The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: The Dem’s RFK, Jr. Problem

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Steve Bannon and company are helping give anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy a boost in the polls, Trump gets challenged from the right on foreign policy, Haley is fantastically cynical, and CNN tried to make Trump happy. Will Saletan is back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is June 5th, 2023, the anniversary of the infamous crackdown in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese. We should double back on this a little bit later because Donald Trump very famously praised that as a show of strength, as what a strong country does. In any case, because it is Monday, my colleague Will Salatin is back. Will, have a good weekend? I did, Charlie. I've got a couple of fewer teeth than I did last week because I had some interesting dental stuff going on, but hey, this is what happens. But you're hale and hearty other than that. I mean, it's not like losing a vital organ. That's what you tell yourself. You're like,

you know, if it happens to your teeth, you got, you know, 31 more of those. You could say, hey, Charlie, I've got one less lung than I did a week ago. And then I would say, hey, so does the Pope. So, you know, it is a, boy, this is an offensive beginning. Okay, so let's just start with some of the big news of the day. Donald Trump thinks it's coming. Donald Trump thinks he's going to be indicted. He put out a true social bleat. Reports are that the Marxist special prosecutor, DOJ and FBI want to indict me done for all caps, seven years, including all caps spying on my campaign, which never happened, period. Biden crimes go unpunished, including that he had boxes in Chinatown in his garage by the Corvette and 1850 boxes in Delaware that he won't let anyone see. That is real. All caps, obstruction, exclamation point. They seek retribution for Republicans looking into Biden's all caps crimes exclamation point. I have done nothing wrong period election interference exclamation point. So he thinks it's coming. And this comes the day after we learn the grand jury in the Trump classified documents case is expected to meet this coming week after a hiatus. And if you read one thing about this case, the New York Times has a fascinating piece over the weekend.

Trump lawyer's voice memo could be a key in the classified documents inquiry. Oh, Lordy, there are more tapes. Here's this one sentence here. In complete sentences and a narrative tone that sounded as if it had been ripped from a novel. Mr. Corcoran recounted in detail a nearly month-long period of the document's investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter. So he recorded it all. And now the special prosecutor has it all. So if I'm reading this story about the lawyer's testimony correctly, this is like a script that the lawyer wrote down to testify. He's being extremely careful to protect himself, the lawyer. But it appears, Charlie, that he is just a witness. He is the dupe in this story. Trump apparently

conned him and other people about what documents were there or were not. And so, it's the misleading of the lawyer that's part of the story. But it's really kind of interesting the way when you drag a lawyer in to testify, which almost never happens. Am I right? Very, very. That's extremely difficult. The lawyer goes in making sure that he is not under any legal threat. So he's got his script down about what happened to him. And if somebody is going to go to jail for this, it's not going to be the lawyer.

He's going to make sure that it's going to be Donald Trump. No, that's right. And this is an important point, actually, because a lot of the commentary out there is speculative, right? Because we don't know what the grand jury is going to do. We don't know what the special prosecutor is going to do. We don't know if they're, I mean, make a long list of things that we don't know. So, you know, this is why I'm very, very cautious about the whole walls closing in type thing. However, there are some things that we know, including the fact that a federal judge ruled

that in fact, Jack Smith could have access to the lawyer's notes because he was piercing the attorney-client privilege using the crime fraud exemption. In other words, this federal judge has formally ruled that yes, there is evidence that a crime was committed and therefore takes the extraordinary step of piercing that shield. So that did happen. We do know that.

Just laying that all out there. Okay, so otherwise, over the weekend, I think everybody in the world by now has read Tim Alberta's piece. I'm exaggerating only slightly. Tim Alberta's piece in The Atlantic about Chris Licht, shall we say, the besieged CEO of CNN. It was a thorough defenestration. He had complete access to the CNN boss who thought this was a good idea to bring him along. It's quite an expose. And, you know, one passage that I excerpted in Morning Shots this morning talks about what happened at the infamous Trump town hall meeting that went so well. It seems obvious, he writes, that CNN leaders had been contorting their coverage to

keep Trump happy, perhaps to prevent him from walking off stage. At one point during the pregame show, when the words sexual abuse appeared on the CNN chyron, one of Lick's lieutenants phoned the control room. His instructions stunned everyone who overheard them. The chyron needed to come down immediately. And Tim Alberta, who wrote that, tweeted out this morning, cannot overstate how shocked, shaken CNN staffers were at the time of this episode and how irate others have been as the story spread, justifiably so. If this decision was indeed made to appease the Trump team to keep him from quitting the town

hall, it is an absolute scandal. And that's like only one of many, many details here. So I don't know, what do you think though, the over-under of whether Chris Lick survives? I'll put five down on he doesn't last the month. What do you think? Yeah, I'm not selling Chris Lick any career insurance right now. Can I just pause on this story about the Trump town hall? This is kind of an interesting rebuttal, a refutation to some extent of the sort of right-wing myth about the media. Now, it is true that a lot of people in the media are liberal, and that's the way they think. But here we have a case where CNN, the ostensibly liberal network, is essentially self-censoring, right?

They take this sexual abuse chyron off the screen, and Trump's about to go on. Why? Why would they do that? That behavior on their part is not consistent with an ideological analysis of the news. It's not like they're fake news, they're left-wing. It's that they're a business, Charlie, right? CNN is a business. It has been losing viewers. It is afraid, apparently in the story, that Trump is going to walk off the set, that this town hall will be a disaster. They need

to keep this guy happy because he brings audience. He brings eyeballs. And that's good for their business, right? But was it good for their business? It seems like it was a sucky business decision. It was bad journalism, but also not the savvy business move that they might have thought. You may be right about that, but that's retrospective, right? At the time, they were desperate to get him on.

In fact, Trump bragged. One of the hilarious things, the sadly hilarious things about that town hall was Trump just demeaning CNN about how they begged him to come on and they desperately needed his viewers, right? And at the time that that executive says pull down the chyron, that is a business decision. That is we're afraid we're going to alienate Trump. We don't want him to walk off. And so it's the news business, that bias that a lot that people should worry about. Okay. I think that that is a legitimate point. I think that people do need to understand what the incentive structures on all of these

media operations are. On the other hand, as you read this account, you realize a couple of things, including the fact that some of the people who are making have the most power in the American media ecosystem are not deep thinkers. I mean, you know, I mean, this is the thing is Chris Lick thinks that he's got this insight that we need to move back to the center, that we need to get the audience back. But he clearly hasn't thought it out. And I mean, Tim Hilbert does a really good job of pointing out that, OK, your analysis of your credibility issues has merit, but the execution was horrifically bad because you could not connect the dots. And he even has this scene where Chris Licht is telling some college students, you know, you know, he's figured out how to handle Donald Trump. I'm not worried about it. We'll just handle Donald Trump like any other candidate, which shows that he clearly did not know what he was doing. I mean, that was the flaw here.

Just to follow up on that, this is something that I have learned as I've gotten older. So when you're a young person, you see people in positions of power, the political power, economic power, CEOs, right? And you think there must be some reason why this guy got there, right? He must be really smart. They must know something. And then as you get older, you begin to realize that they actually don't know more than you. I mean, you know, Chris knows things about the media business, but they make mistakes, big mistakes all the time. And it certainly appears one of the things that I love about this Tim Alberta piece is

that Tim goes deep into this with the reporting and essentially confirms that, right? Licht has made lots of mistakes. He just didn't know things. A lot of times companies bring in a CEO. He's supposed to fix things. He has an idea, but the idea is bad. It doesn't work. And then they bring in another one and another one, but that doesn't mean that there's some genius to these people. No, there's not. I want to get to Jack Dorsey in a moment. I have to mention, one of my tweets is actually quoted in this piece in the reaction to the town hall. It actually has tweets from Dan Rather, AOC, Adam Kinzinger, and me. I wrote, Chris Licht is rapidly becoming the Elon Musk of CNN, which has actually aged pretty well. Speaking of CEOs who you think are these great geniuses who understand things and clearly don't. What is the report in the New York Times

this morning that advertising revenue at Twitter is down by 59%? Good luck with that business, mom. Speaking of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, the previous CEO of Twitter, who we sort of have had moments of, you know, nostalgic flashback. Hey, remember the good old days when before Elon Musk? Well, he tweeted out an endorsement. And I'm not kidding you. He tweeted out an endorsement yesterday of RFK Jr. for president, that RFK Jr. can and will defeat Biden and Trump. And RFK Jr. is a, I'm sorry, batshit crazy grifter vax conspiracy theorist who, talk about a strange phenomenon right now. You have any thoughts about RFK Jr.? So, you know, can it get worse than having a crazy Republican party? Yes, yes, it can get worse. It can get worse by having a crazy Democratic Party. Let me take you back to 2020, right? Bernie Sanders starts to surge to the front of the Democratic Party, right? And there's all of a sudden, a sudden movement of other Democrats in the race, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar and a bunch of others, right? All these guys, they're like, this can't happen. And we're going to pull out of the race. We're going to consolidate behind Joe Biden and bring

our party back to sanity. So go forward now to the 2024 race. We don't have that anymore, because Biden kept everybody else out of the race. There isn't a Gretchen Whitmer or Jared Polis or whoever in the race to do that. So Joe Biden's got to hold this down by himself. But there's so many Democrats who don't want Biden to be the nominee. I mean, they'll vote for him in a general election, that there's this huge pocket open for a nutcase like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right? So, I mean, among other things, we know about the crazy vaccine stuff. I mean, he's got a whole bunch of other crazy ideas, but- There's a lot of baggage there.

But the point is that if he starts to gain traction, what is the force that's going to pull in the Democratic Party against him? I mean, I hope it is simply that Democrats look at his record and say, you know, we can't have this guy as our nominee, but there isn't a consolidation that can happen because that's already happened to the extent it will. Well, and also, you know, there is this phenomenon that I think we need to constantly remind ourselves of that not everybody is as online as we are. Not everybody pays attention to politics the way that we do. And that there are millions of people who probably look at his name and go, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

He's a Kennedy. Wow. You know, this is a return to Camelot. And they don't know any of this other stuff. So what a surprise that he's polling so well, at least initially. It's all name recognition. And I think that there's a certain cohort of a certain age that looks back nostalgically on, on RFK. And by the way, there's his anniversary of his assassination as well coming up. So there is that danger that unless people are informed, no, this is not that RFK. This is the son who has gone through some things.

Right. And he is weird and he is dangerous. And there are questions about his ethics and his judgment. And one would hope that the media would not make the same mistake with RFK Jr. that they made with Donald Trump back in 2016, which was they didn't take him seriously enough to do the normal vetting and do the kind of investigative reporting that a leading presidential candidate needs to have. Right. And on that point, I was very happy to see in The Washington Post today that there there is some of that digging now going into RFK Jr. And so in addition to the vaccine stuff, I was not aware of this, Charlie. I don't know if you were that RFK Jr. has his own election theft myth. So Trump has his about 2016, 2020, all that stuff. And RFK Jr. has his about 2004. RFK Jr. claims that John Kerry won the election. others to dig into this. But meanwhile, they are up against Fox News and other folks in the right wing media sphere who are promoting RFK Jr., right? Of course they are. They just want to take down

Biden. So you can count on the right wing media sphere to be promoting RFK Jr. throughout the Democratic primary, such as they are, in order to hurt the president. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing for Steve Bannon, Toutum. I'm just wondering, you know, how many people who listen to and pay attention to and trust Steve Bannon will be voting in a Democratic primary, given what's going on on the Republican side? I mean, who knows? Well, that is the RFK model, though. He's saying that he's going to bring people into the party. He doesn't say like Trump, but it is like Trump.

He's going to bring in people who are, you know, part of that horseshoe of the far left and the far right. Okay, we need to parse out how significant the developments over the weekend were. I'm talking about the blowback about the Kim Jong-un praise from Donald Trump, if anybody is, you know, was like living their life or something or, you know, hanging out and, you know, spending time with their family as opposed to being online. Let me just get you up to speed on all of this. For some bizarre reason, the World Health Organization named North Korea to its executive board. I mean, what the, you know, I mean, WTF, let's start right there. Donald Trump reacts the way he always reacts when one of his murderous thug friends has a success, tweeted out or bleated out on True Social, congratulations

to Kim Jong-un, which he misspelled. But anyway, you know, there was the exclamation point, congratulations. Nobody apparently is walking around saying, do not congratulate because he does this. There was immediate blowback to all of this. Okay. So all of the leading Republican candidates, Nikki Haley, Ace Hutchinson, even Ron DeSantis ripped him. Brian Kemp, who is not running for president, governor of Georgia, actually put out a statement. Interesting. He does not feel the need to comment on everything that Donald Trump does, right? But he put out a statement, taking our country back from Joe Biden does not start with congratulating North Korea's murderous dictator.

And here's Mike Pence, who also had this teed up for him. Look, whether it's my former running mate or anyone else, no one should be praising the dictator in North Korea or praising the leader of Russia who has launched an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine. This is a time when we ought to make it clear to the world that we stand for freedom and we stand with those who stand for freedom. Asa Hutchinson says Kim Jong-un, the tyrant dictator of North Korea, should not be praised by Donald Trump for a leadership role in the World Health Organization. We sanction leaders who oppress their people. We do not elevate them on the world stage. Nikki Haley was pretty tough.

Kim Jong-un is a thug and a tyrant. He has tested ballistic missiles against our allies. He has threatened us. He's terrible to America. We need to stop being nice to countries that hate America. Rhonda Santus said, I was surprised to see it. Kim Jong-un is a murderous dictator. Then, of course, felt the need to attack the World Health Organization, too.

So I guess the question is, what do you think about this? I mean, I kind of speculated, why is this happening now? This is not the first time that Trump has lavished praise on this particular brutal despot. And this is not the only brutal despot that Trump fawns over, right? I mean, he's got a bro crush on murderers. That's pretty well known. I mean, everybody has to know this. So there's a little bit of irony to the feigned outrage over the weekend, a little bit belated, since he's been doing this now for six or seven years. Maybe I'm going to be the optimist here, because I thought it was still welcome, because it shows three things. Number one, a willingness to punch Trump, which we hadn't seen before. Number two, the fact that he sucks up to people like Kim Jong-un does underscore his fundamental unfitness for office. And three, people like Kemp and others, I think, sense that this might be a vulnerability because, I don't know about you,

Will, but I'm guessing that the pro-Kim wing of the Republican electorate is pretty small. So what do you make of this, that they're willing to take shots? Or is this just too low-hanging fruit to really read anything into? Where do you come down on this? Charlie, I feel like you're stealing my pony here. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, I am going to do an optimistic take on this, even though it's not that different from yours. First of all, Trump was praising dictators the whole time he was president, right? And a bunch of Republicans who believe dictators are bad, stood by Trump, looked the other way, defended him, whatever, because he was the leader of the party. He was the Republican president. Then he's out of office, right? At this point, you would hope that they would revert to their principles because they

don't need Trump anymore. They don't have to stand behind him. They could stand up for traditional conservative ideas about foreign policy. Charlie, I think that's what is happening. And there is some opportunism involved because this is Iowa, right? And all these guys are trying to take down Trump in Iowa. And the way to do it is apparently they figured out that you can go at Donald Trump from the right on policy. On this issue. On this issue. But so COVID was one issue, right?

DeSantis is going after Trump as too much in the pocket of Fauci and the medical establishment. Ukraine is complicated because you got the question of American money going there, the whole America First movement, isolationism. So that's not politically advantageous. But Kim Jong-un is kind of an easy hit. I would say they are being somewhat opportunistic in terms of playing in Iowa, opportunistic in terms of choosing North Korea to focus on instead of Ukraine. But it is encouraging. But good, yeah. They're reasserting a traditional Reaganite foreign policy against

a president who claimed to be a Republican, but just loves dictators. On this question of running from the right. So you have that weird thing that DeSantis is doing, where he's trying to run to the right on vaccines and a variety of other things, you know, saying that, and Tim Miller has a great piece in the bulwark today that, you know, the argument that he was not harsh enough on immigrants who were brought here as children. Donald Trump was too soft on crime that, you know, that he was too anxious to distribute a life-saving vaccine. That's kind of a weird running from the right, and I think it's going to hurt DeSantis, even with college-educated Republicans. But on this issue of saying you should not be praising

these murderous dictators, that does seem like something that's going to have broad appeal in the Republican Party. It is a signal. This is what a normal Republican sounds like. This is what a normal, non-seditious Republican sounds like. And I thought it was interesting that they all jumped on it. I haven't heard from Chris Christie yet, but we're going to be getting him into the race tomorrow. I have a feeling that he's going to have some things to say. So on the issue, I want to talk about Nikki Haley because she had her town hall meeting on CNN last night that I think eight people watched. Did you watch it? I was one of the issue, I want to talk about Nikki Haley because she had her town hall meeting on CNN last night that I think eight people watched. Did you watch it?

I was one of the eight, Charlie. I'll admit it. Did you really? Yes, I did. Sorry. Okay. I was just going to blow past it, but so tell me about it. Okay.

So Nikki Haley to me is kind of a fascinating study in we can talk about her remarks about transgender and a few other things. I think we are in agreement that Nikki Haley is just fantastically cynical about many of the things she talks about. She says things that are just condescendingly untrue about a lot of cultural issues. She's just creating wedge issues everywhere she goes. She's a little smarmy and all that. And at the same time, at the same time as I say that about her, I was really struck watching this town hall that on some really big issues that are not necessarily advantageous for her in a Republican primary and could hurt her significantly, she held her ground. Such as? Okay. Do you want to start with the bad stuff first or the good stuff first?

No, no, no. I want to hear the good stuff. There's too much bad stuff here. Okay. There are a couple of things that I'm remembering from the town hall that really stood out. One was about, she starts off being asked about Ukraine, right? Ukraine is not an easy issue to talk about from sort of a Reaganite point of view in today's Republican party. You've got a lot of people, obviously, who are with the Trump position of, we don't care about other countries, just bring everything home. She stood her ground and she said, we have to defend Ukraine. It's about freedom. And she said something else, Charlie. The Trump position is, if we keep

antagonizing Russia, we're going to end up in a world war, right? Which is sort of a traditional lefty point of view about like, you know, strength through peace. And instead, Haley asserts peace through strength. And she says to the audience twice, she said, we're not going to end up in a world war by standing up to Russia. We're going to end up in a world war if we don't, right? She says, if Russia takes over Ukraine, they're not stopping there. They've already threatened to go into Poland, to go into the Balkans. So you're going to get a much larger war if you don't stand up to aggression. All she's doing is reasserting Reaganite foreign policy. But politically, that was a gutsy thing for her to do in today's Republican Party. So about foreign policy with some of the more normal candidates, the Nikki Haley's, the Mike Pence's, I'm guessing Chris Christie as well, taking a more traditional point of view about peace through strength. And then, of course, you have the appeasement or pro-Putin wing of the party led by Donald Trump. And we had this weird moment yesterday.

Did you catch Vivek Ramaswamy? Well, he was on This Week ABC and he went full appeasement and full reward Russia. Give Putin everything. Jonah Goldberg tweeted out, it's a perfect mix of impressive verbiage and lowbrow thinking. I mean, this is a Republican candidate for president gets pinned down on how to end the Russian invasion. And he basically says his idea, just basically give Putin everything he wants. Let's play a little bit of this because this is the other side of this equation going on in the Republican primary. I don't trust Putin, but I do trust Putin to follow his self-interest. I don't think he enjoys being the little brother in the relationship with

Xi Jinping. And so what I think we need to do is end the Ukraine war on peaceful terms that, yes, do make some major concessions to Russia, including freezing the current lines of control in a Korean war style armistice agreement. Which Ukraine really wouldn't want to do. Which Ukraine wouldn't want to do. And also a permanent commitment not to allow Ukraine to enter NATO. But in return, Russia has to leave its treaty and its joint military agreement with China. That better advances American interests and actually further deters China from going after Taiwan, which I think is a much higher priority for the United States. And she goes on to point out they're not going to do that. You know, I mean, Putin is not going to cut his alliance with China.

I mean, that was you want to talk about wishful thinking. Well, whoa. So let me take people back a little context here. Remember that after Donald Trump got elected president, there was an assessment of the Russian campaign to elect him. And one of the things in that CIA assessment said that Putin likes, Russia likes, businessmen. They like Berlusconi. They like Trump.

Why do they like to help those people get elected in the West? They like them because businessmen are not really well-versed in geopolitics and they're kind of ruthless about, you know, whatever's good for my country economically. And they just sort of lack this traditional sort of ideology or morals about dictators, right? About somebody like Putin. So, Ramaswamy comes along in sort of the Trump lane, right? Trump was a businessman who runs for president. I mean, Ramaswamy looks different from Donald Trump and he's younger, but basically he's articulating the same kind of isolationism, the same kind of morals don't matter, foreign policy. And what he says there, Charlie, is really notable. Can I just pause on that? He says, let's cut this deal with Putin because I

trust Putin to follow his self-interest. What exactly is Putin's self-interest if Ramaswamy were to offer him this deal? Putin's self-interest if Ramaswamy were to offer him this deal? Putin's self-interest is to take the deal, right? To say, absolutely. Thank you for ending aid to Ukraine. Thank you for killing off the Ukrainian resistance. We'll take the Donbass. We'll take the territory we have, right? And you make a commitment not to let Ukraine into NATO. And I agree to tear up my deal with China, my military agreement with China. And then after that's done, just go right back to his deal with China, right? He'll do what Hitler did, right? This is what guys like Putin do. They do follow their self-interest and that includes,

that absolutely includes double crossing you. So, Ramaswamy is a fool or he's insulting the intelligence of all his viewers. I don't think you need to choose between the two of them. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. So let's go back to Nikki Haley because you actually spent a Sunday night in early June watching Nikki Haley. You know, you're mentioning that she sometimes sounds a little bit clunky when it comes to the culture. I think she's got the same problem that Rhonda Santus has, that she feels that she

needs to put on this mask. I mean, she needs to be the culture warrior. And it doesn't necessarily come completely naturally to her. So she has that feeling of inauthenticity, like, this is what these people want me to say, therefore, I'm going to say it. Do you read it that way? So there are certain people like Josh Hawley or Nikki Haley, who when I watch them speak, and I listen to what they're saying, and I compare it to the truth, I think of them as the picture of Nikki Haley is what you would put in the dictionary next to politician, right? She's saying what she thinks you want to hear. She's sort of cynically manipulating an issue. And she does that, but she kind of does it selectively is what I'm learning about her.

She has certain issues where she is totally faking it, where she's just saying what she thinks will get her some votes. And then she has other issues where she draws the line. And she was at this roast and ride in Iowa on what Saturday, and then she does the town hall. And at both times, I sort of noticed this. And so I'm reevaluating Nikki Haley, that it wouldn't be that bad to have Nikki Haley as the Republican nominee, because it appears that there are certain issues and they are the big issues on which she is willing to be principled. Okay, so she will lean very heavily into the trans issue over the weekend. She's not alone among the Republicans. But this was Nikki Haley talking about the trans athlete issue.

I mean, all of these things that are pushing what a small minority want on the majority of Americans, it's too much. It's too much. I mean, the idea that we have biological boys playing in girls sports, it is the women's issue of our time. My daughter ran track in high school. I don't even know how I would have that conversation with her. How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year? Okay, so I'm going to confess here that she had me about halfway through when she's saying, you know, this is an issue that is of concern to young women and girls, and I have heard this. And then she goes through that somehow linking suicide rates to trans athletes being seen in the bathrooms, which I'm guessing she doesn't have a lot of data on.

It was like, it was sort of like she had this mash of ideas that she wanted to cram in. And everybody has to say that if we follow your idea, people will die. Because that apparently is now the default setting that if you say this, people will go and kill themselves. I'm just willing to say willing to stake out a position that the genuine problem we have with teen suicide is not linked to the fact that young women are seeing trans people in bathrooms. I just don't think that's what's doing it. But I could be wrong. So I'm with you on that.

Charlie, you and I disagree about this issue to some extent. We've talked about it and we'll talk about it some more, I'm sure. Nikki Haley loses me at the beginning. She loses me at the beginning when she says, and she said it, I don't remember exactly the same way in at this roast and ride in Iowa and at the town hall, but she basically says that the transgender, you know, girls, boys becoming girls is the number one women's issue. She says it's the number one issue. As soon as I hear that from a politician, I know that I'm hearing bullshit. I'm hearing bullshit and it's cynical bullshit because she literally, Charlie, I can't remember which of these, I might've been at the town hall.

She goes on her next topic is about women being raped on the way up the Western hemisphere to cross the border. Like maybe that's a slightly larger women's issue than how many, like a half a dozen, you know, kids crossing over gender wise and youth sports. You've got to be kidding me. You've got to be kidding me. So it's a fake issue. And then to draw a connection to suicide, I think you and I would agree the problem on the left in transgender is a lack of data, right? You were just talking about that. We don't really know. We don't have enough evidence, enough science about what the effects are of having all these kids physically, chemically transition, much less surgeries and whatnot. And there's going to be a lot of debate about that and which way

the presumption should go. But for Nikki Haley, in the absence of almost any data to suggest that having boys who became girls in girls' locker rooms is the cause of suicide among girls, absolutely outrageous, Absolutely outrageous. That's where you get to that, the Mad Libs approach to politics, which is, and you see this with Rhonda Sandis, where basically Rhonda Sandis has a speech with like 10 or 20 blanks in it, and the word woke has to go into every single blank, just throwing the word salad. Okay, so let's talk about other things that have happened over the last week. Since you and I spoke, the debt deal was sealed. It came as a surprise to a lot of people that they were able to do this. Democratic votes were needed, but Kevin McCarthy was on the shows yesterday saying that he was very, very happy that 67% of Republicans in the House voted for the deal. There's still a lot of, I would say, a lot of heartburn still going on on the right, realizing that they got pantsed on this particular deal.

You wrote a very interesting piece late last week about the antagonism caucus, which, you know, basically the negative tribalism that you see. So talk to me a little bit about this, because you're seeing a lot of butthurt going on on the right about how that vote turned out. There's a couple of interesting threads we could pursue here. The one about negative tribalism is that we now have a pretty significant number of members of the House Republican Conference, really members of the Freedom Caucus, who explicitly said they were going to vote against the debt deal because the Democrats were voting for it. They have some policy objections, but if you are literally going

to do the opposite of whatever the other party does, then by definition, you can't get any unity. We're in this kind of zero sum situation. And so it's kind of no wonder that Kevin McCarthy had trouble rounding up more Republicans to vote for this thing because he needed Democrats to backstop him, right? And the Democrats did backstop him. The Democrats provided votes to make sure that the debt ceiling passed. But we're going to be in a really difficult position as a country if we need Congress to unite, to do some very basic things like, you know, pay our debts to support the defense

of Europe against Russian aggression there. All of that's going to be much, much more difficult if one party refuses to do whatever the other party does. Well, it is interesting that this has become kind of a go-to, you know, line about a piece of legislation, not arguing the specific merits or making the case for it, but simply saying, well, if Democrats voted for it, it must be bad, right? And so let's listen to Senator Mike Lee, who back in the mists of time was regarded as one of the smart principled senators. Listen to this hackery from him. More Democrats voted for it in the House than Republicans, and more Democrats voted for it in the Senate than Republicans. That tells you about something.

That's exactly what you're talking about here, right? One more time. Kevin McCarthy goes on, of all places, Maria Bartiromo show. By the way, Maria Bartiromo still has a job, which is... And he's also talking about this must be good because look who voted against it. Which Democrats voted against this? AOC, Bernie Sanders, the progressives. Why did they vote against this? AOC, Bernie Sanders, the progressives. Why did they vote against it?

Because we did get work requirements in welfare reform. See, if they hate it, it must be good if they like it. And Maria's like, ooh, ooh, Kevin. That's good. Yeah. I mean, McCarthy knows what motivates this faction of his party, and he's giving it to them. Can I point out that Mike Lee's statement is self-fulfilling, right? First of all, the House Freedom Caucus holds a press conference and they say, we're going to vote against this thing. There's so many Democrats voting for it. That shows it's bad, right?

And then they do vote against it. And then having voted against it, and Mike Lee voted against it in the Senate, right? Mike Lee votes against it along with most of the other Republicans in the Senate. And having done that, he says, see, more Democrats than Republicans voted for it, which means it's bad. So it's a completely circular argument, right? I justified voting against it. Then we voted against it.

Then the fact that we voted against it means more Democrats did, and that makes it bad. So let's circle back to the presidential campaign, because we are going to have at least two more announcements this week. Not a surprise, Chris Christie is going to be getting in and then Mike Pence is going to be getting in. There's a guy from North Dakota who's getting in. Do I need to learn his name? Is it worth spending any time on that? Yeah, it is. It's Doug Burgum. Just say it over and over again. Okay. Why is Doug Burgum running? He's running because North Dakota is very close to Iowa. And?

Sorry, that's the answer. Wow. But it's not that close. It's not a border state. We also ought to remind people that Iowa has a somewhat shaky track record for picking the eventual nominee. I just want to say that doing well in Iowa does not necessarily translate into doing well in, say, New Hampshire or South Carolina or someplace else. I do want to mention that. I think it's important. I look at this and I'm thinking, okay, so there are a lot of reasons for people to run for president, including the fact they might want to be vice president or they might want to write a book or because they want to get $50,000 a speech instead of just a mere $20,000 a speech. There's lots of reasons. And yet there's also the possibility that they are looking at the particular race, looking at Donald Trump,

who looks dominant right now. Did you see, by the way, what Reince Priebus said? Talk about going to complete toe licker. He says that Donald Trump is the Bruce Springsteen and everyone else is the cover band. And the cover band, they're going to be standing up there, all these cover bands, and he's the Bruce Springsteen. But these other candidates are looking at this thing, okay, there's these unknowns, these indictments, which we've all told ourselves just make him stronger. They think something might happen, right? And they want to be there. Do they see something we don't see? Yeah, no, I don't think they know any more than we do about the chances of that happening. And in fact, if they think that Trump is going to be brought down by an indictment, I agree with you, Charlie. I think that inference is mistaken, right? It's

not that Trump is going to get hurt if another prosecutor turns against him. That just goes to his point about the deep state and the woke prosecutors are out to get me. But I think it's just opportunism. It is true that these minor candidates who are getting into the Republican side are not treating Donald Trump like he's the incumbent. Right. In the case of Joe Biden, almost nobody is getting in the race against Joe Biden on the Democratic side because he's the incumbent president. Trump wanted that to be the case running for his job another time, but they're clearly betting that it is okay to oppose him as long as they oppose him on some grounds that the base will support. Yeah, I'm tempted to say, and then I will regret having said it, you know, maybe it depends on what the specifics of the indictment are, but I think that that would be naive. I think the document case is going to be

more substantive than I had originally thought it was going to be. In fact, I think I'm on the record of saying at some point, well, you know, that's probably not going to be happening because of, you know, the Pence and the Biden stuff, but I think it's clearly differentiated enough. It's a completely different story. It's about obstruction. The folks at Just Security, I don't know if you've had a chance to see this, the folks at Just Security have done sort of a mock prosecutorial memo, basically the memo that prosecutors would use to decide whether to bring the charges. And it is impressive. It is detailed and quite persuasive. Whether it makes a difference politically, I don't know, because I've got one more soundbite here. This is Ken Buck, who is also on the Sunday shows.

And he's clearly very, very unhappy, by the way, with Kevin McCarthy and the way he handled this. Part of the problem that Kevin McCarthy has, we don't know all the promises that he made to get the speakership. And there does seem to be a certain sort of grinding distrust that that he might have reneged on some of his deals. But that's not why I want to play the Ken Buck. Ken Buck is asked about, would it be better if you didn't have a, I don't know, a nominee wearing an ankle bracelet? I don't look at the actions that he has taken that are being investigated as much as his role as a former president and what his policies were. That wasn't very smooth, was it? First of all, I mean, it's like, I don't really care what he's done or what laws he's broken or his character.

I just think he's been such a great president. Right. Are they going to ride that pony all the way through 2024? Yeah, I mean, Ken Buck is saying basically, I don't care. I don't care about any of that. All I care about is, you know, policies. Did he make the trains run on time? And from Buck's point of view, Trump did that. And Buck goes on to say in that interview, you know, that he doesn't think if Trump gets indicted that it's

going to, he says that could actually help Trump for the same reasons we were just discussing, that it just shows everybody's out to get Trump. So there's just a general indifference in the party. So that's one reason why I think that these bets on Trump, on something materially happening. So I think that these Republican candidates who are running against Trump, if they think something bad is going to happen to Trump indictment wise, that on the merits will hurt him, they're wrong. But caveat, they may be right that the whole image of Trump being saddled with stuff, you know, and just Trump fatigue and Trump losing, that that will hurt. Because I see a lot of folks, I see DeSantis, I see Haley talking

about Trump being a loser and the baggage and all that, and let's move on. That general feeling may work. I just don't think it's going to work for the very small candidates. I think it's going to work if it works for someone like DeSantis. That's right. And of course, you know, DeSantis was buoyed for months by the idea that he was going to be the Trump killer. They know that he'd won by 19 points and he would roll into this presidential campaign and he would become the obvious alternative that would be acceptable to almost all the factions of the Republican Party. And of course, that didn't play out the way that it was planned. He had a very bad rollout. He's had a lot of questions about him. There's a huge amount of investment out there in the punditocracy in trying to say, well, he can still come back. He still can be resilient, which is, of course, true. But I don't know, Will, I keep watching him and this is not a guy with top tier political skills. I don't know how many ways to say this without being redundant. I mean, he is not a gifted politician and I'm not sure that his instincts are right at college-educated Republicans, and he's starting to slip with them

too. And apparently he's decided that he's going to go as crazy and right-wing as possible in the primary, but I don't know that that's going to get him the Trump votes, and it may cost him his college-educated support. How do you see that playing out? No, I think that's true. And look, among folks at the bulwark, I was more bullish on DeSantis than anyone else. And when he was in front, that was merited. He's got a good record to run on in a Republican primary. He's a resume candidate, right? The resume candidate when he's ahead does well.

A comeback is a completely different story. For someone to come out of the field from 50 points behind Donald Trump and take it from him, the person who soars like that is not going to be someone who has a strong resume, but not very good retail skills. The person who does that is going to be someone who just catches fire, who's a really good speaker. And it's pretty clear by now that that's not Ron DeSantis, right? We've seen lots of him with people. Ron DeSantis is a young man, but he's had lots of time to experience other human beings and try to talk to them. And what we've seen so far is he's not very good at it.

So I think it's extremely unlikely that DeSantis takes off based on anyone loving him or liking him. He would only take off if he won at the beginning and began to develop some of that idea that if anyone's going to take out Trump, we need to get behind this guy, DeSantis. Yeah, and the problem is that if DeSantis does stumble, they're going to need a plan B. The anti-Trump Republicans need a plan B, whether it's Glenn Youngkin or whether it's Brian Kemp. But by the time they realize that it's not going to be DeSantis, it may be too late. It was one of the things that we forget every four years and then have to relearn is how fast this process goes. Once it gets rolling, it becomes unstoppable very, very quickly. The one exception to that was the Bernie Sanders rolling to the nomination in 2020,

and then Democrats realizing, whoa, we really don't want to do that. We were like 10 days away from Bernie Sanders as the nominee, and that didn't happen. But I don't know whether you'll be able to stop this when it comes to Donald Trump. Although, I just urge people to, this seems unfair, I'm trying to imagine anyone reading his truth social comments on a regular basis and not thinking, oh my God, I think I said this last week, that if this was a co-worker or a family member who is putting this stuff out on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, you would have a family meeting to talk about having an intervention or calling for a wellness check.

I'm really not kidding here. You'd go, grandpa's going through something. We need to help her. Right. Okay. Now I feel like dragging the Charlie Sykes of a year or two ago back into this conversation to remind the present Charlie Sykes that we've been here before, right? Trump saying some crazy stuff that we thought would turn people against him and it didn't happen. But at some point, theoretically, we could get to a point where we're starting to see signs that the behavior is changing. And so that's why I'm really interested in what you flagged at the beginning, this tweet about Kim Jong-un.

Yes. So this did not happen, right? We didn't get to the stage where Pence and Haley and everybody was, Brian Kemp, my God, people coming in from all over, recognizing, hey, Donald Trump went too far here and we're not afraid to say so. That's why it's significant, potentially significant. Right. So we may be seeing a breakthrough. If it's not this time, it may be the first sign of that there will be another one. And that may be a breakthrough. I don't want to hold out too much hope. But there are some signs. Well, because Donald Trump will do it again. I mean, there

will be a moment in which he will say something about Vladimir Putin. Well, he will say something about President Xi. And this, I think, is a danger for him because it really cuts at his image of being the strong America first. When, in fact, as we know, because we've watched him for so long, the fact is that Donald Trump is purely transactional. And there are other things perhaps going on as well. But the idea that he is a super patriot, that he embodies American values, has always been a fiction because he is fascinated by the use of force by the Chinese to put down the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, his admiration for Vladimir Putin, and the fact that other conservative Republicans are willing to call him out on that,

there is a potential. And I want to just stress potential, not saying this is a game changer, but there's a wedge between Donald Trump's strength with the Republican electorate and the reality. And this is one of the things that I've long thought, that if you want to take somebody down, don't go after just their weaknesses, go after their strength. And if Donald Trump is wrapping himself in the flag while sucking up to murderous, you know, gelatinous gangsters like him, that's going to erode that image that he has cultivated and they relies on to keep the Republican base in line. What's interesting to me about this in part is you referred earlier to what Mike Pence said in

response to this thing about Kim Jong-un. And what's interesting to me about Pence is he didn't just go after Trump on the Kim Jong-un. He mentioned Putin. He brought in Putin too. And so we're starting to see the beginnings, and this is just Mike Pence, but we're seeing the beginnings of a general indictment of what you're talking about. Donald Trump having no values, not really standing up for America or just being a tool of dictators. And so one of the background questions for the 2024 Republican primaries is, is Reaganism dead? And there are some people who believe the Republican Party will never go back to that, but I am seeing signs in Haley, in Pence, in some others that there is still a coherent Reaganism and that Trump's positions

on North Korea, on Ukraine, on Russia, and some other areas of the world violated that, and that there are politicians who are running for president who are willing to stand up in a Republican primary and think that they can survive and possibly profit politically by hitting Trump on those issues. And if that is true, then Reaganism is not dead. Reaganism can renew itself, can return in the Republican Party. That would be really interesting. I am actually more skeptical than you are about that, but these are vulnerabilities in a Republican primary. And there's one other issue that I'm going to be very interested to know whether anyone is going to do. So you're pointing out that, you know,

can you really put America first when you're sucking up to Kim and when you're sucking up to Vladimir Putin, when you are lavishing, you know, the Chinese president with praise? I mean, that's going to be a legitimate question. But who will raise the question about whether or not Donald Trump is really a one order president, whether he really backs the blue, considering his enthusiasm for the January 6th rioters. Nikki Haley sort of edges toward it by saying, you know, well, Donald Trump says that January 6th was a beautiful day. I think it was a terrible day. Mike Pence has clear thoughts about whether that was a violent riot. Chris Christie is going to bring this up. So that's another point that I think erodes one of Donald Trump's strengths. And the most obvious one of Donald Trump's strengths. And the

most obvious one of all is that Donald Trump is the quintessential winner. And that's why I'm going to be interested to see what Chris Christie does, because Chris Christie is the one guy I think capable of saying to Donald Trump, and by the way, Donald Trump will never appear on a debate stage. So just people eliminate that fantasy. It is not going to happen. He's never going to debate these guys. But you can imagine Chris Christie, metaphorically, pointing a finger at Donald Trump and saying, Donald, the thing about it is you portray yourself as a winner, but you're a loser. You lost that election. You lost the presidency and then you lied about it. And as a result of that, there was an attack on the Capitol. If you basically link together loser and liar, you might actually, you know, draw some blood.

But again, you know, I mean, until it happens, it hasn't happened, right? I'll make you the pony guy on this one. I will bet that that never happens. What? Loser and liar? Somebody's got to say he's a loser. See, this is the problem DeSantis. His entire rationale is I can win, he's a loser. We have to get rid of the culture of losing. Well, I'm sorry, Ron,

what are you talking about? Who is the loser we're talking about? Say it. Say the words. Right. He's going to wait. They're all going to wait and hope somebody else does it. I would love for it to be true, but I'm afraid the only person who's going to say that is you, Charlie. Well, I think there might be some other people on the bulwark who might say something similar. Liz Cheney might say something like this. Adam Kinzinger is going to say something like this. There's a small, small group of us. We few, we happy few. It will be said. Well, Salatin, thank you so much. We will talk again next Monday. Looking forward to that. All right, Charlie, take care. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We'll do this all over again.

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.