Pod Save America - “Trump Mini-Me’s and Wannabe’s.”

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

Democrats look to the midterms as they prepare to pass most of Joe Biden’s agenda in one bill, while Republicans believe that their path to victory runs through Donald Trump. Then, The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer talks to Dan Pfeiffer about his new book, The Cruelty Is The Point.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Democrats have an eye on the midterms as they prepare to pass most of Joe Biden's agenda in one giant bill. While Republicans seem to believe that their path to victory runs right through Donald Trump. Then the Atlantic's Adam Serwer is here to talk to Dan about his new book, The Cruelty is the Point. But first, don't miss this week's Hysteria, where Aaron and Alyssa are joined by Tien Tran and Jalissa Arce to discuss this year's controversy-ridden Olympic Games, the IOC's problematic rules, and how we can continue to support our favorite athletes. And check out this week's episode of Keep It, where Black Widow star David Harbour stops to talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, mentoring the Stranger Things kids, and even his relationship with singer Lily Allen.

Big shows this week. Big shows. All right. Let's get to the news. Because we love you, we are not going to depress you with another conversation about Joe Manchin and the filibuster and all the shit that Congress can't seem to get done. We are instead going to focus on the good news. can't seem to get done. We are instead going to focus on the good news. In addition to the bipartisan infrastructure deal, which the White House apparently refers to as the BIF internally,

we have learned, Democrats now seem to be united around the need to pass a budget reconciliation bill that spends at least $2 trillion on climate, health care, child care, education, housing, and more, all paid for by raising taxes on corporations and the 1%. The president tried to drum up excitement for his agenda in a barn burner of a speech in Crystal Lake, Illinois on Wednesday. Here he is just selling the hell out of this plan. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I know that's a boring speech, but it's an important speech. Every speechwriter's dream ad lib, Dan. The end of a speech. I know that's a boring speech. Thanks, boss. So I want to start with the policy here before moving on to the politics, because I think this reconciliation bill has the potential to be the most progressive, transformative piece of legislation since the New Deal or the Great Society.

I think it deserves a lot more excitement and attention than it's getting. Am I wrong? What do you think? I'm going to need you to re-ask the question because I fell asleep when you said reconciliation, Bill. I know. We got to figure out number, step number one. We got to figure out the branding here because we got like, we now we've got the BIF floating around. We've got the, and I think a lot of people don't understand this.

And I also don't blame them. We've got the American Families Plan, the American Jobs Plan. Some of it ended up in the BIF. And now all of the leftover stuff we're trying to package into something that everyone's calling the Budget Reconciliation Bill, which no one probably has any fucking idea what that means. So understood if you're not either if you're not excited or you don't quite get what's going on. You know, I'm glad to talk about this with you, the author of many boring but important speeches, something that Barack Obama thought, but kindly, I guess, did not say out loud. He would say, he would say, he would say, I think that was a good speech. It was, it was workmanlike.

Workmanlike, yes, yes. Or he would say, or the other thing he would say, if it was a speech that you know he didn't like, he would say, this was serviceable. Yes, workmanlike and serviceable are the faint praise that Barack Obama will damn you with. Also, you're competent. That was competent. I never got that one. I never got that one. A competent messenger,

a competent communications professional. Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right, that's right. This is a mess messaging wise, but it's not a mess of the White House's making, right? I know you said we were not gonna talk about your mention of Kyrsten Sinema, but you cannot ask questions about them. It doesn't mean I can't answer some of my answers.

I didn't wanna focus on them. I didn't wanna focus on another round of how it passes, who does what, all that kind of shit. Basically, we had to negotiate this topic because if we were going to talk about infrastructure, the only way we would agree to do it would be if we did not talk about life in the mansion cul-de-sac. But for the

purposes of unpacking this messaging mess, no one would, from a political storytelling perspective, no one would ever design this two-step process this way, where you would do this bipartisan bill that was good by any in large, by any normal definition, but did not include the most exciting parts of your agenda. And you would not have to have a debate about where and when you would, what the sequence would be and all of that. Like that's not how it would be. And it's just like you and I know this,

that if you're in a White House messaging meeting and the head of the alleged affairs office walks in, you're fucked. It's over. You're no longer doing the thing that your experience, instincts and the polling says you should do, what makes the most sense, instead of developing a story that resonates with swing voters in Wisconsin or base voters in Georgia or anything like that, you're now being forced to talk in a way that keeps some number of the problem solvers caucus on board. You are solving a micro-legislative problem with a macro messaging. I think this will get better when we know what's in the reconciliation package.

The problem right now is there's a specific, and I said the word reconciliation, so I got to put two quarters in the jargon jar. I don't know. Look, we're taking suggestions, send them in. What are we going to call this thing? We're taking suggestions. I mean, it should just be the American Jobs Plan. We should just call it the American Jobs Plan. But there's also the American Families Plan, which is going to be a lot of it. That's fine, right? Combine them, right? How about the American jobs and family plan? Jobs and families plan. The AJFP. Yeah, it should never be the AJFP. And I also understand that as someone who thought ARRA for stimulus was terrible and ACA for Affordable Care Act was terrible. But you got

to write a lot of fucking emails in the White House and having to write those things out is exhausting and you end up with the biff. That's how it happens. Got it. But once you have an actual thing to sell that is the larger, more progressive, more transformative, more popular bill, it's going to help a lot.

Because right now it's specific thing here, which is good, but not super exciting. And then other vague thing, which could be between $2 trillion and $6 trillion, could include this, could include that. We don't know. The other hard part to disentangle here is, you know, you have Biden and Secretary Buttigieg and other people running around the country selling the bipartisan infrastructure framework. Also, get framework out of your language. Framework is a terrible term.

Horrible. Right. Deal. Infrastructure is a terrible word. I mean, we are so far fucking over the Rubicon with bad words, right, in this legislative process. Get, you're selling this thing, and one of your major selling points for it

is bipartisanship. Like, they are going around, it's important, it shows that we major selling points for it is bipartisanship. Like they are going around. It's important. It shows that we can work together. It's progress to build on. And then on this other track, you're trying to pass this other thing that is also very popular with bipartisan groups of voters, but that is lacking the number one selling point of part one.

And so it is a mess. It is a mess because you're trying to pass a bill, not tell a story. And hopefully you can pass the bill and then tell the story. But this is why presidential approval ratings tend to go down the more enmeshed in legislative wrangling they get. I just want to point out a few policies that could end up in this bill, I just want to point out a few policies that could end up in this bill, each of which would be a huge deal on its own. Much of Biden's climate agenda, which would achieve net zero carbon emissions by no later than 2050, that was his campaign plan. Unlikely, he gets all of it into the reconciliation bill.

He got a little bit into the bipartisan infrastructure framework, and then hopefully he gets the rest of the climate stuff into this reconciliation bill. I think chances of that are relatively good since so many Senate Democrats are saying no climate, no deal. I think Bernie Sanders, who's going to be writing the bill as the chairman of the Budget Committee, is going to make sure there's a lot of climate stuff. We could get a renewable, a clean energy standard, renewable energy standard in there, which would be gigantic, transformative. So climate, huge. A permanent child tax credit, which is basically social security for kids, would cut child poverty in half. We have that now, thanks to the American Rescue Plan, cut child poverty in half over the course of a year. But if we make this permanent, that is essentially creating social security for kids forever. That is a huge achievement on its own. Lower health care premiums and cheaper prescription drugs, hugely popular. Two years of free community college, universal preschool, universal paid family and medical leave, one of the only countries without that,

and then affordable care for children, for seniors, and for people with disabilities. That is a huge policy agenda. People have fought so hard for those policies for so many years. And if Joe Biden and the Democrats could get some of that passed, even most of that passed in the reconciliation bill, it would be transformative. People should be excited about that. They should fight for it. And I think this is why it's easy to just sort of have your eyes glaze over when you hear negotiations, infrastructure, reconciliation, all this bullshit. But these are the very real policies that would transform people's lives that we're talking about here. And they are absolutely worth fighting for and worth paying attention to as this process goes on. Would you call it a Biff deal?

attention to as this process goes on would you call it a biff deal i almost i almost i stole that i saw that joke from a hundred people just for the record i almost asked for a clip of um of biff tannin from back to the future to play right now but i don't know if it would be dating ourselves yeah you might as well just just like some like some meme that just shows how old we are aren't we aren't we just to be i mean not to delve on this but aren't we actually past the future like haven't we yeah we're definitely we're past the future i think it was um i think it was 2020 oh i don't know i can't remember now i care i haven't seen the movie in a while anyway the challenge for democrats now is which policies to prioritize uh if mansion and other moderates limit the bill to $2 trillion.

You mentioned this, but Bernie Sanders' idea is a $6 trillion bill. In addition to the policies that I mentioned, he's got lowering the Medicare age to 60. He's got including dental and other benefits as part of Medicare. He's got some other health care priorities. other benefits as part of medicare he's got some other health care priority health care priorities he's got immigration in his so that not only do we protect the dreamers but also offer a path to citizenship so bernie's got a lot in his mansion has basically said i don't think i can go over two trillion dollars though he hasn't drawn a line in the sand but if you have to limit it to two trillion which sounds weird because two trillion is still a lot of fucking money um then you're

gonna have to figure out which policies of the ones that I mentioned and that Bernie has that we're going to actually put in the final bill. We thought it would be helpful to know what voters care about. So we asked our friends at Data for Progress, who polled about a thousand voters last week. The most popular policies turned out to be health care, corporate tax hikes, clean energy investments and the child tax credit in that order. Anything about that polling surprise you? And what do you think Democrats should prioritize in this bill?

It's so funny to even, it's like such a departure from the conversation about what gets Manchin, Sinema, some Republicans keep Shelly Moore Capito happy, whatever, you know, whatever, like, inside the Beltway legislative bullshit we're talking about to be like, let's just ask voters what they want and then see if we should do that. And it's like wild, wild. And so all of those people who sent us here, what would you like us to do? Yes. And it's just worth noting how these are incredibly popular policies. And not just popular with Democrats or independents, but broadly popular with everyone. And so I think there's a way to look at this and say, you have to do A, B, and C because they're the most popular. But we are operating off of, I think, how much of my life I viewed. I think maybe we

currently view the Outback menu, which is no wrong choices. Now you got me paying attention. I was going to do Taco Bell, but it's like, that's the other John. I'm an Outback guy. I'm looking for the cheese fries. I want a Bloomin' Onion soon. I got to go to the Outback soon. I mean, thank you, Joe Biden.

Now you can. Now that I'm double vaxxed. Also, Emily and Charlie are still on vacation because Emily would not go with me to the Outback soon. I mean, thank you, Joe Biden. Now you can. Now that I'm double vaxxed. Also, Emily and Charlie are still on vacation because Emily would not go with me to the Outback, I'm sure. Maybe I'll just go to the Outback alone one of these days. You absolutely, probably as the parent of a toddler, be one of the great luxuries of your life is my guess. It will. And also really hard. Yes. I got distracted, get excited about the Outback. Okay, go ahead. The takeaway from this poll is that Democrats have a broad permission structure from the public to go big and bold here. I think from a substantive and political perspective, not including a paying for this with a corporate tax hike would be insane.

It is something that we have to do. We should do all of the bulk of the polling, a lot of the debt for progress polling we've done, the Navigator polling, some other polling is like, it makes things become more popular when you say that corporations are paying for them with higher tax rates. Like that is, we should do it. We should make Republicans vote against it and we should run on it. But, you know, I think there's a like, well, this is 80% popular and this is 68%. They're all really fucking popular, so you should go do them and not worry about it. Because what is interesting is there's such worry about backlash where we're going to do these big things and then it's going to cause this backlash among people on the right.

This polling suggests that there is not a backlash problem with these policies. There are going to be some voters who are going to be pissed no matter what Joe Biden and the Democrats do, but that's going to happen whether they pass something small, something big, something two-troy and something five-troy. And we are in the point where you're better off doing the big popular things and worrying about the reaction from the right who are going to react no matter what you do. I will say that the way this becomes unpopular with people is and the media coverage does this. It just reports on the number, the size of the number, the size of the bill. Right. If you just hear that Democrats are ramming through this, I mean, we're going to see these headlines everywhere and these leads everywhere. So we just have to prepare for it. Democrats are ramming through a multi-trillion dollar reconciliation bill that's partisan, that doesn't have any Republicans,

right? And if all people here who don't pay close attention to the news or to politics is that Democrats are just spending trillions of dollars and they don't actually know what the policies are and they don't know how it's going to improve their lives, yeah, then I think there is a potential for backlash, not just among the right, but among sort of the broad spectrum of voters. And so I do think it's incumbent on the White House, which I know they're going to try their hardest, and all of us, by the way, to talk about the policies in this bill and to sell the policies in this bill. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this today is I feel like we have even been guilty of just sort of glossing over what could

possibly be in this bill. And I think it's not as popular if you just treat it as some behemoth, you know, trillion dollar package that's moving through Congress really slowly, but start talking about all the policies that could actually change people's lives. Policies that we have advocated for and fought for, for years and years and years and many, many campaigns. You mean because we sometimes become punchbowl saves America? A real test now if Jake Sherman listens to this podcast. Okay. Can I say one more thing about this that I think is important? Yeah, sure. Is all these policies are popular and we should sell the policies. But I think in terms of political messaging, policies are a means,

not an end. They are data points that prove a political narrative, that buttress a political narrative. And so when you get into, well, we gave you healthcare, we gave you a higher minimum wage, we did this, now vote for us, you're sort of devolving into sort of, that does not work. There's all kinds of evidence that does not work. This is why I think the corporate tax hike is so important from a political perspective is it is a narrative about who you are and who you fight for. And if it's just about we gave you these policies and you like these policies, we know that does not work. Just look at the minimum wage in Florida where the minimum wage, $15 minimum wage initiative got 60% and Trump won the state pretty easily. And so I think it was

like a 13, 14% gap between people who voted for $15 minimum wage and people who voted for the candidate that supports $15 minimum wage. And so it has to become a narrative about the parties and what they're going to deliver and why Democrats have to hold the majority, not just we gave you good shit, now give us your vote. Yeah, like, you know, Democrats should be able to say that we inherited a country where rich people and big corporations were getting to get off without paying many taxes and pollute the planet however they wanted. And what we decided is that we were getting to get off without paying many taxes and pollute the planet however they wanted. And what we decided is that we were going to fight for the middle class, deliver and actually save the planet for future generations. Right. Like that's just an example of

the larger story you can tell with sort of all these policies that we're going to sort of reduce economic inequality, that we're going to save the planet for our children, that we're going to make sure the children aren't in poverty. Like I think you need to talk about them in value-based statements, as our guest host, Anat, from last week would surely agree, would surely agree. All right. There's also a political question here about which voters Democrats are trying to persuade by passing these policies and whether it's even possible to persuade voters by passing policies, which you just touched on. Pew Research released their 2020 election analysis last week, which is one of the more trusted and respected analysis because they

identify people based on their actual voting record. So it's not just polls. But Pew basically tells the same story as every other post-election analysis. It is one of those years where the four or five or six different post-election analysis have all converged together on sort of the same story. And that story is this. Joe Biden ran better than Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, largely because he improved his performance among married men, veteran households, suburbanites, independents, and Democrats who consider themselves moderate or conservative. Of course, Joe Biden wouldn't have won without incredibly strong turnout among young voters and voters of color. But Biden didn't do any better with these voters than Hillary did. And in most cases, he did worse, especially among Latinos.

Instead, it was Biden's improvement among more moderate and conservative voters that marked the biggest difference between the 2016 election and the 2020 election. Did anything else jump out at you from this analysis? And what does it tell you about 2022 and beyond? I want to be very careful about drawing too many conclusions for this as it relates to 2022. There is very little evidence in recent years about the durability and transferability of presidential coalitions. The Obama coalition did not turn out in 2010, 2014, and 2016 when Obama was not on the ballot. The Trump coalition did not turn out in 2018. And this Biden coalition, as we have found

in these analyses, seems particularly unlikely to vote in the, whether turnout, not just turnout, but vote choice in the same way without Joe Biden on the ballot and without Trump on the ballot, right? A coalition that depends on more moderate conservative voters is going to, by definition, struggle to keep unified control of government in the hands of Democrats. And you're saying that because in midterm elections, you tend to get more committed voters turning out on both sides, Republican and Democrat. And so the voters in the middle, whether they're independents, moderate Democrats, liberal Republicans, people who tend to come in and out of the electorate from cycle to cycle, you don't see those people as often in midterm

elections as you do in a presidential election. It's both things, right? So there's a turnout question about what drop-off do you have? What's the delta between your presidential year turnout and your midterm turnout? And that has traditionally been a huge problem for Democrats. There are reasons to believe, based on this, it may actually be a bigger problem for Republicans as the Democratic coalition has shifted in the Trump era to include more suburban voters. It sort of helped us in 2018. There are reasons to believe a lot of those people will turn out. Where I worry is if your margin of victory depends on moderate and conservative voters who did not like Donald Trump. They are the sort of voters who tend to, in previous elections, shift back to default to divided government, right? You know,

it's important to remember that we don't know exactly how this played out, but in polling heading into the election, there were suggestions that Joe Biden was only going to get a quarter to a third of Trump voters who voted for a Democrat in the 2018 elections. Right. Right. So you can see a world. I mean, we've talked about this before, but there was an Axios focus group a few months ago, which talked to a bunch of Trump Biden voters from Trump in 16 to Biden in 20, who were very, very open to many of them were very open to and potentially likely to vote for a Republican in the congressional elections. And so like you're-

Which is a big warning sign, right? They voted for, they voted for Donald Trump in 2016. They voted for Joe Biden in 2020. And now they're like, yeah, maybe I'll go back and vote for Republican. Yeah, and a Democrat in 18, right? So they went Republican, Democrat, Democrat. And so, but if you want to, you know,

to step out of character for a minute, look at the glass half full nature of this, both in the short term and the long term, the short term is. I was going to do that. I'm not stepping out of any character right there. I was about to give you the glass half full. Let me clear out and let you just let the optimism flow. Go. No, I was going to say, because while we have concerns in our coalition that some of the moderate to conservative voters that turned out for Biden might either return to the Republican fold

or stay home in 2022, on the other side, there's a bunch of people who came out to vote for Trump in 2020 who did not show up in 2018 to the polls at all. A lot of like rabid Trump supporters who just stayed home in 2018. And without Trump on the ballot in 2022, they may stay home as well. That's right.

And I think there's a long-term issue or long-term, there's a finding in this study that is so optimistic for Democrats in the long-term, which is the silent generation and boomers are shrinking as a percentage of the electorate every passing year. And millennials and Gen Z are growing. And Biden won millennials and Gen Z by 20 points. And so just from a pure mathematical perspective, now you have to hold on to those numbers. But the Trump coalition, the Republican coalition is just simply becoming a smaller part of the electorate every year. Now, that doesn't play itself out exactly the same way in the electoral college and the Senate map. But in general, the trends in America are deeply dangerous for Republicans if we as a planet and democracy can just survive long enough to reap the benefits of that. enough to reap the benefits of that. Big if, big if. Does this change anything for you in terms of what kind of reconciliation bill Democrats should be fighting for, which leads to sort of a bigger question for you. Like, how much do you think that any of the legislation Democrats pass or

have passed or might pass will matter to voters? I don't think it has any specific impact on what I think Democrats should pass in the reconciliation package. What it does suggest to me is that this finally is consistent with the model of the electorate that the Biden presidential campaign had going into the election. And it explains the focus on unity, the focus on bipartisanship, on where their gains were coming from. And it wasn't from a massive increase in base turnout. It was going to be in persuasion. And they ran a campaign that was based on persuasion.

And it delivered. And so I think that – like when I look at the reconciliation, I'm not like the things in there like are all super popular. If I am picking one thing that you absolutely have to make the central focus of the reconciliation package, once again, more money in the jargon jar, but is raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy. Where, you know, where if you want to find like there's a disturbing find in the Pew study, which is even though Biden did, I think, three points better with non-college white voters than Hillary Clinton did, which kind of was that that was the how he won. Yeah. Given the makeups of how he won those. That's I was going to say specifically those upper Midwest states. That's how he won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, because a bunch of non-college white voters, not a bunch, but enough, just a small amount, went from voting against Hillary to voting for Joe Biden. But where Trump actually gained massively on 2016 was in rural areas. And so if you look at, it's a huge gain from 16 to 20, but when you look from 12 to 20,

it's a gigantic gain. And one of the things that I think is critical to Democrats is we have to become the people who are fighting powerful special interests on the behalf of middle and working class people. And one of the ways in which you do that is you become the people who want to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for things that actually all people's lives while Republicans are willing to sink a infrastructure bill, they're willing to, you know, oppose all of these things, because, not because they think they're bad ideas or anything like that, because they do not want to ask Amazon, Facebook, ExxonMobil, whoever else to pay a single penny more in taxes to improve your life. That, like, it's, I also think the think it's less about the policies that we are passing from a political perspective and more about framing the Republican opposition to those policies on terms that are most favorable with the broadest swath of the electorate, which includes those moderate conservative voters, Democratic base voters, and potentially keeping some of these Trump, you know, so the Trump

surge voters home in the midterms, because that's not what they signed up for when they be put on the MAGA hat in 2016. Another way to frame that is we are trying to create a multiracial working class, middle class coalition of voters. That is the most powerful coalition of voters for us. And so it's not about how do I just reach out to the moderate voters and the centrists and some of the white people that go back and forth, or how do I keep the base of young people and women and Latinos and black Americans and Asian Americans? It is how do I, if I'm asking corporations and

the wealthy to pay their fair share so we can invest in the working class and middle class and lift people out of poverty. That is an attempt to try to stitch together a multiracial working class coalition that is going to be very powerful electorally for the Democratic Party in just about every swing state that we need to win it. The best political messaging tells a story that has antagonists and protagonists, right? Like who is, what is the force that is stopping you from achieving the financial security you want or the dreams you want, or that is making your life harder? Republicans tell a very consistent story

about it being an array of non-white people, immigrants, poor people, Hollywood elites, all this whole, they have a story about it that are, they are standing in the way of your life. In a world in which you, a teacher, a construction worker, a firefighter, an accountant, pays a higher tax rate than a billionaire or Amazon. There are corporations running around this country who pay nothing. That Peter Thiel is putting billions of dollars in an IRA. That Jeff Bezos is taking a child tax credit because of very complicated tax accounting. That story that was in that ProPublica story from a few months ago should be something that should be the fodder for a gazillion ads,

a gazillion stump speeches. There was a New York Times story about how hedge funds have been jerking around the tax code for years. All of that, things are unfair. Here is why they're unfair. Who's bending from them and who the fuck is protecting them? It's the Republicans. Which, and by the way, there was a story this week that all these conservative groups are rallying around the provision in the bipartisan infrastructure framework that we're going to beef up the IRA so the IRA can go after wealthy tax cheats. And they're trying to get McConnell and the Republicans to say, I'm going to sink this deal if the IRS is beefed up to go after wealthy tax cheats. And I'm like, you know what?

Fucking be our guest. Sink the bill because you wanted to make sure that your rich friends got away with cheating the tax system. Great. We'll take that to the ballot box. One pickup for you. I think you want to say sink the biff. Fuck you. take that to the ballot box one pickup for you i think you want to say sink the biff let's talk about the republican midterm strategy where who else but donald trump

will be playing a starring role uh You might be wondering whether the former president has been laying low since his family business was indicted on 15 felony counts, including tax fraud and grand larceny. Of course not. At a rally in Florida over the weekend where he attacked the New York prosecutors as fascist and authoritarian. You're the puppet. He also demanded to know why so many people are still in jail for attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. And he tried to turn the crowd against the Capitol police officer who shot insurrectionist Ashley Babbitt as she attempted to force her way into the room where members of Congress were hiding from the mob, saying, quote, If it were on the other side, the person who did the shooting would be strung up and hung. Very pro-police, Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Now, you might be wondering, why do we still care what kind of crazy shit Donald Trump says? Well, because if you're a Republican who wants to run for office in 2022 and you don't support Trump, Trumpism, and the big lie about the 2020 election, you will find yourself with the primary challenger who does. More than 700 Republican candidates for 2022 have now pushed Trump's election fraud conspiracies, including people running for the House, the Senate, governor, state legislature, secretary of state, and other offices that have the power to overturn elections. Dan, there's two ways to look at this one.

One, these are candidates who don't really believe the big lie, but are embracing it to win a primary. And two, these are candidates who, if they win, plan to avenge Trump by overturning the next election. What do you think? Can I offer you a third way of looking at it? Both? Yeah, it doesn't it doesn't fucking matter. False choice. There are people in Congress or in the States or wherever else and running in these campaigns who definitely believe the big lie. Their brains have been pickled by Fox News.

They take Tucker Carlson as the gospel. And then there are people who do not believe it at all. Like take Josh Hawley, for instance. Josh Hawley does not for one fucking second believe one word of the idea that the election was stolen. And what's the difference between Josh Hawley and some other person who believes it? Zero. It all ends up being the same. Whether it's a person who believes it, a person who doesn't believe it, they are the same people who are passing the voter suppression laws based on it, the same ones who are voted to overturn the election if you believe half the – almost all of the Republican caucus in the House truly believes the election was stolen. That is incorrect. A disturbing number of them do, but Kevin McCarthy doesn't. I think the press should stop distinguishing between those two. That is the thing we hear all the – all the coverage of the Liz Cheney thing was, no one really believes it. They just don't want her to talk about it anymore.

It doesn't fucking matter. If you are unwilling to stand up and say something about it anymore. It doesn't fucking matter. If you, if you were unwilling to stand up and say something about it, you end up just being a vehicle for putting in place the, the consequences of the big lie, right? The, the laws that come from it, the light, like if this, if there is a stolen election and overturned election or an attempt at that in 2024, it's going to be done from a coalition of the believing and the unbelieving, right? And it's just so it doesn't really matter. The danger is, is it's become table stakes for being a Republican politician to promulgate that lie. I think there's another danger here. And Jonathan Chait wrote about this on Wednesday, I believe, about how Trump is now framing and talking about the insurrection. And he writes,

the anti-anti-Trump right has dismissed the insurrection as overblown, a protest march gone bad, perhaps ill-considered, but never posing any serious threat to the republic, right? You hear Republicans do this all the time. The far right's highlighting of Babbitt's death sends a different message. The insurrection was good. Babbitt's death sends a different message. The insurrection was good. Babbitt's effort to penetrate the defensive barrier was brave and the stopping of her charge a crime. And I do think that is very scary and very frightening, very dangerous. And it's right in line with Trump saying, why are these people still being held, the insurrectionists, right? He's talking about them in other right wing media sources and everyone.

They're talking about them now as political prisoners that need to be released. The people who stormed the fucking Capitol and Trump saying that the police officer who shot someone who was trying to attack members of Congress, that that person, if they were on the other side, they'd be strung up and hung. I mean, that is a pretty, pretty dangerous way to head into the next election, saying that the people who that the people who tried to attack the U.S. Capitol and attack members of Congress who wanted to hang Mike Pence need to somehow be avenged and let free because they're just political prisoners. It's bad shit. Bad shit. And I don't know, like, I guess I have a question for you on this, is how did democrats talk about this because we just laid out this entire message right where democrats

are focused on economic inequality because that's the message that we know that polls really well and they talk about rich people not paying taxes and investing in the middle class and all this kind of stuff and then again in an alternate reality here where donald trump's running around the country saying uh by the way, the insurrectionists were good. Like, how do we deal with that? How do we talk about that? Seems hard. I mean, I talked about this a lot last week, but I think there's two principles here,

which one is we have to frame the counter-majoritarian, authoritarian leanings of the Republican Party as something born of weakness, not strength. That they have to frame the counter-majoritarian, authoritarian leanings of the Republican Party as something born of weakness, not strength. That they have to do this because their agenda is so unpopular. They can't win an election the normal way. The only way that they can hold on to political power is to try to stop you from voting. They're going to fail at that, as 2020 proved, but that's what they want to do. And then you have to explain why they're doing it. And why they're doing is directly connected to who benefits.

All of this is about the fact that the corporate plutocratic special interest agenda of the Republicans cannot – is opposed by the vast majority of Americans as our polling trust is opposed by huge bipartisan majorities. The only way it can be put in place is by limiting the power of the majority, by trying to steal elections, to divide us on racial lines. This gets us right back to the core tenets of the race class narrative. We have to say who benefits because people will naturally believe that politicians will do things to benefit themselves and they will not really penalize them for it. It's sort of like, yeah, they're a politician.

Of course, that's what they're going to do. So if it's just like they're doing this to stay in power is, in my mind, not a compelling enough argument to move people in the direction to move. It has to be about who benefits from that. Why are these people dividing you? Why are these people trying to steal elections? Why are they engaging in this dangerous rhetoric? What are the consequences? And how does that affect your life?

Right. Yeah. I do think how does it affect your life is very important because I do think we talk about this. People write about this. People write about this as sort of attacks on democracy and our institutions. And we talk about authoritarianism. And I think that's fine for like everyone to be debating on Twitter. I was talking about it, but it's pretty esoteric, right, to the average voter. And I think you have to make it about their life. Like these are radical extremists who want to take away your voice, right? They want

to take away your voice. They don't think that you should have a say in how your country is run. They think they're going to make it harder for you to vote. And then when you do vote, they might throw your vote away. They might overturn it if they don't like the outcome. And so you don't get a say in how your country is run, how your community is run. You don't get that because you don't agree with them. I kind of think that has to be part of the message. And I don't know that it's always

easy to connect it to like powerful corporate interests when it's a bunch of people storming a Capitol. Like it's sometimes it's a hard connection to make, but I do think you've got to always bring the argument back to people's lives and what it's going to mean for you. They're going to try to take away your healthcare. They're going to try to take away your childcare. You're going to try to take away your voice, your vote. Let's look at two high profile examples of Trumpy Senate candidates. In Georgia, Trump took it upon himself to announce on a right wing radio show that Herschel Walker plans on joining the crowded Republican field to take on Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in 2022. Walker is, of course, a Heisman Trophy winning running back for the University of Georgia, who briefly played for Trump's professional football team, the New Jersey Generals, and then campaigned for him in 2016 and 2020.

Dan, what do you think about Herschel Walker as a Senate candidate? On paper, great candidate. Yeah. Beloved in Georgia. Yeah, he's a legend. He's a legend in Georgia. He's a black candidate in Georgia,

where if you can just alter just a few points to get a few additional black voters, that would – Raphael Warnock would lose, right? I mean you can't forget how close that election was in the runoff in – I guess it was 2021 when it actually happened. Incredibly close and benefited from depressed Republican turnout because Donald Trump was telling everyone that Republicans were stealing the election from him. So yeah, it's on paper worrisome. Now, the history of very famous celebrity novice politicians is pretty mixed, right? In most cases, they flame out. Now, there's one big giant counter example that we shouldn't ignore, which is Donald Trump himself.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't know about that one. How he will actually respond from a level of press scrutiny he's never had before, maybe able to answer questions like that. It's a really open question. But you look at that and you're like, yeah, you'd much rather run against David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler, some other fucking nameless, faceless

MAGA Republican than University of Georgia football legend. Now, a few things about Herschel Walker we should talk about and that I'm guessing that the electorate will be informed about over the next several months and year. A lot of people are writing about him now. Tim Miller at the Bulwark, a friend of ours, wrote a piece on Herschel Walker a couple months ago. So, you know, he lives in Texas now. He'd have to move back to Georgia. He has talked openly for many years about the fact that he has multiple personality disorder. Obviously, don't want to stigmatize mental health issues.

But part of this issue for him was at one point, and he has told the story, he pulled a gun on his wife, threatened to kill her, her friend and his therapist during a therapy session. He told ESPN that he used to play Russian roulette with a loaded gun in front of houseguests and urged them to play Russian roulette as well before they competed against him in feats of strength. They would play Russian roulette first with loaded guns. And then after the election in 2020, he, of course, spread conspiracies about voting fraud, Dominion fraud, and said that Trump needs to stay in power to punish the people who have done bad things in the election. And he cheered on the insurrectionists. That is the kind of candidate that they want to run in Georgia and, by the way, all over the country. So I do think everything on paper, and especially for voters who are less engaged in the political process, they hear Herschel Walker, you live in Georgia, legend. That's easy, right. And that's going to get him a long way. But I do think it's going to be the Democrats job to sort of educate people about all that other

shit as the next year continues. And we'll see how he actually holds up as a candidate. It's a high floor, low ceiling candidate. Like it could he could be a great candidate or could be an absolute fucking disaster. Right. And we we do not. Yeah, we do not know. Another competitive Republican Senate primary is in Ohio, where hillbilly elegy author J.D. And we do not. Yeah, we do not know. Another competitive Republican Senate primary is in Ohio, where hillbilly elegy author J.D. Vance announced his long anticipated candidacy to fill the seat being vacated by Rob Portman. Vance is a former Marine and Silicon Valley venture capitalist who's running with the help of a 10 million dollar super PAC funded by his friend Peter Thiel. But in his announcement speech, he tried to sell himself to Ohio voters

as a Trumpy populist saying, the elites plunder this country and then blame us for it in the process. Only problem, CNN's Andrew Kaczynski unearthed some of Vance deleted tweets from 2016 where he called Trump reprehensible and said he was voting for independent candidate, Evan McMullin.

Vance has since apologized. Take a listen. Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016. And I asked folks not to judge me by based on what I said in 2016, because I've been very open about the fact that I did say those critical things. And I regret them. And I regret being wrong about the guy. I think that he was a good president. I think he made a lot of good decisions for people. And I think he took a lot of flack. Pathetic. What do you think of J.D. Vance's chances? Can he win this primary as a Trumper come lately?

He could win the primary. I mean, at $10 million in ads from Peter Thiel, a Facebook billionaire could help. In some of the stories I've read about this, internal polling seems to suggest he's currently running in third to Josh Mandel and Jane Timpkin. Now they have go into this race

with the most higher name ID. Josh Mandel has run for Senate before. He's a famously miserable candidate. World class goober, Josh Mandel. Just a fucking bananas, that guy. Take a look. Just scroll through Twitter, put in his name.

We don't have to, just have a good time. Jane Timken, I think, also very Trumpy candidate. There is no non-Trump candidate. She ran the Ohio Republican Party during the Trump era, and many people think that Trump will ultimately endorse her, just so people know. And whoever Trump endorses will most likely and perhaps almost certainly be the nominee. But I think the focus on J.D. Vance is both a gigantic indictment of the D.C. media, which is obsessed with J.D. Vance because they woke up on Election Day 2016 and was like,

oh, my God, we have to learn everything we possibly can about the middle America. Where's a book? And they all read his book. And it became just like it became like people were walking around. Who are these? Yeah. Although of it. They all suddenly turned into fucking anthropologists. Like, let's go out and let's find the diner and let's go, let's go to the white working class. You know, Jason Kander said this, uh, I think said people who treated, uh, middle America as a zoo exhibit. Right. It's like, let's see what's happening there. And then they all like talked about it.

They were like salon book clubs about hillbilly elegy. And he would like come down from his private equity or venture capital office to speak at them. But I think the reason to focus on J.D. Vance is just because it is the pitch perfect fucking example of modern republicanism in the Trump era. He is on – this is who he is. One way to summarize your intro with him. He is a Yale educated venture capital executive, Evan McMullin voter, whose biggest supporter is a Facebook billionaire running as a populist heir to Trumpism. And it's such a giant. That's very good. Very good.

He knows it's a giant fraud. Everyone knows it's a fraud and Trump is himself a shameless fucking fraud. And so it's just like, if you, the person who can most shamelessly embrace their most fraudulent beliefs and instincts, it becomes the heir to Trumpism. And so it is,

he probably won't win this primary. Maybe he will, maybe he won't, but it is he probably won't win this primary. Maybe he will. Maybe he won't. But it is a it's just like as a perfect way to understand this era, it is to understand J.D. Vance and how he got here and what he's saying and who he really is. And that he does not give two shits about how little he believes the things he's saying. And, you know, his rivals are on to this. The Club for Growth PAC, which supports Mandel, issued a statement on vance when he entered the race he says he's from middletown but he made a boatload dissing his former neighbors to sell his book he claims to be a trump republican but in the short

time mr vance has been active in politics he spent the bulk of it tearing down president trump and mocking trump voters uh other people have noted that middletown is not actually in Appalachia. That's who he claims to both represent and understand. So, yeah, I mean, I think that, look, when you have a choice even between someone who seems extremist and someone who seems like a fraud, you probably go with a lot of voters go with the extremist, sadly, like a fraud is maybe the worst thing to be. And I do think that if the Mandel campaign or the Timken campaign are at all competent, which is a big if, they can just fucking tear J.D. Vance to pieces as this carpetbagging Silicon Valley guy who's just coming in and telling them, like being a sociologist about voters. Like they should be able to make quick work of him, the other primary campaigns. I do think if he somehow got through the primary, he may be a more formidable candidate

than the other two Republicans, but I think it's gonna be hard for him to get through that primary. It's just also so perfect that when it was revealed, revealed that he opposed Trump, that he had his, like the first thing he had to do, his crisis communications move was to apologize to Fox news, right? Not the people of Ohio, not the Trump. He had to go on

Fox news. And, and then even better is just like in a world in which things that should be disqualifying perhaps or not is he did an interview, uh, with Molly ball of time magazine. He called himself a flip-flop flipper, which is 100 million times worse than John Kerry saying he voted for something before he voted against it. Like he's a, I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable. Well, there was that. And then he also said to her,

she asked him about the insurrection and the attack on the Capitol. And he said, well, there were some bad apples on January 6th, very clearly, but most of the people there were actually super peaceful. Like J.D. Vance once called Donald Trump reprehensible. And now that he's running the Republican primary after the attack on the Capitol,

he's back to like Donald Trump's view of Charlottesville. You know, people were actually super peaceful there. Like he knows that's fucking bullshit, but you're right. That is the exact story of Republicans in this era right now. And back to the original question in the section, like, do these people believe in the big lie or don't they? It really doesn't matter. Right. Because J.D. Vance clearly doesn't believe in the big lie, clearly doesn't think that most of the people were super peaceful.

believe in the big lie, clearly doesn't think that most of the people were super peaceful. But he's sitting there having to apologize to Fox News and Donald Trump and Trump voters, and he's going to do whatever he can to appeal to them. And that's what every Republican is going to do, whether they are committed to Trumpism or just feel like they need to be committed to Trumpism. It doesn't make a difference. This is the party now. He's still in charge. And, you know, all the dangers are still there. So watch out. Watch out. When we come back, we will have Dan's interview with Adam Serwer about his new book, The Cruelty is the Point. I'm joined by Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Cruelty is the Point, a new essay collection on Trump and author of The Cruelty is the Point,

a new essay collection on Trump and Trumpism in America. Adam, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me. Well, I just want to congratulate you on the book. It is just an incredibly important piece of reading for understanding and contextualizing the moment we are in and the four years we just went through. So congratulations. Thank you very much. the moment we are in and the four years we just went through. So congratulations. Thank you very much. I want to start with asking how it is you came to settle on cruelty as the defining theme of Trumpism and Trump over the last four years.

Yeah. So the title of the book, which comes from a column I wrote in 2018, was basically, it was inspired by, I was watching, this was during the Kavanaugh hearings, and I was watching a rally that the president was holding, the then president was holding, in defense of Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused by Christine Blasey Ford of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager. And in her testimony, one of the most notable parts of the testimony was when she said, indelible in the hippocampus was a laughter, basically referring to what she said was Kavanaugh and a childhood friend laughing during the assault. And the president, you know, heard that and he zeroed in on that as a weakness.

Um, and he, uh, during that rally, he held her up for ridicule. Um, he mocked her. He, he made his audience laugh at her. Um, and it seemed to me that that was so precise and attentive. Um, and also everyone there was enjoying it. They were having a good time. And it wasn't just that. It was that there was a kind of intimacy that was created when the president was mocking this woman who had claimed to be a victim of sexual assault in a way that there was almost no regard for

the possibility, even if you thought she in particular was lying, no regard for how this might affect other women or other people who might want to come forward and might fear being laughed at if they had, you know, if they told the truth about their experience. And so it just seemed very clear to me that part of this act of community creation that Trump was engaged in was cruelty. And it's something that's part of human nature, you know, all human beings are capable of cruelty. But this was sort of like, you know, when you're a kid, and you're, you know, you see a bunch of the cool kids making fun of a nerdy kid, maybe you stay silent. Maybe you join in because you want to be a cool kid as well.

You know, maybe a rare circumstances or one of those people who would stand up for a kid who's getting picked on. But the point is that there's a, an active community creation by the mocking of this other child by the, by the kids who are on the, in the in crowd. Um, and this is just something that had been elevated to a political level, uh, by Trump. And, um, you know, the, the column I wrote was just, I think the reason it took off was because we all sort of instinctively understood that this was a part of his politics and a crucial

part of his politics. But we had struggled to articulate it in a concise way. You also wrote that Trump didn't invent this form of politics, that the politics of, it usually were the politics of cruelty and exclusion had been all around long before Trump. Did he, how did he change? Did he change? Is he just a natural extension of something that's been happening for a long time? Is there a going back from this? Yeah, I mean, I really think that Trump is a manifestation of a conflict we've been having

ever since the founding of the country. After all, we had a country that was founded on the idea that all men are created equal, but what was really meant by that was white men with property. And so when you exclude people from this beautiful principle of human liberty and equality, you have to find a reason to justify doing that. you have to find a reason to justify doing that. And, you know, so ever since the founding, we've been trying to, you know, there has been an element of American society that has tried to expand those rights and freedoms to everyone, and an element that says we've gone too far, or we should not extend these rights and freedoms to these people, because they don't deserve them for whatever reason. And as it currently exists, our political system incentivizes this kind of politics because, you know, between Senate malapportionment, gerrymandering in the House, or, you know,

the Electoral College itself, you know, Trump's coalition is ideally geographically distributed to hold power in disproportion to its influence. So it becomes all the more urgent to persuade that coalition that they're on the verge of destruction, that they are being menaced by, you know, their fellow Americans. And so it, anything they do to prevent that destruction is justified. And not only that, but, you know,

these acts of cruelty against people outside of the community that they've created are heroic. They're not merely justified by expedience. They are, in fact, heroic acts of defense against, you know, people who are threatening your life or your way of life or the way America should be. And Donald Trump uses this rhetoric constantly. He says, you know, I'm the person standing in between you and this impending liberal apocalypse. And this is how you end up justifying things like disenfranchising rival constituencies, banning people on the base of religion, doing laws that are targeted at trans children. This is, you know, you justify this by saying these people are threatening us, they're going to destroy us. And so whatever we do to prevent that is acceptable.

And he didn't invent this. But I think Donald Trump was particularly good practitioner of this politics. And perhaps more frighteningly, he showed the Republican Party how much they could get away with and how far they could go without backlash. And that's why you're seeing, you know, because the structure of American politics has not changed, the incentives for Republicans to hold on to power by frightening their base into thinking they're sort of, you know, on the verge of annihilation has not changed. And as long as the structure stays the same, if the Democrats are not willing to make changes to the system to make it more fair, this kind of politics is going to continue because they can hold power that way indefinitely. It's one of the things I was struck by in reading your book this week. I had read, you're one of my favorite writers, I'd read you throughout

the process as you were writing these essays, reading them in real time. But so there's like one world where Joe Biden wins, the Republican Party walks back from the brink. There was some sort of process to move away from Trumpism. And your book is just this very specific accounting of this one very specific period in American history. But everything you write is just, even though Trump is like, yes, he's going to may run for president again. Yes, he's going to come in for candidates, but he is largely receded from, even Fox News isn't covering his rallies live. But all of the points here, you take Trump's name out of it, it's still very applicable to what the Republican Party is doing right now. I think it was a huge, I mean, I think the pivotal point here was when

Donald Trump and the Republicans beat their polls in 2020. Because if it had been a kind of Hoover style wipeout, like 1932 or something, I think they would have reconsidered their approach. But because Trumpism succeeded in defiance of expectations, I think the Republican Party felt this was still a rational course of action. And it's going to continue. I mean, Democrats, because of thermostatic public opinion, because the way midterms usually go, you know, it's very likely that Democrats will lose Congress. likely that Democrats will lose Congress. And if they do, all this stuff, I mean, you think about the fact the 63 majority in the Supreme Court, all this entire approach to politics, I think, from their perspective, has been vindicated. So they have no reason to stop until they pay an actual political cost for the course that they've chosen. And it's not clear to me how that can happen. Unless Democrats take some pretty drastic actions that thus far

they have been unwilling to take. You write in the book how in 2016, so both in the run-up to the election, the aftermath, so many reporters, political pundits, even Democrats tried so hard to explain Trump's victory in everything other than racial terms, right? Economic anxiety, the system is rigged. So two questions that, you know, I was particularly struck by how you talked about the misinterpretation of the system is rigged, how media elites interpreted it and how you think Trump's supporters interpreted it. So if you could help explain that, but then also have we gotten, we, the political media complex, people who talk and write about politics for a living, gotten better at calling this out for what it is? Or as we deal with the big lie in the 2020 election, are we just making the same set of mistakes all over again?

I'll say that, you know, I think part of the, you know, I'm an opinion writer. I'll say that, you know, I think part of the, you know, I'm an opinion writer. I write my opinion. But I think that my job is actually not that different from a regular mainstream objective reporter in the sense that my job is to describe what's happening accurately. And there are limitations to the tradition of objective reporting in the United States that opinion writers are free from. That's not to say you should only read opinion writers or that objective news reporters are not good at their jobs. That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying that it's difficult to write.

If it was easy simply to describe things as they are, we wouldn't need journalists at all. We wouldn't need a media. So I think on the one hand, it is a challenging thing to do, especially when you have something, a phenomenon like Trump that seems to go against the prevailing trend of the past few years. So the big question in 2016 is like, how does a country that elected Barack Obama president also elect Donald Trump president? And I think that, you know, obviously,

there are economic factors here, you know, the recovery from the Great Recession was halting, and slow, and painful, and a lot of people experienced a great deal of misery as a result. A lot of people who experienced that misery voted for Hillary Clinton. In particular, the housing crisis disproportionately affected homeowners of color. It's not that it didn't affect white people, but it affected the whole country. So the question is, how is that experience mediated by ideology. And I think that's how you get from, you know, the economic conditions that were genuinely bad. And I think the Obama administration's response was genuinely inadequate in many ways, despite other things that they did, that I supported. And so, you know, it's how you interpret those conditions that leads you to a conclusion about whether or not Donald Trump's proposed solutions are appropriate or adequate or justified or effective.

stop and give like a really simplistic economic explanation for it because it staved off the more disturbing interpretations of what it meant for a man who rose to prominence in 2011, rocketed to the top of the Republican field by stating, you know, that the first black president was not born in the United States. I think from that point, and you know, one of the things that Trump did was that he, despite the fact that there was a tremendous economic incentive to say, you don't want to alienate your viewers, your readers, your listeners, your audience by saying racism played a huge role in Trump's election. There's millions and millions of people who voted for this man who you want to buy your products or to vote for you, um, or to listen to your show or to read your book or read your newspaper. Um, and that, you know, and, and for a long time, people really resisted accepting that race had played such an important role in Trump's election. And I think what changed that was the fact that Trump kept telling us over and over and over again what he was about, why he was doing what he was doing, and what he believed, to the point

where it became undeniable, except to the people who still wanted to support Trump, despite these things and told themselves that he wasn't saying or doing the things that he was saying or doing. I think, in fact, that a lot of what I write, there's not that much disagreement between me and Trump about the nature of who he is and what he does and what he believes. I think there is a lot of disagreement between me and the sort of the layer of people who want to continue supporting Trump with a clean conscience who want to tell themselves that he does not believe and do these things or he did not do them or that he does not revel in cruelty towards people that he considers beneath him. But I actually don't think that there's much that me and him are in much disagreement about that or the nature of it.

When you talk about the impact that Obama's election had on the role of race in American politics, you talk about how Obama sort of everything became racialized post Obama, whether it's economic policy, health care policy. You know, you mentioned the selection of, you know, the choice of dog became a racial thing. Portuguese water dogs. Yes. Why doesn't Obama have white dogs? A actual Fox News segment at one point. There's so much stuff we forget. I know. In reading it, it was really interesting to go back to some of those moments and be, you know, when you sort of, you know, obviously you provide a lot of additional context about what you learned since then and the context for why you wrote it. But reading some of these things,

you remember reading in those moments and then recognizing everything that came after was sort of a fascinating way to sort of revisit those years. But when I was reading what you wrote about Obama and politics, I thought back to a conversation that President Obama and I had in 2014, where he said to me that sort of in passing that he thought he might have been elected 10 years too early, that it was sort of the circumstances of that election post post-Bush Iraq war, expedited the sort of brought before people might have been ready for a black president, particularly a black president, Barack Hussein Obama, with a different background. But do you think that we were always headed to a place that

American politics would be so racialized? Or was that sort of inevitable? Or did Obama did Obama's election expedited? Just sort of help me understand how you think about that. I think Obama was an extraordinarily good politician. And I think you can see that in the decisiveness of his victories. I think that perhaps, you know, when he says he was elected, you know, elected 10 years too early, there was never a point at which the election of a black president was not going to provoke backlash.

Every major step forward in American history for civil rights or for democracy has been met with backlash. And the backlashes can sometimes be horrifyingly complete and sometimes they can be less complete and progress can be built on the foundations that are left. I think that we were heading in this direction, regardless of whether Obama got elected. We might not have gotten there as fast without the combination of whether Obama got elected, we might not have gotten there as fast

without the combination of Barack Obama being elected and Donald Trump being elected. I think, you know, something that happened during the Obama administration was not just racial polarization around public opinion on trivial things that have nothing to do with race, like Portuguese water dogs. But around 2014, 2015, when Ferguson happened, I think a lot of Americans started asking themselves, how do we have a Black president? And yet race is still such a determining factor in American life. We still have, these racial disparities persist in spite of what seems like a tremendous amount of symbolic progress. And I think that sort of reevaluation of American history was accelerated by Donald Trump because you have to ask yourself, you know, how does a guy who is running on such explicit white identity politics nevertheless um prevalent in an american election to succeed the first black president um but there were structural factors behind

you know um both of these things like simply the racial polarization of the parties preceded both obama and donald trump i, if you look back to 2006, you know, the one of the, I think one of the important precipitating events to Trumpism is the huge talk radio backlash to the Bush immigration plan. So Karl Rove and Bush had this idea of, you know, doing an amnesty like Ronald Reagan, in which they would legalize or provide a path to legalization to millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. And this would help bring Latino voters,

who had supported Bush in very large numbers, into the Republican column for, you know, a longer period of time. And there was a huge talk radio backlash, just massive, and it totally killed the planet. And I think, you know, you have to look at that. And you can't, you know, I think a big part of the Republican base was waiting for someone like Trump. I think if you look at Mitt Romney, he, you know, he made birther jokes in Michigan. I think we've been heading in thisney, he, you know, he made birther jokes in Michigan. I think we've been heading in this direction for a while because of the racial and religious and ideological polarization of the two parties. I don't think it would have necessarily happened like this without Obama or without Trump. I don't, you know, but I think we were something like this or something.

Something. We were headed toward some kind of reckoning for American democracy, regardless of whether or not Obama had gotten elected, I think. But I do think he was a huge part of it. You know, it's interesting you mentioning the 2006 backlash. I was working in the Senate at the time, and it was a huge controversy because Republican conservatives kept mailing conservative voters, kept mailing bricks to the Capitol because they wanted the Senate to build a wall. Right. Again, that seemed insane at the time.

But like issue, there's so much predictive information about how you end up with someone like Trump. Right. And I think what people like Trump didn't, you know, he didn't like spend 10 years, you know, in the stacks of a library reading like Russell Kirk, you know what I mean? He just watched Fox News every day. And then he repeated those grievances back to an audience, which validated them, validated those grievances for them. And in turn, that cultivated kind of trust and a kind of intimacy with that audience. Your fears are real. The things that you're afraid of are the things that I'm afraid of. And I'm going to fight those things and protect you. That was tremendously powerful. And I think as long as that coalition retains a sort of

disproportionate political influence as a result of our political system, it's going, I mean, it's basically, you know, it's hard to imagine the Republican Party taking another path than the one it's already on. It's an interesting, it sort of speaks to how circumscribed our view of America is to the political system, because there's two ways to look at this, right? As you, not just analyzing who's going to win an election, but like what forces are dominant in American life and where progress is heading is we analyze it in the context of the six and 10 or seven and 10 people eligible voters who vote without ever thinking about the other 30%. And we also, there's two ways to talk about the last two elections.

One is the non Trump side, the side that was pushing for diversity and more progressive policies, one, two overwhelming popular vote victories that are growing in time. Overwhelming. And the other way, yeah. And the other way is Donald Trump won once and came within a hair of winning the second

time because our political system is so screwed up. The electoral college is a squeaker, despite the fact that the anti-Trump majority is, you know, many millions larger. And growing. And growing. Yeah. you know, many millions larger. And growing.

And growing, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the point of that, you know, the 2006 thing, though, is to just, you know, and that anecdote that you just gave about the bricks, I mean, look, Trump gave people what they wanted, you know, and I think part of the,

or like a certain part of the country wanted. And I think part of the point of the book is to say, you know, he didn't create this. He took advantage of it. But he didn't create it. And, you know, if you think he created it, then the fact that he's gone ends the story for you. But Trumpism is continuing, because he didn't create it, because it's something that he merely manifested or was able to manipulate or was able to embody in a way that no other Republican politician has before. And to some extent,

you know, it's, it's Trumpism remains an awkward fit for the would be heirs of Trump, because with him, it's really who he is. And with other people, it's kind of a performance. It's really who he is. And with other people, it's kind of a performance. But, you know, it persists precisely because our political system grants it considerable advantages as a result of the counter-majoritarian levers of American democracy. Adam, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the book. Everyone go out and buy The Cruelty is the Point. It is an essential read to understand what we went through and what we're still going through. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. joining us. Congratulations. The book, everyone go out and buy the cruelty as a point. It is an essential read to understand what we went through and what we're

still going through. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Take care. Thanks to Adam for joining us today. Good to be back. Everyone have a great weekend and we will see you next week. Bye everyone.

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