The Bulwark Podcast - Ross Douthat: Elite Outrage Is Not Enough

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

Trump wins voters who don't read The New York Times or listen to The Bulwark Podcast, and elite opposition may not be enough to defeat him. Ross Douthat joins Tim Miller for a spirited debate about what the conservative movement gave away in sacrifice to Trump on world leadership, abortion, and democracy. show notes: Douthat's recent piece on the pro-life movement **Join Sarah, Tim and JVL  for a Bulwark Live event in Philly on May 1, and May 15 in D.C. with the George Conway. For information and tickets head to TheBulwark.com/events

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast, the New York Times' Ross Douthat. Ross, thanks for doing this. You've taken some hits here at the Bulwark, and so I genuinely appreciate you coming here. A shocking number of folks from the conservative

world just don't want to do it, don't want to hash things out with me for whatever reason. I don't know. I guess I could speculate, but I'm glad that you're willing to do it. It's really a pleasure to be here, and I don't know what you mean. Wasn't I the bulwarks man of the year last year for my you did not win bulwark man of the year well maybe all right you know you might be thinking about the Washington free beacon I've received so many major awards over the course of my career honestly that it may make sense that you know sort of one one blurs into another yeah we didn't honor you no it's a pleasure to be with you nonetheless. Thank you, Ross. Well, I want to spend most of our time hashing out maybe some of the big picture disagreements or the ways we see things differently with regards to the current GOP and Trump, but we got to do a little news first. I want to talk about a couple of your recent columns.

The big news of this morning, Tuesday, is we have the House foreign aid package. Mike Johnson announced that he is planning to try to pass four bills this week that are linked in some parliamentary manner that we don't need to get into. Aid to Israel, aid to Ukraine, aid to Taiwan, and then a fourth bill, which is like a grab bag of some cool stuff and some weird stuff. I've been on TikTok. We're seizing some Russian stuff. We're doing a new Lend-Lease Act. Some convertible loans. You know, who the hell knows what's in that fourth bill. As a result of that announcement, Thomas Massey, the Libertarian Tea Party, a congressman for Kentucky, said he's joining Marjorie Taylor Greene's pledge to vacate the

speaker. And he sent Mike Johnson a message that basically boils down to resign, bitch. So thoughts so far on how the House GOP has handled this. We're about a half year into this saga of trying to determine whether or not we're going to help our allies in Ukraine and Israel. Additionally, given the attacks that they faced. What say you about how the House has handled this? I mean, pretty, pretty badly. Right. you about how the House has handled this? I mean, pretty, pretty badly, right? As you would expect any Republican House of, you know, recent vintage to handle an issue that divides its own members against one another, and more so in a situation where you have this sort of razor thin and

getting, you know, getting thinner with every new resignation for the Republican speaker to work with. I mean, I think part of what's interesting here and maybe connects to a larger conversation about Trump and the Republican Party, right, is that, you know, Johnson is, the speaker is facing these rebellions, notwithstanding having made his pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, right, and received some kind of Trumpian blessing on some kind of support for Ukraine, right? Not the strongest blessing. I mean, he met with Trump and Trump kind of blessed him while also being like, don't pass the FISA bill. And it seems a little bit like a bait and switch. I don't know,

if I was Mike Johnson, I'd be worried about the nature of the blessing. Donald Trump isn't exactly the most trustworthy dealmaker. And so, you know, who knows? I think it's fair to say that Trump is not an enthusiast for any kind of sort of plausibly successful legislation. I think it's also the case, though, that Trump is not the be all and end all of opposition to and skepticism about U.S. foreign policy, our support for the war in Ukraine, all of these things. Right. And, you know, part of what Johnson is dealing with is just this fairly wide range of kinds of skepticism, right, ranging from there's sort of an Asia first version of Republican foreign policy right now that's skeptical about our support for Ukraine, because, you know, it's concerned about China and wants to make more of a pivot to Asia. Then there's a sort of either more strict isolationist, which would be sort of more the Massey variety, or just a, you know, if the libs are for it, we're against it, kind of opposition to aid to Ukraine. And that

is all sort of tangled up with Trump's motivation. Putin curious, there's a Putin curious group. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, go, go, sorry. Yeah, I mean I mean, my view is generally that much of the Republican attitude around Ukraine has a lot more to do with hatred of the near enemy of liberalism, right? And whatever the liberals are for. You guys elites in New Haven, where you live, put the little Ukraine flag in their Twitter bio, then they have to be against Ukraine. That's it. The policy is about as deep

as that. Any flag that goes in a liberal Twitter bio has to be opposed. I think there's a portion of conservatism where, yeah, when liberals get invested in any sort of project or goal or idea, conservatives gradually find, gradually or rapidly, it depends, find reasons to be against it. But that's somewhat distinct, I think, from the people who raise what are, to my mind, totally legitimate and reasonable questions about what our actual policy is in Ukraine, what our plan, you know, are we actually still committed to the idea of a Ukrainian victory and reconquest of the occupied territories? Are we open to negotiation? Are we switching to a defensive strategy? And I guess what I would say is, if you are a skeptic of the current bill, who nonetheless wants to do something to help Ukraine, the total chaos within the House makes that basically impossible to you're not getting sort of a you know a strategic recalibration out of the way mike johnson has to negotiate with his caucus obviously oh i mean what's your view basically and how would you assess like what

you think should be done and i guess if you take the Biden, Biden has a pretty coherent viewpoint, I guess, when it comes to Israel and Ukraine, you know, which is maybe not ideal, but like, you know what it is, basically, which is that he is instinctively wants to be supportive of them, provide support, while also having, you know, kind of a liberal cautiousness, you know, both about the human rights violations in Gaza and maybe about escalation in Ukraine. I think that there are fair critiques of that position, maybe, but that's coherent. The Republican position, as you just mentioned, is kind of all over the place. Like, there are various factions that have various different complaints. Like, where do you stand?

On Israel, I think it's basically an impossible-se situation where i guess in both cases i have a certain degree of sympathy for many of the sort of discrete sort of blow by blow situation by situation choices the biden administration has made without necessarily being sure that they're adding up to a coherent and effective policy overall maybe I meant coherent and understandable, I think, is the way that I was using the word. You were maybe using coherence and that they all connect together into a broader plan. Yes. In the case of Israel, it's a little more straightforward. Basically, Israel is fighting a war that seems to me to be entirely justified, except that

it doesn't have a plausible end game for the war, which is a serious problem that, you know, in turn makes the war less justified than it otherwise would be, right? But then by the same token, the sort of the Biden alternative, or what seems to be the Biden alternative of sort of getting a bunch of provisional ceasefires and hoping that they turn into a permanent ceasefire, you know, that in any immediately conceivable scenario would leave Hamas in power in some form and so on, perhaps enable them to declare victory. That doesn't seem like an amazingly terrific option either.

And, you know, I don't have a brilliant, a brilliant strategic alternative. People who have thought more deeply about the Middle East, you know, will come forward and say, well, obviously, here's what you need to do with, you know, post-war governance in Gaza this way and that way and so on. But I'm basically sympathetic to the critique of Israeli strategy and the critique of the main alternative offered, the sort of more restrained and ceasefire-oriented alternative on offer. In Ukraine, it's a slightly different case where I was basically broadly supportive of the Biden administration approach. Once it became clear that Ukraine was capable of sort of defeating a Russian offensive, I was

quite skeptical that Ukraine would be able to do that. But once they were, I thought it absolutely made sense to provide the kind of support we provided. I also have appreciated the Biden administration's determination not to risk escalation into direct conflict with Russia, because I'm afraid of nuclear war. That's been sort of the balance the Biden administration has tried to sustain. And it sort of carried through the big counter offensive that Ukraine ran that was sort of the place where a lot of hopes for a kind of transformation of and rapid end to the war were placed. That having failed, though, I am very concerned that we're in a position where we're facing serious threats in multiple theaters around the world.

And there isn't a pathway to any kind of near-term Ukrainian victory as victory is defined in Kiev and Washington right now. And so if that's the case, I think there needs to be some kind of recalibration that sort of emphasizes defensive war and is open to negotiation with Russia. It was so cool. You're directionally sympathetic with the Biden administration in Israel and Ukraine defensive of some of their positions right up until the negotiation with Russia, you're about to get that Bulwark Man of the Year awards that you're just, you were so close. I threw it away, right? Well, basically, if you aren't willing to negotiate with Russia, then you're basically saying one of two things. Either we're going to dramatically escalate our support for Ukraine, which I am both skeptical of as a military strategy and also worried about its implications for direct confrontation with Russia.

Or you're going to say, OK, we're settling in. this is going to be a defensive war for the next four years, and we're just going to do it, but we're not going to negotiate with Russia at all. And if you're doing that, then you're just saying, okay, we're basically just going to sort of turn Ukraine into an armed redoubt for the next four years, the next 10 years, the next 20 years. I think that there would be an argument for negotiation, but not at the point of after we just starved them of weapons for six months. But we can argue about Ukraine. It's a defensible position. I understand it. I want to move to another area that's in the news that you have a lot of passions about where the Republican position is increasingly incoherent. And that

is on the topic of abortion. I want to play for you a clip of Carrie Lake, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, backtracking on her view of abortion. Here is Carrie Lake. This is such a personal and private issue. I chose life, but I'm not every woman. I want to make sure that every woman who finds herself pregnant has more choices so that she can make that choice that I made. I'll never forget the first time I got pregnant, taking that pregnancy test, looking down, and I was excited, but I'll be honest, I was afraid as well. I was nervous. I was anxious. It's natural for women to be nervous and anxious when they're pregnant. I never would ever assume that any woman had the same exact feelings I had or situation I had.

We know that some women are economically in a horrible situation. They might be in an abusive relationship. They might be the victim of rape. Man, that could have been like a Bob Casey ad, maybe, from the person that was supporting a zero-week abortion ban. This relates to your recent column that was titled, This is Not the Deal the Pro-Life Movement Bargained For. What do you think about that? So first, I mean, Carrie Lake is, you know, a woman of no obvious principles whatsoever, right? But as such, it's kind of a useful weathervane because she is also a, has real political talent. Yeah, I wrote after listening to that ad, I was like, there's just this fine line between being a sociopath and being a really talented political performer. And she always has been. And she walks, she walks that line very carefully in a way that a lot of, you know, sort of some of the stranger characters associated with the Trump era do not. And I think that what she is groping towards in that ad is actually a version of the position

that sincere pro-lifers, not cynical pro-lifers, are going to have to end up defending in a lot of states, right, where public opinion is not going to be supportive of an absolute ban on abortion. And you're going to want to end up saying, we want, you know, the most protections for unborn life that we can get. And this has been a hobby horse of mine for a long time. And now I have Carrie Lake on my side. God help me. Right. a hobby horse of mine for a long time. And now I have Carrie Lake on my side. God help me, right? And we're going to do more to help and support new mothers, pregnant women, and so on faced with difficult circumstances. I don't think offering that message in purple and reddish states is actually a surrender on abortion in the way that I think some pro-lifers tend to see it as. I think it's

just sort of a concession to political reality. The challenge for the pro-life side is that at the moment, there are not national political leaders who are capable of doing that, of making that argument in a way that combines actual sincerity and an actual willingness to compromise. And instead, what you get is either Lake, who is sort of rhetorically closer to it, but is, you know, again, was sort of supporting an absolute ban on abortion up to two and a half weeks ago, right? Or Trump, where it's all sort of cynicism and political posturing. People may be reassured, people who are pro-choice voters may be reassured that Donald Trump is not a sincere pro-lifer. They may sort of accept his various pivots and shifts on the issue,

but nobody's going to listen to Trump and be like, oh yeah, you know, this is a really plausible argument that's going to move me incrementally in a pro-life direction. The pro-life movement right now needs arguments based in conviction that are capable of doing policy incrementally. And Trump is just, I think, just a huge impediment to making those kind of arguments seem credible and sincere. I was wondering, as a sincere pro-lifer, if you like put yourself back in 2014. And I told you what was going to happen the next 10 years, you know, you said that this is not a deal of the pro-life movement would bargain for, right? But I wonder, like, would you have taken the deal? For context, like, I always have more of a middle ground on this,

I do think that there should be protections for unborn life at various stages. I totally am with you, by the way, that I think there should be more support for mothers. I don't see any, like almost zero, maybe not zero, but almost zero actually genuine non-rhetorical support for that on the Republican side. There are a handful of people in Congress that would be for that, I think. Many of your favorite, favorite senators, you know, Josh Hawley, J.D. V my favorite senators the bulwarks other men of the year i believe yeah a couple of them i and i'd be happy to talk and even little marco now i think would probably go along with something like that though again i sort of i'm suspect how much those guys would stick with it once elizabeth warren was championing the position as well maybe jd but i

don't know about the others but anyway you come you come from, I think, a more doctrinaire view on abortion maybe than I did. And so I just wonder, so like, it's obviously not a deal I would take, but I do wonder if it's a deal you would take in 2014. You know, I was against Trump in 2016. So in that sense, a version of the deal was on the table at that point. And it seemed clear to me that in being Never Trump in 2016, you were essentially saying, no, I won't take an immediate chance of Roe v. Wade being overturned if the price of it is various other costs associated with making Donald Trump president, but also Donald Trump as sort of the voice and face and sort of spokesman for the pro-life cause. I feel like I was presented with the choice. I made a particular choice then.

In terms of where we are now, you see everything through a glass darkly, right? I mean, politics is a really, really complicated sort of arrangement of different games all being played at once by different actors in really complicated ways. And in terms of like what kind of deal the pro-life movement got from Trump, I think we're, you know, 10, 20 years away from being able to answer that question fully. And there are aspects of it that we'll never be able to answer, right? Like I've written repeatedly that I think Trumpism writ large pushes America away from the kind of religious conservatism that I tend to support. It makes people less likely to identify as Christian. I think it makes them less likely to identify as pro-life. Can I prove that, you know, to 100%

certainty, especially to my more Trump-friendly religious conservative friends? No, I absolutely can't. And you'll never be able to prove that fully. I think it's pretty obvious, actually, that that's true. where Trump is most alienating, most off-putting, most likely to sort of cement people in left-wing views and so on. And, you know, we're not operating in the world of, you know, Hispanic voters in Florida and Texas who, you know, lean a little more pro-life and join the Republican coalition a bit more under Trump, right? So there's a lot of moving parts. But I also think a lot of people are drawing sweeping conclusions about where the pro-life movement is going to end up, what's going to happen based on, you know, the first year and a half of post-Roe politics.

And I have that initial judgment from 2016. But in terms of sort of rendering a final verdict on the bargain with Trump, I think we've got a long way to go. And a lot just depends on, most likely, at some point, Donald Trump will no longer be the leader of the Republican Party, right? And at that point, be it in four years, or 20 years, or 100 years, depending on cryogenic technologies, you know, we'll also have more of a sense of what comes after him. I think it's pretty clear, actually. So I just will push back on this and say Trump has contaminated the water to such a degree that, I mean, unless you're making this

judgment purely, and even in this case, purely based on like number of births, if you just look at the larger impact that he has had. As you probably know, I make a lot of judgments about policy just based on the number of births. Based on number of births, right? Okay. So yeah, so maybe in 10 years, we'll have a different look based on number of births. But you know, I just think that the way in which Trump has contaminated the Republican Party, crushed the credibility of so many leaders in the pro-life movement and the conservative movement, you know, led us to like a place where there's just total incoherence and nihilism and cynicism that has reverberations, like generational reverberations. I mean, there are kids now that are 23 that don't remember pre-Trump, you know, and so you don't

think that the trade-off is clearly not worth it, given the other reverberations of his time at the head of the Republican Party in the country. I want to stipulate again that I have never been pro-Trump, right? I'm making the same judgment that you were making. But Donald Trump, if the next election for president were held today, would probably win. Sure, could win. You know, maybe not, but good chance he would win, right? You know, the Republican Party, the contaminated, ravaged, ruined Republican Party won a majority of votes cast in the last House election.

More Americans voted for the Republican Party of Mike Johnson and, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene then voted for the Democratic Party of Joe Biden. I wasn't making a contamination judgment based on its political prospects. I was making one from a moral and ethical standpoint that the trade wasn't worth it. That was what my question was about. We're doing Augustine, not politics. Okay. I mean, the moral judgment of the trade being worth it, the moral judgment that pro-lifers who support Trump made was about things like how many abortions get prevented, how many unborn lives are saved, right? The moral calculus is also a practical calculus.

And if it were the case that the pro-life movement, because of Roe being overturned, succeeded in bringing about, you know, the moral revolution in America, not just on abortion, but on other issues that religious conservatives, you know, want to make, then I think pretty obviously people would say, well, yeah, we, you know, made a bargain with a corrupt and, you know, wicked politician. And sometimes you do that in the world. And in this case, it worked out, right? I mean, I think too, this happens a lot in sort of arguments, including arguments that I myself have made about, you know, people making deals with Trump, right? Or, you know, the folly of supporting Trump, right? Like, you know, the famous line, like, everything Trump touches dies, right?

To quote a, you know, a noted former Republican strategist, right? I don't concur with that line, but yeah. Well, right. But what tends to happen is that the first argument is by making this deal with Trump, you are selling your soul and destroying your party. I do agree with that. Well, no, the selling the soul part, not the destroying the party. Selling the soul part, right?

But then, in fact, what has happened is that the Republican Party has conspicuously and repeatedly not been destroyed by elevating Donald Trump. And instead, you know, it's lost plenty of elections that I think it otherwise could have won, but it's not destroyed at all. So then you get the pivot and say, ah, well, you know, okay, but you've still sold your soul, right? And there are certainly people who have sold their souls to Trump. But if you're trying to analyze, like, what's happening in the country as a whole, and like, why the great and good American public is not united in absolute revulsion against Donald Trump, the issues that occupy a lot of attention for writers

for the bulwark, you can't end the discussion by saying, well, it just turns out that, you know, somewhere between 47 and 51% of the country is, you know, morally bankrupt and sold their soul, right? Because that's probably something more complicated that's going on. Like, you can't fall back on this. Like, voters are making certain calculuses that I'm not judging. I, you know, and there's certain voters that are making a choice based on the information they're receiving that's bad, the cultural soup that they're swimming in. Maybe it's small ball considerations that they have. You know, there are a lot of reasons why voters might vote for Trump that I disagree with. But I'm talking about like, we're looking at this at the biggest picture

from a 30,000 foot level, like whether the deal with Trump was worth it. And to me, it's like any sort of ethical framework, religious or non-religious, is if you make a deal with somebody that you believe to be totally sinful and without value, that eventually there'll be consequences for that. We don't exactly know what the consequences look like. We don't know what it means downstream. The fact that there'll be an entire generation of people that will grow up and understand conservatism and Trumpism is indistinguishable, but there will be consequences from that. You're switching again. You were doing pure moral analysis. You were saying these people are going to lose their souls, but then you're switching and saying, yeah, moral analysis,

there are consequences to immoral sacrifices. But I'm saying, but then notice that you switched and said, oh, and there's going to be this generation that grows up this way and rejects and rejects conservatism. No, no, no, no. I'm not saying they reject conservatism. I'm saying that, I'm saying maybe there's a generation that will grow up that now will, some will be attracted to conservatism. Have you been to a Turning Point USA rally? I think just attending a Turning Point USA rally, it's pretty clear some of the sacrifices that have been made by the conservative movement giving in to Trump. The types of things that people say at those rallies, the types of worldview that they have. I think that there are a lot of downstream consequences from Trump that are hard to

predict. Another Trump administration, which is I want to get to next, like, it's totally unpredictable. But what is known is that making a deal with somebody such as this is going to have consequences, right? Let me just take you back to the distinction you want to make between the voters and the people making this decision at 30,000 feet, because I know plenty of Trump voters, and I know plenty of Trump supporting elites. And in general, in my experience, the calculation is pretty similar. The, you know, yes, the elites have access to, you know, more information and have more influence. And so, et cetera, you know, you can say their degree of moral responsibility is greater, right? But like the difference between the pro-life voter who says, just based on sort of

generic thinking, like Trump's the Republican nominee, Republicans are pro-life, Democrats are pro-choice, I got to vote for the pro-life guy, right? And the head of a pro-life organization who says, look, you know, Trump's a bad guy, but he's going to appoint justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade and enable us to save the lives of lots of unborn children. Like, those people are making the same kinds of choices. You know, if you think the elites are depraved or, you know, or sort of selling their souls. And I don't think you can say, oh, well, you know, the voters are innocent because they, you know, they have insufficient access to information or they're, it's not their fault

they're watching Fox News or something, right? You want me to judge the voters too? You want me to judge? Well, yeah. Yes, I do want you to judge the voters. Yes. Okay. I mean, that's fine. I think that some of them are being fooled. I'm happy to judge certain voters, but I think there are many voters that are being fooled by people that have access to full information. And so I'm more sympathetic to that. Right. Well, and I think I can stipulate that there are people involved at the elite level. There are a lot of people involved at the elite level of politics who are purely cynical in the choices that they make. That is absolutely the case. I think that's often, though, they're often in a different position from

the people who are, and this applies to the left as well as the right, people who are leading activist organizations and have committed themselves to some particular cause and are trying to advance that cause. Those people are in somewhat different position than, let's say, you know, Matt Schlapp or, you know, whatever sort of avatar of cynicism you want to hold up. I'm happy to put Matt Schlapp in the sinful category if that's how we just broke things down. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater

when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. I want to go to the alarmism question because I think that's really the crux of our debate as we look ahead to Trump next. But before we do that, I want to play a fun game with you that I play with my anti-Trump Republican friends.

I love games. I want you to rank and grade the last four presidents. That's Biden, Trump, Obama, and Bush. So I would say of those four, that Bush is objectively the most disastrous president and with the most sort of worst downstream consequences for American life and American conservatism. I really feel like it's a little too soon to say with Biden. I think, I think you can make it, you can make it Obama, Trump, Clinton, and Bush if you feel like it's an incomplete. Biden is an odd case, not an odd case. It's just sort of a

testament to my, you know, sort of limits as a pundit where, you know, some of the things I said about foreign policy also apply to domestic policy. I was not a big critic of the Biden stimulus, for instance. I didn't anticipate inflation would be as bad as it's been, right? So there have been a bunch of cases where I feel like I have found Biden's decision-making very understandable. Welcome into the pool, Ross. I'm seeing you land on my number here, which is Biden ranked first. I'm seeing you landing with me. Biden is first of the four. This is the problem of this kind of ranking, is that I'm more sympathetic to a lot of Biden's decision making than I have expected. But I think Biden's record has been objectively worse in terms

of outcomes, policy outcomes. I'm not talking about, you know, the effects on sort of the stability of the constitutional order than Trump's. I think it's completely understandable why a lot of voters who aren't focused on the issues that you guys are focused on at the bulwark, who are focused on state of the world and state of the economy, think the Trump years were better than the Biden years. Right? So to say that the Trump years are worse, I think you have to just, and I think it's totally reasonable to do this, but you have to say Trump is morally depraved and had a corrosive effect on our politics in ways that you know yielded january 6th well you don't have to say that that's just objectively true but you you have to use that i think to trump outcomes like is the

world a more stable and more peaceful place under the biden foreign policy than the president isn't an omniscient figure okay the president is not an omniscient figure that has control over everything that happens everywhere in every human decision. And it's just like, you know, the infrastructure bill and you know what. His presidency right now is defined by inflation and incredible stress on the Pax Americana around the world. Those are objectively worse situations than anything since the catastrophe of the Iraq War and the Great Recession. Now, is this all Biden's fault? No. But it makes the sort of like, Biden's a great president, rah, rah, kind of narrative, I think, ring hollow. The economy. So I'm waiting for your ranking. It seems like it's Trump, Obama, Biden, Bush.

I'm waiting for your ranking now. It seems like Trump might be first if you're going to rank him ahead of Biden. It's not that hard of a question. It's not that hard of a question. There have been four presidents. Why is it not that hard? Because I think it's pretty easy, frankly, I think, to just judge who you think has done a best job as a presidency. I'm not asking you to grade, you know,

Joe Biden against Herbert Hoover and Andrew Jackson. I mean, they've all been presidents around the same, in the same era. In your adult life, you've seen them all up close. And like, to me, like Donald Trump has, it's not even close for me i know it's not even close and then george bush has been the second worst i've considered views but like neither of them are even close to biden and obama because i mean they both ended their presidencies in complete catastrophe because of the iraq war and the fact that the capital was stormed because donald trump was trying to stay in power against the will of the people so that's how the last two republican presidencies ended as like somebody that is an observer of the world, like to me, it's pretty clear that those are the

worst two. I'm not happy about that. I would love to rank George Bush first, but like that's just an observer of what happened. And I think that's a totally reasonable ranking. So I'm just wondering what your ranking is. I think that to get to that ranking, right, along the way to that ranking, you can't deny the problems that biden is presiding over right now that's all i'm saying that's why i said grade and rank i've got biden as like a b minus and obama is like a c plus and w is like a d minus and trump is like an f you're in new haven you got to grade the students they write essays it's subjective but you know when i coach each class as i let the other faculty member do the grading we We're going to waste too much time on the grading.

I'll let you off the hook. But it sounded to me like you had Trump first. No, I don't have Trump first. Okay. No. Obama first? Four Fs? Four Fs.

I think that the last four presidencies have all been bad in distinctive ways. If you're doing it just based on like damage done, I think Obama is the least damaging. I only hesitate on that because I do think that Obama bears some responsibility for just how bad things have gotten in certain ways on the political left. But it's sort of a it's not a direct kind of responsibility. I think he was effectively sort of carried along by currents on the left in his second term, which is sort of a statement about his weakness as opposed to his sort of direct responsibility. I'll just emphasize again, I think there are some very bad scenarios lurking over the horizon in the Biden administration. That about the concerning scenarios with the Biden administration is a nice transition to our final topic, which is the state of threat from a potential Biden or Trump

administration. I guess let's just baseline because I don't know if you've said this. Do you have a preference between the two of them for November? I've been really struggling to rank them. I guess you haven't been able to rank them retrospectively. So it might be hard to rank them prospectively as well. Like many Americans, I'm unenthused with the choices before me. Okay, you're still weighing. All right. I'm going to give this to you. And it might, it might seem a little bit rude. I don't mean it to be but I just, I'm wondering why when you look at the potential threats from a second Trump term, why there has been no kind of lessons learned from what happened previously. I mean, I think that if in 2015, I'd said to you, Ross, we were kind of on the same like page of Trump being pretty bad. But

at that point, spring of April, we're in April 2016, I guess I'd say. I want to make it clear that we're still on the same page of Trump being pretty bad. I don't think so. About the nature of the threat. I mean, I'm apocalyptic. Right. Okay, fair enough. You're apocalyptic. And I'm still in pretty bad. That's fine. And so back in 2016, if I'd said to you, I'm from the future. And Donald Trump is going to win against Hillary. And he's going to run again against Joe Biden in the midst of pandemic. And he is going to lose that election pretty handily, and then try to stay in power, and then gather a mob on the Capitol carrying Trump flags and Confederate flags. Police officers will die. A couple of people will die. And then the Republicans not only will not convict him or impeach him for that, but then they will within like a month after that, all get in line behind

him again. And he would be the nominee again in 2024. And I'd show you a picture of the Capitol. And I said, what percent chances do you think that I am a prophet from the future and that this actually happened? And what percent chance did this not happen? I think you probably would have been like 0%, right? Like that would have been worse than your worst case expectations. Oh, no. See, not at all. No, no, no, no, if Trump was elected president, the stock market would crash.

He would pull the U.S. out of NATO or do, you know, do something, something along those lines. And that there would be an immediate, not immediate, but sort of a sort of slow rolling test of the limits of U.S. strength along every major front in the world. I wrote columns making these kind of predictions, right? I basically expected everything that we've seen in Biden's first term, in Trump's first term, in terms of the global threat landscape. Again, I would have said, well, the particulars of your scenario are, you know, not, you know, I'm not going to give you like 50% for any like super specific scenario. But I had a very dark view of Trump's personality in 2015. I thought it was going to be worse, much worse than what it was. Now, in 2019, and early 2020, basically, what what changed

my view, what in the end separated me from sort of the kind of never Trumpism embodied by you guys at the Bulwark was partially it's the respective things that we're doing in our lives. You guys have a movement, basically, that, you know, you're a journalistic enterprise that's sort of built around rallying a movement. And I write a conservative column for a mostly liberal readership, right? And that obviously affects the kind of things we tend to emphasize and where we think our talents can be placed. But the other thing that changed was that I thought for almost his entire presidency, Trump was one, an incredibly weak and incompetent president, much weaker as a president by far than either Barack Obama or George W. Bush, much less imperial in the effects of his policy than either president, and also a more successful

president in foreign policy and a less destabilizing one than I expected. And that colored my expectations about what would happen if he lost the election. I think if you told me in 2019 that he would do many of the things he did in terms of trying to stick around, I would have said he'll do it and nothing will come of it. I would not have predicted the riot of January 6th or what happened around it. That is obviously an example of just how bad things can get under Trump. And it's a reason not to want him back again. But in terms of sort of like the state of the world and the way he used the power of the presidency, I think there's a reason that when you get into apocalyptic scenarios about a Trump second term, they usually involve people saying, actually, it's going to be totally different this time because he knows how to use the levers of power. And he couldn't be a dictator last time because he was, you know, clueless about Washington.

But now he knows what to do. He knows who to appoint and so on. And I take that argument seriously. But it is an argument that says that Trump's second term will be very different from the first term. If you want to be apocalyptic, you have to say he's going to be much stronger, much more competent, and much more effective than he actually was in his first four years. I expected much worse. And that colors my reading of the threat level. I think that what you say about how the Trump second term will be different is both objectively true. I don't think that's a stretch

argument. I mean, Donald Trump had John Kelly around him and Mattis and McMaster. These people are not going to be around him again. I think that had a lot to do with what he was constrained by. But I mean, to me, the argument really doesn't have as much to do with that as much to do with what he was constrained by. But to me, the argument really doesn't have as much to do with that as much to do with that Trump is, it's inevitable that Trump will cause a disaster because of the nature of Trump. John Kelly said, the depths of dishonesty is astounding to me. He's the most flawed man I've ever met in my life. Like the idea that you can give the most flawed man in America, this level of power, the best that you can hope for is what you said is like weak and incompetent, weak and flailing. Like that's the best case scenario, staggering, weak and flailing. And like, man,

that's a pretty bleak picture. And then you have the tail risk scenario. The tail risks of Trump. This is why it frustrated me about your kind of arguments about how there will be no Trump coup and how all of us were overly alarmist. It's kind of like the alarmists are always going to seem overly alarmist until something really bad happens. And if nothing really bad happens, then you say to the alarmist, oh, you're too alarmist. But like the tail risk of dealing with somebody that flawed and that I was listening to your Ezra Klein interview said, you know, he's a lunatic. Like the tail risk of dealing with a flawed lunatic is like immeasurable, right? So why?

What is the point of taking the risk, I guess? I mean, I don't want to take the risk. I'm not supporting Trump. Well, but you're not opposing him. Almost everything I write about Trump is giving advice to people who are in different ways, whether, you know, they're within the Republican coalition or in the Democratic coalition, giving them advice about how to oppose Trump. I have a quite different view, I think, from you guys about the strategies that tend to work in opposition to Trump. But, you know, I'm not championing Donald Trump for president of the United States

in 2024. I do think, though, that it's important to recognize the context in which he's running for reelection, because the flash forward story, right, that you want to tell in 2016 and so on, notably encompasses nothing about developments on the American left in that time, nothing about developments in the global landscape, and also nothing about the geopolitical landscape of Biden's first term. And, you know, you want to talk about tail risk. The tail risks of a Trump presidency are substantial. The tail risks of a completely decrepit Joe Biden with a completely incompetent vice president waiting in the wings, managing, let's say, a Chinese threat to Taiwan also seem really substantial, like really, really substantial.

I'm asking you to understand the perspective of the American voter who, not for reasons of moral depravity, but is sort of torn between Trump and Biden in the next election. I do think it is understandable why someone looking at how the world has changed under Biden, how the economy has changed, would end up not being as settled in their enthusiastic support for him as you are. And I guess what I'm trying to say is that we've gone through now a period of eight years where had people who knew better, had people who knew the risks of Trump and the dangers of Trump spoken about it to those folks clearly, had they not been watching Fox News, had they not been getting propagandized to

and rationalized and had the senators who all knew better and the members of the house who had everybody just spoken out particularly after january 6th and said we can't do this anymore you guys don't understand how dangerous this is you guys don't understand the threats then maybe that number would be 44 and we wouldn't be here anymore right like i like that's what i'm saying they're they're obligations like certain people who know better have obligations to not rationalize number would be 44% and we wouldn't be here anymore. Right? Like, that's what I'm saying. There are obligations, like certain people who know better have obligations to not rationalize for the voters and not say, oh, these poor 47% and to speak what the truth is and speak clearly about the truth about Donald Trump in the way that Liz Cheney has. Why is she alone? You know, like, wouldn't it be different if there had been a more concerted effort to be honest with people?

So this is maybe close to the heart of our disagreement. I think that the lesson of the last extended period of time is that unified elite opposition to and critique of Donald Trump has limited effectiveness, given all the various other reasons driving support for his kind of populism and populism writ large. A lot of people spoke out against Trump in 2016. I agree there was an opportunity for unified Republican opposition and that opportunity was missed. I think there was also an opportunity when Trump was being impeached that should have absolutely been taken after January 6th. Republicans in the Senate should have had the guts to actually convict him. But I think that those windows for sort of elite intervention are actually quite limited. And that one of the big lessons like is that, you know, you can have every, you know, newspaper editorial board in the country against Donald Trump. You can have every major conservative opinion columnist in the country

against Donald Trump. And you can have lots of Republican politicians, including the last Republican nominee for president, Mitt Romney, including various Republican senators speaking out against him in various ways and moving away from him, as they did after January 6, as they did, you know, after the Access Hollywood tape and so on. And Trump lost a bunch of voters, lost a bunch of bulwark voters in 2020, right? He lost a bunch of Liz Cheney Republicans, suburban Republicans, Mitt Romney Republicans, he absolutely did. But he has made up for that by winning the kind of voters who don't listen to podcasts like this, right, who don't read the New York Times, who have, you know, their own sort of disillusioned, disaffected perspective on the country. And you need something beyond elite outrage as a strategy. One thing you need

is not to drive the other political coalition into a left-wing ditch, which the Democrats almost did in their primaries, barely avoided by nominating Biden, but then proceeded to do in all kinds of ways at the elite level across 2020, right? Like, that's a big part of the story of why Trumpism has been so resilient. It's a very important part of the story that the Democratic coalition and the Democratic leadership responded to this, they said, existential threat to the country by moving way to the left. They're like, oh, it's a huge threat to the republic and also a great opportunity to become way more left wing. Great, great move. Good job. I think that has made much more of a difference to the landscape that we find itself in. We are out of time. I would

have argued that Joe Biden has not moved that much to the left, but, and I also wanted to talk to you about the elite failings in the Catholic church as our fellow, we're the same age, elder millennial cradle Catholics. And so I wanted to do that too. So maybe we can do this again in a couple of months and argue about the Democrats and the Catholics and leave the Republicans to side. I would love that. And I appreciate that you came on the Borg podcast. And for everybody who didn't notice, my power went off about halfway through this. So God was judging one of us and we'll let you kind of determine who that was. So thanks for dealing with this. It's always me. He's always judging

me. Anyway, it was a pleasure. I'm happy to come back again. And we can, you know, wind ourselves into ranting second time. So thanks for having me, Tim. This was fun. I'd appreciate that. Thank you, Ross Douthat. And we'll be back tomorrow with a little foreign number on the door You've got something in it so can you see Something wonderful that I could not be Everybody hanging on for their lives But you can't help them cause you don't have the time

I know everyone goes any damn place they like All this goes over well on the toxic radio You can take it all the time for a fool I don't know why You're so gullible but I don't know why You're so gullible but I don't mind Oh, that's not the problem And I don't need anyone with me right now Monday, Tuesday is the weekend

You get taken all the time for a fool I don't know why You get taken all the time for a fool. I don't know why. You get taken all the time for a fool. I don't know why. I don't know why. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.