The “Everybody Sucks” Foreign Policy (with Tom Nichols)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I’m Sarah Long publisher of the Bulwark, and this week we’re talking about the GOP’s evolution on foreign policy. One year ago, Around when Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, I did a focus group of two time Trump voters and they were firmly pro Ukraine. One year on not so much. Only twenty nine percent of Republicans see Russia as a major threat to US interests according to a January Pew research poll.

That’s down for fifty one percent in March twenty twenty two. At that time, only nine percent of Republicans thought we were doing quote unquote too much for Ukraine. This past January, that number jumped to forty percent The Iraq War also began twenty years ago this week. All of the Republican voters we talked to supported it twenty years ago, but now they are deeply cynical about American foreign policy. My guest today is Tom Nichols, Staff Raider at the Atlantic and Professor Emeritus of National Security Affairs at the U.

S. Naval War College, He’s also my good buddy. Tom, thanks for being here. Gonna

be with you, Sarah.

Okay. I’m just gonna ask you an open ended question just to start because you already tweeted and you already showed me your face right before we started the podcast to indicate that perhaps your reaction to hearing these voters was one of a deep concern. But just tell me what you thought of the focus groups listening to these voters.

Well, you know, in a way, sometimes I’m a nora’s person asked because I’m I adhered to that old Churchill line about the argument against democracy is a ten minute discussion with the voter. Mhmm. But I also understand that foreign policy is really complicated and people find it, you know, a difficult and emotional subject. The overall comment I’ll make compared to, say, focus groups that used to see on television in the seventies or the eighties even. Is just this immense amount of confidence and assurance.

There are a few exceptions and, you know, they’ll probably come up when we’re talking of people. So, I absolutely know what’s going on here. And of course, then they proceed to say something that’s just wrong. And so the information basis and the kind of epistemological certainty you know, those two things combined really worry me, and I think that’s part of an overall phenomenon that’s been a problem, you know, in this country for years now. Yeah.

Well, a lot of them have been doing their own research. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So

I know as a complaint of yours and something that I hear all the time in the focus group, is that the sort of gold standard for information because they can’t trust anything else is that they do their own research. And as a result, they were kind of all over the map about what they thought about foreign policy and what information they had. But I wanna dive into what these voters were thinking because I wanna just stipulate upfront. I’m not a foreign policy person. At at the risk of sounding like one of these voters overly confident in my own positions, I just wanna say I have you on here to be the expert because I am not.

So I was born in nineteen eighty, which I’m sorry, that must sound hard to you because I think you’re you’re slightly older. Wow.

I’m going into grandpa’s Simpson mode while we’re sitting here already

here.

So I

was born in nineteen days. So I’m born the year that Reagan takes office. I remember the wall coming down I was in college when nine eleven happened. I sort of began my professional career as a young conservative at the time we were going into Iraq. And I was part of a conservative establishment that was super supportive of going into Iraq.

And I, you know, was sort of raised on the weekly standard politically and by a lot of the Neocons. And I guess the one thing sort of stipulating that I don’t know that much specifically about foreign policy. I will say the change in the Republican Party and the change in Republican voters for how they talk about foreign policy is to me the biggest change I mean, there’s a lot of other changes we can talk about in terms of character not counting. No.

It’s astonishing.

Right? There’s change a lot. But but this, this on foreign policy really is wild. Right?

Right. Right. And as you were entering the world, and opening your eyes for the first time in this great adventure. I was voting for Ronald Reagan. Yep.

That was my first election. And I think when it comes to foreign policy, and in so many other things with foreign policy especially. What’s changed is that the party that I joined in the late seventies which had this deeply confident, optimistic, very assured belief in America even though by the end of the seventies. This was after Watergate. It was after Vietnam.

You know, all the tropes that are also true about how people didn’t trust government anymore. The Party of Reagan, as it was constituted in eighty and onward, believed in the shining city on the hell that America could do great things that we were more often right than wrong. And that confidence has been lost and the base of the Republican Party in particular has kind of congealed into this sour, shirtless, a pox on all houses, everybody sucks kind of pessimism that not only pushes back against the foreign policy establishment, that these voters, these base voters see as hopelessly liberal — Mhmm. — which, you know, that’s that’s a big part of it. Right?

If you say state department or even defense department, you know, the corrupt, liberal, deep stateers even though, especially in in national security, most of those, you know, are pretty conservative. And so, they’ve kind of resorted to this know nothing isolationism with one horrible difference, which is that These are people that go to rallies that said rather be a Russian than a Democrat. They’ve kind of cast the Russians as a placeholder in the way that Liberals used to do, by the way, this is the thing that really, if you were a young conservative in the eighties, that Liberals would say, well, you know, the Soviet Union is not perfect, but it’s counterweight to the United States. It limits the United States from just doing whatever it wants. Kind of stuff you read in the nation back then.

The core Republicans have become that, well, you know, Putin is not a great guy, but, you know, white Christian traditionalist, hates trans people, hates gay people, what’s not to like about the guy. And I think that this is really the effect of propaganda, a steady drumbeat of propaganda from places like Fox, but also the collapse of local news. The collapse of any form of news that isn’t either entertainment or Internet rabbit holes.

Yeah.

Where

people just don’t read newspapers, they have no sense really of national news. As you say, they do their own research. And I think that’s what’s happened with a lot of these people, and it is completely melted down their sense of moral orientation or their ability to engage in any kind of critical reasoning?

This is undoubtedly true. And one of the reasons I know it’s true is that I was doing focus groups right after Russia invaded Ukraine. And we did an episode back then with Alexander Vindman. And this is how two time Trump voters sounded back then. The most concerning issue at the moment, I believe, is people going into Ukraine.

War crimes, the issue for the United States I think the major problem is who the president is. If

Trump was president, I should say he is, but we know what happened on that. Putin would have never been. What

do you guys think about what you’ve seen from Ukrainian people and their leader? How do you feel about them?

They’re amazing.

I love them. Absolutely amazing. Especially when a sixty year old woman can stand there and tell a soldier from Russia, I’m going to put seeds in your pocket and then kill you, and then the seeds will grow up flowers and then your dead body.

Right. When the babushka’s take AKA forty seven There you go. Absolutely.

Exactly. That’s impressive.

I mean I think president Zelensky is a phenomenal leader too. I mean, when his line when he said, you know, I need ammunition. I don’t need a ride. Like, that was such a powerful line. And I

fine had one percent of his spine. America would be okay. We have more than enough oil and natural gas in

the United States that we can supply the rest of the world. Nobody has got a good gas from Russia prices would come down here as a result. Open up the fucking pipeline.

Okay. Now I remember this episode really vividly. And the reason I remembered is because gas prices were really high, and a bunch of voters in that group said that they would tolerate high gas prices if it meant that we could defeat Vladimir Putin. They’re like they’d be fine with it. And I remember at the time, Vindman was very sort of reassured listening to these voters that their instincts were in the right place.

And I remember being like, I wonder how sticky that gas price thing’s gonna be. And it turned out not very sickie. But more importantly, to your point about the media, these guys loved Ukraine. Back then, they wanted to get Putin and they wanted to help and they they admired Ukrainians. When we get to the the next section about where people are now, suffice it to say it’s different.

And I think that your point about the media is dead on. Like, there has been a relentless campaign to change how these voters view what’s happening there. And

it’s working. No.

It’s totally working, but I guess why do you think Tucker Carlson and the entire right wing infrastructure It’s still to me sort of gov smacking that they’ve become. Is this not too much to say pro Putin? Oh. Like, what what is happening? Why do they wanna do this?

Boy, that is a gigantic subject. So with the caveat to everyone that I’m going to do this in shorthand, I think there’s a couple of reasons. First of all, I think Fox in particular, its brand is we are the loyal leader to opposition to the gigantic Democratic machine that runs this country. And it’s an attitude they took with them even when the White House and both houses were in the hands of Republicans. They are addicted to this notion that we are the plucky gorillas telling you the truth against this giant blob.

And so, of course, because Biden and NATO are all in on this and helping Ukraine. It’s not an interesting hour for Tucker to come on and say, hey, you know, United States basically doing a good job You don’t keep people riveted in their seats with giant waves of cortisol and dopamine jolting through their brains. With that. So some of it is just the kind of crazy showmanship that is meant to keep people angry and staring at the television until their eyeballs are dry. Some of this though, I think you can’t underestimate the degree to which people like Tucker Carlson hate a cultural establishment of which they wanted to be a part and yet were rejected.

And so it’s almost like the kind of childish, I’ll get even with you approach is is decide with someone like Putin. That’ll show those bastards at CNN and MSNBC who fired me, watch what? You know, watch what I’ll do now. But there is also a cultural affinity with some of these people. You know, these are people that say, well, Vladimir Putin is brutal dictator.

But this is a guy who really didn’t want drag queens to win Eurovision,

you

know — Yeah. — that they have this kind of juvenile culture warring sense Here we are in the middle of the biggest war since World War two in Europe, and the right is still going on about woke banks and drag queens. And I think that feeds into that entire thing of saying, look, we just have to take this side. I think that when you said, it’s not too much sales pro Putin. It’s openly pro proof.

Yeah. There’s not even subtlety about this anymore. I mean, Carlson, as the kind of avatar of this, went years ago from, well, I’m just asking questions. Why shouldn’t we side with Russia? Is this really our business?

All the way to Zalenski is a gangster and Ukraine is a crazy dictatorship and all of this kind of Kremlin sludge and slime that has made its way from Russian television onto American television. Because it sells, because it’s culturally in sync with people like him believe and because it’s a kind of natural oppositionism to people who really think they are like the plucky gorillas even though they have the highest rated shows on cable.

Yeah. In fact, with that, just because I think these next group of sound bites really confirms what you just said. Let’s listen to these two prime Trump voters that we talked to for this episode because, you know, most of them. I think seven out of nine just in this group in particular wanted to see the US play a lesser role in world affairs period. And zero people wanted the US to act as a world leader during global entanglements.

So let’s listen to them, talk about why.

We already knew Ukraine was a country. We’ve seen it and heard about it throughout the past. Now he’s going through and closing churches to any Christians over there, and we’re paying the major share of the financial aid to the country, and it’s probably going in the front door, right back out the back door? The

Ukraine situation is in a way a cloak to ink, Russia, and China are powerful together. So Putin’s goal is to add him up. With China. And that’s his whole push. He needs to weaken us militarily drain us economically.

And so this aid to Ukraine is a game that you went The whole thing because I parts.

And

to

weaken us, to divert us, our attention, our energy, so that China and Russia have become very powerful and militarily cautious because there’s no money that is filtering into our military that’s done on purpose by this current administration. It makes me really nervous They don’t care. They think that that borders are bad in the United States, but they wanna send money to another country for borders.

You

know, and how about the trade spill? Too. Right? The train spill happens and and Biden’s like, hey, let’s get one of the Ukraine. I’m like, hey, wait a minute.

Why don’t you just go help? All those people — Right. Right. What is happening? Like, I couldn’t even believe that was happening.

The media

has been pumping all this potent stuff forever. I could care less about the guy. I mean, when Trump was in office, obviously, he respected us. So there was gonna be no mess around, like, what’s going on now. But Zelensky, where people don’t understand, he is exactly too a t, the same guy’s putting this.

He still has all the same corruption. He steal money from everybody. He’s oppressing people. He’s the same guy in a different suit. So I was never for that since the beginning.

Always been against it. They shouldn’t have time. I don’t care if Russia takes it over that. It’s a rollover test. We got so many problems here.

We need to solve what’s going on here.

Wow. So okay. Now I gotta say there’s two things. One is you can just see how much the whole of right wing media is just filtering through people. I never heard this last year, the idea that Ukraine was a corrupt country.

And one of those women seemed to be suggesting that we were diverting the money to Ukraine and that that was like the goal of Russia and China —

I know. —

so that they could, like, drain us of our money and then crush us. And we’re too stupid to know that, I guess. I had you watch the one group, but this has been coming up over and over and over again. And we don’t ask a ton about foreign policy, but we often just ask people, hey, what do you think about what’s happened in Ukraine? And we’ve just seen it evolve.

Over time. And the number one thing that comes up is this idea of we’ve got too many problems here. We’ve got a border issue. You know, we’ve got an education issue. We’re not taking care of our own people.

And deep in that kind of analysis is really the America first Trump idea. Yeah. I

was gonna say, sir. I mean — Go ahead. — you know, as a veteran of eighties politics. I have to tell you, this is very much a horseshoe moment because as I was listening to this, well, the train spill and we’ve got These were the arguments of the American left. Mhmm.

The far American left. Why are we sending money to NATO and you know, to fight the Soviet Union that has no interest in us. If we just leave them alone, and Reagan’s gonna take all that money from our schools and our towns and, I mean, I’m listening to this and I’m saying, holy crap. This is nineteen eighty four all over again. But from the far left and it really proves the horseshoe theory that if you just go far enough to the right, you will come around to the and vice versa.

If you go far enough to the left, you will sound like a scientist. And I took a couple of notes while that clip was going. By the way, of all the things people believe was also I don’t know if you’ll play this clip, but there were at least two people in there who think we’ve been in Afghanistan for thirty years. Yeah. Which is off by a full decade.

Mhmm. And it was twice. Two people. Thirty years is just too long. Yes, I agree.

Good thing we weren’t there for thirty years. But there is that confidence again. These are things everybody knows. Everybody knows. They’re shutting down churches.

Everybody knows the money is going out the back door. Everybody knows that they’re trying to drain us. Again, not even bothering to read the news that that this tiny fraction of American weapons and aid has now been used by the Ukrainians to destroy, like, the bulk of the Russian Armed Forces at this point. But glued to cable, glued to Internet newsletters, glued to YouTube, And I don’t know how you break through that. I think the reason you didn’t see it when the war broke out is that there was just so much video and so much obvious shock at what Putin had done that it was really hard to just kind of stick your head in the and it took a while for all of the kind of American propagandists to regroup.

You know that I and I get off this particular sub box, but you know from watching the way I interact with people on social media. I’m all for putting everything that happens, putting it on blast, I would love to take nothing but an hour of RT the way Juliet Davis does and show these Russians saying, we should nuke Ukraine. We should nuke Georgia. We should destroy London. We should attack the Americans.

You know? And just put it on there all night because and I keep thinking this watching these focus groups. So if you walked in there and said, look, here’s what the Russians are doing. Here’s what they said, you’d get, well, I don’t know that. I didn’t see that.

Right. They have this amazing ability with that huge epistemological surety to say, well, I don’t think that’s happening. That’s not what I know. And I don’t know how you break through that.

Yeah. Well, you know, this comes down to the theory that I talk about all the time, which is the Republican triangle of doom. Which is the toxic and symbiotic relationship between the right wing infotainment media, the politicians, and the voters. And this to me is a perfect example of how it works and how they sort of mutually enforce to push people more and more into a radical place. See, when I heard people a year ago, I’ve, you know, actually one of my sticks that I can’t let go of is the fact that, like, I like people.

I think that they’re good, generally. And I think this is your first miss I know. I know. I know. I know.

You and I don’t agree on this. But, like, here’s the thing, like, last year when listening to them talk about Ukraine, their instincts were all correct. It was to root for Ukraine. You know, you heard the woman in the first clip talk about the old lady that was giving the Russian soldiers the sunflower seeds so that when they were killed, sunflowers grow in their place and people loved that. They thought it was badass, Ukraine’s were on the side of righteousness, and then you watch the right one media.

And I think for for some of the reasons you say about can’t say anything nice about Joe Biden. So basically, some of it’s just negative polarity or negative polarization. We got to be against Joe Biden, and so we’re gonna side against all his foreign policy decisions to support Ukraine. And so now we’re sort of weirdly pro Russia, but you can just see how their instincts were right these people and it was the right wing media working on them over this past year that has now brought them to this place. And I think sometimes I have a more charitable view maybe than you do to some degree because, like, they didn’t come up with that stuff on their own.

Like, there’s a poisonous right wing in photo media that is feeding it to them. Yeah. You should keep them mad as you say.

But but and and let me just say, all joking aside. I am actually I’m a humanist and I’m just less optimistic than you are, and neither of us can begin to match our friend Jonathan Last laughs who, you know, is the Prince of darkness. So in the in the big scheme of things, I’m somewhere slightly more optimistic than Jonathan Last, definitely less optimistic than you. But here’s what I think is going on. That you’re missing about this.

Yes. People they’re natural instinct at that moment because it’s interesting and it’s exciting and it’s got a moral clarity to it. And so they kind of bandwagon onto that. But I think one of the things I saw reviewing the focus group footage is that this is part of an overall American thing, which is that you can see that these are folks that have a kind of restless dissatisfaction in general, and they’re looking to stick that onto something. Mhmm.

You know what I mean?

Thank you.

Yeah. I’ll put up with high gas prices. And then it’s like, what the fuck? I hate gas prices now. You know?

It’s like something goes by and they say, yes, that’s the thing I’m mad about. Oh, this new thing, that’s it. You know, that’s the thing that I’m really mad about. And the problem is, that I think, you know, and I’ve been more and more inclined. I’m just gonna plug my book here and say, ever since I wrote our own worst enemy, I’ve been more and more inclined to say, this part of just a kind of spiritual and civic emptiness that people are looking to blame on something.

And so they kind of go and it’s happening on to people on the left as well. But the American right in particular because of their location, because of their declining demographics, their rural location, etcetera, they’re saying, I am very unhappy with the world, and somebody’s or something is to blame. So let’s see. You know what it is? It’s that weird guy in Ukraine who’s just like Putin because everybody sucks.

It’s, you know, if only Joe Biden wasn’t juggled up with the oil companies, he’d open up the strategic reserve and gas would be a buck a gallon again. That kind of stuff. And I think, again, as you point out, so cogently, there isn’t a media politics, entertainment ecosystem that says, hey, we understand that feeling you have. We will enable that we will give you all the rationalizations you need. And all you have to do is sit your ass in that chair for two or three hours a night and buy pillows.

Yeah. This is why I When I think about who I blame, you know, this is me and JBL’s most fundamental disagreement. My Jonathan laughs to you bring up my best friend. And podcast partner. Like Tucker Carlson knows better.

The Fox News Brass knows better. We know that they lie. He

doesn’t care.

No. I know he doesn’t care. I know he doesn’t care. But that that’s my point is I guess that’s who I reserve just my I r four, especially because I’ve read your book and I thought your book was great. But the the thing you know, I see it in people and there’s a loneliness.

Yes. Now, and a lot of these voters are older And the world, even though it feels like it’s gotten closer with social media ever, they were just more and more isolated and they’re looking for community, and they find community in all being mad together — Right. — about the ways in which the world has sort of done them wrong and their grievance and somebody else is getting this or that, And I I guess that’s why I just always sort of feel compassion. Like, it sounds like a terrible life to sit in a chair and watch doctor Carlson and just be mad.

Okay. But I I I will try and mediate between you and Jonathan because I think you’re both right. But on the other hand, as old school conservatives, all three of us, whatever happened to human agency. Yeah.

No. Personal responsibility. I agree. It’s another one of those big thefts in the party. Agree.

Agree. Agree. Agree.

When I think of people who sit there and just stick that electrode in their neck every night. Right? This kind of comes back to an argument like about, say, drug abuse. Right? Say, this is terrible.

These people are addicted to this thing that’s killing them. And you get some people who do the tough love stuff of saying, well, they should just say no. You know, you get the Mitzy rig Let’s say no. Mhmm. And that’s the equivalent of, you know, me and Jonathan saying, here’s an idea.

Turn the goddamn television off. Change the channel. But as you point out, this is also a sense of community. Mhmm. I had I had an argument with an old friend from my hometown.

I went back and he was just spewing all this nonsense. And I said, where are you getting this? And he said, Hannity. He’s the man. And you could see that, like, my old buddy, he was like, Sean Hannity was his new pal.

Yeah. You know, like, this is the guy. He works in the restaurant business. He works long hours. His TV’s on at night.

And Sean Hannity is his pal. I’ve talked about other friends from from my hometown and from school that I’ve had these disagreements. My my late brother But in this case, I said, look, you once said I was your smartest friend. And I said, you can believe me or you can believe Sean Hannity. And you could see him kind of going, oh, wow.

I don’t see you very often, you know, like and is that, I

think, like, I don’t see you very often. I see Sean

every night. Exactly. Sorry. That’s exactly I see Sean every night. And, you know, I see you, you know, at Christmas and Easter, and and it was really disturbing.

And I again, if we offload any responsibility for this to just say, look, this candy, this crack that these guys are selling is just too good. The blue meth that they’re selling is just too good, then we really have to give up on democracy because the answer to that is paternalism. To say, okay, these people simply have no human agency they’re not capable of making their own decisions. You cannot inform them. And anytime you put on a bunch of carney barkers, they’re just gonna walk up and hand over their money.

I actually don’t believe that about the American public. I think that a little bit of that tough love, a little bit of that stigma, I I would like to bring back stigma because that conversation, I said, I’m sorry. But, you know, you’re rotting your brain, watching Fox News, and my buddy was like, wow. You know, that’s Dude, Harsh. So, you know, I think I think that could be recovered.

But I on on this sense, I’m, like, with Jonathan Last people want this and they’re doing it voluntarily, and that says something terrible about them. But with you, I agree. They are lonely Even though we are a closer society because of the Internet, that closeness is artificial. Yeah. It’s all plastic.

It’s electronic closeness. But it’s not actually the shaking hands with another human being and looking into their eyes and having a conversation. And so these people are terribly lonely. They’re scared. Because they think, as one of my friends once said, they think they’re on the wrong side of the evolutionary roller coaster

— Yep.

— in terms of where there’s towns and way of life or going. But I’m sorry. But that’s when I go back to being a hard climber. I’m saying, I’m sorry. I know you’re scared.

I understand change is scary. But that’s not an excuse for siding with psychopaths, seditionists, insurrectionists, and the goddamn Kremlin. Okay. Okay.

So alright. So, okay. You wrote a couple weeks ago about candidate’s responses to Tucker Carlson’s questionnaire. Right? And we read those statements to our present day group.

And they unsurprisingly, they liked a lot more of the isolationist policy statements from Trump and DeSantis, a lot better than those from Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie. Here’s the thing. So it’s not just the media and that people believe the media. Right? What we saw.

Now I know that there’s been a cleanup on IL-twenty twenty four here for misunderstanding. He’s trying to walk back a little bit of what he said. But, like, the toxic and symbiotic relationship between the voters, the elected officials and the right wing infotainment media. Like, DeSantis absolutely knows better. And he has decided to call it a territorial dispute.

He’s following the voters. Right? He’s allowing the right wing infotainment media who has poisoned the minds of these voters, and now he needs them to vote for him. So he is now saying, that he wants to be more isolationist. This is just a territorial skirmish that the US doesn’t have any vital national interest in it.

And what does that do? It creates another layer of people who also would know better or who would be inclined toward taking a harder stance against Russia. And it turns them into people who are like, Wama to Santa supporter and the two main people who represent the Republican Party now say that doesn’t matter to us, we should just stay out. That has an impact. Right?

And so

But I think part of it is that they’re following Trump. I mean, look, I really believe that at this point, the Republicans, and I’ve said this many times, they’re a post policy they’re not even a party. They are a movement. They’re a post policy movement. If Trump came out tomorrow and said, you know, I’ve been thinking about it.

Putin, bad guy, courting hands start flying. Right? Putin’s bad guy. We gotta take him out. I’ll take this guy down.

They’d be all in. I mean, I really think we’ve proven over five years that Donald Trump can whipsaw back and forth a hundred and eighty degrees, and people go with him simply because that is their, you know, that loneliness again. It’s like, well, this is my tribe. Trump is my big daddy. And a big daddy says, we’re gonna do it this way.

We’re gonna do it this way. And proof of that is look at the way he has turned on a dime about DeSantis and about things like COVID responses. I mean, Trump sounds like Fauci at this point. Right? You know, it’s like Florida had this terrible cold response and all these people died and he shut down things and then he didn’t and he opened up and he And people are going, yeah.

And I’m like, oh my god. You you guys have the the historical memory of tree squirrel. But and I think that’s simply because of kind of a cultish identification. So I think that’s a big part of it. I think Ron DeSantis is a candidate to the donor class.

When he stepped on that rake about, oh, it’s terrible. I assume that he got angry phone calls from people saying, what the hell are you talking about? And so he had to clean this up. Even before he tried that, DeSantis is in free fall. Trump gives people this moral theater.

Right? Does Santa’s bad, me, good? Ukraine, terrible, Putin, okay, you know, back and forth and they go, okay. These are, again, people that are drift and looking for somebody to latch on to, and to hang that vague sense of emptiness and frustration on it. And I think that that’s what’s going on here.

Okay. I’m gonna disagree that DeSantis is in free fall. I think that is too strong a statement. I I wanna let that just take care of my opinion. Fair enough.

But

But where is he now? He’s like, it’s he went from, like, neck and neck to, like, twenty seven percent. There

were two polls this week, Monmouth, and then morning consult that both saw a slide for DeSantis and Trump sort of picking up steam. And that is on top of Nate Kona done this aggregation of the polls where he’d compared where Trump was in the same poll he took a bunch of the same polls, and Trump had gained about a net four points of stance.

So he lost about a

net four points. So I think free fall is too strong, but I

do think Bankruptcy.

Right? I think that you’re right that DeSantis has had a bad couple of weeks here as he’s kind of put his toe in the water of really getting into it. And we see people kind of looking at Trump and still liking that show somewhat. So that’s true. But here’s here’s so I set up the Republican triangle of Jimmy, and I knew you and I were gonna argue about this and the culpability of the voters.

Because I just blamed the two, the the politicians and the right wing infotainment media. To me are the really pernicious side. And And I wanna go to bat for the voters one more time here, which is one of the reasons I think that the Republican Party has turned against its more hawkish ways is because of Iraq and Afghanistan. Right? It’s soured the GOP base, and I wanna play a telling snippet from the February twenty sixteen debate.

Or Donald Trump went after the Iraq war head on. It took Jeb Bush if you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he

announced for president, took him five days. He went back. It was a mistake. It wasn’t a mistake. It took him five days before his people told him what to say.

And he’s ultimately said It was a mistake. The war in Iraq, we spent two trillion dollars, thousands of lives. We don’t even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second large oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake.

So George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have

destabilized the Middle East. But so you so, I mean, let let’s see. You so you still think he should be

in peace. Think it’s my turn and then You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I wanna tell you, they lied. Okay.

He said there were weapons of mass destruction, there weren’t none, and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass. Okay. Alright.

Alright. Here’s the thing. At the time, I remember watching this and being like, the Republican voters aren’t gonna go for this. And that was one of the early indications of just how much I didn’t understand what was going on with Republican base voters. Because he was talking in a language that they agreed with.

Like, you guys lied about this. This is wrong. I mean, it was one of the reasons nobody wanted Jim Bush And I don’t think any of us knew that. But do you remember that period of time? No.

Did you see it going sideways then? Or what did you think? You

know, this is the classic time where all of us on the on the right look back and say, which was the moment you thought was gonna kill him you know, and I thought it was the John McCain thing. So by this point, I figured he could just drop his pants and start ranting in Russian, and it wouldn’t matter. But, re again, what really strikes me? Listening to that clip, then and now, I’m like, wow. So Donald Trump is basically Dennis Cassinitch now.

Yep.

It’s one thing to say, yeah, the Iraq War poorly executed, a screw up, a good attempt by a misguided administration, but, you know, among Republicans, and I don’t expect Democrats to talk that way, but certainly among Republicans, that’s what you would have expected. And instead, it’s like, wow, when did Ralph Nader wander into this debate? And again, I think the reason he got away with it was not because of anything about Iraq specifically, with the possible exception there, a lot of military families in the Republican Party, and I’m sure a lot of the people who were there or their families or new people, they were the people who bore the burden. So let’s get that caveat aside that perhaps that resonated with them. But nonetheless, I think for a lot of people, the real code underneath what Trump was saying is, those smarty pantses far away made decisions.

That you didn’t understand and didn’t wanna be involved in. And I’m running against an establishment. Of course, now I come back to my culpability of the voters issue. Trump is there saying, these people did something And in my mind, I’m adding that you all consistently, especially Republicans, that you all consistently supported. That you were all pretty good with, you know, one of the most controversial things I wrote in last year was when I basically blamed Afghanistan on us, on the people.

How much effect did Afghanistan ever have on an election after two thousand and two? Congressional, presidential? Nothing. It wasn’t there. This is all Afghanistan.

We got to brought it up, but, you know, but gas prices. And, I mean, it just wasn’t there. And all of a sudden, They watched Trump and they got a signal about what to be mad about. They said, yeah. Yeah.

That’s it. That’s what I’m

trying to do. Agree with this. I do not agree with this. I think he was tapping into something that existed, which was a disillusionment. You know, people being exhausted by being at war for at that time.

It’s been a long

time. I’m pushing back there, sir. People were not at war. The US military was a world saying Take

your point that, like, they were didn’t have to engage day to day. But, like, whenever somebody would get reminded, they would be like, why are we still doing this?

Well, okay. Why are we still doing this? Then, you know, you’re gonna vote for Barack Obama. He’s gonna do a full pullout. Oh, wait.

If he does that, he’s a coward. So he’s not gonna do it. Well, I can’t believe we’re still there. Okay. Well, we’ll like Trump.

He’s gonna get us out of there. Well, we can’t just get out of there. You know, I mean, the problem was that the American public was Goldilocks about this from the beginning. Get us in there and do good stuff. And if you pull out, you’re a complete weenie.

Even now, lover hate Biden, pulling out of Afghanistan the way he did it, It was a complete mess and I wrote a piece at the time saying this was a mess. On the other hand, it was what people wanted him to do you know, if you listen to these groups and if you look at the polling, get us out of Afghanistan. But what they really meant was get us out of Afghanistan in a completely cost free, non painful way that doesn’t leave anything in the hands of the bad guys. That’s not a real option. That’s not the real world.

That’s magical thinking. And what’s the new line on Joe Biden that he’s a worst, that he’s weak, that he doesn’t fight back? This is an argument you cannot win. I wrote a piece about the Iraq War two days ago and people mostly from the left have been bombarding me, but I keep pointing out, okay, the war went sour What was the response to the American people? They reelected George W.

Bush with three point three million extra votes. At some point, you have to just step back and say, I understand your anger about this issue, but what is it that you wanted your government to do? And how did you express that through voting? And I’ll just I’ll drop one international parallel here. Oh, Brexit, you know, we’ve never once been in the European Union.

Okay. But you elected government after government after government that kept you in the European Union, and you never really insisted on it, and you finally did it by stumbling into a referendum that was a razor sharp thing, and now you’re full of regret, and now you just want somebody to blame. And I feel very strongly if Bush had said, as I’m leaving office, I’m firing Rumsfeld. We’re gonna get out of this. You know, we’re gonna draw down, but the American public didn’t wanna do that.

They could say, well, as long as it’s not dangerous, Well, it is dangerous. For reality, it’s dangerous. And they didn’t wanna hear that, Sarah. They didn’t wanna hear about cause. So

I think that might be true to some degree. That they did wanna get out of Afghanistan with a lot fewer casualties and not feeling like we were abandoning I think it was a horrible thing to watch. And — Right. — people didn’t didn’t want that. There’s

always going to be no matter who did. But

here’s the thing where I think you know a lot about foreign policy. I’m, like, slightly more sympathetic to them because I have always been somebody who, like, just cares more about domestic policy than foreign policy. And I might know more than the average voter, but, like, I just think you come from Earth’s perspective where you know all of this stuff. Like, you’re an expert in it. They don’t know any of this stuff.

And like, where are they supposed to learn about it? They’re gonna learn about it from because they have family members who are in the military. You you hear this in the groups. I’m gonna gonna get to the groups here where some people who had perspective on it had it because either their kid was in the military or they themselves had served in the military, Otherwise, they’re relying on people that they trust to tell them things. And I think that it is

No. That’s where I disagree. I’m sorry, interrupting.

Go ahead. Go ahead.

So what I was gonna say here, the thing that occurred to me is you were you were saying this. There is a person in your focus group I kind of admired because she’s like you on this. She said, look, I don’t know a lot about this stuff. At one point, your your house said, who feels, you know, that that they don’t know enough about these issues to reach really firm conclusions. One person raises her hand.

One. And you, to your credit, you’re saying, look, I’m an informed voter, but I really don’t know a lot about this stuff. The rest of those people in these focus groups are like, well, of course, it’s because we’re just exporting heroin to get money for black ops.

Somebody did say

that. Somebody did say that. And I’m like, okay, I’m sorry, but there has to be at least a natural curiosity to say, okay, what actually is happening? Why aren’t we there? And the thing that flashed my mind, some years ago, I was on a panel with dance balls for the Washington Post.

And a guy stood up in the audience and he said, why don’t you guys in the press write more explainers about stuff? And Dan very quietly when I’m assuming he said, we do. You don’t read

them. Yeah.

And so if it’s not on TV and it’s not fun and interesting and engaging and dramatic and visual, then people just tune it out when the Washington posted that book on secret history of Afghanistan, my head kind of exploded because as I was reading all this stuff, I’m like, if you had been reading a newspaper for ten years, you already knew almost all of this stuff. And what what they’re really rebelling against is not more information It’s information that is boring. Let me tell you, what I always tell everybody, you know, listening out there, government an even foreign policy is boring. Yeah. It’s dull.

And people have gotten used to the idea that nothing should be boring. And so they say, well, I know what’s going on. We’re selling heroin to fund black ops. I know what’s going on. We’re in bed with a, you know, with a Nazi dictator who’s a Jew.

I’m in this Marvel Comics universe where, you know, everybody’s an interesting weirdo villain. And, yes, I know a lot about foreign policy, but I don’t as a moral issue, I don’t have a huge amount of certainty about some of these things. I mean, twenty years later, I just wrote a piece kind of saying, jeez. And I thought the Iraq war was the right thing to do, but my god, we screwed it up and people got killed, you know, for nothing. You know what I

I know

we gotta get to another clip, but I was watching this. And I’ve done this impression before but it struck me that you had a bunch of people who all reminded me of Cliff Clavin

—

Yeah. — from Cheers. The mailman from Cheers are on well, you know, it’s a known fact, you see, that, you know, we’ve been in Afghanistan for thirty years because we’re moving the tide. And I thought to myself, Holy shit. If you’re a candidate for office, how do you even begin to engage these people?

And I don’t know.

Alright. So let’s let’s see how spot on your impression there is and listen to these guys. Talk about why they’ve shifted, why they’re disillusioned about foreign policy. The

turning point was when I started to ask questions. And I was being demonized for asking questions, and that was the turning point. When it it was like, oh, well, why did we do x y z a b c or, you know, why weren’t there plain parts in front of the Pentagon? You know, like, various little things like that. And then all of a sudden, you know, it started arguments and things.

And I thought, whoa, arguments? I was just asking a question. I mean, if it’s all true, then where’s the answer? Anyway, that was a big turning point for me that got me down this road of questioning everything. Like, oh my gosh.

I don’t even know what to believe anymore. And

then

we find out that we got into Iraq based on all these lies, and it’s like, wow. Now what do we believe? I don’t know. I

don’t know. Bin Laden did what he did and everything, but there’s not one single American life I would trade for that idiot. So all all those Americans that died pursuing that. We could have done it with drones. I mean, there’s a million ways we could have handled that differently.

And it just sickens me that all those kids died for nothing. They entered Afghanistan without

having any real exit plan And I got later in the first golf ball. We knew when we went in, we were gonna do one thing, three Kuwait, and then we’re gonna go home. And that’s what we did. The plan was in place. Afghanistan, they went in blindly thinking they were gonna convert a whole country to think American had no plans on how to get out when we see the results of that thirty years later.

I have a son because his first day in the army was nine eleven and was struggling a bit in college that we felt like it was a good thing, and I went from thinking that he was joining the military to straighten him up to thinking, You have a really smart man that’s gonna go in and help our country. So I was totally loyal to it. Ten years later, when I had son come out broken, and the military was not helping him. And I see a broken son at forty two. And he trusts no one and does not believe in what he did.

It’s devastated our family. So yeah, we feel betrayed in the whole situation that we thought we were doing the right thing at the time.

Okay. So we’ve got listen. So so just we did we did four people there. So one of them I’m pretty sure that first guy when he was just asking questions came in about nine eleven and whether or not it happened because there Bulwark plain parts in front of the Pentagon. Yeah.

So we got one nine eleven conspiracy guy. And the other guy, I didn’t think we should get Bin Laden. Laden’s just an idiot. And then the third one was talking about Afghanistan, and we’ve been there for thirty years. But this fourth one.

This is somebody who whose son was in the military and who had an experience that has shattered him. We had a piece by Will Saletan who we love over at the bulwark talking about what it was like. And Afghanistan is just an incredibly shattering piece. So I guess there’s this part of me that says I hear a woman like that. And I think, I don’t know.

I’m not sure we did enough as a culture or that our elected officials did enough. TO HELP PEOPLE UNDERSTAND WHAT THE COST WAS GOING TO BE AND TO EXPLAIN WHY IT’S WORTH IT.

I CAME AWAY FROM THAT DIFFERENT lee. Alright. And that’s the second time around. I mean, I watched last night and, you know, went through it again with you today. First, the first thing that struck me about the nine eleven guy said, well, I was demonized who demonized you?

Probably

anybody who talked to about nine eleven being an inside job.

Maybe demonized was like people going, what? Or I suspect spent a lot of time on Internet chat rooms —

Yep.

— which is where people really probably roughed him up. And so now he thinks that the whole government, that everything democracy is bad, okay, because I asked about playing parts in front of the Pentagon where hundreds of people died, and people got mad at me. The guy who said, well, I wouldn’t have given one life to get in a lot. Well, I’m sorry, but your millions of your fellow citizens demanded it of your government that Bin Laden be found and killed. Right?

Imagine saying right after nine eleven and in those first five or six years. Hey, one American soldier isn’t worth getting bin laden, guys at jerk, let them go. There was literally almost no one again out of the CUCINAGE wing or, you know, I mean, maybe I’m being unfair to have Ron DeSantis CUCINAGE. There was nobody in America was making that case. That’s an easy thing to say twenty years later.

Because it sounds like righteous anger. But I would really like to know if that guy was saying that in two thousand and two. The no plan for getting out of Afghanistan while you know, everybody’s a military strategist. Again, you know, Bush said we’re going to eradicate Afghanistan as a source of terrorist threats. Which for twenty years, and my argument about this, the end of the occupation was, hey, for twenty years, there wasn’t another nine eleven.

For twenty years, there were no more terror starts coming out of Afghanistan. That’s what you wanted. You know? But the last one, this is where we really diverge. The thing I heard that this woman’s son who apparently she said he served ten years?

Yes.

She said ten years later when I had his son come out broken. And the military was not helping him.

And on that, I think, you know, to criticize the fact that we don’t help veterans enough in general in this country is absolutely right and it’s one of the really shameful things. We glorify veterans as spartans when they’re going in and then we tend to forget about them. When they’re coming out. And I think that’s perfectly legitimate. But I the idea that somehow, all of American foreign policy is a failure because my son to me, that resonated with this thing we’ve been talking about all morning, which is I have things in my life that have gone wrong, and I’m going to hang knees on giant issues policy now.

If the guy who was in the military ten years came out broken, then the government should have helped him. I don’t know where he served. I don’t know if he was a combat. Don’t know what he did. But that becomes this kind of tragic personal story that somehow gets woven into a larger political narrative.

Alright.

I think that’s a totally fair point you’re making in response to that, and I understand why you would hear that in that. And you’re right. There’s some of that in there. I guess this is my question to you. It’s the final one, which is okay.

So you think a lot of the problem here is with the voters that a lot of this responsibility lies with them. I know I read something you wrote where you said something like, you know, Iraq was a terrible mistake, but it would be another mistake to draw the single minded conclusion much as we did after Vietnam that everything everywhere will forever be another Iraq. But like I’ve listened to these voters on all kinds of issues, and the absence of trust, like the extent to which trust has just dissolved, and they don’t trust any institutions, and they basically, it only trusts their peers who sort of agree with them. And I guess, Tucker Carlson to some degree. Like, what do we do?

What is the solution if if there’s gonna be Tucker Carlson’s and an entire infotainment media system and politicians who know better are gonna pander to them and tell them, like, yes, let’s have this isolationist form policy. Like, what do we do to create a more responsible civic commitment to what America stands for circa nineteen eighty. Well, I

don’t know. I think some of this is not fixable. On this, I’m kind of, you know, in the pessimist camp, and that particularly people my age, right, late fifty 70s, early sixties, they’ve gone down this rabbit hole. They’re not coming back. I don’t know who was in favor of Trump in nineteen ninety nine.

Okay? So there’s always gonna be those folks. But I think some of it has to do with the political class being willing to maybe even lose elections if it means speaking truth to the public and being more stuck. You know, when we talk about nineteen eighty, and I don’t know if you remember the movie Roger me. Right?

Michael Moore, the only good movie Michael Moore made where he’s trying to, like, track down the head of General Motors and and chew him out about closing a factory in Michigan. And there was a or where Reagan was in it, and someone said, well, what can we do? You know, we’re in Flint, Michigan, and Reagan was like, ugh, you could move, you know. And I thought, you know, people don’t run a reggae, you know, he bendered to the white working class. I mean, imagine being a political leader now and saying, this call tone you’re living in, in Kentucky or wherever, it’s not coming back.

You need to move. Both McCain and Obama did that. You know, standing in front of factories and saying, these are not gonna reopen. Whatever these were, it’s not gonna be that again. And men people just didn’t want to hear that, but I think if leaders are going to lead, then they have to tell the truth.

You can’t be an at least a fanic and talking about investigating the d a and you ran Paul, we’re gonna put Alvin Bragg into you have to be able to step forward and say, look, I’m gonna say things, you may not like them. And if you don’t wanna vote for me, then I understand. But at least it’s gotta be part of the public discussion. And we just have class people that particularly in the Republican Party who have decided that they were made for bigger and better things And if lying to people is how they stay on television or stay in Washington and never having to, you know, live in rural Indiana or Pennsylvania, then that’s what they’re gonna do. And I don’t know how you overcome that other than simply voting them out of office enough times until somebody kinda hits that right formula, but I’m not I mean, sir, I gotta be honest, I’m not optimistic.

Well, I gotta tell you, for all of our disagreements, it sounds like you and I do agree that the only way out of this is through leadership, which has always been my bag. The moral crumbling of the leadership in the Republican Party has been to me the is the main thing that’s gone wrong. Like, there’s lots of other things. There’s the media. There’s but, like, the way that people and and Ron DeSantis is a perfect example of that right now, people who know better, who had ideals just dropped them so that they could fall in favor.

Like, to me, that is the fundamental problem. The only way out of it is for somebody to say, I’m gonna tell you the truth. And people think Donald Trump is telling the truth. It’s what’s so funny. I hear it in the groups all the time.

They’ll be like, yeah. I know Donald Trump, like, he lies about stuff, but, like, he’s telling the truth. Because people felt like he talked to them, like they mattered, and like they could understand them, and not just talking points, somebody is gonna have to emerge that is willing to tell voters the truth and has the sort of charisma and smarts and ability that they believe them. That’s it. That’s the only way we’re gonna get out of this.

I think you’re absolutely right that this object moral cowardice and collapse of leadership on the part of the Republicans. We need to say to them, you know better, but I I just think we have to add to that turning to the voters as well and say, and so do you, deep down, you know better than this. You are better people than this. And you used to be and you can be again.

Tom Nichols. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks to

all of you for listening to the Focus Group podcast. Please go rate and subscribe over wherever you listen to your podcast. This is gonna be a last episode for this season. We’re just gonna take a couple months hiatus here until we get deeper into the primary. I wasn’t even gonna do this episode.

We were gonna end on the culture wars, but I just kept hearing so much Ukraine stuff. I really wanted to make you listen Tom to what these voters were saying. So I appreciate you doing this sort of bonus episode with me. And I will let everybody know when we’re back, probably around May or June. See you.