No Justice, No Jeeps

Welcome to beg to Beg to Differ. The Bulwark weekly roundtable discussion, featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right on Mona Sharon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bulwark, I’m joined by one of our regulars, Damon Linker, who writes the sub stack newsletter notes from the middle ground. Ben Willis, a senior fellow at the brookings institution, an editor in chief lawfare is sitting in for Will Saletan today, and Amy Stoddard, now of the bulwark, is sitting in for Linda Chavez. Our special guest this week is Francis Fukuyama.

He is the Olivier No Malini senior fellow at Stanford University Freeman’s Spogli Institute for International Studies, and he is the author of many sprawling scholarly yet general interest books that have affected the way all of us see the world. And we are delighted to have you all thank you one and all. And I invited you here, Frank, to talk about your interesting article entitled in defense of the deep state that you published in Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration. And just to set the table a little bit for our listeners. The idea of a deep state was not something that was discussed in this country until the Trump era.

In twenty seventeen, Steve Bannon famously declared that it was going to be the policy of the Trump administration to deconstruct the administrative state and later, New Kingridge and others began to talk about the deep state in the United States. A a term that had been associated with Turkey, but not so much with us though as you point out in the piece, there is a long tradition of suspicion in this country of government bureaucracy and of government itself. And so this attack on the deep state by the Trump Margo wing of the Republican Party was playing into some very old themes. So you have written a piece where you say that the deep state or the administrative state needs defending. So what is your elevator pitch about why we need to stand up for bureaucracy?

Well, sure, Mona, I think that you simply cannot have a modern democracy without a competent professional bureaucracy civil servants that are chosen on the basis of merit rather than on the basis of political patient is. That’s the system that we used to have before the passage of the pendleton Act back in eighteen eighty three. Where everybody was basically a political appointee. So it’s just become a staple of Republican rhetoric these days to say that they’re going to somehow abolish the administrative state. Viveak Ramoswamy is the latest in the Republican debate.

He says he’s gonna fire seventy five percent of civil servants and abolish the IRS of any number of other cabinet departments And if a Republican is elected next year, it doesn’t have to be Donald Trump. I think any Republican is then going to carry out a plan that’s been developed at Heritage and in other places to vast easily increase the number of political appointees and then to fire as many bureaucrats as possible. Numbers, you know, currently about four thousand turnover between administrations, and they wanna raise that number to, I don’t know, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand. And I just think that This is going to be a devastating and disastrous attack on our professional civil service, Americans do not appreciate how important it is to have basically nonpartisan people with some expertise and devotion to public service running the US government. And what I find dismaying is I can’t think of a Democrat who has stood up and tried to defend the administrative state.

Every Republican wants to get rid of the administrative state, and nobody is explaining to the American people why you need to delegate some important authorities to people that know what they’re doing. It’s a little bit long for an elevator, but that’s my pitch.

Yes. Well, and I will quote from your piece. You said, quote, we do not want elected politicians to make decisions, for example, on setting interest rates or deciding which banks to bail out to determine schedules for air force aircraft maintenance or to certify particular drugs as safe and effective, just to name a few. But you do acknowledge in the piece that some of the conservative critiques about overreaching bureaucracy have merit, and you cite a few examples like the EPA, waters of the United States, decision, which was recently overturned by the Supreme Court. So you say, according to this EP interpretation of the law that in order to be considered a navigable water, the land did not have to contain any actual water, but could include dry land that was used by migratory birds.

And then you write this, very funny. Indeed, the birds did not have to actually use the land. In the words of one commentator, it was enough that a, quote, wayward goose glance longingly at a given parcel of land, unquote, for it to be considered under federal jurisdiction. And you give other examples So, there’s no question that sometimes bureaucracy can be over waning. And so you acknowledge that, but then you say, well, but the Supreme Court overturns that or there are checks, but I would challenge you on that and just say, well, you gave examples of where the bureaucracy was pared back, but arguably those are the exception.

Like most of the time, people don’t have the wherewithal or the ability to challenge some of these rules, and they can be incredibly disruptive and expensive and all of that. So, what do you say to that criticism?

Well, I guess it’s a matter of balance because you can certainly find cases of bureaucratic overreach. If you listen to the rhetoric of a lot of Republicans, you know, they would have you believe that we’re living in this bureaucratic tyranny where or subject to these rules that nobody voted on. Now, first of all, I think a lot of those things exist at a state level rather than at a federal level. I mean, living in California, I can give you lots of examples sort of out of control rulemaking, but I think that people don’t recognize that there are actually mechanisms of control for cutting back these authorities, and the real failure has actually been legislative. One of the cases that I cite is actually this West Virginia versus EPA ruling where again the the court cut back the authority of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.

And I think that is something that could have been done by Congress. Congress could have changed the statute to say that carbon emissions are something that fall under the purview of the Clean Air Act. But because of our polarization, and inability to legislate sensibly, we didn’t do that. And therefore, the EPA acted on its own. So I think that These agencies are in a way trying to fill a vacuum that is left by the dysfunctions of our political system.

Yeah. And you make that point about the federal system as well where the Republicans who are saying they want to dismantle the administrative state or the deep state in a point all of these loyal political appointees to these posts are really in a sense saying, that because they cannot gain enough votes to pass the policies that they want, that they’re going to use executive power to do something that is really the province of the legislature. But, okay, Ben Willis, you wanted to get in on this.

Yeah. So my question is your defense is, as I read it anyway, of the kind of conventional post nineteen thirties era administrative state. It seems to me that there’s something novel in the branding of this as the deep state, particularly its law enforcement apparatus, which is an intelligence apparatus which has connotations from the Turkish and Egyptian and Pakistani examples where the term comes from of a kind of permanent military strata that can kind of get rid of the democratic super strata at its will and has its own business interests that are kind of the real government. And I I guess I’m curious whether you’re framing of this as a defense of the deep state, whether you’re adequately distinguishing between the American administrative state and countries where the term deep state comes from which is, I think, what the coiners of the phrase in the American context are sort of trying to imply about the American system that it’s really actually ruled by a sort of shadowy cabal of military intelligence, child molesters who eat in the basement of pizza places where they keep the kids.

Yeah. Well, that’s Yeah. Frank, before you answer that, let me just add to it that in twenty twenty, none other than the White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, when he was asked about claims that the deep state was working against Trump, and he said that this was absolutely one hundred percent true.

Well, look, part of the reason I use the deep state instead of the administrative state is is precisely to neutralize the very sinister and pejorative connotations of that term because in fact, I think the security part of the American state is pretty transparent and pretty much well under the control of political authorities. There is no Turkish style military cabal This is something that’s in the fervent imaginations of various conspiracy theorists on the right. And so what I wanted to do by using that somewhat provocative title was to say, yeah. Okay. We got a deep state, which is otherwise known as the administrative state, and it’s pretty harmless because Actually, we have the mechanisms for controlling it.

You know, now that Trump is under multiple indictments, they’re doubling down on this idea that There’s this extremely sinister security component, but that’s a charge that really needs to be answered very clearly.

Okay, Damon Lincoln. Did you have thoughts about the peace or about the deep state in general?

The deep state. We go way back. I think it’s a great piece. I hope listeners will read it. Despite the fact that it sounds like it’s in a fairly at Struce academic journal that is extremely well written and accessible and gives a very useful kind of analytic history of the civil service and the bureaucracy that is the necessary component of modern liberal democracy.

I mean, you cannot have as Frank talks about in the piece, you cannot have a modern state, a nation state with the complications of our economy and public health and just running the edifice of it if you don’t have dispassionate professional, educated civil servants who work in this field and oversee it. Political appointees are often not going to have, enough of that pertise, but the bigger danger is that if you do use Schedule F as Trump wanted to do to summarily fire many more layers down into the bureaucracy and replace them with political appointees. You will, as Frank notes in the piece, get far more corruption. You’ll also get a lot of ignorance, people who have absolutely no idea how to do things that the government regularly does to make our lives better, make the country safer, and more confidently run And so this is the kind of dark irony of the way Trumpist populism is a kind of sinister heretical offshoot of Reaganite skepticism about federal government power because What you’re likely to end up with is a far more dysfunctional corrupt and badly run government that then can be used for the foreseeable future as even more evidence for the need to make deeper cuts.

The idea being that the worse you make the government in providing services and running the show, the more effective you will be at making the case for getting rid of it even more fully. So the piece is a great rebuttal to that, and I can’t think of many more topics more pressing, at least on the domestic side of our politics than that. I mean, it isn’t just Trump by this point. If it was DeSantis, And even some of the people down in single digits in the primary who are trying to sort of unite Regonism with elements of right wing populism. I wonder if really any of them would be able to avoid the pressure to institute schedule f if they actually won the presidency in twenty twenty four because this has become kind of the common sense position for the right these days that this is the way to go is to deconstruct the administrative state or reconstitute it in terms of seizing the administrative state for right wing ends.

I don’t know of any of the folks trying to win the nomination on the right these days who would not pursue some version of that. So it’s a very important topic.

Frank, answer that if you like, but if you don’t have an immediate reply, I wanna direct you to something else that your piece prompted thoughts on. Namely that it does cause us to sort of step back and say, what is government for? I mean, in the era of these culture wars, people do lose sight of the fact. That if you are fortunate enough to live in an advanced wealthy democracy, the most important things that the state does are the things that we absolutely take for granted. They make sure that we have pure food and drugs.

They make sure that the planes land safely. They make sure at the local level that your trash is picked up, that the water that comes out of your tap is fit to drink. And so on and so forth, These are all the sort of things that in a non functional state go badly wrong. I mean, of course, in the worst example that that we can think of in recent history was the awful thing that happened in Libya where a dysfunctional state, a state at war with itself, didn’t maintain the dams, and you had one of the greatest man made tragedies of recent memory with thousands upon thousands of people washed away. And You know, taking those things for granted though can lead to problems, right, if we don’t maintain.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. No. I mean,

that’s the problem with being secure and pretty rich is that you do take a lot of things for granted. You know, Michael Lewis wrote this very nice book called The Fifth Risk about the transition from Obama to Trump. And one of the things he pointed out is that Americans simply do not understand what their government does, and and it’s important. So for example, The commerce department, he pointed out sixty percent of the commerce department goes to Noah, the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration that produces all of the weather reports in the United States. So if you abolish the commerce department, you’re not gonna get accurate forecasts of hurricanes and so forth.

It was very amusing. Rick Perry, former governor of Texas, was actually made energy secretary, which he had vowed to abolish. Well, it turns out, what does the energy department do? Rick Perry thought it was about gas. You know, it’s not.

Yes. They run all of the national labs. You know, Los Alamos, Sandia, Lawrence Livermore. So if you abolish the energy department, you’re not gonna have any expertise about nuclear weapons, you know. So It’s just it really drives me crazy that people simply don’t understand how important modern government is the last little anecdote I’ll give you, I I’m of an age now where I had to sign up for Social Security.

So I went to the local Social Security Office in Mountain View, and there’s a long line waiting to talk to somebody. You take a number. So I was just thinking to myself, alright, if Ramaswamy is seventy five percent cut in personnel happens. What’s that line gonna look like? Yeah.

You know, is it gonna get any shorter?

Right. Yeah. And, of course, it’s now axiomatic within Republican policies that nobody can speak of reforming the entitlement at all. So on the one hand, they are for a huge nanny state, but they don’t want anybody to know how to run it. I guess.

Okay. Well, thank you for that great discussion. A b, did you have a comment or a question, and before we move to our next topic?

Yep. To be brief, I do agree with Damon and I commend it to the listeners because of what Frank just said, which is that there really is a lack of awareness about what Congress is suppose the whole of government, but what Congress particularly is supposed to be doing with its powers, a third branch. And in its refusal to, this article really shows the consequences of that paralysis and and the unfortunate outcome. And I think it’s important for people to understand that. I was fascinated that he said at the start that no Democrat is out there making a defense since We can’t, for all the reasons you’ve all described, rely on Republicans to step up and try to argue for a competent administrative state, which basically sustains our global competitiveness and serves our people.

It would seem that Democrats would have to if there’s any hope of any kind of reforms, some Democrat not running for office would have to step in and start talking about ways to improve delegation and increase accountability. And it seems like the only hope of any kind of reforms would come from Democrats moving to the middle. So my question to Frank is do you see anyone on the democratic side some kind of gray beard who could who has the interest in this? And the platform to take on something like that?

Well, quite honestly, no. The Democrats have a really big problem. I mean, I do think that there is actually a certain point to schedule f in that over the years, there have been too many protections put in place for federal employees. So it’s very, very difficult to get rid of them or to discipline them for poor behavior. And the reason for that is really the public sector unions.

You know, I tried to push Max Steyer at the partnership for public service to get the Biden administration in its first year to think about a more general reform of the civil service and his lobbyists came back and said absolutely no room for that because the public sector unions simply will not hear of any kind of modification of their protections. And so There is a problem on the democratic side that they they want the government to do a lot of stuff, but they create a government that is so encumbered by rules that you can’t actually make it more functional. But I do think, nonetheless, you know, you should get some politician to at least try to explain to people why the government does a lot of really important stuff that they take for granted and that they’d be in big trouble if it didn’t exist.

Okay. Excellent. And great transition to our next topic because you mentioned the problem of public sector unions. And this week, we have watched the spectacle of a private sector union going out on strike, namely the United Auto Workers. The strike has now been ongoing for nearly a week.

The leader of the United Auto Workers is now threatening that, if they don’t get some sort of progress that they will expand the strike, to other plants. It is now just on particular models. Actually, this gave an opportunity for a fairly funny slogan because senators, John Federman, Jared Brown, and Gary Peters showed up on a picket line and joined in the chant of no justice, no jeeps, which is kind of clever. This is a really ticklish problem for Joe Biden. Because the two parts of the democratic coalition are arguably intentioned here the environmentalists push and that most Democrats, I think, would consider themselves to be environmentalists.

Certainly, this administration is very concerned about climate and the workers who are concerned about the rise of electric vehicles because, you know, there’s something two thousand parts that go into an internal combustion engine, but there are only about forty that go into an electric. So the need for workers obviously dramatically, declines. And then you also have the problem that The unions are asking for a lot here. They’re asking for a forty percent pay raise over four years and they only wanna work a thirty two hour instead of a forty hour work week. And this is going to amount to about an average of about three hundred thousand dollars a year in salary.

Now they say well, but Mary Sarah Longwell the other executives get huge increases, but, you know, that’s, gonna be a tough sell. So, AB Stoddard, let’s start with you. Do you think this puts the Biden administration in a tough position. I mean, Trump has announced he’s gonna go out there and campaign with union members on September twenty seventh to do counter programming to the next Republican debate.

Yeah. And we can expect more of what he said on his meet the press interview over the weekend where he uses the word China as much as he can, trying to make people believe that all of the EV production is gonna happen in China, not here. He’s gonna try to muddle up the facts. And just be seen with the workers. I don’t know if he’s gonna take a specific position.

We don’t know yet, but He’s looking for a really good photo op, and I I bet he’s gonna get it because these members are culturally trump’s orders now, and they’ve drifted from the Democratic Coalition. So if you add that to the fact that Joe Biden is in this bind on policy, You know, he’s shoveling all these subsidies into EV production and right to work states. It means fewer jobs overall. It means fewer union jobs. And then now you have the hat of the UAW basically saying our endorsements are going to be earned.

So he’s holding his endorsement that Biden desperately wants hostage what? What is it that the UAW can extract from the administration now I just I, you know, maybe Joe Biden pulls a rabbit out

of a hat, but you can tell by their silence, they’re not really sure what they’re gonna do. Yeah. Ben, what do you make of the equities here? What do you make of the argument that the union is being unrealistic and risking bankrupting the car companies. I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time that GM and, well, it used to be Chrysler now.

Stelantis went bankrupt because of overly generous packages for their workers.

So Well, So first of all, I have a general prejudice that when people are actually willing to go out on strike, it’s usually because there is some merit to their grievances and demands. I also think the delta between what a union will demand at the beginning of a strike and what it will settle for at the end of one is not zero. So I don’t think you should take the forty percent and four day work week as the UAW’s bottom line here. I think rather you should take it as their opening position in a negotiation that they expect to be hard fought. The problem for the auto workers, and this has been a problem for really the last fifty years has been that there is stiff competition from overseas And there is stiff competition from overseas where labor costs are lower than they are here.

And that are more than capable of producing cars that are competitive and in some cases market preferable to ones that are produced domestically. And so what we used to think of as a completely dominant US manufacturing just isn’t anymore, and the electric vehicle version of that same problem is just the latest iteration of a very long set of cycles of this in which the unions make what may be very reasonable demands in the context of the domestic economy, and they do have the effect of incentivizing offshoring and making US car makers less competitive with their foreign competitors and also less nimble because union contracts do tend to make you know, manufacturing of this type a little bit lumbering. And so, I look. I mean, my basic view with all labor disputes of this type is the union should demand what it can get and the businesses are responsible for watching their bottom line, and the good is something like where the two can meet. And I will add that on the political side, everybody’s talking about the consequences that this has or the the potentially negative consequence that this has for Democrats and for Joe Biden.

I actually wonder about the opposite that these plants are Some of them are in so far, there’s only three, but they’re in swing states. You know, they’re in Michigan and Ohio. And these are places where among other things Republicans have made a play to be the party of working people. And you have figures like Trump and also JD Vance in Ohio, right, who have kind of aligned themselves with traditional working class concerns, albeit mostly on cultural issues. But here you have an acute situation where people are feeling pinched enough that they’re actually willing to walk off their jobs and stand in picket lines and maybe notice which politicians come and clearly say they are supporting the UAW in this.

And I actually wonder if it may pull the mask off some of the more self consciously populist Republican politicians who when push comes to shove won’t actually stand with a union on a picket line against management.

Yeah. That’s gonna be very interesting to watch. Damon, the, union though has to be aware that it isn’t just foreign competition that they have to be concerned about. It’s competition from red states where, by the way, a lot of these foreign companies are setting up shop in the south, in Tennessee and Kentucky, places like that, and where Tesla also is operating, and their non union forces. They earn less per hour than people in the Detroit area and then the midwestern states.

And, you know, the question is, are they gonna be possibly to echo Ben? Are they gonna be incentivizing the companies to consider relocating to places where their labor costs are lower. The labor is the one variable in a car’s manufacturer that is negotiable. I mean, they can’t really do much about the cost of their inputs, but they can do something about labor.

Well, exactly. I mean, I think the real subtext to this more than auto workers simply wanting to increase their hourly pay and maybe cut back on the number of hours required to work per week is precisely that context This is not as Trump indicates primarily about Chinese competition and jobs being shipped overseas. It’s about jobs being shipped from northern union states to southern right to work states, combined with what you said earlier, Mona, about the production of electric vehicles being much simpler with a lot fewer parts than internal combustion engines. So you combine them both And the fear is that within the next few years, these very factories up north that are already paying these auto workers pretty well for their labor might just shut down entirely in favor of new plants in Georgia and Tennessee and other places. Where they can make electric vehicles at far lower cost and pay the workers a lot less.

Sort of like with the strike that’s been hampering the writers in Hollywood, there are these larger structural changes happening to the economy and our society because of technological advancements that I think in the longer run are going to make a lot of this inevitable. And I’m not sure. Maybe in the short term, the union can win some victory here, but I don’t know in the middle to long term whether they really will be able to simply because of these larger dynamics. A lot of these problems we’re talking about that are facing Biden that he wants to be a president who’s helping to encourage the transition to renewable energy sources and away from false oil fuels while continuing to drill for oil and keep those prices down, that’s one set of kind of difficult balancing or trade offs that he’s dealing with. But then he gives money to a lot of red states that are right to work in order to give them an economic leg up and kind of undercut the Republican appeal to the voters in those states showing look.

I’m the president of all of America. I’m gonna help even red states. I’m unlike Trump who comes out and just basically says grew you to any state that didn’t vote for him. Biden is not gonna do that. And that’s gonna mean he’s gonna transition to electric vehicles by helping to open plants in these red states and give jobs in these places, helping them economically.

That ends up leading to this problem that it accelerates this trend that has the Northern Union voters that he and his party rely on going out on strike whereas the Republicans on the one side, you have Trump who is going to go, he says to give a rally for the striking workers as counter programming to the debate next week. And when he does it, he’s going to just talk nonsense about how oh, this is all about China. The just kind of word salad stuff that he’s gonna throw out that is not gonna point take the real material difficulties and trade offs that are what’s really driving this. And then on the other side, you have poor Tim Scott, who comes out this week, and says, oh, good. An opportunity to show that I’m just like Ronald Reagan all these years later.

And so he says, It sure was great when Ronald Reagan fired those air traffic controllers all those years ago implying that he thinks the solution should be that the president fires the UAW workers. Like, first of all, at the most basic level, it’s the difference between public sector unions and private and private companies and the fact that his own party is trying to appeal to those kinds of working class voters Yeah. I mean, I’ll be surprised if he, like, ends up settling above two percent in the polls. But that points to the same kind of post material fantasy politics that we now see on the right, whether it’s Trump with his fake populist appeals to phantom threats and causes, or Tim Scott, who just wants kind of sit there idly dreaming. This is something that a president can just snap his fingers and look tough.

It’s just not serious, but we’re still left with the question of which kind of politics is going to actually appeal to voters. And I don’t know. Are the American people truly capable of grappling with a material world where there are real trade off and you need to sometimes give politicians credit for doing the best job they can under the circumstances. Or do they want one kind of fantasy or another, and Republicans are offering a lot of the latter.

Frank, president Biden said that the transition to electric vehicles should be a win win for both the workers and the companies. And that seems like a little bit of fantasy politics too. I mean, this problem, this strike raises real divisions, don’t you think, with in the democratic coalition. It’s nice to have language and there was even a statement that was put out by a bunch of left wing environmentalists sort of saying, yes, we stand in solidarity with the workers here. But the fact is the workers are saying that they want their internal combustion jobs And even if it means that we’re not gonna move as quickly to a greener kind of transportation because that’s in their interests.

And so they are really not in alignment with those who think that our top priority has to be climate. Yes?

Oh, of course. Well, this is not a new phenomenon. I think that this struggle between environmentalists and workers wanting to protect their jobs goes back. Many decades, but it’s particularly acute just because of these technological advancements that’s really going to, in, in many ways, inevitably, state, the entire auto industry, it’s not just the big three workers. It’s all the people in the supply chains because electric vehicles are not just cheaper and easier to assemble.

They also don’t need as much maintenance. And so all of the auto, you know, the muffler shop and and window repair places. They’re just not gonna see the kind of demand for their services in the future. And I just don’t see how auto workers can really resist this for any extended period of time because it is fundamentally driven by this big change in technology.

Alright. Well, we shall see. Certainly, Michigan is a key state in the electoral college. So how this works out is incredibly critical for twenty twenty four. Alright.

With that, let’s turn to treatment of another subject which is how the press should handle Trump. We we had the spectacle this week of Kristen Welker as the new host of meet the press big sort of splashy interview with Donald Trump. And she attempted to question him in a way that was not rolling over, but, a lot of people think she failed, a, b, where do you come down on this and how should the press approach interviewing someone who is unique in the sense that he will just spew lies so fast and so furiously that, it is very, very hard for the interviewer to keep up.

Well, I really I’m splitting the middle here. Mona, I really agree with so much of what Jonathan wrote yesterday and so much also of what Will Saletan wrote. And I think when I watched the CNN town hall in May, because there was a live audience, it was cheering for Trump, the whole time, laughing at Eugene Carroll and his insults at her, you know, just littling the moderator. I felt that the answer there was to have Daniel Dale there. Fact checker do on screens that people at home could see at the same time that people in the audience there could see fact checking every time he came up with a lie up next to Trump on stage.

That’s an idea for a live event. It’s very different when you’re trying to put together a television interview. Most Americans, I think will is trying to argue need to see Trump compulsively lying again. And not caring that he’s lying or not knowing that he’s lying and focused, you know, always on his grievance. I think they know that about him.

At the same time, you can’t really fact check them. You can’t count on Americans to read the fact checks later that come out online or that the network runs on their website or anything like that. So they really are taking it in and a lot of it, I think, can be believed, or unless the the anchor is so adept at interrupting him to refute the the lies. So it’s a challenge always. It it normalizes him.

It’s always an opportunity for him. The town hall in May was particularly disturbing because he just owned the whole crowd from start to finish. So I think that the media has a very tough to ahead. I don’t know that I have the answer for how to do it in television. I really don’t.

I really see both points, but I think if the next anchor who sits down from the mainstream media Trump Will Saletan think up maybe a new way to use the fact checking.

Ben Wittis, I’ve only seen one person handle this Well, and that was Jonathan Last. But he had the facts at his fingertips. He was ready. He had prepped intensively and so he was prepared for every lie that Trump was gonna throw out there. He was ready to rebut it.

Most people are not that good. Do they have to interview him at all? Mean, wasn’t this just a ratings grab for NBC? Why do you have to interview one?

Yeah. I I wouldn’t. I mean, if you had the opportunity, Mona, to have him on beg to differ, you might say know that I don’t really think he has very much to contribute. The world is not lacking for the voice of Donald Trump. What reason really is there to do it.

Right. I do think one of the major beneficiaries of this is Jack Smith because he keeps making admissions that are contrary to his interests in litigation that he has pending. And so there may be some public goods associated with giving him lots of rope to hang himself with over and over again, but they’re not public intellectual goods. They’re not informational goods. So I I actually don’t really think he has anything to say that materially contributes to the conversation in a way that is enriching.

I agree with Will that he said a lot of things that are reasonable person would listen to and say, oh, that’s absurd. But I’m not really sure who we’re trying to convince of what at this point. Right? And I don’t think we have a very good sense of what Trump says that moves those people in pro or anti trump directions. And so I I actually look at it from a very simple minded point of view, which is the one you just articulated, which is, well, what’s interesting about talking to him at this point?

What’s journalistically valuable about it. And I think the answer to that is really nothing. And it’s just a kind of ratings grab And I think if you wanna interview Trump in a responsible way, the way to do it is the way Bob Bulwark and Susan Glasser and Peter Baker have done it, which is you sit down with him and you do it in writing. And you put it in books. So you slow the whole process down because that is a process that he doesn’t seem to understand doesn’t favor him, but he doesn’t really have good control over it.

And the more control you give him the more abusive it gets.

Yeah. What about that, Frank? You know, television is his Metier. He can blast his fire hose of falsehood. It does make sense to deny him that platform if it’s within one’s control.

Right?

Yeah. I would, however, point back to something that Ben just said that it does seem to me that Welker did get this one confession out of him that is gonna be legally important. I mean, he basically said that denying the election wasn’t something my lawyers suggested to me. It was something I thought of myself at ten PM on election night. And I do think that that’s going to hurt him down the road.

Given that the rest of it is probably not gonna sway a whole lot of people. I think that in itself might actually have made the whole interview useful.

Damon, what do you think? Useful, not useful? Any rules for the road, for the future, and for the next year and two months? God Will Saletan only that?

Well, I agree that sitting down in that forum with just, you know, kind of all the formalities of a head of state interview directly asking him polite questions and always

And when Mr. Presenting can’t

contact you,

like, really irritates me.

And then moving, she had this agenda that she wanted to ask certain questions at any time He was filibuster and go off on his own lunacy instead of trying to pin him down and point out that he was lying instead she would be like, oh, okay. But we need to keep moving. Let’s keep moving on and get to what I wanna ask because I’m a journalist and I wanna ask forward president this question.

Let’s move on. Yeah.

Yeah. I do we wanna interview him at all at this point? He was president for four years. He was hanging out for years before that. This has been, like, eight years now.

You could make the case that the media contributed in an important way at the beginning of all of this in the fall of twenty fifteen and then through the Republican primaries and giving him tons of free media for people who had never entertained the idea of voting for such a figure. But by this point, I’m very much with those analysts and pundits who continually point out that he’s basically an incumbent. And, I don’t really see, like, that doing, like, real time fact checks. Is that gonna do any good? Can you imagine at this point?

There’s anyone watching this very carefully and paying attention and thinks, whoa. They really showed he lied about that one. I guess I won’t vote for Trump now. I mean, that’s just not how this works. If you care about facts and the reality based community, you’re not voting for Trump in the first place.

So the idea that we can somehow play Gotcha with him, and that’s gonna make some positive difference. I don’t buy that either. So maybe in the end, in my own way, I’ve ended up where AB started us out with, which is sort of, like, in the middle saying, yeah, this kinda stinks, but I don’t really see what better option there is other than tuning him out.

Okay. And with that, we will come to our final segment, which is our highlight or low light of the week, and we will start with our guest. Frankfukuyama.

The highlight, it may not qualify because it was a week ago that it happened, but I think it was the Ukrainian strike on Sebastian poll. That managed to basically put out a commission to Russian ships and their drydock system. It was a really stunning, successful operation. The low light. So I know that people have been talking about Tommy Tuberville for a long time, but he added to the offense by actually trying to get the Marine commandant exempted from his ban on promotions.

I mean, it’s just outrageous that a single senator can think that he can manipulate the system to that extent, the whole system of allowing all hundred senators to put these holds on personnel decisions. It’s ridiculous. It’s an example of what I once labeled Vetocracy. That is to say ruled by veto. And it’s a real defect in our political system.

Agreed, but I would just add that I don’t know why we’re not seeing Kamala Harris and Chuck tumor out, you know, on the shows and stuff railing against this and saying, our our military readiness is being harmed by this republican who will not allow these promotions to go through, and they should be up on their hind legs screaming about, you know, why they’re not? Okay. Damon Lincoln.

Well, this is absolutely a low light. In fact, it’s so low that it should probably count for two. It requires a bit of back story here. During the Trump administration, there was a self published book published under a pseudonym by an individual named bronze age pervert. And this book actually became a bit of a sensation with people buying it on Amazon, and it’s even been reported that this book was widely read and passed around in the Trump administration by young staffers It was an appalling book very much in a Nietzian tradition that among other things advocated for a strong eugenics program to eliminate mediocrity from the race and spewed contempt at the majority of human beings, which the author described as bugmen, So this was pretty much a neo Nazi track.

Well, it turns out the author of this is a guy named Kostin Allah Marie, who is a PhD from the Department of Political Science at Yale. And to get that PhD, he wrote a doctoral dissertation which this guy has now self published titled selective breeding and the birth of philosophy. Yet another kind of Nietzschean tract in which there’s all kinds of wild stuff about among other things as you tell from the title, kind of early ancient world eugenics programs, somehow being connected to the origin of philosophy in ancient Greece, a defense of a very kind of nihilistic character in Plato’s Gorgias named Calocles as a preeminent philosopher. Caliclees is sort of notorious in the dialogue for threatening to beat Socrates to a pulp. He’s a kind of hero of this book.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, you know, I wouldn’t wanna be accused of giving this individual any publicity, but the fact is he doesn’t need any Over the previous weekend, this self published book about philosophy rose to number twenty three on Amazon. That’s not twenty three in political philosophy or ancient Greek history. That’s twenty three of all books on Amazon. And it was then endorsed by some very chummy tweets by the likes of Christopher Ruffo and Richard Hanania who has a big book out criticizing the woke turn on the left.

Both of them, you know, given Costa Nala Maria, a big Pats on the back for this new book of his. Just to show, when we talk about the dangers of the right on this program, we do mean Trump. We do mean all those republicans in Congress who say and do these crazy things, but there’s an intellectual movement on the right going on too that is dangerous and threatens to make all of the more real world political craziness even more ominous.

Thank you for that. You know, when I was younger and thought of myself as a very active anti communist, you know, my friends and I used to say boy, you know, no matter how many crimes it commits, no matter how terrible. It’s results for the average person’s life. You just can’t kill the idea of communism, and I did not think that I would now be thinking and seeing that neither can you kill the idea of fascism? It’s just shocking.

Okay. AB Stoddard.

Okay. I want to, my first beg to differ as a Bulwark staffer, take the unpopular position of low lighting, the change to the Senate dress code. I know it’s really cool to think it’s just cool. And I know I’m stodgy, but I think it stinks. I agree.

Yep. If you have enough respect to dress up for a funeral, you can dress up for your job as a senator. In the United States Senate. And if you don’t want to, you can have another job. And I cannot believe I’m about to quote Kevin McCarthy, but I am.

He said, let’s be respectful of the institution, but more importantly, let’s be respectful to your constituents who are lending you that voice. And I agree. So that is my low light. And to cheer everyone up on this really dark week, I wanna highlight that I stumbled upon the good news that Henry Winkler and Dolly Parton both have books coming out about their lives in October, and most all of you would be happy to hear that at least one of them, if not both of them. So I’m trying to end on a positive note.

Well, thank you for that.

Can I just say that I second AB on the dress code thing? I am a liberal and I endorse this message.

Oh, thank you.

Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. I also endorse it. I think clothing does convey respect.

And, I just wish that Kevin McCarthy had shown a little bit of respect for the office when people were trashing the capital. But oh, well. Okay. Ben Wittis.

So my highlight which again is a little bit more than a week old is as many listeners know. I have a weird hobby. Some people play tennis. Some people collect stamps. I travel the world harassing Russian diplomats with projectors.

And The other day, I was invited by the Ukrainian embassy in Washington to show up at their national independence day celebration, which is actually in August, but they observed it in September. They invited me to show up to project on their facility as an invitee, not as a harassing protester. So I did and I showed up at this event dressed in my usual less than holy respectable clothing. I did wear a Vichyvanka, which is the sort of traditional Ukrainian embroidery, but I was basically wearing street clothes only to find that there were multiple US senators there dressed appropriately, a, b, as well as the attorney general who gave a very moving speech about war crimes and at least one or two other cabinet secretaries. And so I found myself there projecting images of Ukrainian soldiers, giving the finger to Russian warships, and it was entirely delightful.

And it’s and I learned that it was nice to be invited to project on a diplomatic facility rather than doing it as a jerk, which brings me to my low light, which also involves the attorney general. I do expect to be rewarded for this in the next life, but I spent all of the morning and the early afternoon listening to Eric Garland’s testimony before the house judiciary committee And I have to say it was multiple hours of testimony. And there was from the Republican side, I think I can count on the finger of one hand, the number of questions that were not fevered conspiracy theories about the prosecution of Hunter Biden. And I have to say I was expecting it and it still shocked me how bad and in bad faith these questions were I think to link this to Damon’s point about scary intellectual movements of the right. This is the people’s house, the mass of elected representatives are all in on the idea that the most important thing to grill the attorney general about is the imagined sweetheart deal that the president’s son who, by the way, is being prosecuted in federal court has gotten at the hands of a justice department, you know, that has essentially farmed this out to a Trump appointed US attorney in Delaware.

So congratulations, guys. You had a lot of the attorney general’s time, and you wasted literally all of it.

Thank you, Ben. Agree a hundred percent. I did dip into it a little bit, and I heard one of the esteemed congressman asking the attorney general if he was in favor of more crime. So that was the flavor.

Yeah. And that was act actually one of the few that wasn’t about Hunter Biden. You know, that was one of the people who rose above the question to about whether the attorney general favored killing police officers in Wisconsin.

There you go. Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, I also have a low light, which is this. I mean, it’s almost funny, but not really, is that Trump and his you know, idiot son, Trump junior, are out promoting the idea that Trump is going to gain support among African Americans because now Trump has been arrested and has a mugshot.

And Trump told Hugh Hewitt that his support among Bulwark voters went up by four or five times since his arrest, and they are promoting this now It is hard to say how offensive this really is. You cannot overstate it really. I mean, the idea that African Americans in general are pro crime that they’re going to identify with somebody who was a criminal or an accused criminal is incredibly racist and insulting. And, of course, the fact is that I guess they might even actually believe this. They might not know very many black people or know that, you know, in African American communities, the support for things like defund the police is well below what you find among white progressives, for example, be African Americans who live in bad neighborhoods, and many don’t most African Americans don’t live in inter cities.

They live in suburbs, but anyway, when they do, they want good policing. They want responsible policing. They are not pro crime. Okay? They wanna be protected from criminals.

So, anyway, this is just offensive on so many levels. And, oh, yes, by the way. Is it true that Trump’s support among blacks has improved by four or five times since his arrest? Of course not. Another lie.

So with that, I want to thank Frank Fukuyama for joining us today and for writing a wonderful piece that stimulated a good discussion, and I’d like to thank Benjamin Willis for sitting in and AB Stoddard. And, of course, our own Damon Lincoln, who had to jump off. I want to also thank our producer, Katie Cooper, who is going to be leaving us now and we are going to have a new producer, but she is still gonna be available to offer her wisdom when we need it. And she has done an incredible, incredible job for us and For that, we are so grateful. And our sound engineer is Jonathan Siri and gonna get editing help this week from Jim Swift.

And with that, I want to thank our great listeners and say we will return next week as every week.