The Bulwark Podcast - Michael Steele: Slapping Matt Schlapp

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Former RNC Chair Michael Steele had a front-row seat for the start of the ugly transformation at CPAC. Racist rhetoric has now been normalized, and they're not even pretending anymore. Steele joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod. 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 Bulletwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Friday the 13th. Now, I'm not going to say that I'm superstitious, but when I got up today, I had to ask myself, what could go wrong today? But then I realized I asked myself that every single day.

So joining me on today's podcast, Michael Steele. Welcome back, Michael. It's good to be back with you, Charlie. I have a variation on that theme when I get up every day. Instead of asking what could go wrong today, I just simply ask, who can I piss off today? Oh, well, then virtually every day is like mine, kind of successful. Right, exactly. Okay, so for people who, I mean, for the one or two of you who don't know, Michael Steele is a

former chair of the Republican National Committee. Don't blame him. He was lieutenant governor of Maryland and a political analyst for MSNBC, also hosts the Michael Steele podcast. So he is no stranger to podcasts. You know, there's so much to talk about today, Michael. And this week, which felt very, very long, is also a reminder how fast things move in politics, that one week in politics can be a lifetime, which just as a reminder for people who assume they know what's going to happen a year from now or two years from now, think about this week. Think about, I'm sorry to say, use the word vibe this early in the morning,

but, you know, the vibe shift that we've had this week with moving from, you know, the absolutely shambolic story about House Republicans and how Democrats were sitting back and they were eating popcorn. And now we're sitting there going, oh, what? Joe Biden's getting his time in the barrel with a new special counsel. I mean, shit moves fast. It does. It does. And it waits for no one. And the reality of it is you're either going to get ahead of the shit or you're going to get consumed by the shit. And that's where I think the Biden administration feels or should feel it is right now. The Republicans went through that shitstorm, if you will, last week, trying to get Kevin

McCarthy the speakership. And the reality of it is simply you don't know, which is why you're always, particularly from someone from my perspective, who've been in the bowels of political activity, you're always guarding against the next thing. And the reality and the truth of it is, Charlie, you don't know what that next thing is going to be. So it really behooves you to, when it happens, to be on the best and proper foot forward as you can. And you don't want to be splaining. You don't want to be backpedaling. Well, is the Biden White House there? Are they ahead of this thing? I think they're at least running even with it. I'll give them that because they have been somewhat forthright in terms of, oh, this happened. We turned everything over within less than 24 hours.

Oh, there's some more stuff that we found in a garage. That's probably it. If there are any more hiccups, if there's, oh, well, you know, we found a box, you know, in an office on Capitol Hill, then this becomes a real narrative that has other elements, criminal elements potentially attached to it, which is why you have a special counsel involved now. But here's the thing that I find interesting. They said that they were moving offices or moving locations, and they went through these documents and found it. I'm just curious if any of our other former presidents are also potentially in this pickle, that if they go back through their documents, they would find something that's secret. We're going to double back on all this, but I want to get a sense of,

you know, how bad this is, what it means for Trump and all of that. But because it's Friday and it's Friday the 13th, I kind of want to back into that. Can we do that? There's a couple of other things I wanted to ask you. I want to talk about what's going on in the House, what the Republican agenda is, what the Republican agenda is, what the Republican theory of government is right now. Also, I really do want to ask you about the RNC chair race, which is kind of below a lot of people's radar screen, but I figured you would have some thoughts about it. I do have some thoughts on that, yes. Well, hold them, because it is Friday the 13th, so you knew some shit was going to come down. And because I am old enough

to remember lots of things, I have in my back pocket sort of a list of real golden oldies of great moments in American politics, great videos. And I want to go back. Why don't I feel like I'm getting in trouble here? This is purely coincidental that I want to play something for you, given the fact that you may have noticed, I don't know, Matt Schlapp is back in the news again. Oh, yeah. Boy, is he back in the news.

Head of CPAC. Interestingly enough, you and I both go way back with him. So how far back does this go? The moment when you got in his face. You had a moment. What year is this? 2017, 2018? Yeah, yeah. It's a while. Anyway, so here is this classic moment, Michael Steele sitting, and by the way,

this is kind of unusual sometimes in politics. You are sitting right next to him. This is eyeball to eyeball, mano a mano. This is not tweeting, subtweeting, or, you know, commenting, you know, in boxes on television. You guys were sitting right there. It begins with some comments by a CPAC flunky. Actually, no flunky. No flunky. Okay, who was he? He was the communications director. Oh, okay. Thank you for the clarification. That's what made it so egregious. He was the communications director, so this was deliberate. So here is the communications director of CPAC, which is the conservative political action, whatever the hell it's called. Everybody knows what it is. It's the Star Wars bar scene of American conservatism. So it started with this jab by this guy, whose name I'm not going to try to remember, against Michael Steele.

And then the follow-up is when—we just say that Schlapp tries to downplay it, and Michael is just not having it. Let's play it. We had just elected the first African-American president, and that was a big deal. And we weren't sure what to do. And a little bit of cynicism, what do we do? This is a terrible thing. We elected Mike Steele to be the RNC chair because he's a black guy. That was the wrong thing to do. Those words that tumbled out of his mouth, I believed were unfortunate words. It was stupid. It's not unfortunate. Call it what it is. It is stupid to sit there and say that we elected a black man chairman of the party and that was a mistake.

Do you know how that sounds to the black community? Yes, I know. Do you know how that sounds to Americans? I do. And do you know how they didn't equate that level of stupidity to conservatism? That's the objection I have about the moment we're in. I know, but he called you. He called you.

He felt terrible about how this was sounding. I know he did. I talked to him. That doesn't change anything. I've spent 41 years in this party. 41. All right? I've taken crap you have no idea about, and I've carried this baggage.

And for him to stand on that stage and denigrate my service to this party and for you as a friend to sit here and sit there and go well you've been critical of the party there's only one word i can say and i can't say it on this air there was a there was a little bit of flop sweat there yeah Yeah, yeah. It took every ounce of energy I had in me not to reach across the mic and slap the shit out of him. Okay, all right. Because Matt knew better. I'd known Matt at that point almost damn near 20 years. I remember when his first daughter was born. And we had been in the political vineyard for a long time.

His wonderful wife, Mercedes, and to watch the two of them just transform into this distorted sort of ugly version of political characters has been very heartbreaking in many respects. I mean, Charlie, I know you know people that you look at right now and go, what the hell happened, right? Oh, yeah. So, that was the moment for me. And that was actually the beginning of this ugly transformation inside CPAC. The rot started to grow inside the party. They felt comfortable. I dealt with that crap when I was chairman. I had people like, you were only elected because Barack Obama was, they wanted to stand a Black man up again. Well, first off, chairman of the RNC is not equivalent to being president of the United

States. So there's no equivalency there. Electing me had nothing to do, was no counterweight to Barack Obama, for God's sake. Secondly, these folks knew me. I'd been on the committee. I served on the executive committee when I was state chairman of Maryland. I'm the only chairman who was a county chairman, state chairman, national chairman, and an elected official. So I kind of know the game and I know the party. And to say that the five states, they came forward, not once, but twice.

In 2006, five states went to the White House, went to President Bush and said, we like Michael Steele when there was a vacancy. I think it was Ed Gillespie who stepped down. They had wanted to have the president appoint me as chairman. Karl Rove nixed that in the butt because he and I butted heads over Katrina during the 2006 campaign. And so he killed that, and that's how we got the senator from Florida as our national chairman. Who was that? I'm trying to remember.

Mel Martinez. Oh, man. Okay. And so it just, I couldn't take it to sit there and have someone say that, you know, you were elected because you were a Black man and it was a mistake. After I had done something that no other chairman had done in almost 100 years, and that is actually win more elections than they knew what to do with. I was like, I'm not going to sit here and let this bitch

go after me and explain it away. And so I put his feet to the fire on it. And then he had the nerve to look at me and say, I should show some grace. Yeah, you should show some grace. Let me tell you what to do with that grace. Let me tell you what to do with that grace. So right now, Matt, this is what I have to say to you, Matt, given that you like to pummel young men while they're driving their car, I still don't even know what the hell that is. I don't know how you do that. But have some grace, Matt.

Have some grace. Yeah, have some grace. Do something about it. I've used the word oleaginous to describe him because he is sort of a greasy guy, kind of this, like, sort of like tofu. He takes on the coloration of everything around him. But his transformation into a complete Trumpist suck-up is really extraordinary. And you mentioned, you know, that you've known him for some time. I actually was standing in a hallway at CPAC back in 2016, right after he and the other executives

of CPAC told Donald Trump, no, they weren't going to give in to his demands and everything. And Trump decided he was going to boycott CPAC because back then it wasn't a safe space. And at that moment, you know, Matt Schlapp was willing to basically say to Donald Trump, fuck off. And now he is the ultimate just suck up. Right. And he's dealing with this Nessie scandal, which he's in complete denial about it. But it also exposes what a complete phony he is. You know, what a hypocrite is not a strong enough word to describe him. It's not a strong enough word. And the thing about this narrative is that this young man,

married man, volunteering, trying to break into politics. Talking about the guy who was pummeled and groped and grabbed. Yes, yes. Who has made the allegation, has been able to back it up with contemporaneous evidence. So it's not like, oh, he's just now saying this happened and there's no way to connect that moment. He has contemporaneous videos where he felt so bad he just wanted to express it out. He told his friends, he told his wife when all of this happened. So I don't know how all of this plays out. He said he wasn't going to say anything or come forward unless Matt had denied it. His lawyers have denied it. And so now they're like, OK, game on. So look for more to come. But here's the thing for me. I'm just spitballing here. That's not the first time at 50 some years old that you decide, oh, you know what? I've always wanted to pummel a guy.

Let me see what that's like. No, I think that that's a pretty safe bet. I'm waiting for other shoes to come out of the closet and say, yeah, when we were in Oregon, when we were in Florida, when I was in New York, you know, at CPAC event, this happened to me too. You're waiting for other shoes to drop, the next shoe to drop out of the closet. Yeah. I actually once rode in the back of a car with a match lap. Nothing happened. And I'm trying not to take it personally now. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I think you need to share that with your therapist and work through it. On a more serious level, I was listening to this and, you know,

flashing back to this comment when they were playing the race card against you and there, you know, the guy calls you and he's apologetic and match slap is trying, you know, find some way to gloss it over. What's interesting is that from then to now, just to watch the trajectory, how the kind of normalization of racist rhetoric has just proceeded apace at CPAC. I mean, it's like they don't even pretend anymore. You know what I'm getting at? I listened to a podcast I had with Matt Lewis back from 2019, which is really not that long ago. And this was right at the moment when Republicans were going to have to decide what they were going to do with Steve King, the congressman from Iowa who had said things about white supremacy. And at that time, Republicans

still actually cared about not sounding that particular way. They cared about having a little bit of ideological hygiene and moral backbone, and they actually did strip Steve King. Well, think about where the Republican Party has gone from that moment to the moment where Kevin McCarthy is taking selfies with Marjorie Taylor Greene. It's like in recent memory, they actually cared about this or at least went through the motions of caring about it. Now it's like, screw it. This is who we are. We're not apologizing to anybody. Right? I mean, and this has happened within the last four or five years, it feels like. Yeah, that particular feature of this has emerged over the last four or five years. But that underlying narrative has been an internal battle for the party going back to the late 50s. There has grown up inside the party this element that lurched away from the party's civil rights origin story, its human rights origin story, its individual rights origin story, to embrace this sort of

view of itself and America that manifests in the John Birch Society trying to take root inside the GOP. Nixon's Southern strategy in the 68 campaign to try to open up the South, which was controlled by Democrats so that Republicans could win presidential elections. These things all began to metastasize the moral majority, sort of bringing in this religious element into a party that its libertarian roots said, look, you do you, boo. We're not going to get into what happens in your bedroom, in your home. We just want to make sure the government isn't there. Now to saying that not only is the government there, the government is going to tell you how to make up your bed and who you should be in bed with. That arc has been an evolving arc over some time.

What Donald Trump did, among so many other things, was he created permission streams. He would go to Israel and say, yeah, if it were me, I'd just smack the hell out of them. So that led to people responding with violence. He's standing there making fun of a disabled reporter. That allowed people to begin to say publicly what they thought about other people. So you begin to see this wormhole open up and suck more and more of the party into it. And never apologize. And never apologize.

And never apologize. Never. This is really an interesting question because you were an African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee, so you lived with this. I've always described some of these attitudes about race as a recessive gene on the right in the Republican Party. They've always been there. There's no denying it. Yes. And yet it seemed for a while as if they were going to once again manage to push those off into the corner. So just talk to me about the dynamic of a Republican Party or a right wing and how it's dealing with race. I mean, you've always known that there were people like this and they played a significant role, but they were never in charge. They were always sort of on the fringes. Now they've moved from the fringes into the mainstream. So you had to deal with this in

politics, in Maryland, as lieutenant governor, as a Senate candidate, as chairman of the Republican National Committee. So what was the balance like back then? It's hard in a lot of respects. It is difficult because, I mean, particularly for someone like me who did not grow up in the party, I didn't come through this system. I was raised in Washington, D.C. My political origin story, while it was Republican, it was surrounded by a little bit differently. I saw and was exposed to that other side of the party before I actually became really involved in the party, which is an interesting way to look at it, because, you know, you would have these instances where you're talking to people and they're telling you their encounter with certain kinds of Republicans who, you know, would say certain things a certain way or, you know, behave a certain way. And it wasn't until I actually got involved and began to experience it

firsthand that I saw this competition, this sort of internal battle inside the party. And it's an interesting collection, Charlie. There are those who don't know what to do with African-Americans or gays or Hispanics or whatever group that ain't white. They just don't know what to do with them. They don't know how to talk to them. They don't know what they're interested in. It's kind of always sort of the stumbling, bumbling kind of comments that are made. So, for example, the day I get election, a member says to me, oh, it's so exciting to have you as our chairman. Now African-Americans will become Republicans. That's where I work. All right. Yeah. Because it says Pied Piper on my card. Right. And so there is that group. Then you have those who are much more cynical about it, who see it as a means to an end. All right. So if we can show just a little bit of, you know, connection to Black folks, that'd be enough to dampen the noise that we don't

care, even though we may not care. Then you have those who are forthright and really believe in expanding the party and growing the party. And so you have this space in which all of these interests are in competition. The commanding difference, my friend, is the leadership of the party that embraces one of those approaches. And unfortunately, we have leadership now that embraces the combination of the cynical use of race to the outright, I feel good about expressing my racism. The final piece is there's always this pressure and a lack of understanding that I come into this not as a Republican, but as a Black man. So I bring my Blackness and what

all that means into this, because it's a part of who I am. I wake up in the morning. I'm Black before I'm Republican. I'm Black before I'm Catholic. Right. Because when I walk out that door, no one, they may not know I'm Catholic. They may not know I'm a Republican. They may not know I'm gay or straight, but they damn sure know I'm Black. And whatever they feel about Black people, that is something I got to deal with before I even get to say hello. That feature of this relationship is rarely understood and very difficult to approach because people have this sense that, well, you're a Republican, you're part of our tribe, then we need you to go out and sound and act and be like us.

I'm like, well, no, that's not how this works. I will bring our views into my community and express it in a way in which my community can understand it and embrace it. But I'm not going to come here and sound like a white man in a room full of Black people. There's a name for that, and I'm not that, right? It was hard being a Black Republican in that era just a few years ago. Hasn't it become exponentially more difficult to be a Black Republican right now in the party of Donald Trump and the party of Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Greene? I would think so. Yeah, I would think so. But there are those, you know,

who embrace it. Diamond and Silk. God rest her sister past. I think it was Diamond. There are some who embrace it and use it because, hey, I can amass two things. I amass money and I am amass influence because they ain't got no power. Candace Owens, y'all think you got power. No, you ain't got no power. The only thing you got is the grift and influence. That's it. And that influence is used at the discretion of those who will push you out there and refer to your tweet or take the snapshot of you and, you know, Charlie Kirk together or whatever. Well, so so that Charlie Kirk can say some of my best friends are. Of course. Right. of course. That's true, but also leadership does matter, doesn't it? This is an unanswerable question, but if the leadership of the party made it clear that certain attitudes and behaviors were unacceptable, that would have an effect on the followers.

We have examples of that of Bob Dole at his national convention for the presidency in which he was very, very clear about the issue of race and racism. John McCain, in his run for the presidency, was declaratively clear about how he would run a campaign against Barack Obama and pushing back on those within our party who wanted to go down the road of birtherism and all of that. George Bush, after 9-11 and any number of times, whether it was the work he was doing to lift up the African continent again or to safeguard the rights of our Muslim brothers and sisters, made very clear. So leadership, Charlie, makes a very, very clear difference. When the leader of your party, the titular head of your party says, no, that's not who we are. We're not doing that. And pushes back and stamps it down. The rank and file will follow that. They will appreciate that. And in fact, they in turn will rise up and help push that down

in those corners where it could potentially rear its ugly head. But when that leadership turns a blind eye and says, hey, you know, they're good racists too. You know, they're fine racist as well. Then that changes the way people look at what's happening. Okay, this is a good segue to talk about the RNC chair race. I really want to get your views on this. There was a story a couple of days ago in Politico, Harmeet Dhillon, she's running against Ronna Romney McDaniel. You know, Harmeet Dhillon is very, very, very Trumpy, but she's also Sikh. And there's a whispering campaign among RNC members about Dhillon's Sikh faith. People are trying to raise all of this. In fact, there was apparently some supporter of MyPillowGuy,

Mike Lindell, who wants to be RNC chairman. One of the supporters sent out an email saying she is an Indian Sikh by birth and heritage, not of Judeo-Christian worldview. One of the supporters sent out an email saying she is an Indian Sikh by birth and heritage, not of Judeo-Christian worldview. None of these core character positions aligns with the Republican Party platform, planks, or conservatism in general. Politico reached out to Mike Lindell, pillow guy, about that, and he just said that Politico should shove it. But let's talk about this. Well, Mike Lindell should shove it. The fact that he's given countenance inside the Republican Party tells you exactly what state the Republican Party is. The fact that he can speak with some degree of credibility running for RNC chairman tells you

all you need to know about the state of this party and its leadership. It is woefully, woefully weak and incapable of winning the hearts and minds of the American people as long as it stays in that space. With respect to Harmony Dandler, God bless her. If she can make the case to the 168 members to run, run. Her faith has nothing to do with that. I don't remember in our platform any declaration saying that we are here for and forever a Christian party. I don't remember that. We're not a white Christian nationalist party, but that's what they want to make. Isn't Ronna McDaniel a Mormon? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everyone kind of looks over the fact that she's a Mormon. But hey, what? One of the first things I wrote for The Bulwark was a piece about something that was happening in Texas. Do you remember when you had a Republican county organization in Texas that had to have a vote on expelling one of its leaders solely because he was Muslim? So this is not isolated. Okay, so let me ask you this. So what's going on here with Ronald McDaniel? You know, she's facing, looks like a grassroots rebellion, has stuck with the leadership that has lost in all of those cycles, that it has not transitioned away from. Now, look, I can say that if Rana

had been replaced in 2018 or 2020 by someone, the outcome would have been no different. Because at the root of this is not just how you organize the party, it is what you collectively are saying to voters and what those narratives are. So you're not going to overcome a Supreme Court decision that takes away the right of women to make health decisions for themselves. You're not going to overcome a decision by the court to strip voting rights of citizens in the Voting Rights Act. So you've got to be able to deal with that as well as what your candidates are putting out there on the ground. So when you have a candidate that stands up and says, elect me and I'm going to make sure that Donald Trump never loses another election again,

voters are like, you know what? Pass. In one sense, there's very little that Ronna could do because at that point she had become so beholden and giving over her power and control to others. The White House, Trump forces inside the party. I was not about to have that happen. And I butted heads with the Senate leadership, with McConnell on a number of occasions, with John Boehner on a number of occasions. Because I'm like, I'm your political arm. And I'm the guy who's got to go out here and day in and day out and explain the crazy that's coming off the hill. And if it's too crazy, I'm not doing that. In fact, I remember Charlie getting pushed back when I said that I wanted to go on the offense

on health care, that I wanted to go after Obamacare. I got shot down. And I remember in this one pretty heated meeting, basically telling the leadership, y'all go ahead and think I'm not going to do this if you want to. And that's when I went out and launched the Fire Pelosi tour. I was like, no, I'm going to do this because I know what's going on on the ground. And when you lose touch with that, it makes the job of being chairman that much harder. And I think that's part of her plight. In the end, I think Ronna may survive this. I have not heard any of the voters that she has secured peeling off of her. She's apparently picked up the endorsement of 100 of the 168 members. There's not been any

stories that I've seen that says she's lost any or all of that or some of that. So I suspect she will be okay. But you're beginning to see just how much the rot inside the party has affected every aspect of this party. And the self-neutering that you're seeing in the RNC is paralleled by what Kevin McCarthy did to himself. Okay, I know we don't have much time left, and I promised I was going to get back to this. So Politico describes this Biden document

story as a belated Christmas gift to the Republicans. I'm afraid that sounds right. So I guess the question is, how damaging is this to Joe Biden? On a scale of one to 10, this is nuclear winter one. It's a minor scratch that he'll just shake off. So, what do you think? How bad is it? Right now, I think it's a 4. There are questions, legitimate questions that the press and the people have about timing process. How did you discover? Okay, so you discovered this on November 2nd or so before the election. Why weren't we told? Then there was another discovery in December. Why weren't we told?

And then the discovery a couple of days ago, you tell us about that one. But then at that point, the cat's out of the bag. So they've got to explain that timeline. press secretary yesterday and other officials in the White House on the president's team sort of talking about this is they have been sort of in this kind of caught between the world of, hey, this is what we know and this is what we did. And it is the what we did portion that the Justice Department doesn't want them to get out there and talk about, which is why the timing is off. You know, once they were notified, they kind of took it over and the administration wants to have clean hands when it comes to not trying to influence the Justice Department.

So I think they're kind of caught in that space. They've got to clarify that as much as possible. I think it's a four. Like I said, I think they're running parallel with the story. They're not running behind the story at this point, which is good, but they could very easily fall behind on this story, in which case this becomes a six. And if there are any things that sort of pop up that's leaked out by the special counsel, this could become an eight real fast. Yeah, I would go along with this. I would say that in terms of substance, it's probably a three or a four, but in terms of politics and optics, it is a seven, and that could be heading north. Michael Steele, thank you so much for coming on

the podcast on Friday the 13th. We really appreciate it. My lucky day to be with you, Charlie. All right, and thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday and we will do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced

by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.