The Bulwark Podcast - Philip Bump: Running Against Reality

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Reality is Kari Lake's biggest opponent, Tim Scott is warmly welcomed into a growing candidate field, Biden gets blamed for guns, and younger voters are more likely to vote for Democrats. Plus, did Twitter grave-rob a username for DeSantis? The Washington Post's Philip Bump joins Charlie Sykes today. show notes: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696653/the-aftermath-by-philip-bump/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the governor of Arizona, which is interesting that these things drag on for so long. So, so apparently we are not going to get an announcement from Kerry Lake saying you won't have Kerry Lake to kick around anymore because we will always have Kerry Lake, won't we? Phillip Bump joins me, national columnist for the Washington Post. We're always going to have Kerry Lake, aren't we? Yeah. I mean, we will have Kerry Lake as long as Carrie Lake can continue to generate attention by saying Carrie Lake-ish things, which seems like so far an inexhaustible resource. The thing about the kind of the shamelessness or the, you know, alternative reality she lives in is that even though, you know, a judge has been looking at this for months,

and even though there's, you know, massive evidence and it's overwhelming evidence that she did not, in fact, win the election, that Katie Hobbs is, in fact, still the governor of Arizona, it will have no effect on her and very, very little effect, apparently, on the Arizona Republican base. Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think it's important to recognize that what Carrie Lake is running against here isn't really Democrats. She's not just running against Katie Hobbs. She's running against this idea of reality that is bolstered by people she dislikes, by the elites, by the mainstream media, by the left broadly. This is who her opponent is, and it's always been her opponent.

So the November 8th, 2022 election against Hobbs was merely a benchmark in her progressing campaign against reality. By my count, and I have a piece up today at the Post, by my count, she's lost this election six times. She lost it on November 8th. She lost it when it was called by the AP. She lost it when the results were certified. She lost it in the court challenge in December. She lost it in the court challenge in February. And she lost it this week in her most recent court challenge, right? But it doesn't matter. Each of those things is a data point for her in this war against what they want you to think and what they want you to think is reality.

But she doesn't want people to agree with that, in part because she generates so much attention simply by refusing to accept the reality that's obvious to everyone else. There are a lot of states that have really crazy, interesting politics. I mean, I live in Wisconsin, but Arizona seems to be kind of in a class by itself, because if in fact she is running for the United States Senate, this is going to set up the most amazing Senate race of 2024. And that is saying a lot, right? Because you have Kyrsten Sinema running. She's got a Democratic challenger. She's not running in the primary, right? So you got Ruben Gallego running as the Democrat. Kyrsten Sinema may be running as an independent.

And then Kerry Lake, what the hell, Philip? I mean, how is this going to shake out? I mean, that's also assuming Kerry Lake wins the Republican nomination. We also have this Sheriff Lamb who's planning on seeking the Republican nomination as well. You know, this is a guy who was alive with the truth of vote, folks. He's pretty much out there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he and Lake are sort of competing for the fringe. And, you know, this is going to be in 2024, presidential election year. You know, if I'm the GOP nationally, I'm very concerned about who ends

up on the ballot in Arizona, you know, simply because having Sino actually run, which doesn't seem like a sure thing necessarily, is going to potentially and likely split the vote on the left to some extent. But, you know, we just saw how in 2022, Arizona had this great opportunity to take the governor's seat, to win the Senate seat that failed in part because their candidates were so extreme. And this is a state that obviously they're going to want to win the presidential level. And I don't think Kerry Lake Orland helps them do that. Okay. So do they have a normie alternative? Yeah. I mean, honestly, not that I've seen. I think part of the challenge is, and this is the ongoing challenge of the Republican Party, which, you know, I don't

need to tell you about, but the fact that, you know, normie candidates usually don't win the primaries, right? You know, the base that turns out for primaries is often looking for someone that's going to espouse these fringe views or this opposition to reality. And so those candidates win. You know, we saw it so many times in 2022. This is also kind of speculative, but last month I was talking with some pretty well-known Republicans from Maricopa County, and we were discussing about what had happened to the Republican Party in Arizona. I mean, the Republican Party in Arizona has a kind of a long tradition of, you know, pretty reasonable, normal people.

And you can just run through, you know, whether it's John McCain or, you know, John Kyle or Jeff Flake, etc. And he was speculating about what has happened, why the Republican Party in Arizona has gone off the rails, why it has been so crazified. And one of his speculations was, well, it's different being a border state, you know, because everything is more intense. Everything is, you know, you feel a little bit more under threat. These things feel a little bit more dangerous. But I don't know whether there was any basis to that. I mean, he's there every single day. And he's looking around at people who had supported him in the past and just watching the madness spread. And it has become intense. I mean, the fact that

Republicans in Arizona might have the choice between, you know, crazy Kerry Lake and even crazier Sheriff gives you an indication of just kind of how bizarre things have become there. Yeah. I mean, look, this is also the state that gave us Barry Goldwater, right? I mean, so it's not as though, you know, everyone's been a John McCain all the way down, right? But Barry Goldwater is not a Kerry Lake. No, no, sure. Right. I mean, Jan Brewer is not a Kerry Lake, right? I mean, Jan Brewer was seen as sort of an outlier when she was governor of the state. Now she's like, oh, my gosh, I can't even with these people. And I think the last time I was on this podcast, I was talking about my book, which looks at the shift, the generational shift in American politics.

And one of the things to remember about Arizona, it has become a destination for retirees and for people moving from other parts of the country. Not all of them are hard right people, but it is very much a state where there is an increasing presence of a generation of people that is older and more likely to be conservative than younger Americans. And so we see in part, I'm sure, some of this being a function of the new arrivals to the state who are looking for a type of politics that the state didn't have previously. I guess what I'm saying is it may not be the immigrants coming in from the southern border, but from all the other borders from the rest of the United States that are playing some role here. All right. Well, let's just look at the week in news that we have.

A lot of things are going to happen in a very short period of time. We had Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina announcing he's running for president yesterday. Ron DeSantis is going to announce within the next couple of days. And of course, we're up against this debt default deadline. president yesterday. Ron DeSantis is going to announce within the next couple of days. And of course, we're up against this debt default deadline. Now, I have to admit that I'd gotten into the habit of just simply assuming that you went through this kabuki dance, kabuki dance, everybody got nervous. And then at the last minute, they resolved all of this. That doesn't seem to be the case at the moment. Give me your gut sense of whether or not we are going to go over the cliff this time. Yeah, it's really hard to say, right? And I think that I'm with you that we've done this several

times prior and that it's gotten resolved and it's like, okay, that was a waste of time, right? The difference here is that we've already seen earlier this year that Kevin McCarthy is not able to get things done the way he wants to get them done, right? You know, this speaker election should have taken, you know, a ballot or two and it lasted for days, right? And here we have a hard deadline. You know, the speaker election could last as long as it needs to last. It doesn't really matter once it gets resolved. But here, there is a real deadline that they're up against. And so they need to solve something sooner rather than later if they want to be able to mollify the people who are going to want to make a big deal out of this in McCarthy's own caucus.

And I just don't know what that looks like. And one of the things that's a question, you know, I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised a valid point in a recent interview in which she's like, does McCarthy know? Does he know where the votes are? Does he know what his caucus is actually can go along with? And I think that's a totally fair question. I've circled this from the moment that he was elected speaker, whether or not he's capable of actually making a deal, whether he's capable of delivering anything. And I don't even think that he knows that at this point. So we'll get to Rhonda Sanderson in a moment because you have a very, very funny piece

about him. But yesterday, Tim Scott announces, and I have to admit that I am somewhat puzzled by what the theory of Tim Scott being elected president is. I mean, as I wrote in my newsletter this morning, you know, the sweet summer children of the punditocracy, you know, have these theories about how, you know, Tim Scott's going to rocket to the presidency. But as you explained yesterday, no, Tim Scott is not Rick Scott. And yes, there is another politician from South Carolina who has announced that she is running for president. And, you know, Tim Scott's big splash yesterday was, drumroll please, the endorsement of John Thune. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't mean to badmouth John Thune.

I mean, he's the number two ranking Republican in the Senate. But I do think that the D.C. set, of which I'm probably not a part of, despite working for The Washington Post, overstates the value of high value endorsers. Right. You know, one of the things that I point to is in 2016, Donald Trump basically had no endorsements coming into the Iowa caucus and didn't matter. Right. The endorsements that year followed the support of the base as opposed to driving it, which is theoretically the role of endorsements. You know, Mitch McConnell came out early in favor of Rand Paul in 2016. And Rand Paul, as people may recall, was not elected president. He did not win the Republican nomination.

So John Thune, I think, does Scott some good in that he signals that Scott is a player in the other lane. So, you know, we used to talk about how all the multiple lanes in the Republican primary in 2016 and moving forward, there are two lanes. There is Donald Trump and there is not Donald Trump, right? Donald Trump has a pretty solid lock on the Donald Trump lane and will for the foreseeable future. And that everyone else is fighting for the not Trump lane. And right now, DeSantis is the heavyweight in that lane, but it's pretty clear that he's wobbly. And I think that Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Glenn Youngkin, potentially, who made pretty obvious last week that he was thinking about maybe throwing his hat in the ring here. You know, I think all those people are saying, okay,

well, what happens if it's not DeSantis? And then secondarily, what happens if Trump somehow stumbles? And they want to be positioned to do that. I think by Scott coming out and having Thune by his side, he's saying to the establishment that doesn't like Trump, look, I'm a real credible guy. Maybe I'm the not Trump guy who can win this thing. That's, I think, the best case. You're a number cruncher. I love some of the numbers you had in this piece on Thune. South Dakota has fewer than 900,000 residents. Thune was actually included as a possible contender for the presidency back in 2012. 53% of voters had never even heard of him. He's got a little bit higher name recognition.

Only 22% of responders to a YouGov poll said they liked him. I like this one. On YouGov's ranking, Thune is the 80th most popular Republican landing, just above former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and just below Reince Priebus. Okay, so here's my question about Tim Scott. And I understand the lanes. I guess I am even more cynical because I think there are multiple lanes. I think that there are, obviously there's the Trump lane, there's the not Trump lane, and then there's the, hey, maybe I'm running for something else. Tim Scott, for example, I've described it as the Potemkin campaign. Sure. And I thought it was interesting that Donald Trump put out a truth social bleat yesterday

saying, good luck, Senator Tim Scott, in entering the Republican presidential primary. It is rapidly loading up with lots of people. And Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable. I got opportunity zones done with Tim. A big deal that has been highly successful. Good luck, Tim! Exclamation point. No caps anywhere. So, Philip, what does that tell you that Donald Trump is going,

I have no problem with this guy getting in the race. I kind of like this guy. What the hell? I wrote about this when Donald Trump did the same thing for Vivek Ramaswamy a week or two ago. Donald Trump thinks zero moves ahead. And what he's doing here is exactly what it seems like he's doing, which he's trying to promote Scott against DeSantis in order to both increase the number of viable candidates in the field and therefore make the level of victory that he needs to have lower. Right. The Republican primary process is stacked for the front runner. A lot of winner take all contests that if he just wins 30% of the vote and gets more votes than anyone else, he gets more delegates, right? Trump is aware of that, hadn't gone through this in 2016,

but he's also just trying to, you know, have people see that there are other people in the not Trump lane. Oh, you don't like me? Oh, here's this guy, Tim Scott. You know, if he's sort of like me, maybe you go for him instead of Ron DeSantis. And all he does then is keep Ron DeSantis low. I mean, it's, you know, it's not so. Well, this is where I have the PTSD flashback from 2016, because a large field clearly benefits Donald Trump. Donald Trump understands that. Right. I'm assuming that other Republicans understand that the more candidates that get in this race, the better it is for Donald Trump. I assume they understand this. Yeah, right. That seemed like it was the obvious lesson from 2016. You have Rubio and Cruz and Kasich and all these other guys who just want to be the last man

standing. And it seems pretty obvious now that you have people like Glenn Young, and who again, hasn't declared, but has taken the first sort of steps toward challenging around DeSantis, saying, hey, why not me? DeSantis is fumbling. Maybe I could be the guy. And then that's how you end up in the same situation you had in 2016, where it's like, is fumbling. Maybe I could be the guy. And then that's how you end up in the same situation you had in 2016, where it's like, you know what, maybe I can be the last guy against Trump. And then it ends up there are eight people running against Trump. And then Trump, you know, clears we're going to take all states with 35% of the vote. Well, yeah. And, you know, stop with the logic, because this is the way it plays out.

Just one more question on Tim Scott. I mean, Tim Scott, he clearly has a different, you know, persona and personality than Ron DeSantis or than Donald Trump and kind of a sunny optimistic. I'm kind of a nice guy. Sounds very pre-2016 and, you know, talking about personal responsibility. Does Tim Scott think that there is a lane for that sort of sunny optimism? Just give me your sense of how his message plays with the base. I think the base will look at him and they will like him. They will feel validated. Hey, we have a conservative black Republican running, but hard to imagine that this base, which has its own, shall we say, predilections and tastes is going to go along with that kind of a message.

Yeah, no, I think you're generally right. I do think that his sunniness and optimism is oversold a little bit. He's had a number of interviews since he announced his intent to form an exploratory committee, which he sort of bashed the left in the ways that you would expect of a guy who's seeking a Republican primary. But I think generally speaking, there is the sense among Republicans that when Republican voters say, I like Donald Trump, I just didn't like all the mean tweets, you know, sort of the argument that we heard from Mike Lee last week, that they take that at face value. And I think they shouldn't, right? I think a lot of Republicans really like the mean tweets, but they know they shouldn't say they like the mean tweets. And so I think that to your earlier point about Tim Scott potentially running for something else,

like VP, I think that's valid. I also think every single politician who's ever won any election for anything has pictured themselves taking the oath of office on January 20th of an odd numbered year. Like every politician sort of dreams like, well, maybe there's a path for me. And so I think that's playing a role, too, here. And you work with what you got. And that's what Tim Scott's got. OK, so Ron DeSantis, who has been reminding us over the last couple of days that he's not the most gifted retail politician in America. You have a kind of an interesting story that we'll talk about. You rewrote it on Monday, this development on Twitter, where it appears that DeSantis got a new Twitter username from a dead California realtor. What is that story? Yeah. So this is purely speculative, just to be very clear.

But delicious. Yeah. Yeah. But with very serious implications, really, should it be borne out? So Ron DeSantis used to be Ron DeSantis FL on Twitter, right? That FL, not super useful if you're running for national office, which Ron DeSantis clearly is going to be imminently, you know, officially, you know, has been for a long time. So he is now Ron DeSantis on Twitter. There was a Ron DeSantis on Twitter, and it was this guy who sold real estate in California and hasn't tweeted in years. And it turns out actually appears to have died in 2020, September 2020. That guy who was Ron DeSantis on Twitter is now

Ron DeSantis underscore one. So at some point in the past couple of days, Ron DeSantis, the original, the realtor became Ron DeSantis underscore one and Ron DeSantis FL, the days, Ron DeSantis, the original, the realtor, became Ron DeSantis underscore one. And Ron DeSantis, the governor, became Ron DeSantis. How did that happen is the question, right? You'll remember that at the beginning of the month, Elon Musk very publicly came out and said, you know, we're going to start doing is we're going to start shutting down accounts that have been inactive for 30 days or more. And everyone was in an uproar. How can you do that? You know, my dead relative was on Twitter.

I want to keep all the tweets, et cetera, et cetera. I wasn't surprised by that because I've known since Musk took over Twitter, he's going to eventually realize that the usernames have value and try and loosen up some of these usernames. But now I'm curious, was that a way of clearing the field so you can have people like the poor deceased Ron DeSantis of California and have his username altered so that Ron DeSantis can have the Ron DeSantis username California and have his username altered so that Ron DeSantis can have the Ron DeSantis username. I just find it hard to believe that the dead realtor's family was contacted by DeSantis' team and they agreed somehow to figure out what the password is.

The process of actually changing that to RonDeSantis underscore one seems very onerous for someone who died three years ago and wasn't a Mac Twitter user. It's just all very strange. Well, speaking of very strange, Rononda Sanders is launching this presidential campaign based on let's turn America into Florida or whatever. This comes the week after Disney announces, yeah, that billion dollar office complex that we're going to build in Orlando. Yeah, no. This whole Disney fight has really become, I don't know, you tell me whether I'm wrong. It feels like a quagmire, sort of an own goal, mix my metaphors for Rhonda Sandis. And you know, that he doesn't have the deftness to pull back or minimize it. He keeps plunging in, he keeps doubling down. He thinks he has to be a fighter. And now he is in a fight that looks

increasingly unwinnable from his point of view. Your thoughts? Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, Disney is a more powerful entity than the governor of Florida, right? In part because it's an international organization and it's going to outlast Ron DeSantis. Disney will be here after Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida, right? So they just have to wait four years, right? You know, they can file lawsuits and just wait. One of the things that I think DeSantis is being challenged with broadly is that he sees his argument against

Donald Trump as being predicated on the fact that he wins his fights. He won his fight against Fauci. He won his fight against, you know, so on, so on, so on, so forth. That's a hard argument to make when you continue to trail someone by 30 points in the polls, right? So he has to just demonstrate it in other ways. And so I think that he thinks he needs to come up with some sort of concrete victory against Disney, especially because Disney outplayed him on, you know, when Florida took over the whatever that weird entity in Florida was called, how they sort of, you know, submarine all the power that it had before DeSantis' people took over. He's being seen as taking losses on this thing, and he very clearly wants to have a win.

But Disney's just, you know, they have more power, and they know how to fight these fights, right? They know how to win fights against political entities. And you're right, he is stuck in this fight, and he doesn't have a path toward victory that's obvious to me. I don't know what I know, but he continues to engage in it because he needs to prove that he's a fighter who can win. Except that it seems like it's a liability, at least on two fronts politically, within the Republican primary, leaving aside what it will

do to swing voters in a general election. You know, number one, you know, there are still Republicans who have the, you know, muscle memory of remembering when the Republican Party stood for small government that did not use its power as a cudgel against private businesses. You know, that's certainly number one. The other one is the fact that clearly part of his sales tool is the business climate in Florida. You know, people want to come to, you know, Florida. You want to, this is a big thing among Republicans. You know, we are business friendly versus places that are, you know, hostile to business.

And now you have, you know, one of the largest corporations saying, no, actually, we don't think this is a good business climate. So there seem to be multiple downsides within a Republican primary. And then he has also decided because he's a fighter, he's going to double down on the book bans and leaning into that. And it feels like every day there's another story like, are you kidding me? What is going on in Florida, the dumbing down of Florida, which does not strike me as an asset in a general election campaign. Yeah, I don't argue with any of that. For months, my assumption has been that Ron DeSantis thinks that he can outflank Trump to the right. And I do think that there is validity in saying that in him picking up fights that Trump

could never have, in part because they're newly emergent and in part because Donald Trump was different on them, like vaccines, right? The issue of his focusing so heavily on trans identity, that was not an issue when Trump was president. Now DeSantis can really plant his flag on it. But he just can't stop going down that path. And the Florida legislature is, you know, just sort of rolling over for everything he wants to do. At some point in time, he's demonstrated what he wants to demonstrate. And now is going so far that there are obvious negative repercussions to it that I don't understand why he and his team don't just simply put on the brakes, right? And I'm curious the extent to which he has people in his ear like Christina Pushaw, who obviously is a far right actor and uses that sort of rhetoric.

To what extent is he hearing from people who think this is the right move and really ought to expand his universe of advisors so someone can say, hey, look, maybe enough is enough. Okay, so let's pull back the lens a little bit and talk about something that you have written about extensively, demographic trend, your book. We talked about it the last time you were on the podcast, The Aftermath, the last days of the baby boom and the future of power in America. I was struck by this new report by the folks at Catalyst about the 2022 election. And they write, Gen Z and millennial voters had exceptional levels of turnout, with young voters in heavily contested states exceeding their 2018 turnout by 6% among those who are eligible. Further, 65% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Democrats. Many young voters who showed up in 2018 and 2020 to elect Democrats continue to do the same in 2022. So this is a trend that the people have talked about for years. I think there's been a lot of skepticism about whether

young voters would actually turn out in big numbers. What kind of trends are you seeing there? Because if Republicans keep losing two out of three younger voters, that's pretty ominous. Yeah. I mean, for the party, absolutely. Yeah. There are three overlapping things at play here. The first is that younger people are more likely to be engaged politically at this age than were older generations. So they turn out more and are more registered to vote than was the case for Gen X or the boomers at the same age. The second is that they necessarily are making up more of the electorate simply because the silent generation and older in particular are dying. And so now we see this shift downward in terms of generations simply by virtue of the natural processes that

lead to people not voting anymore, namely they are dead. Then third of all, you also have this shift to the left, that younger people are much more likely to vote Democratic than Republican. It is not the case that older voters vote very heavily Republican. You know, the baby boom generation preferred Donald Trump, according to Pew Research Center, by just a handful of percentage points in 2020. But that's so much more moderate than the younger voters who preferred Joe Biden by a wide margin that you see this gap between a very liberal young person or a young generation and a more moderate older generation. So there's some of that tension there. But yeah, you're absolutely

right that the Republican Party long term, there are still questions about how and if the party can appeal, particularly to non-white voters better. But the party has been so invested. I mean, look, Charlie, you recalled after the 2012 election when the GOP sat down, like, how do we win elections? One of the things they said is we need to expand our base. And then Donald Trump came along and he leveraged Black Lives Matter and he leveraged the immigration crisis of 2014 to say, no, actually, what we need to do is we need to quadruple down on white grievance. That's been what's been defined the party for the past five years. And at some point, the party's going to have to shift. They're going to shift away from that messaging.

The problem is that Trump's presence makes it very, very hard for them to do so. And as such, they are postponing the point at which they can start trying to appeal to younger voters better, and in the meantime, costing themselves politically. Is Joe Biden's age a problem for Democrats with younger voters, or are they going to vote on issues? Considering that they are now becoming more and more dependent and hopeful about these demographic trends with younger voters, what do Gen Z and millennial voters think about a guy who's 80 years old running for president? Yeah, I mean, he's not even a baby boomer. He's the asylum generation, right? And he is very old. And you're right that younger voters, you know, one of the reasons that Nancy Pelosi stepped down,

in addition to the fact she wasn't the speaker anymore, but one of the reasons she stepped aside as leader of the Democratic Party is because the party recognized it needed to send a message to younger voters who overwhelmingly vote for them, that it recognized the generational problem that has been had. Dianne Feinstein is a huge problem for the party, not simply because she's not adept at actually doing her job, but also because she is a symbol of the gerontocracy that a lot of young people feel frustrated by. All of that said, if it's Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, there are going to be like a lot of Democrats and a lot of Americans broadly who are like,

I don't love Joe Biden, but I really don't love Donald Trump. The Washington Post had a new focus group reporting on that yesterday. And I think that's going to be the defining thing. If it's those two, at the end of the day, people don't like Biden, they don't like Trump, but they like Biden better than Trump. And that may be it. This is a good segue into the piece you have up in the on the post today, or maybe it was yesterday about the gun issue. This is one of those issues that I think, you know, Democrats are increasingly vocal about. And the younger generation, I think, has a very, very different perspective. I can't even imagine what it would be like to grow up doing mass shooter drills in school. I honestly can't get my head around that. And clearly, there's going to be a political shift here. But your point to this rather remarkable AP poll that shows, you know, that Joe Biden has

weaknesses on a number of areas. But the one that you highlighted was the fact that President Biden may be paying a political cost for his stance on gun violence. Only 31% of Americans said they viewed Biden's handling of gun policy positively, and the most striking number, that includes only 50% of Democrats. So what is going on here? Is there frustration that he hasn't accomplished more? Why is he sort of falling between the stools on an issue that obviously is going to resonate among younger voters, especially? I think there are two factors at play here at a minimum. One is that he's president. And so, he is the person who is seen as culpable for things that are not going well in this country.

But the second is, I think that there is an increasing frustration nationally on both sides of the political spectrum at the rise in mass shooting incidents in particular. There has been a big spike in those this year. We see, though, general social survey polling from last year, we see this reversal. The number of people who think that you should have to have a permit obtained by a police department in order to own a gun increased overall, but it also increased among Republicans in 2022. It may be an aberration. This may not be a long-term trend, but there is an appetite for something to be done in the United States, and Joe Biden is held responsible for that. It's ironic, obviously, because he doesn't really have the power to do a whole lot, right?

That as everyone who's been paying attention to this for the past 10 years understands that it's Congress that is generally the stumbling block. And even Republicans agree that a lot of restrictions that could be put in place to make it harder to own guns ought to be put in place, that that simply doesn't happen because there isn't the political will to do so on Capitol Hill, but Biden takes the blame for it. And so I think that it is a way in which Democrats are expressing their frustration about the issue broadly, and then Biden's paying the political cost. To your point about, you know, people hold the president accountable for, you know, things that go, well, they give him credit occasionally for when things go right,

they hold him accountable when things go wrong. This would seem to explain the sort of the reptilian instinct that Donald Trump has in calling for Republicans to go ahead and default on the debt. I continue to think this is an undercover story when you have a leading Republican candidate for president actually explicitly endorsing defaulting on the debt, which would be economically a catastrophe. But what Donald Trump understands is that if there's an economic catastrophe, you know, a large portion of the electorate won't blame him for calling for the catastrophe or Republicans. They'll blame Joe Biden because he's the president. Yeah, I think that's true. But I also think it's true that no one takes Donald Trump's assertions of face value, right? You know, if Donald Trump were president, and first of all, this wouldn't be an issue because they would simply, you know, lift the debt ceiling for the duration of his administration, which is what they did when he was president last time. But, you know, Donald Trump were president, first of all, this wouldn't be an issue because they would simply lift the debt ceiling for the duration of his administration, which is what they did when he was president last time.

But Donald Trump just changes on a whim. He pays no attention to policy. And so to some extent, he gets covered for that. You're right. He should be elevated. He should be talked about more. But no one thinks he would actually do that. He's just saying stuff because he's saying what he thinks will appeal to people.

The fundamental driving thing, and I'm just going to get on my hobby horse for a second. This guy spent decades selling real estate in New York City. He'll tell you what he wants to hear, right? Like this is his defining characteristic rhetorically. Whatever he thinks you want to hear, that's what he's going to tell you. And he doesn't mean it. And you can't take him at face value, right? So that said, yes, I do think that he is creating space, political space for the Republicans to do a thing that gives them leverage against Biden, but obviously would be very, very negative for the country broadly. As you mentioned, Donald Trump is really not that complicated. I think people understand

what makes him tick. And we talked about this on the podcast yesterday. Speaking of another, I think, maybe underappreciated story, over the weekend, Vladimir Putin decided he was going to play Donald Trump. He issues a list of all of the Americans that he wants sanctioned. And the list includes everybody from Rachel Maddow to Brad Raffensperger to the cop that shot Ashley Babbitt, Seth Meyers. I mean, a lot of these people had nothing to do with Russia policy. And apparently the only reason that would have come to Putin's attention is because Trump doesn't like them. And so Vladimir Putin is saying, you don't like these people. I don't like them either. It's just the nakedness of it. Like I'm going to suck up to

Donald Trump. And because that works. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. You know, I don't think Brad Raffensperger is upset that he has to get a refund on his tickets to Moscow, right? Yes, exactly. That Putin tried to influence the 2016 election very surreptitiously to Donald Trump's benefit, what is it, seven years ago now. And Donald Trump came out and made very clear that he was all for it. So Putin's like, the hell with it. Donald Trump, I'm your ally. Look at all the, I hate your enemies too. And it's just, it's just very explicit. And, you know, we saw Viktor Orban saying just this morning in an interview with Bloomberg that he supports Donald Trump being elected president in 2024. It's very clear which side of history Donald Trump is on in regards to this stuff.

And Putin is just sort of cementing it. What do you make of Joe Biden's decision to give Ukraine F-16 jets after being so reluctant for so long? It's a good question. I mean, it certainly seems as though he's probably faced some international pressure. Obviously, the stakes are somewhat higher for countries in Europe. And look, let me be very clear, foreign policy, I am not going to present myself as an expert on it. But this does seem as though it is international pressure more than domestic pressure, according to the way I read it. So you also crunched some numbers on Trump versus Biden on the days away from the White House. I mean, we all know that Fox News and the MAGA world creates an alternative universe, but this whole notion that Donald Trump was the hardest working president ever,

and Joe Biden is just never around. So run the numbers for me on who's been away from the White House, especially as we're heading into the Memorial Day weekend. What does it look like? I, over the course of Donald Trump's presidency, in large part because he was constantly criticizing Obama for playing golf, going on vacation to Martha's Vineyard and so on and so forth. I was tracking what Donald Trump was doing. And it became very obvious very quickly that he spent a lot of time away from the White

House. And so I record the numbers on that. And so over the course of Biden's presidency, there's been a lot of furor from people like, oh, you spent so much time looking at what Trump was doing. You haven't spent any time looking at what Biden's doing, which isn't true. I wrote about him in 2021, but I thought it was time to revisit that. And so essentially at this point in each man's presidency, they both spent about 250 days, all or part of 250 days away from the White House. Biden's is almost exclusively to either Camp David or to one of his two homes in Delaware, right? The difference obviously being that when Donald Trump left the White House,

A, he was playing a lot more golf. Biden is usually, you know, when he goes to Delaware, he still has more meetings than does Trump. And I can say this. I looked at all the schedules literally yesterday. So that's true. But secondarily, obviously, Donald Trump was promoting his business and he was schmoozing with customers and he was getting advice from folks in Mar-a-Lago about what he should do as president. And he was charging the Secret Service to stay in rooms at Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago. Right. Like hugely different. Not only just the cost of getting to Mar-a-Lago as opposed to Delaware, but there was a cost incurred both to the government literally in terms of housing secret service, but then a cost just in terms of the way in which people viewed the presidency. And the fact that private customers of the Trump organization could get the president's ear by

paying his company money, that's very different than Joe Biden just spending every weekend at his house in Delaware. Let's double back to where we started talking about the presidential race and all of these candidates getting in. Maybe some of them want to increase their speaker's fees or write a book. I speculate that Chris Christie is going to play the role of suicide bomber in all of this. But clearly, there is a sense, at least in some circles in the Republican Party, that Donald Trump does not have an absolute lock on this nomination. And again, speculating that they think that something might happen between now and the primaries that's going to change the dynamic. And some of that something might be that he will be indicted, indicted in Georgia, indicted by Jack Smith.

There may be more information coming out about his foreign deals. So far, there's no evidence that any of those things shake his support in the Republican base. Is there any reason, do you see any softness in the numbers? Will there become a fatigue factor if, in fact, he goes into the primaries, having one jury found that he sexually assaulted a woman, facing multiple felony charges, potentially facing criminal charges in Georgia, potentially facing federal charges involving the Mar-a-Lago documents and or January 6th. What is your sense looking at the numbers? Because the conventional wisdom is that whatever doesn't kill Donald Trump makes him stronger. Every indictment actually bonds the base to him more intensely. What do you think?

Yeah, I think that the data suggests that conventional wisdom is accurate. And there are two factors here. I always say there's two factors on everything. That's just sort of how my mind thinks. But there are two that I'd like to point out here. since literally before his 2016 election, in convincing his supporters that the left and the elites and the establishment really hate them, hate the supporters, see them as deplorables, and that they are attacking him to get at them. He's been very effective at convincing them of that. The second thing is that they simply don't pay attention to all this stuff. Fox News barely

covers the indictments. It barely covers E. Jean Carroll. It barely covers these things. And that's representative of the conservative media at large. So a lot of them simply don't hear about these things. They don't hear about it in detail. Or if they do, they see a true social tweet or they see, you know, they see something bleak, which I like. They see something which is sort of poo-poo's it in the same way that all of them say, oh, the Russia pokes was disproven, which isn't true at all, but they all see it that way because this is the media universe in which they live. So that combination of Donald Trump saying, oh, they're just out to get you and I'm standing in their way, which is now like emblazoned on his true social page and them just simply not paying

attention to the alternative, that is very powerful. And I think reinforces the idea that, you know, even if he gets locked up in prison, that's going to be seen as the establishment trying to attack the Republican base. And I don't think it hurts him politically. I think I know the answer to this. But even when they hear from somebody from within the MAGA universe, like Bill Barr, that the guy's unhinged, it doesn't make sense. Yeah, then he's instantly out of the MAGA universe. You know, as soon as Barr says, oh, the election wasn't stolen, boom, you're done. Now you're an opponent.

Right. And how many times have we seen this? People down from, oh, I hired a, you know, Mad Dog Mattis. He's the best. The Mattis is like, actually, this guy's not that good a president. Trump's like, oh, he was always terrible. And I was like, yeah, he was always terrible. It's like, what's going on? You know, how long is our institutional memory going here?

But it works for him. Well, that does. And, you know, I see today that Trump is attacking Laura Ingraham for having a segment on the program that Rhonda Sanders is polling better. So he's beating up on her, etc. And anybody that thinks that this is a dramatic shift has forgotten what happened in 2016, where he spent pretty much the first quarter of 2016 beating the crap out of Fox News until they came back into line, which of course they did. So nothing changes. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And Megyn Kelly came after him hard in the very first debate, asking him questions about his treatment of women. I think Fox News, Roger Ailes is a great quote

that I come to a lot from the book The Decider by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, in which they say that Roger Ailes recognized that Trump had a stronger hold over the Fox News base than Fox News. And so Fox News tried to challenge him in that first August 2015 debate and say, hey, you know, this is how you talk about women. And Trump just sort of shrugged and was like, yeah, I'm tired of being politically correct. And, you know, the audience hooted and hollered and Fox News was not backwards by it. Then he started that fight with Megyn Kelly. He refused to do the Fox News debate. And he showed Fox News that he did have a stronger grip on them. And so Fox News came along for the ride over the course of his presidency. And it is interesting watching

what happens to the cable ratings. The fact that Newsmax in some hours is now beating CNN is sort of an indication that this audience wants what it wants, right? And it's going to go where it gets it. And if you don't feed them what they want, there are alternatives out there, which is basically the story of what happened with Fox and Dominion. And that you don't feed them what they want, there are alternatives out there, which is basically the story of what happened with Fox and Dominion. And that dynamic hasn't changed at all, has it? No, that's exactly right. You know, I'm skeptical the newsmax holds on to this. I think it's partly reactionary in the moment.

And I think once they replace Tucker, you know, that person will just do the Tucker shtick and, you know, will bring back most of that audience. But yeah, you're exactly right. That's how in the immediate aftermath of November 2020, Fox News had to choose. Are we going to be reality adjacent news organization? Or are we going to continue to be the surreal right wing fringe network? And they never really resolved that tension. And it cost them, you know, three quarters of a billion dollars. And it made Tucker Carlson hugely influential in a way that ended up not being beneficial for Fox News. And they're still trying to figure out what that path forward is. Philip Bump is national columnist at The Washington Post, who focuses largely on the numbers behind politics and writes the must read weekly newsletter, How to Read This Chart. He's also the author of the book, The Aftermath, The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the

Future of Power in America. Philip, it is great to have you back on the podcast. Thank you. Of course. Always happy to. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will 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.