The Bulwark Podcast - The GOP Is a Failed State

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

House Republicans don't have a platform, and in the absence of Trump, they can't pull together. Plus, the anti-Israel left vs Biden, and the fallout from Hamas' hospital propaganda campaign. Will Saletan joins Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday.

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This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes. But some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding ways to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy, but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try.

It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Charlie Sykes. It's October 23rd, 2023. And if you thought the chaos in the House couldn't get any worse, well, Republicans are saying, hold our beer because it is going to be absolutely wild.

So Kevin McCarthy, down. Steve Scalise, out. Jim Jordan, rejected. And what do we have now? We have nine candidates running for the speakership, seven of whom are election denialists. The other two, well, Tom Emmer, who is apparently the normie great hope. Kevin McCarthy has endorsed him. He's a member of leadership. MAGA World is all aflame saying, you know, no, Tom Emmer cannot do this because he committed the unpardonable sin of acknowledging the reality of the 2020 election. The guy's got other baggage as well, but Donald Trump hates his guts. So what could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, and you know, this is one of those moments, Will, it's Bill Kristol in today's Bulwer, who says sometimes like whole decades take place in a month. So it's not just us that thinks that it just like is so much stuff happening. It just feels like we're being flooded in the Mideast, the various developments, the way the world is changing, the complexification of international relationships. I mean, October, we're not even done with October yet. And it's been a hell of a month. The crazy thing, Charlie, is in half of all respects, everything's happening. As Bill says, it's a a hell of a month. The crazy thing, Charlie, is in half of all respects, everything's happening, as Bill says. It's a decade happening in a short time.

But meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, nothing is happening. It's the weird disjunction between the world's events and the complete absence of activity in the United States and the most important legislative body. Okay, so let's talk about last week, because you and I haven't spoken since the rise and fall of Jim Jordan. So many things have happened here. There was a moment in which people were saying, well, is the senator going to hold? I was actually going back and looking at my old newsletters. So on Monday, it was, will the senator hold? Will there be enough Republicans who will say this is crazy and it's absurd, it's dangerous? The idea of Jim Jordan as speaker is completely ludicrous. You know, are enough going to be able to say no? On Tuesday morning, at least for a while, it looked like the normies were doing what normies do, that they were all going to cave in

one after another. They were rationalizing, you know, why it wouldn't be so terrible to have Jim Jordan. And then they took the vote. And kind of amazingly, I think people were surprised on that first ballot. 20 said no. I think it rose to 22. And in the end, basically, there were enough, whatever you want to call them, normies, establishment types, the appropriators, the sane caucus, that little remnant who were able to say no to Jim Jordan, just to catch everybody up. There was, for five minutes, a lot of buzz saying, hey, maybe we're going to have a compromise where we're going to empower the acting speaker, Patrick McHenry. Then they went into closed caucus, and everybody hated the idea. Jordan's people, the MAGA folks, hated the idea because

that might involve a bipartisan compromise, which is the worst thing in the world, right? The people who basically wanted to keep their boot on Jim Jordan's neck, they kind of hated it because they didn't want him hanging around as speaker designate, which is really not a thing. So that got voted down. Jim Jordan wants another vote, crashes and burns again on Friday morning. By the end of the day, they had a secret ballot and decided that they were done with Jim Jordan. I think, by the way, it's worth noting, Will, that you had a lot of folks who were willing to go on the floor and publicly vote for Jim Jordan to be second in line to the presidency, but given a chance to vote in a secret ballot, said, absolutely not. We're done with this guy. So, Eddie Kaye, just your thoughts on the whole up and down Jim Jordan. Bad news is he came close

to being Speaker. Good news is, weirdly enough, sanity prevailed in the Republican Party. Just give me your narrative of the Jim Jordan saga. So let me take two separate things. One is what you said about the secret ballot, because, okay, just to remind everyone, I am a squish. It's my version of sanity with the people in the middle, the moderates, right? And our advantage is we're usually right, because we're not crazy. We're not ideological. We're not on some extreme. The downside, of course, Charlie, is that we're weak, right? Because what's, is it Yates or the best lack the- Are full of passion and intensity while the best lack all convention. Yeah, right.

While the worst are full of passion and- The best lack all conviction. Right, right. So people like me, we think we're the best, whether we are, set that aside. But the point is we certainly lack all conviction, right? And so we, what you figure is that the people, the squishes, the moderates are going to fold, right? That so what you figure is that the squishes, the moderates, are going to fold, right? That was the expectation. Thus the name Squish.

Yes, exactly. It is descriptive. Squish is Squish, right? But on the secret ballot, your point is correct, right? On the secret ballot, these squishes, they were afraid to cast votes against Jordan when their names were on it, but on the secret ballot, they voted against him. So they squished there. But in that meeting, where Jordan meets with the 20 who are holding out against him, he's expecting and his right-wing supporters are expecting these moderates to fold, to fold to Jordan because we are the people, we crazies are the ones who insist on getting our way. You moderates will fold. And they didn't. They didn't. And Charlie, I don't know if you talked

about this last week, but there was that lovely meeting that was described in the tweet by Punch Bull News where Jordan says, what do you guys want? He thinks he's going to cut a deal with them. And they're like, we don't want anything from you. We just want you to know that you'll never be speaker. Wow. You know, so the squish is really very unsquishy, very, very unsquishy. Good for them. So Jim Jordan finally goes down, but I have to tell you, and again, I think it's important to underline here that nobody really knows what's going to go on. I mean, even the people who are wired in do not know what's going to go on. So you have nine candidates that are going to have this. They will have some sort of a forum later today. Is that right? Where they all get like about 30

seconds to explain how they will run the house, whatever. Right. But I mean, the front runner is this guy, Tom Emmer. And look, I'm not going to claim to be an expert on Tom Emmer. He's one of only two of the candidates who did not vote against certifying the election, which means that he has incurred the wrath of Mar-a-Lago. So I just don't see how anybody whose name that you and I would recognize can get to 217. Does that mean there's going to be some dark horse that is going to drop in the last moment who becomes the consensus of exhaustion? You know, it's just like, okay, we are just exhausted. We're so embarrassed. We're humiliated. We can't come up with anybody else because I can't

see Emmer getting this if he needs to get 217. What do you think? Now, our colleague Tim Miller has previously listed four scenarios coming out of this, and I can't remember the exact names of them, but the one that I favor, the one that I believe will happen is the McHenry, Patrick McHenry pro tem gets added powers and sort of- That's the kind of one I've been going just because I believe in inertia. Right. Inertia is correct. You're correct, Charlie. And the reason why is ask yourself, what is the most cowardly thing that can be done? That is what the House Republicans will do. It's what they've done all along. And the most cowardly thing is they will just keep kicking the can down the road. And you say to yourself, but they can't, they have to elect a speaker and nothing happens. Actually,

the McHenry scenario was the one where they can kick the can down the road. Gates and his crazies and Nancy Mace and all the other, they can say to themselves, look, we're not choosing someone for speaker. We're just temporarily giving the pro tem more power to, and so we'll have an essentially an acting speaker. I think that's the most plausible scenario. What do you think? It may be the least bad. I'm trying to think of other scenarios. I mean, there are some, you know, horrible scenarios. I think Jim Jordan would have been a horrible scenario. Any candidate backed by Matt Gaetz, horrible scenario. Somebody chosen by Mar-a-Lago, horrible scenario. Going along with this sort of, you know, quasi-normy Patrick McHenry, okay, nobody gets what they want, which may be the best we can hope for. You know what I'm saying? You understand we keep lowering our standards here?

Right. So Charlie, we're talking about the vote to object to electors. And I believe, so there are about 200 Republicans at the time, about 120 Republicans voted to object and 80 didn't. So the problem is we're working with a very narrow universe of people who already didn't vote to overturn the election. And then within that, we have the people that Trump vetoes. But if you go with the McHenry route, then you can claim as a House Republican, I'm not actually voting for McHenry. I'm just voting to temporarily give the guy who's in there now a little bit more authority. I think that that's the likeliest scenario, because other than that, you have to have the heavy lifting of getting to 217 votes for somebody else. Well, we've seen, you and I have been around for a while. We've seen divided political parties before. I have to tell you, I don't remember a

time when there was a political party where they hated each other with such intensity. I mean, we're not talking about guys who are going to disagree on policy and then go and have a beer. We are talking about people who loathe one another at a visceral level, who would kick each other's dogs. I mean, this is, by the way, I wish I had it in front of me, that letter from Tom McClintock, Republican from California, who wrote a thing of beauty. He wrote the satirical letter to Matt Gaetz, you know, oh, you brave patriots. People should just look it up. Just do yourself a favor, go on social media, look up Tom McClintock letter to Matt Gates and the others.

It is a class. But anyway, these people are having a hard time. I mean, they're at the point where it's hard for them to be in the room with each other. I mean, so there are political divisions and then there are real political. I mean, this is a party that's not just in chaos. This is a party that is tearing each other apart. So sad. If only they had been warned. I'm sorry. So it's not just that they hate each other, although that's true. It's that they don't have anything to unite around. They don't have an agenda. This is a party without a current platform. The orange god king. And that's exactly right. So some years ago, actually, it was 2016, when Trump was running for president. And I wrote a piece in Slate that said, the Republican Party is a failed state.

And Donald Trump is its warlord. And that that's where we were. And then he became president. And now that he's not president anymore, that's where we are. They don't have anything other than this guy, right. And so because they transform themselves into a cult, they don't have anything other than this guy, right? And so because they transformed themselves into a cult, they don't have a platform anymore. They don't really agree on things. In the absence of Trump, they can't pull together. I mean, Charlie, this is not the first party to have internal fratricide. Absolutely not. The Democrats in the 60s and whatnot. I mean, lots of infighting, but you have to believe in something. You have to have something that at the end of the day says, you know, folks, let's pull

together. Let's choose a speaker because here's what we need to do. And they don't have that. No, they don't have it. And I don't see any prospect for it. So I'm out of the prediction business. But at this point, I'm looking at the nine candidates. And apparently there's been some flippings, you know, this morning, somebody dropped out,

somebody else who had never heard of got in, doesn't matter. It's all white noise at this point. So at the end of the day, they're going to have many, many ballots going back and back and forth, and they're not going to be able to come to 217. Who knows, you know? But again, going back to the Patrick McHenry thing, for those of us who are not in this conference, really the only real significance, well, there's a lot of things that are entertaining about it, but you don't want to shut down the federal government. So, you know, could Patrick McHenry

be the human CR continuing resolution to keep the government open? Will they get a vote on aid to Ukraine and aid to Israel on the floor of the house? I don't expect they're going to get anything else done. Nobody else seems that concerned about all of this. By the way, I have to say, and I know that a lot of our listeners really, you know, hate Mitch McConnell, but doesn't Mitch McConnell kind of come off as, well, this is what a grownup looks like. I mean, the Senate Republicans have their own clown show, but boy, do they look better than the, and again, we are so lowering the bar here. So this weekend, Mitch McConnell did a little PR tour.

I don't know. If you were doing this as a musical tour, I guess you would call it the I'm still alive tour. Which is necessary for him. I'm going to say something very unkind. So please forgive me, Mitch McConnell and your staff. So they've scheduled interviews with two of the Sunday shows. Somebody has made up Mitch McConnell.

He looks like he has been made up in a funeral home. It is an atrocious look. I thought he looked natural. So these are these open casket interviews of Mitch McConnell, right? And he looks terrible and he refuses to answer questions about his health. And for anyone who thought that Joe Biden looks like he can't speak, McConnell looks terrible. But, but Charlie, you're right. What McConnell is actually saying, like what Biden is actually saying, is completely sane and sensible. McConnell was saying, was talking about, you know, there is an alignment of enemies against the United States in the world right now. That's what we need to focus on, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea. And he's making the case for funding Ukraine. And he's got a political party that's becoming isolationist. And McConnell is just, again, the guy looks like a

cadaver, but he's completely coherent in what he is saying. He's talking about where the money is actually going. We're replenishing our own stockpiles. We're helping our own industrial base. The Ukrainians are fighting and dying against our enemy, depleting the Russians. The Europeans are actually doing way more than Republican politicians generally are conceding they're doing. It's a good investment. He's making a very sound case. And yeah, I got people responding to me on social media, basically saying, I don't agree with Mitch McCullough on anything, but I agree with him on this. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin TreadExperts dealer near you at TreadExperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there.

TreadExperts.ca This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes. But some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to, at work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself so you can stop hiding and take off the mask, because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions.

Therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding ways to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. So do you know what movie we're all living through now?

What is it? You know, you sometimes think, are we living through Apocalypse Now? Are we living through now what is it you know you sometimes think are we living through apocalypse now are we living through are we living through game of thrones is this house of cards is it veep you know what the reality is will we are all living through weekend at bernie's i'm sorry this is this is the weekend at bernie. Okay, that was cruel, but I'm playing off your mean comments. On the other end of the spectrum, though, Liz Cheney, who has been keeping kind of a low profile, was out and about yesterday morning. She had some interesting things to say. You were monitoring Liz Cheney yesterday. Where do we want to start with Liz? Okay, I don't know what the correct order is

because she's talking a lot of policy, but the thing that struck me most was Liz Cheney accidentally, not accidentally, as an aside, when she was on Face the Nation, speaking about the Republican Party and suddenly pausing to say, I don't know if I really am a Republican anymore. Let's play Liz where she basically is like, and again, keeping in mind how many decades this woman has been a stalwart Republican up until recently was a was number three in the Republican leadership in the house. And here she was yesterday morning. We need a much louder voices within both parties within my own party. I don't even know I should call it my own party within the Republican Party right now, the extent to which you're seeing people suggest that we should abandon Ukraine,

which essentially is surrendering in this battle between freedom and tyranny. And that would be very dangerous for our security. Yeah, I think she's realizing that something that a lot of us have realized at a certain point is that when you're in the wilderness this far, that maybe you're not going back home, that maybe you are a political orphan. She also had some things to say about the politics that's going on here. She talks with Margaret Brennan about the threats, because this was also one of the big themes of last week, Will, was all of the threats, the intimidation, the bullying aimed at Republicans, which again is very much part of the MAGA playbook. The interesting thing about last week, though, was it didn't work. That I think is significant. Now, how significant is, I don't know. I'm not going to get into irrational

exuberance here. But, you know, folks like Steve Bannon, you know, had basically, you know, let loose the kraken of people who were, you know, inundating these congressmen and their wives with emails and voicemails and all of that bullshit. And because I think there was a critical mass, they basically said, yeah, we're not we're not caving in. But this is this is Liz Cheney talking about those threats to the lawmakers. What do you think is driving the domestic threats against lawmakers within the Republican Party and also among some Democrats? The domestic threats are absolutely being driven by Donald Trump and, unfortunately, some of his supporters who, in fact, have encouraged and taken steps that have resulted in, as we saw on January 6th, political violence.

When you have a member of Congress, reportedly, like Warren Davidson from Ohio, who in the meeting with Jim Jordan last week, when some of the holdouts raised with Jordan the fact that they were getting death threats, one of them told me that in response, Congressman Davidson said, well, that's not Jim Jordan's fault. That's your fault for voting against him. That is the kind of encouragement and acceptance of violence that is absolutely has no place in this party, should have no place in our country. It is. Okay. I think that's an important point. Because if in fact, you have members of Congress who basically look around and say, well, okay, you can't blame people for, you know, the death threats.

This is what you get for going against the origin God King and against MAGA. I'm sorry to use the word again. But this does seem like a rather significant indicator of the normalization of political violence. Okay, so this is a very serious topic. We're seeing actual violence over in Israel and Gaza, but what we have in the United States, we like to think we're above political violence. We're not, we've had political violence before. But what we have now is what I, when I wrote about Lindsey Graham, I called this a symbiotic relationship between the Republican Party and the political violence of the MAGA Donald Trump, you know, extremists.

The symbiotic relationship is that the politicians don't explicitly endorse the violence, but they use it, right? And now in Lindsey Graham's case, it was right after January 6th, and he said to the Democrats, don't impeach Trump, cancel your impeachment of Trump, because I'm afraid there will be more political violence. So we just had a mob attack the Capitol. And instead of saying, we're not going to accept the mob, we're going to do the right thing, regardless of what the mob wants. Graham says, yield to the mob. What Cheney's talking about here, what Warren Davidson allegedly said in this meeting is more than yielding to the mob, it is to the mob. What Cheney's talking about here, what Warren Davidson allegedly said in this meeting, is

more than yielding to the mob. It is using the mob. The death threats against members who voted against Jordan. It's leverage, as January 6th was leverage, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. He's saying, it's your fault. And if you don't do what we want you to do, these people, oh, I'm not saying I support

them, but they're going to hurt you or threaten you, right? So he's using that. And Charlie, let me just bring in one more example. Donald Trump, on January 6th, when Kevin McCarthy is calling him and saying, please send people to help us, we're over, my office is overrun here.

Trump says to him, according to McCarthy's account as related to Jamie Herrera Butler, he says, well, Kevin, I guess those people just care more about the stolen election than you do, right? That's Trump explicitly using the violence. No, exactly. And the fact that Trump and people like Rudy Giuliani acting hit his behalf, we're still making phone calls seven o'clock that night, trying to get senators to delay the certification. I mean, they saw this as a way of advancing their political agenda. And I think you have to be just incredibly naive or delusional not to see the connection here. Okay, so a little bit more Cheney, I want to hear some more Cheney here. So here's Liz Cheney on the importance of rejecting lies, which seems to be a theme these days.

And we ought to reject the kind of attacks that we're seeing, obviously, launched by Donald Trump, but also the kind of lies coming out of Jim Jordan and some other House Republicans, the notion that the entire judiciary system or the FBI is weaponized against us. And I would urge that people think about, as we look at the threats globally, the notion that we've got Republicans saying we're going to defund the FBI, we're going to defund the Department of Justice. Jim Jordan wants to stop a number of the programs that have kept us safe since 9-11. That is very dangerous. Okay, this seems to me to be an obvious issue. This seems to me to be an obvious vulnerability for the party of law and order. And it's interesting that she's highlighting this.

You know, Jim Jordan comes within, what, 20 votes of being elected Speaker, having called for dismantling much of the nation's federal law enforcement apparatus. Right. Well, to Jim Jordan and people like him, they just refer to this as the administrative state, right? The Republicans have always been an anti-government party in their rhetoric. But not anti-law and order. Yeah, but who does law and order? The government does. Part of the government does. So when Jordan and others call for defunding the FBI, Liz Cheney is reminding people, because Liz Cheney, remember, is a national security conservative. She's a hawk,

right? And part of what she believes in is law enforcement and the military. And if you defund the FBI, a lot of what the FBI does is counterintelligence work, that they do a lot of national security anti-terrorism work. So here we have the United States facing a lot of foreign threats right now. And we're talking about Iran. We're talking about Hamas. We're talking about terrorists. For God's sake, half of the Republican rhetoric, Charlie, about the border is that terrorists are going to come over the border, right?

And meanwhile, you've got the House Republicans talking about defunding the FBI, which works on this stuff. And shutting down the whole federal government, which would of course be part of the let's protect America and keep it working, right? Right. In the name of more funding for border security, let's shut down the government that does the border security. It's completely insane. So Cheney, because she believes in this stuff, is kind of heightening the contradictions. She's pointing out that the Republican Party is undermining the causes of security it claims to believe in. Okay, so she makes one other point here, and I want to get to her not closing the door and running

for president, because what's that all about? But she's on with Jake Tapper yesterday, and connects the dots between Donald Trump's loose lips with classified information and other world events. Let's listen to this point. He reportedly shared Israeli intelligence with the Russians very early in his term. He also, as we know now from the indictments that we've seen from Jack Smith, shared highly classified military documents, apparently relating to a you know military action potentially against Iran he shared that with Mark Meadows ghostwriters and

political consultants it seems according to the indictments so if you think about not only is he out there advocating for complementing America's adversaries and in fact terrorist organizations that slaughter innocents, he also seems to have shared very highly classified intelligence information, both ours and the Israelis, in fact with adversaries. So I think it's simply the latest example of why Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. Now I agree with everything you just said there, a little bit speculative, but this is an interesting point that among the documents that he has allegedly been sharing were things like possible war plans against Iran at a time when Iran clearly is playing a malign, with Trump's behavior. And, you know, Charlie, sometimes we ask ourselves, what would the Republican Party be saying if it still believed

anything that it claimed to believe in? And the answer is, watch Liz Cheney, right? So here she's talking about, she's the one who stood still. What would a rational Republican Party look like? Oh, wait. And let me clarify, there are a lot of things I disagree with, most things I disagree with Liz Cheney on, but at least she still believes what she used to believe. So she's talking about, a lot of people forgot this. 2017, May of 2017, right after Donald Trump has fired Jim Comey. The day after, right?

Right, the day after. He's got the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office. He just spills to this guy, the Russian foreign minister, what is highly secret Israeli intelligence, right? And the people around Trump are appalled. They're just shocked that he did this, right? spills to this guy, the Russian foreign minister, what is highly secret Israeli intelligence, right? And the people around Trump are appalled. They're just shocked that he did this, right? Because Donald Trump doesn't care about Israel, right? He talks of it. And he's happy to betray them to his real friends, which is the Russian foreign minister. And then as you point out, the Iran situation where Trump is, to anyone who will listen, obviously taking out this document that is a war plan against Iran, just because he wants to hurt Mark will listen, obviously taking out this document that is a war plan

against Iran, just because he wants to hurt Mark Milley, who apparently wrote this thing. And so we have the tape of him, of Trump sharing this with Mark Meadows' ghostwriters. Charlie, we have no idea who else Trump shared this with, because obviously he's been telling this story about Milley and saying, hey, let me show you this thing. So he's with Iran, with Russia, he's betraying our chief ally Israel, in addition to which, what, a couple of weeks ago, he insults Netanyahu and the Israeli defense minister, because Donald Trump doesn't care about any of this. And the Republican Party is talking about Israel, and they're talking about Iran. Meanwhile, they're backing Donald Trump for president, who is undermining all of that. I think, by the way, I just want to make a correction here. It was not Mark Milley's

ghostwriters. It was Mark Meadows. Sorry, Mark Meadows. Sorry. The documents were from Mark Milley. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your dread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our dread experts. experts ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family enjoy them for years with a michelin x-ice snow tire get a 50 prepaid master card with select michelin tires find a michelin tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca locations this is an ad by better help online therapy october is the season for wearing There's no auto repair. We're always there. Trade experts. That's EA. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. October is the season for wearing masks and costumes,

but some of us feel like we wear a mask and hide more often than we want to. At work, in social settings, around our family. Therapy can help you learn to accept all parts of yourself, so you can stop hiding and take off the mask. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Whether you're navigating workplace stresses, complex relationships, or family dynamics, therapy is a great tool for facing your fears and finding a way to overcome them. If you're thinking of starting therapy but you're afraid of what you might uncover, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be

convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp.com. Let's talk about the state of play with Israel, where we're at right here. I am concerned, and I wrote about this in Morning Shots, and I wanted to get your take on this, about the growing rift on the left. And by the way, I don't mean all of the people on the left, and I'm not even saying the people who are sympathetic with Palestine, but there is an anti-Biden left when it comes to Israel policy. Now, the polls would suggest that the strong majority of Democrats back what Joe Biden is doing. I think there's overwhelming congressional support among Democrats for what

Joe Biden is doing, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a problem because you have an activist left, including a real generation gap when it comes to sentiment on Israel and Palestine, where the numbers are very different or starkly different among Democratic voters who are over the age of 50 versus 18 to 34. So give me your take on this, because it does seem as if there is a ramping up of both anti-Israel rhetoric on the left and more specifically anti-Biden rhetoric on the left. Your take, Will, because this is your world. These are your folks. Okay. So here's where I am going to be the house lib. I'm going to disagree here. There obviously is an anti-Israel left. I think it's relatively small and it's certainly smaller today than it was before this horrendous attack on Israel. The other thing I want to know, Charlie, is

anytime I see poll data separated by age, I want to see that poll data over time. Because what I want to know is, is it that today's generation, younger generation is different and is going to be different from previous Democrats? Or is it that this is the way young people think and as they age and have more experience, they change? What I see in the Democratic Party, Charlie, is tremendous unity, surprising degree of unity behind Biden as he stands with Israel. Now, it's an easy case, admittedly, because the Hamas attack on Israel was horrendous beyond any previous Hamas attacks on Israel. And it was absolutely vicious and it targeted civilians. And the magnitude of it was enormous. So that makes it relatively easy for Biden to unite the

party. But Charlie, I think he has, he has united the party. For now. I see across the spectrum, like Rashida Tlaib is like the only Democrat in Congress who's really still standing out there. Maybe Omar, right? And that's it. Who else is out there? Yes, this is true. I am concerned though, about what is happening among the activist left. And keep in mind that Joe Biden can't really afford to lose, to have demotivated younger voters. He can't afford to lose a significant number of votes to the Cornell West of the world. You have people like John Fetterman who have, you know, been absolute stars on this, calling out the squad. And yet you had 400 congressional staffers, I'm assuming mostly Democrats, who signed a letter calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Now, again, not necessarily a huge number of, you know, these are people, not elected officials. But as Will Bunch said in the Philadelphia Inquirer, these folks have an outsized influence within liberal circles. I mean, I'm seeing headlines from the intercept, you know, Joe Biden funding genocide. I am seeing union leaders who have been at the White House. The guy who runs the Amazon Union is tweeting one pro-Hamas Palestinian slogan after another. By the way, you and I agree completely on what happened in Israel on October 7th. But also, we know that as of this week, we're going to see the narrative begin to focus on Israel's reaction. You already have AOC out saying that Israel is committing war crimes. You are going to have an increasing death toll. You are going to see some really wrenching pictures.

And I guess the question is, you know, which direction is public opinion going to go? You know that there will be more sympathy for the Gazan civilian victims going forward. And the left, and I mean the pro-Hamas left, is going to blame Joe Biden for this. So for the first time, Charlie, I feel like I'm having a good old fashioned conversation with a conservative radio host. So you're focusing on some people on the left who I think are a relatively small number. I'll have to look at the polling on this. But Charlie, a week ago, when I looked at the polling on Israel, Democrats were more supportive of defending Israel than Republicans were by about

10 points. Well, look at this though here. I'm showing you the CBS poll. I hope you can see the, you probably can't. This is the CBS poll. Should U.S. send weapons supplies to Israel? Democrats should 47%, should not 53%. Okay. So a majority of Democrats were against sending weapons. Now that may have been outlier, but I also think that it's pointing a point out that when you break down these, these numbers, what were the Republican numbers? The Republican numbers were 57% favored sending weapons. So that's a turn. So again, this is Will Bunch, who's a liberal. This is a poll conducted by CNN shortly after the attacks found that 81% of Americans over the age of 65, which would be Biden's silent generation, support Israel. They sympathize with him. But it is the 18 to 34 age bracket. This number drops from 81% to just 27%.

And so, you know, he writes, look, these young DC power players are small in number, but they get exercise and outsize and influence if they went public with criticism of Biden's policies, right, as he was struggling with other college educated young voters like them. A lot could happen in 13 months, but even small movement toward a third party candidate like Cornel West or a rise in stay at home apathy could be brutal for Biden. Now, again, here's Nick Cattaggio. I'm just talking about the trend lines. And I'm concerned about this because I think this is why centrists like us are going to be really crucial in supporting what Joe Biden is doing here. He basically points out, look, with the bloodshed increasing in Gaza, left-wing outrage will grow day by day. The perception that Israel's operation achieved nothing meaningful at great human cost will become leftist orthodoxy. And those leftists

will blame Joe Biden, a president for whom they feel no special affection, for having taken moral ownership of the conflict preemptively and enthusiastically. Okay, a couple of things. First of all, this narrative that the left is rising in defense of Palestine and against Israel. I'm hearing it from the people who have an interest in saying it, which is, you know, Will Bunch and Nick Katajian. People on the left, on the left left, who want to have expressed that they have power are going to say, hey, look, Joe Biden can't afford to alienate us, right? They're going to play it up. And then on the right, you're going to have the people saying the left is the problem because that's what the people on the right like to believe, right? And what if the reality isn't that? What if the reality is that there's a lot of people

who are in the middle, who are on the democratic, the center left, who just aren't represented in those numbers, who are not among the signers of those things. But I wanted to make one other point here, which is you were referring earlier to people who express a pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas line. I want to separate those two things. And I want to know exactly. I want to know exactly what the guy from Amazon, without the union or whatever, said. Because there are ways in which I, who am not at all pro-Hamas, am pro-Palestinian rights. And I'm certainly against civilian casualties. And if there is a movement towards expressing concern about killing civilians in Gaza and the number who are being killed, number one, I share that. I don't think that's

a left-wing position. It's not a pro-Hamas position. It's not an anti-Israel position. It's a pro-civilian life position. And may I point out, Charlie, one of the entities calling on Israel to slow down and rethink a ground invasion of Gaza is the United States government, Joe Biden and his administration, because they recognize that the massive casualties aren't just morally bad, they're politically dangerous for Israel, that they can ignite the region against Israel and us. Right. The guy that I was quoting from Amazon was actually using the slogan, you know, from the river to the sea. Oh, that's an anti-Israel slogan. Let's be clear about that. Yeah. But that's Hamas. Right. And then when he

got pushed back, he said, you know viva palestine viva cuba not sure what that was about i need to know more about this guy that is a far left and terrorist sympathetic position so i agree with that so no but this is a distinction that is important i do think that it is legitimate to say okay and the biden administration i think is doing a pretty good job in trying to look we support your right of self-defense, but do not make the kind of mistakes we made after 9-11. Important point. Show restraint. Do not lose the moral high ground. Very, very important point. I also think it's legitimate to be concerned about the extent of civilian casualties. I don't have a problem with that. I don't refer to that when I'm talking about the pro-Hamas. I'm saying if you use a slogan, like, for example, from the river to the sea, that sort of thing, then you're using a Hamas slogan. And I think that there is a bright line

there. So, okay, here I am definitely the house lib. I'm hearing so many echoes, Charlie, in this discussion of the defund the police debate, where it was in the interest of the Republican Party and the right to portray Democrats as wanting to defund and abolish law enforcement, when in fact, a very small percentage of Democrats actually believed in abolishing law enforcement. That's still a very fringe minority position. And the people who were talking about defunding meant different things by it, not necessarily fewer cops, but more mental health. Anyway, the point is is I'm hearing a little bit of a caricature, what I think is a caricature of, in this case, the position of concern about Palestinian casualties, right? A position that I think

is a mainstream concern. And I believe it's important to embrace that, to acknowledge the morality of it, and to distinguish that from the people you're talking about. The from the river to the sea people are talking about, you have to choose between the existence of Israel, right? And the existence of Palestine. And that's the Hamas position. It's constant warfare. It is constant warfare and it is very, very, very dangerous. So where do you think we're going to go here? Because it does feel like we are right on the edge of a possibly widening conflict. I think one of the real tragedies of this particular moment is that Israel is led by somebody like a Benjamin Netanyahu, who frankly is a deeply unsympathetic character. And I believe, and I want to be really careful here. I mean, I think that, you know, his failure in protecting the nation, the role he played in dividing the country and making it weak

cannot be overstated. I hope he's politically dead. Seems to be a lot of indication that Israelis are sick of him. But I have to say that it worries me that somebody who has been as reckless and as extreme, weirdly enough, as Benjamin Netanyahu, is right now in charge of deciding this. And if you're looking for a moment of nuance and restraint, is he the guy? So talk to me about that. Charlie, here's where I think there is, unfortunately, a parallel between our country and Israel. In our country, we've been talking about the crazies in the Republican Party. And every time we think someone's crazier, we find somebody crazier than the last guy, right?

And so now we're clutching onto anybody, even people who voted against the election. We're like, well, he's not as bad as Jim Jordan, right? But they're way worse. So in Israel, we can talk about how bad Netanyahu is. And Netanyahu absolutely failed. Netanyahu had one job that was supposed to make up for all his other flaws, and that was security. And he miserably failed, right? So he should be

out on his butt for that reason alone. But Charlie, it gets worse. Because what's going on in Israel right now, from what I've read, is Netanyahu is not the far right. His own defense minister wants to launch more aggressive. Netanyahu is actually a restraining voice to possibly on the ground war in Gaza, but also in engaging Hezbollah. Because supposedly the Israeli defense minister wants to go engage Hezbollah, which is already involved. But the defense minister, I mean, he is a complete nut, right? And he's got a... The Israeli cabinet is... If you think the House Republicans are bad, let me introduce you to you to the Israeli cabinet right every right-wing party has somebody in there

but anyway the danger I fully agree with this the danger in Israel right now is right now we're talking about what Israel is doing in Gaza and Israel is the aggressor and we can debate that but if Israel ends up right there are already engagements on the Lebanese border, in Syria, in the West Bank. So that's three other fronts that could open in addition to the one in the South, in Gaza. Let me tell you, Israel has been in wars with four fronts before. It's not good, right? And they've survived it. But this could get much, much worse. And that's why I'm relieved to hear that Netanyahu is not the crazy one in terms of engaging Hezbollah. And I'm also relieved to hear that the United States is doing everything it can

to try to avoid these other fronts becoming live action. It is worth pointing out, though, that Netanyahu did name these people to his cabinet. I mean, these people were empowered and enabled by him. But you were right. As far as I can tell, he's marginalized some of them with this war cabinet. I wish I had more confidence in his judgment and in his character, but I don't. This is a cautionary note, what happens when you prioritize a culture war over actually doing the one job you're supposed to be doing. I hope that people are paying attention. I'm skeptical. So, Will, what are you going to keep in your eye on this week other than the ongoing

goat rodeo in the house, which I must admit, I watch with a, I'm going to confess, a mixture of entertainment, schadenfreude, and just pure dread because you know that it can always get worse. Yeah, no, I expect more inertia in the House. And we'll have entertainment, but no action. We won't get any result there. The piece that I'm doing right now, and then I hope to be out tomorrow morning, is about the situation in Israel and specifically about this strike on the hospital. Remember, the New York Times and everybody else portray it as an Israeli airstrike.

And now it's been completely debunked. We now have the Times itself publishing an editorial note saying, sorry, our bad. But the underlying problem is the so-called Ministry of Health in Gaza, which is, I've just been reading what they publish. And there's a reason why they put out this story and got it completely wrong. It is that they are fundamentally a propaganda outfit. And what they publish is propaganda. People need to keep that in mind every time they read these numbers too. People think that the Gaza health ministry is like the world health organization or the CDC or something. It is not. It is a, it is a propaganda outfit. And I am seeing more references to the Hamas run health ministry. And that's good because what people need to understand is this is Hamas talking. This is not just a bunch of doctors.

That's why the numbers have been completely unreliable and the allegations were false and were not retracted. So that's my focus for the next couple of days. It's important to make this point because I think that the whole bombing of the hospital, you look back on it as an extraordinary success for propaganda because they set the narrative. The narrative caught fire, set the world on fire, had tremendous consequences before the truth limped along and corrected the record. And this is the world we live in, where the instant takes, the hot takes, the power of AI, which is going to make all of this so much worse, the power of social media, you can get a

lie out there that can actually change the world. I mean, think, the power of social media, you can get a lie out there that can actually change the world. I mean, think about the consequences of that. You had the president of the United States flying into Israel, had an important meeting scheduled with leading Arabs, and none of that took place because of this false report about the hospital. In fact, you're still seeing the hospital being cited. There's some things that are apparently irrefutable, but this is an important case. It's an important case to remember. It's certainly an important lesson for the media, which continues to report civilian deaths sourcing this health ministry when by now they ought to know better. So keep it up. Will, it is great talking with you. I appreciate it. You too, Charlie. We will do this again,

of course, next week. And thank you all for listening to this Monday edition of the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We will do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. new wheel. Wherever you go, you can get a pro at Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with a Michelin X-Ice snow tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at

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