The Bulwark Podcast - Ben Rhodes: Is Trump Stumbling into a Wider War?

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

The wars in Iran and Ukraine are increasingly entangled, CIA Director John Ratcliffe had to personally deliver a message to Moscow, and Trump is driving our Gulf allies into the arms of China. Meanwhile, the U.S.-Israel relationship keeps mucking up our domestic politics, particularly in Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in Michigan. But it also turns out that podcast host (and senator) Ted Cruz seems to be pocketing money from the state of Israel itself. Plus: Some Democrats have finally figured out how to deliver speeches again, Vance is always trying to turn himself into something he’s not, the DSA posters sound a lot like the Resistance 1.0, and Enes Kanter is still a POS. Ben Rhodes joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod.

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, Deputy National Security Advisor for Barack Hussein Obama and co-host of Pod Save the World. His latest book, Always Say, The Battle for American Identity was released earlier this year. It's Ben Rhodes. What's up, man? Hey, Tim. Good to see you. It's good to see you as well. Yesterday at the beginning in this little intro, I said that Trump had been kind of quiet this week, so I'd see him on. We did a lot of silly stuff. and by the time the show aired, like he was already renaming Lakes again.

Yeah. And I don't even know that it's worth talking about it. He's such a loser, and it's so embarrassing. But that did happen between the taping and the airing yesterday. The Canadians have a former head of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada who's methodically and rigorously in his own hand, probably going through the terrorists that he's going to reimpose on us. And Trump with his own hand is just,

drawing on lakes and renaming things as usual. Yeah, expanding the area of the hurricane. Yeah, I liked how Carney really mugged us with the use of the word, hydronyms in his statement. He's like Trump is obsessed with hydronymes. And I was like, all right, well, Trump certainly doesn't know that word. I had to Google it. It's good.

It's good usage. You got to go to the thesaurus. Yeah, Mark Carney is like a walk-in thesaurus. man. We're not fighting someone in our own weight class in the trade war here. We have a bunch of domestic politics talk about at the end on your substack notes on the stories we tell. You've had two good ones in the last two weeks that touch on things that affect me, resistance one discourse, and hatred of Ennis Canter. So we will get to both of those things at the end. But I've got to start with foreign policy. You know your

expertise. I guess we'll tie this Enoskantr. I want to do the Brian Winhorst thing about connecting dots on a couple of stories I've been reading in the news. And since you actually have sources you talk to, I'm wondering what you think about all this. So the CIA director visits Moscow. The Wall Street Journal reports that depletion of our weapons stocks in the Iran War could be motivating Putin to consider making a move on NATO. The NATO Secretary General has a meeting with U.S. Undersecretary Elbridge Colby, which is a little unusual. U.S. Intel, we've seen these reports for a while now, we're warning Eastern European countries about Russia plans to test NATO. There was a leak of a letter that three Baltic

commissioners sent to the EU president about a deteriorating security environment, an increased frequency of airspace violations in the Baltics. And the Sun tabloid has Kremlin insiders fearing Putin, it was prepared to drop a tactical nuke. So, you know, I'm tying like Albridge and Ratcliffe and the warnings. And it feels kind of like the lead up to the Ukraine war when a lot of people are like not taking that that seriously. And our intel people are like, no, really, like this is happening.

I don't know. What do you think about all that? Yeah, and I've been talking to people, you know, in Europe, and some of the people kind of worked on these types of things over the last decade. And I think there is a feeling that there's rising concern that Russia could do something in Europe that could take different forms. One is like a direct attack on European soil, targeting places where they manufacture, you know, some of the drones and rockets that are going deep into Russia.

the Russian idea being, okay, if you're giving them the weapons that are hitting, you know, places like Moscow and, you know, St. Petersburg, then we have a right to attack the factory in Germany that is producing that. There's lesser things they could do. They've been doing sabotage operations, like there have been fires set in Europe. There have been things blowing up in Europe. The drones at the German air base. Yeah, drones just shown up. They could also just begin a more aggressive version of what they did in Ukraine in one of the Baltic's States or Moldova. You know, there was a great story recently at times about like literally Russian training camps, dudes with like guns and preparing sabotage operations in Serbia,

ostensibly for Moldova. You had NATO undertaking kind of military exercises to kind of show, you know, some deterrence. But, but yeah, I think it is a tenuous time. And there is a feeling that as Russia is kind of on the back foot here because of the Ukrainian drone capability, that one way they might lash out is by trying to impose a cost on Europe and test whether the NATO alliance can respond to it. I want to do flashbacks of how we got here. And there's a really embarrassing Axia story from March about the Trump's administration's lack of preparations I want to talk about. But like even going back to Biden, as you sit here now, does it feel like we were outweighing, you know, World War III concerns and underweighing how much we could have been. helping Ukraine, you know, kind of given where we are now.

And it seems like we might be walking into, I mean, not World War III in like the nuclear sense, but like, you know, an increasingly globalized conflict anyway. Yeah, I worry about two things. The increasing globalized conflict, right, the way in which this comes together with the war in Iran, the closer collaboration between Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, as against, you know, the United States and Europe. I also just worry about something that doesn't look like World War III, but there's just kind of creeping violence into Europe,

you know, like more and more of these sabotage things, drone strikes, cyber attacks, reprisals on Russia. And it's not right to tactical nukes, but we're just learning to live with more and more and more violence and conflict. You know, on this one, as someone who's been willing to second cast the Biden administration on things, they had a tough fucking problem here. I think in retrospect, and again, I say this with empathy that this was not easy to deal with at the time.

There were kind of two paths that might have been able to have been taken. Like one is, it's kind of premised your question. A, we're not that concerned that Putin's actually going to use nuclear weapons, and we're really going to start pouring more and more weapons in as fast as possible to give the Ukrainians advantage. Another is, frankly, if you look at the contours of the front line, it's not that dissimilar from where it was pretty early on in the war, like after the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2023.

And so the other road not taken might have been like, what would it have looked like? And it might not have worked to kind of really drive towards a negotiated settlement earlier, like beginning in like 2023. Now, the Ukrainians didn't necessarily want that. But the reality is what concerns me is it where this thing ends up is probably not going to be that dissimilar from where it could have ended up if somehow you'd been able to do that then. And meanwhile, a lot of people have died. I can sense that Hippie Roads is more interested in the negotiated settlement path.

Well, I'm intrigued by the weapons path. Yeah, well, but I hear you on the weapons path. The natural security people, I've been in all these meetings, you tend to take the middle option, you know. That's like anything else. It's like back when I was in PR, you know, and you had a client. You're like, we're going to give you a crazy option or like a very conservative option. or like here's, yeah. So we've been kind of living with the middle option for years now.

And the Ukrainians, by the way, have broken out of that because their drone manufacturing basically is the more, like, aggressive weapons option. And they're actually having some success with that, to your point. So I think that does bear some scrutiny, but we'll see where it goes. Speaking of Paths Not Taken, this is the aforementioned March story about drones. This is my guy, Mark Caputo, that broke this. Ukrainian officials tried to sell the U.S. their battle-proven. in technology for downing Iranian-made drones.

They made a PowerPoint presentation showing how it could protect American forces and their allies in the Middle East war. Trump administration dismissed the Ukrainians only to eventually reverse course a little while ago. Yikes. That is a miss that has like a ton of implications, actually. It has a ton of implications because the first point is,

you know, Tim, I've been talking about this endlessly, but like everybody you talk to in the Middle East is like the damage to these U.S. bases and facilities far worse than, you know, you know or being told, right? I mean, we took some hits that we might not have taken had we moved more aggressively to adopt this Ukrainian technology. I think the other important lesson going forward, though, Tim, is like you innovate on the battlefield. The Ukrainians have been in it for years, and they've made breakthroughs in both offensive drone technology and then defenses. And my sense, Tim, is that, like, at the same time that the Pentagon is shoveling massive contracts out the door to, like, Don Jr.'s drone company. And we're building, like, the world's most expensive drones.

What the Ukrainians and the Iranians have shown is that, like, you can make pretty cheap Jones in your garage that are, like, more effective. Like, smaller drones swarming are more effective than, like, the Battlestar Galatica being designed in Silicon Valley, you know, or Don Jr.'s company that is getting, like, no-bid contract. And so I do think that there's a, you know, the hippie and me, but who also realizes national security is necessary. It's like, hey, we could probably save some money on the defense budget by, you know, embracing some of the technology that the Ukrainians have innovated on the battlefield rather than, you know, giving Don Jr. a blank check. A lot of talk from the Silicon Valley guys. You know, it's like Palmer Lucky, that Andrew guy talking about how great that they're going to do to help us militarily. I had lunch with him once and he picked his nose and ate it. And so maybe that should have been a warning.

that maybe these guys weren't as good as they seem. What is clear is Ukrainians are the best in the world at this right now. And this gets to the future of Ukraine's defense. They need this on the back end of the war as part of their deterrence, right? And we'd be dumb. I mean, I assume that Trump, like, he just doesn't like Ukraine. So he's probably like, I'll get out of here with that drone technology. And that's a big miss.

Yeah. And now this is impacting kind of the nexus. of all this, right? I mean, who knows? Russia are the Iranian president and Putin are meeting next week at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in Kyrgyzstan. They're talking about nuclear energy production and sharing, but who the hell knows what else they're talking about? And I do think that like the depletion of our patriots is kind of informing, like, you know, different tactical options for both Russia and

on in both wars that were entangled in. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, on the far end of risk, potentially Taiwan, right? I mean, because, you know, the window that people who worry about Taiwan worry about is the second half of the Trump administration, right, when the U.S. is probably a low point in terms of global standing. God willing. Yeah, distracted by a million.

Yeah, God willing, seriously. Allies are divided. The Don Trump Jr. administration in 29, you know, we might not even be able to see the bottom for here, right? Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. So, yeah, I mean, it's never good at a time of heightened global conflict and the active wars to be running out of munitions, particularly defensive ones, that you need to protect your allies. We talked about this a couple times ago when you're on and your previous book after the fall. And, you know, a lot of that is, like, reflective of us and, you know, kind of the mistakes of the American-led world order and things we could have done differently. But another part of it is, like, fears of what a different led world order would look like and why it's so important that we do better.

And as we're sitting here now, and you wrote that, what, eight years ago? It's been a long time. Seven, eight years ago. And we're sitting here now, and the, like, prospect of a China-led world order is feeling, even more likely than it did when you wrote that book. And I'm just kind of curious, kind of how you see, you know, sort of the China interplay as it stands today. I think it is more likely because their strategy for Trump has been

to kind of punch him back in the face when he picks on them. But meanwhile, like kind of quietly go about building their own parallel world order. And so as Trump is, you know, pissing everybody off with his tariffs, the Chinese are there to say, hey, look, you know, you may not like the terms of your deals with us, but at least you know what the terms are, and they don't change. You know, Mark Carney had this line that the U.S. now makes deals in pencil, not pen. The Chinese make deals in pen. And guess where Mark Carney's going? He's going to go to China. That's one thing, the AI of it all. Like the U.S. is building the most expensive AI in the world.

We've got Claude. We've got, you know, chat GPT. But what most countries want is like cheaper, open-source models that can create efficiencies, robots to do shit, you know, industrial efficiencies. And I think we're going to look up in a couple of years, and there might be these giant IPOs for, you know, anthropic and opening eye. But meanwhile, most of the world could be running on Chinese AI. And then meanwhile, they're kind of parallel institutions. They're kind of belt road initiative institutions are just kind of spreading out. They're getting pretty almost near dominance on certain critical minerals. Trump, despite all his talk about that, is not really done anything about it. So, yeah, I think we're beginning to see the outlines of a, not a Chinese-dominated one, but

let's just say in a fractured world order, a place where the Chinese are potentially in a stronger position than the United States and everything Trump is doing. It's literally just driving countries into the arms of the Chinese. And in the long run, Tim, like the dollar is a reserve currency is one of the ultimate targets of the Chinese. And they don't want to get there tomorrow because it'd be too disruptive. But, you know, the moment in which the world starts to move away from the dollar, our standard of living becomes impossible. Where are all the China Hawks that criticize you? It's funny. It's funny to go back to think six months ago when the Iran war started,

some of the right-wing hawks. You're seeing this like galaxy brain Twitter threads about how Trump is doing 4D chess. And this really isn't even about Iran. It's about China. You know, and it's about solidifying our power. And, boy, that doesn't look very good. Well, because they thought it was like this kind of board game

where we were going to like take the Iranian oil somehow and they'd take it away from the Chinese. And we were like bombing like railroads at the, Chinese use as part of the Bell Road initiative. But losing sight of the fact that that's not how the world works. You don't just bomb a country and then get all of its oil, you know? And the underlying fear caused by the United States being this bull in a China shop and doing something like the Iran War, confirms exactly what the Chinese have been saying about us

for a very long time. Look at Kuwait, for example. This is just one example this week. I was reading a story about how Kuwait has had very good feelings about the United States, given the way that we came to their defense when Saddam invaded them, Gulf War I, But like, how are things looking right now? Iran's targeting their civilian infrastructure. They're targeting their water desalination plants, energy installations,

and they're looking around. And like, are these U.S. bases here helping us are making us less safe? So two things I point to, because you kind of want to look at the world's kind of swing states, right? And the Gulf states are the ultimate swing states. Because in it of the globe. Yeah, they literally are, you know, because they've got, in a cash poor world, they have tons of cash. obviously have tons of natural resources. And they've kind of been on our side, but like the UAE, the Saudis, like, they play the

footsie with the Chinese on a bunch of stuff. And look, you're right. It's not just that the bases, you know, don't make them safer. The bases are endangering them. Like, they are being attacked because they host U.S. bases. And that could lead them on the back end of this war to make some pretty fundamental choices about who they want to be aligned with and at least wanting to hedge against reliance on the U.S. What about South Korea?

Like in the middle of a war in which the United States yanked away the thad missile defense system, that's like the most important missile defense system for the South Koreans in a potential conflict, he then just decides to reignite his unrequited love affair with Kim Jong-un, who no longer even writes love letters, he just sends troops to Ukraine to fight with Putin. And he's canceling military exercises. What if South Korea is like, you know what, we're just going to have to cut a deal with the Chinese, like we don't like it, but we've got no other choice. Europe, same thing, like on the tech,

issues, right? There's a lot of concern in Europe about being overly reliant on American tech because what if Trump comes along and just switches it off so he can invade Greenland? And so you're hearing about digital sovereignty, but also that could lead to the Europeans being like, well, let's just buy the cheap Chinese AI. And a few years ago, the U.S. would have said, don't do that. Just like we said, don't use Huawei. I don't know that those arguments carry a lot of water anymore. What worries do you have? Some of your lefty pals sometimes I see on TikTok are like, What, who cares? The Chinese world order is fine. Like, maybe we should just, maybe it's better even, you know. Like, what fears would you have about, like, continuing on this trajectory?

Well, I mean, obviously their political system is one in which, you know, you want to talk about a mass surveillance state. Yeah, I want to be clear. When I say lefty, sometimes the listeners get confused about all the lingo these days because liberal, you know, we're changing all the words. I'm a liberal now. You know, I'm talking about, like, the far edge. the anti-America, like, little corner of the left. Yeah, I mean, I guess to be fair, like, you know, in some regards, like the Chinese have not gone around starting wars, right? But at the same time, like, their political model is one of, you know, complete total control, complete mass surveillance that's already built there. And, you know, essentially the places that have become kind of under Chinese dominance

have not benefited from it. They get into debt traps. like they become kind of vassal states of like a different empire, you know? And, you know, like you need somebody to help create collective action to solve problems. And even from a left standpoint, like that includes climate change, right, and among other things. Whereas the Chinese are kind of just trying to hoard and dominate clean energy sectors, right? My argument to the left as someone who's like very sympathetic to a lot of their critics of American Empire policy makes a lot of those critiques myself is it would still be better.

there's this presumption that the United States can do nothing right in the world and therefore we should just kind of close up shop. I'm sympathetic to some of that. There's a lot we should just stop doing, like dumb wars and I think we don't need a trillion-and-fdollar defense budget and all the rest of it. But I would still rather the United States

tried to do good things in the world. It would be better. And where I think we are, Tim, is like, we're not going back to something we run. We need to negotiate the new terms of the world order. Like the United States, China, a whole bunch of other countries, we should be entering an era of negotiation

about what comes next. Because if it's a competition for who's going to dominate, either the U.S. or China or wrecking ball Russia, that's kind of a recipe for more conflicts and less, you know, let's just say less good outcomes.

The other thing of impacting the swing states that you mentioned in the Middle East is the Israel relationship. Obviously, that is impacting the swing states here in America too. I want to talk to you a bunch about the Democratic side of this, but there's just this one story

the Kaubai is kind of, I think, reflective of the political situation that Israel is facing here on the Republican side as well. Responsible statecraft had this. The Israeli government is running advertisements on the Ted Cruz podcast, a competitor of yours and mine, behind both of ours in the rankings, I think. But he does have another job. Cruz's podcast, we don't have a FEC really anymore. And so I don't know who would look into this. but Cruz's podcast has a strange licensing deal with IHeart,

where revenue associated with the advertising sales goes to Cruz's Truth and Courage Pack, which supports his political endeavors. The company is given at least $1.7 million in digital revenue to Truth Encourage Pack since 2023. So if the Israeli government is running advertisements, it does feel like a foreign government is giving money to the pack. Yeah, well, first of all,

truth and courage are those words, words you normally associate with Ted Cruz? Well, he did have the courage to go on to Tucker Carlson's podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. Truth. I don't know about truth. That's the last time he exhibited some courage. Yeah, courage probably not either, you know, fleeing for Mexico.

Yeah, I don't know. Look, there's a lot of ways to think about Israel, obviously, today. Like, one simple thing I would suggest to people is just remember it is a foreign country. It's not like an appendage of us. And so foreign countries generally should not be putting money into the packs of American politicians. When they are doing that, they are usually going to want something in return for that kind of investment. I mean, part of what my arguments on Israel have just been is like if we just treated Israel like another country, a lot would change. Like, you know, in terms of our military assistance, in terms of stuff like this.

And at the same time, like, part of what's so frustrating to me about this kind of stuff, Tim, is it's like, if you point out, I mean, I remember I wrote a piece of the Times, and I took some shots at APEC for how they try to use money to influence politics. And they're like, well, you can't say that. That's a trope. Like, you're raising money and spending it in campaigns to get an outcome. I'm not suggesting that's... They'll say, well, they'll say, well, it's Americans. It's not really foreign. And so you're advancing this kind of conspiracy. And it's like, well, when I've been starting to talk about this later, I've been like, well, I'm part Lebanese, my mother's sandwich. Lebanese. I'm like if it was, there's a Lebanese American pack, like spending 30 million dollars in a primary race to support a candidate that was on the opposite side of the Israel-Lebanon conflict. I think people would be like, this is pretty strange. Like even if it was American Lebanese that were spending like that much money, right there. Absolutely. It's an American pack, but in the same, there are a lot, like, I don't like money in politics generally. Like, I don't like how fossil fuel companies spend money in American politics. Like, it's not just APEC, but like,

It's also, like, not the best strategy for them. Like, I don't think they have a problem with, like, the Ted Cruz podcast listenership. Like, I keep hearing about this vaunted Israeli PR campaign. And if the PR campaign involves, like, buying ad space on, you know, Ted Cruz's podcast, I'm not sure that's where they have a problem, you know. No, I think there's been a backfire, honestly, like a big backfire from people that would not really have cared one way or the other. Again, I think that they're particularly on the left, people who are super-enged, engaged, you know, who maybe just have generally good feelings about Israel and feel like, obviously, the Jewish state, there should be a Jewish state and all that. And then they're like, wait a minute, but I live in Michigan. Like, why is there so much money coming into this race? Like, especially after, you know, how we've seen, you know, Israel conduct themselves in Gaza and the West Bank. It's just like, it feels out of whack. It's having the effect of having people, you know, have a, like, a negative backlash effect, rather than.

a persuasive effect, I think. It is, because people notice when you spend $30 million on ads, you know. And so the first thing is it's just feeding the backlash, like, because it's get money out of politics and we're uncomfortable with this and like, you know. But the other thing I'd say, Tim, is that, you know, people sometimes, you know, who are more pro-Israel will say, why is Abdul talking so much about, you know, Israel? Like, Abdul's running on like Medicare for all. If someone comes in with $30 million, they're the ones that are making the race about, you know, like a litmus test on Israel.

It's not Abdul, right? You can't simultaneously say, like, we don't like how much American politics and democratic politics in particular is becoming about this one issue. At the same time that you're then getting into all these democratic primaries and pouring all this money in to, you know, and they're not obviously advertising about Israel because they know that Democratic voters don't agree with them. but it's not like we don't know where the money's coming from, right? And I think every time they lurch into these spaces, it creates more backlash. I saw some pushback to that point on Abdul, but just, I just want to go a little bit more into what you're saying on kind of what the establishment or the pro-Israel side of this dispute. Like, even in Michigan, like, it's kind of strange, like Hillary Shulton's congresswoman, you know, talking about how she would rather not be a Democrat if Democrats are not going to. support fully the state of Israel and everything they do.

Haley Stevens, I kind of said this weird, missive to Politico earlier this week after she lost, where she was like, my critics came at me in very personal and anti-Zionist levels. I don't even know. It's kind of a funny saying. I don't even really know what that means,

how you can be attacked on anti-Zionist levels. But they're talking about this. It's like a fundamental, critique, right, of, of Abdul, and on an issue, like, where there's a disconnect between where they are and where the basis. Like, maybe you think, maybe some of our listeners think that's bad, or, you know, maybe they're on, you know, uh, Shulton and, and Stevens' side of that dispute. But, like, yeah, just, if you just look at the numbers, like the, they're, like, way more Democratic politicians who are in the Stevens Shulton camp and way more Democratic voters who are

in the Abdul King. That's just a reality. My point about this is that like any poll you look at, you're up to kind of 70% or more of Democrats who want to fundamentally, they don't want to provide assistance to the Israeli government. They believe that war crimes are committed in Gaza. And like you're not going to just kind of make that go away and stamp that out. Like, because there's another piece of this that I think is important for Democrats as every now and then they try some new whack-a-mole strategy to make just make this go away. And so recently it's been the kind of coordinated statements against Hassan Piker and, you know, Jared Moskowitz, the most pro-Israel member of the Democratic caucus being put in charge of a subcommittee responsible for Middle East policy, you know, not a subtle move by the Democratic leadership there. Another problem with this, Tim, and again, listeners who, you know, don't agree with my views on Israel, the one thing I would ask them is that this isn't just like over because Gaza. You had Gaza.

Right. Then you had a warner on that, again, if you have your eyes open, you know that Bibi Nanyahu was part of, not entirely responsible, but part of persuading Donald Trump to do that. The West Bank. But that's what I was going to get at. This isn't going to get better. Like, look at the West Bank. Look at what's happening.

Like, that's going to continue to happen. Like, everything that the Israeli government says and is doing suggests, they're just going to continue to take more and more of the West Bank. There's going to continue to be these violent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians. Like, that's going to keep. coming. Let's just think in terms of election cycles in the next two years. It's not like Israel's going to swing back to Yitzhak Rabin here, and we can all just get it on with things. And so the people who look like they don't understand what's happening are the Democratic establishment politicians who are just

trying to kind of keep this at arm's length and make it go away. And I think there's a lot of ill will from 2024 when Democrats are told to like shut up and fall in line because how many times are we going to be told to do that? Yeah. I've said this before, but it's just a really big bone. and I've especially had it this week. I get especially frustrated with the idea that like, oh, you know, the Piker discourse or whatever. Obviously, he says a lot of things that I've found gross. The extremes 10 hours a day and we disagree with a bunch of stuff.

Somebody sent me an old tweet of his where he was talking about how much he loved Bashar Assad. It's like me and Hassan disagree on a lot. But again, like he's a supporter of Abdul. He's not Abdul. And like, and if your concerns are about anti-Semitism and you're like bringing back Nazi illusions, it's like, okay, well, like the current government is, like was running a foreign gulag, like a literal gulag based on that they sent people there based on the color of their skin and the bad tattoos.

Like that's, I mean, it wasn't a concentration camp, but like, you know, I mean, it was on the way where we were sending people there, you know, just based on their ethnicity. And we have these detention centers running now, like the Iranian professor I've been talking about that we have in Dilley, who didn't do anything as a green card holder. We're holding an internment camp. And like, does Mike Rogers not have to answer? It's crazy. Like, I don't even, has Mike Rogers even talked about that?

It's like, if you're concerned about this and, like, you know, creeping fascism and racism and putting people on camps based on their race, like, does, like, Mike Rogers doesn't have to talk about the El Salvador Gulloch? Has anyone asked him about it? Abdul's been asked about Hassan Piker, like, a thousand times. It's like, okay, ask her about that. But, like, why? That frustrates me when people say that they're, like, concerned about the human rights side of this and, like, Mike Rogers gets this free pass from media or commentators, activists, whatever. Let me add another one, which is, like, I remember being in Munich, right, in 2025, and J.D. Vance comes to the Munich Security Conference and gives us speech, you know, basically endorsing the AFD, like a neo-Nazi German party. Like, my family were German Jews, including some who perished in the Holocaust.

Like, I'm not suggesting we shouldn't talk about any Semitism left. I am suggesting, like, the discordance between a Twitch streamer saying, things that at times trigger people and the vice president of the United States flying to Germany and telling them that they need to be nicer to their Nazis. Yeah, where is Mike Rogers on that? Like, what is Mike Rogers, the pro-A-FD Nazi party?

I think yes, I think yes, because he doesn't criticize and I think part of this is like, okay, well, we're not even going to ask the Republicans because like the Democrats are having this, I think in some way, well, counterproductive politically, but healthy as part of an organism. At a minimum counterproductive. Yeah, like, extremely counterproductive politically, but like, kind of

healthy is like an organism to like have people say what they really think. Like, there is no disagreement. Like, Trump's has fascist mass thugs in the streets, and we have camps, and we're supporting the fascist governments in other countries. And Mike Rogers, everybody is on board. Like, there's no critique being offered from within their coalition. There's no critique.

I guess actually that's not true. There's one critique. There's, like, the Tucker side of the party wants them to be more anti-Semitic, actually, is the only critique in their corner. But the scale of the outrage about Hassam Piker is so much great. greater than J.D. Vance and the AFD. Or, you know, that we have people saying, we're saying people the gulags.

Let me put it this way. Even if you don't agree with, like, I've been on Hassan stream, I don't agree with a lot of stuff. He says, actually, but I don't think he's in any semi. But let's put that aside. Let's say you disagree with me about that. There's not even a crack open of the door from people who have these views that we need to kind of pay attention to young people here. Like, the Democrats need young voters to win elections, to knock on doors, young voters have been telling you for years that this is a very important

issue to them. And it's a gateway to them trusting you. It's not just about Israel. It's like if I'm feeling gaslit on this issue, well, how am I going to trust that you actually are going to fight to lower prices? Like, this is what Mamdani figured out, that if he showed that he would stand up to the party establishment on Israel, like that guy seems like he's got some balls. Like maybe he actually will try to bring free child care in like lower prices, right? And so the way these statements or put out the way that this issue is treated, it's not even like they're just trying to disaggregate and say, like, hey, can we just, like, isolate some of this more extreme rhetoric that we don't like.

It's more just, like, shut up, right? And if you listen to Hassan Piker, like, you're a bad person, you know? Well, like, millions of people listen to Hassan Piker. We have to be doing addition here, not subtraction. Like, I'm a big tent guy. Like, Jared Moskowitz has a place in the Democratic Party. I don't agree with them. But so should Hassan Piker's listeners.

Like, what are we doing here? Like, when we've been losing, like we've been losing, we shouldn't be, like, trying to, like, kick people off the island. Here's the pushback to you. Wait, wait, when they represent the majority view of Democrats. We're telling what 70% of Democrats think war crimes are committed. Does that mean we want 70% of Democrats to stay home in November? No, I mean, I obviously agree with you.

But here's the push fact that I thought was reasonable. It's from Madaglacius. He wrote this. I think people who want pro-Israel Democrats to get to yes with Abdul al-Said should consider chilling out about this. And he links to a bunch of your tweets that you've been sending about Moskowitz and about Piker and about all this stuff.

His case is basically, okay, heard that like Democrats need to get to these young voters, but Democrats also need to get to pro-Israel, moderate voters who were important in Alyssa Slotkin winning in 2024. And like Abdul al-Syad and his friends, like, don't seem to be like caring that much about that either. It's a fair point, except we're always the ones who are told to chill out about it. You know, like, again, 2024 happened.

The uncommitted movement people were frozen out. There was no Palestinian-American speaker at the DNC. Like, we were told, hey, be quiet. You know, this is a problem. Everybody could say that, though. I mean, like a moderate Joe Manchin Dem or John Bell Edwards' Dem could say, we're never represented. I think everybody could say that, like, we're always told to chill out and be the good sport. My point would be that, like, people really do care about this issue because they don't want to provide weapons.

They're going to be used to commit war crimes or to annex the West Bank. And it's politics. What is the strategy for actually changing the party's position? And at a certain point, like, you can't change the party's position. That's fine. So that's a critique of you, and that's a fair defense of you. Abdul, though, is running a campaign to be a senator of Michigan. And, like, it does still feel to me, I don't know, like, just as an observer, I'm not living in a sense.

I'm not living in Michigan, so it's possible that ads I'm not saying. But just as an observer of this in earned media and social media, Mike Rogers really seems like he's working very hard to get to the moderate Alyssa Slokkin voters that he needs to win. And Abdul, like, doesn't seem like he's working that hard to get to those voters right now. I agree. So, yeah, like, who am I? I'm just a guy.

You're just tweeting, baby. You're just tweeting from the West Side. One of the things I'm trying to do in the world is to shift the party on this issue, right? Abdul has to win in Michigan. Look, it's a human enterprise. The guy had $30 million dumped on him. He's pissed about it, you know. But, you know, he's got to get past that and, like, run the campaign that I think he wanted to run.

You know, he's not DSA and he's not a single issue Israel at all. Like, he's actually, he used to run single issue Medicare for all, you know. He's got a trade board to talk about now that's going to hurt people in Michigan. Like, he's got prices that are up he can talk about. He obviously should talk a lot about healthcare because that's his expertise. So I agree with that piece of the advice. Everybody knows where he is on Israel, right? Like he doesn't need to talk about that.

The people that are excited to support him on that will do that. His job, again, addition, his job in the next several weeks is to close the deal with the Elis Lachin Motors. That I 100% agree with. Let's do a little more domestic politics stuff. Your book's about speeches for people who didn't listen to our past episode. They can go listen to it. We talked a lot about past speeches.

Speechifying feels a little back. Maybe not. I don't know. It feels like, I don't know. There's a moment where it's kind of like, you know, after it's O'Rond 1. It's all short form video these days. You know, it's all two-minute clips. And there's some of that as related to the speeches, I guess.

You can talk about that. But the Asoff strategy of like owning news cycles by giving some like Obama-ish, we should say, speeches on Friday evening, you know, so that people were talking about it all through the weekend, seems to be working for him politically. I'm just kind of wondering, as you watch this, how that kind of intersects with what you were writing about. I think it's really interesting because, you know, part of what I had noticed in writing this book is how the delivery vehicles for speeches change how people speak, right? Radio, plain spoken explanation FDR, TV, Kennedy, Reagan, King, like charisma. In social media, Trump, right? You speak for an hour, and the algorithm

just triggers everybody with it. And then everybody started skipping the speeches and going to the social media video. Like, my argument is twofold. Like, the first thing is that a speech is where you figure out what your argument is. Figure out the story you're telling. Like, I remember writing for Obama in 2007,

and it's actually a feedback loop, too. Trump is pretty good about this. Like, what are people responding to? Maybe I should talk more about what's working out there. It's where you road test your material. And it becomes the trunk of the tree for all of your communications. So if you know the story you're telling,

the coherent story, Asop has a coherent story. It's about corruption and state capture, and the reason that your prices are high, the reason everything sucks for you is because these guys are enriching themselves and they're friends and they don't care about you. And he ties it all together, right?

And therefore, all your social media videos and your interviews and everything else, will they flow from the story you're telling? Now, the other thing, Tim, which you and I, as I'm like the last of the Gen X-Men, you know, your millennial, yeah, what he's doing is such a familiar strategy. he gives a speech, a whole speech. They tweak it each week to have like a topper.

Yeah, Topper. I was saying we called it the Topper. Yeah, the Topper, right? He has something that's in the news and he adds to that speech. They clip it. And every fucking Monday morning or Sunday morning, everybody's talking about like this John Osso's speech that went viral, you know, and it's usually like the topper.

And I knew that speeches were back to him when I saw Pete Buttigieg. give a speech with the exact camera angle. Like, you know how all stuff? The camera points up at him, the hero shot. Like, he's at the podium. And Pete did the same thing. I'm like, we're back. But I really truly believe this,

because what you can do in his speech is you can tell a coherent story. You can tie the whole thing together. You can figure out what your message is. And then, lo and behold, it makes your other communications better. It turns out it still control the narrative with a really good speech,

with a really clever topper that you can clip. send out. You do have to be good, though. You know? Yeah. And there's a reason, I think, about some of the candidates that I worked for, McCain and Jeb in particular. I don't know that it was the era or the medium that prevented us from doing this and giving speeches. It was the fact that neither of them were very good at giving speeches.

Right. And so, like, whether it was social media or whether it was the local news, you know, like the one-minute clip, like wasn't that good. And so, you know, you work with what you can work with. McCain started doing more at the town hall style thing. And that was like really invoked for a while for bad speech givers. They're like, oh, wait, we can do this instead. The other thing that, you know, kind of it allows you to do besides like, frame up the story that you're telling, like in the social media era, is like just give people something to talk about that you control.

Yeah. Like, you know, narrative control. And I do think that like Democrats really kind of lost, have lost the last 10 years, like narrative control. Yeah. They've completely lost it. Because again, what a speech allows you to do, again, you have to communicate outside the speech, too. What is this story you're telling?

Trump's been telling one story for 10 years, right? And we've lived it. The Democrats have been on all over the place. Like, they lurch, right? Like, we're just going to talk about abortion or we're just going to talk about health care subsidies. And we sound like talking... Kitchen table issues.

And, you know, to quote our friend Dan Pfeiffer, like, they read the stage of directions. Like we are here now to talk about kitchen table issues, because we understand that you don't care as much about democracy, you know. And that's a crazy way to do politics because the democracy is fundamentally intertwined with the kitchen table issues. It's one thing. There's no emotional feeling in it. This is the connection of the good speech.

This is what Obama was good at. And this is what Trump is good at. It's different emotions. But like, it connects, you know. And like, Aosov, this is where both Aosov and Pete have a little work to do on that front. But you can kind of set it in a way. that it triggers an emotional reaction, you know, even if that's not their natural state.

I think what Aosov needs, like, I haven't gone back through all these speeches, like the next step is, what is his personal motivation? Like, why him? Obama has that. If he runs for president, like, the next, that's where you make the emotional connection.

Like, you have to understand, like, not only this person's words are right, their story's good, but like, why are they telling me the story instead of anybody else? And I think that's the next step that he can, And he can still get there. Speaking of an amazing speechifying, we do have one other kind of rising star

on that front, on our political scene, somebody just with pure charisma. And I want to play a little bit of a recent speech by him. And I want you to have the real freedom that comes along with knowing that you are the Lord of your own manner. You're the great Southern, the great Southern populist. Probably most of you in the room don't know who I'm talking about, but he's an interesting guy, kind of a crazy guy,

His name was Huey Long, and he once said, every man a king was the goal of his political program. But no man is a king if their castle is under siege by criminals. No man is a king if they can't take their family out to dinner without being mugged or having their carjacked. And of course, ending the Biden border invasion was a big part of why we have changed that over the last 18 months. Not appealing. One of the things you wrote about in the book, though, is the way that kind of like the American story is told and retold and updated. And so I wanted to get your take on J.D. Vance's update of the Huey Long narrative.

The Lord of the Manor there? I mean, like, J.D. Vance is constantly trying to kind of speak himself into being something that he's not. You know, like Huey Long, you know, probably has a higher name wreck on the Bullwark and the Bullwark podcast and some other places. But I mean, this is a guy that like just exuded authenticity, right? Like, you know, you may not have liked you along, but like, you know, you believe

that he came from the places that he was talking about. I believe the things he was saying. Like, J.D. Vance constantly looks like he practiced in front of the mirror at trying to be this weird combination of like a populist and a troll like wrapped in

like a, like Peter Teal constructed, you know, suit. Nothing about it suggests authenticity. Populist venture capitalist role. Yeah. The emotional connection you talked about comes from knowing something about what, you know, John McCain,

like, who I didn't agree with about a bunch of stuff, I agree with him some stuff. But like you kind of knew that guy's story and like what motivated him. It all made sense. It made sense. Like even if I didn't agree with some of his positions, like where they came from made a lot of sense to me.

Yeah. This is why the JD's wife part of it. People are uncomfortable to talk about this because you get it gets into, you know, personal territory and this also popped up in the Michigan Center. racist little thing recently. But like, it also hurts the authenticity of the story.

Like, if J.D.'s story is like, and we talked about this last time you were on, like this populace, like America is blood and soil nationalism. America isn't an ideal. America is a people and a place. You know, and also, to be the Lord of Your Own manner, we can't have any foreigners in the country. And the most best thing that Trump did was make sure we have negative migration. And also, my son's name is Vivek.

Yeah, yeah. It's just like, what? Yeah. It doesn't make sense. Like, the story doesn't make sense. sense. No, his own life is more in line with the other story. Like, we talked about this last time, but

essentially, he gives his kind of blood and throne nationalism speech and all just talk about the, America can't be about the Declaration of Independence because lots of people like that, and they all have to become American and all the rest of it. But meanwhile, his own house looks more like the kind of composite nation that Frederick Douglass talked about, where people come from

everywhere and they can intermarry and there's just discordance here. And Abdul, like, raised that. You mentioned Michigan. I don't know if this is right or wrong. Like, Abdul's testing out this kind of alpha Democrat. And every now and then I'm like, oh, I don't know why he went there,

but I'm also like, well, it's an interesting experiment. It is a very contrasting experiment to what Rob Sand is doing in Iowa. It's just kind of interesting. Yeah. It's the opposite. It's the opposite. And you know what, they both might work. You know, that's fine.

In politics, different things work. Like, Trump is married to an immigrant. Like, this is absurd. Like the people running the, the biggest mass. deportation campaign since, you know, well, bigger, the biggest in American history, you know, sweeping people up off the street, you know, just like for for no reason in some cases. Like, you know, Trump's married to an immigrant and, you know, J.D. Vanz is married, you know, is in a biracial relationship, which is great, but like, it doesn't, it's not exactly

Lord of the Manor white nationalism stuff. Yeah, and to JD's credit, his wife can't speak English. So I do think that's important in contrast. All right, let's go back to your newsletter. Resistance One mistakes, reflections. You know, as a resistor, like you, we both were resist. Me too. I know, I know. My feelings still got a little bit hurt.

My feelings get a little bit hurt, you know. I understand the pushback, the feeling like Trump won again. So obviously, resistance one failed in a way. Like, it's sort of like, you know, that's just what happened. And so there's like almost no sense in kind of arguing about that, that there was clearly a failure. It's like you lost the game. He had to do something wrong.

I do get a little bit annoyed, not at you, but like other people who weren't really on the field. Not really, no, I'm a little bit annoyed to you at one thing. We'll get to that in a second. But on the broader question, people who weren't really on the field that much or who are complaining a lot the whole time, you know, being like, you guys suck. You lost.

And I was like, what are you doing? Do you win? Do you beat Trump? Do you have any wins? Show me. Where are you? So that does frustrate me a little bit. But anyway, I'm going to try to let my personal issues set them aside and look at this objectively.

What were the lessons that you took away from kind of this resistance, one, you know, the page being turned with Vindman and Conway and Goldman losing. Those were kind of the examples you used. Yeah, I used them as kind of archetypes. And again, I acknowledge in the piece, I'm in a glass house. I was a resistor. I was tweeting like crazy at a podcast and you still do. I supported the first impeachment of Trump.

But like the first of them as architects that lead into the lessons, right? because, you know, Conway is the kind of hyper online, never Trumper, right? Then Binman is the kind of like noble civil servant, you know, who did a noble thing and whistleblowing. But, you know, then we kind of the idea that the resistance is from within the federal government. You know, he kind of represented that line of thought. And then Dan Goldman, the kind of prosecutor at the first impeachment and the kind of hero holding Trump to account. The problem is there's a limitation to all this. The first one is that I think the hyper online aspects of the resistance

clearly had a very low ceiling on what they could accomplish. And I did, I singled out the Lincoln Project. But as something where I remember even at the time people, like the most online people I knew would always be sending me these like Lincoln Project clips. And me like they really got them here. Like comfort foods. Exactly. It was less about persuasion and more about comfort food, right?

And so one thing is like the hyper online stuff made us all feel like heroes. but was it really out there persuading people? So that's one thing. The second thing is that the kind of deification of Vindman, right, kind of tipped, let's face it, it tipped into sanctimony. I mean, and I wrote about all the letters I signed, you know, in defense of this norm or this, I think the federal bureaucracy is great, you know,

because I'm a big government guy, you know. But we leaned so hard into it that it played right in the idea of these are the establishment people, Democrats are the establishment. They're defending the government. They're defending the institutions. I have a cringe Instagram post with Vindman. I think the caption is called Saved America from 2021.

Not quite. Yeah. And then Trump impeachment, the first one, the second one was obviously necessary. But like it played in this idea that all these people care about and the resistance is Trump. Do they care about what I'm focused on in my lives, right? But the core problem, too, is that the whole premise of the resistance, and this is the kind of feature, not the bug, was Trump is an aberration. and we represent like America and he doesn't and therefore inevitably

like gravity is going to catch up to this guy Mueller's going to nab him or he'll get impeached because of Vindman or inevitably he'll lose the election right and I don't think he would have lost that election without COVID this isn't me saying now we have to go back in time and examine the white working class grievances people in West Virginia

this is me saying like hey wait a second like Trump represents like deeper you know yes there are those grievances against globalization, but there's also xenophobia and anti-immigrant feeling and a kind of deification of celebrity and rich guys like Trump and even con men like Trump. And he had captured something real and all this populism that was pissed off at everything. And by casting as an aberration, we didn't take seriously, like enough, the deeper occurrence that were behind Trumpism. Now, look, sure we some of us did at the time, but we can't argue with the results. And I'd say, Tim,

just to, I actually thought about adding the bulwark into this as a positive, by the way. I'm not just saying this. Because, like, if you look at bulwark 2.0, you're a little grittier. You know, like, you're doing a deeper reckoning, right? Like, you're doing something different than you did the first time in the same way that I'm trying to do something different. Because I think, frankly, if I'm, now I'll just pick up myself, but I think it applies to a lot of people. Like, we secretly felt kind of like heroes, you know, like we're here on the vanguard, defending democracy.

And that's not inviting to people. And it's not enough to talk about Trump with the Sharpie. You've got to talk about why Trump with the Sharpie means that he's not paying attention to the things that you're actually pissed about in your lives. So there's a lot there, but that's the summer. I agree with this. And I think it's important to really, and I'm like trying hard. So I genuinely appreciate the compliment because I'm trying to hard to actually reflect on

stuff. And obviously, you know, again, at some level this was a failure. should reckon with it because he's fucking back in there. There were two things that I just wanted to bring up from the piece that are, I think, kind of comforting reckonings for the left. Yes, yeah. Because it's like, you know, these are easy things to say because it doesn't really actually require that much reflection.

And one is a personal nitpick, which is about poor Liz Cheney. Yeah. You write this. Liz Cheney was even enlisted as a leading surrogate for Kamala Harris, ignoring the fact there was little evidence of a non-elite never-Trump coalition. I agree with the broader point, but I have a quick quiz for you. What was Liz Cheney's convention speaking slot? Do you remember where she spoke?

I don't. I was referring more to her in Pennsylvania at the end. Yeah, she wasn't invited to the convention. Yeah, she had like three events with Connell. My point is just like, I think it's really easy to like look at this. I think this is a shorthand. It's like, oh, the Liz Cheney thing. And it's like, well, I don't know.

I feel like there are a lot of mistakes that you could look at to the Harris campaign about ways that it did not resonate. And it's kind of like, if you're in the. the left coalition. It's like easy to be like, you know, the big mistake was those two events that she did have with West Cheney and Pennsylvania. Like that signaled the wrong thing. And it's kind of like, well, I mean, Liz was trying to help. I don't know. By the way, so number one, I don't blame Liz Cheney for this. Like, she's trying to help. Like, I blame that. Like, they did bring her out in high profile events in like, I think the final week of the campaign in key swing states. I think

Pennsylvania and maybe Wisconsin. And they kept stepping on the rake of, being the establishment, right? Like, whatever you think about Liz Cheney, and I know you, you know, like have things, you like more things better than I do, but, and I like some things about her. Her name is Cheney. She represents, you know,

most Americans hear Cheney, like they don't think January 6th committee. They think Bush Cheney, they think Iraq War. And there are a lot of ways in which the Democrats, like repeatedly were telling people like, hey, look at us. We had the backing of these establishment Republicans. We're bipartisan.

When in fact, what Trump had figured out was, I believe the way Trump got credibility with voters is by breaking the Republican Party. By being like, I understand how mad Republicans and Democrats are at the Republican Party, and I'm willing to blow it up. And so, again, like Liz Cheney caught my strays, but it's more about that's indicative of a Democratic Party mindset.

I mean, I remember, Tim, like, looking at the, and I'll give you a lefty, another lefty thing. That Kamala Harris Convention speech when she's talking about we need the most lethal military. It's a very like 2002 Democratic, we're still trying to convince people

that we're willing to go fight wars when in fact that that's not what people want anymore. And so I think the Liz Cheney thing is indicative of a mindset that we didn't understand that, you know, that ship has sailed. And I also do think that you know, you and I earn some green rooms or at least virtual ones.

There are these narratives that play out on cable where Liz Cheney is a hero for January 6th. But I don't know how much that filters down to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. And I do think Democrats lived too much in the green rooms and through the first Trump term of the Biden era. I totally agree with that right. I guess my point was more – sometimes I get frustrated with the left criticism because it's like, you know, was a pretty important election. It was the easiest choice of my lifetime. Liz Cheney was begging the Harris campaign to let her do it. And she's like, I'll do whatever you want, literally.

I just know this personally. They didn't fucking call her back until October. And then it's like, and then meanwhile, you got a bunch of people that are like shitting on Kamala the whole time. That's fair. You know what I mean? That's like that environment. I'm just kind of like, why weren't you offering to how?

I don't maybe, and maybe if Kamala said no, then it's like, okay, that's on her. But I think that there was not a ton of excitement to help her from some of the people that were, that are critical. Okay. My other netpack is just this one of your top lesson. I thought it was funny. I thought you were going to mention it, then you didn't.

Online energy is not a shortcut to electoral success. I agree with that about the resistance one. I also wonder if it's also true about the current kind of online energy for the DSA left. And I don't know if it's true or not. But I think that like right now there is like a lot of sort of assumptions that it's popular and it's working because it worked in some primaries and because it gets you a lot of retweets.

It's talking about this is maybe the most offensive thing I could say to DSA posters. But is there actually some parallels between the big, you know, online DSA accounts and George Conway, actually, in lack of trying to persuade and more of, you know, aren't we doing so well right now? Sorry, George, I love you.

Sorry to both sides with that comparison. I know both of you will hate it. Yes, I think that's fair critique. I think if you look at the DSA candidates that get meaning, like, real traction, right? Like, Mamdani is not just posting, right? Like, he's modeling a different kind of politics, right? Both in terms of his agenda and also just he's literally showing up every single place. He's talking every single person he can, right?

He's the best example, though. That's kind of like me using Assoff as the example for a good resistance one figure, you know? Some people are just talented and can over. I guess my point would be the DSAs, how far they can go. Look, I don't think there's any world in which the DSA becomes the Democratic Party. Like, I don't think they think that. They want to move the party to the left on certain things, right?

That happens in politics. Everybody freaks out, but this isn't a normal occurrence. You know, the Tea Party wasn't the first time. This always happens. Like, an activist wing comes in, and they're trying to pull the party in a certain direction, left or right on certain issues. And I guess what I would say is,

right, the success of that effort is not going to play out online. It's just not. It's going to depend upon how good are these candidates in different places, you know? And again, Mdani's the best example. I mean, in a way, like Angie Nixon in Florida, like she, she's going to have a hard time winning that general election. But it's, that Florida Democratic Party, you know, you know, this, Tim, from Florida, has gotten pretty sclerotic over the years. I think it's probably good for them that she won, honestly. I don't think she's going to win the race, but I think it's probably good. But no, it's good because she ran a better campaign

and the message is like, you don't, you know, like you guys are out of touch with these voters. And I'm on the ground doing the work and talking about the things people are really upset about. And, you know, like that will regenerate that party in some fashion, right? And so I think you're correct. Like it's not going to come from like, you know,

I don't know, you know who the DSA posters are. Like the, you know, Matt was going to pick on poor Matt 14. I know, but he's a nice enough guy, you know. So I was like, He's just the first thing that comes to him. Cuduce to him that he's the George Conway at the first name that comes to mine. And here's what I'd say about the DSA posters, too.

Like, they have the wrong definitions of success in some ways, right? Because just posting Medicare for all is not going to make Congress pass Medicare for all. Like, the point is, like, this is how change happens in politics. And now I'll get dunked on by the left. But, like, you're not going to pass Medicare for all the next Congress. I don't think. I mean, happy to be proven wrong.

like the more you've set a barometer, there are more and more people that are for this kind of single-payer system, like you've turned the public option into the mod position, you know, which was the like left position in the Obama era. Like that's how change happens, right? That's a win, right? Right now, I'm against any arms sales to Israel. The mod position has become cutting off assistance to Israel,

like financing of those sales, right? Like that's a win, right? So, like, part of what you're doing, and this is why primary success matters, even if not all those primary successes or, you know, we can look, the candidate quality varies, that the party's going to have to kind of readjust to that. And by the way, if they don't, they're going to have problems, too, because then they're going to have this endless internal civil war. That's why I think this PICA stuff is so stupid. It's such an unforced error because it's like we can't fight an internal civil war when we have an existential threat to the country here, except the fact that the party's moving a bit to the left. It doesn't mean that Matt 14 is going to be writing the agenda and picking every committee assignment in the next Congress.

I agree with that. I just think that, yes, stated. The resistance won strategies didn't work. That does not mean there's no syllogism that's like that means that, this new thing that we're doing that's really hot online, now that is definitely better. It's like, I don't know, it might be worse. Yeah, yeah.

You know, I mean, like we won, I don't know, like it wasn't that good. Hillary won the popular vote, though. She lost. Like, obviously, I'm not arguing that we should redo the Hillary campaign, but this is where my small C conservatism comes in. Things can be worse than the old strategy. Like, just because it's different doesn't mean it's better.

The online piece, I agree with you on. I will say, you know, I'm made different on this. Like, here I'll stand up for the, not the DSA, but the progressive. Clinton, Biden, and Harris all ran as moderates. You know, like, it's not like we haven't tried that. I mean, Harris ran as a moderate, like, only in the construct. of being an anti-war person. Well, she wasn't Medicare for all.

She wasn't, you know, on some of the cultural issues. She was in the sour spot. I've talked about this before. It's kind of like she was seen as a progressive on all these social issues. And like if you're just defining it based on health care and foreign policy, she was seen as a moderate. So she's like running as a moderate on health care and foreign policy.

It was like kind of the inverse would probably be better. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and I think that there's, this goes back to like my easy comfort, food, you know, now the lefty comfort food, which is, okay, well, if we fix the health care and foreign policy part, then that's good. We don't have to deal with anything else. And I'm kind of like, eh, those are things everybody kind of agrees on except for, you know,

Hillary Shulton, right? And those are things that are easy to kind of change in some ways, right? It's like the other stuff is a little more challenging. And Rob, that's where you've got to look at it like a Rob Sand, you know? So we both hate Ennis Cantor. I ranted about him on Monday. You wrote an article about him. people can go read it. The short of it is, Ennis Cantor fooled both of us. Or maybe he didn't.

I don't know. He connected with both of us on human rights issues that we care about. You had dinner with them, even. I dinner with them. I had him on my podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now he's doing Fight Me Bros. stuff with women basketball players. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's sad because basically, the person I met, you know, back in 2019, I thought had real moral authority.

Like, he'd sacrificed real things for his political. beliefs about Turkey and Erdogan. And he's taken that currency and now taking it all the way to, like, messing around with female basketball players, telling Americans that, you know, don't agree with him to shut up, like, which is kind of counter to the whole free speech vibe that he was putting off. And just kind of feeling a bit like someone who is trying really hard to be like a B-List

MAGA influencer. Yeah, and something it's sad. Yeah. He's on the payroll. Someone's paying him, yeah, yeah. I think it's America First before. It's worse than sad. It's like, fuck him.

And they're the ones following him around with cameras. I don't know. It's like a little bit more offensive to be someone that was positioned themselves with somebody that cares about human rights to then just become like a downrate troll. Well, it makes you go back and look at some of his stuff because like his next act after Turkey was about China. And he's writing like, you know, down with Xi Jinping on his sneakers. And then he's like, you know, blaming the NBA. for him not getting another contract and going on Fox.

And I was like, okay, maybe like, you know, and it's really like, you know, I don't like a lot of things about Xi Jinping. But it makes even that feel like an entry point. It was like I can get booked on Fox. If I, because basically went on Fox and said the NBA is hypocrites because they talk about Black Lives Matter, not China. And even at the time I was like, well, I don't know.

Like if I'm like a, you know, an NBA player. Black American, that's a very reasonable thing to care about. I probably would spend a lot more time thinking about. the state of black communities in this country, than Hong Kong, which is something I care about, right? But in retrospect, it makes a lot of what he did feel calculated.

And that's, you know, yeah, that sucks. Ben Rhodes, I appreciate it. We went long on a Friday, so thanks for all the time. Good show, long show. I always happy to do it, Tim. And we'll be talking again soon. I'll be at you next time in L.A., all right? Cool. Sounds good.

All right, later, man. Everybody else will be back on Monday with Bill Crystal. I love having Ben Rhodes on Friday because then Bill Crystal is right after them. It brings a lot of Bell. to the bulwark universe. We'll see you all Monday. The Bullwark Daily is brought to you

thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Dante de Chico and audio engineering and editing by Jason Bro.