The Bulwark Podcast - Tim Miller: Tennessee’s Idiocracy

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

The Tennessee GOP lives in such a bubble, they thought it was a good idea to expel two Black legislators, who've now become superstars. Plus, the GOP can't pivot from punitive abortion laws, DeSantis is fighting about the fight, and Trump's election criminality. Tim Miller joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Good Friday, so a blessed Easter for all of you. And because it is Friday, I am joined by my colleague Tim Miller from the West Coast. Good morning, Tim. Glad to be back in the Friday slot, Charlie. Happy Easter weekend, everybody. Don't have much to talk about, you know, not a lot happening in the news. Maybe we can just, I don't know, discuss Easter egg hunt strategies or something. We've had these conversations before about the weirdness of Friday is when you sit down on a Friday morning and you look back on the week and you go, wow, that was this week. So here we are, Friday, three days after the former president of the United States was arrested, read his Miranda rights. That was this week? That was this week. For all the people like, what does this mean for 2024?

Do you know that that's already not at the top of the news cycle anymore, which tells you something about the times that we live in? Look, I want to talk about that. I want to talk about what happened, get your view on the indictment, and where you think we're going on all of this, because I think that we have an interesting disagreement within our family about all of this. But can we just start with what happened in Tennessee last night? Let's just play a little soundbite from former Tennessee representative Justin Jones, one of the two African Americans who was expelled from that body for engaging in a peaceful protest over gun violence. This is what he said yesterday before the expulsion vote. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The world is watching Tennessee. The world is watching Tennessee. Because what is happening here today is a farce of democracy. What is happening here today is a situation in which the jury has already publicly announced the verdict. Just yesterday, the House Speaker took to national news

to condemn us and call for expulsion before any evidence was presented, before any trial happened. And so what we see today is just a spectacle. What we see today is a lynch mob assembled to not lynch me, but our democratic process. But it will not stand. Because no lie can live forever.

So where do we start with this, Tim Miller? I was watching this in real time yesterday while I was doing Nicole Wallace's show, and there's a lot to be outraged about it, but what really struck me was just the profound stupidity of the whole thing, the stupidity it burns. The fact that the Republicans decided that they were going to make martyrs of these three representatives, they kicked out the two African-Americans, they didn't come up with enough votes for the white woman. These are all very, very impressive individuals. They are quite eloquent. And they were utterly obscure before

yesterday. I mean, when you are a member of the minority party of the lower house of the Tennessee legislature, you are not a big deal. Your voice is not amplified. So what do Republicans do? They say, hold my beer. We're going to make these people into stars by stripping them of their seats and, of course, then disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters. And so help me with this, Tim. What was the thinking? What did Republicans think they were accomplishing? What did they do? How did they imagine that this made them look good? How did they imagine that this would advance their agenda? What's going on here other than idiocracy on steroids? Yeah, well, there's that. I think that there are a few things going on together. You know, I think that obviously you would be

wrong to not just start with the fact that I think that a lot of the motivation for this comes from just these members of the Tennessee House seeing a changing state, a changing country when it comes to race, when it comes to ideology, and wanting to fight back, right? And being in a little bubble where it is okay to make these kinds of derogatory comments about the people that are representing Nashville, the people that are moving into the state, the younger folks that are in the big metros in Nashville and Memphis. And I saw the interview with the speaker. He had a couple of disgusting interviews, which you mentioned in your newsletter about comparing this to what they did to the January 6th insurrection, which we could talk about later.

But the one that I was thinking of was about how he was saying that his caucus, the middle of his caucus, he used the Kevin McCarthy defense, right? The beating heart of my caucus wanted this. They didn't want censure. They wanted to expel these people. Well, why? Why? Because they have this angst.

They have this bigotry about the fact that they want to put down the younger black representatives, the people that they don't feel like represent real Tennessee. I think that you get into this bubble in the good old boys club where this kind of stuff is okay to say. And I was shocked. Did you see, there's this video of the state rep who is speaking to Justin Pearson. He sounds like Kevin Spacey in A Time to Kill, like the evil racist Southern lawyer parody. And he sounds like a parody he's up there going that's why you're standing there you know because that tenter tantrum that you threw for attention and uh well you're getting it now and it's like you could just tell you this he did everything but call him boy and he's like pointing at him and mocking him with this accent and it's like how do you think that this is a winner? Well, I can answer that because it is a winner in his bubble, in his community. And so I just think that that is the first thing here.

I think the other thing that you just have to mention is there is this comfort that has grown within the party on anti-democratic actions, right? I mean, there's the line about the authoritarian impulse like that kind of exists within everybody. It exists within, you know it might have first been written about the left really and how to have there's like a totalitarian impulse at times within socialism right there's this authoritarian impulse that you have to fight through norms and institutions well the impulse has moved to authoritarian action donald trump was we saw from him in the lead up to january 6th all this stuff trickles down all this stuff trickles down. All this stuff trickles down. Like once it becomes okay to act on that authoritarian impulse, like you shouldn't be surprised when people start acting on it, right?

When there aren't internal forces to rein it in and to stop it. And we saw that there aren't within the Republican Party right now. And so, you know, I think that this notion 20 years ago, you know, during, you know, the 90s, I think that like this notion that you would have said, oh, we are going to cancel. Cancel seems like not strong enough of a word. We're going to eliminate three members. Only two, it turns out. Just the two black guys. Not Gloria Johnson, the older white woman. We're going to eliminate two members and have these two districts who voted to represent them. You know, we're going to kick them out of the body so that these two districts don't

have representatives right now for the crime of just speaking out. I mean, that would have been preposterous, right? But once you open the door to these sort of anti-democratic things, you shouldn't be surprised when you get the idiocracy version of it down at the lower levels. I think you're right. And you connect the dots here that what you have here is the GOP id, the beating heart, what the base really demands. And they want vengeance. They want retaliation.

They want vindictiveness. That's number one. Number two, this bubble that they live in, this hermetically sealed world, including the gerryerrymandered districts where they think that this is what you have to do. And they lose any perspective of how they look to anyone from the outside. And then on top of that, you supercharge that with giving these people a super majority. And that's where you really get to it. Because there is that moment where you're sitting around going, well, you know, we have a super majority. What are we going to do with it? You know, if not now, you know, when, if we don't use the power when we have it, we can do this, therefore, we will do this. And by the way, I think that's a danger in a lot of states, including Wisconsin,

which we can get to in a moment. So let's just back up a minute, what these three did. And I was really, by the way, struck by how eloquent they were, how calm they were. When they tell their story, the teacher who talks about what it was like being in a school when there was a school shooting, she was the one they didn't have enough votes to expel. But the others, Pearson and Jones, are very, very, very impressive young men, and they are quite young men. So what did they do? After the mass shooting in Nashville, where three small children

were murdered, three adults were murdered, there were protests. There were peaceful protests at the Capitol where young people primarily came and demanded action. The Republican legislature was apparently so arrogant that they never let the minority speak. There was an interesting little soundbite where normally the speaker just basically says that we have 70 plus votes. We're not even going to let you speak on the floor. So what happened yesterday was unusual that you even had Democrats allowed to speak. So they weren't allowed to bring up anything about gun violence. They weren't allowed to talk about it. They were gaveled down. So what did they do? The three of them stood in

the well of the house and there were people in the galleries who were chanting. They joined in the chants and one of them had a megaphone. That's all they did. They didn't beat anybody. They didn't break any windows. They didn't poop on the podium or anything. No police officers were injured in this particular thing. There was no tasing. So this demonstration came after that deadly Covenant shooting just a few days earlier. Now, technically, it's true. This is a violation of House rules and decorum. You know, that happened, okay?

It was a peaceful demonstration, but it violated the rules. Now, in a rational world, the good old boys could have fined them, right? Or they censured them, or they could have written them a tough letter of reprimand. Or maybe they could have just ignored the whole thing and maybe talked about the dead kids. But instead, they rush ahead with resolutions to expel the elected representatives and disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in two of the state's biggest cities. And that's where I'm going. The stupidity of this, that they're doubling down.

And now these three are going to be everywhere, right? I mean, they're going to be on television. They're going to be on social media. They're going to raise money. They have created superstars because they decided they were going to martyr them. And that's where I said on Morning Joe this morning, I just wish I was in the room just to listen to how they explain this and whether

they thought that this was smart, whether they thought this was going to help defend the Second Amendment rights. I mean, what's going on there other than just that reptilian id let loose because you have a super majority and you can do it. I mean, look, they're in a hermetically sealed bubble where they're told that they're right all the time. I mean, they're in another universe. We're not that far from the Parkland shooting, right? After the Parkland shooting, the Florida legislature, which I guess wasn't a supermajority, but was a very heavy Republican majority, came together and they passed some compromise laws. You toughened up some school security, red flag laws got passed there. You know, you did what reasonable

legislatures do. You know, maybe that wasn't the perfect policy, wasn't what, you know, every single person would have wanted, but, you know, you made incremental progress to say, hey, I need to try to do something. In Tennessee, because of the supermajority, they don't feel like that they have to do that. And it actually, you know, starts to grind on them that they think that these presumptuous, you know, young black men, you know, the young black men, right? Like, like want to talk, you want to offer something else when they got a plan, they got a plan, we're going to arm teachers, we're going to arm teachers who we don't trust to, to determine what books that they're allowed their students to read, but they can, you you know bring an ar into the classroom to defend the

kids if a school shooter coming and the whole thing is preposterous but they're not being challenged there's no one internal challenging and why is that okay well two things one that we've talked about ad nauseum the extremism within the republican party that a lot of the more reasonable voices have been pushed out over the past eight years that's one reason that there there's nobody in the room asking, why are we doing this? The other reason that you mentioned is gerrymandering. Gerrymandering, I think, sometimes can be overstated as an issue because we're gerrymandering ourselves. In a lot of ways, sometimes the reason why the numbers aren't fair is because of the way that we've all self-selected. But in certain places, it is really bad. In Tennessee, they gerrymandered themselves as supermajority. I didn't realize this. Tennessee

is not a swing state. So I don't pay as close attention to the congressional districts as I do other places. Did you know that Nashville does not have a Democratic representative? The county, Nashville, Davidson County went 65% for Joe Biden. They carved Davidson County up into three districts that go out then into rural Tennessee. So Nashville, despite being the capital, despite being the biggest city, the most popular city, doesn't have a representative. Let's just be honest. They don't have representation in Nashville. They've decided to cut Nashville up so that rural folks represent it. Same thing happened at the state legislative level. Just this last round, you know, they cut through.

Now, the districts are smaller, so you have a few Nashville representatives, you have a few Memphis, a few Knoxville. But they cut them all up in such a way that they gained five more seats, and they literally drew themselves a supermajority, right? And so, okay, again, had they not drawn themselves a supermajority, had they forced themselves to at least communicate with, you know, people who represented suburban Knoxville, you know, like have reasonable folks around, then maybe this wouldn't happen. So, you know, you add the structural issues that they've put in place, the anti-democratic structural issues, you add in the overt bigotry, you add in the, you know, you can just sense their, you know, cultural nervousness, right, over the fact that like they're losing, you know, something that they think that Tennessee should be, they project it should be in their head, the old MAGA mindset.

And this is what you get. You end up in the wake of this school shooting, like having your big action be, oh, we're going to arm teachers and we're going to kick out two people out of the legislature. I don't, I do think the stupidity of Burns, Charlie, but I think for me, the more acute thing is that that's a medium-term issue. In the short term, you know, they have the nuts, to use the poker term, right? So maybe that's another reason why they don't care that it's stupidity. Like, they're not worried about it. Tennessee's not a swing state, you know? Tennessee's not going to go blue. Yeah, but it's no longer just a Tennessee issue, and this plays around the country. And I guess this goes to that larger question of, is the Republican Party just going to continue doubling down on the crazy and the extreme? By the way, before we move off of Tennessee, it is amazing what has happened to Tennessee and to the Republican Party in Tennessee. I mean, this is a Republican party that used to give us people like Howard Baker,

Bill Frist, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker. Now we have people like Marshall Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, and the good old boys that you saw in the legislature. By the way, the picture of the house, it looks like something out of 1947, just in terms of the demographics of it. The whole thing felt like it was out of 47. It really did feel that way. Okay, so- We didn't sit on it enough. Let's just sit on it was out of 47. It really did feel that way. Okay, so. We didn't like sit on it enough. Let's just sit on it for one more second. Sure. Like that they voted to expel the two black people.

Right. That they did not expel Gloria Johnson. Real men of genius. I mean, you said the stupidity of her. It's like, for me, it's like, what? What are you doing? They planned this out so carefully. You could just not paint a more caricatured version of racist Southern Republicans. I know. And there's nobody to tell them to stop. So anyway,

I wanted to focus on the substance of this first because the substance is so bad. But I just like the optics of doing that. I was texting with a friend who had worked in Tennessee politics, and I was like, you know, it was kind of like when the Don't say gay bill first backed in Florida, where I texted some friends and I was like, is this really happening? Like, are they really going to expel these people? And they realize how dumb it looks. They're like, yeah, they're really going to do it. I'm like, are you sure? And just in my head, I keep being like, cooler heads have got to prevail, right? This is too stupid. It's too overtly racist. There's no way. And then, then not only did they do it, but they let the white lady off

the hook. I mean, it's just like, oh my God. Anyway, sorry. I was on with somebody who is, I think, overthinking it. And I think, by the way, there's way too much overthinking going on. We can talk about that at some point, where you're saying, man, maybe this is part of this Machiavellian plot that they've come up with, just so chaos. And I'm listening, and he went on, blah, blah, blah, for a very long time. And I'm listening and he went on and blah, blah, blah for a very long time. And I'm thinking, you know, nobody in that chamber knows how to spell Machiavelli. I mean, these are not great geniuses here. This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make

sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I'm sure you're going to find my free Morning Shots newsletter a great companion for understanding what is happening to us. And every morning as I prepare for this show, I share with my readers what's trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day. To sign up for my free Morning Shots newsletter, go to thebullwork.com slash morningshots. That's thebullwork.com slash morningshots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon.

So this takes place the same week that Republicans suffered this really catastrophic defeat in Wisconsin, a swing state where most elections are decided by 20,000 votes. The liberal candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court won by 11 points, more than 200,000 votes. I mean, it was a landslide. And I think it's pretty obvious what the major issues were. It was dominated by abortion, but maybe a close second, you know, concern about election denialism and democracy. You had Dan Kelly, who was the great conservative hope who'd actually been advising the Republican Party on the fake elector scheme. But in any case, you have this huge repudiation of the Republicans on abortion, on election denialism and democracy. You're seeing tremendous, really alarming erosion of Republican conservative votes in the democracy. You're seeing tremendous, really alarming erosion

of Republican conservative votes in the suburbs, you know, juiced up Democratic base. The numbers in the wow counties were way down. The conservative lost the so-called bow counties, Brown County, out of Gamey County, Winnebago County. But what's really interesting to me is the fact that there's no indication that the Republican Party in Wisconsin or any place else is about to pivot away from the things that are killing them. In fact, if anything, they are at ramming speed on punitive abortion bills. They continue to embrace Donald Trump, which means they're going to spend the next two years on election denialism and sedition and having to deal with all of that. And on the gun issue, and we haven't even talked about sort of the underlying substance of all of this, the Tennessee story underlines that this is a party that is not even willing to seriously

have a discussion or a debate about rational guns. And I'm sorry. I know that it's kind of the shtick here to be dark and negative, but this is an amazing moment where the Republicans are basically saying, yeah, we are stuck on stupid. We're not going to be moving on, and we're going to keep doing this shit over and over again. Can I just read you something?

Yeah. Because it's Good Friday, and I know that there's, you know, Axios did a kind of a rundown on the GOP's epic losing streak. First, 2018 House elections were a disaster for Republicans. Democrats had a net gain of 40 seats, largest gain since post-Watergate. Then Trump lost the presidency. Three. Next, Republicans blew two runoff elections in Georgia. Then Trump lost the presidency. Three. Next, Republicans blew two runoff elections in Georgia, lost control of the United States Senate. Number four. Then

Republicans won the legal fight over abortion as Trump appointed justices help ensure the reversal of Roe versus Wade. But the GOP lost a series of political battles over it afterwards. A reflection of polls indicating that most Americans support abortion rights. GOP state legislatures have shown no sign of slowing their push to enact stricter bans, etc., generating the political backlash. Number five, Republicans put high-profile election deniers on the 2022 midterm ballot in key races only to see several lose winnable elections. Number six, Republicans blew a chance to control the Senate by nominating too many hard-to-elect-in-a-swing-state Trump facsimiles. Their hopes of a big House majority were erased for the same reason. Number seven, just this week, progressive Democrats triumphed

in two of this year's most consequential elections, Chicago and then in Wisconsin. Democrat-backed Janet Protasewicz flipped the state Supreme Court, two liberals in a landslide. Number nine, Trump is driving an agenda dominated by vengeance and victimhood, diverting Republicans from the inflation and crime-centered messages that helped them in the midterms. So reality check, Trump, if anything, is stronger and more likely- Are you tired of all the winning yet, Charlie? Well, this is my point is you begin to, and then you say, okay, now extrapolate forward, given what happened in Wisconsin and how you're seeing Republicans act in Tennessee. And it's basically, they're looking at all this environment going, yeah, this is fine. Give us more of all of that.

Yeah, they're staring down the barrel. The beatings will continue until morale improves. Exactly. So I've got kind of a mixed take on this. My first thought, which is a little bit less giddy for our Democratic listeners, which I'll start with, which I think kind of explains all this, is it goes back to this structural conversation, right? Like, we do have a structure that is allowing a minority party to punch above its weight, both in the Electoral College, but also in the Senate. And so, as we're looking ahead to 2024, the Senate map for Democrats is just awful, right? And they've got incumbent

senators up in these in Montana and Ohio and West Virginia, these very red states, you know, we'll see if any of them can hang on, or if all of them even still run in the case of Manchin. So, you know, the Republicans might very well, almost certainly, frankly, will gain in the Senate in 2024. You would think so. Yeah, you would think so, just based on these structural matters, even if they keep doing the stupidest possible stuff. And so, okay. Maybe. So then, right, so then it's hard to reinforce change, right?

Like, for the party to really decide, okay, we need to change, you know, they would need to believe that they lost, which many of their voters don't, about 2020. They've been convinced it was stolen. Right. And, like, the losses would need to be so clear-cut as to shake them. What made the Democratic Party change? And the biggest ideological shift that they made was between 88 and 92 when Clinton ran. I mean, that was three landslide elections, right? That's not where we're in. So I think that part of that, there's part of a structural reason why the Republicans are kind of keeping going along to get along. That said, the other side of this coin is like, it would be so easy for them to fix it. I mean, it would just be so easy if they just had thrown Trump overboard and just had stuck with like, I don't know, 20 week abortion ban or whatever they were pushing, you know, 10 years ago. It's just because of the nature of our cyclical politics, because of inflation,

because of an 82-year-old incumbent president. Like, there would be a lot of reason for optimism on the Republican side. And yet they have these two albatrosses, Donald Trump and his election conspiracies, and pushing these very early, very extreme six-week no-exception abortion bans. We're not even talking about this because so much happened this week. But just this week, Ron DeSantis passes a six-week abortion ban and constitutional carry, so-called constitutional carry, you know, which means you can just carry around a gap without having to get a license. And so, how do you go into Wisconsin, you know, go into Georgia, go into Arizona in 2024 and say, hey, we're going to be pushing a draconian six-week abortion ban with, you know, maybe we'll throw a, you know, Texas-style bounty hunter on top of it. And we're either going to

have Trump or we're going to have somebody that's a Trump clone who talks about how much they love Trump. The math gets very, very hard for them. And, you know, Wisconsin and Michigan, these are states that Trump won in 2016. Time and again, they've rejected. Now, Ron Johnson is the exception to this. So there is one exception in Wisconsin. Michigan has just swept the feet, you know. Not this one. We could talk about that. You don't need to rub it in, okay, Charlie?

They've had a full sweep get out the broom in Michigan. You know, the number of states that Republicans can win, you know, becomes dwindling. So that is, I think, the rose-colored glasses side of this thing for Democrats. I mean, you know, you can overread these Supreme Court elections, but a 200,000-person swamping, I just don't know how you can look at that and say, okay, what we really need to do is double down on election denialism and six-week abortion bans. I just don't think that's what the people of Wisconsin are looking for. Okay, so you are our superstar political consultant here. And in politics, there are pivots you can make. There are ways you change your message.

There are ways that you respond. There's plenty of time between April of 2023 and November of 2024 to fix these problems. Sure. But I don't think they can for the reasons that we've been discussing. Because of this hermetically sealed bubble they're in. Because, in fact, they're held hostage by the extreme elements of their base because they cannot break free of Donald Trump. So is there any indication, is there any prospect that Republicans will wake up and go, you know, we really have to fix our messaging on abortion.

We really have to do something about that. I mean, yeah, they may. Here in Wisconsin, they tried to, the assembly tried to pass an amendment to that 1849 ban that would have added exceptions for rape and incest. And the militant pro-lifers shot it down and the Senate said it wouldn't take it up. So they had nothing going into the election. That's not going to change between now and next year. If Trump is the nominee, it's going to be all grievance all the time, relitigating 2020. It's going to be all about election denialism. I don't see them taking more moderate positions on guns, any of these things. And to your point, they're watching Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin slipping further and further away. You know, perhaps, you know, Georgia, Arizona. There was once a time when Colorado was in play for them.

Who knows what's going to happen in places like North Carolina and Virginia as well. I mean, there is a playbook. This is the thing, and it's not a playbook probably that a lot of our listeners would like. But if you just look at what Brian Kemp and Glenn Youngkin did, and even DeSantis, DeSantis, when he ran in the midterm, let's keep in mind, he didn't talk about Trump that much. Remember, Trump kind of knew he was going to run against him. And so, you know, he didn't have to do the election denial thing because Trump had won Florida. And then if you look at Kemp in Georgia, who ran away from Trump,

DeSantis, when he ran in Florida, you know, at that time, the, you know, abortion bill was, you know, much more in the middle of the road, right, than a six-week abortion ban, of unpopular opinion. You know, they focused on these other issues, right, like schools, economy, COVID, inflation. Like, these were winners, right, for Republicans in a number of key states and a blowout winner really in georgia and florida and yet they moved completely away from that maybe that's not tenable in a national environment because of the nature of a presidential campaign is just different than the nature of a state campaign i understand that but the fact that there's no one out there trying to recruit brian kemp or glenn youngkin into this race and to say, hey, maybe somebody should run on, it's

time to move away from Trump. And, you know, maybe we should only have a 20 week abortion ban. And, oh, by the way, I'm going to focus on the economy and getting better schools and, you know, time to time I'll work with that. Probably that person would lose that the fact that no one is even trying that attempt, I just think shows how deep inside their own belly button the Republican consultant class is and how just scared they are still of their own voters and Donald Trump. So let's talk about the Donald Trump indictment, which did take place only a few days ago. Are you sure that was this week? Do you have your calendar out? Because I swear to God, we talked about this last week.

I double checkedchecked it. Okay. He did his quasi-perp walk on Tuesday. And, of course, look, there's a division of opinion about how strong the indictment is, whether it helps him, whether it hurts him. You know, our colleague Amanda Carpenter has a great piece in the Bul here, because there is a connective tissue that links together everything that's happening in Georgia with the Department of Justice and in New York, which is they all involve Donald Trump's election criminality. And I think this is really a good point. All of the things that he's done in order to try to influence elections, corrupt elections,

overturn elections, you know, from trying to, you know, extort and even going influence elections, corrupt elections, overturn elections, you know, from trying to, you know, extort and even going back to, you know, the first impeachment. And I listened to all of the debates from all of the pundits going back and forth from, you know, you who were celebrating with mimosas, I believe, the other night. Other people who decided that they were going to Nodon, sackcloth, and ashes. I'm sorry. I just don't see how 34 felony indictments with pending indictments coming from Georgia and the Department of Justice actually are anything other than really bad news for the Republican Party. Maybe good news short term for Donald Trump in the base, but you want to talk about a nightmare scenario for them because maybe

we're just overthinking this. The guy is toxically unpopular, and it's hard to imagine that all of these indictments and perp walks and arraignment and maybe mugshots are going to convince a large number of swing voters in these swingy states to go, hey, I didn't support him before, but now I really kind of like the idea of Trump 2.0. Okay, where do you come down on all of this? Yeah, I mean, you and I are aligned on this. And again, I just think it shows a complete lack of imagination among the Republican consultant class. There's a handful of them left that hate listening to this podcast. So, you know, take my advice for what it's worth. But like this very people who now, you know, if you look at these polls who are like

now rallying to Donald Trump's side, like it wasn't that long ago that they were expressing an openness to wanting to move on. Right. And I just, I can't imagine that the type of person, you know, you caricature these people, you just like imagine what's, you know, you think about the stupidest person that you see on the, on the Street interviews by Jordan Klepper at MAGA rallies. But they're just regular MAGA people out there. And they're being told this now by Fox. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone is coming to his defense.

Everyone is saying we've got to stand by our man. Everyone is saying this helps him. Does it have to? I really don't think so. I don't know. We'll see. Maybe he's locked this whole thing down. Maybe it's just that his opponents don't think so. I don't know. We'll see. Maybe he's locked this whole thing down. Maybe it's just that his opponents are too weak and that it doesn't

matter. I think that's very possible. But I just land with you. I mean, 34 counts. I thought Ben Wittes did a very nice job earlier this week on the podcast of explaining why it was serious. And then he has so much coming down in his head. We talked a little bit on the next level, because Sarah was a little more negative on this. I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I was like, what if we inverted this? What if the Fonny Willis one had come first and then the Stormy one had come? Then what would have happened? Well, in my opinion, the same thing with the Fox people and the Republicans would have said this shows that they're coming after him.

Now we got to defend him. So they're always going to say that. And I just think that until there are conservative leaders, which is apparently going to be never, maybe after he dies, you know, who are willing to go out there and say, hey, gold watch time for this guy. Like, look at all these indictments, you know, then maybe the Republican Party will be stuck with them. But it's certainly not good for somebody's political brand to constantly have court dates for multiple different investigations. Like, I'm sorry, I know that everyone's brains are broken because, you know, the statutory rape that Donald Trump committed apparently helped him in the 2016 primary. So,

you know, there are things that we've been surprised by. But I promise you, you know, we have enough evidence now. You just listed all the losses in Axios. Indictment after indictment, investigation after investigation, court hearing after court hearing is not good for Donald Trump. I'm sorry. And I'm going to pop more champagne every time it happens. I have deep sympathy for people who have PTSD from 2016. We understand this. We are gentle. But PTSD is not a strategy going forward. It is not a philosophy of life. It is not necessarily the tool that you need to use to analyze everything is going to happen. I also understand that it is a completely rational thing to say that if something has happened in the past, you know, numerous times, that it will continue to happen, you know,

that bad things happen and it helps Trump. I get that. But as I wrote yesterday in my Morning Shots newsletter, there's also such a thing as overlearning the lessons of the past. And this is called another context, fighting the last war, assuming that every war will be the same, and it will turn out the same. And it's just wrong, because sometimes things change. And I understand that after seven years, you know, having done the Lucy with the football thing so many times, you know, and listen to the talking

head said, well, the walls are closing in now, the walls are closing in now. But this is new. It's new because you have this guy out there who is throwing out the threats, the insults, the false information, as he has done in the past. But now he is an accused felon under the jurisdiction of the criminal courts, and there will be more that's new, that changes the environment here. But there is the collective action problem of Republicans. So I've been spending a lot of time the last couple of days talking to Wisconsin Republicans who are really freaked out by what happened. I mean, you know, very few of them are in any denial about how horrible this election was. But it is interesting that there is a formula out there that they're trying to figure out a way to finesse, which is we need to stand by Donald Trump in this, you know,

moment of his victimization, but we have to move on from the guy. You know what I'm saying? Is that they understand that politically they can't separate themselves from him at the indictment, but they all know that it is absolutely insane to go into next year with this guy. But the problem is, maybe that's unfinessable. If you're not willing to break with him, you're going to be stuck with him. There is an obvious option, which is to be like, and again, I'm about to say this, I'm going to wash my mouth out with soap. This is not what I think. I'm just offering strategic advice to Republicans who want to get off Trump. Is it really that hard to say, man, I think what Donald Trump did for the Republican Party is great, and I'm so happy

we're more nationalists now, and we hate immigrants more now, and he set us on the right path, but like, boy, we need to win, and the real enemy is the libs, and the real enemy is communist Joe Biden, and in order to beat them, in order to solve inflation and to secure our border, we need to actually win some elections again. And Donald Trump has too much happening right now. And maybe that's because people were unfair to him and the media was really unfair to him. But we need to live in reality and let's move on.

Are they sure that won't work? I don't know. Maybe it won't work. But why nobody's trying that, I just don't understand. It feels like it's worth a shot. And instead of just like whispering to Charlie Sykes about how we need to move on for eight straight years as they go older and older, like the image of Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, you know, aging, you know, maybe try something new. How about that? That's just one idea. One man's idea. There's another thing that I'm picking up talking to a lot of these folks, of course,

because there was a lot of speculation that Republicans in Wisconsin would use their super majority in the state Senate, maybe to impeach one of the liberal Supreme Court justices, including Janet Perisiewicz, who was just elected. And so I made some calls. How serious is all of that? And I get a very mixed message on this, which is that the more responsible normals will say, no, there's no way. There's absolutely not. We're not even going to talk about it. No chance. And then they'll take

a deep breath and saying, yeah, except certain people are talking about it. And then they'll name somebody. And yeah, I was talking to so-and-so and they just brought up the issue that maybe we got to hold this over our head. Maybe we got to do this. And it's like, are you kidding me? And so they're pretty much set. And I think they're sincere when they say they have no intention of doing it. But here's the thing. People are angry. They're scared. They're pissed. And we know what happens when the base gets stoked up, when they get jacked up. And if the base begins to demand that they act, and let's say that the Orange Caligula down in Mar-a-Lago begins putting out bleats, saying, what's wrong with those rhinos up in Wisconsin? Are they going to allow these radical lefties to throw out everything they want?

Are they a bunch of cucks? There will be tremendous pressure on them. And I have to say that it's a coin flip whether or not they'll stand up to it, because they haven't shown much willingness to stand up in the past but we will see i'll believe it when i see it i'm standing up to it because here's a party where i think it's a mistake to listen to what their leaders say if you don't know what the base is going to say because the leaders are not actually leaders they're followers they are in a lot of ways you're know, kind of exacerbating the problem, right, by continuing to tell the base what they want to hear, you know, and giving them more ammo to hit their leaders over the head with. Again, just going back to this Trump thing on the victimization thing, and there's been some

debate about this even among never Trumpers and center left viewers about whether, oh, you know, is this exact indictment? Is Donald Trump a victim? Is this being politicized? There's another imaginary world, one that we don't live on, where responsible people spoke up and could say in the same breath, I'm not sure about the specifics of this indictment, whether it reaches the level. But let's be honest, Donald Trump has not been a victim of the justice system. He's taken advantage of the justice system over the years. And this is a man who has so many different crimes that he's committed. He's under so many different investigations. There are so many women who have accused him of assault. And he literally said on that famous tape,

if you're a star, they let you do it. What is the do it in that thing? Grab women's pussies against their will, right? That's what the do it was, sexual assault. If you're a star, they let you do it. So, he has not been a victim of the justice system. And I, you know, I wrote that thing this week about Jordan Hamlet, who's this guy in Louisiana and, and what he did was, was wrong. He took Donald Trump's social security number and put it into an IRS form to see if it would spit back out Donald Trump's tax returns. Shouldn't do that. There were two other people that did that and they got probation and maybe that's appropriate. Losing a license, that's appropriate. You know, there are appropriate ways to handle this.

But how did he get treated? Well, Trump had just got elected, right? And so there are all these district attorneys that want to please the new boss. You know, there's some concerns in the FBI about how this guy might have tried to interfere with the election, which were all overblown. This guy gets railroaded. He's on house arrest for 12 months. He has 15 months in a prison. So he spends a year

and then two years and three months without his freedom for putting Donald Trump's social security number into a form. How does that look compared to how Donald Trump has been treated by Alvin Bragg and Fannie Willis and Jack Smith and over and Robert Mueller? There are plenty of people out there who get treated poorly by the justice system. You don't have to go out on Fox News and say that Donald Trump is one of them because he isn't. And so all these guys going out there and saying that over and over again and saying, oh, why can't we get off Trump? We can't get off Trump because you're telling all these voters that he's a victim. And maybe they all would have believed it anyway because Donald Trump would say it, but it sure isn't helping that they're echoing him. No, it is not helping.

But no, I think the most amazing thing about Donald Trump being in court is that it's taken this long for Donald Trump to be in the dock. He's been skirting the law for 20 or 30 years. And the notion that somehow a billionaire former president is being treated unfairly. Well, look, we have a two or three tier criminal justice system. And if you or I had committed, you know, even one-tenth of the acts of fraud that he has, we would have been fingerprinted and we would have had a mugshot. Ankle bracelets. Ankle bracelets. So let's talk about collective action. I don't want to spend a lot of time on

this, but Ron DeSantis, we're hearing now, has a plan B that maybe his people are thinking maybe we won't go for a big splash early on. Maybe we'll go for the long term to run against Donald Trump. Help me with this. But in the past, every candidate for president that focuses on the sort of the long run ends up losing and disappearing before you even get to the long run. Except Joe Biden, I guess, right? That's maybe the exception that proves the rule. That's true. Our current president. I don't know how good the sourcing is on that story. The actions that DeSantis has taken over the past few weeks, I think it's good reason for people to question him. We talked about how he has the sniff of Scott Walker on a podcast a couple weeks ago.

The thing he is going for him, he's got a good elevator pitch, but he's not giving it anymore. His elevator pitch is, I'm a winner. I own the libs. I know how to do it. The other guy, you know, might talk a big game, but you've seen the results. That's his pitch, but he's not giving it and he can't give it right now, I guess, because he's been bullied by MAGA media into having to stand by Trump's side and threaten that he, you know, he would break the constitution and stand in the way of New York if Donald Trump wanted to evade extradition. That stuff's all crazy. The other thing, you see this this week, the Disney thing, which I just have to do one little riff on because it's so perfect for the bulwark. It's just like, DeSantis now is so wrapped around the ax on this Disney thing. He announces yesterday that he wants

to get back at them, right? Obviously, because for folks who don't remember, like Disney pulled the rug out from under him and he thought that he was taking over the Reedy Creek board, but the old Reedy Creek board passed like a resolution that said that actually the new board has no authority until like after King Charles's last progeny is dead or something like that. And so DeSantis says, okay, no, I'm going back after them. So what did he say?

He's out there yesterday saying, we're putting tolls on the road to get to Disney World. We're going to increase the taxes on the hotels on Disney's property. And it's like, wait a minute, this is conservatism? What was Disney's crime? Nobody can even remember what Disney's crime was anymore. Like what started this all? It's just he's in this stubborn pissing match with a company that he was mad at.

I really do believe that the origin of this is that there were two girls kissing in the Buzz Lightyear movie. He was mad about that. He was mad that Disney had put out one press release about the don't say gay bill. A million companies put out press releases about bills all the time. And so he's mad about one press release and one lesbian kiss. And now he's increasing taxes and tolls on the company because they exercise their free speech rights. Like this is conservatism. And by the way, who pays those taxes and those tolls other than families? I mean, it's like, what? I'm going to disagree with you a little bit too here. I think Ron DeSantis' War on Disney is a complete political winner because there are millions of parents of small children who are

sitting there going, you know, please, Ron DeSantis, I want you to crack down on Disney. Ron DeSantis is the only person that can save me from having to watch Frozen. I'm so sick of that song. I'm so, let it go. I can't hear it one more time, Ron. Can you make it stop? I am being sarcastic here. This is one of those, you know, being in a bubble things where, you know, he's having a fight and he's being, you know, ginned up by people like Christopher Ruffo.

And there is a point, and I've said this before, where the fight becomes about the fight. You forget what you're fighting about. It becomes about the fight. And so for him, as you point out, what exactly did Disney do? Was it because they said something about the don't say gay bill? Is it because of a lesbian kiss between two cartoon characters? No one knows. Ron DeSantis feels, I need to punch them in the nose,

and if we don't hit them hard enough this time, I'll have to hit them again. And you have millions of people out there who subscribe to Disney+, who at some point are going to go, all right, what is your beef? What are you doing? Why are you making things more expensive?

I mean, what are you doing? It's so weird. It's also, why are you so weird? Can you just help lower some costs? Like, things are a little expensive for me. Can you just focus on that? I mean, it does. Anyway. And I think you made this point. You know, some of this stuff is pretty easy to understand, which is that guys like Ron DeSantis want to protect kids from books, but not from guns. And I know that's a simplistic thing, but it's like, wait, you are

pushing all this stuff forward because we must protect our precious children, but not protect them from a nut with an AR-15. Well, no, they're going to protect them. They're going to give my, you know, my mother-in-law is a substitute teacher and we're just going to, you know, give her a sidearm. That's how we're going to protect the kids. We're going to have a, she's 59 and a half. We're going to have a 59 and a half year old mother-in-law out there with a sidearm. And if somebody comes into the school, she's going to be the first line of defense. We're protecting kids. That's brilliant. That's brilliant. Okay. So the other big story, and this is really a remarkable story if people have not read it. I mean, I would strongly urge you, you have a holiday weekend coming up, so you don't have an excuse.

Well, maybe you have an excuse because you have family events and everything. But when you have an opportunity, go read that ProPublica investigation, flagrant act of journalism about Justice Clarence Thomas and all of the gifts he's been accepting, the gifts, the travel. This is another story. I mean, on one level, it's a story about the American oligarchy, a billionaire who has his own pet justice. But it is an amazing story. And how long this has gone on for more than two decades. Clarence Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from this Dallas billionaire without disclosing them.

A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, it's not chump change, has vacation on this guy Crowe's super yacht around the globe. He flies on Crowe's Bombardier Global 5000, how do you pronounce that? Bombardier? I don't want to sound stupid here. I'm also not part of the Uber wealthy, so I have no idea how to pronounce that. Okay, we will confess that we mispronounce that because we do not fly on private jets. Though, hey, if we have any billionaire listeners out there who want to invite me on their Bombardier jet and take me to a remote island resort, I'll accept. I'll disclose and accept. Well, he's gone to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat,

and to Crow's Sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow's private resort in the Adirondacks. The extent and frequency of Crow's apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court, and they appear nowhere on Thomas's financial disclosures. So a couple of things like, okay, how did we get to the point where virtually every other government official has an ethics code with the exception of members of the U.S. Supreme Court? And also, what the hell with Clarence Thomas and with Ginny Thomas? Because there is a tie here. This billionaire has given big bucks to a number of Ginny Thomas's right wing cause. So, you know, Democrats in Congress are talking about investigating it. You know, AOC is saying he ought to be impeached. I

think people need to take a deep breath. That is not going to happen. He's not going to be impeached. He's not going anywhere. But what the hell? This Clarence Thomas story. I mean, if you are John Roberts and you are concerned about the integrity, the reputation, the legitimacy of the high court, this has been just a terrible year. Yeah, and there's two things. There's one on the actual story. I thought that Chris Murphy's observation on this was the most relevant because it isn't just like a rich guy doing favors. As Murphy writes here, it's not like Harlan Crowe is some apolitical pal of Thomas. He constantly has cases before the court. He funds groups that argue for conservative outcomes. One group has filed eight briefs before the court. Thomas sided with Crowe in all eight cases. You know, again, it's not as

if, oh, he has some childhood friend that hit it rich and you know he's going on vacations which again wouldn't probably be great you should disclose it it's more corrupt than that i think that's important to point out and then you get to the ginny thomas part of this and i was saying a year ago and i still don't understand why they didn't do this and i guess there still is a senate judiciary committee so they still could i still think that clarence thomas should be investigated for what he knew about efforts to overturn the government. You know, I mean, maybe I have TDS, maybe it's just me going off the deep end, but I don't think it's great that one of our nine Supreme Court justices' wife was organizing

a coup. And I think that it's probably worth at least putting him under oath and trying to see what him and his wife talked about at the dinner table during her coup attempt. So, you know, in addition to this corruption, I think that that's something that deserved oversight. You better believe that if the shoe was on the other foot, that Republicans would have no compunction about dragging Sonia Sotomayor or whoever in front of a committee. And so, anyway, those are my two big hot Clarence Thomas takes. I find it fascinating that this guy who has basically been, you know,

sucking at the teat of this billionaire and flying around on the private jets and doing all this stuff is... Pretending to sleep at Walmart. Yeah, that he is the populist hero. This is the new populism, which has no relationship to the actual people. I mean, we live in this populist era where the biggest superstars are, you know, the guy with the, you know, gold-plated toilet seats, you know, in Mar-a-Lago, and Clarence Thomas, who was on a very, very short leash from this billionaire oligarch. It's just like, this is

great. So you have not yet made your move. You're like halfway. You're waiting to embark on this epic road trip. Yeah, I know. I mustn't have been clear because I got a lot of messages from people on the road of the road trip like, hey, are you driving through? And it's like, no, I had to. So last week when we spoke, the movers were coming to move my stuff out of my house. And then they were moving in because I'm not like Harlan Crow. I did not have what my real estate agent thought was the appropriately fancy, you know, furniture to make the house look beautiful and help make sure we could sell it at the appropriate rate. And so they've moved in staging. I'm homeless. My child's on spring break. We're, you know, trying to just find places for me to activate content from for everybody that

subscribes to Bulwark Plus. And then next week, we go back to Oakland, gather our remaining stuff, get in the car, start a drive at the end of next week that lands us in New Orleans, the middle of the following week. So I will not be with you next Friday. We are still maintaining our same schedule towards the end of next week of Joshua Tree, Tucson, Marfa, Dallas, New Orleans. So if you have any recommendations along the road, I'll take them. We're going to try to enjoy ourselves, learn about American culture. People should DM you. So you have any special plans for Easter? It sounds like you're on your own. This is probably the saddest Easter of life. We're totally homeless. My child is flying from one place to another. I'm flying for, so no, I don't know. We'll probably

do nothing for Easter. I was very concerned about that because I knew that you needed a little bit of Easter cheer. Oh, great. Therefore, from me to you, just a little bit of Easter inspiration, just something to fill you up. Thank you, Charlie. Did you send me a chocolate bunny? From your favorite musical. Let's play this. Do I have a favorite musical? Is this the Phantom of the Opera? I can just see you going up the hill that's a

Camilla over there this is so bad Camilla all the bulwark is this Jesus Christ Superstar? come on you gotta have hope come on things are gonna get better.

It's not all darkness. The sun is rising. It's gonna be someday. Come on. Oh my god, make it stop. I can't, this is horrible. What is this? What is this?

This is horrible. Oh, my body. Come on, here we go, here we go. Hit it, hit it, hit it, hit it, hit it. Come on. Here we go. Here we go. Hit it. Hit it. Hit it.

Hit it. Hit it. Here we go. Here we go. Oh. I get goosebumps every time. You know? Yes.

Tim Miller as he heads off toward the sunset or away from the sunset. Is this ever going to end? Of course it will. Come on. I want you to be singing away from the sunset. Is this ever going to end? Of course it will. Come on. I want you to be singing this in the car as you head toward your new home and as you think about a future. I've never heard that in my life. I've never heard that one time in my life.

We have an Easter episode, The Next Level with Frank Bruni, which people should listen to. I bet Frank Bruni, that queen, has probably heard whatever that musical was that you just played for me. So thank you. Of course, The Sound of Music. And of course, that was the voice of Annette Funicello.

No. Was Annette in The Sound of Music? No, of course not. But see, if you watch The Sound of Music, if you had ever watched The Sound of Music, you would recognize that song. And you would go, jeez, Charlie, that was so thoughtful of you to play that for me

on Easter week. And I'm telling you, you're going to be lying by the pool in LA, and it's going to be Easter Sunday, and you're going to find yourself kind of just humming, and you're going to think, what is that song? Where did it come from? Tim Miller, have a great and blessed Easter. I think I'll be in rainy Sacramento, actually, but I'll turn it on. 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 be this all over again.

Every path you know Climb every mountain Ford every stream Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream, a dream that will need all the love you can give.