The Bulwark Podcast - Robert Draper: The Talented Mr. Meadows

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

The immunity order Mark Meadows has in the election subversion case could be a big problem for Trump. But his habit of lying could be a problem for Jack Smith. Plus, is Sinema finished with politics? And the Tea Party when it was kinda sane. Draper joins Tim Miller. show notes: Draper's piece on Meadows Draper's piece on Kyrsten Sinema

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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. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, here with my old friend, Robert Draper. He reports on politics with the New York Times. He wrote the recent cover story for New York Times Magazine, How Mark Meadows Became the Least Trusted Man in Washington. It was delicious. I'm excited to talk to him about it. He also wrote Weapons of Mass Delusion and a couple other books. I want to do some throwbacks. I want to talk about some of your older books, Draper. So I hope your memory is fresh this morning. I hope it is too, but thanks for having me on any of that. All right. Happy to have you, brother. Before we get to Meadows, I want to start with a

little bit of news. It's related in a kind of dark way to something your wife, Kirsten Powers, recently wrote. Yesterday, we had one dead, 20 wounded. 11 of the wounded were children in Kansas City in a mass shooting at the Chiefs Super Bowl parade. There was another school shooting at a high school in Georgia that had four wounded. Her wife wrote recently, the way we live in the U.S. is not normal as part of a longer kind of meditation on thinking about becoming an expatriate. You know, there's not much to say about this stuff that hasn't already been said at this point, but I was just wondering kind of your reactions yesterday about Kansas City and how that's impacting your thinking about the state of life here in America. Tim, a couple of things that came to mind after I heard about this horrible shooting

at Union Station in Kansas City was first that the sad reality is that every American knows, absolutely knows, that there will be zero legislative change as a result of this. That if there wasn't any substantive change after Sandy Hook or after Uvalde, there isn't going to be one about this that leaves a mere one person dead, a mere 21 people wounded. The question really is, is this even going to be more than a two-day story? And as you mentioned, there was, you know, an additional shooting as well taking place here, but it hasn't changed my thinking, which really began to change in terms of America, maybe 10 years ago when an Italian friend of mine expressed worry about coming to the U.S.

saying, I'm afraid that I'll get shot there. And I thought, oh, come on, don't be silly. You know, that's absurd. And I've come to realize that, you know, for all of Italy's imperfections, and there are a few, this is one thing you never have to worry about. You never have to worry about when you hug your child right before they go off to school that it might be the last time you see them. And the notion that you could be caught in the crossfire or just a victim of a mass shooting is not an abstraction anymore in the U.S. And as Kirsten, my wife, you know, said, I think very aptly, this is not normal. It should never be normal. I don't know what people who, you know, support the proliferation of guns would say about what took place in Kansas City. Would they really say that what we needed in that parade were more guns? It kind of, you know, stupefies the imagination to think that that would be the

solution. Yeah, I think they would say it because what they were saying about there was another shooting at Joel Osteen's church earlier this week or over the weekend. And that was exactly what they said, because in that case, it was two off-duty police officers that neutralized the shooter and so you get down this like really dark hole you see in right-wing media where i spend a lot of time i know you spend some quite a bit of time and you know where it's like well the shooter was trans like the real problem is trans ideology turns out the shooter wasn't trans you know the good guy with the gun theory did work in this case. And it's like, well, I mean, there was victims, right? So it didn't like really, really work. It didn't work in the way that it would work in Italy or Japan where there are none of these shootings. So I do think that there is always that and but. There is, although in that particular case of the Austin attempted shooting,

the good guys with the guns were in fact, the guys you want to have guns. They were law enforcement officials who happened to be off duty. They weren't some random dude who, you know, had a concealed carry. So, that argument doesn't speak to the desirability of proliferating weapons. It speaks to the desirability of having law enforcement officers on hand. Hopefully, our deep state Pfizer shot hero, Travis Kelsey, can keep us in the news a little bit more than you had hoped. Okay, I want to talk about Mark Meadows. When this landed, Draper, I can't tell you how happy I was. I was just like, it was like meeting of author and subject. I didn't even make it out of bed.

I immediately turned over and just devoured the entire thing. The Mark Meadows situation, I kind of want to go through the whole trajectory that you did of his life. But the biggest picture why he's relevant now, like the mystery of Mark Meadows, is there is an open question, right, even in Trump world, even among Meadows' friends, about how much, if at all, he's participating with the investigations against his former boss. And so I assume that was what kicked off the interest in the story. So just talk about that element and the atmosphere around it, and then we'll kind of run through the Meadows trajectory. Yeah, sure, Tim. I mean, early on in my reporting, there came this moment when I just kind of canvassed a number of folks I knew in Trump world and in the greater magosphere, and would ask them questions. And I'm talking about really prominent people, not justosphere. And we'd ask them questions. And I'm talking about really prominent people, not just activists. And I would ask them what they thought about Meadows and his degree of cooperation.

And they would fall into this kind of somber silence and say, you know, that's the million dollar question. We just don't know. And I remember one of them saying, look, I mean, our suspicion, and I believe Trump's suspicion and all these people I was talking with were confidants of Trump's, is that he's a rat. But we don't want to say that. We don't want to alienate him further and push him essentially into the open embrace of Jack Smith. We're hoping, perhaps against hope, that he's doing what he seems to indicate he's doing, which is just getting by with the absolute minimum by honoring a subpoena.

That turns out, however, not to be the case. If you listen closely to the language of Meadows' attorney, George Terwilliger, he'll say, look, there was no deal. There has been no agreement. And that's true. There was an immunity order that he was granted after apparently a conversation between Terwilliger, a former federal prosecutor himself, and members of Smith's prosecutorial team. And this order acknowledged that if Mattis didn't get an immunity agreement, you know, permission to

speak freely without any concern that it would be incriminating against him, then he would just plead the fifth. So this immunity order was given to him. He then did a proffer on, I think, March the 22nd of last year, and then the next day testified for six hours before a federal grand jury. Now, let's just, you know, make clear to him that they don't hand out these immunity orders for free for anybody who asks for them. They do it because they're expecting something in return. Now, my suspicion is that Meadows does want to get by with the minimum, the defining minimum here as staying out of federal prison. So he knows he has to be helpful. But I think that, you know, what he's tried to do is be helpful in a way that will provide Smith's team with a roadmap,

but avoid him having to take the witness stand. A Manafort level of helpfulness. Yes, right, right, right. But if you're the chief of staff, if you're the guy in the room, and Meadows so often bragged both in his book and to others about he was the one with closest proximity with this unusual amount of face time with Trump, then he's the guy who uniquely saw things that other people did not. And I'm not sure how you avoid, if you're Jack Smith's prosecutors, putting him on the witness stand. This, however, presents a problem. And this is the larger conundrum in the Meadows narrative, which is this guy is an inveterate liar. And so you put him on the witness stand at your peril.

Yeah. I want to go back to that. But just one other follow-up question on the current day, the current situation. He has a job, a pretty lucrative one, at the Conservative Partnership Institute in D.C. And as you write, he goes to the office. They're paying him. This is like every grifting group in Washington at this point, like works at the pleasure of either Donald Trump or one rich person. Is this a job that they're giving him in the hopes that he stays on side?

Or like, what's he doing? What does a day look like for him? Why is he employed? Right, right. Interesting. Well, for one thing, he was employed one week to the day after Trump left office. At that point, there was a lot of anger on the far right after Trump lost the election. The challenges did not come out favorably. January the 6th happened. And there needed to be a place not only to channel right-wing anger, but also a place where there was still some adjacency to the Trump presidency. It's good for Meadows to have CPI because it is a daily reminder to those in Trump world that, hey, I'm on your side. You know, I haven't moved over to the dark side. I'm not one of Jack Smith's buddies. So he gets paid about $900,000 a year and, you know, goes and hands out trophies at CPI conferences and meets with fundraisers and donors rather. It's a pretty

nice sinecure for him. But I think most of all, it is, as I say, you know, this emblem that he can wear that I am still a MAGA guy. Okay, let's go back to his origin story. Because I knew Mark Meadows of the Tea Party era, Thorne and John Boehner's side. It's hard to keep track of all 435 of these people and their origin, where they come from, the motley band of our House of Representatives. And I was just fascinated by the kind of talented Mr. Ripley-esque origin of this guy that moves to Western North Carolina

and I guess he kind of finds a sugar mama, basically, in the community. Yeah. You know, I proceeded with this research with the view that if you believe what so many people in the Trump White House told me, which was that Meadows was a guy who couldn't be trusted, who would say one thing to one person and nothing to another, and then heard the same thing about his time as a member of Congress, that he also was this inveterate pleaser, then I had to assume that this pattern wasn't something that he just learned when he was in Washington, but in fact, was the through line of his adult life. So I went all the way back to 1987 when he and his wife, Debbie, rolled into the resort town in western North Carolina of Highlands, where he had previously been the customer service representative for Tampa Electric Company. You know, he has this kind of quintessential American success story bootstrapped his way from starting a little sandwich shop to then making a lot of money as a realtor and then finally offering himself up as a public servant. It smelled a little too rosy,

to be true. And so, yeah, he showed up to this town and immediately made connections in this very, very right-wing church that had broken off from the Presbyterian church because it was believed that the Presbytery was too tolerant of gay people. Always comes back to the gays, Draper. Always comes back to the gays. It does. Yeah. I've been trying to tell you that, Tim, if you want to listen.

But, and at the community Bible church, he met this sweet elderly Christian lady who was single named Ginger Glasson. And she really took a liking, was even, I think, smitten by Meadows and helped set him up with a person who would lease him property for a sandwich store, then gave him a job at this pizzeria that she opened up, then gave him a parcel of land, got into some investment things with him. And ultimately, when he tired of all of that, put him in touch with the local mayor who had a real estate firm and helped convince that mayor to hire Meadows. And that set Meadows on his way. She was the first person who I was able to locate who came away

feeling like she had gotten a short end of the stick with Meadows, that he had ingratiated himself with her, but she later felt like she had been taken for a ride by him. And exactly why they split off is unclear. She's been dead for a while now, but according to her friends and her relatives, she felt cheated by Meadows. Wasn't he like in her will or something at one point? No, no, but he did. What he did instead was that she had property she intended to give to her kids, and he convinced her instead to give one tract of land to himself and to give another tract of land to this guy who he wanted to lure to Community Bible Church as the pastor, but who didn't have a place to live. So she felt pretty fleeced by the whole experience, and that marks the beginning of Meadows as this upwardly mobile individual.

Yeah, so the other interesting data point from the come up, as we fast forward a little bit, but he gets into politics and he's doing the precinct chair stuff. And then he wins his competitive primary and ends up head to Congress. And then he chooses as his chief of staff, an interesting character. Now, for people who don't know the Hill, usually if you're somebody from Western North Carolina, that's a real estate person and you get to Congress, like the NRCC and the leadership help you find somebody, you know, usually you bring somebody with you, right, that you can trust and be an advisor. But to run the day-to-day office, usually I hire somebody who's, you know, in legislating in Congress at some level. And

Mark didn't do that. Yeah. Instead, he hired a fellow named Kenny West, who had been one of his opponents in a field of eight in their Republican primary when Meadows first ran. Kenny West came in sixth, so he wasn't a worthy competitor or anything like that. And yet, at the end of the campaign, after Meadows had already indicated to two different staff aides that he would like either of them to be his chief of staff. He then notified them both that no, he decided to go in a different direction and hired Kenny West and further retroactively paid West for campaign work that West had not done because he was his political opponent after all. So there was a big mystery as to why you would take on a guy who knew nothing about Washington, who didn't know that much about politics, didn't even know

that much about that congressional district, and make him the guy in charge. So that question came to be even more poignant, first as West proved to be pretty incompetent, frankly, at his job, but secondly then came to be a serial harasser of the young women who worked in Meadows' office. Those women came to Meadows, complained about it. Meadows at first tried to sweep it under the rug, thought of a way maybe to move him to some other office building but keep him on the payroll. In other words, it went to extraordinary steps to keep this guy west on. He went to the chief of staff, who had no business being a chief of staff, who had harassed his young women staffers to stay as chief of staff but just not come into the office. That doesn't smell great. No. He did so first after just kind of demoting him but keeping him on the payroll and then got rid of him but then paid him a severance pay, which was ethically inappropriate.

The House Committee on Ethics found and, in fact, made Meadows against so many reasons not to keep him close and make him his highest paid staffer? There had been a lot of rumors in Highlands about Meadows and potentially having an affair. And I want to emphasize that I couldn't find any confirmation of this, but those coincided with Kenny West having said on the campaign trail, when he ran against Meadows, that Meadows had some character defect and then being hired by Meadows and then being kept on. It's one of these enduring mysteries about Meadows that drives you a little bit crazy, but is a reminder that there's so much about this guy that has not been on the up and up that people even close to him wonder just why he's doing what he's doing one of the things i want to get back to in that that is one of his weaknesses and i think is as i've grown older what i've seen in leadership in any business one of the

worst leadership traits you can have is just to be a pleaser that will tell us everybody what they want to hear and so in this situation this is also like regardless of the affair story like this is true right he tells gaudy that he's going to do it and he does and he tells the staffers he's going to do it he tells other people they're going to be the chief of staff then he doesn't do it you know and this on january 6th ends up becoming a big problem for meadows so then he's in congress and he's most famous he starts the freedom caucus with jim jordan but you know the most epic meadow story is just how he absolutely bombs in an attempt to overthrow John Boehner and then goes into his office and cries. So I like to hear about adult men crying. So please share that story with

me. There's no wonder that you love the story of Mark Meadows because he himself, as one of his former staffers told me, can turn on the waterworks like nobody else. And it does appear to be a, not a reflexive thing, but a manipulative thing, a way to convey his own deep sorrow and ever so earnestness. But it's true that he bridled from the moment he got to Congress at how a guy like him, who described himself as being very similar to the protagonist in A Beautiful Mind, who could see around corners, who could sell ice to an Eskimo also to use as parlance, wasn't fully appreciated. It was just a backbencher. And so he immediately took it out on leadership and tried to overthrow Speaker John Boehner. It didn't work, like he said. And he, as Tim Alberto reported at the time in Politico,

got on one knee and begged forgiveness of Boehner, only then a couple of years later to go after him again with a motion to vacate that did not succeed, but finally made Boehner think, you know what, this asylum is being run by lunatics, and I think I've had my fill of it. So Meadows could claim him as a scalpel. But this is the thing about Meadows. It's not so much chronic people-pleasing on Meadows' part. There is a strategic end to all of this stuff. You know, one member had told me about how Meadows had come to him and said, you know, I got to say, maybe more than any other legislator, I admire you. And that member told me that he was smiling, listening to Meadows thinking, you know, just yesterday,

I know that Meadows was on a conference call trying to get me primaried. And so it just became axiomatic that whenever Meadows is saying something nice to you, it means you just stabbed you in the back. Maybe Apple Polisher better than please or a more accurate description. Yeah, yeah. But in a way, what he represents is this kind of Machiavellian advancement that is one of the real touchstones of the Trump era, you know, and particularly in the Trump point of view. Is that right though? Is it Machiavelli or is it Magoo? Is it just that in the Trump era, like the competition isn't very thick? I always say this, like if you're a 23 year old sociopath right now, like the best thing to do if you want to have rapid career advancement is become a MAGA Republican. You know, if you want to become a chief of staff for a Democratic House member,

there are a lot of people that went to Ivy League schools that want that job. But if you want to be Matt Gaetz's chief of staff, that's not as competitive of a category, right? So maybe it's not that. Meadows just kind of found himself in a lane where the competition wasn't very stiff. I take your point, and I guess my refinement would be that in the Trump White House,

the best way to prove your loyalty would be to do it by demonstrating someone else's lack of loyalty, coming to them, you know, essentially with evidence that this person leaked, for example. I mean, as soon as Meadows became chief of staff, his new aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, was brought into his office, and he said, go find me the leakers. The president wants to know who the leakers are. And Meadows had his own list and that list didn't have any factual support to it, but they were lists of people he personally didn't like and wanted to bump off because he viewed them as competition or people who were sort of onto Meadows. So Machiavellian, I guess, you know, presupposes a superior cunning that maybe a lot of these guys lacked, but the tactics are largely the same, you know,

which is just this ritual of back slapping and followed by backstabbing. And eventually as we learned with Cassie, that comes back to bite you. Yeah, no, exactly. Okay. I want to get to January 6th. One, one, just point of clarity. I support adult male tears. I just enjoy vulnerable adult men. There's nothing wrong with crying men listening to the podcast. January 6th. So this is another question compared to the Machiavelli or the Magoo. Was Mark Meadows intentionally and actively

trying to overthrow the government? Or was Mark Meadows just a coward that was in the middle of Donald Trump and other people's efforts to overthrow the government, and he never had the balls to say no to anybody. The answer is yes to both. Or it depends on who you ask, because when you look at the 2,300 or so texts that Meadows' attorneys turned over to the January 6th committee, as I did, it's a whiplash-inducing thing where he says to one person, I'm fighting like crazy. We will not stop. And to another person, oh, the president's going to gracefully concede any minute now. And for that matter, there were people who were brought

before the January 6th committee, like Jason Miller, who were convinced at the time that they sat down to give their testimony that Meadows was on, you know, team normal, you know, as it were, only then to be confronted by these texts that Meadows had sent to various other people and coming to realize, well, no, maybe he was on the other side, or maybe he wasn't on any side at all, except just, you know, doing whatever it takes to get through the day, you know, this desperate succession of acts of self-preservation on his part. What does seem to be the case, Tim, is that he has told Jack Smith's people, I thought we had lost the election. You know, we went through all the legal challenges and I tried to impress that point on the president.

But there are plenty of other people who are completely convinced that Meadows was giving Trump the wrong advice. And these were the team normal people. And they believed that Meadows was bringing into the wrong advice. And these were the team normal people. And they believed that Meadows was bringing into the room individuals who, you know, would talk to Trump about how, you know, some Italian laser or something like that had managed to change election results. I mean, Meadows seemed to be on board with that kind of stuff. The one thing that stuck out, I forget if this was in your profile or a different thing I read about Meadows, but it just the absurdity of it, it just always stuck in my brain.

There's just so many facts around J.J. Sayees. It all starts to become a blur. As somebody who read all the text messages, you can relate. But there was the one where he asked Jeffrey Rosen to examine the debunked claims of fraud in New Mexico. It was like a random person had emailed him and said that they had evidence that New Mexico actually that there was fraud. And Meadows then goes to the acting attorney general and says, look into this. That's just interesting down point to me because that says that it's somebody that has just totally lost all ability to rationalize. You know, there's no way that Mark Meadows really thought that New Mexico was stolen.

Right. And so what is he doing at that could at minimum show that he, Meadows, was in the center of the fight, if he succeeded, better still, but at minimum to show that he was still on board was so meaningful to Meadows that he was willing to overlook how absolutely ludicrous some of these scenarios were. My last Meadows question, and I think I know the answer, but I just have to ask it. Like, as somebody that obviously was very ambitious, you know, and wanted to be seen as an important person, right? Do you think that at any point in the past three years, he's looked at Cassidy and thought just this deep regret that like he is such a weak

childish cowardly little man and that she ended up showing actual strength all a lot of this other stuff the real estate and the motion to vacate all this was about nothing right like but when a real chance came to you know like it could have been been Meadows testifying on January 6th, right? And he could have had 60 Minutes profiles about his courage and how he stood up to Trump, right? Did you talk to anybody that speaks to him that said that has any sense that he has regret about that? Or is just that not in his character? You know, I don't want to sit here and tell you, Tim, that I think that Meadows has no conscience at all, which would, you know, make him a sociopath. All I can tell you is that I haven't found any evidence of it

and that there have been moments for him to exhibit it. And he has passed on those moments. And he is now at this crossroads with the choice of being helpful to the prosecution of Trump, knowing full well that he would be exiled from the MAGA community once and for all, or to remain loyal, perhaps at the expense of going to jail, though hopefully in Meadows' case, somehow avoiding that fate. And it's clear that he's not doing anything that suggests a following of conscience. But this is kind of remarkable to see. I mean, this is this guy, you know, even as he's fighting like crazy on behalf of Trump, he's preparing for life after Trump and negotiating a book contract, which became finalized on January the 9th. You know,

so this is to do his memoirs. And it goes without saying that if Trump had somehow managed to hang on and have a second term, that Meadows wouldn't be publishing his memoirs in the middle of it. So he clearly was preparing for life after Trump, even as he was absolutely convincing Trump that he was with him through thick and thin. All right, I want to get on to just a couple of your other subjects, but I forgot. I said that was the last question, but I have to ask about the quote on Air Force One, where Debbie Meadows looks at Mark and says that this is going to be yours someday. That's real? Yeah, yeah. Again, that goes to the New Mexico thing.

He seems like sociopathic, delusional narcissist. One of his top staffers told me that when Meadows first ran 2012 and won, that Meadows exalted to this staffer and a few others, well, boys, we're going to do this a few terms, and then we're going to see where it leads us. And the understanding was clear from everyone in the room that that meant higher office and not just governor. And there are others close to me who thought that too. Now, he hardly stands alone, Tim. I mean, you and I, you know, there are tons of people, you know, who have these kinds of delusions.

I mean, usually not within your marriage. Your private delusions, like, I mean, on Air Force One, your wife looking at you being like, this is going to be your plane someday. I mean, usually not within your marriage. Your private delusions, like, I mean, on Air Force One, your wife looking at you being like, this is going to be your plane someday. I mean, that's a category of delusional narcissists and strivers in Washington that puts him in a still a pretty elite, rarefied territory. Well, and also, you know, another subject that we need to get into, but, you know, a window onto the mind of his wife, Debbie Meadows, who wanted this at least as much as her husband did. People should read the article for more on Debbie Meadows. It's so good. I just want to cover a couple of the topics.

You wrote another interesting profile about Kyrsten Sinema I want to get to. But first, as I was going through your little bio, Draper, I had to chuckle at this. One of your books, many books I've read, When the Tea Party Came to Town. Do you remember the subtitle to that book? Let's see. Inside the U.S. House of Representatives? Most Combative, Dysfunctional, and Infuriating Term in Modern History. That's the paperback version, yeah.

Yeah, and of course, what we're talking about are people who basically could be Hamilton and Madison, right? I mean, this book is written in 2012, and you wrote about the most dysfunctional term in modern history, 2012. Eric Cantor was in there, you know, who's like not even a Republican anymore, been thrust out of the party, basically. And we have now the contrast to, let me just pull this up, Jake Sherman at Punchbowl

had this tweet this morning about the disaster that is House Republican leadership. And I'm not going to read this all to everybody, but he goes through a like eight point thread. And Jake usually tries to at least reflect the Republican leadership's point of view in his journalism. Like an eight point thread just about how these guys can't do anything. The impeachment disaster, the McCarthy. And so just talk to us about, you know, you saw that 2012 group, that first Tea Party class up really close, the 2010 to 2012 class. And now you're watching this group as well.

I just talk about that trajectory. Did you ever imagine it could have gotten to where we are? Like what elements did you see back then? I didn't imagine it, but, you know, I also plead guilty to the fact, Tim, that there's a lot that I missed. You know, the Tea Party cloaked its grievances in fiscal and economic concerns, you know, about the deficit and all that, when clearly there were these cultural grievances that, if you scratch just a little bit beneath the surface, you would find that were no doubt triggered by the election of America's first Black president. And, you know, the book you've just cited has very,

very little in there about that. I mean, I missed a lot of that, a complete whiff. Having said that, you know, you look at the Tea Party class now and what they are today and, you know, a couple of them like Kristi Noem and Jeff Landry have gone on to be governors, a couple like Jim Langford and Tim Scott are senators. Langford is like the most responsible senator now, right? You know, or even Ken Buck. I was thinking about the Ken Buck class. In 2010, it was Ken Buck was the Tea Party guy.

Then he runs against Jane Norton. He was the wild-eyed, insane person in Colorado, my home state, back then. And now he's the one that does the responsible vote on Mayorkas. All right. Yeah, no, that's, I mean, Graves, you know, out of Georgia, was a Tea Party congressman who left because it was getting a little too nutty for him, and he was replaced by Marjorie Taylor Greene. And a lot of those people, I mean, I'm talking about members of that Tea Party class that

expressed to me chagrin at what they're seeing now, that this is an ungovernable body. From that class, Adam Kinzinger, you know, got tossed out. Jamie Herrera Butler as well, by tossed out, Kinzinger was forced to retire because of redistricting, but was exiled from his own party. I mean, when you look back on that class, there's one person, Alan West, who might have adapted well to this new group because he always had a performative streak. But those people, by and large, were willing to be part of a team. And they did not see Fight Club as the real aim, where clearly now it really is about the kabuki. So this is a debate we often have at the Bulwark about how much of this is bottom-up, how much of it is failure of leadership, right? But since you were with all those guys in that original kind of Tea Party anti-establishment wave, do you assess that, like, maybe had they acted more responsibly in certain ways, been more responsive to voters' demands, done certain things that they could have staved this off, you know, and had a more responsible kind of populist right-wing governing class? Or is it

like this was an inevitable just disintegration down to nothingness because of what the base wants and what Republican media demands are? It's a tough question to answer. I mean, I'm tempted to say that it was not inevitable, Tim, that it could have been staved off. But the X factor in all this was something that didn't really exist in its present form in 2011. And that was this right-wing media ecosystem. I mean, you had Drudge, you had Red State, you know, and then you had other agitating forms like Heritage Action. But you didn't have, you know, the Bannon podcast, and you didn't have you know the bannon podcast and you didn't have breitbart in the form that it is now just basically stenographers for the right and condemners on the left and and people still watch nightly news you know that's the other

thing yeah it was not the social media feed right like so they might have watched rush and had whatever you listen to rush excuse me and gone to Drudge. But, like, they still, you know, watched their local news anchor at 6 o'clock, right? And that's different. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, you know, these guys on the right in the right-wing media ecosystem, I mean, it pays for them to roil up the masses, to constantly be calling for the heads of leadership. Having any kind of legislative end makes no sense to them. It's not in their financial model. And so it's really, really difficult for people to come back home. Marjorie Taylor Greene comes back home and says, I'm supporting Kevin McCarthy for X number of reasons. And Steve Bannon then

doesn't have her on her podcast anymore and lamb base her. And this is the message that you learn coming into Congress now. And it's also why so many people are leaving, that it really is just about fighting for fighting's sake and with no substantive end in sight. Yeah, you know a telling little anecdote about that with Marjorie Taylor Greene? Right after that Bannon fight, I was at one of these conferences, and it was when her book came out, and the line for her then, the book was still, there were still people in line for her, but it was markedly smaller than the line for like Benny Johnson and some of the TPUSA characters. Those media figures are really what is inspiring folks.

And those are nihilists really at this point. Okay, I want to do one more thing on the right and then get to cinema. You had quite a bit of access in the early days and like to the 1.0 Trump. It was always a motley crew around Trump, but you know, that period before, you know, Reince and John Kelly, you know, before those folks tried to come in and failed, but at least attempted to be moderating forces when it was just pure, unadulterated Trump, it's Lewandowski and Hicks and Scavino and Trump. I kind of feel like we're headed back there. I mean, this campaign isn't really like that because he has Vlasovita and Susie Wiles. But if you were to get into the

White House, it feels like we're headed back closer to that era. So I'm just kind of wondering what your take is on that trajectory. Like, what do you think a reversion to a more unfiltered Trump actually means in practice? And if there's anything you remember from that era that would be relevant. Oh, yeah, sure. No, I mean, but what I remember is that if you presuppose, you know, that a Dan Scavino comes back and maybe a Corey Lewandowski finds a home there, that Johnny McAtee, who was the head of presidential personnel by the end of it, comes back. What you have to remind yourself, Tim, is that they're not going to be the same person they were then. They actually have experience now. They actually know how to do some of this stuff. By

stuff, I don't mean policy. I mean the levers of power. They know how to exact revenge. And they know as well that they're not going to be checked by the so-called adults in the room, the John Kellys and the Tillersons and people like that, or Reince Priebus, that instead they're going to be the guys running it. And a premium is placed on loyalty above all. But meanwhile, the Rick Grinnells and the Kash Patels, who are likely to have jobs in the new administration, have their own, you know, side projects that they can indulge in, their own vendettas they can pursue. So I think that while it's understandable to be bothered by the prospect of what Trump himself might do if he returns to the White House, in a way, the eyes really need to be on all the little balls around, not the big

ball, you know, that they need to be around these individuals who might seem, you know, like, you know, crazed pirates or something, but actually have a much more refined sense of how to do what it is they intend to do when they come back into office. All right. We're going to keep talking about that. You're going to come back on this podcast later. I want to close with Cinema. You wrote Party of One as a profile on her relatively recently. I don't know. When was that? It was last year. Yeah. The summer of last year. Yeah. It's like, I feel like I'm aging in dog years. Time is a flat circle thing.

It's like, yeah, each day is long, each year is short kind of element. The cinema thing, though, I just had to ask you about because in one sense, it feels like the bulwark should be her base. It feels like we should love her, right? Like she is a counter-conventional Democrat. You know, she's willing to bruck the democratic party lines and buck democratic party excesses and yet it just it feels empty to me right and like mansion i can wrap my hand around like i don't always agree with the ways that he bucks the democrats but it seems like it's a coherent ideology i know what he's going to do whereas

cinema like her actions have felt inscrutable. And at times I've been like, yeah, you go girl. And other times I've been like, what the fuck are you doing? And not what the fuck are you doing in the sense that I disagree, but in the sense of I literally cannot understand your logic and you don't seem to be willing to explain it. You spent a lot of time with her. Help make her less inscrutable to me. What is motivating her? Well, I mean, I think a number of things are. But I do think that she likes to demonstrate her intellectual superiority by putting it to the use of getting policy done. I do think that really does animate her.

And it sounds so, like, credulous of me not to mention antiquated of her. But the thing is she is inscrutable, Tim, because she does not like to be scrutinized and she doesn't do her stuff out in public the way Manchin goes on the Sunday shows. And in fact, it was really notable when just the other day, you know, the word leaked out that Sinema had been calling Lindsey Graham a chaos monster because she usually is much more disciplined than that. And I would put her legislative accomplishments, you know, up against mansions. It's very clear that she played an important role in the gun safety bill that came out a couple of years ago and the infrastructure bill that was passed. I mean, people, particularly

on the left, are infuriated by her deals that she does with private equity and all that. But back in the LBJ days, that wouldn't have mattered if you have legislative accomplishments to show for it. I do think, by the way, that this border bill, which she's worked on for over a year, marks the end of her. Her polls look terrible in the three-way race with Gallego and Carrie Lake for Senate. She certainly hasn't announced whether she's made up her mind, but I think that now there's not much incentive for her to come back. I do think she likes some attention. I do think she likes feeling like she's smarter than everybody else, but she also likes getting shit done. And when you have a Lindsey Graham, who at one time was an honest actor, I mean, who you could cut deals with him now basically doing

this bait and switch, I think she's realizing now that this is not a governing body that I want to be a part of anymore. Yeah. And I guess maybe that was really what it came down to. It was so frustrating about her. You said that you're being credulous about her intentions and I would never accuse you of that. But I do think that she was credulous about the Republicans' intentions. Yes. And as somebody that knows these people and knows that they were going to fuck her over in the end, like that was the frustrating part. And some people would say, well, she had to go on TV and butter them up and buff them up

because that's how she got them to deal. And I understood that on the one hand, but on the other hand, I felt like it was providing cover for their duplicity a lot of times. And that was, I think, the frustrating part. Yeah, I think that the way I'd express her cajolity is that it's more that she has had this outsized faith in her ability to be the Republican whisperer. And what she failed to recognize was how this party, right under her own eyes, has been changing so much.

It was, you know, as recently as two years ago, the Mitch McConnell party. I mean, and she could deal with Mitch McConnell and did all the time. And they had a very, very, they've had a very chummy relationship. It's not his Republican party anymore. Indeed. All right. Robert Draper, we have a shared love of the band, The National. And so I will be taking us out with some music of The National. Is there anything in their oeuvre that is speaking to you these days in this moment? Oh, man, I, you know, from their first stuff all the way to their most recent, I'm a, I'm a big fan. To Start a War war was the book title

was a national shout out yes yeah yeah mad berninger the vocalist suggested to me over brunch one day that uh that i considered that as a possibility and i thought okay he's on to something as always all right well we're in episode four of my leadership of the bullock podcast you know we don't want to freak people out and change things too much but you never know there might be new music in the future, so maybe if Matt has thoughts, thoughts are always welcome. The great Robert Draper, please do come back sometime

soon. Oh, wait. I meant to say I was texting some friends about the fact that we were discussing, asking for advice, wanted to ask you, and one wrote that you are the last great long-form political writer. I don't know if that's quite true. You are maybe on a shrinking list. Do you have any other favorites that you want to

recommend to people? I mentioned earlier Tim Alberta, who's now at the Atlantic. And his profile of Chris Lick was really just masterful, for sure. He has a colleague, Elena Plott, who used to be at the New York Times Magazine, who I think is a wonderful storyteller. And so, I mean, those are two off the top of my head, but I could name more. It is, however, kind of an obsolescence of practice, long-form journalism, and smart brevity is clearly in. So I'm outside looking in. I'm glad I remembered asking. I've got to get Elena on this podcast.

She's amazing. Robert Draper, we are together this year in our fake empire, and we'll be seeing you around here soon. All right, man. Thanks for having me. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown. Say goodnight No thinking for a little while This night I'm trying to figure out Everything at once

It's hard to keep track of you Falling through the sky We're half awake In a fake empire We're half awake We'll have to wait and I'm thinking back. We'll have to wait and I'm thinking back. you