Tim Miller: A Season of Grifters and Crackpots

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Speaker 5 Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. It's June 16th, 2023.
I'm Charlie Sykes because it's Friday. He's Tim Miller.
Tim and Charlie back together again. How are you doing, Tim? What's up, Charlie?

Speaker 5 You're in North Carolina? I am in Asheville, North Carolina. This This place is freaky beautiful, I have to say.
So it isn't Friday. It's Thursday afternoon, actually.
We're doing this.

Speaker 5 And so I'm just fresh. You usually catch me in the morning.
Every once in a while, I might have had a couple drinks tonight before, you know. So you're getting A plus Tim today.

Speaker 5 I just, I've, I'm clear-eyed. I'm riding high on the Nuggets victory, the parade.
I was just watching the clips from the parade. They were partying.

Speaker 5 I've been, you know, reading up on Ron DeSantis' DOJ plan. So I haven't been partying, but I'm getting, you know, the high, the, you know.
You could have gone. So you're in New Orleans.

Speaker 5 I'm in Asheville, North Carolina. So life is good.
Life couldn't be better. You know, as soon as I'm done with this, I'm going out in the mountains, walking around.
It's beautiful. It's lush.

Speaker 5 I have to say this. I'll send a bill to the Asheville, North Carolina Chamber of Commerce.
Asheville now has an ideas festival, kind of modeled on the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Speaker 5 And they're doing a really nice job. It's only year two that they're doing, but a very, very, very cool event.

Speaker 5 So. You and I were just chatting before we got started here.
It's only been a week since Donald Trump's indictment.

Speaker 5 And the last time you and I spoke, we didn't even know the details in the indictment. Now, I mean, everybody else has chewed over it, but I have to say that that was quite an experience.

Speaker 5 I mean, for people like, oh, come on, this is ancient history. People, it's been one week.
So can we talk about that just for a few minutes? That Donald Trump had his perp walk, his arraignment,

Speaker 5 multiple indictment. We're kind of finding out who the hell Jack Smith is.
And damn. He's been tough.
Damn. He's been tough.
Yeah, he moved his family to the Netherlands. He's like there at the Hague.

Speaker 5 And like, he, I don't know. He looks like he could be an MMA fighter.
I don't know. He's got alpha energy.
And Donald Trump, one thing.

Speaker 5 So we hadn't seen the indictment when we were talking with Bill last week. The act, the text of it, the full text.
And we hadn't seen the images of Trump.

Speaker 5 Do you see the two sketches? Oh, yeah. It was like the Reuters sketch artist that made Donald Trump look kind of like Leo DiCaprio.

Speaker 5 And then there's the other sketch artist that made him look like Ursula. I don't think.
I think the Ursula was probably a little bit more true to life there. Yeah, I want to hire that guy.

Speaker 5 That person's doing a better job.

Speaker 5 You have a small child now, so you're going to be making like little mermaid references. I know, it's terrible.

Speaker 5 So from now on, I'll be talking to Tim, and there'll be all these little drops for Disney Plus. It's terrible.
I'm feeling like such a dad.

Speaker 5 I was making, I mean, on Twitter today, I made a So I Married an Axe Murderer reference, which is a great comedy.

Speaker 5 I don't know if you've ever seen it, Mike Myers, but it was like from 1995 or something. And I'm like, I'm getting old.
I'm like that guy. You know, I'm the guy making MASH references.

Speaker 5 I'm starting to sound like Charlie started explaining the sound of music.

Speaker 5 So, anyway. So, you probably have your favorite songs from Frozen?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I do. What? I mean, I stick to the classics, but on Frozen, I don't have any deep cuts.

Speaker 5 But, you know, the Trump thing, the most interesting response, I think, and you had your legal expert pod yesterday. So I'll avoid stepping on that.

Speaker 5 But it's not just the men witnesses of the world, right? It is not just like the never Trump folks.

Speaker 5 And you cover this in the newsletter: it's Ludig, it's Barr, it's people that are kind of non-political, that have, you know, deep expertise in prosecutorial matters of this nature.

Speaker 5 To a person, the strength of the indictment and just how airtight it was, you know, in addition to Jack Smith did have a couple of rhetorical flourishes that maybe

Speaker 5 were a little bit of showmanship, but the factual points. It's

Speaker 5 good stuff. The factual points, though, are like so irrefutable that not even Donald Trump is refuting them.
Right. I mean, I did now my party this week for the teens.

Speaker 5 I tried to do a, you know, just kind of, here are the things that Trump and his people are saying to push back on it. And all of their arguments are kind of like, squirrel, look over there.

Speaker 5 Or I feel like I should have been able to do this. Or I technically could have done it had I done it at a different time.
Like none of his defenses are, I didn't do this. Or Hillary, Hillary.
Right.

Speaker 5 And so that is not somebody that is. I gave the whole story if people want to to suffer through it on the next level, about the one time I've been jailed for minor impossion of alcohol.

Speaker 5 But let me tell you, that's the extent of my expertise of being on the defendant side. And I was drinking the alcohol.

Speaker 5 And it does limit your types of defenses when you did the things that you're doing. And you can't even put forth a technical argument that what Jack Smith is saying is wrong.

Speaker 5 And so I think that just on the facts of the matter,

Speaker 5 he's in deep doo-doo. Even the New York Post had that head today.
Well, this is what's interesting about it. First of all, I mean, Jack Smith did a great job of the speaking indictment.

Speaker 5 This was one of my big questions. You know, would he lay out the evidence? Would he tell the story in a way that wasn't like what Alvin Bragg did in New York?

Speaker 5 And by the way, I'm not trying to beat up on Alvin Bragg, but there's two ways of doing these indictments. You just list the charges and everything,

Speaker 5 or you tell the story. And what a story.
Because you think back on Friday, we knew the indictment was coming down.

Speaker 5 And then we had that CNN story that broke this incredible thing that there was a tape of Donald Trump sitting in Bedminster, rattling papers, basically going, Hey, here's my, I'm doing the crime.

Speaker 5 Here's the crime. Here's this, like, you know, I could show you this battle plan, this plan to invade a foreign country, but you know, it would be wrong because it's confidential.

Speaker 5 And when I was president, I could have declassified it. But now that I'm not president, I mean, it's like, are you kidding me?

Speaker 5 You have a tape where he's discussing the fact that he broke the law and revealing that he broke the law with a document about war plans. It's like, come on, come on, really.
Is this real life? life?

Speaker 5 And turns out that's actually in the indictment. It's there.
And we're only seven days out from that. To your point about nobody is denying that he did these things.

Speaker 5 And what I'm seeing is that there was a little bit of, you know, people reading through the indictment.

Speaker 5 And even among some of the Republicans who were inclined to immediately come to his defense, as soon as they saw the details, there was a little bit like,

Speaker 5 a little bit of cringe. You watch people like the Lindsey Grahams of the world and Marco Rubio, there's a little bit of flop sweat going on there.

Speaker 5 You can kind of tell, like, oh, man, shit, we got to do this again.

Speaker 5 And you are having this little incremental move. You even have like guys like Andy McCarthy, you know, at National Review, been kind of, you know, a MAGA shill, let's be honest about it.

Speaker 5 But, you know, he's got some legal cred, essentially saying, you know, this is pretty bad. And Trump really has no defense.
Well, Angry Baseball Head did that as well.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Ken Buck, Colorado, a congressman from Colorado.
It's a far-right congressman. I guess less pressed than Bobert, but he's from the Plains.

Speaker 5 Boebert's from the western slope part of the state, so it's a rural part of Colorado. And even he

Speaker 5 came out.

Speaker 5 So again, and this goes kind of part of into the discussion that we were having last week about, like, did these one-off people matter so much if it's a preponderance of, you know, if you have Fox having the banner up there that's like, want to be dictator, tries to jail Trump, right?

Speaker 5 You know, if the big megaphone folks aren't jumping on board, do they matter? I don't know, but it is a step in the right direction. It's notable that it wasn't just the usual suspects.

Speaker 5 It wasn't just Mitt. You know, it was some of these other more conservative folks that spoke out.
And the Marco one is interesting to me. He must have been broken.

Speaker 5 He's a broken man. I mean,

Speaker 5 his tweet about how actually Chris Christie didn't end my campaign was like one of the saddest tweets ever. I mean, it's like, could you imagine?

Speaker 5 Like, if Jeb called me and he's like, I'm thinking about tweeting that when I did please clap, it was a joke. And people should stop getting on my back about that.
I would be like, plus,

Speaker 5 that is true. But like, you know, just let it go.
Okay, just let it go. All right.
It wasn't even true in Marco's case. Christy did take it out.

Speaker 5 But the interesting thing about Marco's defense, which I think cuts both ways, is the wishful, the rush, the P-tape version of this indictment, like the thing that we wanted, you know, that might have actually been the, you know, damn breaker is like, he had this stuff.

Speaker 5 And oh, by the way, he's showing it to MBS. Yeah.
I mean, like, Jack Smith had basically everything you could have possibly dreamed in this indictment except for that.

Speaker 5 And that is what Marco hangs his hat on, right? It's like, at least he's not a spoke.

Speaker 5 At least he didn't.

Speaker 5 Yeah, at least he's not actively selling the secrets to hostile foreign powers. Okay, he's not Ethel Rosenberg.
Okay.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 that's what they're reduced to. Marco deciding that not only is he sad and broken, but that he wants to expose himself as sad and broken.
That was an interesting point.

Speaker 5 So, you know, I know we keep coming back to this again and again and again, and I apologize in advance for this, but you do wonder whether or not.

Speaker 5 If the Republican candidates took the collective action of saying, like, you know what, this is really, really bad. We're all going to say it all at once, Would it make a difference? I understand

Speaker 5 we know that the base wants to hear what it wants to hear, but you know, would it make a difference?

Speaker 5 I mean, honestly, I mean, if everybody, you know, essentially said, yeah, this is really bad, this is, there's no defense for this.

Speaker 5 I think the answer to that is yes, it would make a difference.

Speaker 5 Would it make a difference now is kind of one of those known unknowns, rummy that we'd love to see it, but we're never going to because there's something to be said for.

Speaker 5 I wrote about this earlier this week, week, so we don't need to rehash.

Speaker 5 I'll feel can read it if they want, but I wrote about how the Koch network, how their ad, you know, was really terrible going after Trump.

Speaker 5 But the point I'm trying to make is that the thing that we learned in the RVAT research: Republican voters against Trump, voters against Trump, yeah, thank you for the 2020 campaign, which I was a part of, and with Sarah and others.

Speaker 5 And then going back to 2016 when I was with an anti-Trump pack.

Speaker 5 The main lesson that you learn from survey research is that Republican voters do not want to be told what to do by DC elites that they do not like, right? And that they feel like don't represent them.

Speaker 5 And so in a weird way, right, like if Paul Ryan or whoever, not to be on Paul, but anyone in that vein came out and spoke out against Trump, it like helped him in a weird way more than it hurt him, right?

Speaker 5 You know, because it was like, screw that guy. I'm going to defend my man.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, if there was like this coordinated effort of McCarthy and Mitch and all these people that kind of smell like old guard Republicans all came out, you do wonder at this point if that would only make things worse, right?

Speaker 5 Like cause the backlash to be greater. Now, I think that there is evidence to believe that there were points in which that would have mattered for sure.

Speaker 5 Like I think at January 6th, if you just looked at his numbers, right? Like he was teetering, right? He was teetering at a couple different points where they didn't take the chance to do that.

Speaker 5 At this point, man, you know, it's just you start to dig deeper and deeper and deeper, right? And it's hard to see if you can dig out.

Speaker 5 So another one of the interesting tells about all of this is how fast candidates have moved to talking about pardoning Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 I mean, it's just like, let's just move past the trial, the evidence, and the conviction of Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 And so it sort of started a little bit small, like, you know, like Vivek Ramaswamy saying, you know, I will pardon him. I'm going to run on this.
I have a pledge. Everybody's going to pardon him.

Speaker 5 And then you had, you know, Nikki, who will, of course, check every single box at the Waffle House on all of this.

Speaker 5 And I see that your good friend Rich Lowry from National Review has a piece up now saying, definitely, it would be good for the country if we pardoned Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 This seems to me to also be a tell that they're like moving past the whole thing. And it's like, can we talk about this now? So, what do you make of this? Now, big pushback from, you know, some folks.

Speaker 5 I think Ace Hutchinson pushed back, said no. Chris Christie said he'd have to actually admit guilt.
So, I'm in the clear on that. Pence waffled a little, I thought.
Yeah, Pence didn't go for it.

Speaker 5 So, what do you make of the, can we just move on and pardon him thing?

Speaker 5 I want to put nikki haley and rich in one box and there are other people like this that think that this is their get out of jail free card and in a literal sense with trump but for them they're get out of jail free card with the base right that they can be like we're not coming after your guy we like him you know i think that he's being targeted but you know maybe we can all move on and sing kumbaya and i think they're just still maintaining this hope that the trump cult crowd will come around he's guilty but we're just not going to do anything yeah yeah and we still get it We're on your team.

Speaker 5 We're not going to punish it. It's all good.
Let's all unite behind our guy, Nikki Iran, or whoever it is. That's the strategy they're doing.

Speaker 5 I think that's an utterly failed strategy, but I think that's what's in their head. The Vivek thing is funnier.
Vivek didn't just start by saying he's going to pardon.

Speaker 5 Vivek went down to the courthouse, stood outside there, and was like, I am going to sue Joe Biden on behalf of my dominant Donald Trump, and I'm going to learn to see if Joe Biden was the one who plotted this attack.

Speaker 5 And what Vivek is doing is more interesting because he's not part of the old guard that wants a kumbaya moment.

Speaker 5 He's like trying to just fly up Donald Trump's flank and just be like, hey, I am reading that this is what the base wants. And I'm either going to get a win.
This is a win-win for me.

Speaker 5 Either Donald's going to be so proud of me and give me a pat on the head for going down there. And I'm going to get to be the new Steve Mnuchin in the next administration when he wins.

Speaker 5 Or if he actually goes to jail, like I'll have been the guy who was the most vociferous in standing by my aside, and maybe the cultists will come to me.

Speaker 5 Now, I think that's probably a silly calculation as well, but I think it shows that that at least feels in a weird way, like at least feels like there's a chance that he's in touch with what the voters want, where the Nikki Haley thing just feels kind of like you just want to

Speaker 5 say, bless your heart, Nikki. Like, it's just not happening for you.
Just, just, I can see it happening. Now it's a Trump Vivek 2024.
Oh, maybe. You know what we have to look forward to, Tim?

Speaker 5 What's that?

Speaker 5 We have weeks and weeks and weeks of being able to speculate groundlessly on who Donald Trump's going to name as his running mate, which I think is a really interesting question, but let's not save it.

Speaker 5 Let's just save something to look forward to. Okay, you know a lot about the Florida politics.
What do you make of this Miami mayor who's jumped in the race? Was it Suarez?

Speaker 5 He's a Republican. He's been kind of Trumpy.
Yeah, it's a weird one. What the hell? Yeah, he's Republican-ish.
I mean, he's a Republican now. So

Speaker 5 are you ready for this little factoid, Charlie? In the 2018 governor's race between Andrew Gillum and Ron DeSantis, who do you think Francisco Suarez voted for? Mayor of Miami. Mayor Suarez.

Speaker 5 Andrew Gillum. That was so long ago.

Speaker 5 Yeah, he's a 2018 Andrew Gillum voter who then runs for mayor as a Republican and kind of goes at DeSantis over COVID a little bit, you know, wanting to have a few, you know, be more on the restrictive side on COVID, but gets way out over his skis on crypto, sees what happens in the midterms where Miami has this big move to the right.

Speaker 5 Miami becomes kind of this avatar for the tech bro. Oh, I'm leaving California and I'm going to Miami and I can be in a free state.

Speaker 5 And, you know, so it becomes this avatar is like the anti-San Francisco for a certain cadre of people.

Speaker 5 And he's just riding this now, wave, this mayor that has very, very little responsibility, actually, because in the weird way that Florida set up, Miami-Dade County actually has much more power than, so the county executive of Miami-Dade County has more power than the mayor of Miami, the city but but he's riding this wave of you know all these peter teal moved to miami all these guys kind of like him and he's also under investigation for some bribery stuff and so he gets into this

Speaker 5 yeah and yeah and i think that he basically is is just like this right place right time guy who's like i'm tripling down on this right like these mag of types love me the contrarian joe rogan peter thiel world loves me i'm going to throw my hat in you know if trump wins you know i'm not going to attack trump i'm just going to it's kind of a different view of the Tim Scott.

Speaker 5 I'll be HUD secretary or something. Yeah.
And maybe I can sell some books. You know, I get my name out there more.
I can get on the speaking. Or maybe I can just get a party.

Speaker 5 Maybe I can just get a party. Right.
So it's like, it is just a total, it's a combination of two really

Speaker 5 common inflection points of the Trump era. There is one, the realignment of our politics.
You know, I wrote about the red dog Democrats, these moderate.

Speaker 5 Republicans have moved over, you know, and then the Republicans picked up, you know, the working class white people and the diners yeah but the other group that they've picked up is these tech bros like the online contrarian tech bros who don't like pc culture and so he's just riding that wave so he's riding the realignment wave just like elon musk at the same time he seems like he's a total grifter who's a complete phony which is also this has been the the salad days for total grifters i mean has there ever been a party where you can just like immediately move to the top of the ranks.

Speaker 5 I mean, if you're some mayor and, you know, if you're a random backbencher in the Democratic Party, you know, there's a lot of people ahead of you in line, right?

Speaker 5 Um, as evidenced by the gerontocracy running the party in the Congress, you know, Katie Porter and you have Katie Porter Adam Schiff. This isn't the case in the Republican Party, you know.

Speaker 5 You can just ride that grift wave, you know, right to well, you had to actually be able to win. But, you know, look at Blake Masters and like these people never would have been Senate nominees ever.

Speaker 5 I wasn't going to bring it up today, but this is my prediction for Trump's running. It's going to have to be Elizabeth Holmes.
It's a great fit.

Speaker 5 Okay, so how much of this is you know, the Miami Mayor getting in? Is an F you to Ron DeSantis? Is kind of a Westloppy kiss to Trump. Like, I'm going to split the Florida vote for you.

Speaker 5 I really just can't understand the answer to that question. I think that something is at play here.
And I know maybe we're going to discuss a little bit about RFK Jr., too.

Speaker 5 And there's a little, I think that there might be a little bit of troublemaking at play here. I mean, you're in South Florida, Roger Stone's down there.
You know,

Speaker 5 yeah, there's always little things in the midst. So I think that is very possible.
I've not seen seen any direct evidence of that. To me, this just looks on its face.

Speaker 5 Like I said, like this is a grifter who loves the limelight, who was like a moderate, who thought that the path was going to be as a moderate Republican Carlos Curvello type.

Speaker 5 And then all of a sudden, like the ground shifts under his feet. And he's like, hell yeah, I'll put on the MAGA hat.
I'll hang out with Elon Musk. You know, I'll ride this wave.

Speaker 5 And I think that really explains it more than trouble making that say, I'm definitely open to waking up in two weeks to a Miami Herald article about how Roger Roger Stone has been having, you know, secret swingers meetings with the mayor where he's been discussing this.

Speaker 5 You know, I'm sorry. Nothing wrong with that.
Not, you know, what to each their own.

Speaker 5 Hey, speaking of Florida grifting, one of my favorite stories of the week has to be the post-arrainment appearance by Donald Trump when he goes to this restaurant and says, oh, the food's on me.

Speaker 5 I'm picking up the tab. And then he leaves and doesn't pay for anything.
It's just such a quintessential Trump moment. It is just, it's all boiled down there.

Speaker 5 Yemeni Yemeni Hassan had a pretty good tweet about it. He said, you know, we laugh about stuff like this, but this isn't just another indication that we kind of grade Donald Trump on the curve.

Speaker 5 Because is there any other candidate that would be able to pull that shit off?

Speaker 5 It would follow them forever. It'd be his bridge gate.
It would be forever. Yeah.
And it goes to like this core thing that nobody was ever able to get him on. I went back and I re-watched.

Speaker 5 a 2016 interview I was doing when I was doing the anti-Trump pack back then the other day. Someone sent it to me.
I hadn't seen it in a while.

Speaker 5 And one of the arguments I was making was, I was like, this guy has a history of acting like he's a man of the people, but screwing over regular people, you know, and like that was his whole thing.

Speaker 5 And I thought we really had something there that that might resonate.

Speaker 5 And it just is, for whatever reason, it just has been a total dud, you know, and he can do this shit and get away with it the way other people can't.

Speaker 5 Yeah, screwing little guys who do the work and then you don't pay them. Or how about that little old lady who was kicked out of her house

Speaker 5 so they could build a casino in Atlantic City and everything? I thought that was, you know, his position on imminent domain.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Nobody cares.

Speaker 5 Hey folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark Podcast.

Speaker 5 We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more.

Speaker 5 And every day we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebulwark.com and take a look around.

Speaker 5 Every day we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact.

Speaker 5 To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bulwark Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebulwork.com slash Charlie.

Speaker 5 That's thebulwork.com forward slash Charlie. We're going to get through this together.
I promise.

Speaker 5 Let's talk about RFK Jr.

Speaker 5 because speaking of this being the perfect season for the grifter of the nut job, the extremist, I mean, he is, did you tweet out this poll showing that he has much higher approval ratings among Republicans than with Democrats?

Speaker 5 He's wet underwater with Democrats. Republicans love him.
Fox News loves him. All of the right conspiracy theorists love him.
And what the hell? Yeah, here's the poll. I just wanted to pull it up.

Speaker 5 Quinnipiak, national poll, favorability ratings. So 40% of Republicans have a favorable opinion of RFK Jr., 18% unfave.
Among Democrats, 25% favorable, 39% unfave.

Speaker 5 You know, almost a complete inversion there. And he's running in the Democratic primary, right? Again, this goes back to those two same issues I was talking about before.
One is the grifting.

Speaker 5 And in this case, I think it may be worse than grifting. You know, we have foul play.
I'll get to that. And the other is just this realignment, right?

Speaker 5 Because RFK really hasn't changed his views on, like, he does believe climate change is a problem, right? And I'm sure he is supporters of union.

Speaker 5 I haven't seen him talk about unions as much anymore lately, but working class economic issues.

Speaker 5 But on the core questions that most voters are determining their party ID on right now, you know, democracy issues, you know, recently the COVID and the public health issues, conspiracy around that, the, you know, Ukraine war, right?

Speaker 5 Like all of like the main hot issues right now, he has sided with the kooky MAGA right and the other end of the horseshoe, the very small number of, you know, Glenn Greenwald leftists, like across the board on every single one of those things.

Speaker 5 And he has become a hero among the Steve Bannon podcasts of the world because it's like we have a Kennedy who will come on this podcast and say that the DOJ is targeting Trump and say that the vaccines don't work and will say that the U.S.

Speaker 5 is at, you know, Ukraine was asking for it, right? Like he'll say all of the stuff that the MAGA guys want on these hot-button issues right now.

Speaker 5 And because he's a Kennedy, you know, I mean, the MAGA folks revere the Kennedys, right? I mean, the whole thing about JFK Jr.

Speaker 5 coming back, you know, really being alive is one of the main QAnon conspiracies, right?

Speaker 5 So there's this synergy between that kind of green old RFK left and the MAGA right in a way that those are the big...

Speaker 5 animating questions for people in politics right now. So the question I've always had is, who are the people that like him in the Democratic?

Speaker 5 Like, why is he getting 18, 19, 20% of the Democratic primary? I'm just dying to see a breakdown of his support because I think it's two groups.

Speaker 5 I think it's one that just are upset about Joe Biden's age and that's it. And they're just they put down anybody's name because they're like, He's too old, I want somebody else.

Speaker 5 And then I said two groups, so I meant three. Two, there's just some vestigial Kennedy types, you know.

Speaker 5 And then three, I think there is a small number of like anti-vax weirdo Democrats still because anti-vax people used to be the Berkeley left, right?

Speaker 5 So, you know, so I think that those three combined kind of are getting him up into the teens. And Bannon has sniffed this out.

Speaker 5 He sniffed out that he could use his celebrity, he could use the fact that he has that small foothold within a certain element of the Democratic base.

Speaker 5 And they, as best as I can tell, encouraged him to run, are contributing funding, are the main engine behind his getting to the race.

Speaker 5 RFK, he even said in interviews, like, I can't believe, I don't even know what's happening. I couldn't, you know, I don't think he can even believe this maelstrom that he got caught up in.

Speaker 5 But you see these pictures of him with Stone and Bannon and Alex Jones.

Speaker 5 And this is an intentional rat fuck that is taking advantage of, you know, that small fissure on kind of the farthest left side of the Democratic Party.

Speaker 5 So since we're talking about sort of toxic griffs and rat fucking here,

Speaker 5 the no labels folks. I'm wondering where you're going with that.
I'm going toward no labels. Okay.
Look, I understand. the 30,000-foot appeal of, hey, can we just have a third way?

Speaker 5 Can we just have something that is just not the same? I mean, I get that. You get that.

Speaker 5 You know, I understand why people tell pollsters, you know, would you vote for a third party party and everything? And yet these folks, I mean, I'm having a hard time decoding what's going on there.

Speaker 5 I saw a tweet from Adam Kinzinger who said, by the way, remember these no labels folks? During the January 6th, the select committee, they lashed out at us. They attacked us for partisan subpoenas.

Speaker 5 And now they're, I mean, last week they were out with this sort of bizarre map that claims that they can win, which no one takes seriously.

Speaker 5 Was it this week that they suggested that, you know, if Rhonda Sandis is on the ballot, we might stand down. Which is exactly backwards.
We might not offer anybody.

Speaker 5 But apparently they're staffing up. What's going on here? Rick Wilson has a good thread about this.
I mean, increasingly, we've talked about this once before.

Speaker 5 Maybe it was on another podcast, but I consider too much people's better angels, Charlie. I know that you say that about me all the time.
I'm just, you know, I'm a truster.

Speaker 5 But I assumed that they were idiots, not malign. Really? It was my first.
You just assumed naivete and

Speaker 5 not malice. Yeah, I thought it was an Occam's razor thing.
It was rich, out-of-touch, New York people who are in a tiny bubble of other rich people that don't like Joe Biden.

Speaker 5 And, like, you know, they thought that there's something here and there isn't. I've talked to a couple of those naive people.

Speaker 5 You know, I've had a couple of rich folks that, you know, people have put them in touch with me and they're like, I'm thinking about running third party.

Speaker 5 And then I kind of run them through what that would look like. And, you know, then they're like, oh, I shouldn't do this actually, because that's not smart in this case.
Right.

Speaker 5 So that's what I thought.

Speaker 5 The evidence increasingly, the DeSantis thing, you know, makes me start to believe that there's malice here because any objective view of a third party, I know that this goes against conventional wisdom, but any objective view, I don't think a third party person would have a chance at a presidential race, regardless, unless it's like the perfect candidate, the rock, somebody doesn't exist.

Speaker 5 But you could draw a map that at least has me listening with DeSantis in because DeSantis changes the game. It's an ideological fight.
You know, you try to get people in the ideological middle.

Speaker 5 You know, with Trump, it's not that. Like, Trump is seen as such a threat, and Biden, by the MAGA voters is seen as an illegitimate, dementia-ridden threat.

Speaker 5 There is no path to getting a lot of independent voters in that primary. And the independent number in 2020 was tiny.

Speaker 5 Despite the fact that people are like, I hate both my choices, they're like, the number of people that actually voted independent was tiny. It wasn't because there wasn't a good campaign run.

Speaker 5 It was because the people that hate Trump don't want to risk him winning. And the people that think Biden is a dementia-riddled grifter don't want to risk him winning.
Right.

Speaker 5 And so DeSantis would actually kind of change the thing to at least make this seem genuine.

Speaker 5 It would still be stupid, to be honest, Charlie, but at least it would seem like it's a genuine thing if they're going to run it both ways.

Speaker 5 But for them to say that makes me think that, and Rick, I think, smartly pointed out that there's some overlap between DeSantis donors and no labels donors, that this is an actual effort to help Trump if he, you know, and Biden end up getting there, because there is just no, the only type of voter that would be open to going third party in a Trump Biden electorate are our people, really, Charlie.

Speaker 5 This is why we can speak to this with expertise. I have these people in my life.

Speaker 5 I don't want to name anybody in this podcast, but I can think about family and friends that are like lifelong Republicans, lifelong conservatives, sucked it up for Joe Biden in 2020 because they hated Trump and thought he was so dangerous.

Speaker 5 And if they were in a third party and they didn't have somebody like me in their life to explain to them how stupid this was, they might get sucked into,

Speaker 5 they would hold their nose for Biden, but they might get sucked into the third party thing. That is the type of voter.
That's the only type of voter they would attract.

Speaker 5 And that's 3% of the electorate.

Speaker 5 And it could be a make or breaks percent of the the electorate it is just weird so i'm seeing here that they're posting job openings for communications director and deputy chief of staff you're probably not going to apply is that what you're telling me i'm not okay i'm not

Speaker 5 okay so do you have your phone with you i do yeah okay i've been posted on the podcast so i haven't been scrolling twitter but i i can pull it up i understand i'm urging you to look at your phone because i just texted you something this is happening

Speaker 5 in real time sorry i put it on airplane mode it turns out this is great radio yeah charlie this is this is why you're an old pro. W, what was it? WMTJ, WTMJ?

Speaker 5 WTMJ. Okay.

Speaker 5 Is that, oh, wait, is this live? No, no, no, no. I just, uh, this is.
I see this photo. Okay.
He sent me a photo of Ken Cuccinelli. Okay, okay.
That was my question.

Speaker 5 I'm flying here to Asheville yesterday and I'm in the have a layover in Atlanta. Yeah.
And I'm sitting there and I'm listening to music, listening to tunes. And then I hear this guy behind me.

Speaker 5 arguing with somebody about Ron DeSantis and why he's supporting Ron DeSantis.

Speaker 5 And so I do what any reasonable person who respects the privacy of others would do, right? I turned off the music, took off the headphones, and listened to this guy behind me.

Speaker 5 And I hadn't turned around yet because he was very clear that he knew a lot of stuff.

Speaker 5 And he was talking about, you know, he was talking about the Mar-a-Lago stuff and using the word crime scene and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they were talking about Chris Christie.

Speaker 5 They were talking about other stuff. And I'm thinking, okay, this guy is a donor or he's bundler or something because he's, you know, interesting.
So I turn around and I look at him and i go shit

Speaker 5 that's ken cuccinelli

Speaker 5 you know blabbing in the middle of the airport not a lot of great op-sec for the uh the ron de santa super pack isn't he like the chairman or the deputy chairman or he has some sort of ceremonial role for the super pack so i of course did not want to be rude and you know go up and introduce myself or anything so i just surreptitially took the picture but i wasn't totally sure it was ken cuccinelli which is why i just texted you this picture and and you know to see like tim that's the guy guy, right?

Speaker 5 Unfortunately, I can confirm it because you, as a reader of my book, can remember that I had some quality personal time with Ken Cuccinelli, where he was making fun of gay people and was unaware that I was a homosexual.

Speaker 5 So it was a really, really pleasant afternoon I got to spend with Ken Cuccinelli.

Speaker 5 I'm thinking that the last thing that Ken Cuccinelli thought was that he's sitting in this airport having this voluble conversation about raising money for Ron DeSanders and about how basically effed up Trump was with the Mar-a-Lago, the criminal criminal trial.

Speaker 5 And he's sitting 10 feet away from me.

Speaker 5 I don't think he'll be accidentally sitting 10 feet away from someone listening to this podcast, but in case he is, can we talk about how Ken Cuccinelli kind of, I'm taking the host chair for a second, he, uh, Cooch, like is the embodiment of what could be a really big problem for Ron DeSantis that somebody like Cooch is attracted to his campaign.

Speaker 5 And that is, have you seen the New Hampshire poll that was out today? No, no, no, no. Please tell, do tell, do tell.
There's a New Hampshire poll that's out today.

Speaker 5 And I do want to caveat that it's from american greatness so you know maybe not the best polling outfit oh damn but i think this is but it's still important they spoke to 500 voters so it's not nothing and here's the numbers and here's why i think it's important because it literally matches the 2016 number basically trump 44 desantis 12 christy seven your boy a plus six from the last poll scott seven plus six from the last poll haley five

Speaker 5 the problem that desantis has is he is staring down down the barrel. He has the same Ted Cruz team from 2016.
It's Jeff Rowe, it's Ken Cuccinelli, it's these far-right TrueCon ideologues.

Speaker 5 Heath thinkers.

Speaker 5 And that could be a good match for Iowa, Bob Vanderplatz. But you go into New Hampshire where the voters are not evangelicals there.
It's the second state, right?

Speaker 5 So you have these kind of working-class MAGA types, right? And you have the Boston suburb types that Chris Christie and Tim Scott are doing with and Portsmouth. Right.

Speaker 5 And then, you know, you have some traditional conservatives as well. And those are basically the three categories that make up the primary.
And the DeSantis group is not that big.

Speaker 5 If DeSantis can't get, if he gets down the ideological drain with these weirdos like Ken Cuccinelli, how do you come back? He's staring right down the barrel of the Ted Cruz redux. What happened?

Speaker 5 Ted Cruz wins Iowa, goes to New Hampshire, and gets slaughtered, gets absolutely slaughtered. Let me pull this up.
He finishes below. Oh, i remember

Speaker 5 i have the exact number up though he finished but it's important to know he got so he gets 12.

Speaker 5 so just what do santis is pulling at below kasich you can't recover from that ken coccinelli is the avatar of this for me that they're doing the same thing all over again the big question that we ought to ponder is is ron de santis scott walker or ted cruz he's looking like ted cruz

Speaker 5 yeah he's looking like ted cruise wow so can i tell you about my other favorite story please

Speaker 5 think i'm gonna get blowback for sending you this picture? I don't know with this stuff. No, I think that's great.
It's not like you chased him into the bathroom. I did not.

Speaker 5 I have a word for you, Ken.

Speaker 5 Child separation. Jeez.
So every time Ron Johnson comes up, you know, of course, I cringe, the senior senator from Wisconsin. And he was on Newsmax, and then they're asking him about these.

Speaker 5 And this is like this other universe out there where in the right ecosystem, there are these smoking gun tapes and whistleblower out there who is going to destroy the Biden crime family because he has these 17 audio tapes of Joe Biden talking about taking bribes.

Speaker 5 And Chuck Grassley has been hyping this. You've been, you know, hyped from House Oversight Committee, James Comer, and you know, all of this stuff.

Speaker 5 And they actually put out a press release saying that the FBI had information that Biden took a bribe while he was serving as vice president.

Speaker 5 And Fox News mentioned the claim in more than 200 chunks of airtime.

Speaker 5 So it must be rock solid. 200 mentions.
Well, exactly. So Ron Johnson is on Newsmax and they ask, well, what about this tape? This is like a big deal.

Speaker 5 And Johnson essentially admits, yeah, we're not actually sure that it exists.

Speaker 5 We don't even know that it exists. And the confidential source appears, again, to have disappeared or died or whatever the hell.
So I just find it's just kind of amazing.

Speaker 5 And so there they are kind of just holding the bag.

Speaker 5 You know, Grassley, for example, appeared on Fox earlier this month to discuss the claim that he'd elevate this document hadn't been provided by the FBI.

Speaker 5 And Grassley was asked, well, what does the document say? Nearly a month after he signed this letter saying that it describes an alleged criminal scheme involving Joe Biden.

Speaker 5 Grassley said he was not going to characterize it. And now, basically, it's like, where are the tapes? Are there any tapes? In a Newsmax interview on Thursday, Senator, this is Philip Bump.

Speaker 5 Senator Ron Johnson was asked about the purported tapes. We don't know, Johnson replied.
Senator Grassley has never said they exist. Wait.

Speaker 5 Instead, he continued, Grassley had simply said the source said he'd heard they existed.

Speaker 5 On Tuesday, Representative Matt Gates, not a member of the oversight committee, discussed the issue with a former Trump advisor, Steve Bannon. I want to be very clear about something, Gates says.

Speaker 5 Even what's on a 1023, this is the FBI report, even what's on that is an allegation.

Speaker 5 What needs to happen is to track down the bank records and to look for these 17 audio recordings that he said he knew about months ago. But apparently, look, nobody knows where these tapes are.

Speaker 5 It's just, I,

Speaker 5 and so Fox News, apparently unchastened by the Dominion lawsuit. Very unchastened.
I mean, they called Joe Biden a dictator this week. Yeah.
Wannabe dictator. Wannabe dictator.
Excuse me.

Speaker 5 I would say that Representative Comer is

Speaker 5 cruising to be deplorable of the year if there was such a thing, you know, for not grading on a curve. I enjoyed the anecdote, but I thought I was ending with a question.
I am

Speaker 5 no question. More of a comment than a question.

Speaker 5 Did you see this one? It's related. It's Fox News.
I feel like me and Pertico need to go do a deep dive on this. Philip Hump's doing a great job, but we might need to add a little more color to it.

Speaker 5 Here it is. Exclusive.
President Joe Biden was allegedly paid $5 million by an executive of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Barisma, where his son Hunter sat on the board.

Speaker 5 A confidential human source told the FBI. Bigot.
Big troop. Bigot a troop.
And I saw that. It's Fox.
You know, it wasn't Gateway Pundit, wasn't Newsmax. So I was like, I guess I'll click on that one.

Speaker 5 You know, try to see what they're talking about. That would be pretty bad if Joe Biden was paid $5 million by an executive of Bernard Stinks.

Speaker 5 And so I clicked on it. The exclusive comes from a single anonymous source who delivered this to the FBI.
So all we know is somebody went to the FBI and told them this.

Speaker 5 And their contention is that Joe Biden, the Biden family, excuse me, control a maze of bank accounts that are so intricate that it would take 10 years to unravel.

Speaker 5 And that is why the 5 million doesn't show up on Biden's financial filings, which are extensive. It's just like

Speaker 5 Joe Biden is a dementia-riddled criminal mastermind with like a Russian doll's nest full of different bank accounts to hide the amount of money he's getting. Like, I guess, I don't know.

Speaker 5 Like, I didn't think that the blind computer repairman story was true. So, crazier things have happened, I guess.

Speaker 5 But the evidence here for them to put stuff forward is so circumspect and so ludicrous in certain cases and fanciful, you know, and yet you have the Saudi Arabia payoff happening right out in the open, you know, and it's like no, no report, no reporting happening on that.

Speaker 5 And the whole, the whole thing is preposterous. This is what the term cognitive dissonance means.
I believe so. You know, the craftiest manipulator in the history of finance is also this demented guy.

Speaker 5 And the people who believe it believe it without blinking an eye.

Speaker 5 They have no problem whatsoever that he's basically sitting there because, of course, I guess what George Soros is sitting behind and pulling the strings.

Speaker 5 See, but unfortunately, and I think we ought to have a little fuss up here. Okay.
You know, when you have these conversations with folks and say, you know, they have no evidence. This is ridiculous.

Speaker 5 You know, they're making it up. Why do you take this seriously? They will come back to the Hunter Biden laptop.

Speaker 5 Look, I do not give a shit about Hunter Biden, but this was a fail when that Hunter Biden laptop. So it was implausible.

Speaker 5 There were questions about it, but it became this thing where everybody in the media, everybody decided that the Hunter Biden laptop was nothing, that it was fake, that it was planted by the Russians.

Speaker 5 And it turns out, as weird as the story was, that maybe it was true, largely true. And so people can always say, that's what you said about Hunter Biden's laptop.

Speaker 5 And yeah, okay, this is why you need to get it right all the time. If you want to maintain your credibility, you can't ignore the stories.

Speaker 5 Otherwise, it creates this sort of, you know, doom loop of I'm not believing anything you guys say. What about this? You know, I guess, but we're human.

Speaker 5 And the story that they put forth was that a blind computer repair man had Hunter Biden's drives. It's a pretty odd thing.
Rudy Giuliani got it. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And that and that the blind and computer repair guy called up Rudy. I mean, the whole story was very unlikely.
So what's the lesson here? Weird shit is happening. Weird shit does happen.

Speaker 5 Simply because something is weird shit doesn't mean it's not true. And I agree.
And that's what I said. That's why I clicked on the story.
I was like, I want to to see what Fox has here.

Speaker 5 Maybe I've been, maybe the wool's been pulled over my eyes about Joe Biden, and he is a criminal mastermind. And we'll find that out in a few years.
I don't suspect so.

Speaker 5 I think that he has a bit of a grifty son who's making some money he probably doesn't deserve. But, like, that's a tale as old as time when it comes to politics.

Speaker 5 I did on the laptop, just one point, in case everyone has these people in their lives who come up to them and say, Well, you were wrong about the laptop. The media was wrong about the laptop.

Speaker 5 That's true. The absurd story did turn out to be true.
But what was on the laptop only served to embarrass and defame Hunter himself, right? And there are all these embarrassing pictures of Hunter.

Speaker 5 There are a lot of texts between Hunter and his dad, where his dad sounds like a very loving father, you know, who's concerned about his son with addiction problems.

Speaker 5 There's the one big guy email that they keep mentioning, right?

Speaker 5 And it's like, okay, you know, okay, I'm open to the possibility that Joe Biden was taking 10% off the top of Hunter's Crift and they were calling him the big guy in a code name.

Speaker 5 But I'm going to need one additional piece of evidence besides the one email

Speaker 5 that says, I I think that there's going to be 10 for the big guy. That's all.
I need one additional piece of evidence. And then maybe we were wrong about this.

Speaker 5 But that is literally the only thing on the laptop that makes Joe Biden look in the least bit bad.

Speaker 5 And a lot of the things on the laptop, you know, make him look like a dad who's struggling in a pretty tough situation with his son. So, you know, that is my other follow-up.

Speaker 5 It's like, you can't just say, oh, Hunter Biden laptop, you are wrong, and have that mean Joe Biden is corrupt.

Speaker 5 But the problem is, is that clearly there's a certain asymmetry in the amount of evidence that you need to make an allegation because Jack Smith lays out all of this detailed information with tapes,

Speaker 5 with records, with video surveillance, with the sworn testimony.

Speaker 1 Yes, many sources.

Speaker 5 The sworn testimony of his own lawyer. And it's like, you got nothing there.
I see nothing.

Speaker 5 You show somebody an email that has the term, you know, big guy. It's like, that's it.
This is all you need. There it is.

Speaker 5 I don't know. So you have a happy Father's Day.
I hope you have some good plans. First Father's Day in New Orleans.
I have no real plans, actually. I don't know.

Speaker 5 These days, I'm not big on those sorts of things. I think that we'll probably just hang out, go to the park, enjoy the weather, work on my tan.

Speaker 5 Maybe I'll work on an article about Ron Johnson's secret source, treat ourselves to a nice dinner. How about you? Do you have Father's Day plans? No, not really at this point.

Speaker 5 You know, Father's Day has never been as big as Mother's Day. You notice that? That's whatever.
I think that everybody should get the recognition that they require.

Speaker 5 And the problem is for Father's Day, Father's Day, my, at least as I observe with my straight friends, you know, Father's Day is really more of a day where the dads get to like extend their normal golf day of four hours while the mother has to parent to six hours.

Speaker 5 You know, they get to extend the happy hour on their golf outing. But I'm not a golfer.
Neither am I.

Speaker 5 And we co-parent regardless because, you know, they're just both of us. So it's nice.
I love having people wish me a happy Father's Day when me and Talouse are on the street. That warms my heart.

Speaker 5 So if you happen to bump into me in the garden district this weekend, you can, you know, I'd love to hear that. But besides that, you know, that's just it.
That's life. All right.
Life is good.

Speaker 5 You have a great weekend. I'm going to enjoy the few precious hours I have here in Asheville, North Carolina.
You enjoy New Orleans, and we'll talk next week, Tim. All right.
You too, Charlie.

Speaker 5 Say hi to Ken Cuccinelli when you see him on the flight back for me. Tell him I said, what's up? Your gay former strategist says, hey, Ken, long time no see.
It could happen.

Speaker 5 Thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bullwork podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
We will be back on Monday and we'll do this all over again.

Speaker 5 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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