The Bulwark Podcast - Mark Joseph Stern and Dave Weigel: A Bad Day for Jack Smith

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

To Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch, the real threat to democracy is not Trump's attempts to steal the election—but the DOJ's effort to hold him accountable. Plus, the story behind the protesters' masks, activists v Biden, and reading the tea leaves from the Pennsylvania primary. Mark Joseph Stern and Dave Weigel join Tim Miller. show notes: Weigel's mask story Marc Caputo on the Jan 6 case

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. I'm here today with Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer at Slate covering courts and the law, a prominent figure on X. He was at the Supreme Court today for the immunity arguments and he's coming at us live from outside the Supreme Court. So if you hear the birds chirping, that's just spring in Washington. Hey, brother. Thanks for doing it. Hey, of course.

A pleasure to come on. If we're coming out a little late today, guys, we wanted to wait until this testimony was over. So critical to both Donald Trump's legal prospects as well as the future of our democracy. So we've got a longer interview with Dave Weigel coming on the second half of this. But, Mark, I feel like we're going to start people off with some bad news. I saw your kind of live tweeting this and basically you summed this up, bad day for Jack Smith. Explain why. Yeah, it was not a great day for the special counsel because it sounded like at least five justices are pretty skeptical of this prosecution, at least particular details of

the prosecution that really go to the heart of the case, which is Donald Trump's effort to abuse his powers of office in order to overturn the 2020 election and secure an unearned victory. You had all five male conservatives, it was an interesting gender split, really pummeling the government's lawyer, Michael Dreeben, with these hostile and aggressive hypotheticals, essentially suggesting that the real threat to democracy is not January 6th or the events that preceded it, but the efforts by the government now to hold Trump accountable for that. I think that Brett Kavanaugh, Sam Alito, and Clarence Thomas think this entire prosecution is basically unconstitutional. I'm not sure about Gorsuch and Roberts, but they too sounded profoundly worried about the very idea that a president could be charged for conduct that he committed while in office. And frankly, even though I'm a skeptic of this court, even I did not think it would be that bad. This was not a shining moment for SCOTUS when it comes to understanding the gravity of January 6th and the importance of

holding Donald Trump accountable for it. I mean, so you follow these cases every session, way closer than I do. Is it not possible that, you know, some of this was performative, you know, wanting to give the Biden administration the business a little bit, asking tough questions, and that, you know, when it comes to decision time, like, does that happen sometimes where the questions don't match the decisions or not really? Yeah, absolutely. And I think there might be some hope, especially for Chief Justice John Roberts, who often wears two different hats, right? He can be the institutionalist who approaches with caution, but he can also be the aggressive conservative who cut his teeth in Ronald Reagan's Department of Justice, who has some scores to settle. And here, I felt like he was switching them on and off,

you know, at points he seemed to understand that, of course, someone could be held accountable for crimes, even if they're the president. You know, no man is above the law, not good stuff. But then he would he would sort of suggest to to Drieben, the government's lawyer, that this was a grave peril to the president's ability to carry out his duties because he would always be worried about the next guy prosecuting him and throwing him in prison. So I think the most interesting justice really was Amy Coney Barrett. You know, she made some interesting points about a compromised position here that would essentially send this case back down to the lower court and try to draw out some of the official acts. So, for instance, threatening to remove someone at the Department of Justice, because he wouldn't investigate voter fraud, that kind of thing, drawing that out and

saying, look, this can't be criminalized. But everything else, you know, talking with GOP strategists, creating these fake slates of electors, all of this private conduct, that can be criminalized, and that can be tried. I mean, I think that's better than the alternative that Brett Kavanaugh was proposing, which is essentially chucking the entire case. But of course, it would mean more months of delays and probably another appeal to the Supreme Court. So I fear that even the best case scenario, which is a kind of compromise by Barrett and Roberts, would ensure that this case is not going to trial this year and maybe not even next year. Wow. The fact that it wasn't going to come to trial this year is something that I kind of expected. But the idea that it would be pushed back down to court for future review, that that

was the best case option. I guess I was maybe a bit naive coming into this, just because to me, the argument is so preposterous, that Trump is making the idea of blanket presidential immunity. And that was, I think, highlighted very succinctly by Elena Kagan in this questioning of Trump's attorneys. Let's listen. Say this president who ordered the military to stage a coup. He's no longer president. He wasn't impeached. He couldn't be impeached. But he ordered the military to stage a coup. And you're saying that's an official act. I think it would depend on... That's immune. I think it would depend on the circumstances whether it was an official act.

If it were an official act, again, he would have to be impeached. What does that mean, depend on the circumstances? He was the president. He is the commander-in-chief. He talks to his generals all the time, and he told the generals, I don't feel like leaving office. I want to stage a coup.

Is that immune? If it's an official act, there needs to be impeachment and conviction beforehand because the framers viewed that kind of very low risk. If it's an official act, is it an official act? If it's an official act, it's impeachment. Is it an official act? On the way you've described that hypothetical, it could well be. I just don't know.

Again, it's a fact-specific context. That answer sounds to me as though it's like, yeah, under my attest, it's an official act, but that sure sounds bad, doesn't it? Well, it certainly sounds very bad. And that's why the framers have a whole series of structural checks that have successfully, for the last 234 years, prevented that very kind of extreme hypothetical. All right, Mark, I mean, you can maybe do a coup. There's certain cases where you can do a coup. This is where we're at. So, yeah, I think Justice Kagan was pointing out that this alleged distinction between private and personal acts leads to absurd results,

because at the end of the day, what this case is fundamentally about is Donald Trump trying to marshal the power of the executive branch to overturn a free and fair election. And so, you know, the idea that there can be some distinction here, I think it has some facile appeal because it, you know, promotes the idea of shielding a president from prosecution for, I don't know, ordering a drone strike somewhere, an invasion of another country. You know, some of the conservatives were saying, well, we wouldn't want Ronald Reagan to be prosecuted for Iran-Contra, maybe, or even sending troops into Central America without authorization. Okay, whatever, set that aside. Someone mentioned the Obama drone strike,

if that was Kavanaugh. Yes, he did. He did. And Trump's lawyer kept talking about here and also in his briefs claiming that Biden was illegally inviting undocumented immigrants into the country and allowing them to distribute fentanyl and that kind of nonsense. So so, you know, there's like this idea that, OK, we want the president to be able to act freely. But this was not a president acting within the bounds of a normal kind of office holder. On January 6th, in the weeks and months that preceded it, Donald Trump was fully acting like he wanted to stage the kind of coup that Elena Kagan talked about. I mean, it's unclear what would have happened if

the military had been more amenable to his demands. And so I think that she really shattered this idea that you could just neatly kind of draw a line here. And that's going to lead to a lot of tension and confusion behind the scenes that might boil over into the eventual opinion. Because the hope is for, you know, a majority opinion that sets a clear rule. I don't know if the court can get there and a fractured opinion with a bunch of different kind of ideas floating around. That's just going to culminate in more delays in the lower courts. Jeez, Alito made what seemed to be one of the more assert arguments from the bench, not unusual. He said that you would encourage peaceful transfers of power by giving immunity

in the future because incumbents will then know they can leave and not be worried about being prosecuted. What say you to that? Classic Sam Alito. I mean, he sounded enraged that this prosecution is even occurring. I think I have to push back on his reasoning there. I do not believe that allowing Donald Trump to be prosecuted for what I think everyone pretty much acknowledges, unless they're totally brain poisoned by Fox News, was like at least illegal conduct on the civil side, if not criminal conduct. I mean, this was bad stuff that he did. I don't know if Alito is even there, though. He seems to think that this is some kind of retribution by the Biden administration.

And he went to extremes to make that point. I'll just note, you know, of course, Clarence Thomas is married to a woman who was at the Ellipse on January 6th, who herself pressured state legislatures to overturn the results of their election at a point of fake slate of electors. And it was striking to me to sort of watch his poker face as it was pointed out during arguments that that is what Donald Trump himself tried to do. You know, one of the things in the indictment that's at issue here was pressuring state legislatures in places like Arizona to overturn the results and the question of whether that was unlawful. Well, Ginny Thomas herself was sending emails to individual legislators saying, I know you'll find it in

your heart to overturn the results of this election. And it was just so outrageous to see him sitting on this case. He may well pass the decisive vote, even though in my view, he's hopelessly conflicted. Yeah, let's make Donald Trump a soft autocrat who can't be held accountable and is above the law. And that's the way to save democracy. That's the Alito case. That's interesting.

One other thing that several people have mentioned, and I know you agree with me, I agree with this, but I'm just going to read Chris Hayes' take on this, which is something that drives me a little insane, I'll admit, is that Trump's own lawyers at his impeachment told senators not to vote to convict him because he could be prosecuted if it came to that. Now they're arguing the only way he could be prosecuted is if they had convicted him. Mitch McConnell also at the time said, we have a criminal justice system in this country, we have civil litigation, and former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one. It's almost like these guys have all memory holds all that and the justices have and Donald Trump

just gets to have both sides of this argument. The minimization of the events of January 6, that I witnessed in court today were truly disturbing. It really almost felt to me like, and I'm just, you know, hypothesizing here, but it feels to me like these justices know Clarence Thomas. They've all socialized with Ginny Thomas. I am concerned that in their minds, they have decided maybe these were just tourists who happened to wander into the Capitol on the wrong day. Maybe these were just misguided patriots. And that attitude really came through last week and arguments about, you know, the obstruction charges against January 6 rioters, as well as Donald Trump, a case called Fisher versus United States, where over and over

again, the conservative justices questioned, you know, did these folks really obstruct a proceeding? Did they really engage in any corrupt behavior? Can they really be subject to prison time just for that? It feels like on the right side of the bench, like they are increasingly living in this Fox News universe. And so the question remains, can Chief Justice Roberts come to his senses? Or is he now fully under the malign influence of his colleagues to the right, who are drawing him closer and closer to this kind of MAGA jurisprudence that starts from the proposition that Trump must be allowed to do whatever he wants and works its way backward from there. Yeah, Mark Caputo wrote a great story about that other case called the one weird trick Trump could use to get away as January 6. We're going to put that in the show notes for you. Mark, Joseph Stern over at Slate,

follow his coverage. It's something I follow really closely in Supreme Court season. It's always spring when I'm following MJS. But thank you so much for coming on and for doing it right outside the courthouse here on a very busy day. I appreciate you very much. Of course. Thanks so much for having me on. All right. Back on the other side, we've got Dave Weigel. We're going to be talking about what is happening in both the MAGA right and the progressive left, a little bit about Biden's signing ceremony yesterday. So stick around for that. And we're back with my friend Dave Weigel, politics reporter for Semaphore, author of the Americana newsletter, because Dave actually gets out into America and reports on what's happening in our political scene from there,

which is why I like talking to him. Hey, Dave, what's up? I'm doing great. Although I'm in DC now, which doesn't count as America, according to one of our parties. It does not. Hopefully you're not filing the Americana newsletter from D.C. I'm going to cross state lines, just to be careful. Going to real Maryland, you know, Bethesda. I want to start with something that has nothing to do with our subject matter today, but that I thought you'd find amusing. On yesterday's podcast, I had Dana Mattioli, who wrote an interesting book about Amazon. We discussed that. I received the following note from Amazon PR. Could you reflect this statement somewhere? Quote,

Amazon's success is the result of continually innovating for consumers and small businesses over three decades to make their lives better and easier every day. The fact show that Amazon has made shopping easier and more convenient for customers, spurred lower prices, enabled millions of successful small businesses and significantly increased competition in retail. There you go, people. That's the other side of the story.

Dave Weigel, I got this email and a chill came up my spine about the fact that this was the alternative life me that I was sending that email. I'm just so happy I've come over to your side of things. Did I ever send you anything this embarrassing no i get those from i want to dump oppo on people but i do get don't dump on anybody you've got i do get those sometimes but i'll it'll be something where i quote from a show i can't believe the pr department wants to be doing this will email me and say hey we saw you quoted from the show could you refer to the longer title that

would have ruined the sentence? And maybe people stop reading it. And I usually say, oh, well, thank you. But I linked it and we're done. That does look like a dark existence. Sorry to anyone in PR who listens. I love you, PR people. I love you. It just wasn't right for my soul. I'm sure you'll have a nicer retirement home than me with Amazon shares. And I do concur that Amazon has made my life more convenient at times. Okay, David, I want to, again, get out into America for most of this conversation. But we have to start with Joe Biden yesterday. Just he was speaking to me, it was like singing Tim Miller's song in this final statement as he was signing the deal that that provided the aid

to Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, Gaza, and the TikTok ban. Let's just take a quick listen. At the end of the day, most of us, whether we're Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, believe that America must stand up for what is right. We don't walk away from our allies. We stand with them. We don't let tyrants win. We oppose them.

We don't merely watch global events unfold. We shape them. That's what it means to be the indispensable nation. That's what it means to be the world's superpower and the world's leading democracy. Some of our MAGA Republican friends reject that vision. But this vote makes it clear there is a bipartisan consensus for that kind of American leadership. That's exactly what we'll continue to deliver. Dave, is he right? Is that resonating, do we think? I mean, that's really working for me. Is that going to work for Nikki Haley voters? I know that Republicans don't love when he says MAGA Republicans, but I think he was identifying the faction of the party that feels this way. They're pretty clear about it. There's not a MAGA faction that says, I want America to be weak. The faction says, hey, every time we get into a foreign entanglement, it's not worth it. So let's get out of them and let the chips fall. The new nationalism that

the intellectual side of MAGA has been working on. Yeah, that's basically it. You get frustrated sometimes. I should say I get frustrated sometimes with the conversation, the campaign, because that's a pretty stark difference. This is a bigger difference even than the one that I think Hillary and Trump articulate in 2016, because that framework wasn't built yet for Trump yet, and it is now. This is very different from the previous 70 years of Democratic-Republican consensus on foreign policy. So when he brings that up, I get the sense that some people zone out, but that's one of the stakes of the election. You could have a nationalist president who says, yeah, let's just shrink inside our borders and let everybody handle their own foreign policy and

hopefully we'll end up with something pretty good. That's the new Trump approach. Maybe they don't want it to be weak, but they certainly don't want America also to be indispensable. I like that word, right, that Joe Biden used. And they're kind of like, well, maybe they like America the best, but being indispensable requires being, you know, relied upon and they don't really want to be relied upon. Yeah. So you get this paradox of we're spending this money Ukraine, but not here without the follow-up of what we should spend the money on, on here. That's the populism that's missing. Well, maybe that. That's something I think gets lost in some of the Biden coverage is the Biden take

is quite popular. Most people do like the idea of being part of the country that when something awful is happening, the world is ready to mobilize and build a coalition and spend money. So this is one of the more popular things he talks about. Do you feel like that's breaking through? I mean, Biden's theory of the case, right, is that upscale, you know, ranging from Bulwark to Dispatch to Nikki Haley types will like this, you know, sort of foreign policy, this vision of America. Some category of Obama Trump voters will like the investment side of things. So, you know, the chips, the building, etc. Questions are either of those groups, you know, is it landing with people?

Do you think? No, I was dealing with this yesterday. I was talking to a Republican Senate candidate in Massachusetts, so long shot. But he was making this critique about Democrats not focusing on the right kind of infrastructure. And that's the dodge I've heard more often is, yes, Democrats have implemented and funded a lot of what people talked about funding for 20 years, but they did it wrong. It's too green. The idea is that the Biden version of things is doomed and not going to work or it's a boondoggle in some way. And

therefore, the TBD Trump version will be better. I hear that I hear that pretty frequently. That's a way to say it without giving credit to Democrats who did it. To me, that feels like the upscale version. It feels like the fancy Winnie the Pooh in the tuxedo argument where like really i think what's happening right is like they're like okay like the biden agenda you know except for to these super voters that are showing up in these special elections but like to the next layer down like what biden's trying to do is not really landing and all they're seeing is like whatever he did yesterday or was it two days ago where you know he read the teleprompter where it said pause like they're seeing that video clip on tiktok but they aren't

actually listening to the clip that i played at the top and i think that's got to be a bigger worry for biden than like the actual substance isn't breaking through and they're not investing in the right types of things i i don't think that that feels right i don't know they are still getting outplayed on optics and it's annoying people in the media talk about optics, like we have no ability to control them whatsoever. I think that you can cover everything that's said beyond just the part that goes viral. I guess that's the modern temptation is, I covered a speech, but this part went viral. Does that mean that's the thing that mattered? You can avoid that, that impulse. But Trump just today had a drop-in at a construction

site where he talked to union workers who love Trump. And it was a prefab event. It was set up for TV cameras, mostly Fox News cameras. He took questions. And will that circulate? If you're looking at your phone and you're looking at pro-Trump news, will that circulate? As while Biden was giving a prepared speech and screwed it up to union workers who won't vote for him? Trump was with the real union workers. Yeah, sure. If you don't want to go and check out, was this real? Did he meet with people that were spontaneous? This happened with his Chick-fil-A visit in Atlanta. And I would say I fell for it, but I didn't pay a lot of attention to that initial visit. But the woman who was most excited to see Trump at that was set up, was supposed to be there for Trump. And this is the thing that Trump gets away with that I think many candidates, many campaigns I've covered, if it turns out that somebody who is at your campaign event and is high fiving and loves you was planted, that's the story.

The story is that you're dealing with plants because you can't handle real pressure. I think the last time Trump dealt with that was his attempt to end run around Biden by having a rally in Michigan with union workers. And there was so much hype that most reporting focused on how those workers actually were not even mostly union. They just were people who love Trump and got select for the crowd. Yeah, that one did backfire. That's a good point. So the Pennsylvania primary was Tuesday. I didn't get around to talking about this yesterday.

Yeah. Nikki gets, you know, 16 percent, despite the fact that she's been out of the campaign for multiple months. There's some people are very excited about this in Biden world. I'm like maybe mildly encouraged by it. It's a closed primary. So this was not Indy's crossing over. This was not the Democrats crossing over.

How do you kind of navigate how encouraged Biden and how discouraged Trump should be by Nikki Haley getting 16% in a closed primary in Pennsylvania? Yeah, you know, it was it was 8%. And the voters who who went for Haley, they were mostly concentrated in Allegheny County. That's Pittsburgh. And then the collar counties of Philadelphia. It's funny. There are parts of northeast Philly that are very pro-Trump where he destroyed her.

And then you drive 10 minutes to a suburb with Whole Foods and she got like 30 percent of the vote. But those people have been Republicans and they voted. They've had to choke down nominees they don't like very much for a while now. They had Trump. They had Doug Mastriano. They've just been voting for Democrats without leaving the party. Because if you're in Bucks County, for example, where Haley did, you got about 19% of the vote. They all voted for Brian Fitzpatrick for Congress in the same primary. And that's one reason her vote was pretty big is because the most competitive primary with a MAGA guy getting

like 38% of the vote was in the Philadelphia suburbs. So yeah, those are not new gettable voters for Biden. I think it was significant, though, there wasn't much of an anti Biden vote, I saw the the uncommitted boycott Biden vote, it got not that much, it got about 6% of the vote, it did very well around college campuses, like you'd expect. But you're already seeing in this primary a fade of that. I think I saw it got like 30% at Penn. And it's like the opposite dichotomy of what you're talking about with the Trump votes in the suburbs. If you're in Philly, it was like got 30% in the Penn precinct. And then, you know, five minutes away in the black, you know, urban district of Philly, it got 3%. Yeah, you know, just a total flip. Yeah, that's what happened. But that's leading to what's going on in the larger universe of democratic politics is that as the protest

movement just vote in the primary and vote against Biden, that's, I think, plateaued or sputtered a little bit and direct action has picked up, which is what Democrats are more worried about. The protest vote they can handle more than what we're seeing every day just to uh credential you because i know this but you know maybe some of our listeners don't you've been covering the well can we call it the weirdos on both sides i don't know you've been calling the activists let's call them the earnest activists on both sides for a long time that you were going to net roots like back in the mid aughts and doing this sort of stuff right i mean you've been kind of deep in this world for a while. Yeah, I have. It's changed a lot. One of the things that I if I need to try to impress somebody, I'll say I covered AOC very early on. I was interviewing her in 2017 when,

to be fair, there's a documentary crew following her. So it wasn't just me. But my coverage has always gone through grassroots politics. And in the last 20 years, before that, in the last 20 years of stuff I've covered, that has meant people who have trouble getting taken seriously by, let's say, CNN or The New York Times, but end up being very relevant. Sometimes they're irrelevant. Sometimes they peter out. But every once in a while, somebody wins a primary and they're, look at the coverage of Marjorie Taylor Greene before and after she won her primary. It was, well, obviously, there's somebody running who can't possibly win. We don't need to pay attention to this. I'm always in the let's pay attention to everything business because who

knows how it could metastasize. How has it changed? You piqued my interest with that question. How, you know, I do feel most out of my element and like progressive activist world. What are the ways that things feel different now than they did in 2007 or in the Obama years even? for Howard Dean or for Wesley Clark in 2004, they are very happy. They were largely suburban Democrats or big city white liberals. There was racial diversity, but this is mostly white liberal movement. And they wanted policy changes and they didn't get, they got some from Barack Obama. They got a lot from Joe Biden. The voter who ended up voting for Elizabeth Warren basically has been pretty happy with Joe Biden. But that changed over time. And I noticed this with Netroots. Netroots is the, there is no liberal CPAC, but this is the closest thing to it. It's all these progressive groups that meet up.

It started as something for people who had weblogs, i.e. on the net. Now it's other groups. By 2014 and 15, it became more of a clearinghouse for all sorts of progressive groups. And identity politics became a bigger part of this. So Netroots became famous, and this is now nine years ago, for getting candidates to show up who'd get interrupted by protesters. And Bernie Sanders was interrupted. Martin O'Malley was interrupted. And he said, all lives matter.

And he was basically heckled off the stage. That part of the movement has been largely less satisfied by Joe Biden and more happy working outside the party and protesting. That has changed. The Biden White House has brought a lot of people into this tent. That's one of the stories. That's one of the things I think Republicans are correct when they attack him for. They wish it was the 1996 Joe Biden who was governing, and it's not. It's a more progressive Joe Biden. But those activists, you start to see people who have drifted away from electoral work saying, there is no point to this. When we tried to elect Bernie Sanders as our moonshot, it didn't work. So we're going to stay outside the party. And this includes everyone from people who are in a safe state and just won't vote for him, or accelerationists who believe,

I don't know how many times you need to learn to like learn that this doesn't work, believe that if you get another Trump term, then the capital R revolution is going to come. And people will be so angry that they'll obviously overthrow Trump and start a new progressive era. Yeah, I think that fissure is interesting. Yes, it's true that Biden has brought in a lot of progressive ideological folks into the administration. Also, his inner circle is like 65-year-old white men from the DLC and his, you know, chief of staff is like a former corporate executive, right? So, like his staffing is kind of reflective of his coalition, this very broad ideological spectrum. And and so in doing that

biden is necessarily the agent that here but like how it has happened is that the people that were not kind of brought in or wanted to be more adversarial are now like really outside the tent aoc is like just doing a selfie with biden yesterday right and then there's now another kind of more radical group that it's like the relationship with biden is it feels different than it did with obama we're like the activist types like trying to push them left push and now it's like the activist types are pretty adversary yeah and more i don't know maybe more outside of the party mainstream on certain issues biden has done a pretty good job of keeping the climate movement happy but what changed and and and that

you bring up the the earth day event is a good good way to get into this that's with ed markey bernie sanders aoc these are all people who worked a lot with the sunrise movement which is this progressive startup and the end of the obama years to where sunrise the ones that diane feinstein r.i.p was like shouting at me i will not get lectured by you yeah okay yeah they sunrise the ones that diane feinstein rip was like shouting at me i will not get lectured by you yeah okay yeah they're the ones who most most famously protested inside nancy pelosi's house office and aoc joined them i was there for that when that happened but anyway they got a lot what they wanted is and but if you look at what sunrise is working on now it is mobilizing around ceasefire in Gaza, stopping Israel's war in Gaza.

Progressive groups, they either were working on Israel-Gaza issues before, or especially these younger progressive groups, have pivoted to make that the central mission. And a lot of that is staff-driven and volunteer-driven. If you have a young membership in one of these organizations, chances are they went to college, chances are they're progressive, and they're very, I'd say, this is a loaded term. I keep, I almost said anti-Zionist. I don't think that's the wrong term. These are people who say, can't we just do to Israel what South Africa did 30 years ago and replace this government with one that's secular and nice? That attitude, I think, is the one that's most prevalent in the left.

And a lot of the organizations that were, you know, working with Biden sometimes, opposing him sometimes, they've been moving towards opposition because of Gaza. We will oppose you until you move on this. And meanwhile, AOC and the folks that are still trying to get the climate stuff done are, you know, engaging, right? I guess that's the contrast I was trying to make. Yeah, I think the most dramatic example that, dramatic if can be an ex post, but AOC's comments on Columbia have been have been measured. And also, when Mike Johnson was there yesterday, her post on X about him being booed was that he wants to take away the reproductive rights. So AOC is trying to bring the conversation from an issue that divides Democrats to an issue that unites Democrats.

And if you're an outsider who wants to blow up the party and bring about the revolution, that's bad. You want Democrats to be divided so that Trump can come in and then you can have a bigger protest. By 2038, me and AOC are going to meet in the middle. I don't know. There's just a lot happening with AOC. Okay, we kind of went down a path I didn't mean to there, but I think that's interesting context is now we get to the actual politics of all this. So there was Summer Lee is one of the lesser known squad members for listeners who don't know her. She won a primary. There was some scuttlebutt that she might lose. I think that smart observers like Dave didn't really think that that was going to happen. So talk a little bit about that primary. Summer Lee's been not like

AOC, actually more forceful on the Gaza issue in particular. There are a couple other primaries still to come on the squad that maybe are more competitive, Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman. So anyway, talk about the Summer Lee race, and then we'll get on to the other ones. Yes. Summer Lee won in 2022. She represents a reform district that's most of Pittsburgh and then some more conservative suburbs. But it's a huge Biden landslide district. John Fetterman won it by 30 points. It's a safe seat. It's one they shouldn't lose. But in 2022, AIPAC and its allies were trying to prevent more Israel critics from winning. And they spent $4 million in the primary, their UDP, their PAC, to beat her with a Jewish Democrat who was more moderate. He almost won. He went from basically 3% in the polls to a few thousand

votes short of winning that primary. And then they came back in the general election and spent more money against her. And this year, this cycle, I would say in October 8th last year, if you talk to Mark Millman and AIPAC, they said, yes, we'd love to unseat every squad member because they are now in favor of a very unpopular Israel critical position. And that's going to be a loser and we're going to beat them. And they've, I'd say, tacked back their ambitions since then, because as we were talking about, among Democrats, just this is not popular. The war is not very popular. Funding the war is not popular. Funding Ukraine is.

Funding Israel isn't. And this is not just everyone who's joining a protest in a college campus or pitching a Coleman tent. These are average Democrats saying, I don't like the video I'm seeing from there. So Summer Lee was in a much better position there. She also just ran in a very AOC way as a Democrat who is getting stuff done with a Democratic president. And so in 2022, AIPAC et al said, this crazy leftist is going to undermine Joe Biden. And

this year they said, well, she's part of a movement that's undermining Joe Biden. She hasn't denounced the uncommitted movement, the protest movement. And she also, she could be divisive, but her ads were all her talking about the money she brought in that her in supporting Biden. She almost was with him. Biden was in Pittsburgh a week before the election, but he was she was in D.C. for votes. But he called her out from the stage. They use that. She ran as a normal Democrat.

Welcome to the machine, Summer Lee. Welcome to establishment wins. She ran as a normal progressive Democrat who disagreed with Biden on one big issue. If she was a challenger, could she pull that off? I'm not sure. As an incumbent, she ran as a normal progressive Democrat who disagreed with Biden on one big issue. If she was a challenger, could she pull that off? I'm not sure. As an incumbent, she definitely could. Okay. In my circles, the scuttle was never optimistic about that race from the, it's not really

my circles, but from people in the Democratic majority for Israel world, the center left folks that would rather have the squad lose in primaries. When I talked to them, they were never that optimistic about that race. They are more optimistic about Jamal Bowman in New York and Cori Bush in St. Louis. What say you about the state of those races? Yeah, they're pretty honest about this too. Not that political operatives aren't always honest, but sometimes they'll be on the record this, off the record something different. In this case, they'll say on the record. On the record, I feel very confident about we have all the momentum. The wind is at our back back off the record, Dave, if you hear anybody looking for a new staffer, I think I'm gonna be out of a job in six weeks. No, totally. In this case, that again, Melman,

they'll say, Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush are famous for things that unrelated to Israel that they have screwed up. And that has made them unpopular. And we have opponents in those districts who've raised a lot of money. So in Bush's case, it's her use of campaign finance money for security that may have benefited her family, which is under a house ethics investigation. And Bowman, it's the fire alarm. It's that he pulled a fire alarm and delayed this vote last year, which it's one of those things when you've worked on the campaign side, that's the dream. You want opponent to have the the voter who hears about him is immediately associating him with something negative and that's what happened with bowman oh bowman the fire alarm guy and he lied about it and also in the context of the january 6th i mean as bad in any context but as particularly i think

it made it worse since then more opposition racers have been done on him and he's reposted or said some things about israel about October 7th, about nine 11. He's just had some left wing. I'm not trying to minimize them just without getting too much into them. Some left wing foreign policy views that are not mainstream among democratic voters in Westchester County. And so he's been vulnerable.

Yeah. I can put it in my words, some conspiratorial shit. That's why you're the host, much more succinct, but he's, he said more stuff that made him vulnerable. Summer Lee was much more careful than that.

AOC is much more careful than that. I remember AOC had a crazy anti-Semite at her victory party who did one volunteer day for the campaign, then showed up to get on TV. And the campaign said, nope, that's not us. She's always been very clear about that. You maybe even see the video of her being chased a couple months ago by protesters demanding that she'd call what's happening a genocide, and she tells them off. They're more careful. They're just better politicians at that level than Bush and Bowman. So if you talk to these Israel groups, they see Bush and Bowman. They also see Ilhan Omar, they see as vulnerable in the same sort of potential ethics issues, but not Israel. They

don't say they are going to lose because in their district, their position on Israel is unpopular. They acknowledge that it is not unpopular. For them to be ceasefire candidates in Minneapolis and St. Louis and Westchester County, that is not, Bowman's is the least. There are a lot of Jewish voters who disagree with him about that. That's been an issue for him. But it's not a winner among Democratic voters. You need them to screw up in some other way, which is what's been

happening with especially those first two, a little bit with Ilhan Omar. Any other primaries you're looking at? On the Republican side, I am watching the next few weeks of primaries in West Virginia and Nebraska, where there are members who voted for Ukraine aid, and they had opponents already. And their opponents are running really hard on that. In West Virginia, it's Carol Miller, who represents kind of the southern tier of the state, who's running against Derek Evans, who's most famous for being elected to the state legislature, then being in the Capitol on January 6, then resigning from the state legislature legislature and now running as a former political prisoner. A friend of a friend is doing working on a AG race. And I guess him and the other guy, you know, they had an event together. And it was like multiple people who

were in the car going to January 6. So anyway, real MAGA. Yeah. And then the last few days, that's his message is not just that it is, I want to bring money to West Virginia, my opponents giving all your money to Ukraine and his memes of the incumbent waving a Ukraine flag. If you pay attention to conservative media, that image of members of Congress taking these flags from Seth Magaziner in Rhode Island and waving Ukrainian flags, that's something I think a lot of Americans probably moved on from and didn't hear about. That's very well known if you are like a rumble watcher. And so that and then in Omaha, polling says that Don Bacon is fine, but his opponent is doing the same sort of thing. And the chairman of the Nebraska Republican Party just endorsed Don Bacon's opponent. Same sort of reason. The Democratic primaries I'm watching through August, we just discussed with the Republican ones. I'm wondering

how quickly opposition could be ginned up. That also mentioned Texas Texas, West Texas, Tony Gonzalez's race against Brendan Herrera. That's been a real flashpoint for this. And Mike Johnson went to campaign for Gonzalez and Gates, campaign for the other guy. Yeah. And there were a number of issues there. There's immigration, there's guns. But Ukraine is the new one where it's how dare this guy show his face in this district after voting for money for Ukraine, which among Republicans, it's not toxically unpopular, but it's less popular as with most of the country. And with a primary voter, with

somebody who votes in a runoff in May, might be a very popular issue. Yes, I too am angry about this Ukraine thing. The one thing they've got going for him is that obviously Donald Trump doesn't care, doesn't talk about it. Once he had a good meeting with the president of Poland, he said, eh, Ukraine, whatever. And he's not saying nice things about it, but he's not trying to kill people over it. And that's that's a category difference. Yeah. I am wondering just your thoughts generally. You know, this kind of sparked a question for you since you're in these worlds.

Like to me, maybe the momentum on this is starting to shift a little bit throughout most of the year. The energy in these primaries, like on the Democratic side, like you said, are, oh, it's best to kind of say you're working productively with Joe Biden and that, you know, not tack to the middle, really, but tack to the competent at I'm getting things done. And on the Republican side, the momentum continues to be to tack to being craziest son of a bitch in the race. I mean, do you see that contrast still? Or is that overstated at all? No, that's, that's basically true. There's also, I think, a slight slant for Democrats in primary is the, if you're a woman, if you're not a white guy, that's still sort of a plus. But look at the primary ads. You can look at ads in a Democratic primary right now, and they are not, I'm the

Democrat who's going to bring us Medicare, even a safe seat even. Look at the districts around Baltimore that are open. They're just running on, yeah, I want to fight for health care and gun control and abortion rights, but I'm better at it than my opponent. And whereas every Republican ad that you watch, because I watch them all and I love this part of my job, every ad is a version of I will support Trump the most. And here is something my opponent said about Trump in 1993, when he had a bad Us Weekly cover. And because of that, he is a traitor and you can't vote for him. It's very Trump centric. And it's very, I'm the one who's going to blow up Washington.

That is not the attitude with them. As frustrated as Democrats are, they want members of Congress, even they want their challengers to go and do things. And that's why AOC does not have a left wing primary challenger. You can tweet at her. People are welcome to tweet her. But there's no one in the district who says I'm the radical who's going to not do things. The fact that she's in that position in Congress and bring money back, the least popular she ever was is when she, I wouldn't say blew up the Amazon deal, but when she was a driving force against bringing Amazon to Queens, that was unpopular among Democrats. They were not demanding that she, yes, stop that and bring the Politburo here. No, that's not how Democrats in primaries vote.

We might need to brainstorm and just think about how you watch all these Republican ads. We need to brainstorm on a YouTube segment with Dave and Tim where you pick an ad and then you get to show it to me and I react to what has happened to my former party. That's like of youtube now i love that i know um i might have one bonus dessert we'll see how long this goes but you have a great story this week which is what uh prompted us because it was a question i saw my book editor actually eric nelson sends out this tweet it's like will somebody tell me why these protesters are wearing masks outside and because you've been going to netroots nation for 20 years dave vogel's like, well, I can report this out. People want to know why are the protesters wearing masks outside. And so what happened? You called them and they told you why? Talk to us about why are the

Gaza protesters wearing outdoor masks? No, I called a lot of people and not everyone responded. This is part of the story is that there are a lot of people taking part in protests right now who don't want to talk to me, don't want to be identified. But I called the organizers of the march on the DNC, the people who met in Chicago a couple weeks ago, to plan how they're going to disrupt the DNC in the streets in Chicago with National Lawyers Guild. And I talked more for background with other protest groups, because I just kind of scanned and said, okay, I'm noticing that a lot of these protesters outside with their arms linked, closing a bridge or something, have masks on. Why is that? So all the ones I could talk to, they say, well, it's a combination of things. A part of this is that in our movement on the left, there is a lot

of solidarity with people who have comorbidities, who have compromised immune systems, and we do take COVID seriously. The DNC marchers were most clear on this. Yes, our movement still believes in the COVID emergency, even though Biden doesn't, and that's one of our problems with Biden. That was one reason. Not so seriously. They don't take it so seriously that they follow the recommendations and the guidelines.

We take it even more seriously than the folks that say you should mask indoors in tight space. Anyway, okay, we take it so seriously, we're going to wear it outside in the open air. Got it. All right, continue. Yeah, I'm giving that preamble, though, because I don't think they're all lying about this. If you go to Berkeley, are you more likely to see somebody wearing a mask outside than you are in Oklahoma City? You are. The main reason, and this is the National Lawyers Guild, which is sort of the official, unofficial legal clinic for all left-wing protests. They said, no, this is something we advise because people don't want their identities to be exposed. And I talked to left-wing groups that have dealt with activists being doxxed, right-wingers showing

up, taking their photos, putting their faces on Twitter, and then they get harassment. They said, no, this is a thing that we recommend people do. If you're going to do direct action, wear a face mask, and you're allowed to because since COVID, face masking in public, which a lot of states had banned or limited, is basically still illegal everywhere. We've started to see a rollback of this. And Philadelphia is an example. Philadelphia was having a problem with just kids robbing stores, wearing masks. So they put a mask. This was happening in Oakland before I moved. Like dudes are just going around wearing the balaclavas everywhere. Yeah, absolutely. The I don't blend the two too much. But the commonality is that you couldn't do that in 2019. Like there were people who were

protesting in Charlottesville in 2017, protesting Occupy Wall Street, and they'd get arrested because they're wearing masks. And the law said you couldn't do that. And in 2017, protesting Occupy Wall Street, and they'd get arrested because they're wearing masks. And the law said you couldn't do that. And in 2020, very quickly, the one I focus on the story is New York, where Letitia James, the Attorney General, points out, hey, the governor just put in this mask mandate. However, we have this law on the books from the 1870s that you can't wear a mask in public. So what do we do about that? And the legislature within days votes to get rid of the mask ban. And so the Lawyers Guild is very clear on this, that there is a new right to privacy that was given to people because of COVID, and people should use it. And I've linked to a legal clinic that I can watch where they say,

if you are taking place in direct action, this is great. You can wear an N95, you can wear a face mask, and it will be harder to identify you. So that is why you're seeing the face masks at protests. It's not that everyone in the quad at Columbia has no immune system. It is that people are very cognizant. I've been told I should conceal my identity. I shouldn't just blab out who I am to everybody. I've been told by lots of people that if I'm identified as a protester at this rally, I might have my job offer rescinded or my legal clerkship taken away. So that's why they're doing it. I guess I would just say friendly advice to my progressive friends. If you want to go to

one of these things, you're concerned about your identity and you are an earnest supporter of the plight of the people in Gaza, which I totally respect. Just find something else to wear. The N95 is triggering. The rest of us do not want to remember the times where we had to wear an N95. I see you in an N95 and immediately I'm like, oh, in an airport, I get it. I get it. Okay. Comorbidities, et cetera.

If I see you in an outdoor N95, it triggers me. It brings back bad memories and it does not bring me to your cause. Let's just put it that way. Okay, I'm over time with Dave. I wanted to celebrate the end, the demise of Gateway Pundit. People that don't know Gateway Pundit, they went out of business thanks to the work of some good progressive activists, actually, who were suing them and who were going after their advertisers. Shea Moss and Ruby Freeman were suing them.

So we will send people out to some music Celebrating the demise of Gateway Pundit Another win for the righteous And the good against the anti-democratic forces In our country. Dave Weigel, Semaphore Americana Newsletter. Do sign up for it He's the best. Come back soon. Thank you very much Yeah, Gateway Pundit's gone, so read me instead Alright, we'll see you tomorrow

On the Friday edition of the Bullwark Podcast With a much-requested guest. See you then This ain't the first time I've been hostage to these things I can't believe I'm finally moving through my fears At least I know how hard we tried, both you and me Didn't we, didn't we? So I grab my stuff, court teachers, put up in the driveway It's time

Bye bye, boy bye Bye bye, it's over, it's over, oh yeah Bye bye, I'm picking up my girl Bye bye, it's over, it's over, oh yeah You know, I'm stronger than I think Usually I join you on the floor But this dance ain't for me But just turn the music up

Maybe someday we'll look back with love Didn't think you'd lose me Now it's just too late to choose me So I'm crying, my stuff, courtly Just put love in the driveway It's over Bye bye, boy bye Bye bye, it's over, it's over, oh yeah

Bye bye, I'm thinking what's mine. Bye-bye, it's over, it's over, yeah. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.