The Bulwark Podcast - Isaac Arnsdorf and Joe Perticone: Trying to Finish What They Started

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Steve Bannon fueled the rise of MAGA by offering true believers a sense of community and purpose. A new book tells the story of ordinary Americans swept up in the movement. Plus, hanging out at the DC jail with the Jan 6 choir, and the House drama over Ukraine and FISA. Isaac Arnsdorf and Joe Perticone join Tim Miller. show notes: Isaac's book, "Finish What We Started"

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We got a double header for you today. Up first, Joe Pertico and our man on Capitol Hill. He was hanging out outside the D.C. prison, you know, listening to that January 6 prison choir.

They're beautiful. They're beautiful tones last night. So I want to ask him about that. After that, on the other side, we got Isaac Arnsdorf, Washington Post reporter. He's got a new book out. He's on the ground in Arizona. So we've got some Arizona talk. He's got some new reporting about what the Trump team is thinking their plans are for Ukraine. So big show, Joey P. Thanks for getting on the pod, bro. Glad to be on again. So talk to us last night. Was there singing? Was there a choir? There were like five people there. Why were you one of the five people outside the DC prison? They are there every single night, been there every single night since August 2022. And I was like, I've been meaning to go. The weather's been bad in DC. And I was like,

might as well pop down once it gets nice. It was nice last night. There were a handful of them. They have the inmates call in and they have a phone held up to the mic. And then the inmates talk to the attendees. And then at one point, like the call dropped, which was blamed on the FBI and the eclipse. The FBI and the Eclipse? Yeah, it's kind of a real-life manifestation of all the weird things that you see online. A lot of these people spend all their time online. One of the guys who organizes the live streams told me that he's in an Airbnb right now, but he was camping in the woods near DC from April to November and kind of lives off of donations or little things he sells from his merch store,

which is like January 6th attire. And this guy is a January 6th-er? He was there, but he just wasn't imprisoned? No, he's just a supporter. He had no connection to them until a couple years ago he was like i used to pass out constitutions and camped out on the national mall he's like and then i met these folks he's like and now i do this he's like i've never met any one of the inmates and so it was kind of eye-opening in that like the way people find their little online communities where they are

repeatedly told things they want to hear and they become like these january sixers despite having no connection to it that happens in real life too at a much smaller scale but like this guy was not involved and just now lives it and lives in the woods or in an airbnb depending on how many donations he gets a month. I always had a soft spot in my heart for the pocket constitution people. And so it makes me a little sad to see somebody slip down the slope from being a pocket constitution person to being a, I want to overthrow the government person. That makes me a little sad. Yeah, it was quite sad. Usually you see this kind of behavior online and you're like, wow, that's crazy. But being able to put faces to all these people was, it's just shocking. Like I've met a million people at the hundreds of Trump rallies that I've attended as a reporter, but the ones who are out there every single night, and like it was, you know, 75 degrees last night. They're out there when it's 25 degrees.

Why do they get to call every night, the prisoners? I mean, my only experience being in a prison, I was in the Vail County Jail for about three hours for a minor possession of alcohol ticket. It wasn't exactly very strict, you know, high security there in Eagle County. But I don't think that, you know, generally speaking, prisoners get to have nightly calls out to protests. How does that work? I guess they do. Because at one point when one of the inmates was talking, there was a, you have one minute remaining over what he was saying. And he was like, damn it. And then, you know, then they go on to the next person. So like each person waiting

in there, I guess, gets an allotment of time to do a call and they're doing it to this vigil instead of presumably to their families. But there were some family members there, like their wives of the J6ers out there. And then they're doing it to the live stream too. There were about a thousand people on the live stream, but it seems to be obviously the same people every night. Huh. Well, that's an interesting, depressing bonus. I asked you to be on the pod today not to talk about the January 6th prisoners, not hostages, prisoners who attacked the Capitol. I want to talk to you about a record that was set.

Mike Johnson as speaker here, this Congress, it was, I i think the seventh time that they tried to bring up a rule to have a vote uh that it was voted down this has not happened since the 1970s these guys can't not only can they not pass anything they can't even bring anything up to vote in this case it was on the fisa bill we haven't talked about the fisa kind of debate on the podcast yet so i just wonder if you kind of brief us on what the hell is happening with regards to the FISA reauthorization and the continued dysfunction of the House Republicans. So the rule votes failed would have been more than seven in this Congress. But during the debt limit deal, Dems bailed out Republicans on one of them, which at the time, like, and you keep seeing it, and I think you're seeing it less, is when the rule votes fail, you'll see the typical horse race covering outlets go, this is embarrassing for McCarthy or embarrassing for Mike Johnson.

It's like, well, you need to be capable of shame for it to be embarrassing. It is now a tactic. And it's interesting because the Freedom Caucus was founded in 2015 when Boehner was speaker for the purpose of being allowed to vote on things that they thought deserved votes. Just for context, for people who don't kind of remember that, the complaint was the speakership, the leadership, was not bringing up amendments or not bringing up legislation to a vote. Yeah, it was a very closed process. And it was like that under Paul Ryan, too. And McCarthy, to his credit, allowed this more open process because they exacted all these demands from him. But that's what the Freedom Caucus wanted. But now the Freedom Caucus functions to block votes from happening.

They do not want the FISA vote. And they say, well, we need to add these amendments or we need to do these things. They want to block existing things from happening. They don't want to vote on Ukraine. They don't want to vote on debt deals. They don't want to vote on all these things. And so- They're nihilists. Say what you want about the tenants of Tea Party,

Tea Party Republicans, but at least they had an ethos kind of thing. These guys are nihilists. Yeah. Well, and it's now just like, they've been revealed to not be like these principled conservatives fighting for an open process they're literally just trying to exact what they want on the entire congress even when the majority wants to do everything else

and the fisa bill itself the function of this debate is essentially this is a reauthorization of the fisa tool which allows government to spy on terrorists and and you do there is a reauthorization of the FISA tool, which allows government to spy on terrorists. And there is a process. There's a separate FISA court. You've got to get a warrant to be able to do this. There is a certain brand of, I guess you can explain to me if I'm wrong about expressing this, but there's a certain brand of Matt Gaetz Freedom Caucus types that are under the impression that this is being used to spy on conservatives, you know, who post wrong

thoughts on X. And so, they want to block this for that reason. Is that basically the gist of it? Yeah. The opposition isn't some principled libertarian one. It is, they're using government to target conservatives, which usually doesn't hold the same weight as, you know, the purpose of this, which is to stop 9-11s from happening. Right. There was one example of FISA abuse, I guess, which was regarding Carter Page, you know, in 2016. That's what these guys all point back to. But Carter Page was a spy. I mean, Carter Page did work with the Russians. It just was that the way that they went about that, getting that warrant on him, and then Carter Page ends up being an advisor to Trump. There's some misrepresentations

on the application for the warrant, but there was accountability for that. So, you know, there are principled legitimate calls for FISA reform, you know, by certain libertarian type Republicans, but most of the jabronis that are doing this now, it's just all part of like, it's the culture war thing. The government's coming for us. Yeah, the real critics were like justin amash when he was in the house and then a lot of the members on the left who have opposed this since its creation yeah okay i want to talk about uh status with mike johnson here he's heading down to mar-a-lago tomorrow i want to get that before i lose you but mona Charon wrote today in the Bulwark, the GOP is the party of Putin. Mike Johnson is a congressional chief of a party that contains a passionate Putin wing. And so he did. There's this week, Zelensky has warned that

Ukraine will lose the war if the aid is not approved. Yet Johnson is headed not to Kiev, but to Mar-a-Lago. We've been having our periodic updates on this. There was some, I guess it was Ryan Fitzpatrick that was like, there's got to be updates on this. There was some, I guess it was Ryan Fitzpatrick, that was like, there's going to be a Ukraine vote. There was some glimmers of hope, little tiny glimmers since we last spoke. Are you seeing any glimmers? Well, Scalise said he was not aware of what Fitzpatrick said.

So I don't know. If there's going to be a vote, it's highly unlikely it would be on the standalone foreign aid package that's already passed the Senate, which if there was a standalone vote on that, it would pass and then it would go right to Biden's desk. That's not going to happen. There's going to be conditions. What that looks like, we have no idea. Mike Johnson's been all over the place. He doesn't really know what he's doing. So he says, oh, there's got to be a border component. Or sometimes he'll say, we're looking at our options. Other ideas might be that they will condition it on a pause to Biden's pause on the liquefied natural gas ban.

Great. We'd love that. Let's do it. I mean, they're so directionless and it it's so like any any idea of voting on something will require a heavy lift in some other unrelated category, which as we've seen with the border is not going to happen, even if they keep insisting that it could, it won't. And so they're gonna have to figure out some kind of deal. And I don't think they can do that. I've said for months that I think that Ukraine is the Scalia seat of this cycle, that it won't be decided until after the election. Yeah, nothing would make me feel more like a 90s college Republican again. I guess I wasn't in college in the 90s,

college Republican again, then the Republicans cutting a deal where we're exporting natural gas and giving weapons to Ukraine. I mean, that would would make me feel great but it just doesn't really seem like that's the actual concern here so the actual concern is that as mona points out there's a putin wing in the party marjorie taylor green has this jewish space laser of damocles hanging over his head um if he wants to if he wants to bring up ukraine aid and fisa it's kind of it's the same people it's a little bit of an overlapping group of people i guess and and even some of the more normal people like chip Roy were like, if he brings up Ukraine and FISA back to back, then, you know, his speakership is in threat. Thus takes us to his pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Playbook's take on this, Politico Playbook's take is that the trip

to Mar-a-Lago is a good thing for Mike Johnson because Trump is giving him cover and maybe Trump will give him the air cover to bring up these bills. I'm pretty skeptical of that. Punchbowl's take is that Trump is blocking essentially and is hampering Johnson by blocking the ability to bring these things up. How do you kind of see that and see Mike's trip down to South Florida? I think that it's a huge waste of time. If Mike Johnson thinks he's going to get cover from Trump in this respect, that's what Kevin McCarthy did. When Kevin McCarthy prematurely launched an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden,

he thought that was an appeasement, and it did not work. And so if Mike Johnson goes and does some kooky, lies-ridden press conference, or likely not a press conference, but an avail with Trump, that's not going to matter if he still pursues FISA and Ukraine. Yeah, because that's what they've said they're going to talk about, the election integrity. You can do that all you want. But if you move forward with FISA or Ukraine, you're going to create a handful of enemies and he can only lose, you know, a handful. He can only lose a handful. I think a lot of Dems will back him up, but they can't hash that deal out ahead of time because working with Democrats is the ultimate sin. Democrats, if they're going

to say we'll save Mike Johnson if he puts Ukraine on the floor, they have to proactively say it on their own. They can't have that agreement in secret because then that's, you know, Johnson cutting a deal with Dems. And that's even worse for him. The best potential outcome here, we're on the darkest timeline that this is the best potential outcome, is that Trump actually doesn't care about policy. You saw this a little bit in the early Paul Ryan era, where kind of Trump let Paul Ryan do what he wants. And what he would say on Twitter was different things, but he wouldn't actually work anything. And so maybe the theory of the case is that Trump gives Johnson enough cover to protect him from Maga Marjorie, you know, doing a motion to vacate. Johnson brings up a couple of

these things. Trump bleats out about how, oh, it's we shouldn't do FISA and the rhinos are folding and the rhinos working at Democrats. He doesn't actually stop it. And he kind of gives Mike a little bit of a sheen of protection to pass this stuff. And then eventually this has an end date, right? Like Mike is just playing with fire just and his whole existence then rests on Daddy Trump protecting him. But I guess his whole existence already existence then rests on daddy trump protecting him but i guess his whole existence already kind of rests on daddy trump protecting him so why not give this a try i think trump kind of stepping back would be a miscalculation on his part because from what we saw in the primaries like even when he was basically running uncontested after nikki dropped

out is there's the lack of enthusiasm there are a lot of people still voting for Nikki, still voting for DeSantis. And I think it hurts his enthusiasm when on top of this, you have him being soft on abortion. Let's say he lets Ukraine happen. He has the power to intervene. I think that that only adds to the waning enthusiasm that he's dealing with, and I think is a very undercover component of this race. The people that are voting for Nikki were never enthusiastic about him. They were always the nose holders. I mean, you think that he has potential base concerns? I don't know. I'm a little skeptical of that. I would say that there's a sliver of the base. And like enthusiasm matters. And I don't think that Biden creates the same kind of rage enthusiasm that

Obama did at all or Hillary did. No doubt. Well, Joe, you've been the merchant of death on prediction. So I've got a final one for you. Johnson says that he still thinks we can get Pfizer done by the end of the week.

It's Thursday at 9 49 AM and New Orleans as we're taping this. What do we think? What kind of odds do you give Mike on that prediction? Maybe. This might be a Monday night or Tuesday night thing. I forget which day they're slated to come back. A huge motivating factor for members of Congress is the idea of working on a weekend. That gets stuff done is when they're like, oh no, we'll have to be here on the weekend. So that could be a motivating factor. But clocks ticking. We'll keep an eye out.

I mean, it's going to be kind of challenging for him to be in Mar-a-Lago talking about election integrity, keeping Daddy Trump happy. And also, you know, reauthorizing our national security services, different functions that they use to keep us safe. Joe Perticone, we're going to keep having you on, keep us updated on what... There's going to be so much not happening on the Hill, and we're going to need you to explain to us in what manner it's not happening over the course of the year. There's the most happening when nothing's happening.

Exactly. That's how it is. Thank you, Joe Perticone. Back on the other side with Isaac Arnsdorf, national political reporter at The Washington Post, author of the brand new book, Finish What We Started, The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy. Since the last segment, we have news that OJ Simpson has died of cancer or murdered by cancer, as the Drudge Report put it.

Isaac, I don't know, you're younger than me. Do you have a formative memory of the OJ chase? Or were you like, were you a toddler? My version of the OJ chase is watching Trump's motorcade go to court to turn himself in in Manhattan. Okay. Or Balloon Boy. Were you old enough for Balloon Boy? Okay. Man, I hate this. Boy, this is making me feel middle aged. I was pretty young for OJ, but I have two formative memories. One was my cousin was at my house. We were in our basement watching the car chase that cut out of a basketball game. It must have been a middle school or elementary school. We thought it was really cool. We had no idea about the context,

but it was our first car chase. Then during the trial, my parents, my parents who never did this, mom, if you're listening, I know you were in my life constantly 24 hours a day but they took like one vacation during my childhood without the kids everything else was kids vacations and it happened during the oj trial and the woman the baby sat us was like obsessed with it and watched court tv all day reported back to mom when she got back i was like like, I don't know about this lady. She just watched Corotv and smoked cigarettes all day long. Anyway, RIP OJ Simpson. Isaac, thanks for being on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Tim. For people that don't know you, you've written this book, Finish What We Started, The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy. It was

a lot of time on the ground in Arizona and in other places. We overlapped in Arizona a couple times. And so I'd like for you to just start. We'll get into the kind of book and the themes, but just talk about your time and of reporting out in the MAGA movement in Arizona and around the country and kind of some big picture takeaways. Yeah, I mean, this reporting really started in early mid 2021 when Trump himself was really out of the picture. But there was a lot of action going on on the ground among Trump supporters that we didn't know how it was going to turn out at the time. But in hindsight, and through the story as it shaped up for this book, really paved the way for his comeback and the way that the party has consolidated around election denial in the last several years. And so I was just out meeting so many people who, you know, were not famous names

and were never going to be headline makers in a newspaper article, but struck me as being kind of the most meaningful and interesting conversations that I was having. And so the book just kind of the most meaningful and interesting conversations that I was having. And so the book just kind of became an outlet to share that experience of, you know, again, things that aren't ever going to be headline news, but are a different way of thinking about the story of what we've all lived through over the past few years. Yeah, I think it's just so important. You were on Bannon's podcast earlier talking about this. That's always a strange experience. You're walking on a tightrope, you know, you don't you hate to be complimented by Steve Bannon, but like every once in a while, Steve Bannon's right. It's a very annoying situation that you have to deal with. I've had to deal with it many times. The one thing that I think that he saw in this book that is maybe one of three things in

life that I agree on with him is just you recognize when you're actually with the grassroots Republicans is when you can really understand where the power is with the party. You know, we have a mutual, I guess, friend, in my case, source, and yours, Kathy Petsis, who is in Maricopa County, who you write about in the book. And she is this kind of longtime traditional elephant brooch type Republican woman who's been a part of the party, her family, I forget if it was her uncle or dad that was the party chair in Arizona. And like seeing this through her eyes, and she's like going to the meetings, going to the door knocking, you can see the change in the party from the bottom up, right? So anyway, talk about, you know, Kathy and talk about what you saw, you know, at a precinct level

happening with the party and how it was changing and what the kind of old time activists thought about the new crowd. Yeah, well, I mean, one of the most interesting parts of reporting this over the years and developing this relationship with Kathy were the times when we sort of had those different perspectives, like when I first met her, and she was encountering all these new people coming into the party who were motivated by Steve Bannon's show and the stolen election myth and explicitly with a purpose of getting rid of people like her. And she was sure that this was not going to last, that these people were going to get frustrated and disappear. And she knew from all of her door knocking and electioneering, she was very sure that she represented the party, not these people. And I remember thinking like, Kathy, these people are coming for you. I wish

I could warn you. And then the primaries was with her in that moment of devastation when the more moderate gubernatorial candidate who she was hoping for lost to Carrie Lake and Karen Taylor Robson. Exactly. And Kathy is confronting with like, how can I belong to this party that nominates Carrie Lake? But then again, in November, when, you know, I like, I think probably you and most everyone else was expecting a red wave and expecting Republicans to dominate. And Kathy, from knowing her district and knowing her people, thought they were going to faceplant. And she was absolutely right. That is what happened.

It's like being in the eye of the storm, Kathy, right? Because it's like these are the people that, you know, when I talk about the red dogs and this reorientation, it's like you have to be in the eye of the storm. And there are two places where this is happening. And they're going opposite directions, right? It kind of depends who you're spending time with. If you're spending time in Maricopa County, with let's just be honest, wealthy, upper middle class, Republican types who had moderate social views, you thought that was the party. And so then you got surprised by the primary, but then the general you're like, well, all these Republicans in my life are voting for voting for the Democrats. So I think the Democrats probably going to win. So you're seeing that firsthand in your community.

Then on the flip side of that, this is why I missed 2016, right? Because that was my community was those people that weren't going to vote for Trump. But there was this other group of people out in the country, this the MAGA crowd that listened to Steve Bannon that hadn't previously voted for Republicans that were and so that I'm like, these are the real people where you can see what's happening in our politics. Yeah. And actually, I remember reading your book when I was reporting mine and thinking about them very much as like companion parallel pieces of the same story, right? Because yours was about professionals and how they all went down different paths of, you know, of election denial and Trumpism or getting off the train. And this is sort of like

that same tension, but it's happening with regular people out in the country who are not professionals, who are just party volunteers or, you know, people who became active in the party after 2020. Yeah, for sure. I want to talk a little bit more about some of the characters in your book. But while we're in Arizona, the real life consequences of this, right, sometimes you're talking about this, and it feels academic, political sciencey, realignment, you know, what's happening. We're seeing the real life consequences in Arizona. Obviously, we talked on yesterday's podcast about the implementation of the 1864 territorial abortion ban, House Democrats and one Republican in the legislature tried to repeal the 1864 ban yesterday. That has no exceptions for rape or incest,

zero weeks. GOP leaders that commanded the majority cut off that attempt to vote. They quickly adjourned, outraged Democrats, started shouting, shame, shame. Like this is the outgrowth of kind of what you're talking about, right? I mean, it's happened slowly, but the Kathy Petsis type Republicans that used to be in the Arizona legislature, they're getting pushed out. They're getting replaced with radicals who are happy to have an 1864 abortion regime. Right. It's a form of this like democratic disequilibrium where the party in power is out of step with the majority of the electorate. And, you know, there are kind of complex mechanical reasons why that happens through the imperfect political

institutions that we have. But that's what you get. Those are the kinds of distorted outcomes that you get when by all measures, you know, this is not what the majority of Arizona voters want, but they'll get to speak for themselves in November. When you're doing that reporting, you're thinking about the legislature. I don't want to pretend like there weren't extreme Republicans in these state legislatures before. There have always been. But there's like more of a balance. Like what were your sense like for the main kind of motivating factors of like the MAGA types that are, and a big part of this book, right, is people that are getting involved in politics, the MAGA movement's ground war. A lot of that is the precinct captains. A lot of that is people that are taking over the parties, but a lot of it also are the people that are

entering these state legislatures and running for these offices and red districts. Kind of talk about that. Well, it's about how the purification of the party leads to nominees, leads to candidates who reflect that wing of the party rather than Kathy's wing of the party, right? There's another character in the book that I'd like to hear a little bit more about, Sally Grubbs in Marietta, Georgia. I just want to let you cook on that story. Tell us about Sally Grubbs. Yeah, Sally is kind of the foil to Kathy, who we were just talking about. She is the example of the Republican who was kind of a casual keyboard warrior, Rush Limbaugh Watcher.

And it wasn't until 2020 and an experience that she personally had that made her think that there was fraud going on that motivated her to get involved in local party politics. And in the past several years, she's become kind of a rising star in the state GOP to the point that, you know, there are now hardliners who think that she's an establishment rhino. Wait, why do they think she's an establishment rhino? Well, she's developed an appreciation for when you're in the conversation, when you're in the room, when you're at the table, things are more complicated. So what happened was there was someone sniping at the state party chair who's under some

pressure because the party is paying for the legal defense for the fake electors from 2020. And there was some criticism of him that she pushed back on in a signal chat. And then they called her a rhino and kicked her out of the chat. Maybe they found out that she went to the January 6th rally, but just hung out on the ellipse. If you didn't actually go into the Capitol and attempt to storm the Capitol, movements, author of The True Believer. Here's a quote from Hoffer. I think it's worth reading the whole thing. The true believers were seeking not self-advancement, but rather self-renunciation, swapping out their individual identities with all their personal disappointments for a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by identification with a

holy cause. I mean, like this is just right on the nose for what is happening with a lot of people that you meet when you go to MAGA rallies, when, you know, I have gone to see Steve's podcast live and talk to people standing outside afterwards. There is a lot of this, like that they are sort of letting their own resentments, you know, their own personal identity wash away and kind of get caught up in this holy movement. Yeah, exactly. And Bannon is very intentional about how he is deploying that and understanding. And again, particularly in the moment where this exploded coming out of the pandemic, that that need for belonging is really what's driving this in a like, it's not as much about the content or the story is that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans figure that out too and figure out that I think you were with Liz Cheney when she went and made that speech, figuring out the power of building community around these Republicans who are still Republicans, but feel so alienated from how their party has changed and where

that leaves them. I was. Liz is so good at this. And this is part of what was the idea behind the Republican Voters Against Trump program that I was part of in 2020, right? Which was, we want to give people who feel politically homeless, this sense of community, right? The sense of home that there are other people out there like them, and try to channel that in a positive way, unlike what's happened over in the war room. I want to get on some of your reporting of some more recent stories. How do you think about elevating people like this, like Sally going into Bannon's war room and talking about them? There is a debate that I think with well intentioned people on both sides, some that say, the right thing to do is ignore

these people, don't give them the attention that they want. I think the other side of that argument is, I mean, they're important. They're taking over these state parties. Like they're a big reason why there's an 1864 abortion ban in Arizona now and why our Capitol got stormed. And so we need to know what's happening and we need to monitor and we need to understand. Maybe you can pull people away from the brink a little bit if you understand what their complaints and what their resentments are. Some of them might be gettable. I don't know, where do you kind of fall in that discussion about, I don't know if you had any criticism of the book from that standpoint, or, you know, the question of how much attention we should be giving these folks?

Well, I mean, I wanted to go on War Room because the idea that like a single one of Bannon's listeners might pick up the book and critically engage with it, you know, would mean the world to me. And I just think that if you're presenting things with context, then, you know, people are smart. The messages can be dangerous when they spread in a vacuum. But when you're giving people context and treating people respectfully, I think that people can be responsible. And Sally, I hope that readers learn to love Sally the way that I did. I mean, she's a lot of fun. She's really smart. She's got great personality. And she believes things that aren't true, but she is a very reliable narrator of her own story and her own life. And I think that there's a lot of value

in that. Do you grapple at all with the more you get to know these folks, the more you kind of develop a human connection with them, you start to paper over the threat a little bit. I grapple with that. I'm not trying to put you on the side. I grapple with it, right? I think it's important to be in this world, to monitor it. But humans are complicated, right? Humans are not two-dimensional. It's not like everybody that listens to Bannon's War Room is evil, right? Like they have desires. They want their lives and the country to improve in certain ways.

They want it to look differently in certain ways. They want it to look differently in ways that I find very troubling sometimes, right? But sometimes, you know, if you get to know somebody, right, like you think about the personal traits that you like about them, and you start to push down, like being clear-eyed about their flaws and about the very real threats that this movement poses. Do you worry about that at all? Well, people are complicated. And, you know, there's a quote in the book from Thomas Dewey, like democracy is not just a system of government, it's a form of associated living. And so like actually forcing ourselves to interact on that human level is really healthy. And it helps to avoid getting so dug in and viewing each other as enemies.

I want to get to two recent stories you've written in the post. One, inside Donald Trump's secret long shot plan to end the war in Ukraine. It seems to me that the the TLDR of this is that Donald Trump wants to, you know, give to put in some territory and hopefully he'll behave, he'll be happy knowing that he'll have a friend in the White House. And so that'll end the war. But maybe you, maybe it's a little more complex than that. So why don't you talk to us about the reporting and what you've uncovered there? Well, I don't know that it's, it's a ton more complex than that. I mean, you know, Trump sees, Trump sees two countries that want the same territory. And so he sees an opportunity to make a deal that

he can get them in a room and on the strength of his charisma and his prowess, he can, you know, pressure them to come to a compromise where both of them can save face. I think that's a great theory. Actually, that's the third one in that frame, Donald Trump sees two countries that want the same territory. And so we should just get maybe we should just give South Florida to Cuba. That'd be awesome. Donald Trump lives there and then he can have his own little Island. You know, that could be an idea, right? There's some little discrepancy. Well, right. Like why didn't, why didn't anyone else think of this first? Yeah. Why don't we give Mexico some of those border towns that, that Donald Trump thinks has so much carnage in him. Okay. Anyway, so he wants to just give some of the territory over to over to Russia. Where do we go from there, then? Well, obviously, you know,

Zelensky has said under no circumstances is he gonna recognize ceding any territory. And Putin has claimed to annex, which is an annexation that the US and European allies consider illegal, but he staked a territorial claim to much more land than his troops currently occupy and that Trump is talking about giving. So, you know, it's not like he would be satisfied with that either necessarily. So, you know, it's just, again, a lot more complicated. You know, even if you were to just, you know, have everyone put their arms down where they are, it's just not as simple as drawing an armistice line and everyone going home. I mean, to me, the next step of that is in the horror world where Donald Trump wins the next election, and Donald Trump is the president, and he actually

tries something like this. And he basically puts America in a position where America supports Putin's annexation at some level or another. And obviously, the Europeans would be opposed to that. What did the foreign policy, I don't know, did you talk to Rick Grinnell or the other foreign policy advisors around him? If they thought one step past, let's just give Putin the land, or not really? So, I think the high-minded foreign policy big think that gets superimposed onto Trump's individual impulse is that that China is a bigger problem than Russia and that the U.S. can't get so committed in Ukraine that it takes its eye off the ball in China. And actually, the connection is between Russia and China, with Russia becoming so reliant on China.

And the thinking is that you could actually kind of draw Russia away from China if you improved Russian relations with the U.S. and that that would end up hurting China. Now, I talk to a lot of other foreign policy experts who think that that's incredibly dumb and would never work. Yeah, that's about a lot of cope. I think that that idea, there are these people around Trump that want to still flex some of their hawkish muscles. And I just think that they refuse to accept the reality that for Donald Trump, Taiwan is not going to be any different than Ukraine. And like they might he might there might be lip service to that now. But like, there's no rational through line to anything Donald Trump has ever said over the last 10 years.

So it'd make you think that he would look at Taiwan any differently than he looks at Ukraine. Isaac, final thing. I'm glad you pointed this out. Trump has made no public statements about Evan Gershkowitz, who is still imprisoned in Russia. I feel sometimes remiss we're not talking enough about Evan on this podcast. Talk about the state of play there and what you heard from Trump world when asked about why he wasn't advocating for Evan's release. Well, I heard absolutely nothing. And that was the point is I the the journal had an editorial ahead of the one year anniversary saying, you know, why haven't we heard anything from Trump?

And so I asked the campaign point blank, did I miss something? Has he said anything? And would he take this opportunity? And absolute radio silence. And, you know, it's part of a long pattern of Trump going out of his way to avoid criticizing Putin. And, you know, the previous recent example was him comparing himself to Navalny, the Putin critic who was imprisoned and died. Sick stuff. Isaac Arnsdorf, thank you so much. Author of the new book, Finish What We Started, The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy.

He was actually out there with the MAGA grassroots and knows what's really happening on the ground. I appreciate you being on this podcast. We'll see you out on the campaign trail, I bet, this year. Absolutely. Thanks, Tim bet, this year. Absolutely. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Isaac. We'll be back tomorrow with the weekend edition of the Bulwark Podcast. I'm pumped about the guest.

We'll see you all then. Like we never ever did See you, your career is done like Johnny Carson's Get me Vex, I do like left, I start in Austin Now that I got that out my system Watch me stab up the track as if my name was OJ Simpson I pack some men like Van Halen I work for mine You, you feel low like Kato Kaelin I'm representing with my crew

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Shorty's in the place, all the shorty rocks, do the hop You got to come back and do the hop, we never go pop The Bullwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.