Pod Save America - “‘Committee to Save America’ my ass.”

Episode Date: August 21, 2017

White House staffers and Republican leaders debate what to do about Trump as he keeps a shrinking base and loses the rest of the country. Then Politico’s Eliana Johnson joins Jon, Jon, and Tommy to talk about Bannonism, Trumpism, and the future of the Republican Party. 

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. This is a more muted intro. I'm Tommy. Who are you? You're Tommy. I'm David Alan Boucher from Bedtime Magic. On today's show, we will talk to Politico's Eliana Johnson about all kinds of stuff. Bannon, Trump, Breitbart.

Great. Wonderful. Happy stuff. Happy Eclipse Day. Anyone get... That was a totally spontaneous, totally not planned piece of music. You know, I was going to be proud of this podcast for not making eclipse jokes.

I've been complaining about them all morning. But there we go. Here we are. I think that Trump missed an opportunity to tell his supporters that Obama was about to blot out the sun, but that he was going to fix it. Okay. Okay. We'll workshop it. We'll workshop it.

We'll try something. Some people on Twitter will like that. Who cares? Yeah. Anyway, everyone should go listen to Love It or Leave It from Friday. It was the best episode of all time. Oh, really? Well, thank you.

It was a good one. It was a really good one. Many people are saying that. People are liking it. Tim Miller's rants, by the way. Tim was awesome. If you guys haven't checked out The Cuck Zone with Tim Miller. Larry Wilmore was awesome.

Langston Kerman was awesome. Gabby Dunn was awesome. It was definitely one of my favorite shows. So if you were letting Love It or Leave It percolate for a while before you checked it out, check it out. Langston Kerman was awesome. Gabby Dunn was awesome. It was definitely one of my favorite shows. So if you were letting Love It or Leave It percolate for a while before you checked it out, get in there. And tomorrow, Tuesday, Pod Save the People is out. DeRay's talking to former Obama drug czar Michael Botticelli about opioids and the cast of Crown Heights. And Tommy on Pod Save the World this Wednesday. What do we have?

A little preview maybe? We're going to dig into the ongoing crisis in Venezuela. Super uplifting. Cool, cool. Well, the ads will be fun. What a diversity of topics on the Crooked Media podcast this week. The sun ever sets. Okay, let's dive in. It's been about a week since the President of the United States held a press conference

where he angrily defended the, quote, very fine people who marched at a rally organized by white supremacists and neo-nazis in a new yorker piece from yesterday i think david remnick sums up where we are quite well quote this is the inescapable fact on november 9th the united states elected a dishonest inept unbalanced and immoral human being as its president and commander-in-chief, who is daily proven unyielding to appeals of decency, unity, moderation, or fact. And yet here we are, only eight months into our four-year sentence. And there's no way out on, I guess there is a way out on good behavior, but good behavior

of Paul Ryan. I think where we are today is what happens now. Because you could easily see this start turning to, I was saying last week, the next thing, the next crisis. He's got the Afghanistan speech tonight. Congress is going to come back next week. There's a debt ceiling coming toward us. So are we just going to move? We're all going to move past Charlottesville.

We're stuck with this guy. What do we do? One is talk about what the white people in the White House do, then elected Republicans, and then get to the voters. But let us begin with the White House. Mike Allen of Axios talked to senior White House officials about why. Axios. Axios. That's right.

Axios. Axios. Sorry, Axios. Axios. Yes. Our friend Evan Ryan at Axios told us it's Axios. We're going to do Axios. Talk to senior White House officials. Glad we belabored that. Glad we belabored it.

Why supposedly senior, serious, adult, moderate White House staffers like Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, Dina Powell, Steve Mnookin, and others don't quit. He said the most common response was, you have no idea how much crazy stuff we kill. Tommy, do you buy that? No. No, I don't't would you like to talk about

it because it's we're eight months in we've been hearing that same garbage since the muslim ban and there's no evidence of anything crazy that's been stopped the tweets still go out the policies are still happening you know and like what we see every single day is a dysfunctional white house staffed by people that spend more time attacking one another than they do doing any work i mean people are pointing this out uh who used to work for our colleagues like you dan said this last week you never read about like david akkarad being sad and sitting in his office because he didn't get his way because he didn't get right and like so it's i think it's nonsense like i give some space to the national security staff.

I want McMaster there. I want Mattis there. There are some things that those people are probably holding together that are very important. But if you're a political advisor in this White House and you're holding out like Gary Cohn because you want an appointment to the Fed or you think that you need to do a year because that looks good on your resume, you are morally bankrupt. And the way you could help the country and do your duty to the country because you signed an oath not to Donald Trump, you signed an oath to the country you serve would be to step outside the office and tell people what you saw. You can go quietly to Paul Ryan. You could talk to McConnell. You could talk to the newspaper of your choice, except for Breitbart, probably, and tell them what's going on in there

because this man is like temperamentally and morally unfit to be president. And I think that's true to a lot of us. But there's a subset of the country that's not going to believe it coming from anybody but a hardcore Republican. Maybe then they won't still believe it. But like, we have to start talking about that now. Yeah, you know, I am sympathetic. Yesterday when there was this whole thing about Donald Trump yelling, that's too bad about some sailors possibly dying. And Maggie Haberman shared a speech that John Kelly gave about the death of two Marines. And I was reminded that John Kelly's son had died in Afghanistan, and he gave this incredibly moving speech about service. And so I was, and I knew we were going to talk about this today. And so I was thinking about it a lot. And, and I do think that there's like a special dispensation for John Kelly, Mattis, McMaster, who are doing national security. And I've always been a little bit more sympathetic to the we have no idea what they kill argument that people like Dina Powell and Gary Cohn and these others make, although I don't, I think a lot of them are kidding themselves because by the way one of the other things mike allen points out is that they're also there because they think it's good for their careers i go back and forth because i do think and brian boitler wrote about this in the new republic today about if

they're so worried about what donald trump could do to the country their moral obligation is to do something extraordinary right call a press conference the four of them stand side by side and say this man must be removed right right? You know, these people... That would have an effect. Right. And that would have... Don't tell me that wouldn't have an effect. Of course it would have an effect. So people like people... And the other part of this too is... So I have these things side by side, which is I want them to do that. I want them to tell the

truth because these people think they're the committee to save America. But meanwhile, they're not. They're prolonging this presidency. But at the same time, I know that if they were to call that kind of press conference, if the people who are telling Mike Allen privately that this is a disaster and they're saving the country every morning from what Donald Trump would want to do, I know that if they were to go public with that, it would take months for there to be ramifications, if at all. We're relying on other people then to be courageous, too. So I am a little bit more sympathetic. The problem I have is these people want their, they want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be in the white house and get the credit, but then they also want to every single day, make sure the world knows just how conflicted they are, just how much they're afraid

their own reputations are being damaged. And it's like, no, I'm sorry. You don't get to have it both ways. You will be associated with Trump forever. All the parts of it. If you're going to do this, you don't get to complain every day to reporters and outside people and say, everyone stop attacking me. I'm doing my best. You have to take the fucking criticism. So let's just remember, White House senior advisors are admitting to reporters that Trump routinely tries to do shit that's crazier than he's already done. The top officials in the White House are saying this. And like, if this is truly their reasoning, then I expect as 2020 comes onto the horizon that Dina Powell and Gary Cohn and all these people quit the administration and go work for a primary opponent if they really want bad

stuff to happen, because that's the best avenue to do that in 2020 and and listen we are all look it is very clear that a lot of these people are just monitoring what people are saying about them at all times trying to do their best to protect their own reputations because they're inside this this sort of mess and the thing i i was just hey dina pow you chose this. You stepped into a big historic moment. And you did it after a campaign in which all of this was very obvious. So very obvious. You walked in the door and you said you wanted to be part of this big moment in history. And now it's asking something of you.

And it's not clear that you're up to it. Because if you want to stay there and you're saying you're stopping bad things, like you're not done. You don't get to just leak your feelings to Mike Allen. You're going to have to go in front of the cameras and you have to do the right thing. And time is ticking. That's it. Yeah. And half of these people have hired their own PR teams to sell their version of events.

And clearly what they care about is their public reputation and not what's really happening inside. You know, remember, remember Kellyanne Conway getting all upset at Jen Palmieri for saying, are you telling me the campaign I ran was a platform for white supremacists? Like that was some sort of outrageous statement. But then you have Steve Bannon on the way out the door saying he wants Democrats to talk about racism every day because it benefits him politically.

It benefits Donald Trump politically. And I think like the obvious way you need to extrapolate that statement is that's not an observation. It's a future he wants to make happen by like sowing racial discontent through his role at the White House or through Breitbart, his disgusting racist zine that he's now back to running. So like, don't tell me that this isn't something that you guys are pushing and wanting to make happen. It clearly is. For all the record.

For all the talk about Democrats and identity politics, this is now an administration. This is now a right-wing media number of outlets. And through that, the base that is energized by white identity politics. That's what this is. All their other policies, all their other initiatives have fallen short. They don't matter. They don't put a lot of pressure. What gets these people going, what gets Trump going, what gets Bannon going is identity politics. Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, that's not new. This is something that he's been campaigning on. This is what he did as a real estate person. This is what he did when he was campaigning against the Central Park

Five. And it's what he did when he campaigned against Obama and made himself a birther. But the other part of this, I just I don't know. I want to want to say one more thing about like these people inside the White House and how they handle this. This is new, right? No one's ever been asked to serve for Donald Trump as president before. No one. These are all people facing a moral test that they've never anticipated, never thought they'd face. And so I am sympathetic to that. I am sympathetic to the feeling that you have an obligation to prevent some of these things from the inside. And I understand being worried about your own reputation in the process. Like, I am sympathetic to that. So I guess it's just like Charlottesville and what Donald Trump

has said, even after John Kelly was supposed to fix things, right? You guys that are these people that are inside the White House, like, I understand how you got to this point, but leaking to Mike Allen that you're worried is just not enough. That's all I want to say about it. Yeah. Committed to save America, my ass. All right. Episode title.

In a great piece, Dan Balls of the Washington Post says that Republican lawmakers and leaders are caught between disgust over his failure to unequivocally condemn neo-Nazism, a desire to advance a conservative agenda, and fears of rupturing the Trump-GOP coalition ahead of 2018 elections. So let's talk about elected Republicans, lawmakers, leaders in the country go beyond the White House. Tommy, what'd you take away from this piece? I thought it was, I mean, Dan Balz is one of the best reporters in the business, so you should always read what he does, especially his step-back analysis pieces. best reporters in the business. So you should always read what he does, especially his step back analysis pieces. I mean, I think it was a it was something we probably all sort of intuitively knew, which was that the base of the party is all in with Trump still, despite all that you hear us

talk about on the show and all the sort of concerns about Charlottesville and everything else. But that there's an elect there's leaders who are a little more thoughtful and a little more engaged and a little more sort of cognizant of the norms and standards that a president should meet that are concerned about him and broader subset of the population to move. Because I think those people who are hardcore Trump folks will only listen to Republican voices criticizing him. They will only start to turn if we can get some additional senior, serious Republicans moving away from him and defecting. Because a guy wrote an op-ed over the weekend in the New York Times, defecting because, you know, a guy wrote an op-ed over the weekend in the New York Times, and he's like some Harvard educated blogger who decided to write a policy magazine about Donald Trump.

Like, oh, that guy left Trump. Well, that guy should have been smart enough to know that he was a racist to begin with when he said a Mexican judge couldn't rule against him because of his race. Right. So, like, I could care less what those people think. I do think we need to find some way to break into the closed ecosystem of Fox News and Breitbart and Facebook and however people are getting their information that are not, like, following this stuff minute to minute. Yeah. It made me realize that a lot of these Republican elected Republicans are sort of in a way in terms of their relationship with the base caught between Trump's megaphone and the Fox Breitbart

megaphone. And so like they they don't know what if they wanted to go against Trump. Right. Which some of them do. Maybe they're going to go against their base and they can. And so they have also made a fairly cowardly decision in that either a they're there because they really want to get their tax cuts and they really want to get a repeal of Obamacare and other conservative priorities. Or B, they just really want to keep their job in 2018.

A political cowardice. Right, a political cowardice. Now, the one thing that may change this calculation is Trump failed to repeal Obamacare so far. We have yet to see how the tax reform debate goes. If they don't get their conservative priorities, does it make it more likely that then they go against Trump? Well, that's half the calculus, right? Getting things done for themselves. But at the same time, these guys have been stoking this base for 30 years.

stoking this base for 30 years. For 30 years, they have been gathering these people in a coliseum and saying, we're going to get some blood. These lions are going to kill these Christians. It's going to be fucking awesome. And you guys are going to love it. And we're all going to love it. And these Christians are going to die in this coliseum.

And then all of a sudden, they woke up this morning and they got walked out into the center of the coliseum and they're like, oh no. They like woke up this morning and they got walked out into the center of the Coliseum and they're like, oh, no, I think this I didn't really think it would get this far. So, you know, they're they're stuck. I mean, they don't know what to say. They have been looking the other way or fully embracing this kind of politics for so long. And now all of a sudden it's like the the gimbals loose and the guns firing all over and it's starting to hit them and they don't know what to do. They just don't know what to do.

And they're probably thinking of themselves. Do you think I needed that second analogy? Probably not. I think the more analogies, the better. That's what they say. So, look, now I lost my train of thought. No, okay. So the question is, what could they do?

In a better world here where these people showed courage, what could they do? I guess they could censure Trump, they could try to impeach him, but like, what specifically are you impeaching him over now? They've got the guts to name him when they criticize him. So there you go. All this cowardly sub-tweeting stuff, like, racism is bad and all of us, all of us should be

able to say it. You are so feckless and pathetic, Paul Ryan. Yeah, I have to say, Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio did the right thing. We've had this debate before. Who is at the bottom of the barrel? Marco Rubio or Paul Ryan? The answer is Paul Ryan.

The answer is Paul Ryan because he is more interested in tweeting out his dumb, fake tax reform bullshit. Marco Rubio has more courage than Paul Ryan. Hey, Paul Ryan, you have less courage than Marco fucking Rubio. I think the thing that everyone should remember, Paul Ryan. 11%, right? But the polling over the weekend in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin shows him well underwater, approval between 34 and 36%. And that large majorities of people are embarrassed by him. 64% say they're embarrassed by him versus 28% who feel proud of

Trump. The thing that seems to be holding him up is that he's doing okay still with his economic argument, which to me is exactly where we should go after. So let's talk about this public opinion stuff, because there's sort of conflicting reports here. So in that Dan Ball's piece, you have a Republican strategist who's working campaigns in red and purple states said that while support for Trump generally declined overall since Charlottesville slightly support rose among his base after a decline last month because of the failure of health care and Russia revelation. So it's interesting that the health care failure and to some extent Russia depressed his base support. But the Charlottesville response increased base supports, which tells you something very

scary, sad, frightening about the Trump base right now. Yes. But I also think a piece of that is yes there is some racial element to his base and i will never deny that but i also think a lot of it is just trolling the mainstream it is like telling the press to shut up telling washington they're wrong yeah never backing down like that there's a piece of liking trump that is just about being a troll i agree with that and And then the New York Times did their 55th story where they go interview a bunch of Trump supporters who say they still support him.

I had to say these pieces. Look, there is there is value in talking to people around the country who voted for Trump, who are on the fence about Trump, stuff like that. But what they do. So this piece features, the person they talk to that they feature in the piece is a 35-year-old African-American woman from Boston, right? She talks about how this whole debate is silly, she still supports Trump, all this kind of stuff. What they don't say is that this woman was a Trump delegate at the Republican convention.

Like, you couldn't find someone who wasn't a Trump delegate. A Trump fucking delegate at the Republican convention. Like, you couldn't find someone who wasn't a Trump delegate. A Trump fucking delegate at the Republican convention is still going to be for Trump. If they're not, that's when we go to what Tommy was just saying, where we're down to like 11%, and that's just not going to happen. So what is the use of talking to that woman? She's also been profiled

so many times because she's an African-American woman from Boston who supports Trump. And so, by all of those qualities together, she is an outlier. She is a rare case, not to mention the fact that she's a delegate to Trump. Anyway, I look forward to the article that's about, I never supported Trump because he's obviously terrible. And I stand by that position. Part seven. The real problem with these Trump supporters still with Trump pieces and their prevalence everywhere is it makes everyone else think nothing really matters, nothing changes. But then you see the Marist poll that Tommy just cited, right? Like he is 36, 35, 34% in the three states where 72,000 votes,

78,000 votes, whatever it was, made him president of the United States. That's really bad. Yeah. And just to that point, I think that there's this kind of, I don't know, professional cynicism that's been aided by the fact that Donald Trump became president. And so, like, obviously, Trump winning was a great, great reward to the cynics and fairly so. But these like won't matter to his base, won't matter to these people. None of this matters. You guys are going to lose again, that kind of thing. And it's like, well, guys, it's not an on off switch. We don't have to win them all. We have to turn a couple dials, right? He has to lose some of the people that were soft. We have to gain some more people who didn't turn out, right? So, like, these changing dynamics do matter, right? It's never going to be a night and day difference where all of a sudden he's lost people, but we just have to do a little bit better than we did before. Well, and to that point, you know, some people said about the Marist poll, well, Donald Trump's approval was underwater in those states when he won the presidency. And that's true. But they also tested congressional preference in those states. Democrats are ahead of Republicans by 13 points in Michigan, 10 points in Pennsylvania,

and eight points in Wisconsin. Now, this is a little misleading to just do general congressional preference in these states, because it's statewide, right? So that basically tells you that in the governor's races for those states, which are incredibly important, and they all have governors up in 2018, the Democrats are in really good shape. Congressional districts are tougher because they're more gerrymandered. And so if you went congressional district by congressional district, you might not get numbers that good for the Democrats. So that is something to think about. But to your other point about we only need some of these voters, Nate Cohn of the New York Times did a piece a couple of days ago where he argues

that the voters who switched from Obama to Trump were decisive, particularly among non-college educated voters and particularly in the states that made Trump president, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio. The question is, can we win them back? So Nate has basically good news and bad news. Bad news is the big chunk of those Obama Trump voters who now identify as Republicans, who basically switched their party self-identification and the ones who voted for Trump because of racial resentment, which was a good chunk, were probably not getting back. But about 30 percent of those voters still identify as Democrats. These are the people who voted for Trump but also voted for Jason Kander, for Duckworth, for Feingold, for Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania, all of whom ran ahead of Hillary Clinton. And I thought the most interesting point that he makes is Tammy Duckworth won the 12th district in Illinois, which is a downstate working class district held by a Republican congressperson by nine points and Trump won it by 12 points.

So in a year in 2016 where Trump won. It's a huge swing. It's a huge swing. Huge number of people with split tickets. Hillary Clinton lost that district by 12 points and Tammy Duckworth won it by 9 points. Man. A lot of opinions on that. I'm just, you know, it's, and these voters tend to support abortion rights, same-sex marriage, higher minimum wage.

So these are actually, because there's this whole debate. Do we go after the Obama-Trump voters or is that ridiculous and a lost cause and we've got to go after third party voters and boost turnout? And I think the answer is both, right? Right. Right. That's interesting. That speaks to you how to go after Obama-Trump voters with, it's obvious when you All right. So we're going to talk to Eliana Johnson about Bannon and what's next, but I thought we would talk a little bit about it first. So the interesting Vanity Fair piece where Bannon goes off and, you know, he says that Jared is a dope.

He believes that Jared Kushner is a dope, which is funny. Bannon is right. Bannon hates everybody, but he's right about some of the people he hates. That's true. He wants to take down, he's got two sources of enemies here, two sets of enemies he wants to take down from the outside now. One set is the globalists, as he calls the globalists, Gary Cohn, Kushner, Ivanka. The other are the hawks, as he calls the hawks, which is McMaster, Dina Powell.

So tonight, Trump is giving his speech about a new strategy in Afghanistan. It seems like from what's leaked out about the strategy that Bannon has lost this battle. He wanted more of a drawdown. And now Trump is... He didn't want to draw down. I mean, you talk about the point of I mean, the question of like, will it make a difference if Bannon now that Bannon is gone? I think we don't know. I mean, I think my fundamental take home is that the problem with this White House is Trump and nothing will change until he is gone. But there is an old cliche that that personnel is policy that has a

lot of truth to it, I think, because a lot of stuff doesn't get to the president. And policies get made and implemented in ways that are that are very important. But so but this is a unique example, like Bannon was an outsized voice in foreign policy, in a way that would have gotten us savaged in the Obama White House, like David Axelrod went to a couple meetings on Afghanistan, and it was seen as some huge breach of faith with the nsc bannon was trying to push to send in no new troops pull all our guys out and send in blackwater to afghanistan a a paid for militia force that he wanted to send over there so that's completely i think everyone thought that was crazy but he made an end run to try to get eric prince ahead of black Blackwater, to come to this national security meeting at Camp David over the weekend.

Like that's the kind of stuff you read about and you think, OK, thank God that guy is out of the building. Is that an idea, like sending private security troops or contractors or whatever they are into a country where it works? Does that have any kind of legitimacy among foreign policy folks? Or what is that? I couldn't... There are private security forces that will, like, provide security to personnel that are in country that need, like, motorcades and, you know, logistical support. But the idea that you would pay a bunch of mercenaries, like 3x what we pay U.S. service

members to go in and take out al-Qaeda or the Taliban, I think is that shit crazy. So what do you think about the plan that you heard that has leaked for tonight? It sounds like he's going to send another three, 4,000 troops. I don't think we know yet. I mean, if you think back to when Obama took office, there were 30,000. We surged up to 100,000. We're down to 8,400. So, you know, another three or 4,000, like, I don't. We surged up to 100,000. We're down to 8,400. So another 3,000 or 4,000, I don't know that that's going to make much of a difference. They're leaking that their goal is to not lose it. It's not to win the war, which is a pretty stark thing to tell Axios, along with everything else they tell them every day. So I don't know.

What is the situation on the ground in Afghanistan right now? What does it look like? It's just, we are losing ground. I mean, I think 57% of districts is the situation on the ground in Afghanistan right now? What does it look like? It's just we are losing ground. I mean, I think 57% of districts in the country are under Afghan government's control as of November 2016, which is a 15% decrease from the previous year. So the challenge is you have the Taliban there that's like sort of an indigenous force that has been a part of the country forever and it's probably not going to go anywhere. forever, and it's probably not going to go anywhere. And we tried to, you know, fight them and kill them into negotiating a peaceful solution, but it never happened. And it didn't happen with 100,000 troops. And it doesn't seem like they're creating any of the kind of context you need to provide for that long-term political situation. We've been there 16 years. In two years, there will be troops there who weren't alive on 9-11. Just think about that. It's the craziest thing.

Such a long war. 18 years. The longest war. Our longest. It's an interesting decision for Trump to do a primetime address on this, right? Very strange. Because it's not like it's going to be a popular policy. It's not popular really among his base or our base to commit the United

States to a longer war. It is more of a, probably the hawk's position here. And they're using a primetime address. His first primetime address as president. I think that there is a cynical need for him to remind everybody that he is still actually president. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, also, you know, Dave, when Obama went through this long review where we were considering sending like tens of thousands more troops, you know, there was a, it was a months long process that we were attacked for dithering and taking too long. And he's been sitting on this decision for like six months and now there's something like maybe 4,000 troops. I mean, it's, it's, it does seem like they are taking a huge messaging event to roll out something that's ultimately very small.

Okay. When we come back, we will talk to Politico's Eliana Johnson about Steve Bannon and more. On the pod today, we have Politico's Eliana Johnson. Eliana, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So let's talk about our friend Steve Bannon. Good friend of yours, I know. Good friend of the pod.

He'll be launching a pod with us soon. So did Bannon create the Trump bandwagonagon or did he jump on it after the primary i know this has been a debate obviously between trump and bannon and some other people but uh what are your thoughts on this from your reporting i think it neither really but what i do think is that um at breitbart bannon um identified a group uh an audience and then a group of voters that became Trump voters, and he very effectively turned them into a pretty potent political force. So in the years before Trump launched his campaign in June of 2015, Bannon and Breitbart were launching anti-free trade missives and leading the immigration restrictionist movement,

and there was sort of a triangle outside of the Fox News echo chamber that consisted of Breitbart News, Laura Ingraham's radio show, and the office of then-Senator Jeff Sessions. And it really created a large audience that turned into a political force, I think, most visibly with the defeat of then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. And I think that was the moment when Republicans, Republican lawmakers, realized that they had to take these political views seriously, both the anti-free trade sentiment,

this protectionist sentiment, and immigration restrictionism. These views had seemed like fringe elements of both, I think, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party constituency, and they were dismissed. I mean, Paul Ryan led immigration reform. On the right, Mitch McConnell, I think, you know, broadly favors it or is indifferent to it. But they realized when Cantor was defeated that they really had to take this constituency seriously. And of course, it really reared its head when Trump ran for president and blew all of the other candidates out of the water. So I would say that Trump, having mocked Mitt Romney for being mean, for having a mean attitude

towards immigrants, really ran to the front of a parade that Bannon created. Nonetheless, I do think Trump has been consistent in terms of his views on trade. So these are very real views. But Bannon had done a lot of work in terms of creating and shoring up a movement before Trump decided to jump into politics. So Bannon's left that went out the door. Someone from Breitbart tweeted war, I believe was the sole tweet. He's talking about how he built the machine and now he's got, you know, back at war with a to fight for Trump or whatever. There's a lot of speculation that he is going to

go back to the Mercers, his billionaire benefactors, and build a TV station that could rival Fox News. How much of this do you think is likely to happen versus the bluster and spin of a man who just got booted out of a job after seven months or eight months and humiliated? I'm more bearish on Bannon in that I think that there's not going to be all that much difference in what he does outside the White House versus what he was doing inside the White House. I think just like he was attacking Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump and Gary Cohn and the so-called globalists from inside the White House, he'll do the exact same thing outside the White House. Maybe he will launch a rival TV network to Fox.

But, of course, that comes at a point when Fox News is flailing, and I'm not sure that there's not already some sort of an opening for that. But in many ways, I think there's a big misconception when it comes to Trump that his head is sort of this battlefield where the extremists on the one hand and the globalists or the moderates do battle. And on each issue, one side or another wins out. I think it's important for people to realize that the president has political instincts. He has views on certain issues. On the Paris Climate Accord, for example, people called it a win for Steve Bannon. that the president has political instincts. He has views on certain issues. On the Paris Climate Accord, for example, people called it a win for Steve Bannon, but I really think there was about, you know, 1% to 5% chance that the president was going to get out of that.

It really wasn't a win for Steve Bannon. It was just an issue on which they happened to see eye to eye. And so I'm skeptical that Steve Bannon will really do all that much more damage, quote-unquote, that Steve Bannon will really do all that much more damage, quote unquote, or launch some sort of huge war, unparalleled war outside of the White House. I really see it more as a continuing, that he'll be more public in terms of his attacks on his former colleagues now that he's outside than he was when he was on the inside. So I think there's been a lot of talk about the sort of infighting between the globalists and Bannon, obviously. And it's been cast as the moderates versus the more extreme right, the elements like Stephen Miller and Bannon, who, you know, who are not whatever, who's ascendant,

who's up, who's down, whatever. But there's also, you know, that feels like a little bit a nuance in that there's also a divide between Bannon and mainstream Republicans, right? That Bannon takes a more kind of almost Democratic line on things like infrastructure. Where do you see that divide playing out between, like, the Fox News Republicans or the Paul Ryan Republicans and Steve Bannon? Like, where does, how does that daylight play out now? Yeah, that's a really good question. In many ways, I think Fox News has drifted more towards the Bannon wing. And in that sense, it's certainly Roger Ailes led it that way because he was a champion of Trump and Trump's candidacy,

though he had an ongoing rivalry with and did not like Steve Bannon. and did not like Steve Bannon. But, you know, the mainstream Republican Party, I think the rank and file favor immigration reform. It remains a free trade party. But I think Trump's candidacy, Trump brought many voters, formerly Democratic voters, blue-collar whites, really, into the Republican Party who are skeptical of free trade and who care much more, for example, about limiting immigration, building a wall on the southern border, than they do about reforming entitlements. And when you think of Paul Ryan, who really has been the darling of the Republican donor class, he doesn't care about immigration.

about immigration he's all about i can i mean you guys are prime sir familiar with the ad that during the obama administration portrayed paul ryan throwing a granny off a cliff in a wheelchair as might the way i try to characterize it in in my mind is a paul ryan stands for you know what health care and more immigration trump stands for exactly the opposite which is you know more health care despite what he did on health care i don't think he cared about it all that much uh... but you know more health care, despite what he did on health care. I don't think he cares about it all that much. But, you know, more health care, less immigration.

He doesn't care about entitlement reform. He campaigned against reforming entitlements. But he cares a whole lot about borders, culture, and so on. So these two things are at odds, and I think that's why there's a tremendous amount of disunity and debate in the party. And the way that that – I don't think it's clear which way the party will go, though Trump stands atop the party right now. And I think that's why there's so much disunity and debate within the party. I don't think the Democratic Party is united in

any way, but I think that is what the Republican Party is grappling with right now. Well, it's interesting you said that about, you know, more health care and less immigration, because he certainly campaigned, and Bannon wanted him to campaign as an economic populist to sort of match the nativism, right? But he hasn't delivered on any of the economically populist priorities

that, you know, he supposedly talked about in the campaign, and he sort of let Paul Ryan and a lot of the more free market conservatives just sort of run roughshod over him. Mulvaney running the budget is a good example, too. So do you think that, like, the Bannon types are concerned or think that he would be more, he would have been more politically effective

in a better political position right now if he had done things like an infrastructure plan or maybe not tried to dismantle Obamacare or protect entitlement or stuff like that? I do. I think there's a big constituency, and I think it probably includes Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, that are sort of puzzled why he led with health care rather than infrastructure. Because I was at National Review right up until the election, and I remember the editors there saying that they were totally prepared for Trump to start with immigration. And Republicans, though they're instinctually opposed to sort of a big infrastructure bill, they were basically ready to get behind something like

that because they did think it was something that would get the Trump presidency off on the right foot. And Paul, you know,itch mcconnell had talked about essentially giving the president a six-month grace period and it does seem like he sort of squandered that and i remember that there being a lot of talk at national review about how this election had revealed that um republican conservative right of center voters are much less economically or fiscally conservative than they once thought, and a bit more socially or culturally conservative, particularly on the issue of immigration, which is the opposite of the way that traditionally Republican candidates have campaigned. You think of them as being kind of afraid to touch social issues, certainly in

Republican leadership, but not at all afraid to say that they're going to cut your taxes. Just stepping back a little bit about the future of the party, when you talked about your time in National Review, I read a piece over the weekend by Alex Perrine that made me nervous. He pointed out that a lot of these individuals you're seeing in Charlottesville or the so-called alt-right are in members of college Republicans. One was, I believe, the head of the college Republicans at Reno or at least a member of it, and that they are the Republican Party is struggling among the millennial generation. And his point is some of these folks are going to be the future leaders of the party and

are likely to pull the party to the right. Do you think that there's truth to that? Is that something to be concerned about going forward for the country, for the party? I don't think it's clear at all where the party's going to go, and I think there's a real absence of thought leadership in the party. Like, when you look at, there was a reform-a-con movement. It obviously still exists, but that was something that was on the front pages of, you know, the New York Times. And I remember there being a,

you know, probably 10,000 word New York Times Magazine story about it that seems not to have taken hold at all. They have no traction in the Trump White House. And the formerly elite journals of the conservative movement, like National Review and the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal editorial page seem to have been totally marginalized by the Trump presidency in favor of the Breitbarts of the world, which now enjoy the direct line to power that, say, a National Review or Wall Street Journal editorial page used to enjoy, but they don't seem at all to be capitalizing on that. So it's just not clear to me what's going to replace, you know, what was sort of the William F. Buckley Jr., you know, line of conservative thought going forward. And I do think, you know, I don't think it's about

old people or young people or anything like that. There just seems to me to be an enormous vacuum in terms of thinking on the right, in terms of what's conservative foreign policy. Health care really brought this to light, and I don't think Trump was wrong to be frustrated with Mitch McConnell when he said, you've got seven years to get a plan, and there isn't one on my desk. But, you know, in absence of thinking around around healthcare policy, or at the very least, because there were a lot of plans out there, but a failure of Republican lawmakers to take the issue seriously and be ready when the time comes

on things like that. So, let's talk about this sort of intellectual vacuum for a second, because you did come from National Review, And National Review was famously, you know, was it came out against Trump. And I think it's fair to say is an intellectual home for never Trumpers, even if there are people that write there that write in favor of Trump or defend Trump. I feel like you see two different assaults on intellectual conservatives. And I think it's one from the left and one from the right. From the right, there's obviously we see Breitbart, we see the rise of Trump, we see the sense that this conservative intellectual movement was ineffective. Whether they lacked ideas or not, they clearly couldn't move the party to stop Donald Trump from happening. And then from the left, I think there's an argument that goes something like,

this is actually just removing the shroud that this conservative intellectualism was always a cover for racism from the Southern strategy to Willie Horton to Donald Trump today. And that that's good that that's been exposed, that there wasn't much to this, to the beginning. What do you say to that criticism? And I know that's a lot. And I guess I guess what I'm getting to is like, what makes you hopeful inside the conservative movement right now? The criticism, I think, is a potent one because it is, in fact, true that Buckley and Goldwater and some of the lodestars of conservatism were wrong on civil rights. Goldwater, of course, in his business and in his personal life was right on the issue, but in terms of public policy, he was wrong. And when you see younger people learning about it, my friend Matt Continetti, who runs the Washington Free Beacon and tries to train conservative reporters, he wrote a great column

about teaching kids about conservatism and how they're really disturbed to learn these things, and it is an obstacle to overcome when teaching, you know, 19, 20-year-olds about this stuff. But Buckley's stance, certainly, and it's something that the people on the left are just, you know, middle-of-the-road journalists when writing about this have used to level this accusation. I think it remains as a stain on the movement, and it's something that Buckley, of course, recanted and said publicly that he was wrong about.

And, you know, there were, of course, a lot of Democrats who were wrong on the issue as well. But I don't think there's a canon of liberal thought that's quite the same as the canon of conservative thought. So it does, it is easier to use as a mark against the movement. So I think you're right in that sense. However, I just don't see any continuity because Trump is not particularly ideological. I don't see any continuity between his, you know, quote unquote, thinking and the people around him and sort of the conservative movement, which I do think I have to say, like my tendency is to think that I think the Buckley-era conservatism has run its course, and there has to be something else to take its place on the right, which I think will be good for the country one way or another.

I think it's good for the country to have two healthy political parties, and the Republican Party is not healthy right now. On that note, we will let you go. Thank you, Eliana Johnson, for joining us. And come back again. This was a good conversation. Thanks, note, we will let you go. Thank you Eliana Johnson for joining us. And come back again. This was a good conversation. Thanks, guys. Alright, take care. Let's break down the conservative media together. Okay, that's

our show for today. Thank you, Eliana Johnson from Politico for joining us. We gotta go look at the eclipse. Okay. There you go. You know how Lovett likes to drag out the outros? Yeah.

She was like, I need to do that. Enough with the song, Bell. I do have one thing we should say. Okay, you do and then I have one thing. We like to raise up great organizations that are doing important work. One we'd like to talk about today is called Sleeping Giants. Check them out on Twitter or Facebook. At Sleeping Giants.

S-L-P-N-G underscore Giants or something. Whatever they do. They're informing advertisers when their ads show up on Breitbart and they've been doing it for over 10 months. That's because something called programmatic advertising, they don't even know their ads are up there without their knowledge. Basically you're accidentally funding bigotry. Uh, so what you can do is follow them on Twitter and you can take screenshots of companies that are advertising on Breitbart and help share them with those companies. They've gotten 2,500 advertisers to pull their ads from Breitbart since starting this effort.

And it's an important group as Steve Bannon goes back into the mothership and decides to double down on peddling hate. Excellent. And one last thing. Our old buddy and former Obama campaign and White House alum Ronnie Cho is running for city council in New York City. District 2 includes the East Village, Union Square, Gramercy Park. Ronnie started as one of the first Obama field

organizers in Iowa. Iowa, baby. With Tommy way back in the day. He was there first, and now he's one of the many Obama alums running for office. Love Ronnie. Get him, Ronnie. So anyway, the Democratic primary in New York City is three weeks away. Tuesday, September 12th. Close race. Go to RonnieCho.com. Make a donation. Help him out. Give him some cash. Get him, Ronnie. So anyway, the Democratic primary in New York City is three weeks away, Tuesday, September 12th. Close race.

Go to RonnieCho.com, make a donation, help him out. Give him some cash. If you know Ronnie. Give him 10 bucks. Or if you're just a friend of the pod in New York City. Give him some scratch. All right, guys. And now, we are going to go try to catch the eclipse. Goodbye, everybody.

The eclipse of the heart. Check out the video. The total eclipse of the heart