The Bulwark Podcast - Tom Nichols: Of Course They All Hate Each Other

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

The House Republican caucus is a jackal pack, with George Santos — the poster boy for our era of grift — along for the ride. Plus, 2023 is starting with green shoots of optimism, including a battered, bruised, and tired Donald 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. It is 2023. I'm Charlie Sykes, and we are back, and we're going to launch the new year with our good friend Tom Nichols, professor emeritus at the Naval College, now a staff writer at The Atlantic. And he's feeling pretty jiggy about 2023.

So good morning and welcome back, Tom. I don't think I've been described as jiggy since maybe the early 90s, if ever. But, yeah, I'm feeling a little more optimistic than I did a year ago. So thanks for having me, Charlie. Well, I was thinking about that. We'll have a discussion about optimism in 2023. And I was thinking about the first newsletter that I wrote in 2022, a year ago. I think it was like a year ago today or maybe a year ago yesterday.

And it began with something like, you know, I have to confess, I'm just exhausted, even after coming back from vacation. And I think it was exhausted by the stupidity and the futility of it in that sense that, oh man, the shit is just going to keep coming. And I have to say, I don't feel that way. I woke up today feeling like, this is going to be interesting. This is going to be a hell of a show.

Whatever happens. I don't know, maybe it's bad for America. Maybe it's bad for the world. But it is not at all going to be a boring year. And for that, I'm grateful. I'm almost afraid of jinxing it by agreeing with you. I feel the same way. I mean, a year ago, I was just, you know, we had just been through a year's anniversary of January 6th.

And it seemed like this stuff never ends. And no one's going to be held accountable. And no one's going to go to jail. And millions of Americans are just shrugging and saying, eh, failed peaceful transfer of power, eh, what are you going to do? And yet, here we are in the first days of 2023. And I have to say that millions of other Americans said, well, we'll show you what we're going to do. We're going to make sure that a bunch of election denying kooks don't become state and national officials. And I thought, wow, I plumped for democracy for, you know, a year to tell people, look, you know,

there are things more important than gas prices right now. And I was thinking maybe that message just wasn't getting through. But apparently there are a lot of people who felt the same way and they voted that way. And I can't help but feel good about what the future holds if we've proven that we can kind of get back on our feet that way. And yet the Fyre Festival of Political Parties is taking control of the House of Representatives today. And I started my newsletter today by saying, you know, today was supposed to be the GOP celebration of the Great Red Wave. I know, today was supposed to be the GOP celebration of the great red wave. I mean, this was going to be their celebration, the triumph. And instead, we are going to get this absolute shitshow clown car from this party, which is unruly, dysfunctional, and obviously not interested in governing.

You know, as we're taping this, we don't know what's going to happen today. It does feel a little bit like certain other days that I'm not going to mention, where you just know it's going to be extraordinary. There's going to be a lot of drama, a lot of surprises. Normally, the election of a speaker at this point is ceremonial, but Kevin McCarthy, as of right now, does not have the votes to be elected speaker, which means they're going to play this out on the floor. And there may be multiple votes, which has not happened for a hundred years. Yeah, I think no matter how it goes, first, the metaphor that came to me is that, you know, we're handing over the keys of the car to this, you know, kind of really hungover guy and a bunch of rowdy people that he has to drive home that

are still loaded. And none of them know where they're going. And they're all going to fight and raise hell and cars going to veer all over the road anyway. No matter how that vote goes today, Kevin McCarthy has already sold his soul. Whatever's left of his soul to be sold, let's put it that way, whatever scraps are still left at bargain rates. But he's already had to make a bunch of deals. He's made deals about the ability to remove a speaker. Win or lose, he or whoever emerges out of this is going to be the weakest speaker in a century. There's no question about that. We keep saying they're taking control of the House. They're taking control of the House by the tips of their fingernails, really, and with very little to get done, especially with a Senate that's still in the

hands of the other party. You know, I mean, a couple of things need to be noted, which is that we're going from one of the most effective and powerful speakers in history to one of the puniest. It's going to be worth remembering that Nancy Pelosi had pretty much the same very, very narrow majority, and yet she managed to get stuff done. This is not going to be the same sort of majority for Kevin McCarthy or whoever. So there's really only two outcomes for Kevin McCarthy. He's either, you know, after one ballot, two ballots, three ballots, four ballots, going to be narrowly elected, and he's going to rely on votes like fabulous George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene. That's his core constituency. And if he gets elected,

he's also going to have to get the votes of some of those five dissidents who hate his guts, right? Having promised to let them hold him hostage. Or the alternative is, and this is kind of a delicious little moment, he actually prematurely moved into the Speaker's office, moved all of his stuff in, or he's going to realize he doesn't have the vote, and he's going to have to move his stuff out. He's got to be on the cell phone, like texting, okay, take this stuff out, you know, take down the pictures. If there is a Narcan for Schadenfreude, we would have to keep it nearby if that happened. But you know, we can't just move on without checking back and saying something about George Santos.

Okay. No, I am obsessed with this story. I actually think that George Santos is like the man of the year already, kind of the quintessential creature of the Trump era, of our age of grift. Yep. I mean, every time I open the news or Twitter or social media and I see something, I think, Jesus, jump in Christ on a pogo stick. Is the guy's name even Santos? Is he even from this planet? I think you're absolutely right, Jeremy. He's kind of the poster boy, the natural end state of the perfect Trump grifter lie about absolutely everything. Yeah, I mean, all of it. I mean, Theranos, cryptos, every scam artist in the world sort

of comes together in this one person. If you were writing the script for this particular age, you would come up with somebody like George Sandus, where you just cram everything together. And you're right. I was listening to somebody, I think, on CNBC arguing that, well, you know, he padded his resume. Bullshit, he didn't pad his resume. He just made everything up. He just made everything up in a pathological way. It's like, okay, so my mother died, you know, on 9-11. Okay, she didn't actually die on 9-11. She died on 2016, but she was in finance. Okay, she really wasn't in finance. She was a cook. Okay. I went to this school and no, I didn't go to that school. I'm gay, except for the time when I was married to the woman. It's truly amazing. And yet Kevin McCarthy needs that guy today in order to get his life's ambition. Right. I mean, imagine, you know, being Kevin McCarthy and having to sit down with this grinning weirdo who's saying, so Kevin, what can you do for me, old pal? Okay, Tom, by now, Kevin McCarthy is used to sitting down with grinning weirdos.

This is what he does on a daily basis. I mean, he goes to work with Louie Gohmert and Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert and all of these guys. Can we just do the game of what if one more time, Charlie? Love this game. What if this guy were a Democrat and had been elected like this? Would there be any doubt that Fox and the whole right wing media industrial complex would be saying, well, he has to resign. Can't seat a guy

like that. That's an insult to the Constitution. It's an insult to his voters. My God, you know, there would be a very special edition of The Five and, you know, a late night media documentary. But it's like, once again, I think not only is Santos emblematic of the kind of end state of Trumpism, it's emblematic of a Republican party that is all about the will to power. Guy's a liar and a grifter and made up his whole resume and nobody actually knows who he is. And he's now these, you know, going to be criminal charges in Brazil and all that. Whatever. He's a vote for us. We keep him. And that's all that matters. I love the fact that Brazil wants to extradite him. So he's fabulous and accused felon George Santos. How is this working out? Well, at least we know who the

faces of this party are. And meanwhile, the president of Brazil has fled to Florida. The ex-president. Which, you know, seems to wrap this all up in a huge, you know, again, if you scripted this, they would throw you out of the room. They'd say, you know, sorry, pal, but, you know, here at Amazon or Netflix, you know, we don't do science fiction. You couldn't write this stuff. You know that there's going to be a dinner with Bolsonaro, Kerry Lake, and the former guy, at least in the next month, right? But we're going to get that picture. Oh, there has to be. I don't know that Kanye West is going to be able to make it, but let's come back to Mar-a-Lago in

a moment. The complete dysfunction of the House of Representatives is going to be on display. I mean, stuff's going to happen on C-SPAN, on the floor of the House that would normally occur in caucus or behind closed doors. And this actually alarms and outrages, believe it or not, because irony is dead, Newt Gingrich. This is the former speaker, bomb thrower, Newt Gingrich, who just can't imagine how things have gotten this bad. Let's play Newt. So this is a fight between a handful of people and the entire rest of the conference. And they're saying they have the right to screw up everything. Well, the precedent that sets is so do the moderates, so do the members from Florida. I mean, any five people

can get up and say, I'm now going to screw up the conference too. The choice is Kevin McCarthy or chaos. And I think it's a remarkably short-sighted and candidly selfish position. And I don't understand where they're coming from. He has no idea. Wow. He doesn't understand. How did this happen? I never thought the leopards would eat my face. So with all due respect, fuck you, Newt. And all of these people are going, well, this is just really terrible. They know that these people are doing this to Kevin McCarthy. After decades of encouraging and enabling people like this, of nurturing and rewarding the bomb throwers, the demagogues, the people whose main goal in life

is to get clicks into so chaos, who have no interest whatsoever in passing any legislation. And suddenly they're all looking around going, who are these people? This is just terrible. Don't they know what this place is really all about? I mean, really. Newt Gingrich, like imagine, you know,

people who are actually trying to disrupt the House of Representatives and do these terrible things. You know, you had mentioned that you were, oh, yeah, I'm gonna have this clip from Newt Gingrich. But that clip is one for the ages, because of the indignation in Newt's voice as if he had just landed here, you know, in his as a first termterm member of Congress and not the guy who ran seminars and political bomb throwing. I love that line. It's either Kevin or chaos. The chaos arrived, dude. And you midwifed a lot of that chaos. To see Newt Gingrich complaining about chaos and decorum and, you know, it me if I'm too good. Wow.

You know, maybe the truth is the first casualty, but the second casualty is any sort of self-awareness on these parts. Or shame. I really believe the superpower of modern Republicans is the complete, it's like somebody went in and just severed the nerve that has shame impulses carried on it. I mean, it is a powerful thing, right? To be able to be in public life and not feel any shame at all. And over the weekend, there was an excellent

piece by Nick Confessori and the team at the New York Times on the kind of emergence of the new Elise Stefanik. You know, again, the thing you notice is there's absolutely no capability to feel shame. There is no sense of history or of ever having held a position that was ever done. I mean, it's astonishing. No memory. That never happened. And also everything I said is completely consistent. Everything I said in the past, well, that doesn't count.

Who are you talking about here? It's gaslighting 24-7. So I made a reference in my newsletter that some people found to be somewhat obscure, but I did include a link. Do you remember when Liz Truss became a prime minister of Britain and everything fell apart like in the first 24 hours? One of the tabloids actually posted this meme of having a head of lettuce. Yes. And they asked, what will last longer, the head of lettuce or Liz Truss' prime ministership? And as it turned out, the head of lettuce actually lasted longer than she lasted as prime minister.

So Michael Beschloss, who is the presidential historian, posted this yesterday saying, keeping this head of lettuce handy is the next House speaker takes office, whoever it turns out to be. And I thought that that seemed pertinent. So whether Kevin McCarthy wins today or whether it's somebody else and who the hell knows what that is, because that's what he's got going for him is there's no plan B. There's no, there's nobody waiting in the wings that's remotely plausible. So I think we all need to have that iconic head of lettuce out there to see which, which lasts longer. There's a truth in this, Charlie, which is that the Republicans, and I said this probably about three, four years ago when I wrote a piece about the 2018 midterms, that the Republicans really do act like a parliamentary party, that they don't really

have any sense of themselves as distinct from their, you know, back then when Trump was president. They can't envision themselves as a governing, independent branch of the government. They think they're just the extension of some kind of social or cultural movement. Because the other thing is that no matter who wins this, there's no plan for governing here. They're not going to do anything. I think that puts a lie to a lot of the years of the Trump era GOP saying things like, well, we're doing this to shake things up, to get better policies, to make Washington work for the common man, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's no plan for any of that stuff. This is, we're going to get in. Basically, it's like,

we're going to tear the place up and have a ball doing it without really caring about whether we actually pass anything or not. Well, and see, that's one of the reasons why you're also seeing this MAGA crack up here. I mean, I have to admit that I didn't see the Marjorie Taylor Greene versus Lauren Boebert fight developing. They apparently hate each other's guts because they are so close together. But this is what's going to happen. I mean, it's, you know, to use the various cliches out there, thieves fall apart, grifters are going to grift. The revolutionaries always end up guillotining one another. But part of the problem is because they don't have an agenda. You know, they're sort of tied together by these vague symbols that really aren't related to any kind

of a policy. The only real thing they have in common is, you know, anger, self-promotion, nihilism, this desire to tear things down. And of course, the cult of loyalty to Donald Trump. So you take Donald Trump out of the picture, even temporarily, and what do they got? They're scrambling for the spoils, right? There's no connective tissue of principle or of vision for the world other than kind of that self-promotion, burn things down, drain the other guy's swamp, believing conspiracy theories, hating brown people. Beyond that, what do you got, right? When your entire career is driven by a combination of opportunism and deeply held and deeply

deserved insecurity, because I think this is something you also see with these folks, is that there's no there there. You know, Marjorie Taylor Greene was in a really good, I'll just throw out one more kudo to a great piece. Elena Plot-Colabro wrote this great piece for my magazine, The Atlantic, about, you know, why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this? And what you see is this evolution from sort of bored suburban housewife to Facebook conspiracy theorist to, you know, hey, going to Congress could be more fun than even being part of CrossFit gym. But that means that there's a lot of baggage, there's a lot of insecurity,

there's a lot of imposter syndrome. And of course, they all hate each other because they don't feel like they're part of a common movement. I think one of the things you and I have talked about in the past, when we were part of a Republican party and a conservative bigger tent, we all felt like we were part of the same thing, even when we were having pitched arguments with each other. People may not believe it, but there were, in fact, once upon a time, pitched arguments within the Republican party about things like abortion and immigration and taxation and all these other things. But there was also this sense that while we kind of all agree that we share a foundational understanding of how politics works and why the world should be

the way it is, these people share none of that. This is a jackal pack where it's all zero sum shrinking pie behavior. And of course they fall into fighting with each other on a moment's notice because they have nothing in common because they don't have anything in common with anyone. What they have in common though is Trump. So let's talk about that because to the extent that I'm feeling better about 2023, It is this feeling, I want to get your sense of this, because I really don't want to engage in wish casting or self-delusion here. But Donald Trump enters 2023 feeling so far diminished from what you would have expected. He's announced he was running for president, then nothing happened. He hasn't left Mar-a-Lago. He hasn't come downstairs except to have dinner with the Nazis. He's getting crazier and crazier. And a lot of the Republicans, including MAGA, seem to act as if he's completely irrelevant. He feels diminished. That Olivia

Newtsey piece just sort of haunts me where, you know, she portrays him as this aging has-been star, Norma Desmond, who's sort of sitting alone and brooding, running a pretend campaign. But he's still Donald Trump, and the Republican base is still the Republican base. He still has to be considered the frontrunner for president, but he just feels battered, bruised. He feels old. He feels tired. Every week, there's just another shoe that drops on him. Not that that's ever been a problem for him in the past. So what do you think? Yeah, I think he's eminently beatable in a primary. But I also think this is where our optimism has to be tempered by some empiricism. Right now, if the primary were held tomorrow, he'd win. It depends whether it's one-on-one or

whether it's one against all the wannabes, right? Whether it's a crowded field. I wonder. I mean, I don't, I think Republicans are making a terrible mistake by trying to clear the field for a one-on-one with Ron DeSantis. I mean, look, Ron DeSantis is a weird guy. You know, he is not necessarily the best person to take on Donald Trump. And I don't know that DeSantis would win nationally. But I think you're right, Charlie, that if it's a big field, again, Trump does what he does and he keeps winning the way he did the last time with 20%, 30% pluralities. I think the bigger problem, I don't want to take too much of the focus off of Trump in this, but the big problem is a Trumpified base. The reason that people like Boebert and Green and Gosar exist is because they have districts that keep sending just brutal, that there is this pathetic, he's one step away from Howard Hughes, you know, shambling around in his PJs with his long fingernails railing about, you know, watching the same movie over and over

again and all that stuff. But on the other hand, you know, he has the ability to get out there when he's revved up, he can get on there and pretty much annihilate anybody who's on stage with him just by being a big fire hose of crazy. Yeah. So I'm not ready to count him out yet. No, no, you can't count him out. Even though his rants and raves are becoming just more insane. Yeah, they're weirder and weirder. Weirder and weirder and less effective.

I mean, you do have the sense that he's lost a couple of steps. Yeah, they're weirder and weirder. vibe, pretty much everything. The January 6th stuff, you know, has been the volume of it, the detail of it, the extreme length to which he went to overturn the election, surprising even to somebody, I don't know about you, but somebody who watched this pretty closely, it turns out to be even more insane, even more demented than we thought. And then, of course, there is the special counsel who seems more likely than not to drop indictments on him. He's facing these other questions about his taxes, et cetera. And again, this is somebody who is post-shame, who has been able to survive everything. I wonder about the cumulative weight of his age, of the defeats of the midterm, of indictments, all of that, whether it's finally catching up with him. And I say this because I think

one of the most significant developments was when the January 6th Committee decided to make criminal referrals. That was a big shot. I mean, maybe symbolic, but a big shot. The response from Republicans was notably muted, wasn't it? There was not a furious rallying around

that we've seen in the past. And you could see frustration in the entertainment wing of the party because they were like, if you indict him, he'll be president. If you indict him or if there are recommendations for criminal behavior, that's how he wins. And I'm thinking now, yeah, maybe not. I'm going to say too, there was one other event that we shouldn't overlook that in a weird way or in an unexpected way, I should say, really hurt him with his base. And that was the trading cards thing. It was so bad.

So bad. I mean, that really landed with a lot of people. I mean, he's like, I have a big announcement. And of course, everybody's out there going, they're all praying to God. He's going to announce a running mate. He's going to announce have a big announcement. And of course, you know, everybody's out there going, they're all praying to God. Oh, he's going to announce a running mate. He's going to announce that Q is real. He's going to announce, you know, some giant thing. And then he does this thing.

And what cracked me up is one of the January 6th conspirators, I shouldn't say conspirators, one of the rioters who has since been sentenced to prison tweeted something like, I can't believe I'm going to jail for an NFT salesman. That was a beyond parody moment, wasn't it? Yes. That was a beyond parody moment. I mean, you put together in a period of less than two weeks, he pledged solidarity with the rioters.

He had dinner with Holocaust denying Nazis and anti-Semites, called for the termination of the constitution and then in the midst of all of that announced nft cards about himself showing him as a superhero i mean you want to talk about what the fuck was moment that was that the script writer would have been thrown out of the pretty that wasn't an nft that was a wtf yeah. I think it showed that the thing that finally erodes Trump's support in the base, sadly, the Trump base doesn't care about terminating the Constitution or supporting January 6th or whether or not Kanye West is an anti-Semite. They just don't care about any of that. They think it's all media

manufactured. They think it's all overblown bullshit. But when Trump says, I have a big announcement, and the announcement is, I want you to spend $100 on a token on an NFT that you probably don't really understand, and it's a picture of me with ripped off, you know, this kind of lifted artwork from comic books, you know, that's when they say, hey, that really felt like a fuck you. Yeah. Because it was. Because it's very personal to them at that point. It was, I am now going to scam you because I think you are a rube. Right. And I'm going to demand that you play along with it and send me a hundred bucks.

I always said, even back in 2016, I said, you know, the moment that could hurt Donald Trump would be getting caught on a hot mic where he tells, you know, some MAGA guy at a rally not to touch his car or to get out of his way or some, like the real Donald Trump who actually, as Howard Stern always pointed out, you know, actually Trump hates his own voters. He hates them with a passion, but he covers it so well. This was a little bit of the hatred and the disdain for his own voters creeping out in a way that those voters finally got. And I think, I don't want to put too much weight on it, but I really think,

you look back at the big decline of Donald Trump, that NFT caper, I think hurt him in a way that a lot of people in the media and a lot of people in kind of anti-Trump or never Trump world, we don't get because it wasn't really aimed at us. It really was just a total fuck you aimed at his own people. And I think they finally got it. I think some of them finally heard that everything that, you know, we were told about this guy seems to be true in that one moment. And I think it was actually one of the biggest missteps he's made. I agree. Do you remember the movie A Face in the Crowd with Andy Griffith, 1957, where he's sort

of a radio demagogue and he goes from fame to fame until he's caught on an open mic basically saying how stupid his listeners were. And that was it. It's even better than that. Because if you remember in the movie, his producer who was his girlfriend has come to realize what a monster he is. And she intentionally hot mics him and catches him saying something like they'd eat dog food if I told him to. Yeah. And that was this moment. That was a lot like this moment. All of his hostility that should have ended his career, they were willing to put up with it because it was always directed at other people. This NFT caper was one of the few times where his people went, hey, that feels very personal that you're trying to take me on this.

Now, of course, they sold it out and he put millions in his pocket. But I think with a lot of the people who actually thought he was on their side, that was one of the first, maybe not the first, but a really shocking indication that, hey, this guy just doesn't care about me. He cares about, this guy is basically a televangelist pocketing my money while he's, you know, boinking the secretary. Well, it is interesting that no other major Republican candidate for president dropped out after he got into the race, which tells me that they see something happening out there. They smell blood. They smell blood. They either think that something's going to happen,

that he's not going to go through with it or something. It's one thing for you and I to sit here and talk about this, but there are people who are right now putting together staffs, and I'll be honest with you, I have no idea what Mike Pence is smoking right now to think that he can go through, but Mike Pompeo thinks there might be an opening. Nikki Haley thinks there might be an opening. DeSantis out there. They feel the 2023 is different than 2015. Maybe it's complete delusion, or maybe they're right. I think they're leaning forward, Charlie, all kind of hovering over the start mark and waiting for the moment where they think he's vulnerable enough that they can then strike and claim that they were, you know, never a part of all this, right? I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but my friend David Frum has this

great line that, you know, when all this is over, you know, no one will ever admit to having been a part of it. They need a moment. I mean, you know, you got a guy like Pompeo or Nikki Haley or all these other people who were absolutely complicit in the freak show and anti-constitutional rave up that emanated out of the White House for four years. It's almost like they're all waiting for one more misstep where they can step forward and say, here's how I was really secretly a hero. And this is why I hate this guy. And we were never pals. And I was never part of all this. Because right now, none of them can think about capturing the nomination without loving up this crazy base that Trump has nurtured and created.

And I think this is where you see Ron DeSantis, whatever else you think of Ron DeSantis, it's smart politics to keep doing all these stupid, performative, chuckle-headed, dumping off immigrants and anti-woke stuff, and he's going to start investigating vaccines. He's trying to displace Trump with Trump's own base. Now, that to me says that he is completely unfit to be president of the United States, but you can see him trying to do it. I think the others are standing by saying, we're not ready to go there yet. We're waiting for one more moment where Trump, you know, steps on one more rake, and then we can step forward

and say, see, we were never partners. At some point, you know, Ron DeSantis and the others will have to lead. They will have to take positions. Did Ron DeSantis speak out about our policy on Ukraine? Did he speak out about whether or not we should continue to support President Zelensky? Did he speak out on the omnibus spending bill? I mean, at a certain point, he's going to have to now take positions on these issues. But before he takes those positions, Charlie, he's solidifying his position with people who just don't give a shit about policy. Yeah, That's the problem. Back to this discussion about optimism.

Because you've written that the American system looks like it's in the process of healing. You know, the judicial system tells Kerry Lake to go pound sand. Katie Hobbs is being sworn in as governor. Trump's presidential campaign is a pitiful mess. Biden signed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which is a big fucking deal. That is a big deal. In the omnibus government funding bill, you have the coup plotters, other criminals facing real consequences. You have the guy behind the attempt to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer going to jail. Going to jail for almost 20 years.

Yeah. You have a sense that like, okay, the system took a while, but now it is moving ahead. But of course, like, because we've been around for a while, we're still worried about the potential for things to go horribly wrong. So because we are who we are, let's talk about what could go horribly wrong. Let me start with one. As great as it is that I think the pandemic has peaked, I think that the precedent set by our loss of interest in it after a million people died and the demagoguery about vaccines means that the next time we have a pandemic, which we will have, we will not be listening to the experts. And it's hard to imagine the country mobilizing against that next pandemic the way we did against COVID. And I think that is deadly.

So that's certainly one of the things that can go wrong. I'm not expecting another once in 100 year pandemic, a year after the last once in 100 year pandemic. But I think what's going to continue to go wrong, and I can't really say it's a case for optimism. But the change in our politics is that we're no longer fighting over COVID and masks and vaccinations. And I think that's unfortunate because I think the attitudes of millions of Americans, certainly where I live, the attitude is, oh, there's people in, you know, I don't know, Idaho or Alabama or wherever don't want to get vaccinated. Well, too bad. And then everybody kind of moves on. There's not this like, well, you know, schools be closed. Should the masks come off? Should we get that? It's like, look, this thing is something we're going to live with.

Get your booster, get vaccinated. If you're particularly vulnerable, take steps, you know, to not be in closed spaces during, you know, high transmission, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that takes an issue away from people who want to walk around without a mask on, you know, at the Costco glaring at everybody. Right. You? One guy walks into the supermarket with his mask off and he looks around like, come at me, bros. Nobody gives a crap about those people anymore, which I think is actually good for our politics that we're not having. You don't want to wear a mask. You're not vaccinated. You're risking getting sick. Well, you do you, pal. I think that it's actually good that we're not having those fights

anymore. Okay, so let's talk about Russia, though, because this is what you do. You think about the possibility of nuclear war started by Vladimir Putin. I mean, Russia still is in terrible shape, but they do have advantages. They may try to take Kiev again or continue this meat grinder across the eastern front. So Putin is making these unhinged threats. How, and we've talked about this a lot over the last year, how seriously should we be taking this? How dangerous a moment are we in right now with this war in Ukraine? Or is it just going to be a long slog? I think it's a slog. My anxiety was a lot higher in the first three months where I was very worried that the shock of losing was going to lead Putin to do something unpredictable.

And by the way, I really want to emphasize to people, I don't, at least I don't, I don't think almost anybody who studies Russia really worries about this in the sense that Putin wakes up one morning and says, that's it, drop a 500 kiloton bad boy on Odessa or Kiev. I worry that he takes actions, he moves things around, he faints at looking like he wants to use nuclear weapons. He drives everybody into a high state of alert where people start making mistakes on every possible side. That's the thing that always worries me. But I have a, since we're going dark and pessimistic in the midst of all this optimistic New Year revelry, the question that keeps haunting me is, there is no road for Russia back into the international community now. You know, I said this in a conversation a while back with Ian Bremer

and Henry Slaughter. And I think, you know, there was some bristling at the way I phrased this, but what do you do about the fact that you now basically have a nuclear armed rogue state sitting in the Security Council? How does Russia come back? Certainly under this regime, Russia cannot come back into the international community, even in the global South. People like to make a lot of noise about, well, India doesn't feel the way we do and the global south. Well, but there's a lot

of people in the global south that are not happy about this because when a large power establishes the precedent that it can just erase other countries from the map at will, you know, that weaker powers take notice of that and they're not comfortable with it. I think even if Putin were gone, you know, back in 1991, we gave the former Soviet Union a huge kind of pass and a lot of the benefit of the doubt. They emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. We kind of said, okay, bygones, you know, the communists made everybody suffer, including ordinary Russians and Ukrainians and Georgians and Armenians and so on. I don't think Russia gets the benefit of the doubt this time. I think, you know, even if Putin is frog marched out of the Kremlin, which is not going to happen,

you know, or if Putin passes away, or if Putin is somehow displaced or becomes too sick to govern. I just don't think that the next guys can walk in and say, let us put the recent unpleasantness behind us because there is something fundamentally wrong in Russian political culture in 2023 that isn't going to be solved by just getting rid of one guy. I don't know how we create a new international community out of that. I agree with you. And of course, you know, the big question is, is whether we're going to, you know, spend 2023 worried about China, but it certainly seems like we're starting the year with China being a rather preoccupied with its own problems. Now, whether it decides to distract from them by say invading Taiwan would of course be another one of the things we really ought to

worry about. And another one of those, you know, what is the silver lining around this dark cloud? I mean, I wonder if the Chinese, and I am not an expert on China, so I'm kind of judging this from afar, but I wonder if the Chinese looked at the reaction to the invasion of Ukraine and said, huh, apparently the world still cares about such things. Because I think what we were sliding into, particularly in the Trump years, was that the authoritarians of the world were saying, you know what, the democracies, the whole notion of Western democracy has been proven to be kind of hollow and a sham and those voters are really asleep. And in the second Trump term, he'll pull them out of NATO and nobody will even give a asleep. And, you know, in the second Trump term, he'll pull them out of

NATO and nobody will even give a crap. You know, and suddenly, you know, they find out what people always find out about democracies, which is that we are sluggish and sleepy until you piss us off. And then we're kind of your worst enemy. This is a very interesting point. So in 2017, you know, Donald Trump could make noises about not observing Article 5, pulling out of NATO. And it was like a second tier story. It certainly would not be next year. That is a real good point. Because we've gone through this before, this is so difficult to do. I mean, you and I remember what we thought on January 7th, 2021. We thought, well, that's it. Okay. After the attack on the Capitol, we thought that's it. Everyone is seen through Donald Trump.

Every criticism has been completely vindicated, which of course it has been over and over again. And yet, you know, he was able to come back. But as we start 2023, you know, you look at, you know, what the right thought was going to be the ultimate narrative meme. Remember Elon, Kanye, Trump, none of those guys are looking that great. None of those guys are starting 2023 having a good year. Kanye totally canceled himself. Elon Musk managed to be the first man in history to lose $200 billion or whatever. Tesla is in absolute free fall. Twitter seems to be at least thumping along. I'm noticing, you know, more sort of bizarre, sketchy ads in my timeline, but they're easy to deal with. What do you see as the future of

Twitter? It seems to be just like kind of day to day. My advice to everybody about Twitter has been to calm down and set your notifications properly. Yeah, exactly. You know, people are saying, I've seen all this crap in my timeline. Well, of course you are, because your timeline is completely open. You haven't set any of the filters that Twitter allows you to set. Your DMs are completely open. Of course, you're having a bad Twitter experience. And it's a bad Twitter experience that you would have had in 2015. Back, you know, when all the MAGA heads and racists and kooks were flooding around then, too.

I haven't noticed much of a difference other than, as you say, Charlie, I feel like the new ad base, the new revenue base for Twitter are the kind of people who advertise for sleep aids and prostate medication at three o'clock in the morning, or the buy now, not available in stores, with flashlights frozen into blocks of ice to prove how tough they are. That's their new base, is like a kind of downscale strip mall. But the program itself, it hiccups now and then, goes down now and then. Musk has tried to block and ban people who annoy him, and he's taken a lot of shit for that because of course, he bought it ostensibly as a free speech protection move. Look, anything that makes people realize that immature narcissistic billionaires are not nearly as smart as they

seem, again, is actually something of a good thing for society. I think so. You've seen The Glass Onion then? Yes. Oh, man. No spoilers, but it's like, okay, so Elon Musk had a lot of bad things happen, but the fact that he got a really good movie made about him, the worst thing that happened to him. And the writer of the movie swears it's not about Elon Musk. And I say, what a load of bullshit that is because that guy is Elon. Well, he's Musk and Zuckerberg, you know, and a few others, but the whole vibe is pure Musk. And that whole popping

of the bubble that maybe these people are not geniuses. Maybe we ought to stop sucking up to them and assuming they actually know what they're doing. Maybe they are just idiots. Because once you get that, once you think that, it's hard to go back, right? The first time you look and go, no, this guy is really not that good. No, he's really, he's creepy. Well, the thing with Musk, of course, is that people say, well, he's a genius. He invented SpaceX. He invented Tesla. No, he didn't. No, he didn't. He had a lot of money. He threw it at engineers with some, I mean, give him credit with certainly with some vision of what he wanted them to do. But in the end, those are programs that have to be run under careful oversight, because of all the government contracts involved, for one thing. You know,

I'm a former government employee, the government doesn't spend money without 15 people looking over your shoulder. Twitter was the first thing that he just sat down and said, watch me run this. And from day one, it's like, you're not good at this. You're just not a good manager. You're not a good thinker. You're not a good strategist. Right. All that stuff you claimed that made you great, because of course you had all these people. He's not going to fire the top layer of management at SpaceX or Tesla. They keep the company rolling. He thought he could do that at Twitter. And suddenly it's like, wow, where's all this bad press coming from? Well, you fired your

press office. Well, who's in charge of the product? Well, you fired your CEO and you fired your board and you fired everybody and you told everybody to sleep next to their desks. Amazingly, that has not produced a better product. And the thing that I think really makes Twitter just chug along is that we all kind of stayed there and just said, okay, well, whatever. The new guy is screwing up. You don't have to listen to him. You don't have to read his tweets. And as long as the lights stay on, which I think is actually the problem Twitter could face much more than Elon Musk's

11-year-old sensibility as a manager, is that there just aren't enough people to deal with it if suddenly the whole thing falls apart mechanically. That was the concern, but I haven't noticed any significant glitches yet. Knock on wood, we will see. Okay, so let's circle back to where we began, that today was supposed to be the big celebration of the great red wave. And instead, we're going to get the chaos. You know, just from a little bit of historical perspective, it is remarkable, isn't it, to watch that the Democrats appear to be completely united at the moment, or at least on their best behavior sitting there. They are not the party in disarray. The Republicans are the party in array. And also kind of a little tidbit for today that Mitch McConnell, who is going to continue to be the

minority leader, apparently now he set a new record for being his party's leader, record previously held by Mike Mansfield. But he's spending the day hanging out with Joe Biden, touting the infrastructure bill in Kentucky. In Kentucky. That is something. I don't see any other way of looking at that other than as a big sort of Mitch McConnell speak, fuck you to Donald Trump, right? Let me just, you know, put in a plug for Joe Biden here, because, you know, we're hearing constantly, oh, he's old. And he, you know, he kind of rambles and he tells grandpa stories. He's been awfully good at presidenting for a couple of years here. If you listed all of the achievements that Biden has pulled off, whether you like them

or not, and when you were talking about Nancy Pelosi, you said one of the strongest speakers in history, I think even if you don't like what she's done, you would have to admit that if you're looking objectively at politics. If you took Joe Biden's name off it and said, this is a generic Democratic president who's just pushed through these bills, handled foreign policy this way, you'd say, wow, that's a pretty amazing record. What strikes me about the disarray among the Republicans, this goes back to something, Charlie, that every time people say, I'm voting for Trump and I want the Republicans, I would say, okay, what is it you want? Even after 2016, the Republicans run the table. And I turn to now some of my former friends and

colleagues and I say, okay, you won. You've got everything. What do you want? What is it you're trying to do here? And what we're seeing is this coming back again in 2023. Okay, Republicans, you took the House. What do you want to do? And the answer has always been, we don't really want to do anything. We just want to jump up and down and scream and, you know, maybe with four votes. On the thing about Joe Biden, I think this is one of those, as I was doing my year-end review, you look at what was actually accomplished and you realize that despite this intense tribalism and this incendiary partisanship and polarization, there were a lot of bipartisan legislative successes on some hot button issues. You know, we talked about the Electoral Count Act, you know, some of the spending bills, but also the codification of same-sex marriage rights, which is extraordinary when you think about the moment we're in. And of course, a lot of us kind of rolled our eyes and laughed at, you know, Joe Biden for saying, you know, over and over again that, you know, that he was going to be able to broker some of these bipartisan deals. And, you know, over again that he was going to be able to broker some of these bipartisan deals. And this showed that he was not the man for the times. And yet, in retrospect,

he pulled it off. He pulled some stuff and he didn't get everything. You had a piece of gun legislation that was passed. Amazing what you can do when you've got a guy as president who spent 47 years in Congress. That's right. And I think that there is on the right, there's kind of this nagging sense like, wait, okay, so we spent the last two years just making fun of him and underestimating him. Maybe that was a mistake. That's why I brought up his record. It's like, okay, you guys, you know, talked about what a clueless, dithering old cadre was. Well, he's run rings around you guys for two years. So what is it you're going to do now? Well, we're going to investigate his son. I don't really think that's the effective

way to go, but you go ahead and give that a shot. I want to be pessimistic at the end of this, Charlie, because there's one... Sure. People are going to tune this in and say, these two curmudgeons, what have they been smoking that they're being so happy? There's one more dark cloud on the horizon, and it's called the Supreme Court. I am worried about the partisanship of the Supreme Court. I am worried about the cases that are coming before them that they seem eager to embrace about things like states' rights. So, you know, while I'm doing a lot of smiling here, I'm kind of looking out of the corner of my eye and saying, and what made me think of it is when you talked about codifying gay marriage. Yeah, there's bipartisanship on some of these issues radical approach, it did sound like the justices were quite skeptical of more extreme versions of that.

That was the one case that really scared me. And, you know, keeping fingers crossed, I don't think that they can... Yeah, it's not over yet. You know what? Nothing's over. There is no finish line. Nothing's over until we decide it is. It Wasn't over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. There is no finish line, Tom. Tom Nichols, thank you so much for joining me on our, well, this is the first live podcast of 2023. So we are off and running now. So thanks for coming back.

Thanks for having me, Charlie. Good to talk to you. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We will do this all over again.