The Bulwark Podcast - Tom Nichols: Knuckleheads with Flamethrowers

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

McCarthy cut a normal deal with Biden when the GOP caucus couldn't agree on what to demand—beyond just shouting and pounding the table. Plus, missing Brezhnev, waiting for a haymaker, and DeSantis is angry and weird, but not as dangerous as Trump. Tom Nichols joins Charlie Sykes today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is the Tuesday after a long Memorial Day weekend. It is May 30th, 2023. It's kind of amazing that we're nearing the halfway point. So we are joined today by Tom Nichols, Professor Emeritus at the Naval College, now a staff writer at the Atlantic,

author of the Atlantic Daily Newsletter, and most importantly, a cast member of the completed show Succession. So first of all, congratulations on that, Tom. Thank you, Charlie. We haven't talked about that. What a weird experience that was. It was totally trippy. You know, we should be clear with people that my screen time was measurable in seconds. But technically, yes, I was a cast member. I had a name and I had a script and all this other stuff.

And you got to hang around with them and you got to see how it was made. That's the thing. You know, there's a great scene in the penultimate episode where Tom whispers to Greg, information is like a bottle of fine wine. Hoard it, you store it, and then you take it out and you smash someone's fucking face in with it. I was standing like six feet away and they were having a hard time with that because it's such a great line. And I got to watch them do that as well as a few other scenes. And also to realize how many scenes I watched them do that in the end, they just cut. There was a whole scene where Tom argues with Darwin about how fast they were going to make the call. And it was funny. And they did it a whole bunch of times, but it never made it into the final cut. I wrote a little piece about it for The Atlantic.

And I said, you know, one of the things I learned is, man, you can know that entertainment is hard work, but until you see it and you realize these people work like 16 hour days. And how much goes into it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that they're just there all day and there's a lot of hurry up and wait. There's a lot of dead time. You know, like you said, I got to see how it

was made behind the scenes. And it was really a once in a lifetime experience. You played a right wing cranky pundit on television? Yeah, it was nice reach, huh? So how did it happen? What is the backstory? How did they choose you to do this? They were looking for a man of a certain age, a certain look, a certain disposition. And somebody said, Tom Nichols would be great to play this right wing nut job. That's exactly what happened. That is exactly what happened.

That one of the producers called somebody he knows who works in political media and stuff and said, hey, we need a kind of middle-aged, cranky, white, you know, pundit guy, you know, sort of curmudgeonly middle-aged, you know, right when he went, I've got your man. So he told the producer, and I guess before the producer called me, they also needed somebody who could do this on short notice. Like I had to go to New York the next day. He went and looked at some of clips of me that are on the internet on like CNN and MSNBC and stuff like that. And he said, yeah, he looks right. Next thing I knew, I was sitting there in a makeup chair getting my hair done in this kind of fascist high and tight.

Oh, really? Oh, they gave you the fascist high and tight hair thing. Yeah, because they kind of slicked down the sides and poofed up the middle. And I brought my own blue suit, but they gave me the red tie and the flag pin, De Regeer. Subtle. And my character's name was Ben Stove, which to me sounds suspiciously like Karl Rove. You know, they were like, yes, portly, middle-aged, cranky right winger. I think I nailed it.

Okay, so because I'm a fanboy here. So what did the director say you should do? The director says, this is your character. You're not Tom, you're Ben. So what do they tell you? How did they direct you? Well, they said, loosen up because I was so used to doing the stuff you do, right? Where we sit there and we look into the camera and he said, hey, you've never been on this network until tonight. It's election night. You think you're just having the time of your life. And so I had a couple of little monologues I had to go through about what was going on on election night. And we would do them two or three or four times. And he'd say, okay, try it this way as straight news. Now do it again, but a little snippy.

But that was easy. But that came naturally. Well, there was one point where i think i may have actually annoyed i hope i didn't annoy jesse armstrong because i couldn't figure out a part of the script where i had to say something and because it was on a teleprompter there was no punctuation where it ought to be i didn't see him sitting over there it's like a britishism you know it's justism. Because it doesn't sound right. And he came over and he's like, that's a direct quote from somebody on TV. And then I figured out I was supposed to say it a certain way. And I said, oh, wow.

Okay, first day on the job already. I'm messing with the script. We did a full day of nothing but the pundits and the anchor desk doing hours of exposition that just got completely cut out. But again, it was like, it's there so that it can be on in the background while the characters, we were like moving wallpaper for that.

And it was very cool. And I got paid by the way, which was very nice. I got paid union scale and, you know, I had a little dressing area and it was really an experience and now you're sitting by the phone saying i'm ready for my close-up charlie i've told you many times i don't want green m&ms in my dish here in the green room so it was a lot of fun and i i actually spent the

most time with zach robitus who plays crazy crypto nazNazi Mark Ravenhead. Very nice guy. And he has a great rant that's actually pivotal in the next to last episode. This is Fanta. I wanted to ask you about all this. Okay, so I also wanted to talk to you about this because this delay is having to talk about the whole debt ceiling deal. The dagger of boredom deep into the heart, right? Okay, you know what? I feel this way, except that I have to admit that this time,

my default setting is, look, don't pay too much attention. It's a kabuki dance. Eventually, there'll be a lot of throwing them around with hands and everything, and then eventually they will come to a deal. This time, I wasn't totally sure because of all the incentive structures, particularly on the right, the craziness, the way that Kevin McCarthy self-gelded himself. So it does look like we have a deal. I don't know where you come down on all of this.

You know, I'm looking at this going, you know, all of that for this, you take the nation and the world economy to the brink of fiscal catastrophe for this, this sort of nothing burger of a deal that you could have gotten through the appropriations process? What do you think? How do you come down on this? That's part of my problem with it. But I'm with you on one thing, which is that, you know, I have this kind of normalcy bias, right? Like nobody's ever going to destroy the sovereign credit of the United States, you know? Hush, hush, my good man. Who would do that? Have you met these people? Yeah.

Well, that's the thing right and then you kind of look at the current republican house conference and you say these people are lunatics and it's not that they will collapse the economy because they intend to but because they're you know a bunch of knuckleheads playing with flamethrowers you know and somebody's gonna get hurt and in the end m McCarthy, who is whatever his weakness is and his lack of spine, he and Joe Biden sat down like a couple of normal politicians and said, okay, we got to hammer out a deal. And I think one thing that came out of it was a reminder that Joe Biden's pretty good at this president thing stuff. I mean, I ripped him last week for not

using his bully pulpit, you're, dressing the nation, sounding the alarms. But in retrospect, I was probably wrong about that, that he was playing an inside game. I guess I didn't have sufficient confidence that he was going to play it as effectively as he did. It's kind of remarkable how little he had to give up to get this deal. I think, too, the bully pulpit, I mean, of course, I read your piece. And, you know, we weren't there yet. I mean, if we were coming into June 1st tomorrow and, you know, McCarthy had walked out and the economy was going to collapse and the markets were, you know, taking, then I think you go the full Reagan, right? Which is that you sidestep everybody, you go on television, you sit down, you say, good evening, my fellow citizens. I want to explain to you why we're about to have,

you know, an economic catastrophe and who you should blame. We weren't there yet. And I think if Biden had pulled that card, it would have encouraged the Republicans to just double down. Well, it would have been premature. I think I had the caveat, if the negotiations went sideways, and if we were actually going into it. And the deal they got, like you just pointed out, it's a perfectly normal deal. I mean, oh my God, it's actually a compromise in Washington where nobody got everything they wanted and they sort of agreed to do something to avert a bigger problem. Wow. The one good thing you can say that came out of this, despite all of the carnies and kooks on the carnival midway, is that, boy, that just felt normal for a moment, didn't it?

It did. It actually did. And, you know, what I wrote this morning was that, you know, politically, nobody really won because the whole thing was just stupid, futile, and dangerous to, you know, play this game. On the other hand, there could have been massive losers in this. There still could be, I suppose. But, you know, had the country gone into default, had this pushed the country into recession, this would have been potentially disastrous for Joe Biden. And I think that he was savvy enough to realize, okay, you know, I'm going to avoid that. What was the surprise was how little he had to give away and what Kevin McCarthy was willing to agree to, knowing he had the Taliban 20 behind him. And, you know, I'm reading these stories about, you know,

the Freedom Caucus being upset and the growing revolt. Well, of course, again, this feels like kind of a kabuki dance because this is what these guys do. This is what they exist to be outraged, to be betrayed, right? I mean, you know, Chip Roy exists to set himself on fire on the House floor and stuff like this, not a surprise at all. I think there's an important point here that, and I think you and a lot of other folks have raised this. Okay. McCarthy establishes the point, right? That I'm willing to play chicken. I will get in the car and I will

gun it. Even if I swerve, I'll actually play that game. The problem is that nobody behind him, you've established that I will weaponize these debt ceiling negotiations. Okay, you've done that. Now, what do you want? And behind him, as you just pointed out, nobody agrees on what they want. This is not a united caucus that says, okay, Kevin, go in there and you're going to put a stop to this. And here are the three inflexible things that will not only are what we want, but are ideologically consistent, that we know the cost. There was none of that. It's like, just go in there and count the table and shout, like you say. So, Chip Roy can go to the floor and go, giba, giba, giba, and gaba,

gaba, hey. And then they all go back to their districts and say, that Joe Biden, what a communist. Without anybody really understanding, I know, what a communist without anybody really understanding. I mean, the deal is, I don't want to say nuanced, but it is a little wonky, right? You'd have to kind of know the details and that nobody's going home and talking about that. It's all like you said, we were betrayed. The communists have taken over socialism. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. It is kabuki. Well, except that Kevin McCarthy now owns it. Nancy Mace, who's, I don't know, she's going through some things. She tweeted out, Washington is broken. Republicans got outsmarted by a president who can't find his pants. Again, let's just stop

there for a moment because a little bit of cognitive dissonance that Republicans got outsmarted by a president, she says, who can't find his pants. So at the same time, they have to say he's completely senile and he is, you know, drooling in the corner, incapable of coherent thought. And yet he outsmarted us. So good luck with that. Aren't you having flashbacks though, to the way liberals used to talk about George W. Bush? This guy is a complete moron. Reagan, right? And he's a complete moron. These guys Yeah, Reagan, right? He's a complete moron. These guys are morons. They read scripts. They, you know, mean frat boy who flunked out of college, Reagan, you know, actor, and yet taking them to the mats over and over again. Hey, maybe they're

actually okay at this. It's okay to say that Joe Biden, after 47 years in government, you know, and making deals in the Senate is actually pretty good at doing budget negotiations. Was it in your piece this morning where he said, why can't I say it's a good deal? Right. You had a great quote there. It's like, because if I say that, you know, that doesn't help it get passed, which is why I'm better at this than you are, basically. And I thought it was pretty funny. Yeah, exactly. He understands that people are saying, well, why aren't you saying, you know, I destroyed the Republicans. I got everything I wanted. Yeah. Does that help me get this through? No, this is part of the deal. I also thought it was

interesting that Punchbowl's Max Burns asked Kevin McCarthy, how would you describe your interactions with Biden during these negotiations? And McCarthy said, speaking of being off message, said, very professional, very smart, very tough at the same time. That's not the way that the right has been portraying Joe Biden, is it? Look, he's 80 years old, but there are a lot of, you know, very sharp guys who know their jobs. Now, you know, do what I want Biden playing shortstop on a, you know, on the congressional team. No, he's going to move as fast as he used to. Now, you know, do what I want Biden playing shortstop on a, you know, on the congressional team? No, he's going to move as fast as he used to, but you know, he seems to actually know what he's doing with this stuff. And for McCarthy to come out and say, yeah, very professional,

very tough, you know, it was a real conversation. Look, that's all I want out of our national politicians. Go sit in a room, figure stuff out, come out with a deal, you know, and get on with the business of the country. Don't crash the country. Just don't do any harm. Don't break anything. That Nancy Mace quote, I mean, of course, I saw all this stuff going by on Twitter. That was all preloaded no matter what they got. Exactly.

It didn't matter. There are some of these folks who cannot possibly ever sign on to any deal. People need to understand this. This is how they exist. Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day, we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebullwork.com and take a look around?

Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebulwark.com slash charlie. That's thebulwark.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together. I promise.

All right, so we have to do this, and we have to do this again, unfortunately. Over the weekend, David Jolly, who's a former Republican congressman from Florida, and a frequent guest on this program, good friend, good anti-Trump, very consistently never Trump Republican, went on Mehdi Hassan's show and was talking about Ron DeSantis versus Donald Trump. Let me just play this. This is Mehdi Hassan asking David Jolly a question. David, last word to you. You and I have talked a great deal about DeSantis' authoritarianism in Florida. Nevertheless, were you shocked by his announcement this week that he would, quote, aggressively go after pardons for one-six insurrectionists. No, Mehdi, I say this with conviction.

I think Ron DeSantis is far more dangerous than Donald Trump for a very specific reason. Donald Trump is willing to ignore the rules, ignore the Constitution, and frankly lead to the incitement of January 6th. But Donald Trump is a transactional figure. He'll do whatever it takes to win. Ron DeSantis, I believe, actually in his ethos, is a culture warrior who wants to take us back 100 years and believes he can use the Constitution to that to that end and ultimately has a very dark vision of what America will be. convicts, if you will, at this point, is because he believes we are engaged in a real war that he

has to win. Ron DeSantis tonight, a very dark figure on the political landscape, far more dangerous than Donald Trump. Okay, so Tom, I agree that Ron DeSantis is a dark political figure, but I think, at least I think, we need to remind people that when we say that Donald Trump is a unique existential threat, we mean he is a unique existential threat and no one is worse than him. But what do you think? Well, you know, it's funny you say that about a dark figure, because I, as I was listening to David, I thought, I agree with everything you're saying until you got to the worse than Donald Trump part.

That's right. Almost as bad? Yes. A particular kind of menace? The thing about DeSantis that I flip back and forth in my mind, there's so much that he does that is purely theatrical. I shouldn't even say theatrical, that he obviously doesn't care that much about and will flip-flop on. The Ukraine 180 that he did a few months ago is a perfect example of, oh, I'm know, he's a congressman, I'm in favor of AD.

Well, no, I'm not because the base isn't. Well, my donors are mad. I guess I am. But there is a part of DeSantis that is just weirdly mean and angry and aggressive about some of, I mean... Vindictive. Vindictive and also just weird. I mean, his Twitter announcement, such that it was, turned into him and Elon Musk and David Sachs and a panel of guest stars, which I didn't think you were supposed to do during a

presidential announcement since it's supposed to be about you and not about Tom Massey or Jay Bataracha or whoever. But it turned into a bunch of wonky, it was like a bunch of the guys in mom's basement going on about ESG and CRT. And he really believes some of this stuff, which does make him weirdly dangerous because, I keep coming back to the word weird because it seems just so weird. But I think that Trump, let me just now, with all respect for David, who I think, as you say, is one of the principled never Trump folks, I'll make the case that Donald Trump's far more dangerous in part because he has a cult, because Trump has a forceful personality. You and I may find it odious and hideous and repugnant, but it is a definable, forceful personality that has attracted a cult around

itself. So if Trump says, storm the Capitol, millions of people are going to go, aye, aye, and they're going to storm. DeSantis is going to come out and say, I'm going to pardon these guys, and he's going to do that kind of high pitch, and people are going to go, yeah, whatever. What I worry about more is that DeSantis will be better at turning some of the knobs of government to get what he wants and wear away some of those internal. Yes, in some ways more competent. But is he more dangerous than Trump? No. I don't think DeSantis is going to walk in.

I mean, assuming he gets a nomination, assuming he wins the election, he's not going to walk in and say, okay, I'm disbanding NATO and I'm loving up Putin and I'm going to start jailing all of my critics. I'm going to put Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani in the cabinet and bring back General Flynn. I'm going to bring back Mike Flynn, exactly. I mean, right there, if you're going to say DeSantis is worse than Donald Trump,

when Donald Trump says, I will bring Mike Flynn back into government, you have to stop and say, okay, DeSantis is bad. He's not that bad. I think when you say that Ron DeSantis is worse than Donald Trump, what you've done though, is you've forgotten a little bit about who Donald Trump has been. I mean, there've been so many things I understand it's hard to keep up with. Could we just go back to that moment? And I talked to Mona Chirin about it a little while ago, you know, in our other podcast, you go back to that moment where Donald Trump explicitly in writing calls for terminating the Constitution so that he could be restored to power. Right. OK, so I understand when David Jolly says that he is transactional, but I think that there's a fundamental misunderstanding there.

There is a huge transactional element to Donald Trump, but there's also something else. And it has been getting worse and worse and worse. It has become unhinged. And so you're talking about someone who has extreme political views versus somebody who has called for terminating the Constitution. That's not normal. That's not within the normal continuum. And to suggest that someone is worse than that kind of normalizes something that is

deeply abnormal. And we have been doing this for so long that maybe the abnormal has become so familiar that we mouth things like he's a unique existential threat, but then go, yeah, but that Rhonda Sanders is really, he's even more dangerous. No, no, no. Wait, wait. Unique existential threat means unique, means no one is. And existential means we don't just disagree with you on policy and you're going to do bad things that we don't like. It means that you can burn down the whole fucking country and you're prepared to do that. So, I mean, that's different. I feel like we're kind of beating up on David here. And now I'll flip to the other case to say, I think what David was saying, I know in politics, if you're explaining you're losing, but I'm going to take a shot at why, because I have felt it sometimes too, where I've watched the Santas and they say, hey, this guy really will just, you know, without the big rallies and without, you know, without all the stupid

vulgar exposition, this guy will just come in and quietly dismantle the Constitution because he actually believes all this nuttery about ESG and CRT and MOUSE and all that other stuff. But I still would argue that that does not make him as bad as an emotionally disordered sociopath who will literally burn the country if it means resolving his narcissistic injury and getting even with millions of people that he thinks have affronted him. And I just think you're absolutely right to say we can't normalize Trump by putting him on

that continuum. When you were talking about DeSantis, I kept thinking about what P.J. O'Rourke once said about Hillary Clinton, something to the effect that he thought she was awful within normal parameters, right? No, that was exactly the way I described it. Yeah, I knew her. You could sort of hold your fingers together and like, yes, within these parameters. And then there's Trump who's like whole different scale. I think, too, your point about Bannon and Flynn and the rest of them, DeSantis would bring people to. I mean, I just think DeSantis wouldn't be good for the country. But as I wrote recently in The Atlantic, it would be a better election with anyone but Donald Trump as the nominee of the Republican Party. Anybody.

I mean, there's plenty that I just absolutely cannot endure about Ron DeSantis. I think once America gets a look at, again, that kind of very strange affect that he has, I also don't think that he would bring this whole band of miscreants. I mean, Donald Trump would literally, I think, come into office, pardon a bunch of felons, install them as acting secretaries and throughout the government, dare the Senate not to confirm them, which he doesn't care about one way or another, and go from there. And I mean, I really think that would be the beginning. I don't want to use the word fascist. That word triggers me and other people. But I think it would be, you know, Trump returning with all of these creeps and clowns behind him would be the actual authoritarian takeover that we have been fighting against for years.

So, you know, speaking of any Republican being an improvement, you wrote about Tim Scott. And Tim Scott sounds like a fundamentally decent guy. But as you point out, he's a classic no-hoper presidential prospect, but a strong choice for vice president. I think I described him as a Potemkin candidate. Tim Scott doesn't sound like he's running for president. He sounds like he's running for vice president. I mean, he would be a definite upgrade from Donald Trump. But I just don't see that happening in this universe that we inhabit. What I wrote about Scott is the same thing I wrote about Nikki Haley and the rest of the

Republican field, which is, you know, Tim Scott seems a decent fellow. You know, he's more to the right than probably I would like, but again, he falls within those completely normal parameters of government, but none of them are willing to throw a haymaker at Donald Trump. And I just don't think that you can run in this primary, especially with any hope of succeeding in a general, without just confronting the Trump problem. And it feels to me like 2016 again, where they're all kind of looking at each other and saying, well, I can't really go after him because once he implodes, I want to be the one to scoop up his voters. I don't know why it doesn't get through to these guys. You're not going to get his voters.

What you have to do is concentrate the other, I'm going to say the other 60% of the party at this point that really would abandon Trump and coalesce behind somebody else. I mean, look at Ron DeSantis' approach, right? Do you think Donald Trump won in 2020? And of course, DeSantis and the rest of them say, yeah, basically. Or they say, I don't want to talk about it. They won't just say, no, 2020 was totally fair. They imply that Trump actually won. But then when they say, why are you running against him? Well, because he's unelectable. Well, by your definition, he's won twice. That's not unelectable. Well, by your definition, he's won twice. That's not unelectable.

And they won't go after him. So I don't know how you- Chris Christie might. But Chris Christie might also go after somebody else. I mean, Chris Christie might play the same role that he played in 2016. I mean, I'm kind of rooting for Chris Christie to come in and throw that haymaker at Donald Trump, but it's just as likely that he will get on the stage and he will throw that haymaker at Ron DeSantis, or he'll throw it at Tim Scott, or he'll throw it at Glenn Youngkin, or anybody else that gets in his way. Again, it does feel that way. It feels as if

everything is settling in. When I think about Tim Scott, right, part of his appeal within the Republican Party, right, coming out as a candidate, say, I am well-liked. Everybody thinks I'm a very decent man of good character, right? If you're basically running again on the character issue, the obvious question is, really? Compared to whom? And then they say, well, I don't want to say, you know, it's like, there are some people, it's kind of like that godfather line, you know, some people who shouldn't be,

but I'm going to blame some of the people in this room if we lose again, you know. Well, who? And I don't understand why, if that's what they're running on, decency and character and normalcy to come out and say, Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president, period. That's why I'm, you know, the only one who has, and we would be remiss not to say, is Asa Hutchinson. Right. Who has come out and said, totally unfit, he should drop out of the race. And I thought, louder for the people in the back, Governor. But he's the only one, so.

Well, and the other thing people like Tim Scott have to deal with is the way that the Republican base has changed. I mean, a lot of what he is saying does sound like pre-2016 Republican Party. You know, back when people like the Heritage Foundation were rational before people like Dinesh D'Souza were tweeting. What has happened to Heritage? Well, I was going to ask you this because, I mean, Heritage used to be very mainstream conservative. It was normally at the heart of the Reagan revolution.

Now the head of the Heritage Foundation is going on Fox News and talking about dismantling and destroying the FBI. You know, talk about,. Talk about defunding the police. This new president, Kevin Roberts, has gone complete nationalist conservative, not even pretending to be mainstream. Do you see the Dinesh D'Souza tweet over the weekend? I'm sorry. It's just horrifying. I'm punching down here, but I want to read you. This is a guy who is you know widely respected in MAGA circles his movie his bogus complete bullshit movie you know about the 3,000 mules was shown at Mar-a-Lago I mean he he's had

a lot of credibility was he was pardoned by President Trump he put out a tweet over the weekend let me just read this virtually every IQ study over the past half century shows that blacks who are the rock-solid base of the Party, have the lowest IQ of any ethnic group, one standard deviation below whites and Asian Americans. How is this compatible with your thesis? Okay, so here you have this figure who has been a fixture on the right for many, many years, now feels that it is completely okay to tweet out a grotesquely racist meme like this, and there will be no consequences for Dinesh D'Souza on the right. That's an indication of how the world has changed, because there once was a time when, first of all, people would have said, I'm not going to tweet something like that, or if they did tweet something like that,

they would be immediately excommunicated, because who wants to associate with that kind of hard white supremacy, white nationalism? And there's Dinesh D'Souza, and he's doing it. And I think people are just going to shrug it off because this is the new world. They will shrug it off in part because I think what's happened to the Republicans is that they have given up on being a party of the majority. When you and I, you know, you got there a little earlier than I did. But when I signed up in 1979 and 1980, the Republicans were the party that said we can actually be a durable governing majority in this country. And I think these conservatives and Republicans now are like, we are this small, put-upon band of misfits and grievance. People carry grievances. I mean, D'Souza is a classic case of this, right? He starts 30 years ago with a book that wasn't bad, actually, about higher

education, wants to be taken seriously as a conservative intellectual. And like so many of them, like Carlson, like Ingraham, it's like, oh, being responsible is boring. And it's not getting me anywhere. These guys were all vying for the two chairs that are already occupied by George Will and Charles Krauthammer, right? And when that fails through a lack of talent, the market being a little too top-heavy

with young conservatives who want to be pundits, they said, okay, then I guess I'll just go for crazy attention-seeking. And then D'Souza's life implodes, right? He ends up getting convicted of a crime and now says, fine, I am just going to live among the... He's like Mike Flynn that way. I am now going to live among the... He's like Mike Flynn that way. I am now going to live among the craziest people

who believe the craziest things, who will not hold me responsible for anything I say, and they will buy any crap that I put on the market, because that's all that's left. And so that's really kind of giving up on politics with a capital P and just saying, and I don't want to use the word grift because it's even worse than that. It's simply saying, I'm just going to go to this well and feed my own

grievances over and over again. But in a way, Charlie, I think it's actually good that more national level conservatives aren't bothering to denounce D'Souza because he just doesn't live. There's no point in Ron De know, Ron DeSantis or Mike Pence or whoever saying, hey, I have to say something about Dinesh D'Souza. I think most of them would say, you know, like you say, it almost feels like punching down at this point. But this thing about heritage, you know, I got shelled on Twitter yesterday because I said, you know, heritage used to be a serious place. And of course, the usual angry Twitter liberals were all like, oh no, they were always this, you know, band of Nazis.

And I'm like, no, I'm sorry. But in the 1980s, even if you were on the left, you paid attention to what Heritage was saying because you wanted to know, you know, what the ideas per, I mean, this is back with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, right? Suddenly the Republicans are a party of ideas. And a lot of those ideas were coming out of Heritage. And Heritage often had debates within itself that were interesting over those years.

And Jack Pitney, who teaches at Claremont McKenna, which is not the Claremont Institute, I think it should be clear. You know, Jack and I both worked in Congress back in the day. When Heritage sent stuff out, even if you didn't think it was great, you read it. You said, okay, these are serious people who have serious ideas. Not all of them are good, but you paid attention to it. And we were having trouble kind of convincing people that, no, no, seriously, Republican staffers read this stuff. And now, as you point out, the thing I love about this new president is that he rails about professors and PhDs and elites. And this guy has a CV, a resume that is

classic kind of intellectual elite. And it's almost like this protective coloring. No, no, I'm not one of them. I'm not one of the hyper-educated. But you're right. It's become this kind of nat-con client servicing. And I guess the only thing I would assume, I assume there are people who actually believe this stuff at Heritage, but I also figure there's got to be a follow-the-money issue here. I assume there's some donor servicing going on or something. You always have to follow that money. Yeah. I was never a huge, I think it's important... You always have to follow that money. Yeah. Yeah. I was never a huge... I think it's important to remind people I was always one of those kind of squishy New

England mod cons, unlike you tough guys out in the Midwest. But I read stuff from Heritage. I paid attention to it. And what a fall for a think tank. It's really amazing. I suppose this is along the same lines just about how the base has changed. And you're right about Heritage and about the donor class, but also what's happened in the base. Did you see yesterday, people have to follow me on this one, Ted Cruz put out a tweet condemning Uganda's anti-homosexuality law.

So Uganda has now banned homosexuality. Ted Cruz put out a tweet saying this is wrong, okay? The responses from the right, from Ted Cruz land, was very instructive because there was a huge blowback. People were like, why are you saying this, Ted? Why are you going this far? This flecks on the part of the right, the culture warriors, to go after not just the trans issue, but all gay rights.

The fact that every conservative didn't go, okay, if Ted Cruz is saying this is wrong, I'm going to go with him. No, this is one of those cases. And Ted Cruz has always been pretty careful to stay and like, I am your leader. Wait for me. I need to lead you. But clearly he was out of touch with much of his own base yesterday on a law which should not have been controversial for any American. It was just kind of a weird moment. Uganda has outlawed homosexuality, to take one of my favorite quotes from Ghostbusters. That ought to do it. Thanks, Ray. Exactly. Good move. All right. Well, now that it's illegal, you've really solved that problem.

The thing you're seeing about Cruz, there's something going on in the base. And I think it goes back to this thing I was talking about earlier, that they now realize what a minority they really are in the country, that all of these culture war issues are responded to with terror, with fear. You and I, I know on your show, we've talked about this many times. There is no confidence left in the American right. Everything is this fearful freak out that is always predicated on, unless we take the most extreme measures, we are going to lose something important to us, you know, like, because we couldn't possibly convince anybody.

And we know that most people just don't agree with us. And so instead of saying, you know, especially if you live in a world where friends and relatives and people you care about who are gay, you say, hey, this law is just a bad idea. It's just repressive. Instead, it's got to be, no, you know, everything is the slippery slope toward, you know, Stalinism or something. And I think that that explains a lot of it. And that fear is stoked every night on Fox to the max and on talk radio, the talk radio Fox Nexus. We didn't even bring this up, but that Mark Levin interview with Donald Trump. Oh my God. Okay. So, so I had seen references to the fact that Mark Levin gave a suck-up interview to Donald Trump.

That is not even close to the right word. No, that is not even close to the right word. This is one of the most embarrassing grovels I have ever seen from a guy that, you know, Mark Levin used to have a little bit of pride, a little bit of self-respect, a little bit of substance. Am I wrong there? Yeah, I think you're wrong there, but okay. But it was like, okay, but I'm going to crawl naked on my belly and lick your toes for the interview. And it was, oh my Lord. It was in the words, since I've been going through my box of cultural references today, I will say that in the words of Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons, I will just say,

ugh. You know, it was just, it was so cringe-inducing. But you know what? You actually have to read it in order to understand that we are not exaggerating here. Yeah. Well, or just watch the clip. Okay, but let's get to some substance here.

Okay, because since you're an actual expert expert and don't play one on television. So I'm sorry to go a little dark here, but you wrote about this recently. Is Russia about to stash nukes in Belarus? What happens if the Russians move nukes into Belarus to escalate the pressure on Ukraine. What is going on, do you think? Well, let me start by saying all is well and remain calm. Yeah. But it's bad.

So here's apparently what's going on. The Russian and Belarus defense ministers have signed an agreement that will allow Russia for the first time in its post-Soviet history to base its nuclear weapons outside of Russia. This is reversing years of progress on nuclear weapons. There used to be nuclear weapons in Belarus because they were stationed there in the old Soviet Union. In the Soviet times, when the USSR was this one big state, there were nukes in Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. And by treaty, all three of those countries returned those nukes and made Russia the kind of custodial successor state to the Soviet Union that had to deal with

all these nukes and get them off their territory. Putin wants to move nukes into Belarus, these short-range nuclear weapons that could be delivered by rocket or jet, and put them close to Ukraine just to see if that rattles everybody. Again, Putin is such a lousy strategist, and he's just so in the bubble about how things work in the West. My suspicion is that he wants to do that and make a big deal of moving them during this big summer counteroffensive and then say that the Ukrainians are threatening Russia's nuclear deterrent, that he wants to get this to some kind of crisis where the West says, well, it's just too dangerous now. We just have to drop everything. And instead, what I think and what I hope is that the West says, hey, you're putting these nukes in another, you're responsible for these. By treaty, these are Russian nukes under Russian control.

So don't fuck up. These are yours. Take care of them. Make sure that things don't get out of hand here. I wrote on Friday in the Daily, I said, you know, Putin thinks that Western leaders are afraid of nuclear war. Well, they are afraid of nuclear war because they're not psychopaths. And he's afraid of nuclear war, and so are his generals. You know, one of the things we found out after the end of the Cold War, we interviewed a lot of senior Soviet generals and marshals, and they were like, yeah, oh, yeah, we were pretty scared of that whole business.

We didn't want to do that either. These are normal human beings. Nobody wants this. But Putin, I think, figures, I can bluster this better than other people can. It's also a way of tying Lukashenko to Russia even more tightly in this war, because, you know, Belarus really didn't want nobody wanted this war, but Putin and even Lukashenko, who is an odious creep himself, was like, yeah, sure, we're on your side here, but well, shit, you know, the other thing that

could happen is that Lukashenko's and apparently, again, there are a lot of rumors that flew. Let this be a lesson to people on Twitter. Don't post rumors until they're verified by legitimate media. Holyshit.news.com is not legitimate media. But Lukashenko is apparently in bad health. So if he's gone, there will be a Russian military presence in his country when the succession crisis hits. That may be a part of this whole business, that this may not be. And again, I'm warning to everybody listening to me,

I am theorizing in the absence of evidence. I did that about the Kremlin drone strike, as I wrote on Friday, I was wrong. But I think one possibility here is that Putin is saying, hey, if Lukashenko is going to go down, if the Grim Reaper is going to step in here, it wouldn't suck to have a Russian military base right there in Belarus, where I can look at this country and say, don't do anything that pisses me off or endangers this base, that whatever happens, you're going to have to stay close to me. But the other possibility is that Putin's just strategically, you know, for years, I and Lawrence Friedman were the two people saying, this guy's not a good strategist. Stop trying to find, you know, 12-dimensional chess moves here.

So it's just a bad idea. So let's talk about these drone strikes, you know, leaving aside the first drone strike that I think you've discussed at some length. The latest ones, multiple drone strikes in Moscow the day after this massive attack on Kiev. At this point, is there any doubt that this is basically the Ukrainians doing this and that it's justified? The U.S. intelligence community, I mean, let me back up and say with that first kind of weird middle of the night thing, you know, that dropped on top of the Russian Senate, I said, geez, that looks that first kind of weird middle of the night thing you know that dropped on top of the russian senate i said jeez that yeah that looks like the kind of clumsy thing that the russians would would pull as a false flag because then putin can you know put the screws to everybody in moscow and you know the security services kind of clamped down

u.s intelligence now says but with low confidence that they think this was, and the word they're using, and this is why you have to read newspapers carefully, orchestrated by, they think, orchestrated by the Ukrainian security services. But that word, if they meant conducted, they would have said conducted. So that could mean anything, Charlie. That could mean that there's a James Bond that they set loose, that there's a small band of civilians who are working with them. There could be Russian dissidents working with them, could be a commando team for all we know. take on this rule of expertise. If you're wrong, come forward and own it. So I was wrong about the false flag approach. So I just don't know who's doing these drone strikes. The thing about drones is they're cheap and they're easy. Hey, Amazon was going to use them to drop packages on your lawn. This isn't like a super high tech. Is it the Ukrainians or is it the Ukrainians with help from local Russians? I just don't know. But the one thing I think is wrong is that it's the Russians themselves. Now, there's one other interesting theory. A friend of mine is a pretty good Russia watcher. He said,

you know, sometimes what the Russian security services have done is they know something's up and they kind of let it happen anyway as a way of then going into the front office and saying, hey, we're beset by spies and saboteurs and traitors. You got to cut us loose and let us start crushing skulls. But I just don't know. What do you make of Russia going after Lindsey Graham right now? Of all the people to target to issue an arrest warrant, the head of Russian state TV calling for his assassination. I mean, Lindsey Graham has been critical of Russia, you know, from the get-go. He's been a supporter of our aid to Ukraine from the get-go.

He's clearly a very, very close ally of Donald Trump. What's happening? Do you have any insight on that? No, except that Russian media is crazier than ours. Russian right-wing media is crazier than even Newsmax or OIM. If you're on social media and you're not following Julia Davis, you're doing it wrong because Julia takes a lot of these clips and then translates and subtitles them to show you what goes on Russian televisions every night. And it is pure hot crazy. So, you know, it could just be like, this is just trolling or that the Russians have kind of, you know, kind of lost their minds and have just decided to, you know, do things to make us look at the big shiny object over there about arresting Lindsey Graham. It's dumb because I don't think either

of us are huge fans of Lindsey Graham, but he did have a great comeback, which is, I will submit to the arrest warrant as soon as you do, and I'll meet you in the Hague, which was a great line. It's one of Lindsey's better moments, I have to say. Yes. I was like, okay, that's pretty clever. We'll agree. We'll meet in the Hague, and I'll stand in the dock and so will you, and we'll see which one of us gets convicted first. And I think too, part of it is it's kind of dumb for the Russian media. I guess it's not dumb. It's a diversion. Because if saying things like Graham said are prosecutable as war crimes, then everybody in every Russian TV studio is on their way to the Hague

because they've called for, you know, genocide and massive indiscriminate bombing and all that stuff. So, you know, some of it's just the trollery of the Russians these days, but I did miss, and I'll just end on this, Charlie, I miss the old Soviet leadership. And I never thought I'd say that, that boring committee of old men who sort of knew how to run a major country and not look like a bunch of unstable clowns while they were doing it. And it's really strange for a Reaganite Sovietologist of the 1980s to say, hey, you know who I miss, Brezhnev? Compared to these guys, they were pros. Tom Nichols, as seen in Succession, is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of The

Atlantic Daily Newsletter. Tom, it is always great to have you back on the podcast and have a great vacation now. Thanks, Charlie. Thanks for having me. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.