The Bulwark Podcast - Dana Milbank: The Chair Was Already Vacant

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Kevin McCarthy hasn't been doing much of anything all year as speaker, except lurching from crisis to crisis and leading from behind. Meanwhile, Trump is much more angry about being seen as less rich than potentially going to prison. Dana Milbank joins Charlie Sykes.

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This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask? BetterHelp online therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. It's October 3rd, 2023. And where do we start? Donald Trump is back in court. John Kelly is confirming a lot of things as his experience

as the former White House Chief of Staff. And of course, we have the incredible dysfunctional House of Representatives. And what's going to happen with Kevin McCarthy? Well, we are joined by Dana Milbank from The Washington Post, who is live on Capitol Hill. But they put you in a box over there. I'm looking at you in this box. Where are you right now, Dana? I put myself in this box, Charlie. In fact, you have to get here early.

You have to write your name on a board and reserve it. So this is a very high privilege that I've acquired this morning. So yeah, I'm about three feet to my right through this padded wall is the House chamber. And then reporters are here on the other side of me. And it's another zany day on Capitol Hill, and nobody knows what the heck is going on. Least of all, Kevin McCarthy. Least of all, Kevin McCarthy. We'll get to that in just a moment because, of course, by the time people listen to this podcast, they might probably know what's going down. So I want to talk about this. Yesterday, to the surprise of absolutely no one, Matt Gaetz went to the floor of the House of Representatives and filed the motion to vacate.

Here's the way it sounded. For what purpose does the gentleman from Florida now seek recognition? Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Clause 2A1 of Rule 9, I rise to give notice of my intent to raise a question of the privileges of the House. The gentleman will state the form of his resolution. Declaring the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives to be vacant. Resolved that the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant. Under Rule 9, a resolution offered from the floor by a member other than the majority leader or the minority leader

as a question of the privileges of the House has immediate precedence only at a time designated by the chair within two legislative days after the resolution is properly noticed pending that designation the form of the resolution noticed by the gentleman from florida will appear in the record at this point the chair will not at this point determine whether the resolution constitutes a question of privilege and then as he's leaving the floor according to to Jake Sherman from Punchbowl News, Democrats broke into loud laughter. I mean, how could they not watching this particular clown car, Dana? So again, by the time people listen to this, they might know what's happened. Is it fair to say, though, that there's kind of a bipartisan consensus that everybody hates Matt

Gates? Yes. I think there's two bipartisan consensus here. Everybody thinks Matt Gates is an ass, and everybody's kind of wondering where Kevin McCarthy's leadership is. Now, it may not be as unanimous on that. Obviously, he has allies on the Republican side, but it's just the same way he sort of bumbled through the lead up to the shutdown, doing nothing at all at the last minute, sort of requiring the Democrats' assistance here. He's done the same thing with this. He finally belatedly made a phone call to Hakeem Jeffries. But yeah, he said he's not doing anything to ask for the Democrats' votes. So, of course, why would they, in fact, do that? It's this leading from behind, if he's leading at all,

that we've seen throughout the entire year. And that's why you're it's this leading from behind, if he's leading at all, that we've seen throughout the entire year. And that's why you're just lurching from crisis to crisis. And that doesn't change after today. Whatever happens, whether he survives or doesn't survive, it's going to still be the same story, right? I mean, we've seen this movie. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, survival is, you know, how do you even define that? You know,etz talks about a resolution to declare the office vacant, it already is vacant. There's nobody doing anything. It's certainly hollow. Okay, so I apologize in advance because I didn't say that it was going to be mathematics here.

But let's do a little bit of math. Okay, so the first thing that happens is there was a motion to place on the table. So does it take 218 votes to do everything? Is that the magic number or does it move around a little bit? It moves around depending on who shows up. So I think there's a couple who won't be here because of illness and whatever else is unexpected. And then of course, people can vote present and that reduces the threshold you need. But yeah, 218 in general is the magic number or a simple majority. So Kevin McCarthy can only afford to lose five Republicans.

And if he does, if he loses more than that, then he needs Democratic help. First of all, we don't know how that's going to turn out. So it comes down to the Democrats. Kevin McCarthy calls the Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. I don't know what he asked for. So just run through, Dana. Why would Democrats want to bail out Kevin McCarthy? If Matt Gaetz wants to stab him in the back, if they want to set the clown car completely on fire,

why would Democrats, might they want to save Kevin McCarthy? So hypothetically, the reason would be if he's offered some sort of a power-sharing arrangement, which he clearly hasn't offered them. And as Jim McGovern, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, said he's not a cheap date. I mean, he's asking for their help, but he's not actually willing to offer anything in advance. So that's really not a reason at all. Kevin McCarthy's every other word out of his mouth is the institution. And, you know, the Democrats should defend the institution. Now, of course, it would be easier to say if his majority hadn't been trashing the institution for the last eight months and change.

So the only remaining argument for the Democrats is he's the devil, you know. So, you know, I don't know if Jim Jordan were the speaker, would things be worse? I think that's kind of a weak reason for Democrats to argue because, you know, how much worse could it be? It's already utterly dysfunctional. They're already trying to impeach President Biden without any evidence whatsoever. So it seems to me that they might as well roll the dice. It's going to be just as dysfunctional no matter who's in charge. If he would have called up Hakeem Jeffries and said, okay, I'm going to drop the Biden impeachment. We're not going to be doing Hunter Biden's laptop. We will have bipartisan votes going forward on everything. But of course, that's not going to happen, right? I mean,

he's not going to do that. Now, the reasons why Democrats would let him sink, this is a much longer list, isn't it, when you think about it? You know, it's like, hey, you guys fight among yourselves. We'll break out the popcorn. Kevin, nice knowing you. Have a great life. I mean, Democrats are not in the mood to bail him out at all, are they? Well, of course not. We may be having a different discussion if this were before he came back from the August recess. And the first thing he did, you know, with Matt Gaetz holding a gun to his head is announce impeachment proceedings, impeachment inquiry. But, you know, as I'm sure you've discussed before, once you start down this path, you're heading towards an impeachment vote

at the very least. So he lost any goodwill he had that way. And he's never worked with the Democrats. Now you think of the two times he's gotten Democratic votes on the debt ceiling and then on the shutdown. In the first instance, he was negotiating with Biden in the White House. But when it comes to the shutdown here, he didn't strike a deal with Democrats. He didn't even tell them what he was doing until, you know, an hour or so before. And he's just assuming that he would get their votes because he'd sort of caved in. But there's been no cross-isle cooperation or

participation. So they wouldn't really lose anything there either because it's already zero. Your colleagues put together a pretty long list of the reasons why Democrats might not want to save Kevin. I mean, just go through this list. It's a very, very long list. You know, they're reminding themselves today that McCarthy did not vote to certify the election on January 6, 2021. A lot of Democrats are never going to forgive McCarthy for voting against certification after the mob was cleared from the building. McCarthy said former President Trump was responsible for the riot and then scurried down to Mar-a-Lago for that infamous picture with Trump with their thumbs up. Democrats have not forgotten that. McCarthy worked against the creation of the January 6th Select Committee.

McCarthy gave the January 6th security footage to since-fired television host Tucker Carlson without releasing it to other news outlets. Democrats remember that. McCarthy delivered votes for the CARES Act, but later became highly critical of pandemic relief legislation. He has worked with Democrats to help put together the microchips manufacturing bill, and then he whipped his party to vote against it. So there's a lot of bad blood here. He backed out of the spending deal. He reneged on the spending deal that he cut with President Biden. And he said in August, he would hold a vote on the floor to open the impeachment inquiry against Biden in September, first day back, as you pointed out. He opened the inquiry without any vote. And then even this last CR thing, he didn't give lawmakers 72 hours to read the short-term spending bill. And then he goes on CBS's Face the Nation and charges Democrats

with wanting a shutdown. So the Democrats are really in kind of an FU mood for Kevin McCarthy. So whatever happens today or tomorrow or the next day is not going to change the dynamic of the House of Representatives, is it? Right. And what you're hearing from Democrats and Republicans, for that matter, is that Kevin McCarthy doesn't have any particular principles. He can't be trusted. So even if he were to say to Democrats, I'll do X, Y, and Z, there would be no reason to believe them. And that's another area where there is some sort of a bipartisan consensus here. I was just talking with other reporters in the basement with Tim Burchett, and he's going to be one of the five,

at least, who will, the Republicans vote to vacate the chair. And he was talking with McCarthy the other day, and he said that McCarthy told him, I really want to be speaker. And he's like, that's the problem right there. That's really what it's all about for him. You know, there's no particular principle there. And so he's going to do whatever suits Kevin McCarthy in the moment. And that's what his critics on the left and the right are unified by. These divisions really seem to be intense. They seem to be personal. I mean, obviously, there's some substance, you know, on the substance level. Matt Gaetz is leading them down a dark alley. There's no successful endgame. He's putting vulnerable members at risk when he does all this. He's putting the whole agenda. So politically, they're pissed off at him for derailing whatever

was left of the Republican agenda. And they obviously just don't like him. So I guess the question is, you have these splits within splits, you have splits within the conference, you have splits within the Freedom Caucus. You know, going forward, I mean, you've been around a long time. You know, we've seen parties that have been divided. But this strikes me as the kind of division that is not going to be easily healed. It is deep. And there are people saying things on television about one another that I don't know how you walk back from. I don't know how you come back from all this. And again, this is not liberals versus conservatives. This is not, I mean, this seems to be breaking down a lot of different lines when you have Marjorie Taylor Greene

fighting with Lauren Boebert, Freedom Caucus people fighting with, just talk to me about the depths of the feeling. I mean, these guys really hate one another at this point. And I'm talking about Republicans. Oh, yeah. No, the names being hurled around. Charlatan is the latest one being hurled at Matt Gaetz. And in fairness, there's certainly an element of truth there. We've often said, you know, the House Freedom Caucus is shorthand, but that's not really what it is here. They're split on this. I think it's the ones who, you know, want to burn the whole place down, which is, in fact, a Kevin McCarthy phrase, and those who don't. And how can you count that? Well, there were 90 Republicans who voted to shut down the government rather than take the one alternative, a continuing resolution at the same

spending level. So, okay, so maybe there's 90 out of 222 who want to burn it all down. Or maybe there's, you know, 21, the number who are pretty consistently opposed to McCarthy from the beginning, from the speakership votes now through this. So it's somewhere in there. I mean, the good news, I suppose, is that's not a majority of the House Republican caucus. There are actually still, you know, 100-odd sane people there. The bad news is that's not a majority of the House Republican caucus. There are actually still, you know, a hundred odd sane people there. The bad news is that's a pretty huge number. So it doesn't really matter who the Speaker of the House is. There's no way to govern here. They're taking up a couple more appropriations bills this week. No idea if they're going to pass or not. You know, the

decision was made by Kevin McCarthy with a gun to his head from the extremists that he had to work only with Republican votes. And that's given him five votes on everything. And that's why you're seeing the defense, the Pentagon appropriations bill, you know, they had to take four tries before they could get that through. And that's, you know, that's motherhood and apple pie. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family.

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He shows up at this trial. This is the case brought by Attorney General Letitia James seeking $250 million in damages, disgorging his ill-gotten gains. The judge in the case has already essentially ruled, yeah, you're a fraudster. Now we have to just determine the damages. And because Donald Trump always hires the very, very, you're a fraudster. Now we have to just determine the damages. And because Donald Trump always hires the very, very, very best people, his lawyers apparently forgot to file the paperwork to get a jury trial. This case will be decided by this one judge. So Donald Trump

begins the day by, before they go into court, standing on the steps, attacking the prosecutor and the judge this way. Let me just play the audio of this. There's a judge that should be disbarred. This is a judge that should be out of office. This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he's doing. He's interfering with an election and it's a disgrace. Thank you very much. Wow, this should go well, Dana. Dis barred disgrace should be criminally charged. And then he walks into the courtroom where that judge holds his entire business empire in his hands. It's a terrific tactic. He probably hasn't consulted with his lawyers. I mean, I thought it was terrific that he's out there railing about them denying him the jury trial when it's his own lawyers who did that in

the first place. Look, his brand is anger, but this seems to be less performative anger and more genuine anger. Maybe that goes to the notion that, as you were saying, he has already been declared a fraud. So this goes to the very basis of who he claimed he was, this successful real estate billionaire. The whole basis of the Trump brand we now know is a house of cards. So he has already lost this. And it's a little bit different from rallying Republicans to his side over election cases. This isn't an election case. This has nothing to do with his political standing.

This is the fraud he committed as a businessman. So it really gets, I think, underneath the Trump brand, and failures. Trump University, Trump Vodka, Trump Airlines, Trump Mortgage, GoTrump.com, Trump Magazine, all of these things. And yet somehow, because of his time on The Apprentice, a lot of people think, well, he's not a politician, he's a businessman. They believe all of it. I don't know that this trial changes it. But for Donald Trump, I did think that the rage was particularly raw. I think that that sense of humiliation was particularly raw because I think it was David K. Johnson who said Donald Trump is his money and this is an attack on his money. There's part of him that is more upset over the possibility of being exposed as not being a rich person than of being sent to prison, which seems bizarre. But he seems more upset about this case and what it could do to him than the other cases where he could actually end up having to wear an ankle bracelet. Yeah, no, no, I think that's right. It does come down to

money. And we've learned from the forthcoming Michael Lewis book that he had his price, what was it, $5 billion not to run for president. Can you believe that story? That is so amazing. I mean, can we just stop there, this story? That there was a plan to pay him off? Like if we give you $5 billion, will you go away? Is this real? Is this real life, Dana? Throw in an island in the Caribbean too. I mean, instead of all these billionaires trying to raise money for Nikki Haley, just give him the $5 billion and be done with the whole thing. So yeah, I think that is a lot of it. It's who Trump is. And also this case, you know, goes after his family as well. So that's another big

trigger for him. And who knows, you know, since we don't actually know how leveraged he is, the extent to which this exposes overvaluing, reducing his net worth, his ability to pay his debt. So we don't know what actual financial pressure he's under either. So the other big story of the day, well, there are actually so many, John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, former general, confirms a lot of stories that we'd already heard to CNN. The details are really quite dazzling. You know, what can I add that has not always been said that Kelly said when he was asked to weigh in on his former boss, a person that thinks those who defend the country in uniform

or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat or spend years being tortured as POWs are all suckers because there is nothing in it for them. A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because it didn't look good for me. A person who demonstrated open contempt for a gold star family, for all gold star families on TV during the 2016 campaign and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America's defense are losers and would not visit their graves in France. By the way, this confirms the reporting from Jeffrey Goldberg. And then he

goes on to say a person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about, a person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason, referring to Mark Milley, in expectation that someone will take action, a person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators, a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our constitution, and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said, Kelly concluded. God help us. So, wow, this is the guy that was Donald Trump's own chief of staff. Yes, and it's profoundly damning.

But can I just say, John Kelly, I mean, come on. He's a little late to the party here. The party's still going on. It's hardly a profile encouraged to be doing this. He could have done it when he was chief of staff and at Homeland Security. He could have done it by not being anonymous with Jeffrey Goldberg. But I'm not going to hold him up and Bill Barr and whoever else is now excoriating the president that they served, you know, his profile's encouraged. But

that said, it's good to have one more piece of it out there. Of course, the Trump supporters who would have dismissed the anonymous allegations are now going to dismiss the RINO General Kelly's claims as well. But look, it's certainly better to be on the record and to be as forceful as this, you know, better late than never. It is remarkable, and I don't think there's any historical precedent, you correct me if I'm wrong about this, of this many members of the cabinet, this many close advisors of a president coming out and publicly saying, this man is unfit to serve. He's a monster. Now, I'm so jaded. I don't know that this moves the needle, but somebody ought to put,

speaking of money, you know, the people who had the $5 billion lying around to pay off Donald Trump, put this on the air. This man, you know, is a decorated general who was the chief of staff. This is what he says. This is what Bill Barr says. This is what, and you can have a long list, you know, former secretaries of defense. And at some point you would think that's going to shake some confidence, you know, perhaps even just the, the anti-anti Trumpers who are saying, yes, you know, we're against Trump now, but of course we'll support him in a general election. I mean, it is kind of amazing. It's not just that he says, I won't support him. It's the how horrific it was to see this man up close and realize what a menace he is. And it's not just us. I mean, this is Trump's own appointee. This is the guy that Trump put in charge of Homeland Security

and then made chief of staff. Right. The God help us is particularly evocative. Yeah, I like your idea. Maybe they could sort of reenact the praising of Trump around the cabinet meeting, but actually select all of the former advisors and all the horrible things they've said about him that they could have said at the time. But at least you're saying now to his supporters, it just, again, confirms that there's a conspiracy. Presumably, John Kelly is now part of the deep state, like all the others. But of course, there are other people out there who are sensible, and perhaps a few of them have not made up their mind about Donald Trump. And for those three

Americans, I think they should be made aware of General Kelly's remarks. select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes, but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Whether you're navigating workplace stresses, complex relationships, or family dynamics, therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding a way to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover,

give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. My colleague Tim Miller has an interesting piece in the Bulwark today about Trump 2.0. We've talked about Trump 2.0. I've made the case that Trump 2.0 would, you think the first Trump term was bad, Trump 2.0 would be exponentially worse.

There's a guy out there named, and this is one of those, like, do you take it seriously or literally or is it a joke? A guy named Mike Davis, who goes on and has some interesting things to say, you know, about mass firings, indictments of political foes, detaining a lot of people in Gitmo. As Tim writes, okay, Mike Davis, there's not some random caddy that Donald Trump drummed up at Bedminster to issue foreign policy discreets. He's a guy who had serious jobs in the Bush Department of Justice. He worked for Newt Gingrich. He worked for Judge Gorsuch. He was chief counsel for Senator Grassley when he was Senate Judiciary Chairman, where Davis says he oversaw the floor votes for 278 nominees, including the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. So this is Mike Davis. Let me just play a little soundbite.

Mike Davis has now become, you know, kind of a feature on right-wing media. You know, he'll show up on Real America's Voice and Newsmax and Bannon's War Room, where, you know, he preaches the gospel of Trump. But listen to this conversation that he had a few days ago about his plans. Mike, I've never called for lava to rain down from the heavens, but maybe upon Washington, D.C., would you be that sweet, red hot lava for us? I've never been called sweet and you call me sweet ginger. So I think I'm in, Ben. During my three-week reign of terror as Trump acting attorney general, before I get chased out of town with my Trump pardon, I will reign hell on Washington, D.C.

We've talked about this, Ben. I have five lists ready to go, and they're growing. List number one, we're going to fire. We're going to fire a lot of people in the executive branch of the deep state. Number two, we're going to indict. We're going to indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden, except for the five-year-old granddaughter who they refused to acknowledge for five years until the political pressure got to Joe Biden. Number three, we're going to deport. We're going to deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing, anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents. We're going to put kids in cages. It's going to be glorious. We're going to detain a lot of people in the D.C. Gulag and Gitmo. And list number five, I'm going to recommend a lot of parts. Every January 6th defendant is going to get a pardon, especially my hero horn man. He is definitely at the top of the pardon list.

Okay. So Dana, I mean, obviously he's trying to be inflammatory there and he's trying to back off from this. Hey, I'm just having a little bit of fun, but whoa, this guy is, again, this is not some just rando guy. This is somebody who has played a significant role and the kind of person, quite frankly, that is going to end up in Trump 2.0. So do you take this seriously? Do you take it literally? Is it a joke? What do you make of a guy of his stature saying shit like this? Well, Charlie, on the positive side, I don't hear him calling for a summary execution.

So we should. Not yet. We should establish that baseline. Not killing people stone cold dead at the border if they have the wrong color backpack. Right. I mean, I think you have to take this sort of thing at face value, particularly in light of all that we've seen about the plans underway to do right in Trump's view or the Trump advisor's view the second time what they couldn't do the first time, and that is decimate the civil service and essentially roll down all of the safeguards

that they weren't able to roll down the first time around. And there is this, I pick it up a lot on the Hill here too, this sense, this desire for vengeance, for punishment. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who might as well be the Speaker of the House, was saying she wanted a shutdown to punish Washington because Washington punished the rest of the country with COVID shutdowns. I live in Washington. I didn't try to punish anybody. But the notion that vengeance must be exacted on people who live or work in this city. So that's a very common thing we're getting, and it often is accompanied by intimations of violence. It is interesting what passes for humor now. I mean, over the weekend, you saw this. Donald

Trump goes over to California. I'm speaking to a raucous group of Republicans. We talked about this on the podcast yesterday. Expands his list of people that he wants killed, shoplifters, that if you come out of a store and you've been shoplifting, you can expect to be shot. Apparently, he has a different standard for people caught defrauding people or stealing or lying about something. But also, he's joking about Nancy Pelosi's husband being beaten up. And the crowd loves it. They think it's funny. I mean, there is something that's cultivated cruelty and taste for brutality, which we can say, oh, they're just joking. They're trying to troll us.

But these sorts of things do have a coarsening effect, don't they? I mean, at a certain point, and the fact that this guy goes on the Benny Johnson show and talks about locking kids in cages as if somehow that's triggering to the libs, that will cause liberal tears. So we're going to rip families apart. We're going to put people in Gitmo. And, you know, there's a price to be paid for this, isn't there? Absolutely. Sort of the normalization of cruelty. Yes.

You know, the Paul Pelosi thing in particular, you know, I mean, yes, he's doing a whole lot better. But from what I understand, he's still not fully recovered from being attacked by a madman with a hammer in his home. Yeah, it's worth pausing. That's why I said earlier, though, the fact that he didn't mention summary executions, that's not a joke. Okay, so that shows you the state of where we are here. So we haven't had as much political violence as I might have expected. I don't think we're out of the woods by any stretch here, but we may be in a little bit of a lull here. But I think it's very valuable that you're playing these reminders that this is

a constant threat from this language. Well, the normalization of the language of violence, I think, can lead to the normalization of violence, especially given what's going to be happening in 2024. OK, so I tried to avoid too much of the rank horse race punditry. But what do you make of the sort of last minute wish casting by the donor class that maybe Glenn Youngkin will come riding over the hill and save republicans uh how seriously should we take that kind of like okay we need somebody if it's not going to be desantis which it's not going to be if it's not going to be haley which it might be but what do you make of this the yunkin buzz it's bizarre you know i think we have we all have this sort of thing that we assume that wealthy people are smart because they've made a lot of money it's like like the Elon Musk effect. What planet are they

on? They think this is a possibility. Look, I admire their aspirations. In theory, it is a good idea to try to narrow down the field to have one alternative, one alternative to Trump. It's Trump or this, not Trump or half a dozen people yammering at each other on the stage. So they're correct about that. It would be a good idea to narrow it down. But it's, yes, something could happen with Donald Trump's health, or maybe something happens in the judicial system that takes things in a different direction. But you also just have to look at what's obvious out there.

And the Republican voters, by and large, have made their decision. And this seems like a continuation of the magical thinking that we've seen really from the beginning, which is that we're not going to attack Donald Trump, we're not going to break with him, because something, something, something, magic unicorn, maybe he dies. There was never any plan to take him out. It was just this assumption that somebody else would come along and do it. And so this feels like a continuation of that kind of magical thinking. So, you know, Nikki Haley is having her moment, but unless you have that consolidation, it's not going to actually go anywhere. And I'm trying to think of like, what would change the dynamic? What surprise could

happen other than the meteor striking? And, you. And in the movie, Donald Trump takes the stand in one of these cases and completely melts down, right? I mean, in the movie, and people go, oh my God. Okay, so I'm trying to imagine, he says, by the way, do you think he's actually going to testify in this New York case? Do you think he will actually, he says he's going to do it. This guy's taking the Fifth Amendment every time they've asked him about this stuff. I am sure I don't know. If past his prologue, somebody will actually talk some sense into him at some point. In the movie on Earth 2.0, he goes on and he has some spittle-flecked meltdown, and everybody goes, oh my god, the guy belongs in a padded cell.

But we've been through that. We've had the spittle-flecked thing. We've had sequels. We've had prequels. Yeah, that's right. And people go, more. We want more of that sort of thing. So I just don't see that happening. Okay. So I talked about this with Will Salatin yesterday. What is your gut sense on the RFK Jr. running as an independent? Because people are all over the place on this. There was one poll, I think it was the Echelon poll that showed that it would actually increase it, that if he ran, it would increase Donald Trump's margin. There are a lot of Republicans who are engaging in their own version of bedwetting about this, saying what a disaster it is,

because this will siphon off all the anti-vax crazies from Donald Trump. What do you think? I mean, what does RFK Jr. on the ballot do? Well, first of all, I don't think he'll be on the ballot by and large. I think I can say this objectively. The man is stark raving mad. It's not an ideological challenge to Biden or to Trump. It's a challenge to common sense. I mean, and this isn't just sort of election denial. This is saying that, you know, they're spying on us with 5G and they've put things in the water supply to control us and to turn people into transgender. I mean, it's just beyond. We saw that when, you know, Republicans tried to bring him up here to the Hill, which basically became a forum for his anti-Semitic

statements and the craziness. So I just think, I don't see this as the usual sort of ideological challenge. I just think it's a challenge to sanity, which of course we can, well, they can. Okay. Right. Can I break this to you, Dana? But if you're interested in having your sanity challenge, you already have a man in this race. Yeah, that's right. If you want crazy, go with the real thing. Do not go with the knockoffs. It's a cheap imitation to talk about the water supply. See, I'm sorry to resurrect the phrase low information voter, but let's be honest. There's a lot of people out there who will go, hey, Kennedy, I like the Kennedys, RFK, I remember how great he was.

And they go into that voting booth. I just don't know. And I just think that there are some of these things that we know we go through all of the crazies, but you have to know about it. You have to hear about it. You have to care about it. And we have millions of Americans that are on Google right now looking up, I don't know, the latest Bachelor episode. I don't know who it was who was doing the analysis. I think Peter Baker. Like, what are people actually listening to? I mean, Taylor Swift is a lot more interesting than this.

So I don't know. By the way, should Joe Biden pick Taylor Swift as his VP? No, I'm just kind of sorry. Testing your sanity. From your lips to God's ears. I know we live in crazy times. And I know that the right has its own incentive structure and that they have to have somebody that they, you know, target and get people outraged about. But the choice to go after Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey just strikes me as like, do you guys have any sort of sense that, okay, maybe that's not the person that you want to go after, that maybe this is not going to be a, maybe they're so jazzed up by what they did

to Bud Light, they're thinking, if we can do to Taylor Swift what we did to Bud Light, Taylor Swift is not Bud Light. This is not the same thing. It's not going to play out that way. And where is their man, Donald Trump, weakest in the American electorate? Well, it is with young voters. So you can see them getting together and saying, how are we going to get right? How are we going to get back young women? We're going to make a demon of Taylor Swift. Good luck to that.

I hope it propels Taylor Swift to be more active. You saw that, you know, she puts out something on Instagram and 40,000 people registered to vote. There's an incredible untapped potential there. You know, it's the same way we used to talk about Oprah, I think. You know, she is larger than life here. Well, let me throw out one other random topic because it's just something that I don't understand that maybe you can explain to me. So the U.S. Supreme Court has a series of really hot-button cases. They're going to be taking up the abortion pill case, the question about whether people who have been charged or convicted of domestic abuse can have firearms. I mean, there's going to be a lot of very, very controversial decisions coming down.

There have been. And yet the court faces this crisis of public trust. You know, Justice Roberts has tried to be the institutionalist who's presided over this. I guess the thing that I don't understand is it seems the easiest possible thing for the court to do is to adopt an ethics code that puts them in line with the rest of the federal judiciary. This doesn't seem hard to me. In fact, I think it came as a shock to people to realize that the Supreme Court doesn't have the same ethics code. And these things are embarrassing. They're not defensible unless you're just sort of locked in. So why doesn't the court, just on a

by ideological basis, say, hey, listen, we have a problem. If we're going to be wading into these things, we need to shore up our image, the consensus of support, and the integrity of the court by doing X, Y, and Z. Why don't they just do that? Man, it makes sense to me, Charlie. They haven't let me in on their internal deliberations there, so I don't know what power it is that Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito hold over the rest of them. It may not work that way. It may not be a, okay, a 5-4 vote, therefore we adopt an ethics policy. But man, it does seem to me that Clarence Thomas and the Koch brothers or whoever is currently manipulating him have an extraordinary sway over the rest of the justices there. Yeah, you would think that

they would do it for their own sake, but I mean, the loss of trust, the loss of confidence in the court, yes, that Clarence Thomas stuff certainly isn't helping. But I think those people already lost confidence because of the Dobbs decision, which is still red hot out there. And obviously another abortion decision could be just extraordinary. As much as Clarence Thomas is the focus of this, I think that Alito is probably the problem because he has gotten his back up and seems to, you know, be in that sort of like, you know, I'm not giving an inch. The fact that he tries to pre-butt a story by going to the Wall Street Journal and, you know, talking about these things. And remember when justices, you know, kind of kept their heads down and, you know, didn't open the robes that much.

And Alito seems particularly bitter and particularly rigid on all of this. But again, you know, if we sit around waiting for people to do the rational thing, we're going to be disappointed and we're going to be waiting a long time. Dana Milbank, thank you so much for joining us from Capitol Hill on an amazing day. So hopefully you'll be able to exit that soundproof booth and go see the clown car in action for the rest of the day. So hopefully you'll be able to exit that soundproof booth and go see the clown car in action for the rest of the day. And we'll have to talk again soon. Charlie, I've enjoyed these few minutes of rationality before plunging back into the madness. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll 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.