The Bulwark Podcast - John Harwood: Our Cartoonish Politics

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Trump may excel at firing up resentment in the base, but the party is squandering support from an entire generation of young people. Plus, Alvin Bragg sues Jim Jordan, Tennessee's governor calls for a red flag law, and Missouri Republicans try to defund libraries. John Harwood joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcoming to the podcast, our old friend John Harwood, veteran journalist, veteran of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NBC, CNN, and now living the dream. John, welcome back on the podcast. Thanks, Charlie. So I started off this morning by Googling Donald Trump debate John Harwood cartoon. And I'll tell you what the shock was to realize that this was from 2015. We are coming up on the seven year anniversary of this debate, the CNBC Republican debate. By the way, there'll never be a CNBC Republican debate again.

For people who don't remember, this is going to come back to you. You were one of the moderators of the debate. And this was when Donald Trump was still kind of fresh and new in American politics. So you described Trump's plans, including his proposal to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, building a wall on the border, which of course Mexico was going to pay for. And then you say, let's be honest, is this the comic book version of a presidential campaign? Seven years later, can you believe that we are still talking about this that it's not just a comic book version but we are all part of this comic book and it has been going on for seven

freaking years it's unbelievable and you know when you think about it people at that time did not think donald trump was going to win the nomination. And before that debate, I was getting incoming from other Republican campaigns who thought we in the press had been way too easy on Trump. And that as soon as he got some strict scrutiny, he was going to collapse and then they'd get on to the real competition between Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or whoever else. And I thought there was some truth to that, that he had not gotten tough enough scrutiny. And so I questioned him sharply in the way that you mentioned. And what happened was we saw a precursor of the pattern that we've seen repeated over and over since then, which is that there was a huge backlash from the Republicans on hand in the audience and the Republican base. And so the Republican candidates who had wanted the press to

be tougher on Trump were defending Trump out of fear of his base. And that's continued to go on. And I have to say that I use the term comic book because it was the things that Trump was saying was so ridiculous. And they have turned win, right? This isn't real. Do you remember what the Huffington Post actually refused to cover him as a political figure? They put him in the entertainment section because it was like, we can't take him seriously otherwise. So now that validates it. And again, this is the push pull. Do you pay attention to him? Does that give him more oxygen? Should you ignore him? Maybe he'll go away if you ignore him. And, of course, he hasn't. And here we are, nearly seven years later, going through kind of the same magical thinking

where Republicans are thinking that, okay, this can't possibly happen. He can't possibly win. Well, something's going to happen, right? We don't have to do anything. I don't have to punch him or call him out. By the way, just for our listeners, you also asked a second follow-up question that is interesting, that aged pretty well. You said that you had talked to economic advisors who'd served presidents of both parties about Trump's tax plan at the time, and you said they say that you have as much chance of cutting taxes that much, as he was proposing, without increasing the deficit as you would have flying away from that podium by flapping your wings.

And, of course, we know he did cut taxes. And, of course, it did explode the deficit. But Trump was very unhappy with you at the time. He said, this is not a very nice question. And, like, Larry Kudlow, you know, he's our guy. You know, you'd have to get rid of Larry Kudlow. Came out the other day and said, I love Trump's tax plans. Well, Trump and Larry Kudlow turned out to be full of shit on that. Well, they did. And, you know, Larry was my colleague at CNBC at the time, and that's why

Trump made that comeback. But very soon, Larry was working in the White House with Trump, you know, repeating the same false promises about what would happen with the deficit. You know, the challenge that we've all faced in covering Trump is, if you know that what someone is saying is bullshit, are you better off stating that bluntly at the risk of alienating some of his followers? Or are you better off stating it in a softer way with the idea that that would permit a sort of more persuasive message to get through to people? Because what we're ultimately trying to do is get people to see reality. And there's a push and pull there.

And I don't think anybody's gotten it right. I certainly, I thought at that time that the most effective way of exposing the ridiculousness of what Trump was saying was a little, very sharp, almost mockery. And, you know, that didn't work any better than people who tried to get Trump to, okay, explain exactly how you're going to get Mexico to pay for this wall. Well, everyone exactly how you're going to get Mexico to pay for this wall. Well, everyone knew they weren't going to get Mexico to pay for the wall. So to some degree, the idea of challenging him as if this is a policy debate was to me a little off, but nobody's approach has been effective. No, see, this is an interesting point. You know, again, with the experience of seven years, no one has really figured out how to do this, because in a lot of ways, Donald Trump broke the model of journalism, didn't he? Because,

I mean, how do you deal with somebody who lies, who exaggerates, who prevaricates, who says outrageous things all of the time, who clearly has this disordered personality? I mean, how in the normal format of journalism or the give and take of a debate do you handle this? And I think that one of the things, maybe in his reptilian instinct, he figured out that they weren't prepared for him, that he functions on a completely different level and not a higher level when it comes to these sorts of things. I mean, American journalism has struggled with this from the very beginning. And you would think by now there would have been a cracking the code, but no one has done it. And maybe there's no way to crack this code. What do you think? Well, look, journalists deal in words, in reason, in rationality, in trying to see the world

accurately and describe it. Donald Trump is operating on an emotional level with his base. It's not about whether numbers add up on a piece of paper. There is a set of people, it's a minority of the country, but it's a substantial minority and one that is very powerful that feels that their country, what they have thought was their country, is slipping away from them. And Donald Trump speaks to a sort of instinct to fight that. Now, that doesn't mean he's in tune with them personally. He's not an evangelical Christian, but he's got the evangelical Christians. Why? Because they think the country is slipping away, and Donald Trump says he's going to fight the people they think are responsible for it slipping away. And so it's not about reason. It's not about rationality. It's just about tribal instinct. This is interesting. I had a long interview yesterday with somebody from public radio who

was talking about the politics of resentment and the populism that he's exploited, that kind of resentful populism. The discussion was probing the question, well, where did it start? It was a pre-existing condition. It was always there. And of course, that's true. And you were talking about Wisconsin and the fact that you had a lot of people in rural Wisconsin who did resent the fact that the country was slipping away, that they were being ignored, that they were not sharing in the prosperity, that they were looked down upon. And that had been around for a long time. And there were politicians who exploited that. But then Trump comes along and he basically takes that resentment and he boils it down into the strongest possible crack cocaine of resentment. And he puts the face of the immigrants and the Chinese and the other elites, et cetera, on it and fires it up.

So something was always there, right, John? But he did something that was new. I mean, it is like Breaking Bad, where the guy goes in the lab and he comes up with the purest possible meth, and he distributes it. And maybe there were people who had problems before, but once that meth got out there, then our politics changed. And it hasn't changed back in seven years, has it? Right. And he accelerated processes that were underway. I mean, if you really want to take it back, you take it back to the mid-1960s when the National Democratic Party made a fork in the road decision to side with the civil rights movement. That ended up causing an

exodus of white Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party that they had considered their home since the Civil War. And those people surged into the Republican Party and sort of flipped the stance of the two parties on racial issues. And as we've seen the share of Americans who are white Christians, you know, it was 80% in the mid-1960s. That has now slipped to under 50 percent. That is a very worrisome trend for a segment of the population, and they're doing what they can to try to push back against that. It's not going to succeed because you can't hold back the tide, but that's the impetus for it. And within 25 years or so, whites of all kinds are not going to be a majority in the country anymore. That's frightening to some people. Well, it's interesting you would say that because I was listening to

Eddie Glaude from Princeton yesterday, and he made the point, and I think they were talking about what just happened in Tennessee. And he was saying that one way to look at what's happening right now is that we are re-litigating many of the issues that we thought had been resolved back in the 1960s. And I thought that was interesting, that we're relitigating all of the changes in society that sort of exploded in the 1960s, and we're kind of back to that period. I was looking at an analysis in the Washington Post of what is happening in places like Wisconsin with the youth vote, the fact that this is not actually working long term for the Republican Party. And I'm talking about the vote in Wisconsin for state Supreme Court. I don't know whether you saw this

chart. They did this fascinating analysis about how Democrats turned out college age voters in last week's election. And the numbers are absolutely staggering. You know, Scott Walker, the former governor, you know, is heading up this Young American Foundation saying, you know, we have this terrible, you know, youth problem because of indoctrination in colleges, which is, of course, kind of silly. But I think he's looking at some of these numbers out of, say, Dane County in Madison, Wisconsin, where college age voters are voting more than 90%, 90% for the progressive candidates. Conservative Republicans are squandering an entire generation by playing these kinds of cards. I mean, one of the Trump legacies may be to fire up all of these

resentments, but the downside of that are these absolutely horrendous numbers. I mean, it's not just Madison. La Crosse, the Student Union Award, 75% for the progressive candidate. Oshkosh, 76%. Green Bay, 84%, 85%. Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 83%. I mean, UW-Milwaukee, 91.2% of the youth vote. There is a cataclysm coming. Well, and Scott Walker's response was instructive. He said, the problem is not us and what we're for.

The problem is them. They're being indoctrinated. That is obviously a losing political strategy. It may be a good strategy for preserving his role at the Young America Foundation because he can cast himself as the chief opponent of indoctrinations. That may be a paycheck, but it's not a viable political strategy. And, you know, the country is getting more secular. It's getting more diverse. And those are things that work against the interests of the Republican Party. And there's no changing that. It's getting more urban. The economy is moving more toward technology and things requiring education. Even manufacturing jobs require community college, technical training.

And all those things that are changing the country in the 21st century are things that Donald Trump is sort of saying he can roll back. And he can't. And the Republican Party can't. And so while you can excite a shrinking base sufficiently, you can win some elections. And Donald Trump won a freakish presidential election in 2016, having drawn just the right Democratic opponent, who a lot of Americans weren't very fond of, and getting just the right number of votes in just the right number of Midwestern industrial states to win the election. But long term, you can't do it that way. And you have to ultimately grow your

party. Remember, in 2012, when Mitt Romney lost, Republicans thought, okay, that's our signal, Obama won re-election, we're going to have to change and we're going to have to reach out. And Donald Trump just took a bulldozer to that strategy. And ultimately, they'll have to get back to it. But the question is when. This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I'm sure you're going to find my free Morning Shots newsletter,

a great companion for understanding what is happening to us. And every morning as I prepare for this show, I share with my readers what's trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day. To sign up for my free Morning Shots newsletter, go to thebullwork.com slash morning shots. That's thebullwork.com slash morning shots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon. So I want to talk to you about the politics of abortion, what's going on in Tennessee, in Missouri, next week's Fox News defamation case, Alvin Bragg pushing back on Jim Jordan. I want to do all of that, but it is hard to move on from Donald Trump. So the indicted Donald Trump returned to Fox News last night to have a sit down with Tucker Carlson.

By the way, are you at all surprised the soft ban on Donald Trump at Fox News didn't even last through the middle of April? Any part of you surprised that Fox News, you know, that I mean obviously the Murdochs wanted to move on from Donald Trump, but clearly they've decided, hey, you know, got to let the guy back on. It's all politics and the intermingling of politics and business for them. If Donald Trump is good business for them, that will be for Donald Trump. If Donald Trump is bad business, they'll try to push him away. And, you know, many Republican elites, Republican donors, Republican business people have thought, oh my God, we got to get rid of Trump. But once they see the demonstration that he still has a robust base of support within the party, that stuff kind of melts away. And in the aftermath of Trump's indictment, when there was a surge of

rallying around him within the Republican base, Fox is going to fold like a cheap suit. And that's what they did, including Tucker Carlson, the guy who was discovered on text saying he hated Trump passionately. Didn't mean anything. He's a demonic force of destruction. Yes. Yeah. He's going to be opportunistic and do whatever suits his interests in the short term. The Trump show is the only show in town when it comes to the conservative movement. And if the Trump show is dominant, then Fox News has to go there because that's what their audience wants. The audience wants more, more Donald Trump.

OK, so we got the weeping, sir, stories. But I think the top line was Donald Trump once again fawning, fawning on some of the world's most brutal dictators. I would urge people to actually watch the video in my newsletter, Morning Shots. I have a big chunk of the actual transcript, which is a wild ride through the recesses of the former president's mind. But in a sort of serial fashion, he goes through his lavish praise for the Chinese strongman Xi, North Korea's Kim Jong-un, and of course, his BFF Vladimir Putin. Here's a very, very short excerpt from his fawning with Tucker Carlson last night. But our meeting was supposed to take 15 minutes. It took four hours. We got along so well. There was a great chemistry we had. Great. We talked about everything a great chemistry, but people ask me

Gets me how smart she has a top of the line. You never met anybody smarter How smart is Kim Jong on top of the line? You know people say oh this is not Really smart, you know when you come out and as a young man at 24 23 even though he Sort of inherits it most people kill people when they inherit, they lose it. And that's easy stuff. He took over a country of very smart people, very, very energetic people, very tough people at a very young age. And he has total dominant control. That's not easy. These are these are very smart very smart very smart now he's had

in probably a bad year don't forget that whole thing is not if he took over all of ukraine and what are we going to do because biden is so committed to ukraine what happens if it's a not winnable war so you know war crimes genocide murders you know it's not something that Trump really cares about. But we knew this, didn't we, John? We've known this over and over again. There's no part of him that is going to back away from his just visceral admiration of some of the world's most vicious autocratic thugs. It's amazing. And he keeps telling us this over and over again. The thing that is ironic about the guy with the make America great again slogan is he is not pro

American. He is not for the American system. Donald Trump is somebody who inherited a family business, has run it badly in many ways, make common cause with all sorts of shady characters in running his business. It's all about him and his control and his trying to sustain that business. He sees governing the country as an extension of his own business, where his word is law, and he's not enamored of the checks and balances and the compromise required in the American system. So he's not on the American side, and that's true with respect to Russia and Ukraine. Donald Trump was assisted in his 2016 campaign by Russia. He returned the favor by being fawning and obsequious with Vladimir Putin. He continues to do that. And the whole notion of

democratic countries sacrificing to preserve freedom in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world, that's not something that Donald Trump relates to in any way. Donald Trump admires people who can govern with an iron fist and the niceties of human rights and freedom and democracy are just not important to him at all. You know, it wasn't that long ago that one of the real dividing lines, one of the real flashpoints on the right was the belief in American exceptionalism and the sense that, well, the left did not believe that America was exceptional. And then Donald Trump comes along and makes it clear that he does not believe in American exceptionalism and the American right kind of shrugs. Remember that famous interview when he was asked, well, you know, Vladimir Putin, you know, kills people,

he murders people. And Donald Trump said, well, we murder lots of people too. We're not that nice. I mean, this was a very clear embrace of the kind of moral relativism that conservatives had for decades said that they rejected. And here you have Donald Trump. And again, the contrast between his admiration for Xi and Putin compared to his contempt for democratic leaders in the West. I mean, think about what he says about everyone from Justin Trudeau to Vladimir Zelensky in comparison to the way he talks about these murderous genocidal warmongers. It's really extraordinary. That interview that you mentioned was with Bill O'Reilly at the Super Bowl. I know.

And O'Reilly was trying to help him out and trying to invite him to condemn Putin for the worst kind of crimes that most ordinary people could relate to. And he says he's a killer. And Trump's response was, oh, you think we're so innocent? Yeah, exactly. See, Donald Trump, he does not care about the law. He really doesn't care about anyone except himself and doing whatever it takes to get what he wants. And so the idea that Putin was getting what he wants by criminal means, that doesn't mean anything to Trump. He admires the fact that he can get what he wants. And he was very accommodating to Putin his entire time in the White House.

This is actually kind of a hilarious pattern now that we're seeing from some of the fawning interviewers who try to help out Donald Trump by saying, you know, I think it was Hannity was in it last week. He was saying, well, you wouldn't actually take these documents if you knew they were classified. And he was trying to help him, right? He's giving him the lines and don't know, damn right, I would do it. Or they, you know, you're not really an authoritarian. Donald Trump says, you know, damn right I am. And they're trying to help him. And Donald Trump keeps saying, no, I told you who I was before, and I mean it. I's going to express it. If there's one thing that you can be grateful for for Trump is that his disregard for law and ethics and the customary checks and balances of democratic government is right out there on the surface. He doesn't hide it.

It is right there. So we also got the weeping, sir, story that people come up to him, you know, sir, with tears in their eyes. And he's describing what it was like being arraigned last week in New York, where he was, of course no problems putting in murderers and they see everybody. It's tough, tough place. And they were crying. They were actually crying. They said, I'm sorry. They'd say 2024, sir, 2024. And tears are pouring down their eyes. I've never seen anything like those people are phenomenal. Those are your police. Those are the people that work at the courthouse. They're unbelievable people. Many of them were in tears or close to it. Many apologists were sorry, sir. We're sorry.

They had me do certain things. They said, sir, I can't believe I have to ask you. I can't even believe that I have to ask you to do it. You could see. So in one sense, it was beautiful because they get it. In another sense, you know, it's nasty. I went to the Wharton School of Finance. They didn't teach me about that.

That wasn't like in the car. They didn't know about the arraignment part? It was the most beautiful arraignment ever. It was the best arraignment ever. John, how many times are you hearing these weeping sir stories? I don't know. Well, we may hear him a few more times because he's got a bit more legal exposure, maybe in Georgia and with the special counsel Jack Smith as well. And Letitia James is still working on investigations of Trump. So yeah, he will have the opportunity to collect other

apologies from weeping police officers if what appears likely to happen happens. Since we're on the subject of the indictment in Alvin Bragg, this is the report in The New York Times from yesterday afternoon. The Manhattan District Attorney on Tuesday sued Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in an extraordinary step intended to keep congressional Republicans from interfering in the office's criminal investigation against former President Donald Trump. The 50-page suit filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York accuses Mr. Jordan of a brazen and unconstitutional attack on the prosecution of Mr. Trump and a transparent campaign to intimidate and attack the district attorney Alvin L. Bragg. Bragg last week unveiled 34 felony charges. So this has been assigned to a federal judge who's a Trump appointee who has rejected the initial attempt to obtain a temporary restraining order. But your thoughts about Alvin Bragg taking that aggressive stance

against Jim Jordan, who was planning to hold one of these show hearings in New York City as part of his investigation of the weaponization of the government. You know, the House Republican caucus is in the grips of extremists who cannot accept accountability for Donald Trump. They couldn't accept it when Trump tried to bully Vladimir Zelensky for dirt on Joe Biden, and he was impeached. Republicans couldn't get behind that. A few in the Senate, seven, I believe, six added to Mitt Romney, who voted to convict on the first time in the impeachment after January 6th. But in the House, there is no visible support for holding Donald Trump accountable. And so the compulsion of their base is going to be do something to protect him. And that's what Jim Jordan is trying to do. And Alvin Bragg, who doesn't answer to Jim Jordan, is being quite aggressive and trying to fend off those attempts. And I think he's likely to succeed. What I think is striking here is that Alvin Bragg has learned the lesson of previous attempts to go after Donald Trump. He watched and learned from the asymmetry of the Mueller investigation. Robert Mueller was an old school guy who was playing by Marquis of Queensberry rules while Donald Trump was wielding

a cudgel. And so unlike Mueller, he's pushing back. He's calling out Jim Jordan, you know, clearly for a move that was pure political retaliation. And he's calling it by what it is. He's, you know, labeling it. This is an attempt to intimidate, an attempt to obstruct justice. It is an abuse of congressional power. And it is interesting that he's pushing back. You know, perhaps prosecutors have learned how you have to confront Donald Trump.

They have learned the lessons of January 6th. And by the way, the Jim Jordan investigations have been falling flat on their face and he's flailing. He's looking for some sort of a way to show that he's actually accomplishing something. Okay, so the other big court action yesterday, and you are a veteran of the media. I've been involved in libel suits before. I don't know whether you have. They're very, very difficult to prove, particularly when you're dealing with public figures. But Fox News is facing really the libel case of the century. And I know that that's hype, but you're talking about a $1.6 billion lawsuit that they have not yet settled. And they were in court once again,

and a judge ruled that Fox News could not argue that it broadcasts false information about Dominion voting systems on the basis the allegations were quote-unquote newsworthy which destroys a key line of defense that the network was hoping to make in in court so John are you surprised that Rupert Murdoch and Fox News have not yet settled this lawsuit, that they are, at least as of right now, prepared to go to trial next week? Yes, I am surprised because what has come out so far is so damning to Fox, and they're trying to use the cloak of an actual news gathering organization to protect themselves from really irresponsible behavior that casts dominion in a completely fabricated negative light. So I still expect that ultimately they will settle this case because it's not going well for them at all. But it is so damning,

the material has come out. Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Donald Trump as we had been saying on private texts associated with the post-election period, that he hated Donald Trump, that he couldn't wait for Donald Trump to go away. And now he has had to bend the knee and come back to Donald Trump because of the force of Trump's stance within the party. Ultimately, that is going to be very costly for Fox. And the only question is whether they want that to be at the hands of the jury or negotiated amongst the legal teams. Does any of this hurt Fox with its audience, though? I suspect that it does, in that Fox has a very large audience. And I think the dominant part of them, like within the Republican primary electorate, are people who are completely

committed members of that MAGA base. But there are some who are not. There's some on the margin. And I think that the more you impugn the credibility of Fox, which is what's happened as a result of this lawsuit, I think there will be some, not most, not even a very large number, but also going to be alienated, even though the dominant portion of the base may be invigorated and may consider him a martyr and want to defend him. There's a corrosive process that occurs that has actually been occurring ever since Donald Trump first got elected. Remember, the Republican Party got hammered in the House in 2018. They lost the presidency in the Senate in 2020. They lost the Senate again in 2022. So while it is true that Donald Trump has not gone away and he remains the favorite to win the Republican nomination, he is a diminished political figure. And I think Fox is a diminished

network as a result of this case. I just wonder whether or not they pay a price when the audience begins to hear the contradiction between what they say in private and what they say in public, the clear contempt and disdain they have for the audience, whether that breaks through, I don't know. So yes, Republicans have lost a number of elections, but they've also won some. And because of redistricting and gerrymandering and other structural issues, they still are competitive and absolutely dominant in the legislatures in places like Tennessee, Wisconsin, Missouri. So let's talk about that. The Tennessee story is incredible. I mean, I described it as, you know,

the stupidity it burns the super majority of Republicans in the House, expelled two African-Americans for engaging in a protest over gun violence. And that was so effective because now these two representatives are both media superstars, political superstars, and they're coming back anyway. They've already, Justin Jones has already been returned to his seat. And to me, this is just another example of how the Republicans cannot resist their id, that even though they may have some understanding that this looks terrible nationally, that it actually undermines their position, that there is this culture now that if you have the supermajority, you have to use it. If you have the gun in your hand, you have to fire it. And whether you're talking about guns or whether you're talking about abortion issues, they keep pushing the envelope.

There appears to be an inability to restrain themselves in the face of public disapproval. So talk to me a little bit about your take on what happened in Tennessee and what it tells us about the state of our politics right now. This is the kind of doom loop that you get when you have a party that's in the grips of a faction that is not a majority of the country, but they're a controlling force within your party, and they're demanding that you do things that make it more difficult for your party to win elections. What happened in Tennessee was a sort of a cousin of what's happened with abortion. You know, the right succeeds in making over the Supreme Court, pushing it way to the right. And so they indulge the longstanding desire of the most conservative

facts within the party to throw out Roe v. Wade. And it's an exploding cigar that's blowing up in their face. And it blew up in their face in 2022. And though they do have control in a number of states, as we saw in Wisconsin the other day, you start eroding enough support among formerly Republican suburbanites, you're in big, big trouble. And the same is true on guns. That doesn't mean that there's going to be some breakthrough anytime soon in terms of national legislation, but it's a corrosive process over time. And there's no accident that Governor Lee, feeling the heat as a result of this colossal misjudgment on the part of Tennessee Republicans to expel these members, he's now embracing some executive actions and asking the legislature to enact a version of red flag law. That is the picture of backfire. And then meanwhile, in Missouri, I would like to say this story is a parody. I had to actually read it several times because there are these parody websites out there

and you have to be careful not to swallow the bait, but this is a true story. Missouri House Republicans voted to defund all of the state's public libraries in a proposed $45 billion state budget that will soon move to the Republican controlled state Senate. The Missouri House debated for more than eight hours last Tuesday on a budget that is roughly $2 billion less than the one the governor is proposing. They cut not only the $4.5 million the governor had slated for libraries, but also any appropriations for diversity initiatives, children and pre-kindergarten programs. It appears that what they're doing is they're cutting the library due to a recent lawsuit filed against the state by the ACLU of Missouri

on behalf of the Missouri Association of Missouri on behalf of the Missouri Association of School Libraries and the Missouri Library Association is suing, seeking to declare one of the more recent Senate bills unconstitutional. This was a bill that resulted in more than 300 books getting banned from libraries, many of which included LGBTQ characters or racial justice themes. So here you have Republicans in Missouri. You want to talk about a cartoon version of these politics, defunding all of the state's libraries. What is happening here? Well, this is a doom loop in another aspect. They take a step in culture war, which has become the method by which people who fear

change in the country are trying to stop it in various ways. And so they take an action at the behest of the most fervent members of their base. The action gets thwarted at some level in a court, for example. And then the response in these states with a stacked legislature is, well, we're going to have to win. How do we win? Well, let's just defund the libraries altogether. It's a different version of what happened in Florida with Ron DeSantis and Disney. Disney speaks out for the values of their employees and customers, and Ron DeSantis strikes out at them, tries to constrict their authority. They outfox him in terms of responding to the restrictions he was placed on the governance of the part of the state where Disney controls real estate.

And now DeSantis feels the need to escalate in other ways. And we'll see what he comes up with. But once you engage in a battle like this at the behest of extremists within your party, it's very difficult for them to back off. And that is just, again, creates a self-fulfilling defeat cycle. And the only question is whether it happens fast or slow. I think that's an important point. And I've described it as, at a certain point,

the fight becomes about the fight, that you forget what the underlying issue was. It's just like us versus them. We need to beat you. You are the enemy. And therefore, any tactics that anyone proposes, you're going to accept because I'm guessing that there's not a huge groundswell of support in Missouri for shutting down all public libraries. And I'm guessing there's not a huge groundswell of support in the state of Florida for demonizing Disney. There are not millions of parents who are sitting around thinking, thank God Ron DeSantis is going after Disney because I just don't want to have to watch Moana one more time, or I don't want to listen to Frozen one more time. These things have taken on a momentum of their own. And it is that culture that says that if you are prudent or if you look I were sitting here trying to come up with a scenario

saying, okay, how extreme are Republicans? Well, they want to ban books. No, banning books is not enough for them. They want to shut down all libraries. The executive producer of the show that we're writing for would say, no, guys, that's going too far. They wouldn't do that. And yet here here we are in Tennessee. It is, again, this sort of cartoonish extremism, and they cannot seem to help themselves. And I wonder how often this is going to play out, because I don't see any end of it between now and 2024, especially if you're a party that has decided that, yeah, we're going to go all in on Donald Trump again. Oh, I don't think there's any way out of it before 2024 at all. I think the question is, what's the time horizon for getting out of it? And, you know, political parties change when they get beat. And usually they have to get beat kind of badly before they change. Look at what happened to the Democratic Party when you and I were growing up. I think I'm a little older than you are, but when I was growing up covering politics,

Republicans seemed to have a lock on the presidency. They had a natural majority in the country. That was built substantially on the fact that they dominated the white vote, and the white vote was an overwhelming preponderance of the electorate. Well, that has been shrinking. The electorates become more diverse and become more tolerant on various social dimensions. So Democrats have now, after George McGovern got destroyed by Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in sequence got just pulverized by Ronald Reagan. George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis decisively. And Democrats then figured out how to win. They moderated the party. The country changed. And now you've got a natural

Democratic majority for president. You still haven't, though, gotten the overwhelming kind of defeats, certainly not consecutively, that would cause the Republican Party to have no choice but to change. And I think that's what the country is going to have to wait for to have a healthy Republican Party is when they're defeated substantially enough so that there's no avoiding the case for changing, broadening, trying to appeal to more people rather than exciting the people who are already for you. So just for the record, John, you are two years younger than me. Oh, is that right? You are a mere babe in the woods.

That is the nicest thing I've heard all day, Charlie. I wanted just to lay that down here. We were both born in November, but you were born two years after me. So John Harwood, it is a real pleasure reconnecting with you. Thank you so much for coming on the Bulwark Podcast. Hey, it was delightful. And thank you all for listening to today's podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.

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