The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Fanone: We Were Literally Fighting for Our Lives

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

Former DC police officer Michael Fanone joined Charlie Sykes for our first live show, and recalled the events of Jan 6 — when he was seriously injured defending the Capitol. A one-time Trump voter and Fox News fan, Fanone is now waging "a one-man war" against Trump and his reality-denying apologists. He also shared his thoughts about Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Mike Pence, and the battle for the American soul. This encore episode was originally released in October. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. This week, we're going to re-release some of our absolute favorite shows from 2022. These weren't easy decisions. There were just so many good conversations to choose from, but we went with those shows that have endured despite the passage of many, many news cycles. So please enjoy our curated choices. And today, we'll start with our first live show back in October, featuring former DC police officer Michael Fanone, author of the recent book, Hold the Line, The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul. His body cam footage provided an historical document of what happened that day,

but what happened after January 6th, he says, reveals a sickness that has taken over the country. Let's go back to my introduction back then. Well, welcome to the Bulwark podcast. We are doing something obviously very, very different. We are doing this live in Washington, D.C. before a standing room only crowd. I don't think that I need to give a lengthy introduction to our guest today. Michael Fanone is a former vice officer with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. for 20 years. And you all know who he is because you remember the pictures from January 6th. You know who he is because you've seen the body cam footage, as have a number of federal courts more recently. And you also remember his dramatic testimony before the January 6th committee, where he said this.

What makes the struggle harder and more painful is to know so many of my fellow citizens, including so many of the people I put my life at risk to defend, are downplaying or outright denying what happened. I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this room. But too many are now telling me that hell doesn't exist or that hell actually wasn't that bad. The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful. And that was an emotional moment for you when you realized even then that there were Americans who did not appreciate what happened on January 6th or what it meant.

And it got worse, Michael, because after that testimony, you got this phone call. Someone left this voicemail for you. You're so full of shit, you got this phone call. Someone left this voicemail for you. You're so full of shit, you little faggot fucker. You're a little pussy, man. I can slap you up the side of your head with a backhand and knock you out, you little faggot. You're a punk faggot. You're a lying fuck.

How about all that scummy black fucking scum for two years destroying our cities and burning them and stealing all that shit out of their stores and everything? How about that? Assaulting cops and killing people. How about that, you fucker? That was shit on the goddamn Capitol. I wish they would have killed all you scumbags because you people are scum. They stole the election from Trump and you know that, you scumbag. And you fucking, too bad they didn't beat the shit out of and you know that, you scumbag. And you fucking,

too bad they didn't beat the shit out of you more. You're a piece of shit. You're a little fag, you fucking scumbag. So Michael, your new book is Hold the Line, The Insurrection and One Cop's Battle for America's Soul. So let's start with this. How's the battle for the soul going? I mean, I wish I could say I thought we were winning, but I don't know. I think we're like in a dead heat between those that recognize Donald Trump and his supporters for what they are, and those that obviously ally themselves or ally themselves with Donald Trump. And then I see the vast majority of Americans that are just indifferent to either side.

So in many ways, you're one of the most unlikely guys to be sitting here having this conversation because you're a longtime cop. You voted for Donald Trump back in 2016. So let's start there. Who were you back then? Why did you vote for Donald Trump back in 2016? 2016 was simple. I was a single-issue voter, and my issue was law enforcement. My career in law enforcement

began just after 9-11. I think like thousands and thousands of Americans, I saw what happened at the World Trade Center and in Washington, D.C. at the Pentagon, and I felt a call to serve. I joined the U.S. Capitol Police, where I stayed for about a year, and I quickly realized that while I love the career of law enforcement, the U.S. Capitol Police was not the place for me, and so I left and lateraled to the Metropolitan Police Department here in Washington, D.C., which for those of you who don't know is the more traditional law enforcement agency. Essentially, if you call 911, we're the ones that pick up and respond. But in the wake of police shootings in Ferguson, Missouri and other places in the country, I saw rhetoric that was being utilized by members of the Democratic Party

that I saw as, one, incredibly harmful to the relationship between law enforcement and the communities that we're charged with protecting. And I'm not going to sit here and say that law enforcement is above reproach and that there aren't reforms needed. But I saw this violent rhetoric resulting in the assassination-style killings of police officers throughout this country. And I attended many of those officers' funerals in Dallas, Texas, Louisiana, New York City. And I saw the effect that it was having on my co-workers. I saw the effect that it had on our families. And I heard Donald Trump and his pandering towards law enforcement, and I bought it hook, line, and sinker. So you thought Donald Trump and the

Republicans were the party of law and order, that they backed the blue. I did. When did you start to change your mind? What changed? Well, I guess for those of you that have gotten to know me or know my personality, I mean, I was definitely attracted to Donald Trump's bombastic approach to politics. I didn't have the highest opinion of American politicians prior to Donald Trump taking office, and I liked the way that he handled them. That being said, I thought it was a shtick, and I thought eventually that he would settle about to handling himself in a more presidential manner. Unfortunately, that day never came, and shit only got worse. And shit got really worse on January 6th. You had not been planning to be at the Capitol. You were working vice, you were working on another case. How did

you end up at the Capitol? You self-deployed. How did that happen? So I remember that morning, well, I remember the day vividly outside of the time that I was unconscious. But I remember that, you know, I woke up, my day started just like any other day, and probably like late morning, I started getting some phone calls from my partner at the time, Jimmy Albright, and Jimmy was telling me that he was hearing from officers that were already on duty at the Capitol, or I'm sorry, at the Ellipse, where the Stop the Steal rally was taking place. And the officers were reporting armed individuals, individuals who were in possession of semi-automatic handguns, AR-15-style rifles, and arrests that were being made at that rally. And then I remember him telling me that, hey, I just heard that a large group has broken off from the Stop the Steal rally and they're

headed towards the Capitol. At that point, it was probably shortly before 1 p.m., I remember turning on my police radio and, you know, getting my gear together. My shift was supposed to start that day at about 2 30, and shortly after 1, I heard the first reports of police lines being breached at the Capitol and officers being assaulted. That was when I made the determination that, you know, I was not going to be buying heroin that day as part of a narcotics operation, but that I was going to be going to the Capitol. And I remember pulling into the first district parking lot and walking up to our office, and Jimmy was sitting at his desk,

and he looked at me, and he was like, what are we going to do? And I said, we're going to go to the Capitol. You could not possibly have imagined that what actually happened was going to happen. Oh, hell no. I mean, listen, I heard the distress calls coming out. I knew that it was bad but all I could do was reference experiences that I had throughout my career. I had no idea what like how bad bad could really be. And that was as bad as it's ever been in my 20 years.

When you showed up and you saw who was there, did you think, okay, I know who these people are. Did you did you recognize them? And who did you think you were confronting? No, I remember when I was testifying for the select committee, Liz Cheney asked me a similar question to what you're saying. And politics played no part in it. All I knew was my colleagues were at the Capitol and they were being brutally beaten. And I was going there to help other cops. Listen, I get the fact that it's the Capitol building and Congress is there and the certification of the election is taking place, but that shit couldn't have been further from my mind. All I heard was distress calls from cops and I'm a cop and I'll be damned

if I'm sitting that out. I'm going there and I'm going to help. So you and your partner go forward and you confront what you've described in the book as this human battering ram. And you can describe what happened. Somebody yells knife, you look around and that's when they grabbed you and pulled you in. And you heard someone say, we got one. Tell me about that. So Jimmy and I make our way up to the Capitol complex and we enter through the southern entrance of the Capitol, which if anybody's ever done a tour of the building, you walk through or you walk up an on-ramp. And I remember Jimmy looking down and pointing and there's just blood splatter everywhere. And that was kind of my first clue that this was, it was bad. So we enter through the Capitol building and we're

walking through, I think it's called the Hall of Columns. We make our way to the crypt, which is the circular area, excuse me, just below Statuary Hall in the rotunda. And I hear a distress call come out, 1033, for the Lower West Terrace Tunnel. And for those of you that may not know, the Lower West Terrace Tunnel is symbolic in the fact that that's where the president-elect walks out to take the oath of office on Inauguration Day. And the tunnel itself is probably about 200, maybe 250 feet long, and it's about as wide as maybe four or five adults standing shoulder to shoulder. When I walked down from the crypt to the Lower West Terrace Tunnel, the first thing I remember seeing was a set of double doors. And there's a, like, plain glass windows, you know, in the double doors. And I could see through there, and there was this kind of haze, and it was the residual CS gas that was still kind of lingering in the air. When I walked up to the double doors, I bumped into a buddy of mine that I had known for almost my entire career,

a guy named Bill Bogner, who's a sergeant with the Metropolitan Police Department. And Bill was an administrative guy. I mean, he's a paper pusher. And he self-deployed like me and like hundreds of other D.C. police officers did that day. And I remember looking at him and I said, you know, hey, Bill. And he kind of stretched out his hand to shake my hand. And he had no idea who I was. And he was telling me that he had just been sprayed in the face with bear spray. I told him, you know, it's phenone and we had this kind of surreal interaction and then we ended up walking towards the set of double doors to go back out into the tunnel. Once I walked through those doors, the CS gas and the chemical irritants just like hits you like a ton of bricks. And I remember thinking like long and hard about the decision

that I had made to come here and how I could just be in my office watching all of this unfold on Fox News. Although I don't know if they were showing it on Fox News. I was going to say something snarky, but... So I remember distinctly I saw a friend of mine that I had known. We were actually partners at U.S. Capitol Police like 20 years prior, Ramey Kyle, who at the time was a commander of our Investigative Services Bureau. He's an executive in the police department, and he also self-deployed to the Capitol. And what I later learned was, you know, he found himself commanding about 40 MPD officers

and maybe a half a dozen or a dozen U.S. Capitol Police officers, including Sergeant Gannell, who's here, who are in this tunnel that became, I guess, the apex of the violence at the Capitol that day. I mean, for those of you who have seen the pictures or the images of what the West Terrace looked like, there's between 15 and 20,000 people there. And that entranceway, that tunnelway, became a funnel of violence. You know, it seemingly was the only entranceway from the West Terrace into the Capitol. And so, you know, what I saw down there was incredibly inspirational and also horrific. You had 40 or 50 police officers, many of whom were severely injured, fatigued. Under normal circumstances, I think, well, I know,

you know, every last one of those officers would have been transported to the nearest hospital. But that wasn't an option. So you had guys that were, you know, triaging other officers, officers that were, you know, picking themselves up, putting themselves back out on the line because we had no other option. We were literally fighting for our lives. So we've seen these pictures, news photographers captured a picture of you being attacked with pipes. A rioter was beating you with a Blue Lives Matter flagpole. I mean, what the fuck? Hands are fumbling for your...

You said it, not me. No, I am... I figured I'd get it in first. So, you know, you try to go back into the tunnel, a three-percenter blocks you, somebody starts tasing the base of your skull. There was a call to kill him with his own gun, and you had to say, I've got kids.

So I guess one of the questions that a lot of people have asked, and I think this is one of the most extraordinary things about January 6th, why didn't you draw your gun and use your gun to defend yourself? Why did other cops not start shooting? So if you're familiar with the policies and protocols that dictate law enforcement officers and the way that we're able to use force, you know that you can't use deadly force unless you believe that that individual poses an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death to either you or to another person. And so the way that I explain it... Someone saying take his gun and kill him, would that... Oh, I mean, listen, were there individuals that rose to that level or met that threshold? Absolutely, especially when I was out in the crowd and encountering them.

So you understand what was taking place there. You could not slide a credit card between two people. And so the likelihood of me drawing my weapon and actually being successful in using it against an individual before it was stripped away from me was slim to none. In addition to that, I have to account for every round that I fire from my weapon. If I'm in the midst of a chaotic crowd and I deem that one or two or three people have met that threshold and that I'm justified in using deadly force, who's to say that in the time that it takes me to draw my weapon and fire it, they don't move, and then I end up shooting somebody else who may have been guilty of a crime, but that crime may have been trespassing on capital grounds,

or something that was not justified in using deadly force. This is not a scenario where, you know, we have a red line in the sand, and if you cross that red line in the sand, we can just open fire. People lose sight of the fact that we're American police officers, and we're dealing with American citizens. And American citizens are afforded certain inalienable rights. And I don't want to live in a country where the police department or any law enforcement agency can just open fire willy-nilly and...

The reason I bring it up is... I do think this speaks to the professionalism and the restraint and the real courage of all the police officers who did not do that. Because we can imagine what an incredible bloodbath it would have been had that actually begun. So let's move to the, and again, people know, I think, the story. You had a heart attack. You suffered traumatic brain injury. The skin on the back of your neck was seared. You lost consciousness. and again, people know, I think, the story, you know, you had a heart attack, you suffered traumatic brain injury, the skin on the back of your neck was seared, you lost consciousness. And the story was told and the body cam pictures were broadcast. In those days afterwards,

did you think that this would be a moment of unity that people would look at this and that all americans would see the this this horrible event for what it was i mean did you have the window where you thought that this would make a difference i did um in a lot of different ways i remember so that the first reason or my first motivation for speaking out, and I think the initial interview that I gave was on January 13th. That's when I said, thank you, but fuck you. So I remember calling my chief, Robert Conte, and several other officials, trying to persuade them to allow me and several other officers to

speak out. And the reason for that was to counteract a narrative that, and we've come so far now from January 6th, I don't even know if you guys remember this, but the original narrative was American law enforcement officers used a disproportionate amount of force against these protesters because they were Trump supporters. And if it had been Black Lives Matter, we would have shot them all to fucking pieces. And I was irate. First of all, because I knew that we were fighting for our lives that day. And I saw these officers use so much restraint. And they were so incredibly professional. and it pissed me off. I had no idea that it would, you know, as time would go on, it would warp into something completely different,

which became this narrative that, you know, January 6th wasn't an insurrection, it wasn't violent, it was hugs and kisses, it was a normal tourist day. But that's the origins of it. I mean, I wanted people to understand how brutal the fighting was, how professional the officers were, and how they handled themselves. And the fact that we didn't make a lot of arrests because we were fighting for our goddamn lives. Logistically, that was an impossibility. So you have been waging what you describe as a one-man war against Donald Trump and the fucking people that refuse to accept reality, but you've paid a rather dramatic price for it. And I think that we started off with

your comments at the hearing and then the reaction that we heard from one of our fellow American citizens. The price you paid for waging this war, you've been alienated from your colleagues in law enforcement. You lost your career as a cop. You lost your pension because you retired five years early. You became a Fox News punching bag. But also you've become this unlikely hero of the resistance, although you gave a rather notable interview to Rolling Stone

where you said you're really done with being a hero. You're tired of it, and you're tired of being lumped together, you know, I'll read this with, you know, associated with people typically thought of as a hero that day, like Mike Pence. I believe your direct quote was, motherfuckers think

Mike Pence is a goddamn hero. Don't lump me in with that fucking pathetic coward. So how do you feel about you're not a Mike Pence fan. And by the way, let's pace it because we're going to get, and by the way,

let's pace it because we're going to get to Kevin McCarthy in a minute. I actually didn't retire. I just resigned. And I did so in kind of a knee-jerk fashion. And so I found myself

unemployed after 20 years of having a good government job. No pension, no retirement, no nothing, I didn't even get to leave with a shirt on my back because I had to turn that shit into the property division when I left the department. I had become friends with Don Lemon from CNN, and I reached out to him,

and I was like, hey, man, I don't have a job. And next thing you know, I get hired by CNN as a law enforcement analyst, which is very ironic because if you knew me prior to, like I was a CNN hater. And a Fox News enthusiast. Which is ironic in a sense because I turned it, you know, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, two people who I enjoyed their programming thoroughly, ended up, you know, shitting all over me. I can't even imagine what it's like to have Tucker Carlson questioning your manhood. Laura Ingraham calling somebody else a drama queen.

And I repeat myself, but what the fuck? But I recognized it for what it was. I had the fortune of a 20-year law enforcement career. I've gone against the worst defense attorneys that money can fucking buy. And I know what courtroom theatrics look like, and I know why defense attorneys resort to courtroom theatrics. And normally it's because their client's guilty as hell and they don't have a fact to stand on. So when I heard those comments, I thought it was funny. But what's not funny is when Laura Ingram or Tucker Carlson says some dumb shit and then

some moron takes that as fact and then they threaten my life or my family's life. That guy in the voicemail, he was a Fox News listener, wasn't he? I mean, he literally repeated the talking points of Laura Ingraham's programming, which was that I was a crisis actor and... It's a good illustration of how this stuff flows downhill. They say this stuff, then people then begin to act out on it, and that's what you got.

Okay, so I have to ask you about your meeting with Kevin McCarthy. So you and the other officers wanted to meet with these Republicans, and you really pressed for it, and there was some big questions. They didn't want to meet with you at first, I'm guessing. They wanted you to go away. Eventually, you did get a meeting with Kevin McCarthy. Tell me about that, because my favorite part about that is that you went into the room, and you picked out the chair that you thought

McCarthy would normally sit in, and you sat in it first? Did I have that story right? Yes. I mean, I approached that meeting the same way that I did with any interview that I ever conducted with a criminal suspect. I wanted to put them in an uncomfortable position, and so I reverted back to 20 years of, you know, interviewing and interrogation techniques and tactics that I learned throughout my law enforcement career. I mean, I also, like, studied up a little bit on Kevin. And, you know, I learned like some little details. The most shocking to me was I read that Washington Post article where they wrote about how he learned Donald Trump's favorite starburst. And then he like assembled a jar full of hand-picked,

I think it's the pink ones are his favorite, the pink and something else, and he hand-picks out of this giant bag of Starburst and then puts it in a jar and flies down to Mar-a-Lago and gives it to Donald Trump. And I was just like, man, if ever there was a reason to pull a motherfucker's man card, that was it. And this is a guy that calls himself a leader of Republicans in America.

I just fucking scratched my head. I didn't understand. Can I just read you a paragraph that you wrote from your book that, actually, this is so good that it made Tim Miller jealous. He said, well, this is what you told Rolling Stone. I think at night when the lights are turned off, Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan have some pretty choice words to say about the fact that they have to hang on Kevin McCarthy's wall. They did some fucking above average things, and they've got to adorn the wall of this fucking weasel bitch named Kevin McCarthy and his fake fucking spray-on tan whose fucking claim to fame, at least in my eyes,

is the fact that he amassed a collection of Donald Trump's favorite flavored Starbursts, put them in the mason jar, and presented them to fucking Donald Trump. So to repeat ourselves, what the fuck, dude? You know, so I mean, so. See, Tim's giving you

a standing ovation over there. This is high praise. Seriously, though, the reason that that meeting came about was there had been a lot of journalists, reporters that were asking Kevin McCarthy, I forget what the reason was, I think it was National Police Week, whether or not he had met with me or any of the other officers from January 6th. And then at some point, Eric Swalwell and Adam Kinzinger were tweeting about it. And then Nancy Pelosi put out a press release. And so the optics, I think, became so bad. You were shamed into it. Yeah, absolutely.

So it was a Thursday night. I find out, you know, I get an email inviting me to this meeting on Friday morning at in Kevin McCarthy's office. And then when I get there, I realize like it's going to be me, Gladys Sicknick, who's the mother of Officer Brian Sicknick, who lost his life as a result of the injuries he sustained from defending the Capitol on January 6th. And also one of my partners in crime, Harry Dunn. And so we get into this meeting and I realized like right away that, you know, Kevin was just trying to consume time. He didn't want to end the meeting too early and make it seem as though it wasn't substantive or he didn't really care. So he gave us about an hour. I described it as a lot of verbal masturbation. But what shocked me was how indifferent he was sitting across the mother of a dead police officer. And how, you know, even then, like he couldn't even muster up

any compassion or empathy for her or for what she had experienced. And it pissed me off. You recorded this conversation. So what did he say? What is in that recording? I recorded a lot of the conversations. But Kevin said that, I mean, I remember pressing him on, you know, statements that had been made by, I think what I refer to as fringe members of his party. These are the tinfoil hat brigade, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gozar, Andrew Clyde, Louie Gohmert. These are people that, they're not just an embarrassment to America, they're embarrassment to humanity. And he told me that he couldn't control the fringe members of his party. And I remember thinking to myself, like, you're this motherfucker that calls himself the leader of the fucking house GOP, and you're telling me that as

a leader, you can't control members of your own party from going out publicly and lying about what happened on January 6th. I mean, it's not mischaracterization. I mean, get away from these euphemisms that people use to describe liars. He's a liar. The people in his party that talk about January 6th for anything other than what it was, a brutal insurrection in which police officers were beaten savagely by Trump supporters. If you're saying anything other than that, you're a fucking liar. And what did he say? He told me that, again, he couldn't control the fringe members of his party, and he theory that the FBI wasn't somehow involved or responsible for January 6th, that it was a false flag operation, that they utilized

informants as instigators, which is all bullshit. And Kevin McCarthy knew it. And I asked him to address that publicly. I thought it was appropriate. Like you should come out against that. This is the fucking FBI. I mean, they're not perfect, but they are. And I know this from experience, having worked alongside of them for more than a decade, the premier law enforcement agency in America. These are some dedicated people. And, you know, he said that he didn't choose to address these things publicly, that he would do it privately. And I say, you know what? How many months later, and we saw an individual inspired by this bullshit rhetoric show up at an FBI facility with an AR-15.

Fortunately, he was the only one that lost his life. But that being said, you know, as the leader of the Republican Party, how are you going to allow that rhetoric to be utilized? I mean, you see, and what also shocks me is I was outraged when Steve Scalise was shot and so many other Republicans were targeted just years prior. We have members of our party who have been the victims of political violence, and they fucking don't do shit seeing this unfold on the Capitol and in the aftermath. So you also met with some other, you met some other politicos. You didn't record it, but you also met with Lindsey Graham.

And I thought your description of the book was interesting, that Graham snapped at Brian Sicknick's mom, Gladys, that he'd end the meeting if she kept speaking ill of Donald Trump. I mean, this is the mother of a dead police officer, and that's what Lindsey Graham was saying in private? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It wasn't that private. There was, you know, Senator Tim Scott, who I will say this. Of all the senators and members of Congress that I met with from the Republican Party, with the exception, obviously, of the 10 Republicans that voted to impeach Donald Trump, Senator Scott was the only one that had any empathy, compassion, and actually took the time

to speak with Mrs. Sicknick. Lindsey Graham, on the other hand, was like the opposite end of the spectrum. I remember sitting there, Mrs. Sicknick addressing him. The moment that she laid any responsibility at the feet of Donald Trump, he lashed out. He snapped. He wanted to end the meeting. He said, if there's any more talk about Donald Trump or Donald Trump being responsible for that day, that he was going to end the meeting. And I also remember, because I had done this with every single member of Congress that I met with, trying to play for him my body worn camera footage, which I had on my cell phone. And I showed it to him and he just couldn't fucking be bothered. He didn't want to look at it.

He did not want to look at it. Did not want to look at it. The only thing that we got him to say was, he said, we gave you guns, you should have shot them all in the head. One other politician you dealt with was a Republican, Andrew Clyde from Georgia, who was, people might not recognize the name, but he was the guy who said that January 6th was a normal tourist visit. And then he refused to shake your hand, but you said that when you confronted him, he folded like a fucking deck of cards.

Yeah, Andrew Clyde. Man of the people. Right. So that day, I found out that there were 21 House Republicans that voted against awarding members of the Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Capitol Police the Congressional Gold Medal. I was pissed off, and I got in my truck and headed towards the Capitol. And I remember calling Harry, and I was like, hey, listen, I'm going to go, you know, try to schedule meetings with all these members. And he's like, oh, I'm on board. And we printed out a list of the 21 House Republicans and started to make our way around the Capitol. Unfortunately, most of the members weren't in their offices.

We ended up just meeting with staffers and scheduling meetings that never came to fruition. But I did see Andrew Claude, and I recognized him, and he was stepping onto an elevator. And I grabbed Harry, and I was like, come on, let's go. So we get into the elevator bay with Andrew Clyde. And I remember looking at him and I said, hey, Congressman, you know, how are you? And I reached out my hand and he kind of looked at me. And I was like, are you going to shake my hand? And he's like, I don't know who you are. And I was like, Oh, I'm sorry, sir. My name is Michael Fanone. I'm a D.C. Metropolitan Police officer, and I fought to defend the Capitol and you on January 6th.

And as a result, I sustained some pretty serious injuries. I said I had a traumatic brain injury and a heart attack. And my hand is still outstretched. And he literally does an about face, turns, faces like the corner of the elevator, and he pulls out his cell phone. And I could tell what he was doing. He was trying to pull up like a recording app. I don't know if he thought like I was going to attack him or maybe I'd yell some obscenities at him.

But he sits there and he's fumbling, and the next floor that the elevator came to, he ran as fast as that old motherfucker could run. You know, Harry looked at me, and I remember he said, man, if you had told me that and I wasn't here, I would have never believed you. But it was just, you know, it's an example of, I mean, listen, we're up here talking about Republican lawmakers that are denying reality, but it's both sides of the political aisle. People say these things on Capitol Hill in this insulated environment where no one is ever going

to confront them or actually, you know, interact with them, and they feel like they can do it, and they can get away with it, and then they go back to their constituencies, and they're hailed as like a fucking hero, which I don't know where Andrew Clyde's constituency is. I would imagine that they, you know, have no idea what happened on January 6th or that, you know, it was anything other than what Andrew Clyde tells them it is. But, yeah, I mean, it's disgraceful. So this takes us full circle back to where we began.

And this is really a hard question, I think. But, you know, we're sitting here a few weeks before a midterm election that's likely to mean that Kevin McCarthy is about to become the speaker, that these people are not being driven out of office in disgrace, but that many of them will be promoted. And millions of Americans believe all of these lies, even confronted with all of this. Everyone in this room, I think, has woken up feeling they took crazy pills, wondering what is happening, what is this alternative reality we live in. But your experience seems to encapsulate it, brings it together because you were there. So I guess from your point of view, you know what happened, and now you see what the politicians are saying

and doing about it, then they've convinced and misled millions of Americans. So your book is about the battle for the soul of America, and it may have come off as a glib question in the beginning, but I have to say that this discussion really makes me, now you must wrestle with this. What does it say about our fellow Americans? What is this?

How do we win this kind of a fight? I didn't say it was easy. No, I mean, listen, I think that the lesson that I've learned has become cliche, but from sitting through all of those select committee hearings, I recognize how this experiment that we call a, you know, democratic republic. I don't see this overwhelming majority of Americans that buy into Donald Trump or Trumpism. I mean, I see like a very dedicated base that he enjoys. But I see more examples of Americans that are just indifferent to either what happened on January 6th or to what Donald Trump and Trumpism really is, because people are just worried about what's happening within their own bubble. If it doesn't affect me in the here and now,

like, it's hard to find that as, you know, important. Well, Michael, keep preaching, keep fighting, and thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today and coming here tonight. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Bulwark podcast. We'll have more live shows on tap. So join the Bulwark to get the first word on when we'll be in your area. In the meantime,

we'll be back here tomorrow and we will do this all over again.