David Frum: House Republicans Aim for a Rerun

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Welcome to the Bullework Podcast on Charlie Sykes. It is a short week because of Thanksgiving, so I hope you’re all thinking about what you are thankful for in the run up to Thanksgiving. But let’s look back at the last couple of days, last couple of weeks, including the election we’re still sorting out all of the consequences. Also, looking ahead to the shambolic clown car that will be the house Republican majority in joining on the podcast today. David From a staff writer at The Atlantic, the author of TenBooks most recently Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy.

So first of all, good morning, David. Hey, thank you. So I mentioned that as we were beginning the podcast, I was reading an op ed piece in a wall places the New York Post by Bill Barr saying that it is time to dump Trump. It’s time to move on that he lacks the qualities for leadership. Again, kind of interesting, build build bar making his move as other Republicans are are now suggesting that, yeah, yeah, they they may have never been, never Trump they may have been Trump enablers and rationalizers, but now it’s sort of kind of never again Trump.

So What do you make a bill bar escalating?

Pretty broadly, among the donor community, among the Republican elected, among certainly former Trump officers, office holders, there is a mood to say, it’s time to move past Trump for reasons we prefer not to specify. And there’s a suggestion. It’s it’s a little bit like that dish of yogurt you have at the back of the refrigerator. It was fine. In its time, but we are now some weeks past the little printed date.

So let’s just get rid of it without ever suggesting there was anything wrong with the yogurt in the first place. Unless

you’re really hungry and you go, okay, so this is just a suggestion. It it may be old, but but I’m gonna eat it anyway.

Or unless you’re a depression baby and says, these young people today with their throwing things out by the cell by day. Why? Yeah. Well, here’s here’s the problem. If you won’t grapple with whether the yogurt was any good or not, you raise the question, well, is it really true that it’s past itself by date?

And one of the things that I see going on in the Republican world is the core of the Republican Party is a coalition of the very rich the very religious and the very racially anxious. Mhmm. Trump’s secret sauce in twenty sixteen and he didn’t win a popular vote plurality or anything like that, but he did better than maybe another candidate would have done, and he certainly broke through in the primaries. Was that Trump found a way to broaden the coalition beyond the very rich, the very religious and the very racially anxious. And you look at the alternatives to him now.

Is there anyone of them who can repeat that? Or are they all falling back on the problems pre Trump appealing only to these very narrow silos in American life. Howard Bauchner:

Yeah, and there are real contradictions there as well I wasn’t planning on getting into this, but I was reading another piece about the the strains between the libertarian, live free, or diet strains. And the more overtly religious, socially conservative. I mean, you know, at at what point do you have to make a choice when, yet, we’re going to go with I want the government to leave me alone. I want to live free, but I also really wanna crackdown on drag queen story hour and go after homosexuals and talk about transgender all the time. I mean, in in in in banned books.

There’s a real tension there and they haven’t had to resolve it yet. Have they?

Yeah. But even these ideological factions I remember during the campaign of nineteen eighty eight, George h w Bush was asked about his philosophy and he said, I’m a conservative but I’m not a nut about it. That is the bedrock of the winning Republican coalition. People are conservative, but not a nut about it. So, I mean, you know, that what happens in the conservative world is different varieties of nuts have debate about what kind of nut you should be.

And so the libertarian people say, you know, I certainly don’t want to to fame the drag queens or go after them, but I agree you should be able to put your gun on the bars, you have nine drinks, then then the religious people say, you know, I’m not sure about the gun and the nine drinks, but absolutely drag queens are the greatest threat to American life. And all of these people who are running small businesses and driving the kids to school, and I think there should be less crime and disorder in the streets and the book should balance, but I’m not a nut about it. And you guys all sound like nuts. Who’s talking to them? Trump tried to do I mean, criminal as he was, and Trump is a great marketer.

And in twenty sixteen, Trump understood that that group mattered. And he found ways to deceive them. And as repellent and wicked as Trump is, he saw marketing possibilities. That are being overlooked by people who are, I think, less propellant and less wicked, but maybe less creative. Howard Bauchner:

Well, thing about the the Paul Ryan’s and the billboards of the world though is that they’re not saying that they have a problem with the crazy. They’re saying they have a problem with the crazy when it loses. At some point, they have to take on the crazy, don’t they? And they have to say that. But that means moving beyond just Donald Trump to actually taking on this base.

Well, it means also facing something else that one thing that lots of Republicans, not and not just Trump is succumb to was the myth of the great victory of twenty sixteen. Yeah. So if you don’t if you once you liberate yourself from that, myth. Then he was, my god, the Republican Party has had a voting an electoral crisis on its hand since the end of the gold This has been the big theme of my work over the past three decades. There was a dominant Republican majority for the second half of the Cold War from Nixon through H.

W. Bush. Then the cold war ended and a lot of the basis of the reassuring Republican message. You know, the the Republicans are the people who are realistic on danger. They’re realistic on dangers abroad and realistic on dangers at home.

They suddenly stopped looking that way. And so from in ninety two, ninety six, two Republicans have is probably the only one time they get a majority of the vote in the presidential elections, two thousand and four in the aftermath of nine eleven. And they’ve had more recently this this string of popular vote defeats twenty sixteen, twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, twenty twenty two. If you are going to think about that, in a serious way, then you have to say, it’s the that while Trump is obviously a moral and constitutional problem, that he was Republicans succumb to the moral and constitutional problem of Trump because they had a political problem that he offered them an exit from. And good for them if they part ways with Trump.

But the reason authoritarianism took root in the Republican Party is because they couldn’t win elections fair and square anymore. And if you’re going to break with not just Trump and authoritarianism,

you have to find a way to win elections again, and that means making your peace with modern America. Except that they did win this election in one sense, they are going to be taking control of the House of Representatives and apparently won the popular vote by about four points. So even though they underperformed and and the narrative is that they lost, Republicans at some point are gonna convince themselves because we know how this work. That maybe they didn’t lose, that may be they have come up with this formula to win, and maybe a formula to win without Trump. Well,

the popular vote in the House of Representatives is something we need to not comment on for a few months because there’s still counting the ballots in California. So we that may turn out to be less dramatic. And, I mean, it will be ironed that the classic Democratic problem of voter inefficiency may have succumb to the that they ran up huge margins in their safest areas and were not competitive in the swing areas. But they didn’t control the House of Representatives. But my most recent article in the Atlantic draws attention to this parallel.

I I look at four times since the cold war when the the house changed hands. Nineteen ninety four, two thousand six, two thousand ten, two thousand eighteen, twice to Republicans ninety four and ten, and twice to Democrats o six and eighteen. Both times the Democrats won their big swing. They won the presidency two years later. Mhmm.

And both times the Republicans won their big swing. They lost the presidency.

Too much. This is fascinating. Yeah.

No. There are many I I don’t wanna have, like, one explanation why that happened. But one thing that happened is if anyone out there likes hockey, you’ll know that that when you get the puck in your zone, your job is not to race to the other guy’s goal. Your guys is your job is to start start making the play, to move the puck up the ice and get ready for a good shot on the net. Nancy Pelosi was the leader of the democrats in the house both after twenty two thousand six and both after two thousand eighteen, and that’s what she did.

Should be gonna say my my rendezvous with history is after we win the presidency, then I can pass the Affordable Care Act. So how do I get from here to there? And then how do I recruit candidates who can win swing districts? How do I how do we have a total party electoral strategy? There were pop ins in ninety four in two thousand and ten.

They just said, we don’t want to expand our coalition. We want to indulge our coalition. Mhmm. And New Cambridge did this deliberately and intentionally John Bainner did it reluctantly and wearily. But in both cases, they let their coalition drive them rather than leading their coalition.

And so where they let them into were these fever swamps in Cambridge’s case, these wild attacks on Clinton, not just for the stuff. Clinton actually did, which was bad, and the president, you know, should not be running the Oval Office as a dating service. I think we can all agree about that. It may not be our highest voting priority. But even in those days before me too, that was that was, you know, improper.

But he’s not a serial killer. I I wrote this this little play like, you know, would you believe it if we told you that Bill Clinton is a bad husband? Yes. Yeah. Do you care?

No. Or what if we told you who’s running an international crime syndicate, drug smuggling and murders? Well, then we think you guys are nuts. And that happened after two thousand and ten with with the tea party and and the attempts and and the near default on obligations in two thousand eleven and birtherism. They just look like crackpots.

And that pattern, I think, is repeating itself after these successes for the Republicans in the House in twenty twenty two, where they’re going to that they had this press conference where they announced that oversight in judiciary are going to make the investigation a hundred by top priority. So hundred Biden is obviously a pretty sad case, emotionally and financially. And, you know, there’s there’s a kind of strong Billy Carter vibe to him that he he did try to play off his dad’s vice presidency to make some money for himself, and that that’s not good. But No one voted is electing hundred Biden to anything. And and there are a lot of unfortunate presidential relatives.

Trump had had his unfortunate presidential relevance. He thought they were fortunate ones, and he got them security clearances against the rules and brought them into his government, and they looted the place. But you’re going to repeat this and people say, you know, you’re right about hundred percent buying. It’s very, very unfortunate.

I love your your now dialogue. You know, you you have the Clinton dialogue. Now Republicans. Do you know that under Biden’s a financial and emotional mass voters? Now we do, Republicans.

Do you care voters? No. Yeah. Republicans. Do you know that Joe Biden wrote notes telling his son he loved him despite his troubles and also let his son stay in his house when his son was down on his luck?

Voters, that sounds like a good thing. Right. And then, of course, if they go to the what if we told you this was part of this international crime syndicate. Well, as you as you write, you can foresee where this dialogue is heading back to the you guys are delusional nut jobs.

Yeah. Right? You know, may maybe we need, you know, a code of conduct for presidential relevance. That would be an that’s an interesting idea. I’ve I’ve often thought about that.

And, you know, maybe any there should be disclosure rules, if you if you accept secret service protection, for example, as the president’s immediate family does, then then maybe there’s some rules that should apply to you. So that’s an interesting proposition. And it would have it would apply to Hunter Biden for sure, and it would apply to, you know, all future presidential times. So that that is a might a plausible line of argument. But the idea that Biden, the poorest man in the Senate, for almost all his time there.

You know, if whatever Joe Biden’s falls financially in propriety is obviously not

one of them. I just want to go back for people taking notes at home on this because I think this analogy is so important right out the the significance of a midterm election. So and again, I’m gonna repeat what you just said though. In two thousand six and two thousand eighteen, democrats won the House on the way to winning the presidency two years later. The contrast, nineteen ninety four and two thousand ten, Republicans won the House and then lost the presidency two years later.

And one of the key variables is discipline as you point out. Nancy Pelosi restrained the fire brands in her caucus, wanted to build a governing majority, behaved like an adult. The Republicans couldn’t help themselves. They went right into government shutdowns, and as a result, they lost the presidential election. And all the signs indicate that that the next house is going to do the the the hair on fire.

What really strikes me about this David. This I’m I’m listening to Jim Jordan, listening to Kevin McCarthy, listening to some of the commentary about what they’re planning on doing. And, honestly, unless you have been spending time on the right wing bubble unless you’ve been following these very online chats. You have no idea what they’re actually talking about.

I mean,

they really have gone into, you know, really into this kind of this little silo of of their own making here, haven’t they? And e even though that didn’t really work out for them in this midterm election. Yeah. There are things to investigate in this context. Yeah.

Sure. You know, Why was the administration taken

so by surprise at the collapse of the Afghan government and military? That’s, you know, that would be an interesting thing to know the answer to. And what do we know about the origins of coronavirus? Congress could try to get to the bottom of this question of whether it originated in a marketplace or in a lab or somewhere in between. You know, the border.

That’s that’s a real thing to look at. But of course, Republicans don’t want to go there because all of those problems are first very complicated. They don’t have grid choices. They’re often not Biden’s personal fault, certainly that with the coronavirus investigation, none of that is that’ll happen during the Trump presidency. You’re not gonna be able to create monsters and villains.

You’re just going to get information that would allow you to make the government work better and what fun is that? One of the points

you make though is that all of those legitimate subjects of investigation involve policy, but what Republicans really want is they just want an excuse to enable Donald Trump in stead. Right? I mean, that’s that’s that’s the one through line all of this that they wanna believe that Biden helping out his son is the equivalent of Trump looting the government.

And that’d be the what’s what’s motivating them at the moment. This is kind of a a thing in their brain is Donald Trump ran the most corrupt presidency of the modern era. And there isn’t a runner-up. I mean, just on a scale that you couldn’t even compare it to anything that happened in the nineteenth sector. I’m just massive corruption, self dealing, plundering, you know, directing his vice president to fly across the island of Ireland so he could stay at a Trump resort rather than stay at the US embassy or in Dublin to go to his meetings.

All of that crooked crooked crooked stuff. Now one of the ways of moving past Trump as you could say, Well, we’d like the Abraham Accord and we’d like the tax freedom judges. But you know what, it was a crooked administration and we can’t have that. Now that would give you a reason to move past Trump. But because Republicans so definitive at the time they can’t say that.

So they have to come up with this fantasy that when Joe Biden leaves a voice mail saying, love you son, that is the equivalent of Donald Trump movement and lets them it’s not they’re not just trying to protect Trump. They’re trying to protect themselves because they otherwise look very complicit with this massive degree of corruption, the worst in modern history, probably the worst ever in the history of the presidency.

So you write off we go with a repeat of an old show written, directed, and performed by a production company, oblivious that it is chasing box office success by remaking it three decade old flop. They’re going to go back to the the old playbook. And obviously, the lead characters here have no discipline whatsoever. I mean, I I I think what’s going to make this almost guarantee that it will be a shambolic, will be that the the public face of this Congress is going to be people like Jim Jordan Lauren Goldberg and Marjorie Taylor Green. And there’s nothing that Kevin McCarthy can do about it.

I can’t

Well well, there is something he could do about it. If you were I mean, if you were completely a different human being.

If he was not Kevin McCarthy — Yeah.

— which is you go find the twelve most conservative democrats in the House. And you say to them, I’m I’m going to need your votes in case of emergency. And I’m asking you to do this for not as a party matter, but for America because I otherwise, these these crap pots. I mean, you guys don’t have the votes to run the house. That has to be me, but I don’t want to be beholden to these crackpots.

Give me twelve votes when I really need them. I think a different leader could make that deal. And then the next time, Marjorie Taylor Green takes you hostage, you say, you know what? No. No.

In fact, am taking you off all those committees. And you know what? You wanna find a you wanna form a crack clock clockwise? I’ve got twelve votes. I don’t need you.

Because

now, here’s the interesting thing about this. And I and I don’t know this is going to play out. Of course, we don’t even know whether Kevin McCarthy will become speaker, you know, whether he’s gonna be able to get those two hundred and eighteen votes. But the number of so called crossover seats has doubled. That’s the number of seats, you know, House Republicans who win in districts that voted for Joe Biden.

And somewhere between sixteen and eighteen House Republicans will be in Biden districts, which means in theory that you have some of these independent minded Republicans who will be a counterweight to the MAGA caucus. Now, I don’t know how Kevin McCarthy, who is known Nancy Pelosi. Is gonna square the circle. But there’s at least the possibility of more than a dozen house Republicans basically say, we don’t wanna go along with this crazy show. We don’t wanna go along with the endless investigations and impeachments.

We actually want to deal with policy. How is that going to shape the clock? Because I mean, there’s obviously gonna be real tension in that caucus between the crazies who are in the safe districts and these folks that are

in the crossover districts. There’s one more political possibility, especially if in twenty twenty three, the inflations of sides and Biden’s number improves, which is I wonder if any of those crossover Republican would like to be ambassador to Bermuda. You know, the United States maintains embassies in a number of tropical island paradigises. You know, why don’t you your wife your kids, they sacrifice so much for your congressional career. You know, maybe you should take them to the say shows for the next two years in this Biden plus four district.

And then you can take away Kevin McCarthy’s house majority if the numbers improve a little bit. And that’s something Biden and McCarthy both need to be thinking about.

This

is actually very funny because I remember former Wisconsin governor, Tommy Thompson, the legendary Republican governor of Wisconsin, used to do that with Democrats in the legislature. He was one of the guys that figured that out. And there is something about being ambassador to, you know, Bermuda that might appealed to somebody who otherwise might be a one term congressman.

Doesn’t

have to be tropical. You get sunburned. I mean, the emergency I’ve been to the house of the US ambassador in Oslo. It’s fantastic. Because like this art nouveau masterpiece.

Maybe somebody would like that in a Biden plus four district.

It’s not completely inconceivable. People need to understand that when you’re about, you know, three, four volt maturities, all sorts of things can happen. And they are very, very fragile. But by the way, that’s also the case, you know, speaking of fragility. When you’re dealing with the United States Senate where you have, you know, members who might be over eighty years old.

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now. So, David, give me your sense of Trump is running. Trump gave his announcement speech, which was more disciplined than usual. Yeah. But he hasn’t cleared the field.

So give me a sense of where yet. You know, you’re saying Trump’s running the but the GOP is to blame what’s going on. Yeah.

Well, so as you say, Trump did run. His speech was undisciplined and that he’d improvised in the bottom half of it. Yeah. And it was the speech was too long and it was not as energetic and lively. But, you know, it was a careful speech.

Trump nowhere in that speech repeated the twenty twenty election wise. Mhmm. There must have been some meeting about this. We talked about after I left office or I departed office. They wouldn’t say that he was beaten, but he didn’t pretend that he was still president either.

And he may want this badly enough to run a different kind of campaign. He does have a lot of money on hand. Much of it raised in deceptive ways, but money is money. He’s running against what looks like is going to be a crowded field, not only Ron DeSantis, but Nicky Haley is pretty obviously interested. Christie Noam looks to be interested in the governor of South Dakota.

You know, there there are people who have maybe less chance Mike Pompeo and Mike former vice president Pence, they look interested. Ted Cruz seems to be running on a religious message. And So he may face him a multiple field. He also has this secret sauce of not being beholden to these traditional Republican micro group. And being able to find ways of talking to people who are less affiliated and I don’t know whether he can repeat that from twenty sixteen.

He’s more of a no known quantity. But this idea that he’s going to fail just because the donors are sick of them. What is Ron DeSantis? Offering those less affiliated Republicans. As governor, DeSantis joined a pretty obnoxious style to a not so radical substance.

But as a candidate, all there is is the style. Well,

also, he hasn’t had to answer the questions. You know, how how will he react to a Trump indictment when someone asks him. Okay. So Donald Trump is suggesting that we execute drug dealers after a one day trial. Do you favor that or oppose that?

Mean, at at some point, they’re all going to have to take positions on all of this and and it’s not clear what they’re going to say. Yeah.

Well, the indictment one is the toughest because there are a lot of things you can say. I’m not going to comment on other people’s campaigns or doing our own campaign blah blah blah. But if and when Trump is indicted, federally or at the state level if he faces other kinds of legal problems, civil jeopardy. He is going to claim, I’m a victim of political persecution. Sure.

Now let me just put this since probably most of the listeners of this thing mean in different parties in directions. Imagine if the Trump administration had indicted Hillary Clinton in twenty seventeen. You’d be out in the streets. And even if you didn’t like Hillary Clinton that much, and even if you thought some of the things she had done were maybe a little shady. You would still say, this is an outreach.

And everyone would be expected to say so on her side of the aisle. Now they would have the advantage that they wouldn’t be that clearly she wasn’t going to run for anything ever again because she was a reasonable risk calculator and not a maniac. So you’re not helping the Hillary Clinton twenty twenty campaign, but you would be obliged to defend her. So the question if Trump is indicted. Or faces out of a legal jeopardy.

Republican leaders are going to have to signal. We think this is a moral outrage. Or we think there’s a fair chance he’s guilty at this at this system should work. And the the Rod DeSantis and the others are hoping that the legal system knocks Trump out of the way, but they’re hoping that they’ll be able to fight the legal system even as it does what they want.

Right. They want it. They want it both ways. That’s

not just hypocritical. That is a very complicated maneuver to execute because they might start a fight that they win.

Or they put out one statement and then they just never repeat it. Right? Let’s say, you know, we we are deeply troubled by all this. We don’t wanna politicize justice and then stop talking about it.

Well, that if they can do that, but they’re going to have, you know, Fox News revving people up. They’re gonna have Fox News as competitors on the broadcast right revving people up. They’re gonna have Trump going And if you do keep quiet, you are signaling. And by the way, this is absolutely the right thing to do. You are signaling.

We respect the process and we’ll let it work itself out. Right. I can’t say that. I don’t know how the voters who have been taught to be rubbed up if they are saying, we think that these prosecutions need to go forward. And if they resist the prosecutions, how do they then not end up serving Trump’s interests?

Howard Bauchner: Okay.

So you mentioned Fox News, but Fox News is part of this Murdoch Empire that is making a pivot away from from Donald Trump. You have, you know, Bill Barr writing in one of the Murdoch newspapers that it’s time to move on. Are we sure that we know how this right wing media is going to react to this? I mean, I think you’re probably right. I think that that’s a trick.

I think Trump is probably counting on the base rallying to him in the in the wake of the indictments. The indictments may actually be the one favor that that jazzes up this this this campaign. But are we sure how will the right way media handle this? I mean, Fox is already, Fox, the Wall’s three journal, New York Post was already signaled that they are they are completely done with Trump. So in other words, that base which has been, you know, feeding, you know, has been injecting Fox News and this sort of stuff, you know, directly into their veins for years are going to be hearing a different different tone and different information and different voices.

Well,

that’s possibly true. It’s also true that in twenty sixteen Fox tried to do the same thing. Remember Megan he’s fanfare question to Trump at the Fox debate in New Hampshire about what he said to women. That was cleared up and down the Fox News hierarchy. There were no surprises.

And Trump knew that. That’s why he refused to appear on the next Fox invitation, and and he broke Fox. They surrendered. Megyn Kelly lost her position at Fox. So it’ll be a trial of strength.

But I’ll tell you any plan for getting rid of Trump that depends on the strength of character of the Republican elite we’ve seen

I think that’s for this simplicity

of purpose. Now we’ve seen that’s a pretty weak read. Okay.

You make another provocative point here. I mean, obviously, sleep, the the conventional wisdom and certainly the the line from his presidential rivals is that twenty twenty two was Donald Trump’s fall that we lost because of Trump. You have a counterpoint to that. Right? That it wasn’t just Trump.

Trump obviously made it worse. And maybe

somebody other than Hershel Walker would have done better in Georgia. I mean, Trump, but he’s just a lot of this was other people. It wasn’t Trump who when the Supreme Court struck down Roe versus Wade, went on TV and said we need a national abortion restriction. That was Lindsey Graham. It wasn’t Trump who went into state after state and began passing punitive abortion laws.

And and or glorying in preexisting unit of abortion laws. That those are state legislatures. You know, some of the the loosiness candidates might Blake Masters in Arizona. That was in Trump’s fault. That was Peter Teal.

And, you know, the Joe can’t in Washington o three, the member of the House who been consorting with white nationalists in defending Putin in Ukraine. That was a Peter teal special. So there’s a a lot of fault to go around. And Trump got his start as a solution to preexisting Republican problems. Trump then worsened those problems, but the problems are still there.

And the Republican Party is still not yet, the governing center right party that it needs to be, to be competitive. It it needs an answer on abortion that he’s not punitive. I mean, without jettisoning pro life views that says that, okay, that now that states have more leeway, they can both build laws that protect the later stages of pregnancy while also doing a better job of supporting women as they in in pregnancy, supporting young children, maybe some mother’s allowances — Mhmm. — make maternity more possible. You know, one of the things we know about women who have abortions is, I think the majority of them are a very large number already have one child.

It’s usually because of some economic shock that this is the path they choose. Maybe if there were cash mother’s allowances, you could you could tip their consideration. Somewhat. Those are the kinds of things that a party that wanted to govern and that wanted to advance incrementally its values. Would do, but that’s not what happened in the run of twenty twenty two.

Howard Bauchner: No,

and they had fifty years to prepare for this. And if in fifty years, they didn’t come up with you know, pro actual child policies was unlikely they were gonna come come up with that afterwards. So you argue that if the Republicans want to stop Trump, they’re going to have to do some truth telling. And we’re we’re not seeing that yet, our way. They’re willing to say that he’s a loser, but they’re not willing to go at the he’s completely unfit for office.

He’s running a scam pack. He is dishonest. He is corrupt. In part because every other Republican who’s ever told the truth about Trump ends up being excommunicated. So is there a path for Republicans to tell the truth about Donald Trump?

Is it possible? Well, they don’t have to tell

all the truth. And they probably can’t at this point. Mhmm. But one truth they can tell is to defend the integrity of the US justice system. So they they can win the legal troubles.

If when and if the legal troubles accumulate form say, you know, we we respect the process. We were the integrity of the Department of Justice. And, you know, Donald Trump says that he will prevail. I hope he will. But of course, justice must take its course.

Mhmm. And those that that’s like a baby step. By the way, it shouldn’t be remarkable that politicians accept the integrity of the American traditional system. But let’s start there. That could that could be a a big first step.

You also point out that the conservative media is gonna have to point out that Trump is running scam packs. I I can see that actually happening, especially you’ve already begun to hear complaints from the Hershel Walker campaign, and then they started to realize that Trump was just sucking money using his name, but not giving it to him. That seems to be a relatively easy one to say, look, and and there are some people even like Nikki Haley saying, we didn’t lose because we had a bad message. We lost we didn’t have enough money. Where did the money go?

Right. Well,

that raises another awkward question, which is Trump was not the only one running a scam pack. So it was Rick Scott. The right of the National Senate the National Senate Republican Coalition turned out to be a scam pack too. That what has happened and that this is a it’s a little bit like some kind of corrupt authoritarian regime. It’s not when the guy at the top loops the treasury.

He sends a signal to all the people at the next level down that they can loop the treasury too. And so — Mhmm. — that there are there are pretty systematic problems inside the Republican world of dooping and deceiving small dollar donors. And I I Rick Scott took raise what up, something like almost a hundred and fifty million dollars for the National Senate effort and squandered almost all of it on an attempt to build a a personal Rickstop political operation to advance his fantasy of a twenty twenty four presidential campaign. So if you’re gonna talk about scan packs, it’s hard to do that without widening the indictment, which which is a good thing.

I’m gonna party that has lost as many elections as the Republican Party has, does need to do some of this may not just message fixing, but mechanical fixing. And and say, we we are going to have a real serious approach to deceptive fund raising methods and to waste by not just Trump, but also everyone else. But that’s a real moment of soul searching, isn’t it?

So you make a great analogy. You you say Greek mythology to point out that monsters don’t get bored or retire and that if you don’t fight or defeat the monster, you’re going to suffer humiliation and destruction by the monster. That does seem to encapsulate exactly where the Republican Party is right now. They’re they’re just kind of hoping and wishing that this monster is going to get bored or retire or that something else is going to happen that they don’t actually have to confront themselves.

Well, if Rhonda Sanders does emerge as the Republican nominee or somebody else, when it gets into the last moments of the twenty twenty four campaign, and the democrats hit them with Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, At that point, he’s gonna wish he could say, I stood up to Trump in some way. Mhmm. He’s gonna want some example standing up Trump and not and not just saying, oh, I don’t I didn’t think that the Trump scam would work if if run one more time. So knowing that that’s what you’re going to wish four, in October of twenty twenty four. Why not start doing it now?

What do you make of Mike Pence’s strategy here? I I continue to be puzzled. You had this moment of real principal encourage on January six, which he appears determined to undermine it at every step now refusing to testify in front of the January sixth committee questioning the appointment of the special counsel What is Mike Pence’s Lane here? Yeah. Where is he just bad at this?

I

remember watching a baseball game with my late father-in-law and the announcer said something like so and so, the player now up was the best athlete in the history of whatever his high school was. And my life hematology said. The worst player in the major league is the best player. That’s a train I decide. So, Penn, of course, he’s good at.

He was governor of Indiana. He you know, that that’s no negligible achievement. Of course, he’s good at but sometimes the problems are just too hard. And sometimes the personality is is just too damaged. So, hence, once prize that there is probably no root for him to get.

And I don’t think he is psychologically ready in times that I’m not going to be the Republican nominee for president. Why don’t I go into retirement taking credit for the thing I did?

Yeah.

Right.

And I don’t think he can do that. So he he’s he’s searching for something. And it’s not that he’s bad at it. It’s not like there’s some other doorway that would lead him to where he wants to go. There’s no door.

Going back, I have a different memory of Mike Pence in Indiana, which was that he might not have been reelected back in two thousand sixteen if he hadn’t taken the vice presidential is remember how he totally botched the whole religious liberty issue, which should be in his wheelhouse. I mean, that should be one of his defining signature issues, and they passed the bill. It kinda blew up. He gave an interview. I’m trying to remember where it was, and he was just freaking awful.

And from that moment on, he was kind of dead man walking even in Indiana. Wasn’t he? So maybe he’s a kind of a room. Yeah. I mean, he he actually kind of saved himself by by bailing out and taking that vice presidential nomination.

I mean, I just remember you know, thinking back at the time that, gosh, Mike Pence is let’s say that he doesn’t have the full toolkit of political skills here. On an issue that he should have been great on. So — Yeah. — I just don’t understand, you know, who’s sitting around going, okay. So if you have the skills to somehow read this needle of having stood up to Donald Trump and then signaling that you really didn’t stand up to Donald Trump.

I just don’t know how that works. Well,

he has the same problem as Paul Ryan has in that in that interview that Paul Ryan just did with Jonathan Karl, which is you you need to create having not taken the off ramp in the first two years in the case of Brian — Mhmm. — or in the first four years minus a few days in the case of Mike Pence. Having taken the off ramp at the last minute or in Paul Ryan’s case having, you know, written with Trump all the way, but then at the truck stop, what happened in your snack? You say, boy, I I sure disapproved of everything that happened at the time. You raised the question, where were you when these other things were happening?

And because they don’t have answers to that, it’s hard for them to come up with credible after the fact reflections. And in Ryan’s case, he doesn’t seem to have future political ambitions. It’s not a problem that for Pence it really is. He he would have to have he would he needs to tell a story with basically honorable administration. But he is a candidate.

There is this question. I’ve written it in, I think, just on Twitter, maybe not in the Atlantic, but in the case of an official general services administration. Who had been a very effective leader for twenty years. There were some GSA event, I think, in Hawaii, and he then booked a very rambling air route. To the event.

He went to the event, but he went via Fiji and then with his girlfriend and spent a few days in in Fiji yet at at least with his own ticket government expense. And he was sentenced to three months in prison. Mhmm. And the punishment would have been harsher but for twenty years of good service before that apparently unique misconduct. Well, when Mike Pence took that trip around Ireland, yes, Trump asked him to do it or suggested he’d do it, but he did it.

If he’d been anybody other than the vice president. He would have come to prison just for that. So he’s got this larger promise. There is no way to be in that orbit. And not be contaminated and the fiction of a generally effective administration is you you need some answer to that and there isn’t one for someone in his position.

So I don’t think he’s got a path, and that means he needs to make some peace with his life choices and his future options. What

are the most extraordinary things about the Trump presidency? And I I need to sit down and update the list, but the number of high ranking officials who have now broken with Trump in one way or another said that he is unfit to serve from the secretary of defense to the attorney general to the vice I mean, I don’t know that there’s any historical parallel from the number of people who, you know, sat in the room with him and said, guys, this is really terrible, chiefs of staff. And we’re not talking about, you know, people who were negligible importance. I mean, you know, the January sixth committee most of the testimony came from people who were within Trump world. And yet none of this seems to have really registered with the Trumpist base, that the people, the closest people, the secretaries of state, the secretaries of defense, the attorney general, the chief of staff, all of them saying, Roughly the same thing, and it doesn’t seem to register.

But is there any historical parallel to this kind of a break from the man who put them in office? None. Nothing like this. By the way, this is something

that critics of Republicans are gonna have to bear in mind, which is if Trump really is the worst as I believe, and by country league as I also believe, then everybody else is not the worst. And so what the coming pivot that you’re going to hear from some talkers about how Ron DeSantis is even worse than Trump, you you let Trump off the hook. And I wrote somewhere that I thought of DeSantis as a recognizably normal politician. That doesn’t mean I thought he had good manners or was a winning personality or should be present. I just I just recognize him as somebody who plays plays the game by understandable rules.

Mhmm. And I had gotten a lot of blowback from people who say things like, oh, he’s the worst ever. Worse than Trump just smarter. And they quote, you know, you you undermine your own argument if you say things like that. Trump really was different.

And as you said, these these statements by members of his innermost circle confirm that difference. Whatever bad things, other leaders, other presidents other would be presidents have done none took part in a plot to try to overthrow an election by violence. That’s a different kind of thing. And that person is a different kind of person.

This is also frustrating, though, the people who will will say, well, you know, Trump is just, you know, simply an updated version of Ronald Reagan or of some other Republican that we don’t like, that does undermine the argument that he is a unique existential threat that he is uniquely awful. That there is something about this man that separates him from any other person who’s ever been in an office of public trust like this.

Yeah. So would Ronald Reagan have tried to overthrow an election if he lost one? We’ll never know because, of course, he never lost one. Right. But that should tell me something to me too.

So so Ronald Reagan kept winning election after election because Americans who are the same good and decent people that they are today they looked at him and they said, you know what? Even if I don’t love everything about this

guy, I can live with him. And there’s no track. I mean, I’m thinking even with Richard Nixon, with all the people that went to prison in Watergate. You didn’t have the kind of testimony against his character that you’re you know, from his from his cabinet and from his immediate step that you have with Trump. And I’m coming up with the worst possible example.

I mean, somebody who was forced to resign in absolute disgrace. And yet, Trump still stands distinctly alone in the way that he repelled the people who saw him up close and intimately as the president of the United States. The

people who saw Nixon up close and intimately were baffled. By his split personality. Mhmm. And that that’s one of the reasons he remains a defascinating character because he could be squalid and petty and dirty and and dishonest and anti democratic. But he also there there were things in him that were great.

And people would be baffled that that he would pivot in his own psyche from one nixon to another nixon. You know, the same man who could have fantasies about firebombing the Brooklyn institution would then an hour later, have a meeting where he would unveil his vision for rebalancing the world to attain greater peace and making the friending former rivals. And so without making excuses for the bad parts of Nixon, the reason he fascinates us is because of of the good things. And the reason his fall is so again, is one of this great sagas in American life is because he fell from a height. Mhmm.

Whereas Trump, What’s a good thing you can say about?

Yeah. He started squalid and ended squalid. So, like, speaking of the the unique nature of Donald Trump, were you surprised by with the option of Carrie Lake. We we are surprised by the rather gracious concessions, the willingness to accept the results of the election from many of the other manga candidates, including people like Doug Mastriano.

Yeah. I I believe and gratify. And, I mean, it’s a sad thing to have to be really even gratified by I am. But I think it it tells you something about how, okay, they got the message. Bill Clinton, when he lost he lost one of his races for governor and then he ran for reelection and one, and in his kinda ability to talk country talk, he when he was running be restored to the office.

He would tell country voters, my dad, he never had to whip me twice for the same thing. So, which is our no. You should never whip me once, but it shouldn’t be any whipping, but that that was the line. So okay. In this case, the voters had to whip whip them twice, but the moss around is the world.

Got it. That there is no tolerance for kuznetto. You know, or I should say, there there are some tolerance. There’s not enough tolerance for kuznettoides, and it’s not going to work. And so, yeah, you lose, you have to step aside.

And that’s just what is expected. And ideally, you do it as graciously as Richard Nixon did, and that amazing enough people haven’t seen this. I I listened to it on on YouTube. When Richard Nixon had to read the news of his own abuse serving as vice president, nineteen sixty one, had to read the news of his own defeat in the electoral college in front of Congress. He gave a statement that it really needs to be seen where he he did it in a very plain way and then there’s a lot of applause and then he was asked to make a statement and he said that this is there is no more dramatic way of sending to the world a message about our constitutional institutions that to have the loser of the election announce the news.

In a formal proceeding of his own defeat. As did Al Gore, as did Al Gore, a generation later, two generations later. That’s the way it’s supposed to be And I’m sorry we have to give marks for it, but it also is what is one of the things that the voters have noticed that. That’s expected. You can’t do that.

You’re not considered for the job in the first place.

Even though he was quasi disciplined during his announcements, I think there’s no way that Donald Trump continues to be disciplined. He is obsessed with the twenty twenty election. He’s gonna continue to re played. It’s gonna continue to demand election denialism as a litmus test. And even though it feels like it’s old, stale, and rejected, And I think that’s that’s going to be a problem for him.

Yes. But, you know, I one of the questions will be, will any of the challengers be able to say, on a stage. Look Donald, you got beat, and we have to face what?

They’re going to have to do that. David From, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. We always enjoy Thank you so much. Bye bye. David Frohn’s a staff writer, the Atlantic author of Tenbooks most recently Trumpocalypse and Trump I.

Thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow. We’ll do this all over again.

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