The Bulwark Podcast - James Hohmann: DeSantis Joins the Surrender Caucus

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Ron DeSantis chose to pander to Tucker Carlson on Ukraine and shows himself as unserious on one of the biggest issues of our time. Plus, socialism for Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites. James Hohmann joins Charlie Sykes for today's podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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James, welcome back to the podcast. Good to be with you, Charlie. Beware the Ides of March. You know, I was going to make an Ides of March joke, but then I realized this was one of those cultural references that about, you know, 0.8% of the world would actually get. Well, 100% of your listeners will get it. I think maybe that's true. See, I'm still reeling from the fact that Tim Miller had never heard of Annette Funicello. So I am... I saw that. That was crazy. I kind of am burned on making any sort of cultural references and mentioning the Ides of March. So, Charlie Sykes, joking with his guests about the assassination of leaders, you know. And I'll get all those direct messages, do better.

I'm sorry. My absolute least favorite. So, we have a target-rich environment. I want to talk to you about what's going on with the banks and the stock market. As I mentioned to you beforehand, I'm very, very interested in all of this, although very conscious of my lack of actual sophisticated knowledge. So I will tread very, very lightly. It is worth noting today that the stock market did not melt down,

that the sky did not fall yesterday, which I think is good news. I mean, a little bit of good news. Well, I have a mixed feeling. I mean, it's obviously good news that the stock market didn't tank, but I have very mixed feelings about this. I think it's sort of the least bad of a lot of bad options. You mean the bailout that's not a bailout? Yeah, the bailout. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, moral hazard, bailout nation, rewarding recklessness, on and on. Okay. Now you see you're hitting my buttons on all of this because I am having flashbacks to the financial crisis. And the more you learn about it, the worse it gets, the recklessness that led to it. And then the fact that nobody was ever held accountable and that we actually bailed out the most reckless class of financial assholes in the world. So I'm still a little touchy about all of that. So you think this is the least bad option? There is the moral hazard, though, still. I do. I'm very nervous about what's next. I mean, if it was up to me, I would have made the corporate depositors take a 10 or 15 percent haircut just so that there was some cost. Everyone knows the FDIC is only supposed

to insure up to $250,000 of deposits. And, you know, we are this, have become this bailout nation and it's sort of like socialism for the Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites and a rugged American style individualism for the rest of us. And you understand how this plays into populist anger at powers that be. And after 9-11, there was a bailout. After the 2008 financial crisis, after COVID, now no bank is too small to fail. You and I have talked on your podcast before about the student loan bailout. Now everyone's going to expect that their student loans are going to get forgiven eventually. It's just, this is not what government should be doing. On the other hand, you don't want a cataclysmic financial collapse and you don't want to destroy

all the smaller banks and on and on. So it's frustrating that it's come to this, but it has. It has. And I think as I was listening to you, the fact that we've now really internalized this sense that mom and dad will come and bail us out no matter how silly we are. We can invest in crypto. We can put all our money in bitcoins. We can do all of these sorts of things. And at the end of the day, we know that nobody's really allowed to fail if it's really, really bad. there's always somebody in Washington who's going to sweep in and, you know, wipe away our tears and make everything good, right? I wonder, you know, if this was in the Southwest, if this wasn't Silicon Valley with such kind of

politically well-connected depositors, you know, whether the reaction would have been different. I don't know the answer, but I do think that there is this, yeah, mom and dad are going to save us mentality. And that's very un-American. Well, but also it's now become quintessentially American because- Yeah, that's true. You're right. It's also a spiraling effect, which is that once you bail out one group, everybody else goes, wait, wait, wait, why did you bail them out? So you saw this with the student loan bailout where people were saying, well, wait, you bailed out all those people with the PPP payments. If you're willing to give money to them, how about us? And then somebody also in the corner goes, well, wait, if they're getting

money, where's my bailout? Where's my bit of all of this? And essentially, Washington, on a kind of a bipartisan basis, has decided, yeah, screw the whole deficit debt thing. We're going to take care of anybody. If you're loud enough, if you raise your hand enough, if you are connected at the moment, there's going to be something for you, right? I mean, there's always going to be something for you. Yeah. And that's what's so frustrating is the bipartisan element of it, that there really is not a constituency for tough love. And there's no leader in our national life who's willing to say, like, no, everyone is just sort of advocating for their, what in the past we would call sectional interest, their constituency.

And sometimes they see it as an either or zero sum game. Sometimes they see it as letting everyone at the trough, but it is just very depressing that no one in our national politics is saying, cut it out. No, and I don't see that ending anytime soon. Look, in a nation where everybody thinks of themselves as a victim, then there always must be some sort of an aid for every victim in America. So we're all there. We're all lined up. Somebody should read a book about this. I don't know. So, James, the story that I'm most interested in this morning, and I know that you are as well, was the announcement that Ron DeSantis is now aligning himself very, very tightly with Donald Trump, of all people, on the issue of Ukraine.

He has now joined the Ukraine Surrender Caucus, and he did it on the Tucker Carlson show. You know, I mean, apparently with everything that's happened with Fox News and Tucker Carlson, you know, he's still the go-to guy and he sends out a survey and everybody goes, yes, Tucker, let's give you the answers that you want. So, Tucker Carlson, who has been probably, you can disagree with me here, you know, one of the most reliable pro-Putin or anti-anti-Putin commentators out there who actually went on the air and said, no, I'm rooting for Russia, is the guy that Ron DeSantis chooses to make this foreign policy announcement that Ukraine is not part of America's vital interests. So I suppose it's not surprising, you know, James, that DeSantis would do this since he's clearly running in the purest form of Trumpism out there

without Trump. He's just not going to allow any daylight between himself and Trump, is he? Yeah, let's talk about the substance of it, and then let's talk about the politics of it. Because substantively, it's perhaps not surprising, but Ron DeSantis knows better. I interviewed him a bunch of times when he was in the House Freedom Caucus. He's someone who served in the Navy. He understands what's at stake in his heart of hearts in Ukraine. That doesn't defend him at all. In fact, it makes what he's done more shameful because this is obviously core to our national interest. If we lose in Ukraine, China is going to be emboldened to take

Taiwan. This is freedom versus autocracy. Ron DeSantis is trying to present himself as the freedom governor. It is all about freedom. And this is the fight for freedom of our time. And he wants to unilaterally withdraw from that fight and pull defeat from the jaws of victory. On the politics, I actually think it's bad politics. I mean, you're right. This is just craven pandering to Tucker Carlson, whose support he obviously craves. He hasn't given a lot of interviews, but he talked to a British newspaper last week and really kind of struggled when he was asked about Ukraine. And so let's talk about something else and change the subject, shut it down. Interesting. Yeah. And so, I mean, it shows that he's obviously

calculating. I mean, I think it shows that he's unserious. If Ron DeSantis wants to emerge as the alternative to Trump, I really do think it's a minority of Republicans who want to surrender and let big nations gobble up small nations. But there's a lot of the Trump people who like Trump and aren't going to stop liking Trump. I think that it's a mistake to try to just be Trump without being named Donald Trump. Because if DeSantis really wants to establish himself with the donor class and with the activist base as sort of the consensus alternative to Donald Trump. This makes that a heck of a lot harder because it shows that he's not serious. You know, I think he could thread the needle a little more. He could nod to concerns about our southern border and how we should defend our southern border and, you know,

help Ukraine defend theirs. But this kind of just saying, no, I don't support what we're doing in Ukraine, without really any nuance, it just makes it that much harder for him to consolidate the Republican Party vote that is not for Trump. Because I think that at least half the party still sort of gets, you know, in a Reagan-esque way, why this fight is our fight. You mentioned that he, you know, his statement is without nuance. It really is quite extraordinary. I mean, he goes on a great length. I mean, he uses some of this boilerplate language you hear among Republicans about,

and I'm not writing a blank check, but, you know, he actually goes beyond that. I mean, ruling out specific weapons. And at one point, seems to dismiss this brutal and illegal invasion as, his words, a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia, which is like, ooh. I mean, it sounds like Vladimir Putin wrote that or Sergei Lavrov. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing that the governor of a major U.S. state would say that and the person who wants to be the standard pair, you know, the party of Ronald Reagan. It shows a lack of seriousness about the big issues. I'm of

the school that DeSantis sort of has a glass jaw and I think Trump's struggling with how to attack him. You know, he's had this rapid political rise and he hasn't really had to do the give and take and he's isolated himself to friendly audiences and friendly media. And ultimately, I think that this shows that he's maybe not as ready for prime time as certainly he thinks he is. Okay, this is interesting, because, you know, his game plan has been pretty clear, which is that, you know, he's going to identify where the conservative Republican id is, and then he chases it, he follows it. And I think this is, this creates an authenticity problem, because, you know, you can just see, you know, how, you know, he's looking at, you know, the surrender caucuses over there and he has to rush to them saying, I want to be your leader as well.

The politics of pandering, you know, has its short-term benefits, particularly if you stay to be the leader of the free world, if you want to look strong, you know, simply, transparently, and unseriously pandering to every talking point out there is not necessarily the way to do this. It's going to be interesting because so far, people have been able to project onto Ron DeSantis whatever they want to believe, right? In many ways, he is an unknown, he is a blank slate on issues like foreign policy. So you have, you know, folks in the, you know, anti-anti-Trump wing of the Republican Party, like, for example, I'll single you out, you know, the fanboys at National Review who decided to go really, you know, heavily in on Ron DeSantis and yet are not anti-Ukraine, are not pro-Putin. And so they have been struggling to kind of defend DeSantis. This is

going to create an awkward moment for them because they're all in on Ron DeSantis. And now Ron DeSantis has cut them off at the knees on the, you know, fight for freedom in our time, which they would agree with. So to your point that this may actually complicate his bid, I think it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out in the short term. On the other hand, maybe people have just decided, screw it, Donald Trump is just awful. DeSantis is the only guy that can beat him. We just are going to assume that he knows better, that he is insincere, and that he's kind of pulling our chain here. That's one of the big differences between, you know, for Trump, we know who Trump is now. Obviously, you and I knew who he was in 2016. But you can sort of put yourself

in the shoes of a lot of voters in 2016 who sort of, when Trump was undefined and he sort of thought, well, he doesn't really believe the stuff he's saying. He's going to grow into the job. Yeah, he's joking. He's joking. You know, this is what all this, you know, everyone knows all that stuff. And with DeSantis, being a blank slate has its advantages. And we saw that with Barack Obama too. You know, like Obama could be, it worked to his advantage in 2008. He could sort of be what people wanted him to be, which was not Hillary Clinton, not the Clintons, not of Washington. And he could sort of use Pablum and stay generic enough that it helped him win a majority of votes. But campaigns are about definition, and Trump's going to define him. DeSantis needs to define himself.

DeSantis' refusal to engage in the most basic ways with the mainstream media means that the mainstream media will define him not on his own terms. And so he's going to get defined. And this is one of the first real things that he's done to define himself in the non-generic Florida's for freedom sort of way. So going back to your point about that he knows better, because back in the before times, before Trump, he was very much in the Reagan foreign policy mode. Back in 2015, he was very vocal in criticizing the Obama administration for not giving Ukraine

both defensive and offensive weapons, saying, if you had a Reaganist policy of strength, I think you would see people like Putin not want to mess with us. You know, he had been very, very, you know, engaged on this particular issue. But if he does know better, then he has to know the consequences of his comments, right? I mean, he knows what's at stake at some level. So he has to know that this morning, Vladimir Putin wakes up in the Kremlin and is looking at this going, okay, so I have the two leading Republican candidates who, you know, between them have 60 to 70% of the Republican vote, basically saying that if they come into power, I'm going to get what I want. I mean, how does he not know that the politics and the substance collide here? And the substance being that statements like this send a message to Vladimir Putin. If you just hang on long enough,

the help won't keep coming. The Western alliance will break if either one of us gets in the White House. I mean, that has real world consequences right now. Oh, totally. And in fact, it also, not just Vladimir Putin waking up at the Kremlin, but European leaders waking up in NATO countries see this too and think, well, the U.S. isn't committed to this fight. Why should we make sacrifices? Why should we take all these refugees? Why should we be dealing with these high oil prices? And even just the mere comment, you're absolutely right, of course, Charlie, that Putin is sort of seeing that I just have to drag this out for two more years and then I win. But this has immediate consequences in terms of it's going to embolden people like Macron in France to push for a negotiated peace,

which is surrender, and won't be a long-term lasting peace because Russia will just keep pushing. It's not just reckless in a two-year sense. It's reckless in an immediate short-term sense, which is that it weakens America's position on the world stage. And it really is exactly what the right accused the left of for so long, you know, during the Cold War and false moral equivalency and all that. And now that you're right, the two leading candidates for the Republican nomination are falling prey to that exact, really dangerous rhetoric. There does seem to, for a moment, to be something of a bipartisan consensus about being tough with China. And as you said earlier, you

know, one of the reasons why Ukraine is the central fight of our times is that if you want to stand up to China, you have to stand up to Russia first. And if we're signaling that we're not willing to do that, if we are turning into this sort of America first, we have to, you know, deal with everything at home. That also sends a very, very clear message to the Chinese to embolden them. And again, I'm going to keep emphasizing, this is not about what happens in January 2025 if they get back in the White House. It's what's happening in March 2023 because decisions are being made right now with the question, you know, how strong is Western resolve? How strong and reliable is the United States as an ally? And this has to call it into great question.

Totally. You know, I think it was Stalin. It was some Russian leader who said, if you, you know, you feel mush, you keep pushing. If you feel that there's mushy resolve in the lead supporter of the effort, then you'll keep pushing. And this is what happened. Ron DeSantis was right in 2015. The Obama administration's drawing the red line over Syria and then not enforcing it. It's terrible. And then, you know, giving blankets to Ukraine when Russia invaded. And those are the darkest chapters of the, I guess, the Iran deal too, but that's more controversial and debatable.

But even the lack of response to Russia's incursion into Georgia in 2008. From Vladimir Putin's perspective, he sort of has gotten away with all this stuff. And reasonably expected he would continue to get away with it. Right. I mean, once you are allowed to get away with it. So there are some pretty clear ideological lines now forming in the Republican primary between those who see Ukraine as they fight for democracy and freedom in our time. This would include, you know, Nikki Haley at the moment. You never know with Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pence have taken very strong pro-Ukrainian positions. So how will this debate play out?

Because so far they have been reluctant to say, I disagree with Donald Trump on these issues. Now we get to the phase where you have the lineup. You have DeSantis and Trump over here on the surrender caucus. You know, are we going to see a robust debate about this? I wrote this morning that the number one divide in the Republican Party is pro-coup versus anti-coup. I still think that's the major one. But how do you see this playing out? Will Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo bring a gun to this gunfight?

Two thoughts on that. The first is I agree it's the pro-coup, anti-coup is still the dividing line. David McCormick has a new book out today, Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate who barely lost to Mehmet Oz. And he writes that he went down and tried to convince Trump to stay neutral. And Trump said that he wouldn't stay neutral as long as McCormick wouldn't say the election was stolen. So that very much is top of mind. To your question, which is an important one, I fear the answer is no, which is that you're not going to see Nikki Haley come in guns blazing and that you're going to hear a lot of equivocation, which is that we can't give them the blank check, we need strong oversight, but we shouldn't support the civil society, we should just support the military effort, and it should be limited in scope. You'll hear nuance. The flip side of that, and the reason

I'm hopeful, is that these candidates who are polling poorly, there is a big opening for them to seize on this issue and to be outspoken and to say, this is our fight. There is a constituency for that. I fear that a lot of these candidates are sort of mealy-mouthed as they showed themselves to be during the Trump administration when they were in it. But I think that there is an opening. The question is whether they kind of try to muddle the issue because they don't think people are actually going to be voting on Ukraine. But I think there's a big constituency of donors and others who care very passionately about this issue and do recognize just how this is the fight of our time. So speaking of this, what did you make of Mike Pence? You know, the more outspoken Mike Pence,

at least at the Gridiron Dinner where there are no cameras and there are no microphones. But he said the words, he said the name. He puzzles me. And I'm sorry to repeat myself. It puzzles me because, you know, it's a profile and half courage. The fact that he blocked the coup is a defining moment of his career. It's also the reason why he will never be president. He will never be the Republican nominee. And he's willing to say it, but he's not willing to do it. He's, you know, waiting for the verdict of history. Well, history is a record of what people do in real time. In real time, he's not testifying. He's resisting the subpoena. So what do you make of Mike Pence? Well, I think half courage is better than no courage. Okay. So, and so I admire what he did on January 6th. I admire that he said that at the dinner. I mean, he's clearly what he feels, but I, it is eye rolly that he won't go talk to the grand jury

and that he's, you know, he's not hiding behind executive privilege. He's actually hiding behind speech and debate clause. I don't know if you've, he's using the legislative privilege, which you can argue it, but I think it's sort of absurd. I think he clearly still wants to be president. That's the thing. I mean, he clearly believes that there is a path to what we were just talking about with Ukraine. Is Nikki Haley going to be outspoken in defense of Ukraine? The reason I'm not confident that she will be is because it's the same dynamic with Pence, which is sort of, if I kind of just mumble through this thing where I have the difference with Trump, then it'll all be okay. I could see Pence changing as he actually announces sort of using this as more of a wedge and a contrast. But the problem is, as you said,

the biggest dividing line in the Republican Party right now is pro-coup versus anti-coup. And I think that for political reasons related to his future, Mike Pence doesn't want to cross that Rubicon. But he basically said- He has crossed the Rubicon. I know, but he said it in like 50 different ways. And it is sort of funny because he's so cautious about the language, every little variation of saying what actually happened on January 6th, whether it's his book or whether it was that speech at the Florida Federalist Society. There's been six or seven other times where it becomes big news when he slightly varies on the wording. And maybe his

calculus is that the people who do care will sort of get what he's trying to do and know that his heart is in the right place. But I'm not sure that he can thread that needle. And I'm not sensing any clamoring, even at the elite level of the GOP for like the Pence presidential candidacy. I don't know who his constituency is. Well, that's the mystery, isn't it? If he thinks that his constituency is going to be the Washington media elite, I'm sorry, that's not going to work out for him in this Republican Party. What I thought was new in the very clear swipe at Tucker Carlson and Fox News for trying to, you know, do the revisionist history of January 6th and, you know, saying it's, you know, an assault on decency to say that it was just a tourist visit, you know, and then very forcefully saying, you know, tourist visits do not result in the injury of 140 cops. That was

strong. And that seemed to me to be, you know, as risky or riskier than going after Trump's role on January 6th, because he's clearly aligning himself with folks who think that what Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson is doing is dishonest and disingenuous. It is dishonest and disingenuous. And it is the overwhelming feeling among Republicans on, you know, certainly on the Senate side is that those two things, even if more people aren't willing to say it publicly. So the thing about the gridiron, for those who don't know, you don't have to give a serious part of the speech. It really is supposed to be a joking, funny speech. And he made a lot of jokes.

And then he turned serious toward the end. He didn't need to have that riff. And I do think it's courageous to call it Tucker Carlson. And it's coming against the backdrop of everything else that we're seeing from this Dominion lawsuit. And Mike Pence, remember, was up against all of that. He's the one who's trying to do his constitutional duty. And the desire of Fox News to pander to their audience and to Donald Trump

meant that he was getting a lot more pressure than he should have been getting from the grassroots. Yeah. to their audience and to Donald Trump meant that he was getting a lot more pressure than he should have been getting from the grassroots. Let's switch the focus a little bit and talk about the Democrats right now. It's been an interesting couple of weeks. You have Joe Biden tacking toward the center on crime, on immigration, now on energy policy, greenlighting this drilling program up in Alaska. Progressives and liberals, in some cases, beside themselves, disappointed, they feel betrayed. On the other

hand, he just came up with a budget that was just packed with progressive goodies. So give me your sense of how Joe Biden is trying to thread the needle in his own party, tacking toward the center with an eye toward 2024 while keeping the left wing of his party at least only minimally unhappy. Yeah, what matters is what people do and say. But I think that this actually is closer to where Joe Biden really is in his instincts. And the triangulation takes him to sort of more closely match the mood of the country. I certainly think that, you know, these issues like drilling, crime, these are 80-20 issues. You know, he obviously did the student debt forgiveness. He's made a big deal about the abortion stuff. He's still giving the left reasons to vote for him. I think that what this does indicate,

the triangulation, is that he does not anticipate a serious liberal challenge in the primary for the nomination. These are moves you make to prepare for general. And I think that the calculus is that the left is going to be there for him. Because I think a lot of Democrats really believe that Donald Trump will be the nominee at the end of the day, including a lot of people in the White House. And so their sense is that the left is going to turn out against Donald Trump. And Biden's done enough for the left. You know, he did it on climate change. He did all this stuff with the Inflation Reduction Act. And so he can do things on drilling to sort of telegraph to the middle, the Republicans who voted for him in 2020, that he is a serious pragmatist.

It does seem as if he's going down the list of the most potent Republican talking points, and he's trying to sort of cross them off, you know, soft on crime, you know, not engaging with the chaos on the border, responsible for, you know, high energy gas prices because he shut down pipelines and drilling. And he's working through it. So at least he's got an answer to all of that. And I think that sometimes there are progressives who underestimate how potent those lines of attack are. And clearly, he is not in a bubble where he doesn't hear those things or doesn't understand how that plays in swing congressional districts and the swing states that will decide the 2024 election. I'm really glad you said that, because that's absolutely

right. And one of the problems in Washington is that there's this generational divide where Joe Biden's obviously been around a long time. I was reading about the Endangered Species Act yesterday, which passed in 1973. And it's like, oh yeah, Joe Biden voted for that. It was 50 years ago. I think he has, you know, through lived experience of watching, you know, the many years Democrats spent in the wilderness in the eighties because they were too liberal and the collapse of the liberal coalition after 1980. I think Biden sort of intuitively gets it, but a lot of the younger people in his administration and in kind of the liberal interest group sort of firmament, they really have internalized this belief, which is wrong, that Republicans are going to attack you no matter

what you do. And Republicans are going to call you socialist no matter what you do. So why not embrace socialist policies? And I don't think they think of these things as socialists, but that is the mentality of sort of like, you know, why is Biden rejecting the crime law from DC because they're going to attack him as weak on crime anyway. And I think that just reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of politics, that the substance does matter. A lot of voters, especially voters in the middle, especially persuadable people, do care about the substance of sort of what you can't just say, well, they're going to say we're evil no matter what. So let's just do the most liberal thing. But that has been very internalized by a lot of people, including Democratic members of Congress. And Biden knows that that's wrong. And so I think that's part of what we're seeing the last couple weeks. So the corollary to that is what Rita Sherrick calls the Fox News fallacy, which is also that if there's an issue that is highlighted on Fox News, they must be wrong and we have to ignore it. So if the Fox News is highlighting crime or is highlighting the border, therefore,

that's, you know, that's not something that we should be talking about. We should react against that. And then as a result of that, you have that reinforced bubble that you were just describing here that, OK, it's like, you know, hey, you know, urban crime people actually are concerned about it. Oh, you know, that's just a talking point on Fox News or Tucker Carlson. Well, sometimes, you know, the worst people in the world have good points. Okay, so I have to ask you this, because I'm going to write about this later this weekend. I know you're on the editorial board and you're all like anonymous, right? I'm sorry. You all assume the editorial position. These are not personal opinions. These are the opinions. It's the institutional position. That's right. This is the institutional position. So I was very interested that the Washington Post editorial position, you took a shot at Gavin

Newsom on the abortion pill. And I think it's interesting because, as you point out, Republicans are not the only ones finding opportunities to bully private companies in culture war battles. And you wrote about, you know, Newsom axed a $54 million contract with Walgreens over abortion because they were not going to be offering the abortion pill in the 21 states where the attorney generals had threatened them. So talk to me a little bit about this, because I'm sure you've got a lot of blowback both sides as he's not nearly as bad as Ron. I mean, Ron DeSantis is kind of the symbol of putting the bully back in bully pulpit in the bully states. But Gavin Newsom is, and California seems to be trending in that direction. I mean, that was rather extraordinary.

So talk to me about Gavin Newsom, why he took a shot at him. The Washington Post is against coercively using the power of the state to get things that partisans want. And so the Washington Post editorialized against the takeover of the Disney tax district and punitively going after Disney.

And what's going on in California is very much similar. It really is Gavin Newsom taking away contracts from a company that is working in good faith to comply with local laws. I mean, one, it's unfair to put this on Walgreens. These are complicated, hard legal issues. And Walgreens is sort of squeezed in really a federalist fight between state and federal government. And Walgreens is trying its level best to comply. And I think Walgreens got extra scrutiny because they actually replied to the letter from the attorneys general, and the other pharmacies just ignored it. But they're caught in this really difficult place. It's deeply unfair for Gavin Newsom to then say, we're going to take away the state contract. And it's basically to provide prescriptions to people in prison because we're angry that you're complying with local laws and other jurisdictions.

That is an abuse of power. And what's particularly annoying is that Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom have been shadowboxing with each other for a year, and they're both trying to call themselves the freedom governor, and they both are trying to fight over the language of freedom. And both of them often want to use the state as a coercive power that is very at odds with freedom, whether it was when the cruise ships wanted to require vaccination, they blocked them from being able to do so. That is interfering with private business trying to manage itself. This fight is played out over abortion and COVID vaccines and all that stuff. But neither DeSantis nor Newsom, when the sort of the rubber hits the

road or whatever analogy you want to use, is really taking the side of true freedom. No. But what you have here, and again, the spiraling effect, or maybe the ratcheting effect, which is that as one party decides it's going to use, you know, the coercive power of government to get its way, there becomes pressure. It was like, wait, should we bring,

I'm sorry to overuse this now, the knife to the gunfight. Isn't this whole he fights thing basically a reaction to the sense that, well, we're tired of losing. We're tired of rolling over. Therefore, both of us now are going to – so you have this mutual escalation of aggressiveness. Otherwise, you're accused of like, wait, they're accomplishing this.

They're winning over here. Why are we not using the same weapons over here to fight for the things that we believe in? And that's what you're kind of seeing in this shadowboxing between Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom. I couldn't have said it better. And that's a lot of the pushback to the editorial, too. It's sort of like, well, what do you expect? They're using these tools of the state.

Why wouldn't we use these tools of the state? And obviously, neither side should be using the tools of the state. But that's where we've gotten. And the problem is that politicians aren't punished for that. They're rewarded for it. And so they're responding to incentives. They see that this has helped Ron DeSantis with his base. Newsom, I think this is going to help him with his base, even though it's a misuse of power and bad policy. So it goes on and on. And it is this escalation ladder. We only climb off of it when the American people reject it. And if Ron DeSantis is the nominee, it worked politically.

And so then more people are going to do it. And then we all of a sudden drift down a very dangerous path of becoming a less free country. And in the meantime, you have companies, private companies that are caught in the middle, you have companies, private companies that are caught in the middle, as you point out. If you're a pharmacy and you do business in, say, Arkansas and in California, if California says to you, if you follow the law in Arkansas, we're going to punish you, you have these pharmacies, these private businesses that are caught between a rock and a hard place over. And you wonder whether or not if this ladder of escalation continues, whether we're actually going to wake up one day and realize,

okay, we don't actually have a civil war. There's not going to ever be a civil war. But we're kind of having a cold civil war right now, a cold civil war between dueling bully states. Yeah, it does feel that way. You know, one of the things I've been paying a lot of attention to is this ERIC database. Oh, yeah.

I actually think this epitomizes not just cutting off your nose to spite your face, but also this cold civil war, which is that in 2012, seven states got together, and it was actually four Republican states and three Democratic states. And they said, it was basically a deal. It was like Republicans care a lot about election integrity. Democrats care a lot about registering people to vote. So we'll have this deal where all the states will pool together their voter registration data. And then in exchange for that, it becomes much easier to know. It's the closest thing to a national database for whether someone has voted twice. But then at the same time, the states that participate

in this consortium also agree to send a postcard to new residents, people who are eligible to vote that are not registered to say, hey, you're eligible to register to vote. And so this actually worked quite well. It's caught thousands of cases of people trying to vote twice or people registered in two states. And a lot of times it's not nefarious. It's just, you know, someone moves from Wisconsin to Virginia and, you know, you don't call the Wisconsin, you know, election officials to say, hey, I'm moving. You're still on the list. And so it makes sense. You want to clean up your lists and that kind of thing. And so this was working totally fine. And it was a great sort of model and the fees for the states are really low. It's like 20,000 bucks a year. And it was all fine

until people like Cleta Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer, and all these people, Mike Lindell, are out there turning this into just a complete lie that this is like some George Soros thing. And so now, five states have pulled out of this consortium, including Florida. Even just a few months ago, Ron DeSantis was talking about how great this program is because it's caught all these cases of voter fraud. And the very day that Florida announced it was pulling out, they actually arrested someone who voted in 2020 in Virginia and Florida. And they only discovered this because of this ERIC system. It's an acronym. And so this is kind of that national coming apart, which is like, here's this thing where if you actually want to cut down on voter fraud, here's the obvious way to do it. But this is falling prey to the conspiracy theory minded craziness of the fever swamps, but also this idea that like Florida doesn't want to

cooperate with liberal states. And so all of a sudden voter fraud is going to become easier, not harder, but it's a result of this escalatory logic and this sort of coming apart. And you're right, it's not going to be people fighting in fields. It's going to be stuff like this where the nation becomes more and more fragmented. And that's ultimately sad, but it's also bad.

So remind me whether I'm remembering this correctly, Donald Trump called for states to drop out of the ERIC program. He did. And then the next day or the same day, DeSantis pulled Florida out of the program? Yeah, the next day. So here's another example of Ron DeSantis just being this kind of little lapdog. You know, if Donald Trump says jump, he says how high.

That's not the way to take him out. Going back to our original discussion here. You look weak. You look soft. You look like a follower, not a leader. Yeah, it's like, I mean, Ron DeSantis basically trying to cling as closely as possible, no daylight. But at some point it's like, Governor, you're not going to beat Donald Trump by being his bitch on everything. You know, you are going to look weak if you keep doing that sort of thing.

Bold colors, not pale pastels. James Homan, Washington Post editorial writer and columnist specializing in domestic policy and politics. James, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. I appreciate it. Always a pleasure, Charlie. It's fun to chat. It's always fun to chat with you, James. We'll have to do this again soon.

And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.