The Bulwark Podcast - Rick Wilson: Why Would MAGA Want Trump-Lite?

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

The base wants the sugar, the fat, and the salt — not someone afraid to say how they're different from Trump. Plus, DeSantis doesn't want to face the CPAC straw poll, Trump attacks Fox, and Paul Ryan doesn't see the world has moved on. Rick Wilson joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is March 3rd, 2023, and we have a trifecta of things to talk about. We have the Ron DeSantis shadow candidacy for president. He's obviously ramping that up. We have the Dominion lawsuit against Fox. We keep learning so much that we kind of already knew about Fox News, but we're getting it under oath now. And of course, this is the weekend of the annual Festivus of Crazy, known as CPAC. And joining us on today's podcast, one of the premier speakers at CPAC. No, not Eric. Rick Wilson joins us again. When's the last time you were at CPAC, Rick?

2016, I was at CPAC. I was there, too. Yeah. The climate had become rather chilly by that point. Well, I have a piece about the temporary separation, clearly not a divorce, but a temporary separation between the crazies and what I euphemistically call the normies who are not showing up there. And, you know, people wanting to draw large conclusions about, is this the end of Trumpism? What does this mean for CPAC? And I said, OK, be cautious about this, because just remember, back in 2016, Donald Trump, in a fit of pique, refused to show up at CPAC.

They said, hey, we have ground rules. You're supposed to answer questions like everybody else. And he said, I'm Donald Trump. Screw that. And the folks who ran CPAC wouldn't cave. And do you know who the guy who wouldn't cave to Donald Trump back then? Mashlap? Mashlap. Do you know who the guy who wouldn't cave to Donald Trump back then? Matt Schlapp. Matt Schlapp. I was actually standing in the hallway backstage with him and his number one henchman.

And they were talking about, yeah, they were kind of pleased with themselves if they blew off Donald Trump. And now, what can we say about Matt Schlapp? There's no depth to which Matt won't dive to please Donald Trump at some perverse level. There's no place that Matt won't reach around to to make Donald Trump happy. Yeah, it's

really been kind of extraordinary. I mean, it does feel like there's alignment of the stars, doesn't it, Rick? I mean, the guy's fumbling with some guy's junk, and you have people quitting and you have what? Charlie, it was just locker room talk. It was grabbing him by the penis. It's just locker room talk, Charlie. I mean, come on. Here's the dynamic, right? I mean, let me bounce this off you. So he is more dependent on Donald Trump than ever because he is totally, if Donald Trump even looks at him funny, Matt Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes, are just totally screwed.

I mean, they're just gone. So they have to up the suckage. At this point, Matt will be personally counting the ballots in the straw poll in a closed room to make sure that Donald Trump wins by a billionty jillion percent. Because he's on life support right now. Matt's D.C. lobbying business had already kind of fallen apart in the last couple years. And now I think with this lawsuit that he's facing and look, I was told when my own organization had a scandal that I didn't know the character of the person that was involved and I didn't know his private life. I was told that everybody involved in that completely had to know. It wasn't a secret in Washington, blah, blah, blah.

Oh, really? You know, for a guy to live in Washington, it might have been a secret. But apparently in Washington, Matt is not a secret. He's in deep shit. His lobbying business has been sort of falling apart because he has gone over the cliff with Trump. And no major corporation wants to say, yeah, we're going to hire X or Y to lobby for us with the overhang of Trump's insanity.

And so he's been in trouble on that. And he's obviously having trouble in his personal life. But so he's going to go and try to make CPAC, you know, Trump PAC once again. And it looks to be much like the Republican Party, like the collapsing neutron star that it is. It's smaller and it's hotter and it's more intensely crazy. It is much more. I mean, the fact that they have Kerry Lake being one of the premier speakers at their big dinner over the week. Kerry Lake and My Pillow Guy is there.

But Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, all the congressional leadership had something more important to do. They couldn't even get Ronald McDaniel to come. Right. In DeSantis' case. Yeah. What's that about? So, Ron DeSantis has this super carefully curated image right now. I'm the tough guy. I'm the badass. I'm the one who, I'll take on the libs and own them. Yeah. This thing is, I never lose. I'm tough. I'm Ron DeSantis. He does not want to go to CPAC and do the straw poll and face up against Donald Trump, where at the end of the day, the sort of grinding Trump affection that may have faded by a notch or two is still there.

I mean, look, Trump's approval numbers have gone in the Republican Party from the high 90s to only the high 70s. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, it's not too bad. But Ron does not want to go in there and have a loss in the grassroots where he has to go out now and ask all these major donors for money and say, hey, I can beat Trump in the primary. I can do this and that.

Because there's an argument that he can't. And I think it's a very good argument that he is an overpriced political stock. And he does not want to have a confrontation now with Donald Trump. Because if he does and loses, that's the ballgame. I think that's exactly right. And of course, he also could have been booed. Because who knows what this, if somebody's paid like 350 bucks to show up and see Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ronnie Jackson, Lauren Boebert, right? Scott Perry, Kerry Lake, my pillow guy, then who knows what they're capable of doing? I mean, it's just. Yeah, I don't think there's an upper limit. You don't want to be in that room. Okay, so let's just dive into this whole question about, so do you think that Ron DeSantis is an overpriced political stock at the moment?

Give me your take on this, because you're a Florida man. Well, first off, I can tell you, as I told the Rudy campaign back in the day, never invest in Florida as your winning strategy. I mean, remember, Jeb and Marco were favorite sons of Florida who came in well behind Donald Trump when he ran in the great state. But broadly speaking, it's a twofold problem. The first is the Donald Trump problem. And Donald Trump, even if you posit that Donald Trump only controls or retains the loyalty of, let's say, 20 or 25% of the GOP base, that means he goes into every single primary with a floor of 25%. And it's going to

go up or down a little bit, but it's probably going to ratchet up, especially because- It's probably higher than that though, right? What do you think it is? I'm being very conservative. Very conservative. But once you get into that fight and you've got Ron DeSantis and five, six, seven, eight other candidates, they're all sniping at DeSantis, dragging his number down. And let's say Ron starts with a hardcore five or 7% even. I don't even know that that exists. I'm just making that up. As they drag Ron down, because they all think if I beat him, I can go after Trump, just like in 2015 and 16, by the way. So you end up with Trump with this large pad in the beginning, this ability to go in and watch

the rest of them tear each other apart. And he's going to start winning primaries. And he only has to win the first two or three where the media narrative completely changes. Rupert wakes up one morning and says, oh my God, I've seen the light. It's Donald again. He's fabulous. Fucking get him on the air, Sean. Do it more. He's going to do that. And on the other side of the equation is that Ron DeSantis, as an overpriced stock, look, Ron is the, and I'll use a baseball analogy so he can understand it. He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. He grew into political power in Florida by facing two of the weakest conceivable opponents that you could, I mean,

if you asked me to pick the worst people to run against him, it would have been Andrew Gillum and Charlie Crist. Two completely terrible candidates, loathsome, in Charlie's case, record in the state of Florida because he's hated by the Republicans because he betrayed them and the Democrats because he sucked. And he was the inheritor of this gigantic political machine in the Republican Party of Florida that I used to work in for years and years and helped elect people from all over the state and statewide officials. And he walked in and thought, oh, it's all going to be like this. The presidential campaign will be just like this. It'll be easy. Well, it's not. The world of presidential politics, as you well know, is a brutal, savage winnowing from the very first day.

And the people who think that they are absolutely going to be the ones, the people that the media declare, this is the one, you know, ask again, as I've said before, ask President Scott Walker, President Tim Pawlenty, President Jeb Bush, President Rudy Giuliani, and on and on and on. Rick Perry. President Rick Perry, sure. And my favorite, President Fred Thompson. Hey, listen, I'm still a Fred stan to this day. I liked Fred.

I made a commercial with him one time, like a not political commercial one time. And he was like so fun to work with and such an easygoing guy. I was like, I love this guy. Well, that's why everybody thought he was going to be so great. So the questions about DeSantis I think are pretty obvious right now is will he be able to scale up to a presidential campaign? We have no idea. Will he be able to take a punch? Will he be able to deliver a punch?

Okay, so let me ask you this because a lot of the cool kids in the room are saying, you know, he's very smart not to engage Donald Trump. He doesn't have to say anything about Donald Trump. He can run against Donald Trump without saying his name. How long does that last? That just seems to me to be incredibly naive to think that you can take out Donald Trump without ever actually taking out Donald Trump. What happens to Ron DeSantis? Here's an arguendo kind of point. What happens to Ron DeSantis? The day that Donald Trump says, yeah, you know, screw this true social thing. I'm going back on Twitter and I'm talking to my 85 or 89 million followers. And however many of those are real, it's still a lot of people. Okay. And he says, I'm going to go back on there and I'm going

to F Ron DeSantis up every day. And I'm going to punch him in the face. I'm going to go back on there and I'm going to F Ron DeSantis up every day. And I'm going to punch him in the face. I'm going to say the worst things in the world. He's a groomer. I've heard many things about him at that private school. You can't tell. He may have been touching that girl. I've heard things.

My friend Jim tells me. I mean, he will just go out and do what Trump does. And he'll say that he's fat and he's short and his wife killed you know somebody and he'll go through that trumpian sort of thing and ron desantis for the first few days will be smug and i'm not responding to that provocation and then finally people will start saying hey um did you really eat a dog hey did is your wife really a the leader of a coven of witches i mean it'll get crazy but trump will use that ability he has because, you know, there are millions of Americans who believe that Donald Trump is the legitimately elected president of the United States to this day. No, of course he's going to do that because

he's done that in the past. I mean, people, you know, remember what he did to Ted Cruz, you know, and then of course, you know, Ted Cruz, Yes. And then sad Ted Cruz came around on all of this. But the reason your prediction is rock solid is because Donald Trump has to destroy Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis is, you know, in his mind, Ron DeSantis poses an existential threat to him. And he's right because Ron DeSantis eats into his base. Ron DeSantis has MAGA street cred, which raises the question, and I guess this is, again, part of the, you know, the conventional wisdom, is that because Ron DeSantis has bought up so much of MAGA real estate, you know, he's bought off, I mean,

the Christopher Rufos of the world, you can see that he's, you know, playing footsie with the Natcons and wink, wink, wink, and all of those folks. The conventional wisdom is that when Trump begins doing his Trumpian, you know, you're a groomer and, you know, people come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, sir, I have to tell you about Ron DeSantis and his shorthands or whatever it is, it will backfire on him. That people will go, okay, wait, he's a good guy. We like Ron DeSantis. And therefore, that the attacks, the barbs, the zingers won't land on DeSantis the way it landed on all of those other pathetic guys in 2016. You know, when you look at the history of Donald Trump wrecking the mental, reputational, and moral characters of his opponents, he's pretty much undefeated.

Except for Joe Biden. He's pretty much undefeated. Except for Joe Biden, he's pretty much undefeated. And every Republican that talked smack and was, you know, pretended to be, you know, go on stage and they'd have their three or four little zingers, their staff at focus group for them. And then Trump would just relentlessly maul them and just go and go and go until they were reduced to a seething pile of guts and a Brooks Brothers suit. This guy is brutal. He does not stop. I mean, look, I'm not a guy who praises Trump very often, but Trump's ability, that feral ability he has to sniff out a one weakness in a

person is unparalleled. But this is true. And the hits don't matter to the elite Republican class. Look, the boys at National Review, they've already decided they would like, they love Ron DeSantis more than their mothers. But when Donald Trump starts mauling Ron DeSantis with the base and he starts losing, which is the only thing in the end of the day, the only score that matters, every one of them will break. Let me just read you something here, okay? You mentioned National Review. This is Rich Lowry, who's writing in Politico magazine. And you can tell he's starting to get a little nervous about Trump's poll numbers and the fact that Trump is still standing despite this. I mean, the guy's called for suspending the

Constitution. He faces criminal charges. He's been dining out with neo-Nazis. Every day he issues- The little things, Charlie. It's the little things. So he writes, he said, and he's talking about this conventional wisdom smart kid idea

that don't engage him, don't make him mad, don't poke him. He writes, yet the disinclination to engage with Trump at all brings back memories of 2016. If it's a temporary dynamic, that's one thing.

If it's another prisoner's dilemma among the non-Trump candidates waiting for someone else to take him on and hoping to emerge unscathed in the aftermath, it is repeating the same mistake and expecting a different result. If the current situation holds, there's no way around Trump, only through. And that will require making a case against him. I have to say, Rick, this is one of those rare moments where he's right, you know, so. Yeah, he's right. Of course he's right. But what have you seen so far of the few people, Nikki Haley, you know, and Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence who have sort of gently kind of sort of eased a foot into the water. Not one of them, not only will they not criticize Trump because they know what the base will do, they won't even say that they have a difference in policy with Trump.

They won't even allude to a single shred of daylight between themselves and Donald Trump. And so the question for the MAGA base becomes, why do you want Diet Trump? allude to a single shred of daylight between themselves and Donald Trump. And so the question for the MAGA base becomes, why do you want Diet Trump? If you're a Trump consumer, you want the high salt, high fat, full caffeine, full sugar Trump. You want all the show. And this idea that you can somehow bank shot your way past Trump or have this sort of pachinko machine strategy where the ball bounces past him somehow. He's the gravitational field at the bottom of the whole thing that sucks every piece of reality into it. And when he doesn't get his way, and that can mean any number of things, that can mean he doesn't feel respected or that somebody owes him or that he has some sort of beef with somebody.

When that happens, he never lets it go. And right now, Ron DeSantis not engaging him to Trump is more of an insult than Ron DeSantis engaging him. So they're right. Lowry and those guys are right in starting to realize that the old mistakes of 2015 and 2016, we're iterating a second edition of those things, were Groundhog Daying a second edition. But they're wrong in thinking that there's any solution other than nuclear war with this guy.

That's the only thing that's never been tried against him, by the way. Chris Christie seems to be hinting that he would be the guy to do that, but whatever. So I'm going to go back to the library. Charlie, remember that scene in that one debate where during the break, Christie is there with his mouth open. He's hugging Trump. He looks like a baby bird ready to be fed by Donald Trump. I mean,

it's just like, I'm like, the guy is so cringe. Yeah. No, don't, don't get me started on this. So you and Lowry are weirdly enough on the same vibe.

He said, look to be the man or the lady, as the immortal Ric Flair said, you've got to beat the man. Trump may indeed be beatable, but the latest polling shows him squarely in the way of anyone who wants to take over the party that he's dominated for 70 years and counting. So you, Ric Wilson, are the guy that I wanted to ask this question of. Okay, I know you are not advising Ron DeSantis. I know that you would never vote for Ron DeSantis, and I don't want anyone to think that you will be within a zip code of Ron DeSantis' campaign. But what does that nuclear strategy look like? Okay, at some point, you know, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis will be on a debate stage together.

And you will have the fire hose of bullshit and misinformation and insults coming from Donald Trump. What is the formula for answering him? What is the scenario? I think it goes back to what I identified as an absolutely crucial moment. And look, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio were friends, okay? They were friends back in the day. I, you know, I'm a Bush guy. When Donald Trump started making fun of Jeb's wife on stage, Jeb Bush needed to realize, and he didn't, he just didn't have the political acumen to do it. He needed to realize that this was Trump destroying his life forever. He should have walked over to Donald Trump and slapped him across the face and said, you take my wife's name out of your fucking mouth.

And I'm not kidding. It takes something shocking. No, it doesn't. It takes something shocking, something transgressive, because you've got to rattle this game that Trump is the most adept player in the political world at doing, which is his audience, they crave the bully. They crave the thug act. They crave. Short of slapping him. You know, it's interesting because the way you described that scene with Jeb, you know,

please clap. It seems like a kind of a peril, the fact that he had no affect, that he wasn't able to react emotionally to the attack on his wife. And look at Ted Cruz, same story. Oh, well, that's even worse. I mean, so, but this is basically a Republican, Michael Dukakis, who, you know, is famously asked, you know, what would you do if Kitty Dukakis was raped and murdered? And you give that complete bland response. What you need to be is to show that you're a real person.

Does Rhonda Sanders have that in him? I mean, I think that Rhonda Sanders is a pretty smart guy, but a very wooden politician. I mean, I don't think he has a lot of range. I watched that debate with him and Charlie Crist where he performed fine, except he did kind of look kind of like a mannequin, you know, and he's like staring straight ahead at one. But remember, and I promise you Donald Trump was watching that debate. I promise you he was. Oh, sure. When he was asked by Charlie Crist, who is a guy I have had a 25-year beef with

even when he was a Republican, okay? It's a long story. I dislike the guy. He's a shark-eyed sociopath. When Charlie looked at Ron DeSantis and asked the most elementary 101 question I'd ever heard, it's a debate prep 101 question. And Ron DeSantis is right now, by the way, surrounded by a large number of extremely expensive consultants. And he said, Ron, are you going to serve the people of Florida and serve out your full term as governor? Are you just doing this to run for president? And DeSantis looked like Charlie had hit him in the head with a two by four. He's standing there with his jaw hanging up. And for about nine or 10 seconds, you can see the gears and DeSantis,

his head going, trying to figure out an answer. Right. But he just froze. It looked like, I promise you, Donald Trump saw that moment and said, I will rip out his liver on stage and eat it on the stage.

And every other candidate will say, okay, I'm done now. I'm not going to fight him because there is nothing he's better at than finding that one crack in somebody's world, especially for a guy like Ron DeSantis, who does not have a warm personal affect, who can't fall back on a smart-ass remark. You know, Donald Trump says something to me about, I don't know, anything, and I can come back with a dick joke or a smart remark or some counterinsult. Ron DeSantis will sit there and, like, with Charlie, he looked like he was trying to pass a goddamn cinder block in the bathroom. He said, I'm not, I'm only interested in one old Democrat. I mean, he was so painfully bad.

And you can't do that with Donald Trump. You've got to be on your game. You've got to be real. You've got to be big. You've got to have a personality. Because look, a celebrity beats a non-celebrity almost every time. The one who becomes the happy celebrity tends to be the one that wins. And Trump is a celebrity, no matter whether we like it or not. He may be the crappiest version of a celebrity, but he is. He may be Fat Elvis in the final years. He's still Elvis, right? Ivanka.

Until the con will bring us special vitamins. See, I cross over there. So what do you think is going to happen? I mean, I don't disagree with anything you just said there. And again, I just have no idea. No one has any idea how DeSantis is going to do it, but he's not going to be funny. He's not going to be likable. He's not going to be personable.

He's not witty. He doesn't have zingers. Here's the other thing. Right now, the DeSantis people are operating under one key predicate, and that is that every billionaire, liberal Republican hedge fund guy in New York is beating Ron DeSantis' door down. You know why?

The dirty little secret, nobody's figured this one out yet. The dirty little secret is all of their wives or partners hated Donald Trump aesthetically. Yeah. They don't like his kind of person. And they thought, well, Ron DeSantis,

he's got an Ivy league background background he's got a beautiful wife he seems like a like a but those guys are going to give ron de santis a lot of money but here's what happened in 2016 i'm going to give you a hypothetical donor because i've literally sat in the room with these guys as they're having this conversation with Jeb or Marco or whoever. I was with a donor who'd given Jeb and his super PAC a lot of money in 16. And I was trying to tell the guy, if you don't stop Trump now, you're screwed. This is gonna go very wrong.

And he makes the call. He goes, hey, Jeb, you're a young man. You've got time. You could run again. But I'm really concerned that if Trump does get elected, it's going to hurt our business. And my partners are worried. And we love you. And I'm always going to be your friend. But yeah, I'm going to have to not give you any more money. And then they hang up the phone. And maybe it's two minutes, or maybe it's two days, or maybe it's two weeks.

And they called Donald Trump's campaign and go, where do I wire? And that money that Ron DeSantis, I don't know, 70 million bucks in the bank right now. There ain't nothing like a campaign to throw money on a bonfire and incinerate it. Jeb Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz. I mean, I could add up in 2016, over a half a billion dollars that went for nothing, that got burned to the ground because they went out and ran conventional campaigns. Nikki Haley is going to go to Iowa and they're going to say, okay, you got to hire this guy and this guy and this guy and this woman here and the guy there. And you got to pay for this and pay for that.

And then you got to do it in all these other states and you got to do media buys and the money just goes. I mean, Rudy went from having $200 million in the bank to at the end, they couldn't pay the charter plan. How much money did Scott Walker burn through? And he was out of the race by like August of 2015. Oh my God. I think it was like 90 for Scott. Let us just go back to the DeSantis coalition, because this is really interesting, because, you know, obviously you have an entire class of Republicans who are not necessarily into the culture war, but really kind of, you know, he kind of sends the tingle up there. Like Tim Miller was talking to Puck News and he's talking about the DeSantis Florida coalition. I wanted to bounce this off you. So in-state, DeSantis pitches himself to the Jeb Bush wing of the party as somebody who's reforming the tax code, doing tort reform, Everglades restoration, teacher pay, education reform, school choice, you know, all that traditional stuff. You know, that's not the kind of stuff that gets attention on Fox, but he's doing that, and they like him.

Right. that, and they like him. And then, of course, the culture war stuff, you know, the gay stuff, you know, the anti-woke campaign, you know, the migrant stunt, the seizure of Disney World by the state, that kind of stuff. But he says that a lot of the old school Republicans, the hedge fund guys you're talking about, they like this other stuff, and they compartmentalize it. So they like the old school stuff, but they kind of go, okay, this other stuff is like performative bullshit, whatever. Sure. Maybe it's what you have to do these days, so we're kind of going to look the other way. So they're able to compartmentalize it. Does that sound right to you?

They absolutely can for now. For now. Okay. What happens? Yeah. Hedge fund guys get to vote with money at first, but at the end of the day, the MAGA horde gets to vote on their thing. Let me tell you what the most poison thing for any Republican is right now in the most conceivably enormous setback of any Republican candidate

is for the base to find out that you're saying one thing to them and another thing to a bunch of guys at the Century Club in New York. If you thought the Mitt Romney, the 47% moment was bad, wait until they find one piece of video of Ron DeSantis saying to some hedge fund bros or some tech guys, I'm going to make sure I feed them enough red meat and I'm a normal guy. Trust me, I'm a normal guy. I'm not going to be a crazy president. They want the crazy. They want the transgressive. They want the insanity.

They want the Trumpism. And say what you will about Donald Trump. He doesn't have a filter. He just is. He's protean in that regard. And so Ron DeSantis is a calibrator and a trimmer. And he's going to have trouble when the illusion presents so much cognitive dissonance that the money people can't be comfortable with it

on the one hand, or the MAGA base can't be comfortable on the other. Because if they say, hey, Ron, you promised us you were going to get rid of all those gay things. And then he then goes into a room of major donors, by the way, who are 150% in favor of gay marriage, gay adoption, trans kids, all that other stuff, and doesn't have the same message and it gets out, it's a nuclear bomb. That would be the end of him. Now, who knows that that's what's going on? I don't know. Interestingly enough, Casey DeSantis, while she is a right-winger, she's also very smart. And I think she's already seen the risk factors of that contradiction becoming public.

Okay, really? It really comes down to sort of going back to our first conversation about why Ron DeSantis is not at CPAC. It seems as if the key moment is going to happen very early on that if Donald Trump looks like he's a loser, you know, the momentum picks up. If Donald Trump wins, if he continues to pull well, as we know, a lot of these guys are just going to fall into line. And it will expose the hollowness of, and I'm sorry to mention my good old friend, my former friend, Paul Ryan, who basically is a I'm never again Trump. Why? Now, is it because he's a liar, because he's a racist, because he tried to overthrow the government? No, because he can't win, because he loses elections. The problem with that rationale is that the moment he starts

winning elections, your entire case evaporates. Precisely. And just like Mitch McConnell, if you held Mitch McConnell down under the hot lights and he could give you a hundred different reasons why Donald Trump is a terrible human being, but he will still say, well, I'll still vote for him, of course, because the alternative is Joe Biden. That means communism. I can't help communism. They always have a jump in their head where they can go from the absurd assertion of what the alternatives are to an excuse. The party's very good, Charlie. You know this very well. And by

the way, your interview with Paul Ryan was brilliant. Well, thank you. And devastating and honestly tragic. I mean, I find Paul to be a tragic figure at this point. I think there's like a moral blindness there that you really revealed in that interview because it's just sad. I mean, it's just like, guy, you know, you can be free of all this pain. You can just say the truth one time. Nobody's going to get mad at you except people that you hate anyway. You know, this kept running through my head that we were having a conversation that I had had with him almost word for word, 2014, 2015, 2016, and he hasn't moved on. He hasn't recognized that the world that he is describing just does not exist anymore.

It's gone. And, I mean, there are no unicorns out there that are going to come, you know, flouncing in post-Trump and let's go back to talk about Medicare and Social Security again. I mean, it's like that's gone. And given his pariah status in the Republican Party, this sort of cute desire that, no, I still need to be in the room. I still need to be on the phone with Kevin McCarthy. I still need to do all of these things. It's like, have you learned nothing? You've been making this Faustian bargain for, what, six years. And what has it gotten you? And yet you're still there on the Fox board,

on the phone with his buddy, Kevin McCarthy. And he thinks that somehow that this is how we're going to move on from Donald Trump. I mean, Rick, it does feel like at the bottom of their great deep thought, the political genius and strategy is one idea. Maybe he will die. And that's pretty much it. That's the plan. Yes. Yes. They all go into this with the predicate that somehow some deus ex dissantis or some other bizarro thing will happen and Donald Trump will not be the nominee. Maybe he'll insult a beloved war veteran, or maybe he'll talk about grabbing people by the pussy, or maybe he'll insult a beloved war veteran, or maybe he'll talk about grabbing people by the pussy or maybe, or maybe,

maybe he'll insult somebody's wives or, or maybe he'll say that the rioters in Charlottesville were good people, or maybe, I mean, all this wishful thinking, it's all magical thinking. It's all just this fantasy world they live in. And they're like,

you know, well, after DeSantis takes out Trump, then I'll take out Nikki and then Mike Pompeo. And it's all this ridiculous bank shot bullshit. And they can't get it out of their heads. You either take him or you don't. Okay. The indictment question. I feel like we've been waiting for Godot for months and no years, I'm sorry, years. And there is this, this deep belief well, they're closing in on Donald Trump. Well, just wait till this happens.

So here we are in March of 2023. We have a crazy jury forming down in Georgia. I don't know whether that has any effect. And I have no idea what's happening with the Department of Justice. Like, as everyone else should admit, they don't know what's going on. Okay, so where do you come down? Are they going to indict Donald Trump? And will it make a difference?

I will say this, and I've told people this for months. Holding my breath already. Stop hoping for a miracle. We must make our own. No one in the MAGA world will give a flip-flying, you know what, when Donald Trump gets indicted. They will say, it's the deep state. They're trying to stop him because he's our man. Oh my God. It's the FBI again, trying to betray our dear leader. They have already priced it in. They've already decided

it doesn't matter. They don't care. They're beyond caring. In fact, it probably makes Trump's Republican support stronger. After the FBI raid on his house, Republican support makes Trump's Republican support stronger. After the FBI raid on his house, Republican support for Trump went up. It did not go down. It went up. There have only been two big things that drove down support for Trump among Republican voters in the last seven years. Number one was the Dobbs decision, which in part reflects that about 20 to 25 percent of Republican women are either

softly or somewhat pro-choice. And also that Dobbs represented, weirdly, Roe had become sort of part of the background noise for a lot of, even for pro-life Republicans. The shock of the change moved the numbers against Trump with female Republican voters, particularly those who are slightly more educated, slightly more affluent, tend to live in more affluent suburbs and exurbs. The second thing was January 6th, which the violence and the crazies, because look, that suburban Republican who loves Trump, who does not want to be associated with the guy with the Camp Auschwitz shirt, does not want to be associated with the guy with the horns or the people shitting on the floor. Those guys are going to be speaking at the RNC convention, you know.

Horn guy is going to be the secretary of transportation someday, I'm pretty sure, or interior maybe. But all of these people, Charlie, they have this persistent illusion that the edge and the base of the party are subservient to the political class of the party. And that's not the world anymore. That is not how it works anymore. You and I and the rest of our Republican elite friends, we're never coming back in the room. The mob runs the party. The base runs it. And I think that's more, you know, more and more apparent, especially as you watch, you know, Kevin McCarthy's Congress, you know, continue to be a, I want to find a better way of saying clown car, because I think it's much more despicable than that. You saw the, what was

it, Congressman Comer, you know, was talking about, you know, why didn't the Department of Justice bring criminal charges against Beau Biden, the dead son of President Biden. The dead son who died of cancer from his exposure to chemicals in Iraq. Who was a war hero, who had been awarded the Bronze Star. I mean, and it's just like, I was actually on the 11th hour the other night, and I came very close to dropping an F-bomb on television. I'm comfortable doing it on a podcast. I've done it. I've done it.

You have. I got reprimanded. So is there a shift? Because here in Wisconsin, we have this state Supreme Court election that's coming up in April. Right. And these things are usually, you know, very, very close run of things. And right now, I have to tell you, I think that the liberal candidate, who is quite liberal, has a tremendous advantage because every single ad I see on television here is about the abortion issue. I think that's going to be an interesting test case about how the electorate has been affected post-Dobbs,

because this is the first post-Dobbs state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin where it's a completely binary choice. It is up or down. There's an 1849 law on the books that criminalizes abortion. If the liberal wins, that will be overturned. If the conservative wins, that will be upheld. There's no doubt about it. There's no ambiguity about it. So it's a straight up referendum on abortion. And we are a key swing state. And so it will be interesting to see how that plays out, especially because I don't I'm not seeing much evidence that Republicans have really figured out how to handle this or find a way to navigate compromises in a country that is at least 60-40 pro-choice. I've thought about this problem a lot, and I've written about it a good bit.

America had a kind of uncomfortable consensus on abortion. Nobody really was like a fan. Nobody was like, yeah, abort. I mean, a few crazies, but most people were like, this is not a great thing. I don't think enough people on the pro-choice side looked at the moral implications sometimes of abortion. And I don't think enough of the pro-life people looked at the actual moments where life of the mother was a real thing.

But we had this kind of weirdly uncomfortable, but generally, you know, abortion with some guardrails view of it in the country. And it's one of the most complicated social issues we've ever dealt with in this country. And I rank it literally as high as slavery in some ways, because it is deeply, deeply personal, intertwined with religion, intertwined with free markets, intertwined with every other thing in the world. But what I can tell you, it didn't take a pollster to say, yeah, you know, no matter how you feel about abortion, nobody wants the government to have snitch clubs where you pay people money to report women getting abortions, like Greg Abbott in Texas. Nobody wants to say

a woman with an ectopic pregnancy has to die, which is going to be the Missouri law, because we're going to ban it so thoroughly. Nobody wants women to have their locations monitored by the government so they can't cross state lines. And so in all these cases, the overshoot right now is in the hands of the Republicans. And the overshoot, now is in the hands of the Republicans. And the overshoot, by the way, a few years ago was when Democrats were like, fuck you, partial birth abortion is fine and fun and funny, and here you go, and we're going to do it. And they should have had a moment where they realized you're over the extremism line a little

bit, where the Republicans right now are racing it over the cliff. And I think there will be a major implication in the 24 election. I think it is bound up in a lot of other opportunities for the Democrats to be smart and careful and grab some Republican and independent-leaning voters who are not, don't want to be part of like the Greg Abbott snitch club. Yeah, my sense just talking to people, and this is anecdotal, which is of course not data, is that- It's anecd people, and this is anecdotal, which is, of course, not data, is that- It's anecdata, Charlie. That's what I call it. Yeah, okay. Well, I'll pretend. So I was at this hipster club, and I heard these two women- Hipster coffee shop. I know a lot of people who were sort of,

the Democrats were kind of renting their votes very, very temporarily. They were willing to do it. Post-Dobbs, that feels more like a long-term lease, if not a complete turnaround. I mean, the number of women that I, Republican women, who are just like, you know, I can't see myself ever voting for Republicans again. And I'm continually sort of surprised by the intensity of it. But it is real. It is happening. I actually think it's going to be interesting to see how Donald Trump handles this. Because, you know, he put out that one statement where he kind of blamed the midterm losses on the abortion issue. And of course, you know, he's a guy that's,

you know, has not given five minutes thought to the entire issue, you know, except- Except did you pay the bill? Yeah, exactly. Something like that. And I, you know, I'm not naive enough to think that it will split the base, but my guess is that you'll have people in the room telling him, you know, you have to take the strongest possible position because Donald Trump is never outflanked on his right. I mean, he and DeSantis are kind of doing that weird thing where neither one of them wants anyone to get to their right. Well, at a certain point, you get to the front of the right, you fall off the edge. I'm not sure who goes first.

Hey, Charlie, I had a question for you. You've noticed, I'm sure, this break Trump is making with the rest of the party on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Yeah. I think it's actually, and I'm not a guy who gives Trump a lot of props, I think it's actually politically brilliant. I think he knows where the base is. Are you seeing that sort of bubble up? I haven't seen it bubble up yet because it hasn't really been engaged. But, you know, that was something that he demonstrated back in 2016, that as soon as he, you know, pricked the bubble of Republicans who claim to be fiscal conservatives and into

entitlement reform, it just vanished. And this was something else I was asking Ryan. He's back on, you know, ideas that have been rejected, you know, a decade ago. And it's like, okay, were you watching, you know, the House Republicans yelling, we're not touching anything, we're not touching anything? You know, the leader of your party, you say, we're not touching anything. There's no political will there. many ironies watching the, you know, the Tea Party movement, which really cared about, you know, budgets and deficits and the national debt, just basically flip when it became MAGA, in which they cared absolutely nothing about all of that. So, yes, I think that gives an advantage. He's going to pound DeSantis with that, that you supported those things. Oh, yeah. And I don't disagree with you at all. I think that particular fight is one where

Trump is showing that sort of like cunning that he has. Okay. So where does the whole Dominion Fox story go? Fox News being exposed in so many different ways. Neither you or I are lawyers. You're not a lawyer, right? No. God, no. I can't figure out why they don't settle this thing. I mean, what is the upside to not just writing a check right now? In the end, they're going to settle this thing because they do not want this to go in front of a jury. Clare Locke is a superb defamation firm. They are the top of the gang. They are stacked top to bottom with a bunch of trained killers, and Fox has trained killers too, but Dominion and Claire Locke have their receipts. Every one of these people knew what they were doing was bullshit. They knew that the harm they were causing to Dominion was deliberate and deceptive. It's

going to cost Fox an awful lot of money. Now, Rupert traditionally, over time, when these things happen in his organizations, finds a sacrificial lamb and kills said sacrificial lamb in order to get the press off of him. It's what he did during the taping scandal in the UK. It's what he did during a scandal in Australia of a similar nature. Somebody is going to die in the Fox world, and it's not going to be the talent. It's not going to be Tucker or Sean or Laura. It's probably going to be Suzanne Scott. It might be someone down the chain from her slightly in the legal side. I don't see how that solves their problem, though.

Right. Those sacrifices, those play into the media narrative, but it doesn't solve the legal problem. They will settle in the end. They will give it up in the end. They will roll over because the risk is so catastrophic for them. I also think there are two other big problems that people haven't really thought through yet. One is shareholder lawsuits against Rupert and the family.

I was just going to mention this. Rupert's got, what do you think, five, six, seven years left? I mean, evil people live a long time. Good people live a long time sometimes, but Rupert's time is running out. He does not have much more on the clock. But for all that, he's still in control of this organization. Does he want to spend his twilight years in the shareholder fights, which are even harder to prevail in sometimes than the legal fights? Those things become very personal. It reduces his range of action financially on all these other fronts. The other place I think Rupert Murdoch is in trouble is there's an element of the right wing that grew up believing that Fox was the one thing that was real. It was the one thing they could rely on. And the rest of the news networks were lying liberal communists pursuing a globalist agenda, make up whatever

the fantasy world of their brain is that day. Now they've discovered that Fox was playing them, that Fox was treating them with contempt, and that Fox knew that their audience was so stupid they would believe anything. And a lot of that audience now is either insulted or they're saying, well, you know, Trump could have won the election if only Fox had stayed disciplined. If they stayed in line, we could have won this election. I just find it fascinating, the coming shitstorm from the right against Fox, because there are other options now, OAN and Newsmax and

God knows what else. I don't think they're going to suffer reputational damage with their audience for lying to them, because I think their audience likes being lied to. Right, but the lie they wanted them to keep telling, they wouldn't keep telling. telling. And of course, they won't even hear about any of this. If you watch Fox, you don't even know that this is even going on. But to your point here, a lot of the story that we're seeing about what happened after the election is the result of pure panic that they will lose their audience to the Newsmaxes, to the OAN, who are serving a much richer, purer form of crack and meth on the street. Oh, yeah. And they were really worried about that. I mean, you can see going back and forth,

oh, my God, they're so mad at us for not giving us the big lie. We might lose these people. The stock price will go down. So right now, as you and I are speaking, down in Mar-a-Lago, the Orange God King is just firing off one shot. He's melting down over this,

attacking Rupert Murdoch. So this is their worst fear, right, that Mar-a-Lago would turn on them. So how long is Rupert going to be able to stand up against that? Because he's got two different things, right? I mean, he's caught here. He's got this massive lawsuit and maybe others coming at him, which would say, you know, keep away from that stuff. Versus if Donald Trump keeps, you know, pumping up the MAGA base on all of this, they may lose share. What do you do? Which way are they going to go? Let me tell you.

Rupert Murdoch in 2014 and 15 was conflicted over where like the Tea Party side of the movement had become. He was one of the people who after Todd Akin and the disasters of 12 was like, no, we got to win with good candidates, good people. He was for his entire life pro-immigration, did not like how the gang of eight had flopped on immigration, did not like the nativist turn that even his own people were taking, did not like Trump, was contemptuous of Trump. I wrote about it in the first book. And he wisely as a player decided, well, my pride and my preferences are irrelevant to the success of my network. And if I don't feed them Trump, they'll go get their Trump somewhere else. And I think you're exactly right, Charlie. I think't feed them Trump, they'll go get their Trump somewhere else. And I think you're exactly right, Charlie. I think they're going to, for a few months,

they'll flirt with Ron DeSantis and they'll flirt with other candidates a little bit here and there. But at the end of the day, if Trump is even likely to prevail, they will not only switch to him, it will become a network that becomes 24-7 about how no matter what the candidate is, we've got to take on communist, heathen, cannibal Joe Biden. Otherwise, our nation will be plunged into the eternal darkness. Pedophile, Satanist. Right, of pedophile, Satanist, you know, goat worshipers, whatever. I think you're right. The one question I have is whether or not you have these countervailing pressures of these massive lawsuits that would slow that down. Because the moment that you do what you're describing, Donald Trump begins showing

up on the network and he begins spewing the fire hose of bullshit on the network. Sean, I'm glad you've had me back to prove that my election was stolen from me. Well, exactly. You lied in the deposition, didn't you, Sean? Well, okay. So that's the awkward. I mean, this is the way the discussion is going to be. Hey, look at this.

We're losing audience. Should we have to get Trump back on? And the lawyers will say, are you kidding me? We now have $6 billion in lawsuits. We have this. We have Dominion. We have Smartmatic. It's a shame they're in this position.

I feel so bad for them. It's a shame. It's going to be a hell of a discussion. And I think that we can be absolutely certain that whatever the principled stand is, forget it. They won't be taken. Okay, one last question I have for you, because we really haven't talked about the general election strategy at all, but how important is the Chicago mayor's election for the Democrats? Have you thought about this? I have thought about this. I've been telling Democrats. I knew it. Take this crime shit seriously.

Stop with this defund the police stuff. It's the most weapons-grade stupid thing I've ever heard. Stop pretending it's not happening. Right. Every human being knows this is going on. Everybody understands that this is a problem. And the people who are most affected by crime are African-Americans in major cities. And essentially, she gave them an out now.

She gave them a pass. The dichotomy isn't abusive cops versus defund the police. The argument is defund the police versus constitutional, sane, trained, legitimate law enforcement. Because the false decision there of, oh, well, if we fund the cops, that means that black kids are going to die, it does a disservice to every single person in the equation. It also strikes me as just this classic asymmetrical debate where people are saying, look, I don't feel safe. The violent crime rate is up. People are moving. It's clearly a massive issue in San Francisco and in New York and in Chicago. And you have a lot of Democrats that respond to that by bringing out charts and graphs saying, no, it's not real, and then giving these wonky things. In some ways, it's kind of a Michael Dukakis answer. People are saying, we are scared. People are being murdered.

They're being raped. They're being robbed. My house is broken into. My car was broken. I feel unsafe. And you have people going, no, this is why you shouldn't be concerned about it because this line is going down. It's like, people, you need to engage.

You need to take this crime issue seriously. There was that headline, weirdly, I thought it kind of framed it weird that, you know, the Republicans looking to pounce on Democratic divisions in Chicago. Republicans are irrelevant. There are no significant numbers of Republicans in Chicago. This is whether or not Democrats want to— You could sit them all around the table in a Waffle House. Exactly. The real question is, are Democrats going to set themselves on fire and give them,

you know, give a great talking point to Republicans? So it's not, Republicans can't influence us in any way. It is the simplest thing in the world. You don't let it be about the ideological predicates that you want to be true, but about the actual predicates of what is in the head of real voters all the time. I love San Francisco, Charlie about the actual predicates of what is in the head of real voters all the time. I love San Francisco, Charlie. It's one of my favorite cities in the world. I'm there a lot for business and I love it, but I can't go there in the same way that I used to, because the streets are not full of people who are down on their luck. The streets are full of

junkies who are being paid by the city to be fucking junkies. It's not cool anymore. And it's not solving their problems. It's not helping them. And so you can help people, you can make cities cleaner and safer and better. And you don't have to do it in an ideological framework that's left or right, but that's real. And too many of these people like these public defenders and these prosecutors that have got this, like, I'm going to reduce everything that's real. And too many of these people, like these public defenders and these prosecutors that have got this, like, I'm going to reduce everything that's a felony that involves property crime down to a misdemeanor. If you want a recipe to turn on a generation of people in the city who will vote for the worst possible law and order message you can imagine, this is it. They're going to do it. That's how Rudy won in 93. And just look at the way this has played out wherever you have these uber progressive

prosecutors, whether it is San Francisco or Chicago or Philadelphia. We've had big controversies here in Milwaukee. In New York, you have the same sort of thing. It is, and you know, my mentions are going to get filled up with people saying, well, actually, just telling you, toxic politically. One of the reasons why Kevin McCarthy right now is speaker of the House of Representatives is because Republicans did so well in exploiting the crime issue in New York. I mean, New York's still a democratic state. State. But Republicans picked up a bunch of congressional seats on this issue, and they picked up the congressional seats that gave them the majority. Without that issue, Nancy Pelosi would still be Speaker, I think. What do you think? That issue was the one saving grace of the Republican Party in the last election cycle. The one saving grace. It was the one thing they had unequivocally on their side. And in New York in particular, the anger that people were ignoring violent crime

had become so palpable. And I talked to a former Republican friend of mine who called me and said, you know what? I just came out of a focus group up there. And a Democratic male voter, business owner, upstate, said, you know what I'm pissed about? I'm pissed that Kathy Hochul talks about guns every five minutes but doesn't talk about crime at all. And it catalyzed it for me. I was like, there it is. They look at the symptomatic part of it and not at the part that affects everybody all the time at scale. They're not dealing with just the emotional reaction and the incandescent anger about all of this. And again, there is a certain denial.

There's a little bit of gaslighting, you know, the obsession with, well, these numbers are not— Look, the perception is very real. It is very intense. Murders may be down year to year, but violent crime, property crimes, when they are up, when people feel they cannot stay in their own homes or when they're scared about their children walking down the street, you cannot change their minds by showing them a whiteboard. And I'm upset. Oh, Rick.

A lot of the arguments about gun control, you know, a few years ago, we pulled the voter file in Florida, and then we matched it up against the concealed carry data that we had. It turned out that about 35%, almost 36% of the people getting a concealed carry permit in the state of Florida were African-American. Now, why is that? It's not because they want to commit crimes. It's because they don't feel safe. That differential is one that Democrats need to get up on quick. Well, I think there's a little bit of an indication. Did I see this correctly, that Joe Biden is actually going to sign that congressional resolution which would override this bizarre new legislation in Washington, D.C. that really lightened up on criminals? And

Republicans led the way, pushing, saying, this is crazy. This is not a time to go soft on crime. A whole lot of Democrats went along with that, got the majority. And it looks like Joe Biden, and he's going to get just filleted by the left of his party. But good for Joe. Good for Joe making a good call on this one. He did indeed. All right, Rick Wilson, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. We really appreciate it, Rick. Anytime, my friend, anytime.

And thank you for listening to this weekend's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday. We'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.