Benjy Sarlin: The Bud Light Freak-Out

Welcome

to the Bulwark Podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It’s April twenty six two thousand twenty three. This is my last day broadcasting from sunny, incredibly hot Phoenix, Arizona. Hopefully, I will be back in Wisconsin.

By the way, I we will have some attempted to say personal news. Actually, it’s more like professional news because we will be unveiling a I wanna say new podcast, but it is not a completely new podcast. It will be a new Thursday Bulwark Comcast. We’re very excited about it. I’ll tell you about it later, but stay tuned for all of that.

Now our guest today, because there’s so much going on here, Benjie Starling, Washington Bureau Chief at Sema four previously covered elections for NBC News, Benjie. Welcome to the podcast. Hey,

Charlie. Thanks for having me.

Okay. So maybe it’s because I was out in the sun too much, but I was thinking about the twenty twenty four election. We have dark brand in running for president. He’s in, you know, made the announcement. It’s been completely overshadowed by the firing of two cable TVOs.

You have, you know, the RNC putting out a deep fake video. And it just occurs to me that at the moment, The presidential race is simultaneously, and feel free to disagree with me. It is simultaneously, boring, same old, same old, and completely terrifying. At the same time. I

find it a little exciting too. I mean, the Republican side is is I find extremely interesting. The Democratic side, it’s, you know, partly because Democrats had such a strong midterms, they’re not making any drastic changes. There’s not really a wilderness that they’re in at the moment. And because Biden’s running, you know, essentially on a pose except for, you know, some sort of fringe candidate so far.

There’s not a lot of drama there. But, you know, the Republican side is think it’s still pretty interesting depending on how competitive you think it is and what the broader implications you think are. But, yes, it is compared to the last several election cycles. I do feel like the presidential election is a bit of a sideshow. And you’re seeing that in things like, for example, donations.

Small donors are not rushing to these candidates yet so far. For today, one example.

Boring was not the right word for me to use. Just sort of the weight of we’re going to be doing this again and this is going to be taking up, you know, all of our head space for the next year and a half. And it’s going to be terrifying stupid outrageous all at the same time and it’s like, I do feel that sort of world weariness that here we go again. And So nobody was surprised. Joe Biden rolls out.

Everybody’s gonna rally around him at a certain point. So we have to have the usual stuff like, you know, he’s old. He’s got these problems, got the convolute problem, but the alternative is so bad. I don’t know. Were you struck by the fact that the RNC came out with that artificial intelligence deep fake ad.

I just thought it was very very strange. You you would think that with all of his real world vulnerabilities, they could have done an ad about things that actually happened in the world and said they came up with this deep fake hat of all of the things that haven’t actually happened but might happen if he’s reelected. I mean, What weird times we live in magic?

Yeah. It was an interesting media tactic too because like you said, you know, Biden announcing for reelection was like, basically the third most talked about story that day. You know, like, I would rank Tucker Girls and Don Lemmon in terms of, like, the sheer amount of media attention and, like, Some of this is because, you know, the media is very naval gazing. But, like, the Tucker Carlson story especially was, like, that really felt like some kind of seismic story with even twenty twenty four implications. You know, but the RNC was a little clever there that they figured like, look, it’s gonna be very hard for anyone to care about

our response to Biden’s reelection when it is already at the fringe of the news, you know, and it’s pretty much just a fairly straightforward video. But if we mention this is, you know, the first one to use controversial AI tactics, then, yeah, that does generate some attention and some debates about

any epics

of it and whether others will use it in the implications. And so I I give them hats off there. You know, they they definitely figure out a way to get us talking. Well,

I do wanna come back to the, you know, how competitive the Republican race is. I mean, I woke up this morning looking at this new NPR poll that shows that sixty three percent of Republicans would still want Donald Talk to be president even if he is convicted of a crime, which I think is an interesting flex for the party of law and order. That the party of law and order is like, We’re all in, at least, on one convicted criminals. We can come back to that. So you mentioned the story from yesterday, and I I have to admit, I the firing of Tucker Carlson.

Even twenty four hours later, still fuel shocking. So I I did a podcast yesterday with Brian Stelter, Mona Charen and I talked about it, but so what is your take. We’ve had a little bit of time to absorb, but we’re getting more reporting. And there’s that Wall Street Journal report that suggests that he had perhaps used the c word too often, including in reference to a senior executive at Fox News. So Give me your take Benjie, the fall of Tucker Carlson.

First off, here’s what I do not buy. I do not buy at least based on what we’ve seen so far. That there was some kind of specific change or specific tipping point that they just absolutely had to act immediately. Right. I mean, it sounds like the move of, you know, executive, an owner who was, like, who was doing for a while and decided, okay, cumulative.

Yes. Cumulatively, I am sick of this. Part of that is, you know, we still don’t really know the full explanation. There’s at this point, you know, a half a dozen theories involving multiple lawsuits. And personal behavior internally and externally.

And, you know, even stuff involving, you know, Rupert Murdoch’s personal life and is, you know, in calling off his engagement has been cited as a potential reason. But I think there are a couple of things here. My boss, Ben’s mistake, who has been covering the media a very long time and covering Tucker Carlson a very long time. And Fox News, is that whatever the specific reason is and we do not know, this seemed to be about Rupert Murdoch and the Murdoch family reasserting control over the and you are not bigger than us. No one is.

No one is irreplaceable on Fox News. They’ve done this before. This will now be the what the third time that they’ve fired or gotten rid of, you know, the single biggest, busiest star they have, you know, Glenn Beck before, you know, who was pretty much just as definitive to the tea party era as Tucker has been to the Trump era.

Yeah. They

had

Bill O’Reilly, you know, who was by far, you know, just the biggest part of the network for, you know, since its inception, basically. And they replace them with tucker calls and without missing a beat. No one is bigger than the Bulwark. And I think they were worried both the perception in the Dominion filings, but also the actual behavior revealed in the Dominion filings that they felt that they were just being sort of tugged along by the talent that they could not break out of this and that they were increasingly fell trapped. And I think there’s an aspect of this too, which are my colleague Max Tani gets into, which is his theory, which is that Rupert Murdoch is a ninety two year old billionaire.

You know, he has zero tuck to give, as you might say, at this point. And he’s been acting erratically in some ways in a variety of context. And there might not be much more to it than that. That is just a very old man who does not have time to waste on lawsuit after lawsuit and annoying distraction after distraction and just does not want this guy around. And that’s the long and short of it.

Let’s talk about the replacement. You know, it is certainly

possible that whoever replaces Tucker Carlson is going to be worse, but the more I think about it, think that that’s unlikely because doctor Carlson was he was very, very smart. He’s very talented, and he was uniquely malevolent. And it’s hard to imagine anyone having that whole trifecta. The Fox hosts are they’re all pretty deplorable, but nobody was really in Tucker’s Lee in terms of what he was willing to do, you know, the way that he inserted, you know, grievance related spirituality theory, showed for Vladimir Putin, pushed revisionist histories. I mean, there was something really distinctly malicious about Tucker Carlson.

It’s not gonna be great whatever they put in that place, but it’s hard to imagine it being worse. What do you think?

Well, there’s different flavors of Fox News host, you know, that are, you know, depending on your political worst wage and hear a matter or worse. But the two models I basically would say are the Glenbeck model and the Sean Hannity model. So someone like Sean Hannity is someone who is very much a low drama company man, you know, who’s very invested in Fox’s success, who’s also very much a party man, who’s very invested in the Republican party’s success. And will tailor their commentary to what they think will help the party if there’s a problem. The party is dealing with, you know, the people who are talking about how to get out of it.

They’re very receptive to electability arguments about things versus the kind of Glenbeck style, which is where you position yourself as like, I’m the crazy anti establishment person who is telling you the things that, like, you know, even my bosses don’t want you to hear. And, you know, I’ll probably be taken down any minute, but you know, we have to take on the powers that be. Now a lot of this is a, you know, classic kind of showman pose, of course, and they’re very good. You know, Glenbeck was a very good traditional radio host and entertainer as well. And if you’ve ever seen him speak live, he can be, you know, extremely compelling.

You know, it’s kind of like an like an almost like old time medicine show kind of feel, but those are sort of the two directions I would look for. So I think you’re likely to have someone who sounds mostly like Dr. Carlson no matter what I think. They’re gonna need someone who incorporates a lot of these populist trumpy elements. Mhmm.

But there’s a big difference between one who is really trying to actively create the impression that they are stirring up trouble, that they do not care about, you know, preserving any kind of institution, that they are just trying to, you know, make problems and point out problems and really rile people up versus someone who’s presenting themselves as thinking maybe a little more strategically and is maybe rained in a little bit more by Rupert Murdoch’s Day.

Well, and I also think that the one thing about Tucker Carlson is that he was not only very, very smart, but he was also an entertainer. There was an article that I read that talked about him as being a successor of the John Stewart of the right who understood you could make the news interesting and fun and entertaining. So he had a unique skill set. And I’m trying to think of, you know, all the possible successors. And you’re right.

Of course, you know, you’re going to get a lot of the same sort of thing, but without perhaps the panache that you got. Okay. So let let’s go from one of the most interesting stories of the day to a story that I and I have to confess, and I’m not bragging about this. I find it very, very difficult to get my head around the whole debt ceiling thing even though that is obviously the most important story. Right?

I mean, I must be made to care about this. So just briefly because of like a dozen things like so and you what is gonna happen? Are we gonna destroy the world economy this week? Just give me your draw take on this. What is Kevin McCarthy gonna pull off.

What is he not able to pull off this week?

So here’s the good news. We’re not gonna destroy the world economy. Okay. This week, Good. We’re still in the kind of prelude to everything.

So right now, Republicans are working on what’s essentially a messaging bill. But that’s extremely important in order for them to get to the next step, which is trying to force the senate and the White House into some kind of negotiation over the bill that will actually prevent the economy from being destroyed. And they’re having a lot of trouble getting there, and it’s for the same you know, typical reasons we’ve seen this entire Congress. Right? Which is Kevin McCarthy is a very narrow majority.

You can only lose four votes. You know, it was a once in a century battle just to make him speaker in the first place because he had so many holdouts and, you know, it was a very difficult process. And they’ve been running into this problem on routine votes the whole time. Right? Which is where any couple of moderates any couple of conservatives, George Santos being George Santos, any of these things can derail a bill.

And this was a case where they were very confident that they had a debt ceiling agreement that, you know, kind of — Mhmm. — had something in for everyone. It had, you know, spending caps had paired back some of Biden’s agenda on the inflation reduction act. You know, it had a whole bunch of things there for everybody. And what they found is that they were regional problems, you know, midwesterners didn’t like cuts to subsidies that boost corn.

They found that there were some, you know, moderate problems. They had Nancy Mason South Carolina saying, hey, some of those IRA tax credits are, you know, good for jobs in my state. They’re opening, you know, a bunch of renewable energy and battery plants and electric vehicle plants. You know, don’t get rid of that. That’s a tax hike.

And then, of course, we had conservatives saying, this doesn’t go far enough. We want stricter work requirements on programs like snap, which more popular known as food stamps, we want spending cuts and regulations to take place faster we want to go further and pairing back things that Biden has already passed. And it’s really, really hard to get all these people together. So as of now, they haven’t done it. Republican leadership is projecting confidence at least that maybe as soon as today even, they can hold a vote and have everyone on board.

Some holdouts, you know, after some changes they made seem to be moving their direction maybe. But, I mean, it is truly anybody’s guess what happens. I mean, Kevin McCarthy is not historically the best judge of when he has the votes. He will bring things to

the floor and be surprised. So we really won’t know until there’s a vote. This

is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I’m sure you wanna find my free morning shots newsletter, a great companion for understanding what is happening to us. And every morning is at prepare for this show. I show with my readers what’s trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day.

To sign up for my free morning shots newsletter, go to the Bulwark dot com slash morning shots. That’s the bulwark dot com slash morning shots. And I look forward to seeing you in your inbox soon.

April

is National Financial Literacy Month. What is financial literacy? It’s applying different skills effectively, including managing your finances, budgeting, and saving. It just so happens, the Qumulus Podcast Network has three great podcasts to help raise your Financial IQ. Stacking Benjamin’s with Joe Solsehi.

Bankrate’s twenty twenty three best personal finance podcast. What’s one of life’s biggest expenses that we can maybe talk about reducing? Housing is housing on the list. Buying a house is the number two. It expense of all these expenses?

What’s a way that we can reduce our housing expense?

We’re from South Florida. Wow.

It’s fucking like somebody with a little into that situation, afford anything with financial journalist, Paula Pan. You have many financial goals. You

want to buy or pay off your house. You need to replace your car. You wanna pay for wedding. Send your kids to college. Travel the world.

And one day, retire the house.

And wevy award winning Brown ambition with Tiffany, the Fudge Nisha Alicia, And personal finance expert, Mandy Woodrow. When I was crafting my resume in my career, I I wasn’t thinking

about the job I had. I was always thinking, like, what’s gonna impress the person who had my next opportunity and make them wanna have a conversation with me. Yeah. I think people are not thinking that far ahead. That’s why we’d be leaning into you career

So as you look to improve your financial literacy, follow stacking benjamins, afford anything, and brown ambition wherever you listen.

Okay, so let’s talk about the twenty twenty four presidential race. You had an interesting piece recently that people should actually say why is it running for president? Maybe you talked about, you know, Chris Christie, you said at a a sum of four event that republican candidates should actually clear about why they think they’re a better candidate than their rivals. So talk to me about this because everybody kind of knows what the case Ron DeSantis over Trump is. Right?

You know, that Trump’s a dangerous and competent who blew the last election. It’s getting ready to blow the next one. But nobody wants to say that. This is kind of the dilemma of the republic. That’s right.

Everybody knows what the

rationale is. No one is willing to articulate it. It’s the basic problem. Right? I mean, how do you defeat president Trump when almost everyone the primary who so far has any serious shot at taking them on, but especially the, you know, the most prominent contender, Ron DeSantis, has not conceded that there was anything wrong with his presidency.

In fact, was, you know, a great supporter of his presidency. But also has not particularly conceded anything is wrong with his post presidency, you know — Mhmm. — that he’s made mistakes there or that, you know, is going on and on about how the election stolen is bad for the party or inaccurate or immoral, but even just bad for the party. You know? So you end up with this problem where candidates for one seem insincere.

If you are not saying the actual case for why you should be president over Donald Trump. Voters know voters know that if you actually believed he was this great president in Canada, you wouldn’t be running to defeat him. You know, they they sense what your argument actually is that — Mhmm. — you think he isn’t incompetent. You think he is gonna blow the next election.

You know, you think he has done tremendous damage to the country in certain ways perhaps or at the very least that you would be dramatically better at trying to achieve the same goals as him. You have to actually say that though. The other problem is that Trump is not going to sit there quietly and play by the same rules. And say that I have to worry about all these voters who love DeSantis, who might be turned off if I attack him too hard. He’s gonna be working hard to define you And if you don’t have some kind of effective counterargument, you’re gonna look weak.

You’re gonna look owned by Trump. And we’re already starting to see some of the effects on DeSantis who is there’s lots of time to recover, but it’s been a very difficult few weeks in part because he is not really counter attacking on Trump. And his allies are still sort of holding their punches. It makes them look weak when Trump is putting him in this box of, look at this weirdo here, kinda creepy and he’s putting with his fingers and has no friends and even the people in the state are endorsing me because they don’t like it because he has a lousy personality. He has to break out of that now.

And it’s a lot tougher when you don’t have a counter message that says, you know, you’re saying this about me, well, this is why you should never be resident again. So you basically

argue that the candidate should skip the whole side show and just take a cue from Trump himself. So you would go right after him. Because I think the feeling is is that If you go after Trump, you’re just gonna get in this shit fight and the base is gonna be offended and you’re gonna get destroyed like everybody else that’s ever gone at Trump. So what should they do? Yeah, it’s a real risk.

I

just want to make clear here. The problems they are imagining about going after Trump are very real. They just are. They’re all talking to the same pollsters and the same focus groups that, you know, you’ve had on your show, Charlie Sykes tell you that, you know, the base still loves him. They’re very defense above him, you know, things like this indictment.

They really do rally behind him for the most parts. It’s a real issue. But if you believe that they are immovable on this topic, I don’t know why you’re running for president. There aren’t necessarily enough votes elsewhere as they pretty much concede with the strategy. So you’re gonna have to think about some way to change those perceptions.

And possibly just possibly some of those voters saying things in focus groups, saying things to pollsters, harbor some of these doubts secretly themselves. And I’ll give you an example from Trump, which is that take the twenty sixteen election. The front runner at the start of this, albeit a much weaker front runner than Donald Trump. Just the starting front runner was Jeb Bush. Mhmm.

And what was the number one liability? Everyone was talking about in the press about Jeb Bush. You know, you turned on morning, Joe, you turned on, you know, whatever show you wanted, whatever radio show they said, well, Jeb Bush has a serious problem because his brother is George W Bush. And George W Bush was an extremely unpopular president when he left. There was a financial crisis.

There was the Iraq War. That’s gonna be a serious problem. But, you know, it was actually kind of taboo to criticize George Bush in a especially the Iraq War at the time. It was not something that came up often. Like, Republicans sort of moved away from him and he he know he kept quiet and just became a painter.

They didn’t have to respond to it much like they do Trump now. And Obama withdrew from Iraq, so it didn’t come up nearly as often. And they could just kind of escape by without talking about it much. And so you had Republicans who were, you know, fearful of opening that can of worms. Would talk about it in this kind of euphemism So like Mark Rubio started his campaign, he would say, well, I’m not gonna mention anything about Bush, but we need a quote unquote new generation of politics.

There we go. Oh, what a brutal attack on Jeb Bush. He says they need a new generation of politicians. Right? Okay.

But then Trump would show up and he just said, hey, you know what sucked, the George W Bush presidency. And you know what really sucked the Iraq War. And that’s why you should not nominate that guy, Jeff Bush, because everyone’s gonna think about George W Bush, and they will never elect him. And, you know, God forbid, he governs like George W. Bush.

Because George W. Bush was not a good president. And, you know, on paper, people thought that attack was gonna backfire because every poll showed that George W. Bush was still quite popular with Republican voters. But because he spoke to what the actual vulnerability was with Jeff Bush.

It came across as authentic. It came across as I’m willing to tell the truth even if people yell at me. You know, and also what I think it really did prove is that quite a lot of those Republican voters secretly felt the same way on some level. Mean, I talked to a ton of them. I was on the campaign trail covering, you know, the Republicans that time.

Even if they were sympathetic to George w Bush, you know, for being delta duffed hand and putting America on a war footing against al Qaeda, you know, they still weren’t thrilled with how the presidency went and especially with the election of president Obama afterwards. And, you know, coming into office with huge majorities that he used to pass things like the Affordable Care Act. I think if you see someone make a similar argument against Trump, and then stand by and just say like, yeah, I said it. I don’t care what some poll says. You might see a different reaction than you expect.

Okay. So here’s a perfect example of this that you that you write about. Ron DeSantis tries this kind of, you know, subtle move by casually mentioning Trump’s hush money payment to Stormy Daniels without criticizing it, you know, he’s defending him, but he sort of leaves that, and I can’t comment on all of that. You wrote, this was too clever by half. Trump’s fans caught the location demanded rally harder behind Trump and then DeSantis look weak backing off.

So what should the candidate be doing on this. And and you kind of cite Chris Charlie Sykes. So what’s Chris Christie doing that Ron DeSantis didn’t do on this?

Chris Christie made the subtext that Ron DeSantis was trying to get out explicit. And to be clear, it’s not obvious like this is the best place to make your big attack on Trump. Right? Especially the Stormy Daniels indictment. But If you’re gonna make the point that this is a problem for Trump, don’t just hint at it.

You can just say, hey, I don’t necessarily agree with this prosecution, but hey, Can we all agree? It’s pretty bad to pay hush money payments to cover up your affair with a porn star that we all, you know, believe that this guy had? You know, while he was married and that, you know, was making hush money payments elsewhere and as a whole history of infidelity and getting into stupid problems of his creation that have nothing to do with politics or anything that any of us care about, that was possible to say if the scientists wanted to make some critique that’s probably how we should have gone about it instead of this worst of all world where I’m gonna come up with this very clever, subtle, nuanced hint and hope people get what I’m saying. Trump is just gonna immediately recognize what you’re doing and force you to say what you mean or back down. And in this case, you back down.

When

I was getting ready for this podcast with you, I went back and I read what Chris Christie said at that summer four event, I hadn’t seen it the first time around. This is right after Trump’s indictment and he said, if you have someone who has had an affair with a porn star paid her off a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to cover it up, to keep that information from the American people while he’s seeking the highest office in the land, that’s not the character of someone I think should be president of the United States. And That’s pretty direct. That’s pretty blunt. That’s what you’re talking about.

But Christmas Eve is not going to be the Republican nominee, Izzy. So give me your sense of what’s going on in Chris Christie’s head? You know, he says, I’m not a paid assassin. I’m not just gonna go out there, you know, and drop these bombs on Donald Trump and then be defeated and then go off. And yet, that’s pretty much what his role is going to be, isn’t it?

Well, we had him over at, as he mentioned, that Semaphor last week, and I, you know, spoke with him a bit too, and I covered him in, you know, the twenty sixteen election when he was running as well. And I think one aspect is that he is very much a debate focused person. I mean — Mhmm. — to him, his crowning achievement, which a lot of people think of as, you know, his lowest but he is an extremely proud of is when he threw the knockout punch at Marco Rubio in New Hampshire in a debate in which if you were a car, Marco Rubio was really making his push to consolidate what they call then the establishment lane, you know, to finally get into a one on one against Trump. And he just sort of short circuited in this debate where he kept heating the same talking point about Obama.

And Chris Christie called him out on it and basically said, you know, Marco Rubio is like an empty suit. You know, he just knows how to repeat talking points. This isn’t a real leader. And he never recovered. I mean, it was just like an overnight disaster that was it for for Rubio.

And that’s how we got Trump. Now, some might say, that’s how we got Trump. I mean, Christie would say, Rubio is the one who screwed up this debate. All mad at me, like, this guy clearly didn’t have the juice here. If he did, you know, if he did, he would be president.

And I think you might see him play a similar role in the dates here, whereas, like, look, what I see is a bunch of Rubios, and I’m sure this is how he sees Ron DeSantis. And I’m sure this is how we see someone like a Nikki Haley say. You know, what I see is a bunch of Rubios here who just do not have the juice to tackle this guy. And I’m just going to keep attacking them to prove that I do. And we’ll see if they’re up to the challenge.

The worst case they’re just revealed for either being someone who should get the nomination or someone who is just laughably short of ever getting the nomination, and we’ll see that in the debates. And

that’s how we get Trump again. Chris Christie is a smart guy. I mean, how does he think it plays out? I mean, something something something you kill somebody and then Chris Christie becomes president of the United States. How, I mean, how many unicorns are in there?

I

mean, isn’t that the story with so many presidential contenders though? Right? I mean, there’s always like these people who look in the mirror and say, why not me. Some people just love running for president in general. You know, you always get candidates like that who have, you know, truly no shot, but enjoy the experience, enjoy having their profile raised, enjoy, you know, giving speeches.

And, you know, sometimes it’s not about even winning necessary, though I do think Chris Christie is very serious about that. Sometimes it’s about getting a specific message about or forcing the other candidates to reckon with a certain position or a message. You know, there’s lots of reasons people run for president. But what I don’t think is that he looks at the rest of the field and says, like, oh man, Ron DeSantis is just this like world destroying force and we all have to step aside and rally towards him. I think he’s feeling vindicated probably by the last few weeks where, yeah, you can make this theoretical argument all you want that Ron DeSantis is the only, you know, train out of this primary, you know, if you unless Trump, and you all have to get onboard it.

But, you know, as soon as he makes contact with the actual campaign, you immediately donors, voters, pundits, they all start wondering if that’s true. You know, this is still very theoretical. But it’s been really bad Ron DeSantis. So I wanted to get you taken around all of

this because people are saying, well, there’s still plenty of time. He can still adjust. He can still change the thing and say, And yet, you know, things things have moved awfully quickly, and I’m trying to remember the last time that Ron DeSantis had a good day, alright, good week, And all of the doubts that had been out there, but had been, you know, suppressed by a lot of the wishcasting are now front and center. Nobody likes this guy. He doesn’t have the instincts.

Not a people person. He doesn’t have a plan for attacking Donald Trump, and he apparently is kind of stuck on saying the word woke as many times as possible in twenty second sound bites. And beyond that. How badly has desantis been hurt? Because right now, again, it’s hard to imagine, him being the the great Florida hope that everybody had thought it was going to be just a few months ago.

Well, I think this gets a little too, they’re saying what you mean thing, which is that you know, everyone sort of knew what this ant is his vulnerabilities. Right? It’s, as you mentioned, you know, the not a people person thing had been talked about for a while. And, you Ron DeSantis was one of those people you often read about a lot more and saw in passing headlines and actually saw a speak. You know, he didn’t do a lot of interviews Those interviews were almost uniformly with, you know, extremely sympathetic press, and thus also didn’t travel outside that press world much.

Yeah. But by the way, a lot of Republican voters don’t watch that stuff. You know, there still are a lot of Republican voters that you have to reach primarily through old fashioned mainstream news. Right? They probably had heard good things about DeSantis but hadn’t seen him.

And we’re seeing some of the the limits here of going all in on him. One is that in order to be the candidate of the right, he thinks he has to attack Trump from the right all the time. And this has led him to take, you know, some positions that are kind of tough. You know, the Florida legislature is just passing a whole bunch of hard right legislation on abortion, on immigration, you know, right before he runs for president. To kind of bolster his hand against Trump.

Say, I’m the true conservative here. But every time you do that, it also undermines your eligibility argument, which is in many ways the core argument against Trump right Right? Mhmm. Which is like this guy blew the last election. He’s gonna blow the next one.

We need to move on. So that’s been one problem. But the other serious problem is that he’s much less defined as a brand than he thinks he is. Republicans who know him who are really in on the DeSantis universe, you know, and by the way, I think accurate view him as someone who really changed conservatism the last few years, who really was a leader on a lot of issues they care about, who really pioneered this idea that for example, a governor can stand up to the private sector and pass, you know, controversial socially conservative bills and stand up to the boycott threats, you know, that that have Cowed previous governors in the past. I think the Sandoz represents something that really is new and interesting and worth discussing.

But at the same time, most people are still fairly unfamiliar with them. They’re not as into these high balloon, you know, intellectual arguments for why he represents this Trumpism without Trump in the future of the party. And what they’re seeing is a guy who is not very charismatic, you know, who doesn’t seem to have like a natural charm or likability, run up against a candidate who is absolutely, you know, love and verbatim, completely magnetic. And I think you’re really seeing the limits of this consolidate around his Santa’s strategy as a result. He’s in danger of being defined very early as look at this guy nobody likes.

And it’s very hard to get out of that box once you’re in it because look, you saw he gave this, like, interview in Japan, you know, a few days ago? Where all he did was just move his head around a little funny And that was like the sensation of everyone sharing pictures of it and GIFs of it and memes of it being like, look at this weirdo. That’s because he’s been defined as a weirdo in the last few weeks. That’s the only reason that happens. And that’s a tough box to get out of if you’re not a dynamic charismatic guy.

So it also feels as if there’s been kind of jail break over the last several days, you know, one senator after another coming out and endorsing Trump. You know, you have Steve Danes out of Montana and and others. We’re basically saying he’s inevitable now. There does seem to have been a significant shift in the conventional wisdom, at least among Republicans who had been keeping their powder dry until, like, the last, what, seventy two hours? What’s going on?

Why is this happening? So the one caveat I’ll give here is that, you Ron DeSantis

hasn’t announced. Maybe when he announces there’s like a flood of endorsements, but we have not seen a lot since. And we have seen quite a few for trumbly by the way, there was not a flood of endorsements when he announced either, which was really at a low point. Right. And it was very much people took note of it when he announced in November after those midterms.

And polls were showing DeSantis surging. Mitch McConnell was every day, you know, pouring dirt on the grave basically about how he’s not gonna be the nominee and, you know, criticizing something he was doing. But things have changed since then. I mean, the big one lately is Steve Danes, the Chair of the — Yeah. — NRSROST, you know, handles senate elections for Republicans and Dorston, which is very influential.

But, you know, this gives an example, which is we know that Trump takes endorsements very seriously. And, you know, he rewards people it’s not the most loyal guy, but there is, you know, rewards to be had for sticking with him and punishments to be had sometimes for not. And especially if you’re say Steve Danes and you’re trying to find candidates that can win this election, having an in with Trump to endorse those candidates is also a very useful chain. You know, he’s influential that way. What we haven’t seen so far is that people worried about not endorsing Ron DeSantis.

What will happen to me if I don’t?

No fear factor. And

I think that’s one imbalance. Right off. Yes. The fear factor is one. And it’s not just fear of the opportunity factor.

Like,

if I’m in a competitive primary someday and this scientist endorses me, does that mean I have it locked up? Often with Trump endorsements, it does. Or at least is, like, a huge I mean, we can quantify this. There was, like, there was a political science paper just a few weeks ago that I think had attributed a fourteen point bump in Republican primaries from a Trump endorsement. Which is pretty significant.

I’m not sure there’s the equivalent with DeSantis yet, you know. So we’ll see on that. DeSantis in particular I think really, really was hoping for some kind of inevitability narrative at this point. Yes. Where the story heading into this was that Trump has diminished the conservative media is coming for me.

You know, the Rupert Murdoch Empire is all coalescing behind Ron DeSantis. Leaders are all coalescing behind Ron DeSantis. The other candidates are looking weak or even not running in the first place. This is clearly, you know, the future of the party, and Trump is the one who looks weak. Attacking him, you know, when he’s down twenty points in polls.

We’re seeing the reverse instead, and that’s really dangerous.

Let’s talk about what’s happening among the other Republicans as as well. Like, every one is completely now. It seems into the whole trans issue and the Bud Light boycott. I mean, I thought the Bud Light boycott was kind of just sort of a one off, like, sounded kind of dumb look kind of dumb. That’s not the way it’s playing in for public and primary politics.

Isn’t it? I mean, they think that this is I mean, well, tell me what they think. You know, why is it all trans all the time, all Bud Light, all the time.

Well, first of all, I mean, it’s fair to say this Bud Light freak out has been a bigger story for longer than the freak out over Trump’s indictment. Yeah. I think that’s just objectively true. In conservative media, in conservative circles, it certainly seems to be talked about a lot more. I mean, this is something that is activating the base more than even something like that.

And it sort of fits into a lot of things right now. One is that I think it’s sort of a bottled up instant that a lot of conservatives had that they had to suppress a long time, which is Republicans surrendered in the gay marriage wars. But it was also a very — Mhmm. — quiet surrender. You know, to this day, very few Republicans openly endorsed things like, same sex marriage.

They basically just decided to stop fighting it and concede that they passed a law that essentially is essentially surrender. They won’t try to overturn it in the courts is what it basically says. But there still was this fear going on that society is changing too quickly on these issues. And they’re not imagining that there has been a real rise in the prominence and acceptance of transgender and, you know, non binary and gender nonconforming individuals. It’s gone from something a lot of people just read about to now.

You know, polls show this. A lot of people, pluralities, majorities, you know, say they personally don’t. People in their lives. I mean, I certainly know plenty. You know, I don’t know about you, Charlie, but it’s, you know, especially around people in my age.

It’s just a part of life at this point. So I think they are reacting to a real thing here. But there’s also this bottle of energy, which is this comes as there’s been this increasing freak out on the right over things involving children that this also gloms on to. You see this in the conspiracy version in q and on, but you see this also now in just the way, you Ron DeSantis’ you know, spokeswoman, you know, Christina Pushaw started talking about the issue about groomers. The idea that there’s these people you’re coming trying to convert your children or reviews your children in some way.

That’s historically a very powerful source of populist uprising, and it’s not a coincidence that when people were trying to go after days in the seventies, they used very much the same language. Very much these are groomers. They’re going after your kids. They can do their own thing, but, you know, that’s that. So that’s another factor.

The last thing here is this conversation has changed also because I feel like the argument on the right has been won by the side who was saying, look, This isn’t a case of live and let live. We honestly think transgender people are mentally ill and this behavior should not be supported or accepted in public life. And I think that’s the shift that this Bud Light thing has really crystallized. I mean, when we talk about culture war, this is gonna be a literally existential one for a lot of people. Right?

There are people right now who are moving from states because they think they will not be able to get basic medical care and they’re not imagining that either. That lets them live the life they want to live as a transgender individual, things like hormone treatments. But the overall conversation has shifted now to, with this Bud Light campaign, no policy stake here. We just do not like seeing these people. We do not like the idea that a company is marketing to transgender people because we do not see them as legitimate.

And that is how this is being talked about right now among Republican candidates and certainly among the Republican and conservative, you know, media figures and activists and and commentators that you’re seeing. Right now. It’s a real fundamental shift in how they view this transgender issue. From there’s a few discrete policy discussions too. We just do not view this as a legitimate identity group.

Period.

The

interesting thing about this issue, of course, is that it’s not completely binary. I know a lot of people who are, you know, pretty sympathetic to, you know, LGBTQ but who have concerns about trans in in sports. It is interesting that the breakdown between trans activists and the so called terfs who are trans exclusionary radical feminists So these are people on the left. You have people in the gay community who are skeptical about what’s going on here. Andrew Sullivan, you know, quite critical.

So this is gonna play out in some very different and complicated ways. However, to your point, there is nothing complex or nuanced. About making Bud Light the center of your cultural war is there?

No. No. Not at all. I mean, this is just saying straight up, we do not like the idea that they are marketing to people and do not appreciate being in public life. It’s really that simple.

And By the way, this is also sort of an Internet age thing too and social media thing, which is, you know — Yeah. — there isn’t anything new about this. Beer companies have into marketing to LGBT, people, they’ve been sponsoring Pride events, they’ve been advertising, and, you know, there you could go pick up the advocate, you know, an LGBT magazine or newspaper and see beer ads for any of anytime in the last thirty years. None of this is new. And this was not like a Super Bowl ad.

This was, you know, in this case, the they were just marketing through a transgender influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, just their own personal page to their audience. Yeah. None of this was like, we’re gonna interrupt this kid rock concert to show you, you know, this this ad. None of this is like that. But because of the Internet, it can go viral on the right.

They feel like it’s a personal afferent to them. And suddenly, what has been completely normal standard marketing is being treated as this wild shift. It’s kind of a wild thing to watch.

Just circling back to the beginning why it it feels again, I I use the word boring, but I probably should have used the word exhausting because we know that this the world we’re going to be inhabiting, and this is the kind of thing that we’re going to be experiencing in an accelerated fashion for the next year and a half again. Benji Serlin, thank you so much for joining me. Benji is the Washington Bureau Chief at Sema four and previously covered elections at NBC News. I really appreciate time today, Benjamin. Thanks so much, Charlie Sykes thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast.

I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we will do something different and special, so stay tuned. Bullwhip podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

Dissecting politics with exclusive interviews, commentary, and humor, useful idiots. With Katy How and Aaron Mate.

Check out this story that comes via wedding planner, Georgia Mitchell. I’d say that’s a deal breaker. If you were to catch your partner being breastfed by their mother, the thing is she’s here in the second hand so —

Right. — and we really —

— did responsible journalist in you, Erin. It’s just an allegation. Yeah.

None of my sources have confirmed this story. Right. So

Terrible if true. And play deal breaker.

Useful

idiots. Wherever you listen.