The Bulwark Podcast - John Dickerson: Hero Story

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Liz Cheney sticks to her values under incredible pressure in an old-fashioned Republican way. And she reminded us that Jan 6 is not in the past—but is directly tied to the threat from a presidency where loyalty is built around a lie. Plus, the politicizing of FEMA, Trump's baiting of the media to fact check, more Megyn derangement syndrome, and the longshoremen and job automation. John Dickerson joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes: The Daily Report on CBS streaming John's book, "The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency" Tim's playlist

Hey, y'all, two updates for you. The Borg is going on the road in October. We're doing a bus tour. We're going to Philadelphia October 17th, Pittsburgh October 18th, Detroit October 19th. We're going to bring along with us some of your Never Trump favorites. We're going to be on the bus. We're going to do live shows at night. Go to theborg.com slash events.

Tickets aren't quite ready yet. We're nailing down the venues, but keep an eye on that feed. And if you've been wanting to get out to a swing state, knock on some doors, use this as your excuse. Come see us in the next morning or earlier that day, do some door knocking, meet up with the campaign. It'll be a nice little fall weekend up in those blue wall states. Hope to see you all there. One other thing, I mentioned at the end of yesterday's pod that this was going to be a doubleheader. Some scheduling snafus. It ends up being an awesome, epic singleheader with John Dickerson, which I hope that you're going to enjoy.

But we very well might have a bonus podcast either later Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So keep an eye on your feed. And I think you'll like the bonus podcast as well. So appreciate y'all. Up next, the great John Dickerson. Donald Trump was willing to sacrifice our Capitol to allow law enforcement officers to be beaten and brutalized in his name, and to violate the law and the Constitution in order to seize power for himself. I don't care if you are a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent.

That is depravity, and we must never become numb to it. Any person who would do these things can never be trusted with power again. We must defeat Donald Trump on November 5th. Hoo boy! Hello and welcome to the Bullerick Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. That was Liz Cheney, of course, and I'm here today. I'm so delighted to be here today with the anchor of the Daily Report on CBS Streaming, soon to be the co-anchor of CBS Evening News. Congrats her in order. And co-host of the forebearer to this show, Slate's Political Gab Fest, it's John Dickerson.

How you doing, man? Hey, I'm doing all right, Tim. It's great to see you over the, I don't know, whatever, over the wires. And I'm a big fan of your show. And I'm constantly, every time I hear you remembering, do you remember a dinner in Oklahoma City? Oh, gosh, no. I was having a memory with you of, see, this is why we're on the trail together and the memories blend together. I was remembering an Iowa straw poll hangout with you just this morning, having some recollections of that. Refresh my memory about our Oklahoma City dinner. Jeb was there, I guess. I actually don't think in the end he made it because no one seems to have made it. It was like a Midwestern regional maybe governor no it was some midwestern

cattle call and there was a vote in the senate so the senators weren't there trump blew it off anyway nobody was there and uh and so it was all by remote and it just was a completely deflated event but the one upside was that we uh had dinner in some uh good restaurant in oklahoma city so that's right was pruitt pruitt's people maybe had recommended it i But the one upside was that we had dinner in some good restaurant in Oklahoma City. That's right. Was Pruitt, Pruitt's people maybe had recommended it? You're refreshing my memory. This is right.

I just always love to FaceTime with you. It's been too long. And I'm kind of dying to hear what you think about everything that's going on. So let's get into it. I guess what was your initial reactions to Liz Cheney yesterday in Wisconsin at the birthplace of the Republican Party? Well, it felt like the third chapter of this week's revisiting of January 6th, which since I tend to see everything or try to see everything in the campaign is what it tells us about any of the candidates ability to operate in the in the Oval Office. For me, January 6th is incredibly important in that context, because for what I think are obvious reasons, but there's obviously

a political incentive for Republicans to bury it as much as possible. And we saw J.D. Vance try to do that in his worst moment of the debate. I interviewed Senator Cotton on CBS because as a part of our debate coverage, he also wouldn't admit that Donald Trump had lost. Then you had the Jack Smith filing, which brought new evidence about what happened on that day and what led up the two months that led up to that day. And then you have Liz Cheney. So it was kind of the third chapter in that. But what does it mean politically? I don't know. I don't know who is the I suppose what I the way I've been thinking about it is if there are sort of Haley voters who are uncertain about Harris or uncertain about turning out,

certainly it raises the stakes and puts the emphasis back on the temperament of the person in the job. But I think also perhaps in a way she it might have a slight validating effect for those who are uncertain about Harris. If Liz Cheney thinks that Harris can handle the job, maybe that helps some people get over their hurdles. But I'm basically still feeling like Harris's job is with other voters, and I'm not sure how much Liz Cheney really helps with that. I received an email this morning, and it puts the voter in my mind's eye that could maybe possibly be nudged by this.

It was from a listener who said that it was speaking about the grandfathers in their life. So they've got grandfathers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin with grandchildren who are all Democrats and children who are all Democrats would have been lifelong Republicans and are planning on writing in, you know, Ronald Reagan's ghost or whatever. And it's like, can some of those people, like they're not flipping people, but can some of those people like they're not flipping people but can some of those people be nudged off of the right end into being a proactive endorser or willing to proactively vote for kamala harris i think that's what liz cheney sees as her job and it was pretty clear that was like that was the person she was trying to talk to yesterday. Yeah, I think that's right. And it does recenter the conversation on the oath of office, the obligations of the job,

and the failure of Donald Trump by the evaluation back in the day of everybody in the party. I mean, there was a time when Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, as you know better than anybody, testified to the fact that he had broken his oath and inspired the attack on the Capitol. So it's not some member of the media who's saying this. It's the leaders of his party, and obviously Mike Pence said the same thing, who said he's broken the oath. And presumably, if you're hiring somebody to uphold that oath, and again, for four years, you wouldn't hire somebody who had broken that oath in the same way you wouldn't hire a known adulterer to officiate your wedding. Yeah, it was Liz and Liz was making this play yesterday to your sake, it wasn't a member of the media, she was kind of like, it's not us. It's not the never Trumpers that were testifying, you know, she's like, the January 6th committee was all

people that worked for him that were in that were the closest ones to him, that were testifying. You mentioned Pence. There was one element of the speech yesterday that struck me the most that, I don't know, maybe it's just my obsession that I'm the only one that noticed this, but I want to play you just one little bit of audio from Liz's speech. Our institutions also held because of Vice President Mike Pence, who refused. He refused to violate his oath to the Constitution. And that is why Mike Pence is not Donald Trump's running mate today. Yeah, yeah. Was Liz Cheney interrupted by applause and yelps in support of Mike Pence?

I just felt like that was pretty striking. Yeah, exactly. This is for those of us who covered the Bush administration in Washington, and the vitriol that Democrats used to aim towards the Cheney family and Dick Cheney in particular, it is still peculiar to go to go through all that. Yeah, that's like she's in front of the Democratic group. It's Mike Pence who isn't endorsing Kamala, who's on the wrong side of the key issue that Democrats are running on today, but they're still applauding. Just thinking about that contrast versus what the reaction would be if Mike Pence was mentioned at a Trump event.

Strikingly different. Just to linger on that for a second. I mean, the hero story in the politics that you and I grew up with, what were stories that and I spent most of my early years covering Republican politics, because when I was at Time magazine, there was already somebody covering the Clinton administration. The hero story were people who stuck to their values and firmly held and did the right thing under incredible pressure. I mean, in the old days, what Mike Pence did would have been held up and retold at every tiny county commissioner rallied so that politicians could associate themselves with that kind of bravery founded on immutable principles that that that, you know, were knit into into his bones and it would have been told over and over and over again now if you tell that story it gets you you know shouted down from the stage

yeah it is kind of striking the other thing that struck me about yesterday was watching it and i sat in on the on the newsletter this morning because the Jewish high holidays leaves the bulwark kind of half-staffed. And I wrote about how she was alone. I mean, not to diminish bulwark contributor Adam Kinzinger and Jeff Duncan and Olivia Troy, who I talked to yesterday. I know there have been plenty of other people out there. But of the name people, of the big names that people around the country would know of Republicans who at times have been at odds with Trump or who have spoken out against Trump, it's just her. It's just her up there.

I do think that that's pretty astonishing, really. And in some ways, it made it more powerful more powerful but in other ways it pissed me off well and as you discussed with jeff goldberg about mattis millie yeah esper kelly i mean mcmaster basically the national security officials who have said that that donald trump shouldn't have power again. They've said it in ways, but haven't, you know, continued to press that case. I mean, we don't have to go down that road, but it is extraordinary when you think about, imagine if you were hiring a CEO and you got that many negative recommendations, you wouldn't say after the, you know, 15th person who worked with him directly in a sensitive position in the part of the job that the president has the most control over of everything, right? Economic policy, it's quite diffuse.

National security decisions sit in his lap. If you have that many negative recommendations that you would say that's the guy for the job. Yeah, between the rap sheet and the negative recommendations i don't forget ceo i think like assistant to the regional manager would be kind of tough for for uh for trump i was this is one just one last thing on the on the generals in that crew because i've talked about a plenty harris is a new ad out that has like the video of esper and and all of them speaking and like as i was watching i was like i was thinking who isn't in it and it was kelly and like as i was watching i was like as i was thinking who isn't in it and it was kelly and mattis that's like they aren't in it because they haven't been

on camera right like they've talked to jeff goldberg and it's like for a tv ad you need you know you need the visual and audio and so just the harris team would use it right i go because they used esper they use millie and millie's kind of speaking pretty obliquely because millie really is in a military role where he says you know we don't want to want to be dictator whatever that clip is i just think that that shows like there is potential political use there and and it's just not on the table right now yeah you're right the other thing that has happened this week in the in the three-part story that you told there was JD. And yesterday, there's this little comedy duo that's pretty funny. They do a pretty good job called the Good Liars. And they were tracking JD through one of those hotel lobbies that you and I used to hang

out in. It's got a sad hotel lobbies where you have a little conference room with a group that you're going to meet with doing political meetupsups and they're chasing him down with the camera and saying do you think donald trump won and jd gives a different answer than he did on the at the cbs debate he said yep uh i do and and reiterated it twice and i think that that was a pretty telling about like the kind of performance that jd was trying to put on on stage. And also that like, you know, when you got off stage, there's a lot of applause, but there was also the boss saying, okay, man, you got to get in line. Well, first of all, I'm aware to begin. That's incredibly revealing. And we can talk about that. I don't think it helps the general

argument when people have to chase him down, because it makes it look like this is some obscure question that he has to be chased in all ways. I mean, this is the center of the presidency. It's the center of the job. It's the center of the oath. It's the center of what made the American system so glorious that there was a peaceful transfer of power. You've talked about that a great deal, but like you can't talk about it enough. It also goes to temperament. A person in a job that's faced with thousands of inconvenient facts, how do they respond when things are inconvenient? How do they respond when people next to them tell them inconvenient information? Are they so enraged by certain information that it operates as a check

on the candid voices of those around them? You talk to any chief of staff who's worked for a president. You talk to any vice president who's talked about the most useful thing they've done to a president. It's tell the president no or tell the president something they don't want to hear. If there's a self-enacting process whereby even when the president isn't there, you're not even admitting to things that are obvious, as obvious as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. If you can't do that,

how do you operate in a presidency? And that's what I think is one of the things about, obviously, January 6th is not something in the past. Donald Trump is talking about it in real time. He's raising questions about the 2024 election, just the same way he did in 2020, in 2016, and even in 2012, when he wasn't even the nominee. So it's not something about yesterday. It's obviously something about today, but also in the way you see J.D. Vance and Senator Cotton build architecture to get themselves around having to admit what's obvious or just deciding to, as you've just explained, say something that isn't true, you're building a pattern of behavior, a brain structure for living in an unreality in a job that requires you to understand reality. So this goes right to governing and temperament for the next four years,

if Trump were to be reelected. It also, I think, speaks a little bit to the state of the Republican Party. I mean, I just, I think back, I guess, you know, to you're talking about your origins of covering the party in the 90s. You know, it's sometimes it's hard to distinguish because there's always liberal media members that are like, oh, there's these crazy Republicans or some crazy Republican candidates. And there've always been some crazy Republicans. There've always been some crazy Democrats. But like, to me, I just think that that if the entry level to become a candidate in good standing is that you have to tell this lie, right, then going back to the resume metaphor, like the resumes that you're going to get are from people like Mark Robinson and Carrie Lake, or who are willing to go there, right? Like the

quality of resume you receive, when you have to be dishonest about something that's fundamental. You have to say night is day in order to be able to get the job. And I think that it explains, in part, just how the party has shifted and the types of people that are representing it. And how the people that are there from the old party, like Cotton, who you mentioned to kind of adapt themselves to the to this new type of person do you think that's fair i do because again because i went and and became obsessed with what is the actual job of being a president mostly it's a job of building a good team because presidents only have so much time and a lot of their time is sucked up with ceremonial parts of the job, the secret parts of the job. So you have to inspire your team at the head of all the agencies to go do hiring people whose North Star is not bumming out the boss. And not bumming out the boss in this case means

believing in things that are not so. So you build a team structure. The job is a team. You build a team full of people with their eye on a different ball than the one that needs to be on if you're going to try and govern. Because governing is super, super hard and you mess up a lot because life is imperfect. I mean, one of the things that was explained to me when I was working on my book, and I'll try and do this quickly, is with Reagan, the people who worked for Reagan knew three things if they didn't talk to him for two years. They knew cut government, cut taxes, cut regulations, and beat the commies.

And if he wasn't around, they knew, you know, I want to do things that align with those objectives. If the objective is just don't bum out the boss, that changes with the mood of the boss on any given day. And obviously it doesn't have anything to do with what you're doing in your underlying job. The counter argument from some people who worked in the Trump administration was because the boss doesn't really care what parts of the administration do big parts of it, you have actually free reign to do good work. But that means you have to hire people who are interested in using government to do good work instead of hiring based purely on loyalty and loyalty is designed around belief in something that's manifestly untrue. And you also don't know which part of the government is going to get into the boss's crosshairs either, right? Like when there's going

to be some Fox and Friends story, that some outrage, that some woke thing that overlaps with what HHS oversees, or to get to our other topic, FEMA. I'm sure that the people that worked at FEMA under Donald Trump thought that they were doing good work and we're doing good work and we're honest people. And then one day he's like, bring me a map. And in order to make one of his lies true, he has to draw like a little extra extended penis on like where the hurricane went, you know, and you have to sort of defend you know backfill that to keep him happy right so like that that is part of the problem but we are now getting to this kind of FEMA question again now and I want to play a little bit about what Trump talked about but in the context of that book and the hardest job in the

world that you wrote just I talk a little bit just about FEMA and the challenge that it presents and how that might reflect on who Trump might be looking to to fill those roles in a second term, God forbid. I have two thoughts. One is, you know, we saw it with Puerto Rico, where Trump went down there and talked at length at first about death numbers in a way that was inconsistent with the role and inconsistent with the human need of the people who were staring at him looking for some kind of connection. We saw it during COVID in which so much of the effort and work was spent by people who were motivated by the loyalty test to backfill and do all this extra work that was cleaning up Trump's remarks that were either lies or deeply dangerous misinformation. And what do I mean by that?

The bipartisan group that looked at the mistakes of the COVID response said that Trump was a comorbidity. What's a comorbidity? An underlying condition that contributes to the loss of life, which is an incredibly damning assessment by that group. And so FEMA requires the least politics. It requires the most keeping the eye on the ball because people's real lives are at stake. And what's fascinating to me is there was a period where massive hurricanes would hit the United States during the Kennedy and Eisenhower period. And even General Eisenhower, who under today's theories, you'd expect him to see him, you know, in a leather jacket standing amid the rubble. The role didn't exist for the presidency. Nobody expected

presidents to bother with these disasters. They expected it all to be done. There were no cameras. No cameras, precisely. That's part of it. And then LBJ decided, wait, there are cameras there. And so not only did he use it to show up for the first time, really, he then basically turned his ability to get money to either Louisiana or Indiana, to major disaster areas during his presidency. He basically fed stories to the press about how he was on the phone working the Senate to get the money to these hurt areas and found it was a perfect way to show the country that their president was at work for them. And also back to the camera point, the network started to compete over who could do better

weather coverage. So suddenly Murrow is up in a plane in the middle of a hurricane because it turned out people had an undifferentiated passion for weather stories. So NBC hires a weatherman to talk about, you know, the hurricane that's coming. So it's this confluence of the theater of the presidency, the desire for presidents to show they can do something, because most of the job is getting beat up, as LBJ said, being presidents, like being a jackass in a hailstorm.

Sometimes you just have to sit there and take it. You know, you can't do much in certain instances but on a disaster you can show yourself working so that's a little bit aside from what's happening now but when donald trump curious about the history actually let's get to trump in a second because i i gave kathleen blanco the business earlier the other day on the podcast because uh she's an underrated villain of the katrina situation as far as mismanagement is concerned maybe not poor intentions but i'm curious so like uh you were there right during all the the heck of a job brownie stuff i mean did that like

it's kind of funny that like the not funny but it is funny to think about like the big criticism there was like the lack of seriousness of that choice right i mean wasn't that kind of the context of of the michael brown a choice and then yes to fast forward to now and like trump's trump's like flirting with christina bach people who have like literally no experience doing this job. But I just am curious if you have any memories from the from the Brownie era. My memories actually are of the post Brownie post Katrina era in which when you talk to the Obama people about how well the Bush people did handing off the government. They did these tabletop exercises where Bush officials sat next to the incoming Obama officials and went through

the emergencies that might be presented to an administration. And the Obama people talk glowingly about how, because the Bush team had learned the lesson, about how they said, here's what we learned, here's what you need to do, that it was treated really seriously, these disasters that might hit. Because of course, what's the presidency? It's a job in which massive disasters hit, you know, wars, what's happening in the Middle East now, whether they hit the country or not, you have these big surprises that happen. And so that's why they were preparing. And they learned their lesson in the Bush years. You would think they would have learned it from the father because he had, I guess it

was Hurricane Andrew. What I think is true is what Obama said, which is that if you have a good FEMA director and FEMA is working well, nobody has any idea who that person is because they don't get the credit. If they handle things, you mostly get on on something like FEMA you just get the blame that story is another example of something that really pisses me off that JD said at the debate earlier this week where he's talking about how oh it was a peaceful transfer of power and like even setting aside the January 6th of it all like the administration it was first like Trump doesn't show up to the following inauguration so he's not there for the

ceremonial part but the part that you're talking about right like the the clean handoff from bureaucrats from experts like that was badly damaged by the stop the steal and oregano precisely right and when you when you look at the 9-11 report and the look back at what the failures were of intelligence that led to missing what bin Laden was up to, the report focuses in on that transition period between administrations as a as a possible weakness in the American system, because you're not allowed to prepare for the presidency before you're elected or you're accused of measuring the drapes. Fortunately, that's actually been excised. There's now a whole process started by something called or highly influenced by something called the Partnership for Public Service that works on getting a transition to be smooth. But as you pointed out, and actually,

Kevin McCarthy made this as one of his criticisms of President Trump in the period after the attack of January 6th, he said he has an obligation to make a smooth transition. And he's not doing it. And he didn't do it. There was a guy named Chris Liddell, who's basically held it all together, who worked within the Trump administration on the transition. Liddell had worked actually for Mitt Romney when Romney created something called the Romney Readiness Project, which was 300 people with expertise before Romney lost, he thought he was going to win, working to figure out how they would run government, because they knew they wouldn't have much time. It's a complicated job. You can't

just walk in and snap your fingers. And so he thought, well, we should be prepared. And Chris Liddell ran that and then went to go work for Trump. And in the period where it all could have gone to hell, because the president was actively working against the transition this guy ended up making the transition work and you know a lot of people credit him with the actual smooth handoff working against obviously incredible odds um there's been some good stories about that chris liddell it's worth folks checking out the other thing that the fema that i want to get back to is uh now we move into the from the mismanagement to the the fema that i want to get back to is uh now we move into the from the mismanagement to the misinformation side of this i want to listen to trump talking about

the response to helene at his rally yesterday that's what's happening they stole the fema money just like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season. So to try to translate what he's doing there is there was a congressionally approved budget, I think it was in the IRA, that was within DHS, FEMA's and DHS, that went to kind of dealing with the migrant crisis. And so they're kind of trying to do this thing that Trump doesn't really even understand, like some of his henchmen are telling him, like, oh, this money that should be going to disaster relief is actually going to migrants. And it gets transposed into this, like that there's, it's a bank thief, and they're giving it to illegal immigrants who are going to vote, which is obviously illegal. How do you even deal with that, as an anchor and a straight news reporter? And it's just a type of lie. It's not a typical politician lie. No, I mean, and you've started

in one of the places you have to do it, which is difficult, because, you know, in this instance, what's the real story? How do you get money to people who are in desperate, desperate need? One of the things that really struck me is that the reason they're in such need is not just the immediate pain, is that if you didn't have flood insurance, I interviewed a guy who told me there was only 1% of the areas that was hit have flood insurance, which means you're not going to get covered by insurance. This was an expert. I was so gobsmacked by this. If you don't have flood insurance, you can have regular insurance, but if it's water damage, you're not going to be made whole or even close to it. So immediate pain, no water, no food, roads are destroyed, cell service doesn't work, and your bank account has to build your house again,

not to mention the death. I mean, incredible human suffering. What if we had a world in which there was a race to center the human? What LBJ did when he decided there was a theatrical role for the presidency is he went to the people who were suffering and said, I'm your president, I'm here to help you, instead of using the suffering in this way. So how do you explain all of that when really all you're trying to tell people is what's going on with this disaster and the condition of the people there? And also, as you know, one of the great challenges is that how do you, and I've dealt with this from the minute I started covering candidate Trump in 2015, how do you not take what is clearly bait and give it a platform where it lives on and gains currency because you're

in the process of fact-checking it? We, I mean, when I was at Face the the nation i wrestled with this all the time i remember glenn thrush interviewing me when he was at politico and he was like wait what are you saying you're saying that he says things that aren't true so that when he gets fact checked it gets a whole nother round in the news cycle and people end up bling the thing that's untrue even your fact check and i'm like that's exactly what happens and studies have check. And I'm like, that's exactly what happens. And studies have shown this. Now, there are other ways you can manage it, but it requires, I mean, and the best way to do it is just a sandwich of truth. You know, you say what

the truth thing is, say the false claim, and then the truth again. But that, as we were talking earlier about disaster management or COVID, that eats up a lot of time there's a lot going on in the world that needs all of us need to try to figure out and if we're spending all of our time trying to unwind this lie about disaster relief we're not spending our time you know pointing people's attention towards the things that are important it's really you get a 30-minute news show so you gotta tell people what's actually happening with the hurricane right you gotta tell people what people like what are the actual efforts to you know resolve all that human suffering and you gotta cover trump and that wasn't the only lie you'll be shocked to hear in the speech

yesterday so it's like do you talk about this one to talk about other stuff right i could just it becomes very challenging on the other hand it's like's like, you can't let them get away with it. You can't get away with this, you know? And that is the flummoxing part, I think, of dealing with him. Right. Because the larger project, as articulated by Steve Bannon and as demonstrated by Trump, is to kick the legs out from under verifiable truth as a whole. So if you run a democracy, you have to at least believe that votes can't matter and that facts matter and that the courts are set up for the purposes of reaching a just verdict. If your platform is that all three of those things are up for grabs, you've basically weakened all three of the pillars of the system we have. And that's the moment we're in.

All right, we're getting bleak. I'm about to get us bleaker, John. This is good. You said that we should be aspiring to having a politics that centers the human well over the past 24 hours it isn't just trump that's lying about what is happening and uh with the hurricane response there has been a centering of a of a human of sorts there's a picture that's going around i don't know if you've seen this or not for youtube viewers we're gonna put it up on the screen. It looks like a young girl, maybe four or five, carrying a little puppy that is wet. And she's in a boat going through like a river. And what

looks like maybe the kind of the area in North Carolina where there is a hurricane. Stephen Miller shared this photo. Senator Mike Lee shared it. A bunch of MAGA media folks, Clay Travis. I'm sure you're figuring out at this point, this is an AI photo. It's not real. The girl isn't real. The dog isn't real. And it's being passed around. It's pretty compelling, the photo, the AI, I have to say. They're getting better. And it's all shared as Biden is abandoning this person because they're in red America or something. It's a little girl holding a puppy. I mean, how the hell do you deal with that? How do you deal with that? Getting it right is so incredibly hard in just in regular the world, the regular world is complicated enough, things are complex, and you can you want to present them in their complexity without just confusing people or suggesting that there aren't real choices to be made, you know,

it's just hard enough dealing with reality. And then when you have to deal with that, it's, it's a hell of a struggle, except for the fact that there's no alternative but to believe in the goodness, essentially, of your audience, that truth will out. And that if you believe in trying to help your audience by giving them clean and clear information, you have to keep believing that even if you're in the middle of a storm of willful misleading of people the only compliment i can give elon about his overseeing of twitter's community notes are pretty good and this this image is community noted which is like the little thing like this is ai underneath all these guys photos now it takes a while for that to get up

the damage is kind of it's the lie gets around the world before the truth can catch up kind of element and even zuckerberg and facebook they're doing it there's a different photo of trump wading through the water which is like even more ridiculous but that my husband's friend from high school he showed me this on facebook she was reposting it saying that zuckerberg keeps taking down this picture because they want to hurt donald trump and it's just like uh you know it's on the one hand at least these tech guys who haven't been far from perfect, or at least trying, like there's the backfire to that a little bit, right? Where they're like, oh, they're censoring this thing, you know? Right. It's a kind of a cousin

to what I was talking earlier about fact checking is that you try and do the right thing and you end up exacerbating the underlying condition you were trying to address. The community no thing is better, at least with Marjorie Taylor Greene, John. It's a little bit easier to deal with this. She tweeted yesterday, yes, they can control the weather. It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done. That's a pretty lo-fi conspiracy there. I mean, that's the type of conspiracy that we're pretty accustomed to dealing with. Right.

That would have been totally wacky and at the furthest edge of things during a time. And now there's been brave new territory discovered in terms of how to asleep people. And by the way, there used to be a break between, well, presidential candidates didn't used to even get involved in their campaigns. And there's a point at which Hoover throws his entire campaign team under the bus because he's like that they run a campaign. I got nothing to do with it. It was true. But then, of course, basically because of Kennedy and others, candidates become actively involved in their campaigns. And why does this matter? Because there used to be a wall between what you did to campaign and how you governed. And all those norms kept people when they governed within certain boundaries too. But when that wall disappears, and I think you can

argue in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush did some pretty and allowed some things to be done that were considered at the time, the kind of worst of campaigning at the moment, Willie Horton and other things. And Bush essentially told John Meacham, like, you got to do break the eggs to make an omelet. He had also this other piece, which was a strong belief about the way the presidency should be operated and whether you agree with the policies or not. He had some other channel that he flipped to when he got in the job.

Again, you may disagree with that channel, but at least he had a different one. When the two are mushed together and the campaign becomes that much more disconnected from reality, it's inevitably true that the governing will become disconnected from reality. It's a way in which the campaign conditions the participants in governing to be less good at it. The other element that has changed that I was wanting to pick your brain on is, you know, I get asked a lot about like, how to combat this, like what's changed in my career, like how you deal with right wing media and misinformation. And like one of the problems is, you know, and this is not to again, not to to alibi George H.W. Bush or certainly not to alibi me.

I've put on the hair shirt plenty. But like when I was first doing campaigns, I first met you in like 08, even at the beginning of the Internet. It's like I think about the people in Iowa that I dealt with. Like they listen to Jan Michelson on talk radio, who's like the local rush. They maybe listen to Rush, but they also got the farm report. They also got Bro farm report they also got bro call at night so there was this mix of information that was protective and like that's like not doesn't seem to be happening that much now i don't think and i do wonder like what is your

sense of that like at cbs are you still like breaking through the bubble a little bit or less and less or how much what's your sense of it yeah it's a great it's a great question i mean first i would say to your just picking you up in iowa in 2008 i mean you know we are not blameless i am not blameless i've spent a lot of years covering politics you know as the horse race and like you know the stuff we all love i mean the show is called political gab fest you know it's not it's not called serious policy thought deep policy right although those guys david and emily are great they're great i just mean like the just if you just think about the conceit of it like when it started you know precisely that's exactly right and so what i think one of the

damages i mean this is like no big surprise but if you want to go hear an 8 000 word speech i gave at harvard earlier to put you to bed at night I thought a lot about this is that my role in our role, like horse race coverage, people know they don't like it. But I think it's even worse because it creates this lens of everything is political for any serious thing that happens. You see the way the economy is covered and it's basically like all through the political lens. And that doesn't inform anybody about anything. the way the economy is covered and it's basically like all through the political lens and that doesn't inform anybody about anything like it just like whether it's up or down for a candidate these things that are happening in the economy you know the the port strike that was averted 258 000 people got jobs this week did that beat expectations for kamala or does it hurt kamala

exactly precisely right and i so that's you you know, that's awful. So people who were hoping to get, you know, a report about what was going on in the economy, and what small businesses were doing to hire or not hire, or what's it going to mean for a small business, if they can now deduct $50,000 of their startup costs, and the real explanation of anything so that it can attach to their lives, that atrophied. Also, the distraction that we are all engaged in, and now we have to compete in that environment as well, which means when we're trying to do a show or a broadcast, we're competing not just with the other networks.

We're competing with TikTok, and we're competing with the latest scores and gambling and all the other things in the world. And that makes it really difficult too. I think we try really, really hard to, you know, keep the main thing, the main thing. I'm now quoting Haley Barber. He's been quiet for about a decade, which is not in his character. He tells you a little bit about the state of the party it is basically to try to focus on explaining the world for people getting out of the way and giving them what's actually happening to to create that counterbalance you're talking about i hope that market is still out there and i'm lifted up at least by the number of people who write in and or who i run into who appreciate that you know it's a

struggle that's good yeah no i mean i'm not looking for market research i'm just talking about anecdotal because i can tell you know what i mean like i can just tell like i do this i have a snapchat thing and the people that reply to me from that are actually mostly kind of young nicki haley types they're like i love this show because i can't like all the other kids on campus are mega or like way too woke or way too left for me or whatever and i like that that i get that help like you know people stop me at whole foods to watch msnbc you know what their politics are you know what i mean and so like you can kind of sense it so i'm just wondering because i have no sense like honestly like is nightly news as siloed politically as this other stuff at this point or or not as much just like anecdotally

our viewers are are not siloed that isn't to say that they don't it's really been fascinating watching a lot of people who write to me and say you know if i say that donald trump lost the election that's now seen as being partisan and that's a bad shift but the fact that there are people whom that are watching that for whom they think that makes you partisan that's a bad shift but the fact that there are people whom that are watching that for whom they think that makes you partisan that's a good sign actually that those people are watching you that they haven't totally checked out they're still watching and are just only consuming right whatever like you know real america's voice sometimes they say like i used to think you were bipartisan and now you know you've gotten so partisan by

talking it means two things one saying that he lost the election and two talking about it at all because they think it's something that's like in the past like an inconvenient position on the treaty of the sea one other thing i should note by the way just going back to jd for a second yeah he mentioned by my account donald trump's past record in 12 of his 15 answers. So then when he got to the end, and he said, I don't want to, you know, talk about the past. He gave up the game right there. Yeah, I think the viewership is there. It's just, it's shrinking. It would just say the viewership is there for people who really want to try and figure this stuff out and be given, you know, information, by the way, on information that has anything to do with politics there's like this huge big you know world out there full of complex things like for example the role that

artificial intelligence will play in our future by which i mean maybe even next week is vast and that's what this port strike was in part about automation those kinds of big stories deserve coverage which are a little bit or totally out of the political context. Yeah, let's talk about the port strike really quick on the news side of it, because that has happened since I was last on the pod that they have not really come to a deal, but they've extended it. And so the workers will go back until, I guess, January 15th. Now, a new deadline it is another example of like this there's a trend of kind of the quiet part of the biden administration has been pretty productive and effective just like the actual process of governing domestically at least and like here's another example of it i think maybe

hampered by his lack of communication skills maybe hampered by all this media stuff we're talking about. So anyway, I'm curious what you what you thought about the Longshoremen news and also kind of more broadly on the Biden administration's efficacy. I think on the Longshoremen news, I mean, a couple of things strike me. One on the wages question, you know, the West Coast dock workers have better wages because they fought and got better wages. So it looks like the East Coast now is going to, because they were way behind, the West Coast dock workers get paid a lot more than the East Coast does. So now the East Coast is going to move back up into parity. And that's just basically the story of our age, which is what are the levers to improve the wage conditions and the incomes of families, because it's not as guaranteed as it used to be, you know, multiple generations ago. So what's your route to opportunity and prosperity?

Is it through unions? Is it through going to college? Is it through, you know, apprenticeship programs? Is it through government assistance? That's all much more kind of up for grabs and much more vital and dire, especially in the time of high prices. So that's kind of, it's a sliver of the whole huge American economic story, obviously a story in which you've had inequality grow and get larger

over the last, you know, 50 years. Until recently. Grow for 50 years, and then actually post-COVID, it's starting to narrow a little bit. The inequality. Yeah, the inequality side of it. Yeah, you've had some growth in the... Bottom quintiles.

In certain quintiles in the bottom, but in particular, but you're still, obviously, you've had some growth in the bottom quintiles in certain quintiles in the bottom but in particular but you're still obviously you've got massive gains at the top so the other part is automation which to me this is now a hot take so okay hot takeaway i don't like this this is uncomfortable territory for me this doesn't suit you as a newsman to do the hot to do hot takes okay we're 47 minutes in I would like to try to. So what's going to cause more displacement of American jobs? Automation and artificial intelligence or the resettlement of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio? Forget about the lying about something you know is a lie about that awful claim about the pets. And forget that the Haitians who are there by the description of the governor, Republican Governor Ohio, have been important to the revitalization of Springfield.

And that they're there legally. Yes, and that they're there legally. I mean, temporary protected status. But all of the attention, there are reasons that that attention has a moral element. But there's also, there is this huge change that's going to happen in the workforce that's not really been a part of the conversation. And when that change happens, somebody's going to be in office. In my view, that's one of the things this election is about is who do you want in office when that massive change happens in the workforce? Because they're going to have to make

decisions on the fly about the changing American route to opportunity that's going to be. And there are opportunities through artificial intelligence. It's not all doom and gloom to opportunity that's going to be, and there are opportunities through artificial intelligence. It's not all doom and gloom, but it's going to present a lot of real-time decision-making and thought and foresight. And that doesn't get talked about so much. And I think that is a massive question that's a part of the automation part. And then to your final point about the Biden administration, I thought about this when J.D. Vance was talking about bipartisanship in the debate. He discussed a world in which there were nuanced, subtle answers that were best worked out through bipartisanship, which if you step back and think about what's the precondition for bipartisanship,

it's the idea that people are elected to office and that people believe that they were elected to office lawfully and everybody abides by the decisions in the elections and gives the power to the people to make decisions. So that's somewhat undermined when you try to overthrow the vote of 81 million people. But leaving that aside, there is no indication from the four years that Donald Trump was in office that he had any inclination to do things in a bipartisan fashion. Some of the senators on the Democratic side, he could have reached out to could have worked with he didn't really do that much for you know what was a tester one of them when biden got in i think it was tester said he's never been to the oval office before which was both an attack on trump

the deal maker but also kind of a subtle dig at obama oh yeah yeah and that was that was definitely one of the digs at obama is that he didn't you know and that dig comes from his own side too um but yeah heidi heitkamp you know, and that dig comes from his own side, too. But yeah, Heidi Heitkamp, you know, Manchin, Tester, there were there were Democratic senators that he could have worked with. And I, I think that's in part because and this is one of the people in the progress, the progressives don't like didn't like Joe Biden for this reason. But as a creature of the Senate, he was willing to work with people who might otherwise be found objectionable. He tells that story of Mike Mansfield telling him that he needs to find the good in Jesse Helms, which Biden as a young senator

was all worked up and exercised about. And you know, it reminds me that reminds me of Lyndon Johnson talking to Senator Byrd, Harry Byrd. He's convincing him to do something on the budget. And he's like giving him instructions about how Byrd can go out and boast about how he dunked on the president. Basically Johnson. And this is all from Caro. Johnson's like, you go tell him that you told me that I needed to do X, Y,

and Z basically make me look smaller and less powerful to make you look bigger. And that's how he was trying to get what he Johnson wanted. That doesn't seem to be a, anything we've ever seen in evidence with, with Donald Trump. That's on the Trump play wanted. That doesn't seem to be anything we've ever seen in evidence with Donald Trump. That's not in the Trump playbook. Okay, I gotta let you go. We have two just really quick, funny things we have to get to. We've been very dark. All right. So I asked Caitlin Collins about her exchange with Megan. I wasn't

an exchange about Megan Kelly's comments about her smile. Very rude. Megan Kelly also some thoughts about you. F-U-C you f you cbs how dare you oh wow but hold on not john dickerson personally this is really it seems like megan kelly's more of a problem with other with other women but it was uh at margaret and and nora f you cbs how dare you how dare you john dickerson how do you how do you feel about the new world we're in where that's happening well i think that i would seek to have the grace and equanimity that caitlin showed in her response i i don't know what the nature of this is what's the nature of the complaint this was the one fact check i guess i guess it was about the one fact

check on the haitians where she lashed out and said you're not you're not supposed to be fact-checking. How dare you? F you. I don't know that that contributes positively to the conversation. Okay. I don't think it does either. It contributes positively to my enjoyment to just be able to talk about the increasing derangement of Megyn Kelly. All right, this one I just have to do too. All right, this is it. Last thing. Because I love that. I mean, the story is insane insane but kind of in the old cutesy political way mike lawler is running against monday jones uh new york times has a story about how he wore blackface and i don't want to get down the blackface because it was like he was dressing

up like michael jackson when he was younger and let's just set that aside for a second we don't have time to to get on the blackface route there was one other nugget though that was tucked in here that i have to read to you in 2005 as a high school senior mr lawler flew from new york to california to attend jackson's criminal trial the pop star had been charged with molesting a 13 year old boy at his neverland ranch the case ended in acquittal lawler had been so disgusted by testimony against Jackson that he muttered something derogatory in the courtroom and was removed. It's like, have you ever loved a stranger, a celebrity so much that you would have been willing to do a cross-country flight to heckle the people testifying against them in court,

John Dickerson? I traveled some pretty long distances to see some Bob Dylan shows, but I guess about as close as I can really even get to this. You know, the passions people have for things that they attach themselves to. I mean, you know, people lining up under Indaley Plaza waiting for JFK Jr. to show up again. I mean, the human brain can attach itself, the imagination, and this is actually, okay, I'm going to ruin this by having the fun you're trying to have. No, this is great. This is exactly how I wanted John Dickerson to end the podcast. Please ruminate on this. You know, the imagination is a powerful thing. And Nixon used to talk about the lift of a driving dream in politics.

Quoting Nixon, I am, you know, politicians play on the imagination. And it's a super powerful thing because we can imagine all kinds of stuff we want to because the reality is so unpleasant. So people whose imaginations run away, you know, just gallop ahead, which is obviously what happens when you're flying cross country and then have that kind of reaction. That seems so much more a part of our politics now. And the skill at grabbing people's imagination and sending it off into other darker places, that seems like part of what we're wrestling with at this moment, in a way, I feel like

is very new and very fast. And obviously, all of the misinformation and digital appetizers and sweet meats that get pushed around inflame the imagination. So it feels at times like we are in a politics of imagination, inflammation. That's what I think of when I think of flying across the country to whatever that story is. Heckle,

Michael Jackson's accusers, Michael, Michael Jackson's accusers, Heckle, Michael Jackson's accusers. Fascinating times. John Dickerson, that was great. I'm so happy we ended on that. Let's do a whole podcast on that topic, hopefully in calmer seas next year. I thought you probably won't have time as the new co-anchor of CBS Evening News, but we'll do our best to make time. Well, I hope so. And it's great to see you again, Tim. And thanks for having me. And I'm there for you in the new year. right that sounds good thank you to john dickerson as i mentioned we might have a bonus podcast this weekend so keep an eye on the feed we'll see y'all soon peace she was more like a beauty queen from a movie screen said don't mind, but what do you mean? I am the one who would dance on the floor and around. She says I am the one who would dance on the floor and around. She said her name was Billie Jean and she caused a scene

And every head turned with eyes that dreamed of being the one Who would dance on the floor and around Flooring around People always told me be careful what you do Don't go around breaking young girls hearts Mother always told me Be careful who you love Be careful what you do before the lie becomes the truth Billie Jean

is not my lover she's just a girl who said that I am the one but the kid is not my son. She says I am the one, but the kid is not my son. The Bullwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.