Tim Miller: Ron DeSantis Is Scott Walker

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is Friday, which means that I am joined by Tim Miller. Tim, how are you? You know, I couldn’t be better,

Charlie. I’m feeling good this morning. Life is good. I guess I gotta be better Donald Trump to be in jail. Yeah.

It’s probably not gonna happen. But I’m pretty good. All things considered. How about you? I’m

glad to hear this. We have so much to talk about. We have the Epic TikTok hearing yesterday. We have Ron DeSantis’ various shuffles. We have Donald Trump.

And I’m I’m sorry to actually use this phrase melting down because, you know, he’s been melted for so long, but these absolutely bizarre tweets talking about death and destruction and posting himself with baseball bats. But could we start with something else? Because I’m sorry, I I need to ease my way into that even though it’s the weekend. I am obsessed with the Florida story about statues without pants. It is so delicious.

Can I talk about it for a few minutes? Yeah. Let’s do it. I mean, this is actually not a parody. I’m I’m not making this up.

There’s this telehassy school, which has basically fired its principal. It’s interesting it’s called Tallahassee Classical School. It is devoted to classical education, the liberal arts, etcetera. And basically, a candidate’s principle after there was a sixth grade art history lesson showing the students a picture of Michelangelo’s David, not kidding here. Okay?

So apparently three parents complained. One of them thought it was pornographic because I don’t know how many model listeners know about Michel’s David. You can’t see his junk. It’s it’s there. So the school is saying, these children were upset, which

seems highly unblocked. Down just by its tone. And you can see a stone junk, I guess. But technically, if you’re really not familiar with it, it’s a stone sculpture. So, you know, it’s not like a a human flaccid penis that you’re looking at.

No. I think most of our listeners didn’t know that it’s made out of marble. Right? I mean, it’s just but anyway, this whole motion, the children were upset. Yeah.

Right. The people who would say that that sixth graders were upset about this have never hung around with sixth graders. What actually happened was you had these three parents Well, apparently, we’re unacquainted with what goes on in classical art. I’ve never seen marble depictions of genitalia before, but we’re really, really, really hyped up to look for in kind of wholeness or pornography. So this principle is out.

The school board chairman, the chief ideocrat down there, tell SLAIP, we’re not gonna show the full statue of David to kindergarteners. We’re not gonna show him the second graders and the sixth graders. Showing the entire statue of David is inappropriate at some age. The thing that’s amazing to me about this, Tim, is this is and I’m sorry to misuse the word literally, but I’m gonna misuse the word literally. This is literally an episode from the Simpsons come to life.

I actually did an episode about David coming to Springfield and people telling Marge Simpson she should protest because it’s offensive and inappropriate. But I think the Florida story is better because and I use the word, you know, episode of TextinFrey and In Philistimism. Because it comes from this school that calls itself the classical school, you know, with content rich classical education, liberal arts, and sciences. And classical education is the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty, and they actually define it. The word liberal comes from the Latin word, Libertás, meaning freedom, but apparently not the freedom to look at the world’s most famous statute.

So, I mean, this is like this reduction to absurdity. And they again, the chief idiot, Craig’s name is Bernie Bishop the third. He’s the guy that fired the principal. And he’s like, we’re Florida. You know, we we we listen to parents.

Any parent that has this, you know, we’re not gonna teach sixteen nineteen or CRT crap. We’re not gonna have courses from the college board. We don’t have pronouns. You people in Virginia might do this sort of thing, but here in Florida, we’re going to have a classical education that protects these tender eyes of these young budding classicists. From seeing this corrupting renaissance art.

You can make this stuff up.

I have a great idea. I think, now, Hannah made did some great art for your newsletter as usual. But if we have more of an amateur artist in the audience, I that we should put some jorts on the David. It’s time to update it. It’s time to update it.

You know, they love their jorts in Florida just like separate, cut off jeans, and maybe we can give them a mullet. You know, like, I just let’s let’s have the kids get comfortable. You know, I just want the kids to feel feel seen when they’re looking at art and see art that reflects their culture. I think that’s important. It’s gotta be safe.

Yeah. Yeah. They gotta feel feel good. The funny thing that this is so when I suffered through that turning point USA conference, one of the things that, like, jumped down at me is that there’s this strain right now going through you know, the nationalist conservatives, the the maga wing about how we need to celebrate beauty. There’s kind of obsessed about this.

Like, modern architecture is ugly. This is an urban line too, you know, the classical. We need to go back to the classical and the traditional I am

slightly sympathetic to this point of view here.

So Yeah. Sure. Okay. Yeah. It’s a fine point of view to have, like, in an arts magazine or, you know, at a wine dinner or something.

It’s kind of weird to to, like, be spending a lot of time during a political speech talking about it. But Okay. The funny thing about this is, there are just so many examples of this all through MAGA. Like, the very small percentage of Claire Monster, Tucker Carlson, intellectual MAGAs, I just don’t really know who they’re in league with. Right?

Like like they think that they’re in league with other people who share their distaste for the elite culture that these guys know so well, but they know elite culture. Like the real mega folks that are in the audience that are showing up to this thing, they’re with the Karen moms that wanna cover up to David and put George on it. Right? They’re not you know, in a return to Montesquieu and caring about classical stuff. And more of that elite French stuff.

Yeah. Exactly. There is this parallel across throughout all of it. Right? You know, I was doing some research for an article.

I got coming next week and about kind of the younger maggas and the, you know, younger new write and and you see the same dichotomy, right, where the college educated ones, the smart ones who are in DC, you know, are pushing for, you know, more of a secular or cultural fight to push back against Wolkism and CRT. And, like, the kids that are showing up, you know, to the college campuses, like, great that wanna do anti semitic memes. Right. It’s like it’s like you think that you’re pushing classicism, but what they’re hearing is, oh yeah, we want bigotry into cover up to David’s cock. Right?

Like, that’s that’s what’s happening among the masses. And, you know, that tension just exists everywhere.

My trigger warning for all of you Libertyans out there is that in my newsletter this morning, we have a discussion of statues without pants. And and and I must confess there are some other pornographic images at least with regard it, you know, have you been to Florence? Yes, I have. The birth of Venus. By the way, I’m I’m just waiting for the folks from, you know, Hillsdale and, you know, Tallahassee to to to come across a, you know, bought a chilis, you know, because Nilly Bulls has a great newsletter, by the way.

And she said, this is the picture that made her turn lesbian. It was just looking at that. I can’t just sort of imagine all of these. We need to have classical traditional education and then we have all the Florida Karens come along. It

was David that may know he must be No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No.

The interaction.

I

thought I thought I thought she was so repulsed by the day a day, but I’m like, when he’s got abs. What’s wrong? No. No. No.

No. No. No. No.

No. The fourth of Venus. So this school down in Tallahassee takes its curriculum from Hillsdale. They’re part of that Hillsdale charter school network. As you point out, there’s a bit of attention between, you know, truth goodness and beauty and all of that with the this culture war desire to, you know, have a moral panic, you know, by statues without pants.

But I do have this mental image now of, you know, people from Hillsdale saying, yes, we need to return to this traditional classical education. And then they bring along you know, all of these Karens, you know, to an art museum in Florence, for example, and I go, oh my goodness. Look at that. Oh, man.

Can I do one other thing on Florida Schools for a move on? Please. Do you mind? Or did you have more? No.

No. No. No. Trust me.

If

you’ve got if you got more bits, We got more material on David and

We can know his old abs. He is pretty hot. He’s hot.

He’s hot. You know, not exactly my type. I need to move on now. You know, on the serious note. Don’t say Gabriel.

As you say his news this week, it’s moved to k twelve. That we’re in Florida. There are multiple legislators that are updating us from k to three and and, you know, Nicky Haley tried to one up to stand us by saying fifth grade and now there’s some slators that are doing hold by beer and saying twelve. I I wanna do just a quick victory lap on this. I mean, it was as early on this as anyone, you know, talking about how this seemed ridiculous.

Everyone was like, this there’s no way that they’re really gonna pass this. Right? It seemed ridiculous. Yeah. I was like, no.

They are going to pass it. They did pass it. And then once they pass it, you had all the you know, you’re you’re don’t be alarmed that, you know, the anti anti set being like, oh, the, you know, the never Trumpers thereof. Assessing over this. And, you know, Tim just is so sensitive about the gay stuff and like this, isn’t that?

We just don’t wanna teach the kids about we just don’t wanna keep the kids about transgender you know, surgery when they’re in second grade. Okay. Calm down. And and this whole time, I was saying, no, this has been particularly crafted. In order to have a chilling effect on all discussion of any type of the existence of LGBT people.

It is crafted for this reason. It is specifically vague, and they were taking that as, oh, we’re overreacting. Now I’m saying, no, that’s the point. Because now any of these three cairns, like at the school I’m sorry, all cairns out there. We’re gonna call them.

We’ll we’ll call them Todds. Well, any of these three tods can call in and force the school to push out a principal or change their curriculum. And now it’s going all the way up to an age where I get a lot of schools. There’s gay dates it prompts. And teachers can’t talk about this, and it is a specific intimidation attempt to silence and to closet gay teachers and gay families, and it is every week that goes by.

It’s more and more clear that, you know, those of us that were doing the hair on fire commentary on this were correct. Right? Like, this is as, you know, bad as as we said it was, and they’re and now they’re trying to expand it all in the name of freedom and parents rights. It’s like, what who what parents? Which parents?

Not me. I’m a parent. Well, that’s why it’s so deliciously ironic that all of these

book bands and things like this are being pushed under the banner of freedom. This is the freedom agenda. And it’s you know what people would understand what I mean by or willing, and if they didn’t ban that book too, but you never know about that. So since we’re on the subject of Ron DeSantis, this process you’re describing, how it was originally for age appropriate, just, you know, up to third grade, now it’s, you know, k twelve. DeSantis cannot allow himself to be outflanked on the right.

I mean, he keeps doing this shuffle. He keeps basically looking like where’s the crowd going? Where is the ed? Where is Donald Trump going? I I need to stay to the right.

So what do you make of Rhonda Sims? What is your take? On Rhonda Santos who who seems to have me a little bit of trouble on the lunch pad. He seems to be leaking stuff. I

was a little bit more bullish on him than I think, you know, maybe some of your other

games. Remember we talked last week. Right.

Yeah. We talked about last week. I I I still I’m not sure. I don’t I think that like dancing on his grave. It’s a little early.

It’s a long primary. And I think that he’s he has a good elevator pitch. The problem is once he gets outside the elevator, he seems to be struggling. And how to handle all these issues and he’s gonna have this tension throughout the whole campaign of how do I keep the donor class hobby the old establishment happy. These guys onboard and the chattering classes while also not losing the megabase.

And it seemed like initially he was making this bet of I’m actually not gonna worry about the establishment class, the donor class. I’m just gonna go full MAGA, and I’m gonna assume they’re gonna go along with me because they hate Trump so much. And that was a decent bet for a while. But now once you get into the thrust of a campaign, you have to engage on issue after issue, you realize some holes in that I think the Ukraine thing is a prime example of this I was messaging this morning. I was thinking about twenty sixteen — Yeah.

— and this Scott Walker parallel. Right? Scott Walker is the example. Everyone uses it like, what’s the worst case scenario for DeSantis. Right?

Right? Which is like, Scott Walker was super hot in June. Right. Of twenty fifteen, and and it all flamed out before there was even a vote. What happened to him?

Well, here’s one thing that I just I I distinctly remember, you know, being on an opposite side, on Jeb’s side is is that Walker didn’t know who he was on certain issues, and that led him into trouble. Right? Say what you want about Trump Trump has this id that he knows who he is. Right? He can jump around on stupid issues that don’t matter, but on the core issues he knew, where he wanted to be.

And Walker on immigration. Right? Was Paul Ryan, you know, capacity conservative Bush era, immigrant that’s what he didn’t have deal with it that much because it’s Wisconsin. You know, you have a couple canucks trying to come across the border, but you’re pretty far from Mexico. I don’t know.

You’re more better at geography. Of Wisconsin to me? Not

a big problem, you know. Yeah.

Not a huge problem. Right? So he didn’t have to deal with it that much. So he didn’t have to, you know, kind of, speak on it in-depth. Well, he gets out in the campaign and he he realizes he has to appeal to the Bright Park crowd.

Right? And he finds himself getting way out over his skis. Remember he said idiotic stuff like, oh, we might need a wall of in Canada. Yep.

I’m a

because he didn’t know how to answer the follow-up questions. Right? He agreed with the ending birthright citizen thing. I know that it was like a meme at the time. Right?

So he gets way out of and then all of a sudden, he’s don’t and everyone else is like, Scott, what are you doing? You want a wall in Canada and you wanna change the constitution? On birthright citizenship and so then then he starts back pedaling, right, to to kinda go back to a more, you know, balanced position that that he had gone so far out that he starts to look like a phony and he starts to look like you didn’t know he’s talking about this. DeSantis is doing this exact same thing right now in Ukraine. Right?

He gets all over his skis on territorial dispute and mask, and he realizes people are mad at him. Like, other parts of his base are mad at him. He’s like, oh, now I gotta backtrack as you know, I punched myself at Bannon’s podcast. To know what’s happening with Magna’s

Chris. Yeah.

All over DeSantis’ backtrack. Right? So DeSantis’ backtracks on peers, he gets a small Attleboy for Tom Cotton in The New York Times, which is nice, but doesn’t matter all in the primary. Meanwhile, the actual napkin maga isolationist wing is like look at him. See, He is a he is a cock.

He is gonna be beholden to the NeoCon establishment. He is gonna backtrack. And so he ends up like losing with both. Right? He he ends up in the sour spot where nobody trusts them on a core issue.

You know, maybe he learned this mistake and gets better. Walker never did. There’s a heavy sniff of Scott Walker in this week. As soon as you wrote that to me this morning, I went, yeah, I remember this

moment. I really do remember the moment. Actually, where Scott Walker had apparently gone down and was hanging on with Jeff Sessions. Remember when Jeff Sessions was was in the senate, and he was he was one of the very few people at that time who was talking about restricting legal immigration as opposed to just illegal immigration. And then Walker basically comes out with his position that he had never held before.

And look, I had known Walker for many, many, many years, you know, had followed him obviously closely. And never once was there any hint that Walker took this particular position. He’d never thought about it. It never came up. This is not a big issue here Wisconsin.

I mean, the dark dirty secret is that our dairy industry relies on illegal immigrants. The whole mantra for decades had been were for legal immigration. Our problem is with illegal immigration, and then Scott Walker flips in two thousand fifty. And it was that moment where you realized, okay, so he’s chasing the crowd. And now he finds himself speaking a language that is not his native tongue.

And I think that’s the problem is that he’s never really thought about it. It doesn’t come naturally to him. He is parodying the language in the words in the verbiage that he thinks will play with the bass. And you do get that sense from DeSantis. DeSantis is trying to figure out, you know, what is the formula, what I have to say, how do I position myself?

When it really doesn’t come necessarily that natural game, it’s it’s like listening to a politician speaking in translation a little bit. You know, it’s like when Mitt Romney said, I am severely conservative. How do I show that I’m conservative? Well, I will say I’m severely conservative. You kind of get that sense of Maybe it’s not totally authentic.

Maybe Yeah. And

the thing about Trump is so you always come back to this, well, how did it work for Trump who’s clearly so inauthentic? But the thing is that the voters knew Trump’s brand was I’m a dealmaker. I’m transactional. But he used to sell himself. Is that in twenty fifteen and sixteen?

And so when he cut this deal with the evangelicals, voters are like, I I mean, they were wrong to think that’s because he’s off he is a deal buster. Right? He didn’t actually, you know, honor his agreements as as a businessman, but the voters didn’t know this. And so since they saw him as that, as transactional. They were like, okay, I know where this guy directionally is.

We have the same enemies. Right? Like, he also hates the lips and the media. And he wants to go this other, you know, more muscular Jonathan Last whatever in his direction. And so maybe he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, like, maybe he can’t quote bible verses, and he and Halperon were interviewing about that, and he he couldn’t pick whether he likes the new testament of the old testament or, like, put his favorite.

He didn’t have it. He can he showed that he hadn’t read anything. Right? Maybe he doesn’t read the bible. Maybe he doesn’t know anything about this.

Bigoted. Two Koreans. Right? Yeah. But but he’ll make this deal with us and we know he’ll be on our side because he’s making this deal because we have this in a symbiotic relationship.

With this scientist, the worry is that voters start to think, is he making these deals with us or is he making these deals with the old Republican party that we’re trying to to change? Right? And that was Walker’s issue too. Right? The Wisconsin people knew him and trust him.

But when he gets on this national stage and has to start talking about issues he’s not familiar with, you start to be like, Which guy are you actually? So Trump’s disingenuousness kind of worked for him because he was nakedly disingenuous, if that makes sense? And the voters trusted instinctually that he was gonna be with them, and he didn’t have to, you know, know all the details they’ve colored in for him. With the scientist, the worry is that his disingen the worry for him. Not not the worry for me.

I don’t fucking care. But is that the disingenuousness you know, comes off as, man, I don’t know which side he’s on. Is Trump right about this? Trump’s planted the seed that he’s a Paul Ryan Republican. Is he a Paul Ryan or a bag or a Republican?

And for the median voter that doesn’t pay as close attention to this stuff, that’s vulnerability. Right? I mean, he might still do well with the, you know, national review crowd who really reads policies and knows all this and, you know, he’s very engaged and he’s like, guys, he’s not, you know, he’s Maga. We watched him as governor, but for people who are getting introduced to him, you know, it could potentially be extremely damaging with that, you know, your soft kind of maga. I watch Fox from time to time voter.

Well,

also, I mean, with with Trump I mean, the fact that it was a bullshitter was basically baked in — Right. — people accepted it. It was part of the clown show. Whereas, you know, people like Walker and DeSantis, you know, want to portray themselves as serious people. And and they’re also a little bit stiff.

They don’t have the the ability that Donald Trump has to basically, you know, turn on the diamonds, say, yeah, I was bullshitting you, you know, but this is what I do. I’m the only person that can pull this off because this is what will trigger I mean, whatever it is, he’s able to pull this off. Hey, folks. This is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more.

And every day, we remind you folks, You are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to the Bulwark dot com and take a look around. Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a bulwark plus membership free for the next thirty days. To claim this offer, go to the Bulwark dot com slash Charlie Sykes.

That’s the bulwark dot com forward slash Charlie Sykes gonna get through this together. I promise.

So

can we talk about Trump? A little bit. Mhmm. Sure. I have to admit that I’m I’m really reaching the point, you know, in this, you know, holy week of waiting for indictment.

A little bit of exhaustion from all of this. And so I understand that people might find it a little bit tedious, but attention must be paid. So overnight, you know, and and tell me if you think you’ve heard this before, because I think it’s important for people to distinguish between, well, this has been happening for the last eight years. There’s nothing new to this, you know, or or the people who go, no, you know, you Republicans have been doing this for fifty or for no years and nothing’s ever actually changed. No, this is new.

In an overnight social media post, Trump predicted that a direct quote here. Potential death and destruction, unquote, may result if he is charged by the Manhattan District Attorney connection with the hush money payments, potential death and destruction. As The New York Times notes, the comments from mister Trump made between one AM and two AM. On his social media side, truth social were stark escalation in his rhetorical attacks on the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. Now what’s interesting is that We’d reached a point where it was hard to imagine that he could escalate any further.

You know, he’s calling him a SORLUS backed animal referring to the African American DA as an animal. Soros back. You kinda have a two for there. You get a little bit of the antisemitism and the racism together. And then also posting a picture of himself, I kid you not, building a baseball bat next to an image of DA Bragg suggesting that he was about to whack him because, of course, it’s all about peaceful protest.

And then he goes on to say, What kind of person Trump wrote? Can charge another person. In this case, a former president of the United States who got more votes than any sitting president in history. You can tell he wrote this himself. And leading candidate by far exclamation point for the Republican Party nomination with a crime, when it is known by all that no on caps crime has been committed and also that potential death and destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our country why and who would do such a thing only a degenerate psychopath that truly misspelled hates the USA.

Exclamation point. How

do you misspell truly? T r o o l I you know,

t r u e l y. Got it. Sorry.

I’m sorry to focus on the micro there. It just that feels like an easy speller.

Well, because what you know is that these are Donald Trump’s own two authentic thumbs at one AM — Got it. — down in Mar a Lago in his silk sheets. You know,

in his

little bathrobe, sucking on his twentieth diet coke of the day, you know, as well as all of the the buyout. But you know, the thing about it is, is that it keeps escalating. And I think we all struggle with with going. And I, you know, I’m preaching to the ConvertKit here, man. You’re saying, people quit your job fucking stop and listen to what’s going on here, what this man is saying.

And then, of course, you have the normies, you know, the Lindsay Grahams and the Marco Rubios, who are basically also saying, you know, this is crazy. This is nuts. This is gonna tear the country apart. Well, this is gonna be absolute chaos. Essentially this entire political culture now, accepting in some ways the legitimacy of threatening violence death and destruction and national catastrophe if Donald Trump is held legally accountable?

I mean, we have moved into this. I mean, talk about the boiling fraud I mean, I don’t know about you, but I am old enough to remember when a president I’d say to would just say, no. Actually, no one’s old. Literally, no one is old enough to remember. When a president of the United States put out this kind of violent toxic, bigoted bullshit.

There’s

a lot there. I have two thoughts. One on the, you know, imminent. Threat, I guess. It is real.

And now I I think maybe there’s this possibility, right, that it’s becoming white noise in Mago world as much as it is. Out here. Right? And he sent, like, thirty four of these bleeds. Was it you the coin bleeds?

Did I steal that from you?

Maybe. Yeah. No. I I I use bleeds.

Because I’m calling them bleeds. No. I stole it from someone. While I’m crediting you. I’m I’m calling them bleeds now.

I I’m I was tired of calling them truth.

Because it rhymes with tweets. Yeah. Okay. And I I was tired

of calling them truth and fake Twitter is kind of long and andbleeds I think has a nice ring to us. That’s what I’m doing now. Bleeds. I sent thirty four of them yesterday or something like that. And, you know, they’re in the middle night during the day.

And so, you know, are the people that are likely to get radicalized by this? It’s hard for me to get inside the brain of such a person, but this might be a serious not literally, you know, case. A little bit. Like, are they gonna really do death and destruction? I don’t know.

But they could, and the threats are real. And anybody else, when we talk about equivalence under the law and how the underworld is like, there’s a two tiered system of justice. I mean, anybody else sending out pictures of d a’s with them with a bat. Threatening them. You know, and they’re gonna get bail withheld.

Like, these are direct threats.

These are not even subtle, literally anyone else. Yes, if you or I tweeted out a picture of us wielding a bat against the DA or the judge, there would be actual and relatively rapid consequences for that. My guess is that because Donald Trump’s name is Donald Trump, that won’t happen, but you know, and just another example of

that. I think that’s a real acute threat. It’s hard to know exactly the degree to which, you know, it’s a threat that it’s not nothing. Not the thing that kind of dawns on me periodically maybe once a quarter. This is one of those days.

It’s like Assuming that the AI and AGI doesn’t kind of overtake the brains of humans and that, you know, people still read in the future. Like, what are my grandkids? You know, going back and reading these these bleeds. Like, just utter lunacy. I mean, utter lunacy.

And, you know, when you go back and read the presidential proclamations from the twenties. And obviously, there’s some racist stuff in there. And you’re like, god, these guys were were more racist than I realized. But, like, that the tenor, the tone. Right?

It’s like, these are these are serious people. Right? That that are doing this. I I mean, he sounds like a moron. They’re the stupidest.

Like, you would block this person if it was a random person on Twitter in a second. Like, if the person was saying this to you, if you’re there just reading you his bleeds, you know, at a coffee shop, you’d be like, how do I get away from this person as quickly as possible? Like, this is a thing that is hard to get inside the psychology of, you know, the Republican senators or, you know, John Thune was out there this week still doing the well. I think the Republican voters are gonna be harder than than putting them in there again. It’s like, you realize your kids think that you’re fucking moron.

Right?

Like,

they they’re reading the Donald Trump bleeds and they’re like, how do you support this idiot? This is like totally this dangerous idiot buffoon? And I know this is not an original thought that we’ve done this, but sometimes you do you know, you just you get myopic reading this stuff and thinking, well, what does it mean for the presidential primary? And what does it mean for his indictment chances? And it’s like, over the scope of time, like it’s it’s hard to even put words to the level of stupidity that this will look like.

Well, you know, perhaps your grandchildren will look back on this period and they will say, well, having just finished the definitive history written

by Dinesh DeSouza of of this period. I don’t know whether they Donald Trump, guys. He was like he had something going. We’re

just simply gonna rewrite it. So, you know, one of the the great tweets of the day as they came from our colleague, Will, who wrote, you know, a giant hook Award pleas to the Hippocrats who denounced the idea of indicting a sitting president and who have since used that lack of indictment to argue that it would now be inconsistent or too late based on statute limitations to indict the former president Now — Mhmm. — this is really a great point because — Right. — you really have it created this this hermetically sealed universe in which Donald Trump, because his name is Donald Trump, can never be charged with anything. And and by the way, you know, we we had a good friend who said, you know, the if his name was not Donald Trump, these charges would not be brought.

Which I think fundamentally gets it completely Bulwark. Because if it was anyone else who had behaved in the way that he has behaved over the last twenty years, he would have been defrocked, excommunicated, charged in so many ways. Totally. The fact that he is Donald Trump, It’s not just that we have a two or three tiered criminal justice system that treats billionaires differently. Donald Trump has skated legal accountability for decades And now the fact that, you know, we know that the justice department believes it could not indict him when he was in office.

And now for the same people who completely understood that to say, well, if it was serious, shouldn’t he have been charged earlier on all of this. You really I suppose you can always have it both ways, but you can’t

have it both ways. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s the same crowd. It’s the Tim’s Scott, Rob Orrman, Matt Mitch McConnell.

Right? It’s the people who are like, oh, we’re the closet normals that are out there saying this right now. You know, and they were the same people to Will Saletan. They’re like, we can’t do this anymore. You know, they use this stupid, you know, kind of legal doctrine of why they couldn’t convict him this second time too.

I these guys have all made their own bet. And Will is exactly right about that. It’s unbelievably frustrating. We had the Kim Waley piece — Yeah. — which was so good about the six different active investigations.

This guy is is under. Well, something occurred to me that Kim was just talking about the criminal investigations. He also has civil investigation that he’s that he’s under. The Eugene Carol rape case, you know, is still active. You know, a civil case against Altra.

And this guy is up to his ears as understating it in various investigations for all of his, you know, illegal and illicit behavior, and yet still they excuse him. Joe Pericom, and his press press newsletter, which is really good. The folks should sign up for. He was over at Capitol Hill asking these guys about about it. And Marco says to to Joe, a prosecution of Trump would shred the country rapid at its seams.

Marco said, what did he call January sixth? What did he call Donald Trump’s whole seven years? And I was Marco’s that we shouldn’t give this guy the button, and Marco was right about that. It was it’s Donald Trump that shred the country, the bit ripped it, and it seems. And so how is not holding accountable for that?

Gonna help bend things. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.

I’m on record of saying that, you know, I I think that this is the least significant of the cases and maybe the weakest of the cases. But having said that, you know, Amanda Carpenter had a great great point in the Bulwark yesterday reminding us what happened to Dennis Hastur, the former speaker of the house. Do you remember that story? I mean, when he was a high school wrestling coach, back in the sixties and the seventies. Turns out that Hastur had molested at least four boys.

Was he

a drag queen at the time? I don’t know. No. Oh, no. I thought it was just the drag queens that there

were No. Ron was not. Apparently, it was the republican speaker of the house. Oh, okay. And so with the FBI and the ARS began investigating him for making unusual bank withdrawals.

Everything kind of unraveled. He originally claimed he was taking out the money because he didn’t trust the banks. Basically, they later admitted that he made the withdrawals because he was paying off one of the boys that he had molested. And the way it turned out, he went to prison, not for the molla station because there was a statue of limitations, so he couldn’t be prosecuted. For actually molesting the boys, even though he admitted to the abuse, he was put away for illegally structuring hush money payments.

Any reported to prison in June twenty sixteen and served thirteen months of a fifteen month sentence, so Just a reminder that this is not the first time that we have had politicians who have been When there’s

also Edwards, And Edward ends up getting acquitted, but he was charged. Same thing. Exactly. So I’m gonna go back to the the threat of violence because I don’t think that we’re going

to have mass protests in Manhattan, although we don’t know about all of that, mainly because I don’t think Mago folks are going to go to downtown Manhattan and screw around with the NYPD. But when you have all of this rhetoric about tearing the country apart in death and destruction, you don’t need tens of thousands of people who are marching on the courthouse. What percentage of Americans with bombs or guns? Does it take? To create death and destruction and chaos, mister Miller.

What percentage? Point zero one. Point zero zero zero zero one. I mean, if you have thousand people around the country, out of a country of three hundred million. Look, this is the danger.

I mean, the loan world factors, you know, a few of these, you know, scream militia people. God knows what’s going on on social media right now. So, you know, maybe and and I said this previously, you know, maybe we’re fighting the last war. I think it’s gonna be a January sixth like, you know, huge event. It doesn’t have to be that to be much much more deadly.

And once again, you would think that there would be grown ups in the Republican Party outside of MAGA who would be, you know, the voices of calm saying, this is exactly the moment to lower the rhetoric. And what is the bullshit we’re getting from the Marco Rubios and Lindsay Grahams which in many ways amplify these kinds of bizarre violent threats from Trump. I mean, they kind of legitimize it because they’re going the only way he’s right. People are gonna die. People are gonna blow shit up, which is a reason why we should be afraid to actually hold them accountable, which is not as really during endorsement of Donald Trump to say.

No.

People I that it was it was it on Fox. I think it was Jesse Waters, says, you know, these people are asking for another January sixth. So, like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. I thought it was antifa that January.

I got I’m confused. Then what why are they asking for each other January six? I thought Donald Trump wasn’t responsible for January six. I It’s hard I guess it’s hard to keep the lies and the spin strike.

It is very hard. Okay. So are we done with Trump for the moment? Anything else we wanna say about? I mean,

I wish I was done with them for life. Yeah. I know. I was if you did the t bone steak of my dreams this afternoon, that’d be great. But you know, such as life.

Is

it dawned on you that we might be stuck with him for another six years? If you get your head around that because I haven’t, I can’t. I have to tell you, what Sarah tried to bring up on the next Secret Podcast,

like, let’s walk through what a Trump administration would look like. And, like, well, who staff it? And I was like, what’s not? Actually, I’m not ready. I’m not ready.

Give me three more months. Okay? I wanna get through the summer and then I’ll start writing fear porn for people because when you talk about tail risks and catastrophic end times, I think that’s what we’re talking about. We’ll revisit Labor Day. And

I think we have to find a way it’s talk about it that will actually not sound like we’ve said it a thousand times in the past even though we have said it a thousand times in the past.

Yeah. The boy who cried wolf thing, the guy who’s always screaming in the street. The end times are coming. I’m ringing the bell. The end times are coming.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We get it, buddy. We’ve been we’ve been hearing that since twenty fifteen.

Okay.

I don’t know whether you have a strong opinion about this or not. I was fascinated by the TikTok hearing yesterday in congress where You had a really a genuine bipartisan moment from Republic as the Democrats took turns just beating the shit out of the CEO of of TikTok. I don’t know where this is going. I don’t know whether or not we’re ever going to see a ban of TikTok. But isn’t this kind of interesting that The one thing that is united Americans is beating the hell out of a Chinese owned app.

But Yeah. It was nice. I guess I could see how it could be gratifying. It’s interesting. Across from the hearing, I was at a an event here in San Francisco for this group called The News Literacy Project.

Did a great stuff just about trying to this important important topic these days, which is getting people to understand fake news from real here. Casey Newton, who writes the platformer newsletter, was speaking about this gonna be a challenge in the AI world. Great stuff. I don’t know if he knew what was happening on the hill, but unbeknownst to him simultaneously as this was happening on the hill. I watched some of it on tape lighter.

He was saying to the room, you know, Congress really likes to drag CEOs up there to the hill to to rail on them. But doesn’t like to actually do anything to regulate tech. And so I do feel that way about this and that in a lot of ways it’s empty. It’s like what? Yeah.

These guys are carrying a big stick, but are they actually gonna do anything with these threats? And the best case scenario with TikTok, then I’ve seen smart people push out Is it the kind of force of sale? Right? It’s an American company, but

is it that seems like the best case scenario.

Yeah. The best case might be bombing the Internet so that, you know, people you have start over from scratch, but but it’s short of that. This seems like the best answer because it, you know, banning it, it’s too popular. Too many people use I it’s just hard for me to imagine either of these political parties wanting to own actually shutting it down. And that’s the way to that’s the way to piss off you know, low engaged voters.

Right? Like, he took my TikTok away. Okay. Now I’m actually gonna vote. And now I’m not saying that’s right or wrong.

It’s just practical matter. I just find that hard to believe. And so, instead, what we get is this kind of performative banging, the table, you know, yelling at the Chinese CEO.

But there are legitimate concerns. I mean, there aren’t legitimate national security concerns. I mean, this is a not just a Chinese own company, but this is a Chinese own company that is required to share lots of data with the Chinese government. The Chinese government has the ability to, you know, access massive amounts of private data of Americans. I mean, we ought to be concerned about that.

Right?

Yeah. Well, the thing that concerns me the most. The data aside, I guess, kind of concerns you, but it’s like, okay. What’s Chinese government can do with all this. Like, they can they can barely they’re they’re just not that efficient of a government.

Like, we we Sarah Longwell than, but there’s not a ton of great evidence over there. They’re doing a great job with with various things. Tell the Uighurs.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, the

Uighurs are pretty weak. Know. And they do plenty of bad stuff. Right? I’m just saying, like, look at their vaccine, look at their fake AI chatbot that they came up with.

They’re not exactly we’re running on all cylinders over there. But that said, at the date, I guess, is concerning. And I guess there’s unintended consequences. The thing that worries me, the more legitimate worries for me is the algorithm. Right?

And for people who have not spent any time on TikTok, a, it’s extremely addicting. And, you know, there’s all these all these worries that, like, Targeted advertising was a little creepy and it was a little weird and they knew what you wanted. And I always kinda felt like the targeted ads I got were, like, mostly pretty bad, like, very rarely did they get me right? The TikTok algorithm is so good at identifying what you like and what you’re interested in and servicing stuff to it to make it sticky. To keep you, you know, following.

Right? So I’m getting IndiRoc stuff and, you know, Nicole Yokic, Born, and, you know,

etcetera. Right? Yeah.

Well, I’m not into cats. But you know what I mean? Like, people get what keeps them on the on the app. Now, the algorithm knows a total black box. It’s like nobody knows why things are and things are surfacing, why certain things go viral.

So how easy it would be to surface things that would divide Americans. That would I mean, you know, they obviously, if they do really stupid pro China propaganda, people are gonna figure it out. It’s like, why is everybody getting this? Chairman Xi is so strong video. Right?

But subtle you know, more subtle ways to to do what the Russia effort was in twenty sixteen. They could do that on a scale that is nothing like twenty sixteen and that is so much harder to track and so much harder to create guidelines and rules around. And I think that to me, the algorithm is absolutely the most dangerous thing. And the reason to argue for for some kind of government action though, I I just think it’s hard to know exactly what

that is or hard to believe that they’ll they’ll actually do it. Okay. So please explain something to me because I’m I’m unclear about this. It did seem as if Republicans and Democrats were equally riled up about TikTok. They were very few if if any people who defended TikTok at that hearing.

However, there is this small little caucus of Uber progressive friends of TikTok out there, and I’m not quite sure what they’re doing. Joe Perticone who writes our press pass newsletter had a really good section on what’s going on. There was this outdoor press conference led by representative Jamal Bowman of New York also brought along to his colleagues Mark Pocan of Wisconsin Robert Garcia of California. Bowman repeatedly brushed aside national security concerns about TikTok drawing a misleading comparison to hate groups or foreign governments posting content and organizing on American Social media sites which Joe points out is comparing the potential for harmful content being posted on a platform to the power of the owner to manipulate all content on a platform and to possess private user information is clearly an apples to hand grenade situation Instead, these Uber progressives are framing this as a free speech issue, a case of racist partisan demagography. He said Republicans have been creating a red scare around China, and TikTok is just the latest target.

It poses about the same threat companies like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Twitter posts, let’s not be racist towards China. So What do we make of that? What’s that about? What are the Uber PROGS lining up behind the the, you know, Chikoms and the TikTok? Is this like it’s like a flashback to our youth?

Mean, there’s like Yeah.

Don’t make me tap the sign that says criticizing the CCP is not racist. Okay? I’m tapping

criticizing

the CCP is not racist. Just say it again. And the CCB does a lot of terrible shit. And like I said earlier, I guess if the argument that you made is, hey, people are saber rattling to a degree that is overstating the threats because, like, the Chinese have plenty of their own problems. Right?

There’s a nuanced way to make argument that I might be more sympathetic to. But China deserves unlimited criticism and what they’re doing, you know, both in their own country and in their wants abroad is unbelievably pernicious. And I don’t the Bowman is an Uber product. Garcia is a new rep actually out of California. I I didn’t perceive him to be actually in the Uber Braun caucus.

I kind of thought he was a normie liberal, so it’s unclear to me what what kind of unites that little trio. It was like the whole squad was there. So maybe there’s something happening as, you know, as an influence campaign behind the scenes. I mean, I don’t mean that as a foreign influence of it. I mean, it is, you know, just a standard lobbying influence campaign where they you know, somebody that is on the TikTok payroll, you know, convinced them that this was unnecessary scapegoating.

But, look, think that there are plenty of nuanced ways to say, hey, you know, we have concerns about YouTube too. There are plenty of other social media concerns out there, but to go out there and say that it’s racist to criticize the CCP or to try to equate the potential for Chinese control over this extremely powerful algorithm to the other problems of, you know, content being user generated content is is like stupid. It’s it’s moronic. This is where you have the hammer and nail problem and, you know, queue all

of the comments that we’re gonna get now on all of this. But when you have the right using the term woke to describe absolutely everything they don’t like. It gets old. And also, you know, having the Jamal Bowman’s and, you know, Mark Buchanan’s, you know, describe everything, you know, that about China as being racist. That that feels like, you know, if you have a nail and a hammer, then, you know, I mean, sorry, what is it?

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail or No.

You have alright.

It becomes this kind of, you know, just sort of noise in the background and it is so knee jerk and it’s become so tiresome, but you’re absolutely right. You know, everything you don’t like is not woke. Let’s tap that sign. Every time you criticize the Chinese, it is not racist, let’s tap that sign. Okay?

Can we

just do that and then just move on? I don’t think so. I think that’s probably false. That’s probably a false wish. I think this is our world now.

So

by the way, I I know it’s a positive negative development this week. Okay. Since we’re talking about AI and various things, you know, all of these, you know, fake picture, deep fake pictures of of the Trump arrest and everything, which I’m sure you’ve looked at, they’re fantastically good, but they’re also a really good warning about what’s coming now, that the ability now to create fake images and videos, this is gonna fry our brains. We just gotta like strap in for it because you know How many bad are you? I

I don’t think people are ready for

No. They’re

not. For how fast the change has come out. And this was with that lunch and that I was at at the newsletter, the project was about And there’s gonna be some phenomenal positive unintended changes, right, that come out of all this, like, as far as productivity and growth is concerned, you know, a lot of that’s happening outside of the narrow space that we deal in of politics and campaign politics and in our world. There are not gonna be a lot of phenomenal positives that come out of it, and there’s gonna be a lot of threats. And the voice side of the ad, you’ve seen the pictures out there that are, you know, whatever.

They’re kind of fun for now, and it’s it’s, you know, fun to play with the voice stuff. I don’t know if you’ve heard this. Some of my friends had access to the AI, you know, sort of voice imitizer apps that are coming out and have sent me, like, audio of, you know, president Obama, you know, making fun of me basically as a troll. And they are good. I think the deep fakes, you know, for a while, people were like, I’m really concerned about deep fakes.

And every deep fake I saw was pretty obviously bad. Man, these the audio people are posting them on TikTok, speaking about another TikTok threat that’s coming of how easy it will be to make audio that makes it sound like Joe Biden is saying, I hate Christians or something. Right? Whatever it is. That could be the story of the

twenty twenty four campaign. Because you’re right, we are not prepared for this. You know, our brains have not evolved that much in the last few months to be able to handle all of this. And we know how many bad faith actors there are out there. We know how quickly they can disseminate all of this.

And so you can imagine October of twenty twenty four, you know, being actually flooded with videos and photos and and audio clips that are designed to completely mislead people. And and we’ll succeed in doing something. Yeah. And it will be hard to monitor. Okay.

So give me some good news. So what is the answer? You know, all these people, you know, sitting around, stroking their chins, talking about media literacy, what do they do about all of this? You know what I mean? We’re gonna have another commission.

We’re gonna have another blue ribbon report. What? What?

I mean, this group is is more focused on schools, right, in educating kids and stuff. Right? Which is important. And that’s gotta be part of the process

because

this is the world that girl up in. Right? How do you identify what is an AI generated piece of content from one that’s a human generated piece of content? And what is that what are the implications? So that’s not of twenty twenty four.

Like, that’s not dealing with the acute problem. I I think, honestly, the good news about AI is all the other stuff. Right? Like the the potential for alleviation of human suffering is immense. Right?

And and just all the applications and things outside. If it doesn’t

lead to our complete annihilation as a species, If

it doesn’t, we don’t complete analysis of species.

So there’s good news, if we’re not all killed by it, then there there will be some upside. Think we probably should leave it at that as we go into the weekend.

That sounds good. Is it already an hour up? This is so fun, Charlie. It’s just like we’re chatting the morning and just like old pals. If our just flies by, we’re talking about the end of society and, you know, Donald Trump’s second term and it’s just been so joyful.

I have We do have on Sunday Jane Lynch on the next level podcast. So after you finish with this, Jane’s a little more uplifting. Jane is hopeful and she does some seuss elvester stuff from Glee. And it’s gonna and she loves us. She loves you.

She’s a daily day lunch. A daily Bulwark podcast listener. Every day, it’s just her. And her cat. That makes

that makes my day. That absolutely makes my day even though there you go. You know, the cat reference was gratuitous there. But Tim. Have a great weekend.

We’ll talk soon. See you, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to this weekend’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back on Monday.

And we’ll do this all over again. The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown. We’re all juggling life, a career, and trying to build a little bit of wealth. The brand own ambition podcast with host, Mandy, and Tiffany, thebudget minister can help. Randy and I are the same age.

So she came out, she really popularized, natural hair via braids. And so all of us had braids. It’s written into dress codes and like schools and even some workplaces where braids, locks, are not considered appropriate and needs to be like written into the law. You cannot discriminate against us for hair, brown ambition, wherever you listen.