The Bulwark Podcast - BONUS EPISODE: The Symmetry Between Zelensky's Visit and the Jan 6 Report

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

The fight against Putin and the fight against Trump are cousins, so how poetic is it that Zelensky and the January 6 report both show up on nearly the same day? Plus, is Trump getting too tired to fight? Bill Kristol joins guest host JVL for a special bonus episode today.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am JVL sitting in for Charlie Sykes. It is Wednesday, December 21st, the winter solstice. I'm joined by Bill Kristol. And Bill, there's so much good news today. But the best news is that is the shortest day of the year. So we have the most darkest. Then we could always cite John McCain. John McCain's favorite quotation was that, you know... Always darkest before it goes pitch black. Right, always darkest before it goes pitch black, which he, for some reason, used to ascribe to Ho Chi Minh.

It was like a weird comic riff he had that was very, very funny, about the way he would, with good timing, say it's always darkest before it goes pitch black. But he claimed somehow that it was Ho Chi Minh or Mao Zedong, I can't remember, used to say this. It was kind of a bizarre description, I would say to them. But anyway, it's good to be with you. And I am looking forward to longer days ahead, though.

I think it's going to get super freezing here in a couple of days. Up here in New York City, it's already quite cold. This week is traditionally a dead news week, and yet we are somehow in a vortex of 24 hours of just tremendous amounts of real and very important news. We have the passing of the omnibus bill. We have the release of the president's tax returns. We have the criminal referrals from the January 6th committee. We have the January 6th Committee final report. And then we have Volodymyr Zelensky arriving in America to meet with Joe Biden and then address a joint session of Congress, all within about 36 hours of one another.

So it is unclear to me how much any of America will pay attention to this as people are running around doing Hanukkah celebrations and finishing their last minute shopping and beginning their travel plans. Because I know some people are already beginning to travel for the holidays. Let's start with the January 6th committee report. At the time we're sitting down to tape this, I have read bits and pieces of the executive summary. It is pretty impressive, I would say. And the thing which struck me most in it is that it begins by quoting a whole bunch of the foot soldiers, the people who were arrested and convicted for their actions on January 6th. And these are people who say, I'm a patriot,

and I was told by the President of the United States that an election had been stolen, and he said we should come to Washington to fight it. And now it turns out I was just being lied to the whole time. I'm paraphrasing. But this is what, you know, like a dozen of these people are quoted as saying in interviews in the opening paragraphs of the report, the idea that these people can have their lives disrupted and many of them wind up in jail, lose jobs, have rifts with family members. And yet the president who did all of this could face no consequences. And even worse, the members of the Republican Party who knew better, but who stood to the side and either actively abetted it or refused to pass any judgment at

all, refused to say anything, right? You know, refused to say that Joe Biden was president, that there'd be no consequences for any of them. That strikes me as deeply unfair. Yeah, and I think that's why they began the report that way, to suggest that they were recommending that the president be prosecuted as so many hundreds of those who followed his guidance, as they took to be his wishes, correctly took to be his wishes, as they have been. And I think that's why they began the report that way. And I think you drew the right conclusion.

And that's the conclusion they hope the special counsel draws. and I think they expect them to, but more importantly, that they hope the American people draw. You know, it's interesting. I was on a call last night with a bunch of sort of lawyers who follow this stuff very closely, the January 6th and the report, the legal situation, and one of them was sort of complaining, understandably, that, gee, the Zelensky news is just broken. Is this going to kind of step on the January 6th report? It's a further coverage of the executive summary from Monday. But I actually think there's a certain, just to begin with that for a second, a certain, I don't know, poetic symmetry or appropriateness to Zelensky and the January 6th report. I mean, they are sort of, it's not the same fight, but the fight of Ukraine against Putin and the fight here against Trump are cousins with one another, aren't they?

Fights for democracy and for the rule of law and for decency and without comparing the situation to what's happening in Ukraine, obviously. But still, I sort of feel that they go together in a way. So I tried to make that point that didn't really console the lawyers who wanted 100% attention to every detail of the report and the criminal referrals. But I guess I think that's the case. So the executive summary was Monday, obviously, and we've looked at that. And that really was an attempt to pretty narrowly and, I guess you could say strictly almost, but certainly compellingly, build the criminal case against the president and against his top associates. A couple of people I know who read it or skimmed through it said, gee, it doesn't really get to the broader issues. But those are addressed in

the report, the full report, 1,000 pages, I think it is, that comes out today. I haven't seen it yet. I've heard some about what's in it. There are a couple of chapters that really get to the point you just raised, JBL, which is the relationship of Trump and the rioters. The way it was put to me by one person who had been briefed on it also was this kind of a call and response relationship between Trump and the alt-right insurrectionists and extremists who did what he wanted them to do. And that Trump knew that was happening. And that Trump had worked on that for weeks and months, and really, you could argue from the beginning of his presidency, the beginning of his campaign, and people like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon had really worked on that, you know, in spades, and had been in touch with Trump. Bannon is one of the people who talks to Trump

on the 5th and the 6th, and Stone has obviously remained at that point very close to Trump, both imparted by Trump. Stone very much involved with the actual Proud Boys and the other leaders of the assault. So one thing I think the broader report does that that summary doesn't really quite get to because it's such a legal document, quasi-legal document, is the, as I say, the kind of close relationship of Trump and the extremists who actually carried out the insurrection and the way in which that was purposeful on Trump's part and on the part of Trump's associates. And that remains the case, right? The violence, the craziness, the rabble-rousing, it's never been incidental to Trump's political efforts. The way it has been to some others, you could say, well, there's some people on the fringes, but I mean, come on, that's not the heart of it.

This is the heart of it. And they did what Trump wanted them to do. I mean, Trumpism has always felt like 1930s European politics, right? A very literally bare knuckles kind of thing, which encourages street fighting and is about power, right? And exertion. So the students of authoritarianism were pointed out that if you look at the 20s and 30s, especially those movements very self-consciously had a parliamentary wing, as it were, and an extra-parliamentary or quasi-military wing. And they worked sometimes in just parallel to each other, sometimes in implicit kind of coordination, kind of call and response, you might say,

coordination with each other, and sometimes in very direct, obviously, total coordination with each other. And sometimes it's very direct, obviously, total coordination with each other. And that is something that, thank God, we've mostly been spared in the U.S. And that's just one of several ways, really, in which Trumpism, it's not the 20s and 30s, it's not Europe, all that has to be stipulated, but it does bear a certain kinship to those movements. So, Bill, the obvious parallel here is the Mueller investigation report. And I can't tell you how different this feels from that. And it's because, I think in large part, because the Mueller investigation, I mean, lots of factors, but the Mueller investigation was very closed face. And the idea was that, you know, we would find out everything when we found it out. And the January 6th committee has played their hand almost like open face, you know, and everybody has seen their cards the whole time. They relied almost entirely on Republican witnesses and the witnesses of

people in and around the Trump administration itself. There aren't going to be a ton of surprises, I don't think. And much of the news we know, and we will learn more details of it, but the committee has already shown us the evidence in broad brushes of what they have. And so I wonder, as a political document versus a historic document, which side of that continuum do you think this is likely to be more like? I just think having those public hearings on televised hearings, having a public report directly issued to the public

with some commentary by the committee members as opposed to Bill Barr getting to interpret it for three or four weeks before it becomes public. The silence of the Mueller team was the other extreme. I think it makes a big difference. There's a reason we remember today the Watergate hearings as decisive. Maybe we underestimate almost how important some of the prosecutions were and the stuff that happened sort of in the privacy

or in the secrecy of grand jury chambers and so forth. But it's the reason congressional hearings have a certain drama and kind of are remembered in a way that, as I say, jury chambers and so forth. But it's the reason congressional hearings have a certain drama and kind of are remembered in a way that the, as I say, secret proceedings or reports that just emerge without having had any public predicate laid for them aren't quite remembered. The McCarthy hearings, right? There's another Joe McCarthy with Joseph Welch. So yeah, no, I think this is a pretty big moment. And you do get a one-two punch, conceivably, that is. You get the public hearings, the congressional, the year-long building up of the evidence in public.

And then you perhaps do get the prosecution as well. So I think it's very, very different from the Mueller situation. This would be like John the Baptist making way for the main event, which would be the prosecution, if we get it. And I've been very skeptical of the wisdom of prosecution for the last two years. I've really come around on that. And I think they're all bad options. But at this point, it strikes me that the least bad option is probably if the special counsel believes that there is compelling evidence that crimes are committed and believes that we're all subject to the rule of law not to bring in indictment unless they're just facts and developments, exculpatory facts that we don't know. You know, just thinking about your previous point, which I hadn't, think about the two impeachments. So those were public and were somewhat dramatic and I think had some real effect.

But remember, no witnesses, right? So we sort of have a continuum, and this will be, I suppose, some political, some social scientists, or maybe a student of mass communications would have to write a scholarly paper on this. We have the continuum from the Mueller report, nothing public, very long, and the complicated report dropped on people suddenly, and the only preparation actually being Bill Barr's kind of distortion of it for two or three weeks before we get to see it. The impeachment, which is public, but not with the drama of witnesses or putting faces to, in a way, what had happened, but rather, you know, intelligent presentations by members of way, but this is pretty far the other direction of real witnesses and real video and a real sense of learning new things and seeing the players and seeing Bill Barr. I was talking to people I talked to, I don't know what you found of this, J.B. I don't really talk to many Trumpists, but to people who were Trump sympathetic, Trump acquiescent, Trump excusing.

I think Bill Barr made a big difference. I mean, of all the different witnesses, he was one they liked. If you were a Wall Street Journal, National Review, Trump acquiescent type, you know, Bill Barr was the kind of conservative who went along with Trump, but did great things for the country, allegedly, but you could still respect him because he sort of quit, you know, two weeks before the end of the administration, he sort of denounced January 6th. And that was the kind of the guy you could hang your hat on. And having Barr not just, you know, on paper being reported, but video of Barr saying what he said, and then the accounts of his deputies at the Justice Department that day of that meeting on January 3rd, the testifying,

I think that that did have an effect on some, I mean, not a huge number, let's not kid ourselves, but on some of the kind of Trump acquiescent types over to, oh my God, it's worse than I realized. I think that's probably right. His testimony probably made a little bit of a dent. It is important to remember that when this was starting, one of the the anti anti-trump position was that we shouldn't do this because none of it matters right no we already know everything and nobody cares and it won't move the needle and you remember mick mulvaney even mick mulvaney was tweeting oh if that's the best they got there's not much there and this was always a bad faith argument against it, but it has been revealed to have been a totally meritless argument. It turns out that this committee unearthed a great amount of new information, that it added to the public understanding of what happened in the period between the election day and January 6th.

And it seems to have had a pretty fair impact on just public opinion in general. And it's going to be probably the best attempt at a historical record of it that the country is going to get. It's just one more instance in which all of those people were wrong. And I want nothing more for Christmas than for them to take their medicine in public. I know I won't get it, but... Yeah, well, you won't get that for Christmas, but that's an important lesson in life. You don't get everything you want for Christmas.

You know, that's... The other thing, and this was not the purpose of the hearings, I want to make clear, I don't think this was the intention, but I do think what affected it also was we had these hearings and suddenly, I think you could say suddenly, in November of 2022, the Republicans who lost, who underperformed the party as a whole, and the party still did pretty well, better than it deserved in my view, though historically a little worse than you'd expect in the midterm. But the Republicans who underperformed were the election deniers, were the January 6th, the people who deny the seriousness of what had happened in January 6th,

or in those cases really embraced, you might say, January 6th. Part of it was their general extremism. Part of it was the baggage of Trump. When you think about it for a second, what was the new baggage of Trump? He'd been so bad and so horrible in so many ways for four years. The baggage was January 6th and his not only refusal to apologize for January 6th or say express regret, but his embrace, as it were, in defense of January 6th. So I think there too, something happened in 2022 to change that dynamic. And one of the main things that happened were the hearings. And again, the repeated increasing difficulty of anyone of goodwill saying, well, that really wasn't so bad, or that was kind of unintended. It was just a riot. wasn't so bad, or that was kind of unattended,

it was just a riot, let's not overdo it, the kind of Byron York, Brit Hume, you know, ridiculing of the seriousness of it. And then suddenly, Bill Barr is recounting what he recounts, and the lawyers, the other senior people at Justice are recounting the meetings on December 3rd. And we're seeing the degree to which Trump purposely is happy that the crowd is armed and wants them to go and march on the Capitol and sits there for 187 minutes in the White House enjoying the spectacle. A little harder to take that Fritz Hume, Byron York attitude. I mean, they probably are still taking that attitude, of course, but at least some people might have moved away from that. So I want to ask you a couple questions that I just asked our colleagues, Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell, over on the Next Level podcast.

Another excellent podcast from the Bulwark that you should all be listening to. First rate. Next level, one might almost say. It is next level. We're here on the kind of regular level, the kind of lower level, to be honest, that JVL and I are just, that I'm allowed to discuss. But when you get JVL, Tim and Sarah in one place, it is truly an excellent. My first question is, would it have made a difference in that period between the election and January 6th if Trump had been doing his Trump thing,

but the rest of the Republican Party had refused to go along with it? And if they had all said, you know, Joe Biden won the election, he's the president-elect. If they had just moved on as if this was the reality and refused to indulge him. I mean, I remember Tim Scott being interviewed during that moment and asked who won the election. Tim Scott wouldn't even say. He was like, well, that's really up to, you know, that's beyond my, I'm just focused on my constituents in South Carolina. So the first, first half of my question is, would it have made a difference if the Republican party had gotten off the bus in a concerted way at that point? So I think it would have made some difference. I mean, I suppose one could say

that the Trump call and response with the mob, with the Proud Boys, with Bannon, through Bannon and Stone and, you know, a few elected officials who were true rabble-raggers and extremists, that would have happened anyway. So there would still have been, I'm just doing this thought experiment, there might still have been a rally, a demonstration on the 6th. Trump would have said everything he would have said. He would have placed the call to Raffensperger. He would have tried to do what he tried to do with justice. But here, I think the people who are most to blame probably for getting to the severity it got to, well, there are many people who are to blame, but one group is Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and the senators who, and people sort of forgotten, I myself have forgotten this until a couple months ago, you know, who I think was right on January 1st, just about then, signaled that they were going to support an effort to overturn the electors as senators, which meant that it was going to be a real vote. It wasn't just going to be a few House members. I think I can't remember the rules

exactly now under the old law, which probably is about to be changed by the Electoral Count Act, but I think you needed one or two senators to object. But if it's just been a few House members, you can write a scenario where, and if McCarthy hadn't gone along, you could write a scenario where 40 House members, 70 House members vote to object, maybe one or two senators, and the people know that that's what's going to happen on January 5th. That, for me, is the key. If there'd been no sense of possibility that, my God, this could really stop this count, we've got Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and it looks like maybe a majority of the House ready to go along. Let's go for it. I think that really gave steam and energy

to the assault on January 6th. So I think you have a bad situation anyway, made so much worse by the kind of, by the incitement of those people and the knowledge ahead of time that they weren't only, that like Tim Scott, they weren't willing to rebuke them. That would have helped even more, of course, but that they were actually some people who were going to be kind of mirroring what they did outside the Capitol or turned out inside, but from the outside of the Capitol, they were going to mirror it on the floor of the Congress. I think that was very important. Look, if Bill Barr, here's another thought experiment, if Bill Barr had resigned, as he did on December 23rd, with a letter excoriating Trump and saying what was happening and how terribly dangerous it was, that we all had to be resolved to make sure this election got properly, the transfer of power was peaceful and proper, and that Trump didn't get away with any of this. I think that changes the dynamic in those two weeks between December 23rd and January 6th. Instead, he resigns

with a letter effusively praising Trump and keeps totally quiet about what he is seeing, what we now know that he saw until January 6th itself, actually. So yeah, I think those figures bear a fair amount of responsibility for turning what would have been an unpleasant rally and conceivably with some, I don't want to minimize this, some fracases on the fringe, so to speak, into what we saw. So the reason I ask this is because I'm projecting forward to the possibility of a criminal prosecution against Trump. Again, I will ask you what I asked Tim and Sarah. What does the Republican establishment do in such a scenario? Do they affirmatively defend Trump? I assume some will. Do they go into strategic silence mode where they say, well, I don't really like to comment on ongoing legal proceedings.

That's not my business. That's between the Justice Department. Well, I don't really know. I haven't looked at the whole case. I do have some concerns about the Democrats politicizing the Justice Department. Or do they say, yeah, you know what? You look at this stuff, it's awfully troubling. I mean, there are three essential pathways, right? One imagines that the incentives

are lined up, so different parts of the party are going to have different, be incentivized to each of those pathways to different degrees, and that you're going to wind up with a response that looks a lot like the response to the election denialism stuff. Yeah, that's interesting. We don't obviously quite know what the charges will look like, whether there'll be even more evidence that'll come out of the grand jury, which might be made public either in the charging documents or very early in the legal process. And so there could be more weight even on the scale. But I guess your middle scenario seems the most likely for the most people,

which is a kind of cowardly evasion, but not a full scale rallying to Trump. I mean, you pointed out, I think, in the newsletter that we haven't seen as much rallying as people might have expected a few months ago, which, again, I think is due to the actual work of the January 6th committee and to the election results, actually. And so maybe a relatively smaller chunk of the party rallies to Trump, or at least to the party elites and the conservative movement elite. But what is a smaller is not nothing, right? Smaller is maybe 20% or 30% is probably not 2%. And the base is probably rallying more than the elite.

And to come back to a point you and Tim Miller in particular made many times such an important point that one just has to keep reminding oneself of. We say elites and the base, or I do, and the establishment and all, but there's a huge MAGA establishment with a ton of money and a ton of media. And I would assume they rallied to Trump. I think they matter a lot, actually.

I mean, I was in a discussion with a bunch of liberals and nice people, good people the other day, a few weeks ago, and it was, can we get the mainstream media to do something about Fox and Tucker Carlson and all this social media stuff? And I was like, Fox is the man. I mean, is the mainstream media more powerful at this point than the Tucker Carlson and Fox-related media? Elon Musk is running Twitter. I mean, you know, people have just so underestimated the power. And this is, in a way, to their credit, their seriousness.

They're thinking through in their own kind of crazy way, admittedly, how to grab various levers of power and exercise them, their recruiting of wealthy people and so forth. I mean, the degree to which there is a big MAGA establishment. Now, Tim Miller has a piece up in the Bulwark, very interesting one, reporting from that insane Charlie Kirk MAGA fest in Phoenix, I think it was, this past weekend. And Tucker seems to be a little bit not quite 100% Trump, rah-rah, a little more, kind of implying that maybe we can get beyond that. And I mean, I think it's still very prodigious, as prodigious as ever. But I do wonder if there'll be some attempt to liberate the broader semi-fascist movement, if I can put it that way,

from Trump in particular as a flawed leader. And that might mean there's a slight tendency to not put all their eggs in the defending Trump basket. Having said that, there's such support for Trump in the base, even if it's 30%, not 50%, but it's not, as I said before, it's not

2%. There's got to be a lot of incentives in that wing of the party to basically be pro-Trump, maybe not quite as vociferously as you would have been a year ago. I mean, it seems to me like a lot of this will depend on what the other Republican candidates for president do, and the invisible primary will be, we will know a lot about the invisible primary by next July, right? Seven, eight months from now. And the operating theory seems to be that they hope, maybe believe,

that Donald Trump's voters will simply transfer to them at some point on their own. That Trump's voters will come to their own conclusion that they should switch camps and migrate over to DeSantis or Kristi Noem or whoever, and that they don't have to be taken. And I guess it's possible. It's possible that some large chunk will. I don't know that all of them will. I mean,

it has looked like a personality cult i didn't often see people running around with flags picturing mitt romney as a bare-chested guy welding gatling cannons while riding a rhinoceros you know like in the way we did with trump i you know you see what i'm sort of getting at here like totally no no i think you've captured DeSantis, Christine Noem, Youngkin, whatever, calculation very well, including Pence. And then Pence himself, who was doing his book tour. So he said, well, you can't really convict Trump for a crime just because he listened to – got some bad advice from lawyers, which is so insane. Trump was earnestly just trying to get good legal advice. He got a little misled.

You know, Trump, of course, is ignoring all the liars who tell him you can't do this and to the contrary is very self-consciously, as I said earlier, inciting it, playing call and response with the super extremist elements of the crowd. So I think you've nicely captured what most of these candidates will try to get away with. But as you say, it's not as if this is where it's important to think dynamically. Once you get a real campaign, they can, I guess, only talk to friendly media or to Fox

and right-wing media. But even then, they might get that question because they'll be diverging points of view there about, shouldn't you be defending Trump more or not? And on the side of they're not fully breaking by any means from Trump, look at Mitch McConnell, who probably is, if you, I don't know, if one is Trump cult and 10 is anti-Trump, McConnell's closer to anti-Trump than almost everyone else we've mentioned so far, right? Certainly than all the candidates to speak of, all the serious candidates. So he's at a five or six or something. And McConnell comment on the executive summary Monday was what it was, something like, I think you all know what I think about what happened something. And McConnell's comment on the executive summary Monday was

something like, I think you all know what I think about what happened then, and I'm not going to be commenting any further on it or something like that. So even he, who has been reelected Republican leader in the Senate, the elections are over. He's going to be a minority leader for two more years. The next time he- And he's never running again, right? I mean, the guy, he's at the age, he's not going to run again for the Senate again. He's not running presumably for the Senate again. And in terms never running again, right? I mean, the guy, he's at the age, he's not going to run again for the Senate again. Republican leader in the United States Senate, I have looked at this rather important document. And I've got to say that, you know, I mean, there's so many things he could have said that would have been more appropriate, honestly, and more courageous is not even is even too high a standard because it wouldn't be that courageous, but just, just appropriate and fitting for someone

in his position to say, and I would say the same about a whole bunch of other political leaders, governors, and other senators and members of the house. How few of them have said that? That's again, they still feel no obligation to the nation, to the country, to the public, to help explain a little bit or put their shoulder a little bit behind an honest attempt to explain what happened in January 6th. So your middle ground is the dominant ground. Pretend it didn't happen. Pretend it was sort of unfortunate, but we can sort of don't need to really come to grips with it and just hope that everyone's going to sort of magically move on. As you say, people, you know, a certain number of voters will share that view and moving on may be a decent short-term tactical strategy for

Ron DeSantis or something like that. But where does it leave the Republican Party? It leaves the Republican Party utterly having failed to come to grips with something that they, one of the most important things that happened in the United States in the last several years, that's something with which many of them were complicit. Yeah. Well, and this is, you know, this is like a quintessential American thing, right? Instead of coming to grips with our past or coming to grips with legacies, we just pave right over them, right? This is what we're just trying to build on top of them. Let me throw an idea at you just to kick it around. I don't know that I believe this, but I'm going to propose it to you.

The level of anti-Zelensky and anti-Ukrainian thinking within the Republican Party is a reasonable proxy for the sway of Trump over the party. So, Zelensky is here in Washington right now as we are taping. We have MAGA types on Twitter tweeting out disparaging memes of him and Mitch McConnell. We have Don Jr. calling him an ungrateful international welfare queen. I think that if you sort of just stripped away all of the particulars of this, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Western support of Ukraine in response would be a 95 to 5 winner among Republican officeholders and Republican base voters basically at any time since the onset of the Cold War. And that is only the particulars of Donald Trump which have eaten away at that because Republican both officeholdersholders and voters, were very pro-Ukraine in the early days of the war. And then that number has shifted over time. And as the Republican base became more pro-Putin and more pro-Russia and more skeptical of Ukraine, then Republican

politicians started going where their voters were. What do you think of this? Is this a cockamamie idea to use that as a proxy measure? No, not at all. I think it's correct. I mean, the good news, I suppose, is Mitch McConnell is still pro-Ukraine. That's more than half of the Republicans in the Senate.

And I don't know the numbers in the House, honestly, at this point, but let's just maybe half will vote if they had a freestanding vote, which I guess they won't. It'll be part of the omnibus. But they would probably vote for appropriate levels of aid to Ukraine. It would not say the thing, the really repulsive things that Donald Trump Jr. and other such types are saying,

or Marjorie Taylor Greene. But you're in sync very early. I think you were more right than I was about this, where you said this, I think Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of the first to just go full anti-Ukraine. And I remember thinking that makes her kind of an outlier. And I think Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of the first to just go full anti-Ukraine. And I remember thinking, that makes her kind of an outlier. And I think you said, yeah, but gradually she'll be less and less of an outlier. She's the canary in the coal mine. I mean, she's the beating heart and soul of today's Republican Party conservative movement, not Mitch McConnell. And old-fashioned conservative elites offer more resistance, I would say.

So it's a little harder for them to simply steamroll the way they can on some other issues. And it's an important issue. So it's not one that a decent Republican senator who's been cowardly and gone along on a whole bunch of other things that he thinks are symbolic or don't matter, or, you know, second tier things and give the base a bone. This is real. So there's a little more willingness to be serious about this. But now the numbers are pretty, it's pretty striking how much the numbers have changed. The fact that they've gone from 5%, the way you put it, 95.5, let's say 10%, to 40% maybe, you know, in the last three, four, five months is pretty striking. Doesn't mean they go from 40 to 70.

It could mean that. It could also mean they just stall out at 40 or 50 and the party settles for the next six months into a kind of equilibrium of being half pro-Ukraine and half anti-Ukraine. This has happened sort of without Trump weighing in too much, right? Am I wrong about that? I mean, Trump personally, it shows how much the movement

exists on its own, so to speak, and Bannon and Greene and all these people, you know, can move Republican public opinion, even without Trump making a huge deal of it. He just hasn't been in public that much in the last few months. And I don't think he stressed it at all in his announcement speech. And he hasn't really done much since then. So some of this is happening without Trump personally. Now it's happening with Don Jr. Maybe he's a kind of leading indicator of where Trump personally will be. That would be an interesting question. I mean, from Trump's point of view, isn't it going to be awfully tempting to go lead this fight against tens of billions of dollars

going to Ukraine? Doesn't he do that and put DeSantis and sort of Tim Scott and sort of more responsible Republicans in a difficult position, it allows him to continue his fight with McConnell. I don't know. I mean, I'm a little surprised that Trump's been so reticent almost on, maybe that's an overstatement, but on this issue. I mean, just tonight, we're speaking here at what, 2 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. I mean, who will show up for Zelensky's speech? McConnell will show up. Pelosi said she was inviting Zelensky on behalf of the bipartisan leadership of Congress. And I think that's, I don't know if that's sort of a formulation that she almost has to use or a true statement. I mean, I assume McConnell will certainly show up.

And I think a lot of Republican senators will. Will McCarthy, will Scalise, will Elise Stefanik? Will there be misbehavior by Marjorie Taylor Greene, or will they just not show up? I mean, I think that's a mildly interesting mini indicator of what we've been discussing. So on the how this happened, two points I would make. There's a confluence of events. First is pre-existing anti-Zelensky sentiment among Republicans because of the first impeachment, because Zelensky did not play ball with Trump. Pre-existing pro-Putin sentiment

among many Republicans because they were forced into defending Putin by Trump. You then have a weird, almost sui generis culture war aspect of this in which big chunks of conservative elites became invested in the idea that American military was a feat and woke. And that the Russians were the great manly, anti-woke, Bronze Age pervert-type soldiers. And seeing the Russians get routed on the battlefield over the course of a year has been very hard for them to take. I think you know all the people I'm talking about, right? There is an aspect to the culture war where Russia was largely seen as a, you know, well, they understand. They know what time it is. Putin knows what time it is, right? And he's anti-gay and in favor of the family and Christian faith and all that. And that stew of factors can happen even without a guy like Trump leading the charge.

As to your second question, you know, couldn't Trump really step out here to lead the anti-Ukraine faction? Absolutely, he could. And the fact that he's not, I've said this since his announcement, I think that something which I did not expect to play a factor in 2024 is Trump's age. And I think he suddenly looks and feels very old and very tired. And I don't mean tired in the cultural way, like, oh, his act is tired. I mean, he looks and feels exhausted. He does not look like he has the vigor and the will and the stomach to fight anymore. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but when you compare and contrast just four years ago, just speeches, you just go to YouTube and pull up Trump speeches. You know, he's up-tempo, he's excited, he's having fun. And this does not

feel like a guy who really looks like he's up for anything less than a coronation. And this is one of the reasons why I have long thought that he was a very, very heavy favorite to be the Republican nominee, provided he ran for it. I actually now think that it's possible he can be beaten. Because, you know, in every race, voters want candidates who want to fight. And the minute you have a guy who looks like he just sort of doesn't have the fire in the belly for it, they smell that. Yeah, that's awfully interesting. I mean, on the first point, I just would say very briefly that I think none of this would have happened without Trump or probably wouldn't have happened without Trump. Trump was key to unleashing a lot of things, but they are unleashed now.

So as you say, he doesn't have to personally lead every aspect of the semi-fascist movement here in the U.S. on every issue. It's now got a momentum of its own. I think on your very interesting second point, maybe Trump's playing some long game that we don't know, and he's holding back, and he's being clever, and it would exhaust people if he were out every day.

But you're right. You've got to think the old Trump would just be all over. Well, he could be over Twitter. I was going to say he can't be over Twitter, but he could be over Twitter. Incidentally, maybe that's a little. You know, today, why not come back to Twitter today and denounce Zelensky and denounce the giveaway of the aid? And you could denounce eight other things as well if he wants. But, I mean, he would get a lot of publicity i think it would kind of put him right back there instead of donald

trump jr and marjorie taylor green and all these characters being in the news as the anti-zelensky faction and that faction's leaders maybe he's looking around the corner maybe he sees that's not where he wants to be he's being a little clever but in a way that's not how he got to where he is by being you know by being subtle and too clever. And one wonders whether either his age, as you say, or maybe just the kind of presidency and running for re-election, which is a little different than being an insurgent the first time, and then sort of coasting on those rallies and on the adulation and on the grift and all that has taken the edge off. But you're right, why isn't Trump, this is a moment for Trump, right? And whether it's the January 6th committee,

it's get beyond defending yourself and looking a little pathetic and sort of whining about the committee and attack Zelensky, attack McConnell for giving all this money away, attack the omnibus. One thinks in the old days he would have been right out there. And maybe it's a sign that he either doesn't want to or think, to say maybe it's a sign that he either doesn't want to or think, maybe it's a calculation, maybe it is just a kind of tiredness. It's very interesting. Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, just a quick word about the Twitter. You know, back when we were immediately post-January 6th and we were having the big deplatforming arguments, I have always been in favor of deplatforming. I think that social media companies should deplatform people more often. There should be more bans. And that has turned out to be true. Trump desperately needs his Twitter weapon back, but I think he correctly intuits that coming back into Twitter under Musk puts him in a very dangerous position. Because if he comes back, Musk, as the new sole owner of Twitter, can do whatever he wants to Trump. And Trump needs Twitter more than Musk needs Trump on Twitter. And so I think he, you know, the one sort of animal cunning thing is that he still seems to have, I think, is a DeSantis supporter, I guess an out DeSantis supporter,

that puts Trump in a subservient and weakened position where if Musk decided for whatever reason or no reason at all that he could start monkeying with Trump's Twitter account or kick him off the platform again for some reason, that that makes Trump look weak. And so I think he's probably right to be sticking with truth. But it shows how important the platforms are and why it was generally good for America that Trump was off Twitter for the last two years. I hadn't really thought through the Trump-Musk relationship. I guess part of me still thinks if he showed up on Twitter, and let's not give him ideas, but whatever, you know, at 5 p.m. today with dramatic tweets about Zelensky and McConnell and the outrage of it all. And, you know, I still think it would be a pretty effective short-term, at least, way of re-establishing his leadership

of that wing of the party and probably, as I say, dominating the news going into Christmas and all, but maybe the West's relationship makes that problematic. One other point, the degree to which Harvey Mansell makes this point in a new conversation I have up, which is very interesting on liberalism, of which Harvey is a friendly defender, critical defender. I don't know what the right term is, but he makes the point in passing that Zelensky's performance and Ukraine's performance in defending its nation against Putin, but doing so explicitly in the name of liberal democracy and explicitly in the name of resisting not just Russia, but the ghastly autocratic Russia. And Putin's appropriation for his own reasons domestically and in terms of appealing to conservatives in the West, or the right wing in the West, appropriation of the culture war over here into his own rhetoric, you know, all of that has had a pretty big effect back here, I think, actually. Zelensky, he's been a non-trivial contributor to the difficulties the alt-right has had, the extremist right, the neo-fascist right, whatever one wants to call it,

in sort of keeping the momentum going that they had going pretty much through last year. Again, the story of 2021 was January 6th, the beginning of 2021. You've got to have thought that would discredit Trump finally. End of 2021, he seems to have a stronger than ever hold on the Republican Party. 2022, Ukraine, January 6th committee, some other things, and Trump does seem weaker. So interesting how those things have gone in some ways contrary to what we would have expected probably at the beginning of each year. And I guess the question we just don't know, and this is such a dynamic situation, not a static one, is where we are three, six, nine, 12 months from now.

We will see. Bill, thank you so much for joining me. Everybody, thanks for listening and sitting with us while we were sitting in for Charlie. Enjoy the last couple days of big news before the Christmas holiday. And we'll be back again tomorrow to do this all over again.