The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: A New American Exceptionalism?

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

Greg Abbott says gun violence is due to a mental health crisis, not guns. So, America is exceptionally crazy? Plus, a bad poll for Biden, Trump's type of woman, and Will Saletan on how Lindsey Graham can explain the rise of authoritarianism in the US. Will is back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Monday, May 8th, 2023. And once again, we begin with a story like this. This could happen anywhere in the United States. It could happen to you. It could happen to you. Okay? And we're not immune from it. And last night I was processing a lot of emotions. I was heartbroken. Today I'm mad. Mental health didn't fire that gun. Okay? Those people were killed with bullets. I saw the bullets. Okay? That's what killed those kids. Maybe he had a mental health issue. Maybe it was treatable. But if that gun wasn't on the streets, chances are he might not would have had access to it.

Joining me on our Monday podcast, my colleague Will Salatin. Good morning, Will. By the best count I can come up with, this was the 199th mass shooting of the year so far. Yeah. So good morning. Yeah. It's another week, another day, another mass shooting. And I think it's going to go like this for some time. So I had to get up

earlier this morning to do Morning Joe. And so at 5 a.m. my time, I got thrown this question. You know how I feel about this. And the first words out of my mouth are, I'm so sick of talking about this. Not because I don't care. I guess it's the frustration of the doom loop that we're in and just watching, you know, one after another. I mean, how many of these mass shootings in Texas, you know, you have Allen, you know, eight dead, Uvalde, 21 dead, 23 dead in El Paso, 26 dead in Sutherland Springs, 10 dead Santa Fe, seven Midland, Austin, American state's been reported back in January. During his two terms as governor, Governor Greg Abbott has witnessed six mass shootings in Texas, shopping centers, churches, and schools, has not used his executive power to champion ways to reduce access to firearms. This is in stark contrast to how he has wielded his political clout on such issues as abortion, immigration, and tighter election rules. I am a believer and have been for many years in American exceptionalism, but I have to tell you,

Will, you look at the comparisons, you look at this record, you look at the number of children around the world who have been killed by guns compared to the rate in any place else, and you have to wonder, is this the new American exceptionalism? And the other point, I'm sorry to go on here, but Greg Abbott and others are saying it's a mental health crisis. It's about mental health, which, okay, that's fine. But are we exceptionally crazy in America? Are we exceptionally insane? Do other countries not have mental health problems? Is there something distinctly American about having mental health problems? Or maybe it's a little bit more complicated than that. What do you think, Will? So first of all, Charlie, we're not just talking about American exceptionalism. All those cities you named, of course, are in Texas. And let me just talk about Texas for a minute, because I

want to talk about gun culture. So I grew up in Texas, and gun culture was everywhere. And a lot of other states obviously have the same thing. But I wrote an article more years ago than I care to remember about one of these shootings in Texas. It was not a mass shooting. It was a couple of boys in different families who both died in shooting accidents. You know, the gun was lying around, the kid picks it up and kills himself. And there was a quote in the article, a friend of the family said, you know, I don't really know how this happened in this family. He talks about the dad. He says he took the boy hunting, took him fishing.

How this got out of hand, I just don't know. So what I said in the article was there was this inability in Texas culture to grasp the connection between having a gun around and getting shot. And I know that's an amazing thing to say, but that is how it goes. And what that man said about, you know, mental health is exactly on point. Mental health didn't fire the gun. If you have guns around, all kinds of things can lead to deadly violence, right? You have somebody with a mental health problem. You have a kid who just sees the gun around the house and picks it up and thinks it's

a toy. We have to face the problem of gun culture, of the ubiquity of guns, the fact that we have more guns than people in this country. And I know that you're sick of it and I'm sick of it, but Charlie, I honestly believe that the way that this will eventually change, if it changes, is that we just get so sick of it. Not just you, not just me, but many more people. Well, and here's a reminder about public opinion. This is a Fox News poll about public opinion, proposals to reduce gun violence. This is the percent saying they're in favor. Background checks for guns. 87% of Americans say they're in favor of that.

81% say enforce existing gun laws. 81% say there should be a legal minimum age of 21 to buy all guns. 80% favor banning assault weapons, which is amazing. Only 45% think that the solution is more people carrying guns around. Let me push back slightly on your definition of gun culture. I don't disagree. I mean, we're a culture that has a gun fetish, you know, particularly when it comes to these weapons of mass death. I mean, I think there's a deep sickness when you have members of Congress who are wearing AR-15 lapel pins. I think there's a deep sickness when you have congressmen who put out, you know, pictures of themselves and Christmas cards, you know, fetishizing these weapons. But I do think there's a distinction between, and I don't know the way you were actually describing this, but there are people who are around guns all the time who do not do this.

This is important. The people who are responsible, safe gun owners who have the gun in the house because they do go hunting. And there are tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people in my home state of Wisconsin, and they don't go out and they commit things, issues like this. What we have is the indiscriminate gun culture, where it is easy to get certain kinds of weapons without any sort of checks, without any kind of red flags. There are too many of these weapons of mass killing out there. The problem is not the legal, safe gun owner who really does want that gun for hunting. That's not the problem.

There is a distinct problem. And I think that one of the wedge issues in our society is getting the legal responsible gun owners to recognize that they are not part of the gun culture that is creating the mass murders. But you may disagree with me about that. Let me go with your idea there. I like your idea about narrowing this down to the indiscriminate gun culture. So you and I come from different points of view on this issue. I am not a gun owner. I never was. I would be happy if all the guns in this country were picked up. I believe the gun lobby says confiscated. Let's just set that aside. You and I disagree about that, but let's just focus on the indiscriminate gun culture. If people

have a right constitutionally, morally, whatever, to have firearms, and if there are largely responsible gun owners, and I think you are absolutely right about that and data bear you out on that, then the key is how can we separate the irresponsible people from the guns, right? And some of those bills that you were just describing, some of those restrictions, let's take background checks as an obvious example, the nature of the background check, red flag laws, if someone's having a mental health crisis, can there be something, a minimum age, you know, at what age is someone responsible enough to handle a gun? Banning assault weapons. Yeah. Although that's the nature of the gun. That's it. Let me just set that one aside. I

want to focus on this, keeping the guns out of the hands of the dangerous people, dangerous for various reasons. So treating guns may be a little bit more like a car where you have a license to get it, and if you handle it irresponsibly, you don't have access to it anymore. So I think that's the sweet spot in terms of getting a sufficient political coalition to prevent incidents like this latest mass shooting and many others. Here's my thought experiment that I wrote about back in January after one of the last mass shootings. I said, okay, here's a thought experiment. You know, instead of talking about, you know, this routine slaughter of children and people, you know, in schools, banks, nightclubs, grocery stores, imagine that we're talking about Islamic terrorist attacks. I mean, imagine that

we, instead of having 199 domestic mass shootings, imagine that we had, you know, that many attacks from, you know, members of a Mexican cartel. Imagine dozens of airplanes had been hijacked and hundreds of passengers had been killed. Would governors and congressmen and legislators simply shrug their shoulders and say, hey, that's a shame, but there's really nothing, nothing we can do to confront the horror where they think it's, you know, a mental health problem? Or would we be so shocked as a nation that we would mobilize to confront the threat? What I said back then was we've gone to war for less than this, and yet we have become so numbed that the inaction has now become just part of the ritual kabuki dance that we go through. I mean, I just don't know how is society, and I think you're right that there has to be a breaking

point. Although if we weren't broken by Newtown, I don't know what it's going to do. You look at small children who are being blown apart, and then you look at the fetish of the guns and like, what is America prioritizing? They're prioritizing the gun, not the child. And I don't know that that's sustainable. It's a weak ass way of putting it. I'm sorry. That's okay. So let me go with your analogy there. So if this were an issue of Islamic terrorism, of course, the Republican party would be up in arms about it. And they're not because they don't think this is their issue. This is embarrassing to them. They're the party of guns. When there are gun killings, mass murders, they just want it to go away. We've talked about this problem before, but I really want to hone in

on it in this context. What we have in this country in part is a political polarization so that there are certain issues that I, a Democrat, want to talk about because they're favorable to me and they hurt the other party. And there are other issues that the Republicans feel the same way about. Let me give you an example. Greg Abbott was on TV this weekend and he's asked about two topics. One is the border. And on the border, Greg Abbott is happy to talk about all the problems. So many people coming to the border. We're not prepared. There's a big crisis. He's got all the data, right? Then they ask him about guns. You just had another mass shooting in your state. What do you have to say about it? Oh, thoughts and prayers, mental health, yada, yada. He's decided, and the

Republicans have decided, that this is just a bad issue for them. They're really not going to try to address it. They just want it to go out of the news. And this polarization where half the country thinks we can't talk about something, even when there's a shooting every day, that's a real problem in terms of solving the problem. The other problem that they have is they keep talking about mental health. And you know, I don't have a problem with dealing with mental health as an issue. What they really also don't want to talk about is the role of domestic extremism and radicalization. I mean, we have this guy who it appears might have been

trafficking in neo-Nazi, you know, hate world. And this is not the first time this has happened. So we have this toxic stew of domestic hatred, you know, memes out there that encourage people to think that actions like this are justifiable to defend the country. And so they not only don't want to talk about the guns, but there's a real resistance to talking about domestic hate, the fact that ideas have consequences. And again, Will, up until five minutes ago, conservatives understood that ideas have consequences, right? And they don't want to talk about that either. Let me go back and recall a speech that Mitch McConnell, the conservative leader of the Republicans in the United States Senate, gave about a week after January 6th.

Actually, there's probably a little bit longer. It was in the context of the impeachment and the conviction trial. And he said about Trump, the president of the United States cannot go out, as Trump had been doing for weeks, and tell people that the election was stolen and then feign surprise when they go out and do something about it, namely an insurrection. It wasn't with guns, I believe, but there was an armed attack on the Capitol of the United States. So there was an understanding there on McConnell's part that if you incite people, they will do violent things. And I think in the right-wing media sphere, there is this illusion that you can

gain audience, make money by peddling scare stories about America and replacement theory and that kind of garbage. And then you have to understand that if you do that, some of those people will take up arms and they will take action and people will die as a result of your words. Okay, so let's talk about the big political news over the weekend, which may actually be news or may be the sort of, you know, faux news when news media, you know, outlet goes out and creates its own poll, it creates its own news, right? Now, with all the caveats that this may be an outlier and it may be early, this is the buzzable thing. The new post-ABC poll finds Biden faces broad negative ratings at the start of his campaign. And as I wrote in my newsletter this morning, it's actually worse than the headline sounds. The president's approval

rating slips to a new low. More Americans than not doubt his mental acuity and his support against leading Republican challengers is far shakier than at this point four years ago. He actually trails Donald Trump by six points. If you believe this poll and the election was held today, Donald Trump would be elected easily to another term, 45% to 39%. George Stephanopoulos calls this poll just brutal. Okay, deep breath here. Let's launch a thousand hot takes on this one. I mean, it could get worse for Biden. I mean, they've got the debt crisis, economic jitters. You've got the Hunter Biden, which is not getting any better. The border surge, that could get better, but it could also get a lot, lot worse for Donald Trump. So what do you make of this poll right now in May of 2023, Will?

Well, I have seen in the last 24 hours a lot of progressives and just left of center people dismissing this poll and calling it an outlier and saying, you know, we shouldn't take it seriously. And even George Stephanopoulos said he didn't believe some of the numbers in this poll. And Charlie, whenever I hear that, I worry. People who, polls are a warning. Now, one poll is not everything, but if this poll showed Joe Biden up 10 points on Donald Trump, the left would be celebrating. They would be saying this poll was straight from God. So do not deceive yourself.

This is a warning. And Charlie, the most alarming thing that I see in this, well, there are several things, but the one that stands out to me is in the Trump-Biden matchup, Trump is at 49. With leaners. With leaners, but that is a very high number for Trump. I mean, remember that Trump won the 2016 election with 46%. He was trailing Hillary Clinton, you give him the electoral college advantages and 49% or anywhere close to that, it's very alarming that that many people in this country are willing to vote for Donald Trump after what he did. And yet, and yet, most Americans say that Trump should face criminal charges. They don't have any problem with him being perp walked. Okay. So when Americans are asked, do you think that Trump should or should not face criminal charges in these cases, whether he tried to illegally overturn the 2020 election, 56% of Americans say he should face criminal charges. Only 38

don't think so. Okay. His handling of classified documents, 54% of Americans think he should face criminal charges. 38% think he should not. 54% think he should face criminal charges. 38% think he should not. 54% think he should face criminal charges for his role in the events leading to the storming of the U.S. Capitol. Now, one of the numbers that George Stephanopoulos highlighted is the fact that apparently something like 20% of the people who believe that he should be perp walked, that he should be criminally charged, say they would also vote for him for president of the United States. So that's a WTF moment.

Which way do you want to look at it? I'm a pessimist on this one because the threat here is not that Donald Trump doesn't get convicted. If Donald Trump doesn't get convicted, but stays out of power, this country can survive just fine. If Donald Trump gets put back in the White House, that is, I believe someone called it an extinction level event for American democracy. So the actual stat in the poll was of the 56% who said that Trump should face criminal charges, I think it was for January 6th, of that 56%, 18%, 18% of those people, so almost one in five, said that they would vote for him anyway over Biden. That's amazing. That's amazing. You've asked Americans basically, is the fact that someone committed crimes in the course of trying to overthrow the government of the United States, is that a deal killer for you? And the answer for those folks is no, I will still vote for him. And that is how a democracy can die. Yeah. This is what I was trying to get at when I wrote my piece about the lowest possible standard, because, you know, it's hard to imagine people saying that if somebody has been indicted criminally, would you make him the CEO of your company? Would you let him babysit your children?

Would you hire him to be the manager of Burger King? No, absolutely not. I wouldn't hire him as a lawyer. I wouldn't hire him as an accountant, but you'd give him back the nuclear codes, right? Because we have a completely different standard for president than for anything else in our lives, which is mind blowing. So I've been trying to absorb these numbers. And I'm willing to accept that these might be a little bit of an outlier. But they do represent something that I think, you know, ought to be the wake up call to use that particular cliche about how weak Joe Biden is. I think this is more about Biden's weakness that people are in a bad mood right now. People are unhappy about the economy. People do have this sort of sense of dread about the way things are going. They don't think the country's on the right track, right?

I don't think people are in a good mood, and I don't think that they have this massive amount of confidence in Joe Biden, because Donald Trump should be absolutely radioactive and is toxic. You know, any rational, reasonable candidate should be thumping him. So when you see numbers like this, it's not because Donald Trump has some magical superpower, although he obviously has a certain cult there. It is a warning for all of the Biden fanboys that we need to really understand exactly how Biden is not clicking now. And it may not be fair. And so don't DM me with all the stuff about, you know, we should be talking about, you know, his wonderful accomplishments and all the legislation. This is the reality. The issue of the age and the acuity have really taken hold with the electorate. And there

is a lack of confidence right now with him. If there's any good news, it is that it's a wake-up call and that it's early enough to correct it as opposed for people thinking, well, of course, Joe Biden is the greatest thing since FDR. You know, Joe Biden is, you know, he's been the best president since, you know, he's even better president than Barack Obama. No, I don't think that that's where you want to go with this. And I do think that two things, number one, it shows how weak Biden is. And also number two, and this is slightly depressing, that we need to do a better job of making the case that you just made about how alarming and horrible and dangerous their term

of Donald Trump in the Oval Office is. Well, I would have thought we would have done that by now, but I think that that is, we'll put that in the category of unfinished business. What do you think? Well, Charlie, there are a lot of smart people who study politics who believe that this concern that you and I have about democracy, like we would say, this is the most important issue, without this, everything else goes, that in fact, that is not how enough people vote. What about the fact that he might be a rapist? That's like, hello? The rape is bad. The rape of a mission is even worse. Let me set that aside for a minute. I am somewhat baffled by the extent of the negative attitudes about Biden as

in terms of his management of things in this poll and in some other polls. I mean, the facts are the economy is actually pretty good relative to economies of the past. Inflation is a problem, but unemployment has plunged. Inflation is a problem. Yeah, it is. It is. But a lot of economic indicators are, they're certainly better than these polls would suggest. People are not stupid if they're concerned about the economy. No, they're not.

I mean, there are reasons to be concerned. Interest rates are going up. Stock market's looking still a little shaky. Nobody quite understands the economy. And literally every human being in this country who shops will have a conversation about how bad inflation is. The thing about inflation is it's true. It's a thing that you experience every time you shop, every time you buy something. And so that is a reminder. But let me say a couple of things here. It is true that Joe Biden has a lot of achievements

as president. If you look at his record, a lot of the bills he's passed, infrastructure and so on, he's accomplished a lot and he should be able to run on that record. But it is also true, and progressives and supporters of Biden have to face this. If you actually watch Biden try to present his case, to talk about what he has done, he's terrible. The most recent example was this interview he gave to MSNBC on Friday. If you watch this interview, first of all, it's very short, probably because his people didn't want him to try to talk for too long. When you see him try to talk, he's just not good at working his way through it. He gets asked a question about Hunter. He gives a very stupid answer about Hunter. He talks from the heart about how his son did nothing

wrong. He should have shut up. He shouldn't have said anything about it. His answer is not good on that or many other things. And this is a fundamental problem. And I think it goes a long way toward explaining why he does more poorly in polls than one would expect based on his record. There is no one out there presenting the case for Biden effectively because he can't do it himself. Flipping it around. I think this poll also though blows the shit out of the hollow GOP argument that we don't need to make the case that Donald Trump is unfit. We just simply repeat that he's a stone cold loser. I mean, you know, think about how many Republicans have sort of hid behind the fact that, well, he can't be nominated, he won't be nominated,

he can't possibly happen and he can't be elected. Well, once a poll like this comes out, the whole argument to electability is blown to hell. And that's a problem. I wrote about this this morning that, you know, I mean, unless Republican critics are willing to make the moral in the constitutional case that Trump is unfit for office, that he's a disgrace and a danger, we're likely to see a repeat of 2016, which leads me to this, Mr. Salatin, because you have done something really amazing that I want to talk about, about Lindsey Graham. But this does feel like a replay of 2016, where Republicans are about to fall in line, even though they know so much more now than they did back then. And they

knew a lot then. This is Lindsey Graham making the case back in 2016 why it would be a terrible idea to nominate Donald Trump. It's better to risk losing without him than try to win with him. When he said most illegal immigrants are rapists and drug dealers, they're not sending our best. Looking back, we should have basically kicked him out of the party. How many of these guys, when there were 17 of us, basically hit in the corner? They didn't want to poke the guy. They didn't want to get people mad. Ted Cruz was running as his best friend. Then they suddenly realized, you let this guy grow. There was a bromance, we used to say. Exactly. And those who calculated calculated leave him alone, don't bother him. Well, anytime you I want to let our listeners know something amazing that you have done for the last many, many months.

You have been working on a massive look at Lindsey Graham, and we are going to be rolling that out tomorrow. It's going to be in the bulwark, and it's going to be an e-book for people to get. Tell me a little bit about it, because I'm looking at the preface of it right now and you write, you know, before we start, I should tell you what this is and what it is not. It is not a rant about Graham's servility or hypocrisy and it is not a profile. So what is it? What have you done? Tell me about what we can look forward to in the bulwark about Lindsey Graham, who once got it right and has become fluffer in chief now.

So what I set out to do in this article was I wanted to understand how authoritarianism arose in the United States in our time under Donald Trump. And what I wanted to understand was not just Trump himself, because any bully, any strong man can come along and threaten a democracy. What's important to understand is how did an entire political party fall in line behind him, the people who should have been the gatekeepers. And it was possible to explore this through this one guy, Lindsey Graham, because he was in the middle of it. And Charlie, the guy would just not stop talking. He gave so many interviews. There's just an enormous track record. So you can trace it step by step.

Exactly. So the way I described it to one of my editors was I wanted to watch the frog boil. How is it that somebody who understood exactly who Donald Trump was and the threat he presented, and Charlie, that clip you just played really captures it. That is March of 2016, before Trump is nominated, and Lindsey Graham is trying to stop him. And he's talking there about his regret that the party didn't get it together sooner to stop Trump. And he actually used the word, I don't know if you could hear it, monster, that Trump is a monster, and that they failed. But he's still at that point trying to stop him. He's trying to get a movement to unite behind Ted Cruz and stop Trump. So he's

talking about the past, but then Charlie, it turns out that what he's describing there is foreshadowing what he and the other leaders of the Republican party are going to do over the next year, two years, four years. They're going to fall in line behind Trump anyway. And it is exactly what Graham describes there. It is a failure of courage. What's amazing is the way these guys talked themselves into, they rationalized. Yeah, the power of rationalization. Yeah. This is a great read, first of all, Will. And people, you know, tomorrow's bulwark and the ebook is coming out at the same time. You write, why focus on Lindsey Graham? Which is an interesting question because it's not obvious to me, but you make a really great case that first, because he was a central player in the Republican

Party's capitulation to Trump, and second, because he talked constantly. He produced an enormous trove of interviews, speeches, press briefings, and social media posts. Through these records, we can see how he changed week to week and month to month. We can watch the poison work. This is great because this is still, you know, we have been talking about this for so long to go back and see how the poison worked. How did the frog boil? And as you write, it is a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn't happen all at once. It advances in stages, a step, a rationalization, another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify.

You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe. And then you write, so let's go back to the beginning. Let's see who Lindsey Graham was before he drank the poison. This is a magnificent piece of work in Tomorrow's Bulwark. So congratulations on that. Looking forward to it. Thank you. And as if we needed any reminders about what is at stake and who we are dealing with, we actually got the audio of the deposition of Donald J. Trump in the civil rape trial with E. Jean Carroll. I have to tell you, Will, I was a little skeptical about whether or not this was going to change anything. But what's really extraordinary is the way in which the whole Access Hollywood thing has circled back. I mean, I remember October 8th, 2016. I remember it vividly when that Access Hollywood tape first dropped and everybody thought this

was the end. This was going to be the thing that forced Donald Trump, either would destroy his candidates or maybe even force him out of the race. And I was texting back and forth with Reince Priebus, and he was saying, I'm in tears about all of this and all of this stuff. And yet, in retrospect, October 8th, 2016 was also the turning point, wasn't it? Because that was the moment in which Republicans decided, yeah, you know what? We don't really care about the character of this man. We are willing to make a rationalization. And they went along with him. And so it seemed like, okay, that happened.

And, you know, that's gone. But it's come back now. And so during this civil suit by E. Jean Carroll, he's forced to sit down for a deposition. And he's asked about the Access Hollywood video, and it's back. I'm just going to play a little bit from this taped deposition of the former president of the United States discussing why he thinks that stars are allowed to grab women by the pussies. And you say, and again, this has become very famous in this video, I just start kissing them. It's

like a magnet, just kiss, I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything, grab them by the pussy, you can do anything. That's what you said, correct? Well historically that's true with stars. It's true with stars that they can grab women by the pussy? Well that's what, if you look over the last million years I guess that's been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately. Do you consider yourself to be a star?

I think you can say that, yes. Great moments in presidential rhetoric, Mr. Sallis. Oh, my God, Charlie. I highly recommend that people watch the middle of this deposition. It's on C-SPAN. You can get, I don't know where to start. Can I start at the end there with where he says, unfortunately, or start wherever you like, because there's so much to do.

Yeah. Let me just do a little background here. Trump is claiming that this story that Eugene Carroll tells about what happened in a department store is completely implausible. I would never do this in a department store, right? So then they play the Access Hollywood video, in which people will not remember this because everybody remembers, you know, you can just grab them by the pussy. He says in the video, I took her out furniture shopping.

I moved on her like a bitch. What he describes in the Access Hollywood video is what he is accused of doing in real life. You will recall that after that video came out, Trump said, oh, that's just locker room talk. I would never do that in real life. And here we have allegation, witness statement that he actually did this. So it is completely plausible that this happened. And you have him on tape saying that he does stuff like this. And I think it puts him in a really difficult position. There were so many different elements to this, including somebody mentioned this, and I kind of glossed over it. He says, well, you know, this is, I'm just making historical

observation, you know, that for the last million years, this has been happening. I think it's worth pointing out, Will, that there have been advances in the last million years. That, in fact, there's been this whole civilization thing. There's been changes in the way that men deal with women in the last million years, okay? So, it is interesting he said, well, I'm just making this historical observation. And he, of course, at various times denied that he even said those things. He's like the burglar that tries all the doorknobs and like, well, no, it was made up. I never said that. Well, of course I said this because of course I was right. It's also interesting that, you know, in this deposition, he talks about, I didn't play the audio of this, where he says that, you know, he couldn't have done this because she wasn't his type. And then he lashes out at the lawyer and says,

and you're not my type either, which raises the question, okay, maybe if you're denying you're a rapist, you should not be saying that there are certain types of women you wouldn't rape, because that implies that there are certain types of women you do rape. You know what I mean? What do you mean? You're not my type. If you don't rape women, then there's no type here, right? Obviously, Donald Trump completely fails to understand some of the distinctions between rape and voluntary sex. One of them is the rapist is not looking for his type. He's looking for someone that he can get away with attacking, right? Can she fight back? If I got her isolated away from it, it's all about predation.

That's the first point I want to make. The second point is, it's amazing what an, I'm sorry, I'm trying to find a non-expletive word here. It's amazing what an awful human being Donald Trump is. You may recall that Brett Kavanaugh was accused in his hearings of having committed a sexual assault. And Brett Kavanaugh said, I didn't do it. But everything Brett Kavanaugh said was sympathetic to the accuser. He did not want to pick a fight. He did not want to make people choose that you have to believe she's an awful person.

Donald Trump is doing exactly the opposite. In this deposition, he says, she's not my type. He goes further. He says, the more I know about her, the more she's not my type. He says, her book is crummy. She's a whack job. She's sick. He goes after the lawyer saying, you're a political operative. You're a disgrace. And you're looking at this and thinking, why do you need to be such an asshole? Why does Trump have to do this? Right. And then, right. So I'm a normal person. You're a normal person. We think this is terrible behavior, but then, you know, Trump says something interesting. He says in the deposition, the difference between me and other people is I'm honest. This is a lot of what sells Trump. There are a lot of people who love Trump because they think he's honest and what he's

being honest about is what an awful person he is, right? It's that I say what I think. She's not my type. Her book is crummy. She's a whack job. You're a disgrace. He's showing you how awful he is. And there's a kind of, weirdly, a kind of integrity to that in the way that in his mind and the mind of a lot of his supporters. I think this whole mentality is sick, but I think it's a lot of his political appeal. It is the, he's just blunt. You know, other guys might think that, but he will actually say it out loud. No, I mean, it was very damaging, the deposition, including the famous moment where he, you know, having said that E. Jean Carroll is not his type because she's too ugly, then he has shown a picture of him with her and he thinks she's Marla Maples. He misidentifies who she is.

Apparently, he's completely forgotten that whole thing. So he's not able to identify her. And this is one of the last things that the jury in this case is going to see. They're going to see the man in full. And I think that's what was interesting. You know, you're talking about, you know, how awful he is. This jury is going to see Donald Trump, the man in full, the insult, the arrogance, you know, the unfortunately or fortunately, you know, stars have been able to, you know, to grab and molest women. And in this case, they're offering essentially no real defense, no defense witnesses. And the judge, I thought, interestingly enough, kind of an interesting judicial troll, gave Trump until last night to decide whether or not he wanted to testify on his own behalf, as he had said with a certain amount of bravado when he was in Scotland. So they're

wrapping up today. It'll go to the jury. You know, this is not a criminal trial, a different standard of proof. I know that our default setting is to be cynical that nothing ever matters. But if this jury comes back and does find him liable for rape, this is an extraordinary moment. I mean, well, I know we've kind of been here before, but this is extraordinary. And I guess one of the ways to think about it is think about the other way, that if the jury comes back and finds against E. Jean Carroll, I think it probably puts to rest all of the other 20. I mean, that's gone. That issue is probably never going to come up again, right? On the other hand, if she wins, how does he not get asked about this

every single time between now and next year, every single time, including in his CNN live town hall meeting? How do you not get asked this question if you have been found liable for raping a woman by a federal jury? I don't know, Charlie. I don't know how this is going to go across because as we've discussed, I can no longer infer from rationality or decency to how history will unfold, right? In this deposition, he says it's a hoax. He says everything else is a hoax, right? He says mail ballots are a hoax. And the point is, he says it's indiscriminate on his part. And so what concerns me is even though the fact that he calls everything a hoax shows that he's completely unreliable as a witness or a narrator, there are so many people who just will take his

side and they will say Russia was a hoax. Ukraine was a hoax. This is a hoax. Even if he loses, they'll say it was, they'll say it was a hoax. But I think, though, that, I mean, rape, we're talking about, you know, the abstractions of do you vote for democracy or not? Rape is a pretty simple concept. You're right. I mean, it does feel like a rational fallacy or hopeless naivete to think this is actually going to make a difference. I'll tell you, my other reaction watching this was, as you see him, you know, watching him, you know, throw out his insults and his bravado and everything to think there are millions of Americans, including evangelical Christians that think that this man is God's champion, who believe, you know, Trump is the great champion of Jesus. And it's like, how do you square that circle? But again, you know,

we've been at this too long to be, I guess. And he just did another one of these interviews, right? I can't remember, Victory was one of these, you know, right-wing evangelical things where they basically describe him, they portray him as God's choice. And I just want to pause on that, unfortunately or fortunately, that's just an amazing thing. I would like to hear a person of the cloth, a person who claims to be a Christian, a person who claims to be decent, explain the fortunately part of that. Trump's saying, when you're a star, they let you do it, grab them by the pussy. And then he says, it's been going on forever, unfortunately or fortunately. I would like to hear a moral explanation of why any decent person would add the words or

fortunately to describing tolerance of sexual assault. Well, I would like Caitlin Collins to ask him that question. Say, okay, could you explain the fortunately part of this? And then stick with him and keep asking the follow-up questions about all this. This is the problem of having these one-hour live town hall meetings. And I understand the argument we need to cover him. But in a format like that, you have, you know, time limitations and time works in his favor because he can, he'll just go off and blather and filibuster. But if you pressed him on all of this and you need to walk him through the other 26 women, walk him through all of this. And that's just the beginning of it. You know, you have to ask him about, do you really believe that we should

terminate the constitution to put you back into office? You know, and don't just spend a couple of minutes on that. Just keep talking about it. What would you be willing to do? Ask him about January 6th and everything. There's no disrespect for Caitlin Collins. It's an almost impossible job in that format because we know what Trump will do. And also the whole idea that we will fact check him. The problem with fact checking Donald Trump is he's a fire hose of lies and disinformation.

You cannot keep up with all of it. And he knows this. No, I don't think fact checking will work because there are too many people who know that he lies and are willing to vote for him anyway. And I don't really know how CNN can accomplish something good here, except to focus the conversation on the topics that he should have to talk about and doesn't want to. They're able to make him talk about his attempt to overthrow the government, for example. If they're able to make him talk about his history of accusations of sexual assault, then they will have elevated important issues, but I doubt they will be able to accomplish that. Well, you know, since you and I spoke last, there's been so much that's going on, including about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, the Thomas

family grift, which just seems to keep on going. New developments about Tucker Carlson. Let's talk about Clarence Thomas for a moment, because that actually does seem to matter. There seems to be a complete inability of our system, whether it is the court itself or Congress, to hold a sitting member of the Supreme Court accountable for the kinds of things that we're learning. The fact that he was, you know, his wife was on the payroll that Leonard Leo, you know, wanted to keep it secret. The fact that you had this billionaire sugar daddy who was paying for the tuition for his nephew, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This is, again, one of those moments where we realize how many of our checks and balances are just based on the honor system. Because if you're a Supreme Court justice, and you don't want to recuse yourself, and you don't want to resign, and you want to keep taking the boodle,

pretty much nobody can do anything to you, can they? Right. What we have here is, first of all, just an absence of a serious ethics code at the level of the Supreme Court, which is kind of amazing, but there's some notion that these justices are somehow so esteemed. They're such honorable people that, of course, we don't need this. Well, obviously we do. That's what's coming out in the Thomas case. In the Thomas case, the latest thing that just totally got me was Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society saying, let's shovel some money to Ginny Thomas, the wife of the justice, and let's make sure that nobody knows about it. Nothing weird about that.

Keep her name off the record. There's an explicit attempt to conceal this financial support of the justice's spouse. Now, Charlie, you and I both know that if this story had come out about Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan, right, the right would be calling for impeachment immediately. But of course, this won't happen, right? Because somehow Clarence Thomas is held to be above this. There's no degree of exposure of scandal in Thomas's case. And the other thing that kills me about this, Charlie, is the members of the Senate, the Congress saying, you know, well, they would like to call in Clarence Thomas and they would like to do something about

this, but we have the separation of powers. Well, okay. I don't want Congress stepping on the Supreme Court all the time, but somebody has to be capable of stepping in when a branch of the federal government is just violating all ethical norms and do something, right? Otherwise, you'll end up with a tyranny of the judiciary, just like you could have one of the executive. And I just don't think we are equipped at this point to deal with a case like Thomas when he won't do anything about it. The Supreme Court doesn't have a serious ethics standard. And so many members of the Senate, so many members of Congress will absolutely not touch this because he's on their side. So let me ask you an even more awkward question, though, because here's another problem that nobody wants to really do anything about because

everybody wants to approach it with kid gloves. And because it's very delicate. It's the whole Dianne Feinstein story. The Democrats do not have a working majority, it feels like, right now in the United States Senate because you have this relatively ancient senator who has not been there for a very, very long time, is not all there, and may or may not ever come back, but is not resigning. It's almost an insoluble problem. And I have a really awkward question to ask you about it when, after I get your take. I think there is a culture of deference in the Democratic Party. And there's one of the things about progressives that conservatives have noticed is the progressives tend to be very nice. Now I know there are a lot of conservatives who say progressives are evil, they attack everybody.

But in fact, one of the problems with progressives in crime, in border policy, is they just don't want to say no, they don't want to be mean, they don't want to hurt anybody. And sometimes you need someone to stand up. In the case of Dianne Feinstein, oh, she's so nice, she's esteemed, she's so good to us, we love her. and there's just no one who's willing to draw a line and say i'm sorry we need to get on with business and you can't do it well i don't even know if it's mainly a progressive problem it is a culture of deference i mean we've been talking about lindsey graham and republicans i mean you want to talk about a culture of deference but i mean you know obviously you want to show respect you might have to deal with that person you don't

want to insult them you don't want to say anything that will you know destroy your relationship your relationship and saying, you know, quit now might do it. However, you do have people like Ro Khanna who came out and were very, very forceful on this issue. Here's the really, really awkward question. And I literally have not heard anyone else ask it, although probably other people have. Before she left, was hospitalized for shingles. There were numerous reports about her declining mental condition. The fact that she didn't remember, you know, a conversation. She had to repeat the same thing over and over again. She didn't recognize things.

I mean, clearly it was bad and it was getting worse. I mean, you read all those accounts. Yep, yep. What happens if she gets to the point where they can't get her to resign? Right. What if she no longer even has the capacity to make that decision? Well, you're assuming that she's been making decisions, which I think is a- Well, no, I'm not.

That's what I'm saying is, I mean, the thing that we don't know is, like, what do you do? I mean, unless she has a power of attorney that she's given to somebody, would even that have legal and constitutional standing? Think about all of this. What has the right been saying about Joe Biden for the last two years? He's not really running the government. There's a cabal of Marxists around him, etc, etc. Now, that's fiction, except it's certainly true that staff, I mean, the president can't run all these things. So even a competent president has staff running things in a Senate office. The Senate office is smaller, but there's a large staff.

And the reality is staff run most of these things. The principal sort of signs off on them. I think that's what's been going on in Feinstein's office even more than usual. Yeah, but they can't vote for her. This is the thing here. See, I think this is like the nightmare scenario. It's like, there's no vice senator. There's no procedure to remove a senator who is, okay, if a United States senator goes into a coma, okay, what happens? I don't know. There's no 25th amendment for senators.

There's no 25th. We have nothing. If you have, you know, an evenly divided United States Senate and somebody becomes non-compost mentis or in a coma, and you can't even get them to resign or they refuse, whatever. Is there anything? I mean, the governor can't do anything about it. I mean, this is the thing that I would have thought that people would have learned the lesson from, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was always compost mentos, who was always on the ball up until the end. But at some point you go, all right, we have to do the prudent, intelligent thing. This clearly has not happened yet with Dianne Feinstein. I wonder whether or not it's going to be worse. Can I say one thing on Feinstein? Charlie, you presented this as a what if,

but your description of what could happen is actually perfectly consistent with what has happened, right? So the fact that everybody sort of understands that she's getting in the way, but nothing's changed could be that she herself is refusing, even though her staff is telling her she should. That's possible. I know. This is. One last thing on the Tucker Carlson beat. By now, people have realized that he's still under contract with Fox, even though he's been fired, which means he's got a no compete. He can't do anything. He is, of course, chafing at this, thinking, you know, I don't want to be sidelined. I want to have a show. He's met with Elon Musk. And there are suggestions from Tucker World that he's

prepared to burn down the house that he knows where all the bodies are buried. So I think it is fair to say that the Tucker Fox story is not over and that it's about to get a lot uglier. What do you think? Possible. So this is the eternal question about Tucker Carlson. Is he just a liar who knows that everything he's saying is nuts or does he actually believe it? And if he believes it, and I'm on the side of, he believes some things. He's a genuinely angry person. He has some crazy ideas. I think that's true. And therefore, he will do some burning, that he will go out and for the sake of some bad causes he believes in, he will absolutely attack his former colleagues. Well, also, not just causes. I mean, just the ego. I mean, he comes from a lot of

wealth. I'm just guessing wealth for you and I being paid $30 million a year might be a game changer that might influence our decision. But if you're Tucker Carlson, you're thinking my ego and my need to have a platform and a voice during the presidential race is more important, even than $30 million. So somebody is going to pay him a lot of money. So I don't think it's going to be the money that's going to be the main motivation for whatever he does. That's my only take on all of this. And again, that takes probably, very much to your piece about Lindsey Graham, which will be in the Bulwark tomorrow morning. And the ebook will be available shortly. I strongly recommend it. I think that, you know, for people who have followed the Bulwark, this is, I think, one of the most important things that we have done so far. So first of all, congratulations for doing

that and strongly urge people to check out the Bulwark tomorrow morning. Thanks, Charlie. It is a great story and I hope people will read it. 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.