The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: The GOP Surrenders before First Vote

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Republicans are racing to bend the knee before the Iowa caucuses even start, while also looking like they want border chaos. Plus, racial resentment right now is worse than at the time of Martin Luther King. Will Saletan joins Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday.

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast and happy Monday. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Happy Iowa Caucus Day. Welcome back, Will Salatin. How are you? I'm doing great, Charlie. We have this stuff outside that's white. It's a little cold. I'm not sure what it is. Can you tell me? Yeah, this is winter. So as you and I are speaking, we're in the midst of the polar vortex here in Wisconsin. It is right now minus eight degrees. That's not wind chill. That's minus eight degrees. So it was an eventful weekend. You know, as predicted, I spent much of it snowblowing multiple times. It was heavy. I know nobody wants to hear about the snow blowing.

I have to confess that I actually don't mind snow blowing. I have a pretty big snow blower and usually I can, you know, you have a sense of accomplishment. It's there and then it's gone. So that's okay. But because this was very, very heavy snow, very heavy, wet snow, we had massive power outages all over the area. And I was without power. We had a complete blackout here for 24 hours, starting Friday night till 9 o'clock Saturday night. Now, that's bad enough. But because I have a well pump, that also means no power, no heat, no water. Wow. Here's a pro tip here.

You can last a very long time without electricity. If the toilets don't work, if the water's gone, kind of problematic. So my wife and I went out and I will confess that dry January had a power outage on Saturday. We had to go out, get a couple of beers, download some stuff to watch at the local, you know, but we survived. So at least we're online now. You are hardy Midwestern folk, and we count on you for these things. By the way, Charlie, can I congratulate you on an American ritual? It's not quite as regular as the Iowa caucuses, but every four or five years or so, the Packers take the Cowboys out of the NFL playoffs, including the last two times in Dallas, if I'm not mistaken. So congratulations on that. It's an American thing, apparently. Okay, so it is very, very cold here in Wisconsin, but it is made

much more tolerable by that thumping last night, which by the way, nobody saw. I mean, all the smart kids in sports world, they all called. It was going to be the Dallas Cowboys. They were at home. They had won like 16 straight games. No seven seed had ever won. We had the youngest team in the NFL and the Green Bay Packers go down there and they just, I mean, tear up the, I've been watching Packer games for a long time. I said to my wife, I said, you know, this is the most efficient Packer team that I have ever seen. And that score, you know, when you look at the score, you know, 48 to 32, it wasn't that

close. It was, it was way worse than that. There was a lot of garbage. No. One reason why I need to congratulate you is that I'm a Texan. So I was rooting for the Cowboys. I'm also, I still got the Texans. They're still in, right? But this is a regular thing. And it's kind of an American story because

the Packers being sort of a different kind of NFL franchise. Well, we are, we are the real America's team. I don't know what that, that stuff is. Yeah. So upsets do happen. And in this case, they happen for you and I'm happy for you. It was a good one. And you know what? It was really worthwhile. Just every once in a while, they would take that shot of jerry jones sitting up there in his skybox looking all disgruntled and everything sad you know thoughts and prayers jerry i actually like mike mccarthy who used to be the packer coach who's oh yeah i have no ill will to him whatsoever there's no rivalry and everything the fact that jerry jones might fire him after back-to-back 12-win seasons, I mean, what an asshat. You know what I'm saying?

I don't think he will. I don't think he will. Okay. All right. So I'd actually, given everything else that's going on in the world, the dark timelines that are all around us, I'd rather spend the entire podcast talking about last night's game. But we really can't do this. So where do we start today?

We'll get to the Iowa caucus in just a moment. You know, as I warn in my newsletter this morning, brace yourself for bored pundit syndrome because the ratio of pundits and commentary to actual horse race news is growing exponentially, which means that we have to chew over less and less and less and less. You're going to have all kinds of creative scenarios and what-if scenarios and all of this stuff. So take a deep breath about all of this. And we're going to get to that in a moment. But the other big development over the weekend, I think, is this continuing collapse of the Republican Party, the bowing of the knee to Donald Trump, which is not a news story, except the speed and the breadth of it is extraordinary. I mean, in 2016, where some

of us watched this with growing horror, it took a while. They actually had to have some primaries, some votes. So think about this. Before a single vote has been cast in a primary or a caucus, you have one senator, one governor after another basically saying, yeah, it's over. We got to endorse Donald Trump, including people like Mike Lee and Marco Rubio, who back in 2016 were among Trump's biggest critics, warning the country about the danger of Donald Trump, they are not even waiting for the Iowa caucus to basically go, yeah, we want to put this guy back in the Oval Office for another four years. So Mike Lee, who's become, you know, based Mike Lee, what can I say about him? Could we just play a little bit of, you know, that was then and this is now. This is Mike Lee from 2016 talking about Donald Trump. It's occurred to me on countless occasions today that if anyone spoke to my wife or my daughter

or my mother or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn't hire that person. I wouldn't hire that person, wouldn't want to be associated with that person. And I certainly don't think I'd feel comfortable hiring that person to be the leader of the free world. Well, that was then. In the last eight years since then, what have we seen? Actually, Donald Trump has been found liable for actually raping a woman, but Mike Lee, let's say Mike Lee has evolved. He hasn't grown, but he has evolved. And then there's Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio, who, hey, well, I am old enough to remember, sorry. I need to retire that. But I'm old enough to remember, I actually have a picture

in my newsletter, and I'm not proud of this at all. I'm just getting the embarrassment out. It's kind of cathartic, where I'm sitting next to Marco Rubio back from 2015, when he was the hope and the future of the Republican Party. See, it turns out that Marco Rubio was, in fact, the future of the Republican Party, not the future that any of us thought. Because back in 2016, Marco Rubio was, he held a lot back until the very end. And then he warned America of what they would be getting if they were to elect Donald Trump. Listen to Marco Rubio, 2016. You compared Donald Trump to a third world dictator yesterday in an interview with The New York Times.

How so? Well, I don't know about a dictator. 2016 you compared Donald Trump to a third world dictator yesterday in an interview with The New York Times how so Well, I don't know about a dictator. I said a third world strongman You know, he's running for president. So no matter what he won't be a dictator unless our republic completely crumbles Which I don't anticipate it will but yeah, here's what happens in many countries around the world You have a leader that emerges and basically says forget don't put your faith in yourselves Don't put your faith in society. Put your faith in me. I'm a strong leader and I'm going to make things better by all by myself. This is very typical.

You see it in the third world. You see it a lot in Latin America for decades. It's basically the argument he's making that he single handedly is going to turn the country around. We've never been that kind of country. We have a president. The president is an American citizen who serves for a period of time, constrained by the constitutions and the powers vested in that office. The president works for the people, not the people for the president. And if you listen to the

way he describes himself and what he's going to do, he's going to single handedly do this and do that without regard for whether it's legal or not. Look, I think people have to make up their mind. I can tell you this, no matter what happens in this election, for years to come, there are many people on the right, in the media, and voters at large that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump, because this is not going to end well one way or the other. Oh, now, of course, he's completely all in. So Mike Lee, in particular, distinguished himself by putting out a tweet where he said, I just endorsed Donald Trump.

Whether you like Trump or not, America faces a binary choice. No, it actually doesn't face a binary choice. You still have DeSantis. You have Haley. I mean, there are alternatives. He goes on. Biden refuses, blah, blah, blah, blah. He says, I'll take the mean tweets, as if these are mean tweets.

So Philip Klein from NRO tweeted out, aside from dismissing all of Trump's conduct as mean tweets, including violating his constitutional oath because his ego is too fragile to admit he lost, it's simply false to say there's a binary choice before a single Republican is voted in a primary or caucus. Jonah Goldberg also has some questions for Senator Lee. But January 6th, the mean tweet was stooping a porn star while his third wife was nursing his newborn child. A mean tweet was saying an eye for an eye was his favorite biblical passage. A mean tweet. I'm just trying to understand what mean tweet actually means. So, Will, that was then. This is now. Well, I don't know where to start with this. So many ironies here. The statement from Marco Rubio

that this won't end well just reminds me so much of Lindsey Graham. They knew. They knew. And I almost wrote, when I wrote a long thing about Lindsey Graham, I almost, I would have written one about Marco Rubio. He just didn't talk enough. But it's the same point. These guys all recognized the character of their party and what was happening and what could happen. They just didn't recognize or acknowledge that they were it. They were the people who were going to fold in the face of Trump. And in Rubio and in Mike Lee, you see two different versions of the same thing, which is, so Lee's point was about morals. I could never support someone who talks about women, treats women this way, right? That was the moral pose of the pre-Trump Republican party, which has now been falsified by the fact that not only are Republicans all falling in line behind Trump, but evangelical

Republicans. Trump is doing gangbusters among people who say they believe in these values. They obviously don't. But the Rubio version is the other version. It's the strongman version. Rubio was the hawk, right? He was the guy who said in that quote from 2016, talking about Latin American strongman. We know this type in South Florida.

We know the guy who says it's all about him and the country all depends on him. And Trump emphatically is that person. He's arguably even more that person today than he was back then. Oh, much more. That's the extraordinary thing is that given what they knew about him then, I mean, Marco Rubio has another rant where he, what a con man he is. Given everything that we have seen in the last eight years, what there has mitigated their criticism? Nothing. In fact, everything they said has been squared, cubed over and over and over again. Every single aspect of it has gotten worse. And yet they're all in, not even waiting for a single vote.

Let me come back to that point, which I think is the essential point. So we're sitting here hours before the Iowa caucuses. As you've said, not a single vote has been cast, right? So right now, just to be clear, we're running the experiment. Because later on, they're going to say, well, it was a choice between Biden and Trump, and we couldn't have Biden. We couldn't have the Democrats. Where we are right now is the evidence that it didn't matter. It didn't matter that as we sat here today,

there were four or five alternatives to Trump. There were two former governors. There were many exits. There are at this moment. And as we sit here, a majority of the Republicans in Congress have endorsed Donald Trump over, not Joe Biden, over these other Republican alternatives. This party has folded to Donald Trump before the binary choice, and that needs to stand as a record in history. Now, this is a rank speculation here. Why did they do it before the caucus? I mean, why now? They could have waited, right? Just a little while. Let me give you my theory of Mike Lee, and then you do Marco Rubio. Okay. Mike Lee, I think at some level of his consciousness is,

I got to get in early if I want to be a Supreme Court justice. Okay, now you go with Marco Rubio. So I think all these people are just racing to be the first. They want to be first in line because they hope Trump will remember them. No one cares who Doug Burgum is other than his wife and possibly some people in North Dakota. But by getting out first, I mean, Doug Burgum just endorsed Trump at a rally. So he does it at a rally. And Doug Burgum says, I'm the first. He literally says it out loud. None of the other candidates who ran against Trump in this primary, but I have. Now the others are going to fold. We may disagree, put down a bet on a Cowboys Packers game, but we're not going to bet on the question of what Nikki Haley is going to do. I think we're in universal agreement. All the money goes down on she's going to endorse Trump.

So they're all going to do it, but Burgum, he's going to be the first. And that counts because Trump is such an egomaniac and they all know it. They all want favors. Burgum wants to be what? Secretary of energy? I don't know. So by getting out in front, they want to be remembered. They're all bandwagoners. They're all looking at the polls in Iowa and the other states, and they all know Trump's going to win. But they want to be first on the bandwagon. Okay, but let's go to Marco Rubio. Okay, Marco Rubio is the senator from Florida. The governor of Florida is on the ballot tonight. The governor of Florida is still in the race. So how much does Marco Rubio hate Ron DeSantis that he would do this before a single vote was cast? Look, I know that it's not hard to dislike Ron DeSantis, but I mean, this is, strikes me as

one of these FUs for the ages. Now, Senator Scott has already endorsed Trump. Also the other Senator from Florida. I mean, DeSantis is the governor of Florida. This is really kind of remarkable. But Charlie, this isn't about like, they don't even like Trump. This is about respect and fear. And the essential lie about the Republican party has been that it is the party of hawks. It is the party of people who stand for courage, right? What's actually happened here is that they have responded to an aspiring authoritarian, a guy who has said he would like to be a dictator and would be a dictator on day one.

The way that they say that other people, the appeasers, respond to tyrants abroad, right? They're afraid of Trump. That's all it is. Charlie, no one's afraid of Ron DeS're afraid of Trump. That's all it is. Charlie, no one's afraid of Ron DeSantis. He's toast and they all know it. So that's why if you look at those two states, Florida and South Carolina, they both have, they have a governor and a former governor who are in the race right now. And not a single one of those senators has endorsed their governor, right? Lindsey Graham in South Carolina has endorsed Donald Trump long ago, right? Tim

Scott, I think hasn't endorsed anyone at this point. Give it a few minutes. Right. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina has endorsed Donald Trump long ago. Right. Tim Scott, I think, hasn't endorsed anyone at this point. Give it a few minutes. Right. And both of the Florida senators, both of DeSantis' senators. And it's because they're afraid of Trump. I think that's all it is. They're afraid and they want to be on his good side. The Iowa punditry boils down, I think, to three big questions. We're doing this, of course, the morning before the primary. Number one, Trump is going to win. Will he get 50 percent?

All of the pundits need something to chew over and they're going to be focusing on that 50 percent threshold. That's number one. Number two, who finishes second? Does Nikki finish second? Does that give her big mo rolling into New Hampshire? Does it mean that we're getting to a one-on-one race? And of course, then the question is, if Ron DeSantis finishes third, having been thrown

under the bus by his fellow Floridians, is he going to drop out? Is he going to have that reality check and say, okay, that's it, I'm gone. So what do you think? Is there anything else you're looking for from this? If you look at the Iowa polls, it's been extremely stable for the past month. Okay. This has basically been Trump around 50 points and DeSantis and Haley around 15 to 20. It hasn't changed. There's a little shuffling going on. The Trump vote has hardly abated, right? You said it's minus eight up there. It's going to be like minus 20 in degrees tonight. Unfortunately for Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, the temperature is minus 28. That is the margin between the closest person to Trump and Trump himself, right? So they're way under. Charlie, there's going to be very cold weather,

and some people are going to stay home. Worst case scenario for Donald Trump, his 30-point margin dwindles to a 20 point margin. I believe the highest percentage win in Iowa in a Republican primary before is, was 13 points for like George W. Bush or something. So like, this is going to be a blowout regardless of what happens. But if it's only 20, but if it's only 20, because of course we have a lot of lint to pick out of our navels on this. If there's only 20 and it's Nikki number two, is that the story? Is the headline Trump wins, but Nikki surges? I mean, Nikki could be the headline at the night, right? Here's my pony. Here's my pony. My pony is, and we're talking horse race, but here's why the horse race could matter. It's exactly the reason you're talking

about, Charlie. If Ron DeSantis beats Nikki Haley, that is comes in ahead of Nikki Haley for second in Iowa, it could happen because although he's trailing her a little in the final Des Moines Register poll, so people know the math on this, the problem that Nikki Haley has in Iowa, and it was shown by the poll, is that she has the least enthusiastic. She also has the least Republican supporters in the caucus. She got a lot of independents and Democrats voting for her, which is another story we can get to, but she has the least enthusiastic. So if it's really cold in Iowa, and if the cold keeps the unenthusiastic people home, I did the math on this. If half of them stay home, her four point lead over DeSantis dwindles to one. If like three quarters of them stay home, DeSantis comes in ahead of her. If DeSantis comes in ahead of Haley, that really kneecaps Haley.

And here's why that matters. And here's where my pony comes in. The only thing that matters in Iowa is can Haley come in ahead of DeSantis, get in enough momentum that she could actually beat Donald Trump in New Hampshire. And she would need quite a shock because the rest of the primaries are not late. She's got South Carolina coming, but Trump's leading her there, right? Nikki Haley is the only one remaining who has even a long, long shot against Trump in the primary. DeSantis has no shot. And that's why we need to keep her alive for another couple of weeks, at least, just to

keep that little window of possibility open that somebody remains in the race who could beat Trump. Okay. So you've been huffing the hoping, I know, there. I understand. Here's a question for you. If you lived in Iowa, would you go out and caucus tonight? Yeah. You're asking me though. I'm asking you. I absolutely would. I would do whatever I could to help this lady get enough votes that she could, you know. My first question would be, what time is the Steeler-Bills game on? Because if I had to choose between that and going to some

church basement and standing up for somebody that does not know that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Not sure that I would actually do this. Okay, so just a couple of things about this whole question of enthusiasm. This is extraordinary. This Ann Seltzer poll that came out over the weekend was fascinating because this is the one shows Trump ahead, but Nikki moving into second place. But she says the deep data on Haley suggests she looks stronger in the poll than she could on caucus night adding that despite the headline of Haley's second place most of the rest of the data here is not good news Seltzer was particularly surprised at the enthusiasm gap between Haley's voters and Trump's voters only 39 percent 39 percent of Haley's voters were extremely enthusiastic or very enthusiastic,

while the number was 89 percent for Trump voters. Whoa. Seltzer said those enthusiasm numbers for Haley, quote, are on the edge of jaw dropping and at odds with a candidate moving up. Wow. So I disagree with Ann Seltzer and I don't. and if I get in an argument with Ann Seltzer, I'm going to get in trouble, right? But here's my argument. My argument is this is not at all inconsistent with a candidate moving. Okay. Because the people Nikki Haley has acquired, the supporters she has acquired are late deciders. They're the people who weren't sure they're uncommitted people. Now they're sort of thinking, okay, I'll vote for Nikki Haley. Of course, they're going to be less enthusiastic because they're not diehards. And so that I think explains why Haley has gained

over DeSantis, but the people she has gained are the uncertain, unenthusiastic people. So if we had great weather in Iowa, then she could count on those people to show up and she would beat DeSantis considerably. And the sooner we knock that guy out of the race, the better. We want it to be a one-on-one. The other thing is when they looked at Haley supporters, Steve Kornacki was saying this, and I hadn't noticed it. He said half of Haley's support in the Iowa poll comes from self-described independents or self-described Democrats who are voting in the caucuses. I don't know how this is working exactly. In other words, Nikki Haley has support, but it's not support from Republicans. And Charlie, this is why Chris Christie had to get out of the race. It wasn't that Chris Christie wasn't telling

the truth. He was telling the truth. It wasn't that he didn't have supporters. He does have supporters. The problem is those people are sane people. Sane people respond to the truth. And those people aren't in the Republican primary. They've left or they're not voting in the Republican primary. So you have a fundamentally diseased electorate in the Republican primary. And those hardcore people didn't support Chris Christie and he had to leave. And not enough of them are supporting Nikki Haley. She's surviving on the same. So you would actually leave your house in minus 24 degree weather. Do you have seat warmers in your car?

Charlie, I'm going to revoke your never Trumper card. You wouldn't show up. You got one chance to vote against Donald Trump and you wouldn't do it? For Nikki Haley? I would have maybe done it for Chris Christie. Okay. So you're going to then drive to some elementary school gym. You're going to stand, you know, in that.

It'll be all drafty and weird with that weird lighting and everything. And you're going to be in a crowd of, you know, be surrounded by MAGA-hatted people. And you could be home. Not for Nikki Haley. She's not the one we've been waiting for. Okay, more from these polls, though. NBC poll. This is from NBC News.

Majority of Iowa caucus goers say the Trump conviction wouldn't affect their support. I'm sorry, this is a Des Moines Register poll. More than six in ten likely Republican caucus goers say that it doesn't matter to their support if former President Trump is convicted of a crime before the general election. Whoa. Not even a crime. This, once again, is this illustration that we do spend a lot of time talking about Donald Trump. Shift the lens to what Donald Trump has done to the culture of his party. The fact that the party of law and order has now decided voting for a

convicted felon, have no problem with that whatsoever. And I think that the delegitimization of the criminal justice system is going to be one of those things that we're going to have a hangover for a very, very long time, because I think faith in institutions has been somewhat shaky and rocky. And Donald Trump has just taken a hatchet to the foundations of the legal system, basically saying we don't trust prosecutors, we don't trust judges, we don't trust juries, we don't trust any of that entire process. It is interesting how dramatically that has changed in the last few years. You got something there? You got something good for me? So we had the debate in Iowa this week. Trump didn't show, obviously, or he counter-programmed. So we had DeSantis versus Haley. So this is one of DeSantis' statements in this debate with Nikki Haley.

He says that Trump is going to face, quote, trial in front of a stacked left-wing DC jury of all Democrats. What are the odds that he's going to get through that? So this, it's not just Trump. It's others in the Republican Party. They've joined- Who are running against him. Right. They're telling you. So they said, don't believe election results, right? If our guy loses, they're not real, right? Don't trust the courts. The courts are stacked.

Don't trust law enforcement. Every prosecution is political, right? And then we're to the point of don't trust the juries. Because if we lose the jury verdict, it's because the jury was voting based on politics. So that sort of completes the cycle. In other words, if Trump gets convicted, it'll be by a jury. The jury is a bunch of libs. So it is a party-wide assault on faith in not just elections, but in the criminal justice system and in our own people. We have one more really deeply pathetic soundbite I'd like to play for you.

This is Iowa Senator Joni Ernst. Okay, now I'm not saying that she's like one of the great thinkers. I mean, when your main campaign theme when you're running for the US Senate is that you can castrate pigs, you know, I mean, she kind of let us know where she was coming from. Because of course, you know, castrating pigs is, is essential to the business of governing. This is what the founding fathers when when they designed the U.S. Senate, they were thinking, we want people who are capable of removing the testicles from pigs. Right. I just want to point out that in truth, in reality, the skill that makes one a Republican senator these days is being castrated by the pig, namely the nominee for president. Go ahead. Okay, that was not bad. That was pretty good.

Okay. Anyway, this is Joe Nier. She's on with Kristen Welker on the Meet the Press. And Kristen Welker is pressing her on the question of pardoning the people who attacked the Capitol, beat up the cops, and engaged in insurrection. Now, a little spoiler alert here, after January 6th, where she specifically, literally used the word insurrection to describe what happened. I just want to mention this. But again, that was then, this is now. And it's really interesting how fuzzy political memory is. Let's play this soundbite. And as you know, Mr. Trump is also talking about pardoning some

of those who have been convicted. Would you advise him against that? Are you opposed to pardoning those who are serving time for January 6th? I am not opposed to that. That is a president's prerogative. And so if former President Donald Trump is elected as our next president, he does have the right to do that. And I think we all need to reflect on January 6th and understand it was... 700 of them have pled guilty to crimes related to storming the Capitol on January 6th. You would support pardoning them? Well, again, I am not saying that I would support pardoning them, but that is a president's prerogative to do so. We have seen many presidents through the years that have pardoned many others.

And so if Donald Trump chooses to do that as our next president of the United States, again, that will be his decision. These are people, though, who attack the building that you were in. You called them insurrectionists at the time. Would you not counsel Mr. Trump against pardoning them? No, I did not call them insurrectionists. I don't remember using that term. Yes, you did. I would say that they did break the law.

They did break the law. And I am not excusing any of their behavior. But again, that's up to the president. That term was used in an op-ed by you in the Des Moines Register, but let me just do a quick rapid fire round. Okay. All right. Will, I'm going to struggle here. I'm going to confess. I'm going to struggle getting through this without dropping more F-bombs. How pathetic that all is. It's like, well, it's his prerogative. Yes. Well, a lot of things the president can do a lot of things he has the right to do that are not the

right thing to do. And she's not able to make that particular distinction. And it's like, insurrection. Did I say insurrection? Really? Was that really an insurrection? What about, the seditious conspiracy? Huh? Did I say all those things? As I was listening to this, one of my thoughts, leaving aside all the F-bombs, was if anyone thinks that there's a chance that a Republican Senate would prove a break or a guardrail on a and every one of these 700 convictions, that that would be a, you know, a really a dark day. Nothing required her to have you even have a comment on it. And yet she felt the need to embrace it. This ladies and gentlemen is the future of the Republican party under Donald Trump. But I do think there's some wishcasting out there like, well, you know what, you know what, Trump 2.0, at least you have the senators and the senators would resist the most extreme. What bit of evidence do you have to back that up? Not even Will has a pony that big.

I don't have a pony for this one. So just to be clear for everyone, Joni Ernst is, I think, the number four Republican in the Senate and the number three Republican, John Barrasso, has already endorsed Trump. Again, before a single vote has been cast, all the top three Republicans in the House have endorsed Trump, right? Johnson, Scalise, Emmert, and Stefanik, of course. What's Mitch McConnell sitting there doing? I mean, Mitch McConnell, is he basically saying, fuck it, go ahead, do it. What? You know, I'm old. I'm on the way out anyway. What?

The purge of Mitch McConnell is definitely coming, by the way. But let's come back to Ernst for a minute. So the first point is the distinction that you drew there. Joni Ernst says, it's the president's prerogative, and therefore I don't oppose it. And as you point out, it's fine to say he has the right to do it under the Constitution, but it's wrong. But no, she doesn't say that. I'm not opposed to it. Yeah. In addition, she comes up with an excuse for it. Oh, past presidents

have done pardon. So everybody does this. So we can't fault him. The third thing is her denying that, you know, I don't remember having called them insurrectionists. And how many times have we seen this now, Charlie? I'm trying to think of the other examples where the Republican politician is apologizing, not for doing the wrong thing, but for having done the right thing, for having said that it was an insurrection. Anything that crossed Donald Trump, anything that could offend him, that's what they're apologizing for, right? Not for the current cowardice. But the final point I want to make here is the important one. It's what you said about Republican senators rolling over for Trump. So there was a phrase that we're all going

to remember now from the last week, and it was Judge Penn, the DC Circuit judge saying, what if the president ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate his political opponent? And Trump's lawyer saying, well, could he be prosecuted for that? For murder, for murder, for walking out on Fifth Avenue and shooting somebody, right? And the answer was, yeah, but only if he's impeached and convicted. And conviction, as we know, requires 67 senators, right? So all you need, in other words, to commit murder, to order SEAL Team 68, is 34 Republican senators. When you have people like Marco Rubio and Mike Lee and Joni Ernst, when you're counting on those people, what is your level of confidence that there are fewer than 34 who would defend Donald Trump? I think at this point, it is naive to think that they would draw the line. I mean, it became kind

of this old cliche that Donald Trump could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. I think that's now become obvious. And that includes votes of United States senators. Yeah. And Kristen Welker is saying to Joni Ernst, she's asking the question three times because she can't believe the answer. She's saying, but Joni, these people literally physically attacked the building you're in. And she still can't get an answer from her. So we're inching closer to, we're not at SEAL Team 6 yet, but we're already at the point of political violence, of violence and violence committed against lawmakers. And violence that's being excused.

Right. Not just violence, but excuse of violence. Okay. So on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we had some disturbing poll numbers, but also before we get to that, you wrote a piece about some things that Donald Trump is saying in case we missed it. Because again, there is this fire hose of information. We don't never slow down to go, wait, what did he just say? He's bringing back the Muslim ban and playing the birther card against Nikki Haley. And interestingly enough, that has barely raised a ripple. So we have a soundbite of Donald Trump attacking Nikki Haley and calling Barack Obama Hussein Obama.

Let's play that as well. Nikki Haley opposed my border wall. You know, she opposed the wall very strongly. She was totally against it, which tells you where she's coming from. She condemned my strong border policies and in 2016 she stabbed the Republican Party in the back by siding with the gentleman named Barack Hussein Obama. Remember Rush Limbaugh? He goes, ladies and gentlemen, there's a rush. Talking about Barack Hussein Obama. Emphasis on Hussein Obama. He was a piece of work. We gave him the presidential medal of freedom. Remember that? Respect. He was very brave. He fought a piece of work. We gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Remember that?

He was very brave. He fought a hard battle. That last couple of years, he fought a hard battle. But Barack Hussein Obama, she sided with Barack Hussein Obama against me on a thing called the Trump travel ban. Then he goes on. He has tweeted, I don't know if he's actually talked about it. Maybe Nikki Haley is not eligible because her parents were not citizens. She was, in fact, born in this country, which means she is a natural born citizen in this country. Look, there's nothing about Trump that is subtle at all.

It was interesting that he wanted to use the Barack Hussein Obama, and he felt that people might think he was being too subtle. So he had to like really emphasize it in case anybody missed the point. Okay, so let's leave that aside. You know, his attacks on Nikki and his push for Muslim bans. Again, this is going to be part of the 2024 campaign, isn't it? Again, it is. And to me, I'm surprised that not more has been made of Trump's revival of this Muslim ban. And here's why I'm surprised and upset. The word fascism has increasingly been used to describe Donald Trump. And sometimes we feel that we're going overboard. Okay, he wants to be a strong man. He wants to be sort of an authoritarian. But look, this isn't

Nazi Germany, right? This is America, right? That kind of thing can't happen. It doesn't happen. Let's not go, you know, full Godwin. Let's not, you know, call this Nazism. But Donald Trump, let's remember, first of all, in 2015, explicitly proposed to ban a religion, a religion from coming to the United States. So we were already there in terms of targeting a religion. Okay. We're not at the level of concentration camps at this point, but we're at that level. All right. That happened in 2015. By the way, of course, Trump had already at that point done his whole birther campaign against Obama, right? So there was a lot of Muslim bashing going on. We thought maybe that had passed. We thought maybe Donald Trump had cooled it. It has come back. What we have to remember about Donald Trump's Muslim ban is there were three versions of

the travel ban. The first one was, I'm going to ban all Muslims. There were second versions in 2016 and 2017 where Trump's advisors, Rudy Giuliani, if you can believe it, and other people got to Trump and said, you can't ban a religion. So let's talk about banning people from certain terror infested countries from coming here. Nikki Haley opposed the first version, the Muslim ban. She said it's un-American, it's unconstitutional. She supported the later versions, which were targeted at specific countries. She said, I'm for keeping terrorists out,

but we can't ban a religion. Donald Trump is running TV ads right now against Nikki Haley for that position. He's using quotes from her where she actually said, drew that distinction. So he's in effect bringing back the Muslim ban. And for people who doubt that he's serious about it and that he understands it, when he does that Hussein shtick, and Charlie, this is at least the third time that I have heard him do that in the last week or so. Okay. So it's not an ad lib. He's got it written down or he's got it as part of his stump speech, including the part where he hits the Hussein. Oh, yeah. And as you point out, he's going after Haley. He's retweeting the thing about her parents being Indian immigrants. So she's not. So if this race actually were to get close, if I got my pony and we had a close Trump Haley race for a while, this is where it would go.

He's already signaled that he would go hard ethnic, hard bigotry to take her down. So I just want to make it clear to everybody, when we talk about fascism and we talk about comparisons to fascist countries and what they have done to minorities, this is not hypothetical. We are already there. And of course, I also remember back in 2015, when he first proposed the Muslim ban, that there were a lot of Republicans that basically, that not basically, that stood up and said, this is wrong. This is not who we are. You know, then Speaker Paul Ryan very specifically denounced all of that. Now, not only is there no Republican pushback at all, it's like treated as like, okay, it's Wednesday. Trump is doing this sort of thing. This is the challenge of covering this race. I should give credit where credit is due here. I'm trying to think of who said this. We need to focus not on what is new, but what the stakes. And I think that that there's this bias that if somebody said something in the past, it's no longer news. Well, Trump's, you know, repetition of the, yes, I'm going to be a dictator for a day, and Barack

Hussein Obama, and the racist birther cards and everything, he's done that so many times in the past, so it's not new. Okay, that's not the point. The point is that this is hugely significant for the future of the country. Now, the really scary thing, and I mentioned this before, to bring this up on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, this new CBS poll that I'm sure you have in front of you there, let me pull it up here, which is really quite remarkable, speaking of the, you know, worst possible timeline. Most Republicans agree with Donald Trump's statement that immigrants illegally entering the country are, quote, poisoning the blood,

unquote, of the country. This is poisoning the blood. Among Republican primary voters, 81% of Republican voters believe that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country. Also kind of scary, 47% of all voters say. Only 53% disagree with Trump, which is interesting when you add up these numbers because there's no undecideds there, at least in this particular poll. So here we are all of these years after Martin Luther King Jr. said, I have seen the promised land. And here we are in 2024 with nearly half of Americans and 81% of Republicans willing to use the kind of rhetoric that was associated with, should we say, the most deplorable racist figures in world history about poisoning the blood. Damn, Will. Yeah.

Well, the poisoning the blood thing, they asked this in two different versions, one where they told the respondents that Trump had said it and one where they didn't. They just used the statement. I'm less horrified by the Republican numbers, that I'd like to talk about political violence and January 6th and democracy, because you and I talked last week, there was another CBS poll at that point, and they've come back to ask more questions just to gauge the relative sickness of America as a whole at this point of the American population. But in terms of the Republican electorate, there were three numbers that I wanted to flag from this poll. First of all, they asked people, if you had to choose which is the bigger concern for you right now, whether America will have a strong economy or whether America will have a functioning democracy. And the response from Republicans, 65% said they're anti-democratic. It's that they just don't care enough about this issue. Like they think they were better off. And that's why Christie couldn't get any purchase. Second finding from the poll, they asked people, if you had to choose, would you prefer to support a candidate for president who supports the people who entered the U.S. Capitol on January 6th or criticizes them? Right. Right. Among voters as a

whole, fortunately, three to one said they'd rather have a candidate or criticizes them, right? Among voters as a whole, fortunately, three to one said they'd rather have a candidate who criticizes. Among Republicans, among Republicans, more Republicans said they'd rather have a candidate who supports the people who went into the Capitol than one who criticizes them. Okay. Now it's 24 to 15. Most people said neither. Okay, good. Right. But in other words, it's a net loss for you if you're Chris Christie and you criticize the January 6th perpetrators. That's a net loss for you inside the sick Republican electorate.

Third thing, they ask people, this is Republican primary voters, I would prefer to vote for a nominee who, and they had a list of options. The fourth most popular option was someone who would pardon those who were charged for January 6th. 67% of Republican primary voters said that was one of their top, you know, that was a candidate they would prefer. Well, that explains Joni Ernst, right? That explains these senators who are like put their finger up to the wind, you know? You don't have to be crazy anymore to be supporting the January 6th perpetrators inside a Republican primary. You just have to be craven, right? You just have to be putting your finger in

the wind and going with where the electorate is because thanks to Trump and thanks to the people who have collaborated with him, that is now a, not just a majority, but a super majority position inside the Republican Party. Okay, so we're running out of time here, you know, with all of this focus on, you know, the illegal immigrants who are coming here and poisoning our blood, and this is the crisis, and this is why we need to abandon Ukraine, is because we need to defend our own border. The evidence is mounting today that Republicans are completely uninterested in any kind of a border deal, that they have no interest whatsoever in actually fixing the problem that they themselves say is the most urgent crisis facing the country. Explain this to me, Will.

So there's two different versions of how a conservative could approach this issue. Say you believe, as I do, that Joe Biden and the Democrats have not taken the border situation nearly as seriously as they should have. And say you believe that there's a fundamental problem inside the Democratic Party, which is, if not a belief in open borders, so much sympathy for asylum seekers that even though the vast majority of them are not qualified and people are just coming in, we need to tighten things up. One approach is, I'm a conservative, the country needs borders, let's tighten them up. Let's is I'm a conservative. The country needs borders. Let's tighten them up. Let's cut a deal with the Democrats. Let's do what we can. The other approach is let's be purists. We must never have any kind of amnesty. We must never concede anything to the Democrats. And we get a political benefit out of that as Republicans because we keep the

problem going. As long as the border is bleeding, as long as people are flooding. Chaos is our friend. Caravans. Remember, this has been a a, every election, it's caravans. It's the, we need the problem. We need the problem to get our voters upset and get them coming out. And that's unfortunately where the House Republicans are. So they're resisting a deal in part because they know that it is to their advantage to continue the problem. No, I think that is objectively true. Okay, so today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. You know, this morning, I started very, very early doing Morning Joe, and they played that soundbite of the night of Martin Luther King Jr., the night

before his assassination, talking about, you know, that I have been to the mountaintop and I have seen the promised land. I still get goosebumps when I listen to that. I mean, how prophetic that was. What an extraordinary speech. And yet after all of these years, that promised land, and I think for a long time people thought, okay, we can see the promised land too. We're getting there.

We're moving there. We're not there yet, are we, Will? We're not. I mean, it feels like there's been a lot of backsliding in ways that are deeply demoralizing. What were your thoughts? I have a couple of thoughts about this. The first thing I want to say is, in honor of Martin Luther King Day, I want, you know, all of you out there, go ask your Republican friends, what was the cause of the civil rights movement?

Since we already had this about the Civil War. See if they answer the question without referring to discrimination or segregation. If they do, they could be a Republican candidate for president because you're supposed to ignore the obvious now about American history. But okay, setting that aside, in terms of where America is after all these years, Charlie, I think that we're a lot better off in terms of our institutions. American institutions have gotten better. We have the Voting Rights Act. We have the Civil Rights Act. We have a lot of other anti-discrimination laws, and we try our best to enforce them.

That's at the institutional level. But the deeper question, Charlie, is are we better as people? Now, if you look at polls, there has been a big shift. For example, if you take something as simple as interracial marriage, interracial dating, there's been a massive cultural shift in what people say to pollsters about that. And I think there's been a real shift. But racial resentment, right, racial fear and racial angst, I believe in the CBS poll, they asked people whether we had gone too far, not far enough or about right on anti-discrimination,

DEI, that kind of stuff. I believe, if I recall correctly, that more people in the polls said that we'd gone too far than that we'd gone not far enough. There is always that racial resentment. And I'm not even saying that in terms of laws, you can't point to things that have gone too far. There is some really stupid DEI training going on in this and that company, right? David French had a great column over the weekend saying opposing DEI does not mean opposing diversity. Okay. Just want to make that clear. Yeah. Okay. Right. I agree with that. So you can point to that stuff, but I do believe that all the polls show and the politics shows that there is a lot of underlying resentment at the change that has happened since Martin Luther King, and that that remains a well of support, which you can go to if you're a politician and you want to appeal

to those people. And one of the problems we have in our country is there's a high concentration of that resentment now inside the Republican Party. And I'll say this as a former Texas Democrat, this used to be the inside the Democratic Party in the South right and that in the whole Nixon movement they took that away the southern strategy and these people are now concentrated inside the Republican primary and the Republican politicians have to ask themselves am I going to appeal to that or am I going to try to tame that am I going to stand up against it am I going to try to bring my voters along? They're not trying that, Charlie. No, not even trying. Okay, I agree with almost everything you said, but I want to push back on one thing about the institutional change. The one institution writ large that I think has failed

really miserably has been American education, including higher education. I don't think that they have figured out the way to handle all of this. The racial achievement gap in this country is a massive scandal. If we were not distracted by other things, we'd be focused on what is happening. So I think that Martin Luther King Jr. would have seen successful education as the greatest instrument of racial equality, of racial advancement, opportunity, all of those things. That has been unrealized. American higher education has really, really struggled with the whole question of diversity and how to do it. This pushback against DEI is really a pushback against this sort of attempt to impose this very rigid ideological agenda that it really does

lead to resentment. And here's a potentially unpopular opinion for some of our viewers. I think when you look back on the dream that Martin Luther King Jr. had, part of the reason that I think we went off course were policies like, for example, involving education, compulsory busing, which may have been well-intentioned, but has had a dramatic long-term effect that has been positive neither for educational success or opportunity or for dealing with a question of racial resentment. And I think that sometimes the heavy-handed use of mandatory policies, in fact, has backfired badly. But again, I don't think that this country is now focused on how to fix this problem in a good faith way.

It feels as if the debate has been hijacked by some of the worst faith actors, and I'm talking about people like Christopher Ruffo, who decided to demagogue this issue and throw all the things that people find to be problematic in with things that in fact are legitimate and confuse people so that they just don't want to deal with the issue at all. I'll agree with you. And I think Barack Obama was actually very attuned to the problem you're talking about, about not triggering the resentment, not being needlessly abrasive, although it didn't help him in a lot of ways. Right. What really bothers me is the issues like critical race theory, where people like Rufo and Ron DeSantis, who's following him, are gratuitously making, they're looking for wedge issues. They're looking to exacerbate this. And so they're taking something like critical race

theory, which is a fringe thing that is taught in generally in like higher education. You go to some fancy private college, then they're making it sort of standing for everything. Right. Also the transgender stuff where you take like the admittedly wrong situation of like a college swimmer who was born, you know, male and allowing that person to compete with women at a physical advantage. Again, I think the conservatives are right on the particular case, but to pretend that this is the big problem for women as Nikki Haleyaley does, she says, like, this is what's keeping girls down. Bullshit. Absolute bullshit, right? There's a lot of other things going on in the world.

The search for these wedge issues and the inflation of relatively small racial or gender disputes to give the red meat to that Republican, that angry electorate. That I hold the Republican Party responsible for. No, and I think that that's part of the problem, is these bad faith actors who are willing to demagogue this, who are willing to play on this resentment. And I would like to say that that's on the down slope, but I feel it's actually accelerating. One last comment. There's been some other news in the world, including the military action against the Houthis in the Middle East, which, of course, threatens to widen the war. It's interesting how you had some progressive Democrats who were rather voluble over the weekend in saying that the Biden administration did not have the power to do that, which, I'm sorry, Will, they do have the power to do this. And, you know, watching some of the sympathy for the Houthis who are engaging in this violent piracy and attacks on the United States, do they honestly think that the United States should not react to all of this?

So, Charlie, am I mistaken or didn't? So Donald Trump truth or tweeted about this? I think he just truthed about this, where the party line from Republicans about Joe Biden in the Middle East was that Joe Biden was sitting there. He was weak. We were being fired at by the Houthis for weeks and weeks, and he's doing nothing. So Biden eventually says, along with the Brits, the hell with this. We shoot back. We shoot back in a controlled way.

We're not trying to kill their leaders. We're trying to take out some of the places that they're using to actually threaten the shipping lane. So we hit them. And then Donald Trump goes after Joe Biden for doing this. Trump says Biden is, quote, dropping bombs all over the Middle East. World War III. Yeah. Right. So no matter what Joe Biden does, they're going to attack him for it. I sort of roll my eyes at this point. But there's a larger question here, which is, is the Republican Party going to be be in its next incarnation, a fundamentally isolationist party, right? If you're attacking Joe Biden for striking back at the Houthis who are attacking commercial shipping lanes and shooting back at our troops, right? We're fortunate we haven't had more killed

at this point than you're, you know, being an isolationist party. And one reason why, to come back to Nikki Haley in Iowa, one reason why, despite my contempt for Nikki Haley in many ways, why I want her to come out of this, if she can, is because she's the only one left, Charlie. She's the only one left who's an internationalist. Well, I agree with her on these things. Yeah. And in that debate, Ron DeSantis said about Nikki Haley, you can take the ambassador out of the United Nations, but you can't take the United Nations out of the ambassador. That was a big applause line, right? It's a big applause line because DeSantis and Ramaswamy and Trump, they're all isolationists. Christie's gone. There's only one person left in that Republican primary who still supports Ukraine, and that's Nikki Haley.

Okay, so let's get a little bit wonky and geeky. I wrote this down when we were first talking about whether or not the Republican Party was going to have a hard-turned isolationism. This, in fact, is a watershed period for the Republican Party because you think back in modern political history, or it used to be modern political history, two elections, 1940 and 1952. In 1940, Republicans could have nominated an isolationist who would have opposed Franklin Roosevelt's policies that would have supported the allies against Adolf Hitler. Instead, in one of the great historical turning points, Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, who did not win that election, but in fact helped turn the Republican Party into a reliable ally to FDR and to our war effort.

Had they not done that, we might not have passed selective service. Who knows what American policy would have been? The Japanese probably would have attacked us anyway. So 1940 was one of the key inflection points when Republicans rejected isolationism and went with internationalism. 1952, same challenge. Republicans could have gone with Mr. Republican, Senator Robert Taft from Ohio, a very hardline isolationist. Instead, they nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was, in fact, internationalist. People like Arthur Vandenberg, see how wonky I'm getting here, Senator from Michigan, who in fact was an isolationist in the late 30s, 1940s, becomes chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and becomes one of the most important Republican voices for internationalism in the

1950s. So again, another inflection point, the Republicans could have taken a turn toward isolationism. In 1940 with Wilkie, they didn't. In 1952 with Dwight Eisenhower and Vandenberg, they didn't. Now in 2024, it appears as if they are going to take a rather decisive turn toward isolationism, which really you think about, you know, from 1952 until 2016, the Republican Party was a reliable internationalist party, and with massive consequences, some of them negative, I will concede, but that is about to change. And it's hard to imagine at this point, changing back. So 1940, 1952, 2024. That's an excellent historical survey. And the problem today, and I don't know what's the chicken and what's the egg, but these candidates who are

turning against Ukraine, like Ron DeSantis, they're following the voters in the Republican primary. In the new CBS poll, they asked, would you prefer to vote for a Republican candidate who supports U.S. aid to Ukraine was a losing position, 57% against, 43% for. It takes some courage now in the Republican Party. It takes some principle to stand up. And I will give Nikki Haley this. She is a coward. She is gutless on so many issues. But for some reason, this woman has decided she actually believes in allies and she believes that it's important to do. It's the only thing she's not squishy on. You're right. She's not squishy on this. Yeah. And it does matter. I mean, having a president who supports that is all important. So that would make a huge difference. Obviously, I don't think she's going

to win, but you're making a more important point, which is even if Joe Biden wins reelection, even if we avoid a second Trump presidency with all the hell that would unleash, right? What is the future of the Republican Party? And if we proceed with the scenario that's unfolding now of Donald Trump being the Republican nominee, we will still have an isolationist party defined as such going into the next election. And looking at these polls, Charlie, I just don't know how that party turns around and becomes internationalist again. I don't know either. I mean, you go back to 1940 and there was a Republican establishment that did in fact have power and was willing to use its power. It's not

the case anymore. To the extent there's a Republican establishment, it's now Donald Trump and MAGA. Well, on that particular note... It's the winter of the Republican Party. That's our note. It is the winter of the Republican Party. So I appreciate you joining me. I'm going to spend the rest of the day watching replays of yesterday's Packer Cowboy game, kind of on a YouTube loop. So I'll see you on the other side. 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.