The Bulwark Podcast - Dana Milbank: It’s the Trump Show Again

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

The Republican Party had been showing signs it was beginning to move on from Trump, but now it's wrapping itself around him once again — because attention of any kind is Trump's fuel. Plus, a reminder that Kevin McCarthy doesn't believe in anything. Dana Milbank joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is March 21st, 2023, and today is not the day you're going to be seeing a mugshot of Donald Trump. We're going to have to talk about other things like recognizing that none of this is remotely normal. Joining me on today's podcast, Dana Milbank from the Washington Post, nationally syndicated columnist and author of The Destructionists, the 25-year crackup of the Republican Party. Good morning, Dana. It is great to be with you to discuss the abnormal, Charlie. Well, you know, I was calculating this morning that we are in year eight of the GOP hostage crisis. That's true. They continue to, you know, be obsessed with, well, how far do we have

to go to defend him? But this is the eighth year. I mean, just run it out, you know, 2016, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. We are in 2023 and they are still held hostage. You're old enough to remember, right? During the Iran hostage crisis, they used to run a little graphic on the screen, day 452. That's right, that's right. I would stand out on street corners telling motorists to put on their lights

or honk their horn or whatever it is. So maybe we should be doing this on Capitol Hill and trying to get some support for them. But this is a different hostage crisis because the hostage taker had actually let them go in a way, you know, he was sort of caught napping and they were free. And now they've sort of voluntarily come back into it. And they keep re-upping like, okay, no, that was good. Let's do this again. I mean, there's a certain irony, the fact that they're all down at that retreat in Florida, the House GOP, and because they want to talk about their legislative, their non-existent legislative agenda and move forward. And all they can talk about,

of course, is that what are we going to do with Donald Trump? How far do we go? What do we say? What is acceptable? How much suckage is required for us not to be dinged by the MAGAverse? Right. I was actually listening to Kevin McCarthy go on and on about the achievement. So I was kind of compressed. So I actually went to congress.gov to look it up. And there are a total of two bills have become enacted into law so far in this Congress. Three months, two bills, but okay. As I was saying a moment ago, they were virtually free of Trump. They're voluntarily going back into this. Now, we don't know what's going to become of Trump, but it seems to me that they've fallen into the classic of, you know, Trump has got his back to the wall, puts out something that will return the attention to him. Now, maybe this is true, and maybe an indictment will be forthcoming, but he's done this play over and over again. I used to tease long before he actually got into politics, he

would tease presidential runs at the time when he'd need to renegotiate the apprentice. So it's just sort of an artificial way of getting himself back in the news. Now, we don't know if this is artificial or if it's genuine, but he clearly has gotten himself back in the news. It is astonishing the extent to which they've wrapped themselves around him again, turning against DeSantis like, you know, he was dead to rights. And suddenly he's back, the standard bearer of the Republican Party. This debate about whether it's going to help or hurt him, I think, is somewhat interesting. Although I just remind people that, you know, this is going to be a long story at this point. And Republicans are trying to figure out, you know, how tightly do we wrap ourselves around the Trumpian axle here? And they're trying to come up with a template, which

is you attack the prosecutors, you invoke George Soros' name as many times as possible, you use the word weaponization. But you're going to have to use that same playbook, not just after the New York indictments, but potentially after what's going to happen in Georgia. And then perhaps what happens with the Department of Justice. How long does this go on? So I was going to wait a little bit later to pop this question on you. But, you know, there is this debate, which is interesting, I think. I mean, you know, all the cool kid pundits are saying this indictment is going to boost Donald Trump.

I don't know whether you read Alex Burns' piece in Politico. And he says, no, actually, it's not. Because for all of his usual strengths, Trump right now is defined more by his weakness, personal and political deficiencies that have grown with time and now figure to undermine any attempt to exploit the criminal case against him. And his point is that when politicians in the past have survived these scandals, it's because they say this is a distraction from all of these other important things I want to do in the country. But Donald Trump is all about Donald Trump. Donald Trump's entire campaign is about Donald Trump and about his grievances. So it's not a distraction. It's the whole show. And even if he gets 98% of the MAGA voters rallying around him, if he loses 2%, he can't afford to lose any percentage. What do you think? Strength and weakness, long term, short term?

Gosh, Charlie, every time, you know, over this eight year hostage crisis and in which I've said something is going to weaken Donald Trump, I'm hoping you don't have all of those soundbites lined up there to play back at me because there are many of them. The walls are closing in. The walls have, in fact, closed against each other and still he's the last man standing. So it's kind of, in a way, a fool's errand to try to game out what will happen here. So, you know, just my instinct, he was in a really rough shape within the party. They were beginning to move on. This returns him to the center of the party. So, you know, just as a political matter for the left or for the never Trump crowd, I think that's a bad thing because anything that gives him more attention, that's his fuel. Attention of any sort is his fuel. And without question, he's the main

thing people are talking about in the United States of America right now. So, you know, yeah, I can see how you could game it out. And, you know, if there's this indictment, if there's another indictment in Georgia, will people continue to peel away? But just, I mean, the reaction by the House Republicans in particular is really disconcerting. I mean, three committee chairs send this letter, you know, sort of nakedly attempting to interfere in a non-federal criminal probe. Each time we say we're in, you know, unprecedented territory here, but I'm pretty sure we haven't seen that before. No, we haven't seen it before. And, you know, it's another indication of how, you know,

Kevin McCarthy is just willing to do anything in return for the support that he got. He, you know, he continues to be held hostage, obviously, by the crazy caucus. And the fact that he would unleash committee chairs to engage in really what is tacitly obstruction of justice is rather extraordinary. Attempt to intimidate the local prosecutor without knowing what the local prosecutor is going to do. I think it's worth reminding people that as of this moment, nothing has happened. We don't know what the grand jury is going to do. I think it's worth reminding people that as of this moment, nothing has happened. We don't know what the grand jury is going to do. We don't know whether they're going to be charges, whether they're going to be felony, whether they're going to be misdemeanor. I mean, we can make, I suppose, educated guesses, but none of them felt the need

to keep their powder dry until something actually happened. And so that's probably a tell about how tight that string is. I mean, how tight the leash is on people like Kevin McCarthy. Yes. As we were discussing, first is the question of what actually comes out of this thing in New York, and is it a brilliant Trump ploy to regain the spotlight? But in this reflexive way in which they've come to, I mean, I was listening to Mark Green, I think it was yesterday, the new chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and he said this about the potential indictment. Daniel Ortega arrested his opposition in Nicaragua, and we called that a horrible thing. Mr. Biden, Mr. President, think about that. So not only leapt to Trump's defense, this poor man

seems to think that Alvin Bragg is a member of the Biden administration and is mounting a federal prosecution. This sort of cognitive dissonance, et cetera, is not really a problem for a lot of these folks. Okay, so we know what the playbook has been, which is, you know, to attack the prosecutor, you know, to talk about, you know, Soros prosecutors, to talk about the weaponization, et cetera. But then we had the DeSantis straddle yesterday, which is interesting. So Ron DeSantis comes out. And now this is after days of intense pressure from MAGA World. Mar-a-Lago is absolutely obsessed with getting every Republican to bow the knee. He has his focus on bullying Ron DeSantis or Haley as any other issue out there. So the flying monkeys were released on Ron DeSantis. When are you any other issue out there. So, you know, the flying monkeys were

released on Ron DeSantis. When are you going to speak out? When are you going to break your silence? And DeSantis comes out, he hits all the right notes, right? He, you know, he says weaponization about, you know, 50 times, says George Soros, I think about 150 times. And then he says this. I don't know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair. I just I can't speak to that. And he later comes back to porn star hush money payments. So, Dana, your paper, The Washington Post, said the response Monday was also one of many subtler shots DeSantis has taken at Trump while refraining from direct criticism. It wasn't really subtle at all.

I didn't think there was anything subtle about it. And, you know, we don't get to, at least I don't get to say this very often, but it seems Ron DeSantis was pitch perfect with that one. And, of course, it antagonized Trump world. But, okay, he said the requisite lines about Soros. But he also said, wait a second, what are we talking about here? And of course, Donald Trump responds by essentially suggesting that Ron DeSantis has been grooming underage children. Oh, my God.

It's a delicious sort of taste of what that primary could be. You've heard the reporters down in Orlando this week trying to get McCarthy and others to say something about the substance of the matter, about, you know, illegal hush money porn star. And it's just sort of the constant resistance that the answer is just Soros, political prosecution. So they have their talking point and they're going to stick with it. But, you know, to your point about Trump's response, I mean, he's sitting down there in the bunker in Mar-a-Lago and he really hit the kind of equivalent of the nuclear button, which is you go to groomer right away. I mean, it's March of 2023 and he's already there. Ron DeSanctimonious, which is a terrible name,

will probably find out about all caps, false accusations and fake stories sometime in the future as he gets older, wiser, and better known when he's unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are underage or possibly a man, exclamation point, Trump wrote. I'm sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do. Like, I'm not saying these things, but other people might say these terrible things. And I'm going to include the picture here. So clearly you have this fight engaged. Look, I know that DeSantis is trying to, you know, thread the needle, lock the tightrope, whatever, you know, overused analogy you want here.

But at least in Trump world, you cannot suck up hard enough if you don't bow the knee. Now, on the other hand, maybe he sort of put the signal out there. I'm not the guy that pays off porn stars without antagonizing the Trump base. But this is going to be, boy, he's going to have to do some fancy footwork, isn't he? Yeah. I mean, just it's immediately isolated him and it shows you what they're up against. Now, you say Trump has, you know, immediately gone to groomer, but that implies that this is already the bottom. But, you know, of course, there are so many allegations that you and I, if we were sitting here brainstorming,

we couldn't come up with the sorts of things that Donald Trump is ready to throw at DeSantis. Well, he's already throwing in the possibly a man thing, which is, I mean, he's really out there. Right. And it's fair to say how much further, how much lower could it go? And I'm just saying there are depths to which you and I and other mortals cannot conceive when we think about where this is going. If you think about the way Trump has mowed down his opponents previously, many of them have wavered and fallen after a few shots like that. We're expecting this battle of titans here. I don't know if Ron DeSantis is up for it. I mean, he's very good at whining about woke corporations, but just the mano a mano with a guy who will go

absolutely anywhere. Say what you will about Ron DeSantis. I'm not a fan. I think he's doing lots of irresponsible things. It seems to me he's got some sort of an internal framework of playing roughly within the rules or what he thinks the rules should be. I don't know if he's able to compete with somebody for whom there are no rules. I mean, it's one thing to beat up Mickey Mouse. It's another thing to go head to head with Donald Trump, who has no rules, no sense of decency. There's nothing he's not willing to do or to countenance. I mean, we know that. I mean, think about, you know, in terms of the bottom, you know, the fact that he went off on Joe Scarborough implying that he had murdered a young woman years ago when, you know, that's clearly a complete lie.

If you're willing to go to murder, then really, I think you've already established that there's nothing you're not willing to say. The real tension for, for Ron DeSantis is there's two things on his brand, right? That he is, you know, he's Trumpian, you know, without the court dates coming. He's Trump. He's, you know, as close as possible. On the other hand, he's also, you know, without the court dates coming. He's Trump. He's, you know, as close as possible. On the other hand, he's also, you know, a fighter and he's, you know, he's a counter puncher. And so at some point, those are intention because is he going to counter punch and punch back at Donald Trump himself? And if he doesn't counter punch, will he look weak? Will he look like a cuck, which he can't afford to do because that destroys his brand. We're seeing other signs of weakness too. I mean, earlier the Ukraine response, Trump can get away with that. You saw a lot of the sort of establishment or what was left of the

Republican establishment in Congress pushing back against DeSantis in a way you don't hear them necessarily pushing back against Trump. So it's still that Trump can get away with things that even Ron DeSantis, who has been the rising star and the great hope for many Republicans, just can't get away with those same things. It sort of indicates what we may be looking at over the next year, and that is it's not a fair fight. No, life is not fair. Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones.

So why not head over to thebulwwork.com and take a look around? Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebullwork.com slash charlie. That's thebullwork.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together. I promise.

So let's go through some soundbites. What's going on over at Fox News where there seems to be a rolling meltdown freakout about all of this. Let's start with, of course, with Tucker Carlson who is suggesting, guys, we all pay off porn stars or something of this. Let's start with, of course, with Tucker Carlson, who is suggesting, guys, we all pay off porn stars or something like this. Let's play Tucker. And in fact, settlements like this, whatever you think of them, are common,

both among famous people, celebrities, and in corporate America. The result is usually known as an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement. In this case, you can believe whatever side you want to believe, but paying people not to talk about things, hush money, is ordinary in modern America. Yeah, tons of people do this sort of thing. Dana? I thought I was the only one, but now I'm realizing that these hush money payments are more widespread than that. Well, at Fox News, it probably is pretty routine, right? Yeah. You know, I don't want to, you know, spread innuendo about Tucker Carlson, but he has been exposing his private parts to those, you know, blue lights or red lights or whatever they were. It's possible that over some period of time, this has, you know, had a cumulative effect on his judgment and his view of the number of American males who have

paid off porn stars using illegal campaign cash. I've just admitted to it. I don't know if you're a man enough to, but- I'm going to pass for at least for now. You have a reputation to uphold. No, I have the glow light on order. I haven't actually started using it yet. But the thing about Tucker's point, you know, that, you know, there are a lot of NDAs. This is not an NDA situation. This is a case involving, you know, the intentional falsification of business records to cover up potential other crimes. So let's just leave that there. Okay. In the category of whatever happened to blank, Alan Dershowitz was on with Gene Pirro last night and essentially comparing Donald Trump. If I follow the logic, Donald Trump to civil rights workers in the 1960s and Alvin Bragg, who is a progressive African-American district attorney to Southern segregationists. This is where Alan Dershowitz has gone. I'm reminded when I was a young civil rights worker and I trained to go down south

in the 1960s, our trainers taught us one thing. Don't spit on the floor. Don't put out your cigarettes because they're targeting you. They're looking for you as civil rights workers. They will indict you for a felony if you put out a cigarette on the floor. And we all learned that lesson because we knew we were being targeted. And now D.A. Bragg is following the absolute lead of the segregationist South prosecutors and police by targeting somebody who is unpopular, just like the civil rights workers were. It's a terrible, terrible precedent to follow,

and it will establish a terrible precedent that precedent to follow. And it will establish a terrible precedent that can again be used as it was used against civil rights. Exactly. All right. We shall overcome. I just had the imagery of the fire hoses and the dogs in the back of this poor Donald Trump there, you know, cowering in the corner. And Jean Pirro saying, all right, all right, even she's trying to back away. Yeah, this is getting a little bit rich and woolly. So I won't even ask, you know, what's happened to Alan Dershowitz. But I mean, that's a stretch. That's a stretch of a stretch.

Look, I think he's enjoyed representing Trump in the past. Maybe we have a new audition here. But is paying hush money to a porn star with illegal campaign cash the equivalent of putting out your cigarette on the floor? Well, this is what I'm looking forward to with Alan Dershowitz, you know, when and if he is indicted down in Georgia for attempting to overturn the election, they're engaging in election fraud. Will he compare that to snuffing out a cigarette on the floor? Or if he is indicted for taking classified documents, will that be the equivalent of just putting out your cigarette? Or if he's indicted for inciting

a riot, an attack on the Capitol, is that the same thing? He's going to have a little bit of work to do. I mean, when you think about it, it is. You're snuffing a cigarette out, you're snuffing democracy out on the floor. I think it's, you know, in my legal judgment, that's a fair case to me. Pretty much the same thing. Okay, so another soundbite here. Jean Pirro, who was on, she was sitting in for, was it Hannity? Wow. But she has a Trump lawyer named Hubba, I think Alina Hubba on.

She's asking, is America going to tolerate this, this terrible thing? And by the way, how many lawyers are there? Because it seems like every time you turn on cable television, there's another lawyer you've never seen, never heard of, nobody in the legal profession has ever heard of. So here is attorney Hubba on with Jean Pirro. The fact that this case is relying on the testimony of a perjurer, of a liar, of a Trump hater, and that is Michael Cohen, by another Trump hater, Alvin Bragg, and by a whole series of people like Mark Pomerantz, the guy who wrote the book. I mean, will America tolerate this in the end if there is a trial?

I don't think so. I don't think they're going to tolerate if there's an indictment, frankly, Janine. I think that if you have anybody watching the news, both liberal and Republican news, you can see that we have balloons coming over from China. We've got Hunter Biden smoking crack and he's not getting any penalty. If it was Eric Trump, we all know he'd be arrested in front of his children in two minutes. In front of his children. Well, when they're working in the Chinese balloon, you know, they're kind of reaching for stuff. I don't know. It just seems like kind of random there. Well, if Counselor Hubba says so, who are we to disagree with her? You're right. There probably is a whole Murdoch owned law school that is generating new legal minds to the cause. pause. So what do you make of the former president calling for protests, take back our country? I got some pushback from some folks yesterday who said, look, this is not the same as January 6th. You

know, he's just, you know, he's putting out this vague, you know, statement that, you know, people should protest. He's not calling for peaceful protests, but there's nothing violent about it. My take on this is wait, because it's going to be a long summer. We're not talking about this coming to fruition necessarily this week. I don't think that people ought to get cocky if people do not show up in downtown Manhattan over the next three days, because this is going to stretch out. And again, you have multiple potential indictments. And so once Trump has laid out the predicate that this is intolerable, that America should not tolerate it, that people should take to the streets, that this is the time,

I think it would be incredibly naive to think that we're not laying the groundwork for something that is potentially quite dangerous, especially in light of what's already happened in this country. Well, right. And now, okay, if January 6th never happened and Trump said these words, you'd say, oh, well, he thinks people should protest. But January 6th happened. We know what Trump means when he says people should go out and protest. So there's a precedent here. There's a reason why people are concerned about this. There's a reason why even Kevin McCarthy, for all his devotion to Donald Trump, was saying, I don't think people should go down that road. Luckily, it appears, you know, outside

of, you know, people massing at Mar-a-Lago, I guess they're going to form a flotilla on the intercoastal there. But there's not a whole lot of activity going on so far. But I think you're right that, of course, nothing has happened yet. So the very notion that he's essentially summoning his troops at this early stage when we don't even know what's going to happen, you know, that's the ominous thing. We know about his peaceful protest calls. Well, exactly. But this is also the crucial context because, you know, Donald Trump, along with Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson, are busy right now doing revisionist history of January 6th, rewriting that story to make it, you know, either a peaceful protest or

a completely justifiable protest. And Trump himself has embraced the protesters, has endorsed them, has, you know, you know, sing songs with them, has promised them pardon. So right now, I think you need to think about January 6th as something that happened in the past, but ongoing, the attempt to revise that is this is completely legitimate. This is what we expect. This is what America should do. And if I'm elected president, I'm going to make sure that you don't get any punishment in light of his call for more protests. I think we ought to see all of this as an ongoing process. These are not just discrete events here. There's a reason why they are investing so much energy,

including Kevin McCarthy, giving out those tapes in this attempt to somehow whitewash Donald Trump's instigation of the first insurrection. Yeah, look, I think the whitewashing that's been going on here is not just to appease and to placate Trump. I think McCarthy is doing it because that's where his membership is. That's where the Republican caucus is. He can't go back from where he is right now because he's got a four-seat majority and they would very quickly turn against him. So I think this is an area in which it's the Trumpification of the party. So I don't think they're specifically concerned about Trump during the revisionism, but this has just become an article of faith within the party now

that the insurrectionists are being poorly treated, that it was a mostly peaceful protest. That is now an article of faith in the mainstream Republicans, even those who aren't MAGA Republicans can't vary from that. So let's talk about Kevin McCarthy. You had a recent column where you sort of joked that no one since the Know-Nothing Party has boasted having so much ignorance as Kevin McCarthy. It doesn't matter what you ask the Speaker of the House, he hasn't read it, seen it, or heard about it. You know, and you go through some of the example, you know, the Dominion documents where Fox House, you know, privately said they thought that Trump's 2020 election lies were bunk. Didn't read that at all.

I didn't see that at all. Or about the way that Tucker Carlson has manipulated the 40,000 hours of video. This, again, is Kevin McCarthy's playbook, right? Is to do these reckless things and then to pretend that he never, doesn't know what happens to them, doesn't hear any of this. Yeah, no, it's a mystery. And of course, the alternative would be to acknowledge the ruin that he is bringing about. So of course, he can't acknowledge it, but we're seeing this play out over and over again. Now, I think this week starting to see more in a more consequential way what's going to happen

with the budget showdown. He's completely gotten himself into a box there, holding spending to 22 levels, not touching Social Security and Medicare, not touching defense spending and not raising taxes because he has promised those various things across the board. And what he's going to be left with is defunding essentially the entire federal government. I mean, forget about defunding the police. We're defunding everybody now. So I think the IOUs that he put out during his quinceañera in January are now coming due. So I don't think he can keep this ball in the air for a whole lot longer. It's just not going to work. You hear them now saying, well, maybe the balanced budget is aspirational and not something we were actually thinking of doing. That's new. Or, you know, a little more of how the default isn't going to

happen. That's entirely up to Joe Biden. It's a figment of his imagination. You know, we're deep into denial and silliness here and ticking now just, what, three months away from this crisis. And I just don't see the way out. I don't either. I have to admit that I've gotten kind of bored with the budget wonkery after all of these decades of falling, but I'm very interested to see what the Republicans come up with in their budget document. Because as you point out, you know, talk about, you know, trying to shove a square into a, you know, round hole here, it's going to be extremely difficult. And so, you know, they're going to come out with this budget that's going to cut everything. Are they going to cut, you know, border guards? Are they going to

cut air traffic controllers? I mean, they have to cut pretty much everything. Are they going to cut border guards? Are they going to cut air traffic controllers? I mean, they have to cut pretty much everything. But the one thing that we've learned, and again, the one through line of all of this is how weak Kevin McCarthy is and how he is unable, incapable of standing up to the crazies in his caucus. And I think, you know, to go back to this, giving out that surveillance footage

was an indication of just how short a leash he is on here. You know, I mean, that's his see no evil approach. But as you point out, you know, given a choice between fact and fiction, between law and anarchy, between democracy and thuggery, the Speaker of the House proclaimed his agnosticism. And in doing so, he threw the power of the speakership behind the insurrectionists and against the constitutional order he swore to uphold. I mean, this is not just a one-off. This is a guy who is willing to do and say anything in order to hold on to that speaker's gavel. And I think this was a pretty good example of it. And I think it's going to have consequences going forward as well as just as backward looking. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I mean, I think most of the consequences are going forward. Now, that great statesman, Matt Gaetz, I think, had it exactly right at the beginning of the whole speakership battle when he said, Kevin McCarthy does not believe in anything. And that's absolutely true. If you go back to his time, he has a fairly liberal voting record, you know, just bringing

pork home to his district. He's not ideological. He doesn't care. But what he does care, and this is how he is different from Paul Ryan and John Boehner, is whatever it is, he will do it, whether that's the security tapes to Tucker Carlson, whether that's whitewashing the insurrection, whether that's walking the plank on the debt, whether that's making these ridiculous defenses of Donald Trump in the Stormy Daniels case, for the very simple reason that, you know, I, Kevin McCarthy, will not be

speaker if more than four people walk away from me. And on any one of these things, many more than four people will walk away from him. It'll repeat itself every time. I have to confess that I'm a little bit jealous of you, Dana, because you got a full Dan Bongino rant directed at you. Dan Bongino, how do we describe him as an exponentially dumber Rush Limbaugh? He's got a podcast, and he went after you for criticizing the decision to release that footage to Tucker Carlson. Yes. And you pointed out that this raised, you know, security concerns, which, by the way, is exactly what, you know, other security officials have said, you know, including the Capitol Police. What do you think triggered Dan Bongino, who is

sort of a, you know, the dumber id of the MAGAverse, why was he so triggered by you calling McCarthy out on the security issue? I don't know, but he was calling me a clown and he was calling me pretty dumb. So I don't know if you're called dumb by Don Bongino, you must be doing something right. Glenn Greenwald and others reacted to this. I don't really understand. Like, I'm all for, you know, if the Capitol Police, the other people responsible for security of the Capitol, our national security, say this isn't a danger to release this, well, by all means, release it. Release it to everybody. You know, the point I was making there and that I believe in is you don't release things. This isn't, you know, the free flow of information to the media. It's not a First Amendment right to print things that are going to endanger the lives of other people.

There's always a balance involved in these things. The Washington Post and others all the time get leaked information that could compromise the national security. And what happens in virtually all these cases is there's a negotiation with the government to say, all right, well, this is what we want to publish. What are your concerns? And you can't always meet them, but there's a back and forth there. In this case, we know the lawyers for the Capitol Police file an affidavit saying they wanted to be able to say what would be dangerous in this release. And they were denied that by the House Republican leadership. So it's not just that they neglected to ask them, they actively refused to

deal with the Capitol Police, which was only trying to protect the security of the Capitol and of the members, the Republican leadership included. I think part of this is that they sense a certain amount of vulnerability with their, you know, we back the blue, we are the party of law and order, in contrast to the way they're handling all of this. You know, I'd make a deep dive into the various all caps rants from Trump last couple of days, which are bizarre, all of them. I mean, they are, you know, ferret level crazy. But the one that really kind of struck me was when he seemed to be appealing to the New York Police Department not

to protect the prosecutors against the protesters. And he said, you know, I am your favorite president, I am your champion, that he's actually trying to influence the New York Police Department to side with him and any protesters. You know, we're in a very strange period here. And I guess I'm sorry to keep repeating this because every couple of days we have to stand and say, this is really not normal. People, do you see what's right in front of you? I love Kevin Williamson's piece in his newsletter, you know, who looked at these true social statements and said, you know, this is not the kind of thing you'd expect from a man who wasn't until five minutes ago, the president of the United States. It is precisely the sort of thing one would expect from a delusional bedlamite who invented imaginary friend, a light of the New

York post about his sex life, then named his youngest son after said imaginary friend. I don't know whether he's mentally ill in a mental sense, but I do know that in the colloquial sense of crazy, he is as crazy as a sack of ferrets. And I mean, this is the moment, I know you've been, like you and I have both been wrestling with this for the last eight years. This is a guy who is so unhinged, who is, you know, has called for the termination of the constitution to restore him in power. And you have an entire political party that looks at him and goes, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe we'll go with this guy again. Maybe we'll support him because, you know, party loyalty is

way more important than keeping this craziest sack of ferrets nut job out of the Oval Office. What do you think of his statement about the police, basically, you know, trying to tell the police, you know, you should be siding with me. You shouldn't be siding with these communist thugs. You shouldn't be protecting the officers of the duly elected government. I mean, you know, it's not a whole lot different from when he was suggesting that Hillary Clinton should be denied her Secret Service protection, and then we'll see what happens. Or, you know, we can't do much about the Obama judges, except if you want to exercise your Second Amendment remedies. So subtle.

Yeah, they're not terribly. I mean, in the context of, as we were talking earlier about the calls to protest, this is why when Trump makes calls to protest, he is not, in fact, Alan Dershowitz talking about, we shall overcome and sit-ins in the South. This man is not Rosa Parks. He is not Rosa Parks, who has actually, unfortunately, been written out now, apparently, of some Florida textbooks. So, future generations of Floridians may indeed think that Donald Trump is very much like Rosa Parks. You know, none of this is normal, as we've said a million times, Charlie, but the other thing that is,

I think, for a large number of the people now leading the country, it is normal. I was just looking at the Congressional Research Service, the average tenure in the House, eight years. And that includes some of the guys around 30, 40 years. I think McCarthy was just saying this morning that half of his caucus has never been in the majority before. So half of his caucus has no idea what the world was like before Donald Trump. So this is normal for them. And that's the real alarm is that, you know, you and I who have a bit more of institutional memory can say this is not normal. But unfortunately for these guys, it is. Well, and also the constant escalation of all of this, you know, and it's hard

not to make this sound like a parody, but, you know, after January 6th, you know, there were critics, you know, us, who would say, you know, this was a coup attempt. It was an attempt to subvert the Constitution. And of course, you know, the immediate response from Republicans was, no, no, it's not. And then Donald Trump goes, yeah, actually, it was. We should terminate the Constitution to put me back into power. And everybody goes, well, okay. And they just move on from this, where he stands up and says, damn right, I tried to terminate the Constitution, and I will do it again. And everybody sort of shuffles their feet and goes, well, you know, at least we'll keep out, you know, Antifa, BLM, and the other, you know, communist atheists, you know, from the Democratic Party, really. Right. Yeah, the answer is George Soros and ESG. Dana Milbank, thank you so much. Dana Milbank is a nationally syndicated op-ed columnist for the Washington Post. His latest book is The Deconstructionist, the 25-year crackup of the Republican Party. I think you'll have to add on another eight years to that. So the next edition,

when it comes out in paperback, the 40-year crackup of the Republican Party. Dana, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It's my pleasure, Charlie. Thanks. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.