The Bulwark Podcast - Tim Miller: Ron DeSantis Is Scott Walker

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

DeSantis gets over his skis on Ukraine, 'Don't Say Gay' escalates, and it's not racist to criticize the CCP. Plus, the crowd that warns of death and destruction if Trump is indicted said nothing about Trump ripping the country apart. Tim Miller joins Charlie Sykes for your weekend pod.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Friday, which means that I am joined by Tim Miller. Tim, how are you? You know, I couldn't be better, Charlie. I'm feeling good this morning. I guess I could be better. Donald Trump could be in jail. Yeah, it's probably not going to happen. But I'm pretty good, all things considered. How about you? I'm glad to hear this. We have so much to talk about. We have the epic TikTok hearing yesterday. We have Ron DeSantis' various shuffles. We have Donald Trump.

And I'm sorry to actually use this phrase, melting down, because, you know, he's been melted for so long. But these absolutely bizarre tweets talking about death and destruction and posting himself with baseball bats. But could we start with something else? Because I'm sorry, I need to ease my way into that, even though it's the weekend. I am obsessed with the Florida story about statues without pants. It is so delicious.

Can I talk about it for a few minutes? Yeah, let's do it. I mean, this is actually not a parody. I'm not making this up. There's this Tallahassee school, which has basically fired its principal. It's interesting. It's called Tallahassee Classical School. It is devoted to classical education, the liberal arts, etc. And basically, a candid principle after there was a sixth grade art history lesson showing the students a picture of Michelangelo's David. Not kidding here, okay? So, apparently, three parents complained. One of them thought it was pornographic because I don't know how many of our listeners know about Michelangelo's David. You can't see his junk. It's there.

So the school's saying that these children were upset, which seems highly unlikely. It's stone. Just by the way, it's stone. I mean, you can see his stone junk, I guess, but technically, if you're really not familiar with it, it's a stone sculpture. So, you know, it's not like a human flaccid penis that you're looking at.

No, I think most of our listeners did know that it's made out of marble, right? I mean, it's just, but anyway, this whole notion that children were upset. Yeah, right. The people who would say that sixth graders were upset about this have never hung around with sixth graders. What actually happened was you had these three parents who apparently were unacquainted with what goes on in classical art. I've never seen marble depictions of genitalia before, but we're really, really, really hyped up to look for any kind of wokeness or pornography, so this principle is out. The school board chairman, the chief idiocrat down there, tells Slate, we're not going to show the full statue of David to kindergartners. We're not

going to show him to second graders. It was sixth graders. Showing the entire statue of David is inappropriate at some age. The thing that's amazing to me about this, Tim, is this is, and I'm sorry to misuse the word literally, but I'm going to misuse the word literally. This is literally an episode from The Simpsons Come to Life. They actually did an episode about David coming to Springfield and people telling Marge Simpson she should protest because it's offensive and inappropriate. But I think the Florida story is better because, and I use the word, you know, this episode of peck sniffery and Philistinism, because it comes from the school that calls itself the classical school, you know, with content-rich classical education, liberal arts and sciences. And classical education is the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. And they actually define it. The word liberal comes from the Latin word libertas, meaning freedom.

But apparently not the freedom to look at the world's most famous statue. So, I mean, this is like this reduction to absurdity. And again, the chief idiocrat, his name is Barney Bishop III. He's the guy that fired the principal. And he's like, we're Florida. Yeah, we listen to parents, any parent that has this, you know. We're not going to teach 1619 or CRT crap. We're not going to have courses from the college board.

We don't have pronouns. You people in Virginia might do this sort of thing. But here in Florida, we're going to have a classical education that protects these tender eyes of these young budding classicists from seeing this corrupting Renaissance art. You can make this stuff up. I have a great idea. I think, you know, Hannah did some great art for your newsletter, as usual. But if we have more of an amateur artist in the audience, I think that we should put some jorts on the David. It's time to update it. It's time to update

it. You know, they love their jorts in Florida, just like a pair of cutoff jeans, and maybe we can give them a mullet. Let's have the kids get comfortable. I just want the kids to feel seen when they're looking at art and see art that reflects their culture. And I think that's important. It's got to be safe. Yeah, yeah. They got to feel good. The funny thing about this is, so when I suffered through that Turning Point USA conference, one of the things that jumped out at me is that there's this strain right now going through the nationalist conservatives, the MAGA wing,

about how we need to celebrate beauty. They're kind of obsessed about that. It's like modern architecture is ugly. This is an urban line, too. The classical, we need to go back to the classical and the traditional. I am slightly sympathetic to this point of view. Yeah, sure. Okay. Yeah. It's a fine point of view to have like in an arts magazine or,

you know, at a wine dinner or something. It's kind of weird to like be spending a lot of time during a political speech talking about it. But okay. The funny thing about this is there is so many examples of this all through MAGA, like the very small percentage of Claremonster, Tucker Carlson, intellectual MAGAs, like just don't really know who they're in league with, right? Like they think that they're in league with other people who share their distaste for the elite culture that these guys know so well, but they know elite culture. Like the real MAGA folks that are in the audience that are showing up to this thing, they're with the Karen moms that want to cover up the David

and put jorts on it, right? They're not interested, you know, in a return to Montesquieu and caring about classical stuff. And more of that elite French stuff. Yeah, exactly. There is this parallel across throughout all of it, right? You know, I was doing some research for an article I've got coming next week and about kind of the younger magas and the you know younger new right and you see

the same dichotomy right where the college educated ones the smart ones who are in dc you know are pushing for you know more of a secular cultural fight to push back against wokeism and crt and like the kids that are showing up, you know, to the college campuses are like groipers that want to do anti-Semitic memes, right? It's like you think that you're pushing classicism, but what they're hearing is, oh yeah, we want bigotry and to cover up the David's cock, right? Like that's what's happening among the masses. And, you know, that tension just exists everywhere. My trigger warning for all of you Floridians out there is that in my newsletter this morning, we have a discussion of statues without pants. And I must confess, there are some other pornographic images, at least regarded, you know.

Have you been to Florence? Yes, I have. The Birth of Venus, by the way. I'm just waiting for the folks from, you know, Hillsdale and, you know, Tallahassee to come across, you know, Botticelli's, you know, because Nellie Bowles has a great newsletter, by the way, and she said this is the picture that made her turn lesbian. It was just looking at that. I can't just sort of imagine all of these. We need to have classical traditional education,

and then you have all the Florida Karens come along. It was David that made Nellie turn lesbian? No, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, the attraction. I thought she was so repulsed by David. I'm like, what, he's got abs? What's wrong? No, no, no, no, no, no. The birth of Venus.

So this school down in Tallahassee takes its curriculum from Hillsdale. They're part of that Hillsdale Charter School network. As you point out, there's a little bit of a tension between, you know, truth, goodness, and beauty and all of that with this culture war desire to have a moral panic, you know, by statues without pants. But I do have this mental image now of, you know, people from Hillsdale saying, yes, we need to return to this traditional classical education. And then they bring along, you know, all of these Karens, you know, to an art museum in Florence, for example, and they're going, oh, my goodness, look at that. Oh, man. Can I do one other thing on Florida schools before we move on?

Please. Or do you move on? Please. Or do you have more? No. Trust me. If you've got more bits, if you've got more material on David and his chiseled abs. He is pretty hot. He's hot. He's hot.

You know, not exactly my type. Okay. I need to move on now. And on the serious note. The don't say gay bill. As you see this news this week, it's moved to K-12. Yeah. We're in Florida.

There's multiple legislators that are updating this from k to three and and you know nicky haley tried to one up to sanders by saying fifth grade and now there's some legislators that are doing hold my beer and saying 12th i want to do just a quick victory lap on this i mean i was as early on this as anyone you know talking about how this seemed ridiculous everyone was like this there's no way that they're really going to pass this right it seemed ridiculous i was like no they are going to pass it they did pass it and then once they pass it you had all the you know your your don't be alarmed set you know the anti anti set being like oh the you know the never trumpers they're obsessing over this and you know tim just is so sensitive about the gay stuff and like this isn't that we just don't want to

teach the kids about we just don't want to teach the kids about, we just don't want to keep the kids about transgender, you know, surgery when they're in second grade. Okay, calm down. And in this whole time, I was saying, no, this has been particularly crafted in order to have a chilling effect on all discussion of any type of the existence of LGBT people. It is crafted for this reason. It is specifically vague, and they were taking that as, oh, we're overreacting. And I'm saying, no, that's the point. Because now any of these three Karens, like at this school, I'm sorry to all Karens out there, we're going to call them, we'll call them Todds. Well, any of these three Todds can call in and force the school to push out a principal or change their curriculum. And now it's going all the way up to an age where I get a lot of schools, there's gay dates at

proms, and teachers can't talk about this. And it is a specific intimidation attempt to silence and to closet gay teachers and gay families. And it is every week that goes by, it's more and more clear that, you know, those of us that were doing the hair on fire, the commentary on this were correct, right? Like, this is as, you know, bad as we said it was, and now they're trying to expand it all in the name of freedom and parents' rights. It's like, what parents? Which parents? Not me. I'm a parent.

Well, that's why it's so deliciously ironic that all of these book bans and things like this are being pushed under the banner of freedom. This is the freedom agenda. I mean, it's, now, you know what, people would understand what I mean by Orwellian if they didn't ban that book, too, but you never know. So, since we're on Ron DeSantis, on the subject of Ron DeSantis, this process you're describing, how it was originally for age appropriate, just, you know, up to third grade, now it's, you know, K-12. DeSantis cannot allow himself to be outflanked on the right. I mean, he keeps doing this shuffle. He keeps basically looking like, where's the crowd going? Where is the id? Where is Donald Trump going? And I need to stay to the right. So what do you make of Ron DeSantis? What is your take on Ron DeSantis, who seems to be

having a little bit of trouble on the launchpad? I mean, he seems to be leaking stuff. I was a little bit more bullish on him than I think, you know, maybe some of your other guests. Yeah, I remember. We talked last week. Right, yeah. We talked about it last week. I still am not sure. I think that, like, dancing on his grave, it's a little early.

It's a long primary. And I think that he has a good elevator pitch. The problem is once he gets outside the elevator, he seems to be struggling. And how to handle all these issues. And he's going to have this tension throughout the whole campaign of how do I keep the donor class happy, the old establishment happy, these guys on board and the chattering classes while also not losing the MAGA base. And it seemed like initially he was making this bet of, I'm actually not going to worry about the establishment class, the donor class.

I'm just going to go full MAGA and I'm going to assume they're going to go along with me because they hate Trump so much. And that was a decent bet for a while. But now once you get into the thrust of a campaign and you have to engage on issue after issue, you realize some holes in that. And I think the Ukraine thing is a prime example of this. I was messaging this morning that I was thinking about 2016.

Yeah. And the Scott Walker parallel, right? Scott Walker is the example everyone uses of like, what's the worst case scenario for DeSantis, right? Which is like, Scott Walker was super hot in June of 2015, and it all flamed out before there was even a vote. What happened to him? Well, here's one thing that I just, I distinctly remember, you know, being on an opposite side, on Jeb's side, is that Walker didn't know who he was on certain issues, and that led him into trouble, right? Say what you want about Trump. Trump has this id that he knows who he was on certain issues. And that led him into trouble, right? Say what

you want about Trump. Trump has this id that he knows who he is, right? He can jump around on stupid issues that don't matter, but on the core issues, he knew where he wanted to be. And Walker on immigration, right, was a Paul Ryan, you know, compassionate, conservative, Bush era immigrant. He didn't have to deal with it that much because it's Wisconsin. You know, you have a couple of Canucks trying to come across the border, but you're pretty far from Mexico. I don't know. You're more better at geography of Wisconsin than me. Not a big problem, yeah. Yeah, not a huge problem. So, he didn't have to deal with it that much. So, he didn't have to,

you know, kind of speak on it in depth. Well, he gets out in the campaign, and he realizes he has to appeal to the Breitbart crowd, right? And he finds himself getting way out over his skis. Remember, he said idiotic stuff like, oh, we might need a wall in Canada. Yep. I remember that. Because he didn't know how to answer the follow-up questions, right? He agreed with the ending birthright citizenship thing. You know, that was like a meme at the time, right? So, he gets way out of it. And then all of a sudden, his donor guy and everyone else is like, Scott, what are you doing? You want a wall in Canada and you want to change the Constitution

on birthright citizenship? And so then he starts backpedaling, right, to kind of go back to a more balanced position. But he had gone so far out that he starts to look like a phony and he starts to look like he doesn't know what he's talking about. DeSantis is doing this exact same thing right now in Ukraine, right? He gets all over his skis on territorial dispute in Magda and he realizes people are mad at him.

Like other parts of his base are mad at him. He's like, oh, now I got to backtrack. As you know, I punished myself with Bannon's podcast to know what's happening with MAGA. Jesus Christ. They're all over DeSantis' backtrack, right? So DeSantis backtracks on Piers. He gets a small attaboy for Tom Cotton in the New York Times, which is nice, but doesn't matter all in the primary.

Meanwhile, the actual NatCon MAGA isolationist wing is like, look at him. See, he is a cuck. He is going to be beholden to the neocon establishment. He is going to backtrack. And so he ends up losing with both, right? He ends up in this sour spot where nobody trusts him on a core issue. Maybe he learns this mistake and gets better. Walker never did. There's a heavy sniff of Scott Walker in this week. As soon as you wrote that to me this morning, I went, yeah, I remember this moment. I really do remember the moment,

actually, where Scott Walker had apparently gone down and was hanging out with Jeff Sessions. Remember when Jeff Sessions was in the Senate? And he was one of the very few people at that time who was talking about restricting legal immigration, as opposed to just illegal immigration. And then Walker basically comes out with this position that he had never held before. And look, I had known Walker for many, many, many years. You know, I'd followed him obviously closely. And never once was there any hint that Walker took this particular position. He'd never thought about it. It never came up. This is not a big issue here in Wisconsin. I mean, the dark,

dirty secret is that our dairy industry relies on illegal immigrants. The whole mantra for decades had been, we're for legal immigration. Our problem is with illegal immigration. And then Scott Walker flips in 2015. And it was that moment where you realize, okay, so he's chasing the crowd. And now he finds himself speaking a language that is not his native tongue. And I think that's the problem is that he's never really thought about it. It doesn't come naturally to him. He is parroting the language and the words and the verbiage that he thinks will play with the base. And you do get that sense from DeSantis, that DeSantis is trying to figure out, you know, what is the formula? What do I have to say? How do I position myself?

When it really doesn't come necessarily that natural to him. It's like listening to a politician speaking in translation a little bit. You know, it's like when Mitt Romney said, I am severely conservative. How do I show that I'm conservative? Well, I will say I'm severely conservative. You kind of get that sense of maybe it's not totally authentic, maybe. Yeah. And the thing about Trump is, so you always come back to this, well, how did it work for Trump, who's clearly so inauthentic? But the thing is that the voters knew Trump's brand was, I'm a dealmaker. I'm transactional. He used to sell himself as that in 2015 and 16.

And so, when he cut this deal with the evangelicals, voters were like, I mean, they were wrong to think this because he is a deal buster, right? He didn't actually honor his agreements as a businessman, but the voters didn't know this. And so, since they saw him as that, as transactional, they were like, okay, I know where this guy directionally is. We have the same enemies, right? Like, he also hates the libs and the media, and he wants to go this other, you know, more muscular nationalist, whatever it is, direction. And so, maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about. Like, maybe he can't quote Bible verses. I remember when he and Halperin were interviewing about that, and he couldn't pick whether he liked the New Testament or the Old Testament better, or like what his favorite, he didn't have it, he couldn't, he showed that he hadn't read anything, right? Maybe he doesn't read the Bible. Maybe he doesn't know anything

about this. They get it two Corinthians, right? Yeah, two Corinthians, right, yeah. But he'll make this deal with us, and we know he'll be on our side, because he's making this deal, because we And we know he'll be on our side because he's making this deal because we have this symbiotic relationship. With DeSantis, the worry is that voters start to think, is he making these deals with us? Or is he making these deals with the old Republican party that we're trying to change? Right? And that was Walker's issue too, right? The Wisconsin people knew him and trust him. But when he gets on this national stage and has to start talking about issues he's not familiar with, you start to be like, hmm, which guy are you actually? So, Trump's disingenuousness

kind of worked for him because he was nakedly disingenuous, if that makes sense. And the voters trusted instinctually that he was going to be with them. And he didn't have to, you know, know all the details they've colored in for him. With DeSantis, the worry is that his disingenuous, the worry for him, not the worry for me, I don't fucking care, but is that the disingenuousness, you know, comes off as, man, I don't know which side he's on. Is Trump right about this? Trump's planted the seed that he's a Paul Ryan Republican. Is he a Paul Ryan Republican or a MAGA Republican? And for the median voter that doesn't pay as close attention to this stuff, that's vulnerability, right? I mean, he might still do well with the, you know, National Review crowd who really reads the policies and knows all this

and, you know, is very engaged. And it's like, guys, he's not, you know, he's MAGA. We watched him as governor. But for people who are getting introduced to him, you know, it could potentially be extremely damaging with that, you know, your soft kind of MAGA, I watch Fox from time to time voter. Well, also, I mean, with Trump, I mean, the fact that he was a bullshitter was basically baked in. Right. People accepted it. It was part of the clown show. Whereas, you know, people like Walker and DeSantis, you know, want to portray themselves as serious people.

And they're also a little bit stiff. They don't have the ability that Donald Trump has to basically, you know, turn on the dime and say, yeah, I was bullshitting you, you know, but this is what I do. I'm the only person that can pull this off because this is what will trigger it. I mean, whatever it is, he's able to pull this off. Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to

thebullwork.com and take a look around. Every day we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bulwark Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebulwark.com slash charlie. That's thebulwark.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together. I promise. So can we talk about Trump a little bit? Sure. I have to admit that I'm really reaching the point, you know, in this, you know, holy week of waiting for indictment.

A little bit of exhaustion from all of this. And so I understand that people, you know, might find it a little bit tedious. But attention must be paid. So overnight, you know, and some of you think you've heard this before because I think it's important for people to distinguish between, well, this has been happening for the last eight years. There's nothing new to this, you know, and some of you think you've heard this before, because I think it's important for people to distinguish between, well, this has been happening for the last eight years. There's nothing new to this, you know, or, or the people who go, no, you know, you Republicans have been doing this for 50 years and nothing's ever actually changed. No, this is new. In an overnight social media post, Trump predicted that direct quote here, potential death and destruction, unquote, may result if he is charged by the Manhattan District Attorney in connection with the hush money payments. Potential death and destruction.

As the New York Times notes, the comments from Mr. Trump made between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. on his social media site, Truth Social, were stark escalation in his rhetorical attacks on the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg. Now, what's interesting is that we reached a point where it was hard to imagine that he could escalate any further. You know, he's calling him a Soros-backed animal, referring to the African-American DA as an animal, Soros-backed. You kind of have a twofer there. You got a little bit of the anti-Semitism and the racism together. And then also posting a picture of himself, I kid you not, wielding a baseball bat next to an image of DA Bragg, suggesting that he was about to whack him because, of course, it's all about peaceful

protests. And then he goes on to say, what kind of person, Trump wrote, can charge another person, in this case, a former president of the United States who got more votes than any sitting president in history, you can tell he wrote this himself. And leading candidate by far, exclamation point, for the Republican Party nomination with a crime. When it is known by all that no, long caps, crime has been committed, and also that potential death and destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our country, why and who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truly, misspelled, hates the USA! How do you misspell truly?

T-R-O-O-L-I-E? No, T-R-U-E-L-Y. Got it. Sorry. I'm sorry to focus on the micro there. That feels like an easy speller. Well, because what you know is that these are Donald Trump's own two authentic thumbs at 1 a.m. Down in Mar-a-Lago.

In his silk sheets. In his little bathrobe. Sucking on his 20th Diet Coke of the day. As well as all of the bile. But you know, the thing about it is, is that it keeps escalating. And I think we all struggle with going, and I know I'm preaching to the converted here, but to say, people, would you just fucking stop and listen to what's going on here, what this man is saying?

And then, of course, you have the normies, you know, the Lindsey Grahams and the Marco Rubios, who are basically also saying, you know, this is crazy. This is nuts. This is going to tear the country apart. Well, this is going to be absolute chaos. Essentially, this entire political culture now accepting, in some ways, the legitimacy of threatening violence, death, and destruction and national catastrophe if Donald Trump is held legally accountable. I mean, we have moved into this. I mean, talk about the boiling frog. I mean, I don't know about you, but I am old enough to remember when a president of the United States who would just say, no, actually, no one's old. Literally, no one is old enough to remember when a president of the United States put out this kind of violent, toxic, bigoted bullshit. There's a lot there. I have two thoughts. One on the imminent threat, I guess.

It is real. And now I think maybe there's this possibility, right, that it's becoming white noise in MagaWorld as much as it is out here, right? And he sent like 34 of these bleats. Was it you that coined bleats? Did I steal that from you? Maybe. Yeah, I use bleats because...

I'm calling them bleats now. I stole it from someone. Well, I'm crediting you. I'm calling them bleets now. I was tired of calling them truths. Because it rhymes with tweet. Yeah. Okay. And I was tired of calling them truths, and fake Twitter is kind of long, and bleets, I think, has a nice ring to it. So, that's what I'm doing now. Bleets. He sent 34 of them yesterday or something like that. And, you know, they're in the middle of the night, they're during the day. And so, you know, are the people that are likely to get radicalized by this, it's hard for me to get inside the brain of such a person. But this might be a serious, not literally, you know, case a little bit like, are they going to really do death and destruction?

I don't know. But they could. And the threats are real. And anybody else when we talk about, you know, equivalence under the law and how the MAGA world is like, there's a two tiered system of justice. I mean, anybody else sending out pictures of DAs with them with a bat threatening them, you know, and they're going to get bail withheld. Like, these are direct threats. These are not even subtle. Literally anyone else, yes, if you or I tweeted out a picture of us wielding a bat against the DA or the judge, there would be actual and relatively rapid consequences for that. My guess is that because Donald Trump's name is Donald Trump, that won't happen.

But, you know, I'm just another example of that. I think that's a real acute threat. It's hard to know exactly the degree to which, you know, it's a threat, but it's not nothing. The other thing that kind of dawns on me periodically, maybe once a quarter, this is one of those days, it's like, assuming that the AI and AGI doesn't, you know, kind of overtake the brains of humans and that, you know, people still read in the future. Like, what are my grandkids? You know, going back and reading these bleats, like just utter lunacy. I mean, utter lunacy. And, you know, when you go back and read the presidential proclamations from the 20s, I mean, obviously, there's some racist stuff in

there. And you're like, God, these guys were more racist than I realized. But like, that the tenor, the tone, right? It's like, these are serious people, right, that are doing this. I mean, he sounds like a moron. They're the stupidest. You would block this person if it was a random person on Twitter in a second. If a person was saying this to you, if they're just reading you his bleats at a coffee shop, you'd be like, how do I get away from this person as quickly as possible? This is the thing that is hard to get inside the psychology of the Republican senators who are, you know, John Thune was out there this week still doing the, well, I think the Republican voters are going to be smarter than putting

him in there again. It's like, you realize your kids think that you're a fucking moron, right? Like they're reading the Donald Trump bleeds and they're like, how do you support this idiot? This is like totally this dangerous idiot buffoon. And I know this is not an original thought and that we've done this, but sometimes you do, you know, you just, you get myopic reading this stuff and thinking about, well, what does it mean for the presidential primary? And what does it mean for his indictment chances? And it's like, over the scope of time, like, it's hard to even put words to the level of stupidity that this will look like. Well, you know, perhaps your grandchildren will look back on this period and they will say, well, having just finished the definitive history

written by Dinesh D'Souza of this period, I don't know whether they... Donald Trump, guys, seems like he had something going. We're just completely going to rewrite it. So, you know, one of the great tweets of the day yesterday came from our colleague Will, who wrote, you know, a giant chutzpah award, please, to the hypocrites who denounced the idea of indicting a sitting president and who have since used that lack of indictment to argue that it would now be inconsistent or too late based on statute of limitations to indict the former president now. This is really a great point because you really have created this hermetically sealed universe in which Donald Trump, because his name is Donald Trump, can never be charged with anything. And by the way, we had a good friend who said, if his name was not Donald Trump,

these charges would not be brought, which I think fundamentally gets it completely backwards because if it was anyone else who had behaved in the way that he has behaved over the last 20 years, he would have been defrocked, excommunicated, charged in so many ways. Totally. The fact that he is Donald Trump, it's not just that we have a two or three tiered criminal justice system that treats billionaires differently. Donald Trump has skated legal accountability for decades. And now the fact that, you know, we know that the Justice Department believes it could not indict him when he was in office. And now for the same people who completely understood that to say, well, if it was serious, shouldn't he have been charged earlier on all of this?

Really? I suppose you can always have it both ways, but you can't have it both ways. Yeah. And it's the same crowd. It's the Tim Scott, Rob Bortman, Mitch McConnell, right? It's the people who are like, oh, we're the closet normals that are out there saying this right now. And they were the same people, to Will's point, that were like, we can't do this anymore. You know, that use the stupid, you know, kind of legal doctrine of why they couldn't convict him the second time through.

And these guys have all made their own bed. And Will is exactly right about that. It's unbelievably frustrating. We had the Kim Whaley piece, which was so good about the six different active investigations this guy is under. Well, something occurred to me that Kim was just talking about the criminal investigations. He also has multiple civil investigations that he's under. The E. Jean Carroll rape case, you know, is still active. You know, a civil case against Donald Trump. And this guy is up to his ears, is understating it in various investigations for all of his, you know, illegal and illicit behavior. And yet, still, they excuse him. Joe Perticombe and his PressFest newsletter, which is really good, folks should sign up for. He was over at Capitol Hill asking these guys about it. And Marco says to Joe, a prosecution of Trump would shred the country, rip it at its seams, Marco said.

What did he call January 6th? What did he call Donald Trump's whole seven years? And it was Marco who said we shouldn't give this guy the button. And Marco was right about that. It's Donald Trump that shred the country, that ripped it at its seams. And so how is not holding him accountable for that going to help mend things? It doesn't make any fucking sense. I'm on record as saying that, you know, I think that this is the least significant of the cases and maybe the weakest of the cases.

But having said that, you know, Amanda Carpenter had a great, great point in the bulwark yesterday, reminding us what happened to Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the House. Do you remember that story? I mean, when he was a high school wrestling coach back in the 60s and the 70s, it turns out that Hastert had molested at least four boys. Was he a drag queen at the time? I don't know. No? Oh, no. I thought it was just the drag queens.

No, it was not. Apparently, it was the Republican Speaker of the House. Oh, okay. And so when the FBI and the IRS began investigating him for making unusual bank withdrawals, everything kind of unraveled. He originally claimed he was taking out the money because he didn't trust the banks. That's bullshit. Basically, they later admitted that he made the withdrawals because he was paying off one of the boys that he had molested and the way it turned out he went to prison not for the molestation because there was a statute of limitations so he couldn't be prosecuted for actually molesting the boys even though he admitted to the abuse he was put away for illegally structuring hush money payments.

And he reported to prison in June 2016 and served 13 months of a 15-month sentence. So just a reminder that this is not the first time that we have had politicians who have been— Well, and there's also Edwards. And Edwards ends up getting acquitted, but he was charged with the same thing. Exactly. So, I want to go back to the threat of violence, because I don't think that we're going to have mass protests in Manhattan, although we don't know about all of that, mainly because I don't think MAGA folks are going to go to downtown Manhattan and screw around with the NYPD. But when you have all of this rhetoric about tearing the country apart and death and destruction, you don't need tens of thousands of people who are marching on the courthouse.

What percentage of Americans with bombs or guns does it take to create death and destruction and chaos, Mr. Miller? What percentage? 0.01. 0.00001. I mean, if you have a thousand people around the country, out of a country of 300 million, look, this is the danger. I mean, the lone wolf factors, you know, a few of these, you know, scream militia people. God knows what's going on on social media right now. So, you know, maybe, and I said this previously, you know, maybe we're fighting the last war. I think it's going to be a January 6th-like, you know, huge event.

It doesn't have to be that to be much, much more deadly. And once again, you would think that there would be grown-ups in the Republican Party outside of MAGA who would be, you know, the voices of calm saying this is exactly the moment to lower the rhetoric. And what is the bullshit we're getting from the Marco Rubios and the Lindsey Grahams, which in many ways amplify these kinds of bizarre violent threats from Trump? I mean, they kind of legitimize it because they're going, oh, he's right. You know, people are going to die.

People are going to blow shit up, which is a reason why we should be afraid to actually hold him accountable, which is not a really stirring endorsement of Donald Trump to say. Well, people, was it on Fox? I think it was Jesse Waters says, you know, these people are asking for another January 6th. It's like, wait a minute, wait a minute. I thought it was Antifa that said January.

I'm confused. In what way are they asking for another January 6th? I thought Donald Trump wasn't responsible for January 6th. I guess it's hard to keep the lies and the spin straight. It is very hard. Okay, so are we done with Trump for the moment? Anything else we want to say about him? I mean, I wish I was done with him for life. Yeah, I know. I wish if he did the T-bone steak of my dreams this afternoon, that'd be great. But you know, such is life. Has it dawned on you that we might be stuck with him for another six years? Have you got your head around that? Because I haven't. I can't. I have to tell you, Sarah tried to bring up on the Next Level podcast, like, let's walk through what a Trump administration would look like and who would staff it.

And I was like, let's not, actually. I'm not ready. I'm not ready. Give me three more months, okay? I want to get through the summer, and then I'll start writing fear porn for people because when you talk about tail risks and catastrophic end times i think that's that's what we're talking about we'll revisit labor day and i think we have to find a way to talk about it that will actually not sound like we've said it a thousand times in the past even though we have said it a thousand times in the past yeah the boy who cried wolf thing the guy who's always screaming in the street the end times are coming i'm ringing the bell the end times are coming. I'm ringing the bell. The end times are coming.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, we get it, buddy. We've been hearing that since 2015. Okay, I don't know whether you have a strong opinion about this or not. I was fascinated by the TikTok hearing yesterday in Congress where you had a really genuine bipartisan moment when Republicans and Democrats took turns just beating the shit out of the CEO of TikTok. I don't know where this is going. I don't know whether or not we're ever going to see a ban of TikTok. But isn't this kind of interesting that the one thing that is united Americans is beating the hell out of a Chinese

owned app? Thoughts? Yeah, it was nice. I guess I could see how it could be gratifying. It's beating the hell out of a Chinese-owned app. Thoughts? Yeah, it was nice. I guess I could see how it could be gratifying. It's interesting. Across from the hearing, I was at an event here in San Francisco for this group called the News Literacy Project. They do great stuff just about trying to, it's an important topic these days,

which is getting people to understand fake news from real. Casey Newton, who writes the platformer newsletter, was speaking about how this is going to be a challenge in the AI world. I don't know if he knew what was happening on the Hill, but unbeknownst to him, simultaneously as this was happening on the Hill, I watched some of it on tape later, he was saying to the room, you know, Congress really likes to drag CEOs up there to the Hill to rail on them, but doesn't like to actually do anything to regulate tech. And so I do feel that way about this, and that't like to actually do anything to regulate tech. And so I do feel that way about this,

and that in a lot of ways it's empty. It's like, these guys are carrying a big stick, but are they actually going to do anything with these threats? And the best case scenario with TikTok, and I've seen smart people push out, is that they kind of force a sale, right? That some American company buys it.

That seems like the best case scenario. Yeah, the best case scenario would be bombing the internet so that people would have to start over from scratch. But short of sale, right? That some American company buys it. That seems like the best case scenario. Yeah, the best case would be bombing the internet so that, you know, people have to start over from scratch. But short of that, this seems like the best answer because, you know, banning it, it's too popular. Too many people use it. It's just hard for me to imagine either of these political parties wanting to own actually shutting it down. And that's the way to piss off, you know, low engaged voters, right? He took my TikTok away. Okay, now I'm actually going it down. And that's the way to piss off low-engaged voters, right? He took my TikTok away. Okay, now I'm actually going to vote.

And I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That's just a practical matter. I just find that hard to believe. And so instead what we get is this kind of performative banging the table, yelling at the Chinese CEO. But there are legitimate concerns. I mean, there are legitimate national security concerns. I mean, this is not just a Chinese-owned company, but this is a Chinese-owned company that is required to share lots of data with the Chinese government. The Chinese government has the ability to access massive amounts of private data of Americans. I mean, we ought to be concerned about that right yeah well the thing that concerns me the most the data side i guess

kind of concerns me but it's like okay what's the chinese government going to do with all this i'm like they can they can barely just not exactly that efficient of a government like we we scare monger them but there's not a ton of great evidence over there they're doing a great job with various things tell the uyghurs what could possibly go wrong well the uyghurs are pretty weak i know and they do plenty of bad stuff, right? I'm just saying, look at their vaccine, look at their fake AI chatbot that they came up with. They're not exactly running on all cylinders over there. But that said,

the data, I guess, is concerning. And I guess there's unintended consequences. The thing that worries me, the more legitimate worry for me, is the algorithm. Right? And for people who have not spent any time on TikTok, A, it's extremely addicting and you know there's all this always all these worries that like targeted advertising was a little creepy

and it was a little weird and they knew what you wanted but i always kind of felt like the targeted ads i got were like mostly pretty bad like very rarely did they get me right the tiktok algorithm is so good at identifying what you like and what you're interested in and servicing stuff to it to make it sticky to to keep you, you know, following, right? So, I'm getting indie rock stuff and, you know, Nicole Jokic porn and, you know, etc., right? – Cat videos. – Yeah, I'm not into cats, but you know what I mean? Like, people get what keeps them on the app. Now, the algorithm, though, is a total black box. It's like, nobody knows why certain things are

surfacing, why certain things go viral. So, how easy it would be to surface things that would divide Americans. That would, I mean, you know, obviously if they do really stupid pro-China propaganda, people are going to figure it out. It's like, why is everybody getting this Chairman Xi is so strong video, right? But subtle, you know, more subtle ways to do what the Russia effort was in 2016. They could do that on a scale that is nothing like 2016, and that is so much harder to track, and so much harder to create guidelines and rules around. And I think that, to me, the algorithm is absolutely the most dangerous thing, and the reason to argue for some kind of government action, though I just think it's hard to know exactly what that is, or hard to believe that they'll actually do it.

Okay, so please explain something to me, because I'm unclear about this. It did seem as if Republicans and Democrats were equally riled up about TikTok. There were very few, if any, people who defended TikTok at that hearing. However, there is this small little caucus of uber-progressive friends of TikTok out there, and I'm not quite sure what they're doing. Joe Perticone, who writes our Press Pass newsletter, had a really good section on what's going on. There was this outdoor press conference led by Representative Jamal Bowman of New York, also brought along two of his colleagues, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, Robert Garcia of California. Bowman repeatedly brushed aside national security concerns about TikTok, drawing a misleading comparison to hate groups or foreign governments posting content and posted on a platform, to the power of the owner to manipulate all content on a platform

and to possess private user information is clearly an apples-to-hand grenade situation. Instead, these uber-progressives are framing this as a free speech issue, a case of racist partisan demagoguery. He said Republicans have been creating a red scare around China, and TikTok is just the latest target. It poses about the same threat that companies like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Twitter pose. Let's not be racist towards China. So what do we make of that? What's that about? What are the uber progs lining up behind the, you know, chai comms and TikTok?

Is this like a flashback to our youth? I mean, there's like... Yeah, don't make me tap the sign that says, criticizing the CCP is not racist, okay? I'm tapping it. Criticizing the CCP is not racist. Just say it again. And the CCP does a lot of terrible shit.

And like I said earlier, I guess if the argument being made is, hey, people are saber rattling to a degree that is overstating the threat, because like the Chinese have plenty of their own problems, right? There's a nuanced way to make that argument that I might be more sympathetic to. But China deserves unlimited criticism. And what they're doing, you know, both in their own country and in their influence abroad is unbelievably pernicious. And I don't, but Bowman is an Uber product. Garcia is a new rep actually out of California. I didn't perceive him to be actually in the Uber product caucus. I kind of thought he was a normie liberal. So it's unclear to me what kind of unites that little trio. It wasn't like the whole squad was there. So maybe there's something happening as an influence campaign behind the scenes. I mean,

I don't mean that as a foreign influence of it. I mean, it is, you know, just a standard lobbying influence campaign where they, you know, somebody that is on the TikTok payroll, you know, convinced them that this was unnecessary scapegoating. But look, I think that there are plenty of nuanced ways to say, hey, you know, we have concerns about YouTube, too. There are plenty of other social media concerns out there. But to go out there and say that it's racist to criticize the CCP or to try to equate the potential for Chinese control over this extremely powerful algorithm to the other problems of, you know, content being user-generated content is like stupid. It's moronic. This is where you have the hammer and nail problem and, you know, cue all of the comments that we're going to get now on all of this. But when you have the right using the term woke to describe absolutely everything they don't like, it gets old. And also, you know, having the

Jamal Bowman's and, you know, Mark Pocan's, you know, describe everything, you know, that, you know, about China as being racist, that feels like, you know, if you have a nail and a hammer, then, you know, I mean, sorry, what is it? If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail or... No, you have it right. It becomes this kind of, you know, just sort of noise in the background. And it is so knee-jerk and it's become so tiresome, but you're absolutely right. You know, everything you don't like is not woke. Let's tap that sign. Every time you criticize the Chinese, it is not racist. Let's tap that sign. Okay, can we just do that and then just move on? I don't think so.

I think that's probably false. That's probably a false wish. I think this is our world now. So, by the way, the one positive, I know it's a positive negative development this week. Okay. You know, since we're talking about AI and various things. You know, all of these, you know, fake picture, deep fake pictures of the Trump arrest and everything, which I'm sure you've looked at. They're fantastically good, but they're also a really good warning about what's coming now,

that the ability now to create fake images and videos, this is going to fry our brains. We just got to like strap in for it because you know how many bad actors. I don't think people are ready for how fast the change is coming. And this was what that luncheon that I was at at the News Literacy Project was about. And there's going to be some phenomenal, positive, unintended changes, right, that come out of all this, like as far as productivity and growth is concerned. You know, a lot of that's happening outside of the narrow space that we deal in of politics and campaign politics. And in our world, there are not going to be a lot of phenomenal positives that come out of it.

And there's going to be a lot of threats. And the voice side of the AI, you've seen the pictures out there that are, you know, whatever, they're kind of fun for now. And it's, you know, fun to play with. The voice stuff, I don't know if you've heard this. Some of my friends had access to the AI, you know, sort AI voice imitator apps that are coming out and have sent me audio of President Obama making fun of me, basically, as a troll. And they are good. I think the deepfakes, for a while people were like, I'm really concerned about deepfakes.

And every deepfake I saw was pretty obviously bad. Man, the audio, people are posting them on TikTok, speaking about another TikTok threat that's coming, of how easy it will be to make audio that makes it sound like Joe Biden is saying, I hate Christians or something, right? Whatever it is. That could be the story of the 2024 campaign, because you're right, we are not prepared for this. You know, our brains have not evolved that much in the last few months to be able to handle all of this. And we know how many bad faith actors there are out there. We know how quickly they can disseminate all of this. And so you can imagine October of 2024, you know, being absolutely flooded with videos and photos and audio clips that are designed to completely mislead people. And we'll succeed in doing so.

Yeah, and it will be hard to monitor. Okay, so give me some good news. So what is the answer? You know, all these people, you know, sitting around stroking their chins, talking about media literacy. What do we do about all of this? You know, I mean, we're going to have another commission, we're going to have another blue ribbon report. What? Yeah, I mean, this group is more focused on schools, right, and educating kids and stuff, right, which is important. And that's got to be part of the process, because this is the world that they're going to grow up in. How do you identify what is an AI-generated piece of content

from what is a human-generated piece of content and what are the implications? But that's not a 2024. That's not dealing with the acute problem. I think, honestly, the good news about AI is all the other stuff. The potential for alleviation of human suffering is immense, right? And just all the applications and things outside. If it doesn't lead to our complete annihilation as a species.

If it doesn't lead to our complete annihilation as a species, yeah, exactly. So, there's good news if we're not all killed by it, then there will be some upsides. I think we probably should leave it at that as we go into the weekend. What do you think? That sounds good. Is it already an hour up? This is so fun, Charlie. It's just like we're chatting in the morning and just like old pals,

an hour just flies by. We're talking about the end of society and Donald Trump's second term, and it's just been so joyful. We do have on Sunday, Jane Lynch on the Next Level podcast. So after you finish with this, Jane's a little more uplifting. Jane is hopeful, and she does some Sue Sylvester stuff from Glee. And she loves us. She loves you. She's a daily Jane Lynch, a daily Bulwark podcast

listener. Every day, it's just her and her cats. That makes my day. That absolutely makes my day. Even though the cat reference was gratuitous there. Tim, have a great weekend. We'll talk soon. See you, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark Podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. out.