The Bulwark Podcast - Adam Kinzinger: Why Trump 2.0 Will Be Worse

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Trump wants to weaponize the office of the presidency, and who would stop him? We have a built-in weakness of basing our constitutional norms on the honor system. Plus, the Democrats have a Hamas problem. Adam Kinzinger joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod.

Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Friday and somehow, Adam Kinzinger, we've made it to December. It is December 1st. I don't believe it. I mean, I'm just, I'm struggling with, this has been a year. But the thing that makes me happy, even after all this year is like, did I bump Tim Miller today? Because if I did, my November is complete and December's off to a good start. Well, okay. So there's an achievement. By the way, congratulations on your bookmaking, the New York Times bestseller list. Actually, if people can see behind me here on YouTube, I have your book over here, Renegade. And Liz Cheney's book comes out next week. And obviously, I think that's going to be a big bestseller. And these voices in the wilderness at least are going to be heard for a while again.

So where should we start today? You know, in my newsletter, I kind of devoted it to the case that I don't think people are sufficiently alarmed yet. And I know that's like, oh, come on, that's all you guys do. And I say, no, no, I really don't think that people realize how dangerous this is. But I had to sort of back in with some palate cleansers. And I know you've commented on all of this. I'm not necessarily proud of myself, but the story out of Florida. I mean, come on.

I mean, I mean, really, this woman telling cops that she and the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, Christian Ziegler, along with Ziegler's wife, who is a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, had been in a longstanding consensual three-way sexual relationship prior to the incident that is now being investigated as sexual assault. I mean, it's never the ones you expect, you know? I think Moms for Liberty, like, I don't know much about them. I think they hate LGBTQ stuff. Charlie, it is always these people.

Liberty, man. Liberty. I mean, it's always, yeah, it's always these people. Like, honestly, of the last 10 politicians to be arrested for child sex crimes i think all of them have been republicans at least nine out of ten this thing i mean it is always these people and i think there's got to be you know we could probably devote an hour to this so i won't go too deep into this rabbit hole but yeah there's something weird about this like celebrity culture of trump where it's like people that i guess wanted, wanted to go to Hollywood that kind of grew up thinking those parties and everything were awesome. And they couldn't make it, right, because very few people can.

But they saw that they could make dork Hollywood at Mar-a-Lago. And so they're kind of like living out their biggest dreams. There's just something broken in that whole system right now. Well, there's something broken, but it's also the sense that, hey, you know, the rules don't apply to us anymore. I mean, this is one of the things that Donald Trump, this is the great gift that he's given, right? That you can shelter under the wings of his complete amorality. So I was actually on a panel with a young Republican who was explaining that the thing about the Republican Party was what attracted him was its belief in traditional values and the nuclear family. And I'm thinking,

okay, Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, this guy, we could go through it. Okay, so what else do we have? I don't know. Did you watch the DeSantis Newsom undercard debate last night? I didn't. I got some top lines of it. But first off, honestly, this is gonna sound maybe petty but i just i don't want to ever tune in fox news anymore i just can't do it i don't want to be checked on the rating scale i didn't want to because i i just didn't want to right but i did like politico's take the debate between ronda sandus and gavin newsom was a big mess there was even some poop fox news moderator sean hannity did not help clean things up. That's kind of all I want to know.

I mean, it's really good. Although I like that Ron Filipkowski always does his like Ron DeSantis awkward smiles. So he's been posting a couple of those. So I've enjoyed that. Yeah, there were some moments, but, you know, life is short. We also got a new story about the new normie speaker of the House of Representatives, your former colleague, Mike Johnson, who apparently wrote the foreword for a book filled with conspiracy theories and homophobic insults.

Who knew? The book is written by Scott McHale, a local Louisiana politics blogger. It's called The Revivalist Manifesto. It gives credence to unfounded conspiracy theories often embraced by the far right, including the Pizzagate hoax, which falsely claimed top Democratic officials were involved in a pedophile ring, among other

conspiracies. This caught my eye. The book also propagates baseless and inaccurate claims, implying that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was subjected to blackmail and connected to the disgraced underage sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. So Mike Johnson continues to impress with his willingness to go down every rabbit hole of crazy and every Republican in the House voted to make him Speaker second in line to the presidency. Yeah, it's frightening. It's dangerous because dangerous because look if this was a one-off like you know i mean i never would do afford to any book as a congressman but you know you'd get asked to and i could see i could give him a one-off where it's like oh no i knew the guy i i didn't read the book i did it as a favor fine yeah but the problem is this is consistent and i know and

i talked about this a lot in renegade which is I know what this kind of culture is. You had David French on this week or last week, and he was really good. He understands like I understand kind of that evangelical movement because we were raised in it. And I will tell you, it is rife, not the good evangelical. There are good evangelicals left. But if you look at the crazy stuff that's like infecting Florida that we see all over, they believe these conspiracy theories because it feeds into this, as David French called it, this prophecy narrative, but this like good against evil, that if somebody says, yeah, John Roberts was part of the Epstein Island thing, it's believable because your default setting as this kind of evangelical is that humanity is naturally evil. And so all this thing must be true and Satan controls everything. And so it's frightening because Mike Johnson, let's be

honest, he comes across so well. He's out of central casting in terms of speaker of the house. And so people, when you talk about him being crazy, you can see him as a conservative. It's hard to see him as the crazy that he frankly is. You have to do that deep dive into him. Okay. So speaking of the house, before we move on to the more substantive things, Kevin McCarthy continues to go through some things. I am absolutely fascinated by some of the recent stories we've had, including he continues to be absolutely obsessed. And I guess maybe this is where the blind squirrel gets the nut once in a while, obsessed with how much he hates Matt Gaetz.

I mean, so there's that. So what do you make of the fact that Kevin McCarthy, and I have a couple of things I want to bounce off you, that Kevin McCarthy apparently had a phone call with Donald Trump after he was ousted as speaker. And we all remember that Kevin McCarthy had bailed out Donald Trump at one of the low points of his political career, actually began the comeback when he did the whole Mar-a-Lago thing. And apparently he called up Trump and said, what the hell? Why didn't you lift a finger for me? And Trump apparently said, well, you didn't expunge my two impeachments and you didn't endorse me. And apparently Kevin McCarthy is going around telling friends that he then said, fuck you to Donald Trump. What do you think? Do you think he said it or think he's saying he said it? Okay. So I'll tell you just to be fair on Kevin, which I never am. So I will make an

exception. There is a couple of times he can use anger effectively. So this was back in maybe 14 or 15. There was some issue I was talking to Kevin about. I was going to vote the other way from the party. And he's Mr. Nice Guy Smiley McGee, and he actually showed a flash of anger, and I thought that was effective. So I think there is part of him, and I also think that given how he has debased himself so much, I mean, you see it in when he shoulder checked me on the floor of the house, and then when he elbowed dude from tennessee you're starting to see like this internal i basically am in a bad place emotionally you know socially yeah emotionally i guess that's all building up in him and it's exploding and so i think it's possible he did say this to trump but let me say charlie i also think it's just as likely

and i know this isn't the answer you're looking for it's just as likely, and I know this isn't the answer you're looking for, it's just as likely that he made it all up. Because what Kevin does is he tells whoever he's talking to what he needs to tell. When I was in Congress and in the middle of my career, when we were trying to take on the crazy caucus, the Freedom Club, he would come into me and be like, yeah, I mean, Adam, I'm doing this because we got to take them on. And I know for a fact that he went and told the crazy club, you have people like Adam, the moderates that are trying to harangue me. He tells Liz Cheney, he has to go down and spoon feed the president of the United States, which is the funniest, funniest thing I've ever heard. I love this story. Okay. So what do you make of that story

that he's telling people that he told Liz Cheney? I went down to Mar-a-Lago because they called and said he was depressed and he wasn't eating and I just had to be there to sit by his bedside. Okay, this is clearly complete bullshit, right? Yes, 100%. But apparently he thought this was going to be the plausible explanation, you know? Yes. I'm not a craven coward. I was actually there on a mission of mercy tomorrow the merciful kevin mccarthy i've got to go feed the president listen when liz says in her the excerpts from her book about like uh what was it she said you know i thought the picture was fake we all did we were all on a text chain actually of the uh of the impeachers we were all on a text chain and actually, of the impeachers. We were all on a text chain, and we sent that picture out.

So Liz evidently saves her text forever, just so you guys know. Like, mine delete in 30 days. That's a good thing. It's also a bad thing because I don't have text to share in my book. But I do remember one of us sent the picture, and it took us time. Somebody had to reach out to Kevin to see if it was real. Kevin told, it wasn't me, somebody else on our text chain, Jamie Herrera Butler or something like that had said, oh, I was down there fundraising with some big donors and the

former president invited me over and you have to stop and see the former president. That was his explanation to them. So then Liz calls and evidently he knows that that's not going to fly with Liz. So that turns into Kevin is just this loving person. Frankly, don't feed the president. We wouldn't be in this position if you wouldn't have fed the former president for God's sakes, but instead he's sitting there spooning them out. I got a two-year-old kid and Kevin wants us to believe that he basically went and stirred his cereal up while he was throwing a fit. Incredible. Okay. So speaking of some of the things in Liz Cheney's book, we're not going to spend the whole time on all this. Hopefully we're going to be talking with her on the podcast next week. Good. From the New York Times, six takeaways from Liz Cheney's book. You were in the room for

some of this. And I think it's worth reminding people how amazing it is that these indictments are coming from people like you and Liz Cheney, who were very conservative Republicans, who never would have been on anybody's list for who are going to be the renegades necessarily. I mean, this is Liz Cheney. She is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney. But this description about when she's criticizing Trump, the men in the room did not like her tone, thought she was not contrite enough for breaking with the party and effectively embarrassing them and putting them on the spot for questions about why they still supported the former president who had tried to

overthrow the election. You've just got such a defiant attitude, Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina told her. Representative John Rutherford of Florida said she was too recalcitrant and not riding for the brand. John, she writes, that she replied, our brand is the U.S. Constitution. But this is my favorite part. Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania made a memorable analogy in describing how betrayed he felt. It's like you're playing in the biggest game of your life and you look up and you see your girlfriend sitting on the opponent's side, he complained. Several astonished women in the conference started yelling, she's not your

girlfriend. Ms. Cheney agreed. Yeah, she said, I'm not your girlfriend. Dude, I was there for all of this. It's 100% accurate. So let me set the scene. So we're in what's called the CVC, the Congressional Visitor Center. And it's basically like all the members of Congress, you know, the Republican members, right? And everybody goes up to the microphones and they can speak. And Liz is up there with all the leadership. And it's just like this kind of, you know, hour-long bitching session. Or actually, it's about two hours. So everybody goes up.

And there's people like me who actually, I went a little off the handle that day. I went a little too far in basically calling everybody cowards, but I was furious. And then folks would go up and exactly as she described, there was this demand, this desire to say, we don't need her to admit that Donald Trump's a great president. But as long as she says, like, I get it, I made a mistake in some version, all they were looking for, they didn't understand it. They were just looking for something to soothe their own conscience. It's embarrassing, right? Yeah. If the person making them feel guilty says, I did something wrong, then you can soothe.

So we're sitting there. So Mike Kelly, remind me to tell you about Gallagher, if I forget. So Mike Kelly, he's always this guy, he was a former coach or something, and he was a car salesman. And so he'd always give up and give these what he thought were rousing speeches to the conference like you know it would end in some crescendo like a baptist pastor and he thought like he would always compel people and everybody made fun of him behind his back like that he would go give these speeches so he stands up and gives this speech about liz and he's yelling you know you look over on the other side and your girlfriend's with the opposing team. And we're all like, what? Like, you know, I get it. We're all for analogies and fun things, but that was way over the top. And so he, he really spanked him, Mike Gallagher. So it was right about this timeframe. When I remember seeing Mike Gallagher in the speaker's

lobby, which is just basically kind of behind where you see the speaker sitting. It's like a hallway. And I said, you know, dude, I saw in some Wisconsin thing where you said, basically, it's time to move on from Liz Cheney. And I was shocked because to this point, Gallagher, he was going to vote to impeach Donald Trump. It was on my list. He made a last minute decision not to. So anyway, I was surprised in not only that he didn't impeach, but then he was turning against Liz because they're both security hogs, supposedly. And he just goes, well, Adam, don't you think it's time that we heal as a party and we've got to quit kind of attacking each other. And she's just doing it too much in the public. And I was just like, Mike, like, dude, are you kidding me? But I've been amazing to watch

his transition, especially Mike Gallagher, because I thought far better of him. Well, and he was, you know, as a fellow Wisconsinite, you know, when he emerged, he really was sort of touted as the next Paul Ryan as a real rising star. And, you know, he may have a future, but he's made a future by backing off on a lot of all this. Okay. So speaking of your list, the impeachment list, before we move on to other things, I want to get your thoughts about, I know you must know him very, very well. You know where I'm going on this. Peter Meyer, who actually did vote to impeach Donald Trump, lost his seat as a result of that. It was kind of an act of courage and has been

decompensating since then. He's now running for Senate in Michigan as a Republican and trying to sort of straddle and say he doesn't regret voting to impeach Donald Trump, but saying that if Donald Trump is the nominee, he will vote for him to become president again. What's going on there? I'll be honest. This one has surprised me more than probably anything because after Peter Meyer voted to impeach, I was very public about that he, to me, was the most courageous because he was a freshman that made the decision. I don't know if it's boredom, if it's being out of, you know, look, I had the advantage of, I was in the public eye and I was in Congress for 12 years. So when I walked away, you know, I had a pretty fulsome career behind me. He had two years. To take the

courageous vote that he did, you have to have gone to the point of saying that no political career is worth my soul. And to watch what's happening, look, even outside of the principles of it, the raw political scientist, and Meyer's a good political scientist, he's got to understand that if you're going to run in a Republican primary, you either have to be all in for Donald Trump or you have to be all out. And maybe you can't win all out. I think someday you can win as all out. So this is why I don't understand. Why didn't he wait two years, four years? He's young. Nobody's going to forget him. Anybody that voted to impeach Trump, if you run for office again, you're not going to have been forgotten. I don't get this, Charlie. And, and, you know, he was a friend of mine. I guess

I would still call him a friend, except that part of my friendship is based on this honor that I thought he had. And I just don't get this. I can't put my arms around it. It just feels like such a familiar story, but it is still shocking. Okay, so big development of the week politically, the Koch network endorsing Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley, who is still way, way, way behind Donald Trump. Stipulation, she's unlikely to get the nomination. I think the Republican Party has made it very clear that they are Trump's party. What is your take of this? Is Nikki Haley last woman standing? Is it starting to consolidate? What are you thinking at this point? I think it's consolidating the three. It's Trump, it's Haley, it's Christie.

I personally like Chris Christie. I know you do too. And I think he needs to stay through New Hampshire. I mean, I really do. I get it that, you know, New Hampshire is a shot, but I think honestly, let's say Chris Christie gets out at New Hampshire. Haley comes in second anyway, or let's say she even barely wins. I don't know if that's going to propel her to the presidency just as much as like, I think if Chris Christie can win New Hampshire, I think that's going to be effective

for him. And we need his voice out there. I've heard you saying that we need his voice. I mean, look, I like Nikki Haley. I do. And I would give all of my money for her to be the nominee versus Donald Trump, but she's not out there telling the truth. So yeah, there's this consolidation happening. I'm for it. I'm supportive of it. I really think, though, you're not going to see any leap of anything until potentially if Donald Trump goes to trial in March, I guess. What is it?

Early March. And you start seeing the evidence for this and people start realizing he's completely unmoored. Then I think Chris Christie has a case. It's a 1% chance. I'll grant you this. But if there's a chance that people, it's like Saturday morning after your Friday night bender, you kind of look around and you're like, what the hell did we do last night? If the party is that, after seeing this evidence of Donald Trump come forward, Chris Christie's in the best position to benefit from that because Chris Christie can say, see guys, I've been telling you, I've been accurate.

Now, granted, what are the chances that the party wakes up like a Saturday morning? Probably not high, but I think he's got a point to make. The good thing, at least, is it is consolidating and I am pleased beyond pleased that Vivek Ramaswamy is just collapsing. I think that this leads to something I wanted to talk to you about, that we can parse through what Koch is doing and why they're doing it, what Nikki Haley's trajectory is. I think at a certain point, we do need to step back from sort of the horse race punditry and the game theory and recognize, okay, if a Donald Trump

presidency represents an existential threat to democracy, maybe we ought to treat it that way. Maybe we ought to, you know, set aside the cynicism and the doom gloom and the Eeyore stuff and say, okay, what is it going to take to stop him? I think, you know, one of the things that, look, it's going to take another Republican to slow him down. I don't think it's going to happen necessarily, but we go into 2024. You're going to have these Republican voices out there. Liz Cheney, you, Chris Christie, members of the Trump administration, his former secretary of defense, his former attorney general, his former national security advisor, his former chiefs of staff. This is the world you live in all the time.

Why hasn't this been more effective in breaking off Republicans? It's one thing for Democrats, CNN, MSNBC, the Huffington Post to say that Donald Trump is a menace, but this voice is coming from inside the room. Your voice is coming inside the room. Liz Cheney has a lifetime of credibility built up, and yet there is this resistance. Are we just back to the fact that Republicans have become a cult as opposed to a political party? Well, I think there's definitely some of that. I think, you know, the number of people that, and doing a book tour is fun because you get to go out and meet all kinds of different people. And what I've noticed is there are a lot

of people that were Republicans that have become kind of hesitant Democrats in this moment. The problem is, is Donald Trump has convinced a lot of Democrats to become Republicans in this moment as well. So while it feels like the base hasn't shifted, there have been movements like the suburban Republicans or whatever. But I think the other thing, Charlie, in a cult-type environment, I grew up in a really conservative Baptist church, Independent Fundamental Baptist, which I would consider cultishtype environment. I grew up in a really conservative Baptist church, independent fundamental Baptist, which I would consider cultish, honestly. And what happens is when you

exclude yourself or you go outside of these predetermined parameters, you get isolated. You get pushed aside. And that's what the party does really well to me, to Liz Cheney. They say, I mean, all you got to do is look at Twitter and it's like, Adam Kinzinger is a Republican laughable. He's not a Republican, right? He's, he's a Democrat or he's an, he's a CNN guy, whatever. And that's what you can do. You, it's fine. You can try to minimize me all you want.

And the problem is now we've gotten to the point at the very beginning of Donald Trump, you know, people would go along with him because they didn't want to get tweeted at, or they didn't want, you know, whatever would go along with him because they didn't want to get tweeted at, or they didn't want, you know, whatever the consequences were. Now though, they have compromised so much of themselves that to admit that Donald Trump is unqualified or completely unfit for office, you now have to admit that for six or seven years, and this isn't just elected officials, this is people that vote for him. You have to admit that for six or seven years, you looked aside a morally corrupt person and you supported him. You have to admit that for six or seven years you looked aside a morally corrupt person and you supported him you have to admit that everything you did to enable him was wrong and it's much easier charlie

instead of facing a lot of sunken costs it's much easier to retreat to the safety of your tribe where your tribe puts their arm around you and says you're safe here you don't have to come face to face with what you did. Instead, just understand as long as we're owning the libs, we're in this together. And people like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney and Charlie Sykes, they make you feel bad, not because you deserve it, because they're bad. I think it's increasingly obvious that 2024 is very different than 2016 and 2020 in the sense that there are no longer any illusions about who Donald Trump is, whether he will grow into the office, whether he will be more presidential,

or that Trump 2.0 will be anything like Trump 1.0. You and I have discussed this. Robert Kagan has this very long piece in the Washington Post where he goes through what Trump is saying he will do in his second term, who he will go after, who he will punish. And then he raises the question, and who's going to stop him? Who's going to stand against him? Is it going to be the criminal justice system? Is it going to be Congress? Is it going to be the media? Is it going to be the public? Are Republicans going to? And his main point is, Donald Trump has made it clear how he wants to weaponize the office of the presidency, make it into this instrument, this cudgel of retribution, and that there are very few restraints, very few constraints that will limit him.

And I'm not sure that everybody has fully taken on board. I mean, I think because there's the same old, same old. But when you sort of run through what Donald Trump is saying he's going to do, and then watch the way he's preparing. I mean, there's a piece in Axios where it talks about how they are already vetting people for the administration. They want to make sure that there are no normies in this administration. They're not so concerned about credentials. They want to know that you've been red-pilled and that you follow Tucker Carlson, that you are a true believer in all of this bullshit. And these are the people who are going to have the levers of power. So it's not the second chapter of Trump 1.0. I wrote a piece saying we're not sufficiently alarmed because I think there's still this assumption that something's going to come along, the magical thing is going to stop it, or that there are going to be these bulwarks and

these guardrails that are still going to protect us. And if he gets back into office, I just don't think that's true anymore. What do you think? Yeah, I agree with you. And I think when we think of the guardrails of democracy, like they're not static objects there, you know, to quote Mitt Romney, it's people, man, you know, they're people. And so a guardrail of democracy is a attorney general that believes in the Constitution. Well, maybe some constitutional scholar knows this better than me, but from what I understand, there really is nothing constitutionally that prevents a president from putting a completely partisan attorney general in to do completely partisan things.

The only thing that stopped that is our kind of compact among Americans that we're not going to do that, that justice needs to be fair. So I guarantee you when Donald Trump gets in, he'll interview five people and look for the first guy that tells him, I don't give a rat's ass about the constitution. I'll do whatever you want. And trust me, it's not going to be hard to find that person. I mean, look at Jeffrey Clark, for instance, and this was back before it was even cool to be against the constitution. And so all those guardrails will be gone because they are working on this now you may think donald trump is dumb and maybe he is but he's got a lot of

really smart people around him that have a plan and so i say this to my democratic friends because i almost said like not to scare you yes to scare you because this is a very real possibility. And if you think, look, the courts have been stellar so far in protecting this, but you think that like a Supreme Court, for instance, and I'm not trying to take a dump on the Supreme Court. I like the Supreme Court, but let's say they come out with a rule against Donald Trump and he says, no, how are you going to enforce it? You can't do it. This is a serious issue. And I say this to all of the scoffers sometimes in the crowd when I get asked about issues and it's like, well, how do you feel about this issue or that issue? And I give a Republican position because I'm still a moderate conservative and they scoff like we've never could be in the same camp. Okay. But if you think that

you're going to grow to 51% to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, actually probably 54%, without people like me, you are incorrect. Well, I think that's true. By the way, this is almost a footnote to what you were just saying here. This is from the Robert Kagan article, which is something that never really occurred to me. So it talks about what might be motivating Donald Trump, including a desire for re-election. Of course, he can't run for re-election, right, if he was elected. He couldn't go for a third term. He writes, Trump might not want or need a third term, but were he to decide that he wanted one, as he sometimes has indicated, would the 22nd Amendment block him any more effectively from being president for life

than the Supreme Court if he refused to be blocked? Why would anyone think that an amendment would be more sacrosanct than any other part of the Constitution for a man like Trump, or more importantly, for his devoted supporters? So this is a, you think you have the worst case scenario out there. Again, once we've learned how much of the Constitution and all of our norms are based on the honor system, who's going to enforce them? Would a Republican Senate actually stand up against him? We just don't know. Would a Republican Senate refuse to confirm that attorney general? I'm skeptical at this point. And can I say something controversial that's not controversial,

but it sounds it is. I get asked all the time, why did you make the decision, obviously, to impeach on January 6th and all that? And I go, look, I represented 700,000 people, and I didn't take an oath to any of them. None of them, none of those 700, if every one of the people I represented in Northern Illinois had called me on the phone and said, vote against impeachment, I am under no obligation to do what they say. Because the oath I took was to the constitution of the United States, not to my district, not to the people I represent. And the problem is, we are allowing people to get into office skating by on taking the oath

perfunctory, when the oath is the only thing and that commitment to the oath is the only thing that holds self governance together. And that's what, frankly, in 2024, I'm telling people that I don't care, like guns, nothing, none of that's on the ballot. The only thing on the ballot is democracy. And so find the people that believe in the oath and don't worry about any of the other policies because we'll debate those for the next hundred years anyway. I have not gone as far as some of my colleagues, including Bill Kristol on the whole Biden

question. But among the alarming articles I linked to in my newsletter, this Pamela Paul piece in the New York Times, where she goes through, again, the authoritarian threat and said Trump is saying the gloves are off, that what he's going to do as president. She writes, still the Democrats act as if everything is normal. They talk about why to support Joe Biden's campaign for reelection, that he's done a pretty good job, they say. He led the country out of the pandemic, avoided a deep recession. True. He beat all other primary candidates last time, and he beat Trump before. We should go with a proven contender. But she goes on to say, but even if Biden has done a pretty good job as president, most Americans do not see that. His approval

ratings have just hit a new low. Biden may want another term, but the obvious, if unchivalrous, response is, so what? Not every person, whether young or elderly, wants what is in his own best interest, let alone in the interest of a nation. And then she finishes here. Democrats cannot afford to take a version of the it's Bob Dole's turn approach this time around. It's kind of a gut punch because I actually did have that flashback to why did Republicans think it was a good idea to put an elderly Bob Dole up against Bill Clinton in 1996? Well, it was his turn. What do you think, Adam Kinzinger?

You know, look, yes, Biden has accomplished a lot. I'm still confused because when he ran, I thought he made it pretty clear he was just running one term. It's got that implication. Yeah. Yeah. I think the reality of this implication yeah yeah i think the reality of this is he is running because the alternative will be kamala and i think kamala is guaranteed to lose and so i think that's the danger that the democrats are in i think that's

their quandary that they can't say out loud but look i said this at an event i was at last night i'm like you guys you know you democrats out in the audience, you may not believe that immigration is an issue. You may scoff when I talk about crime. You may want to pretend like Biden didn't just have his 81st birthday and not put out a single press release about it. That's fine. You can do that. But I'm telling you, the people that are going to vote are talking about this. And you have to meet them where they are.

Or you can pretend like and be surprised in 2016 when you know donald trump wins i mean that's the reality of where we are and this israel thing is a huge problem and the democrats have got to get a grip on this no i agree with you completely and i wrote about immigration the the border problem earlier this week uh ruiz has a great post about uh you know what Democrats need to do on crime. But let's talk about the other big elephant in the room right now. And you're out there talking to people. You have some strong thoughts about what's going on with Israel, with Hamas. This divide on the left is very real.

And I am increasingly concerned that it is durable, that people's passions have been aroused. And so give me your sense of how the political fallout from the Biden administration's support for Israel. In 2015, I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee with a guy named Dana Rohrabacher. And Dana Rohrabacher, yeah, nuts. And he was very pro-Putin yeah he was the only Republican that was pro-Putin and I would get into literally yelling matches with him on the committee and people would come up and be like oh Adam don't worry about Dana he's kind of a one-off we all thought he was on the KGB payroll anyway and now over 50% of my party is pro-Putin like

that happened that happened I was the only one taking on Dana and calling this insane the rest of them just like oh it's going to go away so to my democratic friends first off if you think this pro-Hamas wing if you think this isn't a big deal you're hanging out in the wrong circles like you need to see that this is a big deal and I'll tell you Charlie again on my book tour this is the beauty of a book tour, because I get asked about Israel and every thing. And I said, well, first off, Hamas needs to be utterly, completely destroyed. It is amazing to watch about half of the audience sit on their hands for that very basic statement. All I said is Hamas needs destroyed. And I even preempted with like, we care about Palestinian lives, but Hamas needs

destroyed. Hamas is ISIS. I mean, it's even almost in some cases worse than ISIS. Democrats have a real issue. And when the White House has to put out a statement by the president that says, on the one hand, Israel should be able to destroy Hamas. On the other hand, Israel should not resume the war. And you see that they're trying to have it both ways. I'm sorry, if you have to rely on the pro-Hamas kind of wing of the Democratic Party to hold your coalition together, that is a pretty tough coalition to hold together. And it's really problematic and it's very concerning. I have to admit, I'm a little confused here because on one screen, it looks as if Joe Biden has been firmly in support of Israel.

I mean, he went there. He embraced Netanyahu. The policy has been very clear anti-Hamas. On this other screen, though, I get the sense that Democrats are kind of looking over their shoulder. They're seeing that they have a problem with young voters, with the left wing, with the Arab-American voters. And then we had that tweet, I think we were referring to earlier this week, which was,

I think the best thing I can say about it is it was ambiguous. It seemed to be implying that we should just stop everything was a ceasefire. The Biden White House came out afterwards and said, no, no, no, there's no change in policy. This was just a badly done excerpt from from a speech. But I guess this seems to me to be the worst possible moment to go squishy on this issue, particularly if 2024 is going to be this test between the strong man and the weak old vacillating man. So what is your sense? Like this is the moment, you know, and I'm frankly, I'm not a huge Netanyahu fan, obviously, but I'm glad that the other day he came out and said, look, we made it clear we're going to eliminate Hamas.

We're going to eliminate Hamas. And I think the United States has to take into account, okay, if that is Israel's stated goal and they're going to actually do it, every day of a ceasefire extends the war, not just a day, it extends it months because Hamas right now is able to better dig in. They're able to resupply. It's a huge problem. And so I think he's appearing weak on this. I think he needs to just say we back Israel in finishing and protecting themselves.

I think the president would be benefited by going out and giving a televised speech or something somewhere and saying, do you guys remember what happened on October 7th? Let me remind you of what October 7th was. You know, we've said before, you know, the Nazis, as terrible as they were, obviously incredibly awful, they didn't videotape with glee their crimes. Hamas videotaped with glee their crimes. And so I think that they're making a danger. The other quick thing I want to say too is Biden, it sounds awesome to say it, is like America will do anything to get its people back. That is a commitment, by the way, that we should have for the American military.

And we do. And the point is we're going to invest in rescue assets and everything else. But when you start saying we will do anything to get every American back, we're going to trade the worst arms dealer for Brittany Griner. We're going to give $6 billion in theory to Iran for these five hostages. We're upset because, you know, only one American was released and there's other Americans. So we're going to encourage Israel to extend the ceasefire so that we get more Americans. You know, Hamas knows that. And the reason they're not releasing Americans is because they want the U.S. to continue to pressure Israel to not resume the fight. Like, we need to be a country that's recommitted to doing anything to get our citizens out except negotiate with terrorists.

We can't do that. No, and of course, what does that lead to? It leads to more hostages. I just think there needs to be more clarity about who Hamas is, what Hamas is, that Hamas does not believe in a two-state solution. Hamas does not believe in the peace process. Hamas is committed to wiping out Jews and the state of Israel. You mentioned Netanyahu before. We had this report in the New York Times, I believe it was today, that suggests that Israeli intelligence actually had a detailed memo of the Hamas plan to launch these terror attacks. And they decided,

what, it wasn't going to happen. I don't know how Netanyahu even keeps his job at this point, the level of failure. There's another report, which I'm sure you've seen of a speech that the Hamas leader had given some time ago, where he made it very, very clear that we are coming for you. There's going to be the flood. We are going to be murdering men, women, and children. And we're going to be doing it again. There's nothing subtle about this. There's no gray area. And I think to the extent that the administration has to deal with this, they need to keep hammering

on the point. This is who Hamas is. Hamas is ISIS. Maybe Hamas is even worse than ISIS. There can be no compromise. There is no coexistence with ISIS. I don't remember any pro-ISIS demonstrations. I don't remember people taking to the streets to say, you know, we need a ceasefire in Mosul, you know, that we cannot go after them. This just didn't happen. So this is part of the mind-exploding moment that we find ourselves in. Yeah, it is. And if you think of Mosul, I mean, we basically destroyed the city

to save it. I mean, that's a fact, right? We being, well, some of us, and then also with the Iraqi military, decided to level the city to save it from ISIS. And it worked. It sucks, but it worked. There needs to be that clarity. And Netanyahu, well, I think he's going to have to face his comeuppance. I mean, the reality is, I've heard rumors. Again, it's just rumors, so take this. But basically, the Hamas kind of IDF was pulled to deal with these West Bank settler issues. And that's why you had such open holes. And if that's the case, I mean, yeah, he's certainly going to pay a heavy price. So I guess one last question going into 2024. I mean, we're in December of 2023. And I think part of this moment is to think, what are we going to be thinking and knowing a year from now, December 1st, 2024? Because it is going to be a hell of a year. I mean, it's going to be the

trials. It's going to be the election. It's going to be the election, it's going to be the conventions, it's going to be the possibility of a convicted felon being elected president of the United States. We have the possibility of multiple impeachments. By the way, do you think your former colleagues in the House will impeach Joe Biden? Can they help themselves? No, they can't help themselves. I think the pressure is going to be too great. Now there's some mobster boss that's testifying against Joe Biden. I don't know what the latest is. I think they have to do it. And I've said this from the get, I'm just surprised they didn't do it every month, but they will have to do it, I think. See, this is the kind of the weird thing looking at it from the other point of view, because I'm thinking that if there's one thing that will

solidify Democratic support for Biden and maybe turn things around, it would be impeachment. I mean, this is one of those things where I think that for a long time, we all thought that if you impeach somebody, that would be the political death knell. Actually, this may be the one thing that will focus the minds of Democrats on all of this. The other question is whether or not they will have enough of a margin. We don't know what's going to happen. I mean, as you and I are speaking, we don't know about the George Santos thing. But what do you make of these rumors that Kevin McCarthy may resign? That's kind of an F you. I mean, because they don't have a lot of votes to give. No, but he's bitter. I mean, he's obviously really bitter. And I think he decided to stick

around for a while. I had heard that he actually wasn't getting quite the job offers he thought he would. And that kind of happens when you tie yourself to Trump, you become unemployable. And so I think it's true that he ends up going because he's got to be miserable every day faced with he is not speaker. He is not speaker. That's a huge damage to his ego. And yeah, I think he's going to be gone by next year. He has to go to work every day in the scene of his ultimate humiliation.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, but... No, I know. I cry for him nightly. And a lot of these guys have to walk in there, Steve Scalise, and go, okay, I got humiliated, but now I have to find a way to suck it up. Obviously, people really, really like that kind of power. So Adam, could you just remind people that there in fact is life after Congress, that you don't go away, you don't dry up and it just works. You know, the biggest thing is like your fear as a congressman is like the second I announce I'm not running again, I'm going to regret it.

But the announcement's already out. That's literally, you talk to any of them, that's their biggest fear. There is life after. It is awesome. Everybody's like, well, how do you talk to any of them, that's their biggest fear. There is life after. It is awesome. Everybody's like, well, how do you still be relevant? Obviously, I'm still out there. I personally, if I lost relevancy and went away, it'd be fine. Trust me.

I would be okay with it. I've lived enough of a political life, but there are ways to stay out there. Yes, your soul, your soul and your place in history is not worth another two years at the job. The job kind of sucks, to be honest with you. It's just not worth it. And you don't have to call and suck up to donors. The book is Renegade. I'm holding this up for our YouTube viewers. Renegade, Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country. Adam Kinzinger, New York Times bestseller. Adam, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Yeah, you bet.

It was good to be with you. And thank you all for listening to the weekend edition of the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday, and we will do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.