The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Steele: Confronting the Ugliness

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Oklahoma sheriffs pining for lynching, Tennessee legislators trying to teach young Black men a lesson, and Stand Your Ground turning the innocent into victims: Things feel like they're spiraling out of control. Plus, even Trump is trolling DeSantis about his Disney flop. Michael Steele joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is tax day. It is April 18th, 2023, and I am joined by the chairman himself, Michael Steele. Welcome back to the podcast, Michael. Hey, my man, Charlie.

Good to be with you again, my friend. I have to confess, I am wrestling with today's podcast. I am wrestling with where do we start. Okay. We have the Fox News trial, Dominion case, which may be starting today. I continue to be amazed that they're not settling this case, that it's not settled. I mean, if there was ever a case in the history of defamation lawsuits that needed to be settled before trial, this is it. And they're going. It sounds like they're going. I don't think the million wants to settle. So meanwhile, virtually all of the

Republican candidates for president are lining up behind the boycott of Bud Light because of course, in case there was any doubt that we live in a post-shame society, by the way, George Santos has announced, this is not a joke, that he's running for re-election. I'm not kidding. We had the Jim Jordan clown car hearings in New York City yesterday on the issue of guns. You know that I don't like talking about the gun issue because it is this doom loop. Every week we have another mass shooting. Every week we have the same sort of bullshit. But we also have these stories, the stand your ground story in New York and in Kansas City, which I have to tell you, Mr. Chairman,

may make my head explode. And then you have Ron DeSantis who has decided that he wants to slingshot his way to the presidency by harassing the happiest place on earth, threatening Disney World with putting in a state prison next door. So, I mean, okay, I'm just going to toss the ball in your direction because you are a professional podcaster. Which one do you want to start with? Well, let's start with stupid.

That doesn't narrow it down. I'll narrow it down. That would be Ron DeSantis. So I had to tweet out when I listened to this presser or whatever the hell he was doing, standing up, talking about this, suggesting building a state prison next to Disney World. I tweeted out, because he said in this, he says, yeah, I think we're going to go analyze this, right? And I went, okay, so you want to analyze putting a state prison next to Disney.

So when families stop visiting Disney, all right, and Disney's $75.2 billion worth of economic impact in Central Florida just evaporates. And it's $5.8 billion tax revenues just go to shit, right? It's 75,000 employees suddenly are facing layoffs and the 463,000 other jobs that are created by Disney for Central Florida just start evaporating? What would your analytics say caused that to happen? But you've triggered the libs. Charlie, what is the deal with this level of just piling on BS from these Republicans who are now, they're so woke in their anti-corporatism.

They're so woke in their anti-culturalism. They're so woke in their anti-business tones. I just don't understand where this is coming from. And if Disney, Charlie, if Disney just said, you know, just for shits and giggles, says, you know what? We're gone. We don't need your bullshit, Ron. So we're going to leave you all this land. And we're going to take our, you know, 500,000 employee base and our billions of dollars of revenue, and we're going somewhere else. You use your analytics to figure it out. I have. Well, I mean, this is one of those cases where the vindictiveness is the point

or the fight is about the fight. I don't mean this to be snarky, but can anybody remember, I mean, without Googling, remember, what is this actually about? What is the DeSantis-Disney fight actually about? Because no one can actually, well, okay, so he's going after Disney,

and then Disney has outmaneuvered him with his special district, so he's going to show that he doesn't back down. It actually goes back to the fact that they passed that, what was called the Don't Say Gay Bill, and Disney came out against it, and he's been waging this vendetta since. But it's almost as if we've kind of lost the entire, which was stupid enough, but we've lost the entire thread of what it's about. JVL had a great point yesterday. He said, look, I mean, his value proposition right now to Republican voters is I will use every power

in the state to hurt the people you hate. And so, you know, Trump says, I will be your retribution. And DeSantis is saying, well, I'm going to be your retribution in a very concrete way. This is what we're going to do. But to your point, this is one of those things where how does he actually think that this is what gets you to the presidency by going after a private even, you know, Chris Christie is doing a video this morning and he's saying, you know, this is an indication that Ron DeSantis is not actually a conservative. And by the way, Michael, do you know who else is ripping, who is now trolling DeSantis on Disney? Who? The former president. No.

Let me read you this. No. A truth social bleep that went out moments ago from the desk of Donald J. Trump. DeSantis, which is short for DeSanctimonious. I mean, he's been working on this. DeSanctus is being absolutely destroyed by Disney. His original PR plan fizzled. So now he's going back with a new one in order to save face.

Disney's next move will be the announcement that no more money will be invested in Florida because of the governor. In fact, they could even announce a slow withdrawal or sale of certain properties or the whole thing. Watch. That would be a killer. In the meantime, this is also unnecessary, a political stunt, all in caps. Ron should work on the squatter mess, all in caps. I don't even know what that is. So I regret to tell you, I hate myself for what I'm about to say. I know. But he's right. He's right. He's absolutely right. And this is the thing about Donald Trump. He's like a broken clock. He's going to be right maybe twice a day. And on this one, he's right. I mean, the reality here

is that DeSantis is playing from a hand that is not a winning hand because yes, it may excite some folks in Florida and it may make some people in MAGA world a little bit wet. But the reality of it is Donald Trump is still the king here. And this isn't what you take the king out with, because you still have to translate. I mean, for all the things that Donald Trump is bad at, he gets this. I mean, he would have had another angle or another way to come at Disney. I mean, how do you take out your source of revenue? No, this one is so easy. And this is what should raise red flags about Ron DeSantis, because pretty much anyone, you know, sitting on the outside would say, okay, here's your vulnerability on this. Okay. You're in this fight with this company, pivot, move on,

do something else. But this is part of the, you know, the fight is about the fight. It's become this thing that I'm in a fight with them. I can't look like I'm weak. I cannot back down. I need to keep escalating no matter what, even though it's a completely hopeless and self-defeating fight. But Charlie, Charlie, what are you backing down from? Well, exactly. Nobody even remembers anymore. You set the table at the beginning here when you said this was originally about the don't say gay bill. And Disney, which is a corporate citizen in the state of Florida who employs close to a half a million Floridians, right? I suspect many of whom may be gay, you know, took the sound corporate position that this is not something we want to

associate our company with. And companies have done this time immemorial, right? This is nothing new for corporate America to express its opinion about something that really strikes at the heart of its employees. Ron DeSantis, to quote Donald Trump, got his hairs all in a tizzy about it because he saw it, as you said, as a way to sort of prove his MAGA bona fides, but then got caught in a rabbit hole that's now spiraled further and further down that not only has he been punked by Disney on the special district issue, but likely now is going to see a loss of revenues. Because I think in the first instance, what your point is exactly what Disney will do. You said, you know what?

We're stopping all investments as long as this man is in Tallahassee. We're done. Okay. This is the play. This is why, you know, he's clearly not a chess player because all Bob Iger has to do is put out a press release saying they're thinking about that. Yep. And Ron DeSantis is dead.

Toast. Toast. Toast. Okay, speaking of attacks on private corporations and mind-blowing priorities, peace in real clear politics, Republican 2024 field backs boycott of Bud Light. Now, interestingly enough, Trump is the only one who has not weighed in on this yet.

Because he's here drinking a bud. That's why he hasn't weighed in. So Nikki Haley says, you have this man who dresses up like a girl and clearly makes a mockery of women. It is just not right. Let's talk about Dylan Mulvaney, who is the trans person who did like one thing for Bud Light. Haley said she backs the Bud Light boycott.

We need to use the power of our voice to call this out. Deep breath here, Mr. Chairman, because you would think just on one level, just a common sense, like old time, you know, before Trump level, that a candidate for president of the United States would have more important things to think about than whether or not there is a TikTok influencer who has done a promotion for a beer. But even Nikki Haley is all in on this because, of course, none of them feel that they cannot participate in the latest profoundly stupid culture war spat. What do you think? So, okay, they're upset because a trans individual is selling beer. Beer.

Of all the things to be upset about, I'm sorry, all you men who are sitting there gesticulating over this and are upset about it, it doesn't impact your ability to enjoy the football game on Sunday or the basketball games or baseball. This is, again, a made-up cultural fight over nothing. And the fact that you have this language now floating around from people like Nikki being upset about this man sort of having this impact on women. Were you upset when Rudy Giuliani donned the wig and the dress and the makeup on Saturday Night Live and hanging out with Donald Trump and all of that? Were you upset when he exposed his transvestite nature? You can re-up that picture. Were you upset by former Representative Cawthorn sitting there in his little slip blouse and makeup in his wheelchair

in his little transvestite outfit. We're upset about that. And again, just to put a little pin on that one, what upset them with Cawthorn wasn't the fact that he was dressed like a woman. It was that he was telling dirty little secrets out of turn. Yeah. The moment he said that, they were willing to put up with everything else until he said, you know, I've been to these parties and that was it. And then Kevin McCarthy who doesn't go to the line at members of his caucus who are

consorting with neo-Nazis, that was it for him. That was, we're done. Again, we're in a cultural war, Charlie, because some people want us to be here. And they're going to fight and resist everything. These are the same idiots. Remember this. These are the same idiots who for damn near 40 years have been telling us how to live, who to love, what to think, how to feel. They are so

much more morally superior than us because they can put the Christian label on their words. As a former seminarian, I just like to remind them, Christ just wasn't about the words. That was one of the things he held against the Pharisees and the scribes because all they did was talk-ish. They didn't actually do much. They didn't actually live out the Torah. And what we're called to do is live out the gospel and the gospel would frown on this and they know it. But what they do is they mask it in this culture war crap. And that's, they want to use as a hammer against the rest of us. And it's, you know, we have to resist it. We have to fight against it and largely laugh at it to the extent that we can, because it is so silly that we're having a conversation about a can of beer.

See, this is where you step back and go, you understand that we're having an argument about beer, light beer. Okay, so there is an interesting little twist here that actually is somewhat intriguing. I'm going to read from this real clear politics piece. Anheuser-Busch has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years bankrolling Republican candidates, an inconvenient fact that was underscored when the National Republican Congressional Committee blasted the company publicly only to quietly delete a fundraising pitch mocking Bud Light for tasting like water. As conservatives were cleaning out their coolers, Donald Trump Jr. urged caution while calling for an end to the boycott. So here's the deal, he said. Anheuser-Busch totally shit the bed with this Dylan Mulvaney thing.

I'm not, though, for destroying an American and iconic company for something like this. We looked into the political giving and lobbying history of Anheuser-Busch, and guess what? Junior said, they actually support Republicans. I mean, so you have Trump world over there going, now guys, slow it down. So here's another case. Have we really entered through the crazy mirror

where the Trumps are the voice of reason for at least five seconds here? Well, Trump is nothing if not practical, even though he at times may seem impractical. But he does have instincts about human behavior and corporate behavior, and his instincts tend to be pretty spot on. And he's right, again, like a clock, a bad stop clock. Twice, we got our two times in where he's looking at this and saying, dude, these people are Republicans. They have supported Republican businesses and candidates and the party. Why are we doing this to them? And the same could be said about Disney to a large extent. And a lot of other

corporate entities out there who used to align themselves around Republican philosophies with respect to business and taxes and size of government and things like that. We got that. But I think Trump is right again in that this does not help in looking at a general election scenario, Charlie. How do you go forward when now you've alienated this company, you've turned off a lot of your supporters from drinking this beer, but not only that, but now they're trash mouthing the beer. How do you think that's going to play out? And the reality of it is if the company comes out and says, you know what, we can't support those who hate us and don't support us, what do you do? It's the same issue that DeSantis is facing in Florida. If Iger decides, you know what, let me just put out a

little tweet saying, you know, we're thinking about a, we may do X. Yeah, there are going to be rippling effects from that. And that's going into an already precarious political cycle for Republicans, who are now, in my view, not only putting the presidency on the line, but the Senate, where they should have a clear advantage, I think is going to be a jump ball, and the House. And so the country could invariably in 2024 say, you know what? Y'all go and beat the crap out of a can of Budweiser. You go on and try to take down a major family entertainment industry like Disney. We're going to go in a different direction.

And then what are you going to do? Take a deep breath here. Okay. I want to talk about the gun issue, which is not funny at all. None of it. In fact, I have to check my notes, all of the various mass shootings that have taken place since you and I spoke, not just Tennessee, but then Louisville. And then after Louisville, we had the shooting at the Sweet 16 party down in Alabama. And now the headlines are 84 year old man is charged with shooting a black teenager who went to the wrong address, rang his doorbell, shot him twice. Then we also have the story, New York homeowner shoots dead woman who went to wrong house two days after Ralph Yarl shooting

Ralph Yarl being the black teenager. This young woman just turns into the wrong driveway, 20, 21-year-old woman shot dead by a homeowner with a gun. And then, of course, we have the story out of Texas, where a man was convicted of murder for shooting a Black Lives Matter protester to death. And the governor down there is saying that he's going to pardon him because of the stand your ground laws. I'm throwing all this out here because this whole stand your ground mentality in a world in which everybody has a gun and everybody is looking at everybody as a threat, what could possibly go wrong? Well, we're getting the answer to this because, you know, the NRA will tell us that it's a mental health problem or that it's a criminal problem. You know, we need more good guys with guns.

Well, what we're seeing around the country is people in their own homes who have been so jacked up to fear other people that their response to someone ringing the doorbell or pulling into their driveway is to shoot and perhaps even kill them. And the political response to this, at least in places like Tennessee, is to expel representatives who say, we think we have a problem here.

We need to do something about it. I don't even know where to begin here. Michael, this is one of those where things feel like they are spiraling out of control. You have that NRA convention in Indianapolis where we have all those pictures of these little kids playing with guns, showing guns, being groomed to be gun owners and everything. Will Salas and I discussed this on the podcast yesterday. What will it take for us to come to the point of saying there are just too many guns in the wrong hands? We are killing one another, tens of thousands of us. Can we just have a moment of sanity or are we past that tipping point?

We're past that tipping point. We're past that tipping point. There are 400 million guns for 320 million Americans. So we're past that tipping point. How do you get control of that in the nation's bloodstream? You can't. It is exacerbated by the fact that you have Republican legislators at the state and federal level who literally will make excuses for every shooting that occurs in the country. They don't want to acknowledge the racial undertones. They don't want to acknowledge the lethality of owning certain weapons. They don't want to acknowledge the obvious desire of upwards of 90% of Americans who want something done and who've said explicitly, Charlie, what that something is for them. So in one sense, we are where we are because the vast majority of Americans, though

they are tired of thoughts and prayers and they're sick of the violence, continue to elect these bastards who write these laws. And until we begin as a society to take control of that end of the spectrum, where we are now looking at not to elect people who want to abolish the second amendment and all that, because we know that's not happening. But individuals who recognize the legislative responsibility to do something, the legislative responsibility to acknowledge, not just acknowledge the pain with thoughts and prayers, but then follow it up with thoughtful action. But it feels like everything's going in the opposite direction, one state after another, making it easier for people to carry weapons without permits, without background checks, without any training whatsoever. I mean, you and I are both old enough to remember when the N, as irresponsibly as possible, so that you have old people sitting in their house with guns who will blow you away if you ring their doorbell.

Or if you're in a standard ground state, two people with guns, you know, walk up to one another. Words are exchanged. Who knows what it might be? Somebody like, you know, like you look like somebody who would drink a Bud Light and one of them shoots and kills the other one because they think the other one is a threat. In Greg Abbott's Texas, you know, depending on the color and the politics of the person doing the shooting, he might actually pardon the person for murdering the other person with the gun because they didn't like them. I'm sorry. This is why I don't talk about it because I'm getting myself worked up here. No, no, you've laid it out exactly right. That is the America that we are in at the moment where, again, governors and legislators make excuses. I've

never understood the purpose of a stand your ground law. I don't get it because this is the consequence of it. You have a woman trying to make a U-turn, pulls into someone's driveway and is killed. She wasn't attacking the house. She wasn't threatening the homeowner. She was making a U-turn in her car. And yet they pull out a gun and shoot and kill. A young man who's asked by his mother to go pick up his siblings, goes to the wrong street, goes to the wrong neighborhood, walks to the wrong house, knocks on the door. This ass opens the door, screams at him never to come here again. This kid is 16 years old and confused. Look, dude dude i'm just here to pick up my siblings

right and get shot not only is he shot in the head and falls to the ground this man then goes stands over him and shoots him again so where is the threat there where is the stand your ground application there and what is the purpose of a law that a citizen thinks that what that action that he's just committed is okay under those circumstances? This is on us because we keep putting people in power who give us this kind of law. And then we all sit back and wring our hands and wonder why they won't change it. Well- And also we're living in a culture where we are being whipped up to distrust one another, where fear has become the coin of the realm. So, yes, we have the laws, but then we also have this cultural moment where we are encouraged to fear one another, to distrust one another, to be angry with one another. So you saw that story out of Oklahoma,

by the way, right? Yeah. The story where you have the sheriff and the people that are joking about lynching and hiring hitmen and everything. Of course. We talk about this all the time, but I guess in the context of that we are an angry society, we are a fearful society, and we're a society right now, a culture where, you know, this kind of the threats, the demonization has become routine. Let me just play you a little bit of soundbite. Okay. Now this is a not safe for work people. Okay. For those of you that are tenderhearted, we have the explicit warning on the podcast and everything. This is going to be very explicit. Miles Taylor has a new book coming out about the danger that Donald Trump poses to the country.

And listen to some of the voicemail messages he got from fellow American patriots, people who believe in America first, who think that we can make America great again. Listen to some of the reaction that Miles Taylor got on his voicemail. What you're doing to President Trump is disgusting. You're disgusting people. You're evil and you're going to go down. You, my friend, are a piece of shit. You are a traitor. You're pushing for anti-Trump?

You dumb motherfucker. We will squash you like a fucking peanut, bitch. You're dumb. You're dumb. Sounds nice. So eat a dick and die. You're anti-American. You hate your country. Sounds nice. Well, they sound nice. Bless their hearts.

I guess this is part of this concern, that we're a country with 400 million guns in which this sort of thing is spreading. Now, I'm not going to say that that represents a majority of MAGA supporters. I'm not saying anything like that. But if it represents 1%, we're talking about millions of people. Well, I'll say it. You don't have to because I hear that shit all the time. Yeah, no, I mean, come on. I mean, that's the other thing. Then we start tiptoeing so nicely around it all, Charlie. We're so nice about it. The rest of us are so nice. Oh, we don't want to say anything that hurt their feelings. Oh, we got to understand. We got to listen and learn.

No one's accused me of being nice before, ever. Some things you don't need to figure out because they're so self-evident. When someone tells you that they're coming for you to eat shit and die, and you are this and that and blah, blah. Do you mean that metaphorically? Do you mean that symbolically? Yeah, right. Exactly. What exactly are you expressing? Exactly. So just like they like to paint with a broad brush when it comes to, quote, owning the libs, because every Democrat is a socialist. Every Democrat is a pedophile. Every Democrat is some nefarious, blood sucking vampire.

Right. Atheist communists. Atheist communists. So why can't they be that? Why can't all of them be that? Because what reason? So this is the reality that we get boxed into, where the victim, right? I put in air quotes, the victim is actually the threat. Let's talk about what happened with Tennessee. That feels like it's been several weeks ago.

But as I told you when I was walking my dog, listening to you on SiriusXM and your response to the Tennessee expulsion and to the shootings, you were really on fire, Mr. Chairman. So let's talk about this. The expulsion of Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, who've now been reinstated.

So it was completely pointless. Right. But I heard you say that you've never seen anything so hateful and so disgusting inside the Republican Party since you've been a member since 1976. So let's talk about what happened in Tennessee, because I went on the day that they were being expelled and said, just the stupid, it burns. It was so obvious that it was going to backfire, but it was so, well, you have better ways of expressing yourself about this decision by the good old boys of the Tennessee legislature to expel two young African-Americans because they could. Because they could. And in the conversations that I was having that week about this, I couldn't help but think about what my father would tell me as a young man in my teenage years about his experience growing up in Virginia and then living in Washington, D.C., I remember him saying,

you're going to run into people who will express to you their desire that you not act too uppity. And I was like, well, what is that? I mean, what does that mean? And it is something that has been a feature of racism in a particular way towards Black men that says, you are okay as long as you stay in your place and do as you're told. And these two young men in that state legislature did not do as they were told. They admittedly broke the rules. And in breaking the rules, Charlie, the worst that should have happened to them was a censure for what they did, not expulsion. Not expulsion when you look at the other white men around them who were caught doing far worse than standing in the well of the house with a megaphone, right? Pedophilia,

crimes, all these other things, and yet no expulsion. And what I saw in that moment, as I watched that vote come down, and particularly when the white female, Representative Johnson, did not get expelled, and their rationale was, well, she didn't have a megaphone. She didn't have a bullhorn. I was like, okay, that's the standard. Was telling these two young men, y'all were too uppity. Yeah, they did. We don't like uppity Negroes. So this is the lesson we're going to teach you. And I think we need to see that for what it is. I know some people, oh, there you go, seeing race and everything. Well, guess what? It's because it is. It is. For 400 years, it is in everything. It is in everything. It is why young black men get shot. It is also why young Black men get expelled from the state legislature.

I know so many folks, Charlie, just want to shut it down and close it off and not think about it, but I've been saying it since I was a young man. Our issues in this country are profound, and at the core of them is the relationship between Black people and white people. It just is. We have yet to resolve that. We've yet to come of a mind where, I mean, despite the statues to Dr. King and the marches and all of that, you still have a moment like this. And you still have a young black man making the mistake to walk on the porch of an older white man and get shot in the head because he rang the wrong doorbell. And he was perceived as dangerous. Then, Charlie, on top of it, what does the state's Republican House legislature do? They then go and pass a bill that basically said, we want to put guns in schools. We want every teacher now to have a gun in Tennessee. I don't know if that's a good day for Black kids. I'm just telling you.

Especially Black males. Yes. I want to drill down on this. You and I could spend three or four hours actually talking about this because I am really wrestling with this. I want to get your point of view. It feels as if, I'm going to use a really saccharine term here. OK. As if there is a permission structure out there to people to act out things that I had thought had been in decline since the 1950s. I know you have a different perspective on all of this, but you're seeing people articulate it and act out in ways that is.

And it's more and more common. There was once a time, not that long ago, I mean, you were chairman of the National Republican Party where Republicans would have been embarrassed to behave like this. Somebody would have stood up in the caucus and said, do you know what we will look like? You know what they will say about us? And right now, it sounds like even from some of the audio that's been leaked is that they just don't give a shit anymore. They actually don't care. And people are saying things to one another,

like the Oklahoma sheriff. Okay, there have been rednecks and there have been bigots forever. But at least there was a stigma, there was cultural pressure. You don't talk like this. You don't sit around with law enforcement officers and talk about you wish you could bring back lynching.

You don't say that. Maybe I'm wrong about all of this. It feels right now, though, that something is happening, that something has been scratched. Some wound has been opened up. What do you think about? I mean, it's always been there, but there was an attempt to appeal to the better angels. Like, that's not who you want to be. That's not happening anymore. And it does go back to this. Now, just let it rip. You know, show how brave you are by saying these outrageous, bigoted things. Show how willing you are to fight by throwing out these two African-American state representatives because, you know,

we're in this war and we don't care what they call us. We don't care what they say about us or even how it looks. I think you are right on all points. I think your feeling about this and your instincts are spot on. I'm going to say something that may sound a little bit surprising, but I think it's very constructive. In one sense, I'm very glad for all of this because I'd really rather see and know that that exists, that that's how my neighbor feels about me. Growing up, I would spend my summers in South Carolina. And the one thing I always appreciated about the South is they would always tell you what they thought of you as a black child or as a black man or as a black woman. Because they would put on the front of their buildings for white only. And I remember

taking my aunt who worked at a country club in Orangeburg and I took her to work. She worked the late shift from like, you know, nine to whatever. And I took her to drop her off and I pulled up to the front of the building and she looked and said, oh baby, I can't go in through the front door. And I said, why not? I mean, you're going to work, right? She said, no, no, no, they're not allowed to do that. And then she pointed up and showed me the sign and said, for white only. This was not 1957, right? This was in the early 80s. In the 80s. In the 80s. In the 80s. I ran against a gentleman for the chairmanship of the RNC in 2009 who was still a member of a country club that was notorious for not allowing Jews nor African Americans to become members. Once that got exposed, he resigned the country club,

but then when he lost, he rejoined. Convenient. Here's the rub. I'd rather know that about you and others, because now I know what I'm dealing with. Where we have been lulled into this sense of complacency in the past is when people hide it and they shroud it and they don't express it. We know of this in the North. I've been to a lot of cities in the North where you can cut the tension around race with a knife, but nobody wants to say it. Everyone pretends to be your friend. Everyone's patting you in the back, but they don't mean it. So in one sense, this visceral expression and exposure is important for the country to see. And it goes back to the point I made earlier. We still haven't dealt with this issue of race between black folk and white folks.

Everything else will take care of itself. Everything else, I think, pivots off of that. But until we're honest about that relationship and how we ultimately want it to be, the fact that you've got people in power, sheriffs, police sitting around talking and wishing, damn, I really wish we could bring back lynching. Why do you want to lynch somebody? What are you hoping to do with that? Here's the other piece. For all the things you can say about Trump, the one thing Trump did was he took the Band-Aid off and he gave the permission that was necessary for people to behave this way. And people can scream at that thought if they want to, but Donald Trump was the one who was standing up at his rallies talking about how he would knock the crap out of someone who disagreed with him, right? And pushing these other narratives out there, referring to people, brown-skinned individuals, Mexicans and other Hispanics, as murderers and rapists. So if I refer to you

that way openly. And now as animals. Yes. And then people are going to look at you and go, yeah, there goes a murderer or a rapist. So he gave them permission to sort of put it out there. And that's where we are now. And the central thing, Charlie, is in the past, our leaders were a key ingredient to helping us deal with these issues and learning how to talk about and confront our own racism, our own feelings about others. And when those leaders now are the ones who are validating and perpetuating and pushing out those ugly narratives, there is no more permission structure because guess what? It's gone. It's a free-for-all. Well, listening to you, it also occurs to me that we're having these debates about,

should we teach the history of racism? It's not the history of racism. This is not something in our history. This is something in our culture. This is something in our lives. And the story you're telling about you and your aunt, I mean, that is within our memory. And so for people who want to say, we just need to move past it. I think that the right has gone through several stages here. You know, there were a lot of folks who just decided, I think in the, maybe it was in the 80s or the early 90s that we just need to kind of move past it. Okay, we've solved all those problems. We need to, you know, just not talk about it anymore. Now there is this desire to say we cannot talk about it. I mean, this backlash, this post-George Floyd backlash on the right where you have demagogues like Christopher Ruffo,

who basically is saying that any conversation that makes you feel uncomfortable about race, we should stigmatize as part of critical race theory, and that we should pass laws prohibiting teachers from being able to discuss it. I mean, the backlash has now been weaponized by government power in a way that, you know, back in the days of, you know, Jack Kemp, you know, and I mean, a lot of these guys, you know, they were, you know, the, you know and i mean a lot of these guys you know how old they were you know the the only empower america bit man this was like republicans would have a different approach to race they would take it very seriously yeah you you even had the the autopsy and the rnc we have to change all of this all of that that's all part of the before trump era it's all been wiped away on the right. And Trump came down those stairs and in literally a 45 second span of time, crapped all over that autopsy.

And the party said and did nothing. I remember calling up Reince or sending him a text and saying, dude, your next move is to call Donald Trump down to Washington, sit his ass down, give him that autopsy and tell him this is what the Republican Party is doing on this subject of building and expanding and growing the party, not calling people murderers and rapists. And he didn't do it. He didn't do it. Instead, he got on a train, went to New York and started kissing the butt, bending the knee. Oh, yeah. I remember that in real time. And so here we are again when the leadership capitulates to the source of the ugliness, capitulates to the bad stuff.

Imagine the party leaders in the 1950s when the John Birch Society tried to infiltrate the Republican Party saying, yeah, y'all come on in. Imagine what that would be like. But they didn't. In the time that we have left, you have your own excellent podcast. In an episode you released last week, you talked with Larry Hogan. And, you know, Larry Hogan, I'm sure you've had many conversations with him about things like we're talking about right now. I mean, Larry Hogan, the outgoing governor of Maryland, you of course were lieutenant governor of Maryland. And a lot of people

thought Larry Hogan was going to run for president. It would have been a quixotic bid, but he decided he was not going to run. He said his heart was in it, but his head told him that it just wasn't going to happen. So why do you think the Larry Hogan's of the world just look at the Republican party and go, yeah, there's really no lane for me? Right, because there isn't. We won't allow it. And here's the frustration. It's not that, you know, we don't expect, Charlie, the 30, 35%, even 40%, if we just want to be generous, of the MAGA Republicans won't allow it, is that the remaining 60% to 70% of Republicans seem uninterested in creating it. We lose sight of the fact that in every one of our election cycles, whether it's off-year elections or presidential cycles, congressional cycles, doesn't matter. The turnout for our

primaries is a very narrow 25%. That means you have a significant number of Republicans who don't participate in the process. And yet, so we sort of create this foregone conclusion that there is no way to win. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I've said to Larry and I've said to some other candidates, potential candidates for the presidential as well as for other offices, that you've got to create that lane. You've got to go to the remaining portion of the Republican base that, yeah, they didn't like Trump's behavior in his mouth and his tweets, but they like his policies. How would they want to rationalize it? Those folks are in play. They want change. They want to move forward in a different direction.

But what you're seeing now with Mike Pompeo and others retreating and saying, I'm not going to run, including my friend Larry Hogan, you're ceding that ground to Trump because everyone else who remains, including Ron DeSantis, all right, they're not beating Donald Trump. They're not. My question to everyone who's thinking about getting in this race is, are you prepared to lose the primary in order to win the general? Because if you're not, don't waste our time. Don't waste your time. You're going to wind up capitulating to Trump anyway. anyway, because the reality of it is I don't even know how Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or Tim Scott explained themselves. When the indictment came down on Donald Trump, they were the first ones

to run to the bank of microphones to defend it and to defend him. So if I'm Donald Trump, guess what my first ad against you is going to be? It's going to be running your support of me. Yeah, exactly. No, I don't think any of them have figured out that particular formula. In this Republican Party, how do you win a Republican primary without totally torturing your ability to win a national election? And clearly what they're doing now is figuring we're just going to light ourselves on fire, whether it is, you know, wars on Disney or book bands or whatever it is that Rhonda Santis is doing, or Nikki Haley feeling that now she needs to, you know, go along with the Bud Light thing. And yet, this is what is required right now, or they think is required to get through a Republican primary. Well, good luck going forward. Although I am not overly

cocky about, you know, Joe Biden's poll numbers and everything. And I guess I would caution people just don't think that it's an automatic. It's not a slam dunk. I worry about that. No, it's not. Because Democrats don't know how to get out of their own way. They're the most politically inept people. I don't even know how they survive this long in politics. I just don't.

You know, when your political opponent is digging a hole, you don't get in it with him. Let him keep digging by himself. When your political opponent is going out saying all kinds of batshit crazy stuff, you don't get in the way of that. You don't set up an administration that comes in the door with the winds of democracy in its sails and spend the first 18 months talking about filibuster rules. Oh my God. No, you go back to that first two years and the amount of time they spent fighting one another and the amount of energy that was spent by Democrats attacking other Democrats. Well, all of this was going along. It was almost like, okay, Trump is gone. The coup failed. Let's go on and we're going to scratch other itches here. And they really squandered two years. I mean, maybe they'll get it back at some point, you know, but counting on the Republicans to do it for them. I know it's tempting and I know that they live in their own. And see, this is the thing about it. I mean, you and I both know that the Fox folks live in a bubble. Yes. I'm not sure that progressives fully understand how they live in a bubble as well. Yeah, they don't.

They don't. They don't. And there's not much we can do to tell them about it. Except, hey, we have these podcasts. This is what we do. That's why we're here, baby. Michael Steele, it is always great to have you. Michael Steele is host of the Michael Steele podcast, also a political analyst for MSNBC, the former chair of the Republican National Committee

and Lieutenant Governor of Maryland from 2003 to 2007 in the before times. Michael, great to have you back. Charlie, it's always great. I love our conversations, man. I look forward to coming back. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sacks. We'll be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.