The Bulwark Podcast - S2 Ep1048: Jonathan Chait: House GOP Doesn't Care How Bad the Bill Is

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Republicans moved at such lightning speed that even they don't know how many people would lose health insurance— or how much they'd be spiking the deficit with their highly risky and big, ugly turd of a bill. And they don't care because they're cosmically committed to stopping the government from making rich people pay for healthcare for people who aren't. Plus, Dem leaders have an age culture problem, environmental groups are stuck in a Ralph Nader time-warp, and the danger of radical politics and supporting Hamas hits home on the streets of DC. Jonathan Chait joins join Tim Miller. show notes Jon's new piece on the House GOP bill (gift) Jonathan Cohn on the proposed Medicaid work requirements Tim and Patrick Gaspard on Trump's lies about South Africa Jon's piece on John Fetterman (gift) Jon on Trump's immoral foreign policy (gift) Douthat interviewing JD Vance *Join Tim, Sarah and Crooked's Jon Lovett for a FREE ANDRY live show and fundraiser June 6

Hello and welcome to the Bollard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to have back at the show, staff writer at The Atlantic, writing about American politics and policy and triggering John Padoretz in the far left daily. It's Jonathan Chait. What's happening? So glad to be on your show again, Tim. It's good to have you. So we have passed, the House rather, has passed by one vote, what they've turned the big beautiful bill. Sarah Longwell and Bill Kristol are trying to rebrand as the big fugly turd. And I guess you have an article out this morning about how it's the largest upward wealth transfer

in American history. Why don't we just get your overall reaction, then we'll kind of go through the policy and politics of it. It's pretty shocking in a way that Republicans were willing to absorb the political and economic risks that this legislation is going to cause them. The political risks of combining two unpopular things, tax cuts for the rich and Medicaid cuts and the economic risks of blowing up the deficit at a time when interest rates are high and rising and interest payments are already a trillion dollars a year and

the recovery is teetering from the trade war. To me, the argument I make in this piece is that just shows the level of ideological commitment they have to the project of shrinking redistribution. That's really been the major theme of my writing since I started in journalism, the Republican Party's just absolutely implacable commitment to shrinking redistribution. They just hate when the government taxes rich people to give money to people who aren't rich. They think it's just wrong, it's unfair at a cosmic level, and they'll do anything they can to roll it back, and that's what they're doing now.

Not to, in any way, minimize the work that you've been doing in journalism, talking about the Republicans' love for tax cuts for the rich for the past couple of decades. It does feel like this is the worst example of it for a variety of reasons. Like one, it is happening at a moment where they're trying to brand themselves as a kind of a populist working man's rebrand. So it is in direct conflict to the actual messaging that they're putting forth. I mean, say what you want about the tenants of Reaganism. He was pretty unapologetic about this.

So that's one, so there is a dishonesty to it. But also just the economic situation that we're in right now. Like given the massive, as you just mentioned, the interest payments on the debt that we're making, given the fact, as you just mentioned, the interest payments on the debt that we're making, given the fact that what we've seen from the bond markets about how it's really impacting people's lives in a way that the debt and deficit wasn't, you know, during some of these past tax fights, right? Like, people who have car loans, home loans,

student loans, right? Like, the interest rates are rising in a way that's squeezing a lot of middle-class people. It is happening in a way like after a long... We've had several of these already. The Reagan tax cut took a top tax rate for a very high level down to a lower level, right? There was what, one increase since then, and so it has been brought back down then by Trump. It's gone back and forth. It's gone back and forth. It's gone back and forth with the control of government. You know, I mean, we're doing it just at a moment where it is on the merits, the least called for and potentially damning and where the politics of it are, you know, betray a

deep hypocrisy and what MAG is putting forth. So I agree with you on the economics. I disagree with you on the politics. So why don't I start where I agree, and then we'll move to the disagreement, so I'll give you a chance to push back. On the economics, you're right. I mean, the interest rates have been low

since Bill Clinton came in. Bill Clinton got rid of the deficit, created a structural surplus, brought interest rates down to rock bottom levels, and he created so much headroom on the deficit that George W. Bush could blow up the deficit, Trump could blow up the deficit, Biden, to an extent, could blow up the deficit, and no one really paid a big cost for it. But that era seems to be over.

I'm not sure there is an economic free lunch where you can just keep issuing Treasury debt. We want more people to borrow money to fund our deficits, where you can just keep issuing treasury debt. We want more people to borrow money to fund our deficits and they'll just keep buying up those T-bills over and over again at any price. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. So we don't know what's going to happen. I don't want to say that there will be a huge crisis, but there might be and we don't know and it's highly risky. So on the politics, sometimes when I listen to your show, and you guys talk about the past, I think, oh, this is why these guys used to be Republicans. That's right. That's refreshing. That's why you use me.

It's nice to remind people why it's nice for us to flex the old muscles. It's nice to demonstrate to people that we haven't gotten fully native. That's good from time to time. When you put on those rosy glasses and remember the good old days, this is when I like to put on my old liberal Democrat hat and remind you that George W. Bush didn't say he was going to give rich people a huge tax cut because he thought they were productive or they deserved to keep their own money. He just lied. He said, no, no, no, the poorest people are going to get the biggest tax cut. And, you know, it wasn't true. Ronald Reagan was also in

many ways selling himself as a new working man's Republican. He would, you know, speak to the unions. He would say, like, he's more populous than old Republicans, because it was never popular to say, I wanted tax cuts for the rich. So people are always comparing the rhetoric of whoever is a Republican now with the policies of the old, but at the time, they were never selling the policies at face value. We're just going to have to go through and look at some George W. Bush. We're going to have a separate bonus segment where we watch George W. Bush's 2003 speech about the second tax cut.

We're going to watch the speeches about it together. There you go. And then we'll do a mystery science theater. Well, that'll be some bonus content for the weekend. I'm not prepared to push back on that. So I'll grant it to you for now with a caveat that we might have some bonus content later. Sure.

I want to get into the policy substance of this a little bit, just one more on the biggest picture. I thought Jared Golden's critique was pretty compelling because Jared Golden's been a craw in the eye of Democrats in a lot of ways. He's probably been the most mansion-y in the House. He hasn't maybe gone full mansion, but he has been willing to buck the Democratic Party on a number of things related to working class voters in particular.

It was interesting to see his response to this bill. He writes this, the House GOP had every opportunity to work across the aisle to write a budget that put middle-class families first. Instead, they're ramming through an extreme agenda that takes healthcare away from the working poor and borrows trillions of dollars to fund a package of tax cuts, tilted to those at the top.

Mainers want more healthcare, not less. They want a tax code where everybody pays their fair share. They want Congress to get its fiscal house in order. The bill fails on each of those fronts. So this is one of the easiest no votes I've ever taken. I would think that would be like a warning sign to some of the front line Republicans. Like to have somebody like Jared Golden,

the most front line of the front line Democrats, saying this is the easiest no vote he's ever taken. And yet there doesn't seem to be any concern. It's kind of full speed ahead on this. I don't think they're not concerned. I think they're concerned. I think they're just willing to pay the price. And in a way, you have to hand it to them.

Sometimes if you really care about policy, you're willing to take political risks in order to advance something you think is important. They think it's very, very important to throw 10 million people who are poor off their health insurance and to give wealthy people a tax cut. That is in keeping with their moral values, they're willing to pay a price for it.

So you can question the values, and I do, but they're not cowards. Is that your real view? You really think they, or do you think they've tricked themselves? No, no, I don't. You think that across the board, the 215 Republicans voted for this, just they have a passionate, principled commitment to throwing the working poor off their healthcare. I mean, yes, they have fought for decades on these principles. I mean, the Republican Party has been utterly rock solid consistent on opposing economic

redistribution for rich to poor for decades. They paid a heavy price in the past and will continue to do so. I'm not saying that they wish they could keep the people on healthcare. I guess I do think that there's more of just a straight cultish political element like strained to this. I was listening to Bannon yesterday. Bannon can use the muscle to muscle these guys into not voting against stuff. We've seen that.

I mean, Bannon basically deposed a speaker by himself with Matt Gaetz, right? So he didn't do that. But still, on the merits, Bannon was basically like, they should have increased taxes on the rich more. There should have been fewer cuts to Medicaid. There should have been cuts in other places so that we would have got the deficit number down. Like that's basically the Bannon position on this.

I feel like had Bannon been the chief of staff and had Trump tried to jam that through, I think they would have jammed it through. Do you not think that's right? You think there would have been a principled objection among House Republicans to maintaining Medicaid and letting tax rates rise on the rich? I don't know. It's a counterfactual, so I don't know. They've pushed in this direction. They haven't laid down the hammer, as you said, but they pushed

pretty hard. They said, what if we just do a small tax increase on the rich, just to give us a talking point, just to give us something to say? Like, hey, we raised the top tax rate by two points, and the rich are paying their share. It's not all the sacrifice going on the poor. Even if the overall thrust was still very regressive, you'd still have a talking point. And House Republicans just absolutely refused to go along with it. There was almost no support for that anywhere. So I mean, I don't think they completely lack power.

I think this is the deal. The reason the House Republicans have been willing to overlook the corruption in the authoritarianism, and even some of these old line Republicans don't love that stuff, but they're willing to live with it because there's a payoff in the end. And this is the payoff. You take away that payoff and the whole bargain that holds together this party unravels. I think there's plenty of evidence for that point. And I think you make a compelling case.

Just looking at local Republican, looking at the states, there's a ton of evidence for this too. And just like what happened here in Republican, looking at the states, there's a ton of evidence for this too. And just like what happened here in Louisiana, they passed the most insane regressive tax cut that I've ever heard of last year. It's like preposterous that David did it. It was great for me. They cut the income tax for everybody, but obviously that's disproportionately favors folks towards the top.

And they increased the sales tax to pay for it. It's just a pure, straight, regressive tax, and they jammed it through. Party line here in Louisiana, crazy. So there's a lot of evidence for you that that's- At the state and federal level, that is the central policy goal of the party. Let's look really quick at just a couple of the policy particulars. The cuts to SNAP. Eighty-one percent of recipients of SNAP live

below the poverty line. About a third live below half the poverty line. They're cutting 30% from SNAP. And we'll see what kind of happens in the Senate side of this. But like a really draconian cuts to the SNAP program. Which also hurts farmers, incidentally, right? Because like the people who are too hungry to eat food don't buy food and then the people who are selling them food lose out. You wrote also about updating, we'll just keep trashing Reagan's legacy today, Medicaid Queens, one of the amendments that they gave to the Chip Roys of the world who are never going to vote against this anyway, so I'm not sure why they felt like they had to give him concessions, but they gave some concessions

to the pretend deficit hawks in the house that voted for this largest debt busting bill, and ever, certainly in modern times. They moved up the work requirements for Medicaid from 2029 to 2026. You wrote about this myth of the Medicaid queens. Just talk about that policy a little bit. Jonathan Cohen wrote a terrific piece for you guys as well about this for the bulwark. But congrats to Jonathan Cohen, our newest bulwark member who we love and his son's getting married. His son's getting married. So I would have him on instead of you to talk about this.

So you're going to have to talk about it in his place. I will be there. I'm going to witness the event. The way this policy works is that you don't technically throw people off Medicaid, or at least not directly. What you do is you impose work requirements. Now, the overwhelming majority of the people on Medicaid are eligible, so they could pass the requirement. You have to be working. You have to be of working age. So you have to prove that I'm too old, or have kids at home or I'm disabled or I'm working

or I'm looking for a job. You have to go through these steps. And you have to go through them usually every month. And if you've ever dealt with paperwork requirements from the government, these are like the worst version of paperwork requirements where it it's like impossible to understand what they're asking for. It's impossible to get people on the phone to answer your questions. You know, it's vague. And we've dozed all the people that would have answered the questions previously, previous

years. Right. They've tried this in two states, Arkansas and Georgia, and an experiment has proven that what it does is it throws eligible people off the program. People who are eligible, who are working or otherwise eligible to receive this, just can't get through the paperwork and they lose their eligibility. And then they go to the doctor and they find they can't pay for it. And then they're ruined. Sometimes those people had jobs and get sick and can't get treatment for getting sick and then lose their jobs as a result of the fact that they're now too sick to work. So rather than promoting employment, this actually discourages employment. But what it does

do is cut government spending because a lot of people just lose their access to Medicaid. And then that's how the government saves money. That is literally what it does. But they're going to claim that, well, we're just making 25-year-olds get off the couch and stop playing video games. But that is absolutely not what these requirements do. Any other thoughts on the healthcare cuts? I know there's some marketplace cuts, some of the various ACA plans, but it's not just Medicaid folks that are going to be hurt.

Right. No, they literally just threw that in the last minute. It's happened so fast, we don't even have analysis of the effects of how many people are going to lose their insurance and how much the deficit is going to spike. And they just don't care. I mean, they're just, they're literally just rushing it through so fast because in a sense, they don't even want to know. The lack of caring is pretty striking. I'm going to do a separate, I haven't finished it because I have to watch it in small doses because it just, I'm concerned I'm going to

stroke out and I have a young child who needs her, who needs her papa. But I was watching Ross Douthat interview JD Vance. Oh, yeah. And it's in Rome. So JD had just met with the Pope. Right. So you think if there was ever a moment for your, for the humanity and the caring of your fellow man to be overwhelming your political instincts, it might have been in that hour

right after you'd met the Pope. Not the case for JD Vance. And they start talking about the migration issues and the immigration issues. And truly the biggest takeaway is just that he doesn't give a fuck. He just doesn't care about these people at all. Yeah. You know, he's just the epitome of an absolute power hungry striver. And, you know, look, that's how he's gotten to where he is from humble beginnings through just relentless attention to upward advancement and he's not gonna stop being that person now. All right well that's so that's two bonus segments that listeners can look forward to me and Jonathan Mystery Science Theater looking at watching old

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Wildalaskan.com slash bulwark for 35 bucks off your first order. Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. I wanted to get to the politics of this. Time to turn to the Democrats a little bit. The Democrats all voted against us, of course, except for the fact that there are three Democrats that have died this year. It's hard to talk about this without being too macabre or crude. And so obviously nothing but sympathies for the families of Sylvester Turner, Raul Grijalva

and Jerry Connolly. But they're all over 70 and they're all running in safe Democratic districts, Jerry's maybe a little bit less so, but generally they all have been replaced by younger Democrats. And Republicans probably still jam this through, if they get them. They only got it by one vote yesterday. Two Republicans didn't show up to the vote. Two Republicans voted against. So they would have had to twist an arm. Tom Massey is a crazy son of a bitch, so he probably was never going to vote for it.

But maybe who's the other guy voted against? A Davidson of Ohio. So Republicans probably still get this passed, even if all of the Democrats were there. And yet it's hard to talk about this without, especially in the context of Biden, without just talking about the fact that the Democrats once again, like made this easier on them than they needed to. I think what this points to is just a broader cultural problem within the Democratic Party's leadership class.

When you're a public servant, the responsibility you have is to the American public. You affect hundreds of millions of lives in this country and around the world. That is an awesome responsibility. That responsibility should dwarf whatever feelings you have about your own life and your own satisfaction. What you should be thinking when you wake up every day is, how can I maximize my choices to benefit the broader world given how many people depend on my choices? And time and time again, old people in these jobs have chosen to put their own life satisfaction

ahead of the broader good. They've decided, you know, my life won't have as much meaning if I step aside and let some younger person take this job. That's what Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided. That's what Dianne Feinstein decided. That's what Joe Biden decided. That's what all these old Democrats who actually stand a high chance of dying in office at an important time. I'm not saying everyone over 65 needs to automatically retire, but the older you get, the easier this choice gets, and they just don't care enough about the country to make the right choice. And I think it's a cultural problem in the party that people need to get tougher about

discussing openly and not be held back by, oh, we need to be sensitive to their feelings and, oh, they've served us so long and the poor old guy. You make a really good distinction there because sometimes this pushback is, oh, this is ageist and we need to respect our elders. If you want to work till you die, I'm for that. I don't care. I mean, I understand. Maybe it's smarter to want to spend some of

your golden years with your grandchildren. All this is a personal choice. If you started a PR firm and some 30-year-old young buck is trying to kick you out, fight back. Keep working. I don't care. It doesn't matter what you do. Whatever you need to feel fulfilled, I'm for. This is public service. And this was my thing about the Biden thing the whole time. And I wrote several columns about this. So I was like, this is not about you. This is not about your legacy. Your legacy is 100% immaterial to anyone except for you and Jill and your grandkids. Like, that's it. And so, and frankly, you're harming it by what you're doing.

But like, there's just, there has been so much focus on all of that, rather than focus on this is public service, the threats are very great right now. And as a leader, you need to do what is in the public interest first. And you know, I just think that you point that out perfectly. And then you add into that, just the fact that there's been no, I think finally the pressure is starting to build for the Democrat leadership class to reconsider this. Because just the idea that after the Biden catastrophe, that Jerry Connolly won a leadership battle against AOC to run the oversight committee, it was preposterous.

It was preposterous at the time. I'm not on the AOC 20 run the oversight committee. It was preposterous. It was preposterous at the time. I'm not on the AOC 2028 bandwagon. Objectively, AOC was the right person to lead oversight against this administration, not somebody that had health issues. And she was good on that committee. I mean, the things you and I might not love about AOC were not germane to her performance in that committee. Correct. Because that committee was not about Medicare for all, it was not about foreign policy. It was just about the blocking and tackling of working really hard and communicating Republican

corruption to the country. And she's really good at that. I guess just since we're here and we're doing the Biden book tour, do you have any additional Biden thoughts you want to share? And if any of the revelations from the past week brought any nuance or color to your views or same as it ever was? You know, I have contradictory thoughts. I think a point that you made is that like, the cover-up thing is real to the extent that people around Biden understood how limited he was, and they were working to keep that hidden.

But they thought he was going to go on the debate stage and win. They didn't put him up on the debate stage because they thought he was demented. They thought he was going to win. So it's very hard to reconcile the most extreme kind of coverup scenario with that. That said, I think if you look back on the way liberals were discussing Biden all along, and even after the debate, there's a real internal culture problem we had where it was hard to say this guy shouldn't be the candidate we're going to lose. Like,

I wrote those pieces. And when I wrote those pieces, I would get slammed over and over again, right? You've got, you know, an audience capture problem. You've got social media dynamics that make people hesitant to say what they know. And like, wouldn't it be either just to write the column or to make the point about the thing that all my audience is going to like hearing and not the thing that they don't like hearing. And when enough people do that, it prevents you from correcting real mistakes in your own position. And then you lose. And then that feels a lot worse.

And I hope people learn the right lesson, which is like an open culture where people can actually identify mistakes on their side and say them without getting slammed by their own side and treated as the enemy is ultimately a healthier culture. And within any organization, dissent within an organization is helpful, right? Like everybody's saying, yes, sir, Mr. CEO, sir, like is a path to Enron. Right. You can just look at any organization, right? That's a healthy organizational culture aligned descent. Also, why don't we give a quick shout out to some of our elders too.

There are, you know, benefits and threats to every situation. While as a public servant in a safe blue district, maybe it doesn't make sense for you to be 77 years old with health issues and running again. Maybe it's better for you to have a younger person replace you. In the pundit class, it seemed like there was some value actually in being a semi-retired person because David Axelrod and James Carville and Bill Kristol, they weren't worried about what people said about them. They're old and curmudgeonly and they were able to actually say the truth. Yeah, right. That a lot of people who, you know, were maybe hoping that they could get invited to the

2025 White House Christmas party weren't. And so, you know, there's a role in life for everybody, I guess, is one is one lesson for this. Maybe no role for McDonald and his $4 million payout that he got to to fucking rule the country. So boots to you, McDonald. And one other quick thing on age, or I guess maybe it's more acuity. You wrote about this. There's this Fetterman saga that I was like somewhat wrapped into just

because I interviewed him and, and I was like, he is just not, not capable of doing these kinds of interviews. And I had to treat him with kid gloves. I felt like, like some people, some listeners were like, why didn't you go harder at them on that? And I was like, it felt like arguing with a second grader. I didn't want to be too mean. And so I said that after the interview and that got included in this big, the first Ben Terrace article about Fetterman. And there's been this backlash now. The Republicans are on the right, there's been a lot of commentators and on Fox, coming

to Federman's defense. They're like, his mental acuity is fine and the left is just coming for him because he took a pro-Israel position. I don't know how that squares with the bulwark coming for him, but whatever. Because you guys hate Israel so much. Yeah. So anyway, I don't know. What, if you have any additional thoughts on the Federman saga?

I mean, I wrote a piece about it. You can read it in the Atlantic and I tried to just go through this argument step by step. So I'm not going to recapitulate the whole thing. But number one, the position the Republicans are taking on this makes absolutely no sense. The main person who's testified about Federman's mental state is his chief staff, right? It's Adam Gentleson, friend of mine. Adam Gentleson has complained about the woke staffers. When the woke staffers were attacking

Federman's Israel position, he was slapping them down and saying, he got elected, you didn't get elected. So the idea that Adam Gentleson is complaining about Federman's health because Adam Gentleson is upset about Federman's Israel position is implausible. And what I wanted to point out in this piece is that the Republicans are literally doing the exact same thing that the Biden dead-enders were doing,

which is just disregarding extensive evidence that this public servant has lost cognitive ability because it's inconvenient for their position to make that admission. And it's just remarkable that when they knew they were coming into this big public debate about Biden's fitness, they had a test case to show that actually we're better than you hacks. We're willing to admit it when a guy we like is second.

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had Republicans won, but it turned out that was a big failure. I have a big piece coming out of the magazine this weekend about the abundance agenda that I hope people will have a chance to read over the weekend. What people discovered basically in the final stages of passing this signature legacy bill for Biden is the same thing that Barack Obama discovered in the early stages of passing the stimulus. There's no such thing as shovel-ready jobs, is what Obama said. And what that really means is that we have made it so time-consuming for the government to build anything that it can't be done at scale and in a reasonable time. Obama's whole

idea when he came in is like, we're gonna do what Roosevelt did during the rest, right? We're gonna put everyone to work by building all these big infrastructure programs. And that's what they did in the 30s and it was successful. But they said we can't do that. We could do it in the 30s. We can't do it anymore because now the permitting and all the hoops you have to jump through will take so many years. The recession is gonna be over by the time we actually put anyone to work. In the 30s they weren't worried about the rare grouse that was like habitat that was going to be effective.

Right, no, they built the Empire State Building in a year. Crazy. Right, they built these giant infrastructure programs with worse technology, way faster than... You've got a Trader Joe's going in down the block. I feel like that's going to be in by 2027. Exactly. Exactly. Right.

You know, so, um, you know, then, then they just kind of forgot this whole lesson. It was just like, well, that sucks. So, you know, wish it was different. And then they did another like gigantic infrastructure bill. They get to the final stages and they say, oh, wait, you actually can't build stuff in this country. That's a problem. And one analysis said like the whole purpose, or at least the main purpose of the IRA was

to get greenhouse gas emissions down. We're going to build out green energy. We're going to put people to work. It's going to serve all these purposes. They're going to be in these battery factories, these car factories, these new power plants. They're going to have jobs. They're going to love Joe Biden because Joe Biden gave them these jobs. We're going to get emissions down.

But they said 80% of the emissions reductions projected in this bill will not materialize if we can't fix permitting in this country. So they tried to fix permitting. And you know who blocked them? Among them? One thing was Republicans, because Republicans were so mad that they raised taxes on the rich in this bill. They said, like, we're going to make this bill fail because you violated our moral precept

to bring this back to point one. But point two, the environmental groups. Almost all the environmental groups lobbied to block the permitting bill because they are so committed to this 1970s Ralph Nader era agenda of blocking everything the government does in paperwork that they can't get their heads around the fact that the situation has changed to what you actually need to do to save the environment is build stuff and not prevent the building of stuff. So a huge part of the abundance agenda came out of this realization that the choices that

liberals especially have made in the past have prevented us from doing the things we want to do today. So you have to almost completely reverse your old mentality in order to do the things you want to do. And getting people to reverse their mentality is hard work, but that's what the abundance agenda is about. It is hard work. You know who's out there in the streets doing it is Ezra Klein. What have you made of Ezra's heel turn? And this was your space. Do you feel a little jealous that Ezra's out there arguing with Sam Seder and getting shouted down by all the liberals that loved him when

he was starting Vox? And what do you make about kind of like dark Ezra? I know. Ezra doesn't love being hated like most people. I kind of do. I kind of enjoy being- Maybe that's why people. I kind of do, I kind of enjoy being. Maybe that's why people have moved on for you because haters don't love hating people that don't mind being hated. Haters want to get under the skin. No, it's true. So Ezra's really, I mean, Ezra's a brilliant writer. I've loved his work since he started. His work is better than ever. And I feel like he tries to keep things as simple as he possibly can, but in a way it's become impossible for him because he's hit this red line.

He's really challenged progressive dogma for many people at such a fundamental level that they need to do the only thing they ever do when their ideas are challenged, which is to demonize the person who's challenging them and say that person's a terrible, evil person who's our enemy. I mean, you should never listen to a single word he says. So he's really struck this raw nerve within the left that it's been fascinating to see because he's the nicest guy on earth. And convincing people to hate Ezra Klein is a hard task, but people are trying it anyway.

Convincing people to be a little annoyed by. Maybe it would be easier, but hate is tough. It's such a sweetheart. I feel that since we discussed earlier, going back to our top topic, maybe some of the blind spots and some of the limitations of being a former Republican commentating on the news of the day. And I'm open to the fact that I've got some of those. I've been working through them slowly, but surely.

There's also some clarity though. Just the Biden thing last year and this, now this Ezra kerfuffle. I look at it and I'm like, have all these people lost their mind? And like, Ezra is not saying anything that is just not as obvious as the sun rises in the East or like LeBron James is a good basketball player. It's like California is a blue state controlled by Democrats and they have the highest cost of living. It's challenging for middle-class folks.

They are unable to build a train and that's a problem. And there's, they have a homelessness crisis and that's a problem and California should try to fix it. Like that's like really all he's saying. I mean, you could kind of sum up abundance has a lot of detailed policy walk nerd stuff, but his overarching point, you can summarize in a tweet and a very obvious one. And it's pretty, I guess it's kind of alarming to me that it's even controversial. People don't like being told that they're the problem. No one likes that. And what abundance

does is it points at the progressive movement and says, we are the problem. The things we did in the 1970s are causing us to fail today. We have to change our mentality. And a lot of people are still invested in those ideas. And one of the points I tried to make in this piece that I'm writing, obviously you haven't seen, hasn't come out yet, is that Ralph- Can we just tease on people now? Pretty much all of our listeners are already Atlantic subscribers because this is the official

home of the Atlantic, the official podcast home of the Atlantic, so I'm sure they'll be able to read it. It's true. You guys have- But if there are any who are not, go subscribe to the Atlantic. And eventually Jeff Goldberg will give me a 10% VIG on all those subs, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm sure it will.

People talk about the groups, right? That's part of the discourse within the left is the role of the progressive groups in creating this infrastructure where every group has its position that it holds to and it gets all the other groups told to it. And that's what's pushed the party to the left over the last 10 years. Ralph Nader pretty much invented that. He invented the groups. He invented all these groups that came in to DC to lobby for their individual position. The whole idea that we're

called them like a new class of citizen that we're inventing this professional activist group. So like, this is a gigantic part of the progressive movement infrastructure that has a stake in this set of laws that the abundance movement is trying to change. So it's not a small thing that they're trying to revise. It's really the entire orientation of the progressive movement. As somebody who's been making these cases for 30 years, a neoliberal shill who has, you have college-aged kids, not college, right?

We're in college. I do. Go blue. And so you're in touch with what's happening with the youth a little bit, just from a parenting perspective. Do you ever kind of sit back and be like, why are we so unpopular? I just, it's hard to kind of understand, right? Because we being the Democrats or we being the old people. Neoliberal Democrats, right? There's this huge negative reaction online. It's like the MAGA folks, we need to tear everything down. And the young

online leftists, we need to totally reject all of these leaders that have got us to this place and instead go to our perfect socialist future. And I just, I kind of like look at the arc of the last 50 years and think, I don't know. Things are pretty good. I can understand why you're mad if you live in Youngstown, you know, but it's not like Venezuela over here or Argentina, or it's not like, you know, like things like directionally have gotten better since our

grandparents were kids. What do you think it is the reason that like the now new, the Ezra Jonathan Chaite view is being rejected by the youth? I mean, that's a really big, profound question. I think to the extent you want to focus on youth, I sort of buy the theories of, you know, Jonathan Haidt, who is not me, let alone in fact, completely different person, that. Just one different letter, no, two different letters, I guess. A couple different letters. He's got a D, I don't have a D, I have a C.

That the social media has caused, you know, this kind of negative affect and mental health difficulties. In a lot of this radical politics on the right and the left, really is at some level it shades into mental illness in a way that is sometimes difficult to distinguish one from the other, where you just view everything in hyperbolic negative terms and refuse to look at practical steps you or the world can be taking to make the situation better. It's cognitive behavioral therapy in reverse. I think that's Heidt's phrase, where you just catastrophize everything that's happening. In a lot of these spaces, I think it's gotten better actually since Elon broke Twitter by

mistake. But just even saying that, hey, I'm kind of like happy makes people angry because if you're like a happy, normal, well-adjusted person, that means you don't know how terrible the world is and you're insensitive to all the problems out there. People have actually built political movements around that whole wave of thinking and expressing yourself. It's totally impossible, right? It's just unworkable. It's not a practical way to make the world better. I think there is this nostalgic idea on the left that you old Republicans are not burdened by. That there's something noble in being a protester who shouts and screams and

exaggerates and carries on because even if you're not technically right, you're pushing things in the right direction. I think, you know, vestigial Republicans like yourself understand that that's actually not always the case. And oftentimes, you just convince people that you're crazy and they shouldn't listen to anything you say. Yeah. I was with you on the cell phone answer. I don't know if the protest answer is right, because I've been talking about this a lot on my Gen Z pod, like there's actually, it's kind of a surprising lack of protest among young folks on the left right now. Yeah, right? And so the allure to that might be more of a generational thing about your peers who are out there in

these streets and we appreciate that. That's true. And we appreciate that. That's true. That's true. And we appreciate that. That's true. That's true. No, really, my people at least leave the house. It's the young people who want to do it all on the phone. Yeah.

I don't know. We could probably do a whole podcast on it, but I think it's just a big challenge, right? What Ezra is pushing for and Derek seems to have an appeal to basically upper middle-class college-educated folks. And it is not resonating beyond. Like I saw a little image of some of the abundance meetups and it's exactly, you know, it looks exactly what you think it'd look like.

And God love all the folks at those meetups. Some of them probably are bold podcast listeners. We'd probably hang out and agree on a lot of things. But in the social media age where all of that, you know, catastrophizing is winning, you know, how do you make the argument that like, well, guys, some of these radical changes might make things worse, not better. Like, have you seen China? Like all of those arguments are a little bit, it's tough.

And like, honestly, maybe it's just cyclical and like letting the populists fuck things up for a while is the only path back. I don't know. I mean, the irony is the biggest piece of it up for a while is the only path back. I don't know. The irony is the biggest piece of it and the oldest piece of the abundance agenda is housing. We should build more housing. Look, I'm 53. I bought into the housing market in the 90s when it was the cost of what's now a nice cup of coffee at Starbucks. cup of coffee at Starbucks. And so the young people, I don't need it. I own a house now. If anything, I stand to lose from building more housing and devaluing the cost of property, of which I'm already an owner. It's the young people who actually need to allow more housing

to be built. And the only way to do that is to legalize it. But no, you're right. And the other aspect of it is that abundance agenda, like I said, what says who's the bad guys? The bad guys in many cases is us. Or the bad guys isn't a corporation. It's that when you want to build a new apartment building, you have to get approval of some neighborhood planning

commission. They're going to listen to the four 75-year-olds who've lived there for 50 years who want to show up and complain about how they don't want anything to change in the neighborhood, and they get to veto the whole prospect and tie it up in lawsuits if they get cranky about it. Those bad guys aren't as compelling to some people as a bad guy who's a giant wealthy corporation, but they're bad. Yeah.

There's some bad corporations and some bad geriatrics that aren't letting people move into the neighborhood. Hey guys, it's Tim and Sarah. We're here with my friend and me, Jon Lovett from Love It or Leave It. We're bringing you guys all a special crossover collab with the Bulwark and Crooked Media. The Never Trump Rhinos meet the Self-Important Podcast Bros. You are definitely the fucking self-important one.

June is Pride Month, and we're going to be live in DC on June 6th for World Pride for a very special live show fundraiser featuring the three of us, plus some gay special guests. This one's a little different. Proceeds from tickets will be donated to support André Romero, the makeup artist who the Trump administration wrongly disappeared to El Salvador and who is currently being held in Sikant. Crooked and the Bulwark will be donating the proceeds from this fundraiser to the Immigrant Defenders Law Center.

Tickets on sale now at crooked.com slash events. These are going fast, so get yours before they're gone. Go to crooked.com slash events. And we will see you all on June 6th. Speaking of radicalism gone awry. This is just such a horrible story to Israeli embassy staff were fatally shot at the capital Jewish Museum in DC yesterday. You're on Leshinsky and Sarah Milgram. They're engaged. They about to be married. The suspect, I guess suspect is the term that we have to use, but the guy that did it was

chanting free Palestine and globalizing the Intifada while being taken into custody. I don't even really know what to say about this beyond the fact that it is so, it's just fucking self-sabotage, this radicalization that you're saying that could lead to something like this. But, and it's pretty alarming that this stuff keeps going on. And it's unfortunate that we have kind of this fake anti-Semitism agenda being put in place

by this administration when there's like actually real issues there. Right, the administration is stocking up with right-wing anti-Semites and using anti-Semitism as a pretext to crack down on peaceful demonstrators, often with very unobjectable views. At the same time, a lot of these demonstrators have very radical, very dangerous views. I mean, globalize the Intifada. This is what it means.

If they wanted to say, let's just get people around the world to speak up peacefully, they could say that. But that's not what globalizing the Intifada means. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab, means that there won't be any Jews anywhere in the state of Israel. There won't be a state of Israel. I mean, these groups actually are fairly tightly organized and disciplined and they're loyal to Hamas. They won't denounce Hamas, they won't denounce 10-7

because that is actually what they believe. They attract a lot of people who are just motivated to help the Palestinians who are suffering horribly. So many of the people who are attracted to these protest groups have noble motives that I share. But the causes into which they're joining are often bloody ones that we should be honest about describing. And all of these things can be true. What's happening in Gaza right now is almost as bad

as it's been the whole time. What is happening in Gaza, like blocking food from getting into Gaza. Young children and babies are dying in Gaza as we speak. These are not Hamas toddlers. These are just toddlers. They're being held hostage by Hamas. Yeah. And so, you know, like there are valid reasons to protest and to speak out about the atrocities there. But it's very obvious to anybody seeing this clearly how often that like bleeds into the type of anti-Semitic rhetoric that can take a person to the place where they feel like the right thing to do is to randomly shoot people outside of a capital Jewish museum.

Here's a point that I think I've been making. Students for Justice in Palestine is a radical group with eliminationist goals that supports Hamas and supports violence. People should not work with that group. People should not endorse that group. You should find other ways to support the Palestinians. I don't care if they're the main group on your campus that's organizing a protest. Organize your own protest that's separate from them because they are bad.

Blunt and well said. Speaking of people that are bad and eliminationist, we had another one of these fucking reality show Oval Office meetings yesterday between Trump and the president of South Africa. Trump advancing the notion that there is a white genocide happening in South Africa. There have been, also saw from the Washington Post was there have been 12 deaths, 12 murders on farms in South Africa, which is not good, but there were 6,900 murders in South Africa last year, right? So we just have to contextualize all this that's happening.

Do a nice note from a South African who just wanted to make sure that it is important to contextualize this administration in South Africa. There's some bad laws that are being put in place. There's some race-based laws that are being put in place that are pernicious. The like. In the grand scheme of things, the idea that the white farmers, the African hunters in South Africa are the only victims in the world that we should care about and that the United States president should browbeat the president of South Africa in the Oval Office a week after sucking the cock of MBS is obviously

motivated by racial animus like it's just obvious what Trump is doing here. And so anyway, you've written about this I wonder if you have any other thoughts. Right one of the columns I wrote last week was that I was trying to make an old New Republic counterintuitive argument, which is that- Watch out. No slate pitches on the Boulogne podcast. Radical candor here. We've updated- The New Republic invented that, yeah. Before slate existed, that the slate pitch was the New Republic. Anyway, when Trump flew to Saudi Arabia, he basically, he gave a speech where he was saying like, we're not here to moralize. We're just about, you know, making business deals with people.

And that's what our foreign policy is about. I think a lot of people took that idea completely at face value. But my argument is actually they do have values based foreign policy. JD Vance has gone to Europe and he's lectured people about their immigration policies and about their free speech policies and about letting AFD have more access to the political system, their policies. They've lectured South Africans on their treatment of white farmers. Their concepts of democracy and free speech and human rights are very important to their foreign policy.

So they have values, but their values are bad. It's not amoral, it's imm their foreign policy. So they have values, but their values are bad. It's not amoral, it's immoral foreign policy. And I think it actually gives them too much credit to assume that it's pure commerce based, just making money and making deals. Trump's dealings with the Gulf are corrupt. They are money based, but there is a shared value system. He genuinely admires the authoritarian character of these regimes. He loves the fact that he can go there and no one is allowed to protest against him and that he can get his palms greased. So that's not just about making deals for the country or even for himself.

You can see it in his face. He loves dictators. He admires them. It's a value of his. And so it's a values based policy, I think is an important point. Yeah. The pluralist countries are the foes. Yeah.

I just, it's across the board. It's like anything in life, you know, when you have a friend or colleague, you know, it gets them excited. You know, like you can just tell, like you can tell like in their energy and their voice and their engagement level, like Trump gets very engaged and excited when he is attacking our small L liberal allies around the world. Like he does not like them. He does not want to be in the black all the more. So yes, right. It does not really want to be in their company. He wants to talk down to them, and he enjoys, erotically, the company of the

Middle Eastern fascists. And that's just it. I think it's a very, it is a good point. And I was making a softer version of the point yesterday by saying that the Trump doctrine is that there is a Trump doctrine that is mercantilistic and that they just have carve outs for white people. But I'm open to the next step of that argument, which is no, it's not purely mercantilistic. It's also values based.

It's bad values. I thought it was really... You might have pitched it as a contrarian pitch, but I liked it. Right. The Canadians are mostly white. The Western Europeans are mostly white. Their leaders are white and he's hostile to them because they're liberal democracies. There's this concept that's been going around that if people who are listeners, who are

blessedly off of the internet, are probably not even going to be aware of this concept. It's an intra right wing fight about the woke right, that there is a woke right that is themselves obsessed with race and identity and identitarianism in a similar way to how Robin DiAngelo might be, but in a way that is ill of ill intent. And so the key difference is the intent is ill, but the identitarian obsession is the same. You've kind of observed this. I do think that this in some ways overlaps with what we saw with the South Africa discussion too.

But I don't know if you have any insight into the woke right. Right. So this is the critique that sort of originated on parts of the right that were at least open to Trump, if not completely in his camp. And then since, you know, that we're basically against the illiberalism of the far left and saw Trump as a corrective to that. And then realized that Trump was just recapitulating or in my view, exceeding the illiberalism of the far left.

I would say massively exceeding the illiberalism of the far left. And so they were using the word woke to express the kind of parallel, the sort of meet the new boss, same as the old boss dynamic of this. I personally prefer illiberal or authoritarian as descriptors, but the difference between my descriptor and woke is they hate the term woke, right? It makes them so angry. They can't stop talking about how angry it makes them there is a real appeal in it but also making them realize the degree to which they they really have recapitulated the worst

habits of the people they most hate I made up can I can I repeat one of my little Twitter burns will Chamberlain one of these right-wing Fed Soc, illiberal lawyer types who's in the Trump circle, he was really complaining about Ed Wheelan, who's a more traditional conservative, who called Emil Boeve, the Justice Department staffer, a henchman, saying, we can't promote a henchman. He says, like, how can you? Is this the term we're using? We're calling him a henchman. Is that fair?'t promote a henchman. He says, like, how can you, is this the term we're using? We're calling him a henchman, is that fair?

And I said, like, you're right. When you're in the walk right, you gotta call a hench person or person experiencing hench. That's the real, nice walk right term. So, in a way, there are all these parallels but the language policing but in the conscious obsessions with race, they like to claim sometimes that we're the

race neutral people, but they're not race neutral. They're very, very conscious of race. I want to give one example of this conscious obsession with race that's really kind of tragic that I want to talk about. Just really quick though for listeners, I did a late night chat with Patrick Gaspar. He was on the show a couple of weeks ago, who's ambassador to South Africa, where we kind of went more into the details about what's actually happening in South Africa. So folks, if you want to listen to that and go check it out either on YouTube or on the board takes feed. Patrick's really, really good. I was noticing

this more in my comment section from both the woke left and the woke right. And so I just kind of wanted to weigh in on it because it's a tragic story. There's a story out of Mississippi out of Starkville, really annoying that the cowbells at the football game, it's very annoying, but it's, it is, it's America in Starkville. Okay. Casper Ericsson, he came from Denmark. Maybe he's being targeted because as part of the pressure campaign against Denmark to give up Greenland, I don't know. He came from Denmark on a cultural exchange program in high school. One of these things where you come and do a semester abroad. He went to high school in Starkville. He meets an American girl there. They fall in love. He moves back to Denmark, the pen pals.

He comes back. They decided to get married. They have four kids, one on the way. The guy tries to fill out all the firms to become an American citizen. His wife's American, his kids are American. I guess 10 years ago, one of the forms he did not fill out, there had been an oversight. He'd had many, many meetings with immigration in the intervening periods where they had not told him about this form that he'd forgot to fill out.

He says it happened right after there was a stillbirth of their child. So there was a lot happening in the household. He went in for his immigration checkup. He's still going through the process like you're supposed to do to become a citizen. The fucking ice goons shackle him and they send him to Louisiana. He's in a cell in Natchez now. He's been there for one month awaiting deportation while his pregnant wife is at home with the four kids.

They're charging a ridiculous amount for him to even use the phone to call her because it's a private prison that's monetizing all this. This is a fucking horrific story. And what it is, is an example of just how inhumane the Trump immigration regime is across the board. There are elements of it that are racially motivated. There also are, that is just a blanket inhumanity. And they're trying to reach their numbers.

And the easiest way to reach their numbers is to take people who are doing things The right way not criminals. It's hard to find fucking criminals It's easy because they're the ones who walk in the door exactly It's easy to find people who just walk in the door And so this guy is gonna be sent back to Denmark who knows what happens to his family It is despicable what is doing it is just fundamentally un-American what we are doing, this immigration regime. And so I was grossed out by it. And then like literally my entire reply chain from left and right was about how this guy's white.

It's like, Oh, lefties being like, Oh, well, it's a white guy. So that's, so the Trump people let them off the hook eventually. And then it's right-wing people being like, Oh, I thought that, I thought that we only deported Brown people. See, we also deported whites. Hell yeah. And I just like, it leads to an unhealthy culture where you're centering the skin color above everything. Because the center of this case is the tragedy of it and the fucking horrific immigration policies that this administration is putting forth. And it makes me

concerned when we are immediately leading to where people are stoking race war over things such as this. Anyway, I don't know if you have any thoughts about the story. Yeah. I think what you're hitting on is the hangover of this ideology that really got very fashionable in this country for a few years, maybe peaked around 2020, which is really a totalizing analysis of race, right? Like Ibram Kendi saying that literally everything is either pro-racist or anti-racist, and nothing is

neutral. And I think it began with the very correct understanding that racism left an incredibly deep and enduring imprint on American society that didn't go away when slavery disappeared and didn't go away when segregation disappeared. But in many people's minds that has grown into a just a totalistic explanation for everything. So it certainly impacts our immigration policy, but they have no other way of understanding anything else that could be impacting our immigration policy. And so they're driven to this totalistic frame. And so you're just left with these kind of black, I mean, black and white, I suppose is the wrong phrase to use, but you know, right.

This is absolutist analysis. It's a black and white cookie living in harmony together. I mean, I think you need to, you not only can, but you have to recognize the impact of racism in American life while leaving yourself room to see other forces that are at play. Yeah. And to me, this case in particular, and what we're doing across the board, that I just, I like to keep bringing up because sometimes just people don't think about it. Like they have a, you know have whatever their view is about immigration,

liberal or conservative. It's not like, well, he didn't follow the rules, he should leave or, well, we should be more generous. There are choices that are made by the government about how to handle situations such as this. You know what I mean? We could change the law where if you run a red light, you get jailed for life or like, or you can get a ticket, right? Like, there's a whole range of different punishments for things such as this. And the notion, and this is happening across the board on these immigration detentions, and every story I read about it, is that this administration, probably because the private prison lobby is the one that's making the most bank during the Trump years, private prison folks are crushing right now. They've made a decision that anybody who has an immigration violation, you get shackled, put on the bus and sent to

Natchez, Louisiana or the other places where there are these private prisons and you sit there. That's where Malcolm Khalil is. That's where this Danish guy is. That's where the woman from Georgia that I've been talking about, the immigrant from Mexico, she got sent to one of these in Georgia. And it's like, none of these people are a danger to their community. Why are they in cells? Like there's no reason for it besides like intimidation, cruelty, and wanting to give widgets to your private prison pals, right? Human widgets.

Because like none of these folks are, have any past crimes or any threats to their community. And all of them, you're trying to get them to leave. So like, there's no flight risk. It's not like, Ooh, maybe the Danish guy will leave to Denmark. Like, that's what you want. Okay. So it's not like there's a flight risk situation. There's no reason that this man should be away from his four children. Like, even if in the end you do a stupid policy that I disagree with, which is to deport him, in the meantime, the idea that he should be in a prison in Louisiana is fucking insane and inhumane. And like, that's the center of this.

And it's happening across the board. My suspicion is that they recognize that actually finding and deporting all the people that they want to find and deport is not going to be possible, even after they get the money from this bill to staff up on the immigration enforcement. It's just too hard to find everyone. It's too resource intensive. I mean, doing the math and the plane loads and the bus loads of people, it's too forbidding. I think what they're trying to do instead is to scare people.

You create enough high profile cases that make it into the media than anyone who's here illegally will self-deport. The cruelty is the point, as my colleague Adam Serwer said. The abuse is better. It's better. And if you're getting an innocent person to mistreating them, and it makes the media all the better, because that's just going to be a better story for the media. It's going to travel farther and scare more people. Now maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe it is purely incompetence, and I'm sure incompetence is part of the play. There's malice and incompetence and cruelty, and there is just straight grift. Yeah. I don't think they're concerned about abuse. I think abuse is really built into the plan. Absolutely. All right. Any parting thoughts? Any, you know, recruiting, Michigan recruiting news? Any... Well, you know, I know you had two Michigan professors on in the last seven days and now you've got a Michigan alum on. So, you know, I love Michigan week. It's, it's been the best week of your podcast. I'm not letting my bitterness over Bryce Underwood abandoning us for Michigan affect the guest

list on the podcast, which the listeners who have no idea who Bryce Underwood is appreciate. So there you go. I, I do have to give a final, just big condolences to friends of the pod, Timothy Chalamet and Ben Stiller, and John Hamm and all the other Knicks fans. That was a brutal loss last night, but basketball is great. And I hope that the Knicks can rebound and make this a series. What a game that was last night. You don't make the choke sign after game one. You make the choke sign after game seven. It was a risk for Tyrese Halliburton. Hopefully, he gets his comeuppance. And I don't want to jinx the Knicks by saying I'm rooting for them. But I would like to see Tyrese get his comeuppance. All right, Jonathan Chait, always a pleasure. Thanks so much. We'll be

having you back again soon. Loved it. Enjoy the Jonathan Cohn wedding this weekend. Will do. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark Podcast. Peace. tomorrow for another edition of the it's 2 a.m. They're bound to get you cause they got a curfew and you go to the Starkville City Jail. Well they threw me in the car and started driving into town. I said, what the hell did I do?

And he said, shut up and sit down. Well, they emptied out my pockets, took my pills and guitar picks. I said, wait, my name is all shut up. Well, I sure was in a fix. The sergeant put me in a cell, then he went home for the night. I said, come back here you so and so I ain't being treated right, well they bound to get you

Cause they got a curfew And you go to the Starkville city jail I started pacing back and forth And now and then I'd yell And kick my forty dollar shoe against the steel door of my cell I'd walk awhile and kick awhile and all night nobody came Then I sadly remembered they didn't even take my name At eight a.m. they let me out I said give me them things of mine They'd give me a sneer and a guitar pick and a yellow dandelion They're bound to get you cause they got a curfew The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason

Brown.