Susan Glasser: Trump 2024 Is Scarier than Trump 2020

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is Monday, what a deranged news cycle this weekend as we are waiting to find out Whether or not the former president of the United States becomes the first former president of the United States to be indicted arrested, we have no idea What we do know is that Donald Trump is playing the same card that he played before January sixth, and Kevin McCarthy is all in. So Oh, take a deep breath here. Joining Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and her latest book is, it seems so timely once again.

Is the divider which you co wrote with her husband Peter Baker. Susan, welcome back on the podcast.

Oh, thanks so much. It’s really terrific to be with you. We

need to start with the most important news. Congratulations to your son. Theo Baker’s student at Stanford. Who won a Polk award for writing he did for the Stanford Daily. Wow.

Good gene pool.

No. No. No. Are you kidding? It’s automatically made me the the third best journalist in my family.

That is just fantastic. It is interesting, you know, your son wrote a piece for the Stanford Daily uncovering allegations that some research papers co written by the university’s president contained manipulated images and he is the youngest recipient ever of a Polk Award. So that must be the highlight of your at your household, I’m guessing. Oh,

I’m We couldn’t be prouder of Theo who always said he didn’t wanna be a journalist. So we’ll see. Maybe he’ll just you know, his career will come and go at the top in college. But it’s amazing to see it. Peter and I have just watched in having nothing to do with it, but just being incredibly proud.

Okay. So we started on a high note because of where we’re going now. You wrote ten days ago, the two thousand twenty four Trump is scarier than twenty twenty Trump. And boy, you wake up this morning after a weekend of Trumpian rants and threats in calling on his supporters to protest tweets aimed at the New York police department essentially encouraging them not to protect the prosecutors. So let’s talk about this.

Europe, the simple truth is the twenty twenty four is all about Donald Trump. And there’s been a lot of wish casting that he was sinking or that he was losing or he was gonna be replaced. And right now, it does feel as if it is all about Donald Trump and he is scarier than twenty twenty Trump.

Yeah. I mean, look, the capacity for, you know, sort of hope over experience is one of the the big themes I would say of the Trump era and we’re still for better or often for worse, living in in the Trump era. And he hangs as a long, long shadow over our politics because the Republican Party can’t renounce its addiction to this man, it seems to me. And, you know, I ever since the twenty twenty two midterm elections. I’ve been struck by people’s capacity to just project onto a set of facts that didn’t support it the idea that that Donald Trump was over.

In in my view, he has remained the front runner for the Republican nominations, not a guarantees, not a slam dunk. And, you know, he is playing from the same playbook, but without many of the constraints that his inexperience and ignorance when he first entered politics at least put around him. This is Trump without the guardrails. So

what did we see this weekend? I mean, one of the big questions was, would the Republican Party rally around Donald Trump if he was criminally indicted? And there there was no question that he got the reaction from his base that he wanted. So let’s just talk about what we’ve seen happen over the last forty eight hours. How aggressive Trump has been and how there’s been, as far as I can tell, no pushback, no pushback, really, from his fellow Republicans.

Yeah. I mean, even people who are not supportive of Trump have either been supportive of the idea that somehow this represents vast overreach on the part of the New York State prosecutors have not exactly come out and suggested that maybe the Republican Party doesn’t wanna have a president who might be under one criminal indictment and possibly featuring additional charges as well from other prosecutors in other jurisdictions. And, you know, that’s again something that at this point, you know, this isn’t our first Trump news cycle. Again and again and again, we’ve seen this playbook run itself out. And Trump by now has mastered it.

He forces Republicans to choose side, and they continue to be fearful or whatever of his hold over the base. And so they choose him. They choose him even the one to are nominally against him or talking about running against him. I mean, it just we should step back and stay. Of course, It’s still shocking that before we’ve even seen the Charlie Sykes, Republicans are so quick to condemn them.

Did they really want somebody who has alleged to be a pair of hashtags, to a porn star actress, to be the party standard bearer. Once again, it’s it’s kind of mind blowing. Well,

I mean, the counter factual is they could have simply said, well, you know, let’s wait and see what the jury does. Let’s see what the Charlie Sykes. Or let’s wait to let the criminal justice system run its course. We should trust the criminal justice system instead. They’re really all in.

And and of course, the Magna folks have unleashed the flying monkeys on Ron DeSantis saying, you know, you need to come out and also defend Trump and denounce the prosecutor. What do you think DeSantis is going to do? This is a trick question, actually. I think.

Well, interestingly, this may pose a tougher challenge for him than than Ukraine where he basically, I guess, looked at the numbers or looked at his his old soul or whatever he did and decided to go with Trump on the war in Ukraine last week, which is a very interesting moment in these sort of brewing twenty twenty four presidential nomination. This one, I think, is harder because it seems to me that Ron DeSantis’ campaign looks like it’s going to be promised on, I’m Donald Trump without the court dates. I’m Donald Trump without the legal problems. And so for him to embrace Trump’s grievance over those legal problems might strike a little bit more of a problem for somebody who’s carving out an identity as the unsullied Trump, if you will. Well,

based on past experiment, I just assume he’s gonna cave because the one thing that seen from Ron DeSantis is that he does not want any daylight between himself and Donald Trump. He doesn’t want to be accused of being establishment or being a rhino. So We’ll see what do you make of Kevin McCarthy who came out immediately and pledged to have congressional investigations against the prosecutor. I mean, not simply, notoriously saying that he thought it was a political prosecution, but actually threatening retribution against the state process. A killer.

That seems like kind of a new thing.

Kevin McCarthy made his deal Charlie Sykes the first week of January when he couldn’t. Become speaker in any other way. He has been bought lock stock and barrel by the Freedom caucus and Trump’s most outspoken defenders on Capitol Hill. If Jim Jordan wants it, then Kevin McCarthy is gonna do it. And Jim Jordan wants it.

And the bottom line is that it can’t surprise anybody at this point that McCarthy is completely already made his choice and is simply following through there. He wants his job as speaker more than he wants to look independently at any of these issues.

Well, I think you know that I agree with you about this, but let’s talk about, you know, your argument that, you know, twenty twenty four Trump is scarier than twenty twenty Trump and that we need to pay attention to what he is saying and doing because I think there’s been kind of this tendency that, like, okay, he’s down there. Let’s kind of laugh him off. Let’s not really parse everything he’s saying. Let’s not amplify it. But what he’s doing is a doomsday laden frontal attack on American democracy.

Far darker and more threatening to the constitutional order than even his previous two bids. Talking about this, why is this even more threatening than what he’s done in the past, which was pretty bad.

Well, there’s a number of different ways to unpack that, Charlie. It seems to me, first of all, that it’s important to reckon with the fact that Trump having already been president over the course of four years, and that’s something obviously Peter and I document in our book. He’s pro ed already the weak points in institutions and individuals. He understands much better than he did when he came very unexpectedly into office after the twenty sixteen election. He understands the vulnerabilities he’s aware of the need to have a kind of yes men amplifying staff around him, not officials who would perceive themselves as as guardrails against him in any way.

So that’s number one, is a different group of people around him. Number two, he survived not one, but two, impeachment and the Republican Party refused to foreswear him after either of those. He took the party over the cliff, of January sixth and seeking to overturn a lawful election. They still followed him. And so he would really be coming back to power without any of the even perceived institutional constraints that hampered him before.

And of course, now he faces the potential of being indicted and possibly beating that rep as well if he were actually to win the presidency again So I think it’s very important to understand that number one. Number two, many of the kind of people who held their nose types and surrounded him have disappeared since he left the White House. They might not be condemning him wrongly, but they aren’t necessarily in his orbit at Mar a Lago anymore. And so what you’ve seen is a Trump who maybe in the past, he flirted with white supremacists, he flirted with QAnon in twenty twenty. Now he openly embraces those types in a way that has made his rhetoric much more doomsday laden, much more apocalyptic, much more openly confrontational.

If in the past, he was, you know, typing out his tweets and truth socials with, you know, all capital words every Tenth word. Now, it’s every word. It’s all caps shouting at America. Well,

I do think it’s also important to realize what he’s been doing over the last several years, and we’ve seen the fruits of this. Delegitimizing the justice system, celebrating, embracing, and promising pardons to the rioters on January sixth. I mean, this process of revisionist history is not about history. It it is about changing what is acceptable norm. So, I mean, this whole you know, January six, you know, were peaceful, you know, patriotic American protesters who were just outraged to the stolen election, that narrative now suddenly becomes very relevant to what he’s talking about possibly doing in the future and what is considered to be normal.

I mean, I don’t think that this week is gonna tell us what happens because, you know, it’s not gonna happen in New York. But if you have indictments in Georgia and the Department of Justice, this will build over the summer. I mean, this is a long term process. And I I just have to ask you, because I go back and forth on the America one question, but it really feels like we are feeling the consequences in a very real way of the failure and or delay of holding him accountable for what he did on January. The fact that it has been more than two years that none of the architects have been charged or convicted, that he was able to announce his candidacy before anything came down.

It feels as if much of this is a consequence of our failure to hold him accountable in real time. What do you think?

Well, I would note in that vein that it’s actually already been longer as of today from January sixth than the entirety of the Watergate scandal — Yeah. — from it occurring to the investigations to Nixon being forced out of office. Mhmm. And that gives you a sense of just how long the process has gone on. And I do think that this kind of dismay and outrage that Trump has always managed to escape accountability again and again again.

It’s one of the things certainly that has fueled democratic opposition to him But I also think it is corrosive to the system. It is part of the general dismay at the failure of American institutions, which is now something that left as well as right, I think, increasingly feels and drives our politics in some way. And you know, if Trump is indeed indicted as he said he was going to be by the New York authorities this week, you know, it still is going to fall short. Of this kind of fantasy of the transformative accountability moment. You know, Trump is just sort of hauled away and handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit, you know, obviously, a, it’s not gonna play out like that, but b, given the gravity of the allegations that are being investigated about Trump at the federal level, the idea that he potentially should be held responsible for instigating an insurrection against the country’s own congress to remain in power, to then have him indicted on, you know, this sort of, hundred and thirty thousand dollar hush money payment to a former porn star actress that was covered up before the twenty sixteen election, you know, that just that’s inevitably going to produce not the accountability moment that people have been dreaming of.

It’s

unfortunate that this is the first case. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t bring the case, but I think it feels as if this is the case that is the easiest for Trump and his allies to frame as this is just not important. Do you have higher priorities? This is political. Especially given the magnitude of these other cases, the mean that the payoff to the porn star, the changing of the business records, which in itself is a misdemeanor, just pales in comparison to these other possible charges that are hanging out there in George in the Department of Justice.

So I think it’s unfortunate this is the first one.

Well, I think the other thing to keep in mind is that there are even many critics of Trump attorneys who are concerned that just not that strong of a legal case. Now again, we haven’t actually seen the indictment. I’m personally very curious to see whether Alvin Bragg has come up with new evidence because remember that this was actually already investigated before and it wasn’t taken through to a case by federal prosecutors. And so one of the interesting questions is why was it resurrected now? At the state level.

We don’t know the answer to that. The underlying offense as far as we understand it is a federal offense. It is a federal election after all that Trump was a candidate in in which he withheld this information. Ron DeSantis there a rationale that proves compelling to people for why this case now and what information the DA may have that wasn’t previously in the possession of prosecutors. That’s something that perhaps will be answered this week.

Listening to the new Donald Trump, you wrote that his speech to CPAC should have been the front page news. This is the the speech where he vowed that, you know, I am your retribution. I am your justice. What do you hear in that speech? What do you think that should be a front page story?

Think

about it this way. I mean, and now he will organize his campaign around grievance, and I’m a victim, and they’re executing me. But, you know, what are the two kind of signal moments of Trump’s twenty twenty four campaign so far up to this moment. I would say that it was when he vowed to even terminate the constitution, that was the word to use terminate the constitution if that was what was required to return him to power. He did that just a few weeks after announcing his campaign in twenty twenty four, and then retribution.

So termination and retribution. Eventually, stating in that CPAC speech, essentially that he wanted to go to war against the institutions of American justice and American government on his own behalf should he return to power? Yes, I think you should take that seriously because it’s not the kind of thing that we’ve ever had an American would be president certainly not somebody who was the front runner for his party’s nomination saying as his platform. And termination and retribution suggest a very different Trump than even the Trump of twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen. In

his very apocalyptic, in his rhetoric, if we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever. He he was also describing the January sixth defendants and rioters as great great patriots. This is the final battle. They know it. I know it.

You know it. Everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win or we win. If they win, we no longer have a country.

I mean, that is that is very, very stark, you know. And then, of course, he gives the address where he talks about, you know, obliterating the deep stage of the video last week where he’s saying that you know, our real enemy is not Russia or Vladimir Putin. Our real enemy are the Americans in the deep state that he would completely restructure fire people in the Department of Defense, the intelligence agencies, theoretically, also the Department of Justice. You know, your book was titled The Divider. I mean, that was so starkly on display that here is somebody who is running for president pitting Americans against one another and saying, our enemies are not abroad, our enemies are other Americans who hate you and whom we must destroy.

Well, you know, having spent a fair amount of time in Russian across the former Soviet Union, of course, that is the language of purges. That is the language of Bolshevism. It is in us against them mentality. Some of that sort of apocalyptic. This is the final battle.

Explicitly recalls a cleansing fervor, the idea that there is no choice but to fight It does seem to be almost an explicit call for violence, which is really striking, given what Trump is under investigation for. In the aftermath, of the twenty twenty election in January sixth. It’s almost as if he’s daring, the federal prosecutors come and get me. Come and get me. Otherwise, we’re gonna double down on this.

Is it chilly in reality? I understand why many people wanna turn away from it. Trump is out of office. They can tell themselves that actually the system worked, that he was defeated lawfully and clearly in an election in twenty twenty, Joe Biden is the president, they can say that, you know, there have been trials of of hundreds of people who took part in the violence of January six and, you know, they can say that it’s giving oxygen to someone like Trump to, you know, amplify his outrageous and absurd claims. And there’s merit to all of those arguments.

But this is also a story that we’ve seen before. And this in many ways was was why people did not take Trump seriously enough as he was gaining steam in the Republican primaries in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen, and that actually helped to enable him to win that primary election. And,

unfortunately, they’ve internalized the lesson that you should not necessarily go at Donald Trump. So looks plain Mike Pence to me. I I just need some some pencil whispering here because here you have the former vice president who gave a speech to the gridiron dinner which was neither recorded or televised. Where he had some pretty harsh words about Donald Trump’s behavior during the insurrection on January sixth, where, you know, his life was threatened, his family’s life was threatened. And there were people who went well, like, you know, at least he’s now speaking out.

He’d be more aggressive. He’s amplifying this. And yet yesterday, he sits down with Jonathan Last. And refuses to really push hard on Donald Trump. Going along with the line, this is a politicized, you know, political unfair prosecution by the the Far left.

And then there was this very interesting exchange, Jonathan Carl from ABC, plays a tape for Mike Pence, and I just wanna play the back and forth. And then, Susan, if you could help me understand the mentality of Mike Pence under these circumstances, let’s play this Jonathan Last. I wanna play something Donald Trump has said to me when I asked him if

he was concerned about your safety on that day. Were you worried about him during that that siege? Right. Were you worried

about the siege? I thought he was well protected, and I I had heard that he was in good shape. Mhmm. No. Because I had heard it was a very good joke.

But but No. You heard those

chance.

That was terrible. It was, you know,

he could have well, the people are very angry.

They’re saying hang

me. Because it’s it’s common sense it’s common sense that You’re supposed to protect. How can you if you know a vote is fraudulent. Right? Yeah.

How can you pass on a fraudulent vote? To Congress.

I mean, he’s effectively justifying

or or excusing the actions of people who were We’re calling for you to behave. There was no excuse for the violence that took place at the capital on January sixth. And and I’ll never diminish it as long as I live.

But

but but look, I president’s wrong. He’s wrong that day. And I had actually hoped that he would come around in time. John, that he would see that the cadre of of legal advisers that he surrounded himself with had led him astray. But He hasn’t done so.

And it’s a I think it’s one of the reasons why the

country just wants a fresh start. To to saying, to justifying those murderous chants, does that effectively disqualify him from being commander in chief again?

I think that’s a judgment for the American people to make. Mhmm. What’s your judgment about it? And I’m confident they’ll make it. Well, look, I’ll be honest with you.

I was angry that day. And while I believe in forgiveness, I’ve I’ve been working hard at that for a while. The president let me down that day and let us down. We let the country down that day. But thanks to the courage of law enforcement.

The riot was quelled. We reconvene the congress the very same day and a day of tragedy. Became a triumph of freedom. And I’ll always be proud of our small part in that. But be honest with you the emotions of that day, the emotions sense.

I just haven’t had time for it. To me, there’s just too many issues that we’re facing this country today under under the failed policies of this administration that I don’t have a lot of time for looking backwards. Could you ever support him again for president? I think that’s

yet to be seen, John. I get to be seen, Susan.

It’s funny. I’m a little bit mad at you. I’m having painful to listen to you. I know. And it’s in it’s full.

My bivalent. People are always You know, first of all, one tell after a career in Washington is when somebody says, I’m going to be honest with you. Whatever comes next in the sentence is probably not their most honest. Observation. It’s painful to watch people grown men abase themselves in this way in front of Donald Trump as they have done again and again again.

Of course, Mike Pence made a career of that over four years as Trump’s vice president accepting things that he would not have accepted from any other politician having you know, preached a a kind of saint pneumonious public morality to the American people. Okay. He excused it again and again and again. And Donald Trump and continues to do so.

And why he thinks this is a savvy strategy to be neither hot nor cold, neither fish nor foul. Why he thinks this is gonna work for him? I just don’t know. So Am I right that you are skeptical about Ron DeSantis’ ability to be the Trump slayer? Because he, of course, is the great non Trump hope for many of the magical thinkers in the Republican Party these days?

You know, I’m interested to see how this plays out. It does appear that DeSantis is moving toward running against Trump He seems to have made a very interesting and clear choice to run as Trump without the legal troubles, as a young Trump, forty four years old, without burdened by possibly being hauled off to jail. And maybe that’s appealing to people to have exactly the same positions as Donald Trump answered if the culture war without the problems of the first warrior, but he also, of course, is without some of the advantages that Trump has in terms of his hold over the electorate in terms of his charisma and, you know, carnival. People are not afraid to criticize him. I mean, you saw like carnival barker essence is not something that that Ron DeSantis has.

You know, he’s an untested commodity at the national level. And I think we’re gonna see how that plays. It’s a heady and short run for Ron DeSantis from being a basically an obscure back venture in Congress. And I I have to say there’s a certain merit to this one complaint that Donald Trump has, which is I made this guy. That’s

not untrue.

And in twenty eighteen, he was nothing, you know, without me and losing a gubernatorial primary until he decided to go all in on being the Trumpiest of Trump Republicans in that Florida gubernatorial primary. And, you know, when Trump complains about that, you gotta say there is there is a little bit of merit to that, isn’t there?

Yeah. Exactly. So this is also the anniversary tree of the beginning of the war in Iraq. And you had very interesting column recently that you’re getting this strong sense that we still have this big hangover from the George w Bush era. I mean, this is the anniversary of the decision to invade Iraq and we’re getting all kinds of echoes of the banking crisis.

So looking back on that, how should America think about that long and tragic and ultimately futile in the eyes of many conflict.

Well, that’s right. Ron DeSantis start out first of all by saying what a tragedy it was for the Iraqi people, first and foremost, who lost hundreds of thousands of dead, millions of lives, disrupted, Saddam Hussein was a terrible tyrant, and I saw that firsthand. I was a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post at that time. I entered Iraq on the first day of the war unilaterally with a bunch of fellow journalists. We literally took our rental cars from the Kuwait City airport.

You’re not supposed to do that by the way. We took our rental cars from the Kuwait City airport and drove over the sand into Iraq. And we saw firsthand that the parades and the flowers were not there, and yet also the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime met people who were tortured, spoke with doctors in Basra who literally had to slice the ears off deserters at the orders of Saddam Hussein’s regime. So, you know, stipulating that that this was a horrible place almost like Stalinism in the desert. It was also a great political tragedy for the United States.

I think very comparable in that sense to Vietnam in terms of its lasting and enduring legacy on our own political system. We came to export democracy to the Middle East, but here we are two decades later, and it’s an inward looking time of worries about our own. Democracy here in the United States. I think that it has certainly cast a long shadow over foreign policy debates over our presidential elections, arguably both Barack Obama and Donald Trump would not have been president without the backlash to George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.

Now, this is fascinating when you think about all of the political fallout from that. And as you point out, it’s it’s really remarkable the transformation of Bush’s own party in the two decades since that. I mean, two decades ago, Republicans embraced what you called brash militarism that sought to topple Saddam and transformer Iraq and the broader Middle East. But of course, you know, Iraq was transformed after hundreds of thousands of people were killed. But you think about what’s happened now to the Republican Party and how far it’s come from that, and you’re right.

It’s hard to imagine the Republican Party’s present state right now without, you know, the twin bullshocks of the two thousand eight government bailout of Wall Street and the overreached the invasion of Iraq. I mean, both of those things now lately shaped and transformed his own party.

Well, that’s right. And of course, you see a strong echo of this among the Republican primary candidates over support for the war in Ukraine. Increasingly, you have people like Rhonda Sanchez joining with Donald Trump in what can only be called a pro Putin wing of the Republican Party, which absolutely would have astonished anyone who was covering the foreign policy debates of George W. Bush shares. You know, you have Ron DeSantis claiming that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, literally a war of annihilation against the neighboring state was a quote unquote territorial dispute.

Yeah. This from a man who, as recently as twenty fifteen, before Donald Trump, came into the picture. Ron DeSantis was out there criticizing Barack Obama for not doing enough to support the Ukrainian people in their conflict with Russia. So you know, that’s a pretty radical shift in thinking that represents the view that the Republican electorate has just abandoned its previous views around internationalism, around American leadership in the world, around Russia itself. You know, it used to be that you understood that Republicans were the kind of tough on Russia party, but that’s not the case anymore.

And you have many polls after a year of conflict in Ukraine suggesting that there is a very pronounced gap between the two parties on the issue of the United States support for the Ukrainians and that it is Republicans who are more quickly souring on that enormous commitment of military assistance and financial resources to Ukraine than Democrats. Perhaps it reflects just another example of the extreme polarization of our politics that we’re living through. Well,

and then we spent decades talking about the Vietnam syndrome and the hangover from Vietnam, but I think you make a great point about the hangover from Iraq, you know, shattering American confidence, you know, making the whole idea of promoting democracy suspect distracting us from China and Russia. And obviously, you know, as you just said, you know, breaking the Republican commitment to a robust foreign policy. INSTEINLY ENOUGH GEORGE W. B. B.

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B. B. B particularly in recent years with Trump. He does not support Trump. He voted against him.

Yeah. But he’s been very wary of kind of sticking his head out and and having Trump go after him publicly, which he surely would do. Trump really is a bush basher of long standing. Of course, ran against Jeb Bush in twenty sixteen, but really he was running against Jeb Bush’s brother George w Bush as much as against Jeb Bush and attacking the Iraq War notwithstanding his initial comments years ago in favor of it. And, you know, just basically using the bushes as a foil for the kind of Republican party Trump wanted to happen.

So George W. Bush is really, you know, he’s gone into his retirement in Texas. He’s painting pictures of wildfires and and birds and, you know, generally sticking out of politics, but I was told he was here in Washington just a few weeks ago had a reception sponsored by the business roundtable, and a bunch of his foreign policy advisers from the end of the Bush administration had just published a book called Handoff of their transition memos to the Obama team. Arguably, this was kind of the last good transition that we’ve had between administrations because, of course, than there was Trump. Bush came to this party and he was asked about Iraq.

And in these off the record comments, I was told he was actually very unrepentant. That was the word used by the former Bush official who told me about it. He was kind of stunned actually at how adamant Bush was, you know, this was the right decision then, and it’s the right decision now. That’s what he said. There are very few people even in his own administration who still think that?

And

you you mentioned David From, who was a speech writer at the time, you know, who’s now calling it a grave and costly error. And I I I tend to agree with all of that. So now we have this debate within the Republican Party as you as you point out. You know, between Trump Ron DeSantis, you have they have the eighty eight percent of the primary voters support, and they’re both saying they’re not border of Ukraine. The actual opinion of base voters is a little bit more divided.

You you still have people like Mike Pence and Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo and others who are supportive of more robust foreign policy. So how do you see this playing out? Is the Republican Party now gone, will it be isolationist for the next decade? Or do you think there’s a possibility that we might have return to a more internationalist foreign policy. What do you think?

Where is this going?

Well, first of all, no accounting for flip flops. Rhonda Sanchez already flip flops once on Ukraine, so he can certainly flip up again if he emerges as the Republican nominee or as the president, I definitely wouldn’t rule that out. I think this is an example of how our politics is pushing the extremes on a country that isn’t quite as extreme as its outcomes keep suggesting that it is. And, you know, that eighty percent of the electorate is supporting right now in the Republican primary Trump or DeSantis according to recent polls. But eighty percent of the Republican electorate is not against American support for the war in Ukraine.

And so that might be a a classic example. Actually, of where an extreme position is adopted by a party even though it’s electorate is not necessarily sold. Entirely on it. You have minorities within the parties who are able to dominate and lead the parties in extreme direct AND I THINK THAT’S ONE OF MY GREAT FEARS WERE AT LARGE FOR THE COUNTRY. Reporter:

SUSAN GLASSER’S STAFF WRITER, HER LATEST BOOK IS THE DIVIDER, WHICH co wrote with her husband Peter Baker. Susan, thank you so much for coming back on the Bulwark podcast.

Well, it’s a pleasure to believe with

you. Thank you, Charlie Sykes thank you all for listening to today’s Secret Podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we’ll do this all over again. Secret Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, an engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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