Michael Steele: Confronting the Ugliness

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is tax day. It is April eighteenth two thousand twenty three, and I am joined by the chairman himself. Michael Steele.

Welcome back to the podcast, Michael. Hey, my man, Charlie. Good to be with you again, my friend. I have to confess I am wrestling with today’s podcast. I am wrestling with where do we start?

Okay. We have the Fox News trial, Dominion case, which may be starting today. I continue to be amazed that they’re not settling this case, that it’s not settled. I mean, if there was ever a case in the history of defamation lawsuits that needed to be settled before trial. This is it, and they’re going.

It sounds like they’re going. I don’t think the million wants to settle. So, meanwhile, virtually all of the Republican candidates for president are lining up behind the boycott of Bud Light because of course, In case there was any doubt that we live in a post shame society, by the way, George Santos has announced this is not a joke. That he’s running for reelection. I’m not kidding.

Mhmm. We had the Jim Jordan clown car hearings in New York City yesterday. On the issue of guns, you know that I don’t like talking about the gun issue because it is this doom loop. Every week, we have another mass shooting. Every week, we have the same sort of Bulwark.

But Right. We also have these stories. The Standard Ground story in New York and in Kansas City, which — Uh-huh. — I I can tell you. Mister chairman may make my head explode.

And then you have Ron DeSantis who has decided that he wants to slingshot his way to the presidency. By harassing the happiest place on earth, threatening Disney World, with putting in a state prison next door. So I mean okay. I’m just gonna toss the ball in your direction because you are a professional podcaster here. So which one do you wanna start with?

Let’s start with stu. Okay. That doesn’t narrow it down.

Yeah. I’ll narrow it down. That would be my Ron DeSantis. So I had to tweet out when I’d listened to this pressure or whatever the hell he was doing, standing up talking about this, suggesting building a state prison next to Disney World, I tweeted out because he said in this. He says, yeah, I think we’re gonna go analyze this.

Right? And I went, okay. So you wanna analyze putting a state prison next to Disney. Sure. So when families stop visiting Disney, Alright?

And Disney’s seventy five point two billion dollars worth of economic impact in Central Florida just evaporates. And it’s five point eight billion dollar tax revenues just go to shit. Right? It’s seventy five thousand employees suddenly are facing layoffs, and the four hundred and sixty three thousand other jobs that are created by Disney for Central Florida just smart evaporating. What would your analytics say cause that to happen?

Mhmm. But you’ve triggered the lips. Charlie Sykes trading What is the deal with this level of just piling on b s from these Republicans who are now There’s so woke in their anti corporatism. There’s so woke in their multiculturalism. There’s so woke in their anti business

doing their

tones. I just don’t understand where this is coming from. And if Disney Charlie, if Disney just said, you know, just for shits and giggles, says, you know what? I’m gone. We don’t need your bullshit, Ron.

So we’re we’re gonna leave you all this land. And we’re gonna take our you know, five hundred thousand employee base and our billions of dollars of revenue. And we’re going somewhere else. You use your analytics to figure it out.

Yeah. It’s what I mean, this is one of those cases where the vindictiveness is the point or the fight is about the fight design. I don’t mean this to be snarky, but can anybody remember, I mean, without Googling? Remember, what is this actually about? What is Ron DeSantis Disney fight actually about?

Because no one can actually well, okay. So he’s going after Disney and then Disney has outmaneuvered him with a special district, so he’s gonna show that he doesn’t back down. It actually goes back to the fact that they passed that what was called, but don’t say gay bill. And Disney came out against it, and he’s been waging this vendetta since But it’s almost as if we’ve kind of lost the entire, which was stupid enough. But we’ve lost the entire thread of what it’s about.

JBL had a great point yesterday. He said, Look, I mean, his value proposition right now to Republican voters is I will use every power in the state to hurt the people you hate. And so You know, Trump says, I will be your retribution, and DeSantis is saying, well, I’m gonna be your retribution in a very concrete way. This is what we’re going to do. But to your point, This is one of those things where how does he actually think that this is what gets you to the presidency?

By going after a private even, you know, Chris Christie is doing a video this morning and he’s saying, you know, this is an indication that Rhonda is saying this is not actually a conservative. And by the way, Michael, do you know who else is ripping? Who is now trolling DeSantis on Disney? Who? The former president.

Let me let me read you this — No. — a truth social bleep that went out moments ago from the desk of Donald j Ron DeSantis, which is short Ron DeSantis and he’s been working on this. DeSantis is being absolutely destroyed by Disney. His original PR plan fizzled, so now he’s going back with a new one in order to save face. Disney’s next move will be the announcement that no more money will be than in Florida because of the governor.

In fact, they could even announce a slow withdrawal or a sale of certain properties or the whole thing. Watch. That would be a killer In the meantime, this is also unnecessary, a political stunt all in caps. Ron should work on the squatter mess, all in caps. I don’t even know what that is.

So I regret to tell you. I hate myself for what I’m about to say. Oh,

I know. But He’s really right. He’s absolutely right. And this is the thing about Donald Trump. He’s like a broken clock.

He’s gonna be right twice a day. He just and on this one, he’s right. I mean, the reality

here is so bad. Is that

Ron DeSantis is playing from a hand that is not a winning hand. Because, yes, it may excite some folks in Florida and if they make some people margo world a little bit wet, but the reality of it is Donald Trump is still the king here. And this isn’t what you take the king out with because you still have to translate I mean, for all the things that Donald Trump is bad at. He gets this. I mean, he would’ve had another angle or another way to come at Disney.

I mean, how do you take out your source of revenue? I mean,

No. This one is so easy. And this one should raise red flags about Ron DeSantis because pretty much anyone sitting on the outside would say, okay, here’s your vulnerability on this. Okay. You’re in this fight with this company.

Pivot. Move on. Do something else. But this is part of the, you know, the fight is about the fight. It’s become this thing that I’m in a fight with them.

I can’t look like I’m weak. I cannot back down. I need to keep escalating no matter what, even though it’s a completely hopeless and self defeating fight. But Charlie Sykes, Charlie, what are you backing down from. Well, like, exactly.

Nobody even remembers anymore.

She said to the table at the beginning here when you said this was originally about the don’t say gay bill. And Disney, which is a corporate citizen in the state of Florida, who employs close to a half a million Floridians. Right? I suspect many of whom may be gay. Yeah.

You know, took the sound corporate position that this is not something we wanna associate our company with. And companies have done this time of memorial. Right? This is nothing new for corporate America to express its opinion about something that really strikes at the heart of its employees. Ron DeSantis, to quote Donald Trump, got his hair all in a tizzy about it because he saw it, as you said, as a way to sort of prove his magna bona fides, but then got caught in a rabbit hole that’s now spiral further and further down that not only has he been pumped by Disney on the special district issue, but likely now is going to see a loss of revenues because I think in the first instance what your point is exactly what Disney would do.

You said, you know what? We’re stopping all investments as long as this man is in Tallahassee. We’re done.

K. This is the play. This is why, you know, he’s clearly not a chess player because all Bob I iger has to do is put out a press release saying they’re thinking about that. Yep. And Ron DeSantis is dead.

Toast. No. Okay. Speaking of attacks on private corporations and mind blowing priorities, peace in real clear politics, Republican twenty twenty four feel backs boycott of Bud Light. Now interestingly enough, Trump is the only one who has not weighed him on this yet.

As he said drinking a

bud, that’s why he’s waited. So Nikki Haley says you have this man who dresses up like a girl and clearly makes a mockery of women. It is just not right. Let’s just talk about Dylan Mulvaney. Who is the trans person who did, like, one thing for Bud Light.

Haley said she backs the Bud Light boycott. We need to use the power of our voice to call this out. Deep breath here, mister chairman, because you would think just on one level, just a common sense, like, old time, you know, before Trump level. That a candidate for president of the United States would have more important things to think about than whether or not there is a TikTok influencer who has done a promotion for a beer. But even Nikki Haley is all in on this because of course, none of them feel that they cannot participate in the latest profoundly stupid

culture war spat. What do you think? So, okay, they’re upset because a trans individual is selling beer. Beer. Of all the things to be upset about I’m sorry.

All you, you know, men who are sitting there just titulating over this and are upset about it. It doesn’t impact your ability to enjoy the football game on Sunday or the basketball games or baseball This is again a made up cultural fight over nothing. And the fact that you have this language now floating around from people like Nikki being upset about this man sort of having this impact to women Were you upset when Rudy Giuliani crossed the wig and the dress and the makeup on Saturday Night Live and hanging out with Donald Trump and all of that. Were were you upset when he exposed his transvestite nature to be at that picture? Were you upset by former representative Hawthorne sitting there in his little slip blouse and makeup in his wheelchair his little transvestite outfit.

We upset about that. And again, just a little pin on that one. What upset them with Hawthorne wasn’t the fact that he was dressed like a woman — Mhmm. — it was that he was telling dirty little secrets out of turn. Yeah.

But the moment

he said that, they were willing to put up with everything else until he said, you know, I’ve been in these parties, and that was it. And then Kevin McCarthy, who doesn’t go to line it, members of his caucus who are, like, consorted with neo Nazis. That was that was it for me. That was we’re done.

Again, we’re in a cultural war, Charlie Sykes some people want us to be here. And they’re going to fight and resist everything. These are the same idiots. Remember this. These are the same idiots who for damn near forty years have been telling us how to live, who to love, where to you know, what to think, how to feel they are so much more morally superior than us because they can put the Christian label on their words.

Yeah. As a former seminary, and I just like to remind them, Christ just wasn’t about the words. That was one of the things he held against the Pharisees and the Scribe because all they did was talk ish. They didn’t actually do much. They didn’t actually live out the Torah.

And what we’re called to do is live out the gospel. And the gospel which frown on this. It may know it. But what they do is they mask it in this culture war crap And that’s they wanna use as a hammer against the rest of us. And it’s, you know, we have to resist it.

We have to fight against it and largely laugh at it to the extent that we can because it is so silly that we’re having a conversation about a can of

beer. I’m just See, this is where you step back. No. You understand we’re having an argument about beer. Like yeah.

Right there. Okay. So there is an interesting little twist here that actually is somewhat intriguing. Unread from this real clear politics piece. Anheuser Busch, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years bankrolling Republican candidates, an inconvenient fact that was underscored when the National Republican congressional committee blasted the company publicly only to quietly delete a fundraising pitch, mocking Bud Light for tasting like water.

As conservatives were cleaning out their coolers, Donald Trump junior urged caution while calling from end to the boycott. So here’s the deal he said, and Iser Busch totally shook the bed with this Dylan Mulvaney thing. I’m not, though, for destroying an American, an iconic company for something like this. We looked into the political giving and lobbying history of Anheuser Busch. And guess what?

Junior said they actually support Republicans. I don’t I mean, so you have Trump world over there going now, guys, slow it down. So here’s another cases. Like, have we really entered, like, through the crazy mirror where the trumps are the voice of reason for at least five seconds here?

Well, Trump is is nothing if not practical.

Transacta Even though he

at times may seem impractical, but he does have instincts about human behavior and corporate behavior, and his instincts tend to be pretty spot on. And he’s right again, like a clock, a bed and stop clock. You twice. We got our two times in, where, you know, he’s looking at this and saying, dude, these people are Republicans. They have supported Republican businesses and candidates and the party, why are we doing this to them?

And the saying could be said about Disney to a large extent. And a lot of other, you know, corporate entities out there who who used to align themselves around Republican philosophies with respect to business and taxes and size of government and things like that. We got that. But I think Trump is, right again, in that this does not help in looking at a general election scenario, Charlie. How do you go forward when now you’ve alienated this company, you’ve turned off a lot of your supporters from drinking this beer, but not only that, but now they’re trash mouthing the beer.

How do you think that’s gonna play out? And the reality of it is, if the company comes out and says, you know what, we can’t support those who hate us and don’t support us, what do you do? It’s the same issue that DeSantis is facing in Florida. If Iger decides, you know what, Let me just put out a little tweet saying, you know, we’re thinking about it. We may do x.

Yeah. They’re gonna be rippling effects from that, and that’s going into an already precarious political cycle for for Republicans, who are now in my view, not only putting the presidency on the line. But the Senate where they should have a clear advantage, I think, is going to be a jump ball. And the House And so the country could invariably in twenty twenty four say, you know what, y’all go and beat the crap out of a can of Budweiser. You go on and try to take down a major family entertainment industry like Disney.

We’re going to go in a different direction. And then what are you gonna do?

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Take a deep breath here. Okay? I wanna talk about the gun issue, which is not funny at all. Mhmm. None of it.

Like, I have to check my notes all of the various mass shootings that have taken place since you and I spoke, not just Tennessee, but then Louisville. And then after Louisville, we had the shooting at the Suite sixteen party down in Alabama. Right. And now the headlines are eighty four year old man is charged with shooting a black teenager who went to the wrong address rang his doorbell, shot him twice. Right.

Then we also have the story. New York homeowners shoots dead woman who went to wrong house two days after Ralph Yarl, shooting Ralph Yarl being the black teenager. This young woman just turns into the wrong driveway twenty twenty one year old woman shot dead by a homeowner with a gun. And then, of course, we have the story out of Texas where a man was convicted of murder for shooting a Bulwark lives matter protester. To death.

And the governor down there is saying that he’s going to pardon him because of the standard ground laws. I I’m throwing all this out here because this whole standard ground mentality in a world which everybody has a gun and everybody is looking at everybody as a threat. What could possibly go wrong? Well, we’re getting the answer to this because, you know, the NRA will tell us that it’s a mental health problem or that it’s criminal problem. You know, we need more good guys with guns.

Well, what we’re seeing around the country is people in their own homes who have been so jacked up to fear other people that the response to someone ringing the doorbell or pulling into their driveway is to shoot and perhaps even kill them. And the political response to this, at least in places like Tennessee, is to expel representatives who say, we think we have a problem here. We need to do something about us. I don’t even know where to begin here. Michael, this is one of those where things feel like they are spiraling out of control.

You have that NRA convention in Indianapolis where we have all those pictures of these look kids playing with guns, showing guns, being groomed, to be gun owners and everything. Will Saletan and I discussed this on the podcast yesterday. What will it take for us to come to the point of saying, there are just too many guns in the wrong hands. We are killing one another. Tens of thousands of us can we just have a moment of sanity?

Or, you know, are we past that tipping point?

We’re past that tipping point. Yeah. We’re past that tipping point. There are four hundred million guns for three twenty million Americans. Jesus.

So we’re past that tipping point. How do you get control of that in the nation’s bloodstream. You can’t. It is exacerbated by the fact that you have Republican legislators at the state and federal level who literally will make excuses for every shooting that occurs in the country. They don’t want to acknowledge the racial undertones.

They don’t want to acknowledge the lethality of owning certain weapons they don’t want to acknowledge the obvious desire of upwards of ninety percent of Americans who want something done and who’ve said explicitly, Charlie, what that something is for them. So in one sense, we are where we are because the vast majority of Americans, though, they are tired of thoughts and prayers and they’re sick of violence continue to elect these bastards who write these laws. And until we begin as a society to take control of that end of the spectrum, where we are now looking at not to elect people who want to abolish the second amendment and all that because we know that’s not happening. But individuals who recognize the legislative responsibility to do something, the legislative responsibility to acknowledge not just acknowledge the pain with thoughts and prayers, but then follow it up with thoughtful action. But

it feels like everything’s going in the opposite direction. One state after another make it easier for people to carry weapons without permits, without background chats, without any training whatsoever. I mean, you know, you and are both old enough to remember when the NRA used emphasize things like gun safety — Yeah. — and would have, you know, gun safety programs. And now it’s basically, let’s push as many guns into as many hands as possible.

Is irresponsibly as possible so that you have old people sitting in their house with guns who will blow you away if you ring their doorbell. Or if you’re in a standard ground state, two people with guns, you know, walk up to one another, words are exchanged. Who knows what it might be? Somebody likes, you know, like, you look like somebody who would drink a Bud Light and one of them shoots and kills the other one because they think the other one is a threat. In Greg Abbott’s Texas, you know, depending on the color and the politics of the person doing the shooting, he might actually pardon the person for murdering the other person with the gun because they didn’t like them.

I’m I’m sorry. I’m dude, this is why I don’t talk about it because I’m getting myself worked up here.

No. No. You’ve laid it out exactly right that is the America that we are in at the moment where, again, governors and legislators make excuses. You know, I’ve never understood the purpose of a stand your ground law. I don’t get it because this is the consequence of it.

You have a woman trying to make a u-turn pulls into someone’s driveway and is killed. She wasn’t attacking the house. She wasn’t threatening the homeowner. She was making a u-turn in her car and yet they pull out a gun and shoot and kill.

Yeah. A

young man who’s asked by his mother to go pick up his siblings, goes to the wrong street, goes to the wrong neighborhood, walks to the wrong house, knocks on the door, this ass opens the door, screams at him never to come here again, Right? This kid is sixteen years old and confused. Look, dude, I’m just here to pick up my siblings, right, and get shot. Not only if he shot in the head and falls to the ground, this man then goes stands over him and shoots him again. Mhmm.

So Where is the threat there? Where is the stand your ground application there? And what is the purpose of a law that a citizen thinks that what that action that he’s just committed is okay under those circumstances. This is on us because we keep putting people in power who give us this kind of law. Then we all sit back and ring our hands and wonder why they won’t change it well.

And also we’re living in a culture where we are being whipped up to distrust one another, where fear has become, you know, the coin of the realm. So, yes, we have the laws, but then we also have this cultural moment where we are encouraged to fear one another, to distrust one another, to be angry with one another. So you saw that story out of Oklahoma, by the way. Right? Yeah.

The story where you have the sheriff and the people that are joking about lynching and hiring hitmen and everything. And — Of course. — we we talk about this all the time, but I guess in the context, of that we are an angry society. We are a fearful society. And we’re a society, right now, a culture, where, you know, this kind of the threats, the demonization has become routine.

Let me just play you a little bit of sound right. Okay. Now, this is a not safe for work people. Okay? For those of you that are tenderhearted, we have the explicit warning on the podcast and this is gonna be very explicit.

Miles Taylor has a new book coming out about the danger that Donald Trump poses to the country. And listen to some of the voice mail messages he got from fellow American patriots, people who believe in America first, who think that we can make America great again. Listen to some of the reaction that Miles Taylor got on on his voicemail. What you’re doing to president Trump is disgusting. You’re disgusting people you’re evil, and you’re gonna go down.

You, my friend, are a piece of shit. You are a traitor. You push your courage, I don’t? He’s dumb motherfuckers. We will squash you, like, a fucking peanut bitch.

You’re done. You’re done. Sounds like So eat a dick and die. You’re anti American, you would hate your country, you know? You are more than strong with America.

You show or a piece of shit. You guys hope to bear. You want to sleep in the night when come in my bed. Well, they sound nice. Bless their hearts.

I guess this is part of the this concern that we’re gonna work country with four hundred million guns in which this sort of thing is spreading. Now, I’m not gonna say that that represents a majority of Magazines Direct. I’m not saying anything like that. But if it represents one percent, we’re talking about millions of people.

Well, I I’ll say it. You don’t have to because of I get a shit all the time. Yeah. No. I mean, come on.

I mean, that’s the other thing. Then we start to towing so nicely around at all, Charlie Sykes so nice about the rest of us are so nice, oh, we don’t wanna say anything hurt their feelings. Oh, we gotta understand. We gotta listen and learn.

No one’s accused me of being nice before. Ever. At

some things you don’t need to figure out because they’re so self evident. When someone tells you that they’re coming for you to eat shit and die and you know, you are this and that and blah blah. Do

you mean that metaphorically? Do you mean that? Yeah. Exactly. Are you expressing?

Exactly. So just like they like to paint with a broad brush when it comes to, quote, owning the lips, because every Democrat is a socialist, every Democrat is a pedophile. Every Democrat is some nefarious blood sucking vampire. Right? Atheist communist.

Atheist communist. So why can they be that? Why can’t all of them be that? Because what reason? So this is the reality that we get boxed into where the victim Right?

Yeah. Put in air quotes. The victim is actually the threat.

Let’s talk about what happened with Tennessee that feels like it’s been several weeks ago. But as I as I told you, when I was walking my dog, listening to you on SiriusXM and your response to the Tennessee expulsion and to the shootings you were really on fire, mister chairman. Let’s talk about this. The the expulsion of Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, who’ve now been reinstated, so it, you know, it was completely pointless. Right.

But I heard you you say that You’ve never seen anything so hateful and so disgusting inside the Republican Party since you’ve been a member since nineteen seventy six. Right. Let’s talk about what happened in Tennessee because I went on the day that they were being expelled and said just the stupid it burns. It was was so obvious that it was going to backfire, but it was so well, you you have better ways of expressing yourself about this decision by the good old boys of the Tennessee legislature to expel two young African Americans because they could.

Because they could. And in the conversations that I was having that week about this, I I couldn’t help but think about what my father would tell me as a young young man in my teenage years about his experience growing up in Virginia and then living in Washington, DC. I remember him saying, you’re gonna run into people who will express to you their desire that you not act too uphiti. Mhmm. And I was like, well, what does that?

I mean, what does that mean? And it is something that has been a feature of racism in a particular way towards black men. That says, you are okay as long as you stay in your place and do as you’re told. And these two young men in that state legislature did not do as they were told. They immediately broke the rules.

And in breaking the rules, Charlie, the worst that should have happened to them was a censure for what they did. Not expulsion. Not expulsion when you look at the other white men around them who were caught doing far worse than standing in the well of the house with a megaphone. Right? Pedophilia, crimes, all these other things.

Mhmm. And yet no expulsion. And what I saw in that moment is I watched that vote come down, and particularly when the white female representative Johnson did not get expelled. And their rationale was, well, she didn’t have a megaphone. She didn’t have a Bulwark was like, okay, that’s the standard.

Was telling these two young men Y’all were too uppity? Yeah. They did. We don’t like uppity niggros. So this is the lesson we’re going to teach you.

And I think we need to see that for what it is. And I know some people, oh, you’re gonna go seeing race and everything. Well, guess what? Because it is. It is.

For four hundred years, it is in everything. It is in everything. It is why young black men get shot. It is also why young black men get expelled from state legislature. I know so many folks, Charlie, just wanna shut it down and close it off and not think about it.

But I’ve been saying it since I was a young man. Our issues in this country are profound and that the core of them is the relationship between black people and white people. It just is. We have yet to resolve that. We’ve yet to come over mind where I mean, despite the statues to doctor King and the marches and all of that, you still have a moment like this.

And you still have a young black man making the mistake to walk on the porch of an older white man and get shot in the head because he rang the wrong doorbell, and he was perceived as dangerous. Then Charlie Sykes top of it, what is the state’s Republican House legislature do, they then go and pass a bill that basically said, we wanna put guns In schools, we want every teacher now to have a gun in Tennessee. I don’t know if that’s a good day for black kids. I’m just telling you. Especially black males.

Yeah. Yeah. I wanna drill down on this. You and I could spend, you know, three or four hours actually talking about this because I am really wrestling with this. I wanna get your point of view.

It feels as if I’m gonna use a really factoring term here. Okay. Is it there is a permission structure out there to people to act out things that I had thought had been in decline since the nineteen fifties. I know you have a different perspective on all of this, but you’re seeing people articulate it and act out in ways that is and it’s more and more common. There was once a time not that long ago.

I mean, you were Chairman of a National Republican Party where Republicans would have been embarrassed to behave like this. Somebody would have stood up in the caucus and said, do you know what we will look like? You know what they will say about us? And right now, it sounds like even from, you know, some of the the audio that’s been late, is that they just don’t give a shit anymore. They actually don’t care.

Right. And people are saying things to one another. Like, you know, they the Oklahoma share. Okay. They’ve been red next and they’ve been biggest forever.

But at least there was a stigma, there was cultural pressure, you don’t talk like this. You don’t sit around with law enforcement officers and talk about you wish you could bring back lynching. You don’t say that. Maybe I’m wrong about all of this. It feels right now, though, that something is happening, that something has been scratched, some wound has been opened up.

Yes. What do you think about? I mean, it’s always been there, but there was an attempt to appeal to the better angels. Like, that’s not who you want to be. That’s not happening anymore.

And it does go back to this. Now, just let it rip. You know, show how brave you are. By saying these outrageous, bigoted things show how willing you are to fight by throwing out these two African American state representatives because, you know, we’re in this war and we don’t care what they call us. We don’t care what they say about us or or even how it looks.

I think you are right on all points. I think you’re feeling about this and your instincts are spot on. I’m gonna say something may sound a little bit surprising. But I think it’s very constructive. In one sense, I’m very glad for all of this.

Because I’d really rather see and know that that exists, that that’s how my neighbor feels. About me. Growing up, I would spend my summers in South Sarah Longwell, and the one thing I always appreciate about the South is they would always tell you what they thought of you. As a black child or as a black man or as a black woman because they would put on the front of their buildings for a white only and I remember taking my aunt who worked at a country club in Orangeburg. And I took her Bulwark.

She worked the late shift from, like, you know, nine to whatever. And I took her to drop her off, and I pulled up to the front of the building. And she looked, there’s, oh, baby, I can’t go in through the front door. I said, I said, why not? I mean, you’re going to work.

Right? She said, no. No. No. That I can’t.

I’m not allowed to do that. And then she pointed up and showed me the sign instead for white, don’t we? This was not nineteen fifty seven. Right? This was in the early eighties.

In the eighties. In the eighties, I ran against a gentleman for the championship of the R and C. In two thousand nine, who was still a member of a country club that was notorious. For not allowing Jews nor African Americans to become members. Once that got exposed, he resigned the country club.

But then when he lost, he rejoined.

Convenient. Here’s the

rub. I’d rather know that about you and others. Because now I know what I’m dealing with, where we have been lulled into this sense of complacency in the past is when people hide it. And they shroud it and they don’t express it. We know of this in the north.

I’ve been to a lot of cities in the north where you can cut the tension around race with a knife. But nobody wants to say it. Everyone pretends to be your friend. Everyone’s patting you in the back, but they don’t mean it. So in one sense, this visceral expression and exposure is important for the country to see and it goes back to the point I made Charlie Sykes still haven’t dealt with this issue of race between black folk and white folks.

Everything else will take care of itself. Everything else, I think, pivots off of that. But until we’re honest about that relationship and how we ultimately want it to be, the fact that you’ve got people in power shariffs, police, sitting around, talking, and wishing to him. I really wish we could bring back lynching. Why do you wanna lynch somebody?

What are you hoping to do with that? Here’s the other piece. For all the things you can say about Trump, the one thing Trump did was he took the band aid off. And he gave the permission that was necessary for people to behave this way. You know, and people can scream at that thought if they want to.

But Donald Trump was the one who was standing up at Israelis talking about how he would knock the crap out of someone who disagreed with him. Right? And pushing these other narratives out there referring to people brown skinned individuals, Mexicans, and other Hispanics, as murderers and rapists. So if I refer to you that way openly and now as animals? Yes.

And then people gonna look at you and go yeah, there goes a murder or rapist. So he gave them permission to sort of put it out there and that’s where we are now. And the central thing, Charlie, is in the past, our leaders were a key ingredient. To helping us deal with these issues and learning how to talk about and confront our own racism, our own feelings about others. And when those leaders now are the ones who are validating and perpetuating and pushing out those ugly narratives, there is no more permission structure because guess what is gone?

It’s it’s a free for all. Well,

listen to you, it also occurs to me that, you know, we’re having these debates about should we teach the history of racism. It’s not the history of racism. This is not something in our history. This is something in our culture. This is something in our lives.

And the story you’re telling about you and your aunt, I mean, that is within our memory. And so for people who want to say, we just need to move past it. I think that the right has gone through several, you know, stages here. You know, there were a lot of folks who just decided, I think, I mean, maybe it was in the eighties or the early nineties that we just need to kind of move past Okay. We’ve solved all of those problems.

We need to, you know, just not talk about it anymore. Right. Now there is this desire to say we cannot talk about it. I mean, this backlash this post George Floyd backlash on of the right where you have demagogues like Christopher Ruffo who basically is is saying that any conversation that makes you feel uncomfortable about race, we should stigmatize as part of critical race theory, and that we should pass laws prohibiting teachers from being able to discuss it. I mean, the backlash has now been weaponized by government power in a way that, you know, back in the days of you know, Jack Kemp, you know.

And, I mean, a lot of these guys, you know, hole they were, you know, the the only the Empower America bit, ma’am. This was, like, Republicans would have a different approach to race. They would take it very seriously. Yeah. You you even had the the autopsy in the RNC.

We have to change all of this. All of that. That’s all part of the before Trump era. It’s all

been wiped away on the right. And Trump came down those stairs. And in literally a forty five second span of time, crap all over that autopsy. And the party said and did nothing. I remember calling up Ryan’s or sending him a text and saying, dude, Your next move is to call Donald Trump down to Washington, sit his ass down and give him that autopsy and tell him this is what the Republican Party is doing on this subject of building and expanding and growing the party, not calling people murderers and rapists.

And he didn’t do it. He didn’t do it. Instead, he got on the train, went to New York and started kissing the butt. Bending the knee. Oh,

yeah. I remember that in real time.

And so here we are. Again, when the leadership capitulates to the source of the ugliness, competulates to the bad stuff. Imagine the party leaders in the nineteen fifties when the John Burch Society tried to infiltrate the Republican Party saying, yeah, y’all come on in. Imagine what that would be like, but they didn’t.

In the time that we have left, you have your own excellent podcast. In an episode you released last week, you talked with Larry Hogan. And, you know, Larry Hogan, I’m sure you’ve had many conversations with him about things like we’re talking about right now. I mean, Larry Hogan, the outgoing governor of Sarah Longwell. You, of course, were lieutenant governor of Maryland.

And a lot of people thought Larry Hogan was gonna run for president. It would have been a quick sodic bid, but he decided he was not going to run. He said his heart was in it. But his head told him that it just wasn’t gonna happen. So Why do you think the Larry Hogan’s of the world?

Just look at the Republican Party and go. Yeah. There’s really no lane for me.

Right. Because there isn’t. Yeah. But we won’t allow it And here’s the frustration. It’s not that, you know, we don’t expect Charlie Sykes thirty, thirty five percent even forty percent of who just wanna be generous of the Maga Republicans won’t allow it, is that the remaining sixty to seventy percent of Republicans seem uninterested in creating it.

We lose sight of the fact that in every one of our election cycles, whether it’s off your elections or presidential cycles. Congressional cycles doesn’t matter. The turnout for our primaries is a very narrow twenty five percent.

That

means you have a significant number of Republicans who don’t participate in the process. Yes. So we we sort of create this this foregone conclusion that there is no way to win, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And I’ve said to Larry and I and I’ve said to some other, candidates, potential candidates for the presidential as well as for other offices, that you’ve gotta create that lane. You’ve got to go to the remaining portion of the Republican base that, yeah, they didn’t like Trump’s behavior in his mouth and his tweets, but they like his politics.

How would they wanna rationalize it?

Those

folks are are in play. Yeah. They want change. They wanna move forward in a different direction. But what you’re seeing now with Mike Pompeo and others retreating and saying I’m not going to run, including my friend Larry Hogan, you’re seeding that ground to Trump because everyone else who remains, including Ron DeSantis, Alright?

They’re not beating Donald Trump. They’re not. My question to everyone who’s thinking about getting in this race is are you prepared to lose the primary in order to win the general? Because if you’re not, Don’t waste our time. Don’t waste your time.

You’re gonna wind up capitulating to Trump. Anyway, because the reality of it is, I don’t even know how Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or Tim Scott explain themselves. When the indictment came down on Donald Trump, they were the first ones to run to the bank of microphones to defend it. And to defend him. So if I’m Donald Trump, guess what my first ad against you is going to be.

It’s gonna be running your support of me.

Yeah. Exactly. No, I don’t think any of them have figured out that particular formula. In this Republican Party, how do you win a Republican primary without totally torching your ability to win a national election. And clearly, what they’re doing now is figuring, we’re just gonna light ourselves on fire, whether it is, you know, Wars on Disney or book bands or whatever it is that Ron DeSantis is doing.

We’re Nikki Haley feeling that now she needs to, you know, go along with the Bud Light thing. And And yet, this is what is required right now. What they think is required to get through a Republican primary. Well, good luck going forward. Although, I am not overly cocky about, you know, Joe Biden’s poll numbers and everything.

And I guess I would caution people just don’t think that it’s an automatic. It’s not a slam dunk. I worry about that.

No. It’s not because Democrats don’t know how to get out of their own way. They’re the most politically inept people I’ve and I don’t even know how they survived this long in politics. I just don’t. I mean, you know, when your political opponent is digging a hole, you don’t get in it with

him.

Let them keep digging by themselves. When your political opponent is going out saying all all kinds of bad shit crazy stuff, you don’t get in the way of that. You don’t set up an administration that comes in the door with the winds of democracy in its sales and spend the first eighteen months talking about filibuster rules.

Oh my god. No. You go back to that first two years and the amount of time they spent fighting one another and the amount of energy that was spent by Democrats attacking other Democrats? Well, all of this was going along. It was almost like, okay, Trump has gone.

The the coup failed. Let’s go on and and we’re gonna scratch other issues here. And and they really squandered two years. I mean, maybe they’ll get it back at some point, you know, but counting on the Republicans to do it for them. I know it’s tempting, and I know that they live in their own.

And, see, this is the thing about it. I mean, you and I both know that the Fox folks live

in a bubble. Yes. I’m

not sure that progress is fully understand how they live at a bubble as well.

Yeah. They don’t. They don’t.

They don’t. And there’s not much we can do to tell them about it except hey, we have these podcasts. This is what we do. That’s why we hear, baby. Michael Steele.

It is always great to have you. Michael Steele is host of the Michael Secret Podcast, also a political analyst for MSNBC, the former chair of the book a national committee and lieutenant governor of Maryland from two thousand three to two thousand seven in the before times. Michael, great to have you back.

Charlie is always great. I love our conversations, man. I look forward to

coming back. And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes We’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll do this all over again. The polar 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. Tell that to the deal breaker if you were to catch your partner being breastfed by their mother. The thing is that she’s here in the second hand.

So —

Right. — we really did

responsible journalist. In you, Aaron. It’s just an allegation. Yeah.

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

Terrible if true. And definitely a deal breaker.

Useful idiots. Wherever you listen.