The Bulwark Podcast - Peter Wehner: A Grotesque Leader of a Grotesque Party

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Too many GOP leaders failed to grasp that going along with Trump would increase his hold on the party—and further radicalize the base. Now, the party is being consumed by the monster it created. Plus, Trump goes even further than a mob boss. Peter Wehner joins Charlie Sykes today. Show Notes Peter's Atlantic piece Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulletwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Seitz. It's April 11th, 2013. And I was doing a SiriusXM interview yesterday, and we came on right after a news broadcast about the latest mass shooting in Louisville. And they were describing it as the 145th mass shooting of the year so far. And my initial reaction was, that can't be right. It can't be 145 so far. I mean, it's only the middle of April. And sure enough, it is. And so I wrote my newsletter this morning, I broke a long standing rule that I have that I don't, I try not to engage in the doom loop of debate about gun violence, mainly because it gets me so worked up. But, you know, what I wrote was, it is staggering that we are not staggered by this, the volume of it, the frequency. We're really at the point now where our coverage of the latest tragedy, mass shooting, school shooting, is interrupted by breaking news about the next mass shooting, the latest tragedy, mass shooting, school shooting is interrupted by breaking news about

the next mass shooting, the next tragedy. And yet we move on, and it is so frustrating. So there's so much to talk about today. And so we are very fortunate to be joined by Peter Wehner, contributing writer at The Atlantic and The New York Times, whose books include The Death of Politics, How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump. And Peter is a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum, served in the Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 administrations. Peter, it's so good to have you back on the podcast. Thanks, Charlie. It's always a pleasure to be with you. I'm a great admirer of your work, so thanks for having me on.

So I want to talk about your latest piece about Donald Trump, a grotesque man presiding over a grotesque party. But since I broke my own personal rule about not talking about shootings, I thought I would get your take on all of this. It has become so numbing to see this process of people who are shocked, they're horrified for a few days. But we always seem to have the sense that we're not going to engage in it. And I guess I try, if this was if this were acts of Islamic terrorism, if this were Mexican drug cartels who were killing children on a regular basis, if we had 145 planes that were hijacked and hundreds of people killed, this country would be on fire. And yet this is like almost the background noise of our lives these days. It may be a hard time reconciling the fact that we are living with this brutality, that children have to go through shooting drills, that half of American parents are concerned their children will be shot at school. And yet there's little or no prospect that we will do anything about this.

Yeah, I think that's well stated and poignantly stated. I mean, I guess my one caveat or qualifier is that half of the political class doesn't want to do anything about it. Half does. But it's the American right and the Republican Party that, you know, every time this happens, they engage in whataboutism. What I've noticed about it more recently is almost an indifference or a passivity. I've heard any number of Republican lawmakers now basically shrug their shoulders and say, you know, there's just nothing we can do. There's no reason even to try.

And it is as if we are sort of corks in a river and the currents are pulling us where they will and we have no capacity to shape policy or to shape the outcome of events. And of course, you're right, this numbing of America, the fact that we've got inured to gun violence, it's true in other ways too. I mean, we'll get to Donald Trump, but there's something about human psychology when you're overwhelmed with a certain amount of negative information. for some people, part of their minds and part of their hearts shut down. But behind every one of those statistics, of course, is a human life or a lost human life.

And around all of those lost human lives are many other lives of parents and siblings and friends whose lives are shattered. And all of us, when these happen, the best of us are shocked by these kinds of things and feel grief. But we move on with our lives. With the sun rises the next day, new issues come up and we go on. But those families and those friends have had a wound that will last for a lifetime. And that gets lost in all of this, but it just doesn't seem to move people. And I think it's a complicated issue because as you know, the gun culture in America is different than any other country. And there are more guns in America than

there are people in America. But the notion that there's simply nothing we can do or the most obvious things that we can do, such as betting the AR-15, it's viewed through such an ideological frame that it is as if all human emotions, all human sensibilities, all human sympathy is locked out. Not judging people who want to move on with their lives, because I will confess that I cannot bear looking at the pictures of the children who are gunned down. I literally avert my eyes. I don't want to confront it, because I don't think I can handle it. And I think that's one of the psychological

processes that we go through as a country, that we just cannot confront it. So we try to move on. But let's talk about this ideological sense. You and I have both been around for a long time. You know, you served in Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 43. Was this always the case? I mean, I know there's always been support for the Second Amendment, but it feels like there was a time when people could be shocked into changing their mind. Somebody posted on Twitter, of all places, a short sound bite from Ronald Reagan, who was talking about his support for the Second Amendment, but said, you know, he didn't think that people should be allowed to have machine guns or weapons of war. There have been Republicans in the past who were shocked by shootings and events who said, OK, you know what? We can't be absolutist on this. We've changed our minds. Our hearts and our minds have been

changed on this issue. And we are going to support common sense reform. So there once was a time when it was not so locked in and tribal. What happened, Peter? Yeah, I think that there has been an ossification, an ideological ossification. I think it's happened in both parties, but it's much more the realm of, I don't know, what would you call it, intellectual ossification, that is, ossification around public policy positions. And it's been conjoined to almost a psychological and emotional element of this, which I think shouldn't ever be underestimated. And that is the notion, just to take this particular issue that we're talking about, which is we're not going to make a compromise. We're not going to change our mind because that would be retreat. That would be surrender. That would admit that the other side has a valid point and we want to change our mind. And given the current political environment in which we live in, in which I think the psychological disposition of people is driving almost everything else, even beyond public policy, they're just not going to

back down. There's a way in which they said, look, this would be a sign of weakness and we can't be weak. But you're right. I mean, the Republican Party, as long as you and I have been alive, has been a pro-Second Amendment, quote unquote, pro-gun party. But there was room for compromise and there was room for give around the margins. I mean, Justice Scalia, in one of his opinions on guns, talked about that there wasn't an unlimited right to guns. People couldn't walk around with a bazooka if they wanted. That wasn't a Second Amendment right. So even Scalia, whom I admire a great deal and was one of the leading intellects of our time, accepted the fact that this was not

an unlimited right. There are almost no unlimited rights in American life. The other thing I would say is, and this is a broader topic, but there's been a kind of anti-intellectualism that has seized the American right. When you and I were young men and we were formed by the Republican Party, it was a party, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said in a 1981 New York Times article, the GOP of a sudden has become the party of ideas. And so you and I were drawn to the Republican Party because there were serious intellectual arguments that were being made. Alan Bloom and the closing of the American mine, losing ground and welfare reform, Richard

John Newhouse and the naked public Square, Scalia and the Federalist Society. And over time, there's been a retreat from this, not only from admiring rigorous intellectual approach to things, but the opposite. It's becoming, in a sense, an anti-intellectual party. And when that happens, the ability for people to change minds based on empirical data, changing facts, people are less willing to do that. And I think that is one of the signal developments of our time. There's also the grotesqueries. We can intellectualize why people support the Second Amendment, and we can disagree about this. But when you have members of Congress sporting lapel pins of AR-15s or members of Congress putting out Christmas cards where their whole family, including

small children, are brandishing AR-15s, that's just performative. And that they're doing this in the context when that is the weapon that is being used to tear apart young children's bodies. And of course, we know scientifically, intellectually what that means. We've never seen pictures of it, thank God. But that's where the grotesque seems to overshadow any sort of principled position on this issue. Yeah, that's really true. That's very well stated. Performative is right. It's performative politics. It's theatrical politics. It's a kind of virtue signaling, though it's not a virtue that they're signaling, but they're signaling to other people in their tribe that we're with you. And again, it's not simply that we agree with you on

X issue. It's that we're aggressive, that we're angry, that we're proud of our stand and we're going right at them. We're going to troll the left. And I think that that is a lot of what is going on. And when serious politics has been replaced by that kind of mindset, you're just in a really bad place. I did see that there was a member of Congress who had one of these Christmas cards and asked about it after some of the massacres of the AR-15, and it was utterly unapologetic. Because nobody can ever apologize. Right, exactly. out that, you know, I'd raised some of these issues, you know, long before Trump came down the golden escalator. And one of the grotesque pieces of legislation that was out there back in the day that has now returned is this whole idea that not only should people be allowed to carry concealed weapons, but they should be able to do so without any background check, without any

permits, without any training whatsoever, this constitutional carry. NRA made a big push here in Wisconsin for that. And at the time I was friends with the chief of the Milwaukee Police Department, and we were talking about it. He said, you know what a disaster this would be for law enforcement, for law and order, if any individual without any sort of training or permit or background check is carrying a gun. So that every time my officer approaches somebody, that person may be carrying a concealed weapon legally. And, you know, how this would undermine the ability to protect the public. And I remember getting on the phone and calling one of my friends who was then in the administration and saying, you know, you guys are not going to go along with this crazy thing. And they didn't. And what was interesting was the vast majority of

gun owners understood this was a really bad idea. They did not want to go to Miller Park and watch a Brewers game with some Yahoo sitting down there with a gun in his waistband that they did not know how to use, that they didn't have a permit, that they had never been trained for. But now that whole idea is back. And you want to talk about virtue signaling and performative legislation. In the state of Florida, Rhonda Sanders just signed a bill that essentially says that people can be packing loaded weapons without any permit whatsoever. So at this moment, when we're experiencing this epidemic of gun violence, what is the response? It's not just simply a shrug to do

nothing. It's actually to make it, I think, exponentially worse and more dangerous from the point of view of people who allegedly are in favor of law and order. Yeah, right. The party of law and order has been turned on its head. My dad, who was conservative-leaning and Republican is how he voted. And I remember when the NRA supported dumb, dumb bullets, I think was the term, and he gave up. I don't know if he was an NRA member, but I remember him turning on it and having a conversation with him. And he thought this was mindless and inhumane. There was no purpose for those dumb, dumb bullets other than to really hurt and injure people. Yeah, they were cop killing bullets.

Exactly. They were cop killing bullets. And we have to be intellectually honest that the kind of gun control measures that you and I would support would probably have, at best, limited effect on guns because we're a country, a Washington country. But you do what you can do at any moment in time. And because you can't do everything doesn't mean you shouldn't do anything. And again, it's what you described quite well. It's the mindset behind it that's most troubling because that mindset, as bad as it is, as injurious as it is to the country on the issue of guns, is not confined simply to guns. It's just a broader outlook that's touching almost every area of political life for the American right.

This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I'm sure you're going to find my free Morning Shots newsletter, a great companion for understanding what is happening to us. And every morning as I prepare for this show, I share with my readers what's trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day.

To sign up for my free Morning Shots newsletter, go to thebullwork.com slash morningshots. That's thebullwork.com slash morningshots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon. Okay, so let's talk about Donald Trump and what happened last week. You had a piece in The Atlantic where you wrote that before the arraignment, you'd referred to Trump as acting like a mob boss. But after you saw Andrew Weissman, who's a former lead prosecutor in Robert Mueller's special counsel's office, explain that mafia dons would never go after a prosecutor, a judge of their

families. You wrote, leave it to Donald Trump to go where mafia dons will not. So let's talk about what's on display because you and I, neither of us are lawyers. Is that correct? You're not a lawyer? No, I'm not. I don't want to get into the weeds of, you know, with the prosecution and the way the law is structured. The incredible sleaziness of the conduct and what we're seeing once again, this thuggish former president who is threatening and insulting the prosecution, and not just because he's being a jerk, but because he clearly has a strategy, I think,

of trying to intimidate the justice system and to try to obstruct justice. And it takes place in real time, in broad daylight. And it's extraordinary. And even though we've seen it for the last seven years, it's like this is something else we ought not to be numbed about. So talk to me about Donald Trump, the grotesque man presiding over a grotesque party and what you saw last week. Yeah, I think what we saw last week was, you know, Act 912 of this awful drama that's unfolding. None of it was shocking. And yet it's shocking that a former president would do this. And that's really what I think our responses are, which is what's different about this. And in one respect, nothing is different about it because we're dealing with a man who's a

sociopath. And yet, on the other hand, everything is different about it because we're dealing with a man who's a sociopath. And yet on the other hand, everything is different about it because we've never had an American president or even an American politician who acts this way. So it's a lot for us as citizens to take in. And I think sometimes I struggle with how much attention should I pay to this? On the one hand, you don't want him to sort of live rent-free in your mind, as they say. On the other hand, you don't want to go silent or just shrug your shoulders and pretend that this is normative when it's not normative. And you and I as political commentators and other people have to figure out what the right response and what the right mode is to deal with this. A couple of things about it. The first is, I think that the

decomposition, the psychological decomposition of Donald Trump is continuing, but he was already a deeply wounded person and a psychologically broken person a long, long time ago. It's not as if he's crossed some sort of line. This is a trajectory he's been on. And this is who he is fundamentally. And that hasn't changed and it will never change. And we simply have to accept that. I don't know if I've ever shared this story with you, but it was a 2016 campaign and a very well known journalist had called me. This was the spring of 2016. And this person was getting ready to cover Donald Trump. And so he was clearly calling Republicans to ask, what should I know about the Republican party? What should I know about Trump and covering him? And I said, the fundamental thing to

understand about Donald Trump is his disordered personality. That was the term that I was using at the time. And I said, if you don't understand that, you won't understand anything about him. And if you do understand that, a lot of the other pieces that don't seem to make sense will begin to kind of fall into place. And he pushed back, even though he's a person, generally speaking, on the center left. And we got into this debate about the Goldwater rule and how you shouldn't make psychological assessments of candidates. The conversation went on for about 45 minutes, but the upshot in my response to him was, as a general matter, I completely agree with the Goldwater rule. And I don't think that the people who aren't psychologists and haven't

examined a person should make psychological assessments, but every rule has an exception. And what do you do if, in fact, you're dealing with somebody who is sociopathic? Are you not supposed to say that? And I just think that that has played out time and time and time again. And we've seen Republicans who haven't accepted that reality about Donald Trump continually think that he couldn't go further, and he continues to go further. He's a given. Of course, in a way, where the real complicity is in this is with the Republican Party, because Donald Trump is a sick man. The Republican Party, on the other hand, have people who are not sick, but who have gone along with this freak show. They know that. And that's the part that makes people, I think, feel that they've taken crazy pills over the last half decade. And, you know, you write that two things are happening at once. The Trump depraved and deranged is lashing out more venomous than ever. That's number one. And number two, and Republican officials recognize he is the most dominant and popular figure in the Republican Party and that they are stuck with him. And let me just read what you wrote. You said, they have had countless opportunities over the years to take the exit ramp from the release of the Access Hollywood tape to Trump's

first impeachment, to his attempt to overthrow an election, to the violent insurrection at the Capitol, and they have refused every time. More criminal charges of an even more serious nature are unlikely to change that. And here's the key sentence, I think. We're witnessing the political equivalent of abuse victims struggling to break with their abusers. Having long failed to part ways with Trump, they now feel they can never break with him. Yeah. I think that's dead on. it becomes clear that a catastrophe happens. The other thing that struck me, Charlie, was that in the past, we always wondered how far would a party go in defense of its leader?

And it was always a speculative argument. But what Trump has done is he's moved that question from the realm of speculation to the realm of reality. So when the GOP hitched its wagon to Trump, it led them to places that they never imagined. If you had said in 2016 that this is where the Republican Party would be, what Trump has done, and what you, the Republican Party, has defended, I think most people would have blanched. They would have said, not on your life, never. But they accepted it. It's an illuminating period in political history, even as- It feels like a laboratory experiment almost.

Exactly. That's exactly right. Like a simulation. How far, if you did this, if you provided these stimuli, what would they do? How far would they go? What would they be willing to swallow? When would they decide that eating the mared sandwich, in fact, was a tasty delicacy? Right. Yeah. I said at the end of the piece, I think, I said that it was January 2016 when

Trump said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters. And most people, including me, thought it was hyperbole and it turned out to be prophecy. That's one of the most important things the last seven or eight years. Not that Trump's done these things because he is who he is. It's that an entire political party, one of the two most important political parties in the world, has rallied behind this person, stood with him, never broken with him, gone silent at best in the face of these horrific acts and deeds and statements. And the deformation, the moral deformation of that party over those years, day after day of doing it, is what we're living with now. That's why there was never going to be a snapback, a quick snapback, thinking,

well, Trump lost in 2020, so we're going to get the old Republican Party back. Not on your lives. You make the point that Republican leaders never grasped that their willingness to go along with Trump increased his hold on the party and then further radicalized the base. And then the normies became more passive and less influential. So you're talking about the way in which the base has been radicalized has changed and the Republican Party has been changed in ways that nobody expected at the time. But now you look back on it and you say, well, that was the process. So Republican leaders never grasped that going along with him would increase his hold on the party. Do they get it now? I mean, how can they not recognize it now? We're sitting here in April,

2023, what they have wrought. I think some of them do recognize what they've wrought, but they really are in a quandary because Trump is deeply unpopular with most Americans, and he's extremely popular with the base. And they're right in that assessment. And so anybody who voices criticisms of Trump is going to be chewed up and spit out in the Republican Party. We saw that with Liz Cheney. She's Exhibit A. She was intrepid, conservative as could be, lifelong Republican. Her bona fides as a Republican and conservative, much stronger than Donald Trump's. What was her sin? That she spoke the truth about Donald Trump in the context of January 6th, and they turned on her ferociously

and meet her in a primary. So they're stuck because the base continued to get more and more radicalized, more and more deformed. And there's no off switch. I mean, I think that a lot of Republicans thought there'd be an off switch and it turned out that there wasn't. And now they're being consumed by the monster that they've created. And what that does in turn is catalyzing a whole series of psychological reactions of which aggression and anger and grievance is very much a part of that because they feel and they sense the corner that they're in. And I'd say actually even beyond that and even deeper than that, I think for a lot of people, and this is complicated, I think there's some degree of shame that is not among all of them, but of some. I think

it gnaws at a lot of them. But cognitive dissonance is a very, very difficult thing for any of us in life to live with, the sense that who we think we are is at odds with the life that we're living. I think there's a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance for Republicans who've been lifelong Republicans, party of family values, party of law and order. How on God's earth did the party of law and order end up rallying around a man who inspired a violent insurrection and attempted to overthrow an election? That's mind-blowing. And on some level, they know that, but they can't really live with it. They don't want to face that. So what's the response to that?

The response to that is to lash out, to attack, whataboutism on steroids, in a sense, always to say to the other side, Trump critics, Democrats, you're as bad as we are. And so I think this is a very complicated psychological moment as well as a complicated political moment. I think this is an immensely important insight here that whataboutism is not simply a cynical tactic. It's also a psychological necessity that it has to be exhausting and shameful to be defending Donald Trump. So it becomes necessary to pivot, to lash out angrily at the other guy who is always more evil, more dishonest, more corrupt. So you wrote another piece, a separate piece last week, right after the announcement, and

you predicted, you know, how this is going to inflame our politics. Republicans are going to bow payback. They're going to weaponize the law against the Democrats. There's a lot of projection here, right? They're going to do what they claim is being done to them. So our politics are going to become more brutal and savage, even though they're already pretty brutal and savage. How bad will it get, Peter? I think it's going to get worse in the short term. I just don't see a way that it's not going to because the virus has spread. Now, ultimately, you know, the hope one has is that these

things, I'm mixing metaphors here, but that they kind of burn out, that they run their course. And it's important to keep in mind that Donald Trump isn't president, and that's a big deal because he doesn't have the power, obviously, that he would as president. If he was president, we really would be on the edge. But the politics is so angry and so morally deformed. And I think what has to happen is that it's contained and controlled until eventually it begins to recede. But I don't know what the timeline is going to be. I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. It's not going to happen between now and 2024. You look at the polls, the RealClearPolitics aggregate polls for the Republican primary has Trump plus 26 against DeSantis. And the two of them together, I don't think anybody

else even is above 5%. It's an absolutely Trumpified, magified, performative party. And that isn't going to change. And as we get closer to the election, it's going to accelerate. So, you know, we just got to buckle our seatbelts and each of us in our own way has to act with as much integrity and honor as we can in our lives and say what we can say and hope that we can do what we can to preserve, you know, this beloved republic. Well, to your point about the politics being inflamed and the payback, you know, right on cue, the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Jim Jordan announced on Monday that they're going to be holding a field hearing in Manhattan next week at the federal building near Alvin Bragg's offices in the courthouse where Trump was arraigned. And, you know, the committee put out a statement saying that they will examine how Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's pro-crime, anti-victim policies have led to an increase in violent crime in a dangerous community for New York City residents.

Really extraordinary how naked their position is. The larger context here, of course, is that as Donald Trump increases his hold over the Republican Party, his approval rating is now down to 25%. So the one thing that I think a lot of us were expecting and hoping and who knows, projecting, would be a trigger for Republicans is when they realized that that he would lead them to certain defeat. And there was a little bit of that after the 2022 elections that, you know, here's a guy who's losing and is, you know, keeps losing. And if you go into 2024, if Republicans are looking at the year thinking, you know,

Joe Biden should be very vulnerable, should be vulnerable in the economy, on immigration, on a lot of these issues. But the only Republican who is going to get shellacked by him is Donald Trump, and we're going to nominate him. So does the prospect of defeat focus the mind enough for them to break away? I'm hearing you say not even that will be enough. I don't think it will. I don't think it will. It's a factor, I think, and we saw it. I mean, your colleague, Sarah Longwell, does these fantastic focus groups, which are so revealing. And there was a time in which when she did focus groups with two-time Trump voters that she saw some erosion, not an aggressive turn against him for sure, but an openness to DeSantis or somebody else, because there was a kind of weariness that took over. But in her most recent focus groups, as I understand it,

all of those people that she was in conversation with rallied around Trump. And why did they do that? Well, it's the sense that he's being attacked, that he's being persecuted, that he's a martyr. And of course, he's absolutely dominating the headlines, not just in the Republican Party, but in all of American politics. He's a genius at doing that. But I don't think it's a normal party. And so I think the normal metrics that we would use, normal analysis, normal judgments we would use don't really apply. So yeah, for all of our lifetime and for most of the history of American politics, when

a party got beat or faced the prospect of a defeat, they would change. And sometimes it took time. The Democratic Party in 1972 got destroyed by Richard Nixon. And then you went through the arc between 72 and 88. They lost a whole series of elections with really one exception, and that was the Watergate election of 76. So what did they do? They adjusted, and by 1992, they nominated a so-called new Democrat, Bill Clinton. So it takes time for a party to change. And one other thing, Charlie, that I wanted to mention, it just dawned on me the other

day in terms of the political insanity that's gripping the Republican Party is what's happening in Tennessee with the lawmakers, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. And of course, your listeners know about what happened. They were expelled from the House. It was a politically insane thing to do. You were actually the first person that I heard that I think you said that the stupidity burns. It was just so inanely futile. It was so inanely futile. And it raised the question, why did they do it? And it wasn't for political reasons, at least in Tennessee, I guess this sells, but nationally it doesn't.

But what did that catalyze? Well, you heard people, including the Speaker of the House in Tennessee, say that what these representatives did in Tennessee was comparable to or worse than what happened on January 6th. Now, that is moral idiocy to an amazing degree. Why would they say that? Why would they do that? I think that goes back to what I was saying earlier. It was this notion of a psychological lashing out. It was the political id. They could do it, and they were going to do it, and it made no sense whatsoever. Exactly. Exactly. And when that happens, when the passions take over, the irrational passions, the political id takes over, you do really stupid and silly things, like say that what happened in January 6th is comparable to what's going on. I think we probably need to talk more to psychologists and psychiatrists

and less to political scientists, because I think that is, in a sense, the Rosetta Stone of American politics today. I agree with you completely. In fact, I think that given the times that we're in right now, you can find historical parallels, you know, like what the 1850s, what we went through, but I think it seems more insightful to turn to the social psychologists to talk about the tribalism and the way our minds work in order to bind ourselves to the tribes and the, you know, the psychological need to belong and to lash out and, you know, the dominance of the id over, you know, the calmer voices. But what happened in Tennessee is so remarkable. I mean, I made this point before. These representatives, you know representatives would have finished out their career in complete obscurity being a member of the minority party of the lower house of the Tennessee legislature. And what did Republicans do?

They made them into freaking superstars. They are everywhere. And of course, it was completely futile because they are back in their seats. They're back in their seats with this massive uprising. And there are the good old boys of Tennessee who decided that it was more important to kick out these two young African-Americans than it was to address the murder of six people the week before. It's like, if you came up with a script, how can you make them look worse than they did? You would struggle to come up with a scenario that how can you make them look worse than they did? You would struggle to come up with a scenario that would be more stupid. Yeah. And you know where else you would do it? You would do it in a state of Tennessee, which is the home of the KKK. Ironically.

There are three legislators, two of whom are African-Americans. The two African-Americans are expelled. The white legislator is not. Yeah. you couldn't script this any worse than it is. You know, in the case of Tennessee, I mean, this is a microcosm. We see it here, there, and everywhere. It's just playing out at the local level. But America is comprised of a lot of localities. And so what plays out on the local level influences and shapes what happens on the national level. And it's not good. Okay. So let's have a brief,

somewhat awkward conversation here because both you and I for decades have been part of the pro-life movement and it feels, and I've used this phrase too many times. I know it feels soul crushing to watch what's going on right now after the victory with overturning Roe versus Wade, to watch the punitive and performative legislation around the country, it feels as opposed to enhancing the culture of life. You can feel public opinion turning against the pro-life movement. You can see what happened in Wisconsin.

I'm looking at a new CNN poll showing that 70% of Americans are opposed to this ban on the abortion pill. Republicans and the right, again, I think following their id rather than a prudent strategy, seem to be squandering an opportunity. And this has now become a real albatross for Republicans. And I don't see any way out of it for them because their base is demanding the most extreme possible policies and nationalizing all of this. Your thoughts as somebody who has been on the other side of this issue for many, many, many years. I just feel, let me try to articulate this. Ultimately, if you are pro-life, you want to change hearts and minds. You want to create a culture of life. And I think that what's happening now is poisoning the groundwater for the next 40, 50, 60 years on this. So it's, you know, sometimes be careful what you wish for. Yeah. Oh, I think that's an eloquent expression. It's interesting. I think what's happening is that the effort to

change laws is actually not changing hearts and minds. It's actually moving it in the opposite direction. Exactly. That's exactly right. Yes. And ultimately, these laws are going to be, I think, pushed back, but the hearts and minds are going to be shaped in the way they are. You know, David French said something which I think has a lot of value. And he said, when the pro-life movement, those who were advancing a culture of life, joined with Donald Trump, that was just not going to end well, because he was so fundamentally at odds with the spirit of a culture of life. And I think that's happened. The other thing that has clearly occurred, a lot of Republicans assumed that

the country was genuinely split on abortion. And they were split on abortion in an abstract way when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. But once that was gone, and once this became a very present reality in people's lives, the issue massively changed, partly because people had been conditioned for a half century to believe that abortion was a constitutional right. And I don't think that that's a correct interpretation. I don't that abortion was a constitutional right. And I don't think that that's the correct interpretation. I don't think it's a constitutional right, but that has been the law of the land. And so people, in a sense, shaped their lives around that. So when you pull that away, that was one big step. And now with these state legislatures doing what they're doing,

and now this federal judge in Texas suspending the FDA's approval of the abortion pill. This is turning out to be a catastrophe. You saw it in Wisconsin in the election with a state Supreme Court judge. We saw it in Kansas a year or so ago. So you're seeing pretty red states, not Wisconsin, but Kansas and elsewhere, how this issue is really, really hurting Republicans. You know, I have been pro-life pretty much my entire life, but I've always been qualified. I have tried, I've tried to think this through as carefully as I can. I've written pieces on it. And I find the issue of abortion a massive moral gray zone. And I just don't think that it lends itself to neat and tidy answers or neat and tidy lines, I would venture to guess, I think even

most people who count themselves as pro-life don't honestly believe that what happens in abortion, at least in most abortions, is the murder of an innocent child. And they don't believe it's the moral equivalent of killing a six-year-old child. They believe it's on a continuum. All of the polls show this. There is, for most people, a reticence on abortion, a reluctance. It's not something that they celebrate. And the further it goes along in the pregnancy, the more uneasy they become with it. But where you draw the lines and how you do that is very, very complicated. And when you take an issue of that degree of complexity and then try and turn it and weaponize it and use it as a political billy club, it's not going to work. And it's

certainly not going to work for Republicans in the way that they're handling this. So you're right, you know, it was a source of tremendous celebration with overturning Roe v. Wade. And now this issue is blowing up in their faces. And they had about 50 years to prepare for this moment. And rather than creating, and we've talked about this before, rather than creating policies that made it clear that they were pro-life for life after birth as well, more pro-child policies, more pro-family policies, none of that got off the ground. I mean, there's some discussion about it. There's some very thoughtful people who have advanced these policies. No indication that there's any juice behind them. Instead, they're going for, again, this is a phrase I think from David French,

you know, the punitive and performative legislation. Also, the way they pivoted from that this should be an issue decided by the states to now talking about a national ban or having the federal courts decide which drugs are allowed, which sort of parenthetically would introduce massive chaos into the entire pharmaceutical industry if any doctor, any judge anywhere can overturn the FDA and decide that we like this drug, we don't like that drug. I mean, do the courts really want to get into that particular area, which is, I think, rather decidedly outside their area of expertise. So it does feel as if there is some flailing. But here in Wisconsin, this was an ugly, expensive judicial race, not particularly attractive candidates. Not everybody wants to hear this. It was also not a great moment for

the independent judiciary. But the fact that the progressive pro-choice candidate won by 11 points in a state like Wisconsin had a margin of more than 200,000 votes in a state where if you win by 20,000 votes, it's considered pretty comfortable. Had to be a massive wake-up call, except that they're hitting the snooze button because I don't see any prospect that they're going to change their position on any of this because they are afraid to take on their base on all of this. So I'm curious because you've, you followed this so closely to what degree was in your estimation was abortion an issue and what other issues played into this? Because the person who won seemed to be pretty far on the left. And as you said, Wisconsin is just a razor thin or has been a razor thin state. So to win by 11 points, a lot had to have happened. And it's not entirely clear to me what it was. There are obviously a number of factors, but I think abortion overwhelmingly dominated the

outcome. There were also questions about the elections, about election denialism. We had the conservative candidate who was so deep into Trump world that he actually had advised the state Republican Party, was on their payroll, advised them on the fake elector scheme, you know, and then went around the state campaigning with January 6th rally organizers. So that was certainly in the background. But if you were watching television, the progressive ran just pounding on the issue of abortion. The conservative never talked about abortion at all and tried to make it about crime, and that fell flat. And I thought it was interesting because during the primary, Dan Kelly had, and I've talked about this before, I think, on the podcast. During the primary, I would say two-thirds of the mailings that got here at the house here

in Mequon from the conservative candidate, Dan Kelly, were about abortion, that he was the most pro-life candidate, that he was endorsed by every single one of the pro-life groups, including the most militant ones, the ones that would not support exceptions for rape or incest. So when he got to the general election, he wanted to change the subject, but he was stuck and he wasn't able to push back and say, no, you know, I don't take these positions, because he had told all these pro-life groups that he was, in fact, you know, a reliable absolutist vote on these issues. So he had boxed himself in. That's fascinating. I saw there was a member of Congress, I don't recall the name, and he was interviewed on one of the Sunday shows, I think it was on CNN, and was being asked about abortion.

And he basically just waved the white flag and said, I don't want to talk about that. There are a lot of other issues that I don't want to talk about. And that is an indication of where they are. They get this huge legal victory, and now it's destroying their electoral prospects in a lot of places. Well, and one of the big tells was the reaction to that federal judge ruling about the abortion pill. You know, Democrats jumped on it immediately. Republicans really went quiet. I mean, they turned turtle on that. They understand that this is a dangerous issue for them. So this is a big victory, but they want to be as far away from it as possible. Peter, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Peter Wehner is contributing rhetoric at The Atlantic, and you could read his stuff at The New York Times. His books include The Death of Politics, How to Heal Our Afraid Republic After Trump, and Peter is a senior

fellow at the Trinity Forum. Peter, thank you again. It's great talking with you again. It's always a pleasure. Thanks so much, Charlie. Keep up the great work. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sakes. We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.