The Bulwark Podcast - Tina Nguyen: The MAGA Diaries

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

The young people who show up at CPAC and Turning Point events are there because of a deeply entrenched grassroots effort to draw in new soldiers of the conservative movement. The inside story from a journalist who got out. Plus, a diagnosis of Tucker Carlson. Puck's Tina Nguyen joins Charlie Sykes. show notes: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-MAGA-Diaries/Tina-Nguyen/9781982189693

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Just we need another book about the Trump era. But I got to say, this one is completely different. I'm really looking forward to discussing this today with our guest, Tina Nguyen, founding partner and national correspondent at Puck, formerly a reporter for Politico and Vanity Fair, as well as a number of conservative publications, where she first started out in journalism under her mentor, Tucker Carlson. Is that unfair? Say Tucker Carlson? He's going to play a role here, isn't he? Oh, he's going to play a giant role. And one of the things I do go into the book, first, I'm so happy to be here. I love hanging out with you, Charlie. Second, interesting that you bring up mentor because one of the overarching themes in my book

is trying to get ahead in America. And my parents were immigrants that had no idea how like building a career in America worked. In Asia, it would be more like, okay, are you smart? Do you have the screen? Cool.

In America, it's like, who do you know? Who can teach you the ropes? And my mom was reading a lot of Forbes magazine articles about career development. It was like, you should find mentors. That's Tucker. He could be a mentor. Go. Well, I mean, this is part of what I found so interesting about your book is it does explain the process by which people are recruited into this movement. And I think it's absolutely crucial to understand this. So on your first page in the author's note, you write, there are hundreds, if not thousands of books about the history of the Republican Party, the history of the American conservative movement inside the party, and the history of Donald Trump and his administration and January 6th and militant white

nationalists and whatever other right-wing insanities have emerged in American politics over the last eight years. This is not one of those books. The MAGA Diaries is a coming of age memoir, one of those tales wherein the main character goes on a transformational journey from childhood to adulthood, a political book with a curveball, really. Kirkus describes it as a sobering, endlessly readable fly on the wall account of creeping fascism. My colleague and friend Tim Miller says a critical tale if you want to understand the people behind Trump's rise, the MAGA media ecosystem and how conservative youth are getting sucked into the quicksand without even realizing it. So for a lot of our viewers, the idea of young Trump supporters feels like a contradiction in terms. And yet, there is this vast ecosystem, this vast

circus-like universe out there where people are drawn in. So let's just talk about this, how you got in into this. You're a young, bright, Vietnamese-American woman who ends up at Claremont McKenna, an elite university. Describe what happens. How does someone like you get sucked into what's become the MAGA movement? Oh, it is a very odd story, but one I realized over time is replicated by hundreds if not thousands of other kids. But basically, it comes from two different factors. One, like I was talking about earlier, my parents just didn't understand American society to the point of like, how do you become established and how do you get ahead? And so when I was in this prep school,

I was on scholarship. And I was smart, but it wasn't the type of person who would have like, you know, money to go to interlock an acting camp for the summer or get an internship at the United Nations or get yo-yo model, right? My Harvard application. Like that was the level of person I was competing against. And for a 17 year old, you're like, that's kind of fundamentally unfair. Like, what is it about, in my mind, the left that makes things this way?

Second, I was a giant freaking nerd about the founding fathers, like the biggest one you'll ever see in your life. That's what happens when you grow up in Boston next to John Adams's mansion, right? But would you have considered yourself a political conservative? Did you have an ideological leaning when you were leaving high school, going to college? I would say I was getting more into the libertarian moment of 2008. People who were trying to reconcile this part of themselves that were like, okay, I love America, but the war in Iraq is horrible, and we shouldn't be here anymore. I love like freedom of speech and liberty, but i also am a little nervous about how traditional republicans are reacting to things like that but i also do find that the state weighing into my

daily decisions is creepy and oh no here comes the recession why is the government trying to take our money and use it to to like i don't know bail out these banks that screwed up on their own and oh no what if they take our money and start using it to pay for universal, I don't know, bail out these banks that screwed up on their own. And oh, no, what if they take our money and start using it to pay for universal health care? I'd be totally lost right now. So you were conservative curious. Yes, you show up at Claremont McKenna. And you describe in really great detail, how young people are recruited to the movement. And we'll get to what the movement is, how big it is, and what I think both people on the left

and frankly a lot of reporters in the mainstream media don't get about it. So how are you seduced from going from conservative, curious, to full-on MAGA? You have to understand that full-on MAGA didn't exist yet. Yeah, that populist strain was kind of like bubbling in people's subconscious, but no one dared to say it out loud until Trump came along. But like we're talking 2008, 2009 here. And this is a weird moment where I am just a normal student who is working at this research institution called the Salvatore Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World. Okay, yes, that pings my little baby American history heart.

But then you start getting invited to things because people in the Institute know the people who run the things. And all of a sudden, someone sends you an invite like, hey, do you want to go to this black tie gala where John Bolton's speaking? And you're like, of course I do. All of a sudden you show up in this room with like powerful people and tuxedos and suits wandering around. And all of a sudden you see like, oh my God, this guy's an appellate lawyer who took on this case. This guy's Andrew Breitbart who is here and like talking to me. Oh my goodness. And like they keep inviting you into back rooms and give you attention. And they're like, oh my God, you they keep inviting you into back rooms and give you attention and they're like oh my god you're very promising like that was the word i kept hearing throughout

my entire journey you are promising you have a future you are going to be famous you're going to be powerful and influential and like this is not an empty promise because the people who are telling you these things do have those connections and like are powerful and or eventually will be powerful. Like a friend of mine once told me that he was this like 19 year old dingus in a room and Neil Gorsuch came up to him and was like, hey, yeah, like here's my business card. Drop me a call whenever you'd like. Yeah. I mean, one of the people that called you very promising was Heidi Cruz, Ted Cruz's wife, you know, and people offering to be your mentors. And I think people need to understand how powerful that is for a young person getting started. You know, somebody saying, hey, you know,

let's have coffee, paid internships, summer camps for conservative journalists, all of those things. So what you describe is this concerted effort at the grassroots to recruit students and young journalists to be soldiers of the movement. I mean, this is not just a random thing. This is not just people who are reading the New York Times one day and deciding, you know what, I'd like to be a conservative. I mean, there is a real infrastructure that draws bright young people into this movement

and then creates for them a world and a career path. And obviously careerism is a big part of this whole story. Oh, for sure. And the thing is, it's not even just journalism programs to begin with. Like, I would always get these jobs emails from the college, and there would be opportunities to learn leadership skills, electioneering skills. There was this group called the Leadership Institute that was literally throwing, like money and flights and lodging at people who wanted to have a future in politics. And they're like, would you like to learn how to run a presidential campaign? Would you like to become an academic or something and study the ideas of liberty? Would you like to enter this legal system,

the Federalist Society or any other numbers or like enter think tank world or grassroots activism. Like if you go to a student conference these days, like turning point, CPAP, whatever, the most important part of that room will not be the places where people are speaking. It will be the booths. It will be the expo floor where they have packets and packets and packets and swag promoting like different jobs you could take. It's a giant career fair out there. Well, one of the interesting things about your book is you discuss how members of the media from the outside just don't understand really what's going on. You write very early in the book, missing in their work is something that a journalist looking in from the outside would

never quite understand. The way the conservative movement makes itself immortal, turning idealism, friendship, and ambition into the same thing. It draws in young people with promises of stability, purpose, and career summer seminars full of new like-minded friends. It invites them into a world of power full of eager mentors and cocktail hours who want to help them mature. It gives the most promising kids internships, research project, and the loyalty becomes organic to the point where even when your friends and associates begin saying crazy, extreme things, outrageous things, you don't break with it. I mean, this is the loyalty, right? That it becomes part of your world. So that when people say, well, why don't you speak out against this? Or why don't you break with this? Why do you tolerate this? They don't understand sort of the organic ecosystem that you found yourself in.

Right. Like here's how far back the movement goes. So you know how Mitch McConnell is a really old guy? Like very, very old. He was part of the Leadership institute as a 20 year old that is how far back they catch people and when you develop something a network like that over decades and decades and decades and catch people really young it's less of a political movement where people kind of get together fully formed it's like this is the core of your identity. This has been the core of your identity since you were in college, maybe even high school. This is the core of your friend group, not just your career, but like your entire social circle.

And if it were just a matter of like saying, hey, I don't believe this anymore, it would be one thing. But if you say, hey, I don't believe this anymore, I'm not doing it. And then your entire friend group turns against you with like this insane vigor and anger like that's harder that's a harder proposition to make let's fast forward to that moment when this happened with you so are so you are immersed in this you know most of these characters i think you're at the beginning of the book you're talking about how you know your editors are talking about some crazy

thing going on in the right wing and you're're saying, I know that person, I know that person. And they're like amazed because, you know, you were kind of like zealot in the conservative movement. You were sort of everywhere. But how did you hesitate to say, no, how did you get deprogrammed? It was one of my mentors that actually kind of accidentally pushed me out. But the reason I got into conservative world in the first place was because a path that was offered to me was journalism. One day, an internship opportunity dropped in my mailbox going like, would you like a paid journalism internship in the summer of 2009? Are you liberty minded? And I was like, okay, yes, I'm both of these things. So I entered this

program, I get a paid internship for the summer, it requires me to go to these seminars that talk about how journalism from a right wing perspective should be conducted, but it wasn't presented like that. Otherwise, I would never gone but it was like journalism in the free society. Why is it that the media doesn't approach things in this direction, for instance? And after that internship, I get another email from IHS saying, you've been selected for your promise to be part of the Institute for Humane Studies mentorship program in journalism. I will be here. His name was John Elliott to guide you on this path and make sure that you have the connections, have a good resume,

know who to talk to, and I will build that out for you. And eventually, I'm full sold in at this moment. I've never had anyone like this. But over time, I start realizing that the people he puts me in touch with increasingly want me to write things that are either completely untrue or like tilted to such a point that decontextualizes it from the broader story and is specifically only geared towards hurting Democrats rather than Republicans. And the third or fourth time that he did this, I started looking into the people who he was sending me to. And I'm like, oh, my God, you come from activist groups. You've never had jobs in journalism. Why are you my editor? This is insane. And so I'm 22, but I'm still thinking I can't do

this. There's just something in me that I cannot break if I want to go down this career path. Would I rather quit and do something else? Sure. Yes. I'm going to move to New York. I'm 22. I'm just going to forget this ever happened. And I don't know, maybe I'll become a food blogger or something. Well, there's a darker side to this as well. John Elliott, who you mentioned, I mean, it turns out that John Elliott was exposed in 2019 to be part of, if not the heart of, this white nationalist email server full of right-wing media types, where they were all brainstorming ways to sneak this white

nationalist ideology into the editorial pages. The server was called, subtly, Mourning Hate. They made jokes about Hitler and how Trump was akin to Hitler. So looking back, you write that Eliot had been looking for people to recruit. He was sifting for zealots. Interesting phrase, sifting for zealots. I phrase, sifting for zealots. I can't take credit for that phrase, but I used the heck out of it. The weird thing about that program was it was libertarian-ish, and people who graduated from that program ended up in mainstream journalism being totally okay people. Rachel Beatty, who writes Playbook, was someone I met there. And I think what he was doing was like testing for who actually was the most extreme. My internship application mentioned the

founding fathers and James Madison as like a political or philosophical ideal. And he was like, oh my God, that's the right answer. And that was something he literally said to me. But after this article came out, I started looking at other articles where he was cited. And there was this one woman named Kitty McHugh, and she ended up leaving the movement. But she was telling this BuzzFeed reporter the way that she was recruited, in which she listed a paleo-conservative, almost quasi- white nationalist guy as her intellectual influence. And then Elliot writes back, you are the only person

who has ever listed him as an influence. He was a friend of mine. And I was like, oh my, yeah, he was literally looking for the right people. And it wasn't trying to get a big volume of people. He just had to have the right people to put in the right places in order to sneak these ideas in. One of the fascinating things for me is watching the transition of young people who are intellectually curious, interested in conservative ideas, may have grown up reading William F. Buckley or reading National Review. And in a few years, they're embracing these extreme ideologies. And I guess the question is, how much of that was

pre-existing condition and how much changed? I will say that the one thing that shocked me about your book, this was the one shocking thing, is you describe, and I'm sorry, this is personal, but you have it in the book, that when you went to Claremont McKenna, you were following a boyfriend there, right? Yes. And it was Chuck Johnson, Charles Johnson, who was one of the most notorious alt-right Holocaust denying extremists. Was he always like that? Did you know that? Or is this something that he, you know, transmogrified into over time?

Man, that's a difficult question. I kind of detached from what was going on in his mind right after Obama was elected. And all I could see was what everyone saw from the outside of him like going further and further and further in that direction i'm sure there was a part of him that accepted this ideology back when he was younger but everyone was like don't do that that's insane but the thing that's always kind of unnerved me about conservative about the movement not like conservative ideology. The movement is the degree to which they will permit young people to go in, reach the boundaries of civility and maybe legality in order to make a political point and to win. So he was part of that wave that included Project Veritas, the James O'Keefe project where they dress up and do undercover camera work to catch journalists and celebrities off guard.

Who else was there at the time? Miley Yiannopoulos, Breitbart troll guy who was just like generally very shocking. And there seemed to be a new incentive for shock value and for like these trolls. And they blaze this path for a much younger generation to be like, oh, wait, I can go online and say a whole bunch of shocking things and people will follow me. Like that's the problem with the Turning Point USA brand ambassador model right now. They hire a whole bunch of young people who are great at social media in order to build online presences. But these young people are like, wait, I don't need the Turning Point brand in order to get a following. It gave me prominence, but they can't control what I do. So I'm going to just go wild. And whatever Turning Point USA wants, I don't think they initially wanted that. But at this point, it's like, well, we can't stop this. Let's go. It does have a self-perpetuating, you know, fissionable action here. You discussed the idea of what you call the infinite fringe, where, you know, on the internet, if you get kicked out of one media spot for saying the

wrong thing, if you get canceled, you can always keep going somewhere else. There's, if you're on the right right now, there's kind of no limit on what is conservative anymore. And you mentioned the incentive structure. And this is something that I've really seen accelerating where you have people that if you squint, you could think we're like somewhat normal, but there is that incentive structure for them to become more shock value, more clickbaity, more outrageous. And in the old days, somebody would say, no, you can't say that. You don't want to be that. These days, actually, you get rewarded for it. So it's become this really dangerous spiral. And so you see people moving from what we would think of as more traditional conservative or libertarian to these bizarre you know edges that used to be you know

invisible yeah and again that was sort of what i saw at like the daily caller where people were like too insane for the daily caller but then got kicked off to breitbart and some people were too insane for breitbart who got kicked into the ether but then started their own things initially i was like okay who's gonna tell them to stop billiam f Buckley was able to stop the Birchers back in the day and the Birchers for people who don't know are proto QAnon guys from the 60s and 70s who almost got a hold of conservatism until Buckley literally pushed them out. But he was able to do that because he had a broad medium of print magazines right and like a ton of political capital but there was not enough space out there to declare who was and was not

conservative and he owned it like wholeheartedly box news also had that to an extent but like right now they can't stop tucker carlson like he is the ultimate example of this infinite fringe i'm talking about. And not that he's gone, okay, yes, he's gone kind of off the reservation, but when Fox kicked him out, there was nothing that stopped him from going back on Twitter immediately and having just the ability to talk out loud and for people to remember that he existed. If you're being really cynical about it, it's sort of how Netflix and Apple TV always offered their... The way that they got people

into buying their content was like, it's going to be like $5.99 a month or like $2.99 a month. You get all of this content for free. Come on in. And then now they've jacked it up to like $20 a month plus ads. But Tucker just had to give his content away for free just to remind people he existed and Fox wasn't going to take him off the air and he can still talk. Landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees. Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord

isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash RentSafeTO. Okay, so let's talk about you and Tucker, because Tucker is a fascinating case. Tucker, you know, in the early days, you know, wore the bow tie, was a writer for the Weekly Standard, very much a mainstream conservative, very highly respected as a writer and thinker. We kind of know where he is right now. So talk to me a little bit about Tucker, you and The Daily Caller. You describe Tucker as super fun. The qualities that made him a really good magazine reporter, however, do not make him a good pundit. So talk to me about that. Yeah. I think magazine writers have a lot more latitude to engage in crazy ideas, like absolute, maybe stunty, either like gonzo journalism, things where they insert themselves into the story and do something wild like say christopher hitchens waterboarding himself for fun or like i found this crazy thing and i'm gonna go explore it from i don't know being on a cruise ship with david foster wallace to oh man being in antarctica and he was an amazing writer like he was able to just like find a crazy story,

drop in, describe it with such detail, have his own spin on it, and then take it back and publish it in the mainstream. And like, that was cool as a magazine writer. But when you jump onto like opinion television and say, all right,

here's the story. I have eight minutes to deliver it to you. I find this super interesting. Let's talk about ufos that is taken much differently and especially at some place like fox it's treated less as like intellectual fascination and more like gospel and the more that someone at fox was like wait no you can't say this on tv and the more tupper's like what the hell are you talking about i want to say this on tv why are you not me? The more I think he just dug into his beliefs that he's trying to do the right thing.

Okay, well, that's the question, because there's a transition with Tucker Carlson. And I guess, what are his motives? You know, he clearly was testing the boundaries all the time. Can I say this? Can I say this? He's challenging Fox. He's going to embrace bizarre, you know, racist theories like, you know, the replacement theory, deep into conspiracy theories. This is not the Tucker Carlson of 10 years ago, but is this what Tucker Carlson is thinking? I'm going to show these guys the more he got criticized, the more extreme he became. Was he like high on the dopamine hits of seeing which envelope he could break what do you think was was happening with him and in those final days at Fox and now I couldn't really get into

his mindset at the final days of his Fox time although I do go in at the very end of the book I do an interview with Tucker while he's still at Fox but it's bookended by the fact that I saw him right before he got fired from Fox, like literally the day before at this heritage event. And then I watched him afterwards try to keep his career afloat. And at the very end of his time at Fox, he seemed to view himself as someone who was prophesying the fall of America to dark liberal forces. Like if you listen to the speech that he gave at that event, it was literally like, I'm not a religious man. Like this is not me being like preaching the gospel or whatever,

but there seems to be something very dark happening in America. That's going after our churches and our children and our culture. And we got to stand up for that. It was a little bit like, I don't know if your listeners would be familiar with the Flight 93 essay. Yeah, they will. Yeah, exactly. It's like a lot more tinges of that, except in a much more like telegenic form. And apocalypse is a good sales tool. If you come on the air every night and you tell people

everything is fine, you don't need to worry about anything, you're probably not going to be a star. On the other hand, if you say, you know what, the end is coming. And I'm going to tell you, if you stay past this next commercial break, I'm going to tell you how, if you do not seize the cockpit, we will all die, you know, back in a moment. I mean, it's not new that, of course, you know, people in the media will sometimes, you know, create and exaggerate catastrophes, but this seemed to be really, really ramped up. Okay, so you were working at The Daily Caller. You were writing. You've described what happened, your departure from there.

You were writing a story about a telecommunication company. Your editors were trying to get you to twist the truth. You wouldn't do it. This was clearly one of the breaking points, right? So this is a medium, The Daily Caller, that had an agenda. And so they start with who they want you to like or who they want you to hate, who they want you to attack, and you weren't having it? I was definitely not having it. And here's the interesting part about the structure of the Daily Caller that made this happen.

The person who was directing my coverage was not a caller employee. He helped get me through the door, but I always thought it was just sort of a, hey, I know a girl who could have a job here. Here you go. Here's a job. Like, you know, a really traditional network. But then the fact that like he started asserting himself as the person who was directing my coverage got real weird very quickly. Like he wasn't hired hired no one there knew who he was except for Neil who kind of knew him through the side and then he was just like acting as my editor sending me where's your story where's your story where's your story here are the people I want you to talk to here are the stories I want you to cover and I was 22 at the time and so like if i were a bit more i don't know if i were less stubborn and less

into following my gut i probably would have just like accepted it as what happens in conservative journalism but i did call it out and in a chain of events that i will describe solely as the exact chain of events as they happened. I said this out loud and two days later, I was let go for quote unquote financial reasons. And that is the exact chain of facts. Yeah, it's always quite a coincidence, isn't it? Well, interestingly enough, you were one of the few journalists, because you were enmeshed in this universe, to actually predict that Trump would win in 2016. And you were working at Vanity Fair at the time. Is that correct? Your editor scoffed at that, like there's just no way,

as by the way, 98%, 99, 99.9% of all the people in the media, including me, would have scoffed at that idea. So tell me what you saw that they didn't see. Do you remember earlier I was talking about how the conservative movement had a degree of permissibility for people who were kind of like out there and crazy and probably broke the rules but got things done? The moment I saw Trump running, like stomping all over everybody else and everyone was like, oh no, we'll try to stop him. But they didn't. And I was just thinking like, oh, no, oh, oh, no, like, he's getting very popular. And I don't think anyone can stop him just because I don't think anyone knows how to stop him. Like, here's the critical flaw of the conservative movement as I see it. It's a really powerful movement movement which has become an industry and a bit of a machine but over the 60 years of the movement they were always convinced that they were working for a specific

vision of what is conservative and what is not and they believed that the voting base would go along with it right but the moment that the base was like wait actually we kind of like populism and free trade sort of sucks. They're like, oh, calculus becomes like, do we protect these ideals, but that are clearly very unpopular and then see the collapse of everything we worked for? Or do we go and find some sort of intellectual common ground here and go along with it like the core of conservatism apart from all of those ideals that kind of came to fruition with goldwater and reagan is society's moving forward too quickly and we have to stop it in some cases it looks like communism in some cases it looks like obamacare but in this case it's like there is a cultural critique to be made of the left and the base

still likes to go against the left maybe Maybe it's for reasons that we find reprehensible, but you know what? We have to go with the people that we cultivated too. So you were also not surprised by January 6th. Why? What do you see bubbling up there before the attack on the Capitol? It was an interesting chain of events that came from me covering Trump in 2020 as a White House reporter. So when I pitched myself to Politico for that position, I was like, all right, the most powerful people whispering in Trump's ears right now is not lobbyists on K Street or people in the Capitol or like interest groups or whatever. It's people in the media and online like they are just tweeting

things at him and he's retweeting them out to the public and those people are like oh my god trump loves us we're gonna keep having this feedback loop and we're gonna gain more and more and more power and over the summer of 2020 it went from covid disinformation like hydroxychloroquine to there's violent antifa and black Lives Matter protesters in the streets. You have to go out there and fight them. Also, those people are supporting the deep state who want to knock me out. And so with the rise of militia groups in American cities and suburbs and Proud Boys starting to prowl the streets, beating up people that they thought were like Antifa

or libs, and the fact that trump was engaging with them more and more and more was a little bit like unnerving to me the more he started dabbling with q anon too and feeding back into their love that was even worse the moment that stop the steal comes up and then all of a sudden militia guys with guns show up to ballot counting locations and Trump is going stop the steal stop the steal stop the steal and these guys start going we've got to go like take our country back and we are sovereign citizens and are allowed to do whatever it takes to get our country back I'm just like it's gonna be violent I don't like this. And I was fully prepared for actual fights and bloodshed

at the Capitol that day. My one miscalculation was that I thought the Capitol would be prepared for it. And the Capitol security was not at all. Okay, so that was unnerving. But what do you make of the last three years in which Trump has been able to rewrite the history of all that? I mean, it's one thing for these fringe militias to engage in violence. I mean, I can remember if this was, you know, five, six years ago, if you would have told me that, you know, this kind of thing would happen. Virtually every Republican that I knew would have said, we draw the line there. There's no way we're going along with this. And on January 7th, they seemed to draw the line. And here we're sitting three years later, and the Republican Party, at least the electorate, overwhelmingly has accepted Trump's big lie, is not repelled by his reference to the rioters who attack police officers as hostages. You have Joe Niren saying, yeah, I really have no problem if he pardons the seditionists. What do we need to understand about the conservative movement and conservative voters that they would have actually accepted something that would have been unthinkable

just a short while ago? I think that that moment has been like memory hold in the right. And part of it has to do with the fact that Trump is no longer on Twitter. When he was in a online format where everyone could see him and he was just constantly tweeting and no one could stop him from tweeting, people were reminded, oh my God, this man is crazy just all the time. In their face, he is encouraging these seditionists. He is not telling people to leave the Capitol. It was his biggest megaphone. And in the short term, it was, I think, helpful for the stability of the country that he was off Twitter. But in the long run, I think the Trump campaign realized that he was not constantly in people's ears being like loud and conspiratorial and like crazy he was quarantined up on truth social just like ranting and ranting and ranting in giant blocks of text that were completely

unreadable and over time when people forget that loud howling trump monkey in their ears they just think back on like we were having better lives back then. Trump was like our crazy uncle. But like we had money. The inflation was not bad. We were not in these wars. Our children weren't being attacked by DEI. Debate whether that's true or not. So what does that mean for 2024 if the spotlight, which will inevitably turn very brightly on the howling Trump monkey again. What does that mean? Because I've actually heard, you know, some Democrats say, well, you know, once the campaign begins and people are reminded who Trump is, Trump is now showing up at trials. He's showing up at the trial of the woman that he was found to have raped. He thinks that that's a winner for him. But we're about to have 10 months of, you know, nonstop Trump, aren't we? Howling Trump. We are, but the media

atmosphere and environment has just atomized so much that wherever you get your news these days, it's not as unified as it was back in 2016. Like cable audiences are shrinking. All of these podcasts where people get their news are growing. I think more and more Americans have cut the cable and cut their subscriptions to newspapers to get their news from literally Joe Rogan. And the newspapers are dying. Yeah, the media that would have reminded people constantly that Trump was a howling monkey is just diminished. And there are more people who are like, I don't really care about that. Here's what I actually do care about. And also, I mean, there's a there

has been an exhaustion. I mean, I just sense a certain just, you know, shoulder slumping, just tiredness and numbness about this, because this has been going on for seven or eight years. And I guess the question is, whether or not people are going to, you know, reengage or whether or not it's like, so, you know, Trump's a howling monkey, you know, same old, same old, tell me something that's new. I actually talked about this. I thought it was really interesting when Nikki Haley, you know, failed to say that slavery was the cause of the civil war. It was a news story for what, five or six days, right? Trump says something crazy and insane every hour. And it's just like, just, you know,

it's the banality of crazy. He's like, okay, well, that's not new. In some ways, that's kind of working for him, right? It's like, you know, it's not breaking headline news that, hey, howling monkey, wrapping up the Republican nomination. Yeah, exactly. All right. So what is the way out of Trumpism and the MAGA movement? You say, if I get this correctly, that looking forward, if he doesn't designate a successor with the same kind of rhetorical skills, you think that it's going to pay off? The flip side of that is what you describe, and one of my takeaways from your book, is that this is going to be in the long haul. There's an entire generation of politicians and young people that have come of age during this period. And we are going to be

dealing with this, not just for the next election cycle, but for the next decade, two decades, maybe three decades. The hangover of this is going to last a very long time. That's why I think your book is so valuable because it shows, you know, this is seeped deep into the culture with a certain intent. What is the future? What is the post-MAGA future? Or is there a post-MAGA future? I think the movement, like the MAGA movement is going to last in also a very atomized form. What I think one of the downsides of MAGA is that it's not really based on an ideology so much as it is based on a fighting style right it's really dog eat dog too you can't have one person at the top of it it's

just going to be a whole like you are still fighting for audience share and the best way to do it is try to like knock out someone else and someone can like say oh no this is my political belief it's more like traditionally conservative or i actually am more of a populist over here but like that does not particularly matter unless you can show dominance and i don't know if the conservative world as shaped by maga will remain as coherent as it used to be because of that. Red in tooth and claw is what you're describing. It's not about ideas. It's about turf. It's about dominance.

It's about who's up right now. I think that's an interesting way of putting it. Yeah, I mean, look at what's happening in the House right now. Technically, like Mike Johnson, the speaker, is a conservative. If this were 2015 or 2018, what he was proposing would have been a very conservative budget and he would be considered a hardliner. But he has the temerity to try to work with Democrats. And that's a horrible sin for the part of the party that is willing to take him out. Well, yeah, I mean, look how the window has moved from Paul Ryan, who was, you know,

the bright young conservative to now Mike Johnson, who knows where we're going. Okay, so let's talk about one of the really fun parts of your book, and there are so many, is your description of Turning Point USA. For people who are not familiar, this is the Charlie Kirk organization. It is one of the most flamboyantly successful organizations. You went to the other summit back in 2022 when Nazis with swastikas and armbands showed up along with signs praising Ron DeSantis. I mean, this dynamic is so strange. So Turning Point USA has become very MAGA. So tell me about the incident with the Nazis. Oh, man, that was a fun one. So these Nazis show up and they're part of this group called the Goyim Defense League

and their entire deal is we're going to troll the mainstream media and people about how bad the Jews are. And like literally they will dress up as Orthodox Jews and hold protests where they say that the Holocaust was faked. That's how trolly they are. Yeah.

But all of these students show up and these guys come in and they're like, we're Nazis. We're here at Turning Point USA. I'm watching these students come in. They clearly don't like Nazis. I think that's what everyone misses about this incident. Well, that's reassuring.

Yeah. They go in and they start screaming at the Nazis to get out of here. And they all get into this big screaming match. And the thing that really struck me, though, was that these kids did not believe that these guys were actually Nazis. They started accusing them of being Antifa interlopers who were trying to make them look bad or from some campaign that wanted to associate them with Nazis. And these guys just keep goading them. They're still wearing masks. And the fact that they didn't take their masks down so the students could identify them just made them more and more suspicious. But they thought they were from the Lincoln Project, or they thought they were lefties. I mean, is that the story they have to tell themselves?

What's the mental flex that they have to make when they're confronted with groups like this, I guess? I mean, we saw this in January 6th, right? I mean, you still have the cognitive dissonance of some people saying they were brave patriots and others saying, no, they were Antifa because anything bad that happens must be the left, right? They can't actually be Nazis. Yeah. I mean, the entire movement is reactionary and I don't think there's any net negative for admitting that they are actually Nazis and that they condemn that movement. They have no affiliation with them. And frankly, the Nazis and white nationalists really hate Charlie Kirk because he's pro-Israel. But the students at that level were like the idea that someone negative had showed up in their space and for them to think, oh, no, this is leftist trying to make us look bad like that

just seems organic and sort of bred by this sense of like this little tiny sprout of resentment that must have happened somewhere in college and it was just something they refused to believe i don't know if there is any sort of like this is something I have to believe in order for me not to like confront why it is that they want to show up in the first place. It was, no, these guys are here to make us angry. Who else makes us angry? Leftists. There we go. Yeah. So there is no breaking point. There's nothing that Donald Trump or the right is going to do that's going to cause the shattering of this movement. I think this becomes very clear, you know, because of the way that it's set up. I wonder, and I wonder what you think about this. How many of these young people that are associating with some of these extreme ideas now, 20, 30 years from now, are going to

look back on this as you do now with like, what was I thinking? What was I going? I mean, how many of those will have that second thought versus the ones who basically this is now their life and they're going to be with us for the next half century? Oof, that's a really tough question to answer. I think it's possible, but only if, I don't know. I don't know what that would look like. And I don't know whether that involves schisms. It looks like you, right? I mean, you know, you know, I know people of both, you know, I mean, especially the way you describe it and you describe it so well, that, that network, the people, the

jobs, the prestige, that sense that you are protected is incredibly powerful. And the vast majority of right-wingers, conservatives, Republicans that I know continue to go on it. But obviously, being where we are here, we also know some people who go, wow, what was I thinking? And by the way, when I say this, I am not judging you or anybody else. Because what was I thinking when I thought that Ron Johnson was going to be a really smart mainstream Republican? What was I thinking when I thought that Ron Johnson was going to be a really smart, you know, mainstream Republican? You know, what was I thinking? You know, when I went along with some of that, I got a long track record. What was I thinking when I was shaking Ted Cruz's hands eight years ago and saying, you know, we're going to help you win the Wisconsin primary? All seemed like a good idea at

the time. And you go, what the hell was I thinking? Because as you know, once you get outside the bubble, you look back and you see it all. But it's hard to get out of that bubble in the first place, isn't it? Someone else did ask me that question. And the strongest answer I can point to, I think, is if there is something that you just kind of fundamentally think is wrong and you confront it and you think, wait, no, I cannot keep going like this. Protect that sense. Especially if people try to convince you that you're wrong and if you're wrong and you have to stay or else bad things will happen, just keep cultivating that in self and keep that little tiny spark alive. And if you can find some way to get out of it or at least mitigate your own involvement in it,

do so. Absolutely. I was able to take that risk when I was younger because I was 22 and could just move to New York and survive on pennies and stay on my mom's health insurance. When you're older, I think that's a little bit tougher, and I'm completely empathetic to that. But there is always a way out. It's just a matter of, can you find it? But as you point out, it gets harder and harder with time for many people. I cannot tell you the most frequent word that I hear when I have this conversation with my former friends who are Republicans is mortgage. The book is The MAGA Diaries, My Surreal Adventures Inside the Right Wing and How I Got Out by Tina Nguyen, who is a founding partner, national correspondent at Puck, formerly a reporter for The Daily Caller, Vanity Fair and Politico.

The book was released yesterday. So congratulations, Tina. I appreciate it. It is a great read and incredibly valuable to understand what's happening to us. Thanks for coming on the podcast today, Tina. Thanks for having me. This was fun. And thank you all for listening to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm Charlie Sykes. We will 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.