Only the Heroes Have Paid a Price . . . Until Now

Welcome to Begg to Beg to Differ. The Bulwark’ weekly roundtable discussion, featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and policy editor of the Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars Bill Gough Austin of the bookings institution and the Wall Street Journal and Linda Chavez of the Niskannon Center. Damon Linger is off this week.

But we are delighted to welcome to guests, Pete Weiner, of the Trinity Forum, and Kristen Dumay, professor of history at Calvin University, and author of a book that made quite a splash, it’s called Jesus and John Wayne, how White evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. Welcome, one and all. I think it’s particularly good timing to check-in with professor Dumay because the role of evangelicals, specifically white evangelicals is incredibly important in our politics, and it is also a source of a lot of worry. Pete, you’ve written about this in the Atlantic about how politics seems to have overtaken many denominations, many congregations in this country where pastors are leaving. They’re demoralized by the fact that their congregants seem to want politics instead of religion, but Kristen, I’m gonna start with you.

Your thesis as I understand it is that the embrace of Trump by evangelicals, and by the way, listeners, yes, we are gonna get to the indictments, so hang tight. But, your thesis as I understand it is that the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump is not a departure from their beliefs. It’s the fulfillment of their beliefs. Is that right?

Yes. And that’s a good synopsis. And I came to that conclusion by paying attention to evangelical popular culture. And particularly to evangelical ideas, about masculinity, and I had started noticing more than twenty years ago, a growing embrace of a very kind of militant, rugged, even militaristic conception of what it meant to be a Christian man, a kind of warrior. And I traced that up to the present and heard so many echoes of that in evangelical support for Trump.

He was their ultimate fighting champion. Who would do what needed to be done to advance their aims.

Now, this is interesting because at the same time you’re saying this was happening within the evangelical world. At the same time, there was a lot of worry that masculinity itself was in crisis in the larger society. So what’s the interaction there between evangelical pop culture and ordinary regular pop culture.

Yeah. Evendelicals are Americans. Right. And evangelicals do influence other Americans. So it’s always important to kind of keep those together, to hold those together.

That said, you you can see in the history of evangelicalism, recent history, kind of an ebb and flow of, you know, perceptions of masculinity and what’s wrong with masculinity. So if you go back to the nineteen nineties, you had the rise of promise keepers and an evangelical men’s movement. Where their preferred masculinity tended to be more of, kind of tender warrior motif or servant leader. A kind of kinder gentler one that maybe went hand in hand with a compassionate conservatism. And then you see that pendulum start swing and by the early two thousands, an embrace of a of much more of this kind of warrior mentality.

And you can see some similar patterns in the broader culture. And today, you you kind of see some parallels in terms of what we see happening in evangelicalism. And really brought to mainstream evangelicals through religious culture and some of what we see happening in some more fringe spaces like the manosphere, both really embracing this kind of rugged masculinity that is not uncommon if you look at, history of authoritarianism to be frank, right? It kind of goes hand in hand with a reactionary populism And so I think that’s what’s disturbing you see it kind of across the spectrum both in religious and in secular spaces.

So how do you analyze the dramatic change among evangelicals between the Clinton era and today. So in the Clinton time, leading evangelicals, and I think people in the pews as well had a very strong view that ethics and personal morality were incredibly important in a leader, and they felt strongly that Bill Clinton was failing them, failing the country in that regard. Now during the Trump era poll showed that there’s been a complete reversal and that evangelicals are the least likely to think that personal morality is important in a leader. Yeah.

Yeah. That survey data really does depict and dramatic style. You know, it’s it’s easy to kind of stand up for moral values when Bill Clinton is under critique. It’s proven much more difficult in recent years, particularly around Donald Trump. But I would say that if you go back in time, one of the things that I saw in my research is that this is not a new trend.

If you look at how many conservative evangelicals responded to abusive leaders, abusive pastors in their own churches and in their own organizations for decades. In time and time again, you see evangelical communities ending up defending perpetrators of abuse, of sexual abuse, of abusive power, and doing so in the name of protecting the witness of the church, of, you know, blaming women for leading men on or for seducing men, all sorts of excuses really, and that was stunning to me in my research And what I saw is that there is a longer pattern here of protecting men with power who are perceived to have an important role to play. In protecting, defending the faith, protecting Christianity, and that’s exactly the rhetoric that we have heard and continue to hear around somebody like Donald Trump.

And do you think that the support for Trump within the evangelical world continues as strong as ever or do you see cracks

you know, it’s been remarkably resilient if you look at survey after survey, and trump certainly has the commanding lead among white evangelicals. Second, you see Ron DeSantis, but I think here too, it’s important to look at, you know, which evangelicals may have been drawn to DeSantis early on because he seemed like maybe less extreme alternative to Trump. But he’s really repositioned himself to to be this culture warrior and has tried very hard to do so and is is understanding that to appeal to the base republican base and white evangelical base, this is the path to do so. And so whether they are supporting Trump or still embracing this playbook, it still is really a powerful force throughout the White evangelical world.

Pete Weiner, about thirty eight percent of GOP voters are evangelical protestants, and they are critical to the first electoral contest namely in Iowa. Tell me how you react though to Kristen’s thesis, her broader thesis that these trends are very old and that there’s an authoritarian substrate to their worldview.

Yeah. I agree with. Kristen. I in every point that she made, I think her book is a very significant one and and very well done. I think that Donald Trump was a cat scan on the white evangelical movement in the same way that he was a kind of cat scan on the Republican Party.

He didn’t appear to know when he came on to the scene in twenty twenty fifteen, he tapped into something that was preexisting. And that was true of Republicans and it’s true of evangelicals. I think that a lot of evangelicals back in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen has sort of comforted themselves with a notion that Trump’s lawlessness, his crudity, his cruelty, was a bug rather than a feature. In fact, I think it turned out to be a feature more than a bug, and there was a kind of psychic sociological, psychological connection that they had with with Trump. I think this does go back a long time.

So this is not a new movement. I mean, the whole history of Christianity and politics from the very beginnings is is mixed. There are moments of glory and moments of shame. And I do think that there has been a kind of misogynistic patriarchal attitude and a lot of white evangelical humanity, a lot of frustrations, roiling anger and resentments over what they, perceive as a liberal cultural institutions. That, condescended them and patronized them.

And to some extent, that was true, but I think it’s it’s dramatically overstated. But the the kindling was there, and and Donald Trump in some respects lit the match, but a lot of things went into it. In the end, I would say, well, from my perspective, it it’s a case in which faith is subordinate to sociology and to politics and to psychology. And I think it’s unwitting for a lot of people of the Christian faith. I think they believe they’re doing what is faithful, but I think an honest assessment would say that it’s really not and that faith is being embroidered into these pre existing attitudes which are destructive.

And in the end, unchristian.

Christian, I wanna just ask if you’ve heard anything, about a couple of things. One is that one of the loonyer people associated with Trump is Michael Flynn, his former short lived national security adviser, but who has really gone off the deep end even more since he left office, and he has become this religious figure very much associated with QAnon, and he touring the country on a so called reawaken America tour, which is explicitly Christian nationalist that doesn’t believe in abiding by elections. He famously wanted to have the military confiscate all of the voting machines and do a recount or, I guess, maybe just substitute Trump votes, and he was giving that advice to Trump in the White House in December of twenty twenty. Have you heard anything about whether that’s penetrating, whether that’s really a thing out there, and and where does QAnon stand now within evangelical ranks. For a while there, we were hearing that, you know, huge numbers of evangelicals were saying they thought at least some of the qanon stuff was true.

Yes. I mean, with Flynn and his reawaken America tours, they came to my hometown here in Michigan, and they’ve really been around the country, that is just kind of one strand of Christian Jonathan Last. And to understand Christian nationalism, you really have understand kind of this very complex landscape where, Flynn is coming out of this new apostolic confirmation tradition. This is where you’re gonna get a lot of spiritual warfare talk. You have prophets and prophecies.

And in in that corner you see a lot of overlap with the kind of QAnon way of thinking. And you get a lot of that out in kind of televangelist spaces. But that’s not the only strand that’s contributing to Christian nationalism in this country. You’ve got many more kind of mainstream options as well. Just if you turn on any Christian radio station, you’re gonna get a whole lot of god and country kind of talk.

And all sorts of things in between, and you can go a long history too here of, you know, very popular writers like David Barton and his wall builders.

What are the wall Bulwark?

This is this is an organization this idea of, you know, not wanting a separation between church and state or wanting a separation of their sort so that their version of Christianity is free from government intrusion but then takes over the government. And really the idea that America is Christian nation, by which they mean a very right wing white evangelical version of a Christian nation at its founding and it needs to be restored. Right. So if you look at evangelicalism, you can find all sorts of echoes of this kind of Christian nationalism from kind of extreme prophecy traditions to very mainstream. And I think that’s the tricky part here that, you know, some of these characters look like they’re fringe, and in many ways they are, they’re more extremist versions, but a whole lot of very ordinary church going evangelicals, maybe your neighbor, your friend, your family member, have values that align fairly close that they have grown up and heard from their pastors and heard from Christian radio every day that America is god’s special nation.

Right? And so what we’re seeing now is these all of these strands kind of coming together, you you’ve got two candidates, a Democrat and a Republican to vote for many, if not, vast majorities of these folks who have been seeped in some variant, are going to pull the lever for Donald Trump in the end. So that’s kind of what we’re looking at, and Michael Flynn is not necessarily typical but he is influential in many of these spaces. What does this have to do with QAnon? You’re right.

The surveys are really quite alarming in terms of, you know, a third to a half of evangelicals, embracing some pretty wild QAnon theories. And, you know, this rings true for a couple of reasons, I think. One, you have to understand kind of information silos, echo chambers, many conservative evangelicals get their news from not just Fox News, but from Christian sources. And you have a lot of the QAnon kind of seeping into those spaces. And then they also don’t trust outside sources who are checking who are vetting, and they’ve been really trained for decades now to mistrust the, you know, quote, unquote mainstream media.

Evangelicals have long had this distrust. So you have those factors, but then I think you also have to consider, you know, evangelical kind of spirituality too, which believes in prophecy and believes in certain traditions, especially of there being this kind of hidden knowledge that some people have access to and others do not. And I think that all of those practices kind of make evangelicals more susceptible to believing, these theories. And then, of course, tribalism, you know, us versus them, our team is saying these things, and there’s a real attraction there as well.

You know, as a Jew, I look at the QAnon thing and I see echoes centuries old of the oldest liable against Jews, namely that they were, kidnapping and killing children to use their blood in in, sacrifices. Do other people see that connection and that echo?

You know, that would not be the only space where you can see a senate kind of connections between historical anti Semitism and this kind of right wing reactionary movement. And do other people see this inside evangelical spaces? No. I don’t hear any sort of self awareness or warning signs. And in that case too, it’s complicated by the fact that many conservative white evangelicals are kind of pro zionists in Pro Israel.

Yes.

Right? While they can still be anti Semitic. And so it’s complicated, a complicated three there, but you’ve got both of those things going on in which, which suggests that if you say, hey, you know, this is anti Semitic, you’ll get a lot of, no, I really like Israel, so it can’t sibley be. Right?

Yeah. Okay, Linda. I’d love to hear you on this. I know you you’re Catholic and there’s a movement within Catholicism. It’s also kinda concerning these days, Catholic integralism, which also has given up on democracy, but weigh in.

Well, the Catholic churches never been exactly keen on democracy is a very hierarchical institution. So that’s not terribly surprising. However, what strikes me is so odd about all of this. Is that evangelicals in particular, I think Catholic a little less so. The fascination with Trump and seeing him as manly.

I mean, he’s one of the least manly men I’ve ever known. The guy slathers makeup all over his facing Dice’s hair. He’s so vain. He’s pudgy. He looks like the dough boy.

By the way, you know, he thinks wearing those long ties is slimming, which is hilarious.

Anyway, so he’s not very manly, and I actually think it’s great that evangelicals are very interest in the family and and see the family unit is important and even the father having a particularly special role, but What kind of father is Donald Trump? The guy’s got five kids by three different women. You never get any sense that he’s usually, fatherly, the way he treats Ivanka is frankly cringe worthy. It sort of makes you nauseous when you see him sort of applying at her. So I I don’t get it.

I do think that Pete though talked about the most important part of this very strange bedfellows that constitute religious people and Donald Trump. And that is it is demoralizing in that literal sense of that word. This is a man who makes a mockery of all of the moral teachings of all faiths Christianity Judaism, he is just an immoral person. And if you wanted to illustrate the seven deadly sins as they used to call them at the Catholic church, You couldn’t find a better way to illustrate it than my taking a look at Donald Trump. I don’t think there is a single one of the seven deadly sins that he does not illustrate.

So I find it very troubling. I do believe that what we’re seeing in particularly in the evangelical movement. I read recently someone complaining about a pastor who had a parishioner come up to him afterwards. And basically give him an earful about the sermon that he had just given, which I think was loosely based on the sermon on the mount of Jesus Christ in which he, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth, etcetera. And, basically, queues the pastor of being some sort of a communist.

You know, where did you where did you get this stuff? You know, and he said, well, it’s Jesus Christ’s own words. It doesn’t matter. Fact. And the the person was just couldn’t believe it.

And so I I do think that to me is the most troubling.

Will Saletan, some of this is the result of our information silos and the failure to have a common understanding of reality, but some of it has much deeper roots. What are your thoughts?

Well, I’ve been thinking hard as I’ve been listening to everybody. And, you know, I’ve decided that my thoughts will get me into trouble, but I’m going to share them with you and our listeners anyway. First of all, we shouldn’t pretend that there are no biblical origins of ideas, for example, like male headship and granted their ways of interpreting texts like the famous one in Ephesians and elsewhere. That will make the sentiments there more agreeable to current prevailing sort of liberal or secular norms of how men and women should relate. But frankly, I don’t think that the defenders of more traditional gender relations within Christianity as I understand it are bereft of authentic resources for defending the kind of hierarchy.

However, suddenly interpreted, it may be that they are espousing now. And We should not pretend that Christianity or for that matter Judaism are perfectly compatible with modern liberal sensibilities about gender relations. So that’s the first point that will get me into trouble. The second point that will get me into trouble It was said of Great Britain after the Second World War that they had lost an empire hand had not yet found a role. And it strikes me that a lot of contemporary men are in exactly the same situation.

Right? The older more traditional understanding of how a man was supposed to behave hasn’t disappeared. Indeed, it’s being stoutly defended on the right. But on the left, or the center of our political culture for that matter. The question of how men are supposed to comport themselves in what respects are they allowed to be different?

And if they are no longer bread winners economically or heads of households, theologically? How are they supposed to behave? And A number of books written by scholars right center and center left, the latest being my former bookings colleague, Richard Grieves, have focused on what I don’t think they overstatingly call the crisis of masculinity. In contemporary United States and to some extent in the contemporary west. So what’s going on within evangelical Christianity, I believe, is a subset of a much larger cultural issue within modern society.

I’m not sure exactly what sorts of responses or solutions this analysis leads me to, but I I really believe it’s the case.

Well, let me frame this to both Kristen and Pete because it’s an irony of our time that the people in those pews were Probably among the most passionate anti Muslim people in America during the period after nine eleven. I mean, In the immediate aftermath in particular, there was a period of heightened sense of threat from what we called radical Islam and what we thought was a religion that had been perverted. And so it’s funny that the same people who would have been very exercised about a religion being perverted for political ends in the case of Islam, which in the hands of some of them, it clearly was. You know, the radicals didn’t didn’t take into account all the verses of the Quran that instruct you to be meek and to be generous to the poor and the downtrodden and so forth and always to be just and all the no. They focused on the warlike parts.

And isn’t there a parallel here? Ironically enough with these nationalist evangelicals. Kristen, you first.

Okay. There’s a lot there. And I think Bill raises some important points as well. On the issue of Islam though, to start, you’re right, evangelicals were in the years after nine eleven, far and away the, kind of most critical demographic group in the country when it came to Islam and associating Islam with violence. And, what’s interesting in just the in recent years is how there’s a potential for kind of science around conservative moral kind of gender roles between, American Muslims and conservative evangelical.

And I’ve kind of been watching that play out and hearing from, various Muslim scholars and activists as well, saying, trying to kind of raise the alarm bells within their communities of, you know, don’t trust these white evangelicals. You need to know more what they’re up to when they’re going to turn on us next. So I’ve just been watching that conversation, and in terms of parallels, I think, you know, it remains to be seen exactly where that goes. But inside evangelical spaces, that’s not really gonna resonate much simply because evangelicals understand their god is the real god, right, so the problem with Muslims. Is that, you know, their religion is false, and that’s why it’s dangerous, their religion, why evangelicalism is the true religion, and therefore, you know, imposing that on society and aligning, you know, politics in in that way, that’s all good.

Right? That’s what they’re called to do. And that is the way for peace and prosperity for all because if you don’t align the nation’s laws and culture with god’s will, then, you know, destruction will ensue is is kind of the way this works. But I I do think Bill raises important points, and I just wanted to say a couple of things on on that topic. First, as a historian, it’s important to note that, you know, there are any time we hear the the words crisis of masculinity, should be a little cautious because historians can point to there’s a lot of change over time.

And that language of crisis of masculinity suggests exactly that that there are some profound economic shifts oftentimes, broader shifts, cultural shifts taking place that make certain categories that seemed stable and god given, all of a sudden, not quite fit well anymore. And you see that in the late nineteenth or late twentieth century when you have earlier crisis of masculinity in the first kind of Christian men’s movement in this country. And it’s because a lot of things changed and that old conceptions of Victorian masculinity of gentleness and self restraint and this gentlemanly ideal didn’t really makes sense given economic conditions. Right? And so masculinity, we talk about it as if it’s stable and static, but it is always changing.

And we really should talk about it in the plural term. Right? There are always masculinities, kind of competing that vary by kind of racial group and ethnic group and demographic group class, social class plays an important role. So one of the important things is to keep those complexities in mind when we’re looking at any crisis moment. And that is something that Richard Reeves does really well in his book.

So I also would commend that book because he’s able to take seriously some of these destabilizing changes take seriously evangelicals or conservatives’ responses to them, but not necessarily and and not uncritically adopting than this kind of backlash vision of a a very reactionary, even anti modern masculinity, that there are still some principles that Christians ought to be able to hold to. That, yes, are found in the Bible that even if you see patriarchy and hierarchy there, there are many other biblical principles, as he suggested in the sermon on the Mount, you have verses about in Christ, there is no male and female. So how do we take this kind of Christian ethical system and then craft various versions of what it means to be a man that don’t throw all of those out in order to embrace something that stands against some of these social disruptions of our contemporary moment.

Beautifully said. Pete, if you wanna add to that, feel free. Otherwise, we can move on to the big news of this week.

Briefly, I wanted to add one thing, because I think it’s really interesting. Point, a hermeneutical point, interpretation of scripture point that Bill raised. Just one, I guess, insight that I’ve had as I’ve as I’ve gotten older and older in faith, which is, to me, the absolute centrality of the shaping of of sensibilities and dispositions and temperament in people of faith, you know, in the merchant of Venice, Shakespeare said that the devil can, quote, scripture for his own purposes. And that’s almost literally true. I mean, if you want to justify slavery or genocide or patriarchy, there are verses in scripture that you can proof text to support that view And proof testing, the first grade proof testing war for Christians was between Jesus and the devil, in the second temptation, when the devil quoted Psalms and and Jesus quoted deuteronomy back.

So the proof texting goes on all the time. And so the question becomes, well, how do you ascertain with the truth? And the reality and the ethic. The proper ethic is in any given moment for people of faith. I think what’s happened is that the sensibilities and dispositions have been corroded and and deformed and malformed.

And so people are in a sense proof texting what they already believe. And if their attitudes and their approach and those dispositions have been demoralized and deformed, then you can proof text the scripture to support it. And in fact, it adds a kind of fuel to it. So I think this whole issue of what it within Christianity is known as catechesis, the the shaping of attitudes, is hugely important. Memorizing scripture, in the wrong hands can lead to a lot of human, harm.

You know, and I just remember you had a quotation in your Atlantic piece about pastors who were despairing that their congregants were getting fifteen hours a day of input from other sources and one hour a week from them, and it’s very hard to compete.

That’s right.

Yeah. Alright. Well, we’ll leave it there for now. Thank you all for, really deep and interesting discussion. Let’s turn now to the fourth indictment that came down from Georgia this week.

And, Linda, I’m gonna turn to you to just set the table for us. What struck you about this indictment compared to the others? What do you think the strengths and possibly the weaknesses are?

Well, obviously, the big difference between this and all of the other indictments is that this is an indictment that basically deals with the entire conspiracy leading up to January sick. And the aftermath. It is not aimed at just one person or as in the case of the Jack Smith indictment in Florida, which is got three persons indicted in that instance. This is one in which there are nineteen defendants It’s Donald Trump. He is certainly the focused.

He is certainly the mob boss, if you were. This is a Rico statute. A statute that we have generally seen used and we sort of associate most with the mobs because it is the Rack a tier influence and corrupt organizations act. It’s a state version. And as I understand it, this Georgia state version is even more capacious than the federal statute and allows the district attorney there to include what they call predicate acts into the indictment.

Only two of which need to be essentially proved. For the person indicted under that act to be found guilty. This is it’s really it’s an amazing sweeping indictment. And as I say, it goes not just from top to bottom. I mean, you’ve got local officials in Coffee County for example who get ensnared in this, it also goes beyond the state of Georgia, acts that took place in other states are brought in under this indictment.

And I think anyone who thinks that Donald Trump is going to be able to wiggle out of this is badly mistaken. For one thing, he does not have the ability Should he be reelected as president of the United States to pardon himself nor does a governor, including a Republican governor, like Governor Kemp have the right to be able to pardon him should he be found guilty. So I think this is a very grave threat to this whole enterprise.

Will Saletan, because there are eighteen co defendants, it’s almost impossible. To envision this trial going forward in six months, which is what Fony Willis, the prosecutor said she would like, And so it’s almost inconceivable that it would happen before the election, but as Jack Goldsmith pointed out in a bad for the New York Times. If god forbid, Trump were reelected, there would be tremendous pressure for the state to drop the case or at least postpone it until the president had served out his term. What do you make of all of that, the timing issues and so forth?

What I make of all of this is that we are facing a presidential election in twenty twenty four, like no other that we’ve seen in our history. The number of ways in which twenty twenty four, it will be exceptional. Keeps on expanding. And the complex city and variety of illegal challenges facing former and perhaps future president Trump are lead items on this list of distinctive features of next year, but not the only ones by any means. The the Georgia case is of such complexity with so many co defendants that the lawyers that I’ve read on the subject are of the view that the case will probably have to be broken up in different ways.

It’s being brought as a single case, but they are skeptical. These commentators that it will remain a single case. And the prospect of sort of a reorganization of the Charlie Sykes division of the charges, makes it even more likely that this is going to be a long legal process, appreciably longer than any of the other cases that have been brought against the former president. And how this is going to play out is anybody’s guess. You have referred more than once Mona to Jack Goldsmith’s very sober and thoughtful.

Not quite dissent, but certainly a cautionary note published in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago and the the prospect for a further erosion of the already fuzzy line between legal processes and politics is very much present. And I suspect will become a larger and larger feature of our political discourse over the next fifteen months. I have to say that I cannot talk about this without intense feelings of both sadness and alarm. Rising to the surface. I think that mister Trump’s behavior has left the country with no good choices.

Obviously, there are better and worse ways of proceeding, but I there’s no way of proceeding that won’t inflict further damage on American politics, American culture, and American law. And this legacy of no good choices is one of the worst things that Donald Trump has done to the country, and that’s saying something.

Pete Weiner, so Bill’s right. Of course, the This is the responsibility completely of Donald Trump and and his enablers and what he has done to the country to corrupt it. But I, demur, beg to differ, perhaps, would be a term a bit with the idea that this is going to further damage the law, the courts are the one institution in American society that has performed well. During the Trump challenge. And so far, they are continuing to, and I sent around the Jack Goldsmith piece because, you know, I do think it’s important to keep in mind how this looks To average Republicans, for example, at least for now, I think this will change as the facts come out.

But At least for now, their view is, look, this is a democratic administration or a series of democratic prosecutors, Democrats are coming after their guy. After all, the Russia investigation didn’t amount to anything. They were just out to get him. Is there a perspective? And, what about Hunter, and this is all political, and everybody does it.

So it’s important to keep all those things in mind that, yes, that is going to be the perception to an extent. But the fact is that Trump forced the hand of the justice department. He forced it with his flagrant criminality. And so, you know, Jack’s Goldsmith and others say, look, you know, this is bad. It’s it’s not good to prosecute a former president.

Look at what a precedent we’re setting. But What would be the precedent reset if we did nothing? Because that would reward what Trump did. How do you feel about it?

Yeah. My views, Simone, are very much aligned with yours. I agree that, that there’s no good option, but I think there’s one worse option. And that’s to let Donald Trump get away with it. I’d say a couple of things that I think are relevant to this point in this conversation.

The first is Donald Trump himself, there’s no sign of repentance at all. He just continues to shatter norm after norm and after norm. Including witness efforts to intimidate witnesses and judges. So we’re not even dealing with a person who feels any sense of remorse for what he, what he did. He continues to to double down.

I agree that going forward with these prosecutions is going to injure and it may even injure the the perceptions of legal institutions, but they’ve been injured because of Donald Trump, and they will be injured even if they were to pass. For people who think that the law has to be upheld. And I think my view is that Donald Trump has broken almost every other institution in American and political life, he has not yet broken the judiciary. And if he were to get away with this and the courts special counsel, district attorneys were to back away from what they believe to be. The evidence seems to show are very serious and grave.

Crimes. It would mean I think that he would have broken that as well. That would be tragic. One other thing in the context of the Jack Goldsmith, op ed in the New York Times I respect Jack. He’s he’s a thoughtful person.

He’s just an anguished op ed that he wrote. But Jeff Rosen, who’s the head of the, National Constitution Center, did an interview with Judge Michael Ludick, who was a revered figure or has been in the past, rightly so among conservatives. He was on the appeals court of the fourth circuit. And judge Ludwig has been very forceful in his condemnation of the Republican Party and Trump in a way that I think is courageous. And he said that what Trump had done is the gravest offense, the US, that any other, incumbent president has ever done.

And the worst thing possible, perhaps with the exception of treason. And when Jeff Rosen asks, judge Ludig about Jack Goldsmith’s, bad. And Jack had been a clerk for Judge Ludig. He said that, he judge Ludig disagreed with every analytical point that Jack Gold Smith made and in the end that it would make a mockery of the constitution and the rule of law to let Donald Trump get away with this if the evidence points to crimes and in any other case would point toward indictment So I wish we’d have to go through this. Like, Bill, and, like, I’m sure everybody else on this conversation, there’s a lot of sadness.

We’re entering a period also deep disorientation, but we didn’t create this. Donald Trump did and his party did. And in the end, justice has to prevail, and you have to get through this to get to the other side. It won’t be easy, but it’s necessary. And the rule of law, in the end matters.

And so does truth, and so does does integrity.

Thank you. Krista, there’s been a couple of references to the ugliness that is going to ensue and the fact that Trump is, again, as usual smashing norms, attempting to tamper with witnesses. And one of the ugliest things that he is doing, which was entirely predictable every time he is challenged by somebody who’s African American. He accuses them of racism. Always, he never accuses white people of racism.

It’s a it’s consistent theme. Well, Fanny Willis is African American. Alvin Bragg is African American. Leticia James. Judge Chukkin is African American.

So one of the things that Trump is now doing, and by the way, there’s already been an arrest of a person who threatened the life of judge Chutkin. Now, Trump, his latest thing is to, here’s what he said on his truth social. There will be a complete exoneration, all caps And then he said they only went after those that found to find the rigors, the rigors. And this has come a meme now on the Trump supporting social media sites. They’re going after the rigors.

So it’s the raw racism now is part of this.

Yeah. And there’s certainly precedent for that, you know, when going back years with Donald Trump he isn’t really afraid, and I don’t know if dog whistles are even, it is accurate. Right? It’s it’s pretty blatant at this point, and and that does play effectively to his base, in, you know, survey after survey, we can see that that you know, trump supporters and have to include white evangelicals here are, the least likely to think that things like structural racism is real, that racism is still a problem. And, for a long time, the playbook has been to turn things on its head.

And so, you know, the problem isn’t racism. The problem is people talking about racism. And, you know, people complaining. And and you certainly see that and and what this is doing is kind of reverse victimization. And it it seems so clear from the outside, that that’s that’s what’s going on here, but it is incredibly effective in these spaces.

And I I think that that connects to just a a broader strategy, which is this the sense of persecution, the persecution complex. Right? But what that does and this is actually something from my research that that startled me when I first recognized it. That for a long time, people were saying, okay, evangelicals and other Republicans supported Trump be because they were afraid. Right?

They were afraid of declining religious liberty. They were afraid of demographic change. They have all these fears. What I came to see was that, and then so then they responded with kind of militancy. Right?

So Donald Trump was their guy. But what I came to see was that in so many cases historically and in contemporary situations, the militancy precedes the fear. It’s a militancy that then needs to be just a side, and that’s where you get this kind of manufactured fear of the rigors, of, you know, the liberals, the Democrats out to get us, and they flip that script. And so it becomes really difficult to push back against that, to fight back against that. And so I’m also kind of filled with dread here.

In what’s coming, not just, you know, in the immediate future, but how this is going to in turn justify the kind of politicization of the law and of our court system in the hands of publicans when they will think it is justified to seek vengeance and take revenge. Right? And so I think we see that in terms of race quite clearly. I think it’s part of a broader strategy that sadly has been enormously effective for Trump.

Yeah. Will Saletan, I know you don’t oppose prosecuting Trump. Let’s clarify that. But one of the things though that this Georgia indictment makes clear sort of with chapter and verse that some of the other ones didn’t, but namely the role of Republicans in thwarting Trump’s plans. And there were quite a few, and Georgia is, in particular, is the epicenter of good Republicans, if you will.

I mean, you know, you have Brian Kemp, who refused all of Trump’s pleas, and you have Brad Raffensberger most famously, of course, received that phone call. There’s Gabe Sterling, There’s the former lieutenant governor, Jeff Duncan, who had some very tough words about trump being the absolute worst president and Republican history and maybe the country and so on and so forth and the party had to move on. And so it is worth pausing, and I hope that this trial eventually will remind some Republicans that if it had not been for those people and the leaders of the legislature in Michigan who also rebuffed Trump’s request to change the outcome and Mike Pence. That we would have been in a far, far different situation in January of twenty twenty one than we were, and it would have been potentially explosive. What do you think?

I couldn’t agree more. If it had not been for a handful, of courageous Republicans starting with the vice president of the United States, but going all the way down to county election officials. Not just in Georgia, but in Arizona as well. I heard as I think you did. Some of them testified personally as to what happened to them after they resisted intense pressure from the White House as well as from their own Republican hierarchies in their respective states.

If it hadn’t been for a handful of courageous Republicans, probably about as many as the apostles of Jesus, the country would be in a much, much worse situation than it now is. And what started as a culpable disruption back in after the election of twenty twenty could have turned into a full fledged constitutional crisis. We came very, very close to that. And so all honor to these men and women who in many cases starting with Mike Pence have probably paid for their courage with their careers. Imagine where Mike Pence would be politically.

I’m not saying morally, but politically, imagine where he would be if he hadn’t stood up the way he did because his standing up is now taken as an absolute qualification for consideration for the presidential nominee of his own party by probably a majority of Republicans. So, you know, my hat’s off to them. They put more on the line than any Democrat did, and they’ve paid more than any Democrat did.

Pete, one of the things you could say about this time period and now that the indictments are coming in is it’s changed that. Namely, there was never a reckoning. There was never a price to be paid by the bad actors. As Bill just said, the heroes have paid a big price. But the villains have not.

And so it is refreshing to see that there are eighteen co defendants in the Georgia indictment, and they are in a world of hurt right now. Good. That is necessary, but the only thing I’d like to hear you on is If there had been no prosecution, then how many good Republicans like the ones we saw in twenty twenty twenty twenty one would be left? If god forbid, there were another Trump term. I mean, the lesson that would be taken away is that this is the new normal and that we all have to get in line with the authoritarian.

Yeah. That’s a very good point. I mean, it’s it’s in a sense, I suppose the the the term is a teachable moment And one of the frustrations a lot of people had is it seemed as if Donald Trump throughout his entire life has gotten away with all sorts of behavior that was awful. And you just never paid a price for it. And that’s largely true.

But now that chapter is ending, and sending for him, and it’s as you said, it’s ending for a lot of the people who surrounded, him and who did his bidding. And that’ll have radiating effect. It’ll have radiating political effects. It’ll have radiating cultural effects and probably radiating legal effects. As well.

You know, the good guys have to win once in a while, and the bad guys have to lose once in a while. And in this case, the bad guys are gonna lose And also just for the history of this time, things are so distorted right now. It’s like being in a in a whirlpool, it’s difficult to get one’s orientation. But, you know, over time things will settle settle down in perspective, I think, will come into focus. And the people who stood up spoke truth when it mattered.

And when there was a cost to it, people like Liz Janie and others, I think we’ll echo a word that Bill used. You know, we’ll be honored for having done that. But this is like a drama that’s unfolding. Life is a drama. Politics is a drama.

This is a particularly dramatic moment in the life of the country. And that’s why some of these lessons really, really do math.

Yes.

Mona Yes. Can I just add something here? Cause I wanna pick up on something that Pete said earlier, and that is that Donald Trump has broken almost every institution except for the judiciary, the courts. I have to tell you my greatest fear right now is not what will happen in a trial that Donald Trump will be convicted. I do believe he will be convicted in at least one of the jurisdictions.

My fear is that he is going to basically try to break the courts, and I’m wondering to myself what would happen If he decides just not to play, that he’s not going to show up in the courtroom, he’s not going to sit there during the trial. And, you know, whether he’s already shown his ability to attack the judges in such a way that as she mentioned, Chudkin had her life and the life of her family threatened this week. And I just think back on the civil rights era. And the massive resistance that was put up when the courts handed down decisions that people didn’t like and the resistance that they put up. It ended up with having to get the president of the United States to mobilize the national guard to bring in troops in order to make sure that students be able to attend the schools.

They were entitled to attend. And I fear we could see something like that on the horizon. That’s that’s what keeps me up at night.

Well, indeed. Alright. Let me just quote to you from couple of polls that we’ve seen this week. Usually, this is Bill’s job. He keeps us all on our toes about the polling, but I’m gonna do Bill’s job this week and, note.

That while we have seen a strong rally round trump effect within the Republican Party, it’s a very different story for the country at large or even from registered voters. So we found from Quinnipiac this week that fifty four percent approve of the prosecution of Trump over his attempt to, overturn the twenty twenty election, and sixty eight percent that same poll said that anyone convicted of a felony should not be eligible to be president. And in an AP poll, Fifty three percent of Americans said they definitely, definitely won’t support Trump in the next election, and another eleven percent said they probably won’t support him. So that’s a little bit reassuring, at least about the nightmare that we all fear that his get out of jail free, literal get out of jail free card could be getting elected president of the United States again. There’s other polling as well.

Sixty two percent of independent voters said that they believe Trump did something illegal. So we are seeing a reaction in the country at large that is quite different from that within the Republican Party and even within the Republican Party, the numbers who say Trump did something wrong are creeping up. Alright. With that, I think we will turn to our final segment, which is the highlight or low light of the week. And let’s start with you Linda Chavez.

Alright. I have a a piece. I don’t know how to charge I guess it’s a low light, although the column itself is very good. It’s a piece by Jason Riley in the Wall Street journal, and it was entitled a sanitized French connection versus hip hop gutter. And he describes how sensors have now scrubbed from one of the movies of William Freedkin who died last week and who famously did the film, the exorcist, but also famously did the movie, the French Connection.

How sensors had scrubbed from the French connection and early seen in the movie in which the character Popeye Doyle uses a racial slur with respect to someone accused of having killed his partner. And what Jason talks about in this column is something that has concerned me. And that is the way in which words to describe people and even ugly racial slurs, not that they should be condoned, not that they should be used in conversation, but that there are times in art when those words are appropriate And when you basically denude the language of those words, you take away the power of art. And what is interesting about Jason’s piece is he says what is so striking about that is we scrub that word from a movie where it would say something about the character would say something about the story when kids hear that word all the time in the popular culture, and particularly in hip hop, music, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary also last week. So I thought it was an interesting piece, and I commend it to our listeners.

Okay. Thank you, Pete Weiner.

Yeah. Mine’s not a highlight exactly, but it was an important and and poignant moment. On Tuesday, my wife Cindy and I went to, New York City to attend the memorial service at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral for, Tim Keller. Tim was a a protestant, significant theological influence in American Christianity. He was a person of enormous personal integrity.

We were talking earlier about all the problems plaguing. Evangelical movement. That wasn’t the case with Tim. No scandal, no hint of scandal in his life. He was an intellectual who had a pastor’s heart.

He’s a person that walked to death in his faith, and he was at peace when he died. And I wanted to mention one anecdote in the context of of Tim. I introduced him, to a close friend of mine, John Rausch. And so it was an unlikely friendship. John is an atheist, and he’s gay.

And they became friends, over time. And I asked John, after Tim died, what it was about him. That he remembered and and stood out to him. He said, I can’t understand Tim’s world, but his gift was to give me glimpses of it. And he made me feel loved.

By him and by his god. I once asked him if god hears the prayers of an atheist. He said yes, And I hope that’s true. And in that spirit, I’ll pray for him. So Tim was a very, remarkable person that he touched a lot of lives, and he touched John’s, and he touched mine.

And it’s nice to be able to have gathered this week to pay, honor to him and to worship the the god he loved.

Beautiful. Alright. Thank you for that. Will Saletan.

I wanna highlight the importance of vacations. I’m on one and I find that It’s very important from time to time just to slam on the brakes. Stop doing what you do. For such a high portion of the year. It’s an invitation to reflect on pretty fundamental questions, like If you weren’t doing what you’re doing, what would you do?

Perhaps because I’m nearing retirement. This question has hit me even more forcefully than usual, but just, you know, yes, vacations can be wonderful alternatives. To what you normally do, but they are also occasions for reflection. And our lives I think are so filled with antidotes to reflection. Occasions for avoiding it that being forced to do it is really important.

And reflection is compatible. I’ve discovered with the voices of four little beings, ten and younger. And it’s humanly important in ways that I find hard to capture in words. But if you haven’t taken a vacation in a long while, you’re missing something, even if what you’re missing can be sobering and even painful when when you’re forced to face the sound of the silence of the everyday world. And to listen to things that perhaps you haven’t listened to for a very long time.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, in case you were in any doubt, You now know that this is an American podcast because if that had been in France, they would not have known what the hell you were talking about. Quite two. Alright. Kristen Dubay.

Yes. First, a quick amen to, Pete’s comments about Tim McCaller, you know, grieving his loss and the loss of his voice in conversations to come. It is a profound loss. In terms of a highlight, I am the mom of three school aged kids, and this week is back to school. And so I am going to be celebrating that.

I’m celebrating that. Getting a lot more writing done in the day and a half. They’ve been back at school. But really a shout out to our teachers. You know, they have really gotten drawn into in many school districts, many local schools, this kind of polarized culture war conflict when in fact, you know, day in, day out, they work miracles.

And, you know, love our kids, teach our kids, things that we never could as parents, many of us at least, And so just, you know, a shout out to all of the teachers out there starting a new school year and, you know, best wishes to parents and kids.

Thank you for that. Alright. So there’s been so much bad faith commentary, and we can’t possibly respond to all of it, but One of them that I just thought I had to reply to is Alan Dershowitz this week wrote a piece for the daily mail, the British Tableoyd, in which he said, in light of the Georgia indictment, how Gore he said could have been charged with a crime it turns out because he contested the two thousand election, which is so absurd. The comparison is just not worthy of Dershowitz, a former Harvard law professor, he surely knows better. I think he’s gotten to the stage of life where he just wants attention so badly that he is willing to state these absurd on their face arguments.

The fact is that Al Gore pursued every legal remedy available to him and when the Supreme Court ruled against him rightly or wrongly, he accepted that and told all of his people not to call the legitimacy of the court into question, and he gave an incredibly gracious concession speech He’s the polar opposite of Trump in every way and was just an offensive comparison, unworthy of a former professor at a leading institution. And with that, I want to thank our guests, Kristen Dumay and Peter Weiner, and our regulars. Of course, our producer, Katie Cooper, Sound Engineer, Jonathan Last, our editor, Aaron Keane, and of course our wonderful listeners, and we will return next week as every week.