Philip Bump: The Self-Disappearing Informant

Welcome back to the Secret Podcast. I’m Sunny Bunch of sitting in for Charlie Sykes today. Very excited to be talking to Philip bump. He’s National columnist at the Washington Post, focuses largely on the numbers behind politics. We’re gonna get into some really fun numbers in a minute here about Dairy Queen and politics.

I’m very excited to talk about that. He also writes the weekly newsletter how to read chart, and is the author of The New Isch Book, The Last Days of The Baby Boom, and The Future of Power in America. Great, exciting book around the Bulwark offices as some folks know. Jonathan Last is the author of, you know, a book about the end of birthing. And what that means for the world.

So that was an exciting kind of companion. Book with that, Philip, thanks for being on the show. Really appreciate it.

Of course, happy to be.

So let’s start with the biggest and almost funniest story of the week, the gal Luffed story, the missing informant, Right.

I’m

gonna put this in air quotes. People won’t be able to see it.

But he

ran a think tank in Washington DC and claimed to have information that would lead to the arrest of Hunter Biden. And was immediately disappeared by the DOJ. Isn’t that right? Philip, isn’t that exactly how it all went down?

As it turns out, Sonny, I I hate to burst her bubble. That is not how it went That has been the public presentation. Yeah, no, this is a fascinating issue because really what happened Monday was the DOJ sort formalized what had already been out neither. I mean, Gal Loft was, as it turns out, indicted November first, twenty twenty two, that indictment was placed under Seal, presumably, because it’s dealt with national security issues who’s accused of violent rioting sanctions of acting as an agent of China without declaring it. Of arms trafficking, you know, these are all obviously unproven allegations at this point in time.

But he was arrested in February and Cyprus. And at that point, chime, he started making these allegations like, oh, actually, I have dirt on the Bidens. And House Republicans jumped on it because, you know, the House over committee in particular, has been very eager to try and elevate these claims about Joe Biden and Badley. And so he became this sort of celebrity figure in the conservative right wing mediosphere, Although he was obviously already had already been arrested, and then skipped bail and was on the mayhem. And, you know, people may remember James Comer, there was a committee going on Fox News and say, you know, we had this involvement, and we lost him.

He’s missing. Well, he was missing because he skipped bail because he’d been arrested for these violations of potential national security crimes. And so, all of that occurred. And then finally on Monday, they just done CLD Diamond. And so that was the only change that occurred this week, but that then became this trigger so many people on the right to say, oh, look, they’re targeting these guys who have information about the Bidens.

It’s like, no, man. You’re getting it backwards. Said he had information about the Bidens after he’d already been arrested, and that was the point in time when people got all excited about it. But, you know, truth is a malleable thing.

Truth is a malleable thing. No. The the COBRA thing is very funny because I remember when the news came down that their star witness had gone missing. And There were two basic trains of thought here. One was, he’s been disappeared by the Biden administration he’s in, he’s rotting in gitmo somewhere probably,

And

then the other was and this is frankly where I was. I was like, well, did he ever actually exist? Mhmm. But it turns out to be kind of a third thing where he did exist. And he disappeared himself.

Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So Comer gets on Maria Bartoromo’s show.

And of course, Maria Bartoromo, which is like, you know, a gog with any conspiracy theory that someone throws in front of her. And she asked this very loaded question, like, where are these informants? Like, very clearly, like, he’s sort of leading him on and Thomer’s like, well, you know, this informants missing. Now, she was asking in the context of this whole other thing, this nonsensical bribery allegation, which is this incredibly thin thing that has been spun into this huge scandal. That was the context we choose Anthony.

And Commer said, oh, you know, our informant there is missing. And he was wrong. And his staff later that day had to come on and be like, oh, actually, he was sort of completing these two things. We’re talking about this other guy. And they said at the time that it was this guy gal loft, who we had already known had been arrested in Cyprus although we didn’t know why.

But just last week, the New York Post and Miranda De Vine, released this report based on a video that Lufth had done. In which he detailed, essentially, did things that were included in this indictment, which he’d obviously had already seen because he’d been arrested back in February. And so all of these elements about what had happened to Luf, even if at the time Comer was confused and But we knew it was left at the time. This was in May when Kermer made this mistake. And then we knew last week what the elements of the indictment were.

So again, nothing about this particular thing here is new.

Let’s just remind folks what Lufth is actually saying about Biden and the the accusations he’s making because there’s a kind of funny element of projection to a lot of this.

It’s somewhat vague, right? Which is I think sort of befits the scenario. He, apparently, not just by way of background. He apparently spoke with FBI agents back in twenty nineteen, which is a thing that Republicans seized upon. Like, what was he telling them?

What what were the what were the notes there? There are certainly indications that you speak with the FBI in twenty nineteen because the FBI was investigating him. Right? And they were actually trying to collect evidence. To use against him.

But he claims that he has information about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden’s brother Jim’s interactions with a Chinese energy corporation. Now, those interactions are well known, the Washington Post had a big report about them last year, and said, he was aware that Biden was present at a meeting with some of these Chinese business people, which also has been previously reported. So it’s not actually clear that loft has new information about the relationship between the Bidens and the Synergy Corporation. But, you know, obviously, he, as soon as literally he tweeted, as soon as he was arrested in Cyprus and said, Oh, I’m being arrested. I presume it’s because I have this information about the body and everyone ran with it from there.

It’s kinda funny that the GOP keeps stepping on rakes with the the Biden, the Hunter Biden thing in particular because it feels like it would not be hard to put together a fairly concrete case of like Hunter Biden is a bad influence and should be kept far away from the White House. Just on all the stuff that we already know about them.

No. Hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

I mean, yeah. I mean look, Hunter Biden trading on his dad’s name and he made money and he had made deals with sketching people. Like no one disputes that. Right? You know, but Hunter Biden is also not president of the United States.

We’ve seen in the past, of course, other family members by the presidents do not to what about it. But, yeah, I mean, like, this is a problem. This is a problem in American politics that people trade on, powerful relatives’ names in order to make cash. Under by an unquestionably that. Right?

One of the things that’s sort of fascinating here is Joe Biden has sort of taken it upon himself to embrace Hunter Biden because of a Hunter Biden. So so under attack, which I think doesn’t do him any good. I mean, like having Hunter Biden agree to this plea deal and then show up at a state dinner soon afterward, that’s not a good move by the White House. Well, what’s the point of that? But you’re absolutely right that the Republican Party is so eager to figure out.

Like, I really think people like James Gromer think that there is this connection. Between the money the hunter Biden took and Joe Biden. I think he really believes that. None has been established and it may be the case. We’ll we’ll wait and see.

But as it stands now, it is so entirely contained around Hunter Biden, and all of the things that you hear, these allegations about the Biden crime family, so on and so forth. Are disconnected from Joe Biden. And it’s sort of fascinating because they’re so eager to take these ideas and elevate them. Like, this bribery thing is such a good example. One guy, an informant spoke to a Ukrainian executive back in before twenty twenty and told the FBI, oh, he said he bribed the Bidens.

And that’s all they’ve got is that one allegation in this one document. And it’s become this huge thing for weeks and weeks weeks because they’re so excited about the prospect of it. But then it just ends up embarrassing them because it’s clear that they don’t have anything more than that. Just as they’re getting embarrassed by this gal, love thing, because they went way too far over their skis. And so it’s It’s this combination of Hunter Biden being this sketchy figure, which he absolutely is.

That then triggering all sorts of like, oh, like, what else has he done? Stuff, which is totally valid for the purposes of investigation, but then overpromised consistently and repeatedly, and then ending up getting politically embarrassed.

Is there any real history at least in recent political history of bad relatives hurting the sitting president. I mean, I’m thinking of, you know, Bill Clinton’s brother or Jimmy Carter. I can’t think of anybody off the top of my head who has been so awful and so terrible that they end up actually doing damage to the the sitting president.

Yeah. No. I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t think that Donald Trump’s family does him a lot of favors in terms of expanding his reach outside of his base. You know, I mean, from the standpoint of, you know, on culture war stuff, Donald Trump junior and on you know, sort of sketchy deal making Jared Kushner.

Like, those sorts of things I think do not help alleviate concerns about Donald Trump’s ethics. Yeah, I don’t think it necessarily is the reason that Donald Trump didn’t win reelection twenty twenty.

Yeah. I mean, Trump is almost a special case though, because Trump actually people in his family in the administration, which then once they’re in the administration, you’re like, well, this is now an administration issue, as opposed to, you know, random family members, making money off of the name of their

Well, sort of. But, I mean, you also still had Donald Trump Junior and Eric out there and trying to make deals and, like, having this thing where, oh, we’re not gonna seek new business in foreign countries, then they’re like, well, this is a gifting business. So, you know, I mean, like, there was stuff like that. But, I mean, again, you’re right. That’s Trump is a special case in another sense, which is just that, like, everything about him.

So like, okay, like what’s going on with this guy that it sort of gets lost in the mix.

The funniest part of this whole story to me was that, you know, the Scott luck he goes to the FBI in twenty nineteen. And you know, as JBL pointed out in his newsletter and as you pointed out in your story, the Trump FBI doesn’t pounce on this it’s very interesting to look at the whole sequence of events here and see just how backwards everyone seems to have had it.

Yeah. No. No. You’re absolutely right. You know, there’s a lot those sorts of examples.

I mean, like this whole thing with the bribery, right? This guy comes in the middle of twenty twenty in the middle of election year or in Bill Barr as the attorney general, and says, Hey, this guy told me several years ago that the Bides didn’t take it bribes. And if you look into it and then nothing happens, right? That’s a pretty good indication that there was a whole lot there. And the same thing with Luf, right?

These things have been looked at for an extended period of time, and it is not the case that even when Donald Trump was president, even when he had a justice department that was under his control ostensibly than anything necessarily resulted.

That’s the deep state for you right there. Just undermining Trump, left, and right. There it is. I do wanna unwrap the actual accusations against left here because they’re really interesting to me in part because I have always been fascinated by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which is one of these things that, like, people I knew in DC who, you know, did business with other countries would always grumble about having to, like, fill out these these forms, but lots of people just don’t do it and just take the money and then wind up under indictment. So can you break down what he’s actually been charged with here and what that all looks like?

Sure. So, there are three primary elements. The first is that he was basically acting as an agent of the Chinese government, that he was looping in prominent Americans, particularly is presumed that one of the people who’s including the indictment is the former director of CA and Wolzy, and that he had been essentially leveraging his relationships on China’s behalf in order to, you know, put out information that was positive to China and also build relationships with the Dan Trump administration. This was right as Trump was getting ready to enter the White House. He is accused also of having worked to violate sanctions against Iran, details of which I this gave me at this point in time.

I don’t remember exactly what the elements of that were, but then he is also accused of arms trafficking of helping to negotiate an arms sale he was able to pre butt this to some extent with this video that was covered by Miranda Devonne, New York Post. And in that video, he says that basically, is something along the lines of someone was asking where he might find this weapon. He was just sort of like helping a friend, which is, you know, abnormal behavior for a think tank. Executive, but, you know, so be it. Look, you know, this is a federal indictment.

They are gonna make as broad a case as possible and as sweeping cleans as they possibly can. And so once you take this with a grain of salt, but it is not just sort of your garden variety. This guy didn’t fill out a fair enough form. It is according to federal government more complicated

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primary, the GOP primary, which is settling into about where everybody thought it was gonna settle, which is that Trump has a solid forty to fifty percent of the GOP base, locked down, bunch of people fighting over the scraps, DeSantis kind of collapsing. But Chris Christie’s out there, he’s saying, it’s early still. It’s early. I have four percent. This is exactly what Donald Trump had at the same time.

Why are why are we all calling this race over? What’s what’s the deal? So Is it still early Philip? Are we still early in the race? Or is the season later than some of these guys think?

Yeah. No. It’s a good question. And, obviously, as you know, I wrote about earlier this week. But this idea that it’s still early.

Absolutely, that’s the case. The voting has not yet started. It is only July in twenty six eighteen, Donald Trump was not at four percent as Chris Christie likes to allege, but he was already surging in part because there was all of a sudden this huge national media attention paid comments he made about immigrants in his campaign launch. And then there’s a backlash to that, but, you know, that really spoke to the base of the republican party. And so Donald Trump was at this point in twenty fifteen.

So literally exactly eight years ago, who’s just about to overtake the lead in the Republican primary, which he’s held ever since. That is the key detail here. You’re absolutely right that Donald Trump is you know, in most polling averages now above fifty percent, which is higher than he had at any point in the polling averages in twenty fifteen. He didn’t start actually getting fifty percent of the vote in primaries until after he essentially clinch the nomination after he won Indiana and most of the other candidates had dropped out. So he is in a stronger position now than he was then.

But they thing about when you consider this being early in the primary season, I also doing air quotes right there, is that that presumes that you have an unsettled field that’s gonna sort of fall into place. This is not an unsettled field to your point. Right? This is Donald Trump is a very, very well established and well known quantity. And very importantly, when you look in the past, at times when there has been And insurgents who wasn’t on the radar early in the year prior to the election who then ends up winning the nomination or challenging for the nomination, it is someone who is saying, hey, let’s challenge this establishment figure.

You know? It was Donald saying, you know, Jeff Bush, Scott Walker, these guys know. Let’s you know, let’s come from the outside smash the establishment. You have Bernie Sanders in twenty sixteen challenging Hillary Clinton or even Barack Obama back in two thousand and eight. It is this person is a figure of the establishment.

Let’s have this outsider. Let’s have someone else come in and challenge that. The thing that Trump has done very, very well and really helps secure his position is he still manages to present himself as the outsider to the established even though he is the establishment of the Republican Party. Right? Like, he is the guy who is calling the shots consistently the Republican Party.

But because he’s done such a good job of resenting himself, as an outsider still, how do you combat that? Like, who is the outsider who’s gonna come into this race now and shake things up? When Donald Trump already holds that outsider status. You know, obviously, this stuff’s fungible and and, you know, I’m making some broad generalizations here. But it’s hard to see who shakes up a race that is predicated on Donald Trump being the guy who shakes things up?

I think the big story of the race so far is the I hesitate to call it a collapse just yet, but the the noted decline in support for Ron DeSantis, you know. Sure. The thinking was, Ron DeSantis would come out. Campaign would start it’s still, you know, kind of in the early going here. But the kind of steady, you know, doop doop doop doop just going down the the polling averages has been noticeable and marked and I think kind of disastrous him.

I feel like this is the moment where he needs to consolidate to get everybody else out of the race. Right?

No. You’re exactly right. Yeah. So a few things on that. I like to say that he didn’t launch his campaign.

He started his campaign. This campaign just sort of, you know, he was going flat, and then it started, and then he kept going flat. The main drop that he saw on the polls actually began back in February before he actually got into the race, and he sort of held steady since since he got into the race, which has only been, you know, a month, a month and a half at this point in time. Yeah. I think there are a few things at play here.

The first is that everyone said, okay, we need someone who let’s consolidate around an alternative to Trump. And so he was supposed to be the guy who was the alternative to the Trump among the people who didn’t like Donald Trump. But as it turns out, who he really is is the alternative to Trump among people who liked Donald Trump. And so if you look at the polling over the course of the past eight months or so, he and Donald Trump combined have gotten seventy five percent of the vote, almost consistently. And so as Donald Trump has risen, Ron DeSantis has gone down, but it’s still combined, it’s about seventy five percent of the vote.

That means this is the same pool of voters. Right? So it’s not that he is the alternative to Trump in the sense of the anti Trump folks are like, worried we can solidarity around this guy, and then he’ll be our guy. It is that he’s the alternative to Trump among Trump voters. And so he’s trying to find wiggle room on the right of Donald Trump, which, of course, is very hard because Donald Trump defines what constitutes the political right to a large extent, or at least he’s very good at driving what that looks like.

And so now then we have this vacuum on the left. Like, so then who is the actual anti Trump guy. And so now we hear Berberling’s, you know, Rolling Stone and New York Times both reporting that the Murdochs, for example, are disappointed Ron DeSantis. How he hasn’t gotten anywhere. Maybe Glen Young can be that guy.

Like, now then the conversation starts turning back to Okay. Well, then who’s the non Trump candidate? If it’s not Ron DeSantis, because Rhonda Santos is just Trump junior, who’s the non Trump guy and they don’t have there’s, you know, there’s not a good answer to that.

The Santos is in this very weird double mind where you mentioned I believe in your piece that he’s trying to figure out how to run to the right on Trump on certain things. Especially culture war stuff, you know, gay rights, libraries in Florida, whatever.

That’s right.

And it doesn’t seem to be working, which I think is surprising a lot of folks But also, like, one thing that jumps out at me is that he is running to the right on that, but also on, you know, Medicare right and social security and that sort of thing. And this is where Trump has always kind of found the part of the base that really hates the Reaganomics Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Wing of the GOP. Right? We don’t want you to take away our entitlements. We like these things.

We think that it’s good to have them. And we don’t want those gone. I’m curious to see if you think that DeSantis can shift on this or if that’s just baked into the cake at this point.

Well, I think there there’s two different issues here. Right? So the first is the culture war stuff. And the scientist, you’re right, is trying to frame himself as taking this more stringent position on LGBTQ stuff in part because Donald Trump didn’t prioritize that when he was president. And so it’s in the aspect of Donald Trump’s politics so you can actually run against.

On most things, Donald Trump is fungible and doesn’t have hard and fast positions, but there are some spaces where he can be like, oh, I’m gonna be, you know, I’m gonna be further to write on this. And you’re right. It’s not getting much traction just what is the right really focused on right now. It is a politicization of the Federal law enforcement, which, of course, is driven by what Donald Trump wants to talk about. This issue of entitlement was fascinating.

And you you mentioned earlier that I spoke about the baby boom. One of the things that’s important to remember is part of the shift on the right towards more hostility towards undermining so security and Medicare is the fact that Republicans are older. Right? A third of the Republican party is age sixty five or over, more than half are over the age of Right? You know, I think it’s something like sixty percent or over the age of fifty.

That’s the you know, I’m like, okay, yeah, let’s talk about how we cut back on social security and Medicare spending. And so I think Donald Trump sort of tapped in that. You know, he’s always been good at elevating what the populist argument was. That’s how he, you know, won the nomination in twenty sixteen in the first place. But I think that, yeah, on this front in particular, DeSantis’ legacy of being the sort of Paul Ryan, let’s government spending my target in these programs certainly doesn’t know good.

The other thing that jumps out is I I saw somebody on Twitter mention this. I can’t remember who it was, but DeSantis had kind of positioned himself very weirdly as the very online candidate. Right? He he, like, launches with his this Twitter spaces with Elon Musk, and that that’s kind of a weird thing, and then it doesn’t go very well. But also, all of his issues are focused on things that the online write is very focused on.

You know, the kind of lids of TikTok right is very focused on. But we’re also in this weird moment where Twitter is in collapse. It doesn’t matter as much in the general conversation. You know, there’s lots of competitors. Coming out as somebody who spends a lot of time online myself.

And as I think you do as well, do you think there’s something to this that this intersection, this x almost of Twitter’s decline? Ron DeSantis decline, I guess not really an x more of a slope, kind of coincide. Is that something we’re seeing?

I don’t know, because if you think about who the people are that are more enthusiastic and fuses about Twitter now, it’s exactly the base that Ron DeSantis is trying to appeal to. Right? I mean, like, the people who Musk is trying to empower and give space to and elevate the voices of are exactly the sorts of people that Ron DeSantis is trying to target with this campaign. And so, yeah, I mean, I think for normies, Twitter is not what it used to be and is increasingly toxic and so on and so forth. I mean, not that, you know, not her normies for god’s sake, but you got my point.

But I do think that in terms of Ron DeSantis, Twitter is more useful to him than it used to be with the exception of, you know, having people to punch.

Let me rephrase slightly, which is that, yes, Twitter is more useful for Ron DeSantis. There’s like a greater concentration of I would argue that it is maybe less important, even in the general GOP primary space, that there’s much less energy and discussion there than there was even twelve to eighteen months ago?

I honestly don’t know. It’s a fair question. I do think that there obviously is this alternative truth social which has a lot of energy from the Trump space, although only a fraction of, you know, what you get in Twitter or even gotten Twitter twelve, eighteen months ago. It’s hard for me to say, but I just I find it hard to envision how the changes in Twitter disadvantage a candidate whose goal is to foment that kind of in his campaign.

If DeSantis is in decline, you know, Christie’s kind of stuck at four or five percent. Mike Pence, you know, is getting nowhere

He’s doing better than Christie.

Well, I guess that’s true. I guess that’s true. But, you know, he’s doing less well than you would think that the former, you know, GOP, Vice President.

Then you would have thought on January fifth twenty twenty one. Yes.

So is there a lane for a Youngin type or even like a Brian? Can maybe, like, is there another challenge you’re waiting to enter the arena, do you think? Or is this all just kind of wishful thinking by the Murdochs and the rest?

No. I think there’s a lane that the question is you know, how wide it is. Right? You know, yeah, I think there’s an access road that runs along the super highway. Yes.

That Jacquelyn Young can sort of travel along. I do think there is some space for someone like Chris Christie to say, look, Donald Trump is Charlatin. And, you know, he makes these promises and the Republicans lose. And the answer is not to out Trump Trump. The answer is instead to just like stop and revisit and reset what the party is doing.

I think there is space for that. I think that gets you maybe fifteen percent of the party. Right? Like, it’s just so much of the republican party is centered on not only Donald Trump but sort of the Trump approach to politics and the partisan high ability that Trump has been so good at leveraging, that’s really hard for me to see how someone gets a whole lot of that space. And again, when we think about Ron DeSantis, Rhonda Santos is the top challenger to Donald Trump.

He’s getting beat by him, two to one. And he’s still only like twenty percent in the polls. Right? You know, there’s only like twenty five percent of the electorate that’s out there up for grabs, and a lot of that’s just people who are undecided to lend up voting for Trump anyway. So I Yes.

There absolutely is a lane for that. And if you wanna be a Glen Junkin, and raise your national profile, and raise a lot of money, and have fun going on TV. Sure. You can do that. Are you gonna be the nominee?

Almost certainly not.

Yay. Yay. This is all exactly what I wanted to hear.

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So the interesting thing about Trump has always been that he connects with GOP voters, yet he is clearly not of the same milieu. He is a wealthy New Yorker, who lives in a literal giant tower when he’s not living on a literal golf course mansion. And he doesn’t even know what Dairy Queen is. So you did a really great breakdown of the sort of dairy queen density and proximity to GOP strongholds. And you did this because Donald Trump went to Dairy Queen, bunch of the sports areas, like, I’m gonna buy things for you, maybe.

What do you want? And was very confused when people ordered blizzards, which is, of course, as anybody, who’s been to a Dairy Queen knows is the number one Dairy Queen offering. You go to a Dairy Queen, you get a blizzard, and that’s what you eat. What was this all about to fill folks in? Yeah.

No. It’s fascinating.

Right? Because I continue to be intrigued by Donald Trump rolling up to restaurants, offering to buy people stuff and then not buying them stuff. Right? What he did in Florida right after he got arraigned. And as he did in Palestine, Ohio when he went there earlier this year, he went in the McDonald’s, like, oh, you gotta buy you got something and buy anything.

Right? It’s this very trumpian shtick of making this promise. I’m going to deliver it to you and then walk it up. Right? It’s just a good encapsulation as politics.

So, So he goes to Dairy Queen and he does exactly that. I don’t know if he actually bought any blizzard because I was so fascinated by this idea he didn’t know what a blizzard was. And look, yeah, you’re right. It is not abnormal for someone that lives in a penthouse on fifth avenue in Manhattan to not necessarily be familiar with the menu items. I’m very clean.

I totally understand that. But this is a guy whose whole appeal is like, oh, I’m one of you. I’m a beat. Obviously, he still retains this distance from, you know, average everyday Americans by virtue of as well. But, yeah, this is his appeal.

And only he can really get away with this of just being like, well, that was a blizzard, which is literally exactly what he said. You know, people are like, oh, that Trump. You know, he’s just he’s just so fun. But, yeah, Dairy Queen’s this great thing. I I went to high school in Northeast, Ohio.

I went to Ohio State. Like, Dairy Queen’s very much a part of you know, of that time period to my wife. And so I went and looked at where all the dairy queen locations are, and there’s this, you know, they’re all over the country. They’re in forty nine states. But there really is this density in the Midwest, in this area where, you know, Donald Trump has long focused his energies and his attention.

And specifically, that there are more dairy queens per person in more heavily Trump voting places than there are and less heavily trump voting So, Dairy Queen is the sort of thing that is in a place that Donald Trump has always focused on politically, among voters who support Donald Trump very well, and yet there’s this disconnect in that he doesn’t even know this very basic thing that has been on the menu for thirty years in this very famous restaurant, which I just found fascinating.

I’m looking at the heat map now, the Dairy Queen heat map. Dairy Queen’s mostly in, let’s say, Ohio, Indiana, kinda Illinois then up towards Michigan, and Wisconsin. And then also a big spot right where I live interestingly in Texas. You got a big spot there in a Northeast Texas you did an interesting breakdown on the density of the Dairy Queen’s versus, you know, whether or not they were in specific voting locations. Could you just break down your methodology?

There for us and how you wanted to look at that?

Yeah. Sure. You know, I mean, look, the issue isn’t necessarily just where there are Dairy Queen’s. And again, their Dairy Queen’s all over the place. The issue is how common dairy queens are relative to the population.

And this was really informed, but I went back and looked at the number of gun stores that were in the United States, where they were located? Because I want to see how a red state or how a red country gun stores were. And so, when you compare for the population around a gun store. You get exactly what you’d expect, which is that gun stores are really, really, really common in heavily voting Trump places. And then they decline very, very consistently until you get to very blue places.

Right? But that only has when you control for population. So I did the same thing with theory let’s say there are four dairy queens in New Jersey near New York City, which That’s fairly close to being accurate. Right? What does that mean relative to one dairy queen in a region with more or less people.

Right? Like, that density comparison is a better way of understanding how important, again, using your quotes, Dairy Queen is to a community. So, what you see is once you control for the number of dairy queens per people, then you start to see this correlation with politics. Because what you’re doing is better capturing, how frequently people may be exposed to dairy queens simply by virtue of the fact that there are more dairy queens relative to how many people there there would be in a large city. I’ve explained this extremely poorly.

This is why I do charts, man, so I don’t have to talk about them and explain it. Just go with the goddamn article. I forgot

Charlie Sykes are great. No.

The charts are there. They’re great to

look at. But you’re drilling down on a really important point about Trump. Can’t emphasize this enough because he has always been a fascinating figure because he is, in theory, exactly what the GOP primary base hates. Right? He lives in New York City.

He, you know, is basically a social liberal on all sorts of stuff. And despite, you know, everything else, appeals very, very strongly to I don’t even know how to describe aspirational wealth voters. Like, we he is like the idea of, like, if I had a billion dollars, this is how I would live, kind of. And it’s fascinating. Just on a very basic political connection level, to me.

I’ve always been really, really interested by this.

I feel like I would have agreed with that more early in the Trump era that you know, Donald Trump is sort of this representation of, you know, gaudy American wealth that is appealing to some I’m not sure that’s really much of his appeal these days. I think what his base really likes about him, in terms of his wealth and his access to privilege and, again, using your quotes’ luxury. I think what they really like is this guy turned on the rest of them. This guy was part of that crew he was hobnobbing with politicians. And then he said, You know what?

F these dudes, I’m going and I’m working for the people. I see how you’re corrupt. I see how you’re turning your back on that. And I think he is a champion in that sense. I think that, for example, is why he retains popularity with evangelical voters.

Like, this is not a religious person. But he is someone who’s like, you know what? I’m fighting for you because these guys, I’ve seen what they’re like. I’ve seen who they are, and I think they’re gross. I think you’re right.

And I’m gonna be your advocate. And so, yeah, he is you know, this is not someone who’s religious. He said his favorite books were the bible and, you know, the art of the deal. Right? And he he sort of had to be prompted to say the Bible at one point in time back in twenty fifteen.

This is not who he is. But because he is this guy who has sort of rebelled against the people that they hate, I think that’s more what the embrace is than man, I I would love to beat this guy some day.

As a connoisseur of spite, I also appreciate this reading of Donald Trump. He he does hit a very specific sort of resentment isn’t even the right word. Just like, I hate these guys and and he hates them too, and

they hate him.

And therefore, you know, I am for him.

But this is really important because it also colors things like his

being a diet, because he is

convinced his base that the reason the media covers him the way that they do is because the media hates him, because we are all elites, and we are very frustrated that he’s he’s undermining us. When reality, of course, we’re like saying, oh, this guy cost my documents in his house. And he ought not to have done that. Right? You know, but because this is all framed as, hate and fights with the elites and his turnings back on the elites, that allows him then to position it this particular thing, these in diamonds, as his being unfairly targeted by his long standing, their long standing collective enemies.

And it’s been really, really effective, and I think is a really important part of his appeal.

Yeah. This is why I’ve always been very skeptical of the idea that him being indicted or even being in the midst of a trial during the election, season is going to hurt him. I think it only helps him certainly in the primary. And, you know, if he wins the primary and loses the general, well, then he just runs again for the primary in four years, and still has forty five to fifty five percent of the vote. That’s like the live die repeat version of the primaries, the edge of tomorrow, sorry, Tom Cruz, sci fi movie that not enough people saw.

Is what actually terrifies me the most. The idea that we’re just gonna do this over and over again until he shuffles off this mortal coil, real trouble for the GOP, I think. I don’t know.

Yeah, I mean, the one question is, if he gets the nomination next year, which seems likely and loses the presidency, which seems possible, if not, you know, fifty two percent chance, does he end up going to prison? People ask me for years. Is Donald Trump ever gonna get arrested? And I was like, No. Like, he’s not going through.

Like, this is just not how the system Bulwark, you know, just cynical, obviously. But that’s up for grabs. You know? I think that he really sees his chance of staying out of prison as winning this race. And so I think he is gonna go balls to the wall in this contest, do everything in his power, to be elected president, and or to firm commitments should some other Republican win the nomination that they’re gonna to pardon him.

Because I think that Yeah. I think this is his legal strategy. But if that doesn’t work, you know, who knows what position he’s in in twenty twenty eight?

So, basically, he’s playing Monopoly with the theory of I need to get the get out of jail free card.

A hundred percent. Yes.

That makes sense. Alright. Philip, thank you for being on the show. I really appreciate it. My pleasure.

And again, the name of your book, which you can get on Amazon, The aftermath, Last Days of The Baby Boom, a power in America, everyone should check it out. Subscribe to the Washington Post if you don’t. My name is Sunny Bunch. I’m glad to be sitting in for Charlie. He’ll be back shortly here.

So you won’t have to deal with my voice anymore. That’s a big win for everyone else. Alright.

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