The Bulwark Podcast - Jeff Sharlet and Joe Perticone: The Confidence of a Bully

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Trump's shark/electrocution anecdote was not a sign of deterioration. Trump is actually getting better at communicating a solid message in a carnivalesque atmosphere—and he's reaching people outside of MAGA. Plus, when Republicans talk about a message of unity, they are referring to the party, not the country. Jeff Sharlet joins Tim Miller from New Hampshire, while Joe Perticone checks in from Milwaukee. show notes: The Andy Kroll piece about J.D. Vance that Jeff mentioned Joe's Press Pass dispatch from the convention on Tuesday We’re heading to Dallas on September 5 for An Evening with The Bulwark. For more information and tickets go to TheBulwark.com/events.

Hey guys, a couple programming notes. Coming up, an evening with the Bulwark in Dallas, September 5th. Adam Kinzinger will be in the house, also me and Sarah and Sonny and Bill. Tickets and info can be found at thebulwark.com slash events. Reminder on Wednesdays, I'm giving you my political hot takes over on the Next Level feed, so definitely check that out. In this convention week, we are giving even more minute-by-minute, blow-by-blow updates on YouTube. I popped on last night after the Ron DeSantis speech because I had to shout about that little elf to our YouTube followers for a few minutes. So, make sure you're monitoring that as well.

Today's show, I want to have a little bit of a step-back conversation about the MAGA movement, the Christian nationalist movement in the wake of the assassination attempt. So we've brought in a friend of the show and an expert, Jeff Charlotte, to talk about that. So coming up, it's Jeff Charlotte, and then on the back end, an update from Milwaukee with our man Joe Perticone. All right, welcome back to the Bullard Podcast. We'll have Joe Perticone with a report from Milwaukee on the back end. But first, welcoming back Jeff Charlotte, a journalist, author, and Dartmouth professor. His latest book is The Undertow, Scenes from a Slow Civil War. Also has a sub stack of the same name.

Hey, Jeff, how's it going? Hi, Tim. Good to be with you. I can remember where I was the last time you were on this podcast talking to Charlie. I was driving around Los Angeles. I was trying to take a day for myself, kind of have a self-care day. Decided to turn on that podcast and you dampened it a little bit. So I should warn people, you're not exactly coming on to check my dark view of the state of affairs.

No, things have really changed, Tim. We're in a time of unity now. It's morning in America, things are looking good. Jeff's done a lot of, folks that missed that last conversation, has spent a lot of time out in MAGA world and even in deep MAGA world, I'd even say. And so I want to kind of have a step back convo about all of that, the research you've done, particularly in light of the events in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. And so I just would like to start there and ask you kind of what you were thinking about witnessing that attempted assassination and what you think some of the fallout is going to look like. I mean, I'll tell you honestly, the very

first thing I was thinking was, I am so glad I'm not there, which I guess says what kind of journalist I am. I should have wanted to be there. I had planned to go to Butler and at that moment, call my wife and say, I think somebody just shot Trump. And my favorite moment of this whole campaign is going to be the student who was sitting down the row said, shh, I'm trying to work, which there's something about that that sort of says to me about the ways, I mean, who knows what that young man was thinking, but the adaptability of human adaptability, this is just the way America is now. Right. And I think looking at that rally, and sort of checking in beforehand, and sort of seeing the same kind of fever dream rhetoric that we don't talk very much in the media about that what Trump attributes his life to, besides,

of course, intervening hand of God was that he had turned his head to point to an immigration chart. And what he was doing is he had turned his head to tell a lie. And that's why the bullet missed him, that he was speaking this same kind of really almost straight up great replacement theory at the moment of the shot. And I think that's something that a lot of the press and a lot of the left has missed about Trump rallies. And I covered them 16 and 20, and I'm looking at them now. And I think people say, well, we know what he is. Yeah, we know what he is. We know he's a con man. And I think we know he's a fascist. I can defend the f word if we need to

i like to call him a soft-handed fascist but sure oh that's nice it's sort of gentle it's it's okay this way to the gas it's it's going to be fine i i come on that's too much that's too much that's that's that's dangerous rhetoric um unlike of course the language that we hear trump talking the the video we saw at the RNC last night, basically attributing 300,000 fentanyl deaths directly to Joe Biden. He says they killed him, right? So that violent rhetoric has been stepping up. And it's always been there, 1620, not well covered by the press. And in 24, it is amplified profoundly. It's violence. It's gore. It's hallucinatory nature.

And that's what we're seeing rally to rally. And the press is kind of falling down on the job. Yeah, a lot there. I want to get to the press party and the Trump speech. I think you and I see eye to eye on Trump's rhetoric in a way that I think a lot of people miss. But first, just because you spent so much time among the people, among the MAGA voters, I just was wondering how you think they are processing what happened.

It's just been something that I've been noodling on a lot, a rare maybe silver lining so far. And it's been three days or four days since the shooting. I was a little more scared about the reaction. The reaction in Milwaukee has not, there's been plenty to criticize, plenty of heated rhetoric, but among the actual people there does not seem to be bloodlust. But, you know, the types of people that go to a convention are maybe different than the types of people that you have spent time with in militia world and Christian nationalist world. So, I'm just wondering how you think that the extreme parts of Trump's base are processing what happened.

I don't think you're hearing the explicit bloodlust because what they've turned to is a confirmation of the divine, of theology, right? And that's been going on for a long time. I remember when Trump, when he was in the White House, joked about being, you know, chosen by God. And it was a joke, by the way. A lot of people said he wasn't joking. That's Trump's method is always joking, not joking. Very quickly, when you started moving through everyday MAGA world, people were like, yes. And there were already folks saying that. I mean, 2016, there was a bestselling book called God's Chaos Candidate. This is the idea that god had sent trump to

to blow up the establishment do you think they stole that from jeb we'd coined chaos candidate in 2016 do you think that god's chaos candidate author bar no kidding i i didn't well guy named lance wall now i'm gonna have to reach out to lance to see if he snagged that yeah yeah because we uh it failed in the in the as a political slogan but as maybe insightful as a comment on on what's really happening that's going to be your ticket to freedom you know come the new term and they're knocking the door like i'm the guy that gave you god's case canada i did my bit but so that that religiosity was always there and i think what a lot of people misunderstand about christian nationalism is they confuse it with the old

religious right and they think it's a movement of piety about Christian nationalism is they confuse it with the old religious right. And they think it's a movement of piety, of churchgoers. But Christian nationalism in the United States and, you know, look, I reported in Russia, which is deeply Christian nationalist. They love the idea of the holy Russian nation and about 9% of people go to church. It's not about going to church. It's about believing that you have a strong man anointed by God. That's been escalating. And you couldn't design a passion play more perfectly than what happened in Butler to confirm that. And I want to be careful there because I hear people on the left saying it's

staged. It wasn't staged. It wasn't designed. It wasn't God. It was a horrible, horrible event, but we have a candidate who knows how to turn it and how to make it into a narrative. And so in Milwaukee right now, they're not talking about bloodlust because they're talking about God, but those two things in Christian nationalism go hand in hand. They are two sides of a coin. Yeah, it was guns and luck. That's what it was. Yeah. It was guns and luck. And that's it was. Yeah, it was guns and luck. And that's sometimes hard. That's not satisfying, right? That's not a satisfying explanation. People look

for something more deeply satisfying, I think, which explains the conspiracies on the left and the turning to God on the right. It was luck. Had he not turned his head, we could have had a very different outcome. That's something I've been thinking about a lot the last few days, and a horrible outcome. And I wonder where you're at on this question of kind of the bottom up versus the top down threat of fascism, right? This idea that like, had Trump tragically been killed, I think that the response would have been terrifying from people in the base, from the militia crowd but on the other hand there isn't a figurehead quite like him out there to fill the void either and so on some level you kind of wonder what would come next from the top down standpoint so anyway i

wonder how you kind of process that how much of this is is trump's unique style and whatever you want to call it charisma doesn't work on me but charisma for other people or how much of this is Trump's unique style and whatever you want to call it, charisma. It doesn't work on me, but charisma for other people. Or how much of this is bubbling up from the types of folks you spent time with, regardless of Trump? Forgive me, but I'm going to mix my metaphors. I think Trump opened the door, but now he's riding the wave. And that's been true since 2020. I mean, there's even almost a pivot point in an interview he gave with Laura Ingraham in 2020. And he's sitting on the edge of his chair, and he's sort of spouting this kind of QAnon conspiracy theory, men in black flying above us right now. And you see Laura Ingraham, you know, trying to do her job, which was to make this presentable and yank him back,

and she can't. There was a point at which he sort of started using his own product, started believing his own delusion. And I think now we see, as for instance, Steve Bannon recently told David Brooks in the New York Times, Trump is fine, but we're going ahead of Trump. This is true, by the way, historically of most authoritarian movements. It's better to speak of Trumpism than Trump himself. And no, there's not a figurehead. And maybe J.D. Vance thinks he's going to be the figurehead. There may not be a national figurehead, but I do see at this point the problem as mostly bottom up, licensed by the top of a million little Trumps across the country. Don't think in terms, in other words, of the top of the ticket. Think about who

your county sheriff is. Think about whether they're part of the constitutional sheriff movements or like according to some polls, as many as 40% of sheriffs in the United States have gone over to some idea that they're somehow not beholden to federal law. Think about who's on your school board, right? The school board story that the press has kind of dropped, but it's still happening. They're still following around the country with really, really, you know, we talk about, we're not hearing much red meat in Milwaukee. You want to hear red meat, go to your local school board and you'll hear the most violent rhetoric. You might actually see violence. So I think at this time, Trump is the one, he's the surfer who is at the head of this thing. But I agree with you. Had he been killed, and I'm going to say, God forbid, because I'm a nonviolent person,

but also God forbid, because I think, look, we're not on the brink of civil war, but we can see it in the distance. And that would have been a major step closer. On the delusion point at the beginning of what you're saying there, to put a finer point on it, because it's been the most alarming but also clarifying anecdote of the reporting of how Trump settled on J.D. Vance as his pick, was this anecdote about how Tucker Carlson heard that he was wavering and moving back towards a Marco Rubio, and called him and said that if you pick a neocon like Marco Rubio, who wants, you know, to whatever, defend Ukraine, the deep state will try to assassinate you. How seriously they took that? I don't know. I'm not inside Tucker and Donald Trump's brain, but like that is a conversation

that is being had, shows you kind of how high they are in their own supply you know on this sort of stuff yeah and we saw the reporting uh who was it andy kroll i think talking about jd vance and a private meeting i think in a private meeting with donors saying look you can learn more from alex jones than you can learn from the news that's not him posturing for the public and so that shows us that level just speaking to students i think students in that private meeting so it was an educational setting well then yeah it wasn't even like a private meeting of like crazies where he was trying to like you know butch himself up among some other crazies like yeah you know i'm at a college we've got to be open to all ideas um we do the other thing that troubles me right is this question that plagues us and and i like the way you just moved right past it whether

or not trump or tucker believes this it doesn't really matter this is the story that's being told so trump has been in this interesting moment post-shooting and which he can't say he's found jesus because he was supposed to have had jesus all along. But if anyone's ever been in a near death experience, it's a lot. And if you're a drama queen like Trump, who believes already that you are somehow chosen, whether it's theologically or not, of course, he's come to that. And people saying, this is just a con. It doesn't matter. Fascism is a con. It always has been. Fascism promises a purity that doesn't exist. So in as much as we waste time calling out the hypocrisy of the right, we are failing to do the real work of building the vibrant democratic culture that just looks brilliant compared to it.

Because I guarantee you, there's plenty of people in that convention who know what the con is. When Amber Rose stands on the stage and says, I'm here as a mother, among the 50,000 folks who have flocked to Milwaukee, you don't think there's any men who maybe know her in another context, but they're willing to go along with the story. It does us no good to say, well, but she's a soft porn model. She is. And she is now a fascist spokeswoman. I want to go back to, you mentioned the Bannon and Brooks interview. And you wrote about that on your sub stack. There's a lot there. I find being a very extremely interesting among this group because a, he's the smartest and he has an actual vision of what the,

the soft fascist movement looks like in the future. Post-Trump some percentage of it like has a hint of truth. And then there's another percentage of it that he's bullshitting. And it's like, you're, you're trying to define, you know, kind of wade through all of that. i was interested in your take on his discussion with brooks on the brink of his imprisonment so i want to hear you vamp about that a little bit well you know the first thought that comes to mind is i gotta say i'm jewish and i'm on a college campus and in american life there's been a lot of debate about this idea of anti-semitism on the

left which has astonished me as anti-semit flourishes on the right, such that Steve Bannon can go into the New York Times and say to David Brooks about Christian nationalism, which he is advocating, he can say, oh, we're the best friends of the Jews. And the Jews' only hope for survival is to weld themselves to Christian nationalism. That's a threat. That's a fist. That's anti-Semitism. And you said, okay, well, that's terrible how Bannon thinks about the Jews.

But I think you can expand from there to the kind of whole far-right Catholic movement of which he's a part of. And I think you said he's the smartest, and I think the other important thing about Bannon is for a lot of people, he can be our doorway into understanding fascism, soft fascism, whatever you want to call it. It does have a real serious intellectual wing right now. Bannon's the smartest of the public figures. He's not the smartest of the thinkers in that movement. guys like Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame and Adrian Vermeule at Harvard. There are real thinkers putting their mighty minds to work on how do we shape a society according to these ideals. There's something about Patrick and Adrian. I don't know. They're converts. I mean, they weren't always like this. Yeah. I just don't buy it. I don't know. I just don't buy it.

You're closer to it than me. But I mean, it doesn't matter whether we buy it, because there's the book, right? I mean, the giggles of the intellectual elite when they speak in the public, and they sort of imagine and, you know, I'm going to dumb this down and make this accessible to people. But I think there is also a process of self conversion there. I think I look, I believe JD Vance, I don't really careD. Vance's politics. I think there's another sort of element that having been at Trump rallies for a long time and understanding what the thrill of them, the thrill of them, even back in 2016 is when Trump would, you know, punch his fist in his hand and say, I'd talk about a protester. The very first rally I went to, Youngstown, Ohio. I'm sitting, standing. You have to stand for hours, an aircraft hangar in Youngstown, Ohio in 2016. Kind of hippie-ish, grandmotherly type and her husband. And the man says, you know, first, I'd like to get a hold of a protester and beat the shit out of them. And then I get on CNN.

You know, the whole narrative, like, he still wants to be on TV. He wants to be seen. And his wife, at first, I think she's going to be upset. And then she just kind of leans into him. She's like, oh, Jean, that's just the sweetest thing you ever saw. And it's absolutely creepy. She then leans into me to speak about Hillary Clinton, of course, in 2016. And she's saying something that she doesn't normally say, language she doesn't normally use. She whispers because she can't say it out loud. She says, don't you look like she's been rode hard and put up wet? It was disgusting.

And you could see the pleasure they were taking in this kind of grotesque, violent, and sexual transgression, right? That was the action. Now, you come around to J.D. Vance. And what does J.D. Vance actually believe? I don't think it matters. It doesn't matter all that much what Trump believes. What they believe is the pleasure of hitting. That's what you experience at a rally. And I think J.D. Vance, we know Trump loves what he calls killers. And before Trump was the man,

J.D. Vance wanted to hit somebody and he was rewarded for hitting Trump. Great. Now Trump is the establishment. Oh, you want me to hit trans kids? I'll hit trans kids. I'll hit whatever you want me to hit. Just let me hit something. You know, it occurs to me that pleasure of, did you say pleasure of hitting or pleasure of hating either really work in this context ties into the first topic right which is why why has it been a little more calm than i would have expected among mega world that's because they're kind of achieving the pleasure right like like they think they've believed that they've won not you know not just that god has chosen them but also that they've won and that the people that they hate are about

to get their comeuppance so there's like a high maybe associated with that. There's a high. I can't help but think of this moment, this great moment of unity we're having now. Remember that moment when Obama handed off the White House to Trump and they sat down together and Trump came out and he was actually remarkably even-keeled. You know, we had a nice meeting. And then what happened? I mean, this idea that, oh, they've won and now they've calmed down. Hey, you know what? Maybe Trump's going to become presidential now.

Yeah, come on. No, they've won. They're having a party. We've been so desensitized to what the networks are calling red meat that we can't even hear it at the convention anymore. So, for instance, we had Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, speaking on the stage. Nobody made too much about it. Here is a guy who has just recently been talking about killing his enemies, who has said the most vile anti-Semitic things. Remember in 2020, there was a speaker who had been found had the most vile anti-Semitic things. Remember in 2020, there was a speaker who had been found had said much milder anti-Semitic things. She was

booted from the stage. They took her off. This is how far we've gone. The red meat is there, but it's not being expressed in the terms that we come to hear, which is just like grievance and grumpy and I'm losing. It's being expressed in the terms of we are going to fuck you up and it's going to be great. It's that woman way back in 2016 turning to her husband and saying, oh, Jean, isn't that sweet? Right. That's what's happening in Milwaukee. We link to the longer version of the Mark Robinson comments because he's jumping all over the place a little bit talking about war and killing but like the the tone his tone the anti-semitic comments and this person has a history of comments that just would have been like it would have been absurd to

have this a person like this on stage he would not have made it on the stage in 2020 i mean put that yeah the min romney convention it's like it would have been absurd to even consider that this person would have even made through vetting i want to get to the media part too and how you know the frog boiling element of dealing with the blood loss but one of the reasons i want to have you on i first reached back out to you six weeks ago because uh you sent a tweet and we were watching the same rally and trump was i kind of on his game you know and a lot of the liberal media world, and I don't mean that as CNN is liberal, or Washington Post is liberal. I mean, the progressive opinion media world

only takes out these clips of him where he says something really stupid or bumbling, and there are plenty of those. But overall, I was kind of struck by how much better he's getting. And you wrote the same and took some heat for it. Then you up and wrote this i'm tweeting this because i've been made dizzy by the reassurance narratives we've been telling ourselves that he's a mess if only he's a fascist and he's getting better at it he's not going to defeat himself we have to defeat him decide for

yourself how to resist and vote against fascism but don't do so based on a phony story that trump's running on fumes or that nothing but his base that he'll take care of himself. That's 2016 delusion. He's strong, and he's more fascist than he was even four years ago. And that was before the debate and before for Butler. You know, just talk about that, you know, kind of about what you see is why he has has gained strength and what you see about his rhetoric? You know, he's like a Broadway actor who's been playing a role for a long time. And in the beginning, he was a little rough in it. I mean, he nailed it in 2016, obviously, but now he's finding new depths and new nuances in that role. And watching him as you have and I have over the

years, and watching him closely, not just the clips, but watching whole speeches and understanding how he works the crowd, understanding that what is often derided as word salad, people are going to hate me for this. He's a good order. Yeah. He's not like Obama, but he knows how to work the crowd and he knows how to make- Phrases stick in people's brain. He's good at coming up with phrases that stick in people's brain.

It's even worse than that. He knows how to make meaning. And I hate to use the word in conjunction with him, but he knows how to make meaning in collaboration with his crowd. And so, you know, I'm sitting here on a college campus. There's all kinds of scholarship and religious studies that looks at how sort of major evangelical preachers do this work. For instance, the late Jerry Falwell,

not the younger, but the late Jerry Falwell, would go up in his megachurch week after week, and he'd often tell the same stories, and he'd tell them differently. You knew he was lying. You could hear it from week to week. So why isn't it just collapsing? Because it's giving a space for the crowd to participate, to nod, to say, you know what I mean, to say, I get it, right? Instead of, you're not sitting there passively, you are constructing the lie with him. That is also part of his social media presence. He takes things that bubble up from the internet, like little phrases, little memes, and then he'll use them, right? So, like, in a literal sense, like, they're making meaning in conjunction with each other. Like he's he's taken things from his fans and employed them.

I have, you know, traveling across the country, talking to MAGA people you encounter again and again. And this is going to get upset liberal listeners. And let me tell you, I'm not saying this as a positive thing. There are words that we imagine belong to goodness and virtue. One of them is creativity. Creativity is a neutral word. You can be creative about terrible things. And I hear people experiencing their relationship with Trump as creative, their own work toward

memes, people who weren't really ever, all they thought was, I just received politics. Now they feel like they're making politics too. And they're making this kind of fever dream with him. But it's worse than that, because as you've noted, he's sharper. And I think let Trump be Trump as any vestige of establishment falls away. And he is giving in to sort of pure id, pure inner, whatever. I mean, the word fascist is too small for what it is because he doesn't care about the history of 20th century ideology. It's Trumpism, right? And that allows him- He likes the costumes. He likes the costumes. Those are nice. But he can stumble on a word. It doesn't matter.

After the debate, there was that astonishing moment where people saying, well, the only solace we have is that Trump did just as poorly. And go back and look at that debate like Joe Biden didn't, because what you see him doing, what he does, of course, he's lying. I don't know what. Why don't we point out? Because we know he's lying. That's a given. What he's doing, though, is he's he's identifying Biden's weaknesses. He's reading Biden. He's waiting for those moments to say, ah, he knows when to hit and when not to hit. What I'm about to say is as painful for me to say as it is for you to listen. So I'm not, I'm with you.

And the focus on the Biden part of the debate, one thing that got lost in Trump's savvy that you just said was what not to do. Like there were several times where Biden gave him opportunities to go crazy and to do what he did in 2020, right? And like just jumped down his throat. And he did it. Like he knew that his opponent was imploding. And so, he didn't have to. He made a little face, middle smirk at his fans, you know, but he didn't do that and freak people out. And that is what we keep using the metaphor, like the velociraptor learning the door handle right like he he is learning and he's getting better and his speeches still have you know people like oh there's

the electrocuting and the shark and it's like yeah he does weird shit he's weird like he says weird stuff sometimes he's he's also old i'll disagree the shark thing was good okay there you go i've been to enough trump rallies to understand how that works and to understand that the crowd the crowd isn't saying what is he talking about they saying, this guy's a cut up. He's funny. It's ridiculous. He speaks from this overwhelming, the bully's confidence that he can pretend to be serious. I mean, you got to understand the kind of the carnivalesque mode of a Trump rally, the ways in which, the ways in which people can go to a Trump rally. I'm thinking of a rally in Sunrise, Florida, and Trump's not on every speech. Sometimes he goes on and on and people get bored.

Yeah, no, he's not. This is the important point. And people don't care. I remember people were streaming out, right? And he was still talking. And I said, oh, so you didn't like the rally? No, it was great. I loved his speech, but he's still talking. I know, I loved it. That was a collaboration too. Well, he's going on too long. That's okay. He's my crazy friend who says what I can't say, except now I think- I kind of can. Yeah, now we can. We've moved past that moment. We've moved past the license. The door is fully open. The other thing that he's doing better is my last compliment about Trump because he obviously has vulnerabilities

in the J.D. Vance pick. It provides vulnerabilities. This is not, I'm not over saying this is Superman. I'm saying he's getting better. He's getting better at being awful. It's right. Right. So like, because we both know

there's people out there say, how dare you say anything good about Trump? He's getting more dangerous is maybe the word. And it is at appealing to the people in the audience, right? He's good at playing that, that a cut up but like he also is focused again for trump right like more focused like he has a clear message that is resonating for people outside of the outside of the cult and that's the dangerous part really i mean like i mean he could just he could be really great at speaking to 30 of the country and that does us that does us no harm politically i mean maybe they're that might

lead to some stochastic terrorism or like there could be other cultural issues with donald trump having a huge grasp on 30 of the country but the message on stage if you watch him outside of the 20 second clips is not like this is a person that's totally off his rocker like he is he's found his groove on a few things that i think appeal to a broader audience and that's the scariest fucking part of all yeah and i think he's also recognized in terms of what you were saying in terms of i i he's learned how to lean back a little bit at times he's also recognized that with that cult people say well it's a cult of personality i mean here's a truth of cults it's a kind of derogatory term well i feel pretty derogatory about that so okay the way they expand is people say wow those people look really happy those people look like they're

having a good time and you can think of something as trivial as hara krishna's dancing on the street but the reality is hara krishna's have endured for a long time and have been able to recruit young people to do it because a certain number of people and that smaller cult say, hey, look, they're dancing, they're happy, they're smiling. I don't know if I share their beliefs, but I'd like to learn more about that. Maybe they're onto something.

And I think Trump and Trumpism have figured out how to leverage that momentum, which is, as you say, drawing in people who aren't down with the whole program, but say, this feels good. I think I'd like to be part of this. Let's talk about the media's failings in dealing with this. I always start, listeners will know, any media criticism with this this caveat the media is big and vast there's a lot of media a lot of people doing good there are people doing bad there are people that have good moments and bad moments but so i want to just narrow in on on the criticism

that i think you and i share in particular which is the trump is old news right like this stuff is old news right like we've seen this kind of rhetoric before he got away with it once before so people don't care the bias of news towards the new which means that that he gets a pass and these people get passes on things that as you said even in 2020 would have been hair on fire news stories like Mark Robinson speaking at the convention now is like kind of seen as old news so anyway that's my critique but I'd like to hear from you you know kind of how you assess it from a more academic perspective well first of all I think I'm going to double down on your caveat that the media is big because one of the things that is

breaking my heart is to see liberals and the left replicate the same kind of anti-media sentiment that is core to Trumpism and is core to every anti-democratic movement, to fail to distinguish between the critique of a reporter, an editor, a byline, or even a tendency and the media writ large. Because for instance, there are great journalists out there. Charles Holman's at the New York Times did a great piece that didn't get enough attention saying, no, Trump is not saying the same old things. David Fahrenthold. Yeah, the language is changing. And they're also doing so, which I think people forget, with the kind of resources that we need at a time when Trumpism is growing partly in direct proportion to the collapse of media.

I think of a guy I met in Layton, Utah, at a VFW. This is real Trump country. And he's sitting there, old man with his veteran's cap, grumbling at the newspaper. And I think I know what he's feeling. So I say, fake news. And he holds up the paper. It's this thin little rag. And he says, fake news. And he holds up the paper. It's this thin little rag. And he says, no news. We gave it all away to those phones that someone was sitting there looking at their phone. He's right. There's the media critic of late in Utah, a Republican, a never Trump, a Republican is like he understood how his Republican Party has vanished because there's no, no one holding accountable at the local level. So I think part of what's happening on the national press is we see a commercial or an

industry-wide death spiral of the media. And people are scared. They're scared for their jobs, right? But they're making calculations. And I've not been one who has said, I can't stand when people say, I'm never, you know, I'm going to show Trump by canceling my subscription to all newspapers. Great. Or I'm going to turn off and not tune into any TV news. And I think if we understand this period that we're in since 2016, as the Trump scene, as the age of Trump, the rhetorical style is going to infect everything.

And we have to be really on on guard against it. Watching the convention coverage this week, even on MSNBC, I heard a correspondent say, right after a fight, fight, fight, tell Rachel Maddow, who has kept her head. But the correspondent says, one thing we're seeing here, I can tell you, is a unified front against violence. And this was sort of a hallucinatory moment. Or over, we go into CNN, and we didn't have to interview just Don Jr. We also had to interview Eric at the convention coverage, where we are deciding on politics that are going to shape our lives. What's a hard-hitting question for Don Jr. and Eric?

How did it feel as a son? You almost sort of see news folks calculating, I'm going to need access in this new administration i better i better pivot right so it's not just the blunt you know the blindness of i can't see how the thing has changed there's also the adaptation uh the calculation which i think is profoundly naive yeah and so i think some of the adaptation actually is subconscious even it's human nature yeah yeah sometimes it's cynical i think this is like the leftist imagination that that jake tapper is sitting there and saying aha no of course not no one's doing that there's no conspiracies a conspiracy ever explains can't be explained by incompetence and ordinary fear

yeah ordinary human failings yeah i know I know. The other thing about the convention coverage, this was frustrating to me. I was ranting about on MS last night. So we're not perfect at MS. I'm not perfect when I'm on MS. I'm not perfect at the bulwark. I take negative criticism. They're big organizations though, right?

Yeah, exactly. You can still hear Tim Miller on MS. Yeah, I said it. I was like, again, there a left leftist tendency to want to mock trump and say like he's incompetent he couldn't do anything last time they couldn't build the wall i'm on there and i'm like okay you know so do we even need to be worried about these promises and that's a fine instinct to make fun of and all that but like my point is like actually yeah no we need to be really worried about what a Trump 2.0 would do and the choice of J.D. Vance and what that means

for what the administration would look like. And I think that there's a failure of imagination also, because people don't feel like they've lived through this. They don't know how bad it could get. I mean, just as I said, nothing that you imagine can be explained by conspiracy can't be explained by incompetence. But at the same time, you can't pin your hopes on incompetence. You also have to recognize that the Republican Party, we know there's a Trump takeover in 2016. But that evolution has been going and going and going. I mean, this is now light years away from anything that you knew, right? Think about the staff of the 2017 staff versus what this staff will be in 2025. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, for instance, I mean, like here, here's one example. I see in lefty circles, people very afraid, those who are taking the threat seriously about who's first in line for retribution under Trump. And I think they underestimate the fact that first in line, first in line isn't even never Trumpers. It's people who are still claiming to be Trumpers, but are suspect. It's a purging and a cleansing, right? It's making things loyal. And it doesn't matter what Trump does. We know this. I mean, it's now I think it's well reported Project 2025, the expansiveness of it doesn't matter whether Trump distanced himself from it. Of course he does. He doesn't serve a document. Documents serve him. That doesn't stop Russ Vought and

Heritage and all those organizations from plowing on. And they've said this, look, we don't care what he says. Let him say whatever he wants to say. We're going to be in Washington and we're going to do what we're laying out here. All right. Last thing you wrote in one of your recent posts, for the last year or so, when speaking with friends and colleagues on the fascism beat or interviewers after the show is over, I've been asked, what time is it on your doomsday clock? So I'm not going to wait till the show is over. I want to know, what time is it on your doomsday clock when you consider? And I want to contextualize, use the word civil war in the book, Scenes from a Slow

Civil War and in the sub stack. To me, that's not like the movie Civil War. It's more like The Troubles, right? It's more of these little skirmishes that become hard to move past. So anyway, I want you to define what that civil war means and tell us where we are on the doomsday clock? I'm going to be optimistic and then really doomy, right? Okay, great. I think it's not even as bad as the troubles, the troubles in Northern Ireland. It is not even at that level. It is moving in that direction. And that's a level of political violence that we are not ready for.

The slow civil war, though, is right. It's the sort of the skirmish that's sort of setting up the potential for skirmish. You know, a group of proud boys are Oath Keepers lining up with guns outside a school library. Right. And no shots fired. And enough times that happens, we start to reassure ourselves. It sucks, but it's no big deal that men with guns are lining up. And, you know, I said this for a while, but it's like flicking matches, lit matches into dry grass. And then every time the field doesn't burst into flames, you start to say, I guess it's okay. It's going to burn if you keep doing that. Yeah, boom. The political violence, and it is here. I think that's the other thing that people sort of neglect to pay attention to.

So the slow civil war, I count as casualties of the slow civil war, all the people who are having children that they don't want to have, or every journalist knows for every story we hear of, say, a woman who gets in terrible medical condition or even dies because of lack of reproductive health care, every story you hear, there are countless more that you don't hear about because they don't get reported. And we could go through that issue by issue and looking at how that's boiling, right? But in terms of what time it is, maybe this is actually more optimistic. I think I've gone past 12. I think it's 12.01 a.m., which is to say this, I'm still going to fight like hell to try and stop Trump from getting elected. But I think the move now, when you go out and you look at, when you spend time in MAGA

world and you understand how entrenched it is locally, even if we were to stop Trump from getting elected, the work now is to be thinking to yourself, what am I going to be doing the day after November? Maybe I knock on doors until then. What am I going to be doing the day after November to survive whatever is to come? Because even if we stop Trump, the slow civil war is going to keep slowly, slowly heating up or, God forbid, quickly. That doomsday clock was, you know, till the advent of soft fascism in America. We're past it. So now, how do we endure it and survive it? With the one lesson from history, no fascist regime yet has ever survived as long as many democratic ones. They collapse. They're beatable. Yeah, they have fundamental flaws. Okay, that's a good place to leave it, because the next time let's talk about the weaknesses of fascism so we can uh we can give people something to grab on to

because i'm with you and um well and i do think beating donald trump this year would go a long way and helping it though though i concur it wouldn't solve all of our potential problems jeff charlotte thank you so much for your expertise for your time coming back to the podcast and um you know i think this is a subject matter that's going to be with us. So we'll be having you again soon. Thanks, Tim. Good talking with you. All right.

Thanks to Jeff Charlotte. Up next, Joe Perdico. All right. Hey, guys. all right hey guys um i wanted to give you an on the ground update from milwaukee uh sam stein marco puto and joe perricone are there i've got joe with us they've been filing reports joe's got a press pass newsletter about kevin mccarthy that brought a smile to my a smile to my mouth and smiled my eyes my eyes, a smile to my eyes, the whole deal. So, hey, brother, how's it going out there? It's very weird and exciting and confusing all at once. Yeah, let's talk about the weirdness.

To me, the most interesting thing about this convention from afar has been less about what's happening on stage and what's happening in that box with Trump. I think it's very telling about what's going on with the party, about who's in there, who's around Trump, that Trump's sitting there watching, kind of who's in good standing with the cult leader and who's not. So anyway, I don't know, maybe talk about that and then any other impressions you have from on the ground? Something that I picked up on was that the people in his box with him, it's a lot of house members, a lot of random house members who don't have chairmanships or anything. These aren't people in leadership.

They're just the most loyal people like Marsha Blackburn, Byron Donalds. These aren't top members. Top members aren't as vigorous in their support, or if they are, they're not sycophantic enough. And so you can really see the grip on the party and who is rewarded for the most loyal behavior. Yeah, Corey Mills, Anna Paulina Luna. It's just funny, Tucker was in the box the other night. It's interesting to think about

who would have been in the Mitt Romney box in 2012, right? And it's just a totally different cast. It made problems its own ways. It would have been big donors and establishment figures and maybe past dignitaries. There isn't even any past Republican president or VP candidate there, right?

Besides Trump. Is Palin there? I don't think Palin's there. I haven't seen her. She's probably the only one. I guess Dan Quayle could walk through the floor because nobody would know who he is. But other than Palin, she's the only one in the past 20, 30 years who could walk through the floor and not be harassed. You know, Bush couldn't do it. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney,

none of them could even step on the floor without being attacked. Yeah, not just that they aren't welcome or aren't interested in going, but they would be harassed. That's a good point. You've been milling about with the people. What are you hearing?

What's the mood? So I think leading into this week, we saw it from a lot of other publications about like unity being the theme. And my immediate suspicion was that unity was not going to be a countrywide unity, it was going to be party unity. And that's what we've seen these past couple days is that the talk of unity was about unity within the Republican Party. Everybody is now on board. And if you listen to the speeches last night, it was very aggressive. It was very antagonistic to the people that they are opposed to on the left.

And you're going to see a lot more of it tonight, too. Peter Navarro is going to be released from jail and then speak tonight. It's not going to be a calm speech. Yeah, that's alarming. You know, I've been saying that, you know, the worst case scenarios have not come to pass after what happened in Butler. I was very worried about just the kind of a rabid vibe in Milwaukee. And it doesn't sound like that's been the vibe

from your all's reporting and others. But man, coming straight out of jail, Peter Navarro, it feels like it might be the tone might might shift a little bit tonight i don't know what's your sense i think it's been shifting and i i think that the reason why it doesn't seem as rapid is because everybody's on the same page and so there's no need to ravel up the crowd because a lot of everyone everyone's in agreement with each other they know what they're doing this time there's no drama there's no like in 2016 there's no mike lee on the floor demanding that there be an open nomination process mike lee is fully on board now

they all are the organization is already there So I don't think there's going to be this kind of, it's not going to feel like a Trump rally. It's just like a coronation. The one area where there could conceivably be some disunity, but I haven't seen it, would be foreign policy. Jonathan Martin wrote a little bit about this for Politico this morning, I think probably for people that aren't in milwaukee that are in uh in the think tank class but you know this choice of jd vance is the party's rubber stamping a move away from the bipartisan foreign policy consensus the notion that we should care about our allies in europe etc etc more moving towards more isolationist posture but has there been any kind of you know rumblings about that at all not really because the way that people who are i guess somewhat

pro-ukraine have spoken up they either haven't said anything or for example last night eric hovde he's the republican nominee in wisconsin for senate hovby yeah that's i learned how that's it's pronounced that way really yeah that's how well that's how the announcer said it was hubby i thought it was hubby or hubda anyway he in his speech he was rattling off like america's enemies that have capitalized on joe biden being president uh and one of them is like, he just kind of subtly said, Putin in Ukraine, and like quickly moved on. And he said it so quick that nobody could stop and think to boo him. But if you look, for example, at David Sachs' speech,

it was a lot more aggressive and a lot more focused. And I would anticipate maybe that J.D. Vance's will be as well. Nikki also did that. And just a pathetic speech from Nikki, right? Where she's like, you know, kind of makes some nod that she disagrees with Trump on stuff, but also basically blames Biden for Ukraine. And, you know, I think that's how they're kind of handling that.

That it wouldn't happen if we had a strong Trump in there. Trump would have stared him down. Any other things to look for in the next two nights besides Navarro? Or any thoughts about what to expect from J.D.? I think that J.D. was partly picked because of his pitbull, attack dog style. And so if there is a calmness, I don't know if there will be, but if there is to Trump's speech, J.D.'s will likely be the far more aggressive one. I think he's going to have to do some bio.

He'll do a little bit of the, oh, you know, the Meemaw stuff from the book. And he'll do the, I went into the military, you know, but I agree. Eventually that pivots to kind of what he's been good at what part of why he was picked everybody keep an eye on uh you gotta go read what joe wrote about coven mccarthy it's it's hilarious joe's newsletter uh mark caputo's newsletter magaville sam stein's also filing from there check us out on youtube we'll be keeping everybody posted joe thanks for uh popping on are you at the floor there? Where are you? I'm in the press area. All right.

Thanks for popping on from Milwaukee. And we'll be seeing you soon, brother. Everybody else, we will be back tomorrow with your friend and mine, Adam Kinzinger. See you all then. Peace. Blue skies, they light up the rivers that the birds fly over. Better not to quench your thirst. Better not to be the first one diving in. Though you caught me and you know why.

You breathe in the deepest part of the water What's the matter? You hurt yourself Open your eyes and there was someone else Now I've got you in the undertow Now I've got you in the undertow Why you wanna blame me for your troubles? Uh-uh-uh

You better learn your lesson yourself Nobody ever has to find What's in my mind tonight tonight The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.