John Harwood: Our Cartoonish Politics

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. Welcome to the podcast, our old friend, John Harwood, veteran journalist, veteran of The New York Times Wall Street Journal NBC CNN and now Living the Dream John. Welcome back on the podcast. Hey, Charlie Sykes started off this morning by Googling Donald Trump debate John Harwood cartoon.

And I’ll tell you what the shock was to realize that this was from two thousand fifteen. We are coming up on the seven year anniversary of this debate, the CNBC Republican debate. By the way, there’ll never be a CNBC Republican debate. Again, for people who, you know, don’t remember that this is gonna come back to you. You were one of the moderators of the debate.

And this was when Donald Trump was still kind of fresh and new — Mhmm. — American politics. So you described Trump’s plans including his proposal to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants building a wall on the on the border, which of course Mexico was going to pay for. And then you say, Let’s be honest, is this the comic book version of a presidential campaign? Seven years later, Can you believe that we are still talking about this?

That it’s not just a comic book version, but we are all part of this comic book and it has been going on for seven freaking years.

It’s unbelievable. And, you know, when you think about it, people at that time did not think Donald Trump was going to win the nomination. And before that debate, I was getting incoming from other Republican campaigns who thought we in the press have been way too easy on Trump and that as soon as he got some strict scrutiny, he was gonna collapse, and then they’d go on to the real competition between, you know, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush or Scott Walker, whoever else. And I thought there was some truth to that that he had not gotten tough enough scrutiny. And so I you know, question him sharply in the way that you mentioned and what happened was we saw a precursor of the patterns we’ve seen repeated over and over since then, which is that there was a huge backlash from the Republican on hand in the audience and the Republican base.

And so the Republican candidates who had wanted the press to be tougher on Trump. We’re defending Trump out of fear of his base.

Yeah.

And that’s continued to go on. And I have to say that I used the term comic book because it was the things that Trump was saying was so ridiculous, and they have turned out to be much more outlandish than even I imagine that they would

be. Because you recount that there was a lot of magical thinking at the time. It was sort of a precursor of the current magical thinking was that, well, this can’t possibly happen, he can’t possibly win. Right? This isn’t real.

You remember what the Huffington Post actually refused to cover him as a political figure. They put him in the entertainment section because it was like —

Mhmm. — we

can’t take him seriously otherwise,

you know,

that validates it. And, again, this is the push pull. Do you pay attention? To him, does that give you more oxygen? Should you ignore him?

Maybe he’ll go away if you’ll ignore him. And of course, he hasn’t and here we are nearly seven years later going through kind of the same magical thinking where Republicans are thinking that okay, this can’t possibly happen. He can’t possibly win or something’s going to happen. Right? We don’t have to do anything.

I don’t have to punch him or call him out. By the way, I just for our listeners, You also asked a second follow-up question. That is interesting. That aged pretty well. You said that you had talked to economic advisers who’d serve presidents of both parties about Trump’s tax plan at the time.

And you said, they say that you have as much chance of cutting taxes that much as Lloyd is proposing, without increasing the deficit as you would have flying away from that podium by flapping your wings. And, of course, we know he did cut taxes, and, of course, it did explode the deficit. But Trump was very unhappy with you at the time. He said, this is not a very nice question. And like, Larry Kudlow, you know, he’s our guy.

You know, you’d have to get rid of Larry Kudlow, came out the other day and said, I love Trump’s tax plans. Well, Trump

and Larry cut load were turned out to be full of shit on that. Well, they did. And, you know, Larry was my colleague at CNBC at the time, and that’s why Trump did that combat it. But very soon, Larry was working in the White House with Trump you know, repeating the same false promises about what would happen with the deficit. You know, the challenge that we’ve all faced in covering Trump is If you know that what someone is saying is Bulwark.

Are you better off stating that bluntly? At the risk of alienating some of his followers or you better off stating it in a softer way with the idea that that would permit a sort of more persuasive message to get through to people because what we’re ultimately trying to do is get people to stay in reality. And there’s a push and pull there, and I don’t think anybody has gotten it right. I certainly I thought at that time that the most effective way of exposing the ridiculousness of what Trump was saying was a little very sharp, almost mockery. And, you know, that didn’t work any better than people who tried to get Trump to, okay, explain exactly how you’re gonna get Mexico to pay for the wall.

Well, everyone knew — Mhmm. — they weren’t gonna get Mexico to pay for the wall. So to some degree, the idea of of challenging him as if this is a

policy debate was to me a little off, but nobody’s approach has been effective. Now, see, this is an interesting point. You know, again, we with the experience of seven years, no one has really figured out how to do this because in a lot of ways, Donald Trump broke the model of journalism, didn’t they? Because I mean, how do you deal with somebody who lies, who exaggerates, who perverocates, who says outrageous things all of the time, who clearly has this this ordered personality. I mean, how in the normal format of journalism or the give and take of a debate?

Do you handle this? And I think that one of the things maybe in his reptilian instinct, he figured out that they weren’t prepared for him, that that he functions on a completely different level. And then not a higher level when it comes to these sorts of things. I mean, American journalism has struggled with this from the very beginning. And you would think by now, there would have been a cracking the code, but no one has done it, and maybe there’s no way to crack this code.

What do you think? Well, look, journalists deal in words

in reason and rationality and trying to see the world accurately and describe it. Donald Trump is operating on an emotional level with his base it’s not about, you know, whether numbers add up on a piece of paper. Yeah. There is a set of people. It’s a minority of the country, but it’s a a substantial minority.

And one that is very powerful that feels that their country, what they have thought was their country, is slipping away from them. And Donald Trump speaks to a sort of a instinct to fight that. Now, that doesn’t mean he’s in tune with them personally. He’s not an evangelical Christian, but he’s got the evangelical Christians. Why?

Because they think the country is slipping away And Donald Trump says he’s gonna fight the people they think are responsible for slipping away. And so it’s not about reason. It’s not about rationality. It’s just about tribalistic. This is interesting.

I I had a long interview yesterday with somebody from public

radio who was talking about the politics of resentment and, you know, the populism that he’s exploited, that kind of in resentful populism. The discussion was probing the question, well, where did it start. It was a preexisting condition. It was always there. And and, of course, that’s true.

And you were talking about Wisconsin and the fact that, you know, you had a lot of people in in rural Wisconsin, who who did resent the fact that the country was slipping away, that they were being ignored, that they were not sharing in the prosperity, that they were looked down on and that had been around for a long time and there were politicians who exploited that. But then Trump comes along and he basically takes that that resentment. And he boils it down into the strongest possible crack cocaine of resentment. And he puts the face of the immigrants and the Chinese and the other, you know, elites etcetera on it and fires it up. So something was always there.

Right, John? But he did something that was new. I mean, it it is like breaking bad where the guy, you know, goes in the lab, he comes up purest possible myth, and he distributes it. And maybe there were people who had problems before, but once that myth got out there, then our politics changed, and it hasn’t changed back, and seven years hasn’t.

Right. And he accelerated processes that were underway. I mean, if you really wanna take it back. You’d take it back to the mid nineteen sixties when the National Democratic Party made a fork in the road decision deciding the civil rights movement That ended up — Mhmm. — causing an exodus of white southern conservatives from the Democratic Party that they had considered their home since the civil war.

And those people surged into the Republican Party and sort of flipped the stance of the two parties on racial issues. And as we’ve seen the share of Americans who are white Christians, you know, was eighty percent in the mid nineteen sixties. That has now slipped under fifty percent That is a very worrisome trend for a segment of the population and there doing what they can to try to push back against that. It’s not going to succeed because you can’t hold back the tide, but that’s the impetus for it. And And within twenty five years or so, whites of all kinds are not going to be a majority in the country anymore.

That’s frightening to some people. What did you say that? Because

I was listening to Eddie Glied from Princeton yesterday, and he he made the point, and I think they were talking about what just happened in Tennessee. And he was saying that one way to look at what’s happening right now is that we are relitigating many of the issues that we thought had been resolved back in the nineteen sixties. And I thought that was interesting. That were really litigating all of the changes in society that sort of exploded in the nineteen sixties, and we’re kind of back to that period. I was looking at an analysis in the Washington Post of what is happening in places like Wisconsin with the youth vote.

The fact that this is not actually working long term for the Republican Party, and I’m talking about the vote in Wisconsin for State Supreme Court. I know whether you saw this chart they did this fascinating analysis about how Democrats turned out college age voters in last week’s election. And the numbers are absolutely staggering. You know, Scott Walker, the former governor, you know, is heading up this young American foundation saying, you know, we have this terrible, you know, youth problem because of indoctrination in colleges, which of course kind of silly. But I think he’s looking at some of these numbers out of, say, Dane County in Madison, Wisconsin.

Where college age voters are voting more than ninety percent, ninety percent for the progressive candidates. Conservative Republicans are squandering an entire generation by playing these kinds of cards. I mean, one of the Trump legacies maybe to fire up all of these resentments. But the downside of that, are these absolutely horrendous numbers? I mean, there’s not just Madison La Crosse the student union award, seventy five percent for the progressive candidate, posh gosh, seventy six percent green bay, eighty four, eighty five percent, Oclaire, Wisconsin, eighty three percent, I mean, UW Bulwark, ninety one point two percent.

Of the youth vote, there is a cataclysm coming.

Well, Scott Walker’s response was instructive. He said the problem is not us and what we’re for. The problem is them. They’re being indoctrinated. That is a obviously losing political strategy and maybe a good strategy for preserving his role at the Young America Foundation because he he can cast himself as the chief opponent of indoctrination.

That may be a paycheck, but it’s not a viable political strategy. And, you know, the country is getting more secular. Is getting more diverse. And those are things that work against the interests of the Republican Party, and there’s no changing that. It’s getting more urban.

The economy is moving more toward technology and things requiring education, even manufacturing jobs. Required community college, technical training. And all those things that are changing the country in the twenty first century are things that Donald Trump is sort of saying he can roll back, and he can’t. And the Republican Party can’t. And so while you can excite a shrinking base, sufficiently, you can win some elections.

And Donald Trump won a freakish presidential election in twenty sixteen, having drawn just the right Democratic opponent who a lot of Americans were very fond of and getting just the right number of votes and just the right number of Midwestern industrial states to win the election. But long term, you can’t do it that way. And you you have to ultimately grow your party. Remember, in twenty twelve, when Mitt Romney lost, Republicans thought, okay, that’s our signal. Obama, one reelection, we’re gonna have to change, and we’re gonna have to reach out And Donald Trump just took a bulldozer to that strategy.

And ultimately, they’ll have to get back to it, but the question is when? This

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

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So

I wanna talk to you about the politics of abortion, what’s going on in Tennessee and Missouri, next week’s Fox News, defamation case, Alvin Bragg pushing back on Jim Jordan. I wanna do all of that, but it is hard to move on from Donald Trump. So the the indicted Donald Trump returned to Fox News last night to have sit down with Tucker Cross. And by the way, are you at all surprised the soft ban on Donald Trump at Fox News didn’t even have to the middle of April. Any part of you surprised the Fox News, you know, that that I mean, obviously, the Murdoch’s wanted to move on from Donald Trump, but clearly, they’ve decided, hey, you know, gotta let the guy back on.

It’s all politics and the intermingling of politics and business for them. If Donald Trump is good business for them. That will be for Donald Trump. Donald Trump is bad business. They’ll try to push him away.

And, you know, many Republican alleads, Republican donors, Republican business people have thought, oh, my god. We gotta get rid of Trump. But once they see the demonstration, that he still has a robust base of support within the party. That stuff kinda melts away in in the aftermath of Trump’s indictment when there was surge of rallying around him within the Republican base, Fox is gonna fold like a cheap suit, and that’s what they did, including Tucker Carlson, the guy who who was discovered on texting. He hated Trump passionately.

Didn’t mean anything. He’s a demonic force of destruction. Yes. Yeah. He’s gonna be opportunistic and do whatever suits his

interest in the short term. The Trump show is the only to show in town when it comes to the conservative movement and dip the Trump show is dominant, then fuck news has to go there because that’s what their audience wants. The audience wants more more Donald Trump. Okay. So We got the weeping SERR stories, but I think the top line was Donald Trump once again fawning fawning on some of the world’s most brutal dictators.

I would urge people to actually watch the video in my newsletter warning shots I have a big chunk of the actual transcript, which is a wild ride through the recesses of the former president’s mind. But in his sort of cereal fashion he goes through his lavish praise for the Chinese strong man g. North Korea’s Kim Jong un, and of course, his BFF, Vladimir Putin. Here’s a very, very short excerpt from his fawning with Tucker Carls in last month.

But our meeting was supposed to take fifteen minutes. It took four hours. We got along so well. There was a great chemistry. We had

great.

We talked about everything. A great chemistry. But people ask me, gets me. How smart? She has a top of the line.

You’d never met anybody smarter. How smart is Kim Jong un on top of the line? You know, people say, oh, this is not. Really smart. You know, when you come out and as a young man at twenty four, twenty three, even though he sort of inherits it, Most people kill people, and they inherit, they lose it.

And that’s easy stuff. He took over a country of very smart people very, very energetic people, very tough people at a very young age, and he has total dominant control. That’s not easy. These are these are very smart food, very smart. Now, he’s had and and probably a man here, don’t forget that whole thing is not if he took over all of Ukraine, and what are we gonna do?

Because Biden is so committed to Ukraine, What happens if it’s a not winnable war?

So, you know, war crimes, genocide, murders, you know, it’s not something that Trump fully cares about. But we knew this, didn’t we we’ve known this over and over again. There’s no part of him that is gonna back away from his just visceral admiration of some of the world’s most vicious autocratic thugs. It’s amazing. And it keeps telling us this over and over again.

The thing that that is ironic about the guy with the

make America great again, slogan is He is not pro American. He is not for the American system. Donald Trump is somebody who inherited a family business has run it badly in many ways, make common cause with all sorts of shady characters in running his business, It’s all about him and his control and his trying to sustain that business. He sees governing the country as an extension of his own business where his word is law and he’s not enamored of the checks and balances and the compromise required in the American system. So he’s not on the American side, and that’s true with respect to Russia and Ukraine.

Donald Trump was assisted in his twenty sixteen campaign by Russia. He returned the favor by being fawning and obsequious with Vladimir Putin. He continues to do that. And the whole notion of democratic countries sacrificing to preserve freedom in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world. That’s not something that Donald Trump relates to in any way.

Donald Trump admires people who can govern with an iron fist and the niceties of human rights and freedom and democracy are just not important to him at

all. No. It wasn’t that long though, one of the real dividing lines, one of the real flash points on the right was the belief in American exceptionalism, and the the sense that, well, the left did not believe that America was exceptional when Donald Trump comes along and makes it clear that he does not believe in American exceptionalism. And the American right kind of shrugs. Remember to that famous interview when he was asked, well, you know, Vladimir Putin, you know, kills people, he murders people, and Donald Trump said, well, we murdered lots of people too.

We’re not that nice. I mean, this was a very clear embrace of kind of moral relativism that conservatives had for decades said that they rejected. And here you have Donald Trump. And again, like, the contrast between his admiration for Xi and Putin compared to his contempt for Democratic leaders in the West. I mean, think about what he says about everyone from Justin Trudeau to Vladimir Zelensky in comparison to the way he talks about these murderous, genocidal warmongers.

It’s really extraordinary. That

interview that you mentioned was rebuilt O’Reilly at the Super Bowl. I know. And O’Reilly was trying to help him out — Yes. — and trying to invite him to condemn Putin for the worst kind of crimes that most ordinary people could relate to. He says he’s a killer.

Yeah. And Trump’s response was, oh, you think we’re so innocent? Yeah. Exactly. See, Donald Trump, he does not care about the law he really doesn’t care about anyone except himself and doing whatever it takes to get what he wants.

And so the idea that putin was getting what he wants by criminal means. That doesn’t mean anything to Trump. He admires the fact that he can get what he wants. And he was very accommodating to Putin his entire time in in the White House. This

is actually kind of a hilarious pattern now that we’re seeing from some of the funny interviewers. Who try to help out Donald Trump by saying, you know, I I think it was Hannity. It wasn’t Jonathan Last week. He was saying, well, you wouldn’t actually take these documents. If you knew they were class side.

And I was trying to help him. Right? He’d give me him the line. And don’t you know, downright, I would do it. Or they you know, you’re not really an authoritarian.

Donald Trump says, you know, downright. I am. It’s they’re trying to help him. And Donald Trump keeps saying, no. I told you who I was before and I mean it.

I’m just like, I am all in on this. Exactly, they can

see the liabilities associated with Trump’s stance. Right. But Trump doesn’t see them or doesn’t care if their vulnerabilities. He’s going to express it. If there’s one thing that you can be grateful for for Trump is that his disregard for law and ethics and the customary checks and balances of Democratic government is right out there on the surface.

He doesn’t hide it.

It is right there. So we also got the weeping SIR story and that that, you know, people come up to him, you know, SIR with tears in their eyes, and he’s describing what it was like being arraigned last week in New York where he was, of course, charged with thirty four FELINESE. THIS IS WHAT HE TOLD TUCKER

CARLSON. AND I’LL TELL YOU PEOPLE WERE CRYING, PEOPLE THAT WORK THERE, PROFESSIONALLY WORKED THAT HAVE NO PROBLEMS PUTTING in murder rooms and they see everybody. It’s a tough, tough place. And they were crying. There I actually crying.

They said, I’m sorry. They’d say twenty twenty four, sir. Twenty twenty four. And tears are pouring there is, I’ve never seen anything like those people are phenomenal. Those are your police.

Yep. Those are the people that work at the courthouse, they’re unbelievable people. Many of them were in tears or close to it. Many apologists were sorry, sir. We’re sorry.

They had to have me do certain things. I said, sir, I can’t believe I have to ask you. I can’t even believe that I have to ask you to do it. You could see. So in one sense, it was beautiful because they get it.

And another sense. You know, it’s nasty. I went to the wharton school of finance. They didn’t teach me about that. That wasn’t I didn’t go about the arena was hard.

It

was the most beautiful arena ever. It was the best arrangement ever. John, how many times do you hear these weeping SIR stories? I don’t know. Well,

we may hear him a few more times because he’s got a bit more legal exposure, maybe in Georgia and and with the special counsel, Jack Smith, as well. And Leticia James is still working on investigations of Trump. So yeah, he will have the opportunity to collect other apologies from weeping police officers if what appears is likely to happen happens.

Since we’re we’re on the subject of the indictment in Alvin Bragg, this is the report in the New York Times from yesterday afternoon. The Manhattan District Attorney on Tuesday sued representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in an extraordinary step intended to keep congressional Republicans from interfering in the offices, criminal investigation and former president Donald Trump. The fifty page suit filed in federal court in the southern district of New York accuses mister Jordan of a brazen and unconstitutional attack on the execution of mister Trump and a transparent campaign to intimidate and attack the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg. Brad last week and billed thirty four felony charges.

So this has been assigned to a federal judge who’s a Trump appointee who has rejected the the initial attempt to obtain a temporary restraining order. But your thoughts about Alvin Bragg taking that aggressive stance against Jim Jordan who was planning to hold one of these show hearings in New York City as

part of his, you know, investigation of the weaponization of the government. You know, the House Republican caucus is in the grips of extremist who cannot accept accountability for Donald Trump. They couldn’t accept it when Trump tried to bully Vladimir Zelensky for dirt on Joe Biden — Mhmm. — and he was impeached. Republicans couldn’t get behind that.

A few in the Senate seven, I believe. Six added to Mitt Romney who voted to convict on the first time in the impeachment after January sixth. But in house — Mhmm. — there is no visible support for holding Donald Trump accountable. And so the compulsion of their base is going to be do something to protect him.

And that’s what Jim Jordan is trying to do. And Alvin Bragg, who doesn’t answer to Jim Jordan, is being quite aggressive and trying to fend off those attempts, and I think he’s likely to succeed. What

I think is striking here is that Albert Breggitt has learned the lesson of previous attempts to go after Donald Trump, he watched and learned from the asymmetry of the Mueller investigation. Robert Mueller was an old school guy. Who was playing by Marquis of Queensbury rules, while Donald Trump was wielding a cudgel. And so unlike Mueller, he’s pushing back. He’s calling out Jim Jordan, you know, clearly for a move that was pure political retaliation.

And he’s calling it by what it is. He’s, you know, labeling it. This is an attempt to intimidate, an attempt to struck justice. It is an abusive congressional power. And it is interesting that he’s pushing back.

You know, perhaps prosecutors have learned how you have to confront Donald Trump. They have learned the lessons of January sixth. And by the way, the the Jim Jordan investigations have been on flatter in their face, and he’s flailing, he’s looking for some sort of a way to show that he’s actually accomplishing something. Okay. So the other big court action yesterday and you are a veteran of the media.

I’ve been involved in libel suits before. I don’t know whether you have. They’re very, very difficult to prove particularly when you’re dealing with public figures, but Fox News is facing really the libel case of the century. And I know that’s that’s hype, but talking about a one point six billion dollar lawsuit that they have not yet settled and they were in court once again and a judge ruled that Fox News could not argue that it broadcast false information about Dominion voting systems on the basis of the allegations Bulwark quote unquote newsworthy, which destroys a key line of defense that the network was hoping to make in in court. So John, are you prized the Rupert Murdoch and Fox News have not yet settled this lawsuit that they are, at least as of right now, prepared to go to trial next week?

Yes. I am surprised because what has come out

so far is so damning to Fox. And they’re trying to use the cloak of an actual news gathering organization to protect themselves from really irresponsible behavior that cast dominion in a completely fabricated negative light. So I still expect that ultimately they will settle this case because it’s not going well for them at all. But it is so damning the material has come out of it. Tucker Carlson who interviewed Donald Trump as we had been saying on private texts associated with the post election period that he hated Donald Trump, that he couldn’t wait for Donald Trump.

To go away. Mhmm. And now he has had to bend the knee and come back to Donald Trump because of the force of Trump stands within the party. Ultimately, that is going to be very costly for Fox. And the only question is whether they want that to be at the hands of the jury or negotiated amongst the legal teams.

Does any of this hurt Fox with its audience though? I suspect that it does. In that Fox has a very large audience. And I think the dominant part of them, like within the Republican primary electorate, are people who are completely committed members of that MOGA base. But there’s some who are not.

There’s some on the margin. And I think that the more you impune the credibility of Fox, which is what’s happened as a result of this lawsuit, I think there will be some, not most, not even a very large number, but some who will be alienated by that just as there are Republicans, as Trump gets into deeper legal trouble, who are also gonna be alienated. Even though the dominant portion of the base may be invigorated, may consider him a martyr and want to defend him there’s a corrosive process that occurs that has actually been occurring ever since Donald Trump first got elected. Remember, the the Republican Party got hammered in the house in twenty eighteen. They lost the presidency in the senate in twenty twenty.

They lost the senate again in twenty twenty two. So while it is true that Donald Trump has not gone away and he remains the favorite to win the Republican nomination, he is a diminished political figure. And I think Fox is a diminished network as a result of this case. I just wonder whether or not

they pay a price when the audience begins to, you know, hear the the the contradiction between what they say in private and what they say in public, the clear contempt and disdain they have for the audience, whether that breaks through, I don’t know. So, yes, Republicans have lost a number of elections, but they’ve also won some. And because of redistricting acting, and gerrymandering, and other structural issues, they still are competitive, and absolutely dominant in alleged later is in place like Tennessee, Wisconsin, Missouri. So let’s talk about that. The Tennessee story is incredible.

I mean, I described it as, you know, the stupidity, it earns the super majority of Republicans in in the house expel to African Americans for engaging in a protest over gun violence. And that was so effective because now these two representatives are both media superstars, political superstars, and they’re coming back anyway. They’ve already Justin Jones has already been returned to his seat. And to me, this is just another example of how the Republicans cannot resist their id, that even though they may have some understanding, that this looks terrible nationally, that it actually undermines their position, that there is this culture now, that if you have the super majority, you have to use if you have the gun in your hand, you have to fire it. And whether you’re talking about guns or whether you’re talking about abortion issues, they keep pushing the envelope.

There appears to be an inability to restrain themselves in the face of public disapproval. So Talk to me a little bit about your take on what happened in Tennessee and what it tells us about the state of our politics right now.

This is the kind of doom loop that you get. Yeah. When you have a party that’s in the grips of a faction that is not a majority of the country, but there a controlling force within your party, and they’re demanding that you do things that make it more difficult for your party to win elections. What happened in Tennessee was a sort of a cousin of what’s happened with abortion. You know, the right succeeds in making over the supreme court pushing it way to the right and so they indulge the longstanding desire of the most conservative facts within the party to throw out Rovi Wade and it’s an exploding cigar that’s blowing up in their face.

Yeah. And it blew up in their face in twenty twenty two. And though they do have control in a number of states as we saw in Wisconsin the other day, you start eroding enough support among formerly Republican suburbanites you’re in big, big trouble, and the same is true on guns. That doesn’t mean that there’s gonna be some, you know, breakthrough anytime soon in terms of national legislation. But it’s a corrosive process over time and there’s no accident that governor Lee feeling the heat as a result of this colossal misjudgment on the part of Tennessee Republicans to expel these members.

He’s now embracing executive actions and asking the legislature to enact a version of a red flag law. That is the picture of backfire. And

then meanwhile, in Missouri, I would like to say this story is a parody. I had to actually read it several times because I there are these parity websites out there and you have to be careful not to swallow the bait, but this is a true story. Missouri House Republicans voted to de fund all of the state’s public libraries in a proposed forty five billion dollars state budget that will soon move to the Republican controlled state Senate. The Missouri House debated for more than eight hours last Tuesday on a budget that is roughly two billion dollars less than the one the governor is proposing. They cut not only the four and a half million dollars the governor had slated for libraries, but also any appropriations for diversity initiatives, children and pre kindergarten programs, it appears that what they’re doing is they’re cutting the library due to a recent lawsuit filed against the state by the ACLU of Missouri.

On behalf of the Missouri Association of School Libraries and the Missouri Library Association is suing seeking to declare one of the more recent senate bills unconstitutional. This was a bill that resulted in more than three hundred getting banned from libraries, many of which included LGBTQ characters or racial justice themes. So here you have Republicans in Missouri. You wanna talk about a cartoon version of these politics defunding all of the state’s libraries.

What is happening here? Well, this is a doom loop in another aspect. Yeah. They take a step in Culture War, which has become the method by which people who fear change in the country are trying to stop it. In various ways.

And so they take an action at the behest of the most fervent members of their base. The action gets forwarded at some level in the court, for example. And then the response in these states with a stacked legislature is, well, we’re gonna have to win. Yeah. How do we win?

Well, let’s just defund the libraries altogether. It’s it’s a different version of what happened in Florida with Ron DeSantis, Disney. Disney speaks out for the values of their employees and customers, and Ron DeSantis strikes out with them, tries to constrict their authority. They outfox him in terms of responding to the restriction he was placed on the governance of a part of the state where Disney controls real estate. And now to say this feels the need to escalate in other ways, and we’ll see what what he comes up with.

But once you engage in a battle like this, at the behest of extremists within your party, it’s very difficult for them to back off. And that is just, again, creates a self fulfilling defeat cycle. And the only question is whether it happens fast or slow. I

think that’s an important point. And I’ve described it as at a certain point the fight becomes about the fight that you forget what the underlying issue was. It’s just like, us versus them, we need to beat you. You are the enemy. And therefore, any tactics that anyone proposes you’re going to accept.

Because I’m guessing that there’s not a huge groundswell of support in Missouri for shutting down all public libraries and I’m guessing there’s not a huge groundswell of report in the State of Florida for demonizing Disney. You know, there are not millions of parents who are sitting around thinking, you know, Thank God, Ron DeSantis, is going after Disney because I just don’t wanna have to watch Moana one more time or I I don’t wanna listen to Frozen one more time. These things have taken on a momentum of their own. And it is that culture that says that if you are prudent or if you look for compromises or you don’t pick up the biggest acts on the table that somehow you’re soft. You’re a rhino.

You’re a cock. And so this does create this cycle. It feels like a self destructive cycle. Because if you and I were sitting here, trying to come up with a scenario, saying, oh, okay. You know, how extreme are Republicans?

Well, they want to ban books. No. Banning books is not enough for them. They want to shut down all libraries. The executive producer of the show that we’re writing for would say, no, hi, guys.

That’s going too far. They wouldn’t do that. And yet, here we are. And Tennessee, it is again this sort of cartoonish extremism and they cannot seem to help themselves. And I wonder how often this is going to play out because I don’t see any end of it between now and twenty twenty four, especially if you’re a party that has decided that, yeah, we’re gonna go all in on Donald Trump again.

Oh, I don’t think there’s any way out of it before twenty twenty four at all. I think It’s a the question is, what’s the time horizon for getting out of it? And, you know, political parties change when they get beat? And usually, they have to get beat kind of badly before they change. Look at what happened to the Democratic Party.

When you and I were growing up, I think I’m a little older than you are, but when I was growing up covering politics, Republicans seemed to have a lock on the presidency. They had a natural majority in the country that was built substantially on the fact that they dominated the white vote, and the white vote was a overwhelming preponderance of the electorate. Well, that has been shrinking. The electrodes become more diverse and become more tolerant on various social dimensions. So Democrats have now, after George McGovern got destroyed by Richard Nixon.

Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondele in sequence got just pulverized by Ronald Reagan. George h w Bush beat Michael DeCaucasus decisively. And Democrats then figured out how to win. They moderated the party. The country changed And now you’ve got a a natural Democratic majority for president.

You still haven’t, though, gotten the overwhelming kind of defeats certainly not consecutively, that would cause the Republican party to have no choice but to change. And I think that’s what the country is gonna have to wait for to have a healthy and parties when they’re defeated substantially enough so that there’s no avoiding the case for changing, broadening, trying

to appeal to more people rather than exciting the people who were already for you. So just for the record, John, You are two years younger than me. Oh, is that right? You are a mirror babe in the woods. That

is the nicest thing I’ve heard all day, Charlie.

Wanted just to lay that down here. We were both born in November, but you were born two years after me. So John Harwood, it is a real pleasure reconnecting with you. Thank you so much for coming on the Bulwark podcast. Hey, Sebastian.

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

The

Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

Dissecting politics with exclusive interviews, commentary and humor, useful idiots. With Katie Halper and Aaron Mate.

Check out this story that comes via wedding planner, Georgia Mitchell. I’d say that’s a deal breaker. If you were to catch your partner being breastfed by their mother, I think she’s here in the second hand. So — Right. — and we really Did responsible journalist in you, Erin.

It’s just an allegation. Yeah. None of my sources have confirmed the story. Right. So Ten terrible if true.

And definitely a deal breaker.

Useful

idiots. Wherever you listen.