Pod Save America - A Unified Theory of Trumpism

Episode Date: August 2, 2026

Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, stops by the show to talk to Lovett about his "Grand Unified Theory of Trumpism" — that Trump's opponent "will always choose surrender over discomfort." Together, they try to make sense of America's rotting political culture, breaking down when and where it all went wrong, and debate what it'll take for the nation to heal from this moment, be it a reckoning of virtue, kindness, or democratic will. Jonathan also walks Lovett through the echoes of Goebbels recently displayed by Secretary Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller and why he believes the desire for a figure like Trump may have always been present within the Republican base.Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.To watch this episode with subtitles, click here and turn on closed captions (CC).You can also request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

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everybody, welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Lovett. I just wrapped a great conversation with Jonathan V. Last of the bulwark. It went all kinds of places to what went wrong inside the Republican Party, what a post-Trump Democratic Party should be fighting for, and what it means to have a politics that centers virtues like kindness and what happened to lead a country to a place where someone like Donald Trump could be president in the first place. I really appreciate the way Jonathan thinks. and writes about politics, especially as one of the rare conservatives who understood from the beginning why it was so toxic to embrace someone as awful as Trump. I'm grateful to him for coming on the show, and I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. So here it is. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on, finally, John. I, you know, I understand that there is a text chain in which whenever Sarah Longwell or Tim Miller has been on the show, you know that you hadn't yet been invited. I'm sorry that it took this long to have you on because I am genuinely such an admirer of the way you think about politics, the way you talk about politics. And as I said to you

on a substack, a compliment that you then wrote an essay about to kind of dispute. I appreciate those who did something that is clearly harder than it looked, which is be honest and moral from the right or the center right in the face of Trumpism when so many refused to do that. And so I think you have a lot to say to help understand this moment. I want to talk about what you called a grand unified theory of Trumpism, which you summarized as, and I quote, the essence of Trumpism is that the other side will always choose surrender over discomfort. I want to use that to kind of help us understand a bunch of different stories. But just what do you mean by that? And what are some of the salient examples to you?

Yeah. So I was writing about the White House correspondence dinner. and it strikes me this is a lot of the way Trump has approached waves, hands, you know, all of it. And especially the way

he approached the Republican Party. And I have to say this, I mean, Trump really did understand the Republican Party in the conservative movement much better than I did. You know, he saw those people for who they are.

And one of the things he has found, even with not them, but just sort of mainstream culture, is that if forced to make uncomfortable choices, people normally choose comfort over like unpleasantness. And so this was, you know, the white-house correspondence dinner, they invite up onto stage,

this group of Wall Street Journal reporters who did fantastic reporting about Trump and the Epstein stuff. And these people like come up on stage and they're like, I guess I'm supposed to shake this guy's hand and they shake hands. And then he, and he even like when he went and gave his speech afterwards noted. He was like, yeah, can't believe it? You know, these guys up here, they kill me all the time.

Then they just come up and shake my hand. It's like, yeah, it's a little weird, isn't it? Yeah. And he does that again and again. He's doing that right now about Todd Blanche with, with Thumb, Phyllis, and John Cornyn. And they are saying, we're totally in on this Todd Blanche thing,

even though he's your personal lawyer, and even though he aided and abetted the Epstein cover up, and even though it was his idea to do this slush fund, the one thing is that we really would, we know you said you won't do it, but if you could just write that down for us, that'd be great. And Trump's response to this is, fuck you.

You know? And when confronted with, the fuck you, their response. I don't know if you saw this, I was, I was a, this is literally where I was going next. I want to read Tom Tillis. So, yes. So John Cornyn, uh, and Tom Tillis have been the hold up in the Senate Judiciary Committee just for people that haven't been following that closely. Yesterday, Thursday, uh, they were supposed to vote on the, on the Todd Blanche nomination. This is Trump's former personal defense attorney, the guy that met with Galane Maxwell, uh, uh, who, uh, wants to be a attorney. The guy who says,

that the Attorney General is not independent, which was, by the way, Tillus's or Cornans, Tillis's red line that's now been crossed, obviously. They have said they're not going to vote because they haven't received a guarantee that they won't pursue a fund to give millions of dollars to insurrectionists and other allies of Trump who have been, quote unquote, persecuted by Biden. Trump puts out a stemwinder of a statement defending the fund, justifying it completely, saying, I want this. This is good. Let's do the fund.

Tillis quotes that statement and writes, and I quote, Senator Cornyn and I have been working with acting AG Tom Blanche to end the anti-webinization fund, and he has been forthright, thoughtful and patient. It's a shame. His confirmation has hit a snag only because an incompetent personal advisor to the president refuses to amend the bogus settlement. Once again, Stalin has been failed by the secretariat.

If only they would tell him, John, the Kulaks would never have been liquidated if Comrade Stalin had known what was happening. All the wheat they would have had, were it not for these bourgeois farm owners. Even now, right, Cornyn and Tillis, these are people that are, I have lost their seats in part because of Trump, who are ostensibly, I would say probably, you know, when they're alone with their thoughts, believe they are actually doing something good right now. But we have allowed Trump to move our baseline so far that this is what this is what kind of stands in for Republicans not going along. What was your reaction to that statement?

I mean, my reaction was was befuddlement. I mean, I don't know about you, but I remember a time when people in Washington could be motivated by spite. Yes. And like, I don't know. It's just like, wouldn't there be a fuck me? No, fuck you. I'm not going to confirm your, you know, you just cost me my Senate seat. I'm never going to confirm your AG.

You know, good luck. Hope you, hope the Democrats don't capture the Senate. Right. And there's none of that. There's none of that. You know, you're right about the other side choosing surrender over discomfort. But it's that there's a kind of, I think it comes from a place of decadence, which is some version of, I don't, I don't think these guys have really thought very deeply of what it is to use power via negotiation, right? Because the idea that they're saying over and over again, I want to get to yes on Todd Blanche,

like Donald Trump, who is at his heart, what he believes himself to be is a negotiator. That's what he sees himself as. And, you know, obviously we could we would we can attack whether or not he's genuinely good at it. But the basics, you know, set a crazy anchor, be erratic, whatever. He has those, he has those tools in his tool chest. And these guys are such, they're just babies about it. It's unbelievable. Yeah, they're babies, but here's the thing.

And this is why I think it's vanity. I think this is about them wanting to feel like they drew a line in the sand. But even their line isn't a real line. Like, I am sorry. If Todd Blanche signs a piece of paper saying that, you know, we won't do this one. What is that? That is a worthless guarantee. It is not worth any.

It is not enforceable. You know, this is not a law. It's not something you have to go to the Supreme Court and have them overturned. It's just a piece of paper. You do whatever. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified under oath that he wasn't going to do anything about vaccines. He said that thing, under oath. He went and did it.

It's not worth anything. And this is something that covered. Trump just signed a deal with Saudi Arabia. Did you see this over, over nukes like two weeks ago? And the deal was signed. And then he was like, oh, yeah. And I want them to recognize Israel, too. And the Saudis are like, hey, bro, what?

What are you talking about? The paper signed, bro. And he's like, yeah, no, don't care. You know, it's like, this is this like, so even the idea like, oh, well, we got him to sign this piece of paper is itself ludicrous and decadent. Which is why I think it's all about self-image and it's what they've got to tell themselves. And I don't understand that. Like, I could understand. Here are the things I could understand, John.

I could understand them just saying, I'm getting too old for this shit. fine, have your Todd Blanche. I don't give a fuck. I'm out of here, right? I would understand that. I wouldn't like it. I wouldn't respect it, but I'd understand it. I would understand the, you know, no, the spiteful.

I don't care who you could nominate Jesus Christ himself. And I would not, I would not, you know, vote to confirm him. What I can't understand is I'm going to look at the totality of this nominee. I'm going to find one thing about it that I'm going to set as a condition that makes it surmountable and then I'm going to pretend to hold out until you give me a meaningless assurance so that I can say I satisfied my one condition. That is bizarre. Do you understand that?

Like, just as a piece of human psychology? I don't other than perhaps because they're so solicitous towards Blanche himself. And I think they sort Blanche into the category as a guy we can work with, right? Like, you know, he's a guy we can work. He's a serious guy, right? Yeah, he's Trump's personal authority. He's one of the serious ones. You know, he's one of the good ones.

He's not one of the cooks, right? He's one of ours, right? And he's one of ours. He's not like that cracking lady. Right. And he's not, you know, he's not like a Bill Pulte. He's a Clayton, right? We have the Bill Pultes, right?

And we have a Clayton. Now, the fact that in practice, Bill Pulte, you know, a Pulte really believes what he says about Trump being persecuted and wanting to destroy his his enemies. And Clayton just performs that way for the cameras. They still view that as having a distinction as important, right? And so because Blanche is their kind of guy, when they have that meeting and Blanche says, look, some version of he can't admit it, he can't say it's bad, we're not pursuing it.

There's no intention to pursue it. It's dead. But the more you press on it, you know him, the more he's going to dig in, right? So I am giving you this assurance. It will never be something that I pursue as attorney. general and beyond that it is just very difficult I just need room right I just need room to operate within this administration and these they the they've allowed you know there's a like it's true in you know relationships you know crazy you'll move your baseline right you've been in a terrible

relationship for a long time and you're just trying to get through the day and you just you just trying to kind of eke out a little wins get things a little bit back towards normal meanwhile what are we talking about here we are negotiating over whether the president can take one $1.776 billion in taxpayer money and just give it to his buddies, some of whom beat up fucking cops at the nation's capital in an insurrection that these guys all believed at the time was so destructive to Trump politically and to the country that they didn't worry, have to worry about him ever again. So they didn't have to, to your, per your theory, do something uncomfortable for the base,

which is impeach him and remove him so that he couldn't run again. And they have never learned that lesson because if they learn that lesson, it requires something of them. Remember Mitch? Like, they'll take care of this son of a bitch for us. Right. We don't have to do anything on this. They'll do it.

And this is, I don't know, and maybe this is persistent. I mean, maybe this is a persistent trait of the human condition that we see in all times in all places. I'm sure if we were to look at the progress of authoritarianism throughout history, we would see a lot of this from people. But it's a, Trump is, Trump is very smart about human nature, I think. And he was smart about understanding that America's not. exceptional. Oh, that's interesting. I don't agree with that. I think that is too, too many moves

away from the way he sees these people. I think, like, when he shakes the hands of those reporters on that stage, he's actually doing what was a criticism of the dinner that actually in hindsight wasn't as true as we said it was, which is, oh, it's all a game to these fucking people. And that the original criticism of the White House correspondence dinner was these people are supposed to be antagonist, the press and the administration. And they have this cushy, dinner and both optically, so optically, it represents something that is like ugly to the American people. But on a substantive level, it reveals something, which is their commitments aren't real, they aren't serious. I actually, in hindsight, don't agree with that. I disagree with that.

I actually think their commitments were real. And actually what that dinner, it turns out, was about and something we took for granted is, yes, they're an opposite sides in the game, but they're all believers in the game, right? They're in the stadium together playing the game of democracy. Trump's not in that, which is why it's so ugly. Because it's not just that people aren't uncomfortable with discomfort. I think that what Trump, it's not that America wasn't exceptional or that we don't believe in America's sort of special virtues. It's that he understood that there's a lot of people who don't actually care about those

virtues enough to do something, right? That's true of the press in that room. That's true of the lawyers at those firms that capitulated. That is true of the corporate media. that actually that is that that after 30 years of post history liberalism, there is a lack of understanding of who, you know, there's there's a there's been a gunshot in the courtyard. Someone's got to call 911. We all can't look out the window and wait for someone else to call 911. Somebody who's got to call 911 and his great realization actually is that that none of these

people realize it's their job, right? And I don't think that's an indictment of our view of America. It's indictment of this generation of elites. All right. I'll have to chew on that. I mean, I think it's certainly, I think that is certainly true. It may also be true that the rest of America is worthy of indictment. But I'll take that under advisement. Pod Save America is brought to you by Simply Safe. If an intruder were to approach your house, what would the average security system do? Not much until a window breaks. Then the alarm goes off. Then you get a notification. Then maybe the police will come, but shouldn't true home security be about stopping that chain of events from happening in the first place? That's the question SimplySafe answered. Unlike traditional security systems

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Hemingway quote. Yes. And many people are fascists and they'll find out when the time comes. Yeah, something to that. I'm butchering this. I know. I was afraid. I'm afraid I'm falling for a brainy quote like Gandhi once said live, laugh, love. But the gist of it, I think, does apply. A point you've made repeatedly, which I think there's very little equity, equity to in politics

is you can blame Trump, you can blame misinformation, you can blame Republicans. But, and this is a paraphrase of something you've written, 77 million Americans who voted for Trump are some combination of unsurious, decadent, or weak. Now, it's a lot cheaper in politics. to blame the powers that be, that's true on the left, that's true on the right. There's not a lot of discussion about the culpability of the actual voters and their agency in this. So can you just, as somebody that has been an observer of conservatism from the inside for a long time, what have you learned about the voters themselves through this period?

Well, so, I mean, I can tell you my impressions. I can't tell you that they are like facts that I've learned. What I have seen suggests to me, though, that you, to avoid coming to the conclusion that voters wanted what they chose, you've got to start creating a whole bunch of Rube Goldberg contraptions. And the minute you push on any of these constructs, even a little bit, they start wobbling. And so you have to build another one, right? And so, you know, when people say something like, oh, they only care about the economy.

And you're like, well, but the economy was terrible when Trump left office. Oh, well, that was just the last 18 months of the economy. And they really,

they think about the first, you know, two and a half years. And, and you're like, well, wait a minute. America's always say,

what did you do for me late daily? They say, well, yes, but then they really understood that the COVID was an exogative,

event and that you can't blame the president for exogenous events. You're like, what the fuck are you talking about? You think what percentage of the country could spell the word exogenous, right? And so you wind up making all of these things to avoid coming to the conclusion that, no, people saw Donald Trump for who he was. They heard what he was saying. They heard the things he was saying. And they said, I would like that.

And I think the reason people don't want to go there. is because that's a dark place, right? I mean, if the conclusion you end, you wind up with is some large portion of that 77 million voters, maybe not all of them, maybe not even a majority, maybe it's only like a third of them,

wanted this. Like, this is what they understood Trump to be, to be promising, and they wanted it. That's tough, right? You're now saying, well, hold on. That means we've got like 25 million voters in the country who are fascist,

like who want a strong man and who are not sold on the liberal order? Because the reality is, like, you don't need a majority, right? If you have a, I mean, how many Bolsheviks were there, right? For the Russian Revolution. It wasn't like there were 50 million of them, you know, they had like 50,000 guys.

If you've got a core group of people committed to illiberalism, You will eventually get a liberalism. And I, that's the sort of stuff that, you know, it just keeps me up at night because I don't know if there's an answer to it other than maybe the culture heals itself. Wow. That's not very satisfying. Or there has been, you know, forever. Because I do think the how many matters, right, whether it's objury.

Because I don't think it is. You know, I don't think it is. You know, there's a big difference between weak, unsurious, and decadent. And the distinction between them does matter. But even if there is this group of people, and look, Trump's approval rating always remains, you know, we've never gotten below 30, right? Like, let's say it's in the mid 30s on a good day. That's a third of the country that's like, I'm still good with this, which tells you

something, whether some combination of loving it or actually kind of not getting really good information about it and sort of and not yet willing to walk away. I do think, though, like, you know, to get, to get dark and to think about like, how, How many, you know, how many does he have? There is something about the blood and soil Trumpism. It may appeal to 25 million people, but there's not that many that are willing to kind of put a lot of blood onto the soil. Like, it is an online movement, right? It is a lot of people on Facebook and Instagram and social media and TikTok and wherever and watching television.

I think it's, you know, not as many on TikTok as they would like. But it's an online movement of people riling each other up based on kind of narratives about cities and places they're not at and people they don't really observe or talk to, but they see through television, whether it's an AOC or trans people or whatever. And when push comes to show, you know, he put a good show on at the insurrection. That is a dark day in our history for which Trump is responsible. It could have been stopped with a little bit of planning by. security officials if they had taken it more seriously, right?

Like, like, this wasn't exactly a, this wasn't a mass mobilization that could have shut down the capital, prevented traffic, that kind of things that have been traditionally part of what a true, like whatever revolution or counter revolution would look like. So maybe they just don't have a guise. Totally possible. Totally possible. And I, you know, I look at it and it's, it's just hard to know. And I would say it's not new.

This is the other thing that I've really come to. I mean, so I talk a lot about like my blind spots. And my biggest is always been race, right? And part of this is just because of the, I grew up in a very middle class suburb where it was normal and race wasn't a problem. And you look at, you know, like, oh, we have all these authoritarianes. Well, you know, before the civil rights movement, we had a whole swath of the country that was committed to authoritarianism, right?

Before the Civil War, we had half the. country who was committed to a form of authoritarianism. And so there was, I mean, for people of our age who came of age in the post-civil rights era, there is a sense of like, oh, you know, so everybody was sort of aligned by the Cold War. And so, you know, once you get in that 20-year period post-civil rights before the end of the Cold War, it looks like you've got this vaguely liberal monolith. This isn't to say that there aren't racists in the country and whatnot, but just sort of Broadly speaking, right?

Both Democrats and Republicans were against the commies, you know. And there was, in the last two years of the Carter administration's approach to the Cold War were indistinguishable from Reagan's approach to the Cold War. And so there was this like, hey, we're all in on liberalism. We don't like this authoritarianism stuff. And I, because of when I was born and, you know, my political upbringing, just thought, okay, so that's America. And so this Trump stuff is new and different.

But it's not really. It's much closer to a reversion to a strain of American political thought, which actually ran for a very, very long time. It just happened to have come to an end right before I was born. Does that make sense? Yes. Well, no, it does. It does make sense, you know, whether it's the ways that. And, you know, I think there was downsides to this version of a liberal consensus.

the kinds of topics that were acceptable, right, the kinds of people that were considered respectable. Like there were real downsides to this actual strange period in which also in the media, there was a real narrowing of kind of the bounds of the debate. And there are positive aspects to what happens when an entire culture is built around a kind of narrow debate that there's not as much difference. It's not as much. In fact, all of that is certainly true. But you see kind of an emergence of right-wing media during this.

time that slowly starts building power and influence, in part because there is this, you know, there is this sort of darkness in us, in people, right, in our culture and in people. And there was clear whether it's, you know, Coughlin and then to Limbaugh, right? Like there were people that realized, like, there's a need that's not being met in a pretty broad way. How much causal effect do you give the sort of right-wing media ecosystem as it evolved in where we are now? Because I'm never sure. Like, clearly there's some, it has some effect, right? I wouldn't say it has no effect. It has some effect. But I don't know how much. Like,

if you snapped your fingers and it all went away, would things be a lot different? I don't know. What are your thoughts on this? Here's what I've been thinking lately. A lot of what we're seeing is a result of a kind of permission. Like, what is fascism? It's a hard thing to define for people. It's a little bit murky. And I think part of the reason it's so murky is, there were a lot of people during Trump 1.0, be like, oh, stop calling him a fascist. That term doesn't apply. Look at everything's working, right? And I increasingly just, I don't think it is best to think about it as an ideology, a goal. It is permission to a kind of evil that we all feel, which is, I will give into my ego completely. I will not accept any kind of injury. I will not have

to admit to any kind of fault. I will not have to be wrong. I will not have to accept discomfort I will not have to accept nuance. The reason there was a pandemic is because Fauci. The reason I was stuck at home is because of the liberals. The reason people died is because of China. The reason I'm not happy right now is because of AOC or Mamdani or whatever. And that is intoxicating.

It is an intoxicating way to go through life. Forbearance, religious virtue, civic virtue, is a bulwark against those ideas. We all feel them. Some are better than others as naturally showing a discipline against them. Some are, you know, when you say someone, oh, they don't have a bad bone in their body,

it's actually very hard for them to go in that way. We're all on that spectrum. And decades and decades of media slowly telling people to just let go. Just let go. It's fine. You can feel whatever you want to feel. Culminates in Trump.

Did the media follow the people? Did the people follow the media? Is Trump a symptom? Is he called? I don't know. But at root, I think it is, I think it is that thing inside of us. It is as old as people. And we will always have to fight it and it will come and go.

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qualifying direct deposits required, terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com slash disclosures for details. So this is, I have a very similar view about the parties in that one of the things that the Republican Party was able to do when it was strong was prevent people like Donald Trump from ever being presented to voters, at least to the presidential level, right? And so even if voters would have wanted something like that, it wasn't on offer. They got Bob Dole.

They got Mitt Romney. They got, you know, guys like that. And once Trump appeared, and it was like, you know, when he got big cats in captivity and, you know, like they get a taste for live meat and all of a sudden they won't like take the stakes that you throw them anymore. That's what it,

what it's like with with Trump and in Republican voters. Now that they have like, oh, I could have that. I could have the guy who talks about shooting illegals and says only in the panhandle. I can have a guy who encourages political violence who says, go ahead and knock that guy out. I'll pay for your legal bills. Oh, yeah. You know, like that's the, that's the real dope for them.

And that's why I have a hard time seeing how we go back. because the parties aren't strong enough to prevent people like that from coming in anymore. I mean, just the structure of our party systems are too weak. They're both too strong and two weak. Yeah. You know, they're too strong to be killed and to have a new party pop up in their place, but too weak to prevent things like these sorts of takeovers. And so you wind up in a sour spot.

And voters have a taste on Republican voters have a taste for this because they were offered Trumpism. And then you saw when they were all for DeSantis, which was basically Trumpism without the violence, without the physical violence, they were like, that guy? What are you talking about? Well, yes, also without Trump, which is who is a charismatic figure. And, you know, I think there's here's where I would say there's like a little reason to be a little bit less pessimistic. Because I think there's a little step. Pass. I think there's a step in there that's important as part of this, which, because I.

It's not this idea that Trump suddenly appears and they can have this kind of, you know, it's like, oh, I don't want a Beyond Burger. I don't want, I want the red meat, right? That's certainly true. But there is a moment. And it plays out during that first primary 2016 where you see Trump doing what Trump's doing. You see Rubio just doing what Rubio is doing and Cruz doing what he's doing. And everybody kind of looks around first and they look around at each other and they're like, is it okay if I do this? Like, I want, I'm in.

I'm kind of interested. This is attractive to me. But I know it's wrong. It's still, by the, I know what's wrong is everywhere still to this day. It is the understanding that what we're doing is wrong. It is inside of, it is the unspoken part of everything. It's in everything across the media. It is about assuaging the people who know they're doing something wrong.

You know, when you see that, you never see a liberal, you never see a liberal say some version of, this is just a political disagreement, we should still treat each other as friends, right? Like, that's something conservatives, there's a conservative effort to say versions of that to kind of make what they've done be normal. But the reason I say all that is because that moment of looking around is a corrective that still exists. Like, if you, there are, if you go, there can be two gates side by side at an airport and two different airlines operating that gate.

And at one gate, everybody is obeying the rules of when you board. And at the other gate, nobody is. Why? It is a combination of the culture of the flyers, the expectations of the flyers, and the rules of the airline. Do they enforce? Do they send anybody back if they come up with their boarding group that they're not in? And also, hey, is this an airline where everybody lines up?

Or is this an airline where we all crowd the fucking thing like we're trying to storm the best deal, Like, what kind of vibe is this? And people look around. And maybe they'll be a transgressor and others will follow. Maybe there won't. It's a little bit of luck and happenstance. Somebody's got to throw the first brick. But that moment of corrective is still available even now.

Or is that wrong? I don't know. So yesterday I wrote a piece about this conference that the Trump administration did two weeks ago. So they did a conference on the resurgence of political terrorism. And it was all, I mean, it's about, of course, irony is dead, right? The people who reintroduced political violence into America after like a 30-year hiatus, basically, are now like, oh, my gosh, there's violence, right? But the only violence they care about is left-wing violence.

That's the big thing. And you had Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio both give speeches, which were, and I say this. in a measured way, indistinguishable from something Gerbils or Hitler would have said in the 30s. And I just went and pulled quotes, like from Hitler and gerbil speeches. And they're talking about, this is Rubio and Miller, about the ugly people who, I mean, like they're really getting into the, how do you say it's a physiognomy, physiognomy, you know, like the calipers, like, you know, oh, you can tell the dysgenic types, the untermench. I am on record predicting a phrenology comeback five years ago.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I agreed. Yeah. So, you know, and this is, this is, so why is Marko Rubio, who is supposedly the responsible one, who is the Secretary of State giving a speech at a conference in which he is talking about Americans? This is what he's talking about. Americans, the protesters, you know, the left wing terrorists and all this as being ugly and deformed. who, you know, spiritually all they can do is destroy the work of the great men and the great culture that the Aryans have built. And it just, you know, and I just think, I don't know, like, Rubio is a pretty shrewd diviner of what people want from him in any moment.

He seems to think that this is what Republican voters want. I don't know, man. It was pretty, I was pretty worked up about this. Because, I mean, it's one thing to, like, rhyme with Nazis. It's another thing to, like, copy them. It is a difference between, like, the Miller rhetoric is as fascist and as, as, as you could imagine, even where it's sort of like, you know what is good and beautiful and true, right? There's a kind of, I don't even know what. Can I read the passage, fame?

Yeah, let's hear. I've got it in front of me. Let's hear. Hold on. Because it's really amazing. It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph. of those who are assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal.

They're all deformed in some way in their appearance, in their dress, and their mannerism. Why is that? Why? If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street and you see an Antifa protest, why do the people that are violently demonstrating? Why is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways,

to the point where their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred. Trust your instincts to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is. You know that families are right.

You know that children are precious and beautiful must be protected. This is so much deeper than issues about taxation and regulation. It's about normal, healthy, ordered living. Like, this is... You can... It's like vermin, dysgenic types.

It's all right there. You could see like Gerbilt's looking at that and being like, hey, I think we've got to turn this down a little bit. I think we're getting a little bit. Hey, guys, I know we're the Nazis, but this is getting a little crazy. Yes, but so what's interesting about that, I saw that passage. And if you turn on Fox News at many points during the day, you will see a kind of of brightly colored, over-the-top aesthetic, including facework and changes to the body that are all meant to be, like, there is that that, that, like, you stop and you read that and you're like,

what are you talking about exactly? What are you, what are you saying exactly? Because when you look, there is, the other side of that is an aesthetic to fascism, right? Like with what kind of extreme aesthetic to what it means to be beautiful, right? And it does flow from this idea of, which is like one of the lies at the core of fascism itself, which is in the same way you do not need to admit to any flaw or fault or mistake and you can dominate and actually to lose is always embarrassing. To concede is always embarrassing. One place where we all must concede is to time and death itself, right? Like we must concede to the

fact that we are all bought. Not if Peter Thiel has his saying that. Yeah, the techno-fascist for sure. But like that like that we all have bodies, right? And that actually, We all experience pain and we all experience loss. And part of like that rhetoric is around convincing a bunch of people to deny their own kinds of pain, right, to like to model a kind of a strength in which the reason it's okay to support Trump, even though he actually does nothing to improve the country, is that your dissatisfaction, your pain doesn't matter because you actually are sort of a tool of this operation. You know what I'm saying?

Like, there's a kind of like, there's a, there's a, there's a kind of ask that they make of, of their own people to kind of like deny themselves, like their own humanity and how they kind of approach the world. During Trump 1.0, there was a New York Times piece written. It was like there was some storm down in Florida. And Trump had like done jack shit for people. And the Times reporters like down interviewing Trump supporters who had been like, you know, hurt by the storm.

There's a quote from a woman who says that she was disappointed in Trump because she said, he's not hurting the people he's supposed to hurt. And to me, this was like the Rosetta Stone of Trumpism. Like this is, as you say, like, they can't stop their own mortality, can't stop their own pain. But Donald Trump promises to hurt the people that they hate. That's really good. There's a lot of debate about what Democrats should be calling. for what reforms should look like, how we resolve attention, which is if we are able to

retake power, it will be a great incentive to use the new executive powers to fix what Trump has done, while at the same time collectively understanding that limiting the power of the presidency, returning some prerogatives to the legislature and the courts is a good thing. Pete Buttigieg, I think, said something interesting about this, that you wrote about which is basically some version of there's places where we need to strengthen the presidency. Basically, we need to strengthen it on the stuff you want me to do and we need to weaken it on the stuff you don't want me to do. Like, it has to be stronger going after inequality and fighting the corporations and, but we need

to be, the president should be weaker when it comes to invasions of privacy and violations of the rule of law. Okay, fine. I agree with that. How are you thinking about executive power and like, and what, you? it means sort of post-Trump to kind of protect the country from another one? Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't know the answer. I, you know, I, there are, you can see like three different pathways for this.

And it's not clear to me, which is wisest. There was a bunch of debate about this when, when Biden took office. And he chose to try to like, hey, look, Trump was an aberration. That's not who we are. And what we're going to do is we're just going to go back to being normal and we're going to fake it until we make it. You know what? That wasn't a crazy view. That was not a crazy view.

It was totally defensible. It was a real theory of the case. It did turn out to be wrong, though. And we just need to say that. Like, it was wrong. And it wasn't a little bit wrong. It was a lot wrong. Biden had a successful presidency.

He had a pretty good economy. Unemployment was below 4 percent almost the entire time. He beat COVID. We had about a 13- or 14-month period with very high inflation, but then he achieved a soft landing. I mean, this is as good as gets. We did not have a recession. We did not have a big unpopular foreign war. And at the end of it, people chose Trump again.

Yeah. Even with the, I mean, so Biden's theory of the case was wrong. What could Democrats do if they take power again? Well, they could try some version of we're going to reform everything. And so we're going to go after the big institutional problems, which led to Trumpism. Things like the Supreme Court, things like the electoral college, things like the Senate. They could, instead of that, they could pursue accountability. They could say, look, the system is what the system is.

but we're going to make sure that everybody who broke any law during that period that just happened, whether they were a member of the government doing things that were illegal or whether they were private corporations who were participating in illegal things with, you know, doing frauds and whatnot, everybody pays a price so that people see going forward that if you get another strong man, if you go along with him, there will be consequences, right? That's one thing. or they could say, hey, you know what? People don't care about process.

People don't care about all that stuff. They care about the bottom line. Kitchen table issues, John. And you know what? We're not going to get distracted by worrying about the past and fighting the old fights of the old generation. We're going to look forward to building something new, something that really matters to people's lives.

And look, you know more about Democrats than I do. But my sense is they're going to pick door number three. If they ever get into power again, and I'm like, great. Good luck. Part of it is like I worried about that. I worried that there is going to be polling that says very clearly, you know, some version of do you want to look backwards or do you want to go forwards?

And gosh, I want to go forward. Always. Yep. And that will be a real, there will be a lot of pressure on Democrats to say this. And then you will have the Democrats that are the smart messengers who say some version of, we got to walk at you gum at the same time, you know? They're going to say it on this show. They've said it before.

They'll say it again, John, we've got to walk at you gum at the same time. so we've got to look forward, but also we have to fight for accountability. But all of it to me is avoiding what I think, I think in like in the Democratic heart, right? Like what is what a Democrat, what would what would the kind of engaged Democrats who have kind of been part of this debate for a long time? What are they really, what are they really saying that they want, what they want? Or what I, what I imagine some version of this is what people think we need, but have find it hard to articulate is. We need a period in which we have some version of. another founding, right?

Like we've been through several foundings, we, in which we kind of have a big debate about authority and limits. In that period of friction, there's a lot of room to operate. And then laws and norms kick in and it gets constrained and you get stuck in that for a long time, right? That's what happens after the revolution, the constitution, the civil war, and the civil rights movement. And we're kind of, where maybe we're due.

And what that looks like, right, is to the Buttigieg point, you kind of want a period where you can have a president who can operate like Trump, tear down the ballroom, kind of remove all the executive orders. Oh, you've all come around? You've all come around with me on the ballroom? You know what? I'm going to put your values to the test right now. Would you tear down the new Dulles?

There's a new Dulles? He wants to build the New Dulles Airport. He wants to get rid of the people movers. You're going to tear that down, too? I mean, to what end? Well, it would be another. To what end is this? It would to fix the fact that Dulles sucks.

Is this an infrastructure thing? Yes, he announced. He announced this week a giant plan to, he personally has approved the designs for new terminals at Dulles, which include getting rid of the people movers and a 32,000 foot parking structure. Now, should the president be walking through the details of a new parking structure when we're at war with Iran and have no control of the Strait of Hormuz? No, he should not, but he did do that. Yeah, that's closer to, like, highway planning infrastructure, though.

Like I am not in the like Donald Trump built a Donald Trump's transportation department built a bridge in West Virginia. And so we have to tear that down. That's not where I am. I'm in the the ornaments and the personal monuments to himself, which are things like the arch, the ballroom. Yes. The name on the Kennedy Center. That's that my view is that anything that looks like a presidential palace gets pulled down. Yes.

Because you have to show that there's no throne there. You know, show the name. next guy. Anything that any part of his infrastructure where you could uh imagine Ude and Cousay walking out yes to say hello I think you got a ding ding ding down but but back back on this that that you want to do a court expansion get rid of the filibuster pass some sort of uh you know repeal the big beautiful bill taxes there's a lot of sort of big strong executive leading the Congress towards a singular goal but then and by the way but then at some point you also want to reassert the Justice Department as an independent body, which I think we, at this point, depending on the

court, you have to do through law or constitutional amendment. You want to reassert Congress's prerogatives over the national security state, which requires legislation, maybe at this point also a constitutional amendment. There's a bunch of ways in what you want is a period of time where the Democratic president operates like Trump before a whole set of rules kicks in which there can never be a Trump again, which is exactly the kind of thing. that dictatorships are made of. Right?

Like that, like that's what, you know what I'm saying? Like, that is what people want. And yet what, that is the problem. That is the problem.

And that's the tension. That's what they think they got with Trump. That's, that's the tension. And the other, I mean, there is also a false sense of security here, which is that if the,

if the people in a democracy want a Trump, they will get a Trump, regardless of what Democrats build in the guardrails, right? Because the guardrails are people. And if America wants authoritarianism, it's going to get a, authoritarianism. It's going to get a strongman. So you can't fix that part of it. Right. And so that,

honestly, that does. I was making fun of the, you know, Democrats that just want to look toward the future. Maybe that is the answers. I say, I don't come to you with answers, John. Maybe the answer is you do have to look to the future so that you build something so that people don't think, yes, I want a strong man. Maybe that's, I don't know. To me, that doesn't feel like satisfactory, but that doesn't mean it's, it's not the right answer. Well, there's a there's also, I think, I think your story of Biden, and I am a great critic of Joe Biden is a little, I think it's, it's a little bit overdetermined in that if Joe Biden, Joe Biden's theory, right, was we have to, we have to demonstrate what a democracy should look and sound like. We have to reassert some normalcy. We have to achieve

some big policy goals to demonstrate that government can work. And because there was an insurrection and he's such a pariah, the Republicans will move on and they will have a primary that sits where you end up with someone somewhere between Trump and what Rubio sounded like in 2014. And you kind of muddle through, right? Like, you know, there have been plenty of cases with history where the kind of charismatic leader goes away. And everybody kind of, you don't go back to where you were, but it mattered that there was one charismatic leader. And without them, people kind of go back to old habits. The problem was, to me, two things. One, Joe Biden was way too fucking old.

And as a result, kind of became very, couldn't communicate. And his weaknesses as a leader became evidence of his age. His age became evidence of his weaknesses and became a downward spiral comma for her, for her best efforts, was unable to get out of that for various reasons. The other is you could have had Joe Biden doing exactly what Joe Biden did. and you put Adam Schiff at DOJ instead of Merrick Garland or somebody gave Merrick Garland, you know, some Adderall in his oatmeal every day without his knowledge. And suddenly you have some prosecutions happening faster.

Trump is unable to run for office and the world looks very different. Possible. And I mean, I should say in all this, it is also possible that everything just kind of of fixes itself on its own, right? It's possible that none of the things that we've talked about happen. And yet a decade from now, things aren't worse than they are right now. They may not be a ton better, but like we haven't continued sliding into authoritarianism. We're only like a third of the way there, the way we are now. So like that's also possible. I'm, you know, I'm open to that. I'm open to all possibilities, John. We often find ourselves in the trap of saying,

well, what was the real reason? And what I use is? like murder on the Orient Express. Who did it? All of them did it. Right. And it is. It's Biden was too old. And Trump was charismatic and Merrick Garland didn't act, you know, with enough, enough impetus.

Like, it's all of those things together. But it's also like, and the Supreme Court was pretty clearly going to try to make sure Trump could run again. Like that they wanted Trump to be able to run again. They were going to do whatever they could to do that. Right. And so you are in this, physics people call it a simple complex system. It's not a fully complex. Like complex systems are like ecosystems.

They're gigantic. And they're incredibly resilient. But a government is a simple complex system, which is to say it's like an engineered biosystem. And those sort of things, simple complex systems are actually really delicate. because they don't have all the redundancies and self-governing features built into them that true complex systems have. And I think one of the things we've learned over the last decade is that the American experiment is a simple complex system, not a truly complex system. The guardrails are not real guardrails.

And that if the people go rotten or like sort of lose their minds temporarily or decide they want something bad, they will get it. And, you know, maybe you don't need all the people. Maybe you just need 47% of them distributed in the correct way or something like that. But, you know, they're going to get it. And so I wish I knew what the answer was to all this. Virtue. The answer to this is virtue. Let's let's end by talking about virtue for a moment.

Because I, it's, it does seem to be, you step back from all of this. And it is just a collective, like you can blame the elites, you can blame the voters, whatever you want to do. There is a, there is a sense in which we've just sort of lost a kind of muscle memory for the importance of making virtue a big part of identity. Right? Just like, like I remember when I, there was a, there was something that would happen on sitcoms when I, that was just a part of sitcoms all the time, which was, there was a character who would drive back to the bank with the 20 bucks. They got an extra 20 bucks and that character would always drive back to the bank with 20. And even in that, it was a cheesy thing.

It's obviously a cheesy thing about, but like there is a like kind of and maybe Trump is a reflection of it. He also makes it worse. I think about Fauci when public health officials said, you don't need masks, right? They were doing it because they wanted health in a crisis. They're worried about the health system coming apart. They're worrying about first responders dying of COVID. they're desperate to get those people masks.

And they, and public health had a choice. And the choice was between trusting the American people with the truth or doing a kind of nudge because you want to make sure that the PPE gets to the hospitals. They chose to lie because they didn't, they, because they, not lie, heavily lawyered. I mean, I would say this. So I've done the Fauci thing a whole lot. I know Fauci didn't lie. What Fauci did was a very lawyerly.

depends on what the definition of his is. I, yes. So I want to be clear. Anthony Fauci was somebody that devoted his life to public health. He's being smeared to be blamed for the entire pandemic because these people are being fundamentally dishonest. Donald Trump was president. He was lying the whole time. He was a man that did his best in a massive emergency. And I'm not just saying him. Collectively, the goal was to convince Americans that they did not need masks when they did because, and I think rightly, they knew that if you said to the country, don't buy masks right now, they're life-saving and we need to save them for the people that are in the in the in the shit right now. I don't think that they were wrong, right?

I don't think they were wrong. And that and like and to me like that is at the root of this. Like the, that sort of politicians, not politicians and officials not trusting the voters, the voters not trusting those people in return. I just don't know like the question is what does a virtuous cycle look like? in which you're kind of getting back to a common sense of high trust society versus low trust. I wish I knew. Honestly, I wish I knew, John. Because I think you're right about the general public. But at the same time, the general public is made up of all of those nurses and orderlies and techs and docs and who showed up to hospitals taking care of people.

Especially in New York, I mean, I don't know if people remember. Everybody is like this mass. you know, forgotten, this mass forgetting about COVID because like nobody wants to remember it. But New York looked like fucking doomsday. You know, like there were just like mobile refrigerators with bodies just, you know, stacked inside the alley's outside hospitals. It was like seeing one of these virus movies. And the hospitals were full of people who just went in and tried to save lives and put themselves at risk anyway.

you know, all these essential service workers who were like people who worked at just delivery and logistics, people who worked in grocery stores, you know, checkout lines and stocking things. Like that's true too. Like those people did that. That was virtue. And so it's become so hard to understand. Well, why is it that these people will exhibit such true virtue at the individual level? but then when we ask, do you think people respond collectively in the right way? Or would they have run out and just like hoarding toilet paper every time there's a warning about snowstorms?

And I don't know how to square the circle there. And maybe maybe the answer is like you just have to trust people. And if they make the wrong choice, so be it. And everybody lives with radical candor. I don't know the answers. And I wish I did. I think part of it is. I do think it matters that Donald Trump had been president for several years.

And like he makes these kind of he makes mistrust and cynicism more true of us. And I do think maybe the answer like it's in the same way, why do I think you and Sarah and Tim and others who have had profound disagreements over the years stepped up when others didn't. Well, I think part of it is these virtues aren't just something you believe in. I think everybody would claim to believe in them, they were part of your identity, right? They were part of your identity. And a politics in which Democrats find a way to make those kind of virtues central to how we talk about ourselves, how we talk about what it means to be an American, I do think is kind of points to the way out. Because I think the difference, I do genuinely think the difference is, is what are you? Are you a Republican?

Are you a conservative? Are you a Texan? Are you an American? Are you moral? Are you righteous? Are you honest? Are you somebody that is good at, are you fair dealing, right? Like do you cut lines or do you understand why you shouldn't even when you see others doing

it? Right. Like these kind of simple things are like kind of, I think part of what Trump makes less, less salient to people. And I think maybe that's part of the way, whether inside the Republican Party or in the Democratic party, a return to that kind of. of moral language is maybe part of what has to happen next. Yeah.

And I wish, again, I don't have any of the answers on this stuff. I think a lot about kindness, because kindness is one of these values that sort of sands over vices, you know, like if you can fix kindness as your North Star, that cuts across. You don't have to be, you know, a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or an, like, it's just, it's universal. It everyone understands kindness. And to the extent that we could try to just model that and be me talking about kindness. I know.

It's hysterical. You're rumored to be a very kind person. That's what the rumor is. Don't believe it. I mean, whenever they let you out of that room you're in. But I strive for it, right? I mean, it is something. I think it's something we can all strive.

We can all be aspirationally kind. And maybe that collectively leads us back somewhere less terrible. And I will also just note, too, that, like, in politics, these kinds of virtuous words aren't always going to be on the list of polling questions or the list of topics that rise to the top. But I will remember when Hillary Clinton was campaigning in 2016, and I know every losing campaign did everything wrong and every winning campaign did everything right, and we shouldn't have Pokemon go to the polls.

But when she would say what we need is love and kindness, it was electric. It was the most electric thing that came around her in a campaign that was kind of more in the kind of neoliberal language of kind of technocracy. That idea of kindness did like kind of bring something out of people. So I do think it's a very good place to leave it. Jonathan V. Last, it has been so good talking to you. You know, and I hope you felt I was kind today. This was so great. I loved hanging out.

I would do a show with you. every single week. Holy. You mean Alex Wagner. Wow. This is great. Okay, I got to talk to my bosses. Oh wait.

We're an independent media company. You mean Alex, what are we gonna do? We'll do a show about pinball. Let's go about comic. Let's go on the blower. I'm into it. Whatever you want. Yeah, we can talk about, we can talk about watches too.

Are you a watch guy? I'm a watch guy. I got a, I got a Grand Saco going right now. Oh, which one? It's the, it's the cherry blossoms. It's the cherry blossoms. Oh, the shundland. Oh, you know what?

It's a classic. Grand Seco is a, if you love Grand Seiko, then you really love watches. I'm a nerd. This is, for those, this is a nerds, this is a nerds watch. And it, and nerds stop me on the street because they know, because they know. But everyone was, oh, that's a Seiko. No, no, no, no, my friends. It's a Grand Seiko.

And the story of Grand Seiko. Zaratsu polishing, my friend. And what people don't know is that there was a period of time where Seiko wanted to compete with the Swiss. And so they had two factories, Grand Seiko and King Seiko. And they said, fight to the fucking death boys. And you know what? They did. Grand Seiko won.

It's the Japanese way. It's the Japanese way. Jonathan, it's so good to talk to you. Everybody, go subscribe to the bulwark. Go subscribe to the Triad, his newsletter. And subscribe right here on this channel. Help us build a pro-democracy ecosystem to get good information to people. And that prize is kindness.

How about that? Pod Save America is a Cricket Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Ferris Safari with Reed Erlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt De Groat, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Carol Pelaviv, David Toles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.