John Avlon: Is the Center Finding Its Spine?

I’m I’m not gonna get through the show without using the word cluster fuck. I apologize.

That’s fine. I’m not

using the word clusterfuck. I just wanna make it clear, John, before we actually begin that I was hoping to avoid using the word cluster fuck, but we’re probably gonna use the word cluster fuck. I’ve just and I’m warning the audience as as well. Hey, welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes.

It is October twentieth two thousand twenty three. And I confess that I am actually, even though I do for a living. I’m running out of words to describe the goat rodeo of the Republicans in the House of Representatives. So I actually was sort of, like, going through my file this morning You know, Omni shambles, Fubar, quagmire, snafu, goat rope, Massa Creek, shit storm, hot mess, train wreck, shipwreck, Ambralio, pronounced it that way. Follow-up, fizzle, snafu.

Don, I I need a wordsmith like you to help me to describe How absolutely mind bogglingly what this whole Jim Jordan fiasco is?

I mean, you need you need a bigger the SARS, Charlie. You need a bigger the SARS. This is a self inflicted shit storm that doesn’t only reflect on the Republican Party, although it’s a Republican Party problem. Mhmm. But it reflects on our democracy.

I mean, this is Congress can’t get itself organized because the Republican Party created this problem and continues to light itself on fire. So I’ll go goat roadie or a shit storm. Other one you want.

Okay. So today, This will take place before people actually hear this podcast. Jim Jordan is going to the floor or allegedly going to the floor for a third vote. To see whether he succeeded in coercing, intimidating, and bullying enough of the squishes, to vote for him, spoiler alert. I think that’s very, very unlikely.

And he started the day with this very strange press conference. Even Republicans are kinda scratching their heads and saying I’m not quite sure what that was all about. His attempt to use the bully pulpit to round up support. But this is the way Jim Jordan began his press come. Just listen to

I think the American people are thirsty for change. I think they are hungry for leadership. And frankly, they know that the White House can’t provide it. They know the Senate won’t lead. And they are looking for House Republic to step up and lead and make change on these important issues.

John, I do not think that American people are thirsty. For more Jim Jordan. I do not think they hunger for more Jim Jordan. I think the American people as they’re looking at this are saying, you know, I would prefer an enema. I warned you on this.

I mean, look, man. I look, he’s high on his own apply, but that’s the problem with folks on the far right. The far left as well, then that’s not relevant to today’s conversation. When you get these hermetically sealed kinda hot house environments, they constantly mistake themselves, they’re increasingly narrow ideological interests for the national interest. It’s got nothing to do with There’s a million different ways you can hold test that.

You could just judge it on simple accomplishments and functionality, whatever you want. Jim Jordan doesn’t represent leadership. He can’t unite the Republican conference. This is a guy that I’ve been pointing out on on air who his fellow, Ohio, his fellow Republican, John Bainer described as a legislative terrorist because all he has done in his time is destroy, not build. And now he wants to sell this idea of a new Jim Jordan who’s gonna make concessions and deals.

Right. Don’t believe it for a second.

Well, Republicans aren’t believing. No. Let’s talk about what happened yesterday because okay. So it it’s pretty clear that he’s not gonna get to two seventeen. He’d lost twenty one votes.

So it looked like for a while that he was going to, sort of, tap out and say, alright, I’m gonna support this compromise measure that would empower the acting speaker Patrick McHenry. And then and by the way, talk about a Ruth Goldberg thing. So he would stay follow me here. He would stay as speaker designate which is not a thing. But McKinney would have certain powers to get things done between now and January.

It actually seemed like the least awful of the of their various options. And by the way, can you imagine what the GOP leadership meetings would have been? You’d have the speaker the speaker designate. You’d have Kevin McCarthy. You’d have Steve scalise.

Who is actually the leader of the party? I mean, just let’s set that aside. Like, what a goat rodeo that meeting would have been. I mean, who’s in charge here? Who do we listen to?

Who’s the leader? The answer is nobody. So they they go into the house conference. Turns into a complete shit storm. People are yelling at each other, screaming at each other.

Everybody hates Matt Gates, and they decide they’re not going ahead. With this compromise that it would at least allow the House of Representatives to function. John, Give me your sense of of what happened, why they didn’t take the modest off ramp that even Jim Jordan seemed willing to accept for five minutes.

I think it’s because they have so deeply drunk their own kool aid that any form of compromise even within themselves is seen as collaboration.

That’s the remedy.

Not

of course, undercuts the basic idea of democracy. And this is what frustrates me so fundamentally. Right? Go back to the I don’t know, the constitutional convention. The system we have of a Democratic Republic is based on constructive compromise.

Comprise is not collaboration. You can be principled and still find areas of common ground and figure out

how to give and take

and build on it. Republicans can’t even do that within their own conference. Let alone with the Democrats, and that’s the obvious way out of here. I just gotta tell you, you know, the obvious way out of this is for the Republicans to the center to grow a spine. Stop getting enrolled.

Liberate themselves from the far right and make a deal with just enough Democrats to have stable governance. That would be a a a revolution within a revolution. It would be a great new beginning. I know it sounds like Aaron Sorkin script brought to life, but it’s not impossible. It’s only impossible in this version of Washington that they’ve all been inculcated and whether terrified of losing the closed partisan primaries so they can’t think about the national interest.

They can’t even govern. And so the reason they couldn’t deal with this is because they view any compromise, let alone working with the opposition party, as a fatal sin because of fear and because of greed, and that’s where the threats come in. Where I think you saw the deployment of threats.

There does seem to be sort of a general consensus that everybody hates Matt Gates. A lot of members of this caucus, obviously looks the idea of Jim Jordan becoming speaker as both absurd and dangerous. But as you point out, it is absurd and dangerous as Jim Jordan is or going through this pleat paralysis, the red line, the thing that currently they’re most afraid of is cutting a deal with some Democrats because this is the culture that we live in. It’s not the culture we live in.

Yes.

It’s the culture they live. Okay. Fair. And what I mean by that is we, the vast majority of the American people, go to work every day with people we probably don’t agree with on many things, unpolitical, and we find a way to work together because that’s how democracies work. It’s this particular culture that’s been created inside the Republican Party.

Because remember, Nancy Pelosi had a similarly narrow margin. No problem governing. No problem getting does the legislation done?

This is not a both sides deal. This is specifically the culture created inside the conserve Agensia, and it has come to this And you’ve been chronicling this for well over a decade, you know, when you wrote wingnuts, it’s not just the Republican Party. It is this ecosystem, this alternative reality system that has changed all of the incentives. You know, historical comparisons are always difficult to say that this is worse, but You know, I’m watching this Republican party being this badly fractured, and I’m not gonna say that it was worse than, you know, the whigs back in the eighteen fifties or whatever. But I was actually apt to leave it or not.

The sixty eight Democratic National Convention in Chicago. So I’ve seen I’ve seen parties rip themselves apart. No kidding. Truly right. That was a page to the Wisconsin delegation.

I was on the floor when Abe Rybakov was yelling at Mayor Daily or near Daily was yelling at Abebic whatever that was. See, this is how old I am.

Did daily say finker or, you know?

Yeah. Yeah.

That’s amazing. You were there.

I was there. So I’m not gonna say that this is the most divided I’ve ever seen a political party, but I’m really tempted to say that because

this is as divided at political

I mean, these people the level of anger, the level of distrust, the level of hatred of one another, the way they are treating one another, the culture of I mean, this is really a remarkable moment, particularly because as you point out, the Democrats are united, and Democrats have a long tradition in this country of being very, very fractious. Republicans have a long reputation of falling into line. So this is really kind of a an extraordinary in version of the polls, isn’t it?

But I think it’s a really important one to understand. When I started writing wing nuts a decade ago, I I began writing it no nine, came out twenty ten, and it was based on my reporting and then what was sort of the this idea of an extremist beat, which hadn’t really become a thing yet. But what I noticed was a lot of the tea party activists were co opting quite consciously sol lenski, right, who’s that sort of leftist agitator academic. And under the rubric of, like, they did it now. We will.

So there there became this conscious mirroring.

Mhmm.

And indeed, you look at the sixty eight convention. I would argue that Republicans now are more divided and dysfunctional than Democrats were then, which is saying some.

Very interesting.

They’ve inculcated a lot of this fractureousness. The what aboutism that justifies threats of violence, if not outright violence? And they’ve taken it to a deeper extreme because I’m not a fan of identity politics period, but white identity politics is more pernicious because of the simple numbers and culture in the country. It’s more more dangerous. It’s All these things are poster children for why these ideas are dangerous.

Mhmm.

Extremes hijacking a political party in a process as opposed to reasoning together under the rubric of a big ten. Rationalizations of violence or threats to get what you wanted, to push through a narrow political agenda without trying to persuade people to win majoritarian support. Tried to undercut majoritarian support because of various crusades. I’ll I’ll say that that any of these individuals may be on employment of identity politics and tribal politics to divide the country into us against them, divide the conquer, but then ends up becoming about dividing your own party and this narcissism of small differences becomes really, I mean, feudal fights. You know, the old, I think it was the life of Brian line about, you know, the judean people’s front versus the people’s front of judea.

You know, die heretic is a classic right.

Yeah. Oh,

this sort of stuff. And so we see it now that mirror image and it has become absolutely embedded in the right.

Fascinating. If you

go to the history of conservatism, The opposite of conservative, as you pointed out many times, is storming a capital to overturn an election. You think. You know, that’s got nothing to do with Edmond Burke, whoever else you wanna you wanna cite. I think this rot is profound. It is deep.

It’s reflected in the fact the Republican Party seems likely to re nominate someone who tried to overturn an election on the basis of a lie who’s been indicted and, you know, ninety one counts, but it’s also reflected here. That’s why I think, you know, the world on firehouse on fire is is a very real problem we’re confronting. This is a bad advertisement for democracy, but we need to not let it reflect on ourselves as a country because it reflects on one political party at this particular point in our

Hey, folks. This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day, we remind you folks. You are not the crazy ones.

So why not head over to the Bulwark dot com and take a look around. Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a bulwark plus membership free for the next thirty days to claim this offer go to the bulwark dot com slash Charlie Sykes. That’s the bulwark dot com forward slash Charlie Sykes gonna get through this together. I promise.

One of the themes of the last week has been the campaign of bullying and threats against the centrist and the moderates, the squishes, however you wanna call them. And, you know, as I mentioned yesterday, These threats have worked in the past with Republicans, and we’ll talk about whether you know Centrus are growing as fine here. But it has gotten uglier and uglier and uglier and on your network on CNN, they played a voicemail of a call to the wife of a congressman Let’s play this. I wanna get your take, John, because I think you can you can kinda parse through this. But and this is just a taste of what Republican members of Congress are getting from fellow Republicans.

Why is your husband such a pig? Why would he get on TV and make an asshole of himself? Because he’s a deep state prick because he doesn’t represent the people. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna come follow you all over the place. We’re gonna be up your ass nonstop.

We are now Antifa. We’re gonna do what the left does because you’re a husband. Gets on TV. Oh, the bad guys. They did it.

So I need to vote for Kevin McCarthy, a piece of shit who everybody knows. And for his

piece

of shit ass, talk about Americans who are actually fighting for Americans as the bad people, does everything about him. So you, your husband, and we are gonna we we’re not like the left. We aren’t violent, but we’re gonna follow your ass every appointment you have, everything you can do. Your your husband’s an asshole. He should talk to his stupid ass, Wirt War, Israel, is being killed, and your dumb husband is acting like a two year old.

No wonder he’s a fucking warm hungry piece of shit. So listen. You’re gonna keep getting calls and emails. I’m putting all your information over the internet now, everybody else’s, and You will not be left alone because you’re fucking constant. Jim Jordan or more conservative or you’re gonna be molested like you can’t ever imagine.

And again, nonviolently, you all go to the beauty parlor. You must be a bitch to marry a ugly mother like that.

Sounds nice. You know? Bless his heart. Only the best people. Only the best people.

Let us now pray because this is how we restore Christian America or something. I don’t know. So, John, what did you hear there? It is

so important to play all of that and to listen to it. I think it actually demands a close reading. I’m actually working on a column on this because I heard it. Jake Tapper aired that exclusively last night on CNN. There’s so much to work with there.

Right? So first of all, Jim Jordan or more conservative is the first thing or we are going to molest you. Nonviolent. Nonviolent. Right?

Okay. So that that there’s a lot to work with here, but so first of all, that reflects the fact that this person has been inculcated, right, via some version of the conservative internet, you know, media or Donald Trump, frankly. There is the language of threats and intimidation, which is the abandonment of reason and persuasion. There is an ideological agenda, Jordan or more conservative This isn’t conservative. Jim George’s not conservative.

This is conservative populism. It’s a radicalism. It is a tribalism. It’s nothing conservative about it. But you could see where he’s going.

Right? Jordan or more conservative. Good Kevin McCarthy in good enough. That’s part of the insult. We’re gonna molest you.

That’s a language of sexual assault.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right? And then that little lawyer on his shoulder, Donald Trump saying peacefully on January sixth, say non violently, of course.

Yeah.

And the rationale for the violence and the intimidation and the doxing he is threatening is we’re gonna be like antifa. Right? This sort of, you know, conjuring up the phantom menace to justify whatever is done. Remember, you know, the the initial story that Matt Gates and other people pulled on the floor to Congress on January six it was antifa had to attack the capital.

Right.

This is someone who’s been inculcated. This is learned rhetoric and learned behavior. Where he feels utterly justified and empowered to call up the wife of a congressman and to threaten her physically to get an ideological

And leave a tape of his voice. I mean, that’s the other thing.

Well, reason left the building a long time ago on every But this is really important because this is up, you know, you know, congresswoman from Iowa got a credible death threat after changing her vote on Jim Jordan.

Right.

These are the kind of threats that are getting mainstreamed inside the Republican Party right now or they’re in danger of becoming mainstream because threats are part of the language of politics on the far right right now and the far left, but again, they’re asymmetric. And we can talk about that, you know, And

this has been building. Right? I mean, this has been building, you know, for

During the second impeachment, Charlie Sykes. You remember this? Their members of Congress, and we see this too much. People don’t always appreciate it unless you cover politics closely. They know what the right thing to do is, but they’re afraid to do it.

In critical moments.

Right.

And in that moment, there were members of Congress who said, look, I know he should be impeached, but I’m afraid for the safety of my family if I vote that way.

Okay. It means part of this background noise is to this point, now you may say these people are are cowards or they should have done it anyway. But the reality is is that They have created this atmosphere of fear, and people are concerned about their family. They’re concerned about their children. They’re obviously concerned about their careers.

But I remember this going back into twenty sixteen. How people would go, well, I’m not gonna go along with this, or we can keep this under control. But the drumbeat of threats and insults and harassment wears people down, and it comes to a point where you say it’s just not worth it. Right? I mean, it’s just not worth it.

And the normies, the decent people are just driven out.

This is one of the key points. That I think we need to understand. This is, you know, the the rally think back to John Stewart’s rally to restore the the center or a common sense in in twenty ten ill fated as it was. Part of the danger for our democracy that we face is that there is a conscious attempt to make politics so dangerous and indecent and ugly that good people, normies, as you say, well, just normal average Americans find that they’ve got to abandon the public square because it’s just too ugly. It’s too messy.

This is by design. They leave.

That’s happening.

It’s happening. And that’s what we need to consciously push against right now. Everybody’s gotta grow a spine, especially the center. My favorite part for Abraham Lincoln quote is I’m an optimist because I don’t see the point being anything else. But that is just to say that now is exactly the time we all need strength than our civic backbones, particularly in the center and push back upon the craziest because that’s odd.

They’re a very small percentage, but they know that if they are loud, and intimidating, they can create the illusion of being a majority and harass the good people to get out of politics.

Right. And

therefore, leave the field to them. This is a classic band and sort of, you know, worldview stuff. And this is absolutely what needs to get pushed up against by average decent Americans, particularly from the center.

Since you have introduced a note of optimism under this podcast, an an unusual note of optimism,

Yeah. And you said this last night.

You said the center needs to grow as fine. Is there a little bit of evidence at the center or whatever you wanna describe? And then maybe the center misleading because a lot of these people are are quite concerned that in fact you are seeing a little bit of this pushback because Jim Jordan is not the speaker of the House of Representatives. You do have close to ten percent of the Republican caucus saying, screw that. We may be crazy, but, you know, crazy enough to go along with Donald Trump, but not crazy enough to go along with Jim Jordan.

And there is this pushback against the culture of threats. You know? I heard Adam Kinzinger yesterday say, hey, you know what? Liz Cheney and I got lots and lots of death threats. And I don’t remember any of you people speaking up about that, but I’m gonna speak up now.

Okay. These folks were upset about the threats. Should have spoken up earlier, but they are speaking of now. So what’s happening now, John?

Is this like a green shoot?

This is a green shoot. This is a sliver of hope, and I’m I’m on the keep hope alive here, but you need to do it with strength. Okay. And that means speaking up and calling it out and not trying to play it close or This is part of the screwed up incentive system in our politics where everyone’s terribly in the absence of competitive general elections for the vast majority of house everyone’s afraid of losing a closed partisan primary. So the sender becomes silent for their own self interest.

And that is just a cannibalizing of the country. I’m hopeful because there has been an effort to say, you know what? We’re gonna stop getting rolled. We’re not gonna go Donna speaker Jim Jordan route under this feeling of artificial urgency to unite the conference, you know, under threats, literal threats.

Yeah.

But it needs to hold. Now the Republican Party, if you look at its ideological spectrum, is three quarters conservative, and there’s a lot under that rubric one quarter model. You’re not talking about a lot of folks. Mhmm.

But

it’s not even about ideology. There are decent honorable people who are very conservative who have a degree of trust with members of the opposite side of the aisle because of their temperament, because of their perspective. You know, I mentioned a couple of them last night who could be utterly credible Republican and conservative speaker nominees who could probably get some Democratic votes. Enough. At least, you know, people like Tom Cole.

Okay. Don Bacon, Mike Gallagher, Those people exist. And they’re not like, you know, Chris Shay’s, you know, card carrying, you know, Rockefeller, Republic and moderates. Those folks don’t even exist anymore. Right.

But that’s what needs to happen. The center needs to stop getting rolled. It needs to grow a spine, particularly on the center right. And realize it’s in the country’s best interest and it’s in there and the Republican party’s best interest. We need to be able to function.

You know, people say, well, what would Democrats ask? Something pretty modest I would have a feeling, you know, like a joint funding bill for Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, and the border. Some for everyone. Yeah. Okay.

Regular order. Not shutting down the government in November. And then everyone can hash out their differences of which there will be many.

Right.

But we need to take the power back from the extremes. The far left is is in terms of sheer political power, largely a phantom menace. I did this statistic, and I don’t know if I mentioned this to you before, but it’s one of my favorite ways of representing where we are. Last Congress there were by my account, seven Democratic members of Congress, mostly freshmen who supported the world’s dumbest political policy as a branding mechanism, defund the police.

Seven seven.

Okay. And there were a hundred and thirty seven House Republicans who voted to overturn the election after the attack on our capital. Right? It’s not that it doesn’t exist. There is a feedback loop, but it is exaggerated and it doesn’t reflect relative political power.

Party that topples its own speaker for the first time and then tries to jam through Jim Jordan That’s a whole different deal. And again, Democrats had no problem. There three hundred pieces of bipartisan legislation passed in those, you know, first years of Biden presidency with Nancy Plus having a similar narrow margin. So, yes, the center does need to hold. We need to show that.

We need to show that in defense of our democracy. Mike McCall made this point the other day. You know who loves kind of self inflicted division and dysfunction. China, Russia, Iran, because that autocracy gets to say see democracies don’t work. It doesn’t Bulwark.

And actually what doesn’t work is ideological extremes capturing democracy undercutting the idea of majority rule, which is a concerted effort North Carolina and Wisconsin still that fight going on. And so it does require the center growing a spine and standing up and actually asserting the real weight. They’re more moderates in this country than folks on the on the far right or the far left. And and that includes center right and center left. People who may be good people, think you should burn it all down if you don’t get what you want a hundred percent of the time.

The Freedom caucus, the Jim Jordan crowd has basically had power because they were prepared to strap on the suicide vest and say, you know, if you don’t go along with us, we will blow you up and everybody said, oh, we have to do what they want. But as you’re pointing out, there is, in fact, a centrist coalition that could run the Congress that is divided as we are. Let’s just take a a vote. Like, for example, on Ukraine and or Israel, but Ukraine’s more divisive. I’m guessing that if you had an up or down vote in the House of Representatives on Ukraine, it would probably be three hundred plus votes in favor of it.

You’d have some Republicans. Maybe a majority of Republicans voting against him, but it would be an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives, an overwhelming majority of the United States Senate. Same thing with with Israel. So there are these pieces of legislation that if they’re allowed to come to the floor, Wood Pass and the eight Matt Gateses of the world of Marjorie Taylor Greens, they, in fact, are a rump of a rump. Correct.

And it’s only because they have convinced people that they are bigger, louder, and scarier than in fact they are, that they have been considered relevant.

That’s exactly right. And those votes you just described would also reflect not incidentally the will of the people. Great. I can take a look at polling and see where things are.

Yeah.

You know, we are not nearly as divided as our politics make it seem. But our politics are structurally set up with a screwed up incentive search structures we’ve got to dilute the will of the people and undercut the idea of majority rule, which is at the heart of the idea of democracy. So that’s the problem. That’s the structural problem. We can we can work on the structural issues and god knows we need to, but we also need more people in the arena to show spine and to push back on this comparatively small number of people who are loud, extreme, employ the threats of violence to get what they want to create an illusion that they’re somehow a a nascent movement.

Unfortunately, the public party because of the rise and persistence of Donald Trump, they’ve managed to hijack that.

Yeah.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be taken back. And we desperately need if you are patriotic and care about the country, care about the promise of democracy and a majority rule and reasoning together across the aisle. This is a time for choosing, particularly if you’re a Republican. These moments come, and people in recent history have rationalized them away. I think about Mitch McConnell, not basically given the green light with three votes from stopping impeachment.

None of this would have happened. Mitchell McConnell knew it was the right thing to do, but he was afraid of, you know, primaries on some folks on on his side. So he didn’t do the January sixth commission vote. You know, an another thing. Unnecessary.

We’re almost there. A little bit of spine at the right moment could have tipped history in a very different direction. This is another one of those moments, those pivot moments in American history. And if we let this pass, because people are afraid of what might happen to their primary, Republicans will reap the whirlwind even more. So I hope to god this is this opportunity is taken.

And the Democrats help Republicans give birth to new kind of politics in this regard.

Okay. So what will they choose? Because this is one of those crises that, you know, something that can’t go on forever won’t go on forever. This one can’t because the House of Representatives is paralyzed. I mean, no matter how many partisan games you want, at some point, you have to resolve all of this.

Now you can either resolve this by rolling over and electing Jim Jordan, which seems increasingly unlikely, or what you are describing some sort of a compromise. At the end of the day, maybe not today, where are we gonna end up here? Are we gonna end up with some jerry built rube goldberg speaker designate, speaker emeritus, triple five, you know, schism popes out there. What? What?

What are we gonna end up with?

Well, this is why it’s a time for choosing, and people need to think about the big picture. It shouldn’t be revolutionary and risky to think about what’s actually in the national interest.

Wow. But

it actually should be the table stakes. Yeah. And and that’s not being pollyannish about the past or saying, you know, I love historic parallels, but sometimes they break down. Except if you really look at how, you know, republics have fallen in the past.

I know.

Which I wrote about in Washington is farewell and and is something that I think people should study more. I wrote a comment about this at CNN, and there is a solution to this. And the solution is, and and Kim Jeffrey’s wrote an op ed opening the door to a bipartisan coalition. The solution is is that the majority of Republicans need to liberate themselves from the disproportionate influence of a handful of loud folks on the far right.

And that would feel so good for them. By the way, if they made that choice, that would be so liberating for them. It would feel so once they did in the country. Yes. Yes.

And by the way, they would be leading by example to show that there’s a new kind of politics that are possible. And I’m not saying don’t elect a conservative who has the, you know, a conservative. But then you have enough Democrats support these folks, not because they’re an ideological agreement, but because there’s atmosphere that embodied in the character of the person in the speaker’s chair where there’s trust and mutual respect, if not agreement. You don’t have to agree in a democracy. We should have great disagreements.

But there should be a baseline of trust and mutual respect, which has been utterly intentionally eroded. That’s the way to create a stable circumstance. What’s the alternative circumstance you just said? We could have a situation of rotating in term speakers where everybody’s under threat by eight votes on the far right. Patrick Henry might not even be there through the end of the year.

In the next, you know, fourteen months, we could end up having, what, five, six speakers, you know. As you

pointed out last night, since two thousand ten, every single GOP speaker has been pushed out or jumped because they couldn’t corral the knuckle draggers and the anarchists.

Right. Which is, by the way, John Bainer’s terms for that crazy call. Right.

We’re in the second decade of complete dysfunction when it comes to the GOP partnership.

Because of the same thing, because of this dynamic. That the Republican party is inculcated. There’s this rationalization. Bainer tried it. You know, McCarthy tried it.

Ryan tried it. Oh, we’ll corral the crazies in a constructive direction. Don’t worry. We could do that. We just need to harness their their passion.

Right? And sure they may be kind of crazy and think that, you know, Barack Obama is a secret Muslim, socialist, man, sure, and candidate, but it’s okay. We’ll be able to corral them. Gollum always turns on its creator. Always.

How many times do we need to learn this? We need to employ that learning now to give people a hope that there is an alternative way to govern to defend our democracy I

don’t mean to douse this exuberant optimism. But It’s tempered up. Here we have the time for choosing in Congress, but we also have the time for choosing for the presidency, and we have this is Donald Trump’s party. Mhmm. Even the quote unquote centrist are gonna line up behind Donald Trump.

Jim Jordan was Donald Trump’s candidacy. What does it say? I mean, give me your sense because I’m watching this. I’m watching Donald Trump decompensate in real time. And yet, the polls would indicate that he is either tied with or maybe even leading Joe Biden.

We are living in a country where half of Americans are least willing at this point to tell pollsters that they think that Donald Trump should be returned to the Oval Office. I don’t wanna dent your optimism here. I’m just trying to put it in perspective.

Let’s say a couple things. First of all, within the Republican party, there’s a morality play going on. Where fear and greed, those ancient biblical net negatives, are driving a lot of people’s decisions. And the question, of course, is who persuadable. Washington posted a poll out.

You discussed this in the past, and I will say the Bulwark is a a favorite here in the Hovalon household. We listen to you guys all the time.

Thank you.

They said that basically, okay. A third of the Republican Party roughly are hardcore trumpers, and they will follow him anywhere. Right? By anywhere, I mean, Anywhere. Anywhere.

Right? Including an overturning democracy and attacking the capital. Around twenty five percent, are never trumpers. I e, this guy doesn’t represent my servitude values. He doesn’t represent the reason they became Republicans, you know, Reagan, era bush era, you know, go on, go on one.

And the rest are persuadables. Persadable means, obviously, that they can be persuaded by another candidate that there’s another path forward for the party. If they feel not intimidated into silence or going along with the crowd. Right. Okay.

So, you know, the whole Randy Jackson line, one man with courage makes a majority. That’s worth remembering. The other one is one of my favorite political aphorisms by Bill Clinton who said people will vote for strong and wrong every time. Right? Yeah.

Which is to say that all these folks who are tip toeing around Donald Trump for fear of offending under some kind of consultant driven rationale are part of the problem. So there’s a super majority that is opposed to Donald Trump, a minority of the Republican Party, which comes around, by the way, ten, eleven, twelve percent of the country. If you netted out, third third third math in terms of Republican Democrat independent. That’s nowhere near a majority. That’s around ten percent, but they’re loud and they’ve intimidated the Republican party into silence until and unless an alternative comes up who is strong and provides an alternate path forward.

I don’t wanna be pollyannaish about it. I’m just saying we haven’t started voting yet, and sometimes we treat all this stuff as a done deal. And I think that disrespects That was Ron DeSantis theory.

Right? I mean, Ron DeSantis figured if I basically gave him trumpism without the Trump, if I just give an alternative surely, if he has indicted all these places, they will turn to me as an alternative. Right? I mean, wasn’t that the theory? Wasn’t that Ron DeSantis?

Well, the theory is also that people wouldn’t realize that

he doesn’t like people and doesn’t know how to sort of he makes Richard Nixon look like a people person in addition to

who knew that would be a problem?

Yeah. Exactly. So I I wanna just keep that aspect open. The right wing media ecosystem is very good at message repetition. And that itself has a way of cowing people who are not really sure where they stand on issues and drags them into those things.

Right? Biden’s governance has been to a large extent sort of the new low no labels fantasia. Again, three hundred pieces of bipartisan legislation in almost two years. I do worry that no labels, which I co founded over a decade ago, and I have nothing to do. But because I I’ve always been focused on how do we overcome hyperpartisanship and how can we restore strength etcetera.

Right.

That are the independent candidates can make the ball bounce in unpredictable ways in an election. And there’s no plan to win win Congress in that circumstance. The persistence of Donald Trump, I think, is about strong and wrong. It’s that he’s captured one political party that doesn’t seem to have the conscience to stand up to him and offer an alternative Democrats have doubled down on an incumbent president who’s been a consequential president, but who the polls suggest, you know, would be one of our greatest term presidents, but people have concerns about what a second term would look like just on the issues of perceptions of vigor, not policies. I would argue.

But until we get through this stage, that is still a point of maximum peril for the Republic, not just the Republican Party. Because if Donald Trump is is returned to power because there’s some weird no one hits two seventy and Republicans, you know, control the majority of house districts, and they decide to fall online because they make all the nationalizations that say, well, we’ll be able to corral the crazy and implement our own policies and get back in power. That’s a giant gift wrap. Or the autocratic alliance that it still exists here in the twenty first century. So this is about strengthening democracies.

And those are the stakes in the election. You know, maybe that they’re they’re unexpected twists and turns, there probably will be between now and the election. But I I just think that folks who treat this all as a fait accompli, or think that we’re gonna have some default into a a apparent sort of stasis election, Trump v Biden, round two. That’s one of the riskiest things we can do. But the risk is all on the Republican side right now.

Democrats are a little bit denial about Joe Biden’s negatives. But he’s been a consequential and effective president judged by the policies and policies that actually represent what used to be called the Bible Center to a large extent.

So one more thing here as we look ahead to at least something that I’m anticipating or we can anticipate something I’m looking forward to is what I wanna Have you read about Mitt Romney’s Byrne book? This is the Mckay Copins book, which is coming out shortly. Oh, yeah. We’re gonna have Mckay on on the podcast. Mckay is great.

What are the best writers of the veteran? New York Times headline, Mitt Romney’s sickest burns, book reveals harsh views of fellow Republicans. Now this is the phenomenon that we keep talking about is what do republicans say in private about one another? Now Mitt Romney is, I mean, he stands alone. One time after another, it has been Romney alone.

But it is interesting. I mean, I always thought of Romney as a little bit, white British, you know, and a little tapioca, but apparently he’s much spicier than that. So Mitt Romney on Ron DeSantis. There’s just no warmth at all. Ron DeSantis posing for selfies with Iowa voters, he looks like he’s got a toothache on Newt Gingrich.

A smug, know it all, smarmy, and too pleased with himself. Not wrong. Ted Cruz, frightening, scary, a demagogue, Mike Huckabee, a huckster, a caricature of a for profit preacher. Not wrong again. Bobby Jindo, a twit, Rick Santorum, sanctimonious, severe, and strange, which, of course, if you ever met him, yeah, you know.

Rick Perry, Republicans must realize that we have to have someone who can actually complete a sentence. John Casey, lack of thoughtfulness, lack of attended ego. No wonder, he and Chris Charlie Sykes spark, and then he has some things to say about Chris Christie too, but it is kind of in thing because as you’re reading this, you’re going, so it’s not just us. No. No.

Right. What a clown show? I mean, the Republican Party You know, used to have people who were serious individuals, and you just sort of look at the horizon. And one, loser and clown after another, the Charlotteton caucus.

And this is, again, because of the screwed up incentive structures and the structural problems in the party. Right.

Right. Right.

There is no incentive structure set aside to try to win the reasonable edge of the opposition or to even have a the ballast to appeal to to to reasonable Republicans. It’s all about playing to the far right, playing to the base. And that leads to this sort of clown car crash that we’ve seen in every, you know, primary since at least twenty ten. My only regret about that list is think if if Mitt Romney had had the courage to be his most authentic self, which we saw glimpses of in that great documentary that came out after the election, we’re we’re seeing in the Senate, He could have won the presidency, but he was I think he’d he’d been disciplined by a lot of different things to sort of, you know, have a have a veneer in place and he’s been liberated I think to say what he really thinks, and we see that he’s an intelligent deeply principled man. I’m excited for McKay’s book.

He’s one of the best journalists of his generation. The quote that jumps out to me isn’t about, you know, I mean, recasting Mitt Romney is some kind of latter day Truman Capote saying, you know, caddy things about other Republican candidates is less interesting than him saying quite frankly that a majority of my party or a great percentage of my party doesn’t really believe in the constitution. And you start collecting comments, and we this is the folks, the Bulwark. A lot of Republicans who are warning about what’s been happening in their party. Take a look.

And I did this on CNN in a digital interview with Elizabeth Griffin, almost a year ago, probably. Where we looked at then, all the former Trump admin illustration alumni who were It’s amazing. Clearly and loudly that a reelecting their former boss would be a threat to the republic.

Yeah. This is not Rachel Madau. This is not NPR. This is not this is not the democratic. These are voices coming from inside the room.

One hundred percent. And what’s troubling to me is that the Donald Trump superfans who’ve never met the man are willing to I think for reasons of face saving and the dynamics of sort of tribal politics, will not listening to the people who know the man best who worked with them who were warning in clear language and these are not Democrats. These aren’t even independents. These are aren’t even, you know, centrist Republicans who didn’t want anything to do with Donald Trump. These are people who worked with him, and that’s the moral urgency we should be feeling.

About sleepwalking towards this election. I think Romney’s voice is as clarion call clear as any. We gotta recognize this is a structural problem. It’s gonna need structural fixes, but it’s gonna start when people the spine to stand up the sarcastic terrorism that we’re dealing

with. We’re almost out of time here, and we haven’t even gotten to, the president’s very rare prime time overall address about the Ukraine and Israel. It’s getting good reviews. What were your thoughts? I had just one criticism, really, which is that I wish he would have done this earlier.

He has been a consequential president, but he has not effectively used the bully pulpit. And the speech like this I think was necessary to rally the nation behind the aid of Ukraine a year ago. So you have this speech, which I think was effective, not perfect, but effective. Why has he not done this more? Why has he not done this earlier?

That’s probably one criticism. What is your thoughts?

He should be doing it more even, Rick Hume praised to speak on Fox. I’m generally suspect when people blame communications for lack of political success. But I do think that the Biden Administration’s communications have not been sticky enough, sound body enough, rooted in stats, in fact, enough, and bleeding into new platforms, to spread the messages of accomplishments. This was a very good speech by the president. He actually, I thought he used his hands effectively, you know, visually He had a decent amount of energy by him.

He was crisp and clear and spoke with with a sense of moral conviction about American leadership in the world. That’s the kind of conversation we should be having as a country. I think it’s it’s notable because of all the crazy and our politics that often the most responsible voices don’t get their share of the oxygen even when you’re the president of the United States.

Right.

And that’s why I don’t think you should over index some of the the noise. I think the signal to noise ratio is very difficult to determine our politics right now. It was a good speech. He should have given it more. And I’ll give you a small example of something I noticed.

I watched it again, last night when I came home because I was listening to it in transit. The White House website did one of those things where it was an hour and thirty eight minutes or something like that, but the first forty minutes were just waiting for the present. They didn’t take the time to edit it. So when you clicked on it after the fact, the speech would begin. It’s these little unforced errors of presentation and clipping that cut into the resonance.

That’s a really small thing. I don’t mean a harp on it.

There’s no margin for error anymore, though.

Not at all. And instead, you really do need to to think about how people are getting their information and lean into those ways. I I had a conversation with a a lower level of pointy in the Biden administration And I I said to this person, you know, that things like, oh, they’re three hundred pieces of bipartisan legislation in the first two years, and this person said to be reeling?

Yeah. That is a problem. That’s a problem. When you said it earlier, even even I thought I thought it was kind of extraordinary. I mean, that sort of cuts against almost all of our narratives.

How did that and given everything that’s been going on here. That’s an amazing number. And that’s your reality. Yeah. John Avalon is senior political analyst Anker at CNN.

His most recent book is Lincoln and the fight for Peace. He’s also a former editor in chief of The Daily Beast. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us and coming on the weekend Bulwark podcast.

My pleasure, Charlie Sykes know, we’re we’re huge fans of what you and your colleagues are doing to the Bullwork here. My wife, Margaret, and I, and RL Family. So, thanks. Keep fighting a good fight, buddy.

Thank you. And thank you all for listening to this weekend’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday, and we’ll do this all over again. Bover podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.