The Bulwark Podcast - Benjy Sarlin: The Bud Light Freak-Out

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

Conservatives surrendered on gay marriage, but kept their fear about societal change bottled up. And now a beer is a stand-in for transgender people they want to pretend don't exist. Plus, Ron DeSantis the weirdo, and Murdoch has zero Tucks to give. Semafor's Benjy Sarlin joins Charlie Sykes today.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It's April 26, 2023. This is my last day broadcasting from sunny, incredibly hot Phoenix, Arizona. Hopefully, I will be back in Wisconsin. By the way, we will have some,

I'm tempted to say personal news. Actually, it's more like professional news because we will be unveiling a, I want to say new podcast, but it is not a completely new podcast. It will be a new Thursday Bulwark podcast. We're very excited about it. I'll tell you about it later,

but stay tuned for all of that. Now, our guest today, because there's so much going on here, Benji Starlin, Washington Bureau Chief at Semaphore, previously covered elections for NBC News. Benji, welcome to the podcast. Hey, Charlie. Thanks for having me. Okay. So maybe it's because I was out in the sun too much, but I was thinking about the 2024 election. We have Dark Brandon running for president. He's made the announcement. It's been completely overshadowed by the firing of two cable TV hosts.

You have the RNC putting out a deepfake video. And it just occurs to me that at the moment, the presidential race is simultaneously, and feel free to disagree with me, it is simultaneously boring, same old, same old, and completely terrifying at the same time. I find it a little exciting too. I mean, the Republican side is, I find extremely interesting. The Democratic side, it's, you know, partly because Democrats had such a strong midterms, they're not making any drastic changes. There's not really a wilderness that they're in at the moment. And because Biden's running, you know, essentially unopposed except for, you know, some sort of fringe candidates so far, there's not a lot of drama there. But, you know, essentially unopposed, except for, you know, some sort of fringe candidates so far, there's not a lot of drama there. But, you know, the Republican side, I think, is still pretty interesting, depending on how competitive you think it is and what the broader implications you think are.

But yes, it is compared to the last several election cycles. I do feel like the presidential election is a bit of a sideshow. And you're seeing that in things like, for example, donations. Small donors are not rushing to these candidates yet so far, to name one example. Boring was not the right word for me to use. Just sort of the weight of, we're going to be doing this again. And this is going to be taking up all of our headspace for the next year and a half. And it's going to be terrifying, stupid, outrageous, all at the same time. And it's like, I do feel that sort of world weariness

that here we go again. And so nobody was surprised. Joe Biden rolls out. Everybody's going to rally around him at a certain point. So we have to have the usual stuff like, you know, he's old, he's got these problems, he's got the Kamala problem, but the alternative is so bad.

I don't know, were you struck by the fact that the RNC came out with that artificial intelligence, deep fake ad? I just thought it was very, very strange. You would think that with all of his real world vulnerabilities, they could have done an ad about things that actually happened in the world. Instead, they came up with this deep fake ad of all of the things that haven't actually happened, but might happen if he's reelected. I mean, what a weird times we live in, Medjie. Yeah, it was an interesting media tactic too, because like you said, you know, Biden announcing for reelection was like, basically the third most talked about story that day, you know, like I would rank Tucker Carlson,

Don Lemon, in terms of like the sheer amount of media attention. And like, some of this is because, you know, the media is very navel gazing.. But like, the Tucker Carlson story especially was like, that really felt like some kind of seismic story with even 2024 implications, you know. But the RNC was a little clever there, that they figured like, look, it's going to be very hard for anyone to care about our response to Biden's re-election when it is already at the fringe of the news, you know, and is pretty much just a fairly straightforward video. But if we mention this is, you know, the first one to use controversial AI tactics, then yeah, that does generate some attention and some debate about the ethics of it and whether others will use it and the implications. And so I give them hats off there. You

know, they definitely figured out a way to get us talking. Well, I do want to come back to the, you know, how competitive the Republican race is. I mean, I woke up this morning looking at this new NPR poll that shows that 63% of Republicans would still want Donald Trump to be president, even if he is convicted of a crime, which I think is an interesting flex for the party of law and order, that the party of law and order is like, yeah, we're all in at least on one convicted criminal, so we can come back to that. So you mentioned the story from yesterday, and I have to admit, the firing of Tucker Carlson, even 24 hours later, still feels

shocking. So I did a podcast yesterday with Brian Stelter, Mona Charan and I talked about it. So what is your take? We've had a little bit of time to absorb it. We're getting more reporting, and there's that Wall Street Journal report that suggests that he had perhaps used the C word too often, including in reference to a senior executive at Fox News. So give me your take, Benji, the fall of Tucker Carlson. First off, here's what I do not buy. I do not buy, at least based on what we've seen so far, that there was some kind of specific change or specific tipping point that they just absolutely had to act immediately. I mean, it sounds like the move of an executive, an owner who was stewing for a while and decided, okay.

Cumulative. Yes, cumulatively. I am sick of this. Part of that is that we still don't really know the full explanation. There's at this point, you know, a half a dozen theories involving multiple lawsuits and personal behavior internally and externally, and, you know, even stuff involving, you know, Rupert Murdoch's personal life and is, you know, him calling off his engagement has been cited as a potential reason. But I think there are a couple of things here. My boss, Ben Smith's take, who has been covering the media a very long time and covering Tucker Carlson a very long time and Fox News, is that whatever the specific reason is, and we do not know, this seemed to be about Rupert Murdoch and the Murdoch family reasserting control over the company.

You are not bigger than us. No one is. No one is irreplaceable on Fox News. They've done this before. This will now be the third time that they've fired or gotten rid of the single biggest, buzziest star they have. It was Glenn Beck before, who was pretty much just biggest star of the network since its inception, basically. And they replaced him with Tucker Carlson without missing a beat. No one is bigger than the network. And I think they were worried both the perception in the Dominion filings, but also the actual behavior revealed in the Dominion filings, that they felt that they were just being sort

of tugged along by the talent, that they could not break out of this and that they were increasingly felt trapped. And I think there's an aspect of this too, which are my colleague Max Tani gets into, which is his theory, which is that Rupert Murdoch is a 92 year old billionaire. You know, he has zero tucks to give, as you might say at this point, and he's been acting erratically in some ways in a variety of contexts. And there might not be much more to it than that, that it is just a very old man who does not have time to waste on lawsuit after lawsuit and annoying distraction after distraction and just does not want this guy around. And that's the long and short of it.

Let's talk about the replacement. It is certainly possible that whoever replaces Tucker Carlson is going to be worse. But the more I think about it, I think that that's unlikely because Tucker Carlson was, he was very, very smart. He's very talented and he was uniquely malevolent. And it's hard to imagine anyone having that whole trifecta. The Fox hosts are, they're all pretty deplorable, but nobody was really in Tucker's league in terms of what he was willing to do. You know, the way that he inserted, you know, grievance-laden conspiracy theories, shilled for Vladimir Putin, pushed revisionist histories. I mean, there was something really distinctly malicious about Tucker Carlson. It's not going

to be great, whatever they put in that place, but it's hard to imagine it being worse. What do you think? Well, there's different flavors of Fox News hosts, you know, that are, you know, depending on your political persuasion here, better or worse. But the two models I basically would say are the Glenn Beck model and the Sean Hannity model. So someone like Sean Hannity is someone who is very much a low drama company man, you know, who's very invested in Fox's success, who's also very much a party man, who's very invested in the Republican Party's success, and will tailor their commentary to what they think will help the party if there's a problem the party is dealing with, you know, the people who are talking about how to get out of it. They're very receptive to electability

arguments about things, versus the kind of Glenn Beck style, which is where you position yourself as like, I'm the crazy anti-establishment person who is telling you the things that even my bosses don't want you to hear. And I'll probably be taken down any minute, but we have to take on the powers that be. Now, a lot of this is a classic kind of showman pose, of course, and they're very good. Glenn Beck was a very good traditional radio host and entertainer as well. And if you've ever seen him speak live, he can be extremely compelling. It's kind of like an almost like old time medicine show kind of feel. But those are sort of the two directions I would look for. So I think you're likely to have someone who sounds mostly like Tucker Carlson, no matter what, I think. They're going to need someone who incorporates a lot of these

populist Trumpy elements. But there's a big difference between one who is really trying to actively create the impression that they are stirring up trouble, that they do not care about preserving any kind of institution, that they are just trying to make problems and point out problems and really rile people up versus someone who's presenting themselves as thinking maybe a little more strategically and is maybe reined in a little bit more by Rupert Murdoch, say. Well, I also think that the one thing about Tucker Carlson

is that he was not only very, very smart, but he was also an entertainer. There was actually an article that I read that talked about him as being a successor of the Jon Stewart of the right who understood you could make the news interesting and fun and entertaining. So he had a unique skill set. And I'm trying to think of all the possible successors. And you're right, of course, you're going to get a lot of

the same sort of thing, but without perhaps the panache that you got. Okay, so let's go from one of the most interesting stories of the day to a story that I have to confess, and I'm not bragging about this. I find it very, very difficult to get my head around the whole debt ceiling thing, even though that is obviously the most important story, right? I mean, I must be made to care about this. So just briefly, because I want to get to other things. So, Benji, what is going to happen? Are we going to destroy the world economy this week? Just give me your short take on this. What is Kevin McCarthy going to pull off? What is he not able to pull off this week? So here's the good news. We're not going to destroy the world

economy this week. Good. We're still in the kind of prelude to everything. So right now, Republicans are working on what's essentially a messaging bill. But that's extremely important in order for them to get to the next step, which is trying to force the Senate and the White House into some kind of negotiation over the bill that will actually prevent the economy from being destroyed. And they're having a lot of trouble getting there. And it's for the same, you know, typical reasons we've seen this entire Congress, right? Which is Kevin McCarthy is a very narrow majority. He can only lose four votes. You know, it was a once in a century battle just to make him speaker in the first place because he had so many holdouts and, you know, it was a very difficult process.

And they've been running into this problem on routine votes the whole time, right? Which is where any couple of moderates, any couple of conservatives, George Santos being George Santos, any of these things can derail a bill. And this was a case where they were very confident that they had a debt ceiling agreement that kind of had something in for everyone. It had spending caps. It pared back some of Biden's agenda on the Inflation Reduction Act. It had a whole bunch of things there for everybody. And what they found is that there were regional problems. Midwesterners didn't like cuts to subsidies that boost corn.

They found that there were some moderate problems. They had Nancy Mason, South Carolina, saying, hey, some of those IRA tax credits are good for jobs in my state. They're opening a bunch of renewable energy and battery plants and electric vehicle plants. Don't get rid of that. That's a tax hike. And then, of course, you had conservatives saying, this doesn't go far enough. We want stricter work requirements on programs like SNAP, which is more popularly known as food stamps. We want spending cuts and regulations to take place faster. We want to go further in

paring back things that Biden has already passed. And it's really, really hard to get all these people together. So as of now, they haven't done it. Republican leadership is projecting confidence, at least, that maybe as soon as today, even, they can hold a vote and have everyone on board. Some holdouts, you know, after some changes they made seem to be moving their direction, maybe. But I mean, it is truly anybody's guess what happens. I mean, Kevin McCarthy is not historically the best judge of when he has the votes. He will bring things to the floor and be surprised. So we really won't know until there's a vote.

This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I'm sure you're going to find my free Morning Shots newsletter a great companion for understanding what is happening to us. And every morning as I prepare for this show, I share with my readers what's trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day. To sign up for my free Morning Shots newsletter,

go to thebullwork.com slash morningshots. That's thebullwork.com slash morningshots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon. Okay, so let's talk about the 2024 presidential race. You had an interesting piece recently that people should actually say why they're running for president. You talked about, you know, Chris Christie, who said at a Semaphore event that dangerous incompetent who blew the last election. He's getting ready to blow the next one. But nobody wants to say that. This is kind of the dilemma of the Republicans, right? Everybody knows what the rationale is. No one is willing to articulate it. It's the basic problem, right? I mean, how do you defeat President Trump when

almost everyone in the primary who so far has any serious shot at taking him on, but especially the, you know, the most prominent contender, Ron DeSantis, has not conceded that there was anything wrong with his presidency, in fact, was, you know, a great supporter of his presidency, but also has not particularly conceded anything is wrong with his post-presidency, you know, that he's made mistakes there or that, you know, his going on and on about how the election stolen is bad for the party or inaccurate or immoral, but even just bad for the party, you know. So you end up with this problem where candidates, for one, seem insincere. If you are not saying the actual case for why you should be president over Donald Trump, voters know. Voters know that if you actually believed he was, you

know, this great president and candidate, you wouldn't be running to defeat him. You know, they sense what your argument actually is, that you think he is an incompetent, you think he is going to blow the next election. You know, you think he has done tremendous damage to the country in certain ways, perhaps, or at the very least, that you would be dramatically better at trying to achieve the same goals as him. You have to actually say that, though. The other problem is that Trump is not going to sit there quietly and play by the same rules and say that I have to worry about all these voters who love DeSantis, who might be turned off if I attack him too hard.

He's going to be working hard to define you. And if you don't have some kind of effective counterargument, you're going to look weak. You're going to look owned by Trump. And we're already starting to see some of the effects on DeSantis, who is, you know, there's lots of time to recover, but it's been a very difficult few weeks in part because he is not really counterattacking on Trump and his allies are still sort of holding their punches. It makes him look weak when Trump is putting him in this box of, look at this weirdo here, who's kind of creepy and he's putting with his fingers and has no friends. And even the people in his state are endorsing me because they don't like him because he has

a lousy personality. You know, he has to break out of that now. And it's a lot tougher when you don't have a counter message that says, you know, you're saying this about me. Well, this is why you should never be president again. So you basically argue that the candidate should skip the whole sideshow and just take a cue from Trump himself. So you would go right after him. Because I think the feeling is, is that if you go after Trump, you're just going to get in this, you know, shit fight and the base is going to be offended and you're going to get destroyed like everybody else that's ever gone at Trump. So what should they do? Yeah, it's a real risk. I just want to make clear here, the problems they are imagining about going after Trump are very real. They just are. They're all

talking to the same pollsters and the same focus groups that, you know, you've had on your show, Charlie, who tell you that, you know, the base still loves him. They're very defensive of him. You know, things like this indictment, they really do rally behind him for the most part. It's a real issue. But if you believe that they are immovable on this topic, I don't know why you're running for president. There aren't necessarily enough votes elsewhere, as they pretty much concede with this strategy. So you're going to have to think about some way to change those perceptions and possibly, just possibly, some of those voters saying things in focus groups, saying things to pollsters, harbor some of these doubts secretly themselves.

And I'll give you an example from Trump, which is that, take the 2016 election. The frontrunner at the start of this, albeit a much weaker frontrunner than Donald Trump, which is that take the 2016 election, the front runner at the start of this, albeit a much weaker front runner than Donald Trump, but just the starting front runner was Jeb Bush. And what was the number one liability everyone was talking about in the press about Jeb Bush? You know, you turned on Morning Joe, you turned on, you know, whatever show you wanted, whatever radio show they say, well, Jeb Bush has a serious problem because his brother is George W. Bush. And George W. Bush was an extremely unpopular president when he left. There was a financial crisis. There was the Iraq war. That's going to be a serious problem. But, you know, it was actually kind of taboo to criticize George Bush and especially the Iraq war at the time. It was not

something that came up often. Like Republicans sort of moved away from him. He, you know, he kept quiet and just became a painter. So they didn't have to respond to him much like they do Trump now. And Obama withdrew from Iraq. So it didn't come up nearly as often. And they could just kind of skate by without talking about him much. And so you had Republicans who were, you know, fearful of opening that can of worms would talk about it in these kind of euphemisms. So like Marco Rubio started his campaign, he would say, well, I'm not going to mention anything about Bush, but we need a quote unquote, new generation of politics. And we go, Ooh, what a brutal attack on Jeb Bush. He says,

we need a new generation of politicians, right? Okay. But then Trump would show up and he just said, Hey, you know what sucked the George W. Bush presidency. And you know what really sucked the Iraq war. And that's why you should not nominate that guy, Jeb Bush, because everyone's going to think about George W. Bush and they will never elect him. And, you know, God forbid he governs like George W. Bush because George W. Bush was not a good president. And, you know, on paper, people thought that attack was going to backfire because every poll showed that George W. Bush was still quite popular with Republican voters. But because he spoke to what the actual vulnerability was with Jeb Bush, it came across as authentic. It came across as I'm willing to tell the truth, even if people yell at me, you know. And also what I think it really did prove is that quite a lot of those

Republican voters secretly felt the same way on some level. I mean, I talked to a ton of them. I was on the campaign trail covering, you know, the Republicans that time. Even if they were sympathetic to George W. Bush, you know, for being dealt a tough hand and putting America on a war footing against Al Qaeda, you know, they still weren't thrilled with how the presidency went. And especially with the election of President Obama afterwards and, you know, coming into office with huge majorities that he used to pass things like the Affordable Care Act. I think if you see someone make a similar argument against Trump and then stand by it and just say like, yeah, I said it.

I don't care what some poll says. You might see a different reaction than you expect. Okay, so here's a perfect example of this that you write about. So Ron DeSantis tries this kind of subtle move by casually mentioning Trump's hush money payment to Stormy Daniels without criticizing it. He's defending him, but he sort of leaves that out. I can't comment on all of that. You wrote, this was too clever by half. Trump's fans caught the implication,

demanded he rally harder behind Trump, and then DeSantis looked weak backing off. So what should the candidates be doing on this? And you kind of cite Chris Christie. So what's Chris Christie doing that Ron DeSantis didn't do on this? Chris Christie made the subtext that Ron DeSantis was trying to get out explicit. And to be clear, it's not obvious like this is the best place to make your big attack on Trump, right? Especially the Stormy Daniels indictment. But if you're going to make the point that this is a problem for Trump, don't just hint at it. You can just say, hey, I don't necessarily agree with this prosecution, but hey, can we all agree it's pretty bad to pay hush money payments to cover up your affair with a porn star that we all believe that this guy had while he was married and that was making hush money payments elsewhere and has

a whole history of infidelity and getting into stupid problems of his own creation that have nothing to do with politics or anything that any of us care about, that was possible to say. If DeSantis wanted to make some critique, that's probably how he should have gone about it instead of this worst of all worlds where I'm going to come up with this very clever, subtle, nuanced hint

and hope people get what I'm saying. Trump is just going to immediately recognize what you're doing and force you to say what you mean or back down. And in this case, he backed down. When I was getting ready for this podcast with you, I went back and I read what Chris Christie said at that semaphore event. I hadn't seen it the first time around. This was right after Trump's indictment. And he said, if you have someone who has had an affair with a porn star, paid her off $130,000 to cover it up, to keep that information from the American people while he's seeking the highest office in the land, that's not the character of someone I think should be president of the United States. Now, that's pretty direct.

That's pretty blunt. That's what you're talking about. But Chris Christie is not going to be the Republican nominee, is he? So give me your sense of what's going on in Chris Christie's head. You know, he says, I'm not a paid assassin. I'm not just going to go out there, you know, and drop these bombs on Donald Trump and then be defeated and then go off. And yet that's pretty much what his role is going to be, isn't it? Well, we had him over at, as you mentioned, at Semaphore last week. And I, you know, spoke with him a bit too. And I covered him in, you

know, the 2016 election when he was running as well. And I think one aspect is that he is very much a debate focused person. I mean, to him, his crowning achievement, which a lot of people think of as, you know, his lowest moment, but he is extremely proud of, is when he threw the knockout punch at Marco Rubio in New Hampshire in a debate, in which if you recall, Marco Rubio was really making his push to consolidate what they called then the establishment lane, you know, to finally get into a one-on-one against Trump. And he just sort of short-circuited in this debate where he kept repeating the same talking point about Obama, and Chris Christie called him out on it and basically said, you know, Marco Rubio is like an empty suit. You know, he just knows how to repeat

talking points. This isn't a real leader. And he never recovered. I mean, itio is like an empty suit. He just knows how to repeat talking points. This isn't a real leader. And he never recovered. I mean, it was just like an overnight disaster. That was it for Rubio. And that's how we got Trump. Now, some might say that's how we got Trump. I mean, Christie would say, Rubio is the one who screwed up this debate. You're all mad at me? This guy clearly didn't have the juice here. If he did, you know, if he did, he would be president. And I think you might see him play a similar role in debates here, where it's like, look, what I see is a bunch of Rubios, and I'm sure this is how he sees DeSantis. And I'm sure this is how we see someone like a Nikki Haley say, you know, what I see is a bunch of Rubios here who just do not have the juice to tackle this guy. And I'm just going to keep attacking them to prove that I do.

And we'll see if they're up to the challenge. The worst case, they're just revealed for, you know, either being someone who should get the nomination or someone who is just laughably short of ever getting the nomination. And we'll see that in the debates. And that's how we get Trump again. Chris Christie is a smart guy. I mean, how does he think it plays out? I mean, something, something, something, you kill somebody, and then Chris Christie becomes president of the United States. How, I mean, how many unicorns are in

there? I mean, isn't that the story with so many presidential contenders though, right? I mean, there's always like these people who look in the mirror and say, why not me? Some people just love running for president in general. You know, you always get candidates like that who have, you know, truly no shot, but enjoy the experience, enjoy having their profile raised, enjoy, you know, giving speeches. And, you know, sometimes it's not about even winning necessarily, though I do think Chris Christie is very serious about that. Sometimes it's about getting a specific message about or forcing the other candidates to reckon with a certain position or a message. You know, there's lots of reasons people run for president. But what I don't think is that he looks at the rest of the field and says like, oh, man,

Ron DeSantis is just this like world destroying force and we all have to step aside and rally towards him. And I think he's feeling vindicated probably by the last few weeks where, yeah, you can make this theoretical argument all you want that Ron DeSantis is the only, you know, train out of this primary, you know, Trump, and you all have to get on board it. But as soon as he makes contact with the actual campaign, immediately donors, voters, pundits, they all start wondering if that's true. This is still very theoretical. But it's been really bad for DeSantis. So I wanted to get your take on all of this,

because people are saying, well, there's still plenty of time. He can still adjust. He can still change the thing. And yet, you know, things have moved awfully quickly. And I'm trying to remember the last time that Ron DeSantis had a good day or a good week. And all of the doubts that had been out there, but had been, you know, suppressed by a lot of the wish casting are now front and center. Nobody likes this guy. He doesn't have the instincts. He's not a people person. He doesn't have a plan for attacking Donald Trump. And he apparently is kind of stuck on saying the word woke as many times as possible in 20 second sound bites. And beyond that, how badly has DeSantis been hurt? Because right now, again, it's hard to imagine him being the great floor to hope that everybody had thought

it was going to be just a few months ago. Well, I think this gets a little to the saying what you mean thing, which is that, you know, everyone sort of knew what DeSantis' vulnerabilities were, right? It's as you mentioned, you know, the not a people person thing had been talked about for a while. And, you know, DeSantis was one of those people you often read about a lot more and saw in passing headlines and actually saw speak. You know, he didn't do a lot of interviews.

Those interviews were almost uniformly with, you know, extremely sympathetic press and thus also didn't travel outside that press world much. Which, by the way, a lot of Republican voters don't watch that stuff. You know, there still are a lot of Republican voters that you have to reach primarily through old-fashioned mainstream news, right? So they probably had heard good things about DeSantis, but hadn't seen him. And we're seeing some of the limits here of going all in on him. One is that in order to be the candidate of the right, he thinks he has to attack Trump from the right all the time.

And this has led him to take some positions that are kind of tough. The Florida legislature is just passing a whole bunch of hard right legislation on abortion, on immigration, right before he runs for president to kind of bolster his hand against Trump to say, I'm the true conservative here. But every time you do that, it also undermines your electability argument, which is in many ways the core argument against Trump right now, right? Which is like, this guy blew the last election. He's going to blow the next one. We need to move on. So that's been one problem. But the other

serious problem is that he's much less defined as a brand than he thinks he is. Republicans who know him, who are really in on the DeSantis universe, you know, and by the way, I think accurately view him as someone who really changed conservatives in the last few years, who really was a leader on a lot of issues they care about, who really pioneered this idea that, for example, a governor can stand up to the private sector and pass, you know, controversial, socially conservative bills and stand up to the boycott threats, you know, that have cowed previous governors in the past. I think DeSantis represents something that really is new and interesting and worth discussing. But at the same time, most people are still fairly unfamiliar with him. They're not as into these highfalutin,

you know, intellectual arguments for why he represents this new Trumpism without Trump in the future of the party. And what they're seeing is a guy who is not very charismatic, you know, who doesn't seem to have like a natural charm or likability run up against a candidate who is absolutely, you know, love him or hate him completely magnetic. And I think you're really seeing the limits of this consolidate around DeSantis strategy as a result. He's in danger of being defined very early as look at this guy nobody likes. And it's very hard to get out of that box once you're in it. Because look, you saw he gave this like interview in Japan, you know, a few days ago, where all he did was just

move his head around a little funny. And that was like the sensation of everyone sharing pictures of it and gifs of it and memes of it being like, look at this weirdo. That's because he's been defined as a weirdo in the last few weeks. That's the only reason that happens. And that's a tough box to get out of if you're not a dynamic, charismatic guy. So it also feels as if there's been kind of a jailbreak over the last several days, you know, one senator after another coming out and endorsing Trump. You know, you have Steve Daines out of Montana and others who are basically saying he's inevitable now. There does seem to have been a significant shift in the conventional wisdom, at least among Republicans who had, you know, been keeping their powder dry until like the last, what, 72 hours? What's going on? Why is this

happening? So the one caveat I'll give here is that DeSantis hasn't announced. Maybe when he announces, there's like a flood of endorsements, but we have not seen a lot since. And we have seen quite a few for Trump lately, who, by the way, there was not a flood of endorsements when he announced either, which was really at a low point. And it was very much people took note of it when he announced in November after those midterms and polls were showing DeSantis surging. Mitch McConnell was every day, you know, pouring dirt on the grave, basically, about how he's not going to be the nominee and, you know, criticizing something he was doing. But things have changed since then. I mean, the big one lately is Steve Daines,

the chair of the NRSC, you know, handles Senate elections for Republicans endorsed him, which is very influential. But, you know, this gives an example, which is, we know that Trump takes endorsements very seriously. And, you know, he rewards people, he's not the most loyal guy, but there is, you know, rewards to be had for sticking with him, and punishments to be had sometimes for not. And especially if you're, say, Steve Daines, and you're trying to find candidates that can win this election, having an in with Trump to endorse those candidates is also a very useful chain. He's influential that way. What we haven't seen so far is that people worried about not endorsing DeSantis.

What will happen to me if I don't? No fear factor. And I think that's one imbalance right off. Yes, the fear factor is one. And it's not just fear, the opportunity factor. You know, like if I'm in a competitive primary someday and DeSantis endorses me, does that mean I have it locked up? Often with Trump endorsements, it does, or at least is like a huge, I mean, we can quantify this. There was like, there was a political science paper just a few weeks ago that I think attributed a 14 point bump in Republican primaries from a Trump endorsement, you know, which is pretty significant. I'm not sure there's the equivalent with DeSantis yet, you know? So we'll see on that. DeSantis in particular, I think really, really was hoping for some kind of inevitability narrative at this point. Yes. Where the story heading into this was that

Trump is diminished. The conservative media is coming for me. You know, the Rupert Murdoch empire is all coalescing behind Ron DeSantis. Leaders are all coalescing behind Ron DeSantis. The other candidates are looking weak or even not running in the first place. This is clearly, you know, the future of the party. And Trump is the one who looks weak attacking him, you know, when he's down 20 points in polls, we're seeing the reverse instead. And that's really dangerous. Let's talk about what's happening among the other Republicans as well. Everyone is completely now, it seems, into the whole trans issue and the Bud Light boycott. I mean, I thought the Bud Light boycott was kind of just sort of a one-off, like sounded kind of dumb, looked kind of dumb. That's not the way it's playing in Republican primary politics, isn't it? I mean, they think that this is, I mean, well, tell me what they think. You know,

why is it all trans all the time, all Bud Light all the time? Well, first of all, I mean, it's fair to say this Bud Light freakout has been a bigger story for longer than the freakout over Trump's indictment. I think that's just objectively true. In conservative media, in conservative circles, it certainly seems to be talked about a lot more. I mean, this is something that is activating the base more than, you know, even something like that. And it sort of fits into a lot of things right now. One is that I think it's sort of a bottled up instinct that a lot of conservatives had that they had to suppress a long time, which is Republicans surrendered in the gay marriage wars, but it was also a very quiet surrender. To this day, very few Republicans openly endorse things like same-sex marriage.

They basically just decided to stop fighting it and concede that they pass a law that is essentially surrender. They won't try to overturn it in the courts is what it basically says. But there still was this fear going on that society is changing too quickly on these issues. And they're not imagining that there has been a real rise in the prominence and acceptance of transgender and non-binary and gender non-conforming individuals. a lot of people just read about to now, you know, polls show this. A lot of people, pluralities, majorities, you know, say they personally know people in their lives. I mean, I certainly know plenty, you know, I don't know about you, Charlie, but it's, you know, especially around people my age, it's just a part of life at this point. So I think they are reacting to a real thing here. But there's also this bottle of energy, which is, this comes as there's been this increasing freak out on the right over things involving children that this also gloms onto. You see this in the conspiracy version in QAnon, but you see this also now in just the

way, you know, DeSantis' spokeswoman, you know, Christina Pushaw started talking about this issue about groomers. The idea that there's these people here coming, trying to convert your children or abuse your children in some way. That's historically a very powerful source of populist uprising. And it's not a coincidence that when people were trying to go after gays in the 70s, they used very much the same language. It was very much, these are groomers, they're going after your kids, they can do their own thing, but you know, that's that. So that's another factor. The last

thing here is this conversation has changed also, because I feel like the argument on the right has been won by the side who is saying, look, this isn't a case of live and let live. We honestly think transgender people are mentally ill and this behavior should not be supported or accepted in public life. And I think that's the shift that this Bud Light thing has really crystallized. I mean, when we talk about culture war, this is going to be a literally existential one for a lot of people, right? There are people right now who are moving from states because they think they will not be able

to get basic medical care. And they're not imagining that either. You know, that lets them live the life they want to live as a transgender individual, things like hormone treatments. But the overall conversation has shifted now to with this Bud Light campaign, there's no policy stake here. We just do not like seeing these people. We do not like the idea that a company is marketing to transgender people because we do not see them

as legitimate. And that is how this is being talked about right now among Republican candidates and certainly among the Republican and conservative media figures and activists and commentators that you're seeing right now. It's a real fundamental shift in how they view this transgender issue, from there's a few discrete policy discussions to we just do not view this as a legitimate identity group, period. The interesting thing about this issue, of course, is that it's not completely binary. I know a lot of people who are, you know, pretty sympathetic to, you know, LGBTQ, but who have concerns about trans in sports. It is interesting the breakdown between trans activists and the so-called TERFs, who are trans-exclusionary

radical feminists. So these are people on the left. You have people in the gay community who are skeptical about what's going on here. Andrew Sullivan, you know, quite critical. So this is going to play out in some very different and complicated ways. However, to your point, there is nothing complex or nuanced about making Bud Light the center of your cultural war, is there? No, no, not at all. I mean, this is just saying straight up, we do not like the idea that they are marketing to people who do not appreciate being in public life. It's really that simple. And by the way, this is also sort of an internet age thing too, and social media thing, which

is, you know, there isn't anything new about this. Beer companies have been marketing to LGBT people. They've been sponsoring pride events. They've been advertising. And, you know, you could go pick up The Advocate, you know, an LGBT magazine or newspaper and see beer ads for any of any time in the last 30 years. None of this is new. And this was not like a Super Bowl ad. This was, you know, in this case, they were just marketing through a transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, just through their own personal page to their audience. None of this was like, we're going to interrupt this kid rock concert to show you,

you know, this ad that none of this is like that. But because to interrupt this kid rock concert to show you this ad. None of this is like that. But because of the internet, it can go viral on the right. They feel like it's a personal affront to them. And suddenly what has been completely normal standard marketing is being treated as this wild shift. It's kind of a wild thing to watch. Just circling back to the beginning, why it feels, again, I use the word

boring, but I probably should have used the word exhausting because we know that this is the world we're going to be inhabiting. And this is the kind of thing that we're going to be experiencing in an accelerated fashion for the next year and a half again. Benji Starlin, thank you so much for joining me. Benji is the Washington Bureau Chief at Semaphore and previously covered elections at NBC News. I really appreciate your time today, Benji. Thanks so much, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we will do something different and special. So stay tuned.

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.