The Bulwark Podcast - Tom Nichols: The Kook Bench

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

The drunken heckling caucus around Marjorie Taylor Greene is not out of control — it did exactly what its voters sent them to do. And Tucker Carlson is playing to that base, which has contempt for people with an education. 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 February 9th, 2023. Man, that was just embarrassing. I mean, embarrassing. And we're joined by our good friend Tom Nichols,

professor emeritus at the Naval College, now a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Atlantic Daily Newsletter. Tom, welcome back to the podcast, one of the few places where you still have tenure. Thank you, Charlie. It feels like home just to hear that. So that was really, really, really embarrassing. Now, the thing about this is you could go any number of ways because I could be referring to about 12 different things right now, right? I mean, we could be talking about the heckling. We could be talking about, you know, the pathetic performance by Kevin McCarthy. And really, by the way, I'm struggling to come up with the right analogy for Kevin McCarthy, you know, having self-gelded himself into the speakership, how he's sitting there watching, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene make, you know, screaming at the president after he told him to behave like adults. Here's what I'm working on. He was kind of like the guy who brings his date, Cruella DeVille, to the soiree at the bowling alley, and he has to sit in the car while she goes in.

He's not even allowed to hold her coat. And he's just like, I'll be here, Marjorie. I'll be here. Dean Wormer thing going on here where, you know, the Deltas showed up and destroyed his homecoming parade and then said, you know, time to reinstate us, sir. It's the drunken heckler caucus. I think the thing that's always important to remember about what the kook bench was doing, these are not out of control Republicans. These are Republicans who are doing what they were elected by their voters back home to do. And that's the really creepy, you know, messed up part of this. That it's not like there are people sitting back in Georgia and saying,

oh, geez, you know, we sent Marge there to get us, you know, better bridges and roads and get the airport fixed up and to make sure that our money is being spent wisely. No, they sent her there to be a mob wife in whatever that thing she was wearing. It was a populist, woman of the people, white fur coat thing. Wearing a coat made out of Pomeranians or something and let us be bipartisan for a moment. It was bad, but it wasn't as bad as whatever Kristen Sinema was doing with that flying nun outfit. Well, see, here's the thing is it's already become a cliche. We're in early February of this Congress and it's already become a cliche. You elect clowns, you get a circus,

right? Okay. Well, that's the thing about cliches is they become cliches because they are absolutely true. And so, yeah, people are getting what they want. On the other hand, I don't know, let me push back a little bit because I'm imagining you're sitting down there, you know, over the Cracker Barrel in Georgia and you're thinking about, you know, your best girl, Marjorie, up there to, you know, fight the power, you know, to be like, you know, every man. And there she is, you know, wearing the Cruella de Vil coat and she's screaming and blubbering. And, you know, she's got like a fifth of Bailey's, you know, stuck in her, you know, in her boot. I don't know. Maybe there's even some of her constituents are going, this is not,

this is not good. I don't know, Charlie. I think, you know, that's, she does that stuff and the foot stomp begins. One of us, one of us. Think about how the poorest white Americans never held Donald Trump's wealth against him because it's okay to be wealthy as long as you're trashy. And that's cool with them. But the minute she yelled liar, I thought, yeah, that's, of course, it was also a great moment of rope-a-dope because two minutes later, Joe Biden said, okay, great. We now have a chamber-wide agreement that Medicare and Social Security are off the table. We shall move on. But I think it's really important to just emphasize every time that what the clown caucus is doing is what they were elected to do. And that speaks to a real dysfunction, you know, in the base of the Republican Party. Well, and, you know, among other things that were really embarrassing,

the new Hunter Biden committee kicked off this week and kind of landed with a thud. You had Lauren Boebert yelling and screaming at former Twitter executives. You had one congressman, was it Clay Higgins, who was saying that, you know, prepare to go to jail for your role. It's all just ridiculous stuff. And what a shock to you and to you and I that they did not come up with actually any evidence. So that was embarrassing. But can we just start with the, and I always debate when you and I have these things, should we start with the really heavy stuff? Or should we go with the absolute ridiculous? And of course, we always offer the absolute ridiculous, right? We're dark enough on our own, Charlie. So we might as well try and lighten it up.

We may get dark a little bit later. So it may seem a little bit repetitive to comment on, you know, that Tucker Carlson is be clowning himself. But, I mean, here's the thing about Tucker Carlson. Speaking of, like, you know, smart, preppy guys, he, unlike, say, the Sean Hannity's of the world or the Marjorie Taylor Greene's of the world or, you know, the people over at OAN. I mean, Tucker Carlson's a smart guy. I mean, he knows what he's doing, but you got to help me with this because there were people online who do this for a living, who monitor Fox News, who are actually asking for mercy killing after last night's broadcast. So I don't know whether you caught it. We're not going to spend a lot of time on this, but, you know, as God is my witness, here is the number one rated cable TV host in the United States of America in 2023 with his hot take of what happened when the president of the United States delivered's State of the Union last night, technically, but somehow it was Dr. Jill and Kamala's spouse, the second gentleman making out that stole the show.

What is going on between those two? A forensic examination next. And I'm sorry to tell you, Tom, he then proceeded to do a forensic evaluation of whether or not Dr. Jill was making out with Kamala Harris's husband. I'm trying to cut down on the F-bombs, but WTF? Well, Tucker knows his audience. I mean, you know, let's face it. You know, this is now, you know, the television equivalent of the Weekly World News. And he knows what they want. I mean, part of the problem, you know, you and I have talked about this problem with the entertainment wing, is once you acclimate your viewers to, you know,

these big jolts of, you know, political crack, of these dopamine hits, it's classic tolerance behavior. You have to go bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And content, the idea that you would talk about content, that's boring. People tune in for an hour of, I'm having a flashback to the movie Network, right? Which really, I mean, if you think about it, for you younger listeners, if you've never seen the 1975 movie Network, go watch it now, because it predicted all of this, where a guy that used to do rants on the evening news turns out to be mentally unstable.

But by the end of the show, it's Sybil the soothsayer and Vox Populi, and it becomes a big Broadway thing. And that's what Tucker's doing. It was a pretty good State of the Union. Joe Biden, I think, walked away with it. And so what's Tucker going to talk about? Was the vice president's husband and Dr. Jill making out? Because what else is he going to talk about? And what has he got to do to hold their attention? Before we came on, I mentioned to you, I'm still amazed at the kind of sneering contempt at signs of education from a guy like Tucker Carlson, who went to a prep school and fancied

himself to be the next George Will, who, by the way, has a doctorate in philosophy. He was actually an intellectual. Yeah. I mean, you know, that he started off in a teaching career and people don't know that about him. Sometimes I bristle a little at the emphasis on the doctor part. I mean, there are a lot of doctorates in the world and most of us don't use them. But, you know, she earned the degree. If she wants to use it, she can use it. But it's clearly play acting to a new base for shows like Tucker Carlson's show and for

the Republican Party to say, these are markers of education. And boy, the thing we hate more than anything are people with education, because they're bad. Right. Okay. But leaving that aside, leaving the snide snark aside about the Dr. Jill Biden, he's basically decided that he was going to lead off his show with speculation that they were snogging one another.

Yeah, it's tabloid bullshit. But here's the thing is at this moment that we're at right now, because I know that you've come back to this again and again, what a deeply unserious country we are. I mean, there are major things going on in America and in the world. The number one issue in the Republican presidential primary right now seems to be Donald Trump's accusations that Ron DeSantis is a pedophile. He's a groomer. That one picture, and I'm sorry to repeat myself, but he's got one picture of DeSantis with some teenage girls when he was a teacher, whatever. If you're Donald Trump and you have about a gazillion pictures of you and Jeffrey Epstein,

you know, and Playboy models and, you know, Miss Teen Americas, you know, probably in on Earth 2.0, you don't want to go there. But of course, this is Donald Trump. So it feels like, you know, as we continue this long slide down the slope of complete triviality, as we amuse ourselves completely to death, we are at this moment where the number one cable show in America is trying to imply that the first lady and the second husband are necking at the state of the union, which is complete bullshit, by the way. And Donald Trump is sitting down in Mar-a-Lago thinking, you know, I'm going to make Ron DeSantis look like a pedo. I mean, this is where we are. And it shows you that the base, and I keep saying the base of the Republican Party because I'm trying to be better about not painting everyone who was ever a Republican, including you and me, with that brush.

But the current Republican Party, and especially its base, Tucker Carlson is the perfect show. It's tabloidism. You could divide the show just as you could the basic Republican platform, right, of who do we hate, who are we mad at, what makes us uncomfortable, and also sex, sex, sex, sex, and more sex. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I was told by Sarah Huckabee Sanders that people just wanted to live their normal lives and that they were being subject to a culture war that they did not start and they do not want to fight. Sarah Huckabee Sanders told us, assured us that they are not the ones that want to talk about the culture war except for, of course, you know, Drag Queen Story Hour, CRT furries, and litter boxes in schools, and whether or not Joe Biden was

snogging Kamala Harris. Should I use the word snogging again? I love that word. It's so British of you, Charlie. You know, 90% of all of this now is just snicker, snicker, snicker. And you know that if you tried to start an actual conversation about, you know, substantive foreign policy or entitlement reform, everybody's eyes would roll back in their heads. And maybe that's what Tucker Carlson recognizes, that he has to

keep— They don't care. He cares about keeping the dopamine rush up. You know, this is part of the problem with the collapse of an entire political party. They just don't care about policy. They couldn't care less. And they care about, you've already taken snogging. I'll take, you know, console hockey. None of this happened. So it's just, it's all bullshit. Right. But there is this prurient kind of, you know, the whole Hunter Biden story. Is it about, you know, we're having a serious investigation into whether classified matters are undue. No, we're looking for pictures of Hunter Biden's main parts because somehow it shows that Joe Biden is unfit because here is a snippet of his son, you know, cavorting with bad girls, doing bad things. There is this kind of

prurience now. I mean, I kind of always liked the fact that the Republican Party back in the day was kind of the uptight party a little bit. I mean, Richard Nixon took a lot of crap for that. Reagan took crap for it. But there was a certain amount of old school decorum about that. And now it's really the Republicans are, I won't even smear the National Enquirer here, because after they got sued, they actually had to be a little more responsible. They had to clean it up. This may feel like a digression, but last night I spent a good deal of time rereading both in the print version and then through audiobook, which I don't know, do you listen to audiobook? I find it fascinating. I switch back and forth.

I do. I have a fascination with John le Carré books read by British authors, which is just really a great way to pass an hour. Okay. Great minds think alike. We need to talk about this. So I was listening to columns from Charles Krauthammer from his final book, you know, including the eulogy given by his son. And, you know, as I was listening and reading what Charles Krauthranhammer, you know, wrote about culture and principles and

life and about foreign policy, it really hit me, you know, how cataclysmic this collapse has been. You know, for people, there are people who listen to us who say, oh, you know, this is all inevitable. This is just, you know, they're just saying out loud what you conservatives had always said. It's a continuum. It is like reading documents from before the fall to realize that at one time, one of the most prominent voices in American conservatism was somebody as decent, as humane, as intelligent, and as articulate as Charles Krauthammer, and that he was a fixture, not that long ago, on Fox News. And you think of the break between that back in, what, 2016 to now. And it is like watching this cataclysm, this, you know, it must have been like this in like, you know, what, 580, when people are looking back on the fall of the Roman Empire and going, fuck, how did that happen? You read my mind. The difference being that the Romans kind of deserved it. Whereas this was just a takeover through default and inaction, you know, that it

was just like, okay, we need better circuses. We need better gladiatorial games. The calls coming from inside the house, the barbarians were inside the Coliseum, so to speak. And that Krauthammer and Will, there were other fixtures. There were actually very intelligent voices on Fox of all places. And yet the other thing you see is that some of the people who started there as kind of middle of the road, center right voices said, okay, I got the memo on Fox. You know, Be crazy. Keep the ratings flowing. Make sure people are tuning in. Let's start talking about kitty litter in bathrooms. I think for a large segment of the population, this is an attempt to give meaning to life in some way that I think they feel has been taken from them. I feel like this is a, that in some way, the kind of viewership and the Republican base that votes

for this stuff, they were the people that were once people that said, listen, I go to work, I take care of my family. I love my dog. You know, I hang out with my kids on the weekend. And that's a good life. And now it's like a good life is being a Marvel action hero because somehow they've just internalized the idea that their life is lacking somehow. And I don't know what to say to people like that. I mean, I just don't understand. That's more than just a lack of meaning. That's a lack of meaning that you have when an entire civilization is collapsed, when you replace Shakespeare with Benny Hill, you know, when you replace Abraham Lincoln with

Donald Trump. And that's what was really striking me is how radical the collapse has been. And so the entire culture that actually believed in character and had values and, you know, would not have seen mercy or prudence as signs of weakness, the thought that the business of being an American was serious, that took citizenship and American leadership and exceptionalism seriously, has been replaced by, you know, all of this. Well, how did that happen? Well, because, you know, once you break it all down, once you destroy an entire value system, once you basically say, no, it's not about, you know, virtue and goodness and kindness and thoughtfulness and intelligence. No, it's not about philosophy. It's about, you know, putting whoopee cushions on the chair of, you know, somebody you don't like. The speaker of the house. The speaker of the house, exactly. You really have to say, what happened?

These people are searching for meaning because we've destroyed an entire intellectual universe. And just spend time reading Charles Krauthammer and realize, I mean, Charles Krauthammer died in 2018. That is not that long ago. And yet- Seems years ago, ages ago. Go if you have a chance and read some of it. And there's a clarity to the writing that feels like it is from a different lost world.

I think, to be fair, as much as it annoys me and you when people say, well, you guys were always like this. Okay, I'll grant one thing. People in rural white America were not sitting around reading Charles Krauthammer, but they were watching him and they were seeing examples on their televisions and in public life of people who said that there are important things in the world that matter, that you should conduct yourself with a certain amount of decorum. I think the collapse is not just a moral collapse. I keep thinking about something George Will once said about when grown men started dressing like their sons. Grown men were indistinguishable from their eight-year-old sons in the way they dress.

I think it was inevitable that there would come a time that they're indistinguishable from their eight-year-old sons and the way they dress. I think it was inevitable that there would come a time that they're indistinguishable in the way they would act as well. That there's no more pleasure in sort of growing up and being responsible. That everything is a game. Everything is sitting in the back of the class, throwing gum wrappers, because there's nothing at stake. And I think some of that is structural, right? I mean, we just live in a safer, people go nuts when I say this, but we live in a safer, more prosperous world where the average person does not wake up every day and think about where their next meal is coming from, how they're going to get back and forth to work, or whether they're going to get nuked into oblivion. And so that leaves a lot of room for

just kind of being a general shithead because it's just fun. And I think a whole political party kind of capitalized on the boredom and ennui and rootlessness, this sense of being lost to say, listen, we are here to rescue you. We're going to make life into a Benny Hill episode, only really dark and violent. Yeah, very dark and violent. In my newsletter today, I talked about Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the gaslighting that the world is divided into normals and crazy. Seriously, a spokesman for a party that has let in every sort of loon imaginable. And she's saying this at a time when know, down in Mar-a-Lago and he's putting out, you know, screeds about how the election was stolen from him.

He can't even spell the word right. She's, you know, saying, I left her phrase here. Every day we are told to partake in their rituals, salute their flags and worship their false idols. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Flags, false idols.

Okay, whatever. But also this whole idea that, you know, it's the normies versus the crazies. And this is the same day that you have people like Alex Jones who are still out there, believe it or not, you know, talking about, you know, went on a rant about their, you know, gang of racists foaming at the mouth.

Black people are coming for your family and he advises his audience to kill every person you need to. So you're not just entertaining them, but you are creating this artificial drama dystopia. Things are not that bad, so you have to cook up. Your kids are having their sexual organs cut off at schools. They are being propagandized. It's like the satanic panic all over again. For people that are old enough to remember, remember that? That people were doing satanic rituals in preschools across the country, which really turned out to be a kind of generational expression of anxiety among the first generation of parents who really were leaving their kids alone all day at preschools., this took hold through, you know, Oh, that's back. I mean,

we could come back and listen to this podcast a month from now and go, wow. Remember when we were just sort of speculating, it was like the satanic panic. I don't know whether you saw the reaction to some of the things that happened at the Grammys and they, they went full, you know, DEF CON, what's the worst DEF CON? Is it one or is it five? DEF CON one, roundhouse baby, cocked pistol. They went full DEFON 2, at least. Two things struck me, though, about the Sarah Huckabee Sanders thing. One was the thing about

false idols and flags. Considering that I watched an assault on the capital of my country with people flying blue flags with a man's name on them, with icons of Donald Trump as, you know, Rambo and Rocky and whatever. Man, what a huge amount of projection there was. Well, did you remember the golden image of Trump that was unveiled at CPAC? Yep. I mean, it looked like Mubi the golden cow from Dogma. I mean, it was incredible. I'm not a fan of Sarah Huckabee Sanders or, you know, or her mad political skills, but I can remember saying, when she replaced Sean Spicer, I took a lot of shit from people because I said, look, she's actually okay at this. I mean, she's not great. I mean, she's certainly better at this job than Sean Spicer. And she kind

of knows how to do this as White House press secretary. The person that you saw the other night, I mean, that was creepy. It was like two seconds away from I won't be ignored, Dan. You know, this kind of staring into the camera and this dark litany of fear and anger. And I thought, you know, this is somebody who used to be better at this. But I think it also tells you, again, they know their audience. They know that that is pushing this, you know, put it right into my veins, that I'm a victim of dark forces that are controlling my life. And, you know, although interesting enough, then maybe the only last thing we need to say about Sanders, not once did the word Trump cross her lips.

Oh, and she's in trouble for that. Steve Bannon is very upset with her about that. Did you hear that? I mean, he actually had, because by the way, I do not do this sort of thing. So Steve Bannon had the Lou Dobbs on his show. Wow. I mean, there's a meeting of the minds. There's a name I have not heard in a long while. So Bannon says Sarah Huckabee Sanders response, she's not intellectually capable. But the real problem was that she didn't mention Trump. Because,

of course, it's not about conservative idea or anything. It's like, she needs to say Trump. I mean, it's really come down to all of that. So yeah, she's lost Lou Dobbs. If you pinned some of these people down and said, okay, fine, we're going to talk about conservative ideas. And this reaches back to, you know, Crownhammer. If you ask Crownhammer, what does it mean to you to be a conservative? You would get a very intelligent answer that had real policy applications. Not everybody would agree. Not everybody on the right would agree, but you'd get some kind of coherent answer. If you ask that question now, it's like, well, I'm a conservative because you will pry my assault rifle from my cold, dead hands while I'm defending against having my kid having

to pee in a litter box in a high school. And I think this is what kind of looping back to Tucker Carlson, this is what everybody's figured out. You're not going to have a rational conversation about any of this stuff. All you can do is play to the crazy. And the one thing Sanders said that was right that I think we all agree about is this is the crazies versus the normals. I just don't think she meant it in the crazies versus the normals. I just don't think she meant it in the way the rest of us mean it. The honorable governor of Arkansas is correct about that, but not in the context. Okay, so one of the bigger surprises of the week, at least to me, did not have this on my dance card at all. They had one of these, what was it,

the press club correspondence, one of these din what was it? The press club correspondence, one of these dinners that you and I don't get invited to where reporters sit down with newsmakers, which is always a bad idea, I think. And Nancy Mace was one of the main roasters, I guess. And apparently from all of the accounts, she kind of killed it. So in terms of surprise, I did not think that Nancy Mace was funny. Let's play a little bit of Nancy Mace and see whether we find it funny. And I know everyone thinks Republicans aren't funny, but if you get a bunch of us together, we can be a real riot.

Oh my. I got an end on a high note. Oh, and she had a couple of other things, you know, hey, did you see Kevin McCarthy, I got an end on a high note. Oh. And she had a couple of other things. Hey, did you see Kevin McCarthy? Kevin McCarthy taking all these positions. No one's ever assumed so many positions for Republicans since Stormy Daniels. Oh, my. Okay, so give Nancy Mace credit for having a good writer and being willing to pull that stuff off,

because that was not terrible. I mean, I remember having this discussion years ago that some of the best outside guest hosts on Saturday Night Live were Republicans that were poking fun at themselves because, you know, there's no one expects them to be fun. There's nobody expects you to be funny. I mean, you know, George H.W. Bush coming on and saying to Dana Carvey, Dana, never said, nah, gah, duh. Never said it. Carvey, all right, Mr. President. Sorry, Mr. President. I mean, even Nixon on laughing, although I guess the less said of

that, the better, but it was the first time you got a presidential candidate to do that. It was a big deal at the time. I actually remember that. I do. Socket to me, which didn't age well, but people thought it was funny at the time. We thought a lot of things were funny back in the early 70s. It didn't age well. Well, there were a lot of other problems with substances going around at the time, too, that made things seem funny that weren't a problem with the Republican Party, is that it is incredibly grim and humorless, because everything about them is, we are in an existential battle for everything, and no matter how trivial. And one of the things that really marks them now, I think marks the Republicans, our former comrades, as a truly authoritarian movement, is that there is no such

thing as compromise. There is only defeat. And that the willingness to accept, you know, compromise or the transfer of power, of course, people like that aren't going to joke. There's nothing funny here. This is, you know, but I mean, hell, even guys at the Battle of the Bulge managed to crack a joke now and then. Part of the problem, though, is a lot of these guys think that they're funny, and it's pretty cringeworthy. I mean, I'm sure they thought it was hilarious to wear gun pins on their lapels. Are you not entertained? Yes. I mean, I'm sure there was a huge amount of snickering about, wow, this is going to be so triggering, get it triggering and lib-boning. And without thinking

for one moment that, you know, there are people all across this country who have lost loved ones to weapons like that. I mean, it's just incredible. Earlier in the podcast, you said something like, you know, these folks are not out of control. I want to take a slightly different point of view. I think that one of the things we're seeing is that they are out of control in the sense that many of them have slipped the surly bonds of sanity, and there is no limit. Once you've taken down the guardrails, there is no limit to what George Santos is going to do or what Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to do. And because of this constant search for the dopamine hits, it's going to get worse and worse

and worse, and nobody can tell them to behave. If Kevin McCarthy was sitting up there thinking, I had a talk with Marjorie Taylor Greene and I'm never going to leave this woman. And, you know, I will hold her coat. And she proved it. She proved that that's true. She absolutely proved that's true. But if he thought that she was going to behave or that he could rein this in in any way. It's like, what a surprise. This is what happens when you, you know, you grow the alligator in the bathtub and it gets out and starts going down the street,

eating people. You're going, wait, heel, heel, down, down. Well, you understand this having cats. Oh, you decided to go there. Imagine having an alligator with the morals of a cat. Wow. You know, Charlie, you had to, and here we were just sitting, chatting so amiably. But I think there's two things to consider about people like Santos and Green. First of all,

I'll just say, my personal opinion, I love Pete Wehner's phrase about Trump, and I'll apply it to these folks. These are emotionally disordered people. There's something wrong with George Santos. I mean, this is just not a normal person to do this much lying and this much fabricating. And I think there's something wrong with somebody like Green or Boebert. I mean, I just think that these are people who just are kind of messed up and have some deep-seated problems that they're playing out in public. Yeah, but we live in their world now. Well, but that's a different problem than the fact that there is no demand signal from anywhere, and this gets to your point, to tell them to stop doing it. Yeah, that's right. Over the table is.

Boebert should have gotten a brushback by only winning her re-election by 600 votes. But the lesson she took from it is, okay, I got to be a little crazier here. I got to be a little nuttier than I usually am. But I think for a lot of the Republicans, and this gets to, let me just link a big cultural issue to a boring, wonky structural issue. This is because of primaries and the fact that only the faithful come out. Because these Republicans in these, it's not just gerrymandering. Some of these districts are gerrymandered, but some of them are also just naturally sorted out.

There was a great book about 15 years ago called The Big Sort, where people are just moving closer to people who think like them. Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not gerrymander Arkansas to win the state. She won the state fair and square. But the problem with that is that when you get these guys going to Washington and wearing guns on their lapels and saying all kinds of crazy shit about you're going to go to jail, Twitter, all they have to worry about is getting past the craziest voters back home. Because once they get the local crazies on their side,

the seat is theirs. But there's also a choice. This was a really good piece yesterday by my colleague Jonathan Last, who pointed out the contrast between Biden's speech and what you're getting from the Republicans. Biden was very self-consciously reaching out to non-democratic voters. He's reaching out to unaffiliated voters. He was talking about voters in small rural communities who many of them presumably live in, you know, deep red states, but at least he's trying to expand the base. The Republicans have made a choice. They have made the choice that they are not going to be reaching out, that all they're going to do is to continue to stoke the base, that they're going to continue to feed them, feed them, feed them, feed the outrage machines. In the contrast that he pointed out, Joe Biden's

talking about people in rural America that I'm listening to, I care about, and this is what I'm going to do for you. And this is my message to you. What do you hear from Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the other Republicans? You know, the sneering at the coastal elites, the you're not the real Americans. So they're insulting fellow Americans where Biden is at least then this is a tactical choice in whether it will work or not. You know, I don't know. I'm not commenting on it. But but that contrast is interesting. You're absolutely right about the primaries. But also, it has been a specific choice by the Republicans, you know, screw the autopsy, screw, you know, changing our message, screw going after any of these other states. We're just going to double down on what we've been doing. And, you know, that's playing out right now. and that I suspect comes purely from self-interest. You know, when I think of the hot mess of crazy ideas,

you know, yeah, we right away think of, you know, Green and Jordan and Biggs and those guys. But if you think about cold, soulless opportunism, look at Elise DeFinn. Oh, yeah, perfect. Who says, hey, I like being in Washington. I'm not here to build a national Republican party. I'm here to say the crazy stuff that people in my upstate New York district want to hear. And I'm going to shovel that at them and they're going to send me back to Washington. And then whatever I'm doing in DC is

really not their business and their problem. Right. You know, if you contrast this with, say, the big Republican takeover of 1980, which was kind of then followed later on the left with the Howard Dean 50-state strategy, right? Yeah. There was a time where both of these parties said, our goal is to become a national governing majority. And the Republicans pull this off for about five years before they get walloped in the 86 midterms. The Democrats pull it off for a while, pull it off again under Obama until they get walloped in the midterms. And I think the Democrats, as you point out, Charlie, they're still trying to say, okay, we're not going to win the 32nd Georgia or whatever it is because it's a ruby red state,

but you can start peeling off voters for statewide elections, statewide offices, presidential elections, and so on. I think you're absolutely right that the Republicans have given up on that, but in part because the group of kooks and opportunists who are there now, there's no upside in it for them. And for many of them, at least Stefanik and Tucker Carlson, you know, are, they're intelligent enough that they could do other things. There are a lot of them who, you know, let's face it, a lot of this stuff is much easier. It's much easier talking about, you know, the culture war stuff than it is actually getting into what should we

do about entitlements? You know, what should the nature of our foreign policy be? One last thought on Tucker Carlson, I was not intending on spending this much time, but thinking about the fact that he would spend so much time about some alleged quasi-sexual affair between the first lady and the first husband is, first of all, how incredibly disingenuous it is, but also how safe he must feel, how secure he must feel in his job that he would do that. And you know that I'm sitting down with a member of the Fox Corporation board next week. I wonder who that could be, Charlie. Former Speaker Paul Ryan. I was going to say, would it be a Wisconsinite? He probably doesn't want to talk about this, but at some point there must be something. I mean, because, and again, Tucker Carlson is a smart guy and he knows he can get away with this. He knows he has

been given the license to do this. He knows that somebody higher up has his back. The thing I will never understand is, when is there enough money in the world that you will finally sit back from the microphone for a moment and say, you know, this is embarrassing to say this. I am keenly aware that I have a child who is a grown young woman, practically, and can hear me and knows the things. I would never want someone to say, is your dad that guy who says all that weird stuff? At some point, don't you just feel like

you have a duty to yourself and to the future not to be a complete freak at some point? I mean, I just don't. I'm not a rich man, Charlie, but everybody likes money. Everybody likes the warm glow of public approbation and all that stuff. But I just wonder when there's enough applause and enough money that you will just push the microphone away and say, listen, there are crazy things that I'm just not going to say, no matter how much people would send me money for it. Well, and also, this is part of the culture that Charles Krauthammer represented, where he talked about the life well lived, how you make a decision to live a life well, virtuous, so that at the end of your life, you can look back on your life and say, I did the right

things. I am proud of what I did. That feels like it has been completely abandoned by his successors. All right. Heavy lifting for you a little bit. All right. I am worried about Ukraine and what's going on, but I'm also worried about the way this is going to play out in the 2024 election. Okay. Undoubtedly, you saw that story in Politico, which had this bizarre headline, Trump's 24 game plan, be the dove among the hawks. Now, I'm sitting here thinking, I me that we need to, you know, draw a line right now that somebody who is an apologist for this homicidal, genocidal maniac

in Russia, that allowing Vladimir Putin to slaughter Ukrainians and swallow up that country, that does not make one a dove. What are your thoughts about that? First of all, on most things, Donald Trump is a goldfish. He darts from one end of the bowl to the other, looking for food pellets and avoiding threats. He has no memory of 10 minutes ago. He has no ability to grasp 10 minutes from now. I think Maggie Haberman in her new book said something effective. Donald Trump survives his life 10 minutes at a time, basically. Now, the one place he has always been as constant as the Northern Star is being pro-Russian. And I think that's because he is compromised. He knows that they

know stuff about him. I don't think he's an agent of Russia or any of that paranoid crap. I think he watches his step because he firmly understands that there's probably all kinds of nasty cheese in a file somewhere in Moscow that he prefers stay wherever it is. And I don't mean a beat tape. I mean, you know, dealing with mobsters and all of that stuff. His position on Russia is, and the Ukraine war, is, I could fix this. I can make it stop. I'll make it go away. Because that's what he has to say in the next 10 minutes. But then, you know, Putin blows up an apartment block and say, I'll call him, I'll fix this, and then he'll move on to something else. And

he is neither a hawk nor a dove. He is just, you know, he's just darting back and forth and in the bowl looking for the right thing to say, to stay out of trouble with the Russians and stay in good with the people who send him money and love. Okay, this analogy works, but it only works partially, okay? Because there's something else. There is the, like a limpet-like quality. What is the fish that, you know, is constantly sucking up to a larger fish? Remora. The remora.

Okay, so. He's a parasitical attachment to the belly of the shark. That's right. Yes, Vlad. You know, yes, you know, you were made to do this. I am your friend. You are my true friend. Can we talk about the Miss Universe contest again?

I mean, whatever. So yes, I think the goldfish applies to him, but there's something a little bit more about his just the the fawning dependency. It's fear, Charlie. It's just fear. Trump is a very weak man. And like all weak bullies, he defers to whoever he thinks is the stronger bully. He likes it, though. He likes the brutality. He likes the fact that Duterte takes people out and kills them. He likes the fact that Xi and the Chinese road tanks over people. It's like that gives him his dopamine hit. Sure he does. He wishes he could be Putin.

Xi and Putin are ruthless, adult, scary men. And Trump is a scared little boy. So of course, whenever he's around these people, he's like, oh, you're very handsome men and you're very powerful men and please don't hurt me. And I'm your friend. And he's like, remember in Demolition Man, he's Associate Bob. I can be a very effective associate for you, sir. He's just a professional courtier to much stronger men, which is why he is such a ruthless bully to anyone below him, because that's how scared little boys get through their day, doing that kind of stuff. His image is that he is the alpha man, right? That he is the apex predator, when in fact, that's not true at all. He is the scared little boy who quivers. He's a terrified nine-year-old.

The moment that should have ended all of this debate about Donald Trump and manliness and foreign policy and all that stuff was Helsinki. When he just came out, you know, and Putin stood there with this beatific, serene smile on his face. And Donald Trump was, you know, if we're going to keep using movie references, Donald Trump was Renfield, you know, oh, tasty flies, master, you know.

Yeah, Reek. Reek. Yeah, exactly. He was Reek. And, you know, he just, I'm too old for Reek. So I went right for the classic of Renfield. But, you know, that's who he is. And he's a bully. You know this. I mean, I've written about it. It blows my mind that people look to Trump as this strong man when everything he does, including right down to his body language, where he hugs himself and he sits back and he jumps his jaw in. Everything just emanates fear from this guy. He can get away with it when he's pushing around Marco Rubio on a stage. He can't get away with it when he's in a

room with guys, plural, from China and Russia who have literally ordered the deaths of other human beings for political purposes. Here's a man who thinks that he is Mussolini when in fact he is the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. That's unfair to Stay Puft. I mean, Stay Puft put up a good fight. And Mussolini, let me just, for the sake of clarity, say you do not ever under any circumstances got to hand it to Mussolini. But Mussolini, like Hitler, frankly, these were guys, and Stalin, these were men who had a certain amount of personal bravery. They were pretty reckless in their way sometimes. I mean, Trump is more like, I can't even think of an authoritarian leader who reached power by being as cowardly and craven as Donald Trump is, because he even lacks that kind of personal bravery. Let's work on that, Yeah. Somebody who would,

you know, hide out and... He's President Greg Stilson, you know, the guy that would hold up a baby. Okay, I don't get that one. The dead zone. Remember Martin Sheen, at the last minute, somebody starts shooting, so he holds up a kid in front of him as a shield, and that ends his career. It was a great Martin Sheen moment. Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen. I know there are people out there who got that reference. I just need to make a list here. The Dead Zone. Charlie, it's classic 80s Stephen King, man. I know. I just need to make a list of the movies to catch up with. So, Tom Nichols, now a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of The Atlantic Daily Newsletter. His

books include The Death of Expertise and Our Own Worst Enemy, The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy. He is Professor Emeritus at the Naval War College and still has tenure on the Bulwark Podcast. Thanks for coming back. Thanks, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will 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.