The Bulwark Podcast - Will Saletan: The New Nikki

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

Haley has taken a hard turn against Trump, and is calling on him to 'man-up' and explain why he grew the debt and why he praises President Xi. Meanwhile, most Senate Republicans are doing Trump's bidding on the border bill. Will Saletan is back with Charlie Sykes for Charlie and Will Monday.

Welcome to the Bulletwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is Monday, and of course that means I am joined by my colleague Will Salatan. Will, how are you? You had a football hangover at all? Neither of the outcomes I wanted happened, Charlie. I was rooting for the Lions, you know, and if not the Ravens, and I got nothing. How about you? At least it's entertaining. And since the Packers weren't in, whatever, you know, what can I say? You know, what's funny, you and I were talking right before we started this, that we just assumed that today's podcast would be consumed by the Gene Carroll verdict. And I do want to spend some time on that. But in this news cycle, so much is happening. It's Monday morning, that happened Friday, it almost seems like we've on that. But in this news cycle, so much is happening. It's Monday morning. That

happened Friday. It almost seems like we've moved on. But I do want to at least pause because I think this is something that we just have to consciously do now and then, which is to slow it down and remark on something truly remarkable, which is that a federal jury came back on Friday and delivered an $83 million verdict against the former president of the United States for lying again about the woman he raped. This is on top of the $5 million earlier verdict. So we're up to $88 million. Now, again, you know, in the next couple of weeks, there's going to be a multimillion dollar award handed down in another New York court for Donald Trump's lies. We've seen the price of lies is, you know, the cumulative price is rising. Ask Fox News, Infowars, Alex Jones.

I don't know that he's ever going to pay it. Your thoughts on all of this, that here we have the leading presidential candidate who has created this environment where he has lied so egregiously, shows up in court. Obviously, for every minute he sat in front of that jury, it probably cost him another million dollars. So your thoughts on the Gene Carroll verdict? Well, thank goodness that there is some punishment in this world for committing crimes and lying about them. Accountability. I mean, accountability is what we so desperately need. So every time there is a verdict, this was not the verdict on what he actually did.

We already had that. This is the money. But the money matters, Charlie. It matters in the same way that a jail sentence matters for a criminal offense, right? It needs to hurt. There needs to be some consequence for Trump. I don't believe, Charlie, I don't know about you. I don't believe this is going to stop Donald Trump

from continuing to defame Gene Carroll and everyone else that, you know, but at least there's a consequence. It's also just a reminder that maybe when you're in a case like this, you ought to bring your lawyer A team as opposed to whatever. I'm not going to get into the whole Alina Haba thing, but that didn't work out that well.

I posted that clip where she was like, would you rather be pretty or smart? And she said, I would rather be pretty because you can fake being smart. Well, apparently not. Apparently not. I find Alina Haba fascinating. She comes out. She's just been smoked. She just got smoked in this trial.

She blew the case. Charlie, she didn't just blow the case. She blew the appeal. She's out there saying, we're going to appeal. So the thing about it is she comes out and she does what all the Trump flunkies do, which is I don't really care about the legal aspect of this, right? Let's just talk the politics. My client is leading in the polls and he's going to stand.

She makes a bunch of political points. That's not her job. She was literally hired to be the lawyer and she blew the part of the job that she was supposed to do, right? He's got lots of other flunkies who can go out and do political spin for him, but she's terrible and he doesn't know any more than he knew who was doing a good or bad job in his administration. Okay.

By the way, I just got a text message. Hey, Charlie, it's Nikki again. I want to talk about this because I'm getting these about every two hours now. And most of them are about, hey, did you see that if you give money to me, Donald Trump says you're going to be exiled from MAGA. She is really leaning into this. I have to say, I'm a little bit surprised. I want to get your take on all of this. And yesterday, Nikki always is sort of like, it's a half glass full, half empty kind of thing. But she did, according to Benji Sarlon from Summer 4, his take was that she crossed the Rubicon by really taking the jury verdict seriously against Donald Trump. She's not saying it's disqualifying, but she said she respected the jury verdict.

This is Nikki Haley on Meet the Press talking about this verdict. And what is unique about this case is that the jury has now ruled. They have found him liable of sexual abuse. Do you not trust the jury and their findings, Ambassador? I absolutely trust the jury. And I think that they made their decision based on the evidence. I just don't think that should take him off the ballot. I think the American people will take him off the ballot. I think that's the best way to go forward is not let him play the victim, let him play the loser. That's what we want him to do at the end of the day. Just to be clear, do you think it's disqualifying, Ambassador?

I don't think he should be taken off the ballot. I think the American people will decide if he's disqualifying or not. Your take on all of that, because, you know, again, it's Nikki Haley. Let's put this in context. And Nikki Haley says that she will support him even if he's a convicted felon. She would pardon him if she is elected. But on the other hand, she did say those magic four words about the jury verdict. Now, she doesn't think he should be kicked off the ballot for it, but it's like she's not backing away from this. She's not pretending that this is a weaponized criminal justice system. Will, what do you think? I find this fascinating, the way she's trying to straddle this line, right? She doesn't want to offend all the Trump voters in the Republican Party because it is

the Trump Party, right? So she won't say it's morally disqualifying. She keeps interpreting it as, should he be taken off the ballot? And she says, no, that's a procedural question. Kristen Welker is asking her, do you think it's disqualifying? And Haley won't answer that question. But I will say, I'm going to grab the pony. Here's pony number one for today. She said, Nikki Haley said, I trust the jury. And she said, they made their decision based on the evidence. Charlie, I'm going to just take that and run with it. I'm happy that Nikki Haley affirmed that there is such a thing as objective reality that a jury weighed the evidence and they found that Donald Trump did commit a sexual assault. I think the term was sexual abuse, but the judge later said it was

amounted to rape and that Donald Trump defamed this woman. That's a jury verdict, and Nikki Haley says it's based on evidence. It really happened. I'm just going to take that as the upside of what she has to say in that interview. No, and I said four words. Actually, it's five words. I absolutely trust the jury. This is what Benji Sarlin writes. He says, Haley's remarks on Sunday fit into an emerging message that answers Trump's New Hampshire riddle more directly and is already forcing a more pointed response. She's unambiguously saying that Trump's a loser. Her attacks on his age, honesty, unhinged rants, and mental fitness all relate to this as well. So before we move on to the tougher Haley, I just want to contrast her answer. I absolutely trust the jury verdict

with Tim Scott, who is continuing to audition for VP and he's on with Martha Raddatz and she asked him about this. And I have to say that if you're looking for the most pathetic soundbite of the weekend, and there's a lot of competition here. Listen to Tim Scott, who thinks he's somehow finessing the answer to this question. Let's play Martha Raddatz and Tim Scott. I want to start with the breaking news on Friday, and that was that your candidate, former President Trump, was ordered by a jury to pay $83 million for defaming writer E. Jean carroll he was also found before as you know liable for sexual abuse does that give you any pause in your support just pause i saw that all the voters that support donald trump supports a return to normalcy as it relates to what affects

their kitchen table the average person in our country country, Martha, they're not talking about lawsuits. As a matter of fact, what I have seen, however, is that the perception that the legal system is being weaponized against Donald Trump is actually increasing his poll numbers. I understand that, but this was, they were jury trials. They were jury trials. They started when Donald Trump was president. That gives you no pause whatsoever. I don't have a, the Democrats don't pause when they think about Hunter Biden and the challenges that he brings to his father. I mean, it's like he's got all these, here are my talking points and I'm just going to go down the list and I'm going to check them all, kitchen table. They don't care about this. They want to return to normalcy because normalcy is a guy who is defaming a woman he raped because Americans just don't care about paying off porn stars.

The Espionage Act, sedition. They care about. I don't know. I'm sorry. I can't even do it. And then, of course, the whataboutism, which we're going to hear a lot of this year, right? Yeah. Normalcy is the perfect word here because, I mean, what's going on here, of course,

is that Tim Scott, who was one of the many Republicans who used to present themselves, and still will, by the way, as sort of good Christians who stand for values and all this stuff, are basically saying values don't matter. When he says kitchen table, what he means is no moral question matters. What matters is, do they make the trains run on time? How is the economy doing? Will it do under Donald Trump? Now, setting aside whether Donald Trump's economy was as good as he said and whether he was responsible for that and all the other stuff, this is just a complete evacuation of the Republican Party. Tim Scott is not alone in this. Not at all.

And I'm trying to remember, Charlie, what was it? So there was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an old defining deviancy down, right? What we've defined down now is normalcy, right? Normalcy, as you say, used to involve more than your pocketbook, right? The term normality has been re-normed so that it now includes rape is fine. Is it too wonky to point out that the word normalcy was actually kind of just made up by Warren Harding in 1920? I mean, what was it? You're one of those normality guys, huh? Okay. Yeah. But normalcy, that's a great line that we've defined normalcy down. Like you look at all this stuff that's going on here. Yeah. it's just, that's why people want Donald Trump because they want things to go back to normal. Seriously. I feel like the cartoon of,

you know, the guy with everything blowing up behind him and the fires and everything going, yeah, this is fine. Right. Just on this question of sort of the Carol verdict, because we absolutely should go to Nikki Haley on this, but there was also an interview with James Lankford, who's good on the border and some other issues, Republican Senator. He was also interviewed on this subject and said about the jury verdict. He's asked about this and he says, Trump has already said he's going to challenge it. So I'm not going to. And so what we see is Tim Scott saying it doesn't matter. All that matters is the economy. And James Lankford and others saying Trump is going to challenge it. Now, the point of this is there is no point in this legal process at which Republicans are going to say, ah, he's guilty.

We accept that. He's responsible, right? No, because there's always an appeal. There's always some appeal and they're going to extend this. Remember, even if Trump loses one of these cases, the four cases before the election, he's still going to be appealing. So presumably that appeal might be in the works at that point. They will always fall back on the appeal. And after the appeal, they'll fall back on what Tim Scott said about, well, it's all weaponization of the justice system, weaponization of the courts. They have to, to the extent that, you know, if they want to stay in the good graces, they want a seat at the table, right? They cannot say, yeah, a jury has found credibly that the former president of the United States, the Republican candidate for president of the United States, is a lying rapist.

And I still support it because it's very difficult to say that I think what America really wants is a lying rapist in the White House. So they have to find some way to either not address it or to rationalize it in that particular way. Okay, so let's talk about this new Nikki. Is it fair to say it's a new Nikki or are we just grasping for straws here? Because again, this is still the same Nikki Haley that has gone back and forth on all of this, right? This is the same Nikki Haley who raised her hand and said, I will vote for him. You know, even if he's convicted, I will pardon him. But I have to say that she is surprising me somewhat. She is leaning into it. I've saved all of her text

messages because I get them and I feel personal. You know, it's like, hey, Charlie, Nikki Haley here. Should we do this one? Oh, and she's selling me a T-shirt. She wants me to buy this T-shirt. And the T-shirt says barred permanently. Hey, Charlie, Nikki Haley here. Donald Trump said that if you support me, he will permanently bar you from the MAGA camp. I will not be intimidated. And I know you won't either, Charles. Charlie.

Chip in $5 or more and we'll send you a barred permanently shirt. Okay, so a lot of us thought that Nikki would fold up after New Hampshire, that she would get in line. She's not only getting in line, but she basically has decided, you know what? I'm not really going to have a seat at the MAGA table, so screw it. What's going on here? What is your take on this, Will? And you have some sound bites too. So let me start with what I believe is the grand template for the whole election, which is the Chris Christie hot mic moment. We've been through this before,

but now we're going to pick a different piece of this hot mic moment. Remember he said about Nikki Haley, she's not up to it. She's going to get smoked, right? She's not up to it. That was his assessment. He was Jersey strong. He was going to hit Trump. She wasn't. Let's give Nikki Haley credit. She's coming out now and she's hitting hard because remember, it was all a bunch of other people and Donald Trump. Then the field gets cleared and it's just Nikki Haley against Donald Trump. Her job at this new stage of the election is to be the anti-Trump candidate, right? We weren't sure whether she was up to this. Chris Christie didn't think so, right? I'm still not totally sold,

but go on. Yeah, right. But she's beginning to do the job. This is a pony that one of our members gave me. I'm supposed to brush the hair of this pony. It's a very feminine pony. I want this pony to put on armor. I want like a warrior with an ax riding it. I think Nikki Haley is coming out fighting now. That's my pony for today. She's been on the campaign trail. I can, we can talk a little bit about that. Can we play a clip from Nikki Haley on Meet the Press? Kristen, look at what happened just in the 48 hours after the election. Here he went on a, he was totally unhinged, went on a rampage election night talking about revenge. Then the next day he goes and says, anybody who supports me is not going to be allowed to be part of MAGA.

Well, that means those people that voted for me in Iowa and New Hampshire and those people who've donated to me. Really? You're going to go and say they're not in your club. You're supposed to be president representing everyone. Then he goes and pushes the Republican Party to make him the nominee. I mean, look, he's insecure. He's threatened. He sees what's happening and he knows these court cases are going to take him further and further away from the campaign trail. And that's what he's worried about. Okay. So what are you hearing on the campaign trail? Was that a one off that interview? What is she doing now that she's campaigning in South Carolina? What is her message? So I have been watching Nikki Haley the entire campaign. She has been the most boring candidate.

She has the same stump speech all the time. And she does the thing, you know, her line on Donald Trump has been the one that annoys both of us. Rightly or wrongly, chaos follows him, right? It's a passive description. It's not directly attacked. That has changed, Charlie. In the last two speeches I've seen of her in South Carolina this weekend, she is going right at Donald Trump and she's attacking his character. She has gone after him for, first of all, for the stuff that she described in that Meet the Press interview, his performance in New Hampshire on election night and threatening her supporters and trying to strong arm the RNC

and all that stuff. But she's also gone after some of the people who have endorsed him. She actually went after our friend, Lindsey Graham. So just a little background on this, right? Nikki Haley's problem, her problem has been the entire congressional leadership of the Republican Party. The entire Republican membership of Congress is endorsing Donald Trump, including the governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, and both senators, Lindsey Graham, and as we just played, Tim Scott. And this is her response. You're going to sit there and have Lindsey Graham stand up next to you, and we're supposed to say, oh, that's what we need to be doing?

What's she getting and i'm just gonna let the one on tim scott go that's up to y'all i'm not gonna say anything about it we have to live with our decisions okay i just she's name checking these guys give me another soundbite from her going after trump that you think is the new tone yeah This is Nikki Haley going after Trump. She went after him on the gas tax and some stuff, but she threw in this stuff about Trump and foreign policy. Don't you think it's time that he answered why he praised China's President Xi a dozen times after China gave the world COVID? Good. Don't you think it's time that we ask him why he praised Hezbollah after they did that horrific killings on October 7th? Good. America deserves answers and Donald Trump won't give them to you.

So what do you think is going on? I mean, she knows that she's not going to win the nomination. What is the mission she's on right now? And I guess I could be more enthusiastic about this if I didn't have the image of knowing that she's going to support him after the primaries. And I'm trying to imagine, given the things that she's saying about him now and that he's saying about her, how incredibly awkward that's going to be. But we've lived through the last eight years of people swallowing as much humiliation as possible. I'm thinking Ted Cruz. And so you know what's going to happen. But tell me, what do you think she's thinking right now is how this is going to play out? I'm not going to bring the pony out again, except that we know, Charlie, you and I are in

agreement. I think everyone at the Bulwark is in agreement on this, that Nikki Haley will endorse Donald Trump. She will lose, and she will endorse Trump for president, right? But here's how I want to look at it. That's like death. We know that we're going to die, but we still should live, right? Let's live. She is at least saying part of the truth about Donald Trump. And these are important parts of the truth. She is calling him out on his anti-American foreign policy, his love of dictators. She's beginning to at least be the anti-Trump candidate in the Republican Party. Now, I think she's going to lose and you think she's going to lose. And what are the odds of that? 99 plus percent. But you're saying there's a chance? Look, I really believe that those of us who recognize Donald Trump as an existential threat to American democracy should stay in the

Republican primary until it's mathematically over in the hope that this woman can knock him off. She is what's left, Charlie. I don't disagree. If I lived in South Carolina, which clearly I do not, I would vote for her. If she's still on the ballot when she gets here to Wisconsin, I will vote for her without any problem whatsoever. It's just that, you know, I feel like I've kind of seen the play before, although I will also acknowledge that she is pleasantly surprising me with this post-New Hampshire rhetoric. Everything seems repetitious, but it's one thing for you and I to say these things about Donald Trump or the bulwark to say things about Donald Trump, but to hear Republicans saying it to Republican audiences, it does matter on the margins. It's not going to convert MAGA, but I think that's why Chris Christie was valuable in this campaign. I think Asa Hutchinson was valuable in this campaign. I think Will Hurdle was valuable in this campaign.

And I think that right now for the moment, Nikki Haley's valuable in this campaign. Let me ask you a question about that though. So let's assume Haley loses. She goes at Trump hard. Remember, South Carolina is how far away now? It's like a month or weeks away. She's going to at least go through there. She probably will go through Super Tuesday. Maybe she gets out at that point. So for some time, she is going to speak the truth about Donald Trump. Then she's going to lose and she's going to endorse him. So she has groomed now this audience of people inside the Republican Party, and she's told

them what's wrong with Trump. And having heard that, they're voting for her. Then she endorses him. What do you think the net effect of that will be? Will she, by endorsing him, bring those people back into the fold and they will vote for Trump and the general? Or will she have defined the case against Trump in a way that a lot of those people will say, I can't vote for Trump and maybe some of them even vote for Biden?

Well, my honest answer is I don't know. I worry that she's going to provide the permission for people who share her views of Trump to the people who go, okay, Trump is completely loathsome. You know, he's done all these things, but in the end you have to vote for him because he's better than the Democrats. I mean, that's a very powerful sort of binary choice rationalization that Republicans voters make. And people like her, people like Chris Sununu are going to make that easier for those voters. On the other hand, you know, there are some sort of indelible marks. And I'm not sure how many people actually pay attention to endorsements, because if you agree with her right now, it's going to be a hard sell.

But again, the people who agree with her right now, they're going to be the votes that are going to be in play in 2024. These are the people who I think are ultimately going to decide this election. The people who, in fact, know who Donald Trump is and are sort of having to decide now, you know, how much do they trim their sails? Can they hold their nose and vote for him again? What do you think? It's a mystery to me, except 2020. I believe in 2020, you can look at the exit polling, you can look at the post-election polling, and you can see the effects in key states of suburbanites, people who used to vote Republican, turning away and voting for Joe Biden. And I don't see them coming back. We know those people can be

split away from Trump because they did it before. And I think there are enough of them to win this election. I think it's going to be close, but I agree that constituency is key and we've seen them do it before and I think they can do it again. Okay, so let's talk about, I think, one of the most interesting developments over the last few days, which is the bipartisan deal on the border, Joe Biden's willingness to sign it, and then Donald Trump coming out and saying, I'm going to tube this thing. I'm going to tank this whole thing. And if you want to blame me, it's all on me. So here we have this extraordinary moment where Republicans have been saying, this is urgent, imminent, existential threat. This is the worst crisis America faces right now. Your children are dying because of the border. Conservative Republicans have come up with this deal that gives them almost everything that they have been wanting.

And Republicans have decided in the end to go, yeah, we'd actually rather have this as an issue than solve the problem. Now, if you think that that is an unfair analysis, listen to Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, who is a quite conservative Republican senator who is one of the negotiators on this. And he's on Fox yesterday. And he goes through a list of all of the things that are in this bill that would be on any Republican wish list, things they push for. So let's just play him talk about this legislation and the way that Republicans have decided that, yeah, we don't really want to fix the problem. Let's play Langford. So a lot of Republicans are saying he has things he could use now, executive powers and laws that are not being enforced. So why give him this in an election year, the cover of this deal that,

you know, critics say is still going to let a lot of people in, but he gets to take a victory lap that he's gotten something done. Yeah, well, it's definitely not going to let a bunch of people in. It's focused on actually turning people around on it. It is interesting. Republicans four months ago would not give funding for Ukraine, for Israel and for our southern border because we demanded changes in policy. So we actually locked arms together and said, we're not going to give you money for this. We want to change in law. And now it's interesting, a few months later, when we're finally getting to the end, they're like, oh, just kidding. I actually don't want to change in law because it's a presidential election year. We all have an oath to the Constitution, and we have a commitment to say we're going to do whatever we can to be able to

secure the border. Or not. So he says, it's interesting that, yeah, we basically tubed aid to Ukraine, tubed aid to Israel, because we were so adamant that we had to have this legislation right now. And now we're saying, just kidding. And that's coming from a conservative Republican senator calling out his colleagues. So, Will. Look, all my friends are Democrats, basically. They think Republicans are all evil. And one of the points that I want to make to them is there do exist principled Republicans. And at the same time, the principles, Charlie, are very selective. So, we just said James Lankford is one of the many Republicans who are waving away the Carroll verdict and still saying vote for Donald Trump. And you can say, okay, so they're all empty, these Republicans, they're all going to support

Trump in the end. And that hugely matters. But, but it is true at the same time that on various issues, some of these Republicans are significantly more principled and serious than others, right? So Nikki Haley, we may despise her for many things, but if Nikki Haley becomes president, she is out there on the campaign trail defending support for Ukraine when her party is abandoning them. That matters. It matters a lot. And James Lankford is out there. James Lankford is out there. He negotiated this border deal and he is out there correcting all the bullshit that Republicans are throwing up about the deal. And he is out there saying, look, are we serious about solving the problem or not? He is serious. And he's calling out his colleagues who aren't right. He's saying what you and I are saying, but he has credibility

where we won't with a lot of conservatives, right? Well, he has credibility for now, because in this new magnified Republican Party, the Oklahoma Republican Committee, whatever, voted to censure him for actually trying to come up with a deal, trying to come up with a solution. What is interesting is that I don't know how this all plays out because, you know, we're saying this is, you know, naked cynicism and people are going to see right through it. They're just calculating that the worst things get the worst it is for Joe Biden, right? But you do have kind of an upside down world, don't you? You have Joe Biden saying, you give me this bill and I will shut down the border. Let's listen to Biden because Biden is taking a much harder line on this. And I want to get

your reaction on the other side, how progressives are going to react to this. So here's Biden. They'll also give me as president, the emergency authorities shut down the border until it could get back under control. If that bill were the law today, I'd shut down the border right now and fix it quickly. A bipartisan bill would be good for America and help fix our broken immigration system and allow speedy access for those who deserve to be here. And Congress needs to get it done. Okay, so first of all, what do you think about that? I mean, here's Joe Biden saying that he's going to shut down the border if this law...

That, I think, safely can be described as new tone, new message. I've been begging for this for some time. Look, I don't know how to say this nicely to my friends who are progressive. This is not racist to believe in a serious border. The asylum system in this country has become a joke. A very small percentage of the people who walk into America, say I'm applying for asylum, actually end up qualifying for asylum, right? Meanwhile, we just say, hey, come on in, give you a work permit or whatever. And we're just waiting people in who will eventually either have

to deport or won't, right? But meanwhile, there's all these people waiting to get in legally, and they're not coming in. So Biden is right that the border needs to be sealed from people abusing the system, right? And what this bill does is, just so everybody's clear on it, there's a quota in there, right? When you get like more than 5,000 people coming in, I think as a course of a week, we pause, right? It's just to stanch the flow of this stuff, which is uncontrolled, not exactly illegal, but I don't know what to call it, extra legal immigration, people who are abusing the asylum system. And so I love that Biden is getting out there because this is the most damaging issue for Democrats. What this issue

says to a lot of voters is the Democrats won't solve this problem for you because they think it's racist to have a border. Right. Or they believe in open borders. Right. And so it's important for the Democratic Party to say we believe in order. We don't believe in racist order, but we believe in order. And so I'm very happy that Biden is out there taking this position. I just want to go back to what's in this bill and how conservative it is. I mean, this is Lankford's point. And this is the bill that Donald Trump and the Republicans are killing right now. Okay. Increases the number of border patrol agents, increases asylum officers,

increases detention beds so that we can quickly detain and then deport individuals. It ends catch and release. It focuses on additional deportation flights out. It changes our asylum process so that people can get a fast asylum screening at a higher standard and they get returned back to their home country. So here's the question, you know, and Politico asked this, could this sort of cynical tanking of this bill while they're saying it's so crucial that we're willing to sacrifice Ukraine, now saying, just kidding. Can Democrats actually flip the script on all of this? Let me just read you. I've quoted this in Morning Shots. There's a real opportunity here where Democrats around the country can raise their hand and be like, it turns out they were bluffing. They weren't

serious. It was a soundbite for them when plugged in Democratic campaign operative told Playbook last night. They've been talking about it, highlighting and freaking everyone out. Then when there's a bipartisan deal with a lot of Democratic compromises in it, then went running for the hills. So is that inside baseball or can they turn this around? I mean, I'm thinking that if I'm Joe Biden, I make the do nothing Congress a centerpiece of my State of the Union address and maybe even the campaign. This is all a flashback to 1948. As everybody remembers, Dewey versus Truman. Everybody assumed that Truman was dead man walking, that Dewey was going to, you know, the election was going to be a coronation. And Harry Truman went out there

and gave him hell and ran against the do nothing Congress. Is that an option for Joe Biden? Yes, the answer is yes. Particularly how you framed it, Charlie, on the border itself, and on immigration, it's very difficult for Democrats to rebrand themselves. They're the party that says, you know, Republican border proposals, Republican immigration proposals are too mean. And we're the nice party, we're going to welcome people, right? And welcoming is fine, as long as it's done in an orderly way. But anyway, the Democrats are branded that way. I think it's going to be very difficult on the border in particular for Democrats to rebrand. But you raise a broader question about governing and solving problems. And there, on the general thing, I think Republicans have a serious problem. Hakeem Jeffries,

the Democratic leader in the House, is always saying, we are the party that believes in solving problems. They're the party that just tears things down, that just, you know, tries to create issues and wedges and stuff. And that is true. And here is a living example of it, right? On an issue where Republicans claim on their terms. In fact, not just that we offered something on their terms, they negotiated something. Lankford and the other Republicans who were serious about this, even Lindsey Graham, they said, let's put these issues together. We're with you on Israel, on Ukraine, on Taiwan, on the border, right? We put this together. And then you walk away from that because Donald Trump wants an election issue.

I think that Democrats can run on, we're for solving problems. And they connect this to what Biden has done on infrastructure or on, you know, the veterans or a bunch of other things where Biden has actually passed legislation. And they run against the party that just wants to have issues. And this is one of those issues. It's also interesting, you know, part of the dynamic that's coming back again is, you know, whether or not this Speaker Mike Johnson actually is in charge of his own caucus. I think he has a majority of what, two votes right now? Right. Yeah. So, I mean, if there was ever a moment when we would have the need for sort of bipartisan

compromise on crucial issues, particularly involving the border and international relations, it would seem to be now. I mean, the fact that we're already having discussions of whether or not Democrats should rescue him if there's a vacate the chair motion, and the fact that we even talk about that, let's not go there at a moment. But he's made it very clear that he's not going to do anything that Donald Trump does not allow him to do. There's no secret there. And again, in the context of where we are right now, so we wake up this morning and we're faced with the possibility of a wider war in the Middle East. The Iranian-backed militants have killed three Americans. Now, this is not the first attack on Americans. I was hearing this morning the number 160 a lot. There have been 160 attacks against American bases or forces. This was the first one where you've had fatalities. You've had the Houthis who've been attacking shipping. And there's no secret that Iran has been at least bankrolling these folks. So we're at the point now where there's a possibility of a wider and bloodier conflict.

I see your good friend Lindsey Graham is leading by tweet saying that we need to bomb Iran right now. By the way, just one of these distinctions, how much easier it is to bomb a country on Twitter than it is to be the commander in chief and to decide what the targets are and send people into harm's way. But Lindsey is the, it's kind of the perfect armchair thumb quarterback out there saying we got to bomb Iran. So what kind of pressure does this put on Joe Biden? Where do you think this goes, Will? Look, this is really serious what's going on. Remember, Hamas attacks Israel. Israel then attacks Hamas in Gaza. So it's a contained war.

Then there's fighting on the northern border of Israel, right? The Hezbollah is like firing rockets into it. Biden sends an aircraft carrier in there. What we are trying to do is minimize the conflict, right? Because this is bad for Israel if Israel has to fight wars on multiple fronts. You know, if Iran goes in also. Right. So the whole point is to de-escalate.

Meanwhile, of course, the Houthis and everybody else, all these Iranian proxies are attacking us, trying to provoke us, right? So we want to deter them, but we actually don't want a giant war. So this is a very difficult line Biden is trying to walk. And the problem he has domestically is that the Republican Party, the party running against Joe Biden, has both factions in it, right? It has like the Lindsey Grahams and the Tom Cottons, like Tom Cotton's out there saying literally, I think his term was, Biden is a coward. President Biden is a coward if he doesn't hit Iran, I believe was what Cotton demanded. These guys are saying directly hit Iran. You talk about escalation, that would be massive, right? So you have these hawks in the Republican Party saying Biden is soft, he's a coward,

he's got to do more. Meanwhile, you have the increasingly isolationist part of the Republican Party led by, guess who, Donald Trump, which the last time that Biden fired some missiles, I think it was at the Houthis who had been attacking us. Trump said Biden's trying to bomb his way through the Middle East again, the warmongers. So the two wings of the Republican Party are conducting a fight with each other through Joe Biden. They're attacking him from both sides. No matter what he does, he'll be attacked. Right. And that's the through line that whatever he does is going to be wrong. I'm torn on all of this. I mean, I think that weakness can be provocative, that if there is no response, there will be more attacks. And

the fact that there have been 160 attacks without any serious retaliation, I'm just putting an asterisk on that, is a question. I mean, Biden was asked last week, is the retaliation against the Houthis, is it working? Is it deterring them? And he said, no, it's not. But then the question is, if it's not working, what are we going to do next? But again, the mindless escalation that is so easy to do on Twitter, I hope they're cautious about it. I was listening to Admiral Stavridis this morning, who used to be the NATO commander, and he was talking about the kinds of options the Pentagon might be giving Joe Biden for striking at Iran. And he thought that the best option might be to pick out maritime assets, because they'd be easier to target very clear, no collateral civilian damages necessarily.

But again, there's not a no risk option. You know, you start blowing up warships, things happen. So I guess my major point here, though, is that we live in very, very dangerous times with incredibly high stakes. The world is burning in the Middle East with Ukraine. You have listened to Republicans, the border is absolutely on fire. And right now, it's just the fiddling of cynical politics that's all we get right i'm with you on deterrence and walking a careful line here what we have to remember about what's just happened in the last three months since the hamas israel war the houthis have been attacking us we have tried on a couple of occasions to send messages of deterrence we've fired back at them we've hit

some of their stuff and said get the message message, right? And instead they've just escalated. So the deterrence, while I agree with it in principle, if it's not working, then you have to do something more and you have to not- More than a message then. Right. More than a message. And here's the problem. Remember, as bad as things are at any given moment, and this is true for any issue, remember that they can always get worse. And in this case, they can get a lot worse. Okay. Remember, in Afghanistan, people were very upset. We lost 13 servicemen. We pulled out. It was ignominious. You know, terrible things happened in the fallout. Think about how much worse it could have been. We stay there. We could have

had hundreds of Americans killed. Lots of things could have gotten worse in the alternate scenario. Here, think about if we follow the Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton thing, and we say, look, we're going to hit them a little bit harder, and we escalate. Let's say Hezbollah then dumps more of its rockets, starts firing more of its massive arsenal into Israel, right? Think about a giant war with Israel in the middle of it. Do we really want that? That's the debate that they're having to have right here. And so the question is, you know, will the calmer, determined voices be the ones that make the decision here? And you certainly hope that, because what you are getting is the demagoguery. But you've just highlighted something that is like the cognitive dissonance of the Republican Party, where Donald Trump is the leader of a neo-isolationist wing of

this party that will attack any use of force. At the same time, there is this, you know, visceral, you know, hawk wing of the party, which wants Joe Biden to be dropping bombs right now. And they're not really at war with one another. It is this weird pincer movement on Joe Biden. And there is cognitive dissonance. And it would be interesting to have somebody in the media have, you know, people from the various wings have, you know, a Donald Trump next to a Tom Cotton or a Lindsey Graham and say, okay, which is it? You know, is bombing World War Three, or is the failure to bomb World War III? Would you guys make up your mind on all of this? But so far, they haven't really been

pressed on that, have they? Except that we all hate Joe Biden and it's an election year and whatever we have to say to get through the election year and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Right. And throughout the situation in the Middle East, Biden has been hit from both sides, not just from both sides, Charlie, from both sides by some of the same people. So Donald Trump, we can safely predict that Donald Trump will attack Joe Biden, continue to attack him from both sides. He's weak. He failed to deter this. He's a warmonger. He's getting us into a war, right? And we can safely predict, based on the behavior of Republicans, that they will defend Donald Trump on both sides of this issue each time he says something on one side and then the other. All right. So what are you going to keep an eye on this week? There's so much going on here.

Anything particular that's caught your eye? Charlie, I feel like those of us who recognize Donald Trump as a mortal threat, we wanted someone to oppose him. We love some of us liked Chris Christie. Chris Christie gets out and says, okay, I can't do this. Nikki Haley is the person who has left. And a lot of us have said what Chris Christie said. She's not up to it. She's not tough enough. She doesn't satisfy us morally. There's things she excuses. I feel like we must not let go of this. There is still a candidate in the race who is not Donald Trump. Nikki Haley is out there saying there's 1200 delegates that you need to win this thing,

right? He's got 32. I've got 17. Yes, Donald Trump is leading her in South Carolina will almost certainly beat her in South Carolina, right? He's leading her in all these other states. But there's a lot of variables still out there. There's issue things with the court cases and whatnot. God knows what Donald Trump is going to say. He had a crazy night after New Hampshire. He'll have more crazy nights. Maybe the Republican Party is so far in the tank that nothing can change, but there is still this candidate. And I don't think we should abandon her as long as she is viable in any way. I think that we need to be covering her and reporting on what she says about him. I don't disagree with you on all of this. In fact, I'm struck by your analogy, which is basically like, yes, the sun will go dark

and we will all be dead someday, but we ought to do the right thing in the meantime, right? Yes. We need to live in the time that we have allotted because otherwise we sit around going, why bother? Because the sun's going to go dark at some point, right? Yeah. Donald Trump's going to win. She's going to drop out.

He's going to, she's going to lose. But you're right. We can't control that, right? This is, I think one of the most important things in life. Make a list of things that you can control and the things that you can't control and care less and worry less about the things you cannot control. Focus on what you can control. We cannot control what crazy Republican voters do. What we can control is what we say and what we pay attention to. And when somebody does something that's right, we ought to encourage them as opposed to prematurely decide that since we're all going to be dead sooner or later, we might as well just lie

down. So this is the deep philosophy of will related to Nikki Haley. And this gets to a larger problem that those people in the media have. Less so the bulwark people, less so never Trumpers, but media in general. I see so much horse race obsession. Can you win? They say to her, you know, the polls are bad for you. Yes, the polls are bad. You know, the polls were bad for people running against Hitler, I'm sure.

The point is you do the right thing. Okay. Don't fuss so much. Don't psych yourself out like she can't win and they're going to ignore this. So I think we should set aside the horse race to some extent and talk about what she is saying about him substantively. With you. With you on this. With you on this. Yeah. Okay. And just a reminder, Nikki Haley, she's a sellout on a hundred things. She's going to pardon Donald Trump if she becomes president. But Charlie, Donald Trump, this would have been true of Ron DeSantis and most of the

people running in the Republican primary. If Donald Trump wins, he's going to cut Ukraine's throat. He's absolutely going to turn off the spigot to Ukraine. His party is with him in that. Nikki Haley, whatever you want to say about her, she is against the polling in the Republican party. She's saying we need to stand with our friends. We need to stand with our allies.

She is making the case for Ukraine. If she were somehow to become president, no, she wouldn't be Joe Biden. A bunch of Democrats are going to be like, well, we don't like her Supreme Court appointments. Okay, valid issue. But it matters. The difference between Nikki Haley and Donald Trump matters in a hundred ways. She'll respect democracy, I believe. She'll respect the rule of law, right? That's my case for Nikki Haley. No, if people were tuning in because they wanted to

see you and I disagree about all of this, I am sorry. Get used to disappointment because I think that was a compelling and will an eloquent case that you made and I appreciate it. So thank you. And we'll do this again next week. Okay. All right, man. See you then. And thank you all for listening to today's bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back, and we'll do this again next week, okay? All right, man. See you then. 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.