Ben Terris: It's Not Going Back to Normal

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Additional terms apply. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.
I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Tuesday, June 27th, 2023.
And oh my God, there are more tapes. I'm going to get to that in just a moment.
Our guest today is Ben Terrace, feature writer at the Washington Post, who focuses on national politics and the author of an incredible new book, The Big Break, The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind. Ben, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks so much for having me on. You describe yourself as having what you call the weirdo beat, which really doesn't narrow it down these days at all, does it? I mean, it seems rather expansive to have the weirdo beat in Washington politics.
Yeah, I mean, I used to sort of have it to myself, and now it's like the entire Washington press corps is on the weirdo beat. I want to talk about all of this, but speaking of the weirdo beat, look, I mean, everybody knew it was coming because the tape recording is described in the indictment of Donald Trump, but listening to the actual audio of a laughing, confessing, coke-drinking ex-president talking about secret war plans, I mean, is really, really something.
So Ben, can we just start here with this and how people are going to process through this weird, crazified political culture we have? CNN broadcast this last night. It runs less than two minutes.
But this is the unedited version of the discussion that's referred to in Jack Smith's indictment. Jack Smith actually left a few things out, had a couple of ellipses.
So you get to hear the whole thing. Here's Donald Trump with his Iranian war plans.
They had sick people. That was your coup, you know, against you.
Well, it started right at the beginning. Like when Millie's talking about, oh, you were going to try to do a coup.
No, they were trying to do that before you even were sworn in. Your coup.
That's right. You're trying to overthrow your life.
Well, with Milley, let me see that.

I'll show you an example.

He said that I wanted to attack Iran.

Isn't it amazing?

I have a big pile of papers.

This thing just came up.

Look.

Big pile of papers.

This was him.

They presented me this.

This is off the record, but they presented me this. This was him.
This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at him.
This was him. This wasn't done by me.
This was him. All sorts of stuff.
Pages long. Wait a minute.
Let's see here. Some of the newspapers.
Yeah.

I just found, isn't that amazing?

This totally wins my case, you know.

Except it is like highly confidential secret.

There's a secret information.

Look at this. Highly confidential.

Your attack.

Hillary would print that out all the time, you know.

She'd send it to Anthony Weiner.

Yeah.

For program. Please print.
By the way, isn't that incredible? I was just saying, because we were talking about it. And he said, he wanted to attack Iran.
He's in the papers. This was done by the military, given to me.
I think we can probably, right? We'll have to see. Yeah, we'll have to try to figure out a...
See, as president, I could have declassed it, but now I can't. But this is quite a...
Now we have a problem. Isn't that interesting? Yeah.
It's so cool. Look, we're here and I have a...
And you probably almost didn't believe me, but now you believe me. No, I believe you.
It's incredible, right? No. Bring some, bring some coats in, please.
Bring some coats. I mean, I'm trying to put this into context.
You know, people are trying to compare it to the Nixon smoking gun tape. But I mean, that's pretty pale stuff.
I think Kevin Cruz, the historian says, imagine if Nixon smoking gun had been this direct. Well, gentlemen, this scheme will cover up the illegal Watergate break-in, which, as you all surely remember, I, President Richard Milhouse, Nixon, personally authorized.
I mean, there's Trump every element of this case, and he's there acknowledging it. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
I mean, this is not a legal reading on the whole matter here, but I feel like the difference between seeing the transcript and hearing it on tape is sort of like the difference between like an SNL skit being written up and then having a table read. Like you can actually know what's funny, know what's important, like know what's going to stick because you hear it.
I mean, he used the word incredible a lot and it is incredible. It is incredible.
I was asked this morning whether or not this will make a difference with his Republican opponents in the primary election. And I said, well, it hasn't so far, right? I mean, this is a party that's in one off ramp after another.
And they have an almost infinite capacity to rationalize this sort of thing, don't they? So, you know, for people like Ron DeSantis, or even Mike Pence, who have been, you know, criticizing the Department of Justice, will they shift? Do you think so? I mean, how will Republican loyalists process having this tape out there? Yeah, at the risk of making predictions, because everyone in Washington predicts things all the time and is wrong all the time. Fortunately, nobody pays any price for being wrong all the time.
I wouldn't guess because it's a long election. But if, you know, past is precedent, like they'll find a way to come around, right? Which is maybe they wouldn't want him as their first pick a lot of folks, but you can't say that.
And you kind of have to keep everybody in the coalition on your side. And so people will just, I don't know, hope somebody else will be the one to hit Trump and then nobody will.
And then eventually he'll, you know, be on top, at least politically. I think that's right.
I mean, they will eventually all come around. They will find a way to do this.

And of course, you know, at least Stefanik and Marjorie Taylor Greene will probably propose expunging the tape because just pretend it didn't happen. So from a legal point of view, we're looking at this from a political point of legal point of view.
Andrew Weissman, who was on the podcast last week, former general counsel of the FBI, a top prosecutor during the Mueller investigation. He was on with Lawrence O'Donnell last night talking about the legal implications of this.
This is what he had to say. The big picture here, I think, for people is this is not a tape recording where we need to fly spec it.
I mean, this is game over if you are following the facts in the law. He's charged with having classified information and knowing that he had classified information.
He's not even charged with dissemination that is showing it to somebody, but even that can be proved. And the tape recording is absolutely clear.
This is a question now of simply, will the government get a trial before the general election? Will a jury actually follow the law and the facts? And will the electorate follow the facts and care? That's really what this is about. It is not about the facts.
I mean, you have the former president on tape. And that's just one piece of evidence.
That's one piece of evidence amid a mountain of evidence. So Ben, it does seem as if Republicans and Donald Trump have essentially conceded the facts of the case, and they're just sort of going around the court, that Donald Trump, that he's playing to the court of public opinion and figuring that somehow he can use his standing to discredit the investigation, or maybe we'll propel him back to the White House where he can just make it all go away.
But he's clearly not addressing the actual facts and law of the case that's going to be in federal court, is he? No. And why would he? I mean, he probably feels like the politics are better than the legal implications here.
And there's this idea that exists about Donald Trump that he's Teflon Don. You hear this all the time, nobody else could get away with the scandals that he gets away with, but also he didn't get away with them.
I mean, he's not president right now. He did lose an election.
It's possible he ends up in jail, which is the opposite of being Teflon Don. And so just because the majority of the Republican base that votes in a primary will rally around

him does not mean there aren't political implications.

I mean, this is not going to win him fence sitting voters is my guess.

And so, you know, between the legal implications that are hovering above him and the political

ones, like this might not be good for Donald Trump, despite the fact that he's going to try to, you know, turn it into a positive. I think that's worth constantly repeating because I think we focus too much on those Trump voters and what they think, but they don't get to decide everything here.
And of course, we also have the cumulative weight of this and what's about to come, which we don't know. I want to switch to the insight behind your book, which I found so interesting.
You have written a book about post-Trump Washington, and you were on another podcast, and you said you knew you had to write the book when people started saying, well, things are going to go back to normal now that Joe Biden has won. You recognized, I think, the fundamental fact of our world,

which is things are not going to go back to normal. Normal is gone.
So talk to me about that.

Yeah. When Trump was president, it was like every single day, we couldn't forget that he was

president, right? I mean, we were basically grabbed by the lapels and shook every morning with

wild tweets or spies in the Oval

Office or nuking of hurricanes and whatever the craziest thing you could possibly imagine was actually happening. And when Biden won, there was this kind of idea that maybe things would go back to normal.
And compared to the everyday chaos of what was happening in the Oval Office, sure like like Donald Trump is more abnormal than Joe Biden. But you don't get Donald Trump without things being weird.
You don't have Donald Trump in office for four years without things getting weirder. And, you know, Joe Biden's a lot of things, but he's not a magician who can just wave a magic wand and make things go back to normal.
And let me just say, maybe normal wasn't good. Like, why would we be in the spot at all? If you know, things in quote, unquote, normal Washington were working the way they should.
And so I wrote this book, it's called the big break. And the idea is the country went through a big break, that was Donald Trump.
But also, a lot of people were searching for their big break, once Trump was gone and trying to kind of put something together. And so I wanted to write this kind of hitchhiker's guide through the back rooms of Washington, show people just how weird things are, why they're weird, find the most interesting, charismatic, dramatic, funny sometimes, weirdly funny, not intentionally necessarily, but weirdly funny characters.
And if people could follow me on the journey, I hoped they would get to the end of the book and be like, oh, now I know why Washington is as crazy seeming as it is. It's filled with people like the ones in this book.
So you said I'd write this book about how Washington works and why our politics are so broken. And you weren't interested in writing about the politicians themselves, you know, because they're boring, they're busy, they're overexposed, as much as the people whispering in their ears who try to.
So you have this extended series of players. And I want to get to Sean McElwee.
Let's talk about Matt Schlapp, because I'm always fascinated by watching the transformation of some of these people. So you have a section on Matt Schlapp and Ian Walters.
And Schlapp had been like a really mainstream Republican. He was the political director during the George W.
Bush years, very establishment, ran CPAC for a decade, was really widely seen as kind of a nice guy. Just talk to me about your section on Matt Schlapp and Ian Walters, because I mean, Schlapp went all in.
So who is Ian Walters? Well, before I get fully into who the characters are, the idea behind spending time with somebody like Matt Schlapp and Ian Walters, because Schlapp went all in. So who is Ian Walters? Well, before I get fully into who the characters are, the idea behind spending time with somebody like Matt Schlapp was, I listened to an interview once with a journalist, I can't remember who, who said that good profile writing is when you find a character who's like a donkey that can carry the weight of a bigger story.
And so, you know, Matt Schlapp is a donkey, right? I mean, he's not a Democrat, but he's a donkey who can carry the weight of the story of Republicans in Washington, if not the Republican Party kind of as a whole, at least Republicans in Washington. And so, Matt, I mean, your listeners probably know, you know, runs the American Conservative Union and CPAC, the big political conference that happens now like hundred times a year all over the globe.
Yeah. And hungry.
And the story that he was carrying is like, he was a guy who went from the Bush white house to becoming one of Trump's most loyal supporters. How does that happen? And if I could explain how it happened for him, maybe that kind of helps people understand how it happens for your average, you know, Republican figure in Washington.
Ian is what makes the Matt story more dynamic and interesting and frankly dramatic in this book. Ian was for a long time, Matt's right-hand man.
He was the spokesman for CPAC in the ACU. They were so close that at one point, Ian wanted Matt to be the godfather to his child, right? I mean, they were like, they were close.
Yeah. I mean, they were written about Matt before, and I'd never seen Matt without Ian by his side.
And Ian, you don't miss him. He's this long haired guy, plays piano.
He's a cigarette smoking kind of Beau Vivant guy, didn't fit in with your average kind of buttoned up, you know, Republican operative necessarily. And what happens is they have this big break.
Their relationship is completely ruined during the Trump years and after. And I wanted to figure out why, right? Like, why does this happen more often? Why aren't more Republicans kind of fighting with each other about their ideology, about where they want the party to go, what they believe in.
And what I found is, you know, politics is personal. And so it's hard to have a big ideological shift just, you know, sitting and philosophizing and thinking.
But you can have that shift if things get petty and awkward and weird with your friends. And so watching their relationship on a small, personal, petty level completely unravel.
And the stories are bizarre. I mean, there's like a possible fraudster, possible con artist, maybe pretending to be part of a rich family, like, you know, infiltrating CPAC.
And there's the MAGA movement that Ian is trying to push away. but there's also just like the drama of two friends who are dealing with life and death situations and not in the same way.
And so their story is sort of the story of why things change and why things don't. In a lot of ways, your book is kind of a dialogue with my colleague Tim Miller's book about the operatives, you know, why they did what they did.
And to understand that for a lot of these people, it's not about ideas or about principles. It's about playing the game.
You know, it's like, you know, people trying to put something together for themselves and for their bank accounts. I mean, it's a very complex series of motivations for these folks, isn't it? Yeah.
I mean, first of all, I love Tim's book. I thought it was a brilliant book.
And, you know, when he kind of catalogs the reasons, the types of people, I thought that was brilliant. And I used that, you know, at least in the back of my head, as I was spending time with folks.
And what I found is a lot of these people kind of skate across all of these different categorizations, right? You can find somebody who is a pure game player, who wants the most influence, who's willing to change everything about themselves in order to fit in with whatever the power structures, you know, will get them the most money influence proximity to power. But you can start that way, and then become a true believer.
And sometimes you become a true believer for dumb reasons. Sometimes it's, wow, everybody's attacking me for supporting Donald Trump.
Now I'm a diehard Trump supporter, because all these people are completely misrepresenting my belief system and what's happening behind closed doors. So now I hate them so much that I truly believe that Donald Trump is the greatest president of all time.
People can have true beliefs for the most bizarre and kind of small reasons. But maybe they convince themselves that they're not petty and small.
And I think that this personal insight is really important to understand that people will react sometimes on a personal level. They won't think through the transition, but if they feel they're being attacked, if they think they're being vilified, if somebody has screwed them over, that's going to be visceral.
And then what happens is, and I think you described this very well, is sometimes the politics will follow those personal grudges.

And I think people need to understand that about politics.

You know, how much of it is like high school. Well, that's the thing about this book, right, is first of all, yes, it is like high school or middle school, honestly.
I was thinking middle school, yeah. You know, Washington is full of people.
People don't remember that, you know, it's like all you think about are the statements and the polls and the horse race and the, you know, ideological malleability and the showmanship and the gamesmanship. But really, like, these are people who have sometimes, like, good idealistic reasons for doing things.
And sometimes just, it's a human response to something else that's going on that you don't know about. And that's why I wanted to spend time with these folks is so I could know about it and help explain it to, you know, a broader audience.
It's not a book for insiders, I hope. I hope it's about insiders so normal people can be like, oh, these are the wackos that are controlling Washington.
I understand it better now. Yeah.
This is why I wake up every morning feeling I took the crazy pills. I really like your discussion of this common belief, and maybe it's a hope in some ways, that somebody somewhere in Washington, D.C.
knows what's really going on. You mentioned in the Playbook Deep Dive podcast that really the reality is no one knows what the hell is happening.
You talked to Jen Psaki when she was still press secretary, and she had no idea if there was any plan, you know, plan B if Joe Biden wanted to run for re-election. I mean, there is that belief that somewhere there must be some secret knowledge.
Somebody must have a plan. It can't be as chaotic and insane as it looks from the outside.
And basically, there's no there there, is there? I mean, no one really knows what's happening. Yeah.
I mean, if there's a secret room somewhere where everybody knows exactly what's happening and they're pulling the strings in some conspiratorial way, I haven't seen it. I haven't heard of anybody who's seen it.
And I know a lot of people who have spent a lot of time inside these, you know, secret back rooms. I've been in plenty of rooms with, you know, operatives and people who are quote unquote controlling the country.
And yeah, most people are just kind of flailing right now. I mean, I mean, not just Trump.
I mean, going back to the Obama election,

the idea that people in Washington understand politics better than average people

has just not proven to be true at all.

Nobody predicted Obama was going to win.

Nobody predicted Trump was going to win.

Nobody predicted that things would go the way they have in this last decade.

And yet people in Washington still act like, you know, quote unquote, wise men. Like, I'm sorry, but you've proven otherwise.
So let's talk about some of the fascinating profiles you have in the book that generated a lot of the buzz. The New Republic noted in its review of your book that Mark Leibovich is famous.
This town book opened with the star-studded funeral for Tim Russert. I mean, everybody was there.
Tim Russert was dead, but the room was alive.

You opened with a poker game at the bachelor pad of Sean McElwee,

the head of the Democratic polling group and think tank in July of 2021.

And this is an extraordinary story because Sean McElwee went through some things, didn't he?

I mean, he was immensely influential. So tell me that story of the poker game, because that also seems to carry quite a story, your profile of this particular operative.
Yeah. I mean, he was one of the most wild characters I've ever profiled.
And I've been in Washington for over a decade now covering colorful figures and never have I found anyone quite like Sean. I wanted to spend time with him for a similar reason that I wanted to spend time with Matt Schlapp and wanted to as a, that's a professional term.
Like I don't really want to spend time with any of these people, but as a storyteller, the same reason applied for Sean as Matt, which is he was a guy who had found his way to the center of his party's base a number of times. He had been a hardcore lefty hosting Bernie Bro happy hours in the East Village of New York City, wearing Bernie Sanders and Karl Marx hats and shirts and talking about abolishing ICE and has become a kind of pragmatist in the Biden era because that's where the power was.
He figured out, well, let's move this way. And so I want to spend time with him for those reasons.
But in spending time with him, I realized like, there was an even more interesting story happening. And it was his gambling habit.
You know, he was playing poker, but the biggest bets he was making at the poker table had nothing to do with cards and everything to do with elections. even though this guy was a pollster or because this guy was a pollster, he was making bets on elections that were all across the country, including ones that he had worked on, including against clients that he was working for.
And so, you know, we talk about the game, right? This was the actual literal gamification of politics. And I was watching it behind closed doors thinking, I can't believe this guy is doing this scandal in front of me.
And then I realized, oh, that's sort of a Trump thing, right? You do your scandals out in the open and people don't call them scandals. And you set the table in the book about how central he was, how influential he was.
So you write around the poker table as a spokesman for Facebook, a head of an organization attempt to end the filibuster, a former top aide, a former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reed, a senior reporter who covered the Senate for MSNBC, and Gabe Bankman-Fried, the brother and political confidant of the crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who went through some things as well. So Sean McElwee describes his job as to make Biden's agenda look more popular than it was.
I mean, the guy was 28 years old. You said he's basically a kid, but he has this vibe like he's been around forever.
And he wasn't a pollster, a policy analyst, or a campaign guy. He was sort of all of those things and also none of them.
So he's this sort of modern hybrid political creature. But just

talk to me about this new sort of hybrid creature in politics that is a pollster, but also an advocate and also probably betting on what he's advocating for. Kind of complicated.
Yeah. So he ran an organization called Data for Progress, and their job was basically to conduct very fast, incredibly accurate polls, and to use those polls to paint a picture, to push a narrative, basically.
They were not, you know, an independent pollster telling newspapers an unbiased view of the world. They were conducting polls.
And when they saw results that they liked, they would push them out into the public. They would get the White House to tweet them.
You know, they were working for John Fetterman's campaign. And every time they'd get a poll that showed him way ahead in the primary, they would push it out to everyone they could.
And Sean's ability beyond anything else was injecting things into the mainstream. He hosted happy hours in Washington.
He had these poker nights. He knew everybody, everybody knew him.
And he was good at whispering into the ears of political reporters and advocates and the like to kind of get a story out into the world. That was a great tool for progressives, but he also kind of had designs on becoming like a White House pollster someday, you know, a serious kind of standard issue pollster.
And the Biden White House took him very seriously, didn't they? Yeah, they would tweet out his polls, Biden would mention him in private. And he was on the rise.
The beauty of a book is I get to spend time with someone when they're on the rise. And then when they have a dramatic downfall, like I'm already in the door.
So he can't really just say, see you later. And so I was with him as this connection to Sam Bankman and Freed was building and was making him rich and influential and had him set up to be a power player forever.
I mean, if you know a 30-year-old billionaire who's going to finance democratic elections and initiatives for 70 years, you're in pretty good shape. All of a sudden, that bet didn't pay off.
His actual bets that he made online and with friends and that he was bragging about, they didn't pay off. He has this unbelievably dramatic end to the year where the organization he built no longer wants him around anymore and he has to fight for his life.
I mean, he was sending money to his staff to encourage them to bet on politics as well.

And for a while, they were all kind of bought in on the Sean Project.

The cult of Sean was strong.

But when that curse broke, I guess, everybody was like, I don't want any piece of this guy

anymore.

And there was kind of a revolt.

And this is the beauty of finding a volatile character is they can be important and matter,

but they can also give you quite a story to follow over the course of, you know, 12 to 18 months. And famously, when it was discovered, you know, before the midterms, he was literally betting that the Democrats would lose both houses of Congress.
So he's wagering against the Democrats who in theory he was working for. He was wagering against Democratic Senate candidates in Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Ohio, and against Fetterman, his own client.
So when the news broke about his gambling, Fetterman staff said that McElwee was releasing polls ahead of election day that look bad for the Democrats in swing states, and that he was bad-mouthing Fetterman. So he resigned from all of this.
Is he in exile? Is he been excommunicated? Is he going to worm his way back in? Is there always a place for somebody like this? I once wrote about a pollster who famously got Eric Cantor's congressional race wrong by like 40 points. And the headline to my story was like, how wrong do you have to be in Washington to never work again? And the answer was like, you could be as wrong as you want, basically, and always have a job if you've made it to a certain level.
That pollster ended up being Donald Trump's presidential pollster. What's his name? McLaughlin or whatever.
Somebody compared it to being an NBA coach. Like once you make it to a certain level, there's always a job for you.
And so Washington is the city of second chances. You can go have the worst NBA record of the year, but you've proven that you are a certain level.
It will be at least an assistant coach job for you somewhere else. Is it possible that Sean reached that level and he knows enough people who like him in high enough positions of power that he could worm his way back in and find a second life here? Absolutely.
I mean, I wouldn't count him out, but it was also one of the biggest self-destructive years I've seen in Washington. It will be hard for him to come back, but he's young and he's changed his shape a lot of times.
And memories are short these days, right? Memories are short. And plus, to give credit to Sean, he did build this organization that provided a tool in the toolkit for Democrats.
There's a lot of people in Washington who have big mouths like Sean, who like to run their mouth. They like to be quoted.
They like to say the most outrageous things because they think all press is good press. And Sean said the most outrageous things I've ever heard.
I mean, the quotes from Sean in this book, I mean, I could have written a whole book that was just Sean quotes and it probably would have been a bestseller, honestly. He did all that stuff and people let him get away with it because he built something that they found valuable.
And so if he finds a way to show he can be valuable again, people might let him get away with stuff again. What's great about this particular profile is it really underlines your point that Washington is filled with people who are willing to do what it took to get in the game.
And so you have these brash, ideologically malleable figures for whom politics becomes this game. Then the game becomes the game as opposed to something larger.
And you see this, and I'm sorry to use the phrase both sides, but I mean, you obviously see this in Republican circles, but you also see it in democratic circles, that it is the game. And once it is a game, then the rationalizations become secondizations become second nature don't they i mean it's like we're not actually rational this is what we do we're playing the game of course we do this of course we have a different different take in this game than we did in that game right i'm going to play different cards depending on which hand is dealt me and you can see how it happens right i mean the goal in washington is to, to then be able to pass legislation, to make the world what you believe is a better place, right? I mean, there's truth to that.
You cannot legislate unless you win. And so winning is very important.
And so when Sean talked about gambling, he said, look, this for me is a tool. It makes me better at my job to have skin in the game.
If I have skin in the game, I'm always kind of calibrating. I'm always figuring out what I'm getting right, what I'm getting wrong.
I never can put aside my mess ups because I literally pay a price for them. And if you're convinced that do whatever you need to do to win works, yeah, you can rationalize anything.
The problem is, if you treat everything like a game, it's possible that that is why you lose. I mean, Trump partially was able to win, you know, his presidential election in 2016 due to xenophobia and all sorts of horrible things that he said and did, but also partially because he made a good point about Washington, which is Washington sucks.
And everybody was like, yeah, Washington does suck. And the reason people think Washington sucks is because everyone treated it like a game here.
And so if you continue that to prove that point, you may end up doing more damage than good by, you know, trying to win. Well, let's go back to the beginning, or maybe the of the beginning back in 2015.
I thought it was really interesting that you were the only reporter from the Washington Post who was there when Donald Trump came down that golden escalator. And you actually had to lobby to be there because the Post really didn't even want to send anybody at the time.
So I'm reading your story from that day in June of 2015, which is really a long time ago now, but feels like it's just, you know, it's our world. We're in, we're still stuck in this loop.
You wrote inside the auditorium of Trump Tower, past the Trump bar, the Trump grill, the Trump cafe and Trump's ice cream parlor. beside the glass encasement selling Donald Trump neckwear and holding the basket of Donald Trump books.
The man himself strode through the crowd, descended a golden escalator, and stood at a lectern in front of eight American flags Tuesday. He came bearing a message, I'm really rich, he said.
While Governor Scott Walker shops at Kohl's, and while Senator Marco Rubio pushes back against the description of his family fishing vessel as a luxury speedboat. In Florida, Governor Jeb Bush tries to

give himself some measure of distance from his patrician family. Trump wants the world to know exactly how rich he is.
I'm not doing this to brag, he said, after spending five minutes detailing his financials, including claimed assets of $9.2 billion and a net worth of $8.7 billion. dollars.
So go back to that moment, what you were thinking at that time. Okay.
So June of 2015, not knowing what you know now, what were you thinking about Donald Trump as a presidential candidate? So there's this great book that Michael Lewis wrote years ago called Trail Fever. Eventually it got a new title called Losers.
And the thesis of this was he hit the trail in, I want to say 1996, and followed around a cast of B and C and D list Republican candidates for president. And his thesis was a lot of the kind of most interesting and ultimately used ideas come from this kind of mix of weird people.
And so I loved the sideshow weirdo beat for that reason. I was the one who went to the Bernie Sanders announcement, even though nobody thought he had any chance then.
I went to Ben Carson's announcement, even though nobody thought he had any chance to amount to anything. I went to the Donald Trump announcement.
And it was because A, they were colorful and funny and strange to watch, but also because I thought they, you know, could kind of shed light on bigger stories about politics today and showmanship and, you know, where the base of various political parties, you know, lay and where American politics could go based off of kind of some of these quote unquote sideshow characters.

And so when I went to the Trump rally, at first, I didn't even know if he was really going to run. I mean, like I was there and they were playing, you can't always get what you want on the loud speaker.
And I thought this was going to be like a big prank. Like, oh, all you guys wanted Trump to run, but you can't always get what you want.
Like here he is announcing a new brand of vodka or water or steaks or whatever I thought he might do.

When he gave the speech, I honestly just thought he was a joke. He did not present as anybody who could possibly rally what I thought of as your average American Republican voter.
But what I quickly came to learn, and like everyone else, is that these sideshow characters had moved on to the main stage, that they were representative of broad swaths of American voters, that people could be convinced to vote for him, that people could admit that they had beliefs that he was willing to say out loud. It really kind of revealed America, big parts of America, for what it really was.
On that point, let's switch back to the Washington scene that you described. Did Donald Trump change slash break Washington, or did he expose something that was always there? Yeah, I mean, the answer is both, right? Like, there's this idea that Trump had no business being in Washington and was a complete outsider, and when he arrived, nobody knew what to do with him.
But like, really, come on, he fit in fine with a lot of parts of Washington. He was ideologically malleable.
He changed his belief plenty of times, as do lots of people in Washington. He cared a lot about press attention.
I mean, how many times have you heard about politicians who like the most dangerous places between them and a camera, right? This idea of personal brand building is not anathema to how people do their jobs in Washington. Social media presence is big.
He made some sense to the place. So he revealed that side of Washington to folks who didn't necessarily know it existed, right? People who weren't paying a lot of attention.
But he also did fundamentally change it. I mean, just by dint of who comes to Washington in the Trump era, the flavor of the place is going to change dramatically because once they're in the door, it's not like they all just go away when he's gone.
They're continuing to run think tanks and they will always be referred to as the honorary such and such. They are still on boards that they probably got appointed to.
They're starting new organizations. Washington is filled with this Trump flavor that, you know, as much as you try to eat ginger and gargle with mouthwash, like that flavor just doesn't go away.
Well, also, though, as you describe how Washington is stacked with ideologically malleable manipulators, what we discovered was just how malleable they were prepared to be, how far they were willing to be. I mean, many of them were, you know, the time servers and the courtiers, and naturally when the new king comes in, they're going to adjust.
Nobody had a sense in advance, though, how far it would go. So in terms of your other profiles that carry the larger story, you know, one of your sections is about a woman named Leah Hunt Hendricks.
She's the granddaughter of billionaire oil tycoon H.L. Hunt.
And you were at a holiday party of hers at her two million dollar mansion in D.C. And I think it's fair to say that she's kind of an uber progressive, despite the billionaire background.
Her dog is named Malcolm X, right, roams around. Yeah.
Well, named Malcolm after Malcolm X. Yeah, that's right.
A little white dog too. Ryan Grimm, who is a writer for The Intercept, was wearing a Harriet Tubman t-shirt and while the host was trying to gather support for Mandela Barnes.
So, I mean, you have a lot of characters here. Yeah.
I mean, Leah's story is fascinating. I mean, H.L.
not only was a an oil tycoon who was believed to be the richest man in the world when he died he was also this kind of right-wing populist that in some ways i don't know kind of predicted or cared about precursor yeah yeah precursor make america kind of look the way it does now you know he was he was like the John Birch Society and Joseph McCarthy and

was never quite as influential as he wanted to be. But as a billionaire who helped fund this stuff was certainly important.
And her kind of role as she sees it is to unwind a lot of her grandfather's projects, right? And so yeah, she has this beautiful house in Logan Circle, and she hosts fundraisers there for the likes of Ilhan Omar or Jamie Raskin. And these are the kinds of people that she supports, either in fundraisers or salons or parties.
This is her orbit. You describe her as a progressive activist and fundraiser who primarily backs candidates who pledge to abolish the fossil fuel industry.
And she worries that people might be only interested in her because of her money. Yeah.
And it's her, her oil money. I mean, there was at least one candidate who called her up or at least the campaign manager of the candidate called her up to be like, this might be a problem because we're being hit for taking money from the oil and gas industry.
And we looked and it was you. You.
She tells you at one point, Hunt Hendricks tells you that she's pretty anti-elite. Well, as you point out, she was sipping a matcha latte, not really overburdened with self-awareness, was she? I think that she had some self-awareness about this, obviously, right? You know, she wanted to get money out of politics, but her job was to bring in big money to the progressive cause.
Like you can't not see it. Right.
And she knows that she's privileged.

She. you know, she wanted to get money out of politics, but her job was to bring in big money to the progressive cause.
Like you can't not see it. Right.
And she knows that she's privileged. She was dubbed Occupy's heiress when she would go down to Occupy Wall Street, you know, when she was a graduate student.
So like, she definitely is aware of how people see her, but there is a kind of lack of self-awareness to a degree about the way that she talks about her role and this idea that she could maybe be the voice of the working class. It seems a little strange, but I will say Donald Trump found a way to be the voice of the working class, at least for part of the country.
And people think he has a golden toilet in his tower above New York City. Sometimes you can find a strange mascot for the cause.

So what is the story though that she's carrying? Why a profile of her? What role does she play in Washington, particularly in democratic progressive circles? What's the larger point here?

Well, first of all, this book is made up of a lot of people who were able to get big or start to get

big because of Donald Trump. Donald Trump is what made her into a powerhouse to a degree as a democratic fundraiser and operative, because she was able to just raise a ton of money when Trump was president.
When you were the hashtag resistance and all you had to do was say, we are against that. You could make so much money, the coalitions were easy to build, and she was able to just, you know, kind of catapult or, you know, vault herself into the stratosphere of powerful democratic figure.
But the story I wanted to tell is like, what happens next? What happens when you're not just against something, but the democratic party has to be for something? And so to tell her story, again, was sort of to get into the tension and the drama of the Democratic Party as a whole. Where do we want to go from here? What role does big money have in politics? She and Sam Bankman-Fried were at odds with one another on a number of things.
Where does old money and new money come into play on the left? How far to the left do you try to move in the Biden era? Is it more important to try to pass, quote unquote, popular things like the popularists want to do? Or do you try to take advantage of this moment and do as many progressive things as humanly possible, because now is the time to strike while the iron is hot. And so to get to spend time with her was to see all of that kind of drama and tension on a very, you know, close up scale.
So do billionaire elitists slash oligarchs play the same role in the Democratic Party that they're playing in the Republican Party? The same role? It's hard to say. Compare and contrast.
Yeah, I haven't actually thought about that, how similar or dissimilar the role is. But what I can say is there is a big role for both of them in both parties, right? Like Sam Bankman-Fried was able to become a huge player in Washington very quickly.
And it was because of money. As a guy who said offhandedly that he might spend a billion dollars on the 2024 campaign.
And if you can say something like that, and it's believable, then people are going to pay attention to whatever it is you care about. And so he was able to meet with everybody, get people to talk about cryptocurrency or talk about pandemic prevention or whatever it was that he wanted them to talk about.
And money was the biggest reason why. So yeah, absolutely.
Billionaires play a big role on the left, just like they do on the right. You didn't focus on the book, but I continue to be fascinated by some of the game players in Washington.
I mean, some of it is purely transactional and you can step back and kind of understand what the game is. And then there are others that go so far that you kind of wonder whether they realize it's still a game.
And I'm thinking of Elise Stefanik, who, you know, had been a very, very much a mainstream Republican, close to Paul Ryan, that kind of wing of the party. And she is not just super MAGA.
She is like whatever is like one step beyond without actually being Marjorie Taylor Greene. Where does she fit into your understanding of this, sort of the game playing element in Washington? I mean, the cynicism seems obvious, but I do wonder, is she one of the people that has actually convinced herself to believe this stuff? You know, at the risk of hearing your question about one person and making it about another, the person that comes to mind when you ask that question is Kellyanne Conway.
And I spent a fair amount of time with Kellyanne Conway for a profile I did about her and George. This was in 2018 or whatever, when their marriage was fodder for whatever the equivalent of a Washington tabloid is.
And I spent a lot of time with the two of them. And what George told me, George, who famously hated and still hates Donald Trump, what he told me about Kellyanne is he said, A, I can't really blame her in a way.
She's part of a cult and you don't get mad at somebody who gets swept up into a cult. You get mad at the cult leader.
So he was mad at Trump. And he also said that he believed that she went in maybe not a true believer, maybe because it was a great opportunity for her or she could make it work or she could help steer him in the right direction.
But when she got there, a real bunker mentality kicked in. This is sort of what I was talking about before, where all of a sudden she's getting attacked from all sides and she digs in and she becomes part of the bunker.
She becomes part of the team and then she becomes something of a true believer, whether it's a believer in every single thing that Donald Trump stands for, or whether it's a belief that we are the good guys and we should be pushing back against the bad guys. That became a real kind of change in her, according to George.
Yeah, you define yourself by the people who hate you and then you hate in return. Right, and also the people who support you, right? When she's getting hated on and Donald Trump calls her into the office and says like, you know, I'm real proud of you, or you're doing a great job, or thanks for the work you're doing.
I mean, it's hard not to feel like, well, this guy is supporting me and backing me up, asking me if there's anything I need. And it's the other side that wants me dead.
I wonder if there's not something similar going on with Elise Stefanik, where she could see where the power was and she knew that to rise in Washington, you have to move to where the power goes. Maybe she thought, okay, if I can get there, I can become influential.
I can steer the ship in the direction I want. But it's really hard not to get swept up into the whole MAGA movement based on personalities, based on being attacked, based on...
It's completely unwieldy. How many people went into the White House saying, I want to be the adult in the room and ended up getting bounced out of there or fired on the toilet or, you know, made fun of for months afterwards.
It's just completely untenable. You know, I think this is an important insight, you know, and I've described it as sometimes the fight becomes about the fight and you forget what began it or what it's about or what is at stake.
It's just you are in this fight and you have to win. It's a different version of the game theory.
And, you know, my point of reference is just remembering how folks on the right were radicalized during the fight in Wisconsin over Act 10. It wasn't that people were, you know, passionately that, I mean, not everybody was passionately interested in collective bargaining reform.
It was the left is coming for us and they will destroy us and we have to rally around our guy.

and at a certain point, even though the polls would suggest that this was not a winning issue,

it really was galvanizing. And I remember that mentality.
I mean, I was close enough to it to know exactly what you are describing, especially because in the modern era, the personal attacks can be very personal. They can be very vicious.
And to your central point, these are people who react as people do. And if you call them names and you attack them, you know, it will change them in a certain way.
It's perhaps naive to think that they will sit back and in a judicious way weigh the pros and cons of various policy decisions or whether or not they are going to hold someone accountable for something when they are basically consumed with it's us versus them. They hate me.
They want to destroy me. I need to fight them back.
And that becomes the central dynamic. And it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? Yeah.
I mean, I think about when Washington was trying to pass like an infrastructure bill, right? And some Republicans voted for it and Trump like named and shamed all of them. And it was like, we will do whatever we can to get these people out of Congress.
It became existential the same way that voting to impeach him had been, right? And it's like, wow, we're talking about potholes and bridges. And somehow, even this is turned into a rallying cry, as if we're going to war here.
Everything becomes heightened when it becomes personal. The tribalism, the being on the team, the bunker mentality, all that stuff added up makes it so even the most boring seeming topic like fixing roads can become a culture war.
The book is The Big Break, The Gambler's Party Animals and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind by Ben Terrace. Ben, great book.
Thank you so much for your time this morning.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes.

We will be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again.