The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: Gelded by the Nutcase Caucus

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Last Tuesday destroyed Kevin McCarthy — he will be either defeated or humiliated. Meanwhile, Republicans may be figuring out that Trump is electoral poison, and they can't win with him or without him. Will Saletan is back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Happy Monday and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes, joined by my colleague, Will Salatan. Happy Monday, Will. Thank you, Charlie, and it is a happy Monday.

It has been so long. I feel like there's so much that has happened since we've done this podcast. Certainly a lot has happened since you and I did the podcast last Monday. So what was the most surprising thing that happened in the last seven days? Okay, go. The election turned out better than I expected. So look, Charlie, I am a weird person. I am an optimist, as you know. I'm a Pollyanna.

I always think things will turn out better than they actually will. And this is the first election I can remember where I way, way underestimated how things would go. So I am discovering what it is like to be, I guess, like you, to be a pessimist and to be pleasantly surprised. I am just baffled by this universe we're living in, in which Democrats did much better in the election than I expect. So what was this election about? I mean, I'm making a short list of things that I think are pretty clear. Rejection of extremism, a rejection of election denialism. It was also about abortion. It was also about Donald Trump. Ultimately, voters were pissed off about inflation. They're concerned about a lot of things, crime. But when it came right down to it,

they decided they were more scared of Republicans, weren't they? Yeah, I do not have a simple answer for you, except I think that there were some negative forces interacting here. And I think that there was like one layer that the Republican party, that the Republican leadership understood, which was that voters were unhappy with the conditions of the economy, with the direction of the country was going in with some Biden policies. And so that was real, that actually happened. And then there was this other layer of, we don't like that stuff, but we don't like these crazy people on the right either. And we're not going to vote for them or enough people decided they weren't going to vote for them.

And I think that second layer is what's baffling to the Republican Party as it's trying to sort out what happened in this election. But I think that accounts for the difference. They're going to be doing a lot of sorting out for some time because it's very clear that they haven't really figured out what happened. And so they're engaging in what most political parties engage in after they've had a surprising loss, which is finger pointing, blame casting, excuse making. I had some hot takes this morning. We can come back to them maybe a little bit later. But my hot takes to start off your week, I think whatever happens with the House, and I think it looks like the Republicans are going to, you know, will take control by, you know,

one, two, three, four seats. Whatever happens, last Tuesday destroyed Kevin McCarthy. I mean, it's just a matter of playing it out. If they win, assuming that they win, it's going to be a narrow dysfunctional majority. So he's either going to be defeated or humiliated. And whichever option he chooses, he'll do it in the most dishonorable way possible.

It's hard for me to see how Kevin McCarthy achieves his dream of being a speaker who actually still has his testicles intact. Maybe that wasn't his dream, but I just, I just don't see how it happens. I agree with you. I don't think there is a scenario in which Kevin McCarthy controls the house of representatives, right? Yeah. So, so totally agree with you there. And it's almost like, I mean, I'm sorry for the rest of us, but for Kevin McCarthy, if God looked down on Kevin McCarthy and said, what is the worst thing I can do to this guy?

It is, I'm going to give him his wish that he's always wanted of having the official power over the House of Representatives. He'll get to call his speaker and I'll make it hell for him. I'll make it absolute torture every day because in fact, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and those types will actually be running the House. Yeah. I mean, he's going to be gelded by the nutcase caucus and until the point where he draws a line, if he ever does draw a line, in which case he's going to be gelded by the nutcase caucus. And until the point where he draws a line, if he ever does draw a line, in which case he's going to be declared a cuck and a rhino and tossed out. At the same time, one of my other hot takes, I'm kind of just throwing this up against the wall at the moment, is that Donald Trump is once again destroying the Republican

bench. It really strikes me looking at the the results of last week, how strong suddenly the Democratic bench looks, whether you're talking about, you know, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Mayor Pete obviously has been around, you know, the new governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania, Jared Polis from Colorado. The Democrats have a kind of a robust next generation base. At the same time, one of the things that Trump is doing is he's destroying his own party's bench in two ways. One, by overtly going out and I'm going to destroy Ron DeSantis, I'm going to destroy Glenn Youngkin. And number two, though, saying if I don't destroy you, you're going to have to, you know, bend over and, you know, kiss the ring and embrace these electorally fatal election lies and extremist policies as the price of his favor. So he really is, you know, just hanging on this party. And we can talk about, you know,

whether he's going anywhere. But in terms of the benches, I think this was one of the problems that the Democrats had. They didn't have a bench. I think they have a bench right now. And I'm having a hard time seeing the Republican bench out there at the moment. What do you think? I agree with that. And I think there are some structural reasons for it. Let me say, first of all, this whole thing where Trump goes after, tries to destroy any Republican who could be a threat to him, who might emerge as a, as a future star, i.e. you know, the bench, the higher level of the bench. This just reminds me so much of a Greek myth. So is it Kronos who eats his children? I can't remember. Yeah, I think so. But anyway, the, the prototype, the myth is the guy who like

kills his children, eats his children, whatever. And then the, the, the mother has to somehow save the children from him. But the, I think I don't, I, I need to get some Greek mythology lessons, but if you are one of the surviving offspring, if you don't get it, you need to kill this guy before he kills all of the other kids. Right? So DeSantis or somebody else somehow needs to emerge to stop Trump from doing this. Or somehow there has to be some gang attack. Because I thoroughly agree, Trump is a narcissist who he will try to extinguish any threat to him from within the Republican Party. And he doesn't carry who he hurts. He's basically saying, look, it's either me or I burn down the house. I mean, that's the asymmetric threat.

The Republican Party can't destroy Donald Trump, but Donald Trump can very easily destroy the party. He's there to do it. He said, I don't care who I attack, what career I destroy. I don't care what damage I cause because it's all about me. And he's taken the measure of Republicans and known that they have caved into that threat for the last six years. And he's thinking, why should we expect them not to cave in again? And I'm not sure he's wrong. Well, Republican cowardice is actually a huge lesson from this election, and it will determine the future of this. I'm reminded of, was it Winsome Sears, the lieutenant governor of Virginia,

who said, you know, Trump, you know, he sort of needs to step aside. She says a true leader understands when he's become a liability. Duh. And the fact that this guy doesn't understand when he's become a liability, actually, as you're pointing out, doesn't care that he's become a liability. It tells you that he is not a true leader, right? He is, he is not someone who is trying to build a party, trying to build a movement. He's trying to consume it and make it somehow fuel his own ambitions. But we should talk about what you just said about the cowardice of the party, because I think that's where this party's going. Again, it's also that calculation that he's got 30 percent of the Republican base. And if he decides to take his ball and go home, they're screwed. And so they're in this position

where they're now realizing after last Tuesday, they cannot win with him, but they also are afraid that they can't win without him. And I'm sorry, I'm gonna restrain the sympathy here because this is the political prison of their own making. I mean, how many decisions led up to this fact that in many ways they're stuck with him? Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate had multiple opportunities to rid themselves of this guy.

They had all of these off ramps. They didn't take it. And they always rationalized each kind of, you know, humoring or rationalization. And now they're looking around going, this guy is electoral freaking poison. And yet we have made ourselves hostage to him. Yeah, they did make a calculation. So let's go back to after January 6th. So they're presented with this opportunity in the impeachment to get rid of Trump, to make at least make it impossible for him to be president again.

But he still controlled the base or, as you're pointing out, a section of the base, right? And so they were essentially hostage to him. And the logic that a lot of Republicans, Republican leaders, elected Republicans, expressed at that time about standing by Trump was that they couldn't win without him. They could not win without him. And not enough attention was paid to the other side of the question. Could they win with him? And so we're beginning to send a message through subsequent cycles, subsequent elections. You can't win with this guy. And honestly, Charlie, when you're dealing with cowards, that is the only

way to get it through to them. They're only thinking about themselves. So you have to make it a losing proposition for them to stand by the authoritarian. Okay. So let's go through some of the audio from the weekend. We are now getting the first glimpses of Mike Pence's new book. You rolled it out in an exclusive interview on ABC. And I want to play a clip. And just so people don't think that their device is malfunctioning, I think the most extraordinary thing about this clip is the pause. I think it goes on for 10 seconds after Mike Pence is asked a pretty good question by ABC's David Muir. Let's play it. In the middle of it all, you can see that the president has tweeted. 2.24 p.m., the president tweets, Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done.

Pence just sits there. Pause. It angered me. But I turned to my daughter who was standing nearby, and I said, it doesn't take courage to break the law. It takes courage to uphold the law. I mean, the president's words were reckless. It was clear he decided to be part of the problem. Okay, well, that's quite a moment, with the former vice president just sits there

for 10 seconds, says nothing. He's calculating, do I finally just say, yeah, I was angry about that? The guy put my life at risk, my family's life at risk. Okay, he is saying these things. I wish he would have said it earlier. I wish he would have said it under oath to the January 6th committee.

But Pence is like working through some stuff, isn't he? He is. I don't know what kind of therapy that you're supposed to go into when your boss tries to have you killed. But he's clearly been in it. And I'm glad he's working his way through it. I do think that in addition to the pause, there are two really salient things that he said there. One is he used the phrase break the law, right? He says to his, he said, he told his daughter, it doesn't take courage to

break the law. Is he just talking about the crowd there? Because the context was what Trump tweeted, right? He was not asked about the crowd. He was asked about Trump and he talked about breaking the law. So let's just pencil that first as a hint that he understands that Trump broke the law. The other thing is he used the word decided. He said that Trump decided to be part of the problem. Now, the problem, as Muir is pointing out, is a physical violent assault on the Capitol of the United States. And if there's one thing that the January 6th committee established beyond any question, it is that during the attack, Trump was told what was going on. He was watching what was going on and he refused to intervene.

That is a deliberate decision. And when Pence uses the word decided, he is affirming that this was not Trump just not knowing what was going on, not Trump looking the other way. It was Trump making an affirmative decision to do something that, as Pence himself says, broke the law. Well, it's interesting, you know, in the last week, you know, watching the number of conservatives and Republicans who've been willing to distance themselves from Trump. Of course, we had the Murdoch newspapers or we have, you know, some of the folks on Fox News beginning to push back this sense of, yes, it's time to turn the page. Look, none of this has anything to do with principle or conscience or revival of courage. It's just the way that an electoral defeat and the prospect of losing power can marvelously focus the mind,

right, Will? So I guess the question is whether this makes a difference. Let's play a little bit more of the sound. This is outgoing Maryland Republican Governor Larry Hogan, who has been a pretty consistent Trump critic talking about three strikes and you're out. That maybe this is the 186th opportunity for Republicans to break away from Donald Trump. Let's play that. I think it's it's basically the third election in a row that Donald Trump has cost us the race. And it's like, you know, three strikes, you're out. Well, do you think that's true? Because we've heard that after one strike and two strikes to keep your analogy going. Well, you know, that's a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. And Donald Trump kept saying, we're going to be winning so much, we'll get tired of winning. I'm tired of losing. I mean,

that's all he's done. And of course, there's a lot of that out there. And again, we've seen this over and over again, haven't we? I mean, they didn't break with him after Charlottesville. They didn't break with him after the insurrection. They didn't break with him after Helsinki. And yet hope springs eternal. Can I just wallow in one particular moment here? Wallow away. Go ahead. Look, it feels redundant to comment on how juvenile, inane and offensive Donald Trump is. But, you know, during his ketchup splattering on the wall tantrum at Mar-a-Lago after he, you know, ranted, you know, his 86 part attack on Ron DeSantis, he took a break to lash out at Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin,

who apparently has been insufficiently deferential to him. I don't know what he said to trigger this, but he puts out a statement in which he says, Youngkin sounds Chinese, doesn't it? Here's Youngkin. He breaks into it. Now that's an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn't it? And then he basically claims credit for getting him elected. Who writes shit like this? I mean, seriously. What grown ass man says something that juvenile and inane who thinks that's funny or clever. And yet it's become kind of routine. And Larry Hogan was asked about this. Now, Larry Hogan's wife is Korean. So Dana Bash on CNN yesterday asked Larry Hogan about this particular, you know, brilliant jab from the

former president. Well, it was definitely distasteful and inappropriate, not only because I don't think my friend Glenn Youngkin deserved to be attacked like that, but it was also, I mean, it's Asian hate against a white governor, you know, and making fun of Asians. And he didn't even have his nationalities right because Youngkin would be Korean as opposed to Chinese. But it's just more of the same from Donald Trump, insults and attacks. And that's one of the reasons why the party's in such bad shape. Is it racist? It is racist.

Well, you know why Hogan said it was racist, Will? Why? Because it was. It is racist. Well, you know why Hogan said it was racist, Will? Why? Because it was. It's so ridiculous. I mean, you know, part of the problem is you focus on the stupid or the racist. But, you know, the fact that there he is sitting there in brooding exile in Mar-a-Lago and he goes, you know, Glenn Youngkin, what do I say about him? Youngkin. Sounds Chinese.

I mean, this is the kind of thing the writers of Beavis and Butthead would have thrown on the floor because they thought it was too stupid. Yeah, obviously it's puerile. This is a juvenile thing that Trump does, but it's not just that, right? As you're pointing out, this is just outright racism. This is just outright bigotry. This isn't critical race theory. This isn't some like debate about quotas and which way they cut and all that stuff. This is just using the

ethnicity of people against them. Trump has done it to Mexican Americans. He did it to Gonzalo Curiel, a federal judge. He's gone after Muslims. He's gone after black people. He's gone after Obama with, you know, he's really a kenyan and this is the second time in the last what two months that he's done it to asian americans right he did that he went after mish mcconnell's wife elaine chow who was donald trump's transportation secretary never mind that calling her coco chow a china loving wife so this is this is a total pattern with donald trump and the fact that we hear crickets, crickets from the Republican elite, crickets from so-called Republican leaders about this overt racism tells you about the depth of their cowardice, the depth of their indifference, and the danger that the Republican Party poses to every minority in this country if they will not stand up for you when this man goes after you. Well, this is an interesting point.

And I've commented on this a couple of times on television. I mean, I was really struck in the weeks running up to the election, the way in which Republicans had really internalized the idea, really convinced themselves that nothing mattered, that there would be absolutely no consequences for any of this stuff.

There would be no consequences for making a punchline about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband. No consequences for pushing big lies about elections or election denialism. No pushback against Coco Chow or Trump's anti-Semitic rant because they figured the wind was at our back. We're going to win. So it doesn't matter. We will never be held accountable for all of this.

And now there is this, you can see them looking at each other going, shit, you know, that kind of extremist rhetoric came back and bit us. That kind of stuff, you know, maybe suddenly their understanding that maybe the rules of politics that they thought had been repealed are reasserting themselves, that gravity's a thing. You know what I mean? Just that this stuff, they will pay a price for this kind of stuff.

Yeah, and the Paul Pelosi episode, which was what, two weeks ago? I can't even remember. It's not that long ago. Also, you know, that sort of drove home the unseriousness. I mean, I can't tell you how many people who I thought were reasonable people on the right were just joking about a hammer attack, that this is some secret gay lover thing. And I don't see any retractions. And they seem to

just sort of brush this off. I think there's a sickness going around where people, some of these folks just can no longer tell the difference between something that is serious and something that is a joke. So Chris Christie, who I look, I hold him significantly responsible for the rise of Donald Trump. I still have it seared in my mind when he was standing behind Donald Trump, when he was the first reasonably normal Republican to endorse him. So I have a hard time coming around. And the notion that Chris Christie can run for president seems more than a little fanciful. But he was on ABC yesterday talking about Trump and making the case for why perhaps it's time to move on. He said we were going to do so much winning that we would ask him to stop winning. Well, in 2018, we lost the House. In 2020, we lost the Senate.

In 2021, we lost two Senate seats in Georgia that we should have won. And in 2022, we performed under historic norms for what was going on in this country and for being the party out of power. That's a lot of losing. And I think what Republicans came to grips with Tuesday night was we're tired of losing and we're tired of Donald Trump dragging us to lose because of his personal vanity.

Yeah. And this is the one thing that Donald Trump hates more than anything in the world, right, is to be called a loser. And can you imagine the meltdown if Carrie Lake loses? That, by the way, is the thing that blew me away the most, because everybody had already anointed her as the MAGA queen and that she was running this fantastic campaign. And, you know, she was going to be Donald Trump's running mate if she actually goes down in Arizona. And that's still a big if, you know, that loser tag really starts to stick to MAGA. And in particular, it's just got to grind his gears that whatever you think of Ron DeSantis,

Ron DeSantis was a huge winner last week. I mean, he just he just ran up the score. So this contrast between Ron DeSantis, huge winner and Donald Trump, huge loser on the eve of his own presidential restoration announcement has got to burn. Yeah. And the loser thing is actually really, really important. And this is a distinction I want. I mean, you and I, I think,

would agree, and a lot of folks would agree with us, that it's not like, we shouldn't expect people to change. We shouldn't expect Donald Trump to change who he is. He is who he is. We shouldn't expect Kevin McCarthy to change who he is. He is who he is. But Kevin McCarthy is not a fanatic, right? Republican leadership, they're not fanatics. They're cowards. And that is important. That is actually a world saving distinction because a fanatic will do crazy stuff on his own. And there could be, you know, future episodes of election denial driven by fanaticism. I think Carrie Lake might be a fanatic, but the cowards who run the Republican party, the national Republican party are doing what they're doing. They have moved over to Donald Trump's insanity. They have echoed his lies. They

have gone along with his authoritarianism, not because they are crazy, but because they're cowards and they're cynics. So if you can show them through elections that Donald Trump is a loser and that he hurts them, they're cowardice and their cynicism will turn the other way. They will turn against because all they care about is their party, their self-preservation, their power. And therefore that, that is a way that we can get them out of the craziness. And I think Charlie, that this election was the beginning, or at least another, maybe another step toward bringing them out of, out of that insanity, appealing to their cynicism, appealing to their cowardice. You will lose if you stay with Trump and his insanity.

I think that's the only way that they will change course is to appeal to their lust for power and their cynicism. Okay, so anytime there is something like this, you go through the various stages of grieving, including denialism and forming circular firing squads and a variety of other cliches that I could use here. Right now, you are seeing much of MAGA world trying to change the focus of this defeat from Trump to Mitch McConnell, that Mitch McConnell is the bad guy. And by the way, I think Mitch McConnell doesn't have a lot of other people to blame other than himself, given the fact that he had a chance to rid himself of Donald Trump and chose not to do it. There's certain ironies here. I mean, I don't want to get too deep into this, but in terms of who's the most valuable player of the midterm elections, I'd nominate Samuel Alito. And so Mitch McConnell's great legacy of flipping the

U.S. Supreme Court is also the reason why he may never be majority leader. So that's ironic. But here's Donald Trump's immigration homunculus, Stephen Miller, on one of the shows blaming all of this on Mitch McConnell. If only Mitch McConnell had sent more money to the deplorable Blake Masters in Arizona as opposed to Lisa Murkowski in Alaska. Let's play that. The extraordinarily fateful decision on the part of the Senate Leadership Fund and Mitch McConnell to take the money that should have been spent in Arizona

to get Blake up on TV early on and instead give it to Lisa Murkowski for a Republican battle against the Republican-backed nominee in Alaska. And if you want to find one state where that extra $6 to $9 million would have been the difference maker, that's it, Arizona. The disparity at the top of the ticket was crushing for our candidates. Yeah. He sounds unhappy. Did you pick that up?

Is this a little, seems a little stressed. So Rick Scott, Senator from Florida, real man of political genius, comes on after him and gives his critique of why he managed to crap the bed as the chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee. Listen to Rick Scott's theory of the case. The Republican leadership caved in on the debt ceiling, caved in on a gun bill, caved in on a fake infrastructure bill. And then we make it

difficult for our candidates. We can't we can't do that. And we've got to tell we got to do exactly what Stephen Miller said. Give people something we're hell bent on getting done and then fight for it. That's what we do in Florida, by the way. I did when I was governor. That's what's been happening since I left. That's why we have big wins in Florida, because we stand for something. Okay, so I'm going to give you this high lob. Rick Scott saying, we weren't extreme enough. Where do I begin with this guy? First of all, it's comical. His job, as you're pointing out, Rick Scott was the chairman of the NRSC. It was his job to elect these people. The idea that he comes out and blames Mitch McConnell is just a masterpiece of lack of self-awareness. But in

addition to this, it's kind of a clever thing they've come up with where they nominated terrible candidates. That's why they lost. You lose Senate races, House races. You can sort of go with sort of a national flow. People are unhappy with the Democrats. You can get a lot of your people elected anyway. In a Senate race, people actually look. They look, do I really want this guy? Do I really want Herschel Walker? Do I really want Dr. Oz? Do I really want Blake Masters? And a lot of people just decided, no, we don't want that guy. That guy's crazy. That guy's extreme. And so Mitch McConnell was the guy who had to say, this candidate is losing because he's too extreme. So we're going to move the money somewhere where we can actually win. And then it's genius, of course, for Stephen

Miller to come along later and say, the fact that you move the money is the reason why this guy lost. No, no. Blake Masters lost on his own because he was nuts, because he was an election denier, et cetera. So yeah, it's, it's ridiculous. And there are, Charlie, we could go into this. There are a hundred reasons, sorry, there are a hundred reasons why Rick Scott is completely wrong in his new jihad against Mitch McConnell. Okay. We won't go through all a hundred of them. Okay. So because that would, that would take some time, but you know, I use the phrase, I refer to the right wing id, you know, and sometimes I'll throw in the entertainment wing of the Republican Party.

But by focusing on the id, it's where is the energy? Where is the center of gravity of the right? And the reason why it's always important to identify that is because that is the direction that the party almost always goes. If you find out what's going on in the fever swamps, wait a couple of weeks or months, and that will be what Donald Trump will push. That will be what the conservative firebrands will grab onto. And right now, as of Monday morning, the id of the right wing is all about delaying the leadership vote in the Senate to reelect Mitch McConnell. I kid you not. This is the this is where all of the passion and the outrage and the energy is going right now. And of course, for people to understand,

the perpetual outrage machine has to constantly be fed. It has to constantly, you know, feel under threat, constantly feeling betrayed. That's how you raise money. That's how you generate energy. And so with a combination of Donald Trump's attacks on Mitch McConnell and these other attacks on Mitch McConnell, this is where the right is, you know, pushing a red wedding in the Republican Senate. So not only have the Republicans failed in their bid to take over the Senate, not only are they consigned to the minority again, they're about to have a real bloodletting. And this is not going to end anytime soon. I'm assuming, I don't know whether you agree

with me, I'm assuming that Mitch McConnell survives. But a tremendous amount of Republican energy over the next year is going to go into Republican on Republican attacks. Who is who is more extreme? Who's more loyal to Donald Trump? Who's a cuck? Who's a rhino? It's going to be ugly. Yeah, it is. And for people who are looking at this, what's going to be a fight, probably between McConnell and Rick Scott. I mean, it's been going on for a while, but now we'll be in the form of a Senate leadership election. Here's how I understand it. Basically, Mitch McConnell is right and Rick Scott is wrong. Rick Scott's diagnosis of the election, setting aside the fact that he screwed up as chairman

of the NRSC, is he's claiming that Republicans needed more of an affirmative plan. Mitch McConnell played a cynical game. He said, look, we're the out party. We're just not going to talk about what we would do. Let voters express expressed their unhappiness with Biden and the Democrats, get our people elected, and then we'll go to work. But don't give them a target to shoot at. Don't give the other side a target. Rick Scott's idea was, no, let's give them a target. Rick Scott put out a plan. And part of his plan was we're going to sunset. Yeah, we're going to sunset Social Security and Medicare. We're going to make Congress vote on it all the time. And which Democrats proceeded to attack. Rick Scott, during the election, provided a target for Democrats. So he was wrong about that. And now, in his post-election diagnosis, Rick Scott is saying, as you're pointing out, we should be hellbent on, you know, just declare a bunch of stuff we're going to do. And, you know, what does the base want? We're going to fight them on the debt ceiling. We're going to fight them everywhere. And Rick Scott's thinking here is representative of this disease in the Republican Party. They don't pay attention to the negative side of the ledger. They don't pay attention to who they're alienating. They're only talking about who they're motivating on the right. But what happened in the election was Republicans had alienated a lot of people in the middle. Mitch McConnell understands this.

It's why if Republicans are saying they'll keep McConnell as the majority leader, but Rick Scott is determined to sort of go down fighting over it. Yeah. And again, it's going to be it's going to be ugly and divided. And and yet waiting in the wings, of course, is the former president. I think that there was some vague hope for about five minutes that Donald Trump would not actually announce his candidacy tomorrow, that he might wait until after the runoffs in Georgia. There seems to be. Well, what do you think? I mean, does Trump go ahead and announce tomorrow? Well, Trump will do, of course, what is good for Trump. I think that Trump will wait a little bit. I think Trump will wait as late as he can, and he will go right before he thinks

somebody else might be about to announce. So you don't think he's going to announce tomorrow night? I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it's a bad environment for him to do it, but we'll see. Tim O'Brien, who knows Trump as well as anybody agrees with you, doesn't think he's going to go ahead with it. I am inclined to think that he will, because right now he desperately, desperately needs to change the narrative. That's number one. He desperately needs to reassert his dominance of the Republican Party. And at this point, not announcing tomorrow night looks like weakness. So he is going to lean into all of this. He's going to lean into this because he knows that every day that he doesn't, the chances are that

he's going to be tagged with loser. And we know the extent, the lengths to which this man is prepared to go not to be considered a loser. So I think he's going to do it. I think he's going to jump in. And I think it's going to be a mess. It's going to be a mess for all of the Republicans, because right now we're in one of those strange windows where Republicans want to move on with them. I don't know how long that's going to last, but you're right about the environment. I mean, you know, objectively speaking, this is a terrible time for him to jump in. And yet he needs to join this chorus that says, you see, I wasn't on the ballot and you lost. You need me to be on the ballot. And it's these other

rhino cucks, the establishment, and we need to replace them. So I think what he's going to do is he's going to try to reproduce that 2015, 2016. I'm the insurgent. I'm the outsider. I'm the guy who's going to burn it all down and hope to be able to capture that again and hope that the same people who caved last time will cave again this time. I think he's in tomorrow. You make a good argument. Any theory based on Trump's ego is a good theory. And the idea that he already said he would do it and if he waits, it looks bad.

That's a good point. However, from Trump's point of view, it's not crucial that he announced that he's running for president. What's crucial, if you understand Trump, is that he belittle, attack, tear down any potential rivals. So I think that when Trump goes after DeSantis, goes after Yunkin and these other folks, that is in effect the Trump campaign. Trump is determined to, so I mean, what you have to understand about Trump is he's, remember, he's not interested in building anything and he doesn't actually have to win the general election, although that's the goal. What he really needs to do is to control the people around him, to control a political party or a faction.

So if he can maintain his dominance of the Republican Party, and he can perhaps do so just by tearing down, belittling DeSantis and the others, that's what he will do rather than particularly announce a presidential campaign. But Charlie, as we're discussing from the results of the election, Ron DeSantis has a better case than Donald Trump. And I'm just not convinced that Trump anymore has the ammo to fight off a DeSantis.

Well, something did happen over the weekend. And again, take it for what it's worth. You had the YouGov survey finding that DeSantis is now in the lead among Republican or Republican-leaning voters. I mean, there had to be another catch-up-on-the-wall moment down in Mar-a-Lago where DeSantis is now leading Trump by seven points. I think the last survey he was behind by seven points. Look, I still think that, you know, Trump is a dominant figure, but Ron DeSantis has something that none of Trump's rivals in 2015 had. He has real cred with the Republican MAGA base. So it becomes more difficult for Trump to attack him.

You know, Trump has figured I can destroy anybody. I just come up with a nickname or something. I go after him and they're gone. It is interesting that I think that DeSantis is going to have a little bit more stickiness. And I'm just, this is, I'm not praising anyone. I'm just, you know, walking it through. And the fact that he won by such a big margin in the midst of all of these other failures makes that case pretty hard not to consider if you're in the donor class, the professional class, the consultant class, the lobbyist class of the Republican Party. Yeah, I think that's true. And can we talk here on this point about the difference between Youngkin and DeSantis?

Because I think that's kind of relevant. Youngkin is was more of a sunny guy. I mean, he's he's he's got he's playing to some of the culture war issues, but he's doing it in a suburban kind of way. DeSantis has something that Trump does, which is the anti-woke liberal tears thing. He really like sticks it to the libs. He really revels in it. And he makes a lot of right-wing people feel like DeSantis is standing up for them in their war to celebrate the pain of the left. And so I feel like what DeSantis is doing captures that thing, which is crucial to a lot of Trump supporters, in a way that Youngkin doesn't. And it may be enough to get enough of the party to go with DeSantis against Trump. Okay, Can I share with you some wonky numbers? Because

I know you're kind of a wonky guy. Go for it. I actually mentioned this on Morning Joe this morning. I was going to write it up, but then I figured, you know, time we've moved on. I'm looking at the Trump effect in Wisconsin, which is so dramatic, especially with the reelection of our very boring, very non-charismatic Democratic incumbent. By the way, that's not a criticism. That's a sign of how remarkable it is. Tony Evers won reelection over a Trump-backed election denier by more than 90,000 votes, which in recent political history is a landslide. And he did so despite very disappointing turnout from the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee. What he did was he turned the Madison area, Dane County, into this massive dynamo of

voting. And he really has cut into Republican margins in the suburbs. So this ongoing erosion in Milwaukee's suburbs of Republican support that began with Donald Trump is continuing. So it is it is remarkable. So, for example, I promised it was going to be wonky. Right. So Dane County is Madison, Wisconsin. It's probably the most liberal county in the state. Tony Evers, the Democrat, comes out of this one county with a 174,000 vote margin. Okay?

Mm-hmm. That is, his margin is greater than the total vote cast in the 2002 gubernatorial campaign. Wow. The entire vote for governor was 172,000 votes back in 2002. Now Democrats are coming out with a margin of over 174,000 in one county. Okay. One more set of numbers. So Tony Evers wins by 90,000 votes by turning out a massive Democratic vote, except in Milwaukee County, cutting into Republican margins in the suburbs. And he actually got 24,000 more votes than Ron Johnson, who was reelected. Which means that if Mandela Barnes or any other Democratic

Senate candidate had gotten the same amount of votes that Tony Evers got, they would have won. They would have been elected to the Senate. So the Democrats did their job at the top of the ticket. In fact, however, Mandela Barnes got 51,000 votes fewer than Tony Evers. I'm just throwing that out there because a lot depends on that. Hey, so in terms of number crunching, you did a really great deep dive for the bulwark over the weekend on the question of what was the Dobbs effect in this election and what was your conclusion? How important was abortion in the outcome of the 2022 midterms? Well, it was decisive. It was decisive in a lot of elections. And it wasn't just one. It wasn't just the network exit poll. It was the AP vote cast. These are massive, massive surveys of the electorate that enough that you

have a sample in every state. Plus, you know, you pool it all nationally. And it drove up the intensity. So it did two things, Charlie. It persuaded some people, a lot of people who might ordinarily vote Republican, people in sort of in the middle of the political spectrum, to vote Democrat. They voted for, you know, John Fetterman instead of Mimidas, for example. They voted for Kelly instead of Masters. And they, so it changed some votes on the margins, but it also, Charlie, it brought people to the polls. So the big problem Democrats had, the big problem you have in the midterms, you're the in party, your president's in power. People are unhappy with your president. You're just not going to turn out. The other side's angry. They're going to show up. And what

Dobbs did was the polling showed that a lot of people who voted in the election said that they did so rather than not vote at all, rather than not show up because of this issue. Now, let me just back up and say, if you are pro-life and you believe that every abortion is the taking of a human life and this has to be stopped, you're willing to say, okay, that is the political consequence of overturning Roe v. Wade. We did the right thing morally, you know, and every baby we can save is great. All right. I respect that as a, that's a moral point of view, but I'm just saying as a political fact, it is incontrovertible from the evidence in this election that Dobbs provoked a big backlash and it cost Republicans a lot of seats, seats in the house, seats in the Senate, governorships.

Well, I agree with you on that analysis. So here's the next big question is where does that go? What does that mean for 2024? How can Republicans scrape that off the bottom of their shoes? I don't think they have a great answer to this. They've got to figure out how to keep their base motivated, the people who are pro-life and, you know, want them to sort of, you know, look at Lindsey Graham, who had a used to have a 20 week ban on abortion federally. That was his bill.

And the pro-lifers come to him and say, hey, can we move it up? So now it's at 15. Over the next decade, if they get a 15 week national ban, anybody think they're going to stop at 15? Okay. But here's the most interesting question, because Lindsey Graham thought that he was bailing out Republicans with this, right? Because the 15 week ban is more reasonable than other bans, than the, you know, absolute bans, the six-week bans, etc., right? He figured 15-week ban pulls much better. It will make us look much extreme. My sense is that backfired very badly because it put this national ban on the agenda, right? So for Republicans who are internally saying, you know, the magic bullet is going to be 15 weeks with exception. That's how we get ourselves out of this corner. Well, the Lindsey

Graham gambit didn't work. No, it didn't. It did a couple of things. Yeah. Graham thought it was reasonable. And all my pro-life friends were angry when I wrote about this because they said, hey, he's not banning abortion. He's just setting a reasonable national limit. And then states can debate beyond that. When you nationalize this issue, it pisses people off. And it pisses people off in part because the whole spin around the Dobbs decision was we're sending this back to the people. The states can make their own laws. And then for the pro-lifers to come along after Dobbs and say, you know what? In addition to that, we're going to pass a federal law that tells your state what its abortion limit has to be. That pissed a lot of people off. And it signaled that

a bigger threat was coming. And in addition to that, Charlie, it's just anytime you come out with an affirmative push on an issue that's hot button that pisses people off, you are courting trouble. And there were a lot, Mitch McConnell did not want to touch this issue. Again, Mitch McConnell was like, we're going to win this election, sit back, don't give the enemy a target. Along came Lindsey Graham, and he provided in this 15 week national limit, an enormous target for the other side to shoot at. And it hurt Republicans. And I think it's going to continue to hurt Republicans unless they can figure out what to do, because obviously this will be a crucial issue in the presidential election in 2024. And we have no idea really what, what Donald Trump is, is going to say.

We would just, I mean, we don't, I mean, he'll, you know, he could make it up on the spot. I certainly remember when he was here in Milwaukee back in 2016 and Chris Matthews asked him as well. So it should, uh, you know, women and abortion, should they go to jail? And he answered, well, yes, it has to be consequences. And the thing was, you could tell women in abortion, should they go to jail? And he answered, well, yes, there has to be consequences. And the thing was, you could tell looking at his face that he hadn't given five seconds thought to it at all. He just sort of was going through what he thought a pro-lifer would say. And I'm not sure that he's given that much thought even since then. So what are you keeping an eye on this week, Will?

This is a rather extraordinary week. A lot is going to be going on. We have a summit in Asia, President Biden talking to President Xi. We haven't, you know, apparently the Cold War has not been called off. We have these leadership elections. We'll find out exactly who controls the House of Representatives. If the NBC projection is correct, and I don't know that it is, and the Democrats have 216 and the Republicans have 219, leaving aside all the woulda, coulda, shouldas, all the things, the races that were close that could have gone a different way. How do you even come close to running a House of Representatives with 219 votes when 218 is the majority? How do you even do that?

Well, you know, it's going to be crazy. First of all, Charlie, you know, there are special elections that are going to come up and they're going to potentially flip the house during the cycle. I was thinking about that. Some guy gets COVID. Somebody gets hit by a car.

Think about it. I mean, things happen. People get indicted. They resign. They get jobs. They die. And if it's a one vote margin, it could be that flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip. So can I throw out an optimistic scenario here?

I am willing to entertain that today. I feel like I have not produced my pony today. And so here's my proposed pony. There's going to have to be, hopefully there will be, some kind of coalition on certain issues between the same Republicans and the same Democrats. I'm thinking of Ukraine at the moment, right? Um, so there is, there's clearly a 200, if, if Republicans have 219 or 220 seats in the house, there is a hardcore pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine, anti-NATO sub-sub-caucus on the Republican side that, in effect, could throw the House and they'll have power over McCarthy. I think McCarthy is a coward, but he is not crazy on Ukraine. And it is possible that a coalition of Republicans who

are serious about standing up to Putin and Democrats who are obviously more serious about standing up to Putin can put together a majority. It is not obviously a partisan majority, and it's very tricky to see how this works, but it's going to be very important over the next year for those two factions to work together. They are a majority of the House, but they're not in the same party. That's going to be really difficult. Well, especially if McCarthy keeps the Hastert rule. And the Hastert rule basically is that nothing comes up for a vote unless a majority of the Republican caucus favors it. So it means that you can have really strong

minority leadership. You have basically, you know, one quarter of the House having a veto power over the entire House. I think that would be unwise of him to do, but I don't know that he has any choice. I mean, look, if you have one or two majority, then think about it. Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, assuming Lauren Boebert actually survives, they walk into his office and they say, you have to do X, Y and Z. And he has to do X, Y and Z, doesn't he? I agree with you. I think what you just said about the Hastert rule is exactly on point.

Yet we cannot, they will not be able to govern this way. If they try, it will be a disaster. And all they will be, the only issues they'll be able to focus on are basically messaging issues, sticking it to the lips. Any kind of government will be impossible. So in order to get anything done, the Republicans will have to work with some Democrats. Now there's no guarantee they go down that road. Maybe they say we're not going to get anything done, but if they're going to get anything done, this is the way they're going to have to do it. I guess I'll take that. I mean, I will take that scenario, that possibility. I think that is a hopeful way to look at the results of this election. Okay. I think we should stop on that hopeful note. I actually agree with you. I think that the

fate of Ukraine was one of the key issues in this campaign. I don't know how many people voted on it. It was really top of my mind what it would mean to the future of Ukraine and of democracy if the Republicans took control of Congress. And I think that the, as Kathy Young wrote in the Bulwark, I think the prospects of a cutoff have been substantially reduced as a result of that. So next week, we'll talk about the United States Senate, what it means for Democrats to control the Senate, whether or not having 51 votes is

a really, really big deal. Fifty one votes as opposed to 50 votes in the Georgia runoff. We'll save that for next week. OK, well. All right, Charlie, see you then. The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Siri. I'm Charlie Sykes. Thank you for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. We'll be back tomorrow to do this all over again.