The Bulwark Podcast - Olivia Nuzzi: Has Trump Become Norma Desmond?

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Trump rarely leaves his 'weird' smelling, moldy mansion, he seems bored and tired, and D-List MAGA are his main loyalists now. Plus, Olivia and Charlie go all in on the parallels to the film, Sunset Boulevard. Olivia Nuzzi joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. This is probably one of the most talked about articles written about Donald Trump in the last year. That's saying a lot because the zone has been absolutely flooded. But Olivia Newtsey's piece in New York Magazine, the final campaign, has just, I think it's hit a nerve because if you have not seen it, the magazine's cover photo of her article features Trump sitting alone at Mar-a-Lago. It And he does appear to be this lonely figure. The headline is the final campaign. Like, is it even a real campaign? What's really going on? So, by the way, thanks for coming back on the podcast, Olivia.

Of course. Thank you for having me. And happy birthday again. Thanks. I mentioned it. Your birthday is easy to remember because it's January 6th, which means that you've had kind of a notable series of birthdays then, haven't you? I guess I have, yeah. Maybe I should move it. No, no, no, no, no. You kind of know something big is going to happen on your birthday.

Well, I want to talk about this article and walk through where Donald Trump is, what his state of mind is, what you saw. But I have to tell you, the image that was just chef's kiss was the fact that he's obsessed with the movie Sunset Boulevard, starring Gloria Swanson as the washed up, lonely, silent picture star, Norman Desmond, who's sidelined by the talkies and driven to madness in complete denial over her fated celebrity. And this is one of the great scenes in American cinematic history. You see, this is my life.

It always will be. There's nothing else. Just us. And the cameras. And those wonderful people out. And the cameras. And those wonderful people out there in the dark. Alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.

Oh my. Oh my. So you can't see that and read your article and not think, Donald Trump is not Fat Elvis, he's Norman Desmond. Even the architecture of Mar-a-Lago, or the architecture of Palm Beach, but it's this mansion from a similar era of Norman Desmond's decaying mansion in Hollywood, you know, on the opposite coast. And the more that I realized that and read about his, I mean, he's mentioned Sunset Boulevard a few times publicly in sort of one-off statements decrying, you know, the state

of the movie business or whatever. And then I realized that it kind of kept coming up. Like Stephanie Grisham, one of his press secretaries, wrote in her memoir from the White House years about how he made her watch it at Camp David. And he was very, very excited to be, she had never seen it before. And he was very excited that he got to be the one to show it to her. And she wrote about how when he watched a movie, it was the only time that she ever saw him just sit completely still, that he was not texting or tweeting or giving someone orders. He was just sitting there the whole time watching.

And I thought that was so magnificent. And I just was thinking, this is a guy who wanted to be in show business and told Marie Brenner for New York Magazine in 1980 that when he decided to go into the family business real estate, instead he realized, well, I'll just turn real estate into show business. I'm paraphrasing, but the quote was something to the effect of real estate has to be show business. And the more that I was thinking about it, the just, the parallels are kind of undeniable. And I watched that film a lot when I was trying to write this piece to the point where I think

my fiance started to like go insane. Our living room is just Norma Desmond all the time for like several days as I was trying to complete this draft. But it's pretty incredible. And I don't think, Grisham actually wrote this in her book, but she said something to the effect of, I don't think that he realized the parallels or how much he resembled Norman Desmond. Really? Yeah. Okay. So he showed this to Tim O'Brien, who wrote the book, Trump Nation. And in that scene where

Norman Desmond's crying, have they forgotten what a star looks like? I'll show them. I'll be up there again. So help me. And Trump leans over to O'Brien and whispers, this is an incredible scene or what? Just incredible. It's funny. He said something to me in our interview where the reason I got to thinking about Norman Desmond, obviously I'm not the first person by any stretch to compare them. I think Catherine Miller in the New York Times a few weeks prior to my article made a comparison herself for a very good piece about how you can both be totally irrelevant and fading and very influential at the same time, which is the kind of a theme I kept returning to. But he was talking to me and I mentioned that he seemed disengaged and he was sort of isolated and alone and he wasn't very relevant anymore.

And I was sort of tweaking him on purpose, needling him a bit in the conversation. And he said, well, I think I've always been relevant. I've been relevant from a very young age, actually. I think I've been in the mix. And I thought that was such a funny quote. And I kept, initially, I was opening the piece with that quote, because it was my favorite thing that he said during our interview. And then I realized, oh, wait a second, Norma Desmond said this. And when I went back and then started looking into it, I realized that he actually had pointed to that scene specifically when he was watching it with Tim O'Brien, which I just thought was amazing. That it seems to be such a key to

understanding Donald Trump, that his great fear besides losing is to be irrelevant. And he's haunted by the thought that he might be ignored. I think so. I don't think that this is a conscious thing, right? Like this is my hunch. I'm not his shrink. He definitely does not have a shrink. But I think that this is something that's like purely instinct for him. I don't think that he has much of an interior life. And I always come back to this memory I have of, I was at the Daily Beast during the 2016 election. And Michael Daly, a colleague of mine there, who's this legendary New York tabloid writer, who used to work for New York Magazine, he came back from jury duty. And he said, you'll never believe who was there. And he was serving with Trump, who was running for president. And he said, he just sat there. And when we had to, you know, be quiet and just sit,

he said, he kind of just shut off and slumped over. I'll never forget this. He said, he's like a bag of cement. There's no light on inside. And I've never really forgotten that because it's, he does not seem to have an interior life. And I've never really forgotten that because he does not seem to have an interior life. So I'm still obsessed with the Norman Desmond thing here. So you have this line, a washed up star locked away in a mansion from the 1920s,

afraid of the world outside, afraid it will remind him that time has passed. So did you ever ask Trump directly if he saw himself in Norman Desmond? Did you ask about that? You know, I didn't. I didn't occur to me that I'd be making this comparison until after. Okay. But I did ask then the campaign if they could ask him when... He did not want to do follow-up interviews. He didn't want to sit for a new portrait with us. And I asked them. The interview was quite contentious. And I think once they realized that it was quite contentious, they just thought, well, fuck it, we're not going to cooperate anymore after this with her. But in our fact checking process, I asked a campaign if they could ask him when the last time he watched the movie was. And they were totally perplexed by that question. They were like, we don't know, What? What does this mean? And never did get an answer from me on that. So that's interesting. You said the interview was contentious and didn't want to do it again. Okay, so you're not exactly an obscure figure or a shy wallflower. What did they think?

He's not exactly a reader, Charlie. What was he expecting? Did he just expect that he's got this magnetic charm that he would somehow seduce you with his brilliance or something? What was he expecting this to be like? Why did he sit down for this interview with you? I'm always fascinated by this. I mean, this is not my first interview with him, right? I know. I know. I've interviewed him a lot.

I think he meets a lot of people and he talks to a lot of people. And he remembers some things and he doesn't remember other things. And I mean, same, I'm not even, that's not a knock on his age or anything. You know, how many times I meet, I see someone at like a party or something and I have no recollection of having talked to them for half an hour at a different party. I think it's probably like that on steroids for him. So I think part of it is that he just kind of remembers selectively. Like every time I talk to him, he brings up an interview that we had, you know, I think five years ago at this point, which is, we've had like four interviews subsequently. You know, I've interviewed him before that. And he just doesn't, you know, he remembers the one that like he remembers and

that's it. So I think part of it is he's just not, he's not exactly sitting around reading long form journalism or reading anything. You caught him at a very interesting moment in his career. He's announced he's running for president of the United States again. He announced with great fanfare and then pretty much nothing happened. I mean, he didn't clear the field. Was it great fanfare? In his mind, he thought it was fanfare. And then, but then it was a damn squib. And as you point out, he doesn't really go anywhere, right? I mean, he stays in Mar-a-Lago. Well, honestly, I was wondering if there was some legal reason why he was staying there. Because once I realized, oh, he has not set foot outside of Florida in weeks and weeks, I think perhaps since the midterm, since his last midterm rally in Ohio. And once I realized that, and I started

asking the campaign, you know, where exactly has he been? And they send me this list of 11 events that he's allegedly done. But like five of them were videos. So he was not actually at these events. Like four of them were at Mar-a-Lago. Like they were all in Florida. And I just was like, is he on house arrest unbeknownst to me or something? I was very confused by it and thought perhaps there was some explanation. You know, he doesn't really have cause to be traveling very much. And there is not really a campaign to speak of at this point. And he's very defensive about this.

You know, he told you, I'm down in Miami. I go to Miami all the time. And you wrote, sure, he goes to Miami where he meets regularly with an impressive ideological diverse range of policy wonks, diplomats, and political theorists for conversations about the global economy and military conflicts and constitutional law. Just kidding. Because basically he just goes, plays golf, comes back, and fucks off. He's retreated to the golf course in Mar-a-Lago. Yeah. I mean, I kind of thought, well, I was very confused because first he said, well,

I don't even stay at Mar-a-Lago. And I, you know, the way he said it, I don't stay there. It sounded like I don't sleep there. Like I stay somewhere else. So I was like, what do you mean you don't stay there? Like, does he have like an apartment in Surfside or something that I don't know about? And when I pressed further about it and I talked to the campaign some more, they were like, ah, you know, I think what he means by Miami is actually Doral, which is his golf course down there. But yeah, I mean, he really doesn't leave.

And granted, Mar-a-Lago, it's an enormous property. Not that he travels the distance of the property. It seems most days he just goes to his office, which is not that far from the residence. And I don't think he's spending his time at the beach or, you know, on a boat or something. But it's a beautiful place. If I lived there, I probably wouldn't leave very much either. I'd barely leave my apartment when I don't have to now. But I'm not running for president.

Well, that's right. And, you know, it's a big country. So why is he running again? I mean, you know, you remind us that back in 2016, his original plan was just do well enough in the polls to say he could have won. And then he'd go back to The Apprentice, right? And then NBC canceled his contract and all of that stuff after the whole golden escalator race of speech. But what is this new campaign about? I mean, you talk to so many people who are basically saying, you know, this is the C-list, D-list people he's surrounding. It's very, very low energy.

Is it just a revenge tour? Is it because he has to be in the spotlight? It's not much of a tour. It's more like a revenge residency. A revenge residency. Something like that. I mean, you quoted one ex-Trump loyalist who says it seems like a joke. So now he's got a reasonably plausible comeback. And he said they said the same thing about me in 2016 and I proved them wrong.

And he could again, right? I mean, I totally think he could. I mean, I I'm always wrong. I should preface this by saying I thought that he was not going to actually announce this time. I mean, up until I was physically at Mar-a-Lago and I was standing there watching him come out on stage. And I still, if you had like put a gun to my head, which honestly someone might there, and asked me whether or not he was going to say, I'm running for president, I would have said, eh, I still don't think so. Because it just didn't feel real. Besides there not being any real logical reason to do it, besides just wanting

to generate more attention, It just didn't feel real and it still doesn't feel real and it's barely real. That's probably why it doesn't feel very real. But I mean, his explanation is that he wanted to put his cards on the table and he's very defensive, obviously, about the idea that he's trying to clear the field or that he's trying to intimidate someone like Ron DeSantis. The major explanations from the people around him and people who know him as well as you could know him are that he's just trying to remain relevant and generate attention or that this is part of a legal strategy.

And his lawyers have advised him that if he is cocooned inside of a presidential campaign, then that might help insulate him from a threat of prosecution. And he's very defensive about all of these things, but he's defensive about everything. So it's hard to really assign value to his specific defensive reactions. So let's go back to that announcement, which I, you know, use the word fanfare. And obviously it was an underwhelming affair. And you were there. And I love the stuff, you know, people in the audience checked their watches, they tried to leave the Secret Service agents yawn. You know, it was really a cringeworthy

moment. And then, well, you had this one famous paragraph, and you know the famous paragraph I'm going to read, right? I don't, I don't. The air was heavy with oleander and snipped greenery and sea mist colliding with mold and wood polish and hotel soap and the metallic vapor of Diet Coke and the alcoholic ferment of generations of cougars in Chanel No. 5. You know, that paragraph, I'm surprised that that made it through. It was really a tribute to Marie Brenner, who I mentioned earlier. She had these twin profiles of Trump, one in 1980 for New York Magazine, which is one of like the first major long form pieces about him. economic and personal calamity. And he's getting a divorce from Ivana Trump and he's in the red and everyone's counting him out. And he's cocooned in Trump Tower, like eating French fries. And there's obviously, I felt as someone who started covering him eight years ago, and I've covered him and I've interviewed him and the people around him during that whole stretch of time, I related a lot to Marie going back and kind of thinking through her decade of experiences in his orbit. And so I was using that as a guide.

And she had this description of Mar-a-Lago, which really does smell weird, as smelling like something about mold and oleander and something else. And so it was really a tribute to Marie for people who are magazine nerds like myself. But it does smell weird there. It's an old place on the beach, and so it's very hot and humid. And there are a lot of people coming in and out of there. So I guess that's why it smells a little weird. But it was a very weird night. It's like, what's a weird night by Trump's standards, right?

I've been to a lot of Trump rallies. I've been to a lot of weird events in my eight years covering him. And it just, it felt almost like being at someone else's family's function or something. It was like this invite-only thing where there wasn't a ton of traditional mainstream press there. There really isn't any more in general compared to like 2016 Trump rallies, let's say. And I don't know, it's just got this very strange, sad, hollow quality to it. And he seems so bored. I mean, I talked to him about this and obviously he was like, I'm not bored, but he really just seems so checked out. And I went back and I was watching the 2015 announcement speech a lot. And obviously, please, no one yell at me for saying

this. It's not like it was a good speech by any traditional standard. However, he was articulating a very, very clear worldview and he was articulating it well. He wasn't articulating it intelligently. With energy. It wasn't intelligent or anything, but it was a coherent worldview. It was weird and scatterbrained and deeply offensive to most factions of the population in some way or another. But it was a clear worldview. And it was like the first album problem, maybe. You prepare your whole life for the first one. And the second one, it's like, oh, shit, what now? I'm starting over. But it was, I am an insider. And therefore, I am the only one who knows how it works on the inside and I'm the

only one who can help fix it. Every cop needs a criminal. That was basically what the gist of it was. And it worked. And when you go back and you watch those 2015 primary debates, I mean, obviously it's easy to say this in retrospect. I certainly wasn't saying at the time, and neither were most people, but there's no one else on that stage. You know, the idea that like a fucking Jeb Bush, God bless him, or a Rand Paul or a Chris Christie was going to be able to take him out. When you watch them, they don't even exist on that stage. They're so diminished, yeah. But you just can't even like, you cannot focus on anyone else but him. He has this, you know, he's like this radioactive waste human form just drawing you to him. And it's incredible to watch it now because it's like, wow, we were all really in denial,

those of us who were refusing to admit what this was. So I do think he could pull it off again, sure. I mean, but he could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Well, he's not going to get hit by a bus. He doesn't go anywhere. But if he started going somewhere tomorrow, he could get hit by a bus. Anything could happen.

So the contrast that I took away from your article was that this Trump is not just bored, but tired and old. I mean, was that your impression? Totally. Because he just feels it, and it feels very low energy. And no one would have ever said low energy about Trump five years ago. No. Your portrayal is a guy who's isolated,

and that seems to explain a lot of what's happening right now. I mean, he needs an enemy. He needs to be focused on an enemy. And he was not—one thing, I think I forgot to put this in the piece because I just, you know, was struggling to finish this piece for a long time. But I meant to include this, which is that some of his advisers kept talking to me about the fact that we're really trying to get him focused on Joe Biden. We're trying to get him focused on Joe Biden. And I kept laughing and thinking and saying, well, that was the problem. You couldn't get him focused on Joe Biden last time. And in fact, you could not get anyone focused on Joe Biden last time. And the fact that he doesn't give a shit about Joe Biden, it seems like it's a huge impediment right now, right? Because he wants to talk about basically anything else. He would rather talk about the media.

He would rather talk about layoffs in the media. And he'd rather talk about real housewives probably than talk about Joe Biden. Mitch McConnell would get him going. Coco Chow. Yeah, a little bit. I mean, a little bit, but he's just not animated by the people who are his actual enemies right now. And I think that that's been a problem. And they're trying to focus instead on Hunter Biden. And it turns out that that was not a very smart strategy he's always best when he has his like backup against the wall but i guess when the walls are closing in and everyone is against you because you have made everyone your enemy maybe it's a bit harder to be you know fighting i don't know he seems very

bored and very tired and he does seem old like suddenly suddenly old and i used to think i don't know i use he's old right but i used to think like i think i wrote this at one point when i ended the story about joe biden but like you know biden seems very old and he's seemed very old for the last several years and i've been covering him a bit but trump never seemed old. He just seemed crazy. And now Trump seems old. He just seems like checked out and old. And if you replaced politics with like betting on horses or something, he would probably maintain like the same level of interest. Well, you have some great quotes. You have this unnamed advisor who said, in this business, you can have it and have it so hot and it can go overnight and it's gone and you can't get it back.

I think we're just seeing it's gone. The magic is gone. And then you look around, you know, who's showed up at his announcement, you know, when Seb Gorka and Rahim Kassam and Kash Patel and Devin Nunes are your stars, that's the D-list. It was D-list MAGA. When Brickman, the freak Brickman, what is he? He wears suits that are in shape of bricks for the walls, right? Yes. It's very complicated. Yeah. When Brickman is in the VIP seating, we've got a problem. No, in some ways, in fairness. In fairness, in 2016, it was a total island of misfit toys. You need a brick man.

Just like an intern and Roger Stone and Sam Nunberg at Hope Hicks. There was nobody on that campaign, nobody with traditional experience. It's not as if he had, you know, longtime veteran people working for him. And in this case, the campaign, to the extent that it's being run at all, is being run by Susie Wiles, who has a legitimate resume and has worked for some real people going back to, you know, Reagan, and I think she worked on for Dan Quayle and Jack Kemp, but like, it is pretty remarkable, at least for now, the extent to which a lot of the kind of MAGA regulars, the people who you have seen defending him on television for the last,

you know, five, six, seven years, all those people are kind of gone. And it's really like, there's some kind of creepy Disney, like animatronic, I can't say that word,

animatronic character quality to the people who are left. Like, it's very strange. There's a lot that's very Vegas about it. It's kind of weird that it's not in Vegas. So what about the family? That was another one of the sub-themes. I mean, as you point out, only three days before the announcement, Mar-a-Lago's crawling with Trumps.

But at the announcement, it was just Eric and Lara, Jared, but not Ivanka, and Kimberly Guilfoyle. So Don Jr. was off somewhere. Ivanka issues a statement that night that she's kind of out of politics. Melania was missing her distinct polish and looked very unhappy. Melania always looks unhappy. I'm sorry. But I mean, so what's going on there? Because it's a very, very small world, a very small circle. And it seems to be shrinking even within that very tiny family. It's strange. I mean, in 2015, you'll recall Ivanka Trump was not only there, but she was the opening act for her father.

She gave a speech in the atrium of Trump Tower about my father, as she calls him, and welcomed him to the stage. And her and Melania were dressed up in these cocktail dresses in the middle of the day. And they looked very happy to be there. And the whole family was there standing by his side. And I kind of, when I realized that Tiffany Trump's wedding was the weekend before the announcement, the reason why I kind of booked a flight down there, I think, was because I thought, well, they are all there. It probably is going to happen. Because that makes sense that, you know, all the Trumps are in one place. He's going to do the announcement on Tuesday. This wedding's on Saturday. Then, you know, half of them were gone. It kind of paints the portrait of him as being very, very lonely. And I was talking

to, I can't remember if this made it into the piece, very, very lonely. And I was talking to, I can't remember if this made it into the piece, but one of the former advisors I was talking to told me that their understanding was that he did not want to stand on stage with half of the family. And so he made the decision to stand on stage alone. And then he only exited and entered the room with Melania by his side. But otherwise, he was alone. And he is still alone. Yeah, he'd be better off if he spent more time alone. How did the Kanye West, Nick Fuentes dinner come? I mean, here's a guy that doesn't go anywhere,

and yet comes down from the residence to have dinner with a neo-Nazi and a guy who was probably the most toxic anti-Semite in the country. I mean, how did that happen? I mean, in Trump's telling, it happened because Kanye called him and was in need of some advice, and he's just too generous and decided to give it to him. And he had no idea. He was conflating his views on Israel with him being just outright anti-Semitic and praising Hitler. But he's very defensive about it, obviously. And he said

something to the effect of, I'm not familiar with Kanye's work, which I thought was a really hilarious and bizarre defense of himself in that context. He claimed to have never heard of Nick Fuentes before, which in fairness, that might be the case. But I brought this up to him. I said, well, even if that's true, isn't it the job of your staff, any staff surrounding a former president is there to in some way gatekeep and prevent you from meeting with people like this, preventing you from having these optics disasters. wouldn't you have not met with them? And him and Wiles, it was Susie Wiles who was on the call, were kind of like shouting over each other at me and saying, no, you know, everyone's great and they have a great team around them. But it just seems like he's got these idiots around him or no one around him at all. And there is really no, I mean, look at Marjorie Taylor Greene

on her iPhone with DT on the call passing the phone over, right? People have a direct line to him now that every chief of staff in that White House tried their hardest to prevent that from being the case, right? I mean, everyone was trying to kind of create a barrier between all of the crazy people trying to get in touch with Trump and Trump. And all those people who might serve as that barrier are now gone. I mean, Jared and Ivanka in the White House, say what you will about them, seem to be pretty devoted to keeping people out of the Oval Office who were trying to influence Donald Trump for, you know, their crazy ends. And there's no one who seems to give much of a fuck about that anymore, who's willing to be around him anymore. I mean, he's got these young assistants, people who don't really know anything,

who don't have political experience around him, and they're just facilitating what he wants. Well, this is a great segue to this week because you had this, something of a paradox where Donald Trump announced that he was ready for his close-up and now endorsing Kevin McCarthy as the leader of the Republican Party. And at least for the first few days, no one switched the vote. He did not flip a single vote. And people like Lauren Boebert actually called him out on the floor, pushed back on him. Matt Gaetz said it was sad and said he was never very good at HR. And then Gaetz, in order to suck up a little bit,

nominates him, votes for him on the floor. And Donald J. Trump, on the second anniversary of January 6th, right around there, gets one vote. One vote. And people laugh. Now, in the end, he was making the calls. And that scene that you're describing where Marjorie Taylor Greene's holding up the phone from Donald Trump, she's trying to show it to the congressman from Montana. And he brushes her away. He doesn trying to show it to the congressman from Montana. And he brushes

her away like he doesn't want to talk to her. But in the end, you know, McCarthy's elected. And one of the first things that Kevin McCarthy says is, I want to thank President Donald Trump, you know, that we should not question his influence. So what do you make of that? Because, of course, Trump now is obsessively doing a victory lap saying, see, it was me. I did it. I am still relevant. They did not ignore me. I think it's exactly what it looks like. It's exactly like the campaign has been this entire time so far. I was thinking back to the 2015 primary again, and a lot of Trump's pitch was, okay, these guys in the Republican establishment don't like me. Fuck them. I don't like them either. And they don't like you, the American people, and they don't work for you.

And so we're going to screw with them and make the party better reflect my base. And I think there's a chance that it'll change going forward and he'll kind of get his mojo back and figure out a way to intimidate the Republican Party with the threat of his base turning on them again, like he did rather effectively for a number of years. But I think for the moment, I mean, how frightening is he stuck in his house in Florida, playing golf, not holding rallies? Nobody seemed afraid of him. Yeah, not in touch with his base. I mean, I think a part of it is like he's this very,

he's one of those weird characters who, not totally dissimilar from a lot of politicians in fairness, who really just feeds off of energy from other people. And I think more than most really requires the energy of other people in order to have energy himself. Whereas there are some people like myself, I'm completely drained from interactions with other people, right? I go to a party and I need to like hydrate for several days and not just restore myself. But he's the opposite, right?

Like he needs a crowd and that is what feeds his soul to the extent that he has one. And I think that part of him being just cocooned there in his, you know, molded mansion, part of it is just, it's kind of depriving him of that, of like a connection to the zeitgeist and a connection to other people and like the vibes that he requires to be powerful. And so he's not right now. But that's why it's also was important to engage in a little bit of ego service, that even though he played no significant role in the outcome of that, Kevin McCarthy felt the need to at least, you know, say that he was that he was, you know, powerful and influential. And that seemed like more like an act of ego bomb than, than a recognition of the actual political reality. Oh yeah. When you don't switch a single vote of your loyal loyalists until the very,

very last moment after they get everything they possibly want. But Kevin McCarthy, you know, felt, you know, we got to make sure that grandpa's feelings aren't hurt. Grandpa's very, very sensitive about this.

We got to throw him something. I mean, look, Kevin McCarthy is like a cocktail shrimp of a man. Obviously, all of his actions lately have been completely mortifying and anyone else would have just killed themselves from embarrassment. But yeah, I think it was totally just to appease him. But we've seen this forever, right, where people publicly talk about Donald Trump just to talk to Donald Trump. And they say things that have no connection whatsoever to reality just to appease him and flatter him and be able to, you know, send it to an aide and tell them to print it out and put it on his desk or something so that they see it.

I don't think it's anything new for any member of the Republican Party to be kind of debasing themselves publicly and saying something that is not true just to flatter him. How worried do you think he actually is about the legal threats against him, about the lawsuits against his company, about the possibility he's going to be indicted in Georgia, the possibility he'd be indicted by the feds? Do you get a sense he's worried about it? Is he hoping that everybody will rally around him as the martyr victim? How does this play into this weird, tired, isolated, old figure that you describe? Is it wearing on him or does he still not give a shit? What do you think? I really don't know. It's hard to get a sense of how he really feels about anything, right? It's not like he's going to tell me. He claims that he's not and that,

you know, it doesn't factor into it and he's not worried. And, you know, he repeatedly, I think, like nine times in 30 minutes told me I did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. But then, you know, there's some people I talked to around him who said that he spends a considerable portion of his day being briefed on whatever updates there are from his legal team and staying in the loop on all that stuff and dealing with all of it. And I imagine that more of his day is taken up by all of that than by the business of kind of vaguely running for president at this point. So after this piece comes out, Trump obviously did not like the piece. He did not appreciate the comparison with them. I don't think he read it.

I don't think he read it, but I don't think he liked what he saw. He called you a whack job and dumb as a rock. And then they suspended your account on Truth Social. Shaky, unattractive. What do you make of that? Except that Donald Trump sees everything through that lens, right? You're either attractive or you're not attractive. So he had to throw that insult out, right? I mean, isn't that the way his mind is programmed?

Yeah. I mean, I think he thinks that that has to be the most hurtful thing to say to a woman, because he thinks that the only thing that a woman could value is being not just attractive, but attractive in his eyes. I thought it was very funny. And I thought that Dumb as Rocks in particular was very funny. But it was interesting how little pickup it got. It was covered by the tabloids. It was covered by the New York Post and the Daily Mail and The Sun. The usual. Right. Yeah, the usual suspects. But it was nowhere near what it would have been just a couple of years ago. He's kind of shouting into the void on that social network that he has. So I figured he wasn't going to be

happy with it. I mean, if he saw it, I figured he wouldn't be happy with the cover and he wouldn't be happy with the headline. And I think I predicted on CNN that he would call it fake news and not read it beyond that. It was definitely, it was interesting to see how minor a blip the reaction to that was compared to the way that, you know, just a few years ago, if he said anything or he tweeted at you or something, it would certainly ruin your week. But it was timed very well for me. I was boarding a plane to the Bahamas and I shut my phone off. I shut my phone off and didn't look at it for eight days. And then it blew over. Well, that was a great life choice. So I anticipate that I might get some blowback because we're laughing about this and treating him as if he's not serious. But,

you know, the reality is, is that he still is a threat. He still is out there. And you quote a former White House official telling you, I think if he's even our nominee, we may lose our country. Even if I don't believe he can win a general again, I think he could burn down the country. I think it's that dangerous. I'm terrified. And this comes from somebody that worked with Trump in the White House. So, I mean, that's the real irony. And somebody senior, by the way, it was someone senior in the White House who said that to me. And someone who does not say that type of thing lightly. I mean, of course, yeah. We've seen what his supporters are willing to do to try to contort reality

to match what he claims it is. So I don't think that it is smart or it behooves anybody to count him out. And I don't think it makes sense to count him out at this juncture when we're so far removed from no one else is in the race yet, right? Except I think Afro Man announced, but not the Republican race. But he certainly shouldn't be dismissed. But I also think, I mean, it's this tough thing, right, where nobody wants to dismiss him and be wrong. Nobody really wants to pay too much attention to him

and, you know, create him by giving him free media. And I don't think anyone, any of us really knows how to handle him at this point right now. In this strange twilight zone, kind of limbo, limbo campaign, the phony campaign. Olivia Newtsey's latest piece is the final campaign about Trump's low energy re-election bid. It is the cover story in the January 2nd issue of the magazine. It is an absolute must read. Olivia's Washington correspondent for New York Magazine. Olivia, thank you so much for coming back on the Bulwark Podcast.

Thank you very much for having me. Thank you all for listening to today's podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again.