The Bulwark Podcast - Joe Perticone and Mona Charen: Trusting the Chronic Liar over the Pastor

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

The base gives Trump higher marks for speaking truth than they give to religious leaders, Vivek will be targeted at the debate,  DeSantis turns on MAGA, Biden needs to tackle the age issue, and the media keeps both-sidesing political scandal. Joe Perticone and Mona Charen join Charlie Sykes.

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. Hey, I want to really thank Will Salatan for filling in for the last few weeks, actually more than filling in. His series about Lindsey Graham was truly extraordinary and shout out to all the people that are involved in that. I think this was one of the most important stories to focus on what has happened to the Republican Party through the lens of one of the most, I don't know whether I should call them pathetic or deplorable figures, because I was actually flashing back to 2016. And I remember having a conversation with somebody saying, you know who the most interesting candidate to watch this year is? It's Lindsey Graham. There was a time back in the day, in the before times, when Lindsey Graham

was actually an interesting political figure who was known for his humor and for his willingness to poke at sacred cows. But that's when he was good friends with John McCain before he switched his affection and his allegiances to Donald Trump. So we have a lot of ground to cover this morning. We are joined by Joe Pertico, a national political reporter at The Bulwark, who writes the twice-weekly newsletter Press Pass, just back from Iowa. First of all, good morning, Joe. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. We will also be joined by Mona Cherin, policy editor at The Bulwark and, of course, host of the weekly podcast Beg to Differ. Welcome for having me. We will also be joined by Mona Charan, policy editor at The

Bulwark and, of course, host of the weekly podcast Beg to Differ. Welcome back, Mona. Thank you, Charlie. Okay, I don't even know where to start today because we have, you know, the listless vessels. We have, you know, Apple of his eye. We have all these, you know, weighty issues of constitutional law. But let's just start with Donald Trump's announcement that he's not only not going to be doing the debate in Milwaukee, he's never going to be doing any debates because he's just so awesome and he's so far ahead in the polls. So how surprising is this? I'm starting off with a real softball for you, Joe. How surprising is this that Donald Trump, the guy who fights the bravest warrior for his ideas in the world is running as far away from any confrontation with Chris Christie or any of the other candidates for president.

Any part of you surprised that he's not showing up ever? Not really. I don't think that he's not going to not show up ever. If things get close, if he doesn't get a dominant victory in Iowa, for example, he'll be there the next week for the New Hampshire debate. But he's in a position now where he doesn't have to. He doesn't have to show up because he's already the PAC leader. And if he doesn't show up, they're all just going to focus on Vivek, which you can already see. I get all these press releases from these campaigns, and they're condemning Vivek for his comments on whatever.

And I saw the speeches at the Iowa State Fair. He's a common name drop among the other candidates. He'll be the target in the debate because he's the one rising, at least rising among the bottom layer of the soil. For the moment. Okay, Mona, surprised at all that Donald Trump is going to cede the stage to the also-rans? I completely agree with Joe that this is a provisional statement. Any statement that Donald Trump makes has to be taken not with a grain of salt, but with, you know, an entire like pickup truck worth of salt. Look, whatever suits his needs in the moment is what he's going to do. And if things

change, he will discard this commitment to this declaration without a single backward glance. And by the way, the entire cult will say that he never said it. He never said he was going to, right? So there we are. I agree with everything here. I mean, look, it's cowardly. It's disrespectful to the voters. It embodies his contempt for the electoral process. But from his point of view, it makes perfect sense. And of course, it's always provisional. And in many ways, and I'm really sorry to say this, this is playing out the way that he had hoped, right? That he would have a crowded field that nobody would be able to rise above. They'll be on that stage. It's hard to imagine anyone, you know, doing so well that suddenly they change the dynamics of all this.

These are always the other guys. Now, of course, Trump's going to be what he's going to be on Twitter with Tucker Carlson, proving, by the way, that there's no way to fail if you're deplorable enough. You know, I mean, again, that's not the most effective counter-programming, but it will be enough. And of course, he'll be doing the perp walk. And we live in this surreal moment. And I mean, let's just take a deep breath and step back from it. We live in this surreal moment where the twice-impeached, four-time-indicted Trump will be arraigned, booked, his mugshot will be taken, and this will be perceived by Trump and others as a political asset for him. And he's probably not wrong. He'll go up in the polls, Mona. I mean, this is, I used Peter Weiner's tweet as a cheap shot today. He said,

I think we can agree how weird morally inverted a time we are living in when a Republican ex-president surrendering to authorities because of his fourth indictment is said by many to be a way to upstage a Republican debate in a way that will help him. But that's where we are. Yeah, it is utterly, utterly surreal. I think we're seeing, though, this very substantial bifurcation of the GOP cult, which digs in further and further and further into Trump with every outrage, and does only serve to strengthen him within the GOP, and the other 70% of the population or so for whom this is a huge, huge problem. Yeah, we should remind ourselves of that, yeah. Yes.

It is a cult, but it's not the majority of Americans yet. It's not even a majority of the Republican Party that's really cultish. I mean, there are a lot of people in the Republican Party who say, well, you know, they think he's honest or they think he could win or, you know, but there isn't that strong of a majority that prefers him. He's over 60% in the CBS poll. Yeah, that's true. And I come back to this, the thing we're seeing is not just all of these indictments causing the base to rally around him, but the complete implosion of DeSantis. When DeSantis was a viable alternative, there were lots of people who were willing to say yeah trump

has too much baggage but now that desantis is fading and uh seemed to be an ineffective candidate there just isn't another alternative which we have been saying at the bulwark for months and months and months like don't put all your eggs in the DeSantis basket. We don't think this guy can go the distance, but they did. And the donors did, and the opinion shapers did, and look where we are now. So, Joe, you actually went out to do some real-world reporting. You were at Iowa at the state fair. So, you talked to a lot of Republicans. I think you said you were actually ran into two Democrats. Is that right? Two? Two Democrats? Yeah, I saw a couple scanning the schedule for the speakers, and I said, how do you feel about the race? And they go, we're actually Democrats. I was like, you're the first ones I've met this whole week. So tell me what you saw there, because we're

going to be talking about the Trump cult a lot, I think, this morning. But what was the atmosphere there? And you mentioned that clearly Vivek has drawn some attention. Is it fair to say that right now among the non-Trump candidates that he's generating the most buzz, that he's probably the best speaker out there? I mean, what did you see in Iowa? Yeah, definitely. So all of these candidates, they go to the state fair and it's kind of like speed dating, where they make their stem speech and they pitch who they are and what they're about. And they all kind of sound the same. They defend Donald Trump. They say, I was with him from the beginning. And then they kind of try to differentiate themselves.

For example, even the most obscure candidate, Perry Johnson, he was one of the last people doing the chats with the governor. And he said, oh, when I said abolish the Department of Education, a week later, Vivek copied me. He's copying my positions. I'm like, I don't think many people even know who you are, man, but okay. But the fact that he's name-dropping another candidate is significant because when they do that, they're saying, this is the person I have to overcome if I'm going to make any dent, even if they know they won't be the nominee, which is the case among a lot of them. They won't admit it, but they know it. What is the mood there in terms of Trump versus the alternative?

There's a new poll out today. I think it is the Des Moines Register NBC poll showing Trump with a big lead, but he's under 50%. So there's clearly, you know, interest in other candidates. So I hesitate to ask this because I know the answer. But I mean, can you explain how the voters you talk to are responding to all of the multiple indictments? Yeah, so a really telling answer that I included in Thursday's newsletter was that one of the guys, he said, yeah, Trump's accused of all these crimes. That makes him unelectable for the general. Okay. with this criminal. And so that really shows the mindset of how so many people who are these committed Republicans will still end up voting for him, even if he's the nominee. And I think you see a lot of people who don't answer that. If you ask most of the candidates in the field

right now, they say, oh, well, we're not there. I'm going to be the nominee. But in reality, they will end up voting for him if push comes to shove. And I think in a much larger margins than you saw in 2016, for example. So, Mona, we've talked about this before, but I think the extraordinary thing looking back at the world since 2015 is that Donald Trump really hasn't changed that much, but he has just transformed the Republican Party. In 2015, you could plausibly argue that most Republicans cared about character. It was the law and order party. And now it's like, yeah, he's a criminal, but they're all criminals.

So he's my criminal. I mean, that's where we're at, right? That's right. And it's this deep, deep cynicism that he has engendered. You know, I wonder if people ever get a longing for a certain amount of uplift from politics instead of this relentless, horrible, crude cynicism, but not so far. But one quick point and then a small rant about Vivek Ramaswamy and the voters. So one thing that gets a lot of attention in polling is, well, X number of people say that they do think Trump did something wrong. That datum standing alone is not all that interesting or not all that revealing,

it seems to me, because you have to then follow it up by saying- But do you care? And do you think, well, do you care? Also, do you think other people did the same kind of wrong things and they're just going after Trump for political reasons, because you have to fold all those things in. And that's clearly a part of many voters' thinking is that, yeah, he did something wrong, but, you know, they're just going after him because it's politics. They all do it, blah, blah, blah, all the excuses. Okay, so that's one quick point. Now, here's my rant.

And this is kind of about Vivek, but it's also about the voters. I mean, the fact that he is surging in some polls we do about Taiwan? Give AR-15s to every Taiwan citizen. He not only defends Donald Trump, but he wants to sue the Justice Department for indicting Donald Trump. How he would have standing to do that, he didn't explain. He wants to lay off 75% of the federal workforce, including 20,000 FBI agents. And he wants to station the military along the southern border every half a mile. Every half a mile. Yeah. And he wants to give Vladimir Putin anything he wants in Ukraine, right?

Correct. Yeah. Complete surrender to Putin. Also making voters from the ages of 18 to 25 take a test, otherwise not being allowed to vote, which I thought was innovative. Thank you. Yes. Edgy. Edgy. Obviously surging. slick, fast-talking, snake-oil-selling scoundrels instead of fine, upstanding politicians.

The thing that they hate the most- There's no way for that. Is politician. Yeah. The thing they hate the most is if you've actually accomplished something. And we'll get to Ron DeSantis whining about this in a second. But this whole morning, I've been sort of ruminating on this. I'm in one of my darker moods, Charlie. Usually, I try to pull you out of your dark moods, but I'm in a dark one

today. Because this whole terrible crisis that we're in as a country, with, you know, really an existential threat of Donald Trump being reelected, is because there was a complete and total abdication and failure of leadership by the opinion shaping class, by the elected Republicans, by media, starting with Rush Limbaugh, who could have, you and I think, could have stopped Trump, and on and on and on. Because the average voter says, well, that sounds kind of good. And they do need some guidance from people who they trust and who they think are generally on their side to say, yeah, this is not good. And that was completely lacking.

So we're being led by the most ignorant and the most passionate of our population, the exact people that the Constitution was designed to protect us against with checks and balances. So Joe, you heard how Mona described Vivek. Again, give me your sense of how the Iowa fairgoers see him though. They all described him as like sharp, innovative. Wow, he's got outside the box ideas and i think it's just that he's young and he's also very good at speaking to the crowd which is not not boring yeah which is that's not true of most of the field if you look at the kind of top candidates in the in the polls like

nicki haley is afraid to take a controversial position on anything so she just gives her stump tim scott gives his stump that's this you know vaguely optimistic you know spiel about the future of america and they're all kind of boring and vivek's really crowd engaging he was rapping on stage at the fair yeah he's entertaining yeah he's at least like doing something slightly different, even if his positions are all the same of, you know, I will pardon the criminal frontrunner, but he's at least engaging the crowd better than obviously someone like DeSantis,

but better than most of, I think, the rest of the second tier field. Well, to Mona's point, though, we're living in an age in which the entertainment wing of the party is clearly dominant as opposed to any sort of substance. Did I see over the weekend that Vivek's on one of the shows and he says that as a businessman, he wants to run the United States the way successful entrepreneurs like Elon Musk run their company.

And a lot of people would say, excuse me, you want to run America like Elon Musk runs his companies, which would mean what? You would crater, you know, two thirds of the value in the first six months of the United States. I mean, I guess. Okay. So here's, here's another deep breath moment because, and I focused on this on my newsletter today. And I think a lot of people have been commenting on the CBS poll that, I mean, leave out the top numbers. This is the one that sort of like slaps you in the face. They asked the voters, the Trump supporters, the Trump voters, who do you feel that what they tell you is true? Okay, who do you believe? 71% said Trump, 63% said friends and family, 56% conservative media figures, 42% said religious figures. Okay, so deep breath. David French said, look, whoa, just hard to wrap your head around

this kind of devotion. It demonstrates why religious objections to Trump fall on deaf ears because his base trusts him sometimes more than their own pastors. I mean, so again, they're not asked about political, ideological, cultural, social issues. It's not about education. It's not about inflation or anything. They're asked who they believe was telling the truth. And overwhelmingly, they pick the chronic liar, fraudster con man for Mar-a-Lago, right? I mean, they pick Trump over religious leaders by 29 points. And he picked him by 15 points over even conservative media figures. And the one that just blows my mind is they were more likely to feel that Donald Trump's telling them the truth than their own friends and family by a margin of eight points.

Okay, Mona, I'm guessing that's not pulling you out of your dark place. No. It's a cult, people. It is such a cult. And you know, it is, God, these are the moments when you say, damn you, Mitch McConnell. You know, because there are moments when you just have to pull the emergency ripcord, right? I mean, after January 6th and after the second impeachment, during that impeachment, McConnell did not rally his troops to impeach. He took the cowardly way out. He said, well, we do have a criminal justice system in this country.

And he didn't impeach him if he had impeached him. One of the punishments that's available for impeachment is that you are disqualified forever from holding an office of public trust in the United States of America. He didn't do it. And I just cannot get over that missed moment because sometimes you do have to take it out of the hands of the people, because the people are screwing it up. Yeah, this is the problem of defending democracy, and also saying that we are not actually a democracy. We are a liberal constitutional republic, which does have laws that protect us against majoritarian excesses. Boy, do you notice how many euphemisms I used there, Joe? I mean, we can't possibly know, but there's got to be some deep, deep down in Mitch McConnell's

soul, some sense of like, damn, I was this close. This could have gone away. Little short-term pain would have put up with a lot of shit. My approval rating would not be any lower than it is right now, but we wouldn't be facing this, right? I don't know. I think that McConnell has always just kind of been all about results that he can get in the Senate, whether it's the Supreme Court justices blocking the Merrick Garland nomination for as long as he did, like all of it's a gamble so that he can rack up these wins that he believes are long-term. And let's say there's another Trump presidency again, he won't behave any different. I think that when you see him kind of break the mold on something, it's really rare. And everyone goes, is this the moment? And it

never is. If he does feel any bit of regret for this, he's not showing it. And I don't think I'll ever see it. I was going to play the Donald Trump Ukraine comments first, but let's play Ronda Sandus. Ronda Sandus, let's just say he's having a really lousy week. He had that email that was published on Thursday and Friday. There's another memo out now. And so he was criticized for being urged to defend Donald Trump. He seemed to be taking a different tone over the weekend, and he's kind of complaining about the mood and the atmosphere among Republicans. Let's play it. You could be the most conservative person since sliced bread, unless you're kissing his rear end, they will somehow call you a rhino. If all we are is listless vessels that just supposed to follow,

you know, whatever happens to come down the pike on truth social every morning, that's not going to be a durable movement. So Mona, he's not wrong. I mean, sort of like welcome to reality, Governor. Yeah. And of course, he's now being roundly attacked. And, you know, MAGA is pretending to be deeply, deeply offended by this, because of course, they're not just a cult, they're a cult of snowflakes. Hold on. This is the Ron DeSantis critique of the entire Ron DeSantis strategy of running for president this year, right?

He kissed his ass constantly. He said he wouldn't extradite him to face charges in New York. He constantly supported, I mean, you know, he had a few. This was the heart of his strategy. I will kiss his ass as much as I possibly can so that people will think that I'm the acceptable alternative. Because if he goes away, there I am right there by his ass, right? Right. And the

other piece of it was that he bargained that it was not a cult, that the party was all about conservative victories, and that he would rack up these wonderful conservative victories. Trump announced right after the 2022 midterms, DeSantis did not. Why? Well, first he had to change the law in Florida, but that was a technicality. But he wanted to get all these legislative things under his belt so he could go to the voters and say, see, I'm even more right wing than Trump. So you should want me. And of course, he's now discovering, oh, no, they don't really care about any of that.

I mean, everything he says there is correct. It's just like, you're just realizing this now, just now. He gives this, you know, how are you this dumb? You can't look at our records and see that I am the more conservative one. I rack up the more conservative wins and you don't get it. But that's a fundamental misunderstanding of that, you know, small but mighty core of always Trump voters. You know, Trump takes liberal positions all the time. He did it as president. He would say things like, we got to round up the guns. And when he says things like that, supporters would still back it amongst his most hardcore

supporters. And so it doesn't matter if you're running to the right of him or to the left of him or even copying him, you're not him. So when you were in Iowa, you got to hang out a little bit with Will Hurd on Friday. Now, Will Hurd has not yet made the debate stage. Is that right, Joe? To my knowledge, no. I know that he was really close on donors, and I think he might be close on polling, but he still has a couple days. So how is he being received there? When he does his Trump critique, and he does it to these mixed crowds, what kind of response is he getting? How does he feel about that? There was a lot of, you know, who is this guy? When he was doing his soapbox speech at the fair, he was just kind of going through his record of like, I was in the CIA, I stopped terrorists. And there were people going,

yeah, that sounds great. Love that. And then he said, the fact is Donald Trump lost the 2020 election because he couldn't expand the Republican Party the way I did when I ran as a Black Republican in a Democratic Latino district in South Texas. When you say something like that, people were groaning because they go, yeah, how dare you say he lost? Even if they know he did, they don't want to hear it. And so there was a lot of groans when he would take those shots, but when he's not, people like it because he is a very traditional Republican and that's what traditional Republicans want. And so, you know, it's hard to gauge, you know, where everyone in the crowd is. Obviously there are most of the people going and attending these things are Iowa

Republicans from all over the state. But there was just kind of, you know, a mixed response. It was more like people listening intently to learn who he is and liking what they hear until he took a position like saying Donald Trump lost the election or Donald Trump's not expanding the party the way he should be. Could I just make one more point about DeSantis? Please. Maybe I'm misreading the situation, and maybe there was absolutely nothing he could have done that would have been successful.

But my sense of it is that actually he did have an opportunity that he blew. Namely, after 2022, he was already popular with a broad swath of the Republican Party, including the Trump supporters. They liked him. And he really didn't need to try to be like the next Trump. All he needed to do was to be an acceptable Trump alternative to the other 70% of the party and to present himself as a viable candidate who was more competitive in the general. And if more non-Trumpy, non-cult Republicans had rallied around DeSantis,

then the cult would have said, well, you know, I like Trump, but this guy seems to have the wind at his back and, you know, people like him. And so I think that was his viable path and he didn't take it but anyway what do you guys both think about that theory i think that desantis is you know he that you're right about that mona but also like he is not good at campaigning no no and and there's so like so much you can have in your record, but when you can't take a good photograph, no matter what happens, when you're grinding your teeth and you always look like you don't want to be where you are, and you can't engage with voters in a normal human way, it's just not, like, there's nothing that can happen. Because that's, you know, not everyone can have the big rally where they just talk endlessly like Trump.

You have to actually connect with these people. And he has shown that he just can't do it. And it doesn't matter how popular you are on paper. It's not translating. We now see that he's really, really bad. I guess the question is then, if he's that bad, how did he get elected governor of the state of Florida? And how did he win re-election by such a huge margin? Because I think that there were a lot of, you know, pundits and donors who looked at those numbers out of the midterm and said, this guy must be really, really good to win what used to be a swing state by 20 points. This guy must have some magic touch.

So what is the disconnect between his inability to campaign on the presidential platform and his successes down in Florida? So he knows Florida like the back of his hand. And so you can see these clips of him before he's running for president where he, you know, scolds the reporter and he fires off a million statistics. And he has these kind of viral moments where he knows everything he's talking about. When he goes to places like Iowa and New Hampshire, where he's meeting an entirely different type of voter, especially somewhere like New Hampshire, New Hampshire people are not like Florida people. They're very diverse. They're not as far right as the conservatives are in Florida. And so he's having to mix with these different crowds where

his response is just sort of, I was a governor. I did these things, I stopped wokeness. And people don't really care about that. And so when you start using all these acronyms like DEI, ESG, that don't really connect with people who aren't very online, he's kind of messing up. And I think that it's easy to win in your own state if you know your state really well the way he does. But when he goes elsewhere, he's not able to connect or have the same kind of mastery that he's had in Florida. Do you think it's also possible that in 2022, he was still getting a lot of credit from voters for his COVID response and that that has faded? Yeah, certainly.

I mean, COVID is not even an afterthought in much of the country now, and especially in Iowa. I didn't see anything. Like even when you, sometimes when you go in cities, you'll see like the vestigial, stay six feet apart signs that haven't been taken down. You see them at airports, but in Iowa, there was nothing. And it was just people out having fun. And so you don't really consider the COVID response, especially even the vaccines. Like everyone who should have gotten vaccinated has gotten vaccinated. It's now part of their yearly health care plan.

But it wasn't even a topic among most of the people. Yeah, I think that's a big factor, Mona. He got the COVID thing politically right. For Florida. With all the asterisks around it. And just for the thousandth time to remind people, there's a tremendous disconnect between running even for governor in a big state and running for president. They're completely different. And he really did create kind of a bubble around himself and he wasn't interacting with the media. And he did kind of create this little alternative political reality for himself. We're seeing how it played out. And he was able to

conceal or use his, how do we say, his personality issues to his benefit in a short term, but it just doesn't play on a different level. I mean, how many times have we seen governors who look great on paper, just fall flat on their face when they run for president? And yet every cycle, we forget that rule. Let's switch gears a little bit to Donald Trump over the weekend. Donald Trump sitting down with Larry Kudlow and talking about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine. Let's play this. You know, Putin would have never gone into Ukraine. But that was just on my relationship with him. My personality over his would have never gone. I used to speak to him. It was the apple of his eye. But I said, don't ever do it. And it was,

you know, tough stuff there, but he would have never done it. Okay, now, so I and others have quoted him as saying that I was the apple of his eye. Others hear that as saying that it was the apple of his eye, Ukraine. All right, so there is a difference of opinion there. Look, I don't know, I mean, whether he said it. I mean, it's certainly in context. He could have said that, you know, Ukraine was the apple of the eye, but he wouldn't have done it. But I think the bottom line is that Trump really seems to believe that Putin either really liked him or was really afraid of him. I mean, Putin knew how to massage Trump's ego to the point where Donald Trump believes he has this massive influence over Vladimir Putin. So Mona, what do you make of this? His insistence that why would Putin not have gone into Ukraine? I mean, really, he says, it was just on my relationship with him, my personality over his. He really believes that Vladimir Putin was so enthralled to his personality and their wonderful relationship that there would have been no war. He is so delusional. He is so cracked.

I mean, Putin led him around by the nose throughout the four years of the Trump presidency. Just the notion where he brags about keeping us out of wars, two points on that. First of all, when you're bragging, that's your great claim to fame, you keep us out of wars. How do you think that deters an opponent, right? I mean, anybody looking at that is going to say, well, his main priority is keeping up, so we don't have to worry about him. We don't have to be frightening him. And then, of course, there's the other point to make about that, which is he kept us out of wars, except the internal one, which he stoked to the nth degree. This is beyond delusional that

these people were afraid of him or that they liked him, or even that it mattered that they liked him. You know, that in international affairs, you know, it does not matter. And besides, you know, he was so obviously biddable. All you had to do was give him a tiny bit of praise, say he was smart, and he would slather all over you, especially if you were a brutal dictator. So I just find this just completely mystifying. Not that Trump believes it, but that millions of Americans believe it too. Yeah, Joe. Yeah. I mean, this perfect example of, you know, well, he likes me a lot. And you saw it too with Kim Jong-un. Like if you ask anybody now, what came of the summit with Kim Jong-un? Like nothing. It's the exact same. And the same thing

with Russia too. He's like, well, they never would have invaded without me. And he says, I could end it in 24 hours if I'm president. That's silly. And when you talk to anyone in the national security space, they know that's silly. Yeah. I mean, I, again, I'm going back and forth listening to this and I do think it's plausible that he didn't say I was the apple of his eye, which by the way, is the headline on my newsletter today. But the point that he's making is that his personality and his relationship was so special that Vladimir Putin would have behaved in this different way. I do think that what David Frum wrote is exactly right, that the perverse truth here is that the election of Donald Trump was one of Vladimir Putin's great triumphs. I mean, you know, had there been a second term, it would have been the destruction of NATO from within. Had Donald Trump been elected, no one would have stepped up to rescue Ukraine. So, I mean, it really is kind of extraordinary when you think about that he keeps

talking about it and how wonderful and close his relationship is with Vladimir Putin. Nothing is going to change there, is it? Nothing. And the fact that Putin is a war criminal who has created so much misery. But a genius, top shelf. Yeah, top shelf genius, so smart, so great, yeah. Yeah, so great. Speaking of criminals, this mentality, maybe they call it the Bill Barr mentality, which is, yes, he's completely unsuited and unfit to be president, he is delusional, and he is, in fact, a criminal who will be convicted, but, oh yes, which is, yes, he's completely unsuited and unfit to be president. He is delusional. And he is, in fact, a criminal who will be convicted. But, oh, yes, of course, I'd vote for him if he was the Republican nominee.

It's this burned in thing that I must show my ultimate tribal loyalty, put the party over country. I guess I was slightly surprised because I am apparently quite naive when you had, you know, Bill Cassidy, who actually voted to remove Trump from office after the second impeachment. He was one of the Republican senators who said that Donald Trump should be convicted and formally constitutionally disqualified from ever being able to be president again. He goes on CNN Sunday and says that he thinks there's no question about it, that Trump has committed crimes, and he says he will be convicted. But listen to his answer when he's asked what he will do if Trump is the Republican nominee.

Let's play it. Bill Cassidy. There's at least one, which is the mishandling of the federal documents, which is, seems again, a very strong case. They have a tape recording of him speaking of it. If that is proven, then we may have a candidate for president who has been convicted of a crime. I think Joe Biden needs to be replaced, but I don't think Americans will vote for someone who's been convicted. So I'm just very sorry about how all this is playing out. Do you think that Donald Trump should drop out of the race? I think so. But obviously, that's up to him.

I mean, you're just asking me my opinion. But he will lose to Joe Biden if you look at the current polls. I'm a Republican. I think any Republican on that stage in Milwaukee will do a better job than Joe Biden. So if Donald Trump does ultimately win the Republican nomination, will you vote for Joe Biden or the Democrat over the Republican on the ticket? I'm going to vote for a Republican. Okay, Joe, is it reading too much to say that Cassidy just said that the guy's a criminal and he's going to be convicted, but he'd vote for him

or is he just what? I don't know. I think you kind of seem to say, well, I'm going to vote for a Republican. Yeah. And I think that you might see a lot of that, especially if you look at the polling as we get closer to election day, because you might see them say, well, I'm going to vote for a Republican. And then if Trump loses, they'll say, I didn't vote for him. And if he wins, they won't say anything. He could be saying, I'm going to write in Ronald Reagan, which is what they like to do. Okay. Is that a hedge and a fudge? Because if you go in and you vote for Ronald Reagan, you said, I said I would vote for a Republican. I did vote for a Republican. Mona, is that what he's trying to do or what? Yeah. I mean, he's envisioning the ads that would run against him in Louisiana if he ran for reelection. Bill Cassidy said, you know, he voted for Joe Biden. And end of story. That would be enough for a primary challenge. And he doesn't want to invite that. And to give him his due, let's assume. He really doesn't want Joe Biden to be

re-elected. Okay. But this just points up something about the nature of our moment, Charlie. And it's something that I think about whenever I look at reasonable, like Republicans who don't see the world the same way I do. So these reasonable Republicans keep saying, Trump can't win, Trump can't win, it'd be terrible for the Republican Party to nominate him because he's a loser. And then there are those of us who say the greatest danger to the Republic is if Trump won. So anybody, including Joe Biden, or pretty much almost any Democrat you could think of, any Democrat really you could think of, would be better than Trump. The thing that is the greatest threat is Trump returning to the presidency. You either think that or you don't. And too many so-called reasonable Republicans do not think that's the worst possible outcome. They think the worst possible outcome is Joe Biden returning to a second term. from Politico said on Unmeet the Press yesterday, because one of the questions I have having in my mind is whether or not anti-Trumpers are banking too much on people voting against Donald Trump because he's so unacceptable in the same way that they simply assumed that Hillary Clinton

would beat Donald Trump and whether or not they've convinced themselves that it's not dangerous to nominate somebody who is as unpopular as Joe Biden is right now. Now, of course, things can change. So Jonathan Martin, who used to be with the New York Times, bestselling author, good friend, chief political reporter now for Politico, was on Meet the Press, and he identified three big problems that Joe Biden is having so far. And I want to get your reaction on the other side. I think Biden has basically got three issues where he's not figured out what to say. OK, one is obviously the questions about Hunter Biden, his son. The other is what to say about the investigations into Donald Trump. And the third is about his age. Those are three massive

issues that are sort of clouding his reelection campaign. And he's not figured out what to say about it. Let's start with you, Joe. What do you think about those three issues? I mean, absolutely, Biden's kind of dodging a lot of those things. You've seen it already. He's been on a lot of vacations lately, which I guess, you know, that strategy worked for him in 2020, is not doing much, but he also benefited from that cycle of not having to go out really because of COVID. And that might not, it probably won't work this time. He's going to have to get out there and have to take positions on these things. And the longer you wait with these things, the worse it gets, especially with the things with his son, because the way we've seen it break down.

That's not getting any better. And I think that there is a sense, and again, you have to have these two thoughts in your head at the same time, that they have not proved any criminality on Joe Biden's part or anything impeachable, but how Biden's got this cloud of sleaze. And I've said this before, this case is not going away. It is getting worse. And I wonder if there's a little bit of tone deafness on Biden's part, not fully understanding how important this is. And Mona's written about this, the psychological need that Republicans have to talk about Hunter Biden all the time, because it's a way for them to, you know, cover their defenses of Donald Trump. But Joe Biden, I mean, I don't know how that's going to play out. And of course, there are a lot of people in Biden world among the, you know,

Democratic circles who are really wringing their hands over the fact that not only is Joe Biden not distancing himself for Hunter Biden, but apparently Hunter has been living at the White House. He's actually living there now. Is that right? I don't know. I know he's been there a lot. He might be living there. It's excruciating and it is very damaging. And Biden does have a tendency to, in certain situations, just get his back up and sort of try to wish things away and say, well, he hasn't done anything wrong, for example, which I think that is just not a truthful statement. This is excruciating because in order to get reelected, he may have to put some distance between himself and his only surviving child, you know, child from his first marriage,

really, really hard, but maybe necessary. I mean, Hunter Biden is obviously a continuing weight around his neck and obviously a very sleazy person. I actually think there's one other weakness that Biden needs to address between now and November of 2024, and that's inflation. The increase has gone down, but anybody who's been to a grocery store knows how much higher prices are than they used to be. I mean, it's... Right. Like he can't wave a magic wand, obviously, and make prices come down, but he has to show that he's aware of it,

that it's a problem, that they're working on it, point to the progress that's been made. Prices have come down, or the trajectory, rather, of increases has gone down. So that's something he needs to point, I mean, he can't just ignore it, because then it festers. One more thing about Hunter Biden is that he needs to make this case to the public and

not make it by appeasing the demands of Republicans, because it does not matter how this progresses in any which way. They're going to continue to ramp this up. And I think that's what I've kind of seen their missteps is that the moves they make are meant to appease elected Republicans when they should be making these cases to the public. Well, Joe, you wrote in your newsletter about this, though, you know, the media coverage is already sort of now buying into the fact that 2024 will be the scandal election because both Trump and Biden will be burdened by politically fraught legal cases that together involve a trio of special counsels, you know,

and that House Republicans are laying the groundwork to impeach the president. I mean, there are a lot of problems with that, but that's the framing, right? Going back to that, the person you met in Iowa said, okay, so Trump's a criminal, but they're all criminals. That's why this is such a big deal because it enables people psychologically to overlook Trump's criminality if they actually believe that there's misconduct in the Biden family. Yeah. And any kind of controversy, especially like big national media outlets, they love to run with it and they get stuck into this mode of, well, we have to present things equally. But it's like the investigation of Hunter Biden is not the same as the charges against Trump.

For one, Hunter Biden's never actually served in office anywhere and never will. Relevant detail. And nothing that they have found about Hunter Biden has shown that President Biden was involved. Yeah. And for example, when Republicans in the Hunter Biden investigation, a big thing they've hammered down as well, they created 20 shell companies. And that is a sign of wrongdoing. They say, Trump had 500 shell companies while in office. You know, he had a Chinese bank account while in office. And so I do my best when I'm reporting these things is to make those distinctions clear. Because you can say, it's bad that he had these shell companies. It doesn't look good that he's done these things.

But you need to make clear there's a massive difference. And also the Republicans, like Comer and others, they're constantly saying things that aren't quite right. So sometimes they refer to companies as shell companies that are actually regular old companies, not shell companies. Mona, I have to ask you about the third issue that Jay Mark brought up, which of course is Biden's age. And you kind of surprised me last week. You had a piece saying, you know, urging people to not worry so much about Biden's age. I have to tell you, I've been going in the exact opposite direction of thinking, boy,

this is really weird, you know, hanging by a thread here. This whole gerontocracy politics is fraught with risk. But you're saying that maybe it's not as bad as you think. So give me your sense of and assure me that you really believe this. All right. So a couple of things. I mean, one is I do agree with you that we're on a knife set. It's kind of like the whole country is skating on one skate, wobbling toward wherever we're

headed. I agree with that. But look, the widespread view that Biden is right now senile and cannot serve is not true. He is not senile. Is he a bit frail? Yes. Does he screw up his words? Yes, he always did that.

He's not senile. And if you look at actuarial tables, people like Biden and also, unfortunately, people like Trump tend to have really good lifespans. I mean, if he's made it to this age, he is likely to live at least another decade because of his class, because of the availability of healthcare, his personal habits, all of these things suggest that he probably has- And you pointed out the data that, you know, under social security longevity calculators, Biden would be expected to live until he's 89. Correct. And that's just for the average guy who was born when Biden was. So it doesn't take into account of all those other things I just mentioned, education, he's married, he's stable, he has a good

circle of friends, he exercises, he eats right, you know, he's good body mass index, all those things suggest that he probably has even longer to live. And by the way, there's one other factor. People who get elected president in the United States have more longevity than others for reasons that nobody knows. But, you know, you can speculate maybe the kind of people who get elected president have a kind of strength, internal strength that others don't have. Who knows? The other thing that I was influenced by was not just that Biden is probably going to be fine. I mean, obviously, risk increases with age, no question about it. It's not ideal. But people are saying he should drop out are failing to consider what a primary in the Democratic Party would look like. Well, that's my big concern, yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, what are the options? I mean, if it's not Biden, then there's going to be an open primary, and Kamala Harris is going to be the nominee, because the party is not going to deny a sitting vice president, who is also the first woman, the first woman of color in that role. I mean, they're not going to deny her the nomination. I agree with you. Okay, so Joe, what do you think? When you're out talking to real

people in the real world, Biden's age comes up all the time, doesn't it? Yeah, I think there's a way that he can lean into his age, though, in some areas, because, for example, ageism is one of the most common forms of workplace discrimination. There's also the fact that him and Trump are basically the same age and he's in much better shape. There's areas that he can lean into this that would look good for him compared to the opposition. I think you ought to challenge Trump to a bike race or a foot race. I mean, lean into it by saying, okay, we're basically the same age, you know, let's go, let's do it. Yeah. I mean, if it's good enough for Elon Musk and Zuckerberg, I mean,

why not? You know, cage match. Push-up contest. Ooh. See, the thing about it is, does anybody doubt who would win the push-up contest or the race or the bike race? I mean, but I have to say, see, this is part of the problem is that every time, and hey, I'm, and this is why your piece was so important because I'm getting to the point where every time I see Biden, you know, he's talking about something. He had a really successful summit that didn't get enough attention between Korea and Japan. This is a major accomplishment. And yet, I'm sorry, but as I try to look at things sometimes through the eyes of just the average swing voter. And he's talking about international trade and security, and I'm thinking he's old. That's my takeaway. I know it's unfair, but I wonder how

many other people are. So I think that to Joe's point, he's going to have to lean into it in such a way. And I'm not sure that playing the ageism, I'm a victim card, don't be mean to me, is going to do it. I think he started by making fun of it. I mean, by joking about it. I may be old, but I'm not old and fat. I don't know. Well, and as I said in this column, there are actual advantages to being old. People don't realize that in the United States because we worship youth to a ridiculous degree. I mean, youth has its advantages, don't get me wrong, but so does age. I mean, there is greater wisdom. People are less dominated by their emotions as they get older. They're better able to control themselves. They're better able to see the path to compromise than

younger people. So those are all things that you can point to. And by the way, they're happier than younger people. So these are all things that you could lean on. Okay, I'm working on it. I am, because I don't disagree with any of those things. I'm just not sure that politically you're going to convince people for whom anyone over the age of 40 is invisible, that all of these virtues are out there. But this is an important issue. There's no question about it. Let's not pretend it's not an issue. So I'm really glad you addressed it. Joe Perticone, Mona Charon, thank you so much for the first of our Hey, Welcome Back Monday podcast.

We'll be joined by Will again next Monday. Until then, thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.