The Bulwark Podcast - John Avlon: Is the Center Finding Its Spine?

Episode Date: October 20, 2023

Republican threats and bullying have finally gone too far when it comes to Jim Jordan. But what about the red line that has to be crossed for stable governance? A deal with the Dems. John Avlon joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod.

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I apologize. That's fine. I'm not going to use it. Okay. I just want to make it clear, John, before we actually begin, that I was hoping to avoid using the word clusterfuck, but we're probably going to use the word clusterfuck. And I'm warning the audience as well. Hey, welcome use the word clusterfuck. I'm warning the audience

as well. Hey, welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is October 20th, 2023. And I confess that I am actually, even though I do this for a living, I'm running out of words to describe the goat rodeo of the Republicans in the House of Representatives. So I actually was sort of like going through my file this morning, you know, Omni-Shobar quagmire snafu goat rope massacree shitstorm hot mess train wreck shipwreck imbroglio you pronounce that way foul up fizzle snafu john i need a wordsmith like you to help me to describe how absolutely mind-bogglingly what this whole Jim Jordan fiasco is. I mean, you need a bigger thesaurus, Charlie. You need a bigger thesaurus.

This is a self-inflicted shitstorm that doesn't only reflect on the Republican Party, although it's a Republican Party problem, but it reflects on our democracy. I mean, this is Congress can't get itself organized because the Republican Party created this problem and continues to light itself on fire. So I'll go goat roadie or shit storm, either one you want. Okay, so today, this will take place before people actually hear this podcast. Jim Jordan is going to the floor or allegedly going to the floor for a third vote to see whether he succeeded in coercing, intimidating, and bullying enough of the squishes to vote for him. Spoiler alert, I think that's very, very unlikely. And he started the day with this very strange press conference. Even Republicans

are kind of scratching their heads and saying, I'm not quite sure what that was all about. His attempt to use the bully pulpit to round up support. But this is the way Jim Jordan began his press conference. Just listen to this. I think the American people are thirsty for change. I think they are hungry for leadership. And frankly, they know that the White House can't provide it. They know the Senate won't lead. And they are looking for House Republicans to step up and lead and make change on these important issues. John, I do not think the American people are thirsty for more Jim Jordan. I do not think they hunger for more Jim Jordan. I think the American people, as they're looking at this, are saying, you know, I would prefer an enema.

I warned you on this. I mean, look, man, look, he's high on his own supply, but that's the problem with folks on the far right, the far left as well, though that's not relevant to today's conversation. When you get these hermetically sealed kind of hothouse environments, they constantly mistake themselves, their increasingly narrow ideological interests for the national interest. It's got nothing to do with it. And there's a million different ways you can poll test that. You could just judge it on simple accomplishments and functionality, whatever you want. Jim Jordan doesn't represent leadership. He can't unite the Republican conference. This is a guy,

as I've been pointing out on air, who his fellow Ohioan, his fellow Republican, John Boehner, described as a legislative terrorist, because all he has done in his time is destroy, not build. And now he wants to sell this idea of a new Jim Jordan who's going to make concessions and deals. Don't believe it for a second. Well, Republicans aren't believing it. No. Let's talk about what happened yesterday, because, okay, so it's pretty clear that he's not going to get to 217. He had lost 21 votes. So it looked like for a while that he was going to sort of tap out and say, all right, I'm going to support this compromise measure that would empower the acting Speaker Patrick McHenry.

And then, and by the way, talk about a Rube Goldberg thing. So he would stay. Follow me here. He would stay as Speaker Designate, which is not a thing. But McHenry would have certain powers to get things done between now and January. It actually seemed like the least awful of the various options. And by the way, can you imagine what the GOP leadership meetings would have been? You'd have the speaker, the speaker designate,

you'd have Kevin McCarthy, you'd have Steve Scalise. Who is actually the leader of the party? I mean, just let's set that aside, like what a goat rodeo that meeting would have been. I mean, who's in charge here? Who do we listen to? Who's the leader? The answer is nobody. So they go into the house conference, turns into a complete shit storm. People are yelling at each other, screaming at each other. Everybody hates Matt Gaetz. And they decide they're not going ahead with this compromise that it would at least allow the House of Representatives to function. John, give me your sense of what happened, why they didn't take the modest off-ramp that

even Jim Jordan seemed willing to accept for five minutes? I think it's because they have so deeply drunk their own Kool-Aid that any form of compromise, even within themselves, is seen as collaboration. That's the red line. That, of course, undercuts the basic idea of democracy. And this is what frustrates me so fundamentally, right? Go back to the, I don't know, the Constitutional Convention. The system we have of a democratic republic is based on constructive compromise.

Compromise is not collaboration. You can be principled and still find areas of common ground and figure out how to give and take and build on it. Republicans can't even do that within their own conference, let alone with the Democrats. And that's the obvious way out of here. I just got to tell you, the obvious way out of this is for the Republicans, the Senator to grow a spine, stop getting rolled, liberate themselves from the far right, and make a deal with just enough Democrats to have stable governance. That would be a revolution within a revolution. It would be a great new beginning. I know it sounds like an

Aaron Sorkin script brought to life, but it's not impossible. It's only impossible in this version of Washington that they've all been inculcated and where they're terrified of losing a closed partisan primary so they can't think about the national interest. They can't even govern. And so the reason they couldn't deal with this is because they view any compromise, let alone working with the opposition party, as a fatal sin because of fear and because of greed. And that's where the threats come in,

where I think you saw the deployment of threats. There does seem to be sort of a general consensus that everybody hates Matt Gaetz. A lot of members of this caucus obviously look at the idea of Jim Jordan becoming a speaker as both absurd and dangerous. But as you point out, it is absurd and dangerous as Jim Jordan is, or going through this complete paralysis. The red line, the thing that apparently they're most afraid of is cutting a deal with some Democrats, because this is the culture that we live in. It's not the culture we live in. It's the culture they live in. And what I mean by that is we, the vast majority of the American people, go to work every day with people we probably don't agree with on many things, some political, and we find a way to work together because that's how democracies work. It's this particular culture that's been created inside the Republican party. Because remember Nancy Pelosi had a similarly narrow

margin, no problem governing, no problem getting bipartisan legislation done. This is not a both sides deal. This is specifically the culture created inside the conservagencia, and it has come to this. And you've been chronicling this for well over a decade. When you wrote Wingnuts, it's not just the Republican Party, it is this ecosystem, this alternative reality ecosystem that has changed all of the incentives. Historical comparisons are always difficult to say that this is worse. But, you know, I'm watching this Republican Party being this badly fractured. And I'm not going to say that it was worse than, you know, the Whigs back in the 1850s or whatever. But I was actually at, believe it or not, the 68th Democratic National Convention in Chicago. So I've seen parties rip themselves

apart. There were actually riots. I was a page to the Wisconsin delegation. I was on the floor when Abe Ribicoff was yelling at Mayor Daley or Mayor Daley was yelling at Abe Ribicoff, whatever that was. See, this is how old I am. Did Daley say Finker or, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. You were there. I was there. So I'm not going to say that this is the most divided I've ever seen a political party, but I'm really tempted to say that because this is as divided a political, I mean, these people, the level of anger, the level of distrust, level of hatred of one another, the way they are treating one another, the culture of, I mean,

this is really a remarkable moment, particularly because, as you point out, the Democrats are united and Democrats have a long tradition in this country of being very, very fractious. Republicans have a long reputation of falling into line. So this is really kind of a an extraordinary inversion of the polls, isn't it? But I think a really important one to understand. When I started writing Wingnuts a decade ago, I began writing it in 09, came out in 2010. And it was based on my reporting it then what was sort of the, this idea of an extremist beat, which hadn't really become a thing yet. But what I noticed was a lot of the Tea Party activists were co-opting quite consciously Saul Alinsky, right? Who's that sort of leftist agitator academic and under the rubric of like,

they did it now we will. So there became this conscious mirroring. And indeed, you look at the 68 convention, I would argue that Republicans now are more divided and dysfunctional than Democrats were then, which is saying something. Very interesting. They've inculcated a lot of this fractiousness, the whataboutism that justifies threats of violence, if not outright violence. And they've taken it to a deeper extreme because I'm not a fan of identity politics, period. But white identity politics is more pernicious because of the simple numbers and culture in the country. It's more dangerous.

All these things are poster children for why these ideas are dangerous. Extremes hijacking a political party in a process as opposed to reasoning together under the rubric of a Big Ten. Rationalizations of violence or threats to get what you want to push through a narrow political agenda without trying to persuade people to win majoritarian support, trying to undercut majoritarian support because of various crusades, I'll say, that any of these individuals may be on. Employment of identity politics and tribal politics to divide the country into us against them, divide to conquer, but then ends up becoming about dividing your own party. And this narcissism of small differences becomes really, I mean, feudal fights.

You know, the old, I think it was the Life of Brian line about, you know, the Judean people's front versus the people's front of Judea, you know, die heretic. That is a classic, right? Yeah. All this sort of stuff. And so we see it now, that mirror image, and it has become absolutely embedded in the right. Fascinating. If you go into the history of conservatism, the opposite of conservative, as you pointed out many times, is storming a Capitol to overturn an election. Yes, you'd think. You know, that's got

nothing to do with Edmund Burke, whoever else you want to cite. I think this rot is profound. It is deep. It's reflected in the fact the Republican Party seems likely to re-nominate someone who tried to overturn an election on the basis of a lie, who's been indicted and 91 counts. But it's also reflected here. That's why I think the world on fire, house on fire is a very real problem we're confronting. This is a bad advertisement for democracy, but we need to not let it reflect on ourselves as a country because it reflects on one political party at this particular point in our history. Hey folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to

provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day, we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebullwork.com and take a look around? Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bulwark Plus membership

free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebulwark.com slash charlie. That's thebulwark.com forward slash charlie. I'm going to get through this together. I promise. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our tread experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. One of the themes of the last week has been the campaign of bullying and threats against

the centrists and the moderates, the squishes, however you want to call them. And, you know, as I mentioned yesterday, these threats have worked in the past with Republicans. And we'll talk about whether, you know, centrists are growing a spine here, but it has gotten uglier and uglier and uglier. And on your network, on CNN, they played a voicemail of a call to the wife of a congressman. Let's play this. I want to get your take, John, because I think you can kind of parse through this. And this is just a taste of what Republican members of Congress are getting from fellow Republicans. Why is your husband such a pig? Why would he get on TV and make an asshole of himself? Because he's a deep state prick,

because he doesn't represent the people um so what we're going to do is we're going to come follow you all over the place we're going to be up your ass non-stop we are now antifa we're going to do what the left does because your fucking husband gets on tv oh says, oh, the bad guys, they did so. I'm going to vote for Kevin McCarthy, a piece of s*** who everybody knows, and for his piece of s***

ass to talk about Americans who are actually fighting for Americans as the bad people, says everything about him. So, f*** you, f*** your husband, and we are gonna, we're not like the left. We aren't violent, but we're going to follow your ass. Every appointment you have, everything you can do. Your, your husband's an asshole. You should talk to this stupid ass. We're at war. Israeli's being

killed. And your dumb husband is acting like a f***ing two-year-old. No wonder. He's a f***ing warmongering piece of shit. So listen. You're going to keep getting calls and emails. I'm putting all your information over the internet now. Everybody else's. And you will not be left alone because you're a f***ing husband.

Jim Jordan or more conservative or you're going to be f***ing molested like you can't ever imagine. And again, nonviolently, you won't go to the beauty parlor. You must be a bitch to marry an ugly mother****er like that.

Sounds nice. Bless his heart. Only the best people. Let us now pray because this is how we restore a Christian America or something. I don't know. So John, what'd you hear there? It is so important to play all of that and to listen to it. I think it actually demands a close reading. I'm actually working on a column on this because I heard it. Jake Tapper aired that exclusively last night on CNN. There's so much to work with there. So first of all, Jim Jordan or more conservative is the first thing, or we are going to molest

you. Nonviolent. Nonviolent. Right. Okay. So there's a lot to work with there. So first of all, that reflects the fact that this person has been inculcated, right, via some version of the conservative internet media or Donald Trump, frankly. There is the language of threats and intimidation, which is the abandonment of reason and persuasion. There is an ideological agenda. Jordan or more conservative. This isn't conservative. Jim Jordan's not conservative. This is conservative populism. It's a radicalism. It is a tribalism. It's nothing conservative about it. But you can see where he's going, right? Jordan or more conservative. Even Kevin McCarthy isn't good enough. That's part of the insult. We're going to molest you. That's a language of sexual assault. Yeah. Right. And then that little lawyer on his shoulder, Donald Trump saying peacefully on January 6th, say nonviolently, of course. And the rationale for the violence and the intimidation and the doxing he is threatening

is we're going to be like Antifa, right? This sort of conjuring up the phantom menace to justify whatever is done. Remember the initial story that Matt Gaetz and other people pulled on the floor to Congress on January 6th, that it was Antifa had attacked the Capitol. This is someone who's been inculcated. This is learned rhetoric and learned behavior where he feels utterly justified and empowered to call up the wife of a congressman and to threaten her physically to get an ideological... And leave a tape of his voice. I mean, that's the other thing. Well, Reason left the building a long time ago on every level.

Right. But this is really important because this is up, you know, congressman from Iowa got a credible death threat after changing her vote on Jim Jordan. These are the kind of threats that are getting mainstreamed inside the Republican Party right now, or they're in danger of becoming mainstream, because threats are part of the language of politics on the far right right now, and the far left. But again, they're asymmetric. And we can talk about that, you know, if you want. And this has been building, right? I mean, this has been building, you know, for... During the second impeachment, Charlie. Right. You remember this.

They're members of Congress and we see this too much. People don't always appreciate it unless you cover politics closely. They know what the right thing to do is, but they're afraid to do it in critical moments. Right. And in that moment, there were members of Congress who said, look, I know he should be impeached, but I'm afraid for the safety of my family if I vote that way. Okay. Part of this background noise is to this point. Now you may say these people are cowards or they should have done it anyway, but the reality

is that they have created this atmosphere of fear and people are concerned about their family, they're concerned about their children, they're obviously concerned about their careers. But I remember this going back into 2016, how people would go, well, I'm not going to go along with this or we can keep this under control. But the drumbeat of threats and insults and harassment wears people down. And there comes a point where you say, it's just not worth it, right? I mean, it's just not worth it. And the normies, the decent people are just driven out. This is one of the key points that I think we need to understand. This is the rally,

think back to Jon Stewart's rally to restore the center or a common sense in 2010, ill-fated as it was. Part of the danger for our democracy that we face is that there is a conscious attempt to make politics so dangerous and indecent and ugly that good people, normies, as you say, well, just normal average Americans find that they've got to abandon the public square because it's just too ugly. It's too messy. This is by design. They leave. That's happening. It's happening. And that's what we need to consciously put you against right now. Everybody's got to grow a spine, especially the center. My favorite Abraham Lincoln quote is, I'm an optimist because I don't see the point being anything else.

But that is just to say that now is exactly the time we all need to strengthen our civic backbones, particularly in the center, and push back upon the crazies because that's not—they're a very small percentage. But they know that if they are loud and intimidating, they can create the illusion of being a majority and harass the good people to get out of politics. Right. And therefore leave the field to them. This is a classic ban and sort of, you know, worldview stuff. And this is absolutely what needs to get pushed up against by average, decent Americans, particularly from the center. Since you have introduced a note of optimism under this podcast and an unusual note of optimism, and you said this last night, you said the center needs to grow a spine. Is there a little bit of evidence at the center or whatever you want to describe? And maybe the center is misleading because a lot of these people are quite concerned that, in fact, you are seeing a little bit of this pushback because Jim Jordan is not the speaker of the House of Representatives. You do have close to 10% of the Republican caucus

saying, screw that. We may be crazy, but crazy enough to go along with Donald Trump, but not crazy enough to go along with Jim Jordan. And there is this pushback against the culture of threats. I heard Adam Kinzinger yesterday say, hey, you know what? Liz Cheney and I got lots and lots of death threats. And I don't remember any of you people speaking up about that, but I'm going to speak up now. Okay. These folks were upset about the threats, should have spoken up earlier, but they are speaking up now. So what's happening now, John, is this like a green shoot? This is a green shoot. This is a sliver of hope and I'm on the keep hope alive here, but you need to do it with strength. Okay. And that means speaking up and calling it out and

not trying to play it close. This is part of the screwed up incentive system in our politics where everyone's terribly, in the absence of competitive general elections for the vast majority of House seats, everyone's afraid of losing a close partisan primary. So the Senator becomes silent for their own self-interest. And that is just a cannibalizing of the country. I'm hopeful because there has been an effort to say, you know what, we're going to stop getting rolled.

We're not going to go down a Speaker Jim Jordan route under this feeling of artificial urgency to unite the conference, you know, under threats, literal threats. But it needs to hold. The Republican Party, if you look at its ideological spectrum, is three quarters conservative. And there's a lot under that rubric, one quarter moderate. So you're not talking about a lot of folks. But it's not even about ideology. There are decent, honorable people who are very conservative who have a degree of trust with members of the opposite side of the aisle because of their temperament, because of their perspective.

I mentioned a couple of them last night who could be utterly credible Republican and conservative speaker nominees who could probably get some Democratic votes. Enough. Like who? You know, people like Tom Cole. Okay. Don Bacon. Mike Gallagher. Those people exist.

And they're not like, you know, Chris Shea's, you know, card-carrying, you know, Rockefeller Republican moderates. Those folks don't even exist anymore. Right. But that's what needs to happen. The center needs to stop getting rolled. It needs to grow a spine, particularly on the center right, and realize it's in the country's best interest and it's in their and the Republican Party's best interest. We need to be able to function. People say, well, what would Democrats ask? Something pretty modest, I would have a feeling, like a joint funding bill for Israel, Ukraine,

Taiwan, and the border. Something for everyone. Regular order, not shutting down the government in November. And then everyone can hash out their differences of which there will be many. Right. But we need to take the power back from the extremes. The far left is in terms of sheer political power, largely a fan of medicine. I did this statistic, and I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, but it's one of my favorite ways of representing where we are. Last Congress, there were, by my count, seven Democratic members of Congress, mostly freshmen, who supported the world's dumbest political policy as a branding mechanism, defund the police.

Seven. Seven. Okay. And there were 137 House Republicans who voted to overturn the election after the attack on our Capitol. Right? It's not that it doesn't exist. There is a feedback loop, but it is exaggerated and it doesn't reflect relative political power. A party that topples its own speaker for the first time

and then tries to jam through Jim Jordan, that's a whole different deal. And again, Democrats said, no problem. There are 300 pieces of bipartisan legislation passed in those first two years of the Biden presidency with Nancy Pelosi having a similar narrow margin. So yes, the center does need to hold. We need to show that. We need to show that in defense of our democracy. Mike McCaul made this point the other day. You know who loves this kind of self-inflicted division and dysfunction? China, Russia, Iran, because that autocracy gets to say, see, democracies don't work. It doesn't work. And actually what doesn't work is ideological extremes capturing democracy, undercutting the idea of majority rule, which is a concerted effort. North Carolina and Wisconsin, still that fight going on.

And so it does require the center growing a spine and standing up and actually asserting the real weight. There are more moderates in this country than folks on the far right or the far left. And that includes center right and center left, people who may be good people, but don't think you should burn it all down if you don't get what you want 100% of the time. The Freedom Caucus, the Jim Jordan crowd, has basically had power because they were prepared to strap on the suicide vest and say, you know, if you don't go along with us, we will blow you up. And everybody said, oh, we have to do what they want. But as you're pointing out, there is, in fact, a centrist coalition that could run the Congress that is divided as we are. Let's just take a vote,

like, for example, on Ukraine and or Israel, but Ukraine's more divisive. I'm guessing that if you had an up or down vote in the House of Representatives on Ukraine, it would probably be 300 plus votes in favor of it. You'd have some Republicans, maybe a majority of Republicans voting against it, but it would be an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives, an overwhelming majority of the United of Representatives, an overwhelming majority of the United States Senate. Same thing with Israel. So there are these pieces of legislation that if they're allowed to come to the floor would pass. And the eight Matt Gaetz's of the world, Marjorie Taylor Greene's, they in fact are a rump of a rump. Correct. And it's only because

they have convinced people that they are bigger, louder, and scarier than in fact they are, that they have been considered relevant. That's exactly right. And those votes you just described would also reflect, not incidentally, the will of the people. Right. I mean, take a look at polling and see where things are. You know, we are not nearly as divided as our politics make it seem, but our politics are structurally set up with a screwed up incentive structures we've got to dilute the will of the people and undercut the idea of majority rule, which is at the heart of the idea of democracy. So that's the problem. That's the structural problem. And we can work on the structural issues and God knows we need to, but we also need more people in the arena to show spine and to push

back on this comparatively small number of people who are loud, extreme, employ the threats of violence to get what they want to create an illusion that there's somehow a nascent movement. Unfortunately, the Republican party, because of the rise in persistence of Donald Trump, they've managed to hijack that. But that doesn't mean it can't be taken back. And we desperately need, if you were patriotic and care about the country and care about the promise of democracy and majoritarian rule and reasoning together across the aisle, this is a time for choosing, particularly if you're a Republican. These moments come and people in recent history have rationalized them away. I think about Mitch McConnell, not basically given

the green light with three votes from stopping impeachment. None of this would have happened. Mitch McConnell knew it was the right thing to do, but he was afraid of primaries on some folks on his side. So he didn't do it. The January 6th commission vote, another thing, unnecessary. We're almost there. A little bit of spine at the right moment could have tipped history in a very different direction. This is another one of those moments, those pivot moments in American history. And if we let this pass, because people are afraid of what might happen to their primary. Republicans will reap the whirlwind even more. So I hope to God this is this opportunity is taken and the Democrats help Republicans give birth to new kind of politics in this regard. Okay, so what will they choose? Because this is one of those crises that, you know, something that can't go on forever won't

go on forever. This one can't because the House of Representatives is paralyzed. I mean, no matter how many partisan games you want, at some point you have to resolve all of this. Now, you can either resolve this by rolling over and electing Jim Jordan, which seems increasingly unlikely, or what you are describing, some sort of a compromise. At the end of the day, maybe not today, where are we going to end up here? Are we going to end up with some Jerry, Bill, Rube, Goldberg, speaker, designate, speaker, emeritus, triple, five schism popes out there? What are we going to end up with? Well, this is why it's a time for choosing. And people need to think about the big picture. It shouldn't be revolutionary and risky to think about what's actually in the national interest. Wow, but it is. It actually should be the big picture. It shouldn't be revolutionary and risky

to think about what's actually in the national interest. Wow, but it is. It actually should be the table stakes. Yeah. And that's not being Pollyannish about the past or saying, you know, I love historic parallels, but sometimes they break down. Except if you really look at how, you know,

republics have fallen in the past. I know. Which I wrote about in Washington's Farewell and is something that I think people should study more. I wrote a column about this at CNN, and there is a solution to this. And the solution is, and Hakeem Jeffries wrote an op-ed opening the door to a bipartisan coalition, the solution is that the majority of Republicans need to liberate themselves from the disproportionate influence of a handful of loud folks on the far right. And that would feel so good for them.

By the way, if they made that choice, that would be so liberating for them. It would feel so once they did it. Liberating for them and the country. Yes, yes. And by the way, they would be leading by example to show that there's a new kind of politics that are possible.

And I'm not saying don't elect a conservative who has a conservative, but then you have enough Democrats support these folks, not because they're in ideological agreement, but because there's an atmosphere embodied in the character of the person in the speaker's chair where there's trust and mutual respect, if not agreement. You don't have to agree in a democracy. We should have great disagreements, but there should be a baseline of trust and mutual respect, which has been utterly intentionally eroded. That's the way to create a stable circumstance. What's the alternative

circumstance you just said? We could have a situation of rotating interim speakers where everybody's under threat by eight votes on the far right. Patrick McHenry might not even be there through the end of the year. In the next 14 months, we could end up having what, five, six speakers. As you pointed out last night, since 2010, every single GOP speaker has been pushed out or jumped because they couldn't corral the knuckle draggers and the anarchists. Right. Which is, by the way, John Boehner's terms for that crazy guy.

Right. So we're in the second decade of complete dysfunction when it comes to the GOP speakership. Because of the same thing, because of this dynamic that the Republican Party has inculcated, there's this rationalization. Boehner tried it. You know, McCarthy tried it. Ryan tried it. We'll corral the crazies in a constructive direction. Don't worry. We can do that. We just need to harness their passion. Sure, they may be kind of crazy and think that

Barack Obama is a secret Muslim socialist Manchurian candidate, but it's okay. We'll be able to corral them. Gollum always turns on its creator. Always. How many times do we need to learn this? We need to employ that learning now to give people hope that there is an alternative way to govern, to defend our democracy. I don't mean to douse this exuberant optimism, but- It's tempered optimism. Here we have the time for choosing in Congress, but we also have the time for choosing for the presidency. And we have, this is Donald Trump's party. Even the quote unquote centrists are going to line up behind Donald Trump. Jim Jordan was Donald Trump's candidate. What does it say? I mean, give me your sense because I'm watching this. I'm watching Donald Trump

decompensate in real time. And yet the polls would indicate that he is either tied with, or maybe even leading Joe Biden. We are living in a country where half of Americans are at least willing at this point to tell pollsters that they think that Donald Trump should be returned to the Oval Office. I don't want to dent your optimism here. I'm just trying to put it in perspective. Let's say a couple of things. First of all, within the Republican party, there's a morality play going on where fear and greed, those ancient biblical net negatives are driving a lot of people's decisions. And the question, of course, is who persuadable? Washington Post had a poll out. You discussed this in the past, and I will say the bulwark is a favorite here in the Houvelon household. We listen to you guys all

the time. They said that basically, okay, a third of the Republican Party roughly are hardcore Trumpers and they will follow him anywhere, right? By anywhere, I mean anywhere. Anywhere. Right? Including overturning democracy and attacking the Capitol. Around 25% are never Trumpers, i.e. this guy doesn't represent conservative values.

He doesn't represent the reason they became Republicans, Reagan era, Bush era, go on, go on, go on. And the rest are persuadables. Persuadable means, obviously, that they can be persuaded by another candidate that there's another path forward for the party if they feel not intimidated into silence or going along with the crowd. Okay. So the whole know, the whole Randall Jackson line, one man with courage makes a majority. That's worth remembering. The other one is one of my favorite political aphorisms by Bill Clinton, who said people will vote for strong and wrong every time. Right. Yeah. Which is to say that all these folks who are tiptoeing around Donald Trump for fear of offending under some kind of consultant driven rationale are part of the

problem. So there's a super majority that is opposed to Donald Trump, a minority of the Republican Party, which comes to around, by the way, 10, 11, 12% of the country, if you net it out, third, third, third math in terms of Republican, Democrat, Independent. That's nowhere near a majority. That's around 10%, but they're loud and they've intimidated the Republican Party into silence until and unless an alternative comes up who is strong and provides an alternate path forward. I don't want to be Pollyannish about it. I'm just saying we haven't started voting yet. And sometimes we treat all this stuff as a done deal. And I think that disrespects the agency. That was Ron DeSantis' theory, right? I mean, Ron DeSantis figured if I basically gave him Trumpism without the Trump, if I just give an alternative, surely

if he is indicted all these places, they will turn to me as an alternative, right? I mean, wasn't that the theory? Wasn't that Ron DeSantis? Well, the theory is also that people wouldn't realize that he doesn't like people and doesn't know how to sort of, he makes Richard Nixon look like a people person in addition to- Who knew that would be a problem? Yeah, exactly. So I want to just keep that aspect open. The right-wing media ecosystem is very good at message repetition. And that itself has a way of cowing people who are not really sure where they stand on issues and drags them into those things, right? Biden's governance has been, to a large extent, sort of the no labels Fantasia.

Again, 300 pieces of bipartisan legislation in the first two years. I do worry that no labels, which I co-founded over a decade ago, have nothing to do with it now, but because I've always been focused on how do we overcome hyper-partisanship and how can we restore strength in the center, that the independent candidates can make the ball bounce in unpredictable ways in an election. And there's no plan to win Congress in that circumstance. The persistence of Donald Trump, I think, is about strong and wrong. It's that he's captured one political party that doesn't seem to have the conscience to stand up to him and offer an alternative. And the Democrats have doubled down on an incumbent president who's been a consequential president, but who the polls suggest would be one of our greatest one-term presidents,

but people have concerns about what a second term would look like, just on the issues of perceptions of vigor, not policies, I would argue. But until we get through this stage, that is still a point of maximum peril for the Republic, not just the Republican Party. Because if Donald Trump is returned to power because there's some weird no one hits 270 and the Republicans control a majority of House districts and they decide to fall in line because they make all the rationalizations that say, well, we'll be able to corral the crazy and implement our own policies and get back in power. That's a giant gift wrap for the autocratic alliance that still exists here in the 21st century.

So this is about strengthening democracies. And those are the stakes in the election. You know, it may be that there are unexpected twists and turns. There probably will be between now and the election. But I just think that folks who treat this all as a fait accompli or think that we're going to have some default into an apparent sort of stasis election, Trump v. Biden round two, that's one of the riskiest things we can do. But the risk is all on the Republican side right now. Democrats are a little

bit in denial about Joe Biden's negatives, but he's been a consequential and effective president, judged by the policies, and policies that actually represent what used to be called the vital center to a large extent. So one more thing here, as we look ahead to at least something that I'm anticipating, or we can anticipate something I'm looking forward to is what I want to say. Have you read about Mitt Romney's burn book? This is the McKay Coppins book, which is coming out shortly. We're going to have McKay on the podcast. McKay's great. One of the best writers of his generation.

New York Times headline, Mitt Romney's Sickest Burns book reveals harsh views of fellow Republicans. Now, this is the phenomenon that we keep talking about. What do Republicans say in private about one another? Now, Mitt Romney is, I mean, he stands alone. One time after another, it has been Romney alone. But it is interesting. I mean, I always thought of Romney as a little bit white bread-ish, you know, and a little tapioca. But apparently, he's much spicier than that. So, Mitt Romney on Ron DeSantis. There's just no warmth at all. On DeSantis posing for selfies with Iowa voters, he looks like he's got a toothache. On Newt Gingrich, a smug, know-it-all, smarmy,

and too pleased with himself. Not wrong. Ted Cruz, frightening, scary, a demagogue. Mike Huckabee, a huckster, a caricature of a for-profit preacher. Not wrong again. Bobby Jindal, a twit. Rick Santorum, sanctimonious, severe, and strange. Which, of course, if you've ever met him, yeah, you know. Rick Perry, Republicans must realize that we have to have someone who can actually complete a sentence. John Kasich, lack of thoughtfulness, lack of attentiveness, ego. No wonder he and Chris Christie spark, and he has some things to say about Chris Christie, too. But it is kind of interesting, because as you're reading this, you're going, so it's not just us. What a clown show. I mean, the Republican party, you know, used to have people who were serious individuals and you just sort of look at the

horizon and one loser and clown after another, the charlatan caucus. And this is again, because of the screwed up incentive structures and the structural problems in the party. There is no incentive structure set aside to try to win the reasonable edge of the opposition or to even have the ballast to reasonable Republicans. It's all about playing to the far right, playing to the base. And that leads to this sort of clown car crash that we've seen in every primary since at least 2010. My only regret about that list is, I think if Mitt Romney had had the courage to be his most authentic self, which we saw glimpses of in that great documentary that came out after the election or we're seeing in the Senate, he could have won the presidency, but I think he'd been disciplined by a lot of different things to

sort of have a veneer in place. And he's been liberated, I think, to say what he really thinks. And we see that he's an intelligent, deeply principled man. I'm excited for McKay's book. He's one of the best journalists of his generation. The quote that jumps out to me isn't about, you know, I mean, recasting Mitt Romney as some kind of latter day Truman Capote saying, you know, catty things about other Republican candidates is less interesting than him saying, quite frankly, that a majority of my party or a great percentage of my party doesn't really believe in the constitution. And you start collecting comments. And this is the folks, the bulwark, a lot of Republicans who

are warning about what's been happening in their party. Take a look at – I did this on CNN in a digital interview with Alyssa Farah Griffin almost a year ago probably where we looked at then all the former Trump administration alumni who were warning clearly and loudly that reelecting their former boss would be a threat to the republic. Yeah, this is not Rachel Maddow. This is not NPR. This is not the Democratic. These are voices coming from inside the room. Yeah, this is not Rachel Maddow. This is not NPR. This is not the Democrat. These are voices coming from inside the room. 100%. And what's troubling to me is that the Donald Trump superfans who've never met the man are willing to, I think for reasons of face-saving and dynamics of sort of tribal politics, not listening to the people who know the man best, who worked with them, who

are warning in clear language. And these are not Democrats. These aren't even independents. These aren't even centrist Republicans who didn't want anything to do with Donald Trump. These are people who worked with him. And that's the moral urgency we should be feeling about sleepwalking towards this election. And I think Romney's voice is as clarion call clear as any. We've got to recognize this is a structural problem. It's going to need

structural fixes, but it's going to start when people have the spine to stand up the stochastic terrorism that we're dealing with. We're almost out of time here, and we haven't even gotten to the president's very rare primetime Oval Office address about Ukraine and Israel. It's getting good reviews. What were your thoughts? I just one criticism, really, which is that I wish he would have done this earlier. He has been a consequential president, but he has not effectively used the bully pulpit. And a speech like this, I think was necessary to rally the nation behind the aid for Ukraine a year ago. So you have this speech, which I think was effective, not perfect, but effective. Why has he not done this more? Why has he not done this earlier? That's my one criticism.

What is your thoughts? He should be doing it more. Even Brit Hume praised the speech on Fox. I'm generally suspect when people blame communications for lack of political success, but I do think that the Biden administration's communications have not been sticky enough, sound body enough, rooted in stats and fact enough, and leaning into new platforms to spread the messages of accomplishments. This was a very good speech by the president. He actually, I thought, used his hands effectively, you know, visually. He had a decent amount of energy by him. He was crisp and clear and spoke with a sense of moral conviction about American leadership in the world. That's the kind of conversation we should be

having as a country. I think it's notable because of all the crazy and dins in our politics that often the most responsible voices don't get their share of the oxygen, even when you're the president of the United States. And that's why I don't think you should over index some of the noise. I think the signal to noise ratio is very difficult to determine our politics right now. It was a good speech. He should have given it more. And I'll give you a small example of something I noticed. I watched it again last night when I came home because I was listening to it in transit. The White House website did one of those things where it was an hour and 38 minutes or something like that. But the first 40 minutes were just waiting for the president. They didn't take the time to edit it. So when you clicked on

it after the fact, the speech would begin. It's these little unforced errors of presentation and clipping that cut into the resonance. That's a really small thing. I don't mean to harp on it. There's no margin for error anymore though. Not at all. And instead you really do need to think about how people are getting their information and lean into those ways. I had a conversation with a lower level appointee in the Biden administration. And I said to this person, you know, that things like, oh, there are 300 pieces of bipartisan legislation in the first two years. And this person said to me, really? Yeah, that is a problem. Yeah, that's when you said earlier, even I thought,

that's kind of extraordinary. I mean, that sort of cuts against almost all of our narratives. How did that happen? Given everything that's been going on here? That's an amazing number. And that's your reality. Yeah. John Avalon is senior political analyst and anchor at CNN. His most recent book is Lincoln and the Fight for Peace. He's also a former editor in chief of the Daily Beast. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us and coming on the Weekend Bulwark podcast. My pleasure, Charlie. You know, we're huge fans of what you and your colleagues

are doing at the Bulwark here, my wife, Margaret, and I, and our whole family. So thanks. Keep fighting the good fight, buddy. Thank you. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.

We will be back on Monday, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.