The Bulwark Podcast - Philip Bump: The GOP Stumbles Towards Impeachment

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

The smoking gun turns out to be a dud, but James Comer and the Republicans move ahead on their evidence-free Biden impeachment inquiry. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump joins Charlie Sykes on today’s podcast.

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Seixi. It is December 5th, 2023. Christmas is less than three weeks away. And of course, Congress has all kinds of things that are undone on its agenda, including are they going to vote on aid for Israel? Are they going to vote on aid for Ukraine? The clock is running on all of that. And apparently, though, the House Republicans have decided to take a break from not doing those things to have a vote on impeaching Joe Biden. The fifth string speaker, Mike Johnson, went on Fox over the weekend with Elise Stefanik and said that, yeah, they're going to move ahead on a formal impeachment inquiry vote and explain that, you know, Democrats were all partisan and everything, but, you know, Republicans are going to, this is not political at all. We are the party of law and order, he said with an actual straight face. And the guy who has become my go-to source

on what's going on with the Biden impeachment, what they have, what they don't have, whether or not this is really a dumpster fire in a clown car, is Philip Bump, the Washington Post columnist who joins us again on the podcast. Philip, good morning. How are you? Morning, sir. I'm good. How are you? Good. Well, let's start with this question. Are they really going to go ahead with this? They have a three-vote margin, and I believe Ken Buck from Colorado has already said that he would vote no, which gives them a two vote margin. What do you think? Are we actually going to have this? Well, there's two competing pressures here, right? The first is the fact that the impeachment probe has pretty much by any measure not gone the way that they had hoped.

And we can talk about why that's the case. I'm sure we will. But the other is that there is enormous pressure from the base, from right-wing media in particular, and from the base mostly of Trump-supporting Republicans for this to happen. And part of that's because for months there was this effort to try and impugn President Biden, basically by tying him to his son's business deals. And it went largely under the radar. And so it was very much a topic of conversation on Fox News and right wing media broadly. But there wasn't a lot of attention paid to it beyond that. And as such, there wasn't a lot of pushback on it. So, you know, the claims that were being made were wildly exaggerated, so on and so forth. But it really built this sense of Biden did these horrible things, we need to hold them into account

that now is putting this external pressure on the Republican Party, even as they are realizing that they don't have the goods. Okay, so you know, I wrote in my newsletter this morning that it's pretty easy to understand what the pressure is behind it. There are three things going on, as you mentioned, the base really wants this. I mean, they really want it desperately. They want the counter programming next year. Number two, Mike Johnson needs this as kind of a CYA because, you know, the moment he tries to act like an adult or, you know, suggest that, you know, he might actually allow, you know, aid to Ukraine or keep the government

open, you know, the fire-breathing fanatics in the Freedom Caucus are going to go crazy. This is the ultimate demand of the Marjorie Taylor Greene faction, the Matt Gaetz faction. He has to do this. He's hanging on by a thread. And of course, you know, the third major factor is Donald Trump. Donald Trump wants this. Donald Trump apparently was desperate to have his other impeachments expunged. And since that's not a thing, the next best thing would be, of course, to impeach Joe Biden. And, you know, the psychological and political impulse is pretty obvious here. You know, the worse Donald Trump looks, the more alarming, the scarier, the more corrupt he is, the more erratic he is, the higher the pressure is to make Joe Biden look even worse, right? I mean, isn't that the argument? Okay, yes, Donald Trump, you know, is a chronic liar

who muses openly about murdering his political opponents and admires dictators and everything and is apparently decompensating. But what about Joe Biden, right? So the pressure to make Joe Biden even more dangerous and more corrupt than Donald Trump, that's rising exponentially, particularly as we move into the felony trial season. Yeah, I mean, at least equivalently, right? I mean, we saw Donald Trump over the weekend try and assert that Joe Biden is the person who is an autocrat and who disregards norms and all these various things. Projection, anyone? Yeah, I mean, it's a ridiculous argument on its face. But there are a lot of people that really believe that democracy is under threat from the left and not the right, right? They believe that, for example, the response to the January 6th attack at the Capitol

was an example of, you know, a heavy political hand weighing in on law enforcement and trying to punish people for their political views, when the reality is people were beating cops, and that's why they're in prison. Like, it's not complicated. But this argument has a lot of traction, especially because, you know, when we think about this issue of democracy in peril, specifically, Donald Trump did such a good job of convincing his base that the election was stolen. They see democracy as already having been undercut by Joe Biden, right? And so that's just one example.

But you're right. There's a lot of this sort of projection that goes throughout Donald Trump's and the rights conversations about Joe Biden. And the remarkable thing is that even prior to this point, even prior to them moving forward with a potential impeachment, Joe Biden and his family are seen as about as equivalently corrupt as Donald Trump and his family, according to polling, which is just remarkable. I mean, yes, Hunter Biden is a sketchy guy, right? He very clearly traded on the Biden name to make some cash, but that does not extend to Joe Biden. There's no evidence that extends to Joe Biden

any significant way. And yet Joe Biden is already looped in and has been successfully looped into Hunter's activities by his opponent. Again, this is where you think you take your crazy pills because, you know, the people, you know, we just spent four years watching Ivanka Trump and, you know, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner just literally cash in on their White House rolls to not a thousand dollars here or there, but actual billions of dollars. But again, this is the necessary. What about him? OK, so let's just stipulate that there's something, you know, sleazy and sketchy about Hunter Biden. The big question is, you know, has Joe Biden been tied to this? Is it anything other than a loving dad who may have made some small mistakes? Let's walk through the kinds of evidence

that are out there, because there are a lot of folks out there, believe it or not, obviously tens of millions of people that see these headlines, direct evidence of payments from the Chinese into Joe Biden. So let's talk about what they rolled out yesterday, the smoking gun. This was the monthly payments directly from Hunter Biden's law firm to Joe Biden himself. And they hyped this. You had a great piece today, which I linked to in my newsletter today about James Comer. You say that the claims do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. There's been a consistent pattern here since Republicans regained control. Basically, Comer makes an allegation of wrongdoing, gets hyped by conservative media.

The allegation is then shown to be incorrect or baseless. But let's talk about this. So what are these payments? Because we actually now have checks, checks from Hunter Biden's business to Joe Biden. So this has been all along the standard that they say they're going to hit is this, that there is money flowing from Hunter Biden, Joe Biden. The challenge that they have, and this came to light very shortly after this, you know, James Comer released this video and made these allegations about money from China. And, you know, this undercuts the mainstream media.

Essentially what happened is that in 2018, Joe Biden went with Hunter Biden to buy a truck. Because Hunter Biden was a mess and Hunter Biden was addicted to drugs and Hunter Biden was having a lot of professional and personal issues. And he went with him and Joe Biden helped him buy a truck and he fronted the cost of the truck.

And there's a photo of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and the car dealer standing in front of the truck. So then later Hunter, through his law firm, paid apparently three payments over the course of three months of about, you know, what is it? Thirteen hundred dollars in total is about forty one hundred dollars. He paid his father back for the truck. That's forty one hundred dollars. It was interesting when I when I read the Republican press release, they didn't actually have the dollar amount in, because it's not quite as sexy to say, yes, you know, these payments. Yeah, $1,300, three of them to pay back a car loan, a truck loan or lease or whatever it was. Also seems relevant that number one, that it was in 2018 when Joe Biden wasn't even in office. So

it's not clear what you're implying here. And this had actually already been reported by the New York Post. So it's not even new. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. You know, but I mean, the remarkable thing is that, and this is why there should be no credibility given to James Comer's assertions, because instead of presenting this in the proper context of what it actually is, you know, we have questions about this. He then goes on television and, you know, to Newsmax, this right-wing network, to try and argue that this is actually significant, that he made this a really amazing transition over the course of the past two months, by the way,

where there was a similar issue that occurred about a month ago where they uncovered these two checks between Joe Biden and Joe Biden's brother, James. So Joe Biden had written these checks to Joe Biden, one for $200,000 and Joe Biden's brother, James. So James Biden had written these checks to Joe Biden, one for $200,000 and one for $40,000. And, you know, James Comer made a lot of fuss about this and how it represents all this blah, blah, blah. But this too was repayments of a loan. And it says on the check, loan repayment, there's documentation of Joe Biden having loaned his brother this money. At the time, James Comer's argument was, well, we don't think this is really a loan. We think this is actually something else that this is, you know, payment, blah, blah, blah. Then it became very

obvious it was a loan. You know, again, the check says loan repayment on it, which is either five years ago, them scheming to try and fool people in the future, or it's actually a loan repayment. But so now what James Comer has done, he did this last night, is he has shifted his frame so that now he's arguing that these loans are the scheme under which the Bidens are getting all this money. So he just changes his argument to fit whatever the pushback he's getting is because the arguments he's making are so poorly constructed in the first place. He is figuratively grasping at straws and then trying to present those as evidence of wrongdoing, and he keeps getting undercut. I was watching a clip of him is a perfect example of him grasping

for straws where he's basically said, well, he's asked, well, this was just a repayment of a loan. How is that improper? And he says something along the lines of that. Well, if you loan somebody money, you know, that's one thing, but if they repay the loan, then you benefit from it. That's right. That somehow the repayment of a loan becomes equivalent to some sort of an illicit payment, which doesn't even pass the snort test. I mean, this is where he's at. It's an incredibly stupid argument. If he were to present this in any context other than being critical of Joe Biden, his allies would be like, what are you talking about, James? But they've been doing this for a year. Okay. So, I mean, let's play devil's advocate for just a

moment, because I think the theory behind this to the extent they wouldn't articulate it this way is you just keep throwing stuff up against the wall. And, and that at some point people think, well, where there's smoke, there must be fire. And so you do have, there are some really sort of, you know, sketchy influence peddling things that went on with Hunter Biden and members of his family who clearly were trading on the Biden name to get deals that nobody would have given them anywhere else, including in Ukraine, including in China. Right. So once you've established, okay, these are people who are doing business in questionable ways, influence peddling, then all of these other allegations are like, well, okay, it's got to be there

somewhere, right? I mean, in this giant pile of shit, we're going to find the thread. We haven't found it yet, but it's got to be there, right? And isn't that kind of the culture we're dealing with here with a mindset? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think there is a presumption that Joe Biden is dirty, right? And I think that's a sincere presumption. I think they really think that Joe Biden was involved, right? And I think that's a sincere presumption. I think they really think

that Joe Biden was involved in all this. I think just on its face, that's a poor assumption. Joe Biden is nothing if not an ambitious politician who very clearly had his eyes on the White House. The idea that he's going to take, you know, 10,000, 50,000, whatever it happens to be from a foreign actor and submarine potentially that, or, you know, these illicit, it just doesn't really make sense. Everyone knew he wanted to be president and he's worked for it for decades. It's odd that you would then assume that he's going to take this money from foreign actors. But this is the assumption. The baseline assumption is that Joe Biden is dirty. It is still absolutely possible that there will be a line that is drawn between the two, but they start from the assumption. They start from the assumption Joe Biden is dirty, they argue that Joe Biden is dirty, and then they have to backfill

the evidence. And so the phase that we've been in for some time now is James Comer and his allies very sloppily and very incompletely backfilling that evidence. But because the base already has gotten to the conclusion that they share, they all accept the evidence as actual evidence, as opposed to just an effort to try and whip up smoke to imply fire. So I was talking to somebody about this who, you know, somebody who I think was pretty reasonable and was saying, yes, but what about the whistleblowers? What about, I mean, and again, this is part of this cloud that after a while people begin to think, okay, because one of the things I've found about a lot of these really, really complicated

scandals is, you know, you may follow them very, very closely. I may try to follow them very, very closely, but the average person just sort of hears it and has a, I don't want to use the word vibe, but you know, a sense and say, you know, he asked, well, what about the whistleblower who comes forward and says that we were investigating Hunter Biden and all the sleaze and everything, and we were told to back down so that there's indications that perhaps Hunter Biden and the Biden family have gotten a sweet deal. What about that? So there are basically four different threads that they are following. And part of this is simply a function of them trying to come up with something that

seems impeachable, right? So there is Joe Biden lied about his familiarity with Hunter Biden's business practices, which is sort of subjective and depends on how you parse what he said and so on and so forth. There is, you know, Joe Biden was getting money and working in partnership with Hunter Biden and his brother. You know, this overlaps with this absolutely ridiculous allegation about Ukraine, which seems the most damning, but has obviously been shown not to be the case. Then there is this idea that he used improper influence over the investigation into Hunter Biden. And so this is what you're referring to, that there are these whistleblowers that came forward and said, we have concerns about the way this investigation went forward. Now, that's

totally fair. It's totally fair to have whistleblowers come forward and say, hey, we think that Hunter Biden was treated differently. And there's been a lot of adjudication, including with sworn testimony before House congressional committees looking at this. We've heard pushback on some of what the whistleblowers have said. You know, this started before Joe Biden was even president. It's very worth noting the Hunter Biden probe has been sort of inherited by the Biden administration. There's now a special counsel in charge of it. So all of that is being adjudicated. There's no evidence at this point in time that Joe Biden leaned on anyone in part because, again, this all began before he was actually president. But they don't have the goods on that either.

And if it were the case that Joe Biden had stepped in at some point post-January 2021 and said, hey, go easy on my son, yes, that's a big deal. There's no evidence that that actually occurred. And there's not even at this point very robust evidence beyond the whistleblowers, a lot of whose testimony has been contradicted by other people, suggesting that there actually was a way in which this was handled with kid gloves in the way that they imply. And of course, you know, the white whale here is some sort of quid pro quo. You know, what policy was changed? What has he done? What is the transition?

And again and again, they've been asked, even on Fox News about this and Fox Business, and they basically say, no, we don't have any evidence yet. And I guess that's what's sort of extraordinary, that they're going to go ahead with the inquiry, having failed over and over and over again. Well, yes, except they also do allege that there was an explicit act of pro quo, which is this incident in Ukraine, right? So they found that. Remind me about this, because I think a lot of our listeners kind of remember this, but

it's like, okay, there was a prosecutor and we know that Biden was involved. So could you just explain this as if I'm a sixth grader? Sure. Well, there's a thing called the government, Charlie. Okay. So people remember the first impeachment of Donald Trump in which he was accused of having pressure on and, you know, was shown to have put pressure on Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden.

Right. So this is an obsession going back. Everybody needs to remember that this whole thing, this was what the first impeachment was about. Find the dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden in Ukraine, which we're back there. OK, so. And so what was shown at that time is that the thing which Donald Trump wanted Ukraine to investigate was shown not to be actually founded on reality. It was shown that, you know, Hunter Biden was working for this Ukrainian energy company called Burisma, and there was no evidence at that point in time that has emerged since to suggest that there was an investigation into Burisma, which then had prompted Joe Biden to try and crack down on the prosecutor general in Ukraine.

What instead was shown, this is again back in 2019, is that Joe Biden was acting in accordance with the international community who viewed this guy, Victor Shokin, this prosecutor in Ukraine, as being corrupt. For example, the UK was trying to prosecute the founder of Burisma for money laundering, and they asked Shokin to provide evidence, and he declined to do so, and they had to drop that probe. As opposed to this idea that Shokin was leaning on Burisma, the suggestion instead is that he was corrupt and actually letting Burisma potentially get away with stuff. So at the time, it was shown that Donald Trump wanted Ukraine to say, oh, we are investigating Joe Biden for trying to get Shokin out of this job, when in reality- It looks bad. I mean, I remember this the first time you saw the clip. It is the edited clip where Joe Biden is clearly saying, we want you to fire

this prosecutor. And they went, aha, that's the smoking gun. That is the quid pro quo. It turns out though, that's a completely different story. That Shokin in fact was the corrupt prosecutor. It was not to protect Burisma and Hunter Biden. And that's been demonstrated over and over again, but they keep coming back to it. And of course, in Donald Trump's mind, and by the way, you know, parenthetically, apparently now Donald Trump is back to various wild conspiracy theories about January 6th. I guess the point is that when Donald Trump gets a brain worm of a conspiracy theory, he never lets go, does he, Philip? I mean, and we live in this world. We live in the world of the election big lie.

We live in the world of what happened with Ukraine and Burisma. And he lies awake at night still thinking about that. And you can't really understand what's happening with the Biden impeachment without sort of going back to that sort of original moment. Right. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, Donald Trump just says he's a human smoke machine. Anything he can put out there to imply that there's a fire is what we see. So now what happens is Republicans, in part because they were so adamant in defending Donald Trump back in 2019,

and in part because they simply tuned out the impeachment hearings, right? So a lot of them simply weren't, aren't aware that all this was debunked back then. Right. But what occurs is then over the summer, the House Oversight Committee interviews this guy, Devin Archer,

who is someone who had worked with Hunter Biden and was on the board of Burisma alongside Hunter Biden. And he says that in December of 2015, that they had had a board meeting in Dubai in that Hunter Biden and the head of Burisma had gone back and made a phone call to Washington. And then shortly after that, Joe Biden had flown to Ukraine and started putting pressure on Shokin. That for Jim Jordan, that's the thing he keeps coming back to. There's four undeniable facts, right? This is what he's talking about that. However, A, Joe Biden's trip to Ukraine had been announced more than a month prior,

so it was not a function of the phone call. D, too. B, that phone call occurred, and this is actually something Comer himself showed, but he has ignored. The phone call occurred at a time when there were news stories by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that were asking questions about Hunter's ties to Burisma. And literally on those days, they were trying to get responses back to the Times and back to the Wall Street Journal about Hunter Biden's role. So it's very natural to assume then that the

conversation back to DC was about what they're going to say in response to these media outlets, right? And then of course, there's C, which is the fact that even Devin Archer has said that Burisma did not view Shokin as an opponent, but rather as an ally. And so there's no evidence that Joe Biden putting pressure on Shokin actually benefited Burisma in the first place. So all of those things contradict the idea that this was something, this was a trigger moment for Burisma and Ukraine and Biden, but the Republicans have glommed onto it anyway, because it is the closest thing they've got to any sort of narrative, which suggests the level of wrongdoing that Donald Trump very obviously was guilty of. So two things, we have thoroughly debunked this whole story. It is completely discredited. However,

this strikes me as a problem for Biden anyway, because it's complicated. Your explanation and any explanation is complicated. You know, you need to listen carefully. Whereas the Jim Jordans of the world who don't give a shit whether it's true or not, all they care about is winning and making the points. They can paint this pastel picture. He doesn't paint pastels. I'm, you know, this lurid picture. He doesn't paint pastels. I'm, you know, this lurid picture. And then the defense

takes, if it takes more than 20 seconds, the demagogues win. I'm just talking about the real politic here. And so how is this going to play out in the hearings? I actually think, and again, I could be completely wrong. I think that in many ways, Biden will benefit from them moving ahead with impeachment. Number one, because the base, which is, I think, kind of disillusioned or bored with Joe Biden, will rally around it. But also these hearings, to the extent that people pay attention, it's kind of going to expose how weak a lot of this evidence is. It's one thing to go on Fox News and spend five minutes with a credulous host. It's something else if you actually have a bipartisan committee with some really smart Democrats who are going to point out all the flaws in the case. How do you think the hearings play out next spring, if in fact they

happen? Yeah, so there's two things I'd say. The first is that what we saw in the Trump impeachment was that conservative media, particularly Fox News, really didn't cover it, right? They didn't air it. And the same held true with the January 6th committee, right? They simply didn't cover it. They didn't introduce it to their audience. Didn't exist. Right. And, you know, at one point, Laura Ingraham's like, we know our audience. I don't want to hear this. And it's like, well, yeah, that's, yes, that's correct. Right. But then the other issue is, will there be hearings? Right. So James Comer, I actually learned that he had told reporters last month that he didn't want to have more hearings.

Their first hearing, they've done one hearing on impeachment, people may recall, it was an absolute debacle. It was a disaster. It was. It was really bad. It was. They had A, no evidence to introduce, and then B, Democrats used the time to criticize Donald Trump and to criticize the GOP. So that seemed to predispose James Comer to tell reporters, I don't think I want to have any more hearings. You know, all it is,

is if people grandstand and we're all so busy and blah, blah, blah. When of course the reality is he doesn't want to subject him to that scrutiny. He doesn't like that scrutiny. Every time he's introduced an argument and it has been subjected to scrutiny, it has been exposed as horseshit, right? So he doesn't want to do that. He particularly doesn't want to do it in public forum. I'd be very interested to see what hearings do look like if they actually occur under this process. Just briefly, because I want to move on to your piece that you had about how Donald Trump uses dishonesty, but the whole back and forth when Hunter Biden seemed to call their bluff and said, yeah, okay, I'm going to come in and testify. I want to testify in public. And all the Republicans went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait,

we do not want you to testify in public. What was that kabuki dance all about? I think it was an interesting move by Hunter Biden's attorney, who, by the way, used to be here in Jared Kushner's attorney. So he's very familiar with these sorts of factors. How weird is that, by the way? It's, yeah, well, you know, I mean, if you're looking for a guy who's going to defend you against, you know, these sorts of influence peddling assets. Welcome to Washington, D.C. Yeah, right.

I think that one of the things we saw with Devin Archer is that Devin Archer testified behind closed doors. There was this lengthy transcript that was released, and there was very thoroughly cherry picked by Republicans. They made this very, you know, they made this argument. Devin Archer had shown that Joe Biden was on the phone with Hunter Biden. And then they left out the parts of the transcript, which were Devin Archer saying, actually, yeah, I got this email from Hunter Biden saying that we can't actually influence my father, but we want people to think that we can, and saying that, you know, Joe Biden was never involved in their business activities. They never talked about those things. And so, you know, it's up to people like me and you to come

out and say, well, Devin Archer actually said the opposite of what they're arguing, but it doesn't have a lot of impact because it depends upon people. You're playing catch up then. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. They frame the issue and then, yes. That's right. You see how effective that is.

The first person out of the box to tell the story basically sets the template of the story. Okay. Yeah. It's William Barr and the Mueller probe, right? Yeah. Well, that's exactly what I was thinking about. Yeah. Right. But you also and the Mueller probe. Right. Yeah. Well, that's exactly what I was thinking about. Yeah. Right. Right.

You know, but you also lose the emotional impact. You lose the sense of, you know, Hunter Biden getting up and saying, no, you're lying. It's different than saying, no, you're lying. You know, I mean, there's like there's a lot to it beyond that. And I think they also wanted to have the opportunity to have defenders in the room. Right. You know, which makes sense. When Devin Archer was testifying behind closed doors, there were people there, you know, Representative Goldman from New York, for example, was in the room and asked questions that got to more accurate answers. But again, that's buried in text in hundreds of pages of material. It has more impact to be able to do this live in front of people. And that's, of course, why Comer doesn't want to have that happen. He wants to first have this, you know, deposition. He said that he's open to having an actual hearing down the road. I'm skeptical of that. But once he's got that deposition in hand, he can cherry pick those elements and make years, you'd think that we would have been completely inured to all of this, but it is interesting. And you point out that the key to understanding Trump is that he spent decades selling real

estate in New York City, an industry renowned, particularly in that city, for its dishonesty and misrepresentations. And you explain this. So, I mean, he tried to get people to buy gold plated condos gilded with veneers of luxury and class. And now, amid the trial, these allegations of fraud linger around him and his company. But as you point out, he was never more successful in using dishonesty than when he joined national politics. I mean, this is the connecting of the dots. And I remember thinking this back in 2015. He was not a plausible candidate for president because he was a notorious grifter and scam artist.

And it was easily documented. But, I mean, there is a through line here, isn't there, that we're seeing in that New York trial? Particularly someone who spent a lot of time in New York City. The idea that a real estate developer should be given any sort of benefit of the doubt on honesty is sort of laughable. I mean, it's also important to recognize that he was also essentially the autocratic leader of a private company for those decades. Well, he has no sense of working in teams. But yeah, so one of the things that we saw, and I really think, and I come back to this a lot, because I really think it helps define and explain how Donald Trump was

able to rise in 2015, 2016, is that at that moment, we had seen basically since the election of Barack Obama back in 2008, the ascent of a right wing world that was centered on amplifying, disparaging things about the left and false claims about the left and their political opponents. That took a lot of forms. One of them was a lot of the Tea Party activism was rooted in these sort of misconceptions and false arguments about what the left was doing and about what was happening to America. There's obviously a demographic element about that. I wrote a book in January about that. So I think that plays a role too here. But Donald Trump came forward at a time when the Republican

establishment was trying to figure out, how do we deal with this? How do we deal with the fact that there's this huge universe of, you know, saying false things that we need their votes? What do we do with that? And Donald Trump stepped forward in 2015. And he basically just plucked arguments out of that, that nonsense sphere, if you will, and present them to the base and said, Oh, here's what Jeb Bush isn't going to tell you is that immigrants are all criminals coming across the border. And yeah, Jeb Bush isn't going to tell you that for a lot of reasons, including that he's a traditional Republican. He's like, he's not going to like amplify lies to get ahead in the way that Donald Trump was. And then people looked at Donald Trump and said, here's a guy that's telling the truth because this is what they're reading on Breitbart.

This is what they were hearing on Fox News. And they thought that was accurate and that the GOP establishment was lying to them about these things when, of course, they weren't lying to them about these things. But Donald Trump was. And so he stepped forward and said, you know, this is what's actually happening. And people said, yeah, that's right. He's finally, you know, finally we have this truth teller. And he built this reputation. And it's been extremely helpful to him because now all he has to do is pluck other lies out of the ether, like, you know, this idea that the DOJ called parents domestic terrorists, which is nonsense. But he reiterated this this weekend in Iowa and said, you know, look what they're doing as a way of then saying, because Biden is the real threat to democracy. So he has long taken these lies, use them to his advantage and use them to bolster

other lies that he's making and has been very successful at. I think that some of his critics have been slow to figure out this playbook. And it's very clear what that playbook is. And you've identified, you know, particularly, you know, watching him. I remember back in 2015, 2016, I'm trying to think who was who said, I think it was Jon Favreau, who wrote speeches for Obama, who said that Jon Favreau was the first really, you know, talk radio candidate, you know, longtime listener, first time caller. And because what he would do is if you watched right wing media and various themes, a week

later, Donald Trump would pick it up. So it wasn't right wing media amplifying what Trump was saying. It was Trump picking out those nuggets so that when he said them, it resonated with the base because they've been hearing them and they're, oh my God, somebody is finally saying what we have been thinking, which, which basically means what I read on Gateway Pundit or what I heard from Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh. The other thing going back to the real estate is the bullshit and hype, which is I have the biggest, tallest buildings. Everything is fantastic. You just keep selling. You never acknowledge any flaws and you keep hyping.

And frankly, his approach to everything from infrastructure to health care to everything else is the same as the way that he was selling the gold plated condos. Right. Figuring that if you say the bullshit, you know, loud enough and with enough power, people will actually believe it if they particularly if they want to believe it. And if they catch you on your bullshit bullshit you say more bullshit to confuse them again you layer bullshit on top of bullshit and the other thing that he's done and he's done it with incredible effectiveness is is projection he takes an allegation against him and he turns it around and puts it back which we've already discussed you know that i'm an authoritarian no joe biden is the authoritarian i'm corrupt no jo, Joe Biden is corrupt. I peddle fake news. No, you are the fake news. And go back to 2015, 2016, and see how many of the phrases, the criticisms leveled at him. He, in fact, has now weaponized against his opponents. And how often has worked for him? No, you're exactly right. I mean, the classic example of that, and I think the most obvious

example of that, which I was really glad when the Washington Post wrote about his rally in Iowa, I was very glad to see they included it, was during the third presidential debate in 2016, when Hillary Clinton got up and said, you know, I don't think we want to elect someone who's a puppet of Vladimir Putin as president. And his response was, no puppet, no puppet, you're the puppet. Yes, I know. That was perfect. But it was also exactly how it works. So, you know, you talked about, you know, what he's doing in Iowa. And again, we mentioned this before, how it's Biden who is the threat to democracy. It is Biden who is weaponizing the justice system, which I find very interesting because it's very clear that one of the real threats of a Trump 2.0 presidency is his overt and explicit promise to weaponize the justice system against his political opponents. But he lays the groundwork for that by accusing the Biden administration of doing that. And as you pointed out, there are a lot of people in his base who believe that. I mean, tens of millions of people who believe that's already happening. So the other thing that he's done, you know, he expands this victimization

very effectively to, it's not just me, it's you. He includes about how they want to control your speech. They want to control your social media. They want to control what car you drive, you know, and that's kind of, you know, the Elon Musk sort of thing, right? That, you know, we are advocates for free speech and all of those things. So I do think it's interesting that you point out nearly the entire right-wing media and political ecosystem is now oriented around boosting similar falsehood. There's no fringe anymore, really. Elected officials and media outlets that were generally aligned with the establishment effort to co-opt the fringe eight years ago now hope to appeal to a huge Trump-primed audience. This makes it easier for Trump in precisely the way

the claim of domestic terrorists work. His audience hears the falsehood, not the reality. That's been the thing that's happened. There once was a gap between the fringe right-wing media and the establishment. That disappeared. Yes, it did. You know, I mean, there still are people who were part of the sensible establishment Republican worldview who are calling us out. You know, one of them is a gentleman named Charlie Sykes who lives somewhere in the upper Midwest, right? I mean, there still exists these people, right?

But it's just that that was not the conduit to power. And politics and media are fundamentally about power, access, and influence, right? Like that's what drives it. And because that got cut off, because once Donald Trump ascended in 2016, there was no more way to do that. You had to be very pure of heart to stand against that. I don't mean to like, you know, smother you with flattery here. But you know, I mean, it took a lot to stand against that. It was very easy. You know, we saw the, you know, Fox News in the wake of the 2020 election, they come out and they're like, okay, he lost, let's move forward, right? And immediately,

they see their base is furious, and they start going to watch Newsmax and One America and so what do they do they recalibrate and they're like well yeah maybe you know you get Maria Bartiromo you know maybe maybe this thing was stolen and you know they have shied away from explicitly saying and giving airtime to Donald Trump saying it was stolen but they've given a lot of credence to all of his other theories and you know sort of the underpinnings of that argument, because that's what their base wants to hear. And that's the conduit to retaining an audience, retaining power. It's become a familiar story now. Okay. Well, another piece that you wrote about, I want to switch gears a little bit here. This is this polling from NBC that you wrote about, you know, shortly before Thanksgiving that found that young voters are not

interested in the institutions that Biden needs. So talk to me about that. Because that's grim, because a lot of talk about where the young voters are going to be. Democrats, Joe Biden absolutely needs those young voters next year. So what are we seeing in these polls? Yeah, so there's been a lot of polling, which has shown that the likely race between Trump and Biden next year, that the youngest voters, usually those under the age of 30, are about evenly split in terms of who they prefer, which is a huge break. Mind boggling. Yeah, from 2008 until 2020, there's a huge gap and a much wider gap than there had been in the past between younger and older Americans. This is would be a dramatic shift. You know, I think that there are a lot

of factors here. Obviously, one should be very cautious about, you know, general election polling one year before the actual election before the candidates are even set, that a lot can change, that no one has actually done any, you know, campaigning. But I think a fundamental issue here and a challenge for Biden specifically in the Democratic Party broadly is that one of the patterns that we've seen with young people in particular, and this is a longstanding pattern that has only sort of gotten more significant over time, is that they are not participants in institutions, that the independent voters in the United States are more likely to be young. Young people are more likely to be independents. They do not belong to a party. So while they share a lot of the ideology of the

Democratic Party, they're very motivated by things like gun control and climate change and all these various things that correlate to what the Democratic Party is advocating, they are not themselves actually beholden to the party. They are not members of the party, and they are not members of social constructs which reinforce those politics, like, you know, the church, right? So one of the things when I was doing research for my book, which focuses on a lot of this stuff, you know, I spoke with a gentleman who pointed out that if young Black Americans are less likely to participate in black churches, they lack some of that social structure, which was very good at reinforcing sort of political worldviews. Right. That holds for a lot of things. And so, you know, we see the Democrats have overperformed in recent elections. But we also see that when it's taken out of the context of issues and candidates you don't really know.

And, you know, I'm going to vote for the Democrat and it isn't said about Joe Biden. They aren't necessarily going to say I'm going to vote for him because he's the Democrat. They're like, I don't like Joe Biden. I know a lot about Joe Biden. I don't particularly like him. You know, I'm an independent. You know, I don't have to just vote for the Democrat. Maybe I'll vote for Donald Trump. And so we see, I think, the lack of institutional rooting by younger Americans is problematic, more so for Biden, because they develop independent views about him. Whereas for, you know, a generic house candidate, they're probably less likely to do so.

So basically, bowling alone is morphed into voting alone. Well said. There you go. Yeah. Well, I think in some ways it's good that they're not politically partisan and tribal. I mean, I increasingly find it sort of weird that people, you know, put on a political party jersey, but there's a larger thing that you're talking about as well, which is the breakdown of all of those institutions, all of those meeting institutions that used to be the basis of civil society, you know, whether they are, you know, clubs, organizations, the bowling clubs, you know,, and all of those things, which means that these

things like TikTok and the media and other things tend to have a much greater impact than we would have thought. So one last question, because I know you're a demographer here. So how is the surge in migration going to affect 2024? Because we know the effect that the caravans have had. We know that a lot of the migration in 2015 sort of lit the fuse for a lot of things that have happened in Europe. So give me your thoughts on that. How might the surge in migration affect next year's election? Yeah. And I think an underappreciated aspect is 2014, there was a big surge in unaccompanied minors coming to the border, which really lit immigration as an issue for Republicans that then led to Donald Trump in June 2015. So I looked at this in a recent article, including new research, which showed that there

was a correlation between an increase in the number of undocumented migrants in a community and the increase in support for Republican candidates, right? Which makes sense, but would suggest that the increase in the number of people coming to the border would spell very bad news for Democrats. But it is worth considering that, you know, this was also the case in 2021, 2022, and Democrats did better than expected in house races in part because of abortion, right? You know, so this is not necessarily predictive in that way. But it is clear, for example, that the historical pattern has been that increases in people crossing the border between the US and Mexico has been bad news for Democrats, that the saliency of this issue has

different effects on different demographic groups. One of the reasons that a Latino based research firm saw that Hispanics had shifted to the right in 2020, particularly along the border in Florida, was that immigration was not a hot button issue in that conversation at the time, that it was not, you know, 2020, obviously there are a lot of issues on the table, immigration was not really one of them. And so that gave them the space then to vote on the presidential election based on the economy and things along those lines where Trump pulled better. So it's not clear if this means that next year, if immigration is a more salient issue, which seems likely, that those voters will then shift back to the left somewhat because they disagree with Trump's position on immigration.

Or if this trajectory has been permanently shifted. That's a really interesting take on all of this, because I had been thinking, obviously, the more salient the issue is, the more potent it's going to be for Republicans. You're saying that, in fact, it could have the opposite effect with Hispanic voters, that when it's not front and center, they're more willing to vote for Republicans. But when it really becomes, once sort of the veneer is taken off and we're talking about, you know, Mexican rapists again, that we're going to go back to previous patterns of voting. It's possible, but it's also the case. There was some really good reporting after 2020, Jack Herrera, who does stuff for Texas Monthly, wrote this really, really great piece, which people should read, which looked at the

extent to which Hispanic Americans also feel as though if they've, you know, the counties that shifted the most to the right, when you look at the intersection of migration and Hispanic density, were counties where Hispanic density was very, very high. There were a lot of Hispanics, but the migration was very, very low. So they'd been there a long time, right? So it was not new arrival Hispanics. It was people who were Hispanic and been in the country for a long time. They were the ones that shifted most to the right, right? And part of that is, according to Herrera's report, which I think makes sense, is that there is a differentiation between people who've been in the country a long time and immigrants as such, right? And that they too are frustrated by immigrants crossing the border. The research that I mentioned earlier

found that it is immigrant communities that see the most deleterious economic effects when immigrants come in. And so there may be a reason then for immigrants themselves to look more askance at that. But, you know, it's incredibly complicated. You know, the entire point is that, you know, it's hard to paint with a broad brush, but it may be the case that Donald Trump, once again, running on this immigration message may actually retract some of the gains that he saw in 2020. Philip Bump is national columnist with the Washington Post, focuses largely on the numbers behind politics and writes the newsletter, How to Read This Chart. Also the author of the recent book, The Aftermath, The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America. So as

a baby boomer, I appreciated the book. Philip, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. You bet. Thanks, Charlie. 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.