The Chris Cuomo Project - Charlie Sykes on Why America’s Politics Are Broken
Episode Date: December 10, 2024Charlie Sykes (political commentator, MSNBC contributor, and author, “How the Right Lost its Mind” and “To the Contrary” Substack Newsletter) joins Chris Cuomo to discuss how political polariz...ation and leadership failures have brought America to a breaking point. They analyze Trump’s appeal to disillusioned voters, Biden’s challenges in maintaining trust, and how both parties contribute to the erosion of democratic norms. Sykes and Cuomo explore what it will take to restore faith in leadership and foster meaningful political change. 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 Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Support our sponsors: Everyday Dose Head over to everydaydose.com/chris for 25% off plus 5 free gifts with your first order including a USB rechargeable frother, Every month after you get additional amazing free gifts with your order. Get Maine Lobster Listeners of The Chris Cuomo Project get 15% off all orders store- wide with the promo code CUOMO. That’s right—15% off the freshest lobster you’ll find anywhere. So this season, create new memories, make it extra special, and add a touch of Maine to your holiday table. Visit GetMaineLobster.com and use promo code Cuomo Shopify Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Untuckit uses. Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at SHOPIFY.COM/chrisc Cozy Earth Want your Cozy Earth pajamas by Christmas? Order by December 13 for free shipping! Missed it? You can still get expedited shipping until December 20 to ensure it arrives in time. Head to cozyearth.com/CHRIS now and use my exclusive code CHRIS for up to 40% off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
You want to figure out what this Biden pardon means
for the Democrats and means for the Trump administration,
especially the way it was rationalized.
Well, I've got one of the big brains for you, my friends.
I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project.
Charlie Sykes, on the contrary, is his outlet now.
He was with the bulwark for a long time.
You see him on MSNBC.
He's a real conservative,
but he's also a man without a country right now
when it comes to his political ecosphere, right?
Because if you're not a Trumper and he is a never Trumper,
then you are not accepted by them.
But it is a set of conservative ideals
that drives his understanding of why he is
so against what Biden just did and what it means for where we're going. Now, I don't
agree with all of it, but remember, conversation is the cure, not some bullshit gotcha contest.
That's what we've gotten enough of. That's what, you know, the fringe is for when it
comes to podcasting,
to make you scared, to give you little bits of information
that proves some conspiracy theory
about how everything is wrong
unless you listen to this person.
Not here.
Let's have a conversation about what this pardon means,
what it doesn't mean, how it relates to our overall dynamic
of where we're headed in this new Trump administration.
And let's do it right now.
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Charlie, how would you describe the state of play now on the heels of Biden pardoning his son,
which I believe is only the first of pardons to come
to insulate him and his family from any further scrutiny.
Yeah, I think we're gonna have an interesting conversation
here because I'm very, very sympathetic
to Joe Biden's position as a father.
And I know that you've expressed that.
You try to imagine if your only son was in this situation,
what you would be willing to do for him.
And that was my initial reaction.
I'll be honest about that.
But the more I think about it,
the more you look at the long-term state of play,
and this is a long game,
I think that this was a mistake.
And I think the blowback is justifiable in a lot of ways.
I think that that pardon was worse than it looks,
and we can talk about that.
How?
Well, I think it's worse than it looked because, first of all,
I mean, look, we expect more
from a president than from just your average parent.
And as a father, I understand his position.
As president of the United States and as a defender of certain constitutional norms,
the rule of law, his own Department of Justice, he had other responsibilities.
And this was a sweeping pardon.
I also would have understood,
perhaps if he would have simply commuted the sentence,
I think that would have been controversial,
or even simply pardoned him for what he had been charged
and convicted for, but he did not.
This is one of the most sweeping,
if not the most sweeping pardon in history.
It basically immunizes his son for an 11 year period.
The only comparable presidential pardon
that historians can come up with is the Nixon pardon.
And I'm not sure that right now at the moment,
and you asked about the state of play.
So at the moment, we're about to have a president
come into office with a campaign of retribution, a wrecking
ball to the institutions like the rule of law and the Department of Justice.
Unfortunately, what I think Joe Biden has done is he has weakened those institutions
and their credibility at the very moment when they are most vulnerable.
And I think that's what kind of makes my heart sink when I think about this. The mistake is his justification that this was prosecutorial overreach.
That, I think, is what put into competition or started tipping the scales the way you're suggesting.
Him saying, I needed to do this because this was brought up
just for political persecution instead of legitimate prosecution. Now that could arguably
open a door to that being a real thing. Lawfare is real. Biden just admitted it and therefore
everything that Trump does in pursuit of that should
not be seen as aberrant.
Yes, I think that's part of the problem there.
If he would have said, you know, he is my son, I want to protect him, you know, that's
one thing.
But the reality is that look, this prosecution was, I mean, by the way, I want to agree with
you on that, that I think that what he did was in some ways his justification echoed and therefore validated some of the Trumpian
Complaints which I don't necessarily think are always valid, but he basically did say yeah, there are
Political prosecutions. Yes, the Department of Justice cannot be be trusted
Even my own Department of Justice cannot be trusted to do the right thing
But I mean we need to remember some things one it was his own Department of Justice cannot be trusted to do the right thing. But I mean, we need to remember some things. One, it was his own Department of Justice that
brought the charges. Initially, Hunter Biden pled guilty when that plea bargain fell apart.
He was convicted by a jury of his peers. His argument of selective prosecution has been
rejected by several judges, numerous judges. The legal system, you know, is still working.
And Joe Biden spent most of the year
saying he trusted that legal system.
This was fundamental, that we trusted the rule of law,
that no one was above the law,
that he was going to respect the outcome
of the legal system.
And then this week he basically said, never mind. And look, I don't
think this emboldens Trump to do something he wouldn't otherwise do. Trump is going to
do what he was going to do. But this is a long game. And there are principles. And this
does set a precedent. And it does open the door for that argument that you just mentioned.
Who says that Biden is better?
Better than?
Than anyone.
Since when is the Biden word something that you bank on?
Since he entered politics lying about his academic records,
since he got chased out of a presidential race
for plagiarism that he denied?
I mean, you know, I get the sweetness of Joe Biden.
I am not looking to just openly disrespect him
as a man or as a politician.
That's not productive.
But where does this come from?
The premise of the Republicans saying,
well, he said it was his word
and his word is supposed to be the Biden promise.
Where is that coming from?
Well, okay, Democrats are saying the same thing.
I mean, I know a lot of Democrats that actually did believe him.
And as you point out, you know, the same ones that said that he was a hundred
percent and that he was sharp as attack and that he hadn't lost the step and
that they didn't need a primary those Democrats.
So yeah, unfortunately.
And that's why this is such a devastating blow to his legacy, because
it is requiring everyone to reevaluate this.
And I think that part of it, look, I think one of the great rules in journalism and politics
is, you know, fawn not on the mighty.
Do not put your faith in princes.
Politicians are who they are.
Joe Biden has been who he is for a very, very long time.
But because he was not Trump, I think that people projected on him certain virtues that
perhaps were not warranted.
Because right now people are looking back and saying, all right, so they did, they were
not honest with the American people about his condition.
They were not honest about what their plans were.
And many of the professions of support for the rule
of law turn out to be paper thin. That's what's so dangerous is that if you are supposed to
be the protector of these constitutional norms, you can't at the last minute, dispose, you
know, expose yourself both to somebody who did not tell the truth and is a hypocrite. That's what's so damaging.
And I think it really does hurt his legacy.
The simple distinction is who's willing to be better.
Charlie, that's all it is.
And the Democrats made a fundamental error in judgment,
which is saying that the other guy is worse is enough.
And it was not enough because grievance was on the side
of the other guy.
So the what's bad, what's worse, who's pissed,
that was all working against Democrats
as the stewards of the status quo
because they were in office.
And the way that they beat Trump was,
we can be better than this guy.
And Biden got a pass on his own personal analysis
because he wasn't Trump.
That election was a referendum on Trump.
This one was a referendum on the Democrats
and the status quo.
And it just happened to be that Trump was the guy
in the slot.
I think they would have lost any of them, to be honest. Well, I think they would have lost to any other Republican. But I mean, look, I want to make it
clear, and I don't think this will come as a surprise to you, Trump is worse. Everything they
said about Trump is true, but you're right. That was necessary, but it was not sufficient
in order to convince the electorate. And part of the problem is now we have this ratcheting down of expectations, the redefining
of deviancy.
And by the way, if you are going to run against someone like Trump and what Trump represents,
you really ought to really try to be better. And I think people will judge you by things like this.
And I think that's where Joe Biden
comes up so short right now.
I think it's bigger than Biden.
I can't, look, maybe I'm just some conniving Sicilian
and I just can't see past my own lineage,
but there's zero chance that Trump's guys don't come after
Biden any way they can for being corrupt. And for a very simple reason, I do not believe it's about
a law and order. I do not believe it's about accountability. I think that's all bullshit.
I think it's a very simple political calculus of let's take away from them what they have on us,
which is that Trump is dirty.
And the only reason we know anything about Hunter Biden,
the only reason we know anything about Burisma
is that it was all reaction formation
to how the Democrats went after Trump,
which I believe was extreme and in many cases gratuitous.
But that's what's gonna happen right now.
They're signaling it every way they can.
I see it as grossly hypocritical by the Republicans
to be what they say they oppose.
But Biden would have been really brain dead
to not insulate himself.
If he doesn't pardon his brother, he's a fool.
The reason I think he pardoned Hunter now,
instead of when you usually do it there
in the Christmas gloaming,
is because he's gotta do his brother.
Okay, so look, I want to concede that he's a good father.
You're also right, there's, look,
I don't know what Trump is gonna do
on a lot of different things,
but this you can be confident on.
He is coming after them.
And there's nothing you can do.
You know, and I wrote this after.
You can pardon the guys that they need
in order to kill you.
So, I mean, you know, this is part of the irony.
When Jack Smith and Merrick Garland
dropped all the charges against Trump,
you know, in order to avoid, you know, a Saturday night massacre on January 20th, whatever that's
going to be, it's going to happen. There's going to be a January 20th massacre anyway,
right? We're going to see that. So the question is, you know, can you possibly insulate yourself
without burning yourself down? It's sort of like, you know, it's the last days of Rome,
the barbarians are there, and they're going to destroy all the icons. So what do
you do? You run around and you destroy the icons before them. You know, there's, there's
the flip side. There's the, I think the most dangerous thing is obeying in, in, in obeying
in advance capitulation in advance, but there's also the self-destruction in advance. Let's,
let's, you know, let's, you know's put out blanket pardons. I'm seeing on
social media, he should pardon Liz Cheney. He should pardon Adam Kinzinger. Well, no,
because they haven't committed any crimes. And so at some point, it feels like premature
capitulation by doing that. But look, I certainly understand the realism of the point you're making
But I certainly understand the realism of the point you're making,
that people should have no illusions
about what Trump is planning to do.
The question is then,
should Biden pardon all sorts of people
who committed no crimes whatsoever
in order to insulate themselves from it?
No, because I think that would be a step down the road
that you're afraid he's paving.
I think this is no brainer, Charlie.
If it were you, you would not only pardon your son,
you'd pardon your brother,
and try to figure out what they were gonna do.
And I'm telling you, I think the best move,
the only way to insulate himself politically
from his own people killing him,
which is the ultimate weakness of the Democrats.
They think it makes them better.
It does nothing,
but make them less competitive in a binary system.
They don't get that.
That's on them.
You know, and I'll watch it.
I'll watch it play out.
He should pardon Trump.
Ooh, boy.
And here's why.
Here's why.
Because Charlie, you already admitted it. You just said that your son was a function
of prosecutorial overreach for political reasons.
On your own watch, your own DOJ, and you just admitted it.
And only somebody who's completely blind with partisanship
can believe that everything that happened to Trump
was 100% legit and would have happened to anybody else.
That is no more true about him
than it is about Hunter Biden.
These are some bullshit cases against Hunter, okay?
Lying on a form the way he did
where there's nothing that happens afterwards
as a function of that application, go find me those cases
and see how they usually get disposed.
This tax case, go find me cases
where people don't get a fine,
it's not on the civil side,
there isn't some kind of dockage
and it goes this way.
It's very, very rare.
This was selective.
Same thing with those New York cases against Trump.
So pardon Trump, say this has to end, this has to end.
We have to be better than this.
I'm pardoning Trump.
So this is what you want Biden to say?
Yep.
You want Biden to basically acknowledge
that all of Trump's complaints were correct.
No, not all of it.
That in fact, his own Department of Justice's actions
were illegitimate.
I don't think, by the way, see,
I think you're making my point indirectly,
because in effect, Biden is suggesting
a certain plausible argument along that way,
but it leads to the absurd conclusion
that Joe Biden should basically wipe away
all of Donald Trump's sins. Not all of them. That Joe Biden should basically wipe away all of Donald Trump's sins.
Not all of them.
That Joe Biden should confer a kind of immunity on Donald Trump's criminality that not even
the Supreme Court was willing to confer.
I don't think that Joe Biden should do that.
I don't think he's going to do it.
But this is, I guess, my point is that he's opened the door for that kind of thinking and logic
by the way that he's done.
And by the way, he did not just pardon Hunter for the gun case and the tax case, it's kind
of bullshitty, right?
Or the tax case.
He gave him an 11 year window of complete immunity for things that we don't even know. No one has ever granted that
kind of a blanket immunity in a presidential pardon. The only one is Gerald Ford with Richard
Nixon for the term of his presidency. What Joe Biden has done is he's pardoned his own son,
by the way, the first president ever to pardon his own son. And he's done it for a longer period
of time than ever before in
presidential pardon history. So I mean, this is pretty amazing what he has done.
It's what he had to do. Well, nothing else would have made sense, Charlie, because he
would have left him vulnerable to what's coming. You know what they want to do. They want to
say that the Bidens were on the take from Ukraine and some Russian oligarchs.
And they, and you know they want to do it
because they say that's what's on the laptop
when they know it's not what's on the laptop
because they would have, they have the laptop,
they would have acted on the laptop.
Obviously they weren't afraid of acting on Hunter.
So they're making that up, but it's a boogeyman that lives
because they want it to.
And if you were to pardon Trump,
you're forgetting who we're dealing with, Charlie.
You're forgetting who we're dealing with.
And we're not dealing with Charlie Sykes.
We're not dealing with, even Chris Cuomo,
who's a very lower form of the same mammal as Charlie Sykes.
You're dealing with Donald Trump.
And if you say, I'm doing something good by you, Trump,
he would say to his guys, you know what, enough of this shit.
Let me pick on something else.
I'm gonna get comprehensive immigration.
Okay.
This is not actually though a mafia transaction, Chris.
This is actually the two presidents of the United States dealing with constitutional issues involving the rule of law.
What's the difference, Charlie?
What is the difference in where our politics are today
between a mob transaction and what we're watching?
Okay, well, that's what's interesting,
because I want to be the person saying,
let's not make it into a mob transaction.
Let's actually have a little bit higher.
Have we defined DV?
I think we're just suggesting we define DV and sit down.
What do you call what the Democrats did with Kamala Harris?
That wasn't a mob transaction?
That was politics.
Oh, what's the difference?
Okay, well, wait, let's stick with this.
Yeah, yeah.
Say, now, Donald Trump has been a serial, you know, you know, has been
a one man crime syndicate for a long time. And I guess the question becomes whether or
not because he was president, he is literally above the law. And we're very close to that
moment. We're close to the moment where the president is the state,
rewards his friends, punishes his enemies,
opens the door to any sort of lawlessness,
tries to overthrow the government, all of these things.
And the question is, do you wipe that away
because he is also an incredibly vengeful person who will bend and twist the
powers of government to get his opponents. Now, again, conceding that point sets precedence,
but even leaving aside the precedent. I mean, seriously, is that really where we've come?
I mean, you really think that the system, that our political culture is so thoroughly
corrupted already, that that would be an acceptable outcome?
Because I don't.
I want proof to the contrary.
I believe that what the Democrats did to Donald Trump, which I covered, which was the job,
to impeach a guy when you know you have no chance
of getting him removed, okay?
Zero chance.
That was a political indulgence to do nothing
but distract from the interests of the people,
and you were creating an impression of a standard
that you never had any intention of holding up yourself.
And the Democrats have proven the problem
with their actions.
Those New York cases, Charlie, were crap.
And they only brought them to try to slow down Trump.
We both know it.
And what they did with Kamala Harris
is proof that they don't give a shit about
any higher standard. They didn't even allow for democratic process in their own stupid
little club where they can do whatever they want.
Well, I don't want to go past this. You know, look, I thought it was unfortunate that the
New York case, you're talking about the criminal case.
Both of them.
Was the first. Okay. The AG's case and Bragg's case.
You just don't find cases like it, Charlie.
Why?
Well, because you don't have figures like Donald Trump.
You don't have people whose entire career is built on a mountain of fraud and lies and
cover-ups.
Commercial real estate guys do stupid, funny money.
This is what it's worth if I'm borrowing against it. This is what it's worth if I'm borrowing against it.
This is what it's worth if I'm paying taxes.
They play with it as an industry standard.
Cases get made.
Okay, this is where nobody lost money.
Remember when Bill O'Reilly asked Donald Trump,
well, you know, I mean, you know,
your good friend Vladimir Putin murders people.
And Donald Trump's answer was,
well, lots of people murder people. We murder lots of people. Well, you know, I mean, you know, your good friend Vladimir Putin murders people and Donald Trump's answer was well
Lots of people murder people we murder lots of people that argument that a lot of people do it doesn't change the fact that
Donald Trump has been one of the most thoroughly corrupt figures we've ever had and there was an attempt to hold him accountable
for it and I I
regret That they didn't move faster on the January 6th case.
Now you mentioned the impeachment.
The second impeachment was not a foregone conclusion after he incited a mob to violently
attack the Capitol, which we ought not to memory hole.
We ought not try to say that that was...
And the reality is that if Mitch McConnell would have gone this way instead of this way,
we wouldn't be having this conversation at all.
There were 10 Republicans in the House
that voted to impeach.
There were seven Republican United States senators
who voted to convict.
This was remarkable.
I don't think that was a distraction, that impeachment.
You know, at some point- No, the first one was. I mean, we really, we are honest. I don't think that was a distraction, that impeachment.
At some point.
No, the first one was.
I mean, we really, we are honest.
And the first one was, Charlie,
and the first one led to the second one.
That's my argument.
And my other argument, and then I'll give it back to you,
is if a fat guy is telling you that an obese guy
needs to lose weight and is disgusting. The reasonable person says, all right, I get it, the obese guy, that's pretty unhealthy.
But you, Chubby, should not be pointing at him.
Worry about yourself.
That is how people process Democrats and now their new allies like Charlie Sykes saying
what you're saying about Trump.
They say, we know what Trump is.
You're not telling us anything we don't know.
But you guys are lesser versions of him and you get away with it all the time.
And now you want to pretend that we need to have a standard?
You guys have been doing nothing but abusing the standard and I wanna burn it down.
And this guy, as flawed as he is, he's willing to do that.
And that's all I need from him.
They've been making this argument though,
for the last decade.
This is nothing new.
I mean, I lived through the rise of what about-ism,
which is that whatever a crime you could point out
that Donald Trump was committing,
well, what about Hillary?
What about?
So the what about-ism is making a comeback here.
But again, going back to the original conversation
about the Joe Biden pardoned everything,
that's why I am so disillusioned by it
because it brings us back to that point saying,
well, you've been lecturing us all this time.
Look at what you have been doing.
By the way, just the first impeachment,
which never had any chance of going anywhere,
let's remember it was Donald Trump
using the power of the presidency
to try to coerce Volodymyr Zelensky
into giving him dirt on Joe Biden and his sons.
So in many ways, we have this complete circle now.
That whole incident can't be separated
from what Joe Biden just did, which was to immunize him.
But there's the president of the United States
telling the president of Ukraine,
suggesting that the shipment of weapons
might be dependent on whether he digs up dirt
on a political opponent.
Again, we've memory hold so much about Donald Trump
because the zone is so flooded with his shit.
There are so many lies.
I mean, there's just so much that even I do this
for a living, I have to like keep notes.
Do you remember this?
Remember when he did this?
Do you remember the people who died because he mishandled COVID.
Do you remember, et cetera, et cetera.
So this is why it is important that if you want to say,
democracy's on the ballot and democracy's on the ballot,
the rule of law is on the ballot,
you don't then do it with what Joe Biden has just done.
I get it. I totally agree with you. Because guys like it with Joe Biden has just done. I get it.
I totally agree with you.
Guys like me are going, what the fuck?
I totally agree.
I totally agree.
The problem is you're wrong, Charlie.
They are not better.
They're just not as bad.
And that is not enough for the American people anymore.
Now you can say, well, hold on a second, hold on.
You're saying that the Democrats are in the hole
because they are not as bad as Trump,
but that's not enough anymore,
but then why would people vote for Trump?
Wouldn't they vote for what they perceive as better?
They are, they're voting for disrupting all of it.
Yeah, but why would they pick him as a change agent?
Because that is the psychology at play
when you are desperate for an outsider,
someone who is removed from the dynamic.
The only other choice they had on that level
was Rameswamy and Kennedy.
And Kennedy was a mixed bag,
because he's like insider,
what is more inside than the name Kennedy.
And he was really a Democrat,
and then he's got all this other kooky shit.
So this was the only pragmatic choice for people
who just want to burn it all down.
Well, yes, I mean, but Greg, your sentence there, you know, burning it all down is not
always pragmatic.
I mean, you know, pragmatic people who want change and get things done had options.
Look, they don't believe that there'll be change.
There's never been any change, Charlie.
Well, history would disagree.
Point it out to me.
In the last 20 years, what has changed in a way
that would give people hope that there is better available
within the process and the culture?
Well, we can go down a rabbit hole there.
But you don't like any of my suggestions.
You call them all rabbit holes.
Well, no, I've only used the return rabbit hole once.
Yeah, but you use memory hole.
Memory hole, rabbit hole, I'm seeing the same thing.
Yeah, same thing.
No, I make a distinction there.
No, I mean, just the world,
whether you're talking about medicine
or technology or prosperity,
the world has gotten better.
Now, are we about to become retrograde?
It is certainly possible that we have,
look, Republican voters, Republicans, head agency,
Republican leaders, head agency.
There were off ramps to Donald Trump,
but clearly he won the election.
But let me, can I just pull back?
Because one of the things that frustrates me
about modern punditry, and I'm not talking about you,
is that the, somehow, you know, the election is,
you know, Vox Populi is the voice of God.
Well, no, at some point,
and I'm more comfortable about doing this as a never-Trump,
which means I'm used to losing and being irrelevant,
is to saying, I don't care if 70% of the voters think X,
if it is fundamentally wrong, if it is immoral, if it is dishonest, then we ought to speak
out against it.
There are things that at the moment, in the heat of the moment, you're willing to accept
that later, you know, you can look back on and go, you know, that was a mistake.
We were wrong.
We got caught up in the emotion of the moment and the divisions of the moment.
But it was wrong.
Donald Trump represents something off the normal scale.
Now I am not.
I've been doing this a long time.
You've been doing this a long time.
I don't have any illusions about the character of politicians or anything, but.
I don't have any illusions about the character of politicians or anything, but normally it's like this, right?
There's the range of good and bad.
Donald Trump is off that chart.
And I think that that's something that we need to acknowledge.
And it says something about our political culture, that the voters did ultimately decide that that was the only alternative
because they had to buy, you know, adjust their standards dramatically.
You and I both know that almost on a daily basis, Donald Trump said or did
something that 20 years ago, 30 years ago would have been instantly disqualifying.
And so in many ways we've gotten better.
In many ways we have back, you know,
there's been some backsliding.
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Hard times make strong people.
Strong people make good times.
Good times make weak people.
Weak people make hard times.
We are in the weak people make hard times phase of our cultural development, I would
suggest. And I see signs of it all over the place,
not just in the embodiment of Trump.
And I think that you have to zero in
on this kind of meta effect of why Joe Rogan has an audience.
Beyond the idea that he has a big platform
for whatever reason that he does,
and he gets great guests because they want the reach
so they can sell whatever they're doing, that makes sense.
But why does Rogan get defended?
Why does Trump get mitigated?
Why do people now just default?
Look at how we're vetting Hegseth, Cash, Patel,
obviously Gates and anybody else that the insiders don't like.
It's all exclusively in the negative.
And that is what knits it all together for me, Charlie,
is that what we're seeing is this is where a zero sum binary
battle to the bottom takes you. Where you have people now listening to Joe Rogan, who
is not a thought leader, okay? He's authentic. He's a conversationalist. He doesn't know
a lot of things that he's talking about
when it comes to politics and policy.
He will admit that he's admitting it less and less now.
But why?
Because they want something that is outside the norm.
And they have been weaned
onto nothing but negative assessments.
Pete Hagseth, I have no idea why they see a positive in him
because nobody has explained it to me.
Same thing with Cash Patel.
Why?
Why?
I wasn't sure where you were going there.
Well, it's all negative all the time.
And this is where it gets you.
That the idea of, well, they're worse.
People are exhausted by it.
Here's how I know I have to be right, Charlie.
The Democrats lost the election,
not because Trump built a new coalition.
That's not what happened.
He had some demographic shifts in his favor, yes.
And the Democrats did not.
The Democrats lost because they stayed home.
There were, this is, I can't remember
the last presidential election we had
where there were fewer votes than the one before it.
Yes, we had a lot of juiced voting
during the pandemic period.
We were trying to get people to vote,
much more because of the restrictions.
But why do you think the Democrats stayed home, Charlie?
Because in that answer, I believe is your overall answer.
Yeah, I mean, at some point you have to say,
this is how I'm making your life better.
This is what I am doing for you.
And I think it always comes down to, are you on my side?
Do you understand people like me?
Can we just go back though,
because I wanna just clarify where we're going
on some of those appointments.
I mean, the Pete Hegseth, you know,
Cash Patel, Matt Gaetz.
I mean, these are fucking absurd appointments, right?
I mean, these are big middle fingers to,
I think all of the institutions, they are beyond the pale.
They're, I actually was on doing one of the cable shows
yesterday and, you know, reading the latest story
about Pete Hegseth's drinking and everything.
And it's like, wow, just wow.
What the notion that we're thinking about putting this man in charge
of the three million men and women of the Department of Defense
in charge of the most powerful military is just so obscenely stupid.
And I think that to sort of take a deep breath here, you know,
have we reached a point?
I mean, you know, have we reached a point where America thinks that's acceptable, that this is a good idea?
It's such a complete insult to the military.
It's an insult to the people in law enforcement, the first responders, you know, to do this
sort of thing.
So there is something breathtaking.
And I do wonder whether or not, and we'll find out, whether or not Donald Trump is misreading
his non-mandate here, he did win the election,
but whether he's misreading,
because you and I both know people who say,
I wanna burn it all down, but then when you get specific,
do you wanna cut this, do you wanna cut this,
do you wanna eliminate this, do you really wanna do this?
They go, no.
And I do wonder whether there's just an obscene overreach
going on right now.
And that's another reason why I think the Democrats
should stop doing stupid things.
Well, somebody's gotta be better.
Somebody's gotta be better.
And that was not the tact that the Democrats took
because of the measuring stick that people like me are only too willing to apply,
which is, can I find some shit on Charlie
that will embarrass him, that will hurt him personally?
That's the only vetting we do.
I mean, listen to the conversation, Charlie Hegseth,
his drinking, his, here's my very crude feeling about it.
I don't give a fuck about what somebody does
in their personal life,
unless it affects their performance, okay?
Now, if the guy is a raging,
if the guy is a raging addict, okay, now we're talking.
But that is not- He's a raging asshole and okay, now we're talking. But that is not-
He's a raging asshole and an incompetent one.
But then everybody's disqualified, Charlie.
Well, it does affect his job.
Nobody survives the scrutiny is what I'm saying.
Nobody survives the scrutiny anymore.
That's why all these great people in our society
won't get involved.
Because they're gonna find something on you. Cash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz are not the great people in our society. The
fact that you point out that Pete Hegseth is a guy who, by the way, it has
affected his performance. He was removed from his position running the only
organizations he's ever run because his misconduct was so egregious. This is a
guy who's so awful. His own mom is saying he's a skeevy-chode.
I mean, come on.
So we do need to have, I think, legitimate,
and I mean, legitimate vetting, and I also think,
and I'm a deep believer in this,
that we can't have a standard of absolute purity.
Human beings are complex.
They are a mixture of good and bad, or weak and strong.
And that we ought to have a weak foundation.
All you do is dig for the bad stuff, Charlie.
I've never heard of balancing.
Every article that is about everybody
has a headline that kills you.
Then you have two, three paragraphs
of why they're killing you,
which is not as good as the headline, but it's bad.
And then five graphs down,
there'll be a balancing statement
just so that you don't get sued.
That's where we are.
That's why you get Cash Patel.
You get Cash Patel because you're asking
for people to pick people who, yeah,
they have tons of marks all over them
because that's all you're looking for.
So let me make it easy for you.
And I'm gonna pick them anyway,
because they have an offsetting virtue
that matters more to me than all the stuff
that you say about everybody,
because everybody gets torn down.
Okay, that's the explanation.
There's no one that they could have picked
that would have been more plausible than Casper Tell.
I mean, you look through,
I noticed like lots of qualified people out there,
people who
in fact have survived scrutiny because they are smart, they are decent, they are honorable,
they are effective.
And our government has been filled with them.
Now have they also been filled with a lot of idiots?
Yeah, you know, people who haven't passed it.
But this is one of the things, look, you know, when when you put forth absurd appointments, obscenely absurd appointments
like Gates and in Cash Patel and Peter Heggett, you ought to expect negativity because that's
what the record is.
That's what we, first of all, that's what the media is supposed to do is to hold people
accountable.
Especially if you're not going to have an actual legitimate vetting like by the FBI or something, you're going to get this sort of thing. But I am afraid that because
you have people who are so grotesquely disqualified from office, that what's happening is the
defining of deviancy down that we no longer expect competence and virtue in the people
that we name. As you keep lowering, lowering, lowering.
I mean, the fact that, okay, Matt Gaetz
was a ridiculous appointment for attorney general.
So, you know, he's eliminated.
And then what does Trump do?
He puts in somebody who is marginally less absurdly
disqualifying, you know, Pam Bondi.
And so what happens is we keep lowering
and lowering our
expectations. And I think that gets you to the kind of point where you're talking about
where people have lost all faith, because if you think that everybody, everybody is awful,
everybody's a crook, then, frankly, how does democracy move forward, right? Because what
what is what is the point, then we have no trust in our institutions, we have no trust in anything we hear. We don't care whether it's true, or whether it's false, or whether it's
virtuous, or it's not. We don't care about character anymore. Well, if your point is that we're
already there, that's one of my great fears, because that's the road we're on. I think that's
exactly where we are, and I think that that's what this election was about.
And I think that the Democrats stayed home
because they were embarrassed by their own party
and the perfidy that was completely on display.
A woman who no Democrat had anything good to say about.
And you know I'm right, Charlie.
Nobody, when Biden said he was gonna run for a second term,
which was ludicrous, said, no, no, no, no, no.
We got Harris.
Nobody.
And then all of a sudden, just because you got to beat Trump,
she's black female Jesus.
And then when I say that, I get called a racist?
I mean, this is where we are and that's why Trump won.
And I'm telling you, you're missing something on this,
Charlie, you're right on the principle,
but you have to look at it through the lens
of what is beating you.
And you can't just dismiss it as irrational.
Cash Patel is all of these questionable things.
He is also ride or die for Donald Trump.
And that is the offsetting virtue that matters to their
voters because they believe they are in an us versus them
war and their warriors are imperfect.
Yeah, they get it. But they are
loyal.
First of all, I don't believe that the voters think that about federal law enforcement necessarily.
But you are right. The overriding virtue of Cash Patel is loyalty, not to the Constitution,
not to the rule of law, not to the institution or its traditions, his loyalty is to the man,
is to Donald Trump and whatever Donald Trump wants to do.
And that is not a virtue, that is the threat.
That Donald Trump has taken the word loyalty
and he's made it all about himself.
He is not looking for people who are again,
loyal to the idea of America, to the United
States.
I mean, I say this as somebody that knows people in the military, knows people in the
Department of Justice, flawed people, but have this long, this deep sense of loyalty,
not to an individual.
And this is what bothers me about him, because he's surrounding himself with people
who he knows will never say no to him.
We'll never see, Mr. President,
that would violate the law.
Mr. President, you cannot do that.
And Trump made, you know,
you can imagine the conversation,
Mr. President, if you did that, it would violate the law.
And the president would say, fuck that.
I will just pardon myself. I will pardon you. There is the law. And then the president would say, fuck that, I will just pardon myself, I will pardon you.
There is no law.
So to put people who don't care about the law,
who have personal loyalty
in charge of these vastly powerful organizations,
this is dangerous.
And this is a uniquely dangerous situation.
Unless you flip the supposition,
which is the danger is the institutions, that they
have been corrupted by culture, but also a binary system of advantage.
And that's how we've gotten here.
And they want people who are going to go in there and change them.
And everything that you're pointing to as virtues,
they see as part of the vice structure.
They don't think that about federal law enforcement.
Yeah, they do.
That's exactly what they think about federal law enforcement.
Well, MAGA loyalists do.
MAGA loyalists just won the popular vote in this country.
No, Donald Trump did.
See, I think this is the misinterpretation, is to assume that the
people who came out and voted, because I think your earlier analysis was correct, that this
is a change election. People were taking out their frustrations. They were upset about
inflation. They don't think that there's change. They vote, yeah, we want to try something different. Does that mean that they have now internalized all of the agenda of project
2025? Does that mean that they want the Department of... Do you think that the people really
want to spend the next six months doing what you've predicted they're going to be doing,
which is a campaign of political retribution?
No.
Did they sign up for that?
I think it'll backfire.
Okay.
Okay, well see, so they didn't say that they wanted.
Basically, I mean, you can see that Donald Trump is sitting down there.
Who will be my instruments of revenge?
Because that is what I am going to prioritize.
Did voters vote for that?
I probably think that the majority did not.
Now look, and Charlie, you're not on the list.
I am.
So if he's gonna go after people,
I guarantee you I'll be one of the people that they go after.
And I'm okay with that, because that's what I signed up for.
I am spoiling for that kind of fight.
And we'll see where it goes, and we'll see how he wants to play it.
And I do believe that's why his people reach out to me as often as they do right now. They're
trying to get a feel for where they're going to have to target and how they're going to
target. And you know, I'm an easy target because the media loves to eat its own. The left loves
to eat its own. And the right only protects its own. So, you know, I used to feel bad for guys like you
because I'd be like, well, this guy's like a real
conservative and now he's got like nowhere to go
because if you're a conservative and you don't like Trump,
you're not a conservative anymore, that sucks.
But I feel even worse for guys like me
because I refuse to give a nod to the bullshit
that either of these sides are trying to convince themselves
of because I know what the salvation for the process is.
I know it.
I'm just watching it develop,
and it's just happening too slowly for me and for all of us.
And it is the rejection of the parties
and the birth of the independent voter movement.
This is the first election
where more people said,
I'm an independent than said they were a Democrat when they voted in the presidential election.
Now, a lot of them were probably people
who left the Democratic Party in a fit of pique.
They were equal to the number of people
who said they were Republican.
The more people leave the parties,
leave the idea of group loyalty
and become just straight up critical thinkers
like George Carlin was begging people to, right,
for a generation.
That is the salvation because nothing changes
if nobody's willing to be better, Charlie.
And Biden was never better.
Biden was never better, okay?
He was just better.
He was just not as bad as Trump,
but that doesn't give you the right to say that you're good.
The fact that you're not as bad as me
doesn't mean that you're good.
And that's what Democrats need to be, or whoever.
Whoever wants to beat what is out there right now
needs to be demonstrably better
and probably not from the system right now.
Okay, so I very much agree with this.
So let me give you two unpopular opinions here though.
Number one, because you brought up Kamala Harris
several times, as you know,
I burned all the boats and supported Kamala Harris.
I was one of those who was a Kamala Harris skeptic.
I was one of those who probably bought the idea that there was no Plan B.
So I'm in that, which is why when Joe Biden came out and did that debate,
I felt really misled about all of this because clearly, the original sin
is his notion that he could run for reelection.
Having said that, I actually, and this is going to be a very unpopular opinion, I think
she was a much better candidate than I expected.
I think she ran a close to flawless campaign, but given the nature of the Democratic Party,
given her association with a toxically unpopular
regime, you know, regime, I wasn't going to say regime, incumbent, there was no way that
she was going to be able to pull this off in retrospect.
But having said that, this is why I think we have to break from this binary world.
And I guess because I have kind of a foot in both worlds, these alternative reality silos
that both the left and the right have are just incredible.
So, you know, you go over to, you know, Twitter and, you know,
it's one, you know, cesspool of cancel culture.
I worry about blue sky becoming the different version
of all of that.
And this sort of the moral relativism that people inevitably buy into when it's all about the team.
Because if it's all about the team and party loyalty, then you're going to eat a shit sandwich all the time.
And then when you go out to people and say, hey, look, the know, the other guy, you know, is serving you shit sandwiches. People are going to go whatever. So I mean, I, I don't know how to
get there though. I don't know how to break people because as you have undoubtedly noticed,
people want to hear what they want to hear. People and so much of the media is now become
about audience service, right?
There's that audience capture and people in their bubbles insist on having all of their prior prejudices and ideas validated all the time.
They don't want to hear. They don't want to hear bad news.
They don't want to hear their opinions challenged. And so this is why what I've seen happening since, say, 2015, especially
accelerating, has been this just sort of hermetically sealing off of people from other points of
view. And so, for example, I'm getting into speaking of rabbit holes. So I think one of
the things that killed Kamala Harris
in this campaign, and a lot of Democrats recognize it,
but a lot of progressives don't,
the whole transgender issue.
I live here in Wisconsin.
You could not turn on any television
without pounding, pounding, pounding.
Trump is for us, she is for they and them,
and transgender surgeries and prisons and
They never answered that and in part they couldn't answer it
Because they were afraid of their activist base turning on them
You know if they if they if they deviated from the transgender agenda and on places like as you know
I'm a contributor MSNBC. I don't even remember having it come up as a conversation.
That hey, this is something the Democrats need
to talk about, the Democrats need to come up
with a response for.
So in some ways the Democrats are trapped
by their own interest groups
and Kamala Harris just was not able to navigate that.
That's the binary structure.
I think if they had had Shapiro and Westmore,
they would have run away with the election. Now, of course, it's completely speculative,
but I just think they were way stronger candidates.
I think that they would have appealed in a way
that would have checked boxes.
She never could.
And, but that all never happened,
so it doesn't really matter.
You're 100% right about the trans issue,
and when you don't tell your own story,
you allow the other side to tell it for you
and they're gonna exaggerate it.
And it's gonna end with you dying.
And that's what they did with transgender.
And the left is held hostage by a flank,
but it is bigger than that.
And it's something that has to be consistently given voice
and it just sounds so weak, but that's unfortunate.
The reason that I believe Jesus had to be crucified
was there is such a vulnerability.
There is such a demonstrable weakness
in being better and virtue.
It is way easier to be tough and hard and mean and base.
And look, my father, everybody lionizes their own
and I am very careful not to do that.
I'm very aware of who my father was,
who my brother is, who I am, who my sisters are.
I get it, okay?
Like you say, I have a foot in both also.
I know what it's like to be examiner and the examined.
I'm telling you, Charlie,
I don't know how well you followed my father.
You do not have Democrats like him today.
And I have these punk ass bitch Democrats
telling me that I don't know what their party is
and that I don't understand.
They're telling Mario Cuomo's son
that I don't understand what the Democratic Party is about
and why they're better.
And they are clueless as are their friends in the media,
okay, who have been given power and platform
they do not deserve.
And not because of race,
but because of pedigree and experience.
We have all these people who are professionals
who've never worked around politicians.
They've never been around a campaign
when there's not a camera on.
They don't know any of these people anymore.
They're just professional yappers.
And it's the negativity, Charlie.
You can't look past it.
It's everything.
Nobody is a slogan deep on positivity.
Nobody.
It is all why the other side is worse.
And that is why Trump is enough for them.
Because, you know, it's like McCain used to say,
you know what happens when you get in the mud
with a pig, right?
You get dirty and he likes it.
And the pig loves it.
And that's what has to change.
Look, Trump is gonna give you guys tons of opportunities
to criticize him.
The mistake will be-
And I will take them.
Attacking what he does.
That will be the mistake.
The right response will be to say what's better.
Constantly.
Make it as much of an echo as the he sucks messaging
is.
So this is why, circling back, why I think that what Joe Biden just did is so damaging
because when Donald Trump comes into office on January 20th, what is he going to do? What
is the first thing he's going to do? The's, you know, the oath will have been given
and then he's going to pardon many of the January 6th rioters,
the people who attacked the cops and everything.
And I think that to your point,
yes, I think people ought to criticize that, you know,
but also you have to say, what is better than that
is to have confidence in the criminal justice system,
to hold people accountable for their behavior.
Joe Biden has just undermined that.
This is a better approach.
I agree. I agree.
But I don't think that's the right response.
Because the most of the people don't give a shit about him
pardoning the January 6th people.
They get what it was.
Once again, the Democrats overplayed the situation.
The truth is enough.
And we keep forgetting that.
So they called it an insurrection, not an insurrection.
That's why nobody was charged with insurrection.
He had some seditious conspiracy,
but there's a law called insurrection
and they didn't charge it for a reason.
But you guys kept calling it that,
that was a mistake and you lost leverage.
And you can say, yeah, but potato potato,
but you were in a battle to the bottom.
The right move when he pardons the January six people
is to say, what about immigration?
What are you doing for grocery prices?
Oh, I'm gonna do that too.
Yeah, but you didn't.
You just came out of the box and did something
that doesn't make anything better for the majority.
I think that they can walk and chew gum at the same time.
No, they can't.
They can't.
They can't, Charlie.
And we say that all the time.
And anybody who's ever said that to you
has not been doing it.
Think about it.
Anybody who's ever said to you in politics,
well, we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Show me.
They never do it.
They can barely raise the debt ceiling.
Oh, okay.
Say, no, here's a question that is gonna come off
a little bit snarkier than I intended to,
but it's a question that I use all the time.
Well, at least you know that going into it.
Right, right, right.
I do, I understand.
So you're saying that, you know,
overplayed the, you know, the we,
because I've been a big critic of January 6th
and have talked about it a lot.
You say that the public doesn't care about it.
And I guess one of my questions is,
and I think this is one of these philosophical questions
that I have learned from the Stoics.
So what?
Sometimes okay, you know, I am not going to decide how I feel about this based on the
poll results.
This was an attack on the US Capitol and attempt to overturn the election.
Yes, it was.
This was a constitutional, you know, an inch away from the worst constitutional crisis in our
history since the Civil War.
So I really don't care if voters in Kansas didn't care.
I care.
I'm going to decide what I care about and what I talk about.
So, you know, let's separate out here because we're talking about, you know, what
Democrats should say.
I am not a Democrat.
I am going to be one of the people who is going to be talking about this and writing
about this.
I think your point, by the way, is that, and I think this is the big flaw of the Trump
presidency, of what's about to happen, is that he will be obsessing
about things that do not affect people's lives.
They don't solve any problems.
For example, what is he doing about the crisis
in education in America today?
Who's actually doing anything to raise academic performance
or close the racial achievement gap?
We're not even talking about these things,
much less talking about the price of eggs.
But I do think that at some point,
in order to get to that independent voter
you're talking about,
we need to sort of tune out the polls and everything
and go, what is right, what is wrong, what do I think?
I agree.
And if someone says, well,
no one cares about what you think, my response is, so what?
This is what I think.
I agree.
This is what's going on.
The Stoics gave you a corollary concern
that you haven't stated, and it is more important
than the first one that you do.
So what?
Yes.
What's the corollary concern?
Now what?
That is, that's the couplet that Aurelius got from Zeno.
There are only two questions.
When anything happens to you in life,
because you have very little control
over what actually happens,
but you have 100% control over what?
Your ability to react to that thing,
what it means to you.
That's why they say things that are so hard to penetrate
the weak mind like mine, like no one can hurt you.
What do you mean?
I get punched in the face as a hobby.
Yeah, but whether you're injured or not is your description.
Whether you're offended or not is your description.
It's your decision.
So, so what?
You don't care about January 6th.
I'm not saying they don't care.
I'm saying it's baked in.
And hearing that it's bad,
they're more worried about their own lives.
Ah!
So now what?
And that's the opportunity space.
Whatever Trump does is gonna leave a yawning gap
of now what?
Because they're gonna be very discreet agendas.
What do you do about education?
You talk about transgender.
That's gonna be unsatisfying for people with kids.
Now, they're gonna be somewhat mollified
if they were convinced that people are gonna tell their kids
that they need to chop off their peepees.
Okay, fine, but that's a subset.
If you talk about what matters and you have ideas,
you're now in the operative plane of the only thing
that gets you out of the situation
you're in right now, which is being obsessed with now what?
Okay, so Chris, first of all, I would be remiss
if I did not give you serious props
for the Zeno Aurelius reference, okay?
I mean, how many podcasts being recorded today
actually talk about Zeno and his influence
on Marcus Aurelius?
I mean, well done.
I feel like we can drop the mic now.
I'll tell you what, if life were a written test,
I would not just get a 100,
I would get whatever the bonus points are
on the back of the page that I never read as a student
because I was just trying to pass.
The practical exam kicks my ass nine times out of 10, Charlie.
My frustration is not unlike Neo and the Matrix,
all I see is the code.
I've lived this my entire life.
I understand exactly,
I could have made a fortune on this election. I knew that it was Trump's to lose eight, nine months ago.
And that was when I just knew
that people were lying about Biden.
Now, was I wrong not to say that I think Biden is,
what they say in Italian, mezza stuna, that he is half dumb?
No, I don't regret not saying that more.
Why? I was lying, I was covering.
No, I was not lying, I was not covering, I was not sure.
And most of my information and observations
were confidential.
They were coming from sources.
I don't have direct contact with Biden
ever since he went bad on my brother.
I haven't heard from him.
So it was confidential sources telling me things
that I advanced within my own understanding
as they came into comparison or contrast
with what was reportable.
Because also, Charlie, as you and I know,
and people don't know enough at home, but they should,
people lie to you.
Confidential sources lie to you too,
or people get shit wrong all the time.
And they think it's true, but then it's not.
So I have seen where we are.
I see why we are where we are. I understand it's not. So I have seen where we are. I see why we are where we are.
I understand it very well.
I got a lot of Trump people in my life.
And I'll tell you what,
only one of them is impressed with Trump personally,
other than with his resilience
and his ability to work the system.
Only one of them, of well over a dozen people
who felt this was the only way they could vote.
And I understand what it is,
and it's not because they're bigots, Charlie.
And if the left and the media don't get off that kick,
that every time somebody disagrees with what they say
or thinks that Trump is on to
something, they're a bigot.
I think that I don't even think that we're at maybe close to midpoint of how many losses
the left is going to take.
I think they're going to lose every state house, every one of them. Because if you can't get to a place
where you're offering regular people
something that sounds better,
you're just gonna keep boots.
And-
Well, you know, politics is in cycles.
And I certainly, and you've been doing this a long time,
and after a defeat like this,
it feels like it's going to be forever, and it seldom is.
But let me go back to this thing about the bigotry,
because this is complicated.
And as a long time conservative talk show host,
I lived through that period where the left accused everyone,
everyone of being a racist.
George H.W. Bush was a racist,
Mitt Romney was a racist,
John McCain was a racist,
I was a racist,
whatever position you disagreed with.
And I think that at a certain point,
people got numbed out about it,
got numb.
And I think that it has lost all of that.
In fact, I don't know if you probably missed it,
but when I actually hosted
something with Kamala Harris and the New York Times did a big story about a word I had used
15 years ago once on my radio show, you know, the Rachel Ian set is it's like, and it was
like kind of the really guys, you're going gonna keep throwing this out. But here's the problem.
Donald Trump did run the most bigoted campaign
we have ever seen. The whole Haitians eating dogs and cats.
The kinds of, you know, great replacement theory.
The problem is separating out the really toxic stuff
from this years and years and years of accusing
everyone you disagree with.
Yes.
And, and, and, and you know what?
This is something that it's a message that I think progressives have a very hard time
understanding that if everything is a racist is racist, then nothing is racist.
So you know, I mean, I was in the position of, you know, the position of making the argument that you're talking about.
I mean, we were so sick and tired.
If you were in favor of school choice, you were a racist, you were a fascist.
Seriously, tax cuts, you were a racist, you were a fascist.
So when the real racist and quasi-fascist came along, people say, well, wait, that is,
people are going, yeah, yeah, we've been hearing that for a generation.
And I think that's part of the problem.
So, Donald Trump engaged in the kind of speech
that would have been regarded as breathtakingly awful
in the Republican Party of say 1988.
But now Republicans just brush it off.
And I, but I worry about how we move
the window of acceptability.
And I don't know how to separate this out.
By being better, by being people like Westmore
and Shapiro who use a different level,
Ben Sasse wherever he went,
there are guys on the right like that too.
Now a lot of them have had to make much harder decisions
because they'll get killed by Trump.
I mean, I just had his guy Bossie last night say,
if you don't vote for all his picks, we'll primary you.
And look, that's what he should be saying,
but you know, Crenshaw, you know,
there are guys who just try to hold a different standard.
People get upset at me.
Why won't you call him a racist?
Why won't you say this about her?
I don't judge people personally
when I'm talking about their professional characteristics
unless that characteristic goes directly to
what they're being asked to do.
If somebody were a racist-
Donald Trump is being asked to be president
of the United States and he engaged in overtly racist
comments and statements and themes in his campaign.
I understand and appreciate that.
That's not what I'm talking about.
And we ought to look very clearly at that.
I'm talking about a suit about paying women
to be quiet about his affairs.
500 women coming up with accounts that nobody feels must be corroborated and
all of that is done to the exclusion of any other kind of analysis about what might matter
to people. This is our own doing. We did this. And well, what are you specifically talking about?
I'm saying that if you want to go at Trump, okay, yeah, you go at him with a nice broad
brush like you do with everybody else. And he gives you plenty to work with because he's
a pathological liar. And then you just constantly show that he doesn't know how to do what has
to be done. And you can do it better. And his whole life is testament to that.
Okay. This is my frustration. And I was on another podcast and I made this point. I'm not sure that
I got it right. But I think we ought to be, those of us who were never Trump and opposition,
everything that could be said about Donald Trump was said. Everything that could be said about Donald Trump was said.
Everything that could be written has been written.
Everything that could be exposed, I think has been exposed.
And he was still reelected.
It's not as if we would have said it differently,
it would be different.
And I don't think it's, and again,
the thing about Donald Trump is there's just so much.
I mean, I've been in hours long discussions
about Donald Trump, and it's only at the end that somebody will say, and don't forget,
we had a federal judge say that he, his sexual assault on a woman was the equivalent of rape.
Yes. If this happened to you or me, there is no job of trust in the world that we could have actual rape and yet
It's it's it's what item number?
568 in all the things that we
Think about Donald Trump. This is part of the problem is that our standard see I don't know about you but
Everywhere else in society. I look around and go, you know
Everywhere else in society, I look around and go, you know, we, you know, parents teach their children about sportsmanship.
We look for people who are honest and we, when the people we hire as babysitters, the
people that you would, you know, name officers in the U.S. military or coaches of a football
team and our standards for politicians are, have become so much lower than in any other walk of life.
In any one of these things would be disqualifying.
And I guess, you know, I know you're talking
about the negativity.
I don't know.
I can't say much more.
Something had to matter more, Charlie.
Because people demand these things in their own lives. People demand these things in their own lives.
People demand these things in their own lives.
Why, why not here?
And I think it's because people don't have the expectation
of better when it comes to us.
Well, so I was saying, now that's a crisis,
because basically, then it means that in our daily lives,
in our businesses, we have these standards,
but we no longer have these standards for our democracy.
So what does that say about democratic norms?
And I have to say that one of the things
that I'm gonna get into with my progressive friends
at some point is, all the references to
defending democracy and everything,
I think you take a deep breath and go, you know, the 2024 election, this is what democracy looks
like. You have to have other things simply than democracy. If you don't have this expectation,
if you don't have standards, if you don't have character, if you don't have the rule of law,
if you don't have the Constitution, you're in a very dangerous situation.
But who says we don't have it? See, I was reading from the other day,
and look, the reason I love you, Charlie,
and I love David from, I love guys
who are just better thinkers than I am
on a lot of these questions.
Because unlike most people these days,
I'm much more fascinated by what I don't know
and I'm not sure about,
than what I do know and I wanna be sure about, right?
I mean, that's part of the issue here
is that everybody's looking for confirmation bias.
But we're in a constitutional crisis.
I think you guys are going way too fast and way too far
and playing into how we got here.
We're gonna be in a constitutional crisis.
We don't even know what the fuck the guy's gonna do.
He's gonna be on a revenge tour. Look at who he's picking. Maybe maybe not
I think it's just as likely that he's picking these cantaloupes
Because he wants them to be in positions to protect him not to attack other people and if that's what they're doing
Then all cash Patel or Hague Seth or whoever it is. All they're doing is
Increasing the chances
he'll be less effective.
I don't know that he's going to go on a jihad.
But again, you know, just earlier in this discussion, though, you said, and I agreed
with you, that he's going to go on a revenge tour.
He's going to go after the Biden family.
And you're absolutely right.
He is going to do that.
So we do know what he's going to do.
No, I don't think it's going to be him.
I think he's going to have to do that. So we do know what he's going to do. No, I don't think it's going to be him. I think he's going to have Congress do it.
I don't think it's going to be Cash Patel
or any of these guys, because frankly,
and this is my same feeling about Trump as a despot,
he's not smart enough.
He's not strategic enough.
He doesn't understand the ambition enough.
He's too lazy to want to be what it takes to be that kind of autocrat.
And the people he's putting in positions of power have never achieved any kind of ambition
that would be suggestive of their ability to be as diabolical as that. They may want
to be, but that doesn't mean you know how to be. That's the genius of McConnell, right?
He knows better in 2.0 than he did in 1.0. And he's surrounding himself with people who
will not say no to his instincts. I hope you're right about this, by the way. And I do think
there's a real possibility that, you know, you surround yourself with incompetent, you
know, folks like this. And, you know, that is not the way you establish an autocracy.
I do, however, worry about the people in the number two
and the number three positions.
And the fact that they do have a blueprint.
I think the fact that he came out
and named his entire cabinet by now
is a sign that they're ready to go.
They wanna run.
I think that, by the way, there's some real downsides
to naming everybody this early
because now we have two months of vetting. Now I think that by the way, there's some real downsides to naming everybody this early,
because now we have two months of the kind of vetting.
And trust me, Hegseth is not going to look better with the more vetting.
But I do think that he's got a plan, and he's got a ruthlessness, and he's got nothing to
lose.
Plus, he knows that he has, or at least he thinks he has, a Congress that will be a rubber
stand for him.
I think he may be wrong about the United States Senate.
And I think he may be wrong about the judiciary.
You know, one of the things we keep talking about the rule of law and these pardons, it's
as if we don't have any confidence that the judiciary can handle any of these issues.
You know, the federal judges are watching all of this.
The Supreme Court is watching all of this.
You know, let's not assume that they have greenlit everything
that Donald Trump is thinking of doing right now.
But look, he lost his first battle.
He lost his first battle with Senator Scott.
I mean, the guy he wanted to be the head of the Senate,
he got it wrong.
He didn't know how unpopular the guy was.
And that was the day he named Matt Gaetz.
That's right.
It was the first of his youth.
And also, you know what else he lost?
He hasn't done the recess appointments yet.
We haven't seen the Congress roll over.
And also, he's going to push very, very, very hard
to abolish the filibuster.
And they won't do it.
So there's several ways in which the Senate Republicans
have already said, hey, we are not potted plants here.
I agree, and I'll leave you on one thought, okay?
And again, you said earlier on,
you don't care if people don't see
why you see things are right, good.
Charlie, that has served you well and it will serve you well.
Because if there's one thing we should all be confident of,
when I look
around at what people are using as the basis of their judgment, I'm not impressed. And
I'm not looking to join with any of the combinations that I see out there right now. I'm pretty
good being alone. And people can say, well, that's because you've been red-pilled. That's
because you're a closet lefty. That's because you hate Trump. All I know is I got both sides.
I never used to believe the idea
that if both sides are coming after you,
it means you're doing your job.
I used to think that it means that you're getting
the mix wrong on how you're telling a story.
I now feel differently about it,
but I will tell you something I know about Mr. Trump, okay?
And I know I'm right.
Trump does not wanna be feared.
Trump wants to be loved. Trump wants to be loved.
Trump wants to be adored.
Trump hates that the left and so many people hate him.
The initiative he cared about most when he won,
surprisingly in 2015,
because he did not think he was going to win,
he didn't even want to be at the hotel that night,
was DJT 100.
How do we get to 100% popularity?
What got him here cannot get him onto Mount Rushmore.
It cannot happen.
He knows that.
If the man has an opportunity to get the love he wants,
he will not give a shit where it comes from or what it means for everybody else who was with him at the time.
So if that means working with the Democrats, if that means throwing his enemies a bone. He'll do it in a nanosecond,
just like he met with Joe and Mika,
because he is not burdened by the principles
that you so desperately seek.
And you have to remember that in your analysis of him.
He ain't a hardcore gangster.
He wants to be loved.
He wants to be loved.
He's not gonna get to 100%.
So his default setting will be loved. But he knows he's not going to get to 100%. So his default setting will be fear.
And the point of a lot of these appointments is fear.
And so he would prefer to be loved, but he's going to settle for fear as all autocrats
do.
All autocrats want to be adored, but if they are not adored, they're satisfied with having
you fear them
and crushing them.
I think he's so afraid of what happened the first time
that he's putting guys in that he believes
the only thing they'll get right
is protecting him from whatever they're in charge of.
And he's not gonna ask anything of them beyond that.
But here's the good news.
What does he need to be protected from?
Are they protected from?
The DOJ investigating him.
The Department of Defense saying that he, all of his military plans are no good,
Congress coming after him.
He doesn't want any of that.
He's putting people in positions.
These are known as checks and balances.
Well, yes, and he believes it was imbalanced.
So he wants people now who can't throw up special councils
every five minutes and come after him.
That's what he wants.
He will not have to worry about that.
He will definitely not have to worry about that.
That's the point.
Well, Charlie, here's what I'm worried about.
I need more psychs in my life.
I need it here, I need it on News Nation,
I need it wherever I can get it
because conversation is the cure.
You gotta keep talking about these things.
And not talking to one another,
I mean, you and I, I don't see you in any way as,
I see you as better, but I don't see you as at odds
with me in any way.
We both wanna see the country get to a better place
and both of us feel that that's very much in doubt right now.
So let's keep talking about it.
Thank you for being a gift to my audience and all the thought and all the passion that you bring to bear in your work.
Thank you so much. I've enjoyed it very much, Chris.
We don't see it the same way, but we have the same goal. How does something get better?
have the same goal. How does something get better?
Who will be better?
What does better even look like?
What are your thoughts?
Give me the questions, give me the comments,
and thank you for subscribing and following, appreciate it.
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