The Bulwark Podcast - Tom Nichols: Our Fatal Complacency

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Pence warned us about the threat to our democracy, and we shrugged. Plus, Bethany Mandel can't define woke, Fox can't keep its talking points straight, DeSantis is Trump's Mini Me, and the despicable elitism of the American right. Tom Nichols joins Charlie Sykes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good morning and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. As we mentioned yesterday, today is the Ides of March, and I'm joined by a guest who will actually get that historical reference, Tom Nichols, Professor Emeritus of the Naval War College, now a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Atlantic Daily Newsletter. So good morning, Tom. Happy Ides of March. Good morning, Charlie, as we come to Barry Caesar on this day. We probably should start by talking about the various financial meltdowns that are occurring. We have more banks in trouble. The Saudis pulling their funding. The fallout is rather dramatic in the stock market. But we're going

to set that aside because who knows? I mean, obviously, there are woke banks in Europe as well as in California. Who knew that, right? Because this is all about wokeness. I have been told. I've been reliably assured it's all wokeness. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, once bank officials start caring about things like prejudice and racism and stuff, interest rates just go through the roof. This is a well-known economic principle first enunciated in the time of Adam Smith. It is interesting, you know, listening to all of this, you know, the Republican politicians who are, you know, talking about this is not about interest rates going up. It is not about deregulation, the deregulation, by the way, which we supported, it's all about wokeness because that's what our chatbot tells us to say. It's not about a poorly managed bank that bet exactly in the opposite direction of the Fed.

No. No human beings here could have made a mistake other than excessively woke lefties who somehow invested in, you know, environmentally sound trout farms or something. It does sound as if a lot of this political rhetoric that we get is generated by, you know, AI all the time. In my newsletter today, I quote Nick Katajio over at the dispatch, who's talking about Ron DeSantis and saying, you know, really, what would you get if you asked chat GPT to craft a Ukraine policy optimized to pander to Tucker Carlson's viewers rather than to maximize American interest? You would get something like what Ron DeSantis gave out. But all of these guys increasingly

sound like chatbots, like there's words they kind of just throw out there. The reason for that, I think, is that when you don't believe in the bullshit you're putting out right you lean on tropes and you say oh crap i gotta talk about ukraine and i know that you know the base is full of isolationists no nothings so you know ha ha ha ha ha and you kind of grope around and then you turn into a human version of a chatbot right you say well you know ukraine not in our it's a territorial dispute and you and you haul off these tropes kind of grope around, and then you turn into a human version of a chatbot, right? You say, well, you know, Ukraine, it's a territorial dispute, and you haul off these tropes, because your answers aren't interesting, because you're not actually invested in them, and you don't believe what you're saying. I want to come back to Ron DeSantis in a moment. In my Morning Shots newsletter,

I said, think of yesterday as the first real day of the 2024 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, and it did not go well for Ron DeSantis. It did not go well at all. And I want to go back to that. But speaking of humina, humina, humina, and sounding like a chat bot, there was a viral video out from Bethany Mandel. Now, many of the listeners may not be familiar with Miss Mandel, whose brain, I believe, was broken during the pandemic. But she is a conservative writer who has written a whole book about things like wokeness, and she tweets about wokeness all the time. And so she's on this program, Rising, and she's asked a very simple, basic question. Now, keep in mind, this is a professional writer who writes extensively

about wokeness, the need to confront wokeness, the need to, you know, push back against wokeness, who's written a book about it. And she's asked a very simple question, and I want you to listen to what happens. And for Americans consider themselves very liberal, and probably fewer of them consider themselves to be woke. And so, you know, when we talk about traditional- What does that mean to you? Would you mind defining woke? Because because it's come up a couple times and i just want to make sure we're on the same page so i mean woke is sort of the idea that um this is going to be one of those moments that goes viral. I mean, woke is something that's very hard to define,

and we've spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and we reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Okay. Sorry. It's hard to explain in a 15-second soundbite. I think she'd been given five minutes. It wouldn't have gone any better.

It's a 15 seconds. We're kind of far into this debate for people not to be able to define the word that they believe defines the entire cultural clash that we're going through, right? You'd think they would have figured that out. And And you know, there is a good elevator pitch answer. A friend of mine texted me the other day and he said, okay, I've had it up to here with this word. What does it mean? And I said, it means a new appreciation and a new obsession, if you're a critic, with social justice and issues of race and gender and equality. The word meaning, because I'd actually asked a friend about this like five years ago,

and the word started to become a thing, that you were kind of asleep before. You weren't really paying attention to these things. You didn't fully understand them. And now you're woke. Now you're awake. Now you have a new kind of, if you mean it in a positive sense, you have kind of gone from being callous to being more sensitive and awake. If you mean in a pejorative sense, you have suddenly become obsessive about social justice. You could sum it up in five seconds and say woke means obsessive about social justice issues, if you want to use it the way Bethany was using it. And she couldn't come up with that. You know, you and I both enjoyed the Reagan era, Charlie, but that reminded me of moments when people would say, Mr. President, what do you think about this thing? And Reagan would kind of shake his head and go, you know, that kind of long,

you know, and you could see the press guy scrambling to intervene. That just, that was agonizing. And I think it's because the word doesn't mean anything anymore. I think that what she should have said is that, well, wokeness is a little bit like pornography. I can't define it, but you know it when you see it. That's really what it's come down to. That would have been a better dodge. I mean, there are things that are worthy of criticism, but this is part of this new political flex of using a word not to mean anything specific, but just sort of as a general rubric for things we don't like.

Things we don't like. Critical race theory, right? Christopher Ruffo was like, it's going to mean anything about race that makes people feel uncomfortable. I'm not actually trying to define it. Exactly. Critical race theory has now been replaced with woke, and yet they haven't come up with a way of doing that elevator pitch, I guess. When this friend of mine asked me about this, I said, well, it means anything

conservatives don't like. And he said, come on, you have to do better than that. I said, I'm just telling you that's the way it's used now. But again, if you're a critic of the whole concept, you'd say wokeness is a consuming obsession with all social justice issues. If you are a fan of the concept, you say a renewed understanding or a new understanding of things you didn't really comprehend before that you now appreciate as problems. That's it. It's a 10-second elevator pitch that covers both ends of how people use it. But I think, again, once you've used it so many times to mean, to go back to your point about the banks, Charlie, it's like, well, you know, we're betting on bonds at a time when, you know,

interest rates are going up and that didn't work out. Wow. You're so woke. It's going to get to the point you go to a restaurant and you're going to say, waiter, take this steak back. It's just too woke. Or it's insufficiently woke. There's some woke in my soup. That's also the critique of what's wrong with Ukraine, why we don't like Ukraine. Ukraine is too woke. It's like at a certain point, you have to like, okay, guys, either define it or move on. Okay, I'm going to try to keep coming back to Bethany Mandel. Actually, I'm lying. I'm not sorry at all. This is a question that you ought to expect, right? Because you already have people in the media who've gone around and asked politicians who use the word, can you define it?

And they've done the hummina hummina that they don't know. So it's been signaled. And I mentioned to you when we were having our green room conversation. And by the way, I'm deeply committed to not having interesting conversations in the green room that we leave there as opposed to here. You know what I'm saying here? I mean, I want to, you know, lay it off. You and I have a tendency to do that a little too often. You said the nicest thing to me a couple of weeks ago when we were drinking at a bar in Washington, D.C.

One of the most flattering things that anyone's ever said about this podcast. Do you remember what it was? No, probably not. I think the location probably erased some of the memory, but God. You mentioned that sometimes in our conversations, we get so into it, we forget that we're actually on a podcast. We forget there are other people out there listening to us because we're just engaging, which is, I think, the goal of these conversations. It's just you and me, and we're just letting it out there. I mean, there's not like, let's plan out what we're going to say. And this is the point

that I want people to draw from it. I do remember saying that, and it's absolutely true. There are times that I'm sort of looking around while we're talking. I'm like, oh, yeah, right. A lot of other folks are going to be listening in, but we actually don't plan this out or plant zingers. We usually start rolling in the green room, and that's when you stop and say, no, no, no, no, we have to stop talking now. Let's just start rolling. I mean, this is the green room phenomenon where people will be incredibly insightful. Inside information, it will be this scintillating conversation and then they come out and they go on camera and they become really boring and rote and talking point ish. And it's like, no, no, no, that's not the good stuff. That goes back to your chat bot point about, you know, why in a lot of, you know, over the years you've had more interesting conversations in green rooms because that's where people will be more honest. Right. And what they're going to say on television,

this is part of the problem with people on the right now, especially, I'll both sides this one a little bit, but I think part of the reason that you're getting, you know, these canned, boring answers is because those are the same guys that go back to the green room. And you know, this happened with any number of conservative figures during the Trump administration and the run-up to the 2016 and 2020 elections that people would come off camera and they'd go back to the green room and say, oh, God, man, that was just fucking painful. And I didn't believe any of that bullshit,

but you got to do your duty for the cause and blah, blah, blah. Most people can spot those kinds of lies. Fox viewers can't. They apparently just love that stuff. But most people kind of get it when someone goes out there and the eyes kind of get a little glassy and they say things like, oh, you know, I haven't done my cliff claim in a while. You know, Ukraine's merely a territorial dispute.

You know, everybody just understands that that's just nonsense. Well, it's also what happens when language, you know, is transformed from, you know, being a medium to inform people to just simply being signals, you know, so I'm on your side. I hate the same people you hate. I'm willing to punch the same people in the face that you want me to. Right. It's verbal semaphore. Exactly. It is all of this just signaling, don't worry, I'm on your side. And so you get that boilerplate. So, you know, Fox News becomes, you know, humina, humina, humina, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke. Other channels, which we're not going to mention, become fascism, fascism, white nationalism, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, so what I

was telling you before in the green room, watching Bethany Mendel, I was having a flashback to my conversation with Paul Ryan, which I enjoyed. But one of my regrets was at one point, I asked him the same question. I asked him to define wokeness. And immediately, based on his body language, it was clear that he didn't have a good answer for this. And he was uncomfortable with it. You know how people kind of stretch themselves and they kind of look up at the ceiling and they're kind of working. And this should have kicked in all of my apex predator instincts. You know, there's blood on the belt. I should have gone, you know, because, you know, he gave this boilerplate thing that was really a definition of from 20 years ago of political correctness, you know, political orthodoxy. And no,

you can't talk about wokeness without talking about social justice, without talking about race, without talking about, you know, our treatment of black people and what happens with police. And he clearly wasn't prepared to talk about that. So anyway, it's one of those things that you think about afterwards, think, you know, if I'd had more bloodlust, I could have come back at that. But here we are. We can talk about it on the podcast. My old Sovietologist instincts often kick in when I hear people talking about woke because it's what happened among Soviets with the word perestroika. We always say, oh, Gorbachev. Yeah, perestroika.

Okay, what does it mean? It's the only Russian word I know. Better. Yeah. I mean, technically in Russian, it means restructuring. I have a somewhat inappropriate joke about perestroika that actually is, but maybe we'll tell it later if we have time. We'll save that for the post-Green Room. Okay, so I want to talk about Ron DeSantis and why I think that he's, I'm not going to go so far as to say that he's flaming out, although David Frum is a very good analysis in the Atlantic of all of this. And by the way, I loved his tweet, what we saw yesterday, message from Ron DeSantis, tough on drag queens, weak on national security.

Brilliant. I was hoping you weren't going to mention that. That's such a great David line. Tough on drag queens, weak on national security. It is so good. And I think there are certain things that are going to stick with him. It was a very bad day. Okay. But before we do this, you had what I thought was an important corrective piece about what Mike Pence said. And given our news cycle, you and I are speaking on Wednesday morning. Mike Pence delivered a rather remarkable set of statements to the

Gridiron Dinner on Saturday night, and it feels like it's already last month, right? There have been so many news cycles. But you write in The Atlantic that Mike Pence is trying to warn us about Donald Trump, and we are too complacent to listen. So for those of us who succumb to a little bit of snarkiness about, you know, his half courage and he should have done this and he should have done this and all of this, talk to me a little bit about that warning and what your reaction to it was. the sitting president, when I served, the man who was president until two years ago, endangered my life and endangered the life of my friends, my family, the members of Congress, Capitol Hill, law enforcement, everybody. And history will hold him accountable. And we all went, huh. Oh, by the way, did you tell an offensive joke about Pete Buttigieg? I just wanted to stop and say, wait a minute.

My old Dartmouth student, Neil Katyal, had a great line where he said there were a lot of great actors at Grin Iron, but nobody could be Mike Pence with a backbone. You know, that it just didn't play well because everybody knows that Pence, you know, says these things and then he kind of runs for cover. On the other hand, just take away the names and all the baggage that you have about Mike Pence and understand that the former vice president said that my boss, the president of the United States, the commander in chief of America's armed forces, endangered my life intentionally. And in the piece, I suggested doing a thought experiment. Imagine after the 1968 riots in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. Imagine if Hubert Humphrey had come out and said,

I just want to be very clear that those rioters who endangered my life and the lives of the good people of Chicago were there because they were instigated by President Lyndon Johnson, and history will hold President Johnson accountable. That would have shaken the pillars of our republic, and it would have changed history. Mike Pence says it, and everybody goes, yeah, whatever. That joke about Pete Buttigieg, by the way, was a little wifty. I mean, it just is remarkable. Right. You stipulate that, you know, he's shamefully late with his criticism. The joke was dumb and inappropriate, but you're right. Perhaps we might zero in on the more important point. Yes. Focus here, people.

Pence told us something horrifying this weekend about the condition of our democracy, and you describe what you call the national underreaction to these comments. This underreaction is a warning that we have all become too complacent about the danger my former party now represents. And, you know, I think it is worth reminding ourselves, OK, do you understand what we're talking about? And have we, and I'm sorry to use this word, have we normalized? Have we become too complacent, you know, in our national lack of any sort of focus, our goldfish memory, because we are a nation of goldfish?

You know, have we actually forgotten what we're talking about here? The fact that we are spending the next few news cycles talking about a dumb and inappropriate joke rather than the fact that the vice president of the United States is telling us what the sitting president of the United States inflicted on the country, you know, it is worthwhile because I think we kind of get stuck in our own sort of rote reactions. Oh, it's Mike Pence again. Oh, Mike Pence, the guy who, you know, put the water bottle down, or Mike Pence who, you know, was anti-woke before it was fashionable. All of that. But, you know, this is an interesting point that we shouldn't lose focus. We should still be shocked that a former constitutional officer of the United States actually said this out loud. And I think maybe the aquatic metaphor here isn't a goldfish, it's frogs that were, this is frog boiling. I mean,

Trump fire hoses us year after year and we just get used to it. I don't know if it's that we are normalizing it. You know, it's that we are normalizing it. You know, it's kind of like, you know, when you're a parent, the first time your kids are just screaming. And before I had a kid, I would look at those parents and say, don't you hear that? Your kids are barbarians. You know, don't you hear this? And then years later, you know, it's like, yeah, I kind of get it.

You know, that bone in your ear just becomes numb to that frequency after a while. And I think that's kind of what happened with Trump, that we've been so shocked that we're not shocked. But there is one other thing, Charlie, and I think this is important. The resilience of the American system has lulled us into a false sense of security about January 6th and what happened. Because when you try and make this case to people, you say, my God, listen to what Mike Pence said. They say, yeah, but it turned out okay. Joe Biden got elected and everything's good now.

No, that is a really dangerous thing to think. Joe Biden got elected, but 50 or 60,000 votes in a country of 340 million people could have made a huge difference. The 2020 election could have gone sideways in a lot of ways. Thank God that the Republicans and that Donald Trump is so crazy and that the Republicans ran a lot of hot crazy. I mean, thank goodness that Kerry Lake was Carrie Lake and not someone better at this. Doug Mastriano is going to try and make a comeback in Pennsylvania.

I mean, these people did not just pick up their toys and go home. And I think for us to think that is whistling past the graveyard sometimes. I don't have this in front of me, but I saw it on Twitter. So it must be true that the number one song in America right now is Donald Trump and the January 6th,th seditionist singing God Bless America or something. They have their new coup anthem or something. And that's been released

and it's like number one on the charts, selling more than Carrie Underwood. I mean, I'm not going to play it. No. Because we are a deeply serious country, Tom. We are a serious country that takes these issues with the gravity that they deserve. We have the former president of the United States singing. Oh, Jesus.

Guys in prison doing the men's penitentiary choir with samplings of Donald Trump, and we're playing it on radios instead of saying, whiskey, tango, foxtrot. it is a sign of a deeply unserious country in the way that we sort of commercialize and marketize everything. I saw that and I thought, at first I kind of chuckled, and then I thought, you know, this is just horribly offensive. I mean, these people are in jail for an act of insurrection against the government of the United States of America. Again, to reach some of the conservative listeners, imagine if in 1969, you know, a bunch of the weathermen were in jail and they released their, you know, prison version of Blown in the Wind with, you know, happy clips from Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy or something. You know, people's heads would explode. something, you know, people's heads would

explode. But, you know, because we just don't take things seriously. And again, because we are complacent, because we think the system, all of the sharp edges of the system have little spongy toddler guards on them, we think we're going to be all right. And I think that's really a dangerous thing to believe. You had a conversation with Tom Jocelyn, who was one of the principal authors of the House January 6th committee report. And he's worried that Americans really don't yet grasp the degree to which Republicans have been taken over by the most extreme wing. And as you mentioned, this is not just an historical event that took place more than two years ago. It is ongoing. And the party, led once again by its intellectual leader, Tucker Carlson, is completely revising the history of January 6th. And Donald Trump is embracing the coup. I mean,

he is, you know, at the same time trying to minimize it, but also saying these were brave patriots who did all of this. So, you know, for people who are concerned, if we don't take it seriously, that was just a dry run for what's to come. These people, I think, you know, were right about that. But there is that feeling. I mean, you feel that way that people just aren't paying attention anymore. The fact that we're even having a debate about is Donald Trump still worse than Ron DeSantis? Well, Ron DeSantis is completely deplorable, but maybe we shouldn't really have a debate. It's a silly debate about whether they're worse. No, Donald fucking Trump is dangerous. He tried to overturn the government. He is a complete lunatic. He is a narcissist and a real existential danger. He's in a category all of his own. And yet we're at the point of going, yeah, DeSantis I intend to bring back into common usage. Trump's always been that guy. What's different is that the base voter of the Republican Party loves that guy.

And DeSantis, I'll just get to the ripping on DeSantis part early. I mean, DeSantis is, first of all, the guy's kind of a weirdo, which I think is going to become increasingly clear the more times he has to go out in public. He's just a weirdo, which I think is going to become increasingly clear the more times he has to go out in public. He's just a weird guy. But he isn't trying to tame the base or talk to them or elevate them or speak truth to power. His big beef with Donald Trump and the base is that he wants to replace Donald Trump. Right.

He wants to transfer all that hot, crazy culture war shit onto himself. He's not trying to run outside of it. He's trying to run right into it. Yeah, I am Trump without the baggage. Exactly. He will not ever stand up to this crazy and push back against that. He's going to slipstream behind and say, see, I am a younger, smarter heir of all of this crazy.

You get all the crazy without the baggage. Right. And I'll be a more effective authoritarian. I actually know how government works. So I'll be during the Trump administration, there was a great profile of Ben Carson where someone at his cabinet agency said, it's a good thing he doesn't know anything about government or he'd break a lot more stuff. But as it is, you know,, basically, it was like he comes in and we give him shiny things to look at. And then we go on running the department.

And I think DeSantis is saying, no, I'm not going to be that guy. I actually know how to break things. I know how to use the power. And everything DeSantis has been doing in Florida, think about it, has the undertone of, I will use the power of government against my political enemies and yours. I will not govern on behalf of America. I will, in a sense, he's arguing, yes, the presidency should be an instrument of retribution. I'll just be better at it than Donald Trump. I think that's exactly right. And he's willing to go to war with Minnie Mouse, but he's not willing to go to war with Vladimir Putin. I want to talk about the substance and the politics of Ron DeSantis' first foray into foreign policy, which I don't think went well.

When I say that yesterday was the first real day of the Republican presidential campaign, what I'm referring to is the fact that so Ron DeSantis comes out, he basically says, I am Trump's mini-me once again, parroting Trump's line on Ukraine. To their credit, many of the other Republicans, the rivals, members of what's left of the foreign policy establishment are pushing back really strongly against DeSantis. Well, in theory, DeSantis and Trump, although you notice they're not mentioning Trump's name here. But I also think that the tell here is that Ron DeSantis has a very clear strategy that you just described, that I am going to cling as closely as possible to Trump. I'm not going to allow any daylight between myself and Trump so that he can't accuse me of being an establishment. Well, the problem with that is it means that he's going to be copying

everything that Donald Trump does. He believes the road to the presidency lies in sticking to this, you know, script as Trump's mini-me, which is brilliant until somebody calls out the bullshit. You know, don't misunderstand me, but Donald Trump was the first guy who jumps on him. He says, look, this guy's flip-flopping on Ukraine and he's just copying me. Look what he's doing there. He's following what I am saying. He was totally different in the past. Whatever I want, he wants. Nikki Haley is amplifying this, saying Trump's right when he says Governor DeSantis is just copying him, first in his style, then on entitlement reform, and now on Ukraine. And then she drags up that old slogan from the 1960s, Republicans deserve a choice, not an echo. I wonder, you're taking this time because I think this might stick, because basically they're

calling out the DeSantis playbook. And I'm having flashbacks because I'm old enough to remember 2016. Are you old enough to remember when Marco Rubio was the future of the Republican Party? And he was surging in the race for president until Chris Christie de-pantsed him during that debate in New Hampshire. He noted that Rubio kept using the same talking points over and over and over again. He was robotically repeating the same line two, three, four times, whatever. And he sort of lay in a way. And sure enough, when he began to press Rubio, what did Rubio do? He used the same talking point. And Christie jumped on and said, there it is.

There it is. The memorized 25 second speech. There it is, everybody. And Marco Rubio was finished. I'm thinking that at this point, if Ron DeSantis continues this mini me campaign, he's going to get his own Rubio moment because either Nikki Haley or Trump or everybody else is going to go, look, there's Ron DeSantis. He's just flip-flopping again. He's parroting everything that Donald Trump is saying. See, he's copying him. And if that is in fact the strategy, he's going to get busted on this. So what do you think? Yeah, I think that's right. This goes back

to why I was saying, you know, DeSantis is just a weird guy. When you watch him, I mean, he does the, you know, the accordion hands and the little pinky in the air and the whole thing. I mean, it's like he's been weird. It's very weird that he almost physically mimics Donald Trump. And I think the other problem for DeSantis in trying to emulate Trump, we, the Republicans especially, live in a post-policy world. They don't really care about policy. If Trump tomorrow said, we have to go kick Putin's ass, as an example, last night I'm watching Fox. As I do, I was a working political scientist, and now I technically count as a journalist, right? So I will watch because I want to know what other people are watching. So I will sit through an hour or two at a time of Fox.

And I was watching Sean Hannity. Masochist. Ranting about why Joe Biden isn't shooting down Russian drones and sending fighter jets to Ukraine and how Biden is just this complete weenie who won't take on Putin. And we got to get in there and blow shit up. But then you realize the talking points don't matter. It's all emotion. And the problem for Ron DeSantis is the base, and I think most of America when they see it, they just don't like him. He's not a likable guy. Trump is a performer. I think Trump is a loathsome human being, but I get it. I watch him when he

goes out in those rallies, and the guy's a showman. He knows how to connect to that particular group of people. And so, you know, I think it's going to be worse than the Marco Rubio problem. It's going to be, I can't believe I'll say that, Rubio with less charisma. Is that possible? I mean, I remember thinking, okay, I'll support Rubio. Yeah, I was going to support Rubio. So Ron DeSantis is Rubio with less charisma.

Yeah, or he's Christie, but less intelligent and just as abrasive. Christie's a performance artist, whatever you think about him. Whereas DeSantis is not. See, I'm going to disagree with you on one thing. I don't think the base dislikes DeSantis. I think the base wants to like DeSantis, but they don't know him yet. I think they will dislike him when they get to know him. But right now, he's been this blank slate, and you have all of these values projected on him. I mean,

the fanboys over at National Review are going through some things right now, because they've been assuring us that, you know, he was the guy. He was going to take out Trump, and he was going to be wonderful. So now, there's actually a piece in National Review saying, no, no, no, really, you shouldn't take what DeSantis said too seriously. What a candidate says, you know, is not that relevant to what they do as president. Like, really don't pay any attention to the fact that Ron DeSantis is, in fact, the candidate of the donor class. Right now, at this point in the race, he is the guy that the donor class and the establishment wants. They think he's going to be the guy. And of course, that's poison among the base.

When they get a whiff of that and try to square that circle. That's, you know, when you're dead. I mean, why is Nikki Haley failing to get traction? Because if there was ever a Republican who looks like, you know, she's trying on the armor plating of MAGA world and it doesn't fit, it's her, you know, she is completely inauthentic in every way. And DeSantis, I think is going to have, I think you're right. He's going to have that Romeo moment where, is going to have, I think you're right, he's going to have that Rubio moment where someone's going to say, tell us the things that you agreed with

under Trump and that you disagree with now that you're running against him. And he's going to go, ha, yeah. He's going to have to answer these questions. Okay, so here's another bit of free advice for DeSantis' rivals. They should do a mass purchase of buttons that just read, Ron! Exactly. Because that's exactly who he is now. Too subtle? Please applaud. Please come in.

Feel free to laugh out there. You can applaud. All right. So speaking of the appeasement, I will say that one of the bits of good news, and you can rain on this parade if you like, how vocal Republican leaders were in pushing back against DeSantis' decision to join the surrender caucus. I do think it's worth pointing out that his position is indistinguishable from Donald Trump's, except for he hasn't gone quite so far as to praise Vladimir Putin and talk about how he wants favors from Vladimir Putin, but he's in the same surrender caucus. So they're willing to attack DeSantis. That's a free fire zone. They're

not willing to say these things about directly about Trump. But you look at these comments here, you know, Chris Christie saying that DeSantis is naive, has a complete misunderstanding of the historical context. Marco Rubio says, I don't know what he's trying to say or to do. Mike Pence is doubling down on his defense of Ukraine. There's no room for Putin apologists in the Republican Party. This is not America's war, but because if Putin is not stopped and the sovereign nation of Ukraine is not restored quickly, he will continue to move toward our NATO allies. Lindsey Graham compares DeSantis to Neville Chamberlain. So at this point, conservatives, they're still like a

recessive gene remembering Reagan foreign policy. They're not willing to abandon it. So I mean, this schism is real. And maybe now that DeSantis has joined Trump, you're going to see more movement of the base towards isolationism, but it's not going to take place without a fight. And I think that's probably a good thing. Yeah. And I think we shouldn't even call it zombie Reaganism or a Reagan type policy. I will happily say that I ascribe a lot of influence to Reagan and especially to George H.W. Bush, who I think doesn't get nearly enough credit for bringing this whole thing in for a soft landing. But the great triumph of the Cold War is that we had a consistent, bipartisan, steady policy of opposing communism and the Kremlin's aggressive territorial grabs around the world. Whether you were Ray Truman or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan

or Richard Nixon, American foreign policy, at least in that sense, did not change very much because we all had a common understanding of a pretty obvious threat. And Trump broke that simply because, again, he always played to the very narrowest and smallest part of the base that would always show up, which is how he won the Republican primaries, as we know. And DeSantis is trying to recapture that magic. And I think it's great that there are some Republicans like Lindsey Graham. By the way, that guy last night when Hannity was ranting, he was talking to Lindsey Graham. Graham went from, oh, DeSantis is wrong about this, to going on television that night

and saying, you know why this is happening? Because Joe Biden's a big wuss. That's why. Again, these guys don't keep their talking points straight. They don't have to. But it's good to see it in a similar vein. It was good to see a lot of these senior Republican electeds coming out and saying, hey, this Tucker Carlson revision of January 6th, that's a load of bullshit too. You had guys coming out and saying, listen, I was there, I was hiding. And you know, this revision is, so we've had it happen twice now where some senior Republican electeds have kind of pushed back and said, no, January 6th was a thing that really happened. And Ukraine is an important interest. Here's the problem is that you have these Republicans who are willing to say, we cannot abandon Ukraine. This is the most

important fight of our lives. January 6th was horrible. Something, something, something, but we'll support Donald Trump if he's the nominee. Yeah, that's the part that just, ugh. There's something that kind of gets lost in the thread here. They can denounce the crazy, the extremism, the indecency, you know, and the danger to the West,

but then dot, dot, dot, there's this ellipses, and yes, but we would support Donald Trump's return to the Oval Office if dot, dot, dot, there's this ellipses. And yes, but we would support Donald Trump's return to the Oval Office if he wins the Republican nomination. That's the part that is the reality. And that's the Larry Hogan moment, right? Donald Trump's a menace. He must be stopped. Well, if he's the nominee, well, I'll support the nominee, but it won't be Donald Trump. No, no, no. Hogan backed off on that. Now, Hogan said he wouldn't. Yeah, no, Hogan did, but there are others like Chris Sununu who continue to say they'll support the nominee. Let me push this harder. People who say, I will do anything to stop Donald Trump except actually vote for his opponent in the general

election. Right. That's the always Republican caucus, right? I mean, the never Trumpers, you know, listen, I did not enjoy voting for Hillary Clinton one little bit. But I said, the only way either to stop Donald Trump or to make sure that the popular vote is lopsided enough so that he understands that he doesn't have some kind of, or that he doesn't understand anything, that the people around him will understand that he doesn't have a mandate, is that I have to cast this vote in a two-party system for his opponent. And one of the big fights that broke out, as you know, because you were in the thick of all this, was the people who said, I am never Trump. Well, what are you going to do? Well, I won't vote or I'll vote third party or I'll be out of the country that day.

No, at some point you have to say, listen, this is, if you're really serious about stopping Donald Trump, you know, this is the Sean Connery thing from the Untouchables, right? What are you prepared to do? Well, I'll vote against him in the primaries. And then what are you prepared to do, Mr. Nash? How far are you willing to take this to really mean it that you will not allow another authoritarian takeover of the White House? And my apologies to Governor Hogan. I didn't really see back to the last I'd heard was that whole I'll support the nominee stuff. It shouldn't have been hard, though. This should be the easiest question in the world.

Bill Barr, same thing, right? Trump's own attorney general who knows how dangerous the guy is. He's terrible. He shouldn't be president. He's none of it. Well, what happened? Barr, to his credit, to his kind of icky credit, I guess, said, well, can't vote for the Democrats because they're a threat to America. So, you know, going to have to do what I have to do, but I don't think it'll

come to that. Well, I'm sorry. That's not the right answer. I've said this before, but it's worth reiterating that if you say that Donald Trump is a menace, that he is unfit for office, that he is delusional, but you say that you will vote for him if he is the Republican nominee, you are literally putting party over country. You are explicitly saying my partisan loyalty trumps my concern for the future of the country. Okay. Literally. So you have written books about expertise. You have talked about elitism. You had a very provocative piece recently about the elitism of the American right, which is interesting because, of course, the American right will insist that we are absolutely as anti-elitist as they come. We hate and are disgusted by the nation's elites. So what is the elitism of the American right,

Mr. Nichols? You know, it's interesting. I came to the Republican Party later than you did. I was part of Generation Reagan, right? My first election was 1980. I was a blue-collar kid. I was going to a not great university. I mean, I have to say, I went to Boston University in 1979, back before it was the BU that people know today. BU in 1979 was, you know, like a working-class university. You know, I said, the Republicans are the people who actually care about ordinary people. The Democrats, we used to have lines like the Bree and Chablis crowd, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Bree and Chablis. That was, you know, limousine Leninists was one of my favorites. And now what you have are Republican thought leaders and elected officials who are all drawn from top schools and Ivy League universities who don't want to live anywhere near the grubby rubes that they hate so much, that they really do hate them. They don't think of them as the hardworking people who do the work and keep the country running. They think of them as a bunch of hay seeds who have to be placated with really dumb stuff and this culture war pablum all day long. And you see this, you see this very much in the Dominion filings, right? Where the Fox news hosts are all saying, oh man, I got to go on TV and I got to say all this crazy shit. We got to deal with Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. And they're doing it knowing that the

only reason they're doing it is to keep hoovering the pockets of the people who watch their show. It is so immensely disrespectful and immensely hostile to their own viewing audience. But then you get the turnaround of people like one of my favorite examples, Elise Stefanik. Harvard. Who is a kind of Bush moderate who then says, oh, I have to put on the funny hat and the cane and go down to the Midway and start carny barking. All righty then. Because I didn't go to Harvard to end up being on the city council in Watertown, New York. Josh Hawley, I was bred for better things. I went to Stanford. I'm going to fist pump to a bunch of

protesters and then haul ass. There is a really despicable elitism. And I feel this keenly because I started my career in my 20s, you know, making a class transition, right? That I was a working class kid. I get all this education and suddenly I'm like working in a think tank and then I'm teaching in an Ivy League school. And I could feel that kind of disdain of highly educated people on the left. And I would say, you know, no, this is really unattractive, this kind of elitism, these kind of class differences in America. And I gravitated toward the Republicans because I thought they were the people who more

understood that than the Democrats. I am amazed to see 35 years later that the Republicans have now perfected the art of class warfare, of being the Bree and Chablis crowd, of being the people who eat in fancy restaurants in Washington and say things like, well, what crap are we going to shovel to the rubes today to stay here, to stay here in the Emerald City? Well, speaking of Tucker Carlson, the bowtied trust fund baby who is now the man of the people. And by the way, I mean, the Republican Party, which is, of course, led by Donald Trump, the quasi-billionaire with golden toilets, but clearly the man of the people. I live up the street from Tucker Carlson's prep school in Newport, Rhode Island. So you got into it with Tucker.

Tucker called you out on the air. Yes, he did. What was he mad about? What did you do to grind his gears? I don't know. I suspect that Tucker's A-block is usually something his interns have found by rummaging around on the internet. And I suspect one of the coffee bringers found something I wrote and they

handed it to him and they wrote this whole thing about how- I'm a little jealous. Well, you know, although David Frum, just this morning too, he's like, you know, usually you get a lot of hate mail when Tucker calls you out, but they seem exhausted now. David got called out by Tucker and his folks. And, you know, there was a kind kind of, again, a collective shrug. But Tucker was mad at me for saying, we must defeat Moscow's armies and rebuild a better world. And it was a piece I'd written about how the 30 years of optimism that came after the end of the Cold War, which I think you can only really understand if you had lived through the Cold War. I was 31 when the Soviet Union fell. And I had a lot of optimism for the next 15 to 20 years or so. And the past 10 years have just drained that all out of me. And the attack on Ukraine, I'm like, so now we're back to a kind of post-1945, we have to rebuild

the international institutions. We have to recreate the coalitions in favor of peace and security and trade and cooperation and openness and tucker lost his mind my favorite part was he said tom nichols a man who has i can't remember how he put it he put it something like who's never achieved anything as far as we know it's not like you're a fox dude i'm 62 i've had three or four careers um that's kind of mean but it was just a very weird a block of yelling oh and, and me and Victoria Newland. And then he shifted to Baltimore and he said, Baltimore. And he literally said, under the leadership of people like Tom Nichols and Victoria Newland,

where apparently we're the co-mayors of Baltimore, you know, and he just went off on this kind of weird rant where- You were actually a character on The Wire, right? I mean, you were one of the guys in The Wire. I was the guy that told you not to take notes on a criminal conspiracy. Exactly. And he went off on this, just to sum up, Tom Nichols is completely insignificant and wrong about overweight, semi-retired professor who now writes full-time for The Atlantic. And I live in a small town in Rhode Island.

If this is how you become a master of the universe. Dark Svengali, the Rasputin of the Atlantic. Okay, so here's the opposite of a palate cleanser, which we usually play at the beginning of it, our friends at the Republican Accountability Project put together an absolutely amazing video montage of Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin, where in a minute and a half, you hear Tucker Carlson almost word for word repeating the various talking points of the butcher of Bucha. Maybe we can get Tucker Carlson to, you know, attack the Bulwark podcast or the Republican Accountability Project, because let's just play this. You can find this video online. Do yourself a favor and look it up. But here's the audio. Tucker Carlson channeling his inner Vladimir Putin.

Siding with Putin. Who's siding with Putin? I haven't seen anybody do that. You. The West started the war and we used force in order to stop it. If there is any single American who deserves scorn and yes, blame for the invasion of Ukraine, it would be Joe Biden. The Ukrainian people have become hostages of their Western masters.

Ukraine is not a democracy. It's a client state of the Biden administration. The U.S. were training on the future theater of military actions by owning biological laboratories in Ukraine. Military biological programs are under development in Ukraine, financed by the U.S. Defense Ministry. Western countries were setting military bases on our border. The Russians don't want American missiles on their border. They don't want a hostile government next door. NATO took specific actions, expansions to our borders. Getting Ukraine to join NATO was the key to inciting war with Russia. The elites of the West are not hiding their goals. They are trying to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. The Biden of the West are not hiding their goals. They are trying to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. The Biden administration wanted all along a regime change war against

Russia. The initiators of the sanctions are punishing themselves. So it's not Vladimir Putin who's getting punished. It's American citizens. It's you. The West provoked the growth of prices in their own countries. Coll collapse of energy sector. Gas prices are already the highest they have ever been in history. So the price of natural gas and the price of electricity and food and everything else you buy. I think we should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine. That is my view. We're on Putin's side! Wow.

Tom, he is on Putin's side, and this is the guy that Ron DeSantis chose to be his conduit for stating his position on Ukraine. Absolutely. And, you know, it's not just that Tucker is channeling Putin. Remember, there's a symbiosis between what happens in places like Tucker Carlson's show and what happens on Russian television and what comes out of Russian mouths. A big part of that speech, as is in every Putin speech, is aimed at the West. This is an echo chamber between the prime time on Fox and the Kremlin where Putin says stuff and it gets picked up and echoed.

And then Tucker says crazy stuff and that gets, you know, the Russian propagandists go, oh, okay, that's a good line. I mean, Tucker Carlson has been featured on Russian television. Russian TV hosts love him. They think he's on their side. And they think that because he is. But it's not just channeling one way. This is a symbiosis here, a synergy. Wow, I'm using all my corporate words today, right?

Synergy, symbiosis. But there is a ping pong back and forth here of what works. And don't kid yourself that Putin isn't speaking to the West. Those speeches, there's nobody in that audience who's saying, well, you know, I was undecided about Vladimir Putin here in Moscow. I'm going to wait to hear this speech. You know, a lot of those speeches are directly aimed at Europe and the United States. And, you know, Carlson amplifies that shit. Well, and it'll be interesting to see how Russian state TV amplifies what Ron DeSantis has to say. The fact that he's buying the idea that Russia's savage, brutal, genocidal, and illegal invasion of Ukraine is a quote-unquote territorial dispute. I'm guessing that he's getting a good deal of play. I'm going to be interested to watch that. Tom Nichols, thank you so much for joining

us again on the podcast. It is always fun. It's always fun, Charlie. Thanks for having me again. 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.