The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: All for the Fan Service

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

The dick pics, RFK, jr,'s testimony, and McCarthy's promise to expunge impeachment records are all for the base. Plus, DeSantis should GTFO of Twitter, the legitimacy of the courts needs to be preserved, and never forget that the ex-POTUS is a RAPIST. Will Saletan joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. It is Friday. It is Friday, July 21st, 2023. And I'm just looking back on this last week. What a shit show. I'm sorry to get us the explicit rating in the first 30 seconds of the show, but what an amazing week. And we are joined by my colleague, Will Salatan, who's been, we haven't had this live conversation because we've been doing your amazing special series of podcasts on Lindsey Graham, but I had to get you back on for this week. So happy Friday, Will. Thanks, Charlie. In Tim's honor, I needed to get a pearl necklace, but I don't have one. So I'm just going to have to try to be half as witty as Tim.

Well, OK, at least half as witty. As we're beginning this podcast, we have some breaking news. Judge Eileen Cannon has set a date for the Mar-a-Lago document trial, May 20th, 2024. So Donald Trump did not get his wish that the whole thing would be delayed until after the election. But once again, we're seeing how awkward these trial dates are going to be because I don't know about you, Will, I'm just assuming that by May 20th, the Republican nomination will be all done. I mean, just imagine that scenario if you're a Republican. Again, assuming that we're dealing with a rational political party, which seems to be a huge fallacy here. At that point,

Donald Trump will either, you know, have sewed up the nomination or will be pretty much cooked, won't it? I would guess so, just because I'm thinking back to 2016, when Trump first ran, and that was over basically the beginning of May. That was the Indiana primary, Ted Cruz drops out, and Trump at that point is the de facto nominee. So, you know, obviously Trump's been president since then. And that makes it even more likely that he probably he would have wrapped it up if he's going to win it by well before this trial. I had a moment of naivete again this week. I can't shake it. I need to get over these sorts of things. But I saw on social media a report that Donald Trump had posted something on Truth Social. He's been making veiled threats about what would happen if he is arrested or he's jailed.

I mean, he went on one show and said, you know, it would be very, very dangerous if Jack Smith tried to throw me in jail. He's put out leads where he's talked report, and I honestly thought that this was either a spoof or maybe it was just AI generated, that it could not possibly be true. But this is something that Donald Trump himself put out this week on Truth Social. I mean, play it. There's a lot of music in the background, but I think you'll be able to pick up the language here. If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before. Okay, in case you missed the line, if you eff around with us, that's real. Now, a little bit of context here. Apparently, that's audio from 2020, where he was talking about what it would do to Iran. But I don't think that there's any ambiguity about why he would bleed it out now in this particular context.

Will, I mean, I think it's been established that Donald Trump is probably every defense attorney's worst freaking nightmare. But it seems as if he is almost on a daily basis escalating not just the attacks on the prosecutors and the criminal justice system, but also the threats of violence, which in the context of the looming indictment for his role on January 6th, is really quite an extraordinary moment, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, when Trump sends these messages out, you know, we're going to stick it to them, we're going to hurt them. You can tell that he's sort of talking to his crowd, like liberal tears. We're going to hurt the libs. We're going to

hurt everybody who's against us. I feel like saying to him, Charlie, what's that line? I'm right here. We can hear you. You're speaking. Exactly. Yeah. Hello. Do you understand when you say, yeah, yes. So we're going to do things that have never been done before. Okay. You know, I always think back to the way Trump walks around mystified about having lost the 2020 election. And what he says is, look, my pollster told me if I got to 65 million, I would win. Right. And we got to like 75. How could we have lost? And the answer is that 81 million people came out to vote against him. How did that happen? Because he says crazy shit like this. He scares the hell out of people. And we can all click on this, right? We can all hear it. We can all hear it. But as you point out, this is directed toward his base, and he knows

what he's doing. It does strike me when I was thinking about, you know, how absurd Congress looked this week, whether you're talking about the RFK, you know, Festival of Bat Shittery or Marjorie Taylor Greene brandishing dick pics of Hunter Biden. This actually happened in real time. Or Kevin McCarthy's latest, apparently these things are scheduled now, but Kevin McCarthy's latest grovel to Donald Trump when Donald Trump was mad at him because he said something on television. So he had to promise, you know, the orange God King that he would expunge the impeachments, which of course is not a thing. You know, what they all have in common to your point is it's all fan service. They're all just talking to their fan base. And I mean, why are they having hearings? You know, these weird hearings that have

nothing to do with really pretty much anything a lot of the time. Why would you feature a whack job and a conspiracy theorist like RFK Jr., except that they know that that's what the base wants. They have this yearning for more QAnon conspiracy theory, insider, tears of the libs, deep state stuff. And so they're just shoveling it to them. And again, what is the rational basis? Why do they think this is really in their long-term interest if they even think in those terms anymore? I kind of think that they've lost the ability to think that way. Part of the world that you and I live in, Charlie, is we look at these guys and we think, well, they're nuts. They're nuts. They've kind of lost it. They're out of touch. And that's a testable proposition. And if it is true that they sort of lost touch, you would see them doing

things like this, where they bring out a complete crackpot to testify about alleged censorship of COVID theories. They think that because RFK Jr. is a Democrat, hey, it's not just us saying that all this COVID stuff was censored and the evil FBI tried to suppress Twitter and yada yada. It's this Democrat not quite realizing that, you know, Charlie, if we look at polls, Democrats at this point despise RFK. I mean, he's got a minus 60 favorable among Democrats. So it's not like this is actually helping Republicans, but in their minds, they think it is. Or they just simply can't help themselves. I mean, they're so trapped in the loop of their own world and the incentive structures. I was thinking about Marjorie Taylor Greene, why she felt the need to actually show pornographic pictures at the hearing about Hunter Biden.

And I don't want to give her any credit for anything. I'm going with the sort of reptilian instinct that she has to keep upping the dosage. You know, we've used this analogy before. It's like crack dealers, and they're constantly competing with one another. Who has the pure, more potent crack? And you realize at a certain point, you know, it's not just enough to, you know, yell, you know, we have whistleblowers, Hunter, you know, crime family. It's like, no, here's a picture of Hunter Biden getting a blowjob. It's the constant ramping up all the time. But it all comes back to fan service and knowing that you have to keep doing that in order to stay relevant, in order to keep getting clicks, in order to be able to get that, the attention that you so desperately crave. Look, some of it is fan service. I agree with that. But I would also add to that, that a lot of it is sheer antagonism. A lot of it is Marjorie Taylor Greene,

deeply, deeply angry. A lot of these people are deeply, deeply angry, and they just want to hurt and they want to humiliate. Like here's nude pictures of the president's son. And they just can't read the room anymore because they're not really aware of who's in the room. And part of what the election denialism does in the Republican party is if you really think you won the election, these people don't exist. These are fake ballots that came out against you. You talk as though they're not there. You talk as though people don't find this repellent that you're flashing nudes of the president's family. Speaking of reality checks, you saw the Monmouth poll. Let's talk about this

a little bit. One poll this early, take it with a grain of salt, it might be an outlier. Also, polls that measure third-party sentiments, there's a long history of them lacking predictive value. That's a nice way of saying it. A lot of people are willing to say, yeah, I'm going to vote for a third party, but when it comes right down to it, no, not so much. So here's the head-to-head on the Monmouth poll. Joe Biden is still unpopular, but in a head-to-head with Donald Trump, he leads by 7.47 to 40. Put this in a little bit different context, a three-way contest. They asked a generic third party ticket. This is the result of this survey.

Biden, 37 percent. Generic third party ticket, 30 percent. Donald Trump, 28 percent. The guy's in third place. OK, so then they actually put a name on it. And they found that when you say Manchin Huntsman, you know, Joe Manchin, John Huntsman, that it actually drops considerably. They only get 16 percent of the vote. But here again, here's the way it looks in a three way race. Biden, 40 percent. Trump, 34 percent. Manchin Huntsman, 16 percent. 16%. So if voters are asked, okay, what if it turns out this third party is a spoiler and it's

going to elect Donald Trump? Voters say when they're given that scenario, 43% for Biden, 33% Trump, 20% third party ticket. So Trump loses in every scenario. And so far, we haven't seen a lot of these polls making this point, but I'm not going to play Lucy with the football and say that, you know, this is going to be the moment that Republicans sober up when they realize that Donald Trump is going to be annihilated. But these are not good numbers for him. In fact, that, you know, in this poll, his approval rating, Donald Trump's net favorability is negative 27 points. 36% approve, 63% of Americans hold an unfavorable view. I mean, so maybe, Will, maybe stuff does matter after all. You know, maybe being a rapist and being charged with espionage and fraud and obstruction and all of these things, maybe they do matter to people in the room.

So is it possible you and I are not crazy? I mean, that's kind of what these numbers suggest. Let me flag a couple of numbers. This is a really interesting poll. So one is you can see that the generic third party, when you don't say who it is, they get 30%, right? This is always the complaint about these polls where there's a name on this guy, there's a name on that guy, and there's no name on this.

Imagine whoever you'd like, right? That gets 30. As soon as you bring a name in, Manchin, it drops in half. It goes in half, right? It's down to 16. So people should not have illusions about what a third party candidacy would poll here. The other thing, though, is that number, the 28%. Let me come back to that.

Okay, that's sort of Biden 37, generic 30, Trump 28. Just introducing an alternative other than Trump, the Trump number goes down to 28. I find that tremendously encouraging. The question I really want to know is what is the floor for Donald Trump? What is he guaranteed? If it's 40, that scares the hell out of me because you can have a little bit of variance and then he can win the electoral college. Charlie, I think the top line, Biden 47, Trump 40, that is enough.

If it comes out that way in that ballpark, Trump's not going to win the electoral college with that number. He's got to get up closer to 45. He won it originally with 46, right? 46% to Hillary's 48. So 40 is an okay number, but the idea that the actual Trump floor is more like 28 in America, that is very comforting because it shows that there are a lot of persuadable people out there. I don't know if they're persuadable to Biden, but if in a general

election, people who think like Chris Christie, they hate Joe Biden, but they can't stand Donald Trump, they don't want him to be president, can vote for somebody other than Trump. If that number is around 30% that's hardcore for Trump, even if he pulls another 10%, he's not going to win the electoral college. And that's, to me, the whole ballgame. If his floor is 28%, isn't the more important number what his ceiling is? I mean, can he get back to 45, 46%? I think the evidence is leaning against that, that his ceiling may be in the low 40s. What do you think? Maybe. I thought before it was low. I thought in 2016. I thought in 2020 it was low. One time he wins the Electoral College. The other time he comes way too close. So I remain skeptical. And

mostly, Charlie, it's because of the alternatives people so hated Hillary Clinton that even though Trump had negatives back in 2016 that you and I would have thought would be way too bad for him to get elected yeah right and then in 2020 again very high negatives but came way too close how bad is the hatred? I don't see in these numbers that the Biden hatred is so bad that Biden would lose, particularly if, you know, even with a third party candidate here, he looks okay. Well, I mean, it goes back to that question of, you know, are there swing voters and who are they and where are they? I mean, this is going to come down to a handful of states. I mean, that's the cut right to it. I mean, this election will be decided in places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, any place else that you

think is a real swing state that will determine all of this. And these states may be decided by, you know, a couple hundred thousand votes. I'm trying to think what Donald Trump is going to do over the last year that will persuade those swing voters in those states that, yeah, let's put him back into office. Because again, you would think that at a certain point, you would want to reassure people that I'm a good guy. I'm not a scary guy. I'm not going to burn things down. And yet every time Donald Trump opens his mouth, he's basically saying, no, really, I am a scary guy. Don't fuck around with me, but I'm going to fuck around with you. I am going to burn it down.

I mean, and this is his relentless message. It's we have our people. We're going to turn out our people. It's a turnout mentality for winning elections and very little attention to the idea of swing voters, to the possibility of them. Which is why they're not talking to those people. They act like they're not there. Right. So one thing that I think you and I would agree on is we got to make sure Donald Trump

isn't president of the United States again. But the other thing is I really want to falsify this model of how to run the country because every politician who thinks this way and tries to govern this way, it's bad for America. It tears our country apart. If we can bring back the idea that it matters reaching out to swing voters, it matters not alienating people, it matters building consensus, bringing the country together, then our politics will move in a much healthier direction. More shockingly, I think we might actually agree on this as well. I don't know whether you read

the comments section on our page, but I would say the vast majority of readers of my newsletter disagreed with my point that people ought to be cautious about delegitimizing the U.S. Supreme Court. I think the other thing that we need to realize is that we are right now in the midst of an all-out attack on the credibility and legitimacy of every institution in America, every constitutional institution. And I understand that a lot of people on the America, every constitutional institution. And I understand that a lot of people on the left, everybody on the left, has been very, very unhappy with the Supreme Court, disagree very strongly with the decision. Those are legitimate disagreements.

I think there are legitimate concerns about ethics, including the fact that I think that Clarence Thomas's behavior has been absolutely deplorable. But there is a danger buying into the notion that we can delegitimize the Supreme Court and then still hope that our constitutional institutions will be guardrails. I don't know whether you've seen this latest article by these two progressives, Mark Tushnet and Aaron Belkin, who basically now are saying that Democrats should make it clear that they will start ignoring the Supreme Court decisions, that the court is so wrong and so illegitimate that Biden should defy the court. I think this is the most dangerous road you can go down, especially when you have Donald Trump,

who's just waiting to burn down these institutions. And I don't think that people ought to be casual about delegitimizing the institutions that may turn out to be the final bulwark of constitutional democracy. Yeah. Okay. So first of all, full disclosure, Aaron Belkin is a friend of mine. So I, and I've had this argument with him and I've had this argument with other friends who are unhappy with the direction of the judiciary and the Supreme court and who want to do various reforms. And some of them include adding justices, which is otherwise known as court packing. Okay. So I'm not with that. And I'm not with it for the reasons that you outlined in your excellent morning shots yesterday, which I encourage

everyone to read. And look, I know this is going to piss off a lot of our progressive audience, the progressive folks, but- They're pretty pissed off. Right. But look, folks, this is part of why the bulwark exists. We're not here to sort of just peddle the standard progressive line. That's not who we are. And Charlie and I disagree about a lot of things, but we are institutionalists and we're going to defend institutions even when a lot of folks on the left are unhappy with them and want to reform or changeaway power by any other branch of government, but in particular at the moment, the executive. Look, everyone, you can see what the main threat to America is right now. It is the restoration of a president who has already attempted a coup, with runaway executive power, a guy who's threatening to destroy the civil service,

install loyalists. We cannot have at this moment, people on both sides of the political spectrum talking about how we should ignore rulings of the Supreme Court or suggesting that we should, you know, circumvent them. What we need are checks. We need checks on executive power. The courts did this, folks. They did this in 2020, right? Donald Trump tried to overturn the election and 60 courts said no. And many of those people were so-called Trump judges. The Trump justices of the Supreme Court turned him down. They did their job. I believe they will do it again if need be, and we need to defend them. And again, and this is why I want to keep coming back to the loose terms like the court lacking legitimacy. What does that mean? I got

some blowback and people saying, well, are you saying that because progressives are criticizing the court or attacking the court, that somehow to obey a court that has a 22% approval rating rather than a court that has a 66% approval rating. This is not necessarily rocket science. The court did play a crucial role in the 2020 election. And I think that when you think about why his attempts failed so miserably, why there was no chance, it was because the courts just were not having it. You know, even the Federalist Society judges were not having it. The Supreme Court did not take up that bogus Texas lawsuit. They're going to be in the same position next

time. I think people need to understand this. There's no mystery about who Donald Trump is. Donald Trump will never concede defeat, will he? He will never acknowledge legitimate defeat. He will challenge anything. You know, I mean, I think the odds are overwhelming that the 2024 election will be litigated no matter what the numbers are. And you will have these extreme MAGA attempts, you know, to attack the voting system. The court, for all of the things that many of our listeners might disagree with, you know, took a very, very strong stand rejecting that MAGA, the MAGA independent legislature theory. I mean, this was the most extreme threat, I think, to the constitutional order, to the

democracy that was being pushed by people on the right that essentially would have given state legislatures sweeping power, including perhaps the power to overturn a popular election result, and the court wasn't having it. So even this conservative court said, no, absolutely not. We are not going down that direction. I don't think it's possible to overstate how important that is. All you have to do is think about, imagine if it had gone the other way. Then where do we go to get the democracy back? Yeah, yeah. And part of what I think is going on here is, and here, let's speak to my friends on the left. A lot of folks on the left think that conservatives are all one thing, and that is not true, right? And so you have foreign policy conservatives, you have family

values, conservatives, law and order conservatives, you got judicial conservatives. And you know, some of these people are hypocritical to varying degrees. But they're not all one thing. And the perfect illustration of that is these so called conservative judges, because you can have a theory that conservative judges being appointed by conservative politicians will do whatever those conservative politicians want. And we have that theory falsified in the form of the current Trump judges and Trump justices. They did not do what Donald Trump wanted because they weren't part of a political party in terms of how they ruled. They do have a judicial philosophy and you can argue with it. You may not like the affirmative action case, right? You may not like the abortion case, but when it came time to sort of do what

was politically in the interest of their patron, the guy who appointed them, there wasn't a basis for that in their constitutional philosophy. And they said, no, they followed a judicially conservative philosophy, not a politically conservative one. Well, I agree with you. And I think that there's a real distinction between a conservative court and a MAGA court. This is a conservative court. There's no question there's a conservative court. When it comes down to the MAGA agenda, certainly not there. I mean, maybe you could point to, you know, this case or that case. But most of these big cases that were decided were based on conservative legal philosophy. And again, people are free to reject that or, you know, criticize that. But they've been around for decades. They preceded Donald Trump. There is a long intellectual critique of affirmative action that has been litigated through the courts for decades. I don't think you should have been surprised that a conservative court would have been skeptical about the executive power to simply unilaterally wipe away trillions of dollars in student loan debt by Fiat, the 303 case involving whether or not the

government can compel speech from somebody. You can disagree with them, but I do think it's important to recognize that there is an intellectual and legal basis to all of this. And I was reminded reading a lot of the coverage when I was on vacation and the commentary was the old quip by William F. Buckley that the liberals always, you know, say they want to have a vigorous debate and then are shocked to find out there is, in fact, another point of view. The number of folks out there who apparently were never exposed to any of these ideas or arguments or the depth of the principle, and again, you can dislike the individual justices, but I do think that one

of the things that we need, if we're ever going to get past this fever, is to at least understand that there are intellectually honest disagreements that we can have. And that some of these decisions, and I'm not asking people to agree with all of them, that these were fundamental and deeply serious debates and arguments, as opposed to, you know, a bunch of political hacks who were doing the bidding of their billionaire buddies or whatever. And so I'm leaving Clarence Thomas aside for the moment. I agree with all of that. And I would add to it, there's way too much focus by politically interested people, by folks on the left or the right in the bottom line. What is the bottom line of the court ruling? And let me just talk for a minute about the student loan case.

That's a really good example. So, you know, people on the left, progressive people, they wanted relief on student loans, right? And they're all pissed off about the Supreme Court not allowing Biden to do that unilaterally. And by fiat, exactly. And this is a ruling that you really got to step back and think about this, because if the president has such power to sort of change policy by himself without having to go through Congress, that's obviously something that's much more dangerous in the hands of a Trump or a Trump wannabe, maybe than the current president. You got to think ahead. You got to think of what are the rules. So it's not just about whether people get relief on the student loans. I mean, Joe Biden could go to Congress and get them to pass that, and the Supreme Court

would be fine with it. It is about runaway executive power, and it's good that the Supreme Court stands in the way of that. So here's the failure of imagination sometimes, because I do think, and this is a longstanding conservative insight, which is one of the reasons why we want to restrain the power of government is you need to imagine what might happen if it is in the wrong hands, right? We don't allow absolute power because absolute power corrupts. And imagine if you concede the point that the president has this kind of sweeping unilateral power,

what might a Donald Trump do with that? What would a president Ron DeSantis do with that? If the government can, in fact, compel speech, what do you think that Ron DeSantis might do with those powers? We talk a lot about the need to defend liberalism against illiberalism, and these are small L things. There is a great deal of illiberalism out there. I have a very, very unpopular opinion here, probably for this audience, that while this was a very conservative court, they were surprisingly liberal in some of their judgments in terms of restraining government power, coming out in favor of religious freedom, free speech, limiting the power of government to tell people what to do in a variety of circumstances. Now, again, leaving aside the, you know, the Dobbs decision,

which was set that aside for the moment, I'm going to get killed for that, right? Because I can actually hear people going, what do you mean, Charlie, you set aside the Dobbs decision? It was the most important decision. Okay. Conceded, but there are elements here of, of a kind of, of a classical liberal approach to some of this that I think gets obscured when we look at the, you know, the fulminations of, of the Sam Alito. By the way, I do not believe that Sam Alito was a small L liberal, and I don't believe that Clarence Thomas is a small L liberal, but there is a strain of liberalism on this court. Okay, we've beaten this to death, right? Yeah, okay, but let me defend you on Dobbs for a minute, because I know you're going to take grief for this. I am pro-choice,

all right? So I favor pro-choice policies. I don't have a huge problem with the Dobbs decision. And here's why, because the Dobbs decision said every state, you can pass your own abortion laws. It didn't say there's a right to life in the constitution and you can't pass any laws. You can go right now, you know, in my state of Maryland or any, any other state, you have to fight in the legislature. You may be unhappy about having to defend it, but you can elect a governor and legislators who will establish pro-choice policies as we have in my state, right? And that's going to be difficult in some states, but the Supreme Court didn't decide this issue for you. It said, you can't. I have a much bigger problem, Charlie, with the guns case and others like that, where

the Supreme Court says, we believe there's a right to bear arms for individually in the constitution. And therefore New York state can't pass laws a right to bear arms individually in the Constitution, and therefore New York State can't pass laws. No matter who you elect in New York, we won't let you pass these restrictions on guns. That's the Supreme Court violating, in my view, the principle of judicial restraint that conservatives advocate, right? If they're going to stick to judicial restraint, if they're going to let us make our laws, I'm okay with that. So let's switch back to presidential politics for a moment.

Ron DeSantis. I'm sorry that I'm, it takes kind of a morbid fascination in watching the implosion of this campaign, but the latest report we're getting out of NBC News is that there is a DeSantis reboot, that they're planning to shake up the campaign as they struggle to close the gap with Trump. So again, this is from NBC News. Expect fewer big speeches, more handshaking in diners and churches. Okay, wait, when you're running for president, you can't just do a lot of retail politics. And he's terrible at that. Okay, that's number one. Number two, there will be more of a national focus than constant Florida references. Okay, duh. And the mainstream media may start to get more access. Yeah. In short, DeSantis will be running as an insurgent candidate rather than as an incumbent governor,

whatever. Campaign's morale's terrible. Donors are pushing for change. Poll numbers are stagnant. Rival presidential candidates smell blood. Downright low is how a source who was present when staffers were fired described morale these days. The entire campaign is on the brink. I've never seen anything like this. And here's Ron DeSantis. Now, we have this clip where he's talking about Bud Light. I assume he's on Fox News or something. And so here's the new retooled Ron DeSantis or something on television saying that his next big initiative is that he's going to launch an investigation of Bud Light because they had an ad that used a transgender influencer. So he's going to use the power of the state to investigate. Okay, let's just listen to this. We believe that when you take your eye off the ball like that, you're not following your

fiduciary duty to do the best you can for your shareholders. So we're going to be launching an inquiry about Bud Light and InBev. And it could be something that leads to a derivative lawsuit filed on behalf of the shareholders of the Florida Pension Fund, because at the end of the day, there's got to be penalties for when you put business aside to focus on your social agenda at the expense of hardworking people. It must be exhausting to be him. This woke, woke, woke, woke stuff. I mean, you know, he does remind me, and I'm going to regret this too, he's reminding me of the whole Scott Walker campaign, where, you know, Scott Walker looked like, hey, here's a new fresh face me and then i'm gonna regret this too he's reminding me of the whole scott walker campaign

where you know scott walker looked like hey here's a new fresh face and everything and then you realize wait he's got this one thing he's got the one shtick and he keeps going back to the one shtick over and over and over again and desantis is just like stuck on the woke and like i'm gonna go after disney and i'm gonna go after Light. And because there has to be penalties and punishment for a private company doing something that I don't like. I mean, really? And we're supposed to believe that. Rich Lowry assured me once that, well, he's a he's a traditional Republican. I mean, how can you object to Ron DeSantis?

Isn't he being conventionally. No, I am old enough to remember when conservative Republicans did not think that it was the job of government to enforce political correctness on the part of private companies. Yeah. Okay. So one of the things that's been going on in the Trump years is the complete falsification of everything the Republican Party claimed to stand for, right? You could run through the list, right? Strong foreign policy, limited government, family values, et cetera. First of all, let me start with this word penalties. Ron DeSantis says there needs to be penalties for a company not doing what is in the interest of its business and its shareholders. You know what the penalty is in a free market? The company fails. That's the penalty. The state doesn't come in and impose a penalty.

Or you don't buy the damn product. Or you don't invest in it. You sell your stock. I'm sorry, go on. Yeah, yeah. So that's what a party that actually believed in free markets would do, right? But the Republican Party no longer believes in that. So we're going to use the power of the state.

What does he say? We're going to have a lawsuit, right? We're going to like, and by the way, by the way, let me back up here. This is a two-stage process. DeSantis is saying that Anheuser-Busch's stock is down, that they're suffering business-wise, and that that's irresponsible on their part. And so the state has to take action against them. Who caused this, right? DeSantis and the other politicians who are out there promoting boycotts of Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch products, right? First, they advocate private action, which is legit. You can do that in a free market. But then to come in after you did that and claim that the company having suffered financially from what you did is somehow that they should be sued. I'm sitting here, Charlie,

holding the actual letter. DeSantis posted this letter to Twitter this morning, his letter to the state board of administration. Of course, to Twitter. This is to the, I guess, the guy who runs the pension fund. And he's talking about how we need to have shareholder action. We need to have a lawsuit. The governor of the state of Florida has no business getting into what a private company is doing here. And he's doing it because he doesn't like their social agenda. And it is outrageous that he and other Republicans complain about socialism while these Republicans are using the power of the state to hurt companies. Well, let's turn this around the conversation we had about the Supreme Court for Republican

listeners. Can you imagine if it was who was Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders who was doing this to attack a private company because they were not towing some ideological line. Once you establish the principle, you know, the government has the right and the power to penalize companies for speech they don't like. Well, you know, does anybody think that's only going to go one way? Do you honestly believe all of that? And of course, he's made it very clear what he thinks of the government's powers to go after a company like Disney. So, you know, in terms of rebooting his campaign, I mean, I would think the major reboot would have to be get the fuck off Twitter. Stop thinking that

Twitter is real life. And also at some point, you're going to have to grow a backbone in dealing with Donald Trump. I mean, this is one of those things. I mean, what is Ron DeSantis' theory of the case of how he beats Donald Trump? I mean, so this third big indictment is coming down. He is joining the chorus of people saying, no, no, no, we shouldn't. We shouldn't hold him accountable for January 6th. Because what? Because Ron DeSantis believes that there's a magical unicorn that's going to come down from the sky and is going to take out Donald Trump for him and that he does not need to do or say anything about all of this.

Now, maybe he's right. Maybe he understands there's no path to this nomination without appearing, at least, to be a Trump enabler. But it's a weird look for somebody who is running as I am the tough fighter. And yet the guy just completely caves. And what did you think of his interview the other night? I know you did a live stream after his interview with Jake Tapper. You know, I just saw some excerpts. I'm sure you saw the whole thing, but he just seemed weak and low energy, but that's just me. What did you think? First of all, let me just start with this reboot. The idea that he's going to give fewer speeches and he's going to get on, do more handshaking, more retail politicking. Have the people who came up with this reboot plan, I have a question, Charlie,

have they met Ron DeSantis? Have they seen any video of Ron DeSantis trying to interact with human beings? It's not pretty. He doesn't. And this is a huge problem because you can do a lot of things to fix a campaign. You can change strategies. You can move money around. You can move resources and that kind of thing. You can't change the candidate. This is the guy. I think all the way back to, you know, 2000 when the Republicans ran George W. Bush, why did they run him? Because people liked him. He was just a likable guy. Even if he just said the same things other people said. Ron DeSantis is the opposite.

You send Ron DeSantis out as your front man. And people are just not gravitating to that. So they can't change that. And I don't think the reboot is going to work. But to your point about the weakness, I agree that in the interview with Tapper and in other formats, DeSantis just comes across as weak. And this is what Chris Christie understands. Christie understands that if you're going to be campaigning for the big alpha job of president of the United States, you have to be an alpha. You have to stand up to the current alpha,

which is Trump. DeSantis' idea seems to be, I'm going to be a mouse about Trump and the Trumpists. I'm going to not take him on. Meanwhile, I'm going to pretend that I'm tough because I'm fighting, you know, transgender people and Anheuser-Busch and Disney. And there's some audience for that. But in America as a whole, if you will not be strong within the primary, and if you will not be strong against the big threats, which is Trump in this country or in the Republican Party against Putin overseas, if you will not be strong about those things, no one is going to take you seriously as president. So speaking of this, I actually have been waiting to have somebody debunk the latest DeSantis story because, again, being naive, I keep thinking this can't be right. I mean,

this can't be real. But here's the NBC report about the latest DeSantis educational reform. You probably heard about this. Florida's public schools will now teach students that some black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills. Part of new African-American history standards approved Wednesday that were blasted by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The Florida State Board of Education's new standards includes controversial language about how, quote, slaves develop skills which in some instances could be applied for their personal benefit. According to a 216 page document about the state's 2023 standards and social studies posted by the Florida Department of Education. Other language that has drawn the ire of some education advocates includes teaching about how Black people were also perpetrators of violence during race massacres. The language says,

instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans, but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta race riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. race riot, 1921 Tulsa massacre, and the 1923 Rosewood massacre. I mean, what? I've heard the defense from the DeSantis people on this, which is the active word there was in that phrase. It was that the slaves developed the skills, that it wasn't the people who, the masters, the oppressors who did this for them. It was the slaves who found the ability, you know, Charlie, I'm sorry, but this is just not going to cut it because look, I'm Jewish. Okay. I can't speak for black Americans, but I can speak for Jews. I am sure that you can, you know, construct a whole curriculum about useful skills that Jews learned in the concentration camps,

right? But that's really not the point of teaching about the Holocaust. Ditto for slaves under slavery. So- Life hacks from Auschwitz. Why are you laughing? I just hate myself. That's all right. But I mean, this is, you're right. It's absurd on the face of it. But the fact that Ron DeSantis somehow thinks that this was going to slingshot him to the presidency. Okay. Speaking of the presidency, I think, and I know that there's an ongoing debate about whether or not we should, you know, pay more attention to Donald Trump or ignore Donald Trump, you know, not give him any air. Look, I mean, the reality is you cannot ignore Donald

Trump, but I do think it's worthwhile paying attention to some of the things he said. And you, Will, flag something very interesting. He appeared on a talk radio show in Iowa. This was the radio show where he actually talked about how dangerous it would be for Jack Smith to try to, you know, hold him accountable. So he had the really overt threat of violence and danger, which we talked about on yesterday's Trump trials podcast. But there was also this little exchange about a crime that took place. And let's just play the question and the answer and then point out what was really going

on here. Let's play that. We have about three and a half minutes left. The final question, sort of based on this whole thing, is that had two teenage boys who were uh committed to jail for life for the murder of their spanish teacher because they didn't like the grades that they got this happened here within the past year and they just were sentenced um is the is the government part of the problem or part of the solution is trying to create a civil society at this point? Because it just seems so uncivil with this generation. Well, I think we're letting people in here that in many cases aren't civil. You know, you have millions of people coming into our country, far more than they say.

You know, they always like to say three or four million. They used to say one million. Now they say three or four. But it's much more, probably double and could even be triple that. And you're allowing millions of people to pour into our country from prisons and from mental institutions. And it's a very big problem. So certainly our government has caused that problem. Will? Okay. So clearly the host, he mentioned that the kids were sentenced for the murder of their

Spanish teacher. So Trump heard the word Spanish. That was the only word he heard, I think. That is the only word he heard. And he starts going off about how we're letting all these Latin American immigrants into our country. He thinks this is an illegal immigrant murder because he heard the word Spanish in the context of a Spanish class, right? Here's the names of these two kids, okay? Willard Miller and Jeremy Goodale, okay? These are Anglos. These are white kids, right? They killed their Spanish teacher. They're not Mexican rapists. They're not the people they're sending their words. These are not illegal immigrants, right? They're not. They're not at all. And this is the way Donald Trump thinks. He's got a shtick that all crime is committed by,

you know, it is just classic Trump think. And it really makes you wonder what is going on in the mind of this guy. The host didn't call him out for it. I don't have to wonder. I know what's going on inside the mind of this guy. I don't think there's any mystery here, Will. So it's just unbelievable to me. And this just gets a total whiff. I haven't seen any coverage of this. I mean, as you point out, Charlie, in the same interview, Trump sort of threatens America, right? There will be a violent backlash if Jack Smith goes after him. So that's the headline. But Trump commits so many of these unbelievable moral, these outrages that you can't keep track of them. And this one sort of slid under the radar while we were paying attention to the other one. Speaking of sliding under the radar, and I make a brief reference to it, I'm going to write about it a little bit more

over the weekend, I think, the most undercovered story of the week. Okay. And again, you know, thinking about all the stuff that's been going on here. Okay, step back. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled in a written opinion that Donald Trump was a rapist. Okay, he wrote, this is Judge Lewis Kaplan. This is an E. Jean Carroll case. The finding that E. Jean Carroll failed to prove that she was raped within the meeting of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump raped her, as many people commonly understand the word rape. He rejected Trump's bid for a new trial, and the judge explained that New York's legal definition of the term is far narrower than the word rape is understood in common modern parlance. He said, indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, and he goes through in great detail,

the jury found that Mr. Trump, in fact, did exactly that. He raped her. Again, he's very blunt. Trump's attempt to minimize the sexual abuse finding, as perhaps resting on nothing more than groping of Miss Carol's breasts through her clothing, is frivolous. In fact, he said, the jury's finding of sexual abuse, quote, necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina. locker room talk. This is actual sexual assault committed by one of the most powerful men in America. And it wasn't even nearly the top news story of the day. I mean, it's just like another data point in how deranged our political moment is. It's sort of like, it's Friday, this happened on Wednesday, and it's like, I kind of forgot about this. So this goes back to what we were talking about. I mean, a rational political party might think that it's unwise to place its fate in the hands of a criminal narcissist and rapist, right? This is not good. It's not that long ago that even talking about

rape in inappropriate ways was enough to get Republicans to throw you overboard. Remember Todd Akin, who ran for Senate in Missouri, talked about legitimate rape in terms of abortion. He was done. His political career was over. You had a Senate candidate in Indiana who said something stupid about rape. Again, his political career was over. If you transported somebody from 2015 to this moment and said, what would you think, in fact, if a court found that Donald Trump had actually raped a woman, leaving aside the espionage, the fraud, the obstruction, the conspiracy charges. And if they looked around and saw

the Republican Party is going, yeah, we're completely okay. We're going to nominate this guy for president again. You would think that you had gone through the looking glass because you have. I mean, this is how insane it is that this happened this week, and it is not a big story at all. I have to point out that remember when Republicans thought it was outrageous that Bill Clinton hedged on the definition of sex, right? Like the oral sex wasn't sex. And everybody said, of course it is, right? But apparently now for Republicans, it's okay to hedge on the definition of rape. Yeah. The charge here was that I believe factually the jury held that he did digitally penetrate her. So it is strictly a legal technicality,

whether in New York State that qualifies as rape or not. Everybody conventionally would understand it that way. But to your larger point, Charlie, this is what happens when you bet your whole political party on such a vile human being. He commits the first offense and you say, oh, that's okay. And then you get another one and another one. So Donald Trump has just been testing them like a book of the Bible practically. How about if I stage a coup? No, no. Okay. That's okay. Right? Okay. How about if I take classified documents with me when I leave and I wave around an Iran war plan in front front of people, oh, no, no, like that's okay. They're just going after you for nothing, right?

How about if I stick my fingers in a woman against her will? You know, it's just – and they just keep going with this. And, Charlie, I just don't see where they're going to stop. No, they can't. At a certain point, you have the sunken cost, right? I mean, you've gone along with everything. Why would you stop now, right? I mean, once you basically watched him shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, you know, what are you going to do when it turns out that he's doing all these other things? I mean, this is part of the problem when you sell that much of your soul for this guy. And I don't see how they come back from it. Although, again, going back to the beginning of our conversation, there are obviously other people who are watching this in the room. And I know that we spend all this time talking about, well, what's going on with the Republican base and what

are Republicans going to do? At a certain point, we also had asked, you know, what are the 63% of Americans going to do who look at Donald Trump and say, yeah, this is not a good person. This is not somebody we approve of because we are talking about a very substantial majority. I think it ought to be more substantial, of Americans that look at the guy and are sick of it and are tired of it. And we can keep talking about the Trump base and the two-time Trump voters, you know, until our heads explode. But we have to realize that they are a minority. And I think they're a shrinking minority.

And that's worthwhile. OK, so in the time we have left, I wanted to get your take on the RFK hearing. And again, let's leave aside RFK because he's such an attention whore, you know, conspiracy theorist who really, I thought, beclowned himself. It was a thorough embarrassment for himself, for his family, and frankly, for Republicans that decided to platform him yesterday. But the context is interesting because there was all of this whining about censorship and why people are trying to silence people. And this has become kind of this new thing that any sort of criticism or like correction or reality check somehow is censored.

Can we just play a little bit of this montage from the hearing? This is from the congressional hearing where you have members of Congress who are just throwing out, you know, charges of censorship almost just at random. Let's play at least like the first 30 seconds of this. Encourages blacks not to get adequate medical care is just completely abhorrent. If it's the witness's time, do not censor the witness. I'm not censoring the witness. I'm not censoring the witness. He's still talking. It is the it's my time and I've given it to the witness. Do not censor him. I'm not censoring the witness. I'm not censoring the witness. He's still talking. It is my time and I've given it to the witness. Do not censor him.

I'm not censoring him. Gently consider point of order. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I just missed two votes on the House floor because we were not given them. We did not recess on time. I think many of my colleagues are probably in this. Properly stated point of order. And then she goes on to say that she was being censored.

So, Will, what is this? I mean, it feels as if this is a word that no longer means what they seem to think it means. We just have tremendous snowflakery in this country about censorship. People whining. They're standing on a giant platform. This is a congressional hearing, right? They've called RFK in. They've called these other witnesses who are crying censorship.

Now, they're all testifying on live TV in front of everybody. Congresswoman Plaskett is, you know, having an argument. She's, and, you know, stop censoring the witness. Stop censoring the witness. It's, they're not being censored. There's a conversation going on. You can argue about points of order and whatnot. But, like, we've just lost all our bearings, Charlie, on what censorship means. And this is a huge problem on the right. So it used to be the left that had

this sort of victim culture, you know, where I'm an oppressed minority, and they're squelching me, and you're silencing a woman and all this stuff. And what's happened is that the right has adopted the same habits, right, and for their various annoying conspiracy theories. And if you so much as put a label on something on social media to say, this is a ridiculous conspiracy theory about vaccines, suddenly they throw up their hands and cry censorship. You argue with a witness in a hearing, censorship. So, you know, I just think we need to get our bearings back. I think that this is this ubiquitousness of folks claiming that they are victims. I mean, it's become that joke where people go on Fox News or they have

bestselling books and they're complaining about how they've been completely silenced. They are silencing me. Buy my book before it is taken off. Watch this YouTube video before they don't want you to hear this, which you're hearing right now. You're on a network that is being broadcast to millions of Americans, and you're complaining that you are not allowed to speak. No, I think at some point, people are saying to RFK, what you're saying is complete bullshit. It is dangerous. It is anti-Semitic. It is racist. It is anti-scientific. You're trying to silence me. No, we're basically trying to say you're full of shit. That's a different thing, right?

Yeah, right. Yeah. So let's restore the idea of saying people are full of shit. That's fine. And one thing we didn't get to with that, and just to illustrate this, so that scene where they're arguing about censorship, that happens on the earlier side of the hearing. And then it just keeps happening with other versions of it. And later on, there's a Democratic congresswoman who accuses Jim Jordan of censoring her because he didn't adjourn the hearing quickly enough for her to get to a couple. You're censoring the votes of my constituents. So everybody's got this censorship idea in their brain. Okay, so this weekend, you're going to go see the Oppenheimer movie or Barbie?

I'm going to see Oppenheimer. What about you? Well, I don't know. Well, I'll get to it this weekend, but I'm definitely going to see Oppenheimer. I'm probably going to go see the Barbie movie too. Seriously. Give me the case for the Barbie movie. You look at the writers, you look at the directors, some of the reviews.

I think it's going to be smarter than I think I would have initially suspected, but the Oppenheimer movie just sounds like it is magnificent. I mean, I've been reading a lot of the reviews, and I'm always skeptical. I go into this thinking, you know, is this one movie where people are telling me I should like this? No, I should

like this. It's like eating your spinach. You never understand because I actually like spinach. When did people get this idea that eating spinach was like making. You never understand because I actually like spinach. We need people get this idea that eating spinach was like making you do something terrible. I mean, spinach is good. Okay. I like broccoli too. Okay. You're into tomatoes. I don't mock you for eating tomatoes. I like broccoli and those sorts of things. Can I just speak for all the people who, look, we eat our spinach and we eat our broccoli. We do. We do. But we eat it because it's good for us, not because it tastes great.

I actually like any, in any case, it looks like Oppenheimer is a great movie. Okay. What I'm planning on doing is I have the book, you know, American Prometheus. I think I'm going to try to read it before I even see the movie. Will that spoil it for me? Do you think? I'll be the guy in the theater. Well, actually, this didn't happen

in this particular way. And so, Charlie, you are a better man than I am because my attitude about the book is, oh, the movie's out, so I don't need to read the book. I can just watch the movie. So in terms of the, you know, reading the book or watching the movie,

I'm really looking, you know, forward to the new movie, you know, Killers of the Flower Moon, but because I read the book and the book was absolutely fascinating. This is about the, the murder of the Native Americans in Oklahoma. It's in one of the best nonfiction books that I've read this year. So I think I'm probably going to enjoy the movie more, but to your point, I'm still going to read the Oppenheimer book. That's the way I roll. And then I'll try really hard not to bore people by telling people about, you know,

but actually this is what really happened. This is why I would never get invited to parties. In any case, good talking with you. And we are very, very much looking forward to the next episode of your podcast series on Lindsey Graham. What do we have scheduled for Monday? We're up to 2019 in the history of Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump, which means that we've gone from Lindsey Graham calling out Donald Trump for being a terrible person and a danger to the country, to Lindsey Graham rationalizing Donald Trump's various abuses of power, firing the FBI director and so forth, to Lindsey Graham becoming an absolute zealot in his hatred of Democrats. And therefore, that is what allowed him and other

Republicans to basically go all in on Trump, no matter what Trump did. It's one of the great evils and dangers of our time. And this series highlights it. You've done such a masterful job of putting this together. And of course, you know, readers of the Bulwark know that this was a very lengthy article. It was a book that you can buy on Amazon. But you and our brilliant sound engineer, Jason, have put together a really compelling story of what happened with Lindsey Graham. And I have to tell you that the reaction we're getting is just completely off the charts for this. So if you have not listened yet to the Monday Bulwark podcast with Will Salatin, I strongly, strongly recommend it. So Will, good talking with you.

Have a great weekend. We'll talk again soon. Thanks, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back next week and we will do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.