The Bulwark Podcast - Amanda Carpenter: Trump's Traumatic Month

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Trump may be holed up at Mar-a-Lago because he's afraid of another attempt on his life. Meanwhile, he keeps trying to take away Kamala's identity. Plus, the stunningly different way the media is handling hacked campaign docs in 2024, the threat from rando county clerks who may try to block the electoral vote count, and more from the mailbag. Amanda Carpenter joins Tim Miller. show notes: A.B.'s piece on Republican election officials refusing to certify a Harris win Tim's 2021 story on voting machine tampering coming from inside the MAGA house Tweet thread on Florida's smooth election process

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We are back with one of my faves. She's a writer and editor at Protect Democracy, a cross-partisan group dedicated to defeating the authoritarian threat. She's the co-author of Protect Democracy's report called The Authoritarian Playbook for 2025. She's my former colleague and pal. It's Amanda Carpenter. What's up, girl? Hey, happy to be here. It feels like it's been a while since we caught up or just a lot has happened. A lot has happened. And I need an injection of Amanda serotonin today. It's the first day of school.

And I just, I don't know. Some people liked the first day of school, but I'm having trauma flashbacks. Okay. That was not a happy day for me. I'm a summer boy. So, you know, we just got to try to keep the vibes high today. Yeah, we are getting ready. And so we're kind of in the part of like, oh, we need to do all those like math review packets.

And so the homework has already started. We're just like drilling multiplication tables. I'm having to learn algebra that I have like deeply forgotten. You're not uplifting me now. And like fractions. And I'm like, please, like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this for an hour every night. My son doesn't want to do it, but we're in it together to get ready to go back to school.

Well, you're good. You're an inspiration as mother. I'm like, should we do the summer homework packets? Nah, let's deal with it later. All right. Maybe this isn't the best place to start with uplifting, but I feel like we must. Maybe it is for mockery purposes.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk held a Twitter space last night. Well, they attempted to for about 40 minutes. They couldn't get it to go live. Little gremlins in the Twitter machine weren't working. Elon said it was a DDoS attack. Now, I'm not a technologist, but I would find it very strange that all of Twitter was working except for the space, and that was a DDoS attack.

So I think maybe he just botched it again like he did with Ron DeSantis. We did a full breakdown with Sam Stein and Mark Caputo on the YouTube page. People want to check that out. There isn't a whole lot to talk about because it was so fucking boring and it was unbelievably boring you know it's just two old guys talking about how much they like each other and telling old war stories and you know it's like somebody you're at the bar with they've had four beers and they're telling you about some work success they've had and you're like just get it over with but um there was one clip i wanted to get your take on if you don't mind so let's take a listen one thing so i thought i was in the spaces

so i was listening to it i want it actually was like i'm gonna gut this out i'm doing the pod tomorrow i'm gonna listen to this thing i'm sorry and then this thing popped up so that you could go to a youtube page my dumb ass clicked it and went to this thing i was like tesla why is he why is tesla sponsoring it he why is tesla sponsoring it like well okay maybe they did this on short notice you guys all know this already it was a deep you got deep last night but uh i just turned it out and i kind of walked away because i was just listening to his ambient noise so i wasn't like really paying attention to it elon i'm putting air quotes was like selling how open-minded Donald Trump was to crypto.

And I was like, yeah, this sounds like a conversation they would have had. And it only really got weird. Like I said, I wasn't watching it. So I didn't notice the weirdness of how it was set up. And Elon was saying, if you click this QR code, I'll double your Bitcoin. And I actually texted you the link so i'm sorry if i ruined your computer but i did not scan the code the dystopian reality of our future that was last night was that the richest man in the world or the second richest now and the former

president united states were trying to have an audio blog and it couldn't work. But what did work was a scam YouTube that tricked people into watching an AI version of the second richest man in the world tell you to buy a Bitcoin scam. That's where society is headed. That's the trajectory. And how endo-crypto Donald Trump really is and how this will present a new economic future for not only America, the world. I mean, it got really weird. But again, I just, I wasn't paying attention. I was cleaning stuff up. I was duped.

It happened. If you were even duped, just imagine how many people out there were, and this is really where things get dark, are just watching that and they're like, yeah, oh, wow, Donald Trump is great for crypto. Maybe I should click on this QR code and sign up for it. How is it any different than the meme stocks

and truth social that he's pushed? This is the thing. Like, it was, yeah. Like, why wouldn't they have a conversation about it? All the dudes are. It's on brand. Okay, well, real Elon and Donald Trump was not much better than the AI Elon

that Amanda was duped by last night. Let's listen to the real deal. She's terrible. But she's getting a free ride. I saw a picture of her on Time Magazine today. She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing. And actually, she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania.

She didn't look like Camilla. That's right. But of course, she's a beautiful woman. So we'll leave it at that, right? So Donald Trump as Sylvester the Cat, talking about how he's kind of a little horny for the drawing of Kamala. Is that what that was? And is Camilla, is that him mispronouncing Kamala or is he insulting King Charles? What was happening there, do you think, Amanda?

Well, I didn't make it that far because once I finally did get the Twitter spaces thing, I gave up because it literally put me to sleep. But what pops in my mind there is Donald Trump, the beauty pageant judge. It's a female politician. It's a female on stage. I must judge her on her looks. And this is where the Kamala drawing ranks according to my beautiful wife, Melania, versus this other lady who's also a first lady of sorts. Like, is that his thought process?

One, two, three. And he's kind of thinks she looks good. He calls her stupid. And then he's like, well, I guess maybe the only thing I can think of to compliment a woman about is how they looked in drawing, I guess, is what's happening there. You wonder why there's a massive gender gap in this campaign, you know. But that was the kind of trenchant analysis that you got on the space last night. There was literally nothing. Honestly, you know that this is our job on this podcast to tell you what happens.

If there was anything else worth playing, we would have played it. He did like a 25-minute long recap of the assassination attempt and okay he said at the on see he was never going to talk about it again it was obviously a lie at the time he's talking about it and it's fine again like if he was a ex-president like telling an interesting story to a small group of adoring fans at the golf club like i'm sure they might have been engaged by that like as a presidential candidate you know doing 25 minutes on that and then another 30 minutes on his same shtick that he always does about migrants it gets a little tiresome after a while but um i do wonder on the assassination attempt you sent a tweet about this last night and we've been talking about it.

Do you think that part of his performance lately is related to the fact that he still isn't quite processing what's been happening to him? I'm not going to say this definitively because I'm not a therapist. You're not George Conway. But I think the question we need to be asking ourselves, how could he not be severely affected by that offense? You're not George Conway. very nearly being assassinated on live television in front of his fans and family.

Right? Like, he has to grapple with that. I think he is grappling with it. How could you not? And so, you know, I hope he's talking to people other than Elon Musk about this in a way that can help him. And this is a thing that, like, really makes me sad. You know, I've mentioned this to other people in my personal life. I have put it out on Twitter, like this idea. And pretty soon after you get this like knee jerk reaction of bad things, bad sentiments. I'm not going to repeat them because I don't think they're right. Like they don't care, et cetera, to even worse. That is not the right reaction. He was our president, whether you like him or not.

The fact that he was almost very nearly assassinated is a bad thing for us all. We should want him to be able to process this and deal with it in some regard. Because if he is elected again, I don't want that to be lingering over everything. That has bad implications for the national security state, the way that things clamp down. We can go down that as a policy route. But at the very least, when he is not doing as many public events, I think you have to consider that as a factor. You couple that with the Iranian, there was an assassination, a plot that was disrupted by the FBI, the other things that are happening to him in a very real way. I think it has to be part of

the discussion, even though he's not willing to go there himself because it seems like he wants to project this image. I'm strong. We got through this. I was nearly shot. We did the RNC in the next day. It's fine.

It's not fine. It can't be fine. And there's got to be some PTSD there. I think he's obviously a unique psychiatric character. He's definitely not taking therapy. But you just think about the last three weeks for him. I mean, he survives this assassination attempt. He believes, like, remember the discourse around the RNC.

Like, they believed they were on a glide path to victory. And that was a coronation type event. And so he has this near-death experience. He thinks that he's on path to becoming the president of the united states again for the second time in three weeks time he is now on maybe a closer path to jail than he is to the presidency of the united states i mean he's still in that we got it's going to be a close race no doubt but like the momentum and the trajectory of the race has completely flipped and he's like dealing with

all that and like and not dealing with it right and he's sitting around mar-a-lago which is not healthy and playing golf and watching his stories and getting mad at the tv and like not doing events and i think that the not doing events thing is very observant and is that really a strategy you know he was in mar-a-Lago all week last week. He literally never left his house last week until Friday when he went to Montana. I think PTSD is as good a guess as any for why that was. Yeah. And he's doing a phoner with his friend, Elon Musk. He's still at Mar-a-Lago. He's back now. When you're ticking through all the events that have happened in the last three months, if you and I in the political class that just watches this thinks it's a mind F, what does he think?

I mean, a couple that with January 6 I'm surprised we're not having that conversation. And I think when I listen to political analysts on TV and in print just talk about like, oh, Kamala Harris is doing more events than him and kind of pointing the finger at him, I think they're really missing something that's really going on. I guess I would just say, if my father was 78, he's not. It was his birthday yesterday, by the way. Happy birthday, dad. If he was 78, and there was a nine-day period where he only left the house one time after he had a dramatic event, I'd be like, I don't know. Somebody should probably go check on dad. Somebody should go check on the old man. He hasn't left his little castle by the sea there yet. It's something worth monitoring. The other thing you said to me recently that I thought was smart that I, that other people have been missing and myself included, he has floated this attack

on Kamala's race now several times talking about how, you know, she just turned black or she's not really black or whatever. And like the initial instinct to that was i think to be like oh this is a this is birtherism 2.0 you know that that worked for trump the last time he did the birth certificate attack on obama it was a little racist maybe not a dog whistle like a racist air horn at obama about how he really wasn't born in america and that this is that again. And I think you observed, I think, a better comp to what they're trying to do, actually. Yeah, I think when this was initially presented, and I think it came in the form of Alina Habababa at some rally, kind of going in the birtherism route. But the way that I think Donald Trump is playing it and the way it's being interpreted

is more they're trying to Pocahontas Kamala Harris rather than trying to go birtherism against her. And the reason why is because if you pay attention to what they're saying, and again, I don't endorse them. This, it's gross. It is racist. I just want to say that upfront.

I'm not taking away about the vileness of this attack. They're suggesting she's not really either. And she's just playing these racial identity games to get ahead. And this is right in line with the accusation that she's a DEI candidate. She wouldn't be there if she wasn't a woman. It reminds me very much of what happened to Elizabeth Warren. I mean, she did have that thing in her form where she kind of overstated her Indian heritage and they made fun of her as being Pocahontas because it was interpreted by people like, oh, she doesn't actually believe in like this racial identity stuff. She's just using it to get ahead for her own personal gain and

ambition. And the way that Donald Trump talks about like, oh, she's Indian here. I don't know if she's really black here. He's trying to take away her identity and say, she's just playing games with you. This is an opportunistic thing. And I think that is how it resonates, especially if you look at all the wealth of material that is coming from places like Project 2025 and the rush to eradicate all DEI language from curriculum and things like that. That's the aversion to this, that these are games that people play to just get ahead of you. And so I think it's much more Pocahontas than Bertherism, and I'm curious what you think. Yeah, no. I mean, when you said that to me, it really clicked like a light bulb. It is definitely an attempt to Pocahontas Kamala.

I think that it is absolutely not going to work because it isn't true. I mean, Elizabeth Warren had some vulnerability here. Obviously, the calling her Pocahontas was racist and it was inappropriate and et cetera. But like the underlying fact of the attack that Elizabeth Warren had kind of exaggerated her racial identity. Indian heritage. Yeah. Her Indian heritage. The fact that she has this kind of minority status or whatever that, that, you know,

could maybe give her a leg up in a hiring process or something because they're looking for it to hit a diversity quota. Like, you know, maybe she, know maybe she she kind of seemed like she kind of did like exaggerate that i might not not as much as the republicans claim she did and again calling her racist nickname that doesn't make it okay but like part of the reason that worked with voters right was because of the underlying reality like this is fucking ridiculous this is absurd like this is an attempt to do that an attempt to say kamala's fake based on the fact that like sometimes she said that she was indian and sometimes she said she was black but it's like that's just totally misunderstanding what it is to be a mixed race person like kamala went to an hbcu like kamala has an indian mother a single mother that raised her. So like, yeah, when she is with Mindy Kaling and they're talking about cooking Indian dishes,

she's going to talk about her Indian heritage. Just the way that if I'm around somebody that's Lebanese, like I will talk to them about my grandma and my grandfather on my mother's side and like how he was raised. And you know what I mean? Like that's, that's part of the American melting pot experience. So like, this time, it's racist and doesn't work. But I think that you are like really onto something that it's the phoniness. It's the Pocahontas narrative that they're going for more than the birtherism. Do you think that there's any, you know, potential? I mean, if you just look at the data, like the blueprint guys, you know, demonstrated that this attack backfires,

like when you're talking to swing voters but do you see any potential vulnerability there yes i think there's vulnerability there because people do understand that she does have a multicultural background and she's like very at ease talking about that but but what is funny is if you look at the smart air quotes trump campaign strategists when they talk to the press, they act like they're just one adjective away from the perfect campaign strategy. If we could just land on the right adjective to put in front of her name, like Lion Ted, then everything would be coming back until, you know, the Wizard of Oz goes behind the curtain, comes up with that magic word. These

are just speed bumps until then. And just once we get that magic word everything will be fine laughing he's going through laughing crooked and crazy yeah yeah it's not a good sign it's not a good sign when you're when you're on nickname number three one other trump thing i want to get your take on it's kind of in your new it's not really that new anymore you've been gone forever but it just feels like yesterday that we were colleagues in your uh protect democracy world is the uh story about there have been some hacked documents it's very reminiscent of the 2016 situation it seems like it's a foreign actor there is strong sense that it's iran but look at me doing iran again i just can't help but be in George W. when I talk about Iran.

Iran. There's some strong sense that it's Iran. But we don't know for sure. The interesting thing is that in 2016, the media was just unbelievably irresponsible with the dealings of the Russian hacked material from Hillary's emails. And they were running front page stories about the underlying material without centering the fact that this was hacked. This was a foreign actor trying to interfere in the election. This time, to Trump's benefit, it seems like the media has learned from that

and Politico wrote a story about how they have these materials but made it all about how they're hacked materials and how it's a foreign influence actor and used very little of the underlying material and has not published all of the pages they have. And so I'm of two minds. I have the devil on my shoulder and the angel on my shoulder, the one that's like, well, it's good that we've learned our lesson. But on the other side, it's like, why does Trump fucking benefit from this after Hillary got screwed? Like, shouldn't we see the docs? What's the protect democracy view on

this? Well, when I agree, it's hard to dismiss the hypocrisy of this when Trump stood up at a lectern and said, Russia, if you're listening, go ahead and cause election interference in this way by getting emails and dumping them. But from the democracy perspective, here's sort of the problem we have mechanisms for punishing criminally obtained information as a result of hacking which politico any talk with any lawyer editorial standards there like you're not going to publish criminally obtained information and it was clear that they knew that would that standard necessarily hold if it was deemed extremely newsworthy and they could find another way to confirm it? I'm not actually true what newsroom guidelines would say. The things with like the BuzzFeed reporting on the dossier, that all came about because

all these things were being talked about and they got confirmation that this was used in a security briefing to Trump. That was like the tip off that allowed that to go public. So there's other ways that newsrooms will confirm information to make it public if it is deemed, you know, widely known or necessary. And so while Politico in this circumstance did do the right thing, I'm not sure you can always count on newsrooms to do the right thing in this circumstance. But from a democracy perspective and a news perspective and everything else, the real gap here is had Iran dumped this information publicly to the internet, then all bets are

off, right? Like you can hack stuff. This is the WikiLeaks things make it public. So we do have standards and guidelines and laws that will punish the person who criminally obtained the information and people that may be an accomplice, I might not be using the right word there, to distributing it. If that criminally obtained information is just dumped to the public and put on X, we have no mechanism to deal with that because the laws that we have for the old media

world do not apply digitally. You can take that conversation to Donald Trump using the fake AI crowd picture and dumping on the internet the, you know, sort of similarity there is he wouldn't be able to put that in a campaign commercial, put money behind it and put it on the air because that wouldn't meet standards. But he can just make it and dump it publicly from his Twitter account, which arguably has much more reach than any ad you'll put in some mass media market. So like, yay, Politico did the right thing. Also, we are just in the wild west of misinformation and hacking. And we actually have no way of dealing with it. It is stunning given what happened in the 2016 election but you know you and i and our conservative lizard brains are not surprised that

congress does not be able to keep up with technology it is really whipsawing hard now and we need some rules of the road for countering this and this isn't to say like stifle innovation and you know technology is where is that, largely because it hasn't been tightly regulated. But we know we know what these problems are. And even if you don't want to apply it largely to the Internet, at least apply it to campaigns. Right. Or to the big platforms. Again, this is where the big preference like criminally obtained documents.

It's tough call it is insane that the difference between 2016 and now is a the media decided to be more responsible and b the russians use cutouts like that's the only difference like the rather than just emailing it rather than having you know yakov smirnoff like email maggie haberman be like well you publish this like they gave it to julian assange and they created that dc leaks page and so there were cutouts and they were posted. And so then that gave the patina of whatever credibility that it was a real leak rather than a criminal hack. And so they published it, even though it was very obvious from the minute one that this was a hack. And so I guess that's the difference this time. did you see i mean this is just

recurring characters that i really just want to stop recurring reporting that it was roger stone who clicked the phishing link that did this that is the high ranking true i love it if true this is got to shout out my friend of the pod nira tandem over there working in the white house she got so fucked and it's just unbelievable it, she didn't even click the damn link. It was Podesta that did. And it was like all of her private, you know, because they emailed a lot. Like all of her emails were public

and she was smeared widely by an email hack. I think she just sent one tweet that was like, oh my God, over the weekend, when in response to one of the reporters being like, we need to handle this more responsibly than we did in 2016. And she was like, great. Thanks for nothing, assholes. Like, where were you when I needed you? And people are accusing me of being part of a child pedo ring at a pizza parlor because I was emailing with John Podesta about whether we wanted to order pepperoni or sausage. Yeah, I just wanted like the gif of her in her office just picking up her laptop and

just smashing it when she heard that news. Anyway, we love Neera around here. Okay, some other protect democracy stuff. There's some bad news. There's some good news. I want to start with the good news. Tina Peters, she was an election clerk in Mesa County in Colorado. It's on the Western Slope. She's been convicted yesterday for election tampering. I think the bulwark was one of the first national outlets to cover this because I got a tip from my buddy Jeff Morton out there in Colorado. This was August 9th, 2021. We wrote voting machine tampering is coming from inside the MAGA house. Colorado County Court Tina Peters may have committed the various crimes she accused the left of committing. The short story of this is that like basically to like frame the left for

tampering the voting machines, they tampered with the voting machines. And so she has now been convicted on a couple of counts. So, I mean, that's some good news, right? Well,

wait, we got to stop and tell a little bit more of the story about what she did. So she hacked the machines to prove Mike Lindell, my pillow man's conspiracies were right. Yeah. And I believe one of the things I was writing about at the time, or at least tracking it, she was skipping out on a court appearance to attend the Mike Lindell conference in Vegas. Like that was a part of the side story. They were trying to get her to not leave the state because she was so like determined to go to Mike Lindell conference in Vegas. Like that was a part of the side story. And they were trying to get her to not leave the state because she was so like determined

to go to Mike Lindell's conference. And even in the closing arguments, I just had to take a little bit of a look at this is that they said that she kind of had a hero complex that was part of the prosecutor's case and that she wanted to, like, she was really spun up in the Mike Lindell world and wanted to prove him correct. And so that's part of the reason why she went down that path. This is bad things happening to stupid, bad people. And that's nice.

That's one of life's great delicacies, as JVL likes to say. So tough break for you, Tina Peters. The bad side of this is we're a little bit worried that there's going to be a proliferation of Tina Peterses out there in 2024. And I think that that's going to be a proliferation of tina peters is out there in 2024 and i think that that's a real threat ab stoddard wrote for us last week if you haven't seen it we'll put in the show notes get ready republicans will refuse to certify a harris win it's like anything else with these guys like part of this is the top down trump and his goons you know and they're plotting and part of this is like bottom up like we're're going to have random weirdo Tina Peters, like election clerks, and all of these red counties across the swing states

that can do some real damage, particularly in Georgia right now. So, you know, talk about that holistically and then about the Georgia situation. Yeah. So what AB was getting at and what was in the news last week is that the Georgia Board of Elections, you know, it's just three people who are not elected. They are appointed. Two of them are MAGA aligned. And so they voted to create a new rule so that county election officials can conduct, quote, a reasonable inquiry into election results before certifying them. This may not like sound like a big deal. Don't you want, you know, local election officials to be able to make sure that everything is on up and up. But what this really is, this is a continuation of the January 6th strategy that

they tried on Mike Pence. Because if you recall what happened there, everything was aimed at getting Mike Pence in his what is called a ministerial duty to obstruct, delay, or send back the election results, maybe conduct an investigation. That was Ted Cruz's brilliant idea that he was bringing to the table to make sure that everything was correct before Mike Pence certified those results. That is not the role that those certification officials can play, should play, or is actually what is stated by law. The way to think of this is, is that certification officials, if that is your role, if you were Mike Pence that day, or if you were at the county election boards and all the votes are in, it is your job. You're like a scorekeeper at a football game. You write

down the score, you record it for the book, you put it on the scoreboard for everyone to see. It is not your job to be a player on the field. It is not your job to be a referee, to go look at the findings. It's not your job to call flags on the play. You just simply record the votes and say who won. And the reason for that is that states have processes and procedures to actually resolve any election issues or challenges after the vote is certified. You actually need that process to say, this is the vote that happened because there are other orderly processes to challenge election results. That can be through recounts.

That can be through legal challenges. That can be through recounts. That can be through legal challenges. That can be through canvases. All the things that we typically see, that is what state law says, especially in Georgia. So what they actually did, they unilaterally voted themselves new powers to interfere in the election when that is not their role. And just one more point on this. The reason why we have that, the states all have these clearly mandated procedures laid out, is that so people can't just launch investigations and delay people who won offices

from taking offices. That's why we have all these deadlines set into place. You have to have your challenge then. And so the fact that they did this, and like, you know, I have colleagues at Protect Democracy who've been tracking this. This is not the first time people have explored this option. Since 2020, my teammates have looked at dozens of instances where this has come about. The good news is it's not successful. It doesn't work because the state laws are so clearly laid out. And once you present evidence to these officials,

you explain, A, this is what the law says. Two, you actually open yourselves up to a lot of legal exposure. If you do go down this route, people typically stand down. And so that's what we've seen. And only two cases I've asked my colleagues, has this had to go to a court order? And the court has said, like, yeah, pretty much you can't do that. And so this should not be successful. Brian Kemp should really nip it in the bud right now. That would be nice. I'm hopeful he will do that under the radar. That's kind of where things are at. Sorry for that long explanation. No, that's important. I've been getting from everybody in democracy space, democracy world, like flagged about this Georgia situation, right? Because it is, you know, it is something that's worth monitoring. And so I wanted to cover it. I do think the good news here in the Georgia situation is that the rare green shoot in

Republican primaries recently was the Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger victories in 2022 when challenged by election deniers. And so I've noticed that the Raffensperger team, Gabriel Sterling, all these characters again from 2020 that did the right thing have been out there you know sort of saying that their deadlines are still going to be the same deadlines and they're going to make sure it's getting certified so that is encouraging i think to me it's more of okay is the georgia thing you know just kind of a you know a flare that like maybe some of these fights in 2024 are going to be crazy random county clerks in these states and that are trying to just gum up the works enough so that you know especially if it's a close election where one state like last time we were lucky it was four

states right where this time if it was one state you know let's say say Kamala Harris gets 276 electoral votes, right? And so had she lost Wisconsin, then neither candidate would have 269, right? So then in Wisconsin, they don't even need to like, give it to Trump, like all they need to do is try to block the electoral votes from getting counted, and then throw the thing to the house. And it's a little fantastical, but it's definitely what they have in mind. Yeah. And I was thinking about one thing, a question that I've been asked when I've been talking to people about this is that there is sort of an eagerness to tie this directly to Trump. And that did present itself because he did call out members of the Georgia Board of Elections by name at a recent rally. People want to say Donald Trump is orchestrating another coup.

I don't think that is quite right. I was sort of playing with the term sarcastic authoritarianism in the way that, you know, you don't need Donald Trump to tell you what to do here. You know what he wants. Everyone saw the play on January 6th where people discovered that maybe you could manipulate the certification process.

And so Donald Trump really doesn't have to call the play for people to just to explore these options. And so that is it's kind of like these these lone wolf disruptor scenarios that you're getting at that you really, really have to be on the watch for. In the other Democracy Space News, you did a, you posted something about Florida that is like one of my little peccadillos. And it's a nerdy issue. But I just think it's important to talk about and something that when Democrats are good government Republicans,

the three of them that are out there take over states would be a good reform that we should push. Groups like yours can push is figuring out ways to speed up the counting of the votes. And in Florida, for all the bad, you know, stuff about policy in Florida during the DeSantis years, since 2000, one thing that Florida did was really streamline its vote counting, so that the votes come in very fast there. We'll post in the show,. You posted a thread about this the other day. And it caught my eye because North Carolina, and I think that people have missed this,

has done the opposite. They have done the same thing that Pennsylvania had done last time, which is pass a law that said that you can't start counting votes until after all the polls are closed. So like, whereas Florida has already counted all their early votes and absentee votes,

which makes it much easier to go through the election day votes. If you're starting from zero, when the polls close, like, obviously, that's going to take a lot more time, the more time it takes, the more opportunity there is for troublemaking for disruption for undermining the quality of the election. I mean, am I over? Do you think I'm overstating that that's like an important, easy reform? No, it is an easy reform. I mean, this is what is the lag in counting mail-in ballots that led to the whole blue mirage, red mirage fears that Donald Trump very effectively manipulated in the night of the election with that weird 2 a.m. speech from the White House, where he first laid out the argument that the election was being stolen from him. That was the vector for it. Everyone knew it was coming and then it happened. And so this kind of got reopened by Ron DeSantis on Twitter. He had like a, you know, like a snark. Let's say it was a snarky pot shot, but he did have a point. Yeah, this is a seat. Florida

elections have millions more votes cast than Pennsylvania elections. Yet we count the votes and report the results on election night and do so in efficient and transparent manner. There is no reason why this can't be done in every state in America. Yes, he is right. The reason why Pennsylvania doesn't have it is because Pennsylvania Republicans played games with the mail-in ballot because there was resistance to the mail-in ballots and they wanted to slow down that count. I mean, that's like the really like Reader's Digest version of it. But if you have resistance to mail-in ballots, it's that resistance that started in 2020 that leads to these slowdowns. Like they were still thinking about like, well,

maybe we can disqualify it because of COVID rules. And everyone got wrapped around the axle for that. But if we can agree that all mail-in ballots count like every other ballot, then of course, tally them up beforehand. They're in the bank. Early voting goes on longer than ever, which is great. People have more voting options. But yeah, they should absolutely be in the bank. But this isn't as easy as he makes it.

Like you don't want a federal law. You want states to run their elections because there's a lot of protection that comes in that but yeah this is like do it new york is fantastically slow when it comes to counting in ballots i don't understand why people wouldn't be eager to get this done yeah democratic states like let's do this friend of the pod josh shapiro like let's do this. Friend of the pod, Josh Shapiro, like, let's do this. You know, the California thing is ridiculous. They count mail ballots. You have a week, right? So you can send your mail ballot in California on election day.

Like, I'm all for easier access to voting, giving people more options. We have to have some reasonable limits here so that we can count our votes like a first world country yeah i mean i guess the only argument against it is that if the results were somehow compromised and it leaked that someone was winning the mail-in vote and that got out that would deter people from voting and people play games yes to all of that we have lots of like that can be locked up follow around to santas i hate to say it josh Shapiro will be like, you know what? They do a really good job in Florida. We should do that.

And go tell all your MAGA friends what a great system Ron DeSantis has. Sure. Well, that's a 2026 issue. I think it's too late for this this time. And North Carolina's moved the wrong way. I want to get to a mailbag with you, Amanda. But I did an interview where I gave the conservative case for Kamala. People liked that and they like

having, you know, something that they can send to their conservative friends that might be on the fence still. And so I figured let's just make it a little series when we have people with conservative backgrounds on the pod and ask them to answer that question. So here it is for you, Amanda Carpenter. Why would you suggest that a conservative would go all the way to supporting Kamala in the election this fall? Sure. I love this question. I will say my everyday conversations, the easiest way to open that up is two things, Ukraine and January 6th. Those are the two like areas where even, you know, the Republicans who are considering this question and want more information is because of those issues.

That's why they start to feel a little queasy about that. So I think it's good to talk about that, why those issues are important to you, because it does come down to democracy. Like if you actually care about Ukraine, you are disturbed by what happened on January 6th, like you are a pro-democracy voter, whether abroad, whether that be here. And so the really like short version of it, the one line that I hope people can take away that maybe just put in your brain

to have that when you're having these conversations with your conservative friends is that if Donald Trump is elected again, he will gut our checks and balances to enact his anti-democratic agenda. I say authoritarian, but anti-democratic is like an easier way into talking about it with people. And the reason I really push that framing is not that people don't believe Donald Trump will potentially do bad things in a Trump 2.0 situation. It's that, A, they think he'll do

good things too, but they also have this belief that the checks and balances will hold. You see this coming from the Wall Street Journal, the idea like, okay, he might do bad things, but we have all these other systems to keep him in check. That is not true once you have the opportunity to interrogate that question. There's essentially four guardrails that they're expecting to hold. It's the courts. It's the Congress. It's the civil service.

It's our elections. The Supreme Court really made it clear that the courts are not going to contain Trump. Even if you don't care about what's going on with all the prosecutions that he faces, the fact that they invented a new standard for immunity for official acts is a game changer. And once you press that, how did they arrive at that decision? They arrived at that decision because Donald Trump was asking for absolute immunity from any accountability that had to do with January 6th. He essentially went to the courts and said, don't even ask me this question don't even try to hold

me accountable because i should have this shield around anything that i do as president if anybody has a conservative bone left in their body after the past eight years that should resonate i mean this is just setting not just donald trump up any president up for gross executive power abuses. And that's exactly what he plans to do. You know, talking about how he wants to order investigations against, you know, not Hillary Clinton, right? He accused his former officials, John Kelly of treason, you know, Bill Barr. These are the people he really wants to go after. The people who are in the first line for retaliation is not the woke liberals like they banged the drum against. It's the noncompliant Republicans who said, you know what? I think maybe what you're doing is unlawful here. Maybe it might be unconstitutional. Those are the people they want to really crack

down on first. And I think most Republicans, whether you have worked in a form of government or just been a Republican voter, Donald Trump has made life hard for you. It's hard to be a Republican, not because like you may like the tax cuts and all that stuff is great, but the indecency and the condescension and aggression that he demands, and not just him, the movement that backs him, they demand that you exhibit towards your fellow Americans. It's uncomfortable and it's uncalled for and it's time for it to stop. So even if you don't want to vote for Harris, but is it a vote for Harris

or is it just a way of saying, you know what, I'm kind of done with this. We're not going back. We're not going back. kind of done with this. We're not going back. We're not going back. We're not going back. We're not going back. Let's just end it. I love that.

I'm going to add one more thing just to make it a little cheekier for people and to play into their pre-existing feelings about Joe Biden. If you want to make the authoritarian argument with your friends, which is that this guy, Donald Trump, now has been given immunity. He's been given carte blanche to act on his authoritarian impulses to attack political foes. And a lot of those political foes are Republicans who spoke out against him. But not only that, it's not even just 78-year-old Donald Trump that would have that power. It's 82-year-old Donald Trump. It's a guy that's older

than Joe Biden is today. Can anybody that is not in the MAGA cult look at this man and say that after four more years of mental decline, that at age 82, they want him to have carte blanche over the powers of the federal government that's fucking scary like i feel like that's i think that there's there's some people who might not be thinking about it in that context you and i both know this when talking to people who are just so closely have the republican identity ingrained to them it's not about donald trump per se it's about them it's about like them preserving this image, this mentality that they have, can't believe in they would ever vote for Harris.

It's identity. And, you know, when I have the chance, I just, I try to level with people and just say, it's just a vote. Just one vote. You are not compromising your whole life by having one vote, you know, against a candidate or like whatever. And sometimes they'll tell me, well, I'm considering voting for RFK. It's like, well, how can you vote for RFK? I mean, let's just walk through his history. I mean, if you are worried about mental fitness, no offense,

but the guy is a admitted drug addict who has suffered like greatly in his personal life, has weird hangups with dead animals and shooting them, lived an incredible life of privilege and gotten away with things. As you know, the Kennedy family has with Ted Kennedy. You know, these are the things I talk about with people, but like it gets down to, are you always Republican? You know, I am a never Trumper. Absolutely. But are you an always Republican no matter what? I don't. You're a free thinker. You have independent thoughts. I think it's OK to deviate from always voting Republican. And guess what? Even if you don't like everything that Harris does, you can vote for Republican Senate candidates. You can vote for Republican all the way down. But let's just have a conversation about why Donald Trump has disqualified himself from a law and order constitutional point of view. It's just a vote. It's not your identity. It's just one vote. Okay, it's just let's just turn the page. All right. It's secret. Nobody knows. Nobody's

gonna know. You don't have to tell anybody. Just time to move on. All right, let's go to the mailbag. That was good. That was good. At the end of the year, we'll rank everybody to say who gave the most compelling case. Oh, jeez. You're one of one. I mean, if I knew I was being ranked like a Donald Trump beauty pageant, I would have really glossed it up. Amanda, you'll always be one of one here. All right, mailbag time.

First one is from Anonymous. Oh, I guess before we get to the mailbag time, email, if you want to mailbag us, bullwarkpodcast at thebullwark.com.bag us bullwork podcast at the bullwork.com questions are short and end with a question mark life advice questions can be longer and end with period question from anonymous i have a family member this one i guess is a question slash life advice i have a family member in his early 20s i think he's going down the alt-right borderline fascist rabbit hole online he's always been socially awkward and often says that he's never been to a party i think the best way to save him would be to help him get a girlfriend but that might be a heavy

lift short of getting him laid how do i pull him back from the brink amanda take him to a party take him to a party number one i mean you don't have to get him a girlfriend there's a lot to this i mean i don't want to get really dark but if you look at like a lot of shooters in america mass shootings things like that there is always an isolation element a lot of it hasn't been able to get dates i mean this is documented i'm not like saying anything revealing here but yes pull him out of that hole right like take him shopping get him looking good get his confidence up why wouldn't you if you care about him as a family member, do not start. If you're trying to pull somebody out of a rabbit hole and be like, well, I looked at your search history and I'm concerned about the things that you're watching.

No, that is not the way to go. Be his friend. Absolutely take him out. I would engage with what he's watching. Here's the's here's the thing a lot of these boy youtubers you know i was talking uh on earlier podcasts about sneeko who is this just despicable kind of boy youtuber guy that um just like makes fun of women and gays and like tries to do the macho thing and he's like unfortunately very popular among young guys but But Sneako is kind of like ridiculous, right? And it's one of those things where if you're sitting alone on your computer and you're watching this stuff, like it can start to make sense, right?

Like your brain starts to rewire itself around it, reorient itself around it. And so like having a family member that just like says, hey, like who are you watching? And like actually watches it with them, or not literally sitting next to them on the computer, but watches a couple videos, sends them the text messages,

is like, hey, I was watching this thing that you're watching, and this one point is making this fucking stupid. Here's why I don't like it, because this one's good. Hey, have you tried this? I mean, send them to far lefty youtubers like like hasan you know i'm not a big fan of his but like i was like i don't even know one but yeah i know that he's not he doesn't seem like that to me yeah yeah mix it up like you know mix them up tell them to mix it like it's healthy for everybody to mix up their diet it's

unhealthy for anybody to be in any rabbit hole hello people on threads like i'm sorry like if you just are talking to people that absolutely agree with you on everything it becomes unhealthy and corrupting it's true for these kids and i think that giving him attention engaging with the material that he's engaging with sending him contrary youtubes you can send him my shit if you want but but send them Hassan. Send them other things that are popular among younger folks. I think that that is step one.

Just bringing people back from the brink, from going totally down the rabbit hole into Nick Fuente's Groperland or into even a darker place than that. That is the first step. It's not getting them to support Kamala Harris, right? It's just like bringing it back from the brink.

Let's engage with some other material, you know, let's engage with some other material that's aimed at his demo. Let's talk to him like a normal human. Let's invite him to stuff. And, you know, I mean, that's not going to have 100 out of 100 efficacy, but I think that's a good step. Yeah, I mean, it's not going to have 100 out of 100 efficacy, but I think that's a good step.

Yeah. I mean, they're called influencers for a reason. They're effective what they do. And one thing that I have tried with some people who, you know, I bring up Andrew Tate because he was very popular for a while. But if you can burst the bubble, like one of my favorite podcasts is Behind the Bastards. They did this long series on Andrew Tate and like all the criminality and things that he's associated with. And I might just be like, try this.

Like, you know, I heard this thing about him. Like maybe he's not so popular. Yeah. Listen, yes. Out of the Behind the Bastards to Andrew Tate. The Behind the Bastards guys are kind of, you know, there's some things I don't, I find them annoying.

Their RFK series was amazing. Yeah, but they're casual. They're fun. I've loved the loved the behind the master series on robert e lee by the way that was so good and so yeah you know it's it's it's chill it's not giving them hectoring it's probably not going to work to try to bring them into kind of resistance bubble but i try to find some other other stuff out there and um hopefully that'll hopefully that'll work keep us posted uh rohanna it seems to be widely accepted that harris needs to do some interviews or press conferences but does she why trump has never held the serious discussions about his positions and policies why should she a man who used to be a comms director why should she does she have to do this

i don't think she should right now i i mean i I am sort of in the camp is going really well. Yes, there should be press access. And like, listen, here's what is going on. Really? J.D. Vance did his round robin of interviews on Sunday to go after Harris for not making herself similarly available for the same reason that they were demanding that she debate on Fox News. They want her out there to make a mistake that they can take advantage of. Yes, Kamala Harris will have to talk to the press at some point. And she does like she does gaggles on the plane at campaign events. But the long form sort of interview where you can go through policy discussions, you know, she will have to do some of that. But I don't think there's any urgency to it. As you know a comms director, Amanda, I would say maybe do one or two ahead of the DNC and then go have the party, live it up, right? Like that is what everybody wants. There will be plenty of time to have a policy discussion. I think it's largely laid out because she's part of an administration that's governing right now.

There's not a real mystery to me as to what's going on, but this is largely a complaint from the right, which has a little bit of merit, but if I were the Harris campaign, I wouldn't be paying too much attention to it. Like I said, do one or two, have the amazing party at the convention that everybody wants. Everybody wants to go live it up,

throw down the balloons, cop their hands for her, and there'll be plenty of time to do that stuff later. Everybody wants to go live it up, throw down the balloons, cop their hands for her, and there'll be plenty of time to do that stuff later. What do you think? Yeah, I might disagree with you on this one a little bit. I agree with you on the convention

and I agree with you to not care about the concern trolling from the right. I just think it's like, why let this hang over? I do think that there's some people, not me, but I think that there's some people out there that are like,

is she really up for this? You know what I mean? That still have nagging Kamala concerns, right? They're like, okay, this has been better than I thought. The speech has been better, but are we sure? It's like, why not just do a couple of easy ones and knock it out and just end the stupid talking point? I just would be tempted to do that.

I don't know. There are plenty of relatively easy things you could do you could just do a gauntlet of three interviews one morning and just have this be over with i i don't know maybe that's wrong i don't know i think it's an interesting question that's why we include it in the mailbag and and i think that there are legitimate views on both sides if they would have done it though in this time frame it would have stepped on the glow of the vp pick yeah And so there is a little bit of lag. I'm trying to think when

they would have even done it. Who would you recommend? Who do you think would be a good interview for? Yeah, I would just do like a little mix and I'd just have her sit there in a room and you could do, I mean like literally you could do a couple of local TV hits in the swing states. You could do a couple of

you know, relatively people that are on her side, you know, influencer types states you could do a couple of you know relatively people that are on her side you know influencer types you could do a big youtube thing with my buddy brian tower cohen or us or the pod bros or and then you can do a black media thing for her sitting down with tim miller i've changed my yeah you can do it sit down with me but i don't mean you know i just mean like she could do some black media and you just sit down, you do four interviews, 10 minutes a piece, you know, a couple of swing states, a couple of advocacy groups. You don't need to do 60 minutes. You know, I'm not saying like, I just think that if you did that, it'd take a little bit of the pressure off, but I don't think that this decision is going to make or break the campaign. But, but that's my

view on it is that it's just kind of checks the box shows that you're engaging shows that you're doing the back and forth undermines that line of attack a little bit but i can see both sides it is true to rojana's point that it's not like oh trump does serious and trump doesn't do anything trump has had one challenging interview in months with the national association of black journalists you saw how that went so i don't it's not like he gets points for letting maria barrett romo you know suck up to him or Elon. By the way, like the fact that she is still on the air after everything, it just blows

my mind. She popped up this weekend. I was like, oh, my gosh, she's still there because she had some random Republican member of Congress starting some other conspiracy. I was just reminded she is still there collecting that fat paycheck to do her bonkers weekend show that is a free forum to seed all this garbage and it just made me mad so thank you for letting me let that out yeah one of the leading spokespeople for the stop the steal still out there doing it great work fox great work

paul ryan all right lastly i had an aside comment on yesterday's podcast about how i don't really love the jd vance eyeliner attacks and i think that they're homophobic. And many people emailed to the mailbag to let me know how wrong I was about that. They said that this is hypocrisy. It's not homophobia. It's like the progressives are just attacking them for the eyeliner, because it's hypocrisy. And I sat with that for a minute. And I was like, maybe the readers are right, and I'm wrong this time. And then I sat with it for a few more minutes. And I was like, Nope, I'm right, you'm wrong this time. And then I sat with it for a few more minutes and I was like, nope, I'm right. You're wrong. For starters, JD Vance doesn't even wear eyeliner.

Okay. Like the only workable theory here is that as a young man, he got one of the permanent eyeliner tattoo. That's a thing that you can do. It's a little beauty tattoo. That's the thing you can do. Nobody's tattooing their eyeliner on except for very committed makeup people. Exactly.

So some people are doing it. I've been thinking maybe I should do it because I'm very bad committed makeup people. Exactly. So some people are doing it. I've been thinking maybe I should do it because I'm very bad at makeup application. And so I've been going down a rabbit hole about this. So unless JD Vance is like a teenager, like decided he was so into eyeliner that he got this tattoo. And that's just how his eyes have always been.

Okay. So for starters. He is blessed with thick lashes at the base. Sorry, guys. He's got a lot of terrible traits. That's what he got. He's got great eyelashes. Congrats on that, JD.

The other thing, what is the hypocrisy exactly? It's not like he's trying to ban eyeliner. All right, okay. It's one thing. I don't mind these attacks. Like I do this, right? If Trump's trying to be a macho man and I'm like, oh, wait, actually,

he's just a fat body that puts on more makeup than his wife and has soft hands and has got was scared of a bald eagle that's great okay that's you're doing a contrast there you know if you're like jd vance was in drag that's bad because he wants to ban drag shows okay i'm with you that's that's hypocrisy making fun of his eyeliner is i don't think hypocrisy i want to after you guys sent this to me sent all these complaints to me i went through my mentions some of the people on twitter wait a second hold on hold on the picture of him that i see he's not in drag it's just a halloween costume what is the blonde wig thing it might be braveheart what that might be a bad braveheart i think but i'm not i don't know for sure i think

there's a necklace or a choker situation here's some of these the youtube people will be able to see this but on audio i'll just explain it to you. Here's what somebody replied to me on x it was a progressive this is not not a far right winger it's a picture of JD from back when he was fatter looking a little effeminate and then it's the drag braveheart picture it says gay D Vance MAGA's own chameleon what's the hypocrisy attack there I think you're just making fun of him for being gay how about this one this one is uh they said jd vance wears eyeliner this dude is weird hashtag jd vance is creepy hashtag jd vance is weird as fuck what is the hypocrisy attack there that's you saying it's weird for somebody to wear makeup so maybe your intentions are good but it seems it seems to me like there's a lot of people out there that just want to be able to call somebody a sissy faggot boy and just think that they have

the coverage cover to do that now because jd vance is bad this is like who is that young republican congressman from north carolina that catherine madison catherine yeah it's that all over again so anyway i get it look i one thing i've been working on we all do this i make fun of people and surely i use attacks that hurt some working on we all do this i make fun of people and surely i use attacks that hurt some people's feelings sometimes and so i hear you and feel free to call me out on that there's one thing i've been doing recently which is i've tried to stop using the p word to try to stop calling people the p word as saying that you're weak because you're that because that's good it's bullshit i've been compelled by the idea that it's sexist.

It's like, actually, like, why do we say you have balls when like to say you're strong, you have balls. Balls are very weak, actually. I don't know if you've ever punched anybody in the balls, but they're weak, not strong. You are correct, but I didn't really need to contemplate the mental image. Okay, so why have we inverted this? Why are you the P word if you're weak, but you have balls when you're strong?

When it's the opposite. Yeah, if you kick them, I heard it hurts. A child comes out of the P word. The P word is strong, okay? The balls are weak. Such a weird note to end on. So, okay, well, this is where we're ending. So, I'm just saying sometimes-

But you are correct. Sometimes there's some internal misogyny and homophobia and the stuff that maybe you just don't think about. So for people out there who are saying you're attacking JD Vance's eyeliner because of his hypocrisy, if you are doing that and you feel good about it, keep on keeping on. But I don't know. Not for me. Amanda Carpenter, thank you so much. What a great podcast. If we do say so ourselves. We'll see you again soon. You know Amanda will be back.

Everybody else, we will see you tomorrow. I think we've got a double header. We'll see you all then. Peace. I know you. I know you've seen her. She's a sad tomato She's three miles up that road Walking down the street

Will I never meet her? She's a real woman's child Oh, my kiss, breath, and time She's a real woman's child All my chest breath through bedtime I am a smith You know me, yeah you know me I can be your Frankenstein My crush with eyeliner I am the spirit

I'm the real thing I'm the real thing Won't you be my Valentine? My crush with eyeliner The Buller Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.