The Bulwark Podcast - A.B. Stoddard: A Desperate Man

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

The hijackers have the energy in the House, Biden is quietly succeeding, no-mentum Trump's biggest fear is being ignored, DeSantis is a closet wimp, and George Santos doesn't respond to his name — is his name fake too? A.B. Stoddard joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Friday, the end of the first week of 2023, and damn, a lot of stuff I did not have on my bingo card. So happy new year, A.B. Stoddard,

columnist, associate editor at Real Clear Politics. Welcome back on the podcast, A.B. Happy new year, Charlie. It's great to be with you. And it's strange to start the year stuck in Groundhog Day with Kevin McCarthy's ego trip, but it sure is better than a real January 6th from two years ago, So I'll take it. It does feel like a schadenfreude Groundhog Day where you experience the same emotions over and

over again, which of course we're not supposed to feel about all of this. But let's just put Kevin McCarthy in that weird story aside for the moment. I mean, I know it's irresistible, but as you just pointed out, today is the second anniversary of the attack on the capitol i mean i think it's amazing i don't know does it seem longer ago to you with things that are traumatizing when i look back on them they feel both close and far so it seems like it must be must have been so much longer yet it feels so raw yeah just this morning my wife and i were talking about you know where we were standing as we were watching this unfold that day, how unreal it seemed and how we were saying to one another, where's the National Guard? When is the Army going to show up?

When are the cops going to get there? And I remember this one moment where I saw some guys in camo gear, you know, going up the stairs. And I thought to myself, OK, well, they finally arrived. Well, it turns out those were the Oath Keepers. I mean, the whole thing is so surreal. Let's just step back for a moment. I wrote this morning, and I know I'm going to get some pushback on it,

that in order to understand what's happening today, you have to recognize that the Republican Party on display this week has been shaped, forged, crafted by what happened on January 6th. are today holding the House of Representatives hostage, but also that some of those supporters of the insurrection are poised to become committee chairs, plum assignments, are about to move into power. So two years on, it feels like we have this split screen where half of America is saying this is a horrible thing. We may have criminal charges coming down soon. And yet the party most closely associated with it seems completely unfazed by it, as if they have learned absolutely nothing. Well, as you said, the most radicalized, the insurrectionist element of the party has been empowered. They've now gained power. So I was

just on a briefing call this morning with the pollster, Celinda Lake, and she has a brand new figure that 90 percent of Americans expect political conflict this year. That is a breathtaking number. I'm assuming that means some kind of violent, semi-violent conflict, not just people fighting for committee chairmanships in negotiations about who's going to become speaker on the House floor. If you think about the people who are holding the House hostage and who, as you said, were so instrumental in the insurrection, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, you know, Paul Gosar of Arizona and others like Marjorie Taylor Greene was, well, now she's on Kevin McCarthy's side, but she's going to be very powerful no matter who succeeds. She was at meetings at the White House about the insurrection. Lauren Boebert famously tweeted today that the speaker had left the chamber as if that was some kind of message to the throngs of rioters.

It's really incredible. The public turned away from election denialism in the 2022 elections. Though, if you look at the perspective that the world has on us watching the House of Representatives in the United States of America this week, knowing that we are paralyzed, part of our government is paralyzed, what they realize is that those people have been empowered, they have gained power, and they're still holding us hostage, and that this arrangement is permanent. We have not expunged it. At least as far as the eye can see, at least at the moment, you know, I'm at the risk of repeating myself again and again and again. The way this is being

framed sometimes, I think, is highly misleading, that you have these far-right extremists who are fighting against the establishment. The reality is, is that Kevin McCarthy is exactly where he is right now because of his shape-shifting on the events surrounding January 6th. You know, his embrace of election denialism, the fact that he voted against certifying the election even after the attack on the Capitol, the fact that he signed on to that letter supporting this bizarre Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to throw out the electoral vote. I mean, you know, Kevin McCarthy, as I said on a cable show earlier this week, there are no normies in all of this. There are no grownups. It's like, which brand of extremism do you want? The notion that somehow that Jim Jordan represents something less reckless

and, you know, less nihilistic than Scott Perry is somewhat naive, I think. And so we're going to be living in that world for some time, even after criminal charges continue to come down. There was one time we thought at least one of them could be indicted before the close of the 117th Congress. Now they're emboldened, they're empowered, and electing Kevin McCarthy's speaker is electing this band of hardliners' speakers. So you're right, everything he did in the face of January 6th to turn away from what he knew was right and true has empowered them. And now he literally has given them the keys. So we can watch him beg for an entire week or two for a job that he will hold for an entire week only or two. But we know where this is coming from. You know, the energy is with

the hijackers. And if they get, you know, seats, they can stack the rules committee. If they get more money for their investigations, more, you know, special purchase of power on these panels and select committees. I don't think we can really wrap our heads around where that's going. Again, as you and I are talking on Friday morning, the situation seems to be fluid. There is a deal or maybe we should call it an, or maybe there's not an agreement with some of the opponents. So we just don't know what's going to happen. But I want to get your sense, as somebody who's watched Congress for a long time, these negotiations between McCarthy and the holdouts seem like less negotiations than just this ongoing abject surrender, where he is giving them one concession after another.

And I guess at some point, you have to ask, at what cost? He has essentially, the phrase I used yesterday was self-gelding. He is making himself the weakest conceivable speaker. And I guess the question, A.B., is that if he gives in on things like allowing any member of the caucus to move to vacate the chair, if he gives in and puts the crazies on the rules committee, is there any way that this Congress will be anything other than dysfunctional? No. And that's why the moderate and conservative allies of Kevin McCarthy who've stood by him in the lead up to the election, in the two months since the election and on this very difficult week are growing very concerned about how he has disemboweled the role of the speaker or the influence and the power of the speakership and the whole kind of structure of how the House functions. And so that's why you're seeing they're very frustrated. They're kind of frightened about what this portends, but they don't have another person. So they're behind Kevin. And I think they're sort of secretly wishing that Kevin will climb down from this nervous

breakdown that he's having, because they're saying, you know, you're giving away too much, and you're going to basically destroy our ability to govern and to get reelected. And here we are over here, there's however many of us, almost 200 of us, and you're giving, you know, you're negotiating with away your job to terrorists. Well, the bold step would be obviously six Republicans join with all of the Democrats to nominate, you know, Fred Upton or Liz Cheney and those as speaker. And that's not going to happen. Right.

And those six Republicans would have to give up their their career. They would say this is my last two years in the House. The problem is only Brian Fitzpatrick remains as someone. I mean, he didn't vote for impeachment, but look at all the votes for impeachment. They've all left. And so the moderates now are new. They're in Biden districts, but they just won. They're not going to walk the plank in that way. So the only thing that they have left is the discharge petition. So you have them saying, look, Kevin, you can't take away my committee assignment and

give it to Lauren Boebert. You can't empower them to run the House and have us, you know, just veer right into a debt default as he's, you know, constantly meeting with the hardliners on the holdouts. They're talking about this discharge petition and it's like a, you know, it's like a bulwark. It's their last protection in the face of something really important where they would get 218 signatures for any House floor vote. Let's say there was a huge natural disaster and we needed emergency spending or the debt ceiling votes that they would get, you know, 20 of them to join with Democrats and they would exceed the numbers left in the House Republican conference to pass something sane on the floor and stop the world

from melting down. But it wasn't supposed to be this way. I mean, they were voting for Kevin and supporting him so that the zookeeper would still have the keys to the zoo. And I think this is why the question about whether or not this event is going to be politically damaging. I think that what you're seeing right now is a preview of what you're going to see over the next two years. So yes, this theater that we have right now with the popcorn and all of the schadenfreude might not be playing, you know, to the rest of the country, to the normal voters, the way it plays to us political geeks. But if this is a rehearsal of what the debt ceiling vote is going to be, if it's rehearsal of one shambolic vote after another, then it is going to make a difference. It's going to make a very, very dramatic difference. And I think this is where the anxiety comes in. You actually kind of called the

shot on this in your last piece from last year. You pointed out that Republicans in the Senate were so worried about the chaotic incoming House majority that that's one of the main motives for them passing that massive omnibus bill so they wouldn't risk this kind of complete, you know, goat circus that you're having right now. I mean, isn't this exactly the kind of thing that Republicans in the Senate were afraid of when they voted for that $1.7 trillion bill? It's like, don't mess with this. We don't trust Kevin McCarthy, you know, and his band of deplorables to get their act together. So one Republican congressman told me after the election, so mid-November, that they were so terrified about Ukraine funding that they basically that there was going to have to be a swallowing of

an omnibus because there was no way to take this into next year because then it would be a government shutdown that Kevin couldn't get out of. And they all knew that and they were willing to just hold their nose and do it. And that's just so interesting about the constant references to the people who are never Kevins are basically saying that he let it happen. He pretends that he opposed this massive spending bill, but really it was fine with him and he was part of the vote no, hope yes crowd. Is that true? What do you think? Oh, I think it's definitely easier for Kevin McCarthy to have had that omnibus pass. No question about it. There's no question. He didn't want that on February 5th. Look what he's going through now. So no, there's no question that he

was. That's what is so frightening is that there's all sorts of scenarios, national security crises, a debt default, things that we can imagine us being in paralysis over. I don't know how much of the American public is paying attention to this, Charlie. That's what's so interesting is, you know, you just mentioned we see it from a different vantage point. And then someone like my mother sees it without understanding sort of all the inside baseball, but watching it, you know, in horror. And then I don't know how many Americans are taking the time out of their day this week to be following this. But it really shows right out of the bat before they even have their first conflagration on policy or substance, that the Republican Party is totally

out of control and that they absolutely are hostage to their extremists. If that wasn't clear before the election, it's so much more clear now. Let's stay on this point, because I think you're describing something that I think is really important to understand, that Kevin McCarthy went along with this 1.7 trillion, sort of wink, wink, wink, I'm going to vote no, but hope yes on this, because he knew that if this came up under his watch, that he'd be held hostage to these folks. So when the never Kevins say we can't trust Kevin McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy says one thing and does the other thing. They have a point, you know, fundamentally at the bottom of this, they don't trust Kevin McCarthy because Kevin McCarthy is a swamp creature. He is a creature of Washington.

And this is business as usual in many ways for someone like Kevin McCarthy to go wink, wink, wink. I'm going to vote no, but let's make sure that it actually goes through because I don't trust myself and my own colleagues not to fuck this up. There's no question. And you're right. They know that at every level they've watched him and they understand that leadership has to clean up anyway. You know, that he is a person who, he really is the human weathervane, the cliche people are using about him, that Kevin McCarthy is not politically shrewd. It's why he backed himself into a speaker's race years ago that he couldn't handle because, A, there was a lot of oppo on him, and B, he went on TV to say that they were trying to destroy Hillary Clinton with the Benghazi committee investigation.

He's very good at the Karen feeding, and he's obsessive about the Karen feeding. And so he makes sure that he raises you enough money. He calls when there's a problem in your district. He calls you before you call him. He wants to help you. He's meticulous about that. He learned that as a staffer and coming up in leadership. And Trey Gowdy once told me Kevin McCarthy reaches his mother by text on her birthday before Trey Gowdy does. That is what he does. Is he keen with political instincts? No. He completely blew all of January 6th, as we've talked about, but pulling those three people off the committee after Nancy Pelosi said no to Jim Banks and no to Jim Jordan when he said, okay, fine, we won't have anyone on your committee. And denying the party an inside man on the January

6th committee is one of the great political debacles of our lifetime. And that's Kevin. He's dumb and he's not ideological. He has no principles. He's just really good at the care and feeding part. And he's raised all this money. And that's why he got steamed in that meeting two days ago and said, I've heard this because he he's worked really hard. But he's not that smart.

He's not that good at this. Well, no, no, no. He's not smart. And he's not a chess player. And he's not even very good at checkers. Let's go back to that first failed run for speaker back in 2015, after John Boehner quit, and everybody assumed that he was going to be the speaker. You know, there was, as you point out, the oppo research. But also in 2015, Kevin McCarthy had the good judgment to know I don't have the votes and that if you don't have the votes, you don't take the votes, you step aside. So let's fast forward now to 2023. One of Nancy Pelosi's famous adages was, you know, don't have a vote unless you have the votes.

Kevin McCarthy obviously doesn't have that same philosophy. So a couple of people have asked me this question, and I don't think it's a naive question. If you know you don't have the votes, why do you do this? I mean, you know, in an alternative, you know, Earth 2.0, where Kevin McCarthy actually has a clue, he would have whipped the votes long before we got to this week. And if he realized that he did not have the votes, he would not subject Congress and the Republican Party in Congress to this rodeo. So why is he doing this? Why is he making a different decision this year than he did back in 2015? Charlie, I really think this just has a lot to do with Kevin McCarthy's psyche. I

mean, he literally has sold off everything now. He has nothing left to lose. He's lost his dignity. He's lost his principles. We know what he told his colleagues after January 6th about the president. He told them that he was going to march off to Donald Trump and tell him to resign. He said that the president was complicit in the insurrection and which should take responsibility for the mob. But that's all gone now. And I don't I think that he believed in 2015 he had a future. And I believe that he truly believes this is his last stand and there's nothing else he can do. He's a desperate man. I think that he knows he's the laughingstock of the world. Unfortunately, that's really terrible for the country.

And I think he feels that he doesn't want to back down. That just all that matters is that title. Yes. I mean, he's gone through all of this. And, you know, he backs out now. And it's, you know, it's a fast track to complete obscurity. And you always remain an asterisk and a punchline. So I certainly get that. And also,

there's a little bit of a, not a little bit, I mean, there's been that also shift in the political culture where you never apologize, you never back down, you always punch back. And maybe there's some of that. I guess the interesting question will be how long the rest of the conference is prepared to go along with all this. As you and I are speaking, he has not lost any of his support. They appear to be hanging tough. There's an agreement out there, so let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Okay, so I admit I am also obsessed about something else you wrote about last year. It doesn't seem that long ago, does it? It was a week ago. The last thing that Kevin McCarthy needed at this point was a cinematic scandal involving a new member, but that's what he got. The George Santos story has been temporarily eclipsed, but I have to admit,

speaking of schadenfreude, and I put it in my newsletter, the picture of George Santos chatting with Marjorie Taylor Greene. This, ladies and gentlemen, is your new Republican establishment. Look, you point out, I mean, George Santos is not your garden variety liar. And as you point out, none of this is funny. It's sick. But A.B., it's kind of sick funny. Funny sick. Terrible to laugh because last week I thought it was very disturbing.

Yeah. But now we're in a different realm of the absurd. And so now we're literally watching, I mean, it's been an interesting week, Charlie. I think people, you know, this is very insidery, but to watch Matt Gaetz talk to Carmilla Jaipal, to watch AOC talk to Paul Gosar, to watch Marjorie Taylor Greene go greet Jesse Jackson in his wheelchair. It is kind of funny, the whole thing. And Seb Gorka is wondering if he should have Donald Trump come in and negotiate a settlement. I mean, everyone is out of their minds. So you're right that the George Santos scandal has now receded because we have

something more insane that's overtaken it. But I watched a clip the other day of Santos sort of muscling over to this intense discussion between the Matt Gaetz crowd and maybe some other sane Republicans. And he just sort of lurked in there, almost looked like it was a fake. I mean, it was just like, if I went live, made a cut, and had George Santos just showing up like this. It was insane. Another video of him sitting all by himself, twiddling his thumbs, Noah will go near him. And then my absolute favorite, you know, detail, so like a runner also, is they keep calling his name, and he doesn't respond because it's clearly not his name. His real name.

It's just, the thing about George Santos that is so interesting is that there's literally nothing you can be sure about with this guy, including whether he's George Santos. Is he gay? Is he not gay? Not clear. Is he Jewish or Jew-ish? You know, where did he go to school?

What country did he live in? How many times did his mom die? I mean, it's just the effect of con man knows when to stop, right? George Santos is like an overdrawn movie character. He's a madman. That's the thing. He won't answer any reporter's questions, except he talked to this reporter from

Semaphore, and he said he wasn't going to answer. He's going to serve his constituents and fulfill every single promise he made in this campaign. I mean, that's what he's there to do for. But then he offered that he's lost six pounds just from walking since he got the job, which was two days ago. I mean, these liars, they live in an alternate reality and they do it for fun and they cannot stop. He won't respond to questions about life, but she didn't ask him how much weight he's lost since he got to Congress, but he just wanted to throw that out. The guy is just, he's on another planet. No, he is. And I'm sorry to go back to this, but I can't get past the fact that this stuff was sort of lying out in plain sight and nobody was able to do anything effective with it before the election.

And we had a good piece in the Bulwark the other day about how this is just a kind of a dramatic example of what happens when you have the death of local news, that you didn't have anybody that followed up on this. You had one local paper that apparently nobody paid any attention to that had the goods on the guy. And apparently the party had the goods on the guy, but nobody in the New York media ecosystem thought it was worth doing anything about. And apparently the Democrats didn't want to invest any money on any opposition.

So here we are. And here Kevin McCarthy is. And Kevin McCarthy cannot do anything about this guy because he needs his vote. Right. This is I mean, this is really so perverse in so many ways. You write about local news and it's a tragedy and there is no scrutiny of people from the ground up where they begin their careers. And once they get away with enough, they can get away with more. That lack of scrutiny at the start at the local level is really dangerous. And so we have the talented Mr. Santos. And you're right.

I don't like the Democratic Party getting blamed because they didn't invest enough in the oppo because the media didn't have the resources to do it. But the Republicans are willing to keep him knowing he'd run for another cycle and was a total lunatic liar. It's so depressing. But no, Kevin McCarthy is not going to get rid of him because he needs his vote. And, you know, you look at someone like Roger Williams of Texas. His wife had a medical emergency. He cannot be with her because he's trying to hold the line for Kevin McCarthy. Roger Williams, I mean, he had a staffer get shot in the shooting that almost took Steve Felice's life. He himself was injured. He ran to the dugout and hurt himself.

His ankle was on crutches for weeks. I mean, this is what serving in Congress is all about now. And this is madness. This is madness that we're going into a weekend and we're in this untenable situation where, obviously, as we've said, George Sanchez is the least of Kevin McCarthy's worries. He's making sure that no one with COVID leaves, no one with a funeral leaves. Everyone is butt in the chair for his ego trip.

OK, so you and I have to have an argument about something here because there's just too much agreement. I think that's our main problem here. So let me just throw this out. Let's do a split screen. The most obvious split screen here is that the Republicans who have just won control of Congress, you know, are kind of miserable. The Democrats who just lost control of Congress are just having a ball. They are having a blast. What should they be doing? Exactly what they're doing. They're sitting there. They got their feet back up. Amazingly, remarkably,

they are completely unified. They have not lost a single vote. So you're seeing the kind of discipline and unity that we don't usually associate with Democrats. But the other split screen is this was a hell of a good week for Joe Biden, wasn't it? I mean, at the very moment that the House Republicans were melting down, he is down in Kentucky with Mitch McConnell and the Republican governor of Ohio and having this bipartisan love fest about getting things done. He's using this moment to go down to the border. I know you're not a fan of Biden 2024, but I think, you know, in the future, we might look back on this and trace this as kind of the boomerang week, if that's the right word I want to use, for Biden's presidential prospects. Because he looks pretty good. At the same time, the Republicans seem absolutely committed to screwing themselves up.

What do you think? I couldn't agree more on what Joe Biden's presidency looks like in the last six months. Everything changed. Everything changed. Infrastructure, which is a huge accomplishment, was before that. But that was in a long slog of other really negative things that really tanked Joe Biden's support. In this spate of all of these consequential bipartisan laws passing, continued strength in his support for Ukraine and holding the coalition together against Vladimir Putin, and then defying history in the midterms. A good enough jobs report today. And like you said, everyone he stood with yesterday,

including Mitch McConnell at an event, that bridge is like a poster child for the need for infrastructure resources. I agree with all that. My argument for Joe Biden stepping aside for 2024 is that he will not be the Joe Biden in two years that he is today. He certainly won't make it to another six. He has not served, Charlie, even half of his term. Everyone is talking about him like he's running up for reelection and he's announcing and he's going to run in June. He is not one halfway through his term. He has been fatigued by it. He's been an enormously successful first term president and it's time to step aside. He cannot promise this country that he can serve us till he's 86. So those are just two separate things. I mean, I steadfastly believe it's his time to serve us two more years.

He's a man who met the moment. He saved the country from Trump. He's never politicized Ukraine and the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party. He holds back on all of this stuff. He just quietly succeeds. And I think it's been remarkable. That doesn't mean he can two years from now tell us he can serve another four. And yet, and yet, it does seem as if this is a done deal. that doesn't mean he can two years from now tell us he can serve another four.

And yet, and yet, it does seem as if this is a done deal, as if he has made the decision that he's going to run. And if he runs, it seems highly unlikely that he'll face any sort of a serious challenge. Right. I think that he'll face some challenge. I don't know how serious it'll be. I'd be really surprised if no one primaried him, because I think that looking at the polling, the party knows that most of the voting public and most of their own party wants him to only serve one term. And I think that he would likely pull it out anyway, obviously. He would pull out the nomination in a primary, even with a challenge. I don't know that he's entirely made up his mind. They're sure making it look that way.

And I still have this strange gut instinct that he knows it's wrong to run again. He may know that it's wrong to run again, but he's stuck. He's stuck in the sense that the dynamics of American politics being what they are, that there's really no alternative to him. So I don't disagree with your critique. I just think that this is a done deal. I think he's running and he's going to get the nomination. I think that, Charlie, if he does run again, he's setting up the country and his party for a potential crisis.

And I think it's I mean, that is a mistake. Part of the problem here is that you don't know who the Republicans are going to put up. If it's Trump, I think it becomes an easy choice for him. On the other hand, if Trump does go away, I'm not making a prediction of just, you know, let's just game this out. And it looks like the Republicans are going to put up a younger, more vigorous nominee. Then I think that changes the calculation. So we're going to have to get ahead of ourselves here. You run Trump, Biden becomes, I think, the default nominee. Trump is out of the picture and it looks like somebody younger, somebody more future oriented. Then I think it becomes a real problem, but we're not

there yet. So speaking of Trump, as we have occasionally have done on this podcast, where do you come down on the how diminished, how pathetic did Donald Trump look this week question? How bad was it that he endorses McCarthy and switches not one vote, not a single one of his MAGA loyalists? And how bad was it when, in order to show that he still loved the orange god king, Matt Gaetz nominated Trump for speaker, and Donald Trump got one vote. He got one freaking vote. I remember how delirious I was when I was with you the morning after the election, and I felt like that it was irresponsible for me to even try to put a sentence or a thought together because I was so out of it. And I'm feeling that it was very responsible for me to even try to put a sentence or a thought together because I was so out of it.

And I'm feeling that 2023 is just like shocked and surprised me and taken me on some surreal wild ride that I can't believe I'm saying this. But I actually really want to thank Matt Gaetz for like the best troll so far of my year of calling Kevin McCarthy a squatter in the speaker suite. And Charlie, I never have said anything nice about Matt Gaetz. And I'm sure that'll be the last time, but I can't even believe that I just said that. But I want to give him points. Donald Trump is mad at Matt Gaetz, who is like a super, super Trumpkin, as we all know, like the uber top Trumpkin of all time. He said a few weeks ago when someone asked him, well, you're opposing McCarthy, but Trump supports McCarthy. And he said, oh, you know, all the best people.

HR is not really his thing about Trump. Right. So I think he had to grovel. So he had to nominate him. Which made it worse. Of course. Because, right. So he becomes the lone vote.

Donald Trump is so pathetic, his true social posts go nowhere, but the one that did yesterday sounded like he drank three bottles of cough syrup. Did you see this one? I actually think that a big Republican victory today after going through numerous roll calls that failed to produce a Speaker of the House

has made the position. Anyway, it goes on and on. But there's. Yeah, this is great. It's winning. It's so big. Yeah. And he says something about it will be bigger than the traditional way.

The sentences don't make sense. I mean, the commas don't make sense. The words don't make sense. The verbs. It's the most crazy and coherent thing you've ever read. And he's just completely aware that he's on the floor picking up the pieces. It's amazing. It's amazing. It is smudged with flop sweat. I mean, he knows he pressed that red button of power

and nothing happened. And they ended up laughing at him. And look, Donald Trump, I just finished writing a piece here. Donald Trump is not a complicated man. He wants the spotlight on him. He does not want to be irrelevant. And what he really loathes and fears is the possibility that he will be ignored. And this week he was ignored. So now he's got to sort of, you know, retro engineer this so that whatever happens, he's going to take credit for, right? Whatever happens is going to be good. And whatever happens is a win because that's the way he is.

But he just looks so much smaller. I am still stuck in the, he's leading in the polls still. He's got that hardcore MAGA base. He's got to be considered the front runner. If he wants the nomination, he's likely to get the nomination. And yet he keeps losing in the, he lost the presidency, lost the Senate, you know, he around the country, you know, his candidates, you know, Carrie Lake in Arizona, Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania flop, even Fox news, you know, called him the biggest loser tonight. He tried to be head Mitch McConnell failed, You know, he railed against that omnibus bill and they ignored

him. And then you have this absolutely pathetic, momentum, political, you know, presidential campaign, this Potemkin campaign, where he doesn't leave Mar-a-Lago. And you have Olivia Newtsey writing that devastating piece, comparing him to Norma Desmond, you know, the forgotten, ignored, aging screen star. And so what does he do? He kind of steps out and says, I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille. And everyone ignored him. I mean, this was, this is bad stuff for him. Yeah, I agree. I think that he's diminished. There's no question. I think that the base is very interested in Ron DeSantis and all that. I just don't think Republicans can shake him. And that's why I'm holding to my thesis that he will burn it all down, because when he's cornered and

he feels irrelevant, that's when he gets the most dangerous. And so he truly has nothing left to lose. I mean, Norm Eisen said this morning that he thinks that Fannie Willis is going to indict Donald Trump by the end of this month in Georgia. And the curtain's coming down, like soon. And he is going to start doing all sorts of stuff to hold on to relevance. And it's going to get crazy. It doesn't mean he can be the nominee, but boy, is he going to do everything he can. And boy, are the House Republicans going to help him. I mean, they're going to be they're going to be poison to the nominee of the Republican Party, the House Republicans. So Donald Trump is going to do what he does best, which is to destroy things. And I think he's well aware of how completely isolated and insignificant he is this week.

And that makes him somewhat more dangerous to some Republicans. But as you know, I completely agree with your thesis that he's going to burn everything down. He doesn't care. And this has been the fear. This is one of the ways that he has held the Republican Party hostage, the threat that, well, you know, I could always go third party or I could, you know, do this or I could do that. And therefore, they can't quit him. And it's one of the reasons why they've been so reluctant to quit him. I get the sense that the fear factor has dropped significantly there. So that may not be the problem. I also, and maybe it's premature to say this, but I was struck by the muted response to the January 6th committee's criminal

referral, because this, again, was something that you have to put down as a big possibility, that the base will and the Republican Party will rally around Donald Trump, you know, if he is charged, if he's indicted, whatever happens. I'm not so sure that's going to happen anymore. I mean, they may say things, but it won't be. It's not the same thing. That's interesting because what the base will be hearing on Tucker is that the government is coming after innocent people with all the tools and weapons that they have and we're powerless, you know, as citizens against it. There will definitely be an anti-Department of Justice.

I don't know about Georgia, but there will be, if there's a federal indictment, there will be a huge pushback because you have to push back against the evil Biden regime. And Biden's a dictator and all that. So Trump's going to count on that and lean on that. I see what you're saying about the criminal referral, but it was so symbolic and sort of meaningless. Is it bad of me to say that? I mean, I think it was like not a big deal. But I think if Garland comes out with one, I think everyone, including Rhonda Sanchez, is going to say it's, you know, this is an abuse of power in some way. Right. They will say that. But the question is, will they rally to Trump? Is this the rocket fuel to restart this campaign? And I guess the, you know, we talked about Joe Biden's age. And as we read Olivia Nuzzi's piece, you just get the spell that he was able to cast, that it's fading and that there is that recognition.

Now, it's not fading because, you know, there's been an attack of conscience or the Republicans have rediscovered their principle. They just they hate losing. And the problem is that every single week now he's reinforced that I am a loser who's losing it sort of vibe. Yeah, no, I agree that he's been reduced. And I agreed with Olivia's frame that he is just an older man who's lost his juice. But he's also without his platform. And so Donald Trump, if he was president right now, if he was a nominee, if he was a candidate, if he was on a debate stage, if he was on Morning Joe like he was every single day in 2016 or 15 or whatever that was, he would be raging. And he would be on offense and he would be making up crap and starting fires and conspiracies, I believe.

Oh, no, no. He would. And you just wonder whether it lands the same way, where at one point it was fresh and provocative and it was kind of funny. And now it's just crazy and cringeworthy and criminal. And like, can we move on? Can we just change the channel?

Well, that's the big question, Charlie. It was always, always insane and cringy and criminal to us every single minute from 2015 on. But the people that loved him because he was fighting us, whoever us is, the media, the whatever, right? The Democrats, the media, the Mexicans, the Muslims and the elites, right? That's right. You know, maybe he's not that good of a fighter anymore. His dumb routine, they always fell for that. And boy, was it old. It was old by 2017. I don't know. It's just all about the base, right? It's not about us. And that's the big caveat on the,

you know, Trump is losing his juice because the Republican Party is not the party you see on television. It is not the party in Washington. It is not the group of elected officials or consultants. It is the base. And as long as the base likes this kind of thing. Yeah. But I have to say that, you know, as another leading indicator, kind of the the MAGA crack up that we're seeing, I mean, the fact that they are now fighting with one another. It was one thing when everyone was all rowing in the same direction or starting fires in the same corner or whatever it is. But now you have, you know, all of these little slap fights that are going on, you know, divisions within the media. You know, Tucker and Hannity are going in different directions.

You have Lauren Boebert fighting with Marjorie Taylor Greene. You have, you know, Jim Jordan versus Matt Gaetz. There is kind of an every man for himself lack of leadership as they're sort of, you know, flopping and flailing around out there. It just feels different. Oh, I agree. I agree. And that's what we talked about last time is the circular firing squad. They really don't know where to land. It's like a musical chairs thing, right? Everyone's still fighting, but they don't even really know who's right or who's going to come out, you know, on the side of the base. And so it is fascinating to see the fault lines. And it's very unsettled. I just don't really know where the Trump and somebody

who challenges Trump, I don't know where that fits in. Who knows if Hannity's investment in backing Kevin McCarthy is going to pay off or if it's better to be Tucker, right? But I just, in terms of the Trump factor, I don't know where the base is going to land. I mean, and that's why we keep our minds open about what's going to happen here. However, I'm just looking at Dana Milbank's new column that just came out a few minutes ago. McCarthy's fate is irrelevant. The terrorists have already won. I would use the word crazies. And that seems to be obvious. And to go back to a point we made a little bit earlier, this is going to be a show that's going to be, you know, be played on loop for, you know, month after month after month. So the Republicans are going into 2024 with the

prospect of having their presidential ticket headed by the disgraced, twice impeached, possibly indicted, you know, one-term president, Donald Trump, who will be railing at the clouds, and a House of Representatives that every week reminds us how uninterested in actually governing they are, and whose, you know, most prominent faces will be people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and George Santos. And that is the mystery, Charlie. Does Ron DeSantis, who's working so hard to not comment on Washington and not comment on the things that Tucker and Hannity have to talk about or Jesse Waters, is the nominee of the party going to use the House Republicans as a foil to say this is crazy and I'm reasonable? Do they dare do that to themselves with the base in a primary

contest? Interesting. I am not a consultant and I don't play one on podcasts either, but I don't think this is a hard one. There's a lot of hard things for Ron DeSantis that I don't know how he's going to figure. I mean, at some point he's going to have to lead, right? He wants to be president. You have to lead. You have to say something about Ukraine. You have to say something about these things, right? You can't dodge them forever. But on that question you just raised for a, and bear with me here, for a successful governor to run against the swamp and the chaos in Washington is easy. That we need somebody who's not been in Washington. We need an outsider. You know, I get the job done here. Why can't we do that in Washington? That's the card

that he has to play. And so the worse the chaos is in Washington, the better it is for any of these outsider candidates. And that's the formula for Republicans to win the presidency, you know. And that's the tried and true formula. I'm just saying that with this new tribal period that we're in, particularly on the Republican side, is he actually going to be able to get away if there's some big dust up between establishment rhino speaker, because whoever's in charge, right, is going to be trouble, who's trying to make a deal with the Democrats to try to pass an increase in the debt ceiling? Is he going to be somewhere where he can, you know, walk a fine line and not really, this is the interesting question, how much more emboldened and empowered are those radicals going to be a year from now? It's just an interesting thing to think about. Well, they will be. And also there are, I mean, there are other cross currents here, not to get too far into it, but I'm, I was noticing, and again, this is way below the radar screen, but Kristi Noem, who obviously has national ambitions, the governor of South Dakota. Yeah.

I remember when she was in the House and she was quasi normal. Yeah, exactly. Well, there's been a lot of that. Well, she's taking shots at Ron DeSantis on his record on abortion. Now the abortion issue is going to be a wild card, you know, for, you know, the foreseeable future. So in Florida, they have a 15-week ban. Correct me if I'm wrong on the facts. Yes, 15.

Which is actually the most politically palatable position. But in a Republican primary, it becomes heresy because why 15? Why not six? And the person who endorses six will be challenged, will hold it. Why not, you know, at birth? Why not, you know, ban birth control? Whatever. But I think that you're going to start to see fights over some of these specific issues. And abortion is going to be a continuing absolute mess, I think, for the Republican Party. And it'll

be interesting to see how Ron DeSantis finesses that one, because you can't finesse that one. You have to put a number on it. And on every other culture war issue, Ron DeSantis' default position is, I'm going to take the most extreme position in the culture war. I'm going to stake that out. I'm not going to let Donald Trump or anybody else get to the right of me. It'll be interesting to see whether he now does that on abortion as well. I know, really, because if he's reading the general electorate from the midterms on the Dobbs decision, he's got to worry about that. He's got to defend 15 weeks to be a general election candidate. And Pence, as you said, will be in there pushing everyone for a federal ban and no restrictions, you know, under any circumstances and no abortions ever. And I thought it was fascinating that Trump just came out and got fed up and said they're blaming me for the midterms and it was abortion.

It was you pro-lifers, you unreasonable pro-lifers. How is that going to happen? I mean, you know, out of the mouths of babes and madmen sometimes speak the truth. You know, it's just so funny. It's easier to blame Trump's candidates in the midterms for the failure to meet expectations than it is to admit that abortion is a huge problem. And so they're not admitting it, but it is going to be a big factor in the primary contest. As you point out, though, issues that work in a Republican primary will not necessarily work in a general election. And I think this is one of the more interesting, and there's so many interesting questions about Ron DeSantis, including, you know, how he's going to run

against Donald Trump, what he will look like if he finally pulls the trigger. As I pointed out, lots of governors look great on paper until they got into the race and it doesn't turn out that well. Just, you know, that well. Just ask President Rick Perry or President Jeb Bush. But having said all of that, whether or not Ron DeSantis, by moving so far right on all of these hot button culture issues, is actually hurting his general election prospects. Because I guess the theory of the game is this is what I need to win the MAGA base. But is the theory also this is what will appeal to the swing voters who will determine the winner of the 2024 election? And his positions are quite hardcore and he appears to be doubling down on all of them. And I don't see him being the guy who's going to bring back those suburban female voters from, you know,

Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin. I don't either, but we don't know who's going to be running against him. It's going to be Biden, I'm telling you. You're in denial, A.B., it's going to be Biden. Like you, Charlie, I have my doubts about whether Ron DeSantis will even get in. I mean, I think Ron DeSantis is a closet wimp, and he's never really been tested. He has a very impressive victory margin with Democrats voting to support him and people really being pleased with his stewardship of Florida in his first term. He barely won that first term. Amazing re-election victory. But can he take the heat in a national election under the presidential campaign spotlight is entirely a different question. So I don't know if he gets in. I don't know if he gets in how well he does. And yes, I agree with you. I don't think he's exactly positioning himself like a Glenn Youngkin,

who is much better at being greasy about slithering back and forth, just enough culture war, and then seeming like he's sane and backing off. So it'll be interesting. We don't know. And we don't know. But that's what's going to make 2023 so interesting. Yeah. A.B. Stoddard, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

And welcome to the new year. Happy New Year, Charlie. Great to be with you as always. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday and we'll do this all over again.