The Bulwark Podcast - Ready for 2024?

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

It was a year of heroes and zeros, highs and lows, and shocks and fizzles. Mona Charen, A.B. Stoddard, and Will Saletan join Charlie Sykes for a special send-off to 2023.

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At Dawn Valley North, Dawn Valley North for Lexus is the place. See website for details. Expect excellence. A proud member of Wayne's Auto Group. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't, and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. Welcome to our year-end Bulwark podcast, a year that began with chaos and ended in actually more chaos, indictments, perp walks, mugshots, and a Republican party that just wants more of that. A soft landing for the economy, but dire poll numbers for Joe Biden, a dysfunctional Congress,

Ukraine on the brink, and a former president who's making it absolutely clear what a second term would be like. Welcome to our year-end podcast with our best and our brightest to break it all down, Mona Charon, A.B. Stoddard, and Will Salatan. Okay, ready to do 2023? Ready to say goodbye? We're saying goodbye.

All right, so let's start with the cosmic, big picture, okay? Deep dive. We're not going to ease our way into this. So 2023 was the year of blank. What was the overriding theme of the year? Mona. I'm going to go with partial accountability. Okay. And I'm a little bit inspired by your morning shots, Charlie, but we had the Fox Dominion lawsuit, which resulted in three quarters of a billion dollar damages assessment. We had Giuliani found responsible for defaming those election workers, and they're soon going to decide on the damages, but he's been found guilty. We had Santos expelled. We had Tucker fired. Stuart Rhodes got 18 years for

seditious conspiracy. The MyPillow guy had to pay out $4.5 million to the guy that he tried to cheat when he had made that bet. Anyway, there's a long list of people who actually got their, at least some accountability this year. And considering how things have been going in this country, that's not nothing. Okay, that's a pretty good way to start this show. Okay, A.B. Stoddard, 2023, your theme of the year. So I love that upbeat start, but my theme of the year was separation from reality. I just feel that if you watch the responses to Biden's economy, if you watch the responses to the Trump indictments, if you watch the responses to the war between Israel and Hamas and on and on, the Fox News audience's response to the Dominion

lawsuit, Elon Musk, we have a profound and disturbing and surreal separation from reality that will be the curtain that sort of covers 2024. Okay. Upbeat, dark. Will? Yep. Break the tie. Okay. So first of all, I have to say, this was the year of the indictment, the presidential indictment. I mean, we started the year with zero presidential indictments in the history of the United States and we ended it with four. So like to me, that's the main headline. But in terms of a theme, first of all, Mona, I'm going to give you the My Little Pony for today because of your answer, which I'm not even going to go there. So I'm going to go on the pessimistic side and say this was the year of regression. Because I personally started the year as an optimist.

And I thought that Ron DeSantis or somebody was going to, DeSantis was already leading Trump in the polls when we started. He completely collapsed. The Republican Party made clear that it had no intention of abandoning Donald Trump. We ended up with, you know, Mike Johnson as the speaker at an election, a guy who tried to overturn the election. Kerry Lake is still politically viable. How is this possible? So I thought that the Republican Party might be turning the corner and I was wrong. So to me, it's the year of regression. Okay, so I have two answers here. I think that 2023 was the

year of the, to quote Winston Churchill, the gathering storm. We saw the chaos. We saw the return of Donald Trump. We see all of these storm clouds gathering. And for the reasons that I think Will just mentioned, the fact that Kerry Lake is still viable, Mike Johnson is the new speaker of the House of Representatives. Things have gotten worse. Donald Trump is making no secret of what a Trump 2.0 presidency will be like, and the Republican Party seems to be okay with that. So I guess the corollary to that is this was also the year of magical thinking or the end of magical thinking. Because remember at the start of the year, there were a lot of Republicans who thought, okay, Trump's not going to get the nomination,

right? Because something, something, something unicorn, something meteor will hit. That something would happen, that someone else would take him out, that even the DeSantis people thought that the indictments at some point would cause people to break off. All of that magical thinking has completely evaporated by the end of the year. Sorry to end on a down note. So, you know, I'm like a news nerd. So I always, you know, wait for the biggest story, the top 10 stories of the year. I almost always disagree with what the top story is. But let's do this. What was the biggest story of 2023?

A.B. Stoddard, you go first. The four indictments. Because as Will notes, Republicans can roll their eyes. Disconnected swing voters who don't follow politics in off years can sort of confuse them and wonder what's going on. And do they all have to do with Stormy Daniels? But they are so consequential and so significant. We have never had a former president be criminally charged. 91 times is beyond anything we could have imagined. And it is a profound dark turn in our history. Okay, Will, biggest story of the year.

I'm going to go with the story that something that didn't happen, which was there was supposed to be a recession. I mean, a year ago, there was supposed to be a recession and that was going to completely define this political year. It was going to like hurt a lot of people. I'm kind of amazed given that it didn't happen, how upset people are with the economy. But setting that aside from where we were a year ago, the fact that we have reached a soft landing. Charlie, you talked about the death of magical thinking. This was way better than I expected for 2023.

Okay. Mona Charon, biggest story of 2023. So I'm going to agree with AB that it's the indictments. This is unprecedented in American history, and we still don't know how it's going to play out. I believe that the first indictment, the Alvin Bragg one, was a mistake. That's another topic. But I just want to say, following up on Will's point, that I also had jotted down in my notes, not for this answer, but just in general, that there are a lot of stories about what did not happen and was widely expected in 2023. So the recession is one.

Another one is the banking crisis. Remember back in April, there was, you know, all this worry, we're going to have a huge banking crisis. That did not happen. And the monkeypox epidemic that was supposed to overtake the whole country didn't happen. So because of the nature of our news, there's just this hysteria about the next coming terrible thing, and then it doesn't happen. So because of the nature of our news, there's just this hysteria about the next coming terrible thing. And then it doesn't happen. What did happen to monkeypox? I totally forgot about monkeypox, you know, and I'd actually also forgotten about the looming banking crisis, which was a big thing for like 24 hours, right? Exactly. No, the monkey, I think they had a vaccine and people took it. And how about that? Who knew vaccines actually work?

OK, so the biggest story of the year, I'm going to go with the fact that we have four indictments of a former president of the United States, something that has never happened in U.S. history, that Donald Trump is facing more than 90 felony counts. I think at the beginning of the year, I always try to think, you know, back to a year ago, what did we think the next year was going to be like? I think we thought there might be some of the charges, but when you lay them all out and the granularity of the evidence against him and the severity of the charges, I mean, Jack Smith, whatever your expectations might have been a year ago, I think Jack Smith has exceeded them. So I think that's the story of the year.

So what was the most undercovered story of the year? The story that, and I think that's the story of the year. So what was the most undercovered story of the year? The story that, and I think we're kind of, you know, touching on this a little bit. Will, you want to start? Oh, well, Joe Biden's age. We haven't talked enough about Joe Biden's age. No. He had a birthday too, right? So he's actually older.

He got older this year. Can you believe it? No, shocking. Can I say it, Kay? We're like 10 minutes in, already getting a snark from Will. So look, I mean, I already talked about the recession that didn't happen. There were some indicators earlier in the year that people thought were going to get worse. They got better. And nobody cares about good news. Good news doesn't get covered. So the decline of inflation,

I think, is an undercover story. It certainly has not sunk in with the public. And I know I don't want to disrespect people. If you go to the grocery store, it still costs more than it did in 2020 or 2019. But inflation has declined significantly. Crime also in a lot of places declined significantly. The border got worse, but a lot of things got better. And the media just didn't focus on that as much as they might have because it's good news. Okay, A.B. Stoddard, undercover story of the year. Yeah, undercover story of the year is the big lie.

In August, Charlie and I spoke before the first debate. And I had just written for The Bulwark how the big lie was going to be possibly buried alive at the Republican debates. Brett Baier had asked about it in an interview. He was certainly going to do it when he hosted the first debate. He had put Trump on the spot about it, and he did not do that. And in every subsequent debate, nobody has done that. And if you turn on Fox or CNN sometimes when they get Republican candidates and they have town halls with them or they have interviews with them, this is not only not a subject in the debates from the moderators, it's not even a subject for questioning in interviews. It's almost like it's gone.

And I find it absolutely stunning because it is so central and it is so important. Yet it's just so 2022. Mona, undercover story of the year. So I have a long list. I'll try to shorten it. Okay, no. You know, Putin came out this year and decried the indictments against Donald Trump, the weaponization of the American judicial system against an innocent political candidate. So that didn't get enough attention, that basic endorsement of Trump by Putin when, you know, supposedly Trump frightened Putin to death. That's why he didn't invade Ukraine while Trump was president. But strange that he would endorse them in that way.

Another thing is that Putin has been holding a Wall Street Journal reporter named Evan Gershkovitz for nine months. And the Wall Street Journal, his home paper does, you know, talk about it and, you know, draw attention to it. But honestly, it's gotten nothing like the attention that the female basketball player got, you know, and it's just as much of an outrage. So very undercovered, in my opinion. And then finally, I would say, this is a much bigger subject, and I can't really do it justice, but there is such a disproportionate focus on the war between Israel and Gaza. There's so much fly specking of everything about this war. And there have been so many other wars in our recent history where, you know, massively more civilians have been killed

or displaced, such as in Syria and in Yemen and in Darfur. Nagorno-Karabakh, they recently ethnically cleansed 100,000 Armenians. These things get almost no coverage and everything about the Israel-Hamas war gets covered extensively. And I just think the disproportion should be noted. Well, I have a few things written down. And the one thing I did have on my list, which I don't think is a good answer anymore, because there's so many other more important undercover stories, but I do think the educational crisis in America, actually, it's global, you know, post-pandemic, what's happened to test scores, our inability to catch up on them. In a normal universe, we would be talking about that particular crisis, but it doesn't even register. But I think I'm going to go back to

something because you got me thinking about this, Mona. I think we've become so numbed by the zone being flooded with shit, quite frankly, that I know this is going to sound a little bit counterintuitive, but some of the most outrageous things that Donald Trump has said are undercovered because they've sort of like same old, same old. The things that if any other politician had said them at any other time in his career, it would dominate the news cycle. It would be career ending. And now sometimes these things don't even get covered. There are major developments that don't even make the newspaper because, I don't know, you know, our journalistic standard is what's new rather than what is like, I think Jay Rosen puts it, what are the stakes here? So, and I know that it seemed a

little bit, again, because we've talked about it so extensively, but for the vast majority of voters, I don't think they have a sense of what Trump 2.0 actually means, because in the information bubble universe that we live in, if you're not a reader of the New York Times, the Washington Post, you don't, you know, listen to podcasts like this, you may not even know what Donald Trump has said, which is really amazing. Can I just add one more quick thing? Yeah, sure. I forgot this one. This was also on my list. And it's related. The other thing that it did get attention briefly when Jack Smith produced the indictment about Mar-a-Lago. But since then, it's been completely forgotten the severity of the security breach that Trump was responsible for, with the handling of classified documents, the most sensitive national security secrets. And it's

gotten completely lost. And the idea that someone who compromised our national security in that fashion could be sailing to the renomination of one of the major political parties, that alone is astounding. It is astounding. I think these questions all kind of link together. So thinking back on where you were a year ago, what you thought was going to happen, what was the biggest surprise of this year? What development surprised you the most? I think this is AB. What surprised you the most? The anti-Semitism. I, in 2017, can remember driving to our beach rental, I believe it was August 13th of 2017, and getting there after Charlottesville, ingesting it and saying, how is it possible? I know there's discrimination against

Black people in this country to this day. Some of it is systemic, but how is it possible that people are walking through Charlottesville saying Jews will not replace us? Where have I been? We saw a rash of anti-Semitic violence leading up to the midterm elections. Horrible. And we have entered something since October 7th in this country that I still did not believe was possible and it is so dark and it is so potent because it says so much about where we are as a country and I still every time I read something each day cannot believe it And the fact that it is not a conversation across the political spectrum, the fact that it is a some kind of political problem for Joe Biden because of the left, and I encourage everyone to read what Will wrote this week about where the data really lines up.

But this stunned me, Charlie, and still really hard to grapple with and hard to see where it's going to take us next year. Mona. Well, once again, I had the same answer. In the aftermath of what happened on 10-7 in Israel, I would not have been surprised if there had been some demonstrations in European capitals and in the U.S. saying we stand with Israel and, you know, expressions of solidarity and sympathy. And instead, to see demonstrations actually celebrating and cheering the massacres, the savagery of what happened to innocent civilians

and even children in Israel, it was profoundly shocking, even for a cynic like me, about people. And of course, as A.B. points out, you know, it was easy for people on the left to decry the anti-Semitism of the right that was so in evidence in Charlottesville, and it was, you know, easy for the right to condemn the anti-Semitism of the left that was evident after 10-7. The point is, it is not exclusive to either side. Anti-Semitism transcends it. So, Will, what surprised you? Okay, the number one event that surprised me was the attack on Israel itself. My wife came downstairs. I'm sitting in front of the TV in front of CNN. She says, what are you watching? I said, an attack on Israel.

No idea this could happen. Never thought this could happen. I thought Israel was better prepared for stuff like this. So that was the event. The trend that surprised me the most was I'm one of the idiots who thought at the beginning of this year that Ron DeSantis was going to be the Republican nominee for president. I mean, he was literally ahead of Donald Trump in the polls. And I thought, I really, I thought that because I, I had never watched a lot of Ron DeSantis. Like here's this guy who'd like won this overwhelming victory in Florida. And I thought much as I despise Ron DeSantis, this is the Republican party's ticket away from Trump. And I was just astounded at what, I don't know how to put this, a meatball he turned out to be.

Just like Trump beat him up, he never fought back. He turned out to be, how the hell did this guy get elected governor of anything? So the collapse of Ron DeSantis was the biggest political story that I misjudged from the year on. Well, and you also did seem to have the delusion that the Republican Party was still a rational political party because you would think that faced with an alternative to Donald Trump, they would pick somebody, right? I'm going to come back to that. I agree with the consensus of the panel here. By far, the most surprising, shocking story was the attack on Israel and the explosion of Jew hate in America, which I have to say, in retrospect, perhaps it is naive, but the extent of it, the virulence of it was genuinely shocking. And the fact that, you know, sometimes we talk about

stories we did not anticipate or that surprises, this is a real shock. It continues to be a shock. It's been a shock, I think, to watch how progressives have looked at one another and realized that their coalition was not exactly what they thought. And I think that some of the most eloquent articles that have been written have been people saying, I thought we were allies. I thought we were on the same side. I thought you would be there. And in fact, it turns out they are not.

So this is one of those things where short term is having very significant effect. I think it's going to have a very long tail because I think it's causing a rethinking of many of the things that have been happening in terms of identity politics, oppression politics, the politics of victimization. And I think that you are going to see some churn here. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough.

Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. Now, interestingly enough, Will, I actually also wrote down my least surprising stories of the year. My first thing, it's actually written down here, two things. Number one, the fall in humiliation of Kevin McCarthy was the least surprising story. I mean, that was one where, man, you called the shot right from the beginning. You know that as he was going through the process of self-gelding that this was not going to end well. And of course, he doesn't even last the year. So that

was not a surprise. The other not a surprise was, and I never understood how people thought that Ron DeSantis was going to scale up because every person I'd ever spoken to about Ron DeSantis says he does not just play an asshole on television. He is one. He is one of the least likable people and that it was not going to play well. But this does lead to, again, this is a sort of a central bulwark question. 2023 was once again a year in which the Republican Party could have taken the off ramp from Donald Trump. Instead, you had, and you feel free to disagree with the premise of this, the complete collapse of the anti-Trump coalition, the failure to coalesce around anyone, and Congress falling into complete chaos and ending up with a complete election denier as the speaker. So let's just talk about what happened to the Republican Party in 2023.

We'll start with you, Will, because I do think it's rather extraordinary. I mean, at the end of it, I think there's, you know, some of us might go, well, of course, the Republican Party was going to cave. Well, of course, the Republican Party is Trump's party. But that was not necessarily inevitable on January 1st, 2023. And when you think that the biggest story of the year was his multiple criminal indictments, to be sitting here now with Donald Trump with a 40-point lead in the polls or 60-point lead in the polls, and one Republican worthy after another endorsing him, all falling into line, is really an amazing development. So as an outsider, what do you make of this? What happened? I mean, I understand they were waiting for the meteor or the deadly Big Mac or something

was going to happen, but it didn't. What do you think happened? So I think that's the core of it. They're waiting for the meteor. When you're waiting for the meteor, you're taking a fundamentally passive attitude toward what's going on in your party. And that's the mistake. This is a point that all of you guys have made at various points, and I would concur with it. The fundamental moral and political mistake inside the Republican Party

has been that those who criticize Donald Trump did so from a sort of political standpoint, not a moral standpoint, not that he's unfit to be president, but that, oh, chaos follows him, as Nikki Haley says, he's going to cost us in the election. And at the beginning of the year, when Trump was literally trailing in his own party, that was a sort of plausible position. And what happened is that they failed to dethrone him. Trump regained his lead in the party, right? He gained a dominating lead within the party. And now we're at the stage where he also has a lead in the polls against Joe Biden. So all of these political arguments against Trump, that he was going to hurt the party, cost the party, and that therefore that's why we had to

leave him, they've all collapsed. And with that collapse, there's been a collapse of any basis within the party to oppose him. The only people who are left standing are people like Chris Christie, who opposed Trump for moral reasons. For now. Yeah. Mona Cheran. There is this terrible inertia, this terrible failure to strike while the iron is hot. One of those moments was right after January 6th. The House should have immediately passed impeachment and the Senate should have come back and had a two-day trial and impeached him right then and there while he was still in office. And that would have been the end of it. That would have been the end of the story. And you know what? Considering the mood in the country at that moment,

the Republicans would not have paid a price, the senators who voted and the House, they would not have paid a political price and it would have changed the entire trajectory of this Trumpism that had taken over the party. They failed. They failed again when they did have the impeachment vote in February. By then Trump was out of office, but they could still have voted to convict and to deny him the opportunity ever to serve in a position in the United States government. And they'd failed again. And, you know, again, it is that passivity, but it's also that sense, that failure to see that there are moments that are served up to you on a silver

platter, that there's a mood in the country and you have to grab it. And if you don't, it's gone. And they failed abysmally. A.B.'s daughter, what happened? Yeah, so I agree that 2021, February 13, 2021, the day of the Senate vote, when Republicans failed to convict him and McConnell gave that speech and said, please, DOJ, take care of him. That was when it was in the control of elites. And then in 2023, they're following the voters. You know, the elites get mad at Trump after the midterms. He spent one eighth of what Mitch McConnell did to try to elect Republican candidates. The people he endorsed were disasters. The red wave never came. Ron DeSantis was doing well in the polls at that point. He wins by 19 points. Everyone is like,

for the first time ever, openly, elites were openly criticizing Donald Trump. And then they saw what the voters wanted. So now it's out of their hands. And that's why we have Speaker Johnson, because in the speaker's race, it became clear that the voters are demanding someone who will lie about the election and will continue to make the big lie litmus test. And so no one who had said that Joe Biden had been lawfully elected was allowed to serve as speaker and lead the House Republican conference. And so those candidates had to step aside. It is undergirding all of what we have to face next year. The voters need to be lied to. It's what Fox News knew. They lost a lot of money because of it. And next year, they will demand that the election be stolen again or be

lied about. And the failure to deal with that and reckon with that by the elites will follow them into next year's election. And come what may, we have really no idea what awaits us as a result of the failures that Mona was describing. Well, there have been so many failures. There are so many off ramps they could have taken, including after the midterm elections, you know, after these indictments, and they didn't. Right before we started this recording, I was reading a piece from NBC News that basically boiled down to, you know, the reaction of normal Republicans to Donald Trump, which is fear. They're just afraid. They're afraid of the base. They're afraid of the attacks. They're afraid of the bullying. They're afraid of Fox News hosts ripping them. They're afraid of talk radio going after them. And the fear has been a through line since 2016. And of course, the flip side of that is political courage.

And unfortunately, what we've seen is that in almost every instance where a Republican has shown political courage, they have been rewarded with exile, excommunication and political death. Now, of course, Liz Cheney has the number one New York Times bestselling book today, but we know that she was kicked out of leadership. She was, you know, defeated for re-election in a primary overwhelmingly, you know, going back to the Jeff Flakes of the world. So fear and cowardice and rationalization proved to be much, much more powerful than any of us figured. And again, going back to the magical thinking, you know, the consensus among Republicans was, well,

surely this is not going to happen. Something will take care of this. I do not need to stand up, which again, makes what Chris Christie is doing rather extraordinary. And I know that there have been skeptics, you know, in our world of Chris Christie. But when you realize how rare this is, it is extraordinary. And by the way, A.B., you mentioned the fight over the speakership. I mean, that was really, in a lot of ways, it really brought so much of what we're talking about together. The fact that you end up with one of the most extreme election denialists, a real extreme conspiracist, I mean, from the far edges of the fever swarms in as speaker, but the process itself, where Kevin McCarthy held hostage by the, you know, slavering jackal caucus for a few months, tries to do the rational governing thing, loses, and then they go through the process of eliminating one normie after

another. And the fact that you voted to actually acknowledge the results of the election became absolutely disqualifying, that it became absolutely required that you believe the big lie. And watching that, that again, what maybe was it seven minutes where the normies took a stand and they said, okay, no, we're not going to go along with Jim Jordan. We're not going to go along with these crazies. And I think that some of us thought, okay, is this the moment where the center will hold? And of course, once again, fulfilling this pattern, the normies do what they always do. This is why they're called squishes.

They gave in and every single one of them voted for Mike Johnson. Every single Republican voted for this sham Biden impeachment. So believe it or not, Will, you know, you're not the only one we've we've spent like the last seven years, you know, going through this pile of stuff looking for the. OK, there's got to be a normie Republican in there somewhere, right? There's got to be a principled Republican in there somewhere. I mean, I know, you know, Mona's going, you know, come on, really, if we look hard enough, there's got to be a principled republican in there somewhere i mean i know you know mona's going you know come on really if we look hard enough there's going to be somebody there right i'm doing that and here we are you know at the end of the year okay so let's second guess ourselves here mona and i had a debate early on

about the the wisdom or or unwisdom of indicting Donald Trump. I think it's safe to say, again, I think the biggest story of the year were the indictments of Donald Trump. I make it clear that I support most of them. But, you know, here we are at the end of the year. His dominance in the Republican Party is stronger than ever. Every time he gets indicted, it seems to improve his standing with the party. You could make the argument, feel free to reject this, that it was the indictments that resurrected his career in retrospect. Were they a mistake, Mona Charon? Okay, so I did say back in our debate that I thought this would happen, that there would be a rally around the crook

effect. And it happened. And particular, I think that the first indictment was a very serious mistake. And that was the Alvin Bragg. It was about Stormy Daniels. It was a trivial thing. It was also done in the worst possible way where he was lassoing some misdemeanor to try to make it into a felony by attaching. I mean, the whole thing stank and really suggested to the Republican rank and file that this was politics and nothing more. And then it set the table for how Republicans should react to all of the indictments that followed, which were serious and not trivial. That much having been said, Charlie, looking at it now from the perspective of December and seeing the incredible strength that Trump does have and seeing that the reason that DeSantis disintegrated was really not because so much of the indictments, but because DeSantis is a cretin. A serial cretin. Yes. So it's not entirely clear to me that even if there had not been the indictments, that Trump would not still be in the position that he's in. Maybe not quite as strong, but I'm really not sure. I cannot

say for sure that it was the indictments that did it. And furthermore, the other thing to say about the indictments is that the Mar-a-Lago, the election interference and the Georgia indictments are all important, moral, sort of putting your flag in the ground and saying, this is important for the rule of law. And so I come out at the end, not really being sure exactly whether it was a mistake or not, because it is important to establish that principle too. Amy. Yeah, I'm going to vote against Alvin Bragg's indictment. I think it's very easy when people saw Trump railing about the civil case in New York, not that it shouldn't

have been brought, but for, again, the middle of the road person in this country to say, well, these people are saying on social media that it's like bookkeeping error and real estate valuations are subjective and maybe that campaign finance thing with the porn star, blah, blah. So all of that kind of being mushed together makes it hard for those of us who want the average American to care about the indictments of consequence, the ones that really matter. However, I would never say that they were a mistake. We have got to test this premise. I'm looking forward to the Supreme Court's response, though they might, by taking this, end up delaying the case a long time, the trial a long time. We have to test the

premise that you don't get to become president so that you can be a criminal and that all of us are subjected to the same laws, every American from the president on down. And so I'm still want to believe, and I wrote recently, there has been a lot of accountability, just like Mona highlighted. The rule of law has been supported recently, and it's very heartening. And we don't know where we're going with the Trump indictments, but they were not a mistake. Okay. Will Salison. Okay. So I'm going to agree about the Bragg indictment. That was a mistake, but it was a mistake because it wasn't legally merited. And for the same reason, I'm going to defend all the other indictments because they were and are legally merited. And I'm not even sure in terms of the political effect. I mean, it was bad that we started with the worst

case, but in a strange way, like when the classified documents indictment came down, a lot of the sort of not quite anti-anti-Trump pundits, some of them were willing to admit that the Bragg indictment was bogus, but this one is legit. So I'm not even sure whether it may have allowed some triangulation, but the larger point I want to make, I want to agree with ABN, especially what Mona said at the end about, we can't let politics drive these things. That's the whole point. The whole point is we focus on what the law says and whether someone committed a crime. And in these other three cases he did, there's a certain kind of

mentality that I think of as Kevin McCarthyism. Remember Kevin McCarthy saying about Hillary Clinton, we did the Benghazi hearings and people said, well, you didn't find it. He, he says, well, the point was we drove down her favorability numbers, right? I don't want to get to the point where we're doing investigations and legal proceedings to do, even though that's how it works, to hurt people's political standing. If it helped Donald Trump, if it hurt Donald Trump, the point is he committed crimes, he was indicted, he's being prosecuted, and that's the right thing to do. I completely agree with that analysis. I mean, the fact is that, you know, Donald Trump is a serial liar, fraudster, criminal who has violated all these laws. He engaged in an attempt to overthrow the government and he absolutely needed to be

held accountable for all of that. And so, yes, we talk about the independence of the rule of law. This is a test. This is a stress test for the country. And the fact that Republican voters, Republican leaders look at these indictments and the evidence that we are seeing, and they say, we don't care. I'm sorry, that is not a reason not to bring them. I mean, fuck those guys, to quote Aristotle. And by the way, speaking of, to be clear, it was Plato. It was Plato, just if you are correct. Yeah, fuck all those guys. He said it in Greek though.

The undercover destroyer that I forgot, along these lines in terms of accountability, It was Plato. You are correct. Fuck all those guys. He said it in Greek, though. The undercover destroyer that I forgot along these lines in terms of accountability. And again, this is like the world we live in. A federal judge ruled formally that Donald Trump had raped a woman. Now, this was a civil trial that found that he engaged in sexual assault. He said, well, that's not rape. And the judge said, no, by the meaning of the word rape, Donald Trump committed a rape. And that's the story that didn't even register. I mean, some of us are old enough to remember when a court found you responsible for rape, that that would be a political negative.

Okay. So should Donald Trump be held accountable for raping a woman? The question should not be, well, what will the political fallout from that be? It's like, no, you know, you rape a woman, you try to overthrow the government. You need to be held accountable for all that. Okay. So because this is a deeply serious show and we do not engage in social media slate-like gimmicks. Okay, that was a shot well. I mean, just out of left field. Okay, heroes and zero.

Okay, because I devoted my last two days of morning shots to just the deplorables. And a lot of people, which means like two, said, well, aren't you going to also highlight the heroes, you know, people who are, you know, who have been good. And I think that's a legitimate point. We're going to get to, you know, who you think the person of the year was. And I want you to name the deplorable of the year, but, you know, leaving aside your person of the year and your deplorable of the year, give me like three or four heroes and zeros. Where would you start? A, A, B, give me, you know, darts and laurels of 2023. I'm sorry I have to copy Charlie Sykes's definitive authoritative list, but some of them, but my heroes are Liz Cheney,

Mitt Romney, not only because of what the way he's spoken out about the same things Liz Cheney has, though not at all to the same degree. There's something about him just cooperating with McKay Coppins and having a book come out where he trashes all of his Senate colleagues and he still has an entire year left serving with them. Amazing. Volodymyr Zelensky remains a hero of mine. He is very intertwined with our country and our mission. And he really breaks my heart. Seeing him come to Capitol Hill twice in two months without being supported really kills me.

And I want to mention that Jimmy Carter is one of my personal heroes. And seeing him attend his wife's services, two of them back to back, the grace of him, the fortitude, the resolve under a blanket with her visage on it was so deeply moving to me. And I can't believe he's still alive. He must have more love to give. But I found it incredibly, incredibly uplifting. I'm fighting back tears now.

Mike Johnson is one of my zeros. He is a total fraud and also everything Charlie said about him. Kevin McCarthy is the zero of all time. He's not a deplorable because he's just a zero. He met with some reporters yesterday and tried to sort of trash talk his colleagues on the way out. He wants sympathy from the Capitol Hill press corps. And just like I said at our live event, I'm still really scared of Clay Higgins and the ghost buses. And I think people need to take this more seriously. He's one of my zeros. Okay. Mona Charon. I'm going to start with the zeros and then end with the heroes since, you know, you need a little uplift, right? Okay. so i have a long list of it's easier to

do the zeros that's uh let's see ramaswamy jd vance tucker carlson the texas legislature for acquitting ken paxton oh yeah tommy tuberville tara reed who this week is decamping to russia kevin mcc, of course. CNN for that town hall with Trump where they allowed Trump to seed the audience with only his people. George Santos, Elon Musk, and RFK Jr. We could go on for a long time here. You can go on for a long time, alas,

because that's the age that we live in. But, so the heroes, and this one I will say could also have been the biggest surprise of the year, John Fetterman. Wow. He's turned out to be amazing. Good for you. Yeah. I mean, you know, first of all, he overcame a stroke.

He acknowledged that he needed psychological help because he suffered severe depression, which a lot of people think has a stigma. It doesn't. But anyway, he was open about that. And then he comes out. He's four square for Israel. He wants to negotiate about the border. He comes out strongly for expelling Menendez, a member of his own party, from the Senate. He has shown himself to be a man of real character, the most impressive freshman senator or maybe an independence. The independence. He's a genuine maverick, which you just haven't seen. Absolutely. I mean, I don't love his sartorial choices. I mean, you know, I'm just going to put

that out there. But he is very, very impressive. Great surprise. And of course, I agree about Liz Cheney. I would add Tanya Chutkin, who, in addition to, you know, being very professional about the way she's handling these trials, written some decisions that are incredibly quotable about, you know, presidents are not kings and the nature of our democracy. Adam Kinzinger, of course, Mitt Romney. And finally, another Pennsylvanian, Josh Shapiro, governor. There was a huge, terrible accident on I-95 that caused a bridge to collapse. And everybody thought I-95, the most important artery in the

Northeast United States and mid-Atlantic was going to be closed for God knows how long. Everybody assumed that. Everybody assumed that because we don't build anything in America now because everything takes, you know, 15 years and he fixed it in two weeks, two weeks. So very impressive guy and he has a nice affect too. So a hero. All right, Will, we've been waiting for this one. Okay. So I agree with all of the above and I'm really glad that Mona pointed out Fetterman. I was going to say the same thing.

In a Congress of hoodlums, he is a hoodie and I will defend his sartorial choices. I will defend everything about him. He's a guy who just came in with no Fs to give and just says what he believes. And I love him for it. I agree about, you know, the Cheney, Chris Christie. Let's not forget Asa Hutchinson and Will Hurd, people who didn't go anywhere, but like those who stood up and did the right thing. Good pair.

My zeros are the same as all of you. Kevin McCarthy, Rhonda Santus, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Tommy Tuberville, who was a jackass and got nothing for it. Thank goodness. Ken Paxton. What I wanted to just call out for this year is something that I noticed. I didn't want to do this in the serious part. We're talking about the themes of the year and the stories of the year. But in some ways, this was the year of he too. This was the year when grabbing men's crotches became a major theme. Let me go back to this. Matt Schlapp in January, right? Gets accused

of grabbing a staffer's crotch, right? He was sued for that. I don't know the ultimate legal disposition of this, but these guys certainly have not been exonerated. George Santos, we forget, in February, accused of also doing the same to someone who was working for him and then rescinding a job offer when the guy pushed him away. Let's not forget Jim Jordan, who, although this wasn't him doing it, and this wasn't this year, he comes up this close to becoming Speaker of the House, a guy who looked the other way when the team doctor was doing this to the wrestlers. And there's one woman in the group, and you know who she is, Lauren Boebert. And I want to give Lauren Boebert credit.

The one woman is the one person for whom- Let's give her Boebert credit. The one woman is the one person for whom- Please give her a hand. Sorry. You're a bad man, Charlie. You're a bad man. I'm sorry. She's part of the package, just to be fair. She's not one of those.

And unlike these other guys who are in these junk lawsuits, she is not accused of doing this involuntarily. It was, as far as we can tell, and there's video evidence, a consensual act, although it was in public. And maybe this is not what a moral conservative should be doing. So this was the year of grabbing men's crotches. And I think we should stand up for the men who are sexually assaulted in the same way that we stand up for the women. Okay. That was the hands he heard around the world.

Okay. So this is a relatively easy one. I mean, the heroes of the, of the year, I agree with everyone, you know, that you mentioned,

you know, Liz, Liz Cheney, obviously Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney, and quite frankly, I got to give a shout out to Chris Christie, who has been much more impressive than I had expected.

He is a magnificent beast. And he, he, you know, goes into rooms where he knows he is going to be booed, and he's going to get catcalls, and he keeps doing it. Now, that doesn't mean that he's going to be president of the nomination, because he's not, but he deserves some credit for that. Okay, among the zeros, I'm a believer in to whom much is given, much is expected. So, yeah, I mean, Tommy Tuberville would be on anybody's list,

but guys like Tommy Tuberville and Sean Hannity, I mean, they Tuberville, you know, would be on anybody's list. But guys like Tommy Tuberville and Sean Hannity, I mean, they're dumber than a box of rocks. So you can't really put them in the lowest levels of deplorable hell here. And same thing with Kevin, who's just a pathetic nothing, which is why I think the most dangerous deplorables of the year are people like Elon Musk, are people like Tucker Carlson. And the guy who I think is becoming worse and worse all the time, J.D. Vance, who is just a shameless demagogue, and it seems to be going down some weird red pill conspiracy rabbit hole. And, you know, I guess he's one of those guys you think, okay, well, you know, he's very well educated. He's a

very successful author. He's a really, really bright guy. Maybe he's just saying this to get through the election. No, this is who he is. And he's in this competition with the Elise Stefaniks and the Rand Pauls of the world who can take the most bizarre positions. So without much more ado, who is your person of the year, Mona? You go first. Time Magazine named Taylor Swift. You can go with that if you want, but, you know, this is the bulwark. We can have different answers. So your person of the year, Mona.

Jack Smith. You know, we did not know that he was going to be this good. Yeah. Right? I mean, he could have been sloppy. He could have been careless. He could have been careless. There could have been many other traits. He could have spoken too much and gotten himself into trouble by running his mouth. He has been like an avenging angel. I mean, his indictments are airtight. And I think his commitment seems to be rock solid.

He's imperturbable. And I love that image of him exchanging a look in the courtroom with Donald J. Trump, kind of saying, I got your number. That was a great one. I'm coming for you. All right. Will, person of the year. That's very in keeping with Mona's upbeat take. So I like that one. I'm going to go downbeat.

My person of the year is Matt Gaetz. I think Matt Gaetz personifies this year. Matt Gaetz, of course, took down Kevin McCarthy and he's nuts. He stands for nothing. He's purely destructive. All he has done is to destroy the house majority and grind the house. The house can't do anything. He's accomplished nothing. I can't name a single thing that Matt Gaetz has done legislatively. He is entirely focused on controlling his party, not on guiding the country, right? It's, this is all of a piece with Donald Trump and the whole obsession with controlling the cult itself rather than doing anything for the country. And the other thing about Matt Gaetz is he is clearly using this job as a stepping stone to right-wing media. He's already, you know, he does some posting on

Newsmax. Everything he does legislatively is designed to get him media attention, to give him media opportunities to promote himself and for nothing. So in a year that has been about destruction and lack of accomplishment, to me, Matt Gaetz personifies the whole thing. AB's daughter. about destruction and lack of accomplishment. To me, Matt Gaetz personifies the whole thing. A.B.'s Daughtered. We had this exact same conversation a week ago, Charlie and I did. He wanted to know who my person of the year would have been. I said Taylor Swift, because she's not only a force for good, but she is consequential. And I thank her for averting a recession, because it would have been harder on everyone, including Joe Biden, in 2024, had that not happened, there's a lot more I could say about her. Charlie's person last Thursday was Jack Smith. I'm going to second that with Mona and

Charlie, but the Taylor power is undeniable. I'm going to go along with Jack Smith again. Okay, so here we go. The deplorable of the year. I'm going to go first because I've already put it out there in my newsletter. A lot of good choices. Matt Gates was, by the way, in the list of the worst of the worst, the Tuckers, the Tubervilles. But Elon Musk is one of the world's richest men. He is in tremendous power. He has managed to destroy Twitter while injecting some of the most toxic conspiracy theories into the bloodstream of our politics. That's going to accelerate. He's brought Alex Jones back. And of course, he topped off the year with this grotesquely anti-Semitic rant. I put him there because of his prominence and the danger and the damage that he can do. So Mona,

who's your deplorable of the year? Yeah, no, exactly what you said. Go to the next person. Okay, AB. Well, i can't um second it so i've got some backup assholes yeah yes i know we're not allowed to include trump but i have tds so i will and um vivek is a new supremely monstrous person and unfortunately i think he's going to survive this whole experience with an increased following b Bannon is incredibly dangerous, as is Elon Musk, but to a lesser degree, but he has a huge platform, growing audience that he just spews and vomits lies to every day.

He enrages them. He is trying to promote violence next year, and it's absolutely terrifying. And if there was one person who I physically could literally punch in the face, this week it would be Ken Paxton. You know, when I ask people for their nominations for deplorables, Ken Paxton's name came up more often than anyone else's. So I think people have figured out how.

Well, no, I don't even think you realize, people realize how awful this guy is. Okay, so your deplorable, Will. All right, so I've used Gates. Anyway, he's not the most deplorable. Yeah. I can't, I'm looking at three people here. Tucker Carl. So I've used Gates. Anyway, he's not the most deplorable. Yeah. I can't. I'm looking at three people here. Tucker Carlson, just a terrible person.

Ken Paxton, highly underrated. I'm really glad you brought him up because if you just focus on the character of the person, Ken Paxton is probably the worst of all of these people. But I'm sorry to not be original here again. If I look at the destruction done by somebody, I have to say Elon Musk, because Elon Musk took something which was a public utility in my mind, Twitter,

which could be a great thing for society. And I hope that it is now being replaced by threads or something else. But Elon Musk took this wonderful asset, which I know some people hated. I thought it could be a force for good. And he made it pernicious. He made it a vehicle for the worst kind of hate and for his own ego.

And so in terms of the damage done to society, I give Elon Musk the prize. Okay. So as we wrap up 2023, we are going into what is going to be a truly extraordinary year, 2024. There's so much. I mean, look, sometimes years come upon you and they come as a shock. 2024, we've been warned about. But here's the question that I want to just leave everybody with.

Are we ready for 2024 as a nation? Do we know what's about to hit us, Mona Charan? So one of the themes that we've all at the bulwark and in this world talked about a lot is our mystification that Trump can be leading in the polls vis-a-vis Biden, that we can be walking into the possibility of, well, almost the certainty that Trump will be the Republican nominee, and then the possibility of him being reelected. And I believe the reason we're seeing those polls is because the country is not prepared for 2024, that most people are not even thinking that far ahead. Most people who respond to polls don't even realize yet that it's going to be a Biden-Trump rematch. And so for now, you know, they are saying this to pollsters, I hope and pray that over

the course of the next 11 months, we are able to appeal to the better angels of enough Americans' natures that horrific outcome can be averted. But there is a lot, a lot, a lot to worry about. The third party risk is tremendous. And in a country that has become so unmoored from traditional understandings of what it means to be a leader, what it means to be a good American, it's anybody's guess how it will turn out.

Will, are we ready for 2024? Is America, the United States ready for what's going to happen next year? No, I just think there's a large part of America, there's half the country supporting Donald Trump and the other half, a lot of them really have not wrapped their minds around the possibility that this could happen again. I mean, this is astonishing that someone who literally tried to block the transfer of power after losing an election, threatened to call out the military and so forth, that that person could be reelected to the presidency. Just an amazing thing. And the other point I want to make about this is we're already there. Even if Donald Trump doesn't win this election, remember when we almost defaulted on the debt, right? When the United States came close to

defaulting on the debt, our credit rating got docked because people saw we can't count on these guys. They came that close. I think the United States is already there internationally. I think Europe, I think a lot of our allies are looking at us and saying, holy shit, you elected this guy once, you almost reelected him. And now you're going to put him back in a guy who's threatening to pull out of NATO, a guy who's threatening to like pull out of all our alliances. I think this so we have already severely damaged our credibility. I think there are a lot of countries around the world who are not going to count on the United States the way they did before, even if Donald Trump narrowly loses. Amy Stoddard, are we ready?

Oh, I can't believe you had to end with me because the darkness is just black. Charlie, you have discussed this with some of your guests on this podcast before. I don't think that the American people who dread a Biden-Trump rematch understand that if Trump were to legitimately lose the election, we have the possibility of state legislatures and people in swing states monkeying with certification of those votes. They come to a house where we have maybe Republicans who do not want to certify those votes. We are looking, as Mona mentioned, at third party candidates who knowing that this would forever change the Republic by reelecting Donald Trump and ruin the constitutional order, which we will not get back. And they will do so anyway. We don't know how many of them,

but we know there will be a few of them who will be willing to split the vote if it's Biden and Trump. We have no idea what artificial intelligence could do to the election that is a whole 11 months away. And we just are like looking the other way. I mean, in the media, we can't even begin to contemplate it, let alone the average American and what it will do. What the serious legal peril that Hunter Biden is in will do to his father, who is the president of the United States and leader of the free world and trying to manage two critical conflicts overseas that will determine the course of democracy across the globe. And finally, what it will be like to watch Republicans basically oppose the rule of law by standing

behind Trump through all of it for the next 11 months. Well, I agree with all of that. And I think part of the problem that we have is the failure of imagination. I agree with Mona that, you know, most Americans have just not focused in on what's going to be happening. But, you know, 2024, we're going to be facing these criminal trials, the possibility of the former president, the Republican nominee, being a convicted felon running. We've never experienced anything like that. You know, there's been a lot of talk about the possibility of political violence. I think it's going to spike next year, whether Trump wins or whether he loses. You know, we've talked a lot about the consequences of a Trump victory, but what happens if Trump loses? You know, things don't like suddenly get fixed if Trump loses. Trump will never concede. Remember, Donald Trump cannot lose.

It can only be betrayed. It can only be stolen from him. So don't assume that the aftermath of the 2024 election will be cleaner or neater than the aftermath of the 2020 election. None of us were really fully prepared for what happened after 2020. I mean, we talked about it, but it turned out to be much, much worse. I think now it would be naive not to think that the post-2024 election could be something exponentially worse than we've seen before. this, they, you know, we're not imagining all the things that can happen. There has been this magical thinking about the guardrails of democracy or the strength of our institutions or the checks and balances. I thought it was very interesting this week, Mona, you wrote a piece that, hey, don't count on the checks and balances to protect us from Trump. And then Liz Cheney basically used

your exact line the next day. Liz Cheney made the exact same point that Mona made, but Mona made it first. And I think that's absolutely right. There's a certain naivete there because we generally think in terms of, we assume that things are going to be relatively normal, or we assume that they will follow existing patterns. And next year is going to break all of that. Now there may be good case scenarios or maybe, you know, look, life is contingent. Politics can change. There are a lot of things that can go wrong next year. There are things that can go right. But I will say that there's no question about it, that 2024 is going to be a wild and a wild ride with possibly a very dangerous conclusion. I mean,

can you imagine where we're all going to be sitting one year from now. I mean, can you imagine where we're all going to be sitting one year from now? I mean, it's going to be interesting to look back on this and think, hey, you know, our December 15th, 2024 selves saying, hey, did you have any idea what the next year was going to be like? Did you have any clue? You know, what did you think was going to happen? So anyway, thank you all for joining me on our year-end show. And thank you for listening to our year-end Bulwark podcast. I am done for 2023. I am done with this year. I will see you next year. Next week, we have some very, very talented hosts who are going to be filling in,

including some of the folks you see right here on the screen. So thank you for filling in. The rest of you, have a Merry Christmas, have a happy holiday, and a prosperous and hopefully a successful new year. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.