The Chris Cuomo Project - Charlie Sykes

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

Conservative writer Charlie Sykes (founder and editor-at-large, The Bulwark, and author, “How the Right Lost Its Mind”) joins Chris Cuomo for an extensive and spirited discussion about the divided state of American politics, why grievance dominates reasoning, and how Joe Biden and the Democrats are losing the messaging war. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You want to talk to somebody who is a real conservative and yet sounds like a Democrat. What happened? Hey, I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to another episode of the Chris Cuomo Project. And the goal here is for you to be a critical thinker, right? Because you are. And for you to have an independent mindset, not to get caught into the party silos. And one of the really interesting ways to do that is to listen to people where this

is what they do, is think about politics and write about it and cover it. And yet, they now sound totally different than their label. Remember, the extension of the party game is the label game. Charlie Sykes, look him up, S-Y-K-E-S. His website is called The Bulwark, but he's been with Scripps. He's on MSNBC all the time. called the bulwark, but he's been with Scripps. He's on MSNBC all the time. He's a conservative, okay? He's a real traditional conservative. He is not a Trump guy. Why? Because he believes Trump is an embarrassment to his party and an embarrassment to his values. But he is also a metaphor for what's going on in America, the state of grievance. Now, here's who I'm really hoping will watch this. Look, everybody's welcome, but center left. Why? There's too much easy dismissing of anybody who supports Trump as being an idiot or irrational. You're missing something. And here's what you're missing,

that there is a group of people, I don't think it's a majority in the country. In fact, I would say I know it's not a majority in the country, who believes that the people and the processes and institutions that are highlighting Trump's wrongdoings are all the problem, deep state. Not some mythology about some culture that doesn't exist. I'm telling you, I've worked with the FBI and against the FBI for over 20 years. If anything, they're much more right in terms of their political ideology. I don't think they

practice it on the job. I'll be honest. I think these men and women do the job well, by and large, but I've never ever thought to myself in 20 years, boy, they're a bunch of lefties. Anyway, put it to the side. Charlie Sykes is going to talk about what's happening in the American electorate. Why grievance has such gravitas. Grievance has become gravitas, which means that instead of having to understand how to get better and how to get things done, it's just knowing what buttons to push about what is pissing people off. And that's Donald Trump.

He is an agent of grievance. And it is working and it continues to work. We have to discuss why. Charlie Sykes. uniquely toxified by Trump's influence in the demagoguery. How do you explain the two parties being in such a dead heat for power in this country? Congress is divided, seems to be an open question as to who wins for president. How is that true if the right is uniquely toxified? Well, it's because America is uniquely divided into these alternative reality silos. I mean, you and I both live in these silos. Half of the country has a completely different sense You know, they are disillusioned. We've had this march through the institutions. People have lost faith.

And so everything is up for grabs. How do you rationalize? And first of all, have you ever seen before a party overwhelmingly support someone who has this much legal heat on them? No, you know, and I think about this all the time. You know, what is the parallel? You know, I grew up during the Watergate era where, you know, I mean, everybody thought that all of our institutions were under siege, but ultimately, well, we had guardrails. I mean, you know, A followed B. If you were exposed as a crook and

a liar, your political party would not support you. The institutions would stand up against you. This is the unique moment in American history. And it's a unique moment, particularly, you know, as somebody that comes from the conservative movement, to watch the absolute inversion of all of the values. You know, you remember back in the 1990s when conservatives and Republicans used to talk about how character matters? Character counts. Yeah. You know, the book of virtues. Now we have a Republican Party that basically has decided, and then I'm talking about the

rank and file, has basically decided that it doesn't matter. You know, the former president could be credibly accused of rape, fraud, conspiracy, you know, conspiracy to fraud the federal government, absconding with war plans, violating the Espionage Act. And it just doesn't matter. And that is a really extraordinary moment, not just in American politics, but in American culture, that you would have this mass movement basically look at Donald Trump and go, yeah, we're okay. We're okay with that. And that doesn't even strike me as ideological anymore. The why matters, right? Now, I don't know what to do with the why, but I think about and understand

the why. And I'm fortunate enough to live in a very Trumpy place and have friends who are pretty conservative. So I hear a lot of this stuff. Yeah. And the why is that who and what is our condemning Trump are seen as a bigger problem than Trump. Trump is a big mouth. He is a rule breaker, but he's not unique in those regards. What is unique is that the systems that are supposed to be better than that

and the people who say they're better than Trump are not so we reject them we reject their findings and we reject the function of the system which we believe is equally as bad as Trump and we're not going to let them be the check on Trump

what do we do with that? Okay, no, first of all, I think that's a good analysis of all of this. The power of whataboutism just simply cannot be denied. And it doesn't take much in order to create this sense that, okay, Donald Trump, you know, is awful, but the people who are aligned against him, I mean, they are also a menace. You know, they hate America. They hate you. They hate God. They're going to destroy all that is good and beautiful in America. And you know how the human mind works. It looks for things that, you know, affirm its prior prejudices. prejudice is if you want to believe something, you only need one data point. And that's easy to get on the internet these days if you want to disbelieve something. So there is this sense that no matter how bad Trump is, everybody else is worse. And it's in and I'm sorry that everybody else is worse. And there's always going to be some data point that's going to support that. And I don't know how you break through all of that,

because there's such a huge investment in the infrastructure in convincing people that they need to be fearful, they need to be outraged, they need to not believe the usual sources. And part of what's happened since, and really, really since, look, it's been going on for a long time, you've been around a long time. But really accelerated since 2015, 2016, this march through all of the institutions discrediting one after another. The discrediting of the media as being any credibility. And by the way, I was a longtime critic of bias in the media. I mean there are legitimate criticisms that can be leveled against the media. But what happened was we destroyed, and by we, I mean the right, destroyed all of the legitimacy

of fact-based information. It's impossible to push back. And now you're seeing this long march through other institutions, whether it's education, whether it is the medical community, the scientific community, and now, of course, the criminal justice community. And at the end of the day, Chris, what really worries me is, you know, we'll look around and Donald Trump will be gone. But all of these institutions will be in shatter. It will be in tatters, at least in the minds of something close to 50 percent of Americans. And I'm not sure how you come back from that.

How did it get to 50%? Because usually this is an argument for 25% or the old aphorism in politics is a third, a third, a third. A third hate you, hate everything you say. A third love you, love everything you say. But most of those two thirds are about identity. And then the final third is open-minded people. The disconnect that I can't put my finger on, Charlie, because I think we get an unfair representation by social media, which certainly I have been guilty of and the media at large is often guilty of

using as a proxy for Vox Populi or Insight. But all of the non-cognoscenti in my life, people who are doing very well, very well, big fishing boats, Charlie, big fishing boats, floating condos. They do not focus on any of these things. They have one line opinions. Trump. Oh yeah. He's, he's fucking crazy, but you know what? He's living in the head of the left rent-free. And they're all dirty. He's just a wild man. And that's it.

And they don't think about it anymore. Hey, I hope that they're not gonna make my kid think it's okay to be transgender tomorrow. I hope they're not putting that in my kid's head. I mean, if that's what he or she is, or they or whatever they wind up becoming, okay, but I don't want people teaching them about that. And then that's it. It's over. And I think the DOJ probably could have done a little more, but whatever. How do we connect with those people, Charlie, who aren't obsessed?

Well, okay. I mean, if I had the answer to that, I wouldn't be sitting here talking with you, right? I'd be sitting in the White House or someplace giving advice to somebody and nobody's going to listen to it. But I mean, you know, part of it is, you know, let's run the clock back. Let's run the clock back before this all happened. Would it have made a difference if trusted voices would have spoken out earlier, if other conservatives would have said, listen, you do not want to go in this direction. This is not who we are. This is not what we stand for. If more people would have appealed to the better angels of people's nature or if at the time when these guys are sitting around – and I know exactly who you're talking about.

If somebody in the room would get, yeah, okay, this guy is – he's a complete fraud. He's a complete bullshitter. You would not hire him for your business. You would not hire him for your business. You would not hire him as your accountant. You would not hire him as your lawyer. You wouldn't put him on any of your boards and you definitely wouldn't want him teaching your children. And if somebody within that world would have said that, instead, what everybody did was either figure, you know, this won't last, I'm going to keep my head down, I'm not going to push back. You know, the Paul Ryans of the world decided they were going to make a Faustian bargain with Trump. It was very, very transactional. And as a result, these things were not challenged.

And it didn't matter whether or not the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC was on a regular basis saying, hey, by the way, you know how crazy this guy is? Do you know what a fraud this guy is? Because they weren't in that bubble. They weren't in that universe. They didn't hear that. They were listening to trusted voices, and the trusted voices failed. And among those trusted voices would be the churches. And to your point about getting out of the cognoscente, the thing that blows my mind is when you go out in the world, and I'm not talking about Twitter, I'm talking about just average Americans who go to church, go to the kids' soccer games, you know, 98% of the rest of their lives, they value things like honesty and integrity and prudence, right? And yet there's a disconnect when it comes to politics. And I think that's

fascinating because nobody, I know a lot of people who have exactly the attitude you described, but you know what? They wouldn't want their kids to be like that. They wouldn't want to raise their kids to behave like Donald Trump. These are the same people that will stress the importance of sportsmanship, of being a good loser, of being honest, treating women with respect. But that's because they see the politics of it, Charlie, as a sport. you know, with respect. But that's because they see the politics of it, Charlie, as a sport.

And I think that it is a natural, it is a natural function of the two-party system, that the only place the two-party system can take you by its nature of being binary is to the bottom. Any competition that is about me and you that doesn't have rules, that, you know that someone else is forming so you can't poke me in the eye, anything that is that way ultimately goes to attrition.

I win because I make Charlie lose. And that's what we're seeing. That's why we campaign 24-7, 365, because it's easier than governing. And you could just tear down the other side and create all your wars and you'll keep the electorate. Sure, they're tired, but they got to vote at some point, you know, and maybe the pile get a little smaller, but it's better than governing and being held to account for what

I do. It's easier for me to win by saying Sykes is worse than saying, look what I did. I'm better. And also there has been this shift from, you know, from being focused on governing and being focused on policy to being focused on the show. I mean, this is the thing that Donald Trump gets and Ron DeSantis does. Ron DeSantis thinks that it's about policy and it's about if I, you know, if I can be as Trumpy on one thing or another, if I can talk about woke. Donald Trump understands people aren't interested in the governing part of it. They're interested in the show, in the performance. And there is, there was a moment where,

you know, it's interesting you put it this way because there are a lot of people who, you know, spent years thinking that people liked him in spite of his transgressions. And I've become more and more convinced that, that part of Trump's appeal is that they like him because of it. There's a certain titillation they get because he basically is in this moral free fire zone. And if he can get away with it, then there's kind of a tingle up your leg, kind of get a dopamine hit that, you know what? We are poking these people in the eye. It's like Bonnie and Clyde. And it has become more theater.

Yeah. It's like what was the one with Woody Harrelson and natural born killers? Yeah. And the perversity of it is, that used to be the fiction part, right? The suspension of disbelief is that someone could murder people and you would find that entertaining or compelling

or in any way admirable. And that's what this is a baby version of, that the system that Trump is violating is the problem. So it's like someone pissing off the warden. Good, because the warden is unfair to all of us and he has too much power. The answer to your question is if it had happened earlier, yeah, it would have worked if it were anyone but Hillary Clinton, because Hillary Clinton checked every box of what people who are for Trump don't like. And you would have need someone who could have said, I haven't been here the whole time. I'm new. Okay. And yeah, I've been in office as a governor or, you know, probably governor because they do best, but you know, senator, whatever. And this guy is bullshit.

This guy is of no account. He has never succeeded. He could never do what I do. And who was aggressive in that fight. But you didn't have that. No, you didn't have that. You know, in 2016, it was pretty obvious. The voters, they didn't want another,

they didn't want another Clinton-Bush fight. They wanted change. They wanted something new. They were tired of it. And what do the Democrats do? They gave them another Clinton. And in retrospect, it should be pretty obvious that, look, maybe she was the only one in America that could have lost to Donald Trump. But this is something to keep in mind.

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You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, the price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. I also think that there is this, you know, we're talking about the bubble and how uniquely toxic the right is. I do, I am struck by the fact that the left also lives in its bubble and does not understand how some of the things it does feeds into this phenomenon that you're talking about, you know, that in fact, I mean, it's very easy to say, well, if you vote for Donald Trump, it's because you are pro-fascist or you are a racist. And some of them are. I mean, there are racist and fascists out there, but there are also a lot of people who are worried about, you know, things like the economy or the border or crime. And at

some point, you have to show that you're listening to them. And I think that one of the problems of particularly the Democratic Party, and we're going to get some blowback on this, I know, of particularly the Democratic Party, and we're going to get some blowback on this, I know, is that a party that used to be fundamentally based on the working class has become dominated at certain levels by these academic social warrior elites. And they make some valid points on a number of issues, but they also have found themselves alienated from their old constituencies. And so one of the things that I think that the Democrats need to do is to ask themselves, why did so many people who used to vote for Democrats, who may have voted for Barack Obama twice, why did they vote for this guy? Why don't they see what we see? And I think it's in part

because they're not looking around and saying, OK, maybe we need to take some of these issues. Simply because Fox News thinks it's a problem doesn't mean we should deny that it's a problem. The border is a problem. Crime is a problem. The variety of these things are a problem. Look at the East Palestine. You know, we live this with Flint when Rachel Maddow at one of your home bases, MSNBC, she decided to shine a light on it. Now, look, some people will say, no, it wasn't Maddow. Yes, it was. I was on TV at the time. And she did a deep dive on it. It reminded everybody. And yes, it had the additional hook that it was disproportionately minority. East Palestine, no one dies. Okay, well, no one was dying at Flint early on either,

but it didn't have the minority hook for the left and nobody died. And in the media, we don't cover a lot of things where no one dies and it is a ruby red place and it got overlooked. The problem is it's a great opportunity for Biden to show that he's better, to go to a place where they're not his people,

do what he does best, which is to be an empath and to show that he's better, to go to a place where they're not his people, do what he does best, which is to be an empath, and to show that government can work for people who think that government sucks, but they won't do it. And now it's become a political football where they believe the right is using it as a weapon against them. And I think the biggest mistake for the Democrats that I can see as someone who grew up

in a democratic household is that my father and that generation of your guys, of those guys, were great messengers. Yeah. And you guys are getting, not you guys, the left is getting out messaged all the time, Charlie. They're getting out messaged. And they'll say, you know, like I just had Senator Joe Manchin say to me, hey, Cuomo, you better stop bashing Congress. You know, the 117th Congress was one of the most productive I can remember. I said, really? Based on what? He said, the chips, the infrastructure thing, and this. I said, all right, so it's like two things. He's like, yeah, but they were really big deals. And we did it with both houses. We figured it out.

We haven't been doing that lately. But I had never heard that before. You know, I had never heard it argued that before, ironically enough, argued by a guy that the Democrats now hate in the form of Senator Joe Manchin, even though he's never changed from what he's always been. And how do you, how do they fix that?

Because Biden is a lot of things. A great messenger is not one of them. No. And this is something they're going to have to wrestle with. You know, even if you're willing to concede that, OK, he's been a successful first term president and he deserves reelection. What kind of a candidate is he going to be? You know, for example, I'm sorry, this is a slight digression. I mean, I actually support much of what Joe Biden has done on Ukraine. I wish he had been a little bit more proactive. I wish, I actually support much of what Joe Biden has done on Ukraine. I wish he had, you know, been a little bit more proactive. I wish he'd move faster. But where was the bully pulpit?

Where was the speech to the American people rallying support? Now, that's just one issue. I mean, it's obviously an important issue. But at some point, you have to talk to the American people. You have to explain to them. And quite frankly, you have to explain it over and over and over again. You have to say the same. You have you can't assume that because you said something once, the people will understand it. And also, you know, you you've you've been around these people, you know, from from Washington, D.C. You get that Washington speak where they start speaking in acronyms and they say, well, you know, look at this bill, this bill, this this bill. Look, the average American has no idea. They're, they're not hanging on Congress. They don't care about the procedure. Um, but there are some fundamental issues out there that,

that, that if, if the Democrats, you know, are, are, are serious, and by the way, you know, my take here is I'm not a Democrat, but I think it is an existential requirement that they keep Donald Trump out of the White House. So I don't want them to blow it. And so they're going to have to address, they're going to have to go where the people are and be able to talk to them. You know, they're going to have to be comfortable talking with people who may not share all of their buzzwords, who may not use all of the pronouns they want, who may not have the exact same agenda, but also, you know, find out where you share the values and then, you know, translate that into

politics. Well, but, you know, if you, my grandmother used to say, you don't blow your own horn, there's no music. But more materially to politics, if you don't make the case, you're going to lose the case. If you don't tell me your story, someone else is going to tell me their version of it, and you're not going to like the ending. Ukraine should be a no-brainer for Americans. This is exactly what we wanted in Afghanistan. Let them fight it.

This is their fight. Now, it may redound to us. It may wind up being bad for us down the road, but this is theirs. Give them money, give them the weapons, but let them do it. Not our boots, not our people. This is what we always said we wanted.

Now they're doing it. They're losing on that issue. The economy, they could be making an argument that given where Biden came in, this is all positive, positive, positive. Okay, but they're losing to the grocery store and to the gas pump because they don't explain it. I have this fight with Bill O'Reilly

every time the economy comes up and he's like, Biden's done, grocery store. I say, yeah, but you gotta look at why prices are up. They're on his watch, it's his economy, it sucks. Trump's was much better. I'm like, how was Trump's much better? I mean, he spent every bit as much and more than Biden has. And he passed those tax cuts that were unpaid for and did not.

Oh, no, they drove the economy better than other. No, they didn't. It was all cyclical, but they're not making this case. And it's not my job to make it, Charlie. It's not my job to carry the flag for the guy who can't make the case against Trump. And I think that's the position they're in. I just don't know how they get out of it. But it does make sense that everything's so evenly divided.

Yeah, I don't think it was a brilliant move for them to embrace the term Bidenomics necessarily. But again, you know, I was just I was just listening to a show on another cable network right before we went on and they were, you know, scratching their heads. You know, why don't the American people understand how great the economy is because here are these various numbers? Well, part of it is that Americans don't think about the world as a whiteboard, you know. And so if you're coming in a seminar room and you're writing down pieces of legislation or you're explaining the rate of inflation is going down, that person who just came from the grocery store knows that the price of things is still dramatically up from where it was a year ago. You have to address them where they are.

Now, again, this should be kind of low-hanging fruit because what are the Republicans doing? I mean they're proving that they're not a serious governing party they look like a complete clown show and a democratic party should be able to to message that look uh we were accused of defunding the police actually we've increased money for the police but these guys want to defund the military they want to defund uh they're attacking the military they're they undermining the military. They are undermining our foreign policy. They are appeasing. They're not putting America first. They are defunding the criminal justice system.

These are things that ought to be relatively easy for them to do. But I sometimes wonder whether or not they're looking over their shoulder and they're afraid of antagonizing certain of their constituencies. And look, those are not the constituencies that are going to determine the outcome of next November's election. We don't fake the funk here. And here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52 percent of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be. Thankfully, we now have HIMS, and it's changing the vibe by providing affordable access to ED treatment,

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OK, that's what happens with your first purchase. So make it. Go to drink AG1 dot com slash CCP drink AG1 dot com slash CCP. slash ccp. Check it out. Making the argument that the wage worker versus the investor should like the economy is a stupid argument, and here's why. As somebody who worked in mezzanine finance and studied economics, that's like you grabbing my arm and pinching me, which would of course do nothing because I'm incredibly strong. But if you were doing that and you started to pinch me less and you said, see, feels good, doesn't it? No, it still feels bad. It's still pinching me, Charlie. That's what's happening with the rate of inflation and wage growth is down for the wage worker. So yes, there's been tremendous

productivity of wealth in the country, even in recent years, not for the wage economy. And look, I think there are things that can be done about this, but the most basic thing, and the reason I harp on East Palestine, and while I appreciate, I do not need a bunch of lefty congressional people and their, you know, Democratic staff to call me and say ease off on East Palestine is it's an opportunity. First of all, it's my job to advocate for the interests of people who can't advocate for themselves. Second, this is a layup. Just go to the fucking place and show them that you care and that you're going to give them more and figure out what's in their houses

and what's in the water. And the answers may be okay. And if they're not, then you can address them, but it's a layup for you. So you got to speak to the people who are in pain. That's what Trump has done.

He doesn't speak to them. He speaks for them. He's an agent of their grievance. I am your voice. And this, by the way, is hard to get your head around that Donald Trump, he of the golden toilets, is somehow this populist champion that he identifies with the working man. The fact that he's been able to pull that off, I know, is, you know, sets people's hair on fire. But I have to say that I was somewhat, I thought it was intriguing, interesting that Joe Biden decided that he was going to join the UAW picket line, the first sitting U.S. president to actually align themselves with the union in that particular way.

Now, I think there's a high risk to that. That could go south. I didn't like it. I don't think it's for the president of the United States to involve itself in a labor dispute. OK, so I actually agree on substance with that. But it also signaled to me, though, that Joe Biden was willing to contest the working class vote because there are a lot of Democrats who seem to think, you know, OK, we've lost the white working class. We're not actually going to worry about that anymore. We're going to replace them with suburban voters, upper educated voters. The math doesn't work on that. them with suburban voters, upper educated voters. The math doesn't work on that. Joe Biden is basically saying, I'm going to fight. I'm not going to cede this ground to Donald Trump. I'm going to fight him. I agree with you actually on the substance of it. But the politics was

there was a certain instinct there and a willingness to mix things up. It was sort of the opposite of the case you were just talking about where they were AWOL. So talk gas, talk groceries, talk promoting the trades as much as you do two and four year colleges. And those people will start listening to you. And on the culture argument, say,

hey, listen, just because people on my party say things doesn't mean I'm going to do things. That's right. But he's got to be able to say that. And also, he ought to be pointing out that Donald Trump is out there saying he's going to impose a 10 percent tariff on everything, raise the price of everything, everything. You know, you think things are bad now? The price of every single thing you buy is going to go up if this guy gets into the White House. Turn it around on him.

But I just don't sense that nimbleness of messaging. The thing about Donald Trump, Donald Trump is, I'm interested in your take on this. I don't think he's a great strategic or tactical thinker, but he's got this reptilian instinct. He's got this sense. He knows what plays. And this makes him an effective and dangerous demagogue. But he does know when there's an issue to exploit it. And I wish his opponents had the same kind of instinct. He has a very good savvy for the cell. Yes. And he understands, you know, yeah, well, he grew up one way. Yeah, but in truth, look, he spent his early years in Queens, which is a very mixed place. And they say he lived in Jamaica Estates.

Fred Trump hadn't made his money yet. They did not live in some opulence in Jamaica Estates. That's a misleading name. I lived right across the road from it in a place called Hollis. And I delivered papers over there. It was not a fancy place. So he's been around a lot of regular people. He was in New York City in the construction business.

He's been around a lot of people. He knows what pisses him off. And he understands how to harness that. And you can hold him as accountable and responsible for not having the level of intellectual prowess and sophistication to his thoughts. But this is politics we're talking about. Well, he's also shameless.

I mean, he's prepared to say anything. I mean, if you're not limited by facts or by the truth, that's kind of a superpower. I mean, this guy, he can bullshit about anything, right? That's not a negative in politics though, Charlie. Not anymore. That's not a negative in politics, never. I mean, I can't tell you how crazed Mario Cuomo

would become with reporters, where he'd be on the phone with them and be like, that's not what I said. That's not what's in the damn bill. You're taking it out of context. And the right, well, I got a source who says that they, you know, whatever bullshit there was being spun his way. That's not how politics is. People don't expect it. So him doing those things doesn't bother them. It's just who's looking out for me. That's what the proxy is for better these days. They're not going to believe that you're going to do what you say you're going to do. It never happens. And for no other reason that they know you don't have enough power. But you do have to

show that you care about what frightens them. And in too many cases, I believe right now, Democrats are seen as a focus of what frightens them, which is absurd to me on a number of levels, but that's the state of play. Charlie Sykes, I appreciate you. I know you're pressed for time. I'd love to have you back again. Hey, this was great.

I would love to come back. We got a lot of stuff to hash out, I think. You think about these things. You write about these things. And that makes you a value to this audience. These are critical thinkers and independents. So, Charlie Sykes, thank you very much. All right.

Thanks. We'll do this again. Charlie Sykes is a conservative. And you heard me even lapse into saying you people, you people, you people as if he is a conservative. And you heard me even lapse into saying, you people, you people, you people, as if he were a Democrat, because he's arguing about why the Democrats should be better.

Why? You heard him explain it. He's not a Democrat. He believes that Trump personally is an existential threat. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Whatever. That's not what's relevant. You are free to. But that's where Sykes is coming from.

As a conservative, as someone who wants to vote Republican. See, I think that's really interesting because I believe that there are a lot of Sykes. I mean, not as smart as he, not as eloquent as he, not as wired in as he, but there are a lot of people who are Republicans, but they're not gonna go for Trump

and that all of these different things they're going to see is going to dominate the next four years. And how much of your time do you want taken up with Trump's troubles? I think that's something that's being overlooked. But at the same time, you've got competing interests. The Democrats are not making the message. I'm not saying they can't make the case. I'm saying they're not making the case. And it's not my job to make it. It's not my job to have Republicans on and say, here's why the Democrats are better. I'll fact check their arguments.

I'll put it into proper context. I'll push back when it's bullshit, but it is not my job to make your case. Please follow, please subscribe. Check out the free agent merch. I love you guys sending me the pictures of you wearing it. Be a critical thinker, be an independent, okay? That is our best

future. And the next generation, once you get under my age, all right, low 50s, people are more and more independent, more and more critical thinkers. And I love it. I love it. This is your world for the taking. Don't let people take it from you. Let's get after it.