The Bulwark Podcast - Tom Nichols: Drama Queens About Everything

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Republican men used to be stoic and quiet technocrats, but now they're screechy and freaky. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has a whole crop of strong, silent types to choose from as a running mate.  Plus, a shout-out to Charlie Sykes, movies Tim hasn't seen, and can we quit the identity-oriented Zooms for Kamala? Tom Nichols joins Tim Miller. show notes: Tom's piece on the manliness flip-flop Tom's piece on Biden stepping aside Charlie on how Never Trumpers really mean never Trump's 400 kids remark

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. Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We're bringing in the big guns this week. It's Tom Nichols is back, professor emeritus at the Naval War College. He's a staff

writer at The Atlantic, author of The Atlantic Daily Newsletter. His books include The Death of Expertise, which has an updated edition. What's up, brother? Thanks for thanks for being back on the pod. Hey, Tim, thanks for having me. Good to be back, man. Isaac Arnsdorf, a reporter who was who was on with us a couple months ago, has some audio from J.D. Vance. It's, you know, maybe a little inconvenient. Maybe Mr. Trump, it might be mad at him again. Isn't there always some audio from J.D. Vance that's you know maybe a little inconvenient maybe mr trump it might be mad at him again uh let's isn't there always some audio from jd vance that's a little inconvenient we could do a whole podcast of it but but today i'm just gonna pick this one that let's take a listen this was uh caitlin collins uh playing the audio last night on cnn all of us were hit with a little bit of a

political sucker punch the bad news is that kamala harris does not have the same baggage as Joe Biden because whatever we might say, Kamala Harris is a lot younger and Kamala Harris is obviously not struggling in the same ways that Joe Biden did. Candid comments there, and they may just be an accurate assessment of how much Biden dropping out of the race has shaken things up, truly. But compare what you heard from Senator Vance there to what former President Donald Trump said publicly just a few moments ago on Fox. Ooh. I think she's a worse candidate than him. She's far more radical left. She is younger.

I mean, she's 60 years old. A lot of people, I didn't realize she was 60. I thought she was a little younger. Wait for the payoff there. Got to judge her looks, right? We got to include a judgment of Kamala didn't realize she was 60 i thought she was a little younger wait for the payoff there gotta judge her looks right we gotta include a judgment of kamala harris's looks at the end so i'm surprised it didn't include disaster it's a disaster clearly jd's right i mean when we last got together i just looked it was july 1st donald trump's ear was fully together all the cartilage was in there and joe biden was the candidate so biggest picture how do you feel obviously you think you concur with jd there and Joe Biden was the candidate. So biggest picture, how do you feel?

Obviously, you think you concur with JD there. And you know, in 2020, I was not a huge Kamala fan. I didn't like the debate. I thought she wasn't great when she was, you know, kind of off the cuff. I think she's gotten better. She seems more disciplined. But the bigger picture is this a 60 year old former prosecutor, big state attorney general with several years experience in the U.S. Senate and for his vice president. Sign me up. I'll take it. Even if this were not the kind of election it is, you'd say, look, that's a completely credible resume for a presidential candidate. But it is the kind of election it is. So compared to a, you know,

unhinged delusional sociopath, she seems especially good. I mean, what Vance had there, I mean, is this where we do the Washington thing and talk about a perfect Kinsley and Gaff, right? Oh no, I accidentally blurted out the truth. You know, what do I do now? I mean, Trump's just being Trump. You know, he's going to say that stuff. And you can almost see the hands going when he does it. If you'd have asked me two years ago, well, I did write two years ago, I said, you know, leave Biden alone. He's doing fine. He's okay. You know, a little slower than he used to be. And I didn't think Harris would be a strong enough candidate. I've been surprised by two things. One is, as I said, how much Harris improved, but also how quickly the Democrats,

finally, at least most Democrats, seem to be taking this really seriously and saying, look, we have a candidate. We have to coalesce around her. We have to get this thing done. I didn't expect that either. Trump's just got to be so bitter at J.D. and Don Jr. right now. It's just like every day there's a new thing. He's going to be like, how did I pick this jabroni? What did he think was going to happen? I think he thought these people would be excited. In another clip, I should have pulled it.

Another clip from that Laura Ingraham interview. I'll put it in the show notes. She asked him about this, about the Vance pick and whether there's some issues and he gives this long and rambling answer about how like oh uh the people with families with big families they like him you know laura there are people out there with big that like him they like him it's like these tech guys and then and then also these people with huge families and and i mean maybe not they're not like 400 kids not the weird families but i kind of just normal big families and and it's like it's like a man who was told by his son that you know he's got to pick this guy because you know he's really hot among the youth and he's really hot among the christians like two

groups that he knows nothing about and and he just kind of assumed that that was going to work for him and and it's not really maybe paying off it was a very online pick yeah you know one of the ways i think biden um beat the field in 2020 and then beat trump was that he basically ignored social media and he ignored the whole online left and you know and it was really interesting primary right because you know people like warren and sanders were, you could tell, just pulling policy off of Twitter. This was the mistake of not ignoring the online world. I think also it was hubris, right? We've got this in the bag.

It's done. We could pick Bolsonaro at this point, and we could get away with it. And so they said, wouldn't it just be, wouldn't it just totally deliciously own the libs if we picked this, you know, annoying guy who's not even liked in his own state, who has all of these, you know, baggage, has all this baggage. But I keep saying this, and I think you'd probably agree with this, Tim. The other reason he chose Vance, and people need to always grasp this part of Trump, Vance humiliated himself more than anyone to get this job. And that's saying something in this crowd of contenders, right, where you had Stefanik and Raman Swamy and, you know, really some amazing suck-ups, you know, vying for this post. But Vance was the one who had to explicitly repudiate things he had said out loud, and explicitly repudiate things he had written.

And I think for Trump, that's a security blanket that made him feel good to say this guy, this guy, you know, I knew Mikeence mike pence was a friend of mine you're no mike pence you're not going to do this to me you will do whatever i tell exactly and and so the fact that that vance was willing to just you know burn every last principle he had to the ground probably put him over the top who would have been a smarter pick in a tighter race maybe somebody reassuring like bergham right i I thought Marco would have been better. I mean, I hate Marco. So like, I feel like I can give this as a totally analytical response. I do not care for Marco Rubio at all in any way. But he can give a good speech. He would have been totally fine on the

debate stage. He has sucked up to Trump in ways that are extremely pathetic but not nearly in the category of vance as far as submission and um you know he's a politician he's ran for president he's been through the traps i think he was a much better pick i think clearly yeah i suppose you could argue too he brings you know that he know a little bit of no it's not too white guys right he sort of goes drives that wedge harder into the hispanic vote and all that i mean i think a safer pick maybe and you know but there were other republicans out there who could have been what vance was which is like don't worry there's somebody you know calm and reassuring and he didn't want that he wanted a shit poster and he got one boy did he get one and he's getting it good and hard right on the

couch um speaking of you mentioned the joke joke. Don't do the couch jokes. You know how I am about that. What are you talking about? I don't know what you're talking about. I've been totally telling people not to do that because it's a faked thing. There's so much real stuff to go after with him that you don't need to go there.

I don't know if anybody can see me, but I'm wagging a finger. In case anyone's listening to the board podcast or watching us on youtube i don't want to spread disinformation jd vance as far as we know there's no evidence that he ever made sweet sweet love to a sectional or a couch of any kind there's no evidence of it there's no evidence of it that's a that's a rumor and we'll just leave it at that um it's like the old out the old uh lbj you what for what would you i'm gonna be the one that does all the time stuff i'm gonna be the one that does the old time and stuff where he

tells the advisor to spread the rumor that his opponent's a pig fucker it's like nobody's gonna believe that he's a pig fucker it's like well let him deny it so i just want to i just want to hear the son of a bitch deny it. There you go. There you go. One other thing you said in there that sparked a thought that I wanted to get to was about how Biden avoided the online left and was able to kind of campaign towards the middle. And I've been interested this week. The dynamic is different. Clearly, Kamala is very online, not online in the way that JD is.

She's not like personally reading weirdo far right web blogs like Modi, a small blog or whatever. She's not that kind of weirdo. But like the campaign is very online. The Kamala HQ Twitter account has a meme for a pop artist, right? So it's not your daddy's campaign anymore. It's not Joe Biden's campaign anymore. But the excitement from the left in the base, I feel like has given her a

little bit of freedom to not have to pander to them. And the latest example of this is here from the New York Times. In addition to changing her position on fracking, campaign officials said Harris now backed the Biden administration's budget request for increased funding for border enforcement, no longer supported a single payer health health insurance program and echoed biden's call for banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them back to the federal government you know moving to the middle moving on over this this feels like somebody that's in it to win it to me i'm sorry but you know it feels like that the normal rules of politics are reasserting themselves. Run to the edge in a primary, run to the center in the general.

Hello? Isn't that what every smart campaign has done for 60 years? And I think also, because Biden didn't have an innate credibility with the left, they always came after him, right? That Biden's just a Republican light, and we remember after him, right? That, you know, Biden's just a Republican light, and we remember Anita Hill, and we remember this and that. And, you know, I mean, it's effective with business to say, I'm from Delaware, where all of you are incorporated. That doesn't really, you know, fly with the left. But I think to, you know, being a little younger,

and being able to kind of, as you say, I won't say ignore the left, but to say, look, I get you. I understand you. We've you know, we understand each other, but we're not doing that today. But also just to have a kind of a hipper sensibility about how to phrase things to normal people. Look, when I was a Republican, I used to love Joe Biden because he was the definition of a Kinsleyan gaffe. Like when I worked in the Senate, you know, or when I was working in politics and living in D.C., of course you would watch the Sunday shows because Joe Biden was going to blurt out something true and it was going to be interesting. But I think that's not how you run a campaign in the 21st century. For example, her decision to just go with this very

simple declaration, something I've been saying for years, that the guy's just weird. You know, like not a normal person, not like you and me. I think where she's really gotten away from the online left is not in terms of campaigning, but in terms of, no, we don't have to go through Twitter and check the box of all these policy positions that we have to make sure that our left flank is covered on i keep going back to 2020 and and campaigns like warren and sanders and others it was like we're gonna decriminalize the border raise your hand it's just like come on right right i i've got a white paper on that yeah i think you know some simple themes he's not a normal guy. I'm a prosecutor. He's a

felon. It feels like somebody there has kind of learned their lesson, which also surprises me because I will be churlish and probably get some flack. But when she ran in 2020, in those first few years as vice president, I was not exactly impressed with what seemed to be the staffing there. No, she went through a lot of, I had a lot of staff overhaul. It's been something I've wanted maybe later this week or next week. I'm going to do a kind of broader conversation about that. Look, I think it's worth being eyes wide open.

JVL had a good newsletter yesterday. Kamala Harris is not, you know, this is not pop music. She's not Beyonce. She's not a slay queen. She's not going to be perfect. She's a human, right? And she's going to have strengths and flaws. she's going to have policy proposals that we agree with that you don't agree

with and one of the things that it's kind of at least worth being eyes open about is that she did have a ton of staffing turnover a kind of an unusual amount that makes you wonder okay what was happening there and and maybe it's just something as simple as she's finding her sea legs i hope it's that like finding people she trusts finding her sea legs it was rocky she was on rocky turf in a primary trying to figure out how do i deal with warren and sanders to the left of me and this young mayor pete over here like talking circles around everybody to the right and old man joe biden talking circles or to the right of me like where's my lane here and and so I think she was a little bit unsteady and then the vice presidency is just by nature an unsteady job you're like I have no real job okay and I've got to like present myself

so I'm hoping that it's just more of kind of finding a role you know that she's really well suited to I think she is well suited to this just one more thing on the policy I've been getting a kick out of the fact you can tell her power right now and her strength in this political moment by there's not that I've seen. Maybe it's out there. There's been very little pushback to her from the left. It's not like you've seen AOC spouting off about how she how she's abandoned some of these left-wing positions and we've seen many of our friends the anti-anti-trumpers the you know the wall street journal crowd the national review crowd being like oh you're just gonna allow her to flip-flop on all these issues and i'm like yeah great she's flip-flopping to the middle that's great the vp on your ticket thought that the p was hitler eight years ago all right so like a

little flip-flop on fracking is just fine with me. All right. So as the punchline to an old beer commercial went, you're going to let her do it. Yes, I am. Some of our comrades, you know, on the right. I mean,

I was talking to Jonah Goldberg on a pod while back and he's like, look, I get it about being never Trump, but why do you have to be a cheap date? Yeah. And accept these policy positions. I'm like, well,

if you start from sedition is bad, okay. Then, you know, the, is bad okay then you know the other then i look i know how to argue about tax rates and fracking and and you know stuff like that those are normal conversations we can have i don't know how to argue with people who say the parts of the constitution i don't like should be covered over in whiteout. You know, yeah, I'm, I'm where you are. It's like somebody jumped on me on speaking of social media. I said, look, she's fine. She's going to do things I won't like. And someone said, see, you never Trumpers. You always have to slip that in. You know, I'm like, every president's going to do things you don't like. I mean, she's a liberal Senator.

You know, she wins. She's going to be a democratic president. Of course, she's going to do things I don't like, but she's not going to try and overthrow the Constitution of the United States. And, you know, as long as that's where we are, I'm good. I can deal with the other stuff. I want to shout out Charlie on this point. Charlie Sykes in The Atlantic has a piece out yesterday, I believe, that said the Never Trumpers are clear on their goal.

At the core of Mark Thiessen over at the Washington Post, his argument is the perception that Harris poses an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives. On paper, Thiessen might have once had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between left and right. It's about preserving our liberal constitutional order. Yeah, it's as simple as that. And so if we're going to get on a little cherry on top of that, that she's going to pivot to the center.

OK, well, and I was going to say the ideological distance between Kamala Harris four years ago. That's a good point. And conservatives was bigger than it is now. But of course, Thyssen, I mean mean this is such a bad faith argument right it's like well yes i'm against trump too but i can't vote for anybody who might run against trump ever yeah right you know it's like well then what then what does that even mean you know okay what is the point of you why do you have a column the point right everybody's bad you can't propose a solution what is the point of you why do you have a column what's the point right everybody's bad if you can't propose a solution what is the point of your newspaper column i wrote a piece of about a month ago because this always just pisses me off immensely and i called it the

jimmy clean hands election you know after a character in um once upon a time in america a union boss who was james conway o'donnell and they called him jimmy clean hands because he was an idealistic young socialist who wanted no part of any of these dirty dealings in the 1930s except of course whenever the mob was helping him fight the police and help them you know with their strikes and stuff so he was up to his ass in mob stuff but he always maintained a distance and so they called him jimmy clean hands i love that you make me feel young with these references that i have no idea what you're talking about it's just a 1984 sergio leone classic with robert de niro in it my friend you must benjamin buttoning just listening to you talk about this you gotta if i were talking about casablanca would you think i

was 90 come on it's a classic yeah you would you are. I know. Tim Walls quoted Little Rascals the other day. And I stole his line. I stole his line not realizing he was referencing something. And everybody in the comment section is like, Tim, have you not seen Little Rascals? I was like, I might have saw it once. Oh, no. Tim Walls really quoted Little Rascals? He did.

He called the He-Man Woman Haters Club. Okay. But that's a classic. I get it. Okay. Anyway, moving on about my age, you know, and all these guys are Jimmy Cleenhans. Well, I am totally against Trump. Well, what are you going to do to stop? Well, nothing. I'm going to leave that to you. And if he wins, if he wins, it's not my fault, but I'll be okay with that. And I think that's the undertone of a lot of these comments. And I think that's another thing Harris is going to have to deal with, with people saying, well, you know, I would have voted for Joe Biden. You're going to get a lot of that now from people who would never have voted for Joe Biden. I would have voted for Biden, but Harris, that's just a bridge too far. 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 rent safe TO. Since we're right on this subject, I want to get to just kind of how you respond to the ads that are happening right now, the kind of frame up this conversation that we're talking about, about how the two campaigns are going to reach out to the people that are trying to have Jimmy clean hands on this. So I just want to play for you. The Trump campaign is on TV right now. 12 million bucks playing in a lot of the swing states with this ad.

I want you to listen to it. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I approve this message. This is America's border czar, and she's failed us. Under Harris, over 10 million illegally here. A quarter of a million Americans dead from fentanyl. Brutal migrant crimes. And ISIS now here. Do you have any plans to visit the border?

You haven't been to the border. And I haven't been to Europe. I don't understand the point that you're making. Kamala Harris failed. Weak, dangerously liberal. That's from her Lester Holt interview in that first year where she was kind of struggling in the vp spot what do you make of that i mean i think that is really where when you separate all the bullshit it's like she's a california liberal she's california what do you mean she wants open borders she wants migrants to come through and rape people i mean

that that's basically what it comes down to right and um she wants her kids to be gay yeah and um does she got to go at that immigration thing head on now? Or is that a sunk cost? Where are you at on that? Going at it head on. I mean, there's always the problem that with immigration, people say it's their top issue. And then they come out, you know this from exit polls, right? They come out and it turns out to be like eighth.

Yeah. But it's something that fires people up because it pings all kinds of racial anxieties and demographic concerns. I mean, it's really notable how much you get a lot of anxiety about immigrants in places like, you know, Iowa and northern New Hampshire. So I got in trouble because I was on the Next Level podcast last week and I was like, are we really going to lose the democracy? Because people in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania are so worried about the border? And people are chastising me, letting me know that, yes, people there are worried about the border. I guess. Okay.

That's fine. I'm not saying the border is not a problem, but, you know, given the battlefield here, you know, what about the Canadian border? Fentanyl could come across the Canadian border, too. It's not like these ads make it seem like fentanyl is being run by mules under the rio grande it's like fentanyl is is very easy to transport like it comes in through airports through ports it could come in through in somebody's car trunk through toronto like it's not like it's just these scary guatemalans that are bringing fentanyl across first of all fentanyl or as republicans like to call it fentanyl. I just did that. So I struggle with that one too. Thank you for correcting me. It's important to get things right. I know. You know what a pedant I am. I do. I appreciate that about you. But the problem

is that even to make that argument like you just did, right, where you say, look, fentanyl comes in a lot of legal places, you know, people put it in car trunks, I could bring it from, you know, Toronto, then you look like you know, Toronto, then you look like you're minimizing it, then you look like you're not taking it seriously. I think you have to take it seriously. But I think you don't have to take the bait. And I think one thing that the Biden people were less good at that the Harris people seem better at. And I'm saying that very tentatively, because it's so early, was that the Biden folks would say, well, we've of you know this on the border well here's our ad that says you know one two here's the fact here's the facts right and you know they they come out and they say this about harris and she goes

man you guys are just strange and to go back to the masculinity thing i mean ads like that they're pretty common in politics for a long time i mean mean, by the way, J.D. Vance ran in Ohio saying number one of the top three priorities for people of Ohio is closing the southern border. Like of Ohio? Like got to stop that. Kentucky. Yeah. You know, you got got issues. in which the Democrats and the Republicans, I mean, back 40 odd years ago, to me, the Republicans were the quiet technocrats, the guys in suits who kind of knew what they were doing and sort of just

did it. You know, they just weren't real excitable. I mean, I grew up around Massachusetts liberals. I grew up in Western Mass, which was my hometown area. It was kind of evenly divided there was kind of the work the lunch pail conservatives the working class tory sort of thing but but a lot of there's also like five colleges and kids chaining themselves to air force gates and all that crap and so you know to me that was a kind of a cool thing like if you're an intelligent reasoning person you went with of course remember i was in new england so i't seeing, you know, the evangelical rise down in the South and all that stuff. Right. But they seem to have changed places where Republicans have become drama queens about everything.

I mean, everything has turned up to 11 and it's very screechy and freaky and kind of just over the top hyperventilating. And who's Harris trying to pick from for vice president, like what Cooper's out now, but Shapiro and some Kelly and all these really sort of calm plotting, you know, again, kind of technocratic person that you could just see kind of in charge of any

like mid-level business, you know, company or whatever, you know, just like a type of person that you'd see in the airport lounge. On his laptop, solving something. Solving a problem. Just regular people.

I think it's important to highlight that change because the undecided voters and I think really the broad mass of Americans, they're exhausted by this. I think it's even more dramatic than that. In your article, The Great Manliness Flip-Flop, this was my favorite part, the strong silent types were venerated. The heroes included cops, soldiers, cowboys. Republicans admired the actors that played these role models, including Clint Eastwood, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, and yet yes ronald reagan all republicans by the way yeah that strong silent type what did ever happen to that like that used to be the paragon of manhood and now manhood if you go to the republican

convention which everybody said was so manly so focused that was a common pundit talking point they were so focused on machismo the last day was like a wrestling actor complaining about things tucker carlson and his little penny loafers complaining about things donald trump with his grievance obviously it's a legitimate grievance when it comes to the assassination story but even still it was very melodramatic the whole thing was i would describe it as campy like it was very campy they were all beset by hurt feelings the media is mean to me the judges are mean to me the rules are unfair everything's unfair like what buck the fuck up yeah it is really whiny and and i don't say this as a matter of politics i mean just as a middle late i know i should say late middle-aged guy it's just cringy you know it's like come on like you say you know

just jesus christ have some dignity i have argued a lot online with bullet truthers i've said hey if somebody shot at me and all it did was make my ear bleed and zing past my ear and burn it or put a little piece of a fragment of a bullet or something, my wife would not be saying, well, it's okay. Tom wasn't really shot. Right. My wife would be like flipped out and she wouldn't let me out of the house. And granted, in that moment, I also, I've said this a million times, in that moment, I grant like it was crazy that he had the wherewithal to want to stand up and raise his fist. And yeah, so sure. So that's not the part we're talking about when he talks about the tough guy.

It's all the whining that happens surrounding that about how the people on his stories are mean to him. Well, that's the thing, right? And you compare that in the piece, I compare it with Reagan, who really does have to get a bullet dug out. I mean, it took a long time, like years, before people realized that Reagan came within a whisker of dying on the table, because Kinkley got him and lodged a bullet in him. And Reagan, in his first appearance, and credit to Karen Tumulty for digging this up at the time. Reagan goes and he stands for Congress and he talks for three paragraphs. And he pays tribute to the cops and the Secret Service guy that got hit. Talks about James Brady.

Thanks his doctors. Tells a cute story about a little kid who sent him a card saying if he doesn't rest enough, he might have to go to work in his pajamas. And then he says, now let's talk about the economy and inflation. You know, that is a very stoic thing. You don't even have to call it manly. It's a very stoic thing to do. But stoic was a manly virtue.

Right. I'm sitting here, as you can see behind me. I have the greatest American stoic on my bookshelf here, President Washington. We have Ryan Holiday. I did an interview with him. He does a whole thing on the stoics and the manly virtues. Oh, President Washington. We have Ryan Holiday. I didn't interview with him. It does a whole thing on the stoics and the manly virtues. Yeah. Being a rock, being solid for people, you know, being reliable.

And you don't have to share every thought that goes through your head. And he just wallowed in it. And I think, you know, you ask, where did it go? I think some of that was going because the role models who encouraged it were leaving public life. But also Donald Trump really made it okay. When I wrote a piece some years ago called The Most Unmanly President, I didn't go after Trump because I'm not some paragon of masculinity. I mean, you know, you, Sarah Longwell has always, you know, joshed me about when I brought up that, you know, I use foo-foo hair products and skin stuff and that my shaving cream is from London. I got no blisters on these hands.

This is not okay. Very soft hands. I just had a manicure. You know, it's not like I'm not like I'm Marshall Dillon over here. What I was writing about was why do the working class white men who prize that sort of masculinity, why are they not repelled by a guy they would normally hate? And that, I think, is the mystery. And I think it's because the deal is as long as he hates the same people, which is always part of that deal, as long as he kind of triggers people they don't like.

But also, Trump is the get-out-of-jail-free card for bad behavior. When I wrote that piece, I was still working for the government, and so people were leaving messages in the workplace. And a veteran called, and he was railing. You were never in the military. What unit were you in? What have you ever done? And I'm listening and saying, you're talking about a guy who went to a military high school. Did you make this message for me or for Donald Trump?

I was just going to say. Whose answering machine is this supposed to be on? Holy crap, man. You know, this guy was hated at the military academy for being like a cheating weasel. You know, you look at the stories of the people that went to Valley Forge with him. And in that sense, I guess I just don't understand it, except that they believe they should adhere to those manly standards. but Trump because he's Loki and he's this chaos agent he's like their their rascally son that they love even though they're constantly bailing them out of jail or something yeah I don't know it's funny it's a be careful what you wish for situation for me you know because I'm I'm in my feelings I did not aspire to be the Clint Eastwood type the strong silent type that was never going to be me I'm my mother internally I had some like I don't know if I was maybe turned off by that type a little bit, or there's something about

it that bugged me. And like now here I am with a little bit more wisdom and a few grays. And I'm thinking, boy, I really wish we had more Clint Eastwood. I wish we had more John Wayans around. It's like, when I meant being in touch with your feelings, I meant like having empathy, caring about others, not like whining, and being so mad and being so angry at everybody and having temper tantrums at the world. It's just like, shut the fuck up. When an American military officer was shot running around in Berlin back in the days when we used to shoot at each other in Berlin because it was a pretty tense place. Reagan was, you know, visibly angry and some reporters, so what do you, he gave like the standard speech, right? We need to deplore this ad, yada, yada, yada. So what do you, what do

you really think, Mr. President? And Reagan kind of looked at him and he said, you don't want to know what I'm thinking. Compare that to somebody like Trump, who's like, please stop talking. You know, please just stop talking. My God, you know, just it's okay to have an unexpressed thought. I think the reason some of that has gone away is, let's be honest, you didn't particularly like that type of man, because it does verge over into dysfunction, right? Sure. I always love that line from Midnight Run for my fam out there who loves Midnight Run as much as I do.

When Charles Grodin turns to Robert De Niro in that movie, De Niro being the strong and silent type in that movie, he says, you know what your problem is? You have two forms of expression, silence and rage. So, you know, you don't want to be that guy.

But, you know, I'm like you tim silence as john adams said of george washington he had the gift of silence as you can tell no one's ever given me that gift but i admire it and i admire it in the men who have it you know and i don't know how that how it became okay to be you know this whiny blinginged-out, daytime TV addict who's constantly bellyaching about how nobody really, nobody likes me, it must be my personality, and everybody's after Trump. And I just, he made that okay.

He made that okay for a lot of men who don't want to grow up. And I think, and I'll just stop the dime store anthropology here but i think some of it is it was very appealing in a culture where a lot of men have refused to grow up and become adults if you're an arrested adolescent you know there's an interesting parallel here i said i'd stop i'll do two more seconds it's an interesting parallel i love talking about trump and his makeup and how he's an arrested adolescent we can do the rest of the show on this so please continue well compare him to his friend howard stern right yeah stern was the worst case of aspirational and i didn't i didn't coin this phrase but i heard it was aspirational assholery

that if you were a young guy you said man i man, I want to be able to just be as racist and idiotic and talk about girls and their boobs all day long. Say whatever I want. Right. Just be a total id walking around. But as Stern got older, even now he talks about Trump and he's like, look, the guy needs therapy. Yeah. Having children, getting married, experiencing life and death, you know, it's supposed to change you. It's supposed to make you different. And when Howard Stern emerges as a good example of mature masculinity in chastising Donald Trump, you know, for his problems, I mean, it tells you what an interesting place we've come to, but Stern really appealed to kids. You know, my one in the eighties, all my friends were Howard Stern fans because they just love that idea. And I think Trump appeals that same thing. It's like,

you can be a dick, you know, it's okay. It's fun. It's more fun than going to work and being good to your kids and, you know, talking to your wife and being conscientious at your job that's for suckers and for chumps that's a mugs game caring about people's feelings that's a that's for losers losers do that right speaking about tough guys you know um that aren't weird at all uh you know there's jd vance tucker little pump little pimp is Is he Little Pump or Little Pimp? I don't know. The little rapper with all the face tattoos that's out there for Trump. The weird thing is you've been on it for a while.

We've been on it for a while. It's hit takeoff velocity. And I think that it's landing. And I want to just talk briefly about why you think that, why you think it's landing. Because they are weird. Boy, this will be the first time you and I ever talked about a Tom Friedman piece. But, you know, yesterday in The the times right thomas friedman said stop calling them weird it's silly it's juvenile no the couch gags were silly and juvenile calling them weird is a denotation it's saying something that's right in front of you i mean when somebody posted that thing from the, I don't know if it was a

CPAC or someplace with Marge Taylor Greene visiting the guy, so we play acting, visiting the guy in prison with a MAGA hat. You know, I'm sorry, you don't issue a point paper in response to that. You turn to all the other normal people in America and you go, look, I know we have our disagreements, but we can all agree, right? That that's weird we don't want these freaks running the government that's just creepy yeah are these the people that you want like in charge of making sure that you get your social security check or that you know are those the people you want like doing procurement at the air force people play acting jail scenes at cpac it's not that we disagree with their policies, which we do. It's not that we just, you know, wish they were better people, even though we do. It's that they

are weird. They are creepy. And it's okay to say that out loud. And I think it gives, maybe the expression I'm looking for here is like a permission structure, where you can turn to other people and people can say, you know, I always felt like something's off about this. And yeah, it's creepy. It's okay to say it. Creepy is really on the point. And weird has taken off just because it's more of a catch-all. But really, the point people are making, and I think why it's sticking, is that word.

It's creepy. You know, we're not out there saying hey you can't have niche interests you know you can't be outside the mainstream and be in government you know you can't be whatever i you can't collect weird collectibles like whatever it is that you might think somebody in your life's a little weird about that's not what that's not what this is it's about now these guys are creepy and they're freaks and they have this like weird obsession with controlling you mostly women right they want to impose their creepiness on you and it's mostly women that they want to impose their creepiness on and it's like they need to have

thoughts about whether they bear children at the right year they want to have thoughts about whether they're they're staying in their marriage appropriately. If their husband is getting lit and slapping them across the face. They want to talk about whether the gender norms are correct in the M&Ms. Whether the green M&M girl should be in flats or high heels. That was a Tucker Carlson segment. It's creepy and we don't like it. And we don't want people with the power of the purse and the power of the law of the government who have those creepy obsessions to be at the helm.

And you can turn that back on them because I think, you know, the Republicans have made their arguments about people, you know, like trans people in the Biden administration, you know, saying, look, they're weird. They're weird. You know, OK, fine. They're weird. You know, if that's how you feel about them. But that added sense of control, it undermines arguments that even people in the center might agree with.

And I think, for example, the Republicans have this really strong point because I think it really pings something deep in a lot of parents to say biological males shouldn't be competing on girls sports teams. Right. That's they're big on that. And I think, you know, for a lot of parents, they kind of shrug and go, yeah, I don't I think that's probably wrong. But then they have to go that one step further and say, and so we're going to do like, you know, genitalia inspections. And all of a sudden, you know, this sort of. Or actually, that's going to be one of the 10 points in our platform we only have 10 things that we care about and what the gender restrictions are on high school skateboarding tournaments is going to be one

of the 10 items like that's fucking weird that moves into creepy territory this this conversation that would have been a kind of normal concerned empathetic discussion among parents about their children and their schools turns into this like freaky dystopian weird out you know where you're like i don't know how i'm gonna come out on this issue and i don't know how we solve it but i don't want you near my kids. I don't want JD Vance doing ball checks at the high school swimming. Yeah. Sorry. And I think that the next stage of this is, you know, there is a difference between weird and creepy. I mean, you know, Vivek Ramaswamy is just weird, right? I mean, you watch him and he does that whole Peter Navarro. I always think of him as stealing

Peter Navarro's hands when he talks, you know, because he does that thing. But what Vance has verged into is creepy. It's not just unusual or offbeat. I mean, it's creepy and a creepy authoritarian version of creepiness, you know, like the hero mothers of the fatherland should have more votes, you know, than everybody else. I mean, there's just this kind of weird because it comes out of all of that weird techno bro stuff about you know remaking society the way that people with billions of dollars think you know a bunch of guys who invented an app think it should be made remade it's weird and it's creepy yeah seasteading it's a little weird let me go live with a bunch of people a small group of people on the sea okay that's fine we're probably better off if peter teal and jd

had done that instead we're this far in tom and if we're going to be curmudgeonly we're 45 minutes in we got to pick on on you know the progressives a little bit there have been these calls this week these zoom calls at first i was kind of i thought it was great it's like hey it's black women for kamala and people are super excited then it's like oh it's black men for kamala like we're gonna take the pause like okay cool and then it was white ladies for kamala and the call was like a little had some weird like some ladies speaking and baby talk on it and then it was white dudes for kamala and then i got to this place where i was like this feels like a scene from the movie get out if identity politics has gone awry it makes me feel the most non-progressive of anything that's happened recently i just don't know how a meeting of white guys is a good idea if stephen miller hosted a whites for trump zoom call my colleagues colleagues at MSNBC would be like rocketing into the sun with rage, rightly.

And so I just, I think we should stop. I think we should stop having segregated meetings. No, no, no. Let's do racial affinity groups. What could go wrong? This is weird, right? So if we're calling them weird, like maybe let's not do weird things like white dudes. Exactly.

If part of your campaign is to point out that the other guys are being weird then it's very important not to be weird now again it's it's a more let us say something nice here which is it's a kind of harmless form of weirdness you know their intentions are good the intentions are fine yeah the intentions are good for increasing the the racial birth rate stuff but it is it is weird i mean it's just i mean i grew up in politics doing ethnic affinity stuff right like in where i grew up you check to find out how many people in your district were irish how many were polish how many were this how many were that italians for heinz or whatever yeah you know i mean my my first boss in politics was polish 1980 census came out we opened up the census and said we're golden you know we're fat so that's a

reality of politics but white dudes for kamala you know like, why? Why do we feel the need to say this? The whole point of this is not that she's going, the way her campaign, I think, reaches out is to say, we're not doing that. It's just everybody who's on this, everybody who's not with Trump is welcome on this side of the fence. You know, I mean, you know this, the Republicans for a long time, when the Democrats lurched to the left and went off the cliff after the 70s, in a way, the Republican coalition became unwieldy because it was the party of everybody else.

Right. Right. The Democrats were like a club that you had to be a card-carrying member of. And the Republicans were just this like default party of everybody else. And I think Democrats don't really understand that that they don't understand that that was key to part of what reagan was doing saying you don't have to be a republican you just have to not like what the democrats are doing yeah and so come on over here you know harris has started her campaign

pretty much saying if you're not that then by definition you're over here with us and doing you know white dudes and you know suburban moms and but it just to me it's it's not necessary yeah if you want to get if you have a little group and get excited together bros for kamala whatever uh you know what a knit people who are into knitting for kamala musical fans for kamala whatever you want to do make a t-shirt i'm cool with that clubs are cool but white dudes just yeah i like let's just let's just not create whites only affinity groups that's it i just i think that's a simple ask and well and also without the bro talk yeah you know you don't need it i mean if you want to say you know suburban middle-aged accountants great you know have a group have a facebook group have a text chain together it's all good raise money for

find ways fun creative raised to raise money for i'm for it but i i don't know the uh the baby talk about how white people are bad at a whites only meeting is just let's just not do it i didn't see that did that really happen that happened on the ladies version of the call it happened how we need to keep our ears open we do need to keep our ears open we do need to keep our ears open it's just like we'll have that convo you know on campus you can have you know in the dorms hash it all out um but what's the presidential campaign we want everybody in the obama 04 ethos i keep complimenting obama lately and just it's just the nature of ways the obama 04 ethos is what we're going for here well it sounds to me like a lot of these were practically the five thousand dollar

plate dinner for us to tell you that you're a racist hard pass on that just keep it open for for every friendly advice i'm not even with tom on the bros thing if you don't have a bros call a racially diverse bros call for comma i'm fine with that okay last thing while people are mad at me because i won't give it up i think you wrote an article about this or maybe i just saw it on twitter complimenting joe biden's speech oval office address about stepping aside i did not share that view i'm still mad at him i can't i'm sorry i know that makes some people upset i'm still mad at him you're a hater he was leading us into the abyss and if it wasn't for the fact that his campaign team was just

mind-bogglingly incompetent and determining that they should have a debate in june had they not made that mistake like we would literally be on trulia right now looking for houses in uruguay but we're not that's great it worked out by accident kind of and um we're here i'm excited about that but i'm a little mad at him but you are not you think that you know we should honor him and i want to hear that perspective so please share okay uh first of all i understand being a stubborn old irish guy okay are you saying i'm a stubborn middle-aged irish guy for still hating him or just say you know know, people always... Maybe this is a me and Joe have something in common and that tension is still there.

People always think of me as Greek, but most of my background, most of my genetic makeup is right from the old country, County Kerry. And so obnoxious, stubborn, old Irish guy that can't take advice immediately is somebody I feel like I can understand. I think that he got to that decision at all is something because I think there are people who

would have said, I don't care. I don't care if I lose. Stepping aside after I've gotten all the delegates, you can kiss my bony Irish ass. And then, you know, he just wasn't going to do it. I think I will share a little bit of your anger here, Tim, because when he gave that farewell message, he struggled with it. And I said, this farewell message of all things is one more thumb on the scale that says he couldn't do a campaign. He wasn't going to be able to take this case forward. I still think he can run the country because, you know, you sit, people don't understand that you don't have big giant thunder domes to develop policy, right? The president sits down, he's got his aides, there's a lot of delegating,

there's a lot of deliberation, there's a lot of executive function that goes on. I'm perfectly fine with him being president. I mean, I think, frankly, I would have been fine with him being president, you know, until the day he died. But that proved to me that he couldn't do it and that he knew he couldn't do it. He should have known it earlier. And the people around him, especially, should have, you know, been, I mean, you want to know what I'm really mad about? Every story I saw where they said, well, he was in a meeting with Jill and Hunter. And I'm like, no, sorry. I wrote a whole piece defending his relationship with his son. I talked about my own father. I understand the love of a son and a father.

Not in the White House. Not in the White House. Sorry. You want to meet with Hunter. You want to get some advice. Fly out to Wilmington. You were supposed to be doing the ode to Biden here. I've already done the shitting.

I know, but now, now look you spin me up you never know what gumball you're gonna get with that said i think it is a line for the ages that will go down in history to say i revere this office but i love my country more oh that's good and that is a line that donald trump will speak. And I think that that leaving on that note to say, hey, I'm not happy in a way, Tim, I'm happy that he didn't come out and say, you know what, you're right. I'm old. I'm infirm. I don't know. You know, instead, he said, look, I think I could have done this. But for the sake of unifying my party and saving my country, even though I think I'm being wronged here, because he kind of he made that implication, right? To say, I get it. We can't beat Donald Trump with me, even though I think, you know, I can do it. My party doesn't think so. People in the country don't think so. And the most important thing is saving this country. That's the part I really admired him for doing and for stepping aside and not finger wagging or saying we need an open convention and blah, blah, blah. He just he did the right thing.

And I think he did it the right way. I will agree with you that he did it three weeks too late after a very bad process. Maybe even longer. But, you know, but I think that that line, you you know i think when they do the joseph biden presidential library there aren't that many quotes he was not a great orator but that quote should be carved in the wall of the of the biden library i revere this office but i love my country more that is a dignified place for us to end we were going to do a victory laugh about how right we were about all this but why do that when we can have a dignified end like that, why not just leave it there?

Right, Tom? People know we were right. No. No, that's not how we're going to do it. Okay, go ahead. I wasn't the kind of guy to, no, I'm totally the kind of guy to say I told you so. And so are you. Let's not bullshit around about this.

I mean, we took a lot, and I didn't even call for him to step down. The range of positions out there were Biden should resign immediately. My own magazine had a piece that said that. We did have Stuart Stevens saying, leave Joe alone, right? And we had a lot of stuff in between. My position was, we need to acknowledge there's a problem and have a real discussion about what to do next, because I don't think he's going to make it through this campaign. And I purposely wouldn't take debate about whether it should be Kamala or Pete or Gavin Newsom or whatever.

I said, look, you've got to get out of respect for the man. Everybody needs to get him to the point of saying maybe I can't do this. And we were right, you know, to say that this could not get worse and could even get better. And I think what nobody expected, including you, let's face it, and me, we didn't expect it to be as smooth a rollout. I mean, for, you know, knock on wood, first two weeks, it's been a remarkably smooth transition to a Harris campaign. And so, yeah, I think the people that called us secret Trumpers and chaos agents and just looking for, you know, clicks and anybody wants to send that apology to either one of us, you know, you know where to find us on social media. So feel free to feel free to send your regrets on that. I just want the record to show I was going to take us out on a dignified high note and in the spirit of the spirit of stoicism and manly virtues i will let tom have the last word on that thank you tom

nichols i hope to see you again soon thanks tim we'll be back tomorrow there might be a trump family member on this podcast we'll see how that goes see y'all then peace Lay here with the advertising slide past my eyes Like cartoons from other people's lives I start to wonder what it takes to be a man Well, I learned to drink And I learned to drink and I've learned to smoke And I've learned to tell and to joke If that's all there is then there's no point for me

So please can I ask just why we're alive? Cause all that you do seems such a waste of time And if you hang around too long you'll be a Down the mountain Your car can get up to 110 You know where to go but you'll go there again And nothing ever makes no difference to my Hey! The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper

with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.