Philip Bump: The Self-Disappearing Informant

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Bullwork podcast. I'm Sonny Bonship, sitting in for Charlie Sykes today.
Very excited to be talking to Philip Bump.

Speaker 2 He's national columnist at the Washington Post, focuses largely on the numbers behind politics. We're going to get into some really fun numbers in a minute here about Dairy Queen and politics.

Speaker 2 I'm very excited to talk about that.

Speaker 2 He also writes the weekly newsletter, How to Read This Chart, and is the author of the new-ish book, The Aftermath, The Last Days of the Baby Boom, and the Future of Power in America.

Speaker 2 Great, exciting book around the bulwark offices, as some folks know. Jonathan V.
Last is the author of a book about the end of birthing and what that means for the world.

Speaker 2 So that was an exciting kind of companion book with that. Philip, thanks for being on the show.
Really appreciate it.

Speaker 4 Of course, happy to be here.

Speaker 2 So let's start with the biggest and almost funniest story of the week, the Gal Luft story, the missing informant.

Speaker 2 I'm going to put this in air quotes. People won't be able to see it, but he ran a think tank in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 2 and claimed to have information that would lead to the arrest of Hunter Biden and was immediately disappeared by the DOJ. Isn't that right, Philip? Isn't that exactly how it all went down?

Speaker 4 As it turns out, Sonny, I hate to burst your bubble, but that is not how it went down. That has been the public presentation.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, this is a fascinating issue because really what happened Monday was the DOJ sort of formalized what had already been out in the ether.

Speaker 4 I mean, Gal Luft was, as it turns out, indicted on November 1st, 2022. That indictment was placed under seal, presumably because it dealt with national security issues.

Speaker 4 He's accused of violating Iranian sanctions, of acting as an agent of China without declaring it, of arms trafficking. You know, these are all obviously unproven allegations at this point in time.

Speaker 4 But he was arrested in February in Cyprus. And at that point in time, he started making these allegations like, oh, well, actually, I have dirt on the Bidens.
And House Republicans jumped on it.

Speaker 4 And because, you know, the House Oversight Committee in particular has been very eager to try and elevate these claims about Joe Biden acting badly and so he became this sort of uh celebrity figure in the conservative right-wing media sphere although he was obviously already had already been arrested and then skipped bail and was on the layham and you know people may remember james comer from the oversight committee going on uh fox news and saying well you know we have this informant we lost him he's missing well see he was missing because he skipped bail because he'd been arrested for these violations of potential national security crimes and so all of that occurred and then finally on Monday, they just unsealed the indictment.

Speaker 4 And so that was the only change that occurred this week.

Speaker 4 But that then became this trigger for so many people on the right to say, oh, look, they're targeting these guys who have information about the Bidens.

Speaker 4 And it's like, no, man, you're getting it backwards. He said he had information about the Bidens after he'd already been arrested.
And that was the point in time when people got all excited about it.

Speaker 4 But, you know, truth is a malleable thing.

Speaker 2 Truth is a malleable thing. No, the Cobra thing is very funny because I remember when the news came down that their star witness had gone missing.
And there were two basic trains of thought here.

Speaker 2 One was he's been disappeared by the Biden administration. He's in, he's rotting in Gitmo somewhere, probably.

Speaker 2 And then the other was, and this is frankly where I was. I was like, well, did he ever actually exist? But it turns out to be kind of a third thing where he did exist and he disappeared himself.

Speaker 4 Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah.
So Comer gets on Maria Bartaromo's show. And of course, Maria Bartaromo is just like, you know, a gog with any conspiracy theory that someone throws in front of her.

Speaker 4 And she asks this very loaded question, like, where are these informants? Like, very clearly, like, he's sort of leading him on. And Comer's like, well, you know, this informant's missing.

Speaker 4 Now, she was asking in the context of this whole other thing, this nonsensical bribery allegation, which is this incredibly thin thing that has been spun into this huge scandal.

Speaker 4 That was the context which she was answered in. And Comer said, oh, you know, our informant there is missing.
And he was wrong.

Speaker 4 And his staff later that day had to come on and be like, oh, actually, he was sort of conflating these two things. We're talking about this other guy.

Speaker 4 And they said at the time that it was this guy, Gal Luft, who we had already known had been arrested in Cyprus, although we didn't know why.

Speaker 4 But just last week, the New York Post and Miranda Devine released this report based on a video that Luft had done, in which he detailed essentially the things that were included in this indictment, which he had obviously already seen because he'd been arrested back in February.

Speaker 4 And so, all of these elements about what had happened to Luft, even if at the time Comer was confused, and you know, but we knew it was Luft at the time. This was in May when Comer made this mistake.

Speaker 4 And then we knew last week what the elements of the indictment were. So, again, nothing about this particular thing here is new.

Speaker 2 Let's just remind folks what Luft is actually saying about Biden and the accusations he's making, because there's a kind of funny element of projection to a lot of this.

Speaker 4 It's somewhat vague, right? Which is, I think, sort of befits the scenario.

Speaker 4 He apparently, and I'll just by way of background, he apparently spoke with FBI agents back in 2019, which is a thing that Republicans seized upon. Like, what was he telling them?

Speaker 4 What were the notes there? There are certainly indications that he was speaking with the FBI in 2019 because the FBI was investigating him, right?

Speaker 4 And they were actually trying to collect evidence to use against him.

Speaker 4 But he claims that he has information about Hunter Biden's and Joe Biden's brother Jim's interactions with a Chinese energy corporation. Now, those interactions are well known.

Speaker 4 The Washington Post had a big report about them last year, and that he was aware that Biden was present at a meeting with...

Speaker 4 some of these Chinese business people, which also has been previously reported.

Speaker 4 So it's not actually clear that Luft has new information about the relationship between the Bidens and this energy corporation.

Speaker 4 But, you know, obviously he, as soon as literally he tweeted as soon as he was arrested in Cyprus and said, oh, you know, I'm being arrested.

Speaker 4 I presume it's because I have this information about the Bidens, yada, yada, yada. And everyone ran with it from there.

Speaker 2 It's kind of funny that the GOP keeps stepping on rakes with the Biden, the Hunter Biden thing in particular, because it feels like it would not be hard to put together a fairly concrete case of like Hunter Biden is a bad influence and should be kept far away from the White House just on all the stuff that we already know about him.

Speaker 4 No, 100%. Yeah.
yeah, right. I mean, yeah.
I mean, like, look, Hunter Biden traded on his dad's name and he made money and he had made deals with sketchy people. Like, no one disputes that, right?

Speaker 4 You know, but Hunter Biden is also not president of the United States. We've seen in the past, of course, other family members of other presidents do this.

Speaker 4 Not to what about it, but yeah, I mean, like, this is a problem. This is a problem in American politics that people trade on powerful relatives' names in order to make cash.

Speaker 4 Hunter Biden unquestionably did that, right?

Speaker 4 One of the things that's sort of fascinating here is Joe Biden has sort of taken it upon himself to embrace Hunter Biden because Hunter Biden is so under attack, which I think doesn't do him any good.

Speaker 4 I mean, like having Hunter Biden agree to this plea deal and then show up at a state dinner soon afterwards, that's not a good move by the White House. Well, what's the point of that?

Speaker 4 But you're absolutely right, that the Republican Party is so eager to figure out, like, I really think people like James Comer think that there is this connection

Speaker 4 between the money that Hunter Biden took and Joe Biden. I think he really believes that.
None has been established, and it may be the case. We'll wait and see.

Speaker 4 But as it stands now, it is so entirely contained around Hunter Biden and all of the things that you hear, these allegations about the Biden crime family and so on and so forth, are disconnected from Joe Biden.

Speaker 4 And it's sort of fascinating because they're so eager to take these ideas and elevate them. Like this bribery thing is such a good example.

Speaker 4 One guy, an informant, spoke to a Ukrainian executive back before 2020 and told the FBI, oh, he said he bribed the Bidens. And that's all they've got is that one allegation in this one document.

Speaker 4 And it's become this huge thing for weeks and weeks, weeks, because they're so excited about the prospect of it.

Speaker 4 But then it just ends up embarrassing them because it's clear that they don't have anything more than that, just as they're getting embarrassed by this Galuff thing because they went way too far over their skis.

Speaker 4 And so

Speaker 4 it's this combination of Hunter Biden being this sketchy figure, which he absolutely is, that then triggering all sorts of like, oh, like, what else has he done stuff, which is totally valid for the purposes of investigation, but then over-promising consistently and repeatedly, and then ending up getting politically embarrassed.

Speaker 2 Is there any real history, at least in recent political history, of bad relatives hurting the sitting president? I mean, I'm thinking of, you know, Bill Clinton's brother or Jimmy Carter.

Speaker 2 I can't think of anybody off the top of my head who has been so awful and so terrible that they end up actually doing damage to the sitting president.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, I don't think so. I mean, I don't think that

Speaker 4 Donald Trump's family does him a lot of favors in terms of expanding his reach outside of his base. You know, I mean, from the standpoint of, you know, on culture war stuff, Donald Trump Jr.

Speaker 4 and on, you know, sort of sketchy deal making jared kushner like those sorts of things i think do not help alleviate concerns about donald trump's ethics but yeah i don't think it necessarily is the reason that donald trump didn't win re-election in 2020.

Speaker 2 yeah i mean trump is almost a special case though because trump actually had people in his family in the administration which then once they're in the administration you're like well this is now an administration issue as opposed to you know random family members making money off of the name of their well sort of but i mean you also still still had Donald Trump Jr.

Speaker 4 and Derek Trump out there trying to make deals and like having this thing where, oh, we're not going to seek new business in foreign countries.

Speaker 4 But then they're like, well, this is a distinguishing business. So, you know, I mean, like, there was stuff like that.

Speaker 4 But, I mean, again, you're right that Trump is a special case in another sense, which is just that, like, everything about him is so, like, okay, like, what's going on with this guy that it sort of gets lost in the mix.

Speaker 2 The funniest part of this whole story to me was that, you know, this guy left. He goes to the FBI in 2019.

Speaker 2 And, you know, as JBL pointed out in his newsletter and as you pointed out in your story, the Trump FBI doesn't pounce on this.

Speaker 2 It's very interesting to look at the whole sequence of events here and see just how backwards everyone seems to have had it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, no, you're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 You know, there's a lot of those sorts of examples.

Speaker 4 I mean, like this whole thing with the bribery, right?

Speaker 4 This guy comes in the middle of 2020, in the middle of election year, with Bill Barr is the attorney general and says, hey, this guy told me several years ago that the Biden's taking bribes.

Speaker 4 And you look into it and then nothing happens, right? That's a pretty good indication that there wasn't a whole lot there. And the same thing with Luft, right?

Speaker 4 These things have been looked at for an extended period of time.

Speaker 4 And it is not the case that even when Donald Trump was president, even when he had a Justice Department that was under his control, ostensibly, that anything necessarily resulted.

Speaker 2 That's the deep state for you right there, just undermining Trump left and right. There it is.

Speaker 2 I do want to unwrap the actual accusations against Luft here because they're really interesting to me in part because I have always been fascinated by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is one of these things that like people I knew in DC who, you know, did business with other countries would always like grumble about having to like fill out these forms, but lots of people just don't do it and just take the money and then wind up under indictment.

Speaker 2 So, can you break down what he's actually been charged with here and what that all looks like?

Speaker 4 Sure. So, there are three primary elements.
The first is that he was basically acting as an agent of the Chinese government, that he was looping in prominent Americans, particularly.

Speaker 4 It is presumed that one of the people who's included in the indictment is the former director of CA Woolsey, and that he had been essentially leveraging his relationships on China's behalf in order to, you know, put out information that was positive to China and also build relationships with the then-Trump administration.

Speaker 4 This was right as Trump was getting ready to enter the White House. He is accused also of having worked to violate sanctions against Iran, details of which escaped me at this point in time.

Speaker 4 I don't remember exactly what the elements of that were. But then he is also accused of arms trafficking, of helping to negotiate an arms sale.

Speaker 4 He was able to pre-butt this to some extent with this video that was covered by Miranda Devine in the New York Post. And in that video, he says that basically

Speaker 4 something along the lines of someone was asking where he might find this weapon. He was just sort of like helping a friend, which is, you know, abnormal behavior for a think tank

Speaker 4 executive, but, you know, so be it. Look, you know, this is a federal indictment.
They are going to make as broad a case as possible and as sweeping claims as they possibly can.

Speaker 4 And so one should take this with a grain of salt. But it is not just sort of your garden variety.
This guy didn't fill out a ferah form.

Speaker 4 It is, according to the the federal government, more complicated than that.

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Speaker 2 All right, let's move on to the primary, the GOP primary, which is settling into about where everybody thought it was going to settle, which is that Trump has a solid 40 to 50% of the GOP base locked down, a bunch of people fighting over the scraps, DeSantis kind of collapsing.

Speaker 2 But Chris Christie's out there. He's saying, it's early still.
It's early. I have 4%.
This is exactly what Donald Trump had at the same time.

Speaker 2 Why are we all calling this race over? What's the deal? So

Speaker 2 is it still early, Philip? Are we still early in the race? Or is the season later than some of these guys think?

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, it's a good question. And obviously, as you know, I wrote about this earlier this week, but this idea that it's still early, absolutely it is the case.
The voting has not yet started.

Speaker 4 It is only July.

Speaker 4 In 2016, Donald Trump was not at 4%, as Chris Christie likes to allege, but he was already surging in part because there was all of a sudden this huge national media attention paid to the comments he made about immigrants at his campaign launch.

Speaker 4 And then there was a backlash to that. But, you know, that really spoke to the base of the Republican Party.

Speaker 4 And so Donald Trump was at this point in 2015, so literally exactly eight years ago, he was just about to overtake the lead in the Republican primary, which he's held ever since.

Speaker 4 That is the key detail here. You're absolutely right that Donald Trump is in most polling averages now above 50%, which is higher than he had at any point in the polling averages in 2015.

Speaker 4 He didn't start actually getting 50% of the vote in primaries until after he'd essentially clinched the nomination, after he won Indiana, and most of the other candidates had dropped out.

Speaker 4 So he is in a stronger position now than he was then.

Speaker 4 But the key thing about when you consider this being early in the primary season, I also doing air quotes right there, is that that presumes that you have an unsettled field that's going to sort of fall into place.

Speaker 4 This is not an unsettled field, to your point, right? This is Donald Trump is a very, very well-established and well-known quantity.

Speaker 4 And very importantly, when you look in the past at times when there has been an insurgent who wasn't on the radar early in the year prior to the election, who then ends up winning the nomination or challenging for the nomination, it is someone who is saying, hey, let's challenge this establishment figure.

Speaker 4 You know, it was Donald saying, you know, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, these guys, no, let's, you know, let's come from the outside and smash the establishment.

Speaker 4 You have Bernie Sanders in 2016 challenging Hillary Clinton or even Barack Obama back in 2008. It is, this person is a figure of the establishment.
Let's have this outsider.

Speaker 4 Let's have someone else come in and challenge that.

Speaker 4 The thing that Trump has done very, very well and really helped secure his position is he still manages to present himself as the outsider to the establishment, even though he is the establishment of the Republican Party, right?

Speaker 4 Like he is the guy who is calling the shots consistently in the Republican Party. But because he has done such a good job of presenting himself as an outsider still, how do you combat that?

Speaker 4 Like, who's the outsider who's going to come into this race now and shake things up when Donald Trump already holds that outsider status? You know, obviously, this stuff's fungible and

Speaker 4 I'm making some broad generalizations here, but it's hard to see who shakes up a race that is predicated on Donald Trump being the guy who shakes things up.

Speaker 2 I think the big story of the race so far is the I hesitate to call it a collapse just yet, but the noted decline in support for Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 2 You know, the thinking was Ron DeSantis would come out, campaign would start, and it's still, you know, kind of in the early going here. But the kind of steady,

Speaker 2 you know, doop, doop, doop, doop, just going down the polling averages has been noticeable and marked and I think kind of disastrous for him.

Speaker 2 I feel like this is the moment where he needs to consolidate to get everybody else out of the race, right?

Speaker 4 No, you're exactly right. Yeah.
So a few things on that. I like to say that he didn't launch his campaign.

Speaker 4 He started his campaign because his campaign just sort of, you know, he was going flat and then it started and then he kept going flat.

Speaker 4 The main drop that he saw in the polls actually began back in February before he actually got into the race and he sort of held steady since he got into the race, which has only been, you know, what, a month, a month and a half at this point in time.

Speaker 4 But yeah, I think there are a few things at play here. The first is that everyone said, okay, we need someone who let's consolidate around an alternative to Trump.

Speaker 4 And so he was supposed to be the guy who is the alternative to the Trump among the people who didn't like Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 But as it turns out, who he really is is the alternative to Trump among people who liked Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 And so if you look at the polling over the course of the past eight months or so, he and Donald Trump combined have gotten 75% of the vote almost consistently.

Speaker 4 And so as Donald Trump has risen, Ron DeSantis has gone down, but it's still combined as about 75% of the vote. That means this is the same pool of voters, right?

Speaker 4 So it's not that he is the alternative to Trump in the sense of the anti-Trump folks are like, well, we're going to consolidate around this guy and then he'll be our guy.

Speaker 4 It is that he's the alternative to Trump among Trump voters.

Speaker 4 And so he's trying to find wiggle room on the right of Donald Trump, which, of course, is very hard because Donald Trump defines what constitutes the political right to a large extent, or at least he's very good at driving what that looks like.

Speaker 4 And so now then we have this vacuum on the left. Like, so then who is the actual anti-Trump guy?

Speaker 4 And so now we hear burblings, you know, Rolling Stone and New York Times both reporting that the Murdochs, for example, are disappointed in DeSantis and how he hasn't gotten anywhere.

Speaker 4 And maybe Glenn Young can be that guy. Like now then the conversation starts turning back to, okay, well, then who's the non-Trump candidate?

Speaker 4 If it's not Ron DeSantis, because Ron DeSantis is just Trump Jr., who's the non-Trump guy? And they don't have, there's, you know, there's not a good answer to that.

Speaker 2 DeSantis is in this very weird double mind where you mentioned, I believe in your piece, that he's trying to figure out how to run to the right on Trump on certain things, especially culture war stuff, you know, gay rights, libraries in Florida, whatever.

Speaker 2 That's right. And it doesn't seem to be working, which I think is surprising a lot of folks.

Speaker 2 But also, like, one thing that jumps out at me is that he is running to the right on that, but also on, you know, Medicare, right? And Social Security and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 And this is where Trump has always kind of found the part of the base that really hates the Reaganomics. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney wing of the GOP, right? We don't want you to take away our entitlements.

Speaker 2 We like these things. We think that it's good to have them and we don't want those gone.

Speaker 2 I'm curious to see if you think that DeSantis can shift on this or if that's just baked into the cake at this point.

Speaker 4 Well, I think there's two different issues here, right? So the first is the culture war stuff.

Speaker 4 And DeSantis, you're right, is trying to frame himself as taking this more stringent position on LGBTQ stuff in part because Donald Trump didn't prioritize that when he was president.

Speaker 4 And so it's an aspect of Donald Trump's politics he can actually run against. On most things, Donald Trump is fungible and doesn't have hard and fast positions.

Speaker 4 But there are some spaces where he can be like, oh, I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to be further to the right on this.

Speaker 4 And you're right, it's not getting much traction because what is the right really focused on right now?

Speaker 4 It is a politicization of the federal law enforcement, which of course is driven by what Donald Trump wants to talk about. This issue of entitlements, though, is fascinating.

Speaker 4 And you mentioned earlier that I wrote this book about the baby boom.

Speaker 4 One of the things that's important to remember is part of the shift on the right towards more hostility towards undermining Social Security and Medicare is the fact that Republicans are older, right?

Speaker 4 A third of the Republican Party is age 65 or over. More than half are over the age of 50, right? You know, I think it's something like 60% are over the age of 50.

Speaker 4 That's that, you know, okay, yeah, let's talk about how we cut back on Social Security and Medicare spending. And so I think Donald Trump sort of tapped into that.

Speaker 4 You know, he was always been good at elevating what the populist argument was. That's how he, you know, won the nomination in 2016 in the first place.

Speaker 4 But I think that, yeah, on this front in particular, DeSantis' legacy of being the sort of Paul O'Reilly, let's cut government spending by targeting these programs certainly doesn't no good.

Speaker 2 The other thing that jumps out is I saw somebody on Twitter mention this. I can't remember who it was, but DeSantis had kind of positioned himself very weirdly as the very online candidate, right?

Speaker 2 He like launches with his Twitter spaces with Elon Musk and that's kind of a weird thing and it doesn't go very well.

Speaker 2 But also all of his issues are focused on things that the online right is very focused on. You know, the kind of libs of TikTok right is very focused on.

Speaker 2 But we're also in this weird moment where Twitter is in collapse. It doesn't matter as much in the general conversation.
You know, there's lots of competitors coming up.

Speaker 2 As somebody who spends a lot of time online myself, and as I think you do as well, do you think there's something to this that this intersection, this X almost of Twitter's decline and DeSantis' decline?

Speaker 2 I guess not really an X, more of a slope, kind of coincide? Is that something we're seeing?

Speaker 4 I don't know, because if you think about who the people are that are more enthusiastic and fused about Twitter now, it's exactly the base that Ron DeSantis is trying to appeal to, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, like the people who Musk is trying to empower and give space to and elevate the voices of are exactly the sorts of people that Ron DeSantis is trying to target with his campaign.

Speaker 4 And so, yeah, I mean, I think for normies, Twitter is not what it used to be and is increasingly toxic and so on and so forth.

Speaker 4 I mean, not that you and I are normies, for God's sake, but you got my point.

Speaker 4 But I do think that in terms of Ron DeSantis, Twitter is more useful to him than it used to be, with the exception of, you know, having people to punch.

Speaker 2 Let me rephrase slightly, which is that, yes, Twitter is more useful for Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 2 There's like a greater concentration of, I would argue that it is maybe less important, even in the general GOP primary space, that there's much less energy and discussion there than there was even, you know, 12 to 18 months ago.

Speaker 4 I honestly don't know. It's a fair question.
I do think that

Speaker 4 there obviously is this alternative truth social, which has a lot of energy from the Trump space, although only a fraction of, you know, what you get in Twitter or even got in Twitter 12 to 18 months ago.

Speaker 4 It's hard for me to say, but I just, I find it hard to envision how the changes in Twitter disadvantage a candidate whose goal is to foment that kind of energy in his campaign.

Speaker 2 If DeSantis is in decline, you know, Christie's kind of stuck at 4 or 5%.

Speaker 2 Mike Pence, you know, is getting nowhere.

Speaker 4 He's doing better than Christie.

Speaker 2 Well, I guess that's true. I guess that's true.
But, you know, he's doing less well than you would think that the former, you know, GOP vice president.

Speaker 2 Than you would have thought on January 5th, 2021. Yes.
So is there a lane for a Youngkin type or even like a Brian Kemp, maybe?

Speaker 2 Like, is there another challenger waiting to enter the arena, do you think? Or is this all just kind of wishful thinking by the Murdochs and the rest?

Speaker 4 No, I think there's a lane. The question is, you know, how wide it is, right?

Speaker 4 You know, yeah, I think there's an access road that runs along the superhighway, yes, that Glenn Young can sort of trot along.

Speaker 4 I do think there is some space for someone like Chris Christie to say, look, you know, Donald Trump is a charlatan and, you know, he makes these promises and the Republicans lose and the answer is not to out Trump Trump.

Speaker 4 The answer is instead to just like stop and revisit and reset what the party is doing. I think there is space for that.
I think that gets you maybe 15% of the party, right?

Speaker 4 Like it's just, you know, so much of the Republican Party is centered on.

Speaker 4 not only Donald Trump, but sort of the Trump approach to politics and the partisan hostility that Trump has been so good at leveraging that it's really hard for me to see how, you know, someone gets a whole lot of that space.

Speaker 4 And again, when we think about Ron DeSantis, Ron DeSantis is the top challenger to Donald Trump. He's getting beat by him two to one, and he's still only like 20% in the polls, right?

Speaker 4 You know, there's only like 25% of the electorate that's out there up for grabs, and a lot of that's just people who are undecided to end up voting for Trump anyway.

Speaker 4 So, I, yes, there absolutely is a lane for that. And if you want to be a Glenn Young and raise your national profile and raise a lot of money and have fun going on TV, sure, you can do that.

Speaker 4 Are you going to be the nominee? Almost certainly not.

Speaker 4 Yay,

Speaker 2 yay, this is

Speaker 2 exactly what I wanted to hear.

Speaker 2 So, the interesting thing about Trump has always been that he connects with GOP voters, yet he is clearly not of the same milieu.

Speaker 2 He is a wealthy New Yorker who lives in a literal giant tower when he's not living on a literal golf course mansion. And he doesn't even know what Dairy Queen is.

Speaker 2 So, you did a really great breakdown of the sort of Dairy Queen density and proximity to GOP strongholds. And you did this because Donald Trump went to a Dairy Queen, a bunch of supporters there.

Speaker 2 He's like, I'm going to buy things for you, maybe. What do you want? And was very confused when people ordered blizzards, which is, of course, as anybody.

Speaker 2 who's been to a Dairy Queen knows, is the number one Dairy Queen offering. You go to a Dairy Queen, you get a blizzard, and that's what you eat.
What was this all about to fill folks in?

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, it's fascinating, right? Because I continue to be intrigued by Donald Trump rolling up to restaurants, offering to buy people stuff, and then not buying them stuff, right?

Speaker 4 Which he did in Florida right after he got arraigned, and as he did in East Palestine, Ohio when he went there earlier this year, he went into McDonald's, like, I'm gonna buy you guys stuff, and then didn't buy anything, right?

Speaker 4 It's this very Trumpian shtick of like making this promise, I'm gonna deliver it for you, and then walking out, right? Like, it's just a good encapsulation of his politics.

Speaker 4 So, so he goes to Dairy Queen and he does exactly that. I don't know if he actually bought any blizzards because I was so fascinated by this idea he didn't know what a blizzard was.

Speaker 4 And look, yeah, you're right, it is not abnormal for someone that lives in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to not necessarily be familiar with the menu items on a Dairy Queen.

Speaker 4 I totally understand that, but this is a guy who's whose whole appeal is like, oh, you know, I'm one of you.

Speaker 4 Obviously, he still retains this distance from, you know, average everyday Americans by virtue of his wealth. But yeah, this is his appeal.

Speaker 4 And only he can really get away with this, of just being like, what the hell is a blizzard? Which is literally exactly what he said. You know, people are like, oh, that Trump.

Speaker 4 You know, he's just, he's just so fun. But yeah, Dairy Queen is this great thing.
I went to high school in Northeast Ohio. I went to Ohio State.

Speaker 4 Like, Dairy Queen is very much a part of, you know, of that time period in my life. And so I went and looked at where all the Dairy Queen locations are.

Speaker 4 And there's this, you know, they're all over the country. They're in 49 states.

Speaker 4 But there really is this density in the Midwest, in this area where, you know, Donald Trump has long focused his energies and his attention.

Speaker 4 And specifically, that there are more Dairy Queens per person in more heavily Trump voting places than there are in less heavily Trump voting places.

Speaker 4 So Dairy Queen is the sort of thing that is in a place that Donald Trump is always focused on politically among voters who support Donald Trump very well.

Speaker 4 And yet there's this disconnect in that he doesn't even know this very basic thing that has been on the menu for 30 years in this very famous restaurant, which I just found fascinating.

Speaker 2 I'm looking at the heat map now, the Dairy Queen heat map.

Speaker 2 Dairy Queens mostly in, let's say, Ohio, Indiana, kind of Illinois, then up towards Michigan and Wisconsin, and then also a big spot right where I live, interestingly, in Texas.

Speaker 2 You got a big spot there in northeast Texas. You did an interesting breakdown on the density of the Dairy Queens versus, you know, whether or not they were in specific voting locations.

Speaker 2 Could you just break down your methodology there for us and how you wanted to look at that?

Speaker 4 Yeah, sure. You know, I mean, look, the issue isn't necessarily just where there are dairy queens.
And again, there are dairy queens all over the place. The issue is how

Speaker 4 common dairy queens are relative to the population.

Speaker 4 And this was really informed by I went back and looked at the number of gun stores that were in the United States, where they were located, because I want to see how red state or how red country gun stores were.

Speaker 4 And so when you compare for the population around a gun store, you get exactly what you'd expect, which is that gun stores are really, really, really common and heavily voting Trump places, and then they decline very, very consistently until you get to very blue places, right?

Speaker 4 But that only happens when you control for population. So I did the same thing with Dairy Queen.

Speaker 4 Let's say there are four Dairy Queens in New Jersey near New York City, which that's fairly close to being accurate, right?

Speaker 4 What does that mean relative to one Dairy Queen in a region with more or less people, right?

Speaker 4 Like that density comparison is a better way of understanding how important, again, using your quotes, dairy queen is to a community.

Speaker 4 And so what you see is once you control for the number of dairy queens per people, then you start to see this correlation with politics because what you're doing is better capturing how frequently people may be exposed to dairy queens simply by virtue of the fact that there are more dairy queens relative to how many people there are than there would be in a large city.

Speaker 4 I've explained this extremely poorly. This is why I do charts, man, so I don't have to talk about them and explain it.
Just go to the goddamn article, for God's sake.

Speaker 2 Charts are great.

Speaker 2 The charts are there. They're great to look at.
But you're drilling down on a really important point about Trump.

Speaker 2 I can't emphasize this enough because he has always been a fascinating figure because he is, in theory, exactly what the GOP primary base hates, right? He lives in New York City.

Speaker 2 He, you know, is basically a social liberal on all sorts of stuff. And despite

Speaker 2 everything else, appeals very, very strongly to, I don't even know how to describe aspirational wealth voters.

Speaker 2 Like he is like the idea of like, if I had a billion dollars, this is how I would live, kind of. And it's fascinating, just on a very basic political connection level to me.

Speaker 2 I've always been really, really interested by this.

Speaker 4 I feel like I would have agreed with that more early in the Trump era, that, you know, Donald Trump is sort of this representation of, you know, gaudy American wealth that is appealing to some people.

Speaker 4 I'm not sure that's really much of his appeal these days. I think what his base really likes about him in terms of his wealth and his access to privilege and again, using air quotes, luxury, right?

Speaker 4 I think what they really like is this guy turned on the rest of them, right? This guy was part of that crew.

Speaker 4 You know, he was hobnobbing with politicians and then he said, you know what, F these dudes. I'm going and I'm working for the people.
I see how you're corrupt.

Speaker 4 I see how you're turning your back on that. And I think he is a champion in that sense.
I think that, for example, is why he retains popularity with evangelical voters.

Speaker 4 Like, this is not a religious person, but he is someone who's like, you know what, I'm fighting for you because these guys, I've seen what they're like, I've seen who they are, and I think they're gross, I think you're right, and I'm going to be your advocate.

Speaker 4 And so, yeah, he is, you know, this is not someone who's religious. He said his favorite books were the Bible and the art of the deal, right?

Speaker 4 And he sort of had to be prompted to say the Bible at one point in time back in 2015.

Speaker 4 This is not who he is, but because he is this guy who has sort of rebelled against the people that they hate, I think that's more what the embraces than, oh man, I would love to beat this guy someday.

Speaker 2 As a connoisseur of spite, I also appreciate this reading of Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 He does hit a very specific sort of resentment isn't even the right word, just like, I hate these guys and he hates them too, and they hate him, and therefore, you know, I am for him.

Speaker 4 But this is really important because it also colors things like his being indicted because he has convinced his base that the reason the media covers him the way that they do is because the media hates him because we are all elites and we are very frustrated that he's undermining us.

Speaker 4 When reality, of course, is worth just like saying, oh, this guy, you know, cost my documents at his house and he ought not to have done that, right?

Speaker 4 You know, but because this is all framed as hate and fights with the elites and his turning his back on the elites, that allows him then to position it, this particular thing, these indictments, as his being unfairly targeted by his longstanding, their long-standing collective enemies.

Speaker 4 And it's been really, really effective. And I think it's a really important part of his appeal.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is why I've always been very skeptical of the idea that him being indicted or even being in the midst of a trial during the election season is going to hurt him.

Speaker 2 I think it only helps him, certainly in the primary.

Speaker 2 And, you know, if he wins the primary and loses the general, well, then he just runs again for the primary in four years and still has 45 to 55% of the vote.

Speaker 2 That's like the live, die, repeat version of the primaries, the Edge of Tomorrow, sorry, Tom Cruise sci-fi movie that not enough people saw is what actually terrifies me the most.

Speaker 2 The idea that we're just going to do this over and over again until he shuffles off this mortal coil, real trouble for the GOP, I think. I don't know.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, the one question is, if he doesn't win, if he gets the nomination next year, which seems likely, and loses the presidency, which seems possible, if not, you know, 52% chance, does he end up going to prison?

Speaker 4 People asked me for years, is Donald Trump ever going to get arrested? And I was like, no, like, he's not going to.

Speaker 4 Like, this is just not how the system works, you know, which is cynical, obviously, but that's up for credits.

Speaker 4 You know, I think that he really sees his chance of staying out of prison as winning this race.

Speaker 4 And so I think he is going to go balls to the wall in this contest, do everything in his power to be elected president and or to get firm commitments should some other Republican win the nomination that they're going to pardon him.

Speaker 4 Because I think that, I think this is his legal strategy. But if that doesn't work, you know, who knows what position he's in in 2028.

Speaker 2 So basically, he's playing Monopoly with the theory of I need to get the get out of jail free card.

Speaker 4 100%. Yes.

Speaker 2 That makes sense. All right, Philip, thank you for being on the show.
I really appreciate it.

Speaker 4 My pleasure.

Speaker 2 And again, the name of your book, which you can get on Amazon, The Aftermath, Last Days of the Baby Boom, and the Future of Power in America. Everyone should check it out.

Speaker 2 Subscribe to the Washington Post if you don't. My name is Sonny Bunch.
I'm glad to be sitting in for Charlie. He'll be back shortly here.
So you won't have to deal with my voice anymore.

Speaker 2 That's a big win for everyone else.

Speaker 4 Bye.

Speaker 8 Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

Speaker 9 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culture Eastas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 10 This is Bowen Yang from Los Culturists with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 9 Hey, Bowen, it's gift season.

Speaker 10 Stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for?

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Speaker 4 Ah,

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