The Bulwark Podcast - Tina Nguyen: The Cost of Fox’s Lies

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

The unsettling Dominion settlement, DeSantis is not fooling MAGA, and the "Taliban 20"—who demanded ransom before Kevin McCarthy could become speaker—are now preparing to hold the whole country hostage over the debt ceiling. Puck's Tina Nguyen joins Charlie Sykes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Seix. It is April 19th, 2023. And for those of you who were hoping for and counting on six weeks of a festival of schadenfreude in Wilmington, Delaware, you probably know by now the Fox trial is off. There will be no testimony. There will be no parade of Fox executives or hosts. We will not be seeing Judge Jeanine taking the stand. Fox paid more than three quarters of a billion dollars so that we would not have to see the sweaty cross-examination of Sean Hannity. And to sort all of this out, we are very fortunate to welcome onto the podcast Tina Nguyen, founding partner and national correspondent at Puck. She's formerly a reporter at Politico and Vanity Fair and

is best known, at least in my household, as the MAGA whisperer. So Tina, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. I've been a fan of yours for ages, so this is going to be so much fun. Well, it is, although I have to say there's a little bit of a letdown. We have to break out the Fox settlement. From the Dominion lawyers' point of view, I get why they did what they did. Their job was not to be tribunes of democracy. They were not there to entertain us. They were there to get the best possible deal for their client. And I think they did a pretty good job. But I also think that it's not inconsistent to say that it feels deeply unsatisfying. So tell me what your take is. You live in this world. We have this $787.5 million settlement, which is probably the largest defamation settlement in American history.

That is not chump change. But where do you come down on this? That's a big, big but. Sorry to put it that way. it's a situation where without the footage of Tucker Carlson squirming on the stand or Sean Hannity having a meltdown or all of the beautiful things that kind of communicate to the American people who are visual people who love watching soundbites that Fox did something wrong here. I don't think the Fox audience is going to be diminished in any way, nor do I think any of the people who had the brain worms about

Trump winning the 2020 election are going to be dissuaded otherwise. If you're looking at this case as a trial, a stress test of the body politic and faith in certain democratic institutions you're not going to get it from this lawsuit unfortunately speaking and i think that everything's just kind of gonna go as it has as it will and it's just not going to be pleasant for people who kind of want to return to sanity. In fact, like in some ways, I think maybe not people within Fox News themselves, but other competitors to Fox will feel somewhat empowered to push the boundaries a little bit on what it is they can and cannot say. One of the things that I've kind of realized when it comes to covering the Trump administration is that Trump is very smart in how he couches his dabbling in conspiracy theories and allegations. It's always alluding to something worse, but never saying this is true. It's always, oh, I hope it's not true that DeSantis is a groomer.

Oh no, that would be so bad if DeSantis were a groomer or just like the subtle retweet of something that's from a conspiracy QAnon account. It's never, yes, this is true. No, this is false.

It's some people are saying some people are saying, yeah. And whereas DeSantis had not been able to do that and it started to bite him in the ass. But the gray zone that Trump has established for his post-truth environment, that hasn't ended with this case. If anything, I think that's going to be something that conservative media relies on. Okay, so I just want to step back because I want to make a couple of stipulations here about the settlement. I mean, I understand from the point of view of the lawyers why $787.5 million in hand today, the current value of that is not to be sneered at. People are pointing out that it's less than half of what they asked for. But having the check right now, as opposed

to three, four, five years from now, after massive litigation costs, there's a real value to that. Plus, juries are inherently risky, especially, you know, in a time of mass, you know, disinformation. And there are always, I mean, I want to, you know, again, stipulate that there are other lawsuits out there. I mean, you know, Smartmatic still has a multi-billion dollar suit against Fox News. And they said, you know, Dominion's litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox's disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest. But to your point here, I guess I can't get over the fact that there's no apology, no admission, no on-air correction or retraction. No one has been fired. If you were watching Fox News last night,

the settlement was barely acknowledged. Fox's response, that statement they issued, I described in my newsletter as weasel-y ledger domain, if you pronounce that word correctly, where they said they were pleased to have settled the case. We acknowledge the court's rulings that certain claims about Dominion were false. Now, I know the dominion folks are saying, see, Fox admitted to telling lies about dominion. Well, no, they didn't. I mean, that may comfort them, but what they said was they acknowledged the existence of the judge's rulings. They didn't say they lied. They didn't say they pushed falsehoods. They didn't say they regretted the errors. They didn't say they were sorry. They just said the judge's rulings existed.

They were there. So I'm sorry. So here's my question for you, being the MAGA whisperer. Within MAGA world, how does this play? How do they react to this? Do they see this as a humiliating defeat? Or they think, wow, we dodged a bullet. We got away with it.

Let's go back to business as usual. What's the mood? It's part B. No one really wanted to admit that this lawsuit existed other than Mike Lindell, who had been shunted off into a corner of MAGA world that's very evangelical, borderline visions and speaking in tongues.

Long story, but I'm not exaggerating. But it doesn't really exist in that world. It's just like, oh crap, it's another white noise moment where the deep state and the establishment have tried to come after the truth tellers and they missed and we can get away with it without, in Trump's word circa 2016, without admission of guilt. And like I said, it's a gray zone in which you can pull off a lot of MAGA. Yeah. Look, this is a big amount of money. There's no question about it.

But is it large enough to have one of those come to Jesus moments where the people at Fox say, okay, you know what? We just have to change our lives. We have to change the way we approach things. We really have to like sit down and, you know, have this deep period of introspection because I'm not seeing that at all. There's no indication whatsoever. And there's no indication that despite all of the evidence that was out there, I mean, you think about all of the things that we learned, you know, the cynicism, the lying to one another, you know, trying to get people fired. None of that has affected the audience at all, has it? I mean, the ratings haven't gone down.

So I guess one of the questions was, if you're a Fox viewer and you know that they're saying one thing in public and one thing in private, doesn't that bother you? Isn't there any fall off or how do they process this? There's a person I was talking to who speaks to some of the higher talent within Fox. And you know how a lot of them had their texts come out in public saying, oh, I actually hate Donald Trump. He's like the worst. The thinking within Fox and by extension, the thinking within the Fox viewership is Trump is really annoying. I hate him so much, but he puts together all of these policies that I like. He represents a viewpoint that I like, and I will excuse a lot of bad behavior as long as I have this fighter for my cultural values. It's a situation where

there's really only one giant institution that is fighting on behalf of a nationalist populist belief. Smaller institutions like Steve Bannon's War Room, whatever remains from the charred husk of Breitbart, various online websites, true social, like tiny influencers on Twitter. Those make tiny little pebble splashes in the water. Fox News is the engine, the heart, the driving force behind the right. So you want to see that succeed because there is no competitor to them that could say, we can do populism, but we could do it better and without lawsuits. And ultimately, they have several billion dollars. They'll survive. Maybe they won't be able to go to a corporate retreat. Maybe Tucker Carlson has to like not take a bonus for a couple of years. Maybe they'll do what, you know, most media

organizations that have layoffs do and fire all of their lowest level staffers, they'll get through it. I'm pretty sure they will. Unless, unless more lawsuits start raining down on Fox. That's the biggest argument against settling a defamation suit is that it invites others and they're already others. So, I mean, they have to understand that they essentially put a huge target out there, you know, $787 million for Smartmatic. I mean, Smartmatic is coming forward now and it has a billion dollar lawsuit. You know, what are they going to do? So you settle with Fox, you're going to have to settle with Smartmatic as well eventually, don't you think? I mean, I have to fact check this, but my coworker, Eric Gardner, who covers media law for

Puck, he pointed out there will also likely be shareholder lawsuits by people who are investors in Fox. Yes, that's a big thing. And go, wait, okay, no, you've just kneecapped our profit margin. You've acted irresponsibly to us, your investors. We could sue you unless you straighten up your internal practices, whatever. That could change things. That really could. But what does that do for the Fox brand, which I think is the most powerful asset it has? Who knows? Yeah. Let me just read you something from The Guardian, which is a progressive newspaper out of Britain. They say, while Fox doled out an unprecedented sum, they were able to avoid something priceless, the public humiliation of a trial and an apology. But the lack of a six-week

trial meant that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro would not have to own up to their role in spreading dangerous misinformation after the 2020 election. It suggests that lies, no matter how dangerous or insidious, are tolerable as long as you have the money to back it up. You could argue that Dominion wins, but the public loses, Brian Stelter tweeted after the settlement. And I agree that Dominion wins, the public loses. But the nagging thought is that considering how bad the evidence was, how bad the rulings were, how disastrous the consequences of this trial were, that Fox did pretty well yesterday, didn't they? I mean, they did substantially better than I was

expecting they were going to come out of this. What do you think? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm just thinking back to the OJ trial, right? Or the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp trial, literally any trial that was televised and broadcast nationally became like lodged into the American conscious. Having Tucker Carlson on the stand outside of his safe little box suddenly squirming under cross-examination i don't think he holds up well under cross-examination and i just say this is someone who used to work for him and watched his programming a lot and just knows of him and what's to say what would happen with an 89 year old man whose power comes from being kind of invisible and photographed, but now he's asked to speak in front of people like that would be more damaging to Fox, to their omniscience, their power than whatever documentation is out there. One of the things I've kind of realized about this movement is that they love projecting strength, they love spectacle, and they love making people mad. Putting the Fox

talent stable, these people that you've watched night after night for decades, suddenly look weak and squirmy and under bad lighting, that is bad. That undermines them so much. I can't let this pass. You used to work for Tucker Carlson? Very briefly. It was in his days when he was still a libertarian back at The Daily Caller. And he wore the bow tie and everything? He did not wear the bow tie. He did not wear the bow tie anymore. It was after the Jon Stewart appearance on Crossfire where Jon Stewart was making fun of his bow tie. He said it was a part of his identity that he wanted to, like, jettison because he didn't want to be known as the bow tie guy anymore. I feel like he was still a little salty about it. But, yeah, that was the Tucker Carlson state of mind at that point.

The bow tie is forever, however. So what about the Abby Grossman allegations? You know, she's telling these stories about what it was like, the environment around Fox, where you had these horny bros who were making jokes and it was just a, you know, a really kind of a toxic environment. How damaging will that lawsuit be? Because that hasn't gone away. Is there potential that there will be more things that will come out that Fox probably does not want to air or do you expect that we'll have another settlement with their producer? It depends on how much Fox wants to fight this. Roger Ailes set a very high bar for how bad someone's behavior at Fox has to be in order for the company to respond. I think a bro-y environment tends to be par for

the course at certain right-wing outlets. And I hate to say this, women who end up at certain right-wing outlets do kind of go in with the understanding that this is how it's going to be. I haven't really followed the case too closely, but unless she came from an environment such as, you know, say Columbia or Barnard and then got thrown into an environment such as Fox News, I think she probably wouldn't have been surprised. And unfortunately, a lot of environments like this, you're supposed to go along to get along and be like, oh, well, boys are boys, yada, yada, yada. I think that's understood. Yeah. Yeah. 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 Morning Shots. That's thebullwork.com slash Morning Shots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon. Okay, let's switch gears. We briefly mentioned Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis

went to Washington yesterday to try to round up support, and all indications are that it did not go well. So give me your sense. You've written about this, you know, the dilemma that Ron DeSantis has. I mean, he spent months trying to be the MAGA-acceptable alternative to Donald Trump. That seems to have run into some rocky weeks here. So talk to me a little bit about what you're seeing and hearing about Rhonda Sandis and the state of play, at least at the moment. So I talked to people who also exist in that liminal space between being MAGA and being not necessarily establishment, but stayed steady Republicans who want to pass bills without freaking out over indictments or whatever he said on Twitter that day or another day. Ron DeSantis, I think, has made

some pretty severe miscalculations about one, the reason he's popular in Florida, and two, what exactly the MAGA movement is. One of the things that I keep hearing from people who are MAGA, and some of them are DeSantis fans, some of them are Trump fans, but they think he's too terminally online. And when I say that, I don't mean that he's like tweeting online, angry stuff like Trump is. It's that they're picking up their cues for what the policies should be based on what memes are circulating on Twitter that day. So if Trump were in DeSantis' position and Disney was suddenly going against their don't say gay bill, Trump would probably make some big fuss about it and try to thump his chest and be like, okay, I'm going to destroy Disney.

I'm going to nuke them into the ground. But then he would come to make some sort of deal afterwards, right? He would look like some sort of winner. Disney would get to act as normal. The problem is that DeSantis went nuclear on Disney and tried to punish them for a culture war thing, but had no strategy to back it up he just put together a whole bunch of extreme policies extreme rhetoric he made these promises that he would destroy Disney for being pro-LGBTQ. And Disney put into a wartime position, really owned him on that front.

There are very few ways that he could spin this as a victory, especially since he telegraphed everything that they were doing properly in advance. They were writing about this in newspapers, which I assume Ron DeSantis does not read anymore because he's too online. Trump would never put himself in a position to be legally owned by Disney. And Disney, you don't mess with the mouse. Those lawyers are the best in their field, and they are a little devious when it comes to that. And they've been lawyers in Florida building these relationships for decades. Don't screw with these guys. This is fascinating to me because this idea that DeSantis

is terminally online, because this was one of the formulas of early Trumpism was to listen to talk radio, to listen to what was being said on Fox, you know, what was being said in the base and then finding a way to follow it or to echo it. So Trump really perfected that being sort of online, at least when it comes to the base. DeSantis looks at this, says, I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to follow the base. I'm going to find out every hotspot and then I'm going to jump on. I'm going to pour kerosene on it.

It's not working for him. And I'm trying to come up with this explanation, maybe because he just doesn't have the instincts. He's not very flexible. He is too dogmatic. Every once in a while, you'll see a politician who decides that he wants to be like Mitt Romney. I want to be severely conservative. And it just doesn't play right. It seems inauthentic. It feels like Rhonda Sanders is sort of like putting on the lizard mask and saying, see, I'm a lizard man too, but he can't figure out how to do the tongue thing. You know, he just like, it's like, I'm a lizard creature just like you. I'm working this one. I'm sorry. Oh, no, no, no. That's actually perfect. That's actually a perfect metaphor for

what's happening here because there are a few things that DeSantis can never get over. One, he went to Yale. He went to Harvard. He taught at private schools. In his book that just came out, he was like, I grew up in the suburbs of Tallahassee, but my heart is really in the Midwest, which like, come on, dude. Second, he rich establishment people's money, because by extension, that means, oh my God, you're in the pocket of these people that we just don't like. We are populists. We want to burn the establishment down. We will literally storm the Capitol in order to keep the swamp from taking our president away from us. And DeSantis is playing footsie with them. That's completely inauthentic. And you see that pop up in the way that he approaches topics that aren't third rail issues for the MAGA movement. When he initially said that Ukraine was a territorial dispute and we don't want to have any sort of involvement in that, donors freaked out you suddenly saw desantis walk that

back and lean into the rhetoric that they like which is we support the ukrainian people we will support them in their fight obviously we don't want to start world war iii but we will just keep giving them weapons which is not the maga position here. The really big one, the thing that I think the MAGA base will not forget is that when the news of Trump's potential indictment and arrest leaked, and he was asked at an event what he would do to stop that, he kind of shrugged and went, well, I don't know what it's like to give money to porn stars.

That's not our business. And unfortunately, that maga instinct is always protect your own against people who are being targeted by the deep state and this is a guy who's a former president being investigated and possibly indicted by a highly politicized george sorosbacked, as they put it, DA. So when DeSantis kind of tipped his hand and went, well, I've got a political future. I'd like to see Trump get arrested. That, I think, damaged his standing a lot.

And it's not- A lot. A lot, yes. And you know what? You can throw a prison up next to Disneyland, but when push comes to shove and a value such as this, this core value was put in your face, you could have been magnanimous. You could have looked stronger than Trump by saying, I will protect the bad guys from getting you. Instead, he kind of

offered up Trump on a silver platter. Jeez. What about the other attack ads that DeSantis has now launched against Trump? Of course, you know, Trump's super PAC, you know, made fun of him being putting fingers and went after him on entitlements. And then you had two pretty tough ads pushing back, you know, one that said, you know, what's happened to Donald Trump? Why is he attacking another Republican and then going after him as a gun grabber. Is that qualitatively different in MAGA world, or will that backfire too? The Republican versus Republican fight, I don't think that will move the needle at all. Because look, that's how Trump became popular in the first place. He beat up Republicans. He completely disregarded the Reagan rule of don't attack your fellow Republicans. And people loved him for that.

Do you remember in 2016, when he started insinuating that he was going to talk about whatever was happening in Ted Cruz's wife's personal life? Oh, gosh, I remember that. Yeah. And Cruz was like, oh, my God. He alluded pretty hard that Trump was a rat fucker and yet Trump won. Yeah. Trump beat him pretty thoroughly. And Ted Cruz bowed the knee and said, yes, thank you, sir. May I have another one?

Yeah, exactly. So I don't think that's going to work. I don't think I've seen the gun one. Can you talk about that a little? You know, it says, you know, Donald Trump's a gun grabber and it has clips of him sitting next to Dianne Feinstein saying, what a great proposal you have here. And I actually want to take the guns before we even have a court hearing. They're talking about red flag laws. So implying that he has no real core value. I think there's one clip where he says, you know, a lot of you are afraid of the NRA. I'm not afraid of the NRA. I don't need those people at all. So they're using the

clips against him. But again, I just don't know how effective it's going to be because in a cult of personality after eight years, it's hard to imagine any of them saying, oh, I was not aware of this soundbite from four years ago. This completely changes my point of view about all of the things that I've been willing to accept up until now. Exactly. And then also Trump has a talent for being malleable on these types of policies. If someone in a crowd yells, why are you taking your guns away from me? He'll just listen and then start workshopping a policy that at least to that crowd placates them. And he leaves and everyone's like, four more years, four more years.

DeSantis, as a hardliner, he can't deviate from those hard lines without pissing anyone off. You've been writing about what you call the Taliban 20, and particularly it was a gear up to the debt ceiling fight. You had an article last week, you know, reporting on how things were going with this Republican majority in the House. I think what they hit a hundred day mark this week, the headline was the Taliban 20s McCarthy's duelists. So talk to me about this. Who are the Taliban 20? Okay. So do you remember at the start of the Congress when 20 people suddenly stood up and said no kevin mccarthy we will not vote for you for a speaker and then america was stuck without

a speaker for like four or five days 15 rounds of voting mccarthy and these 20 populist nationalist conservative hardliners had to go back to a room and hammered out deals that never got put on paper. But from all of the people I've talked to, he basically gave them everything that they wanted, including, and this is kind of key, the ability for them to blow up his speakership whenever they like with the motion to vacate rule. If one person stands up and says, hi, I don't have any confidence in McCarthy at speaker, that forces a vote on the House floor as to whether to keep him as speaker. The threat of that, maybe back in 2015 or so, was successful enough to get John Boehner to step down. And that was with a larger margin than just one person. But from what I've heard out of that room, a lot of the deals included things like preventing the NRCC

from interfering in primary races where they have a moderate candidate they prefer versus a populist grassroots candidate that they'd like to promote. There's still a lot of bad blood over that, placing certain people in certain committees, vowing to get certain diversity and inclusion programs eliminated from the Department of Defense, Department of Education, what have you. The Taliban 20 naming actually came from a Republican congressman who, during a interview during this vote, was like, oh my god, these Taliban 20 are derailing the process of getting our Republican agenda done. And I was like, I kind of like that framing. I'm sticking with it. How bad is it? This New York Times story, I was talking about the infighting between

the budget chair, Jody Arrington and McCarthy, and you said, kicked up a hornet's nest. There are people like Matt Gaetz who are trying to, it's not that bad. What is your sense? I mean, how deep do these fissures run? How far are they willing to go? One person I spoke to who's affiliated with a think tank that has a lot of influence with the 20 told me straight up, we are willing to go to a default because we don't believe that defaults are a thing. We think that the concept of a default is a scare tactic that the establishment uses in order to get us to bend the knee. We are willing to go past the debt ceiling, go into a

cliff. We have plenty of money to pay our bills. Yeah, I think they would literally drive this country off a cliff in order to get it what it is that they want. And just given the margins that McCarthy has, either he has to listen to their demands, or worse, go to a Democrat to get their agenda passed. I honestly, in the environment in which I cover, I don't know which one is worse. Which one's more likely? I'm trying to think of how this actually plays out. So I'm not going to give Kevin McCarthy too much credit. But I mean, he went to Wall Street the other day, and he said, we are not going to default on the debt. You know, you guys should get behind us. This is a reasonable thing to do. And yet, as you're pointing out, he does not have the votes in his

own caucus to push through any kind of a reasonable compromise. So, I mean, am I right about this? I mean, if you're the Biden White House, how do you sit down with Kevin McCarthy and come up with a deal knowing that Kevin McCarthy has no way of living up to or delivering on the deal? I honestly wouldn't be able to speak to what's going on in the Biden administration. Like it depends on what their priorities are. Do they want to, you know, keep the country from defaulting and prevent an economic crisis? Or do they sacrifice a lot of the political values and programs that they've put in place in order to make this so? There's a detailed budget put out by

Russ Vought at this think tank, the Center for Renewing America, that is exactly what the 20 want. And it's things, like I said, things that target, quote unquote, woke programs, things that like support the war in Ukraine, they want to put way more money into the border, but they would literally cut money from NASA, NASA, in order to de-woke-ify the space agency. And if the Biden administration caves on sending, like underrepresented minorities and women to the moon like what the heck what the heck how would they live that down so Russ Vaught is aligned with Matt Gaetz and the 20 and he's already had this proposed budget and he's cutting you know you mentioned NASA the FBI CIA, CIA, Civil Rights Division, the Environmental Natural

Resources Division, cutting the National Science Foundation, cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs for Abortion and Gender Affirming Care, the Army Corps of Engineers. Yeah, they also want to get rid of the programs that investigate white supremacy. So, yeah. Sure. Where does the leadership of the House, where does Jody Arrington, the chair of the Budget Committee, where does he come down on all of this? How do they get this resolved is what I'm getting at. Honestly, I don't know. There's a recent story in Punchbowl

published this morning that said that Jody Arrington seems to have taken a step back and they brought someone else to lead the efforts on behalf of McCarthy. It's a question of like, who can they send in to negotiate with these guys that will listen to their concerns, convince them that some of their demands are unrealistic and bring that back to McCarthy saying, here's what you need to do in order to get people over the finish line. The problem is that we don't know exactly what McCarthy agreed to in this budget fight. And as Gates told me, and this quote was kind of amazing, there's no reason for the 20 to negotiate against what was already agreed to. We shouldn't have to pay twice for the same hostage.

Yeah. I thought that was an amazing quote. So what did they get for the hostage last time? Do we actually know what Kevin McCarthy had to pay? We don't. This is ransom. We really, really, really don't. There are things that he let leak to placate everyone else, such as the motion to vacate rule and the NRCC rule. but the more controversial things, if I'm Kevin McCarthy, I imagine that he hid under the rug and hid from people in his own caucus who probably would have freaked out. So I want to double back on something you wrote. We were talking about Trump and DeSantis earlier,

but I want to go back to a piece that you wrote in early April, which I think the phenomenon that you wrote about is still underappreciated, even though nothing about Trump is really undercover. It's the Trump January 6th revival. You wrote about the fact that there's this creeping realization among Republicans that Trump's 2024 campaign has become a political jihad akin to the events of January 6th, and that he is more and more openly aligning himself with the January 6th prisoners. I mean, he's reframing it from a day of shame to this seminal moment for the movement. And this appears to be increasingly central to his message. When he went down to Waco and he did that, you know, putting his hand on his heart

while you had that anthemthum playing from the prisoners. I don't know very many normal Republicans who think that the key to winning in 2024 is let's go relitigate January 6th and let's make people think that January 6th was a good thing. And yet this is a party that appears to be embracing a guy who is going to make that central to his campaign. Are they embracing him or are they still really hoping that DeSantis gets his act together? Okay, you tell me. You tell me. Are they waiting for the meteor of death to solve the problem for them? Because I just don't know what the plan is.

I mean, that's why you're seeing all these other people hopping into the race thinking, hmm, maybe if DeSantis is gone, what if I could sneak in? Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina, has now parachuted into the race. Asa Hutchinson, Nikki Haley seems to be sticking in it for the long haul, or at least up through a couple of primaries. The calculation is that the majority of the Republican Party does not want to relitigate January 6th. six. But if you're Trump and you're looking at DeSantis' strategy of trying to take more MAGA people away, you double down, you reframe the worst moment of your life as a turning point for you actually. And I think he's getting a lot of aid from Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson. Tucker for the past couple of months has been saying that the investigations for the

people who invaded the Capitol, not as members of a militia, not as members of the Proud Boys, but as tourists who got swept up into the moment and wanted to protest and just wanted to make their voices heard, then getting arrested and tried and put in prison with a 99% conviction rate for expressing their political opinion. That is a different story than a violent overthrow of the federal government. You can easily silo that into the Stuart Rhodes and the Proud Boys who, you know who Trump seems to be stepping away from. We'll see how long that's going to be the case. But there's a couple of examples on the left that people point to whenever they talk about January 6th as their moments. You're from Wisconsin. You

remember when the teachers unions took over the Wisconsin state Capitol for like what? Three months. I do very well. That is something that the pro January six people refer to on a regular basis. Like, Oh, they let the liberals do that in the state Capitol. They let them camp out and harass lawmakers as they came in.

Why can't we do that without having everyone thrown in federal prison? Not many people died in Madison. I don't believe that there were any deaths or the cops were beaten up, but yeah, but I do hear that. And of course, you know, here in Wisconsin, you raise any question like this and say, well, what about what happened in Kenosha, the Kenosha riots? So, you know, there's always a what about, yes, correct. Yeah. Literally the day of January 6th, I was at the Capitol before anything went down. The story I was writing was hilariously, in retrospect, a story about Trump supporters who were staying at the Capitol, hoping that God would descend and change everyone's mind and send a miracle. And the way he put it, he pointed at the Capitol and said, we should be in that building.

If we were Black Lives Matter or Antifa, they would let us into that building. We belong to that building. It belongs to we, the people. That's the mindset I think about whenever I cover anything related to Trump in January 6th. So you mentioned Tim Scott and other people who are getting into this race. What are they seeing? What does Tim Scott think is happening in the Republican Party that would provide him a lane? What do you think that Chris Christie is seeing? Why is Chris Sununu circling around this particular drain here? Are they seeing

something that we're missing or do they have their own separate agenda or are they just delusional? What do you think? I'm not quite sure about whether they're delusional or not, but I think they make a couple of pretty salient points. Trump will always have a floor of maybe 30% of the Republican Party who love him. DeSantis is messing up pretty badly in trying to balance the MAGA movement with a conservative movement that would prefer stability and sanity, but is, you know, freaked out about what Donald Trump is doing. The more that DeSantis wavers and the more that he gets thrown off balance, the more that a quote unquote traditional normal conservative could sweep in. Chris Christie the other day was speaking at an event thrown by Semaphore, and he made this point about how Ron DeSantis is not a true conservative. True conservatives, I would say circa 2012 through 2016, would not be punishing a business to the extent that DeSantis

is. You're supposed to be pro-business. You're supposed to let everyone leave us alone. But Chris Christie is not going to win the Republican nomination next year. He's not going to win the Republican nomination last year. His moment as a political figure probably has passed, but he still has a couple of really good observations. I'm not going to ding him on that. that I still know, that shrinking number, their reaction to watching Ron DeSantis is if Ron DeSantis falls, we immediately have to pivot to somebody like a Glenn Youngkin. So do we start to have Glenn Youngkin buzz if DeSantis continues to stumble? Because Youngkin doesn't seem all that interested.

I mean, there's been so much Glenn Youngkin buzz ever since he won the gubernatorial race in Virginia. But honestly, I couldn't even begin to tell you. Well, I guess the question is, who is acceptable to MAGA? I mean, I can sort of do a little chart, right? I mean, you know, in the MAGA world, Trump is obviously, you know, the alpha and the omega. Rhonda Sanders would be acceptable to much of MAGA. Some of the other candidates say enough to do it. I mean, so Tim Scott feels like he would be acceptable to MAGA? I think he would be acceptable to MAGA if Trump was suddenly out of the picture. I don't know the meteor hits him specifically and just him. DeSantis probably could

just because he's so intense in how MAGA he is, but he does risk losing the half of his base that likes him being normal and the half of the base that likes him because in 2020, he kept the state open. Honestly, I think there's a miscalculation that DeSantis' campaign is making in looking at why he won the Florida election by such a giant margin. In my view, I think it's a lot of people who appreciate what he did to keep them sane during COVID. But look at what he's doing now and going, wait a second, I think I'd like to be in a state that allows abortion up to 15 weeks. Guys. Yeah, you can certainly imagine that. Yeah. I mean, and like, that's the popular opinion among most Republicans is if we must have abortion, I think there's a lot of good reasons

as a Republican to be tolerant of abortion up to 15 weeks is reasonable. After that, absolutely not. Six months, six weeks in, that's a little too crazy for us. So I want to get your other sense about this, about what is the consensus in MAGA world about abortion? Because the pro-life movements had 50 years to prepare for a post-war world, 50 years, and yet they appear to be caught completely a little bit confused about where do we go now? We've caught the car now. Is it six weeks? Is it 15 weeks? Do we ban abortion pills? Should it be national? Should it be statewide? Is there one consensus within MAGA? Or my sense is there's just a lot of division, a lot of confusion about this issue. What do you think? life trump knows how to speak pro-life language he himself is a bit more moderate but in the aggregate of what trump can give them if he's slightly squishy on pro-life but builds a wall and is aggressive against china then they'll go all in for him no matter what else yeah

desantis taking the most pro-life position one could possibly get away with in this era without you know having a giant referendum that humiliates him in Florida sure that will win in Florida but what will that do for the rest of the base that ranks abortion you know number four number five on their list and the top one is can, can we get our jobs back? Will we have to be forced to take the vaccine? And what are you going to do about wokeism? Is there a possible, you know, Trump version of Nixon goes to China? What happens to the MAGA base, including the evangelical Christians? If Donald Trump says, okay, this extremism on abortion really, really hurt us in the midterms. We need to support a 15-week ban.

I would not support a national law, and there must be exceptions for rape and incest. Anybody else says that they would be set on fire. Can Trump pull that off? I think he could, yeah. You do? I really do. I mean, the diehard evangelicals are already going to go to Mike Pence anyways if he runs, or Tim Scott, or run DeSantis. Although, yeah, they might go to DeSantis, but having a guy who's kind of squishy on abortion for the sake of winning the election, I think MAGA, in their minds, can make that calculation.

I know a lot of MAGA people who looked at what DeSantis was saying and went, I think he went too far. It's not popular among the rest of the country. We saw what happened in states that had abortion as a referendum. It drove out millions of voters. It became a wedge issue. We had so many like independents and Republicans switch sides in order to protect abortion. We need to get Trump back in power.

We're okay making this brief sacrifice as long as he's back in power and then can listen to our concerns on a more sustained basis. This is so interesting. Tina Nguyen, founding partner, national correspondent at Puck. She formerly was a reporter at Politico and Vanity Fair. Thank you so much, Tina, for all your time this morning. Thank you for having me. This is great.

And thank you all for listening to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow and we will do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.