The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: Is Tim Scott Running a Potemkin Campaign?

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Are Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pence really running for the VP slot—or a chance to increase their speaking fees? Plus, Trump is still an extortionist, the GOP's not a serious governing party, and Fox created the market for the homeless vet hoax. Will Saletan is back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Experience amazing now at Dawn Valley North Lexus. Right now, lease the 2024 IS300 Premium Package from just $518 per month for 28 months at 2.9%. Or, choose from Canada's largest selection of Lexus demonstrators with offers you won't want to miss. Now is the time, and Dawn Valley North Lexus is the place. See website for details. Expect excellence. At Dawn Valley North, Dawn Valley North for Lexus, it's the place. See website for details. Expect excellence. A proud member of Wayne's Auto Group. Welcome to the Bouldward Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Monday, May 22nd, 2023. And I am back in Wisconsin and Will is back in, where are you? Like in Maryland, right? Yep. Yep. Right outside of Washington.

It's always disorienting because a week ago today, we were actually in the same, in the same building, in the same room, almost. Nobody needs to know the dirty details of it. And then of course uh last week we did the on the road live event just off broadway tim miller and i did our friday podcast in front of a crowd of more than 500 bulwark fans that of course followed by jbl sarah and molly jong fast and you can find those podcasts but it's good to be home i have to say it is good to be home. It is May. It is beautiful in Wisconsin. And I know having just come from the East Coast, it's beautiful out there. So will. Happy Monday. Thank you, Charlie. I've celebrated the beautiful weather by going out and playing five hours of basketball and tennis. And so today

I'm feeling really old, really, really old. It gets worse. Okay, so enough happy talk here. We are slouching toward a debt disaster. I think this has been really predictable. I want to get to that in a moment. There's this one story that I just wanted to note because it is so incredibly bizarre. Over the weekend, Vladimir Putin, with no subtlety whatsoever, starts sucking up to his best friend forever, the Donald. This story out of the New York Times, Russia's latest sanctions on U.S. officials turned to Trump enemies. Let's read this. Russia has expanded its list of sanctioned Americans in a tit-for-tat

retaliation for the latest curbs imposed by the United States, which, by the way, is not tit-for-tat. But what is particularly striking is how much President Vladimir Putin of Russia is adopting perceived enemies of former President Donald J. Trump as his own. Among the 500 people singled out for travel and financial restrictions on Friday were Americans seen as adversaries by Mr. Trump, including Letitia James, the state attorney general of New York, Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state of Georgia, who rebuffed Mr. Trump's pressure to reverse the outcome of the 2020 elections. Lieutenant Michael Byrd, the Capitol police officer who shot the pro-Trump rioter Ashley Babbitt on January 6, 2021. I think Joe Scarborough is on the list. I think Rachel Maddow is on the list. I mean, it's basically just a, how can I suck up to Donald Trump just by showing that the enemy of my best friend is also my enemy.

It's just one of these amazing moments that we just shouldn't pass over. As The Times reports, none of those people have anything to do with Russia policy. And the only reason they would have come to Moscow's attention is because Trump has publicly assailed them. So comrade, not subtle. No, no, not at all. And, you know, this is one of the fascinating things to me about this pretense that we're seeing again in the 2024 race, as we've seen in previous, that Donald Trump is somehow the tough guy who will defend the United States. All these bad things that happened on Joe Biden's watch wouldn't happen under Trump. The reality is, and we've known this since 2017, when the intelligence community assessment came out, I think late 2016, about why the Russians intervened to help Trump in 2016. Donald Trump's

narcissism is a huge national security risk to the United States because every foreign leader, including all the bad ones like Putin, figured out that you can get Donald Trump to betray the interests of the United States. Give him a tongue bath. That's all you need. You don't need nukes. All you have to do is. Right. And remember, I'm trying to remember, Charlie, what was the quote that Putin said about Trump in late 2015? All you have to do is. loves this and it endears Putin to him. And of course, the whole game here is for Putin to get Donald Trump back into power and to get him to do the thing that, what is it that Putin wants most?

He wants the United States to pull out of NATO. And Donald Trump has pretty much said he would do that. And Putin is doing all of this tongue bathing in the hope of solidifying his bond with Trump and getting Trump to do what Putin wants him to do internationally. Yeah, I mean, and the list is almost laughable in its lack of subtlety. So among the people on this, the White House Chief of Staff, Special Counsel Jack Smith, White House Advisor Anita Dunn, Joe Scarborough, Brian Williams, Seth Meyers, and Rachel Maddow. I mean, it's just, the thing about it is that Vladimir Putin knows he's playing Donald Trump, but I'm not sure that Donald Trump knows that he's being played.

And that's the real sad part for the, you know, the strong man astride the planet. No one would dare do it. Oh, he said what about me? He sent me flowers. Right. Look, we all say Trump is mean. Trump sends mean tweets. Trump has vendettas. But the reality is Trump is very easy to con. He's very easy, right? So all you have to do is turn around. I obviously wrote about Lindsey Graham,

and that was a case of somebody who just figured out, I've said a lot of bad things about Trump, but if I turn around and praise him, in this case, you know, Putin putting all of Trump's enemies on Putin's enemies list, that's really enough. That's really enough to get Trump to reverse any previous hostility or opposition he had to you. Okay. So as I wrote in my newsletter today, as the nation teeters toward an objectively insane debt default, it's worth keeping in mind that this is exactly what the GOP's leading candidate for president has endorsed. I mean, I do think that it seems highly relevant and probably should be mentioned in every single news article that Donald Trump has said that, yeah, even if it means defaulting on its debt, Republicans should not give in. I say to the Republicans out there, if they don't give you massive cuts, you're going to have to do a default.

And he was asked to clarify, are you endorsing a default? He said he would endorse a default. I mean, this is an amazing moment, isn't it, Will? The people ought to realize that the former president of the United States, who, by the way, did not default on the debt when he was president, wants his successor to experience a debt disaster. I mean, we throw around words like, you know, Donald Trump wants to burn it all down or he's the chaos candidate. But here we are. Trump wants the U.S. to default on the debt, which is, I'm sorry, objectively amazing. Yeah, it is. And of course, it just underscores what is Donald Trump? He is an extortionist. I mean, he's many other things, but he has always

practiced extortion. And of course, if we look at Donald Trump's business history, he constantly makes agreements with people, then violates them, and then threatens to walk because anytime he feels that he has leverage, that he can hurt you more than you can hurt him. The fact that he's made a promise is irrelevant to him, right? So he's basically treating the debt of the United States in exactly the same way. We made promises to people, but let's just not keep them. And we'll see what sort of leverage we can get out of that in a political negotiation. And we see the Republican Party really falling in behind him, not explicitly endorsing default, but we had this very, very awkward moment, in case people miss this, where Byron Donalds, who is a Republican congressman from

Florida and now become, you know, kind of a Trump lackey, was on with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press yesterday. And Todd basically, you know, called him out on Trump's flip-flop that when Trump was president, he said that he didn't think it was appropriate to negotiate over the debt ceiling. So listen to this exchange. I want you to respond to something former President Trump said about the debt ceiling in 2019. Take a listen. I can't imagine anybody ever even thinking of using the debt ceiling

as a negotiating wedge. Why don't you agree with him on this? Well, first of all, he also said the other day on a rival network that he said that when he was president and when asked why he wasn't saying it now is it

because he's not president. Listen, Donald Trump is always- Do you realize how absurd that sounds? That is not absurd. that he said that when he was president and when asked why he wasn't saying it now is it because he's not president. Listen, Donald Trump is always negotiating- Do you realize how absurd that sounds? That is not absurd. He's always negotiating, Chuck. Chuck, he's always negotiating.

That's what he does. That's actually one of the reasons why so many deals for our country worked out to our benefit as compared to his predecessors, both Republican and Democrat, because he's always negotiating. Do you realize how

partisan that sounds? That is not a partisan statement. What is good for me is not for thee. He's basically saying when I'm president, there's no negotiating on this. But hey, when somebody else is president, screw it. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Do you realize how absurd that sounds? And Donald is like, no. Have you been paying attention? Do you know where my head is at? Have you noticed what political party I am in? So no, I do not think this is absurd. I do not think saying up is down, you know, black is white, peace is war. I don't think this is absurd because I have brain worms.

Yeah. So, I mean, brain worms is such a nice way of saying it. So social conservatives have always warned us about cultural decline, right? You send bad signals, you undermine norms. What we're seeing is who is leading that is Donald Trump and the Republican Party. And in Byron Donald, you can see an example of how this is no longer just a Trump thing. Trump just provided the model and now other Republicans, House Republicans are following in that. So first of all, hypocrisy is okay, right? That's the first thing that Donald's is saying. It's okay for Trump to practice one rule when he's president and demand another thing when Biden's president. But the other thing, Charlie, is listen to that word that Donald's keeps coming back to, negotiation. Trump is such a good negotiator.

Now, what's actually happening here is negotiation is a way of dealing with people, in this case, as opposed to an alternative way called promise keeping, right? We made a promise to you. We made commitments in our budget. We made commitments to bondholders, to people who hold the United States debt. And we're just going to break that. We're going to renegotiate everything. Charlie, I was looking recently at some of the stories of women that Donald Trump has abused. And one of them tells a story about how Trump told her to stop paying her mortgage. He said, leave your keys on the table and walk out and tell your bank that they have to renegotiate with you. Right? So that is how

Donald Trump thinks. So when you hear Byron Donalds or Kevin McCarthy or anyone else talk about what a brilliant negotiator Trump is, what they're really saying is we're not going to keep any promises anymore. We're going to use all the leverage we have to get better terms. Part of the problem here is that there's no way that Kevin McCarthy can deliver a deal, as far as I can tell. And this is something that we predicted at the time when, you know, he self-guilded himself into the speakership. He had made so many concessions to the Taliban 20, however they're described, you know, the Freedom Caucus. And of course, they've been upping their ante and they're not going to go along with it. And so whatever Kevin McCarthy does, he's either going to crash the country or

he's going to lose maybe several dozen of his members of his caucus and maybe trigger an attack on his speakership. And this has been incredibly predictable. I mean, this is what happens when you make the Republican Party completely hostage to the most extreme elements of it. And also, it's just a reminder, though, that for all of the rhetoric and everything, I mean, Republicans can pass all sorts of messaging bills, but they are not a serious governing party anymore. They don't have a serious plan to do the basic fundamentals of their job, which is not crash the economy, keep the government going, pay its debts. And Kevin McCarthy, I think, is incapable of delivering that deal. So where are we at here? It's a real crisis. And the alternative that's been suggested, one of the alternatives

to doing this the conventional way that is getting all of the Republicans on board with this, given that there are several crazies, was a discharge petition, right? And the discharge petition could happen if McCarthy is willing to bring Democrats in on the deal and sacrifice some Republicans. But as you're pointing out- I don't think he can do that. He can't. He can't. He'd lose his job. So- Especially with Trump basically saying, burn it down, burn it down, crash the economy, default the debt. Right, right. And you look like you're a wuss if you don't go that route. So Charlie, remind me, the Hastert rule named after the former Speaker Denny Hastert, I believe was

that you had to have Republicans said they would only act if they had a majority of Republicans in the House, right? That's a majority. Now we're way, way past that. We're to the point where there are in fact a majority of Republicans who would cut an acceptable, a tolerable deal here. But if there are five or six who won't, those folks can bring down McCarthy in a speakership vote, right? And so we're in a much more dire situation than the Hastert rule. Oh, yes, dramatically. So you and I, neither of us are lawyers. So I don't know, do you have a strong opinion on the use of the 14th Amendment? I mean, this has become a thing now. You have members of the Senate, you have the Progressive Caucus in the House saying, you know, that Joe Biden should just simply invoke the 14th Amendment,

which reads, by the way, for people who do not have the pocket constitution, you know, handy, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment is public debt. The validity of the public debt of the United States authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. So let's leave out the whole, you know, suppressing an insurrection or maybe that's relevant these days, but shall not be questioned. Look, I am not a constitutional expert. It seems more than a little plausible to say this whole idea of defaulting on the national debt is in fact unconstitutional. And I don't know what the politics of this are at the moment,

but if the alternative is either completely caving in to the unacceptable demands by the Freedom Caucus, which I don't even think are serious, or crashing the US economy and creating a global financial crisis, it doesn't seem crazy to me that Joe Biden would say, hey, I'm a constitutionalist. Our constitution says the validity of the public debt of the United States authorized by law shall not be questioned. What do you think? Yeah, I'm not persuaded of this public debt of the United States authorized by law shall not be questioned. What do you think? Yeah, I'm not persuaded of this one. And the larger problem is I think the financial markets won't be persuaded of it.

So it's a vague phrase, right? That it shall not be quite. What does that mean? It's anytime someone uses the passive voice. How exactly? When at the same time you have these very clear procedures for the Congress authorizing spending, the Congress authorizing the debt ceiling. So you have a lot of problems making that case in court. And because it's not clear, Charlie, the problem is this will be litigated, right? And it able to count on it. So if down the line, as this goes through appeals, there's a ruling that suddenly it wasn't going to go up anyway, just on the anticipation of the risk. On the other hand, Charlie, did you notice that in his press conference in Hiroshima, Biden said, you know, it's too late to do it this time. There's only a couple of weeks away,

but he's going to research whether he could do it next time. And that is super interesting. Yes, it is super interesting. And I'm still wondering what happens this time, because if people have been paying attention, I just don't see how they get this necessarily resolved. Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebullwork.com and take a look around. Every day we produce

newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bulwark Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebulwark.com slash charlie. That's thebulwark.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together. I promise. Before we get back into the presidential campaign, I just wanted to highlight something that I wrote

about in Morning Shots this morning. By the way, if you're not subscribing, please do. It's generally free. But if you join Bulwark Plus, you can get access to all of our newsletters. And today I focused on Fox's latest hoax, the way that Fox and Republicans went absolutely all in on this story. I think the New York Post first broke it. Vets kicked out for migrants. Outrageous. Upstate hotels tell 20 homeless veterans to leave so that these migrants can go in. And Fox News went all in on this. I mean, just, I mean, and then Elise Stefanik, of course, you know, tweeted out Biden's America, Kathy Hochul's New York, Eric Adams, New York City, a disgrace. Kevin McCarthy called it shameful. Nikki Haley said it was liberal insanity at work.

Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out F Democrats and their bullshit policies. Turns out the thing was a complete lie. Total bullshit. It was an absolute hoax, fabrication, whatever. And so you had this really, really awkward on-air correction by Laura Ingram. All right, before we go, a little update on a story we brought you this week about homeless vets being displaced from hotels so that illegals could move in. Turns out the group behind the claim made it up.

We have no clue as to why anyone would do such a thing, but we'll bring you any updates should they come. Hmm. Well, she has no clue as to why anyone would do such a thing. Why would anyone tell lies to score political points? I love George Conway's reaction. He sort of summarized it. We have no idea why the lies we incessantly repeated were made up, said the network that paid over three quarters of a billion dollars for incessantly repeating lies. Right. Okay. So first of all, at some point here, I want to make sure we talk about the details of this case, which are amazing, just amazing. But let me pause for a minute on

your question. It's hilarious that Laura Ingram calls this a little update. This is not a little update. This is, this is nevermind. Remember Emily Latela? Nevermind. We told a flaming, outrageous lie. Okay. Secondly, we have no clue why anyone would do such a thing. All right. Let's set aside Conway's point, right? That Fox News just had to pay a lot of money for having explicitly lied and the details of their texts, their internal communications show that they lied. But let me come back to this question of why would anyone do such a thing? Here is Fox News, which has provided an enormous market and has generated an enormous market for this kind of story, right? That the

illegals are coming in, they're displacing our brave men and women who fought for us. Fox created this market. And then they're surprised when someone comes along and stages this unbelievable hoax to generate this story, knowing the people who generated this hoax absolutely knew that it would catch on with Fox and Fox's audience. It's because you are out there. I mean, what's the analogy, Charlie? A guy who's out there patronizing prostitutes and then wonders why there are a lot of hookers on the street. Fox News created this market, increased this market, and then they're pretending that they're surprised when someone produces a fabricated story to serve that market. Well, and as I pointed out, if Fox was in the news business, it could have, you know, very quickly have determined that this thing was fake. But of course, you know, they're not actually a news operation. They're purveyors of outrage porn. So it was left to a

smallish newspaper, the Mid-Hudson News. And they basically went out and they checked the story and found that, you know, seven homeless men from New York say they were recruited from a homeless shelter in Poughkeepsie to act as veterans and claim they were forced to move out of a Newburgh hotel because of migrants. This was, wow, somebody's probably going to go to jail for this at some point. But all the politicians who could not wait to get on air about how outraged they are. How many of them have apologized for all this? I mean, Adam Kinzinger called out Elisa Phonix and said, hey, at least the story is a complete and total lie. You should apologize. And oh, wait, you actually put this lie out on your official congressional Twitter account.

Right. Right. Yeah, but just move on. I mean, I got to pause here on the details of this because this is just unbelievable. They, according to the latest revelations about this, and we'll see as the whole thing unfolds, the group that fabricated this literally went to a homeless shelter and recruited a bunch of men, told them, right, told them. Let's lie. Right. So, quote, they were asked to take a trip to meet with an elected official and discuss homelessness, right?

They were promised some goodies in exchange for this. They were brought into a parking lot. They were asked to act as if they were veterans who had been displaced. So, you're playing this role. I mean, think about what an offense this is to actual veterans, right? Then there's a faked credit card receipt that's been altered to look as though this foundation has paid to rehouse these guys in another location. So there's just all kinds of fabrication going on here. Charlie, there could

be some criminal charges involved in this before it's over. So for Laura Ingram to pass this off as nothing, and for Elise Stefanik to pass it off as nothing. Let's just pause here on Elise Stefanik, who when she took Liz Cheney's job as chair of the House Republican Conference, what was her competitive advantage over Liz Cheney? It was her shamelessness. It was that Elise Stefanik would do what Liz Cheney wouldn't. She would lie. She would refuse to apologize for Trump. And so I would be completely surprised if Elise Stefanik did the honorable thing here when the whole reason why she has her job is that she is

dishonorable. Yeah, she's OD'd on the on the outrage catnap. But it is one of those things where you could get a sense of of the way the ecosystem operates. You throw out this tidbit and it was too good to check. You know, the stories are because it just fits my priors and my narrative so perfectly i just have to go with it and oh wait it's not true um and then of course they'll they will just move on i got another new york story though that i gotta like run past you as our resident quasi-liberal uh-oh the new york kiosks have you heard about this no no okay this is not a parody i'm not making this up okay so the new york mayor eric adams so i kind of like and i don't think of as you know as a as a knee-jerk progressive in a new york mayor unveils plan to fight retail theft

with kiosks here's the plan crackdown on shoplifting plan for new york city you have to wait till the end okay just just wait for it wait for it okay so they give first-time offenders intervention programs instead of prosecution. De-escalation training for retail employees. Establish neighborhood retail watch groups to share theft information in real time with one another and NYPD. And then here it comes. Install kiosks in stores to connect would-be thieves with social service programs. The kiosks will be installed in stores for the benefit of underprivileged community members who are prone to crime, like shoplifting, the plan suggests. They will connect individuals in need of critical government resources and social services. Adams did not announce any specific constructive action to actually crack down on shoplifting,

although he said there would be a combination of increased law enforcement, enhanced social service program, etc. So Ari Shulman, who's the editor of the New Atlantis, sums it up. Install kiosks in stores to connect would-be thieves with social service programs. No other country could so meld therapy culture, McDonald's self-service, rat-in-cage Maslovian needs fulfillment, Mad Max dystopian despair, and naive bleeding heart hope.

Pure American sublime. I did actually see this. I saw this graphic, right? I don't know the details of the program beyond the graphic. Obviously, conservative is very upset. No, no, no, not just conservative. Come on. Tell me that you didn't do a head desk.

Like, this is one of those things. I always try to reverse engineer this. Like, people are sitting around with the whiteboard. And here's my idea. And here's my thought. And, you know, somebody in the back of the room says, I think we should arrest shoplifters. No, no, no, no, no. And then somebody says, well, how about kiosks?

So that somebody comes in and thinks, I'm going to steal something. But wait, no, I'm going to go over here. And see, this is the kind of thing that sounds plausible in some sort of seminar bubble. And then you bring it out in broad daylight and everybody goes, are you out of your freaking mind? So, okay. I have a couple of reactions. You're absolutely going to throw stuff at me with this answer. Okay. I am actually the lib on this question. We're not in the same room anymore. Okay. So part of me wants to defend this. Okay. The kiosk thing is a little nutty, but the idea that you would go to a place where a set of people who are feeling the need to get some cash would knock over a store with like shoplift or whatever, that you would offer them instead

a way to get some financial support that doesn't involve crime. That's not crazy, right? It's a, you can argue against, I mean, it's a little bit like a needle exchange program. Like we don't want you to do this the dangerous way. You sweet summer child. So, so, so let me just sort of put that out there that on harm reduction grounds, you can defend the general idea of this, but let me just set that aside for a minute and add the point that I think you would make, which is this whole approach to the problem of shoplifting, which is a crime,

just violates all sorts of moral intuitions that are broadly shared, right? Do not commit crime. You will not get rewarded for committing crime. If you commit crime, you will be punished, right? We're not going to try to make life easier for you because you're here thinking about committing a crime. We're not going to ask the store staff to de-escalate, although, of course, we don't want a violent incidence because the burden is not fundamentally on them. It's on you not to steal. I actually don't have a problem with that. See, I don't have a problem. No, no, no. As I said, of all of those things, I could go, yeah, I can see all those things. I can see the de-escalation. I can see the, you know, instead of, you know, having programs as opposed to having them go through the court system. I get all that. It's the notion that somebody comes in, they want to rip off a store and I go into this kiosk and put my name into this thing, I'm identifying myself as someone who came here to commit a crime. But obviously, the point of it is to get people before they get to that point, right?

There is that. Here's the kiosk for would-be criminals who want an alternative. Here, I, Will Salatin, Charlie Sykes, would-be criminal. You know, I just, I don't know. I don't want to spend too much time on this. This can get us to a broader point because I know you want to talk about Tim Scott. People who are of a liberal disposition, to some extent like me, although I'm more of a center left guy, we really need to be aware of what are the broadly shared moral intuitions of our country.

And when they are to our right, when people are generally more conservative than we are, and we got to be really careful about violating those things so that when you bring in therapy culture to such an extent that you are defying intuitions about personal responsibility and paying for your crimes and just not committing crimes in the first place, you can start to alienate people to the extent that they will vote Republican. And you cannot ignore that. And just avoid stupid ideas like kiosks. I do want to get to Tim Scott. And I know there's going to be a lot of punditry this week

about the presidential race. So this is going to be a big week, right? I mean, last week we saw Glenn Youngkin kind of making moves, you know, thinking that maybe there's a lane open. He has a video where he talks about Ronald Reagan a lot and has pictures of jets a lot, which means he's definitely running for president. Right. I think on Wednesday, we expect Ron DeSantis to finally announce that he's officially running for president. And today, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott rolling it out.

And I want to get your take on this. So so Tim Scott put out a video. And by the way, do you notice who really loved this video? Elon. Elon Musk. Okay. But anyway, Tim Scott put out a video and his kind of his appeal. Let me just play 30 seconds of it. Today's kids are growing up immersed in a culture where everyone's a victim. We have to start teaching the necessity of individual responsibility. If you are able-bodied, you work. If you take out a loan, you pay it back.

If you commit a violent crime, you go to jail. Can I get an amen? I'm telling you the truth. I'm Tim Scott, and I approve this message hmm well thoughts yeah I love this message of Tim Scott's I'm kind of struck by how sort of antiquated it is it's it's 2015 it is it is me 2015 every freaking word me 2015 that uh-huh but it's not 2015 I I'm sorry. Go ahead. So he can get Charlie Sykes with this, but the rest of the Republican Party, will they go for

it? He doesn't really talk about enemies there. And Charlie, these mores that he's describing, these rules about responsibility, I mean, there's nothing Trumpy in this message, right? No. How do they square with a party that glorifies people who were convicted of crimes on January 6th, right? Attacks and calls for defunding law enforcement that prosecuted those people with a former president who brags about cruelty, not paying your bills, right? Here's Trump calling for default. Debt default.

Right? And here's Tim Scott saying, no, pay your bills. And for that matter, Charlie, let's go beyond Trump. How about this one? I would add to Tim Scott's list there. If you make money, you pay taxes on it. But today's Republican Party is like, no, you know, if you can find a way to get around, you know, the IRS, you know, we don't want them to actually get the money from you, which is a libertarian argument, but not a moral argument. So I think that this Republican Party that he's describing, it would be great if we had it back, but it's kind of gone. It is so thoroughly gone.

And that's what really struck me is point by point by point, personal responsibility, these values. And then think about what actually animates the Republican Party right now. You know, the anger, who can punch your enemies the hardest, all of those things. It's a different vision. You know, it is interesting to listen to, say, you know, Glenn Youngkin or listen to Tim Scott. And it appears they're making a calculation that people want this sort of upbeat values based approach that is not punitive, that is not performative. But I don't know that that's the party that we live in right now. I'm also interested in what the theory of a Tim Scott candidacy actually is. And I was on Morning Joe this morning and I said, you know, what we have to see about these various candidates that are getting in.

And I, by the way, admit I'm having a little bit of PTSD flashback to 2016, because the bigger the field, the better it is for Donald Trump. Do you agree with me on that? I mean, the more candidates, the better it is. Sort of except, Charlie, I think I would caveat it in this case. A big field does generally help Trump. But if indeed Ron DeSantis is imploding, if that is the case, then it is important that we get some new people in to see whether someone else can emerge from the field who is more plausible than the candidates who are already in as someone who could rise up and beat Trump. I would agree with that. Now, you know, you start to look at the field and you realize there are a lot of very plausible alternatives here. This is not a bad field necessarily. But of course, we thought that back in 2015 and 2016, there are successful governors as a former vice president of the United States.

On paper, this looks good. The question, of course, is what kind of campaigns will they run? You know, can they run as a fighter without actually fighting the front runner? Will they ever actually take him on? I am skeptical of that. But also, are they running real campaigns? Are they real candidates for president? Or are these Potemkin campaigns? And by that, I mean, you know, Potemkin village, you know, just sort of set up to make it look like it's a village so that the emperors would think that everything was great and everything. Are these real campaigns or are they really campaigns for vice president? Are they really campaigns for, hey, can I increase my speaker's fees going forward?

Are they really campaigns for 2024 or are they setting themselves up for four years from now? I don't know. I don't know how, you know, Tim Scott and others, you know, think it's all going to shake out and they will end up being the Republican nominee at this particular point. Yeah. I mean, I don't know about running for vice president in particular, but I think generally a lot of these folks are thinking what a lot of candidates think when they run for president, which is, let's see what happens. You know, you got to buy a ticket to the lottery, right? And you get in and, you know, sometimes you're, you know, Rick Santorum and sometimes you're Bill Clinton. You know, you get in and the president implodes and there you are and you're president.

So I think there are a lot of them who are going in experimentally. And Charlie, I'm encouraged that they're making that bet because as we see more and more of these folks talk about entering the race, they are each calculating that Donald Trump does not have it locked up, I think. Unless you think they're all running for vice president, which I don't agree with. Let's pursue that line here, that they're all making a calculation that this thing is not done, that it is not completely big, that there is an opening. So perhaps they're seeing something there, right? Because you pull back a little bit and you go, okay, I'm not seeing it. I'm seeing Donald Trump dominating in the poll, Donald Trump having this weird cultic grip on the Republican base. And even as each one of these cases comes along, you know, the felony indictments in New York City for paying hush money to a porn star, the civil trial verdict that found that he had sexually assaulted a woman, not only doesn't seem to hurt him, it seems to strengthen him.

And so the big question mark is, will that pattern continue when the indictments come down in Georgia, which seem inevitable when indictments come down from Jack Smith. So I know you are writing on Donald Trump's long sort of history of, you know, how do you describe it? His grabbiness, his misogyny, his sexual assaultiness. I mean, is that ever going to shake his status as, you know, the only one for the Republican Party? Well, I don't think morally any of this will hurt Trump because the Republican Party has kind of abandoned the moral arguments against him, no matter what comes out. But politically, politically, you know, the fact that the guy could be facing multiple indictments, that he could be perceived politically as possibly losing this race for a very winnable race for the Republican Party, That could come into play. You know, we were talking before, Charlie, about the debt ceiling

and how, you know, before there is actually default, the market starts to price in the possibility of default. I think the same thing is kind of happening politically where nothing has taken Trump down, but you have an increasing number of candidates, including what we have, what the governor of North Dakota, the mayor of Miami. I mean, including what we have with the governor of North Dakota, the mayor of Miami. I mean- Okay, so what is this about? We have more and more of these marginal characters who seem to be, I think, Charlie, they're making a calculation that there is increased risk in the Donald Trump portfolio, that eventually that might bring him down to such an extent that it is worth their while

to try to go out and get 40,000 donors and get their polls up and just enter this race. Yeah. I think the mayor of Miami, I'm always reading about him over the weekend. He's a guy I think is very clearly would be running for vice president as opposed to his name. Was it Suarez? Yeah. I'm not going to spend a lot of time learning about these guys who are the no hopers. So, you know, one of the strange things about this campaign is that I think the vast majority of normal Republicans understand the dynamic that virtually any prominent Republican I think could beat Joe Biden and Donald Trump may be the only one who cannot beat Joe Biden. I said this on Firing Line over the weekend. By the way, did you catch my conversation with Margaret Hoover? I have not yet watched it. This was really a treat for me to be able to sit

down with somebody as bright as Margaret Hoover on Firing Line. And weirdly enough, this is my third appearance on Firing Line. William F. Buckley Jr. was the host the first two times, gives you an idea how old I am. We had a wide ranging conversation about what's happened to conservatism, what the role of the bulwark is, what we envision it to be. And then there was some rank punditry about all this. And one of the things I said, and I wanted to bounce this off you, if it's any other Republican other than Donald Trump, 2024 will inevitably be a referendum on Joe Biden and his record because he is the president. But if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump, then 2024 becomes a referendum on Donald Trump.

And it completely changes the dynamic of that race. And I think most Republicans understand this. They understand all of the baggage. They understand that they actually have a plausible case to win the presidency with anyone other than Donald Trump. But if it's Donald Trump, then it's a completely different environment. What do you think? Yeah, this is such a strange thing to do as a political party. So you're running against an incumbent president, a very old incumbent president, and people are unhappy about a lot of things that are going on. So theoretically, what you would

want to do is make this a change election. You want to bring in somebody new. Whoever it is, is not the current incumbent. And so it's a referendum. The dumbest thing to do would be to bring back someone who already was an incumbent president, right? To bring back Donald Trump so that you have one president against another. And in fact, Joe Biden was the change against Donald Trump. You're just throwing away that opportunity. So I guess that the way Trump intends to deal with this is to claim that he beat Joe Biden. Of course, he lost to him. But if enough Republicans believe that, and shockingly, a majority of Republicans today say they believe that Donald Trump actually won that election. If they actually believe that, they're not going to understand your point there, Charlie. They're not going to understand that they're throwing the election away because they're going to think Trump beat him one time, he'll beat him again.

When Joe Scarborough was asking me about that, I said, stop with the logic, Joe. I mean, we're talking about the Republican electorate here. I mean, yeah, we can lay out all the polls. We can lay out the numbers here. But, you know, this is going to be an emotional decision. And we are dealing with an alternative reality. And I continue to, it continues to blow my mind that Ron DeSantis, who, by the way, just is not covering himself with glory. Did you see the videos of him doing some retail politics? I mean, he's really bad at this. I mean, he goes into a restaurant and a bar and you can tell, I mean, this guy is stiff.

Tim Scott is charismatic. I can see Tim Scott being a great retail politician, but Ron DeSantis is terrible. But Ron DeSantis' entire theory of the case is I'm a winner. He's a loser. And yet he is not able to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. I mean, how do you even advance that argument without explicitly saying, Donald, you lost. He's going to have to say it sooner or later, right? Otherwise, you know, what's the point? Right. He doesn't have that courage. He doesn't want to take that risk. He's a very calculating guy. And that's part of his

difficulty dealing with people is he can't, he's just not spontaneous. He's not a natural person. One of the things people don't understand about Ron DeSantis is until you've run for president, it's just a completely different office. It's completely different in the things people don't understand about Ron DeSantis is until you've run for president, it's just a completely different office. That's right. It's completely different in the way people think about it. It doesn't scale up from governor. Yeah. And so, you know, DeSantis has run for Congress.

He's run for governor. Running for president is different because although the president is in charge of 350 million people, it's a very personal relationship that people feel like. Do they like you personally? People liked George W. Bush. And they were willing to overlook a lot of things that they didn't agree with George W. Bush because they just kind of liked him personally. DeSantis is the opposite. They may agree with him on a lot of policies, but personally, he just doesn't connect. I think that's exactly right. Yeah. And the whole DeSantis machine, Charlie, what was it that was supposed to build up Ron

DeSantis as the next big thing? It was that he won big and he has this amazing political machine in Florida. But the political machine that he has, has insulated him. He doesn't deal with national media, right? He's been well encased and surrounded by people who tell him what he wants to hear. He doesn't deal with tough questions. So now he's getting out on the trail. And now his fundamental weakness as a national candidate is being exposed, which is why, Charlie, I don't think it's so bad that Glenn Youngkin and others like him are thinking about getting in. I agree. Because Youngkin may be able to connect with the public in a way that DeSantis just can't. Well, he's got to be better than DeSantis. I mean, I think the Youngkin thing is the clearest indication that there are people in the donor class, the establishment class that are, you know, very, very worried about Ron DeSantis and think that you need somebody else in that

lane, the, oh my God, let's not do Trump again lane. But this crowded field is still going to be problematic because I don't see anyone backing off on this. And I remember it's burned into my retinas here, the 2015, 2016 debate stage, how many candidates there were. And the thing about it was, at that time, we thought that was a strong field. And Donald Trump, you know, for all of his faults, he made all of them look smaller. And I think this is what each one of them has to reckon with is, how do you get on that stage with Donald Trump and not be diminished? And the only one that I think is able to get on that stage and not be diminished, and do not cancel me here, Will, at this moment, is Chris Christie. Now, Chris Christie has no shot, but I want him in this race because I want him on that stage. I want to make this clear, okay?

Because everybody else is like, ooh, I can't say anything mean. And I can't, I can't, you know, he's going to punch hard and they're going to be afraid to punch back. Well, we have not seen anyone do that yet. Someone who really takes Trump on head to head. That would be the role that Chris Christie would have to play. Can I ask you a question about Youngkin though? And this goes to your conversation with Margaret Hoover and firing line,, right? So, Charlie, you represent sort of Reagan conservatism, the times before Trump. I watched the Youngkin ad. Zombie, yeah. Right. He's trying to bring back the Reagan party, isn't he? I mean, do you think that if Glenn Youngkin somehow made his way through this field and became the nominee, that he actually would and could steer the Republican Party back to your kind of conservatism? No, absolutely not. And I actually said this last week, that it strikes me

as naive that he thinks that an upbeat message is going to appeal to the electorate. Number two, this notion that you can revive zombie Reaganism is incredibly naive. And this was part of my problem with reconnecting with Paul Ryan, where there's a certain delusional sense that the political world and the Republican Party have not fundamentally changed since 2015. So that's what I said when I was listening to Tim Scott. I'm thinking that's me 2015, but it's not 2015 anymore. And by the way, Scott was not, that wasn't necessarily pure Reaganism. That was like, you know, Jack Kemp, Paul Ryan reform Reaganism that had its brief moment before 2016. But no, I don't think there's any going back to that anytime soon. And I think part of the problem that a lot of Republicans have is in the era of Trump, they know what they're against, but they're a little vague on what they're for. And they sort of have the muscle memory of like, we used to be for this kind of stuff. Can we go back to that? And the answer is no. I don't think it's a close call either.

And I kind of regretted saying this. Can I be honest with you here? Margaret pressed me on, well, you voted for Joe Biden and you'd vote for Joe Biden again over Donald Trump. Absolutely. No question about it. She said, was there any Republican that you would consider voting for over Joe Biden? And I had to think about this. And I said, no, I think I'm almost certainly going to vote for Biden because the nature of the Republican Party is such that whoever gets that nomination is going to have to make so many concessions, is going to have to make so many deals, is going to have to embrace so many deplorable things that they won't be who they are right now. I mean, so Tim Scott sounds like that now. What is he going to be like nine months from now after he's gone through the right-wing deplorable meat grinder, when he has to kiss Marjorie Taylor Greene's ring, when he has to, you know,

intone certain things, you know, about banning books or whatever. I just don't see how you come through this process without being deeply, deeply tarnished and compromised. Because the problem is not just Donald Trump, it's what's happened to the Republican Party. And none of them, I think, represent a fundamental break with the lack of principles and seriousness and decency of the Republican Party as it exists right now. So I sort of agree with you, but I sort of disagree. I agree with you that the most important functions of democracy, of voting, is to administer beatings, is to tell a political party when it is offending some of your basic principles and doing a bad job. You're going to take it out of power and keep it out of power until it learns to come around to a more sensible way of thinking. So it is eminently worth for conservatives who

believe the Republican Party should come back to those original principles to vote for Biden, to administer defeats to the Republican Party, to eventually force the Republican Party to change. But Charlie, in order to do that, in order to follow that program, you have to believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel. You have to believe that it's possible for the political party to come back to or to be more sensible. So I'm a Democrat in Maryland. I voted for Larry Hogan when he was governor because I wanted to encourage what I think of Democrat in Maryland. I voted for Larry Hogan when he was governor because I wanted to encourage what I think of as good Republicans, and he's one of them. So I wouldn't be too hardcore against the Republican Party.

Except that we're talking about the presidency here. And I think that for people who will argue, well, okay, the vast majority of Republicans are normal. I would keep coming back to the fact that Kevin McCarthy, the one-time young gun, is now Speaker of the House of Representatives. And look who he has become. Look what he is doing. Look who he has surrounded himself with. Look who he has empowered. And so it's not just the person. It's who do they bring into government and what are the various power centers. I mean, there are competent Republicans out there. There are decent Republicans out Who do they bring into government and what are the various power centers? I mean, there are competent Republicans out there.

There are decent Republicans out there. And yet none of them are really in a dominant position. And we'll see as we go through this process. I mean, you know, maybe one of them will, you know, rise up and we'll be able to throw off the shackles of Trumpism. But, you know, I'm sorry, I cannot find the pony in this pile like you, Will, at least not short term, maybe four, eight years from now. OK, can I challenge you on this? Because please do. I want some optimism.

I want to be cheered up. Right. Full confession to everybody. I'm trying to find the pony again, and I'm always going to try to find it even when it doesn't exist. Here's my case for the pony in this in this situation. So I think it's great that you picked Kevin McCarthy as an example, but this depends very much on the character of the individual we're talking about. If you go back to 2020, you have the House Republican leadership of Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Liz Cheney.

So let's just take McCarthy and Cheney. McCarthy turned out to be a weasel. He absolutely turned out to be a weasel. And nothing was clearer than after January 6th, when he single-handedly helped bring Trump back to power within the Republican Party. Liz Cheney did not. Liz Cheney did not follow. She did not say, because a lot of the base of the Republican Party has turned bad, I'm going to turn bad with it. She stood up and she got thrown out of the House Republican Conference chairmanship because there weren't enough members in that caucus, in that conference, who would stand with her. But theoretically, it is possible to elect enough

Republicans to that conference that they would stand by someone like Liz Cheney. Wait. Okay. That was kind of a leap, Will. The word theoretically is doing a lot of work there. You are offering the political equivalent of, you know, we could have a ham sandwich if we had some ham, and if we had some bread, theoretically. Okay, yeah, but we don't have the ham, we don't have the bread, and we don't have the theoretically real Republicans who would have said, screw you, Donald Trump, we're going to stick with Liz Cheney. Yeah, there are structural problems to someone like Liz Cheney having power. And I can see that as the core of your argument. And that is absolutely true. I simply want to make the point that just the fact that someone represents the Republican Party or is in that party as a leader within that party per se does not mean that they will do the wrong thing. Oh, no, no, no. And that was not my point. It was just I'm trying to imagine who I would vote for for president of the United States next year. I would love to believe that we would have, you know, a Larry Hogan or a Liz Cheney, you know,

to choose from. But that is just not going to happen. I think since 2016, I've realized that I'm not going to get what I want. At some point, you do make the compromises. And this can be difficult. And this can require you to have to swallow a lot of things, make compromises that you would not want to make. But I just am trying to imagine anyone, I mean, I think the most likely outcome is that Donald Trump is going to be the nominee. The second most likely outcome is that it's going to be somebody who has to transform themselves into a very Trumpy figure. Now, I want to plant my flag on the point that no one is as bad as Donald Trump. There is a debate that goes back and forth. No, no, no, no. Ron DeSantis is worse than Donald Trump. No, no, no. Donald Trump is

unique. He is alone in the danger that he poses, you know, the future of democracy. So anyone is preferable. But and I'm completely with you on that, by the way. Yeah, yeah. The general election seems so far away. And I guess I have kind of fallen into the it's going to be Trump versus Biden again. And you take a deep breath and go, that's not a hard choice. Not a hard choice for me.

Well, the challenge here is to defeat Donald Trump enough times that Republican voters start to believe that he actually lost and is a loser. A lot of them do, but we need more of them to believe that. I agree with you, but the flaw in that argument is that Donald Trump never loses. You have to understand this. Donald Trump never loses. Donald Trump has never been defeated. Donald Trump can only be betrayed, can only be cheated. And unless it is so overwhelming, see, I think this is also the problem that Republicans have in getting rid of him. What defeat in a primary do they think Donald Trump will say, hey, you know, congratulations, you got me there. I'm leaving now.

Do you remember the last time that he lost big? Remember when he lost in Iowa to Ted Cruz? Yeah. He immediately asked for a revote, said it was a lie. It was stolen from him. That should have been an indication early on that he was never going to do it. The question is whether or not enough Republicans just become tired of it, just become exhausted. And we are not yet there.

So we have a lot of other things going on here. Yes, speaking of Ron DeSantis, Ron DeSantis, you know, rolling out this week, not having the greatest week, you have Disney announcing a billion dollar office project, not going ahead. You know, I think you and I discussed this, that the vulnerability that DeSantis has in going to war with one of his state's biggest employers is the moment that employer turns around and says, you know what? Your business climate here sucks. We're thinking of moving thousands of jobs and billions of dollars investment out of Florida. I mean, that is a dagger. That's number one. Also, just worth mentioning, what did you think the NAACP issuing a travel advisory for the state of Florida? Can I just read you this?

Under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, the state of Florida has criminalized protests, restricted the ability of educators to teach African-American history, and engaged in a blatant war against diversity and inclusion. On a seeming quest to silence African-American voices, the governor and the state of Florida have shown that African-Americans are not welcome in the state of Florida due to this sustained, blatant, relentless, and systemic attack on democracy and civil rights. The NAACP hereby issues a travel advisory to African-Americans and other people of color regarding the hostility toward African-Americans in Florida. I think that DeSantis should have paid the NAACP

to put out that statement. I think this will absolutely help him. Remember, this is a guy who's running on Florida is where woke goes to die. He loves having enemies. He needs this to bond voters to him instead of Trump. So, and I got to say, Charlie, this also reminds me very much of the Georgia voting laws and how Democrats had called that Jim Crow 2.0, which was not true. It was a misrepresentation of the Georgia law. I think any boycotts that are mounted here against Florida in the name of cultural liberalism or progressivism will absolutely help DeSantis in the primary. Not necessarily in general election, but I do not disagree with you in the short-term impact. Will Salatan, great talking with you again. We will not be

having a Monday, Charlie, and Will show because it's Memorial Day. We're going to take the day off, right? I mean, so... Right. And we're not going to go out to a homeless shelter and pay a bunch of guys to pretend to be veterans. No, we're not. That is not on my agenda. Have a great week, Will. You too. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by

Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.