The Bulwark Podcast - The Fifth Avenue Rapist

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

J.D. Vance has extended Trump's Fifth Avenue immunity claim to sexual assault, espionage, RICO, and election stealing—as he angles for the VP slot. Plus, the border bill Republicans have always wanted. Will Saletan joins Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday.

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Seitz, and because it is Monday, I am joined with my good friend and colleague, Will Salatan. How are you, Will? I'm good, Charlie. The sun is shining. It's cold, but the sun is shining, so I'm in a happy mood. It is unusually warm here in Wisconsin, so my undisputed high point of the day yesterday was going around the yard and in the woods and finding all of the green balls that my dogs had buried in the snow over the last couple of months. And so I actually posted this on social media, seven green balls that I recovered in the

afternoon. And I have to say, I had a tremendous sense of satisfaction about that. Charlie, for those of us who don't have a dog, what is a green ball? It's a ball that's green. Okay. No, but it's got holes in it so that you can put treats in it as if that would be necessary, as if a German shepherd would need a bribe to go chase a ball. But they're their favorite balls.

You can put a treat in them, and they're kind of squishy and everything, and they absolutely love them. Okay, so the theme of today's show is going to be a little light sedition. We're going to talk about Tucker Carlson being in Moscow. You know, the rumors are that he's going to do a little bit of sucking up to Vladimir Putin, not for the first time. We also have to talk about J.D. Vance, yet another extremely thirsty VP candidate for Donald Trump, going on ABC with George Stephanopoulos and checking all the right boxes, including the fact that he would have overturned the election. We have to get to that.

Just running down some other big stories. Obviously, bad night at the Grammys for MAGA. Big night for Taylor Swift. I just, you know, just stick with that. Interestingly enough, what a surprise. Donald Trump looks like he's about to throw Ronna McDaniels under the bus. The RNC chair who had been, you know, doing everything possible to say, you know, I am so loyal to you. But, you know, I guess this story is about, you know, running out of money that's gotten Trump's attention.

And then, of course, we have other stories. We have the border bill. The details of the border bill are out. Republicans in the House quickly declaring it dead on arrival. We'll circle back to this because by every read of this bill, and I mean this as an objective, non-snarky take here, this is the best bill the Republicans are ever going to get. This is the toughest bill they will ever get. It is right there. They could just say yes. And apparently they're going to say no. Also, it must be really weird being in the Biden campaign or the Biden White House because the roller coaster ride. So on Friday, big boffo jobs numbers, right? Then you get that Quinnipiac poll showing that, hey, maybe, you know, rape and defamation

and all that stuff or, you know, takes a toll. And Trump was, you know, trailing Biden. Biden had opened up a lead on Donald Trump. And then, of course, because it's Sunday, we get another crappy poll. And we have this NBC poll. How would you describe the NBC poll for Biden? Bad on bad with hair on it? Yes, bad on bad for additional reasons we can get to, but worse than just bad. Worse than just bad? You're supposed to be the optimist on this podcast. Sorry, man. I got to tell the truth. We can talk about that poll now if you want. No, no, no, no, no. I want to save that for a little bit later. Save it for your masochistic dessert. Yeah. Right, right, right. It's just like

it's Monday morning, people. So I want to start off with the, as I said, the Little Lights edition. Tucker Carlson being in Russia, of course, we don't have to spend much time on that, except that he has become, I think, Vladimir Putin's most prominent media useful idiot, not the most prominent political useful idiot. Who would be the most prominent political? A lot of competition there. No, there's no competition. It's Donald Trump, but for second place. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always put Trump in a category of his own. You know, I have to say that I wrote a piece, boy, you know, when the war began,

and it was a piece for Political Magazine that basically said, you know, despite all the polls, Republicans are not going to break with Donald Trump on this pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine stuff. And I remember thinking afterwards, like, boy, you know what? I might have been wrong on that. Maybe this is the one. unfortunately, that take has aged well, because rather than breaking with Trump, the way the Republican Party has been just transformed by this one guy is really, well, I know we've said this over and over again, but watching the Republican Party about to abandon Ukraine is truly amazing, even by the standards of the Trump years. I think, and we can talk about this more because I think it ties together a lot of what we're

going to talk about today. What's generally going on is that the Republican Party was a party that had beliefs, sometimes, you know, violated those beliefs, but had beliefs, and it's become a cult. And we're seeing various manifestations of that. The abandonment of Ukraine and the embrace of Vladimir Putin, I think, is part of the cult nature of the Republican Party as it stands today. But it's so dramatic because this is, I feel again, we're repeating ourselves, but I mean, you know, the party of Ronald Reagan being what it is today because of this guy. I mean, it's not as if we're talking about a, you know, a brilliant, you know, transformational thinker who has come up with a different

philosophy for global engagement. It's Donald freaking Trump. Okay. So my highlight of my weekend, at least in terms of like watching things was actually the clips you sent me, JD Vance. Now we have to put JD Vance in the category of thirsty VIP candidates. And we've seen this with Elise Stefanik. We've seen this with Tim Scott. We've seen this with Kristi Noem. We've seen it with all of them where they feel the need to embrace the most deplorable aspects of Trumpism as a way of signaling loyalty, correct? I mean, and so they're on this deplorable audition tour. Okay. I have actually a darker theory than yours, which is that they actually, the darker theory is that the Republican Party always had a weakness for authoritarianism and this idiot

who came in exposed that. And that's, they've chosen him as their golden calf or whatever, but it's the nature of the party itself. But we'll see some of that as we talk about Vance. Okay. That is darker. Well, let's talk about J.D. Vance because J.D. Vance is fascinating to me because he was one time a never-Trumper. He was once considered kind of an intellectual on the right, wrote the book, Hillbilly Elegy, was published in

the New York Times, had deep thoughts, and clearly understood who and what Donald Trump was. And then, of course, he transformed himself in order to become a United States Senator, right? I will admit, I can't believe I have any naivete left about this, but there was a tiny bit of me, tiny, tiny bit, and feel free to slap me through the screen here, that was thinking that J.D. Vance was actually an intelligent guy. And so once he gets a six-year no-cut term in the U.S. Senate, he's going to pivot toward rationality or perhaps decency. Just kidding. It's like, politics is full of people like, I said this shit to get elected. I said it during the campaign, but now that I'm elected, okay, it's time to put on the big boy pants. Not the case with J.D. Vance.

No, no. And I think he is a smart guy, but part of the lesson of what we're seeing in the decline of the Republican Party into a cult is that intelligence, that kind of intelligence, lawyerly intelligence, can just as easily be turned into simply a rationalization machine for whatever you want, right? And so what these people are doing is not thinking their way out of a moral decline, it's rationalizing their way into it. Which makes guys like him and Tucker Carlson all the more dangerous, because they may know better, but they have intellectual chops to bring in, you know, let's face, you know, America is not going to swoon over, you know, the Don Bongino's of the world.

But OK, so let's let's go to J.D. Vance, because this was an epic interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday on ABC with a they went through everything from election denialism to whether or not the president can defy the U.S. Supreme Court to why he's brushing off the rape and defamation findings. And George Stephanopoulos basically had enough of him and cuts him off. But let's start with this, where they're talking about the election. And the question is, they're discussing, well, if you had been vice president, would you have made a different choice than Mike Pence made? Mike Pence decided to uphold the law and the constitution and count the legitimately cast electoral votes. What say you, Senator Vance? Let's play that soundbite.

I'm not the least bit curious. In fact, you laid out a litany there, but you didn't answer the question I asked. Would you have certified the election results had you been vice president? If I had been vice president, I would have told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors. And I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that's what we should have done. So it's very clear you would have done what Donald Trump asked you to do there,

not what Mike Pence did. Okay, well, could we just stop and ponder this particular moment in American political history? This, of course, is what Trump asked Pence to do, just admit, and we're going to generate a bunch of fake electoral slates, and we're going to put those before Congress, and then Congress will choose whether to go with the slates that the governor sent or the other slates that we, Republicans in Congress, would like. Essentially, Charlie, what Vance is advocating is you, Mr. and Mrs. America, may have gone out and voted for president. And we'll listen to that. But if, quote, a lot of folks think that there's something not right about the result, whatever that

miserable low standard is, then those of us in Congress will decide whether to take the Biden slate or the Trump slate. So essentially, Congress will decide who is the president, not a vote of the people. Okay. That's not what J.D. Vance is saying. Go ahead. What J.D. Vance is saying, pick me, pick me, pick me, Donald, because I will do what you want. I won't pull a Mike Pence on you. This is what you're worried about. You're concerned that I might have like a streak of independence or integrity and would do what Pence did. No, no, no, no, no. Pick me, pick me. Also, this whole idea of we should have multiple slates of electors. That's not a thing, Will. I mean, could we just point this out? That's not a thing. The constitution lays out

how you get slates of electors. That's voter fraud. That was number one. I'm sorry, do you want to say something else on this? No, I just want to say it's deadly serious. We're having fun with this. And of course, J.D. Vance wants to be vice president. But part of the lesson of January 6th, when there was an actual physical attack on the United States Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power is this is not just people auditioning for roles, right? This is not just, you know, putting on a show for one guy, for Donald Trump. It is, these people are willing to either condone, facilitate, or rationalize the actual destruction of American democracy. So I think it's deadly serious when he says Congress will decide. I think there are enough Republicans in Congress, like within the Republican conference, that if

Republicans control the House, this can happen. They'll just take it over. Yeah, of course, there won't be in 2025, there won't be a Republican sitting in the vice presidential chair, thank God. But I think we get an indication of what you have to do right now to succeed in the Republican Party. I mean, J.D. Vance doing his audition. Okay, as part of the audition, they're also talking about the administrative state and the U.S. Supreme Court. So let's play George Stephanopoulos talking to J.D. Vance about his suggestion that basically everybody be fired. Let's listen to this. I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece

of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it. Fire everyone in the government, then defy the Supreme Court. You think it's okay for the president to defy the Supreme Court? No, no, George, I did not say fire everyone in the government. I said replace the mid-level bureaucrats with people who are responsive to the administration's agenda. Every civil servant in the administrative state.

Okay, now, this is one of those deep breath moments where I'm struggling not to drop a series of F-bombs here. Congratulations, you didn't drop them. We're not through this yet. So Andrew Jackson's quote, is that an apocryphal quote or is that a real quote? Just checking on that. I don't know. It's bad enough. Bad enough that anyone's quoting it.

Yeah. But I mean, there's two things there. Number one, gut the federal government. Now, by the way, I am not like here to carry water for government bureaucrats. But when you say fire every mid-level bureaucrat in the entire federal government, some of those actually have responsible jobs. Would this be like the mid-level bureaucrats in charge of nuclear safety? Would this be the mid-level bureaucrats at FEMA? Would this be the mid-level bureaucrats in Homeland Security? Would this be the mid-level bureaucrats in the CIA or the National Defense Intelligence

Agencies? I don't want to use the word radical. The recklessness of this. You start with that. Then replace it with loyalists. So basically, you're abolishing the civil service. Let's wipe out a century and a half of actually having the civil service. Let's wipe out a century and a half of actually having a civil service, and let's have a bunch of political hacks. By the way,

look around MAGA world, look around a MAGA rally. These are the people that J.D. Vance wants to shove into the federal government. And he also knows, because he's a Yale Law graduate, right, that firing all these people would be illegal, perhaps even unconstitutional. But let's say it would be illegal. And so therefore, he would go to court and the courts would rule against him. He's almost essentially conceding that, right? And then you'd go to court and the courts would rule against you. And he wants Trump then to stand and basically say, fuck you, John Roberts.

See, I couldn't do it. I couldn't get through the whole thing. Right. So I think this is extremely grim. And let me explain why. So yes, J.D.. I couldn't get through the whole thing. Right. So I think this is extremely grim and let me explain why. So yes, J.D. Vance is putting on a song and dance, but what you're seeing him do in this interview. No, this is worse than that. He's putting together all of the elements of American authoritarianism. And for those of you who say this can't happen in this country. So checks and balances. Right. So we heard him say before that he's going to basically overthrow direct

democracy in the election of presidents, right? You send in your ballots and then we in Congress decide whether to accept those or to choose a different slate. So now the president is no longer elected by the people. He's elected by Congress, a Congress that might be to a significant extent gerrymandered in any event. So now we've installed this president that you didn't vote for. Now, having done that, we want to get out of the way the deep state, the bureaucrats who stand in the way of the president that we installed. We're going to get rid of every single bureaucrat, replace them with loyalists who, you know, in the name of the will of the people, because we claim that this guy was the actual will of the people, this president. So we get the bureaucrats out of the way. Then the courts step

in, a separate branch of government. Of course, the founders of this country set up this whole system to prevent exactly what J.D. Vance wants to do. We're going to have courts come in and rule that, no, you can't do that. And then the president, because he controls, I guess, the military, is going to completely ignore what the courts do. So we're going to install our own president. We're going to get rid of the bureaucrats who stand in the way. And then we're going to get rid of the judges who stand in the way of our authoritarian coup. That is the whole recipe right there. Okay, so I don't disagree with anything you said there, but also, basically, what he's also saying is that you ignore the clear lines of the Constitution. Now, the president does take an oath of office to uphold the constitution and to the

best of his or her ability, uphold the laws. J.D. Vance is saying in advance that, nah, whatever oath you take, you don't have to uphold the laws and you don't have to respect the constitution. So, okay. And now, in case there was any doubt about that, now George Stephanopoulos, who I think did a pretty good job. Yes. I think he's the best, the best of this. Okay. He has become really good. So he's not letting this drop. He goes, no, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Here you are. You are a United States Senator. You clearly are putting on the knee pads to become vice president of the United States. You are a Yale law graduate, and you just said that you think that the president should defy the Supreme Court, which said that he'd violated his oath and was violating the law.

Okay, so here's the follow-up, and listen to this. The Constitution also says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn't it? The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings, but if the Supreme Court, and look, I hope that they would not do this, but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can't fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit. This is just basic constitutional legitimacy. You're talking about a hypothetical where the

Supreme Court tries to run the military. I don't think that's going to happen, George. But of course, if it did, the president would have to respond to it. There are multiple examples throughout American history of the president doing just that. You didn't say military in your answer, and you've made it very clear you believe the president can defy the Supreme Court. Senator, thanks for your time this morning. Boom, and it's over. Yeah, okay, the military, you didn't even bring that up the first time. Will? Yeah, so Vance wants to use the military as his example because the president generally, you know, the president does have authority over the military. He is the commander-in-chief, yeah. Right, so Vance, you know, there's a little bit of, I'm not going to bring out a pony here, but there's a little ray of hope in the fact that Vance is trying to rationalize this whole

thing by saying, well, I'm talking about the military, obviously in that quote, which is from 2021. Clearly he was not though. No, he was talking about any bureaucrat, but notice how Vance is using this word illegitimate, right? Remember the election was illegitimate. So Biden's an illegitimate president. If we don't like it, it's illegitimate. And then the court ruling, if the court ruling is against our guy, well, that's illegitimate too, right? The Supreme Court says this. And so you just, we're going to ignore what we call illegitimate. And that's basically the death of the system when half the country, you know, or this Republican cult says, we don't like what the courts ruled. So we are going to just say, you stand up and enforce it, Mr. Chief Justice, you can't.

Well, as this interview went on, that was at the end of it, obviously. But in the course of the interview, they also talk about the, I mean, obviously, I don't know how you could have an interview over the weekend without talking about the E. Jean Carroll case, the $83 million jury verdict on top of the earlier $5 million jury verdict on top of the earlier finding that, in fact, Donald Trump had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. And of course, J.D. Fance has to do with the other, you know, VP audition candidates are doing, which is to say, oh, that doesn't matter, that doesn't matter. So he comes up with a couple of different explanations for this. The first soundbite, he's basically saying it's a left-wing jurisdiction.

Apparently any conviction that takes place outside of, I don't know, the suburbs of Mar-a-Lago is going to be inherently illegitimate. Let's play that one. This case, like so many legal cases against Donald Trump, they're trumped up. They're in extremely left-wing jurisdictions, or it's actually the Biden administration prosecuting his chief political rival. Yeah. Okay. And then he specifically asked about the jury verdict in this particular case, and listen to the word he uses. You call it a ridiculous case. These were juries that found him liable for sexual assault and defamation. That's ridiculous?

These are juries, George, in extremely left-wing jurisdictions. These are cases that are very often funded by left-wing donors, and they're cases that are funded explicitly to harm him politically, not to seek justice for any particular group of individuals, George. If you look at all of these cases, the through line, twofold. Number one, they're funded by Donald Trump's political opponents, and the goal here is not to help us actually have a real conversation about how to advance the country forward. Their goal is to defeat Trump at the courts because these people know they can't defeat him at the ballot box. So I understand that that talking point is going to be very popular on, say, Fox News, that the litigation is funded by these left-wing organizations. I'll leave it

out, you know, the fact that it is the U.S. Department of Justice that is bringing the criminal cases. But I guess I find a little bit of irony here, Will, considering that, and I don't think there's anything wrong with this, that many of the lawsuits that J.D. Vance would like are also funded by right-wing sources. I mean, the Federalist Society is not a secret organization. It's not a secret that there are organizations that have put tremendous amount of financial resources behind conservative legal challenges. And that's not left-wing plot, left-wing Democrat plot. You know, Donald Trump's a victim. It's kind of in this mashed word salad that we're getting from, not just from J.D. Vance, but from MAGA World and frankly, the mainstream of the Republican Party now. Right. And this is part of their campaign to essentially destroy the whole idea of evidence and the

merits of a case. We're just supposed to look at the provenance. We're supposed to look at where the money came from. Charlie, can I throw a name from the past? Paula Jones, right? I mean, here was a bunch of right-wingers funding an operation to hold Bill Clinton accountable, and Bill Clinton had committed perjury. That was a fact. And no conservative said, well, we should disregard that because there was a vast right-wing conspiracy behind bringing this up, right? So here,

the roles are reversed, and the Republicans are doing what the Democrats did, except that what the stakes are, you know, much more serious crimes. I mean, here we have a jury finding of sexual abuse, which the judge said amounted in colloquial terms to rape. And this sort of continues the J.D. Vance project of delegitimizing everything. We delegitimize the election. We delegitimize the courts. Here, we're delegitimizing juries. If the jury is in a, quote, left-wing jurisdiction, then it has no value. So, Charlie, remember the whole Fifth Avenue thing? Trump said I could walk out on Fifth Avenue, shoot somebody, I wouldn't lose any voters. This is the Fifth Avenue defense. What would happen if you shot somebody on Fifth Avenue? Well, a jury would

hold you accountable and would issue a verdict. But it would be a jury. And if it were in Fifth Avenue, a left-wing jurisdiction and J.D. Vance would be saying exactly what he's saying now. Okay. Can we update this now? You can go out and you can rape somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue. You can violate the Espionage Act in the middle of Fifth Avenue. You can engage in racketeering in the middle of Fifth Avenue. And if you are held accountable for it, they will find a way to discredit it. Could your political views make you a target of cybercrimes, identity theft, even violence? The volume of personal data available online has tripled between 2019 and 2023, and angry individuals fueled by their political views can easily obtain personal details from data brokers on 98% of U.S. citizens. Your name,

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Today, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash bulwark and use promo code bulwark at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go joindeleteme.com slash bulwark and enter code bulwark at checkout. That's joindeleteme.com slash bulwark, code bulwark and enter code bulwark at checkout. That's join delete me dot com slash bulwark code bulwark. Okay, so deep breath here. Finally, we get the text of the border bill. And I'm watching the back and forth going on about the border bill, which is a reminder that there is no reality anymore. There is only spin. And it's interesting watching James Langford, very conservative Republican from Oklahoma, going on television. He's one of the negotiators.

And he's telling people, listen, get off Facebook for five minutes. Read the actual bill. But of course, the spin's already gotten ahead of whatever the facts are in the bill. These things are big. They're complicated. They're expensive. You tell me, I'm sure you've looked at this more carefully. This is the toughest border bill Republicans will ever get.

It does link the border to Ukraine. This is the kind of legislation that, you know, in the before times, if you presented a political party with 85% of what they wanted, they would say, this is a pretty good deal. Republicans are saying no. Just give me your take on how tough this bill is and what you think about it. Let's remember, let's just step back for a minute. The old model for how to negotiate immigration was Republicans wanted tougher border security and Democrats wanted some version of amnesty, right? We were just like- Or DACA. Or DACA, a path to citizenship, right? So what we have here is the Republicans held up, they held the Ukraine money hostage and said, we're demanding border security.

So what they got in the bill was border security. All of it is border security. There's zero, you know, path to citizenship here. There's no new anything for the left. And what they're doing is rejecting that. And the reason they're rejecting it, Charlie, is we have had recently several tests of the proposition. Does the Republican Party under Donald Trump stand for anything? Or is it simply a cult of Trump? And this is another piece of evidence that it is simply a cult. It's trying to be performative over substance because they've been performing

what a crisis it is. And now they have a chance to do something in reality and they're not interested. I don't know how you get around that. For those who haven't read this bill, and I have not read the whole thing, but I've read the basic outlines of it. The first thing it does is it ends catch and release. It ends the whole, if you show up at the border, we just say, look, we don't have enough people to, we don't have enough judges. We can't move fast enough. We'll let you into the country, come back in four years, right? It ends that practice. It says, you're going to have to like be in detention or we're going to, you know. So the second thing it does is it increases the standards for asylum. It's going to make it more difficult for you to claim asylum because too many

people are claiming asylum who don't actually qualify, don't actually merit it. Again, a conservative goal here. The third thing is the shutdown valve. There's a valve that says, you know, if you get over a certain number of people, the president has the authority to just shut it off right there. Like, nevermind, you show up, you have a valid asylum claim. Sorry, we're full. We can't adjudicate everybody who's here. You're going to have to wait until we can, you know, get to your case. You don't get to come in during that time. There's other things that are not in the bill. Remain in Mexico is not in the bill. There's not a wall in the bill, that's so forth.

But the point is all of this stuff is stuff that Republicans have asked for. The reason that they are rejecting this is because Donald Trump is running for president and he wants to have the issue. He wants the crisis. He wants the caravans, all that stuff. And so what Republicans are doing is abandoning conservative policy goals to help Donald Trump.

And making this point, this is Nikki Haley, who I'm really fascinated to have a longer conversation about her because she keeps walking up to the line. Sometimes it looks like she's there. She's going there. And then she backs up. So you never, almost from day to day, aren't sure which Nikki's going to be showing up. Although I will tell you, and I think I've said this before, I am getting like every hour on the hour, a text message, hey, Charlie, it's Nikki. I'm not going anywhere. Or hey, would you like to buy my t-shirt? Making fun of Donald Trump threatening to exile

everybody from MAGA for giving money to me. But anyway, she's on CNN and talking about the border policy and whether or not Donald Trump is playing politics with it. Let's listen to what Nikki Haley has to say. Donald Trump, as you know, is pushing Republican senators to oppose the deal, in part because he wants to run on the issue in 2024, in this election year. You called that a mistake. Are you saying that the former president is playing politics with the border? REP. NICOLE HILLSBORN, Well, I think nobody should be playing politics with the border. First of all, he shouldn't be getting involved telling Republicans that

wait until the election because we don't want this to help Biden win. We can't wait one more day. You have millions of people who have come to that border. They are not being vetted. America is acting like it's September 10th. We better remember what September 12th felt like because it only takes one. This is not a time to play politics. What I do think is they need to get something out. Of course he is. He's absolutely playing politics by telling them not to do anything. But what I do think they need to do is they've got to put a tough immigration law in place. I mean, right now, I don't know what the text is, but from what I understand, it doesn't include remain in Mexico. We need to have remain in Mexico. That's actually very important to make sure that they never step foot on U.S.

soil. And now I hear some Republicans saying, oh, but we don't need a law at all because Biden could do this already. Well, there's some truth to that. And then some of that is false. Yes, Biden could go back to some of the laws that put it in place, but 3 million illegal immigrants came under Trump. And that's because the asylum laws are not strong enough. So we need to strengthen the asylum laws so that we don't have people coming in here for loose reasons. Okay, Will, your thought?

Well, she's making the point there that from a policy point of view, if you're actually trying to solve the border problem, electing Donald Trump won't solve the problem. He was in power before. He didn't. The asylum laws were not sufficient. He's trying to do stuff by executive order. And she says, you know, that got blocked. You need the force of law.

You need Congress to be behind this. If you cared about solving the problem, her argument makes sense. She's talking to an old Republican Party. She's talking to like the Reagan Republican Party, right? In the Trump party, policy doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that they're not going to solve the problem because the goal is not to get Donald Trump in office so that he will solve the problem. The goal is just to get Donald Trump back in office, just to get him back in power. And the problem, as she explains, won't be solved, but the House Republicans don't care about that. They don't care.

Okay, so briefly, the impeachment of Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security chief, I mean, apparently Republicans have decided we're not going to legislate, but we want to have a show trial. Number one, it's pretty obvious that it's going to be, maybe they'll be able to eke this through the House by one vote. There's going to be no trial. At least that's what I saw over the weekend. It's just not going to happen. But this, again, in terms of being performative as opposed to serious, perfect example, we're going to show we really, really care about the border by impeaching the guy for not implementing policies, which we are going to refuse to legislate on. Where does that go? Yeah, it's to put on a show. And if they wanted to solve the problem, they'd pass the bill. They don't want to solve the problem. So they're going to

do this impeachment of Mayorkas. I don't have this quote right in front of me, but Mike Johnson, the speaker was on Meet the Press, and they asked him about the Mayorkas thing. And they played the quote from Mike Johnson from one of Trump's impeachments where he said, single party impeachments, partisan impeachments are a bad idea, which is of course what's going on. And Mike Johnson's response in this interview was, it's really bad. You need to do this in an orderly way that in a bipartisan way. And then he says the house Republican majority is doing exactly that. Like he doesn't even realize the words coming out of his mouth, refute his own point, right? This was done obviously by the house Republican majority, which is like two people, right? I mean, this is like

an extremely narrow majority. And they're doing this, not because they actually want to get anything accomplished, but because they're trying to maintain the cohesion of their own base. All right, so let's talk about this poll that came out over the weekend. Now, keep in mind, this is part of the problem of watching your heart monitor every single minute here. Friday, just blow away jobs numbers that even the Fox News hosts were having a hard time processing. I mean, when you've invested so much into how terrible the economy is, and you see these kinds of numbers coming out, very, very impressive. Then, of course, you had a Quinnipiac poll showing Biden with a fairly comfortable lead, not definitive. But then, of course, that's been

wiped away by the NBC poll that you describe as worse than bad. What do you mean worse than bad, Will? So worse than bad is, before it was, well, people are unhappy with the economy. And the economy, objectively, is doing better than a lot of people feel, personally. But, you know, the theory of the Biden comeback was people will start to realize that the economy is better. And when they do, they will realize that Joe Biden's doing a good job. The reason why this poll is so bad, in my opinion, is there is a shift in this poll in people's views of the economy. The expectations for the next year improved significantly. But Biden's approval got worse. It got worse. And so what this calls into question is the whole chain of reasoning that this is going to somehow help Joe Biden.

Whether they're connected. Right, right. To me, that's why it's such a grim poll. mind-boggling that Trump is leading among Hispanics, is doing very well among young voters, has a massive double-digit lead among independents, unless people are told that he's convicted of a felony. That's the other takeaway from this, is that conviction for a felony, at least in theory, flips large numbers of votes. Whether that will happen, we don't know, because there's no track record or history. There's no data set that we can compare this against, right? Yeah. The thing about young voters really drives me crazy because remember, Charlie, the first

time a poll came out and said Trump and Biden are basically tied among young voters, the pollsters, a lot of the smart political people said, oh, I don't believe it. I don't believe it. Young people are not going to move that way. I said that. I was skeptical. This particular finding keeps getting confirmed, right? Now, oh, here, I'm going to bring out my pony for this. A lot of this, I think, is a lot of young people are pissed off about Gaza. They're

pissed off about Israel and Gaza and that they don't think Biden is doing enough to protect the Palestinians. Setting aside the policy question about that, if that's their concern, and if the fighting in Gaza subsides, as presumably it will before the election, maybe some of those young voters come back home to the Democrats, or maybe they get motivated by abortion to support the Democrats. So that's one problem. The Hispanics being virtually tied, another problem. And Charlie, can we talk for a minute about this finding that if Trump gets convicted, the election shifts? shifts. So what they told people is if Donald Trump is found guilty and convicted this year of a felony, that's the quote in the poll,

how will you vote? And in that scenario, Biden is ahead by two points, by two points. It's 45 to 43. Okay. Yeah. 43% of Americans are willing to say in advance, yeah, I'd be willing to vote for a convicted felon. Now, see, when I say that we don't know what's going to happen, I'm pretty sure that outside of say, Wilmington, Delaware, someplace where they have elected, I mean, there have been mayors who've been elected from jail, right? But generally, I don't think there's any data showing that people would. I vote for a convicted felon for city council or for state legislature or for governor or for any job other than president, right? I mean, leaving aside some corrupt political machines in some big cities

where they're like, screw it, we don't care, we want our felon, you know? There's kind of no track record here. It's interesting what that reveals about what's happened in this country. First of all, so Biden's leading by two points only, and he's only at 45. Only 45% of Americans are saying that getting convicted of a felony is enough to discredit you. And so we're going to vote for the other guy, right? And remember, he's the incumbent. So if he's at 45, that leaves a lot of room for Trump to pick up or third party candidates. The point is, that's bad for Biden. Independence, Charlie, when they're told, what if Trump is found guilty,

convicted of a felony? Independents are still for Trump, 40 to 32%, right? Yeah. So it goes from an 18 point lead to a nine point lead, but it's a lead. So to me, the takeaway is how few Americans actually care about this. And here's why I think I'm really concerned. I think that this shows that the Republican campaign to discredit the legal system in this country, to discredit judges, to discredit juries, to discredit any prosecution of Donald Trump is taking hold to the point where if a jury decides that Donald Trump is guilty of a felony, it's probably political left-wing jurisdiction funded by left-wing donors. We're going to just set that aside, which obviously culturally and politically is a really bad place for our country to be.

Well, I agree with you. And I also think that this is one of the most damaging possible legacies of this year. For people who think the fever breaks, you know, the long-term damage of Trumpism is going to play out in a lot of different areas, but that's certainly one of them, you know, discrediting one institution after another because you do not have a liberal democratic order or a constitutional order in which the public decides that it is not going to respect, you know, some of the major pillars. And we're very, very close to that. Now, there is also that story, though, out of the Washington Post, I think it was Philip Bump who looked at the number. Most Republicans still are not aware of Trump's various legal issues.

He said there's an assumption, probably particularly among those who cover the news and those who read it, guys like us, that Donald Trump's legal problems are common knowledge. We talk about things like the potential effects of a Trump conviction on the election with the assumption this would be an event that rose to the nation's consciousness triggering a response, but this is a sort of vanity. This is a sort of vanity. Just because it is interesting to us certainly doesn't mean it is interesting to others. Polling released by CNN last week shows that only a quarter of voters seek out news about the campaign. A third pay little or no attention. And then you get through just the details about the number of cases. The case that was most familiar to most people was

the federal classified document case moving forward, not really, in Florida, six in 10 Americans. But the pattern among Republicans is clear. At most, 45% of Republicans said they knew about legal issues. Only 45%, specifically the documents case, the case being found liable for assaulting Jean Carroll. Only a quarter of Republicans knew about the value inflation suit, the fraud case in New York, only four in 10 knew about the criminal charges in Manhattan related to the hush money. Anyway, so I go either way. Number one, maybe when people find out about it, it'll have more of an effect, or I suspect that you are right, that it's already baked in and that Donald Trump has internalized the idea that nothing matters

or should matter when it comes to him. Yeah, I will get excited about these findings that Republicans don't know and that, you know, the implication that somehow they would change their votes or when I see evidence that it would change their votes, that they care. I haven't seen evidence that they care. And I've looked at a lot of polling where the pollster says if Donald Trump is found guilty and they name the cases, they name the classified documents case, they name, you know, the Gene Carroll case. And what I see in Republican response is basically they're still with Trump. It's a reflexive loyalty. And part of it is that we support whatever the great leader wants. And part of it is the Republican campaign to discredit all the institutions that

find him guilty of these various things, where we're going to dismiss the jury, the judge, the prosecutors, et cetera. And so I just think he has built a wall and his party is helping him to build a wall of indifference around the base. So what does Joe Biden, you know, a larger picture, the pro-democracy coalition, what do they do about that? What is the answer for that? Other than to keep repeating the same things that we have been saying over, or I'm referring to the pro-democracy coalition, over and over and over again, what changes the dynamic? What do they need to do? Now, on the border, I think that Biden has made it clear, he's like, I'm not going to die on this hill. I'm going to make compromise. I'm going to point out where I'm in. On the Middle East, he's trying to triangulate without much success so far.

But what else, Will? Well, there's two parts of this question to me. One is how to talk about the threat to democracy and the rule of law. And the other is how to position Biden and the Democrats beyond this. Because like it or not, and I have my differences with the left on a lot of things, what's left in this country to protect our constitution and our democracy is the Democratic Party. So we need the Democratic Party to win elections until there is a sane conservative party, whether it is the Republican Party or a new party. And so to do that on the question of specifically democracy and the rule

of law, the good news is there is enough to work with. There is more than 50% of the country that in polling says they care about this. Not the Republican base. They're gone. You're not going to get those people. There are some people who have left the party. You can win an election with people who care about democracy, but you've got to get those people to get it. And the other thing is on the policy questions, Charlie, I'm sorry for those progressives who are unhappy with elements of this border negotiation. But Joe Biden came out with a statement last night, firmly embracing this compromise, firmly embracing a lot of strict conservative policies on the border.

And I think he's got to do that because it is a crisis and conservatives have a point there. And he's got to be the conservative on this issue when the Republican Party won't. And there's an opportunity here for Democrats to do what Bill Clinton did a lot of, which is to stand in the center and to say, look, I was willing, I am willing to embrace these policies to solve the border problem. My opponents talk like they will, but they aren't. There are some conservative people who will listen to that. And Nikki Haley is speaking to those people.

You and I may be very unhappy with Nikki Haley in a lot of ways, but she is still talking to an audience of people who remember what the Republican Party was. And if Biden can get some of those people to vote for him, he'll win the election. Well, I agree. And that's one of the reasons why I pushed for Chris Christie to stay in the race, because I was hoping it would be him. But now if it's Nikki Haley, look, we don't get to necessarily choose the army we go to war with, right? I mean, we have to, you know, we have to make alliances that would be uncomfortable in

any other context. So could I just say one final thing, Will, it has been a real pleasure doing this podcast with you. I have been every single time that you and I have spoken or met, I have been really impressed with your integrity and your intellectual honesty and your thoughtfulness and your work ethic. And I have to say that among the many positive professional relationships that I've had, yours has been one of the most rewarding and I appreciate it very much. And I'm going to miss you guy. Oh, Charlie, that's so kind of you. I write back at you. I, I, I have been a guest on this show before I worked with you. And the more I have worked with you, the more I respect you. I am constantly amazed that for somebody who has a reputation as coming from the world of talkers, you're a thinker, you know, that you, you, you know know a lot of history. And I recommend anyone go back

a couple of weeks when Charlie did the history of the Republican Party. The man really is interested in history and has educated himself. And you've educated your viewers. I want to say one more thing, which is when I think about you, because I'm going to miss you dearly, I always think, what do I have that really reminds me of Charlie Sykes? And it's this pony. And for people who think I'm the pony guy and that Charlie's always the grim reaper and I've always got the pony, I want to remind you, the inventor of the pony is Charlie Sykes.

Charlie, one of our first shows that we did together, I was coming up with a rationalization for something and you said, you are determined to find a pony in there, right? Shoveling through the shit and we're going to find a pony. So Charlie Sykes is the pony. And every time I bring out my pony, I'm going to think of you. I am touched. I'm Charlie Sykes. Thank you for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. We'll be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.