The Bulwark Podcast - A.B. Stoddard: Dead Ends after Iowa

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Almost half of Iowa's caucus-goers voted for someone besides Trump—evidence that a criminal defendant preaching to the choir can only go so far. Meanwhile, Haley makes up her own reality, DeSantis crawls to South Carolina, and the Trump suck-ups plot against McConnell. A.B. Stoddard joins Charlie Sykes. show notes: Chris Christie Ending His White House Bid Politico piece Charlie and A.B. referenced

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is January 16th, 2024. This is the morning after the big, big Iowa caucuses. The suspense did not kill me last night. I think we kind of knew how it was going to turn out. You know, short version, Donald Trump wins. He gets 51% of the vote in an incredibly low turnout election. I think we kind of knew how it was going to turn out. You know, short version, Donald Trump wins. He gets 51% of the vote in an incredibly low turnout election. I think he got something like 56 to 60,000 votes. There are some legislative races that get more votes than that, but a win is a win. He wins Iowa. He wins Iowa by 30 points. Ron DeSantis keeps hope sort of barely twitching alive, says he got his ticket punched. He finishes second.

Nikki Haley finishes third, declares that there's a two-person race, and then says she's not going to be debating anymore in New Hampshire. So after all of these big events, I'm always joined. I'm always lucky to be joined by A.B. Stoddard, our new colleague at The Bulwark. A.B., how are you this morning? Iowa hangover? Yeah, I'm disappointed, not surprised. It is a weird numbness, Charlie, right?

Like, I don't know how many months I've been saying that New Hampshire wouldn't matter because he would say it was rigged and diluted by rhinos and socialists and globalists. And so it is weird, though, right, to be here now that it's actually officially begun and officially kind of ended after all the time we've spent talking. Yeah, I mean, Will Salatin and I talked about this yesterday, you know, before even the first vote had been cast, the Republican normies had already surrendered. But let's pretend, you know, let's engage in some of the obligatory punditry. Where should we start? You know, the obvious place to start is with Donald Trump. So let's start with Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis finishes 30 points behind. By the way, he visited

all 99 counties in Iowa. He did not win one, not one county. Here's a guy who had the endorsement of the governor, had the endorsement of some of the major evangelical leaders in a state with lots of evangelicals, and he doesn't win one county, and he gets, what is it, 21% of the vote, but he limps on. So give me your take on Ron DeSantis the morning after. Look, you know, unfortunately, this is the worst place for him to be. If he had finished behind Vivek, he could crawl home in humiliation, but it would end. Now he's going to a town hall. He's flying to South Carolina. He's pretending that he's competing in New Hampshire when you're in second place, but 30 points away, like you're not a contender,

right? So he obviously hoped at one point to win Iowa. But he comes out with the eye of the tiger and all of that stuff, thunderstruck. And I mean, you'd think that, hey, second place winner and. He's got a punch ticket and we'll see what that means. You know, I wouldn't be surprised. I don't think you would be either, Charlie, if he dropped out in 48 or 72 hours. This is just a painful slog for him. Nikki Haley refusing to even debate him anymore. Like he's such a has-been.

So if I were him, I would cut this off as soon as possible. I know I'm not him. Okay. So why isn't he? I mean, this is an interesting question. He's 30 points behind. Iowa was his best shot. He put all of his resources into Iowa. I'm trying to think, where does he go from here? What is the next is, what is the next chapter? So Ron DeSantis is, my ticket is punch. I'm going to New Hampshire where I have done pretty much nothing, South Carolina, where I'm not even really a major factor. So what is, what would the DeSantis spin be about why he's in the race and where he goes now? Right. So that is a huge mystery. If donors are telling him he should hang around because he and

Nikki each got four delegates out of the Hawkeye state and they need to stay in it through the convention and they're going to all succeed in taking Trump down. He's going to get convicted. He's going to something horrible be exposed in a trial. There's certain of it that will change the whole trajectory. Okay. So this is the meteor unicorn strategy. This is the magical thinking that something, something, something will happen, and then you get the nomination, right? That these things that have not happened so far will happen. Deadly Big Mac, something like that. Charlie, even Casey DeSantis knows this morning, there's no path for Ron DeSantis. So

that's the only line of thinking that would keep him in the race is unicorn. Okay, so he's been going through some interesting things over the last few days. You probably noticed kind of, you know, belatedly noticing that, hey, the right wing media is kind of less than an honest broker here, that they're in the bag for Donald Trump. It's kind of, I'm trying to avoid the term deeply ironic, since irony has already dead, but it seems deeply ironic that Rhonda Sanders is going, hey, you know, this right wing media, it's a little bit screwed up. You know, who knew? Or why are all these people always sucking up to Donald Trump, having spent much of the last year running against Donald Trump while trying to suck up? I mean, you want to talk about

fancy gymnastics, Ron DeSantis' efforts to suck up to Donald Trump while running against him. And it's like he's looking around going, boy, this doesn't work. What happened here? So what's he going through in the last couple of days? It's difficult. And it's sad. I think, you know, Tim Miller, our colleague, had a great take on the pathetic ad that Nikki Haley released where she showed all of the footage from his own commercials when he ran for governor doing, you know, Trump suck up with his little kids at home. And so some major suckers doesn't really do anything but help Trump, which Tim noted, but it was painful and so cringe to watch it. So he can't dump on Trump because he's afraid of alienating his voters. But dumping on Fox is pretty interesting. If you think about the fact that he, we think wants to preserve some

kind of political future for himself or his wife down the road. So that I thought was sort of a little bit desperate. Of course, it was weak, you blame the media instead of Trump, you don't tell the truth about Trump. But really, if you're thinking about what is his long term plan, and his exit ramp, that's kind of a strange place to go. Yeah, in my newsletter, I had this bookmark, this one comment where he says, you can be the most worthless Republican in America, but if you kiss the ring, Trump will say you're wonderful. And Noah Smith tweeted that out and said, save this clip for when DeSantis kisses the ring. Yeah.

Because you know how this plays out. So he may be lashing out right now. He may be having going through this, this disillusionment now, but we know where this plays out. If he wants any future in the Republican party, if Casey wants any future, you know, there's going to be some serious groveling followed by humiliation, right? He's going to have to, you know, crawl through broken glass to Mar-a-Lago, beg forgiveness, and then show up at various events pretending to be enthusiastic and standing at the back of the stage in the spot that was once reserved for Chris Christie. I'm sorry to bring that up.

Right? I mean, this is going to be, there's going to be the obligatory photo of him looking like Ted Cruz back in in 2016 making the phone calls you know that sort of thing there's no other path right now i totally agree looking like their underwear is too tight i think that the best thing for him to do after he gets some sleep and thinks about this because he knows he has to do what you just described yeah yeah to tank Nikki Haley and say, I'm getting out now. She has no path. I have no path. Trump's going to be our nominee. Let's fight Joe Biden. And she's a wimp for refusing to debate me. And she's in denial, pretending that she's in a two-person race.

And the truth is that she wants to fight a Trump-Biden nightmare. And I don't. I don't want to fight Joe Biden. And that would be the best thing for him to do. But to compete with her in New Hampshire and try to crawl towards South Carolina is such a futile, injurious path for him. I mean, the best thing for him to do is just get some sleep, have some beers, shake it off, and just kind of screw her on the way out the door, he has to grovel to Trump. Okay. So let's get to Nikki in a moment. Let's talk about Vivek. Jeez, Vivek's gone. No Vivek. I said he was unlamented and preparing for a career, seeking attention in the febrile swamps of the right-wing fringe. But Vivek went through some things over the last

couple of days. Again, having embraced Trump as hard as he could. Did you see those t-shirts? Save Trump, vote Vivek. And even the Trump people said, that's just stupid, you know, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And so Trump's beating up on him saying, you're just a spoiler. Vivek is out, he's endorsing trump you know just another reminder though that you know that that you're either you know at trump's feet or at his throat and you know he's gonna be groveling for a while too now vivek is such a fake and i like you and many others took great pleasure in trump giving him the boot right on time because Trump was pissed that Vivek's 8% might keep him under 50% looking at the results of the South Pole, right? And Vivek's kind of feeding the

conspiracy drunk MAGA bots with this thing about how Trump is going to be, I don't know, assassinated. He's going to be taken out. And so that's why you had to vote for Vivek was it was too cute. It was a stupid game. And he got kicked in the teeth right before the ballots were cast. We knew all along he was going to be a Trump surrogate, right? He has this great rap. Maga loves him. He's going to have the future in the Trump sphere. It's all going all gonna be fine but it was a stupid ending for him the way it was like too slick and fucking weird to run around making the case that trump was going to get killed and or everyone was going to join republicans were going to join even with the deep state and he was going to get buried by jack smith something was going to

happen and he was going to be taken out. And so you had to support Ramaswamy. That's nuts. I have a confession to make. This morning, when I was writing my newsletter, before I'd had sufficient caffeine, I wrote, Vivek is out, unlamented, and soon to be forgotten. But that's completely not true. I mean, he's unlamented, but he's not going to be forgotten, because he's got a place in MAGA world. I mean, he's exactly the kind of person who's going to find a place, if not in the fever swamps, you know, at least on the OANs or the Newsmaxes or something, or perhaps even in the Trump orbit, because he's exactly the kind of unhinged demagogue that has a real place in the Republican Party these days. It would be naive to say, I mean, you look at here, Chris Christie on the way out, people like Liz Cheney, Adam

Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, they have no place in this future Republican Party. Guys like Vivek, even with the conspiracy theories and the really raw racism. I mean, can we just mention that one of the notable events of the Iowa caucus was that Vivek Ramaswamy pulled disgraced bigot Steve King, the former Republican congressman, who was too racist even for the Republican Party, who was excommunicated, pulled him out of obscurity and was campaigning with him. And unfortunately, that wing of the party is still going to like Vivek, aren't they? I think Vivek is going to try to give Tucker Carlson a run for his money. He'll have his podcast. He'll be running around Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster and doing whatever he can to ingratiate himself. He wants to be like an uber influencer. And then, you know, I think even being in the administration is,

right, is like probably too compromising for him. He wants to be the anointed one after John Jr. or whatever. So yeah, he's, he's going to make sure that we're hearing about him for a long time. He's got the perfect skill set, actually. I mean, he's glib, he's demagogic, and he's utterly without principles of any kind. You know, I think we saw this during the campaign. He's somebody who's prepared to say absolutely anything. And then when he's called on it, you know, the next day, he will deny having said it and will say something else. I mean, so he's that perfect, shape-shifting, unprincipled, extremist, conspiracy theorist, demagogue. So of course, he's got a great, bright future ahead of him. The other thing about him dropping out, of course,

as you look at all of this, this is clearly good news for Donald Trump because the Vivek voters are going to go to Trump. So to the extent that there's some consolidation that benefits Trump, I'm going to get to Trump in a moment. So Haley, Nikki Haley, did not get that surprise second place bump that her supporters were hoping that she was hoping. So give me your take on Nikki Haley at the moment. Underwhelming performance. Would you say underwhelming in Iowa? In an underwhelming caucus, you know? Yeah, yeah. You know, I think that she was counting on, you know, the Seltzer poll had her surging, had her in second place. But in the end, the experts did give DeSantis like between three and five overperformance points for the infrastructure that let's say Kim Reynolds, the governor, and Bob Vander Plaats, the evangelical leader, provided him

in terms of ground games. So I think she's disappointed. I mean, you know how I feel about her. She's a total phony. And so she gets up there and knows that in Republican America, you make your own reality. Like Trump saying over the weekend, he was going to win Iowa for the third time. She just gets up there and says she's in a two-person race. And she, of course, told the audience they have to stop the Trump-Biden nightmare yesterday when Neil, or two days ago, time. She just gets up there and says she's in a two-person race. And she, of course, told the audience they have to stop the Trump-Biden nightmare yesterday, or two days ago, or I don't know when it was, over the weekend when Neil Cavuto from Fox interviews her. She says, of course, she would take Trump over Biden any day of the week. And she congratulates Trump. And Kylie

McEnany tweeted today or last night that that was great. She was congratulating Trump. She's lined up for VP and politics is a game of addition. And she can bring a bunch of moderate, suburban, like different types, maybe not so strongly pro-life voters into the- No way she's going to be VP. I'm sorry. This is board pundit syndrome to think that either she thinks she's going to be VP or that Trump would ever name her VP. I think as we watch her in the next seven days before New Hampshire, it is instructive to consider that she is preserving herself for that. And it just might be that she's not going

to be asked. But if you listen to what she's saying, she's not going to start a two-man race with Donald Trump, Charlie. She's not going to fight him. No, no, but I think it's more likely that she's preserving her viability for 2028 because, you know, Donald Trump, even think of Nikki in a VP spot, and she's not stupid. You have to completely misunderstand Donald Trump's psychology. That is a position that he is going to be looking for the absolute predictable loyalist, no unpredictability, no independence, a willingness to say and do anything, far more likely to be an Elise Stefanik. I've said this before, if he had his druthers, he put Don Jr. or Ivanka in there. No way that he named somebody who's run

against him and said some of the things that she's doing. OK, so that's number one. But I think her performance, her performance in Iowa was actually even weaker than it looked. The Seltzer poll was not wrong. In fact, the Seltzer poll, I think, identified exactly the dynamic of this race, even though it had her in second place. And Seltzer said that it was close to jaw dropping how low the enthusiasm was for her. A caucus is all about enthusiasm. I mean, who's going to leave your house in 25 degree below zero weather, you know, during playoff football season? I don't get that at all. To go stand in a, you know, elementary school gym, you know, listening to people in red hats give speeches. She had a lot of support from Democrats and independents and, you know,

not hardcore Republicans. If you take out that segment, the Donald Trump vote is way more dominant than just 51%. And the reality is that going forward, especially into some of these closed primaries where only Republicans can vote, She's really weak if she is relying upon, you know, the non-Republican voters here. Chris Christie, when he dropped out last week, said, you know what, she's going to get smoked. She's just not up to this. And Chris Christie was absolutely right. He beat her. Trump beat her yesterday with moderates and college-educated Republicans, and that's supposed to be her coalition. So, yeah, again, she could surprise us in New Hampshire. Democrats could play in New Hampshire,

non-affiliated, larger than the Republican electorate in New Hampshire. Anything can happen. But again, Trump was always going to tell us, and he's even said it, I guess, to Brett Baier last week, you know, New Hampshire doesn't count. He's so much has said that. And that's what he'll say on the 24th if she romps there. And so it is to me insignificant. If Trump's party, if the MAGA base is not 80% of the party, it's enough to deny her because she's not MAGA. So it was always an illusion that she could make it dramatic for a few weeks, but that she was really any threat to him on the path to the nomination. I think that's right. I think dramatic for a few weeks because now New Hampshire, look, there's a long history of New Hampshire being contrarian,

right? Doing the opposite of what they did in Iowa. So it's possible she will do extremely well. It was possible she might even win. I don't think so. But let's say anything's possible in New Hampshire. And ultimately though, and this is the deep breath. It's not going to matter because New Hampshire will be bracketed by her underwhelming performance in Iowa and the stomping that lies ahead in her home state of South Carolina and in Nevada and other places like that, which means that, you know, this is pretty much over. I mean, you're seeing the anticipatory surrender of Republicans like Marco Rubio. Okay, tell me about Marco Rubio. What's going on with Mike Lee and Marco Rubio and all of these other senators,

you know, Barrasso, who decided they were going to endorse Donald Trump even before the first vote was cast? Give me your sense of what the dynamic is, because I'm just guessing they're sitting in a room going, it's over, might as well begin the suckage. Right. Well, Mike Lee has been jockeying with J.D. Vance to be like chief Trump suck up. I mean, he's, there's a group of about seven Republicans who are openly opposed to Mitch McConnell in the Senate and voted for Rick Scott for majority leader and are in open defiance of the old crow and the establishment. And Mike Lee is one of them. So it's like Holly, Cruz, Lee, Scott, your old brother, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin,

and like a couple others, right? So Mike Lee wants to be like chief ass kisser if Trump wins a second term. So he rushed out. He's got the pole position. Yeah. And so what I loved about Marco Rubio's endorsement, because he's the most fucking tortured person in the entire Congress, both chambers, is that he tried to write an endorsement where he believes he didn't compliment or praise Trump in any way. He said, when Trump was president, I achieved major policy accomplishments like this, that, and the other, and he has a list because we had a president who didn't let the bureaucracy get in the way,

something like that. And it's time to get back to that. We need Trump to be president again, because we have to get rid of the disaster of Joe Biden. So he's not sucking up to him. So he believes, Charlie, deep down that he is somehow remaining true to some shred of himself, which we can all watch on Twitter this weekend, because everyone's sending the 2016 videos back, where he's on stage with Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, and they're endorsing him because Trump is a cancer and a con man and everything else. And so there's going to be gradations, right, of these endorsements. There's going to be wholehearted. Barrasso is a total Trumper. He's from Wyoming. There's not a never Trumper in the state of Wyoming anymore now that Liz Cheney's

gone, maybe Alan Simpson, but you know what I'm saying? There's like five of them. And so Barrasso wants so badly to replace Mitch McConnell and the three contenders are John Cornyn, John Barrasso, and John Thune. And John Cornyn and John Thune can't stand Donald Trump. Cornyn tries to be a little more, you know, he's like somewhere between Barrasso and McConnell. Thune gets the tight underwear look in his eyes. He's a totally sane person. And I don't know that he probably, in the end, wants to replace McConnell because he's going to be having to deal with the Trumpification of the Senate conference. So that's where we are.

Barrasso had to get in there and win the badge of pre-Iowa endorsement. And that was why it was so rich that Christie called him out. In Morning Shots this morning, I dwell perhaps too much at length on Joni Ernst's, you know, vacuous appearance on Meet the Press, where she essentially says she has no problem with Donald Trump pardoning all the January 6th insurrectionists. She has that case, that weird Republican case of amnesia where she doesn't remember that she once called them insurrectionists and everything. But my takeaway from that was, and looking at what we just talked about here, these other Republicans falling into line, that anyone who thinks that a Republican Senate would stand up against an out-of-control Trump 2.0 presidency is incredibly naive. These guys are not going to be guardrails, bulwarks, checks on Donald Trump. They're not going to turn down his crazy cabinet appointments. They're not going to push back against his pardon of felons or his self-pardon or his weaponization of the Department of Justice. Anyone who thinks that, well, you know

what, the institutions will hold, the adults will be in the room. The adults have either left the room or they've gotten on their knees, and institutions are made up of people. And look what the people are doing. No, it's such a good point. They're under the table. It's like shaking in fear. Joni Ernst is another. She's a perfect, so emblematic of this. She's deeply, deeply conflicted and obviously loathes Donald Trump. She took herself off the VP shortlist. It was just reported recently in 2016. She was showing up at De desantis events haley events she said repeatedly and she could hide under the leader in the hawkeye state the prize first in the nation contest neutrality that she couldn't endorse before iowa neither did chuck grassley she could hide behind that but she repeatedly said that she would not reveal who she was going to support and that she didn't even know if she would endorse right away after the caucuses that, you know, we have to see what's going on. But what you got to was the big reveal.

She made it clear that she doesn't want to be taken to the gulags when Trump officially becomes the nominee and might win, that she wanted to be clear that she never called them insurrectionists, which she did. It's just so tortured and so embarrassing and so painful that she felt the need to throw out that lifeline because the Trump camp knows she's anti-Trump. She won't be. I mean, you know, within hours, days or weeks, she'll endorse him, but she's been on the list, if you will. We've now worked our way up to Donald Trump. And I feel that there's not a lot more that we can say at this point, except that, you know, it is interesting that just a few, I named this, I also wrote this this morning, just a few days ago, just picking one little thing, because we get overwhelmed by it. The other day, just a few days ago, Donald Trump is sitting down in Mar-a-Lago,

and he's about to go to trial again for defaming the woman that he raped, E. Jean Carroll. And he put out 40, 40 truth social posts. His own aides were stunned at this fusillade of, in fact, attacking this woman that he sexually assaulted, 40 of them. And of course, this is in the same week in which he refers to the, you know, January 6th protesters as hostages, you know, when he, you know, compares himself favorably to Abraham Lincoln because he could have negotiated the Civil War. I don't know, let them keep slavery or something like that, et., etc., etc. He made it exactly clear what he's doing. And Republican voters look at that. All the insanity, the ransom raving in courtroom, the 91 felony, and they go, we are all in for this. We love this. He wins 98

of 99 counties, beats DeSantis by more than 30 points. I mean, we can all pretend, okay, it's Iowa, it's weird, it's low turnout. You know, but this is the Republican Party right now. I mean, they look at all of this. The big lie doesn't bother them. The sedition doesn't bother them. You know, the threats that he's making in the future. The fact that he is almost every day he puts out something that's absolutely fucking demented and they're going, he's our guy. Let's make him president again.

Well, I mean, I think that what last night showed us is that Donald Trump is stronger in the Republican party than he ever has been. And we've known that for a while. We were looking at polling over the summer that showed that stronger than 16 stronger than 2020 but i want to not like hug a pony but something between total darkness and like my little pony on screen with lavender hair let's look at what mona wrote today yeah let's think about the fact that 60 000 people people voted for Donald Trump last night. Yeah, it's an evangelical state. It's an evangelical electorate. Of course, he was going to win it. The party is more magified. But does that mean that once he gets into a general

electorate, a conviction or a threat of conviction? I don't think today, Charlie, he goes to that courtroom and he thinks that, what is he doing? He's going to get some $20 checks from the people who already love the fact that he's under 91 felony counts. I don't think anyone in the general electorate today is going to be like, I feel really bad for that guy. That judge already said he's a rapist, but look at him leaving that courtroom in the snow. Let's decide he's persecuted. I think he's preaching to the choir. So he thinks that going to all of these courtrooms and having his fucking victim mentality is going to juice the middle of the electorate. I'm not buying that. So I think as he marches towards the general election, we know, and we've talked many times, that Biden's weakness could

give him strength. But I think that we're not entirely certain yet about what the foundation is he brings into a general election after he gets through the next couple of weeks. I'm not entirely certain of it. And actually, he finally looks old. I didn't think he looked old for a while, but he finally looks old. And I want to say one more thing. Watching Liz Cheney speak at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on MLK Day about what Donald Trump has done to democracy and to the vision of people like Martin Luther King, I'll drink to that. It's pretty effective.

Well, OK, so there's a couple of things here. And it's not new that Donald Trump is playing the victim card. But what is I think quasi new, and I was trying to separate out what's new and not, is that he's clearly decided that he wants to use the trials as a springboard, that he's going to show up at all of the trials, he's going to show up at the E. Jean Carroll trial, he says. He's showing up at the New York trial. So he wants to use that. Now, that has worked in his favor in the Republican primary preaching to the choir. Your question is, okay, once now we move to the general electorate, does spending time in the dock actually benefit you? Does it convince other people going, you know, I didn't vote for him in 2016 or 2020, but, but God damn it, you know, he's, you know, a man who's charged with

that many felonies has got to be my guy. He's looked like a winner now sitting next to all those lawyers. And Mona's piece that you referenced, you know, she did find the silver lining here and, you know, points out this Des Moines Register pre-caucus poll found that at least 25% of Iowa Republican caucus goers said they will not vote for Trump in the general election. And obviously that's significant because we have a lot of swing states where the election is decided by a few thousand votes. Now, Iowa is not a swing state, she says.

But what does that suggest about Republicans in places like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia? And our good friends at the Wall Street Journal editorial board are also noticing, they're saying, this vote actually revealed some weaknesses that could pose problems in a general election. You think? So Republicans in New Hampshire should think hard if they want to gamble on another Trump run. He could be a convicted felon by the summer when he shows up here in Milwaukee. And the Iowa entrance poll showed that no fewer than 32% of GOP caucus goers said that a conviction would be disqualifying.

But by then, it may be too late for Republicans to choose another candidate. Well, no kidding. I mean, 32% is a huge number. If it was 12% of Republican voters, that could be decisive. Right. And Charlie, that's why with all the work that Sarah and Bill do in that space, any erosion of Republican support, even if they don't support Joe Biden, the effort to get them to stay home or to come on board in this anti-Trump coalition is so critical. And that skepticism, that red line, look, this guy, he's really been entertaining. Maybe some of the stuff they come after him with is bullshit. But if he's convicted, no, I'm not going to vote for a convicted felon

who can't vote for himself as president of the United States. I think that's real and material and enough of those people drawing that red line and we're okay. Yeah, I mean, there's several different categories. I know some folks, you know, are insisting that if you don't vote for Joe Biden, then you're not really defending democracy. Look, I think there will be Republicans who vote for Joe Biden, but I think the decisive votes may be the undervote for president in a state like Wisconsin. If Donald Trump had got the same number of votes as Republican candidates for Congress in Wisconsin, he would have won Wisconsin in 2020. He didn't, which means that you had a lot of Republican voters that voted for Republicans down ballot,

but then did not vote for Donald Trump. And that is going to be crucial. Hey, you and I have not spoken since Chris Christie dropped out. And I know that both of us had become maybe sort of late converts to what a magnificent beast he was in the campaign. I was hoping that he would stay in. He got out to clear the way. Your thoughts, did he make the right decision? I think he did. I didn't want him to get out, but I see why getting out and having people wanting to lodge a protest vote will just flock to Haley, despite what he said about her at that event. That is closing speech. eviscerated the two remaining candidates in the race, called them out as frauds, called Barrasso and Emma out as frauds. And just also, Charlie, because you and I have watched them closely, it's just worth noting that that speech, if anyone missed it, is really worth actually finding.

One of the smartest people I know in town texted me in the middle of the speech and said, only political hero, that this is the only hero we have in politics right now is Chris Christie. I think that's a powerful statement. I mean, he just really, he really came around. He admitted in that last speech again, Charlie, almost, he didn't use the word haunted. He made it clear he was haunted by his 2016 support of Trump and his continued support of Trump until Trump almost killed him with COVID and then told him not to tell anybody. So it's an incredible, incredible story. And we obviously hope he goes and has some quiet time and then endorses Biden. I think it's entirely realistic that he will. I think it'll be a long time from now, but that's better than now. So it's really hard not to have him to listen to

every day because he gave us kind of, I don't know, did he give us hope? He gave us something. I think he finished as a real class act, and I do expect more from him. I don't disagree with you on all of that. But while he was a candidate, we did hear from him. And it wasn't just that he gave us hope. He was dropping truth bombs in a party that has become allergic to truth. And I think that was useful. And so if we think

of it in normal horse race terms, yeah, he needed to get out to clear the way. Okay. But at some point we acknowledge this horse race is illusory. We know how it's going to end. So how do you evaluate a candidacy like Christie? The impact he has on the horse race or the impact he has on pounding the message about Donald Trump. And I guess I was leaning toward the latter, which is that as long as he's in the race, we are hearing something from him that might break through to a small number of Republicans. And he was also clearly enjoying himself. I mean, the contrast between him and, say, Nikki Haley and Rhonda Sanders. Nikki and Rhonda Sanders are so programmed. They are so tight.

They are playing not to lose. It's like watching a quarterback who's just kind of freezing up. You know, he's got the yips. And it's formulaic. You know, Chris Christie went out there and goes, I'm all that Fs to give. I'm just going to lay it all out there. And it must have been incredibly liberating for him. I mean, frustrating that he wasn't getting traction politically.

But I think to just sort of let it go. And the speech that you reference, he's not reading from a teleprompter or notes. He's just out there talking. And you can tell he was telling people exactly what he was thinking, which is so, so rare in politics. But he had thought deeply, you can tell that day about what he wanted his closing message to be. He includes historical references. Very, very interesting that he went off on kind of the beauty of our melting pot about immigrants coming here, wanting to find the best life on the planet. I mean, it was very, anyways, very deep. I highly recommend everyone go there. But that was a liberated man. That's why we enjoyed him so much because he was so authentic. And I miss the truth bombs. But Charlie, I don't think he's going to stifle them. I really believe that once we go to

trial, that guy is going to be on TV doing Joe Biden's work for him, just pounding about Donald Trump. I don't think he's going to be quiet somewhere in New Jersey. I think we're going to hear a lot more from him. Oh, no, no, no. I don't think he intends to open up that lawn chair and sit down on the beach at all. He's not going back there. I got to mention that. Okay, so I was going to write about this today, but I felt the need that we had to do the obligatory punditry here. I don't know if you saw this piece in Politico magazine,

why the world is betting against American democracy. Ambassadors in Washington warned that the GOP democratic divide is endangering America's national security. It is interesting. We sometimes forget that the rest of the world is watching us way more closely than we watch the rest of the world. And they are really worried about where we're going as a country, what a Trump presidency

might be, what this kind of political paralysis might be, what it means for the Western alliance, for the global economy, for the future of Taiwan and China, not to mention Ukraine and the Middle East. And I don't know how heavily foreign policy is going to weigh in this particular race, but it is really hard to overstate the stakes here. And it's kind of grim to realize that the rest of the world is going, yeah, we can't count on American democracy anymore. I'm so glad you raised that. I read it last night and it's so heartbreaking and disturbing. And I recommend everybody read it because you kind of need to slap in the face of diplomats and ambassadors on background like freaking out and saying that even

if trump loses that the corrosion that he has brought to our system will remain, and that Republicans will be trying to stay in a knife fight over every single spending bill and tying up military funds and not supporting Ukraine anyway, even if Joe Biden wins a second term. It is so sobering, and I really recommend it. What is so upsetting to me when I was reading it was not just the reality of it, which I think about all the time, but it's the fact that now this has become another unmentionable. You think Nikki Haley can stand up when she's trying to win over Republican primary voters and say, the world is watching us and is worried that we've given up on democracy? She can't say that. She ought to say that. If you're going to run against Donald Trump, you ought to say that because there's a substantive difference between

the two of them when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to supporting our allies. You know what the Republican primary voters would say to that? Screw the rest of the world. Screw them. America first. See, this is part of this hangover. Even if Trump loses, the Republican Party will continue to be an isolationist party because you can see that Nikki Haley is still an internationalist, still believes in the Western Alliance, and she's going to get smoked. Mitch McConnell is this lonely, elderly voice in the United States Senate saying we cannot abandon our allies. But you can tell which way the tide is going.

You can tell that they are on the losing tail end of the intra-party fight. And a Republican Party that is isolationist is really kind of a return to the Republican Party before 1940. I talked about this with Will yesterday. We've had this 80-year run where we've had parties that disagree fundamentally on a lot of things, Vietnam War, everything. But they've also fundamentally been pro-Western and internationalist. And that, I think, is very likely to come to an end in 2024 for the Republican Party. Right. No matter who wins, that they're going to stay that way.

Right. Right. Just digest that the Speaker has announced that he can't do any immigration policy attached to the security of military funding. Isn't that something? They just can't do it without Trump. While Mitch McConnell is telling his conference, we have to do a border deal to secure the border because we will never get one under Trump if he wins a second term. And then of course, separate from that, well connected to that is the security aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan that they refuse to give. And that's why they're saying,

we can't do border because they don't want to do any of it. And it's really dark. But McConnell is in the last nine months of his career. I don't even think that he'll stay in the Senate. He's going to be ousted as leader, whether Biden wins or not. Absolutely. Absolutely. I can't see a scenario when Donald Trump loses and says the election was stolen and calls for violence and Joe Biden's president, McConnell can't hold on as leader. They're all coming for him. I just don't see it at all. I think he's not even going to make it to 26 or whenever his term runs up. So I think that it's really important to acknowledge what that means in the macro sense and take that out a year, two, three. Vladimir Putin being given permission if we withdraw from

NATO in a second Trump term to invade another country in Eastern Europe. This is something that really needs to be pushed in the faces of Republican electeds supporting Donald Trump all year long. Exactly. Now, it's important to mention that Congress did actually pass legislation that would take away the president's power to unilaterally withdraw from NATO. But the president is commander in chief. And if you have a commander in chief that does not support NATO, it doesn't matter what's on paper. That alliance is badly, badly damaged.

A.B. Stoddard, thank you so much for joining me the morning after the Iowa caucuses. Thank you, Charlie. We'll keep doing these morning after shows. OK, and thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.