

Looks like I picked a helluva week to get off the hamster wheel of crazy.
As you perhaps know, this is my last Morning Shots; I'm turning the keys over to the estimable Andrew Egger and the legendary Bill Kristol. Starting Monday, the duo will continue the Bulwarkās tradition of standing athwart the madness ā in your inbox every morning. Tim Miller takes over the daily podcast and our extraordinary team will be right there with you for this wild ride.
But before we get to the good-byes, letās catch up a bit.
As Politico Playbook put it: Thursday was āa day Biden world wishes it could forget.ā Jewish Insider headlined: āBiden and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.ā
The president won't be indicted for keeping classified documents, Gabe Schoenfeld writes in todayās Bulwark, but the special counselās report āputs his chief political vulnerabilityāhis ageāback in the spotlight.ā
How bad was it? Hereās Schoenfeld:
ALL THIS WOULD NOT BE SO BAD FOR BIDEN if Hur had not characterized Biden in extraordinarily damaging ways. In particular, he makes out the 81-year-old to be senescent: āMr. Bidenās memory was significantly limited,ā he writes. Biden had ālimited precision and recall.ā Biden āwould likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.ā In an extended passage, there is more:
In his interview with our office, Mr. Bidenās memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (āif it was 2013āwhen did I stop being Vice President?ā), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (āin 2009, am I still Vice President?ā). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.
Hur, it must be pointed out, is a Republican, and Biden supporters are already crying foul. Biden himself has pushed back hard, declaring in a Thursday evening press conference that his memory was just fine and that the special counselās comments were gratuitousābut then embarrassingly referring to Mexico when describing his policy toward Egypt. Whatever the case, at a moment when Republicans are painting Biden as senile, a finding like this in an official Department of Justice document is not helpful, to say the least.
And, no, Trump wonāt be removed from the ballot. The case for disqualifying him under the 14th Amendment didnāt go well. Who says so? Everybody. Kim Wehleās verdict in this morningās Bulwark: āBased on the oral argument before the Supreme Court today⦠there seems to be no doubt that the high court will overturn Coloradoās decision.ā
Shortly after the SCOTUS arguments concluded, Ben Wittes and I recorded our final episode of the Trump Trials.
You can listen to the whole thing here. Or watch us on YouTube.
Ave atque vale
My good friend (and fellow Cheesehead) James Wigderson reminded me of the first show I did after stepping down from my daily radio show.
It was early 2017, and I found myself in New York hosting Indivisible on WNYC. Wigderson describes the show as āthe beta version of what the Bulwark podcast would become.ā
I never thought of it that way before, but heās right. After Trumpās election, a lot of us found ourselves in the wilderness and were trying to work out how we got there and where we might be going. We recorded the first episode just days after former President George W. Bush described Trumpās Inauguration speech as āsome weird shit.ā Wigderson reminded me how I opened that show ā and my conversation with George Will.
āIām probably one of the most unusual political beasts around these days,ā Sykes said. āIām a conservative contrarian, or a contrarian conservative, however you like it. What that means is, Iām still an actual conservative. Yeah, a conservative on public radio. Iām a conservative who believes in things like freedom and limited government and constitutionalism. But Iām not part of what the conservative movement has become.ā
āBut we contrarian conservatives, weāre a very, very lonely band of brothers and sisters these days but I think a very important one. Especially if weāre ever going to break out of these alternative reality silos that weāve all been in. So, one of the questions Iād like to talk about is: What now?
āWhat do we do now if weāre not going to get on the Trump train? What role do these independent conservatives play? Will Republicans ever draw the line? Will they ever stand up to Donald Trump?ā
Sykesā first guest was nationally syndicated Washington Post columnist George Will. In the ābefore timesā (as before Trump became to be known) Willās voice commanded attention and respect throughout the Right and beyond. His contract not renewed at Fox news, Will was in the wilderness, too, as a member of āthe establishmentā and therefore suspect.
Sykes asked Will the question that dogged the conservative movement since Trump came down the escalator in 2015: was Trump the natural result of the conservative movement up to that time?
āAbsolutely not,ā Will replied. āDonald Trump is the consequence of a progressivism that extends the faceless, meddling, incompetent, arrogant government over people who donāt want that. The conservatism that I joined with casting my first presidential vote, at the age I guess of 22, 23 it was for Barry Goldwater in 1964, talked about the rule of law, limited government, a certain modesty about the actual scope and competence of government ā this is entirely different.ā
Now, itās seven years later, and weāre still asking that question. It has been a major theme of the Bulwark and our many podcast discussions. I think itās safe to say that itās been far worse than any of us imagined at the time.
But these fraught times have also given us the opportunity to think through issues that had gone unaddressed for far too long. Itās also been a time of testing, and we know now how Conservatism, Inc. has responded.
Itās also been a time of remarkable courage.
The ongoing crisis has created new alliances, strange bedfellows, and unexpected communities like the one that formed around the Bulwark. Iām deeply grateful for the opportunity that Sarah Longwell and Bill Kristol gave me when we founded this place.
Working alongside folks like JVL, Mona Charen, A.B. Stoddard, Will Saletan, Cathy Young, Jim Swift, Adam Keiper, Sonny Bunch, Barry Rubin, Tim Miller, Ben Parker, and Joe Perticone, has been the most rewarding professional experience of my life.
A special shoutout to our brilliant art director Hannah Yoest, who got up early every day to make the Bulwark the best-looking political website youāll find anywhere; and to the best podcast team in the business ā the absolutely incomparable Katie Cooper, who prepped and produced our daily show, and Jason Brown, our engineer who made us sound better than we deserved.
Extra special thanks to my brilliant wife, J.F. Riordan, who has taken time out from writing novels, books of essays (and childrenās books about dogs) to copy edit Morning Shots every day. (You really should sign up for her outstanding website.)
Finally, Iām deeply grateful to all of you for joining us in the wilderness.
Remember: You are not the crazy ones.
And donāt stop believing.
-30-
Charlie, as a liberal Democrat, I was surprised to find your and the Bulwark's work absolutely mandatory. Thank you for striking a note of wry sanity and humor. I wish you the best and hope to still find your voice in the darkness ahead.
Two things. One, I'll certainly miss your morning shots, even if we didn't always agree. I have always liked reading your rundowns of things in the morning.
Two, I think we have to admit that George Will's idea, that Trump was a response to progressives, is part of the reason that the GOP and conservatism became what it is today. That response to something being bad in your own party being 'actually, it's not us, it's them that did this' means that you're never culpable for what happens on your watch.
The GOP spent the better part of thirty years creating alternate institutions, alternate news sources, cultivating anti-government and anti-intellectual sentiment, and the result was that when someone came in and took over, the machine they built kept right on running as normal. There's a pretty big line between reagan saying that the worst words were 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help' and Trump claiming that the government is actively evil and must be destroyed. There's a pretty direct line between guys like O'Reilly and Beck railing about conspiracies and crime families and Trump and his followers taking that literally.
Progressives, such as they are, did not turn conservatives into paranoid, insular, xenophobic nutjobs. They did that themselves. They deliberately decided to disengage from the wider culture in the 1980s, gained setbacks in the 1990s when they failed to impeach Bill Clinton and pass their agenda during W. Bush's term, and when they finally looked around again during the Obama years, gazed upon a world that they didn't recognize.
It's not unlike the British Brexit movement, where British conservatives expected to leave the EU, and that the EU would beg them to stay. Only, that's not what happened. They left, the EU shrugged, and Britain sputtered in confusion. Conservatives in America had a similar situation. They disengaged, separated their states economically as much as possible, which meant relying overwhelmingly on blue state tax money, and then when blue states kept right on humming, they suddenly had a crisis of self. 'What if we're not actually that important?' they asked, and that simply couldn't be.
In the mind of the Trumpian conservative, going back at least to 2010, it is inconceivable that Kansas' economic plan failed and California's works. It is impossible that Florida is mired in endless problems and New York hasn't collapsed yet. They are told, and believe, that blue states are apocalyptic hellscapes where blue haired karens lecture the population on gender theory, but this doesn't gel with the fact that these places are, somehow, still around.
In other words, George Will is one of the conservatives who didn't understand his own voters or his own party. I knew that the GOP was doomed in 2008 when McCain had to tell a voter that no, Obama wasn't a secret muslim bent on destroying America because he was black. How anyone saw that and went 'I'm sure this party is going to be fine' is absurd. The progressive movement has problems, big ones in some cases, but the Democratic party is a functional institution with lots of interest groups. The GOP is a monolithic, cult like entity that believes that the apocolypse for liberals is tomorrow, and they are gleefully waiting for it to happen.