me and w and biden but like Iraq was such a screw up. Like, so here we are, Joe Biden, doing just fine.

My sense with Joe Biden is this, I think he's exceeded my expectations, but my expectations

for him were extremely low. I've said with him, I think he is a genuinely good man,

though I've been critical of, you know, the issues, the Marine Dowd piece about the granddaughter,

and I never presumed to know things in someone's family. That's hard for me to stomach.
Afghanistan was borderline unforgivable to me. And it is, it's emotional, and it's personal to me.
I spent time in country, I had friends who were translators, I helped work on getting visas for translators when I was on Capitol Hill. It's not unforgivable.
But that was for me, probably one of the lowest moments. Ukraine, I credit him tremendously with keeping the NATO alliance together, I think at a fictitious moment.
My biggest objection to Joe Biden, this will piss off your listeners, is I don't think he should be running again. I have a really hard time and I'm sensitive to ageism.
I really am, but I have a hard time saying that he should be president again, not for a lack of what Democrats wanted from him. I think he's delivered for mainline moderate Democrats.
I think progressives he's going to have to do some work with. And I think moderate Republicans can be like, it's fine, but I don't think he should be running again is my biggest critique.
And listen, I'm always going to disagree with him on pro-life issues. I think the border he's just pretended is not an issue.
And I think that is going to matter. I think China is emboldened in the Western hemisphere, but I think that hasn't come to a head.
So I'm not going to grade him on it yet. So those are your critiques.
China, the border, Afghanistan, spending maybe.

That second COVID-ville was probably overcooked.

Probably too much.

The economy is doing better,

but I'm not convinced that that's translating to voters.

In the last two years,

the cost of nearly all goods have gone up by like 15%. And we get it, inflation's a global phenomenon.

But my family, we vote based on our pocketbooks.

That's always how it's been.

We didn't grow up with a lot. And, you know, that's a significant financial hurdle.
And I do think there are areas he could have done more to reach out to the right. This is the one that annoys me with some of my, and I'm not speaking out of school, because I've said it to him, like my pals, like Stephen Hayes and some of these guys, especially I'm like, what more do you want this guy to do? I mean, they're like, they're calling him a hair sniffing, dementia riddled pedophile.
And he's out there most days. He's just like, you know, I'm just trying to fight for the soul of the country.
And I know that my friends over there on the right, they're going to come around. And one day he was on Nicole Wallace last week.
Nicole Wallace is like, add seats to the Supreme Court. And he's like, nah, I don't know.
I don't think so. He's like, some days he's like, I I think the fever is going to break over there and I can work with Mitch McConnell.
I mean, given how insane some people on the right are, I give him an A++ on how he's tried to just be a president for everybody. And all the infrastructure bills going into red states.
Biden's an institutionalist. And I think for someone like me, that's important for the sake of stability.
I don't think that his approach to the economy long term is going to work. I don't think it's sustainable to pretend that the border is just a red state issue.
I think he's going to get hit a lot on that in a general. I'm not convinced he's got the fight in him for a second term.
But I would say my critiques of his first term are minor. I think the running is what I have the biggest objection to.
All right. So, Alyssa Farah, Joe Biden, best president of her life.
I won't tell any of your MAGA friends that. We're going to...
Yeah, I love that you've... I'm still writing in a Republican.
My buddy Will Hurd. Oh, boy.
We're going to have to do a whole other podcast on Will Hurd for Bullock Plus members only. I have a gripe with you on that, so please have me back to discuss.

Okay. Well, we can flip it.
Next time you can yell at me. Thank you for subjecting yourself to me

again. I'm really appreciative of it, Alyssa, and we'll be monitoring you on The View.
Come back

anytime. Charlie will be back on Tuesday.
On Monday, it's the third edition of Will Salatin's

amazing podcast series, The Corruption of Lindsey Graham. Don't miss it.

Elizabeth Farah, thank you so much.

Thank you, Tim.

We'll see everybody else on Monday.

Peace.