The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: It's In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

The pro-life movement, undaunted by the midterms, is pushing for more restrictions— and the political backlash will be severe. Plus, give Ukraine the tanks, and don't invite Donald Trump to your funeral. Will Saletan's back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The Republicans apparently are split on immigration, amazingly enough. Another mass shooting in an increasingly numbed America. A lot of weekend face palms, which we will get to. But as I was thinking about what I wanted to start with, Will, and hey, by the way, welcome back to Charlie and Will Mondays, Will Salatan. Hey, thank you, Charlie. I was thinking about what I wanted to start off with you. And there's all this heavy lifting. We could talk about abortion. We could talk about the tanks. We could talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene. But I figure that it's always a good idea to start with dessert. Don't you think so?

Just a little bit of a palate cleanser? Definitely. Okay. So what happens when you invite a narcissistic sociopath to deliver a eulogy at a funeral? Well, you don't have to wonder because this is what happens. Let's play this. This is in case you missed it. this is Donald Trump who eulogizes Diamond of Diamond and Silk. Now, I don't have to give you the context. It's a freaking funeral. Let's play it. You know, the world has lost one of its brightest stars, real star, but I see that we have another star who is equal to, but she stepped up and she is different.

I'm serious. I thought I knew them both. I didn't. I knew Diamond, but I didn't know Silk at all. I just learned about Silk. You're fantastic. You're going to carry on beyond anybody's wildest imagination. So he eulogizes Diamond by saying he really didn't know Silk. This comes, by the way, after Silk went on and on and on and on about how much she loves Trump and all the great times they had together and how he treated them just like his own kids, just like Tiffany and Eric and the other kids. And then Trump gets up and goes, I have no idea who you are.

And then, of course, he's at this funeral and he spends most of his time ranting about the 2020 election talking about himself attacking democrats and actually and i kid you not will complaining about the length of the funeral i wouldn't even play that but it's like yeah i was told that it was to take 15 minutes this is taking way more than 15 minutes you know and it's like, yeah, I was told it was to take 15 minutes. This is taking way more than 15 minutes, you know? And it's like, and the thing about it is it's completely on brand, right? This is Donald Trump. You invite Donald Trump to the funeral. And what is Donald Trump going to talk about? Himself.

You know, it's a perfect extension of the Pence incident from January 6th, right? There's a crowd is out there chanting to hang Mike Pence. And at that moment, what does Donald Trump do when his vice president is in mortal danger? He tweets that Mike Pence didn't have the courage to stand up for me, right? The other guy is in mortal danger, right? But it's all about me and what that guy didn't do for me. So, you know, at that moment, you might ask yourself, what would Donald Trump do if the person in his life actually died? And the answer is this funeral at which she's dead and Trump makes it about himself and the length of the funeral and what a burden it is on him. I also love that part where he says he doesn't know Silk. I'm trying to remember, Charlie,

all the incidents where Donald Trump has hung out to dry people who have stood up for him. I don't really know you. J.D. Vance, you've been kissing my ass, right? And you just have to like, yeah, smile. Yeah. Yes, Mr. President, I kissed your ass. Yeah. Right. So if you fake it for Donald Trump and you pretend that you're buds and you know him really well, he just gets up and says, no, I don't really know you. I don't have anything to do with you. Yeah, I've never actually watched your show. Diamond and Silk, their entire existence is shilling for Donald Trump, right?

They become superstars. They go on Fox. They do all of this stuff. And Trump basically says, I thought there was only one of you. There was two? Really? I have no idea. There's two?

So, Charlie, I was a philosophy major and there was this weird German philosophy called solipsism. I know it's not exclusively German, but that's the context in which I learned it. And it was like, okay, there were people who didn't believe anything existed, right? But then there were other people who were like, no, no, I exist. I'm not sure anything else exists, but I know that I exist because I'm experiencing my own thoughts, right? So this is a whole species of narcissism. I think Donald Trump is a solipsist. I think he thinks that nothing outside of him really exists. Okay. But narcissistic sociopath is, I think, more direct. I mean, if we're going to call him this. So I'm trying to remember this quote, wasn't it said of Theodore Roosevelt,

Teddy Roosevelt, that he was always the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral? I think it was his daughter who said that. But of course, it was loving and it was kind of a joke. Donald Trump is the bride at every wedding. He is the corpse at every funeral. It's always about him. So somebody said to me about this, like, what is wrong with that guy? And I said, you know, that question no longer really interests me. I mean, Donald Trump is Donald Trump. He's been this way all along. What is more puzzling is who are these people that look at him and say, yeah, let's put him back in the presidency. I want him to be a role model for my children. I want him to be the symbol of the United States of America.

Trump is Trump. It's the other people who are like, who are you? How are you watching this? And not going, okay, can we just move on? Can we just kind of turn the page now? Yeah. And you know, you and I, we, I think we unfairly accuse these people of having no commitments. What could be a greater commitment than deciding to support this man and

then to continue to support him through every demonstration he is engaged in to show you how awful he is? And yet they stay with him. So, you know, full credit to them. Well, that's because it triggers us. Okay. So we're not going to spend the whole thing on Donald Trump, believe it or not, but this comes as the Washington Post is reporting Trump team struggles to consolidate support ahead of South Carolina events. And they have a picture of Nikki Haley. I think she's going to kneel down that 2% of the Republican primary voters. If there's anybody who's going to get 2%, it's going to be Nikki Haley. Anyway, she's from South Carolina. So apparently they've been calling around and people are going, yeah, we kind of want to keep our powder dry. We have Tim Scott kind of thinking of running and Nikki Haley, who

has, I mean, talk about somebody who has been like a whirly gig. Like where is she on any given Wednesday on Donald Trump? I'm breaking with Trump. No, I'm sucking up to Trump. No, I'm breaking with Trump. No, I'm sucking up to Trump. I might run for president, but I won't run against Donald Trump. Oh, I will run against Donald Trump. What is Nikki Haley's theory of the case, do you think? Because I'm not sure I get it. Nikki Haley is in this weird zone where she said she wouldn't run against him, right? That was about a year ago, right? And now she's hedging because Nikki Haley has one very firm principle, and that is, which way is the wind blowing? So she's noticed clearly that lately the wind has been blowing against Trump.

Not because any of these people in the Republican Party are willing to stand up and say, Donald Trump is a bad person, and I lately have recognized that. No, what they've begun to tell themselves is Trump is a loser. We've lost seats in Congress. We lost the Senate. We lost the House. We didn't do as well as we hoped in 2022. It's sort of Trump's fault. He's getting old. So it's a political case against him. So Nikki Haley sees this unfolding trend and she realizes, you know, I can actually inch a little bit closer to suggesting that I'm going to run for president

regardless of what Trump does. And I think there are a whole lot of other Nikki Haley's in the party who have no principles. It's why they stood with Trump in the first place. And now that they see the wind blowing the other way, they're willing to turn against him. I'm trying to think of the Nikki Haley voter. She's sort of MAGA, but not really MAGA. They look at her with a little bit of suspicion because the pre-Trump Nikki Haley is very different than the post or current Trump Nikki Haley. Remember, she was all about actual diversity and taking down the Confederate flag and everything, and she's remade herself. So there's going to always be a little bit ambivalence on the part of the people who want it raw. The people who would vote for Carrie Lake aren't going to be voting for Nikki Haley. I'm not sure how she runs against Ron DeSantis. What has she got that DeSantis

doesn't have? It's a good question. And obviously at face value, number one, she's a woman and she not just is a woman. She makes that a centerpiece of her pitch, right? It's a centerpiece of her book. It's elect a woman and she's counting on there being no other prominent women, and she may be able to get a substantial number of votes in Republican primaries in a crowded field, that could really work for her. It is wildly hypocritical, is it not, for these Republican candidates to say, we don't care about race, we don't care about gender, that's a Democratic obsession, everybody should be colorblind and genderblind. And at the same time, politicians who are non-white or who are female in the Republican Party relentlessly milk that fact.

And they suggest to you, I mean, Nikki Haley absolutely says women are better government and you should vote for me for that reason. I am shocked, shocked to find out that politicians behave like politicians, Will. I just, I, it shakes my confidence. Okay, so on South Carolina, you are, people should know this, that Will is actually the greatest living expert in the world on Lindsey Graham. And someday we are going to read this piece,

this piece you have immersed yourself in Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham is still kind of cozying up to Donald Trump. I mean, he's kind of, he hasn't actually embraced him. But apparently, Trump still wants to be buds with Lindsey Graham. Is this correct? I's positioned himself as the ambassador from the Republican Party to Trump and vice versa. And the question is, which side is he actually working for? Okay, so Steve Bannon, who still has some juice in MAGA world, is very unhappy with this continuing Trump-Lindsey Graham bromance here. So this is Steve Bannon breaking bad on Lindsey Graham. Listen to this. Collection of senators led by Lindsey Graham, which I have no earthy idea why he's around President Trump. He's a cancer. He is a cancer.

That's metastasizing. President Trump's got to be warned. There's nothing good that comes from having, you know, Mitch McConnell's mini me, the the snake, Lindsey Graham around him at all. Okay. So, Will, what is that about? Well, these are two guys, Bannon and Graham, who each fancy themselves advisors to Donald Trump. People who, you know, they are trying to manipulate Trump. And Trump is obviously very manipulative person. So, there's a very clear difference between them on the question of the role of the United States in the world. I mean, people say about Lindsey Graham that he doesn't believe in anything, and that's just not true.

Lindsey Graham is an internationalist. So, for example, Lindsey Graham believes that we should be supporting Ukraine. He believes that we should be funding Ukraine, sending arms to Ukraine, that we have to defeat Putin. Steve Bannon believes, he said less than a year ago, that no Republican should vote for any money for Ukraine, zero dollars for Ukraine. That's a direct quote from him. So there's a substantive issue. This is globalist versus anti-globalist. Yeah. Isolationist versus globalist. Yeah. I mean, but it is interesting, the whole snake thing. I mean, so they basically say to Trump, you know, yeah, he's sucking up, but he's a shapeshifter. You can't trust him. I mean, is that at some level of Trump's reptilian instinct? I mean, he has to look at the Elise Stefanik and the Lindsey Graham and say, you people are so pathetic, but you're my pathetic person. But, you know, you can't really trust them, right? Because they do go, as you pointed out with Nikki Haley, they blow with the wind. Yeah. I mean, Trump does. We were just discussing the way that Trump insults the people who try to cozy up to him. And he's called, you know,

Lindsey Graham a rhino on the rare occasions when Graham speaks up against him. If they were just a couple of snakes, Bannon wouldn't be going after Graham that way. He's going after him because there's a real reason to do so, because he doesn't like the direction in which Graham is trying to tug Trump. Okay, so I want to get to the abortion issue, the 50th anniversary of Roe versus Wade, which, again, Roe didn't actually make it to 50. But in my newsletter, I described these as facepalm moments. I mean, the Biden folks found more documents, but just like this, that drip, drip, drip more. We are going to get to that in a moment. But also we have the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Mike McCaul, who's actually kind of an institutionalist, right?

I mean, sort of been around a long time, you know, not one of the bomb throwers in the caucus, but he was on yesterday and he's being pressed about Marjorie Taylor Greene being on his committee and what he thinks about Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I would describe this as an awkward exchange. Let's play Congressman Michael McCaul talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene. Now she will sit on Homeland Security and the oversight in the new Congress. She doubted 9-11. She doubted a plane hit the Pentagon. She later apologized for that. But she said that in 2018. Should she be on that committee? You were on that committee. I chaired the committee. There were these conspiracy theories that people go down. I disagree with this. I'm having to debunk this. This one was the worst violation. 9-11 was not a hoax. It was carried out by Al Qaeda. There's no question in

my mind. Should she be on the committee? Well, on anybody that says that, you know, look, this is 2018. I will tell you, she has matured. I think she realizes she doesn't know everything and she wants to learn and become, I think, more of a team player. I think it's incumbent upon more senior members to try. Look, she's a member of Congress to try to bring her in and try to educate her that these theories that she has are not accurate. Would you rather have seen a different choice? I'm not the chair of that committee and I'm not the speaker either. So, Will, but she's matured from the ancient days of, checks notes, 2018. And so now he's, yeah, I didn't put her on the committee, but maybe we can educate her. So in Mike McCall's defense, he doesn't actually believe this, right? Because it's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous. Yeah. What else is he going to say though, right? I mean, he's... And Charlie, we both know that if Kevin McCarthy had another 10 or 15 votes in his conference, he would not be sucking up to, and McCall and the others would not have to suck up to these wackos like Marjorie Taylor Greene the way that they are. But this defense is hilarious because, first of all, 2018 Marjorie Taylor Greene was, what, 42 years old? So, like, this is not like something she did in her youth, right? It's like less than five years ago. It's all relative. Yeah.

It's all relative. We were all so much younger back in 2018. And as you've pointed out many times, there's a long trail of Marjorie Taylor Greene since 2018, not least of which was, wasn't it just like less than a year ago that Marjorie Taylor Greene went to the Nick Fuentes conference where he praised Hitler and Putin? And she, remember this? And she spoke at this- Innocent summer child. Yeah. So that's four years into her process of what Mike McCaul is calling maturation. Yes, but this education is going to stretch for a very, very long time. Now, this comes the day before we get that New York Times story.

Have you seen this? Jonathan Swan and company. How Kevin McCarthy forged an ironclad bond with Marjorie Taylor Greene, which includes this quote, I will never leave that woman, Mr. McCarthy told a friend who described the private conversation on the condition of anonymity. I will always take care of her. It's a transactional, deeply cynical deal with Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I will never leave that woman. I will always take care of her.

Yeah. Hey, is that your gavel or are you just happy to see me? I mean, what? I can't believe you went there. That's great. Okay. So it's going to be impossible. We knew this from the first week when McCarthy couldn't get together enough votes to become speaker without sucking up to all these people, right? And it's just going to be this way the whole way. He is going to have zero distance between himself and the crackpots. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, the whole gang. He can't afford to lose them. It's one thing for him to defend these people as they do crazy evil things. But Charlie, there's a lot of substance at stake here. And one of the things that that New York Times story indicates is that there are a host of issues on which McCarthy is trying to suck up to Marjorie

Taylor Greene. One of them was vaccine mandates. Another was reinvestigating January 6th and defending the defendants of January. Another one is Ukraine. And we were just talking about Steve Bannon. It's not just Steve Bannon. Marjorie Taylor Greene said, this is in November, she said, quote, under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. So if Kevin McCarthy is going to be trying to suck up to Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk on a series of issues, including Ukraine, if I were Zelensky, if I were in Ukraine, I would worry about what this guy is going to do. I would worry, too. I would worry a great deal about what they're going to do. does have an understanding that if he lasts long enough, he can outlast American public opinion, perhaps, or the American political will, European will, although the Europeans are kind of amazing.

I continue to be kind of blown away by, you know, watching how Poland is standing up, you know, leading the way on pushing for the tanks, or these leaders of countries like Estonia and Finland. And I mean, they are right there on the border. I mean, they can see Russia from their house and yet they are being rock solid. But Putin has to be looking over at this country thinking, you know what, if I last through this year, we get into 2024, Donald Trump is going to be coming back. Look who's controlling the Congress. He's got to see that as an incentive to hang in there and to keep committing genocide. Yeah. And this goes all the way back to the CIA assessment,

the intelligence community assessment of Putin's interference in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf. And one of the things that that assessment said was a main reason why Putin liked Trump and wanted to help Trump was that Putin had good experience with businessmen in office, with Berlusconi in Italy. And he saw in Trump a businessman who had clearly indicated by that point that he didn't really care about America's role in the world for the sake of any values. Everything was about what's good for America financially. And if I'm Putin, I'm looking at America and I'm thinking it's not just Trump.

It's Marjorie Taylor Greene. And it's, you know, a whole bunch of, I forget how many, like 63 members of the House Republican Conference who voted against supporting NATO. There is a deep strain of isolationism emerging in the Republican Party that says all that matters is money. All that matters is America's financial self-interest, pull out of Ukraine. That was Donald Trump's policy, and not just maybe pull out of Ukraine. Trump spoke rather openly about pulling out of NATO. I think there was one of those books that suggested that in the second term he would have pulled out of NATO. Okay, so just briefly, let's talk about these tanks and what Germany is doing. Germany manufactures these Leopard 2 tanks, and apparently, though, there's a clause in all the sales that you have to have German approval before you can sell them

or give them to anybody else. You can sort of understand why that might be. And Germany, up until this morning, was essentially saying, yeah, you can't use our Leopard tanks. You can't give them to Ukraine. So not only are we not giving our tanks to Ukraine, we're going to block other people. The other storyline has been that the Germans have been kind of waiting on the Americans. If you give one of your top line battle tanks to Ukraine, we will have the diplomatic cover to give our tanks. So first of all, obviously, Ukraine needs tanks. You know how I feel about this.

I am frustrated that we are having this discussion in January 2023, when I think that the need should have been recognized a long time ago. And once again, we are slow. We have been timid. Will Ukraine get those tanks, do you think? I think they will get the tanks. And the question is, who are they going to get them from? There's some discussion that, you know, the United States simply has to cough up one Abrams tank. Right. Give them the freaking tank. Just do it. I'm happy to put, you know, an Abrams on a, whatever, just send over one Abrams if that's what it takes to get Germany to move. However, what looks like what's actually going to happen as of today is the Germans are going to let somebody else, namely Poland and some other countries decide to use

their tanks. So they're going to release them, but the Germans are going to pretend somehow that they're not involved in this decision. I mean, it's weird because Germany obviously has this reputation from World War I, World War II, especially World War II, the belligerent country, a country that starts wars and invades. And so after the Holocaust, Germany was going to be a pacifist country, or at least it was going to be a peaceful country. And the Germans are very anxious about getting involved, and it makes it very difficult for them to do the right thing when the right thing is to stand up and be militarily involved in stopping somebody else's violent aggression.

Our colleague Bill Kristol, if you followed his tweets over the weekend, he's pretty frustrated by this. He just got back from Germany. I think he was more optimistic that they would come around, but he put out a tweet over the weekend, a farce in three acts. Act number one, Germany to European nations, please buy our excellent leopard tanks in case there's ever a ground war in Europe and we all need to defeat aggression. Act number two, aggressor launches ground war in Europe. Act number three, Germany, no, you can all need to defeat aggression. Act number two, aggressor launches ground war in Europe. Act number three, Germany. No, you can't use our Leopard tanks. And basically, that's sort of like where we're at, too. And so as far as in five acts, U.S. builds Abrams tanks to use primarily

in a ground war in Europe. Two, ground war in Europe. Three, Biden administration, no U.S. troops. Four, so give Ukraine tanks to help defeat the aggression. Five, Biden administration, no U.S. troops. Four, so give Ukraine tanks to help defeat the aggression. Five, Biden administration, nah, they're happier in bases in the United States. Yeah. What do we have these freaking tanks for? Well, there's some argument between the Abrams and the Leopards. But, you know, one thing that I would like Americans to learn from what's going on right now is both on the right and the left, we have often the illusion that Europe is one thing.

So, you know, Trump was like Europe, you know, NATO, they're just, they're out to get us. It's like Europe was a financial block fighting against the United States. And then you have people on the left who think, you know, Europe are our friends and Europe are all. Europe is not unified in every respect. And what we are seeing right now is a clear distinction between Germany and Poland. They are neighbors, but Poland is absolutely trying to do everything they can to help Ukraine, including saying to the Germans, let us put together a coalition of the willing, really, within NATO that will send these tanks. And Germany has been resisting that. But, you know, more power to Poland. So let's talk about the abortion issue on the 50th anniversary of Roe versus Wade. The pro-life movement has staged a major march in Washington, D.C. every year on the anniversary. This year

was no exception, of course. But this is the first time that they are rallying post-Roe. In my newsletter today, I actually featured a piece that you wrote, Will. I was inspired by something you wrote last week. You had some advice for anti-abortion activists. You suggested they need to ask themselves, what do they really want right now? More babies, more abortion laws, or fewer abortions. So talk to me about your advice to the triumphant pro-life movement at the moment. What should they really want? What do they really want? Well, so they caught the car, right? They got rid of Roe v. Wade, and they've been fighting that for so long, I think they haven't really thought clearly about what they want to do from this point forward. And the instinct is they've been trying to pass bans on abortion everywhere they can. Okay. And they're going to keep trying to do more

of that, but passing laws does not necessarily solve the problem better than other ways. And what I tried to argue in this piece was if you actually want to reduce the number of abortions in this country, if that is your metric, which is what I think it should be if you're a pro-lifer, the way to do that is actually through birth control. And it's through long-acting reversible contraceptives, which are basically birth control you don't have to think about. It's IUDs, it's arm implants. You make a decision, you put it in. Until you take it out, it works. You don't have to think about it every time you have sex. There are lots of studies that show that this prevents unintended pregnancies and thereby

prevents abortions. The problem is that pro-lifers like the idea of maternity. They like the idea of babies, right? And so they're focused on a woman who is already pregnant and whether she chooses to have an abortion or to have a baby. By the time the woman is pregnant, I hate to tell you, you pro-lifers, you kind of already lost the fight. Your ability to prevent an abortion at that point is extremely limited. So you're much better off working with women when they would already choose not to have an abortion. And that is the choice not to get pregnant in the first place. Well, let me tell you what I wrote, Will, in my newsletter after quoting your very, very sound advice. I wrote, I regret to tell you that the activists

do not seem to be inclined to take Will's advice. So why is there so little interest in this movement? If the goal is, in fact, fewer abortions, why so little interest in what you're talking about here, birth control? The Catholic Church, obviously, is against birth control, but I can't remember the last time I saw a poll in which the vast majority, even of Catholics, didn't say, nah, yeah, we're okay with birth control. Yeah, this is a distinction between the pro-life movement and ordinary pro-life

Americans. There are millions and millions of people in this country who believe that abortion is morally wrong. Some of them don't think it should be illegal. They just wouldn't choose it for themselves. Some of them sort of are sympathetic to the idea that it should be illegal, but they're practical about this. And if you tell them, you know, birth control would help you to reduce that, they're interested in that. But the movement itself is too dominated by, first of all, the people you described, people who are actually against contraception as well, and also has been so focused on passing

bans on abortion, restrictions on women who are already pregnant. There's a kind of inertia to that, and it makes them feel, Charlie, I don't want to call it virtue signaling because they're actually passing laws, but they're not thinking clearly about what will have the effect of reducing abortions. They're thinking about what can I chalk up as a bill that I got passed. Over the weekend, the New York Times sketched out the new litmus test for Republican politicians on this issue. And one of the things that has changed now that Roe is gone is it used to be that if you were a Republican politician and you said, I'm pro-life, then you were pro-life and the pro-life

movement would say, hey, you're one of us, right? Now, they have to be specific. Now, it's like, what do you mean by you're pro-life? Will you support this? So Susan B. Anthony, Pro-Life America, which is one of the most influential anti-abortion groups, is now drawing new red lines. They're saying that, for example, in 2024, any candidate who does not support a federal ban should be disqualified from winning the party's nomination. So they are already talking about a national ban as a litmus test. Other activists are pushing for a new series of litmus tests that include restrictions on medication abortion pills, protections for so-called crisis pregnancy centers that discourage women from having abortions, and promises of fiercely anti-abortion appointees to run the Justice Department and the Food and Drug Administration. And then, of course, you have at the state level the ramming speed to

push further abortion bans, including, and this is again from the Times article, including prosecuting those seeking abortion care in states where it is banned, targeting allies who help women travel across state lines for the procedure, criminalizing the mailing of abortion medication, and granting unborn babies, fetuses, the same legal rights as people through what's known as fetal personhood bills. So it seems that they are undaunted by the midterm elections or by the Dobbs effect. And this seems to suggest to me that this Dobbs effect is going to be extended into the next few election cycles. And that's putting it mildly. What do you think?

Yeah, yeah. So this all of this behavior on the part of the pro-life movement brings to mind my favorite philosopher, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who famously said in the Terminator movie, it is in your nature to destroy yourselves. And that is basically what the pro-life movement is in the process of doing. So they did not suffer as big a political blowback as I thought they would after the Dobbs decision, but they did suffer some losses in the 2022 elections as a result of this issue. What this article suggests is that it's going to get worse and it's going to get worse because the more they win, the farther they push and the more people they alienate. Let's just take a couple of things you mentioned there. The federal abortion ban. There are a lot of people who thought the states should be allowed to make their own abortion decisions. They didn't like Roe v. Wade for that reason. When the pro-life movement comes in and

says, no, no, you have to be for a federal ban, there's a large chunk of people in public opinion polls who you're going to lose over that issue, the federalization. Well, it was a bait and switch. I mean, they kept saying, you know, there ought to be state, and then instantaneously they went to a federal ban. Absolutely. But the other stuff that you mentioned, Charlie, is more serious. And that is when you actually get down to the nitty gritty of what it takes to enforce an abortion ban, particularly in a world where you can easily get pills or where you can travel across state lines. Now you start to see, yeah, you're going to have to criminalize people sending or receiving abortion pills in the mail. You're going to have

to be inspecting people's mail. You're going to have to figure out how you can stop women from traveling across state lines. I mean, think about how many millions of people will rise up when you start to implement that kind of a law. So the backlash is going to get more and more severe as pro-lifers get deeper and deeper into the nitty-gritty of trying to stop people in any way from getting abortions. Yeah, the enforcement is either going to be difficult or will have to be draconian to be effective. One of the other things that we're finding out is, and this is, I think this is another piece that was in the Times, even though there are exceptions written into some of these laws, what women are finding out is that they don't really work because doctors

are so afraid of losing their license or being criminally charged that even though there may be exceptions for rape and incest, they're basically saying, no, you know, we have to protect ourselves. So the exceptions turn out to be kind of dead letters. That's the other thing. So you know what I'm going to be very interested to see, Will, and I'm afraid to say that I'm skeptical and cynical both about this, is there has been more noise among pro-life groups about supporting legislation that would actually help families with children, that would actually support children who are born, you know, expanding Medicaid, providing more medical services to women who are prenatal and postnatal. And there's some talk about understanding that, hey, if we really

want to create this culture of life, maybe we ought to, you know, show ourselves to be more pro-actual post-birth life. I'll be interested to see whether they actually follow through on that, because there's nothing about Republican orthodoxy that makes me think that you're going to see dramatic expansions of the safety net for children and mothers. Yeah, I mean, if your agenda has been to ban abortion, that's been the focus of the movement. And to be fair, folks who are really, really into this issue on the pro-life side tend to be the people who are involved in crisis pregnancy centers, but the political wing of the movement doesn't focus on this. And the Republican politicians who ally themselves with the pro-life movement are not so focused on that. And they're constantly opposing funding of programs that do that kind of thing. So there's going to be a tension between the hardcore of the movement, the people who do

crisis pregnancy centers, and those politicians. However, I will say that this is different from the birth control issue we were discussing before, because once the woman is pregnant, pro-lifers tend to sort of get interested in that situation in a way that they don't get interested at all prior to the pregnancy. They don't focus on preventing the pregnancy. They think about women who are pregnant, what can be done for them. Well, let's go back to this litmus test and the push-pull. You're going to see this play out in the primaries. For example, Rhonda Sandis down in Florida has passed a 15-week ban, which is not sufficient for the more militant members of the pro-life movement. In fact, Kristi Noem has been taking shots at DeSantis for not being pure enough on abortion. Republican politicians will feel it necessary to pander to the Republican pro-life base rather than

keep an eye on the swing voters they might lose if they go to the more extreme bans. What do you think? Yeah, it's going to be like any other issue in the Republican side. You're focused on winning the primary first. And people like Kristi Noem obviously know that there's a hardcore of pro-lifers in the Republican primary. They are, in a general election, Charlie, these people are such a minority. And one of the problems with this push to go earlier and earlier is this kind of illustrates in a very clear numerical way, the trend of a movement that wins something that is marginally popular just keeps pushing. So you can get in some polls support for

a 15-week ban. And whoever told DeSantis that that was a safe position, I think was largely correct. And Lindsey Graham was pushing 15 weeks at the national ban too, right? I mean, so some Republicans have been telling themselves that's the magic bullet. Right. No, no, no. Because Lindsey actually started with a 20-week ban and the pro-life organizations asked him, hey, would you move it up to 15? And he said, sure. But they're not going to stop there. And what you're bringing up from Christine Ohm just illustrates, they're going to push for 12. And they're not going to stop at 12. They're at 10. The heartbeat bills are at six weeks, right? And they're just going to keep going until they've alienated enough people to ignite a huge backlash.

All right, so let's switch gears a little bit. Biggest facepalm of the weekend was the word that there are more Biden documents. I understand substantively that Biden is doing a lot of the right things, that he's cooperating. But in terms of the politics, in terms of the communication, this does not seem to be going well. It does feel they're not on top of it. Let me play for you a soundbite. This is Joe Biden over the weekend saying that despite the fact that they found even more documents, that he has no regrets. That's the phrase, no regrets. Let's play the president. We immediately turned them over to the archives of the Justice Department. We're fully cooperating, looking forward to getting this resolved quickly. I think you're going to find there's nothing there.

I have no regrets. I'm following what the lawyers have told me they want me to do. It's exactly what we're doing. There's no there there. Well, before I light the fuse here, Chris Coons, who is, I think, a pretty good guy, one of Joe Biden's most ardent defenders in the Senate, was on yesterday. And he seems to be also adopting the there's nothing to see, there's no there there line. Let's play Coons number one. I'm confident that President Biden has said truthfully that there's no there there. And in the end, we will see this was just an inadvertent matter of filing in sharp contrast to his predecessor. Okay. Will, no there there, no regrets. I'm going to bounce off the walls, Charlie. I'm just going to bounce off the walls. Okay.

Joe Biden delivers this statement. It's Thursday evening. It's Thursday evening. For context, Friday morning, the Justice Department, they're going to send people into Biden's home, a planned search. So this is all coordinated. So he knows that there's going to be a search. It's 12, 13 hours. They're going to go through his house and look for documents, right? He also knows that they have already found documents in places where he didn't think they were. Joe Biden says, and Charlie, this is not an ad-lib statement. This is not on Biden. He's reading. He's standing at a podium. He's reading a script where someone has written, there's no there there. Okay. The next one, sure enough, the next day, the feds come in and they find documents that Biden hadn't found, right? It is insane. It is political malpractice to get up and say, there is no there there right

before the people who are going to find the there are going to show up at your house and find it and tell everybody. So there obviously was a there, there, and Biden has misplayed this from the beginning. The point about the there, the documents in Biden's offices, in his home, in his garage, is there was stuff there. There absolutely was. And it's very different from the Trump case. But if you say there's no there there, number one, you're going to get caught saying something that turns out not to be true. And number two, you're blurring the whole thing into whether there's a there or there isn't. There's a there in Biden's case. It is that he shouldn't have had documents. And there's a there in Trump's case, which is he shouldn't have had documents. And then he tried to keep them away after the government asked for them back. And that difference is what Biden should have been focusing on all

along. Okay, but what should he say? Do you have any regrets? What should he say? Yeah, yeah, I have regrets that I didn't make sure that the documents were being handled correctly throughout my career. I have regrets that I didn't a year ago when it was publicly reported that Trump had documents he should have. I have regrets that I didn't have my people search every office, every space of mine to see whether I had documents. Yeah, I have regrets. I have regrets that I didn't say anything earlier about the documents we found. That would be the better thing to say. Is there a reluctance to say anything like that because he has a special prosecutor who could, in theory, you know, bring or recommend charges against him? Of course, we know what the rule is

about charging sitting presidents, but still, I mean, he's got this investigation hanging over him. He's got the FBI. I mean, are the lawyers telling him, don't say that? Be very, very careful what you say. I don't think it's a factual statement. I don't think it interferes with the investigation for the guy to say, I screwed up bad, you know, or the people who worked for me screwed up and I'm responsible for that because it's just obvious. You know, when the truth is on your side, and I believe the truth is on Biden's side with respect to his cooperation with the government, just tell the freaking truth, right? And the truth is, I screwed up. It was an innocent mistake. It went on too long. I should have done it differently, but I didn't lie and I didn't withhold documents the way that Trump did.

I mean, this is one of the frustrating things I think about being in public life is that you think you're creating a narrative or a record going in one direction and then things happen. So imagine that Ron Klain, the outgoing chief of staff, was thinking, OK, I'm going to go out and I have all these legislative victories and a reasonable performance in the midterms. That's going to be my legacy. Unfortunately, I think that, you know, it might be how did you manage to screw this up so badly? How did you know this before the election and then wait all of these months to reveal it? How was the response so bumbling and stumbling?

How did you manage to turn the entire Washington press corps against you on all of this issue? I'm not trying to shift the blame, but you just sort of wonder, like, how was this managed so badly? Yeah, I mean, OK, so if I try to defend the Biden people for a minute, I would say, let's be clear, the Biden and the Trump cases are completely different. Biden, once he finds these documents, is completely cooperating. And all of the evidence that we have so far is that from the moment they found documents, they've cooperated entirely with the Justice Department. They've consulted them, handed over what they have. But the thing is, the cooperation and the candor has been with law enforcement, not with the public, right? Biden didn't tell you that they found these documents right before the election.

They did tell instantly the National Archives, which, you know, instantly, one day, two days, which then told the Justice Department and the investigation began. So they were completely clear. And subsequent to that, the Biden people, the Biden lawyers have absolutely cooperated with and consulted with the Department of Justice leading up to this consensual search, very different from the Mar-a-Lago search, because Joe Biden was trying to abide by the law and cooperate with the government when Donald Trump didn't. That's why the two cases ended up in different places. Yeah, it is such a mess, though. And I guess what I'm most frustrated about is that it just handed this whataboutism, you know, sword to Donald Trump, because those distinctions,

those nuances are exactly what gets lost in our current political debates back and forth. Okay, so briefly, we have to talk about the debt ceiling fight and the fight over spending. We had a fantastic podcast on Friday with Catherine Rimpel from The Washington Post who was talking about, you know, the problem of that is not just hurting cats. It's hurting psychotic feral cats with machetes. This could be bad. I thought it was interesting. Nancy Mace, I think people might recognize her name. She's one of these Republicans who's sort of dipping her toe in, you know, being a moderate, not completely MAGA, although she's gone back and forth. Remember, she famously actually went up to New York to suck up to Donald Trump in front of Trump Tower.

But now she's kind of going her own way and apparently was one of those who was objecting to the,line immigration border-only law that they wanted to ram through. But in any case, she was also on one of the talk shows yesterday. And was being asked about, well, okay, in this debt ceiling debate, what kinds of spending should be cut? And I thought her answer was awfully interesting. Let's play Nancy Mace. You have one thing you're ready to put on the table as a spending cut that you think both parties can accept? Well, I think, well, obviously no cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, or social security. That's a non-starter for either side. But otherwise it's up to, I would lean on the agency heads, whether it's one penny or five pennies, the penny plan does

it with five cents on the dollar in five years. But we can find some way to negotiate. And I believe we should go to the agency heads and say, where can you find cuts? Where can we do this and do it over the next decade? That's a very responsible measure that we should all be discussing. She didn't answer the question. She just asked, give me one thing that you would cut. I mean, they are about to put this country right on the edge of a debt default and you think they have all, okay, we're going to cut this. We're going to cut this. This is wasteful spending. The only answer to the question is, well, we're obviously not going to touch social security and Medicare. Okay. All right. We'll leave that as a, but then we're

going to go to the agency heads. Like what? You go to the FDA and say, can you cut 5% of your budget? She has no ideas, does she? That's as alarming as anything when you realize that one of the alleged grownups asked to come up with any spending cut comes up with nothing. Right, right. I'm surprised she didn language for waste and fraud, what she gave you. Okay, so the Republican line about spending is Democrats are always kicking the can down the road. We keep raising the debt ceiling. We don't deal with the problem. And they just kick this into the future, blah, blah, blah. What Nancy Mace is doing in that interview and what a lot of Republicans are doing is they're not kicking the can down the road. They're kicking it downstairs to somebody. I thought it was like we're going to go to the agency heads and ask them to find some

unspecified cuts. If you won't say when you're asked on the spot, just name one thing, one thing you'd cut. Why should anyone believe that any of this is serious? What we have is a political party, the Republicans, who want to sound tough on spending. They want to sound like they're being responsible, but they won't take responsibility for naming anything that should be cut. And what I think is going to happen, Charlie, is that actual adults like Biden and McConnell,

when they did the omnibus, basically decided McCarthy and the House Republicans can't be trusted to make a responsible decision. So we're going to cut them out of the process. So that was the omnibus. And I think that there's now going to be a movement. There's some discussions with some moderate House Republicans. You know, can Biden sort of cut a deal out where Kevin McCarthy gets to stand off on one side with Marjorie Taylor Greene and his other wackos and sort of keep their hands clean from the process of raising the debt ceiling because they plainly don't have the guts to go in there and actually propose real spending cuts. You know, over the weekend, our colleagues had a live event out on the West Coast. And one of the things they did was to sort of go around the table and say things they've changed their minds on.

And Sarah Longwell said that one of the things she changed her mind on was for a while believing that conservatives actually did care about fiscal conservatism and small government and realized, no, they never believed all of that. I shared the same experience. I really did think that they were serious about it. But then there were a couple of things that, you know, were hard not to notice, although we worked very hard at. Number one is that these proposals for deep cuts were always very unpopular. And it's one of the reasons why when you get into the specifics, they run for the tall grass. Polls would show that even Republican voters, even Tea Party voters,

did not want to cut the big ticket items. And also, when Republicans got into power, noticed that they didn't really slash spending at all. In fact, they decided they didn't care about the deficit at all. And so here we're at, and they're about to go to the mat to cut spending. And Nancy Mace cannot mention a single thing that she wants to cut. So this is not good news. This is, you know, it is not good news because what it means is they're going to engage in a lot of performative demagoguery. And, you know, it's like, you know, watching children with hammers running through the China shop. We don't know what the what the results going to be.

No, and they're following directly in Trump's footsteps here. I mean, part of what Trump showed the Republicans is you can have reasonably popular politics in some respects by playing to cultural issues that motivate the base and don't cost anything. You know, Trump was, I mean, I don't want to call him a lefty, but his the base and don't cost anything. You know, Trump was, I mean, I don't want to call him a lefty, but his whole thing was don't touch, you know, entitlements. And that allowed the Republican Party to continue to run up the debt and not pay any of the political price that would come from it. I'm going to say something unpopular to my friends on the left, which is, I think one of the reasons why we need a conservative party in this

country is that the progressive party will not restrain spending when it's out of control. And we are, you know, running a debt to GDP ratio that's getting pretty close to out of control. And I think we need to rein it in. And the Republican Party is the party that should do that. And if they won't do that, they're just useless. They're useless in addition to being destructive on many other issues. The problem is, is that there's no seriousness on anyone's part to actually deal with it,

because it's always a matter of, OK, so we may have a debt crisis, but it's going to be, you know, down the road, you know, after I'm out of office or I will blame it on the other guy. And meanwhile, we have $31 trillion in national debt. I mean, that is going to be a problem at some point, right? Yeah. See, I don't actually know anymore because I probably, I probably told you this in the past. When I was on the radio here in Wisconsin, I probably had Paul Ryan, and I don't think

this is an exaggeration. I either had Paul Ryan on or at events, maybe a hundred times, where he talked about the debt crisis that was coming and why we needed to care about the deficit and why this was a big problem. And really, it was alarming. And frankly, I believed for a very, very long time, except when, of course, they got into power and decided the deficit didn't matter anymore. But I mean, this was something they talked about over and over and over again. And I think that at some point I internalize the fact that, hey, this crisis is coming and it's going to be terrible. I don't know anymore. The track record of countries that just run out of control deficits, you know,

ad infinitum is not good, right? And they end up in austerity. It's not like, you know, eventually you run out of money and you're Greece or whatever. Charlie, we've been in an era of low interest rates and we figure, you know, when interest rates are low, yeah, borrowing money is okay. When interest rates go up, as they suddenly did, it's not so great. In general, it's just not a healthy thing for any country to do to be that much in hock. And it's also you're lying to yourself. You're spending money that you just can't sustain over the long term. Well, this was the irony of the fiscal conservatives who were willing to cut taxes without having offsetting spending cuts, even though they might say it rhetorically, they didn't do it. So what was fiscally conservative about

writing checks that you really couldn't cash or running up the credit card all the time? And unfortunately, this was a pattern going back and into the Reagan years. But you're right. You need to have that push and pull like, OK, how much does it cost? What can we afford? Do we really want to have this massive intergenerational transfer of wealth? By the way, that was a phrase that I used a lot was we were seeing this massive intergenerational transfer of wealth that we were loading all of this debt on our children. I still think that that is a concern and it needs to be raised, but it needs to be raised by people who actually have a clue and are engaging in good faith debate. And that is

what we do not have right now. So Will, again, happy Monday. I hope you have a great week. I can't wait to read your Lindsey Graham piece and we'll talk a week from today. Awesome. Thanks, Charlie. All right. Thank you. 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. you