Bulwark Takes - Jon Ossoff Taps Into Something People Want

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Sen. Jon Ossoff tapped into something this weekend. Something that the people have been craving. Is that going to be a winning strategy? Tim Miller and Sam Stein discuss.

Hey guys, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here with managing editor Sam Stein. We popped on over the weekend to talk about the Bernie AOC fight oligarchy tour. And I'm intrigued that some of the themes that we covered there were also covered by Georgia Senator John Ossoff, who's maybe not as far on the progressive end as Bernie and AOC, in what was kind of essentially a kickoff for what's going to be a very important Senate race there in Georgia in 2026. So, Sam, I want to play for you this clip of Ossoff, but do you have any top line thoughts on him first? No, no, play the clip. All right, here we go. Let's take a look at John Ossoff in Georgia over the weekend. Trump's cabinet is worth like $60 billion. That's not even including Elon.

They are literally the elites they pretend to hate. The president is not at his palace in Florida thinking about whether you can afford daycare for your daughter or how to stop insurance companies from denying your claim, or anything that matters to our daily lives. When is the last time you even heard Donald Trump talk about health care or child care? He's talking about invading Greenland. He's handing your data over to Elon Musk. By the way, I'm all for government efficiency. And government programs aren't sacred. They have to work.

But when you randomly fire tens of thousands of people, no matter what role they fill, no matter how well they're performing, and then you have to scramble to fire them back because you accidentally fired the people who run the veterans crisis line, and you accidentally fired the people who watch out for Ebola at the CDC, and you accidentally fired the people who fight bird flu on our poultry farms, and the people who protect our nuclear weapons.

When you shut down research into Alzheimer's treatments and cures for childhood cancer that's not efficiency that's just cruelty and chaos all right there you go he tweeted the clip with uh yesterday Atlanta roared Georgia will bow to no king we're just getting started what'd you make of uh Asaf well I think the back the background here is that he's probably the most endangered democrat up for a cycle in the senate this year really could be bad for him if the state's governor brian kemp decides to run we don't know if that's going to happen um i thought you know i was listening to it i thought the messaging was like spot on frankly um especially for a state that's difficult like Georgia.

It wasn't overly liberal. It wasn't overly progressive. It was just sort of like exactly the themes that you and I have been harping on, which is like these people are not for government efficiency. They're for chaos. They're in it for themselves. This is corruption. There were a few things that were kind of interesting that really piqued my interest. So he did actually talk about, he didn like go away from addressing some of the hot

button cultural issues like immigration, for instance, but he did it in this way. Um, that again, I think is more effective for Democrats. And he was like, he's like, does it make sense to turn our military bases into prison camps for immigrants? That's not a, that's not a, that's not a, uh not a necessarily strictly anti-deportation or anti-enforcement messaging. It's like kind of a couched version of it in which you basically say,

you're going about it the wrong way and you're screwing up our other resources. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. And the other thing was, we could talk about the corruption stuff because that was the primary focus. And I think that's where he wants the attention anyway. But the other thing was, he was, you know, we could talk about the corruption stuff, because that was the primary focus. And I think that's where he wants the attention anyway. But the other thing that was interesting was that he talked about all these side pursuits that the Trump White House is obsessed with. And he's like, does it make any sense for you to have a

president who's more focused on acquiring Greenland than ensuring that we have good health care? And that's the stuff I think Democrats probably need to really get into. It's not just Greenland than ensuring that we have good health care. And that's the stuff I think Democrats probably need to really get into. It's not just Greenland. It's this idea that this man in the Oval Office is obsessed with trivial, weird vendettas and insults, and there's real world problems that are going unaddressed because of it. If you can harness that message, I think people will really latch onto it regardless of where they fall in that ideological spectrum. I thought it was really compelling. He's at his palace in Mar-a-Lago. He's worried about Greenland. Have you ever heard him talk about your healthcare? Have you ever heard them talk

about your childcare? Do you think he cares about that i i was harping on this during the 24 campaign that like there is there is a wrong conventional wisdom that is don't take the bait don't talk about trump's stupid stuff you know he wants you to talk about the caissons and the cats and the greenland and whatever it was at the at the time and i say to them during the campaign like essentially people should do what asaf did like there is a way to leverage his bait in your favor. Right. Which is like, he wants to talk about this stupid shit. He's obsessed over stuff that doesn't matter to you at all. You know,

like you want somebody that actually cares about you and cares about your problems and cares about the real interests and wants to fix them. Not somebody that's obsessed with insert, whatever Trump's latest stupidity is i i think that's just a much a much better frame um than ignoring it or than trying to go at it on the merits and be like well denmark actually does you know 2.5 percent in nato right like i i would agree with that i will talk about that as a pundit but as a politician i think this is the right frame. Right. You don't want to be like, oh, we shouldn't offend Denmark and the king and the queen.

No. People are like, yeah, I'd be fine acquiring Denmark, whatever. But the problem is – Denmark? I don't know. You're the first person to propose acquiring Denmark. I want Denmark. Trump's shooting too low.

No. Copenhagen is beautiful exactly no i'm gonna refocus i think the problem is and he's he's right is focus on the lack of attention on the stuff that matters i will let me just tell a little story about this because this is a perpetual um argument within democratic politics that you've touched on i remember a conversation i was having i'm not gonna name the, but I'll try to get his permission. During the heat of like the summer of 2016, when it looked like Hillary was doing really well,

but it was kind of getting closer. Remember that point? And I was talking to this Democrat who has been on a bunch of these campaigns and he was beside himself because she was picking all these fights. Like he shouldn't have the nuclear codes. He's crazy. He's saying all these wild things. He you know bad for it he's you know marginalizing these communities and this guy was like all you should say is this guy's a phony populist who makes his fucking ties in china he's like just go after him for making his ties in china like that's it like he doesn't care about you.

He just wants to make a buck. Like, he's a phony. He skipped his own contractors. Like, just focus on that. He's just a phony. And they never really could do it, or they never chose to do it. And look, I don't think Ossoff's doing that per se, but it's much closer to that than what Hillary was doing and I guess a little bit to what Kamala Harris was doing. And,

and I think, you know, it also has the benefit of roping in Elon. And we could talk a little bit about Elon because he focused a lot of that speech on Elon and Doge and the chaos that it sowed. Yeah. Let's talk about Elon. And then I want to talk about one other thing that I think has been

interesting that ties the AOC rallies, this John Ossoff thing. And my interview with Wes Moore from last week, but, but we'll end with that. But on the Elon side, Elon is real vulnerability. And the joke, Ossoff's joke was pretty funny, where he's like, the cabinet's worth $60 billion,

and that doesn't even include Elon, right? And so you see the numbers. $60 billion? Wow. I mean, Besant is $22 billion, just to be honest. Yeah, yeah. And Linda McMahon, I mean, she's got that wrestling fortune. And yeah, Lutnik and Wyckoff.

We're getting up there. Wyckoff isn't even in the cabinets. You're right. Yeah, I mean, you probably get the number up to a trillion. Some researchers should do some math on that. But it does, again, it feels like Elon is probably a bigger vulnerability, particularly as you mentioned this, in Georgia, you know, in potentially very tough ways with Brian Kemp. Trump won Georgia, right? So you're in the midterm.

You already have a little bit of an uphill battle. Kemp is popular. But the stuff that Elon is doing, you know, cutting government work, there's a lot of military there, a lot of CDC, you know, employees, potential vulnerability there, I think. Yeah. And again, he did it in a way that's like, I don't want to call it like triangulation because it's not that, but it's sort of like a little bit of a bank shot where he's like, look, I'm all for efficiency.

I want to like cut down on government. I want to get the deficit down. But I don't want to accidentally fire people like nuclear weapons containment and working on infectious disease research and helping contain the bird flu. That's stupid. And so it really comes down to, and I think he said it was efficiency versus cruelty and chaos. And if that's the frame, I think people will be happy with that. I mean, again again we talked about this over the weekend i think something's happening here i'm not sure what it is but like

there's so much pent-up frustration and anger and fear uh all around the country and they just are looking for ways to channel this stuff and so you have the tesla protest put them aside. The AOC Bernie stuff is real. And then you have Asif Ghan for this rally, and he's a good orator, and he had a good audience. But the virality of those clips are people are just looking for something that can make them feel like there's someone making sense or at least pushing back on this in the moment. And I think that works for him obviously yeah um i think the other thing that works um which i want to close is that he is how he's framing this as you know they're the elites that they pretend to hate we're going at the elites too because i think that if you i think ideologically you know probably if you put them on a spectrum you'd have AOC and Bernie close.

Maybe Bernie furthest to the left and AOC a little bit closer and then Ossoff closer to the middle. And then Wes Moore, who I interviewed, like closer to kind of the center left of the party. But all of them are saying the same thing. All of them are positioning themselves, I think, correctly as like anti-oligarchy, anti-elites. Like the system is broken. We got to fix the system. And I just think that that is going to be much more. That's what Trump was doing to them. Yeah, right. Exactly. They have to co-opt it now. And I think that the Democrats got caught in a trap that was a really hard trap. I've talked to, we've talked about it a bunch, which is how do you defend democracy and institutions

when people are skeptical or hostile to the institutions, right? It's tough to be like, we're going to protect the thing you either don't care about that much or you don the institutions, right? It's tough to be like, we're going to protect the thing you either don't care about that much or don't trust, right? And Wes, I thought it was the strongest part of his interview with me last week. And you see Asif doing it here. Obviously, that's going to be central to the Bernie AOC thing. I just think that that kind of thread going sort of across the spectrum within the party is pretty notable. Totally, totally agree. Nothing to add on to that. I think that's the nugget.

It's like if you can be the anti-elite, usually that works. But it's hard because Trump kind of forced the frame in the other direction. Trump's made it easier by hiring literally every billionaire under the sun to serve for him and then having dumb dumbs howard lutton to go out there be like they can live without a week of social security um you know i think that makes it a little easier but um but yeah your impersonation is much better than my wit cough people keep an eye out with our live event with bill crystal which is coming up on the youtube page here i did a dramatic reading of the wit cough tucker carlson uh interview oh god i did do their voices i thought my tucker was pretty good my wit coffee had a little work

you're you coming from you haven't you have that little northeast sort of jewish experience it gets you a little better that's anti-semitic i hope not i think i think i don't think i'm honoring you and your experience all right everybody subscribe to the feed sam sam stein we'll be back soon