Tina Nguyen: The Cost of Fox’s Lies

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is April nineteenth twenty twenty three, and for those of you who were hoping for and counting on six weeks of a festival of shot in Freud in Wilmington, Delaware. You probably know by now the Fox trial is off. There will be no testimony.

There will be no parade of Fox executives or hosts. We will not be seeing judge Janine, taking the stand. Fox paid more than three quarters of a billion dollars so that we would not have to see the sweaty cross examination of Sean Hannity. And to sort all of this out, we are very fortunate to welcome on to the podcast. Tina Nguyen, founding partner in national correspondent at puck.

She’s formerly a reporter at political and vanity fair, and is best known at least in my household as the Maga whisperer. So Tina, welcome to the podcast. Hi.

Thanks for having me. I get a fan of yours for ages. So this is gonna be so much fun.

Well, it is. Although, I have to say there’s a little bit of a let down. Like, we have to, like, break out the fox settlement. From the Dominion lawyer’s point of view, I get why they did what they did. Their job was not to be tribunes of democracy.

They were not there to entertain us. They were there to get the best possible deal for their client. And I think they did a pretty good job. But I also think that it’s it’s not inconsistent to say that it feels deeply unsatisfying. So tell me what your take is.

You live in this world. We have this seven hundred and eighty seven point five million dollar settlement, which is probably the largest defamation settlement in American history that has not chump change. But Where do you come down on this?

That’s a big, big butt. Yeah. Sorry to put it that way, but it’s a situation where without the footage

of

Tucker Carlson squirming on the stand or Sean Hannity having a meltdown or all of the beautiful things that kind of communicates to the American people who are visual people who love watching Soundbytes. That Fox did something wrong here. I don’t think the Fox audience is gonna be diminished in any way nor do I think any of the people who had the brain worms about Trump winning the twenty twenty election are going to be dissuaded otherwise. If you’re looking at this case as a trial, a stress test of the body politic, and faith in certain Democratic institutions, you’re not gonna get it from this lawsuit, unfortunately speaking. And I think that everything’s just kinda gonna go as it has, as it will, and it’s just not gonna be pleasant for people who kinda wanna return to insanity.

In fact, like, in some ways, I think maybe not people within Fox News themselves, but other competitors to Fox will feel somewhat empowered to push the boundaries a little bit on what it is they can and cannot say. One of the things that I’ve kind of realized when it comes to covering the Trump administration is that Trump is very smart in how he couches his dabbling in conspiracy theories and allegations. It’s always alluding to something worse, but never saying this is true. It’s always Oh, I hope it’s not true that DeSantis is a groomer. Oh, no.

That would be so bad if DeSantis were a groomer. Or just like the subtle retweet of something that’s from a conspiracy queuing on account. It’s never yes. This is true. No.

This is false. It’s

Some people are saying.

Some people are saying. Yeah. And whereas Ron DeSantis had not been able to do that and it started to bite him in the ass. But the gray zone that Trump has established for his post truth environment, that hasn’t ended with case. If anything, I think that’s going to be something that conservative media relies on.

Okay. So I’m just gonna step back because I I wanna make of stipulations here about the settlement. I mean, I understand from the point of view of the lawyers why seven hundred and eighty seven point five million dollars in hand today the current value of that is not to be smeared at. People are pointing out that it’s less than half of what they asked for, but having the check right now as opposed to three, four, five years from now after massive litigation costs, there’s a real value to that. Plus, juries are inherently risky, especially, you know, in a time of mass, you know, disinformation.

And there aren’t always I mean, I’m gonna, you know, again, stipulate that there are other loss suits out there. I mean, you know, smart madam still has a multibillion dollar suit against Fox News. And and they said, you know, Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s information campaign, smart magic will expose the rest. But to your point here, I guess, I can’t get over the fact. That there’s no apology, no admission, no on air correction or retraction.

No one has been fired. If you were watching Fox News last night, the settlement was barely acknowledged. The Fox’s response, that statement they issued, I I described in my newsletter as weasily, led your domain if you pronounce that correctly. When they said they were pleased to have settled the case, we acknowledge the court’s rulings that certain claims about Dominion or Falls. Now I know the Dominion folks are saying C Fox admitted to telling lies about Dominion, but no, they didn’t.

I mean, that may comfort them. But what they said was they acknowledged the existence of the judge’s rulings. They didn’t say they lost They didn’t say they pushed false. So if they didn’t say they regretted the errors, they didn’t say they were sorry, they just said the judge’s rulings existed. They were there.

So I’m sorry. So here’s my question for you. Being the Mago whisperer, within Mago world, how does this play. How do they react to this? Do they see this as a humiliating defeat?

Or they think, wow,

we dodged a bullet. We got away with it. Let’s go back to business as usual. What’s the mood? It’s part b.

No one really wanted to admit that this lawsuit existed other than Mike Lindell who had been shunted off into a corner of Margo world that’s very evangelical, border line, visions, and sticking in tongues long story, but I’m not exaggerating. But it doesn’t really exist in that world. It’s just like, oh, crap. It’s another white noise moment where the deep state and the establishment have tried to come after the truth tellers and they missed, and we can get away with it without in Trump’s Word circa twenty sixteen without admission of guilt.

And

like I said, it’s a gray zone in which you can pull off a lot of maga.

Yeah. Look, this is a big amount of money. There’s no question about it. But is it large enough have one of those, you know, come to Jesus moments where the people at Fox say, okay, you know what, we just have to change our lives. We have to change the way we approach things.

We really have to, like, sit down and, you know, have this deep period of introspection because I’m not seeing that at all. There’s no indication whatsoever And there’s no indication that despite all of the evidence that was out there, I mean, you think about all of the things that we learned, you know, the cynicism, the lying to one another. I’m trying to get people fired. None of that has affected the audience at all has I mean, the ratings haven’t gone down. So I guess one of the questions was if you’re a Fox viewer and you know that they’re saying one thing in public and one thing in private, it doesn’t that bother you?

Isn’t there any falloff? Or how do they process this?

There’s a person I was talking to who speaks to some of the higher talent within Fox. And you know how a lot of them had their text come out in public saying, oh, I actually hate Donald Trump. He’s, like, the worst The thinking within Fox and by extension, the thinking within the Fox viewership is Trump is really annoying. I hate him so much, but he puts together all of these policies that I like. He represents a viewpoint that I like, and I will excuse a lot of bad behavior as long as I have this, with this fighter for my cultural values.

Yeah. It’s a situation where there’s really only one giant institution that is fighting on behalf of a nationalist populist belief smaller institutions like Steve Bannon’s war room, whatever remains from the Charlie Sykes of Breit Bart, various online websites through social, very, like, tiny influencers on Twitter. Those make tiny little pebble splashes in the water fox news is the engine, the heart. The driving force behind the right. Mhmm.

So you want to see that succeed because there is no competitor to them that could say we can do populism, but we could do it better and without lawsuits. And ultimately, you know, they have several billion dollars they’ll survive. Maybe they won’t be able to go to a corporate retreat. Maybe Tucker Carlson has to, like, not take a bonus for a couple of years. Maybe they’ll do what, you know, most media organizations that have lay off you and fire all of their lowest level staffers, they’ll get through it.

I’m pretty sure they will. Unless unless more lawsuits start raining down on Fox. That’s

the biggest argument against settling a defamation suit is that it invites others and they’re already others. So, I mean, they have to understand they essentially put a huge target out there, you know, seven hundred and eighty seven million dollars for SmartMatic. I mean SmartMatic is coming forward now and it has a billion dollar lawsuit. You know, what are they gonna do? So you settle with Fox, you won’t get to settle with Smartmatic as well eventually.

Don’t you think? I mean,

I have to fact check this, but my coworker, Eric Gardner, who covers media law for puck, You pointed out there will also likely be shareholder lawsuits by people who are investors and Fox. Yes. That’s true. Wait. Okay.

No. You’ve just, like, nicap or profit margin you’ve acted irresponsibly to us, your investors, we could sue you unless you straighten up your internal practices, whatever. That could change things. That really could. But what does that do for the Fox brand?

Which I think is the most powerful asset it has? Who knows? Yeah.

Let me just read you something from the Guardian, which is a, you know, a progressive newspaper article in Britain. They say, while Fox doubled out an unprecedented some, they were able to avoid something priceless, the public humiliation of the trial, and an apology. But the lack of a six week trauma that Burton Lockwood Murdoch, Carlson Shawn Hannity, Maria Bartorama, and Jean Pierre O’Rourke would not have to own up to their role in spreading dangerous misinformation after the twenty twenty election. It suggests that lies no matter how dangerous one city is are tolerable as long as you have the money to back it up. You could argue that Dominion wins, but the public loses Brian Stelter, tweeted after the settlement.

And I agree that Dominion wins the public loses, but the nagging thought is that considering how bad the evidence was, how had the rulings were, how disastrous the the consequences of this trial were that Fox did pretty well yesterday, didn’t they? I mean, they did substantially better than I was expecting they were gonna come out of this. What do you think?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I’m just thinking back to the OJ trial. Right? Or the Amber Herr Johnny Depp trial, literally any trial that was televised and broadcast nationally became like, lodged into the American conscious. Having Tucker Carlson on the stand outside of his safe little box, suddenly squirming under cross examination.

I don’t think he holds up well under cross examination. And I just say this is someone who used to work for him and watched his programming a lot and just knows of him. And what’s to say of what would happen with an eighty nine year old man who’s power comes from being kind of invisible and photographed, but now he’s asked to speak in front of people, like, that would be more damaging to Fox, to their omniscience, their power, than whatever documentation is out there. One of the things I’ve kind of realized about this movement is that they love projecting strength. They love spectacle.

And they love making people mad. Mhmm. Putting the fox talent stable. These people that you’ve watched night after night for decades suddenly look weak and squirmy and, like, under bad lighting. Yeah.

Like, that is bad. That undermines them so much. I can’t let

this pass. You used to work for Tucker Carlson?

Very briefly. It was in his days when he was still a libertarian and back at the daily collar. Any

wore the bow tie and everything?

He did not wear the bow tie. He did not wear the bow tie anymore. It was after the John Stewart appearance on crossfire where Johnson was making fun of his bow tie. Nissan was a part of his identity that he wanted to like jettison because he didn’t wanna be known as the bow tie guy anymore. I feel like he is still a little salty about it.

But, yeah, that was that was the Tucker Carlson State of mind at that point.

The bow tie is forever, however. So what about the Abi Grossman allegations? She’s telling me stories about what it was like the environment around Fox where you had these horny bros, we’re making jokes, and it was just a really kind of a toxic environment. How damaging will that lawsuit be? Because that hasn’t gone away.

Is there potential that there will be more things that will come out that the Fox probably does not want air? Or do you do you expect that we’ll have another settlement with their producer?

It depends on how much Fox wants to fight this. Roger Ailes set a very high bar for how bad someone’s behavior at Fox has to be in order for the company to respond. Yeah. I think a brody environment tends to be par for the course. At certain right wing outlets.

And I hate to say this women who end up at certain right wing outlets do kind of go in with the understanding that this is how it’s going to be. Mhmm. I haven’t really followed the case too closely, but unless she came from an environment such as, you know, say, Columbia or Barnard and then got thrown into an environment such as Fox News. I think she probably wouldn’t have been surprised. And unfortunately, a lot of environments like this, you’re supposed to go along to get along and be like, oh, well boys are boys yada yada yada.

I think that’s understood. Yeah. Yeah. This

is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. Thanks so much for listening to this show where every day we try to help you make sense of the political a world we live in and remind you that you are not the crazy one. If you enjoy this podcast, I’m sure you’re going to find my free morning shots newsletter, a great companion for understanding what is happening to us. And every morning as I prepare for this show, I share with my readers what’s trending and what to pay attention to, including my latest writing and essays on the events of the day. To sign up for my free morning shots newsletter.

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Okay. Let’s switch gears. We briefly mentioned Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis went to Washington yesterday to try to round up support and OLA indications are that it did not go well. So give me your sense, you’ve written about this, you know, the dilemma that Ron DeSantis has.

I mean, he spent months trying to be the mega acceptable alternative to Donald Trump. That seems to have run into some rock a few weeks here. So talk to me a little bit about what you’re seeing hearing about Ron DeSantis, the state of play, at least at the moment. So

I talk to people who also exist in that liminal space between being manga and being not necessarily establishment, but stayed steady Republicans who want to pass bills without freaking out over indictments or whatever he said. On Twitter that day or another day. Rhonda Sanchez, I think, has made some pretty severe miscalculations about one the reason he’s popular in Florida, and two, what exactly the maga movement is. One of the things that I keep hearing from people who are maga and some of them are Ron DeSantis fans, some of them are Trump fans, but they think he’s too terminally online. And when I say that, I don’t mean that these tweeting online angry stuff like Trump is.

It’s that they’re picking up their queues for what the policies should be based on what means are circulating on Twitter that day. Yeah. So if Trump were in DeSantis’ position, and Disney was suddenly going against their don’t say gay bill, Trump would probably make some big us about it and try to dump his chest and be like, okay, I’m gonna destroy Disney. I’m gonna nuke them into the ground. But then he would come to make some sort of deal afterwards.

Right? Mhmm. He would look like some sort of winner. Disney would get to act as normal. The problem is that Ron DeSantis went nuclear on Disney and tried to punish them for a culture war thing, but had no strategy to back it up.

He just put together a whole bunch of extreme policies, extreme rhetoric. He made these promises that he would destroy Disney for being pro LGBTQ. And Disney put into a wartime position, really owned him on that front. Like, there are very few ways that he could spin this as a victory, especially since the telegraph everything that they were doing properly in advance. They were writing about this in newspapers, which I assume Ron DeSantis does not read anymore because he’s too online.

Trump would never put himself in a position to be legally owned by Disney. And Disney, you don’t mess with the mouse. Those lawyers are the best in their field and they are a little devious when it comes to that. And they’ve been lawyers in Florida building these relationships for decades. Don’t

screw with these guys. This is fascinating to me because this idea that DeSantis is terminally online because this was one of the formulas of early Trumpism was to listen to talk radio, to listen to what was being said on Fox. We know what was being said in the base and then finding a way to follow it or to echo it. So Trump really perfected that being sort of online, at least when it comes to the base. Ron DeSantis looks at this, says, I’m going to do the same thing.

I’m going to follow the base. I’m gonna find out every hot spot and then I’m going to jump on. I’m gonna pour kerosene on it. It’s not working for him and I’m trying to come up with this explain I mean, maybe because he just doesn’t, you know, have the instincts. He’s not very flexible.

He is too dogmatic. Every once in a while, you’ll see a pallet a musician who decides that he wants to be a like, mid romney, I’m gonna be severely conservative, and it just doesn’t play right. It seems inauthentic. It feels like Rhonda Sandis is sort of putting on the lizard mask and saying, see, I’m a lizard man too. But he can’t figure out how to do the tongue thing.

You know? It is like it’s like I’m a lizard creature just like you.

I’m I’m working this one. I’m sorry. Oh, no. No. No.

That’s actually perfect. That’s actually a perfect metaphor for what’s happening. Because there are a few things that DeSantis can never get over. One, he went to Yale, he went to Harvard, he taught at private schools, in his book that just came out. He was like, I grew up in the suburbs of Tallahassee, but my heart is really in the Midwest.

Which, like, come on, dude. Second, he’s getting so much money from donors. The most anti magma thing you could do is take rich people’s money, especially rich establishment people’s money. Because by extension, that means, oh my god, you’re in the pocket of these people that we just don’t like. We are populace.

We want to burn the establishment down. We will literally storm the capital in order to keep the swamp from taking our president away from us, and DeSantis is playing FTSE with them. That’s completely inauthentic. And you see that pop up in the way that he approaches topics that are, you know, third rail issues for the magna movement. When he initially said that Ukraine was a territorial dispute and we don’t want to have any sort of involvement in that his donors freaked out, you suddenly saw DeSantis walk that back and lean into the rhetoric that they like, which is support the Ukrainian people.

We will support them and verify it. Obviously, we don’t want to start World War three, but we will just keep giving them weapons, which is not the maga position here. The really big one. The thing that I think the maga base will not forget. Is that when the news of Trump’s potential indictment and arrest leaked, and he was asked at an event what he would do to stop that.

He kinda shrugged and went, well, I don’t know what it’s like to give money to foreign stars. That’s not our business. And unfortunately, that MEGA instinct is always protect your own against people who are being targeted by the deep state. And this is a guy whose former president being investigated and possibly indicted by a highly politicized George Soros backed as they put it, DA. So Ron DeSantis kinda tipped his hand and went, well, I’ve got a political future.

I’d like to see Trump get arrested. That I think damage is standing a lot. And it’s not — A lot. — a lot. Yes.

Mhmm. And, you know what, you can throw a prison up next to Disneyland, but When push comes to shove and a value such as this, this core value was put in your face, You could have been magnamidis. You could have looked stronger than Trump by saying, I will protect the bad guys from getting you. Instead, he kind of offered up Trump on a silver platter.

Jeez. What about the other attack ads that DeSantis has not launched against Trump, of course, you know, Trump’s super packed, you know, made fun of him being putting fingers and went after him on on entitlements. And then you had two pretty tough ads pushing back, you know, one that said, you know, what’s happened to Donald Trump? Why is he attacking another republican and then going after him as a gun grabber? Is that qualitatively different in Margo world or will that backfire too?

The Republican versus Republican fight I don’t think that will move the needle at all because look, that’s how Trump became popular in the first place. He beat up Republicans. He completely disregarded the Reagan rule of don’t attack your fellow Republicans, and people loved him for that. Do you remember in twenty sixteen when he started insinuating that he was gonna talk about whatever was happening in Ted Cruz’ wife’s personal life.

Oh, gosh. I can remember that. Yeah.

And Cruise was like, oh my god. He alluded pretty hard that Trump was a ratfucker, and yet Trump won. Yeah. Trump beat him pretty thoroughly. And And Ted Cruz bowed the

knee and said, you know, Yes.

Thank you,

sir. May I have another one?

Yeah. Exactly. So I don’t think that’s going to work. I don’t think I’ve seen the gun one. Could you talk about that a little?

It says, you know, Donald Trump’s a gun grabber, and and it has clips of him sitting next to Diane Einstein saying, what a great proposal you have here? And I actually wanna take the guns before we even have a court hearing. They’re talking about red flag laws. So implying that he has no real core value. I think there’s one clip where he says, you know, a lot of you were afraid of the NRA.

I’m not afraid of the NRA. I don’t need those people at all. So they’re using the clips against him. But again, I I I just don’t know how effective it’s going to be because in a cult of personality after eight years. It’s hard to imagine any of them saying, oh, I was not aware of this sound bite from four years ago, this complete changes my point of view about all of the things that I’ve been willing to accept up until now.

Exactly. And then also Trump has a challenge for being malleable on these types of policies. Like, if someone in a crowd yells, why are you taking your guns away from me? He’ll just listen and then start workshopping a policy that at least to that crowd placates them, and he leaves in everyone’s, like, four more years, four more years. DeSantis as a hard liner, he can’t deviate from those hard lines without pissing anyone off.

You’ve been writing about the, what you call, the Taliban twenty and particularly late. It was a gear up to the debt ceiling fight. You had an article last week, you know, reporting on how things were going with this Republican majority in the House. I think what they hit up. Hundred day mark this week.

The headline was the Taliban twenties McCarthy’s Do list. So talk to me about this. Who are the Taliban twenty?

Okay. So do you remember oh, at the start of the Congress when twenty people suddenly it up and said, no, Kevin McCarthy. We will not vote for you for a speaker.

Yeah.

And then America was stuck without a speaker for, like, four or five days. Fifteen rounds of voting. It was okay. McCarthy and these twenty populist, Jonathan Last, conservative hard liners had to go back to a room and hammered out deals that never got put on paper. But from all of the people I’ve talked to.

He basically gave them everything that they wanted, including and this is kind of he the ability for them to blow up his speakership whenever they’d like — Yep. — with the motion to vacate rule. If one person stands up and says, hi, you don’t have any confidence in McCarthy. Speaker that forces a vote on the House floor as to whether to keep him as speaker. The threat of that may be back in twenty fifth teen or so was successful enough to get Jonathan Last to step down.

And that was with a larger margin than just one person. Yeah. But from what I’ve heard out of that room. A lot of the deals included things like preventing, the NRCC from interfering in primary races where they have a moderate candidate they prefer versus a populist grassroots. Candidate that they’d like to promote.

There’s still a lot of bad blood over that, placing certain people in certain committees, vowing to get certain diversity and inclusion programs eliminated from the Department of Defense, Department of Education, what have you? The Taliban twenty naming actually came from a Republican congressman who, during a interview, during this vote, was like, oh my god, these Taliban twenty are to railing the process of getting our Republican agenda done. And I was like, I kinda like that framing. I’m sticking with

it. How bad is it? You know, this New York Times story, you know, I was talking about the infighting between the the budget chair, Jody Earington, and McCarthy, and you said, you know, kicked up a hornet’s nest. You know, there are people like Matt Gates who are trying to, you know, it’s not that bad. What is your sense?

I mean, how deep do these fissures

run? How far are they willing to go? One person I spoke to who’s affiliated with a think tank that has a lot of influence with the twenty. Told me straight up, we are willing to go to a default because we don’t believe that defaults are a thing. We think that the concept of its default is a scare tactic that the establishment uses in order to get us to bend the knee.

We are willing to go past the debt ceiling, go into a cliff. We have plenty of money to pay our bills. Yeah. I think they would literally drive this country off a cliff in order to get it when it is that they want. And just given the margins that McCarthy has, either he has to listen to their demands or worse, go to a Democratic get there in the past.

I honestly, in the environment in which I cover, I don’t know which one is worse.

Which one’s more likely? I’m I’m trying to think of how this actually plays out. So I’m not gonna give Kevin McCarthy too much credit, but I mean, he went to Wall Street the other day, and he said, we are not gonna bolt on the debt. You know, you guys should get behind us. This is a reasonable thing to do.

And yet as you’re pointing out, he does not have the votes in his own caucus to push through any kind of a reasonable compromise. So, I mean, am I right about this? I mean, I If you’re the Biden White House, how do you sit down with Kevin McCarthy and come up with a deal knowing that Kevin McCarthy has no way of living up to or delivering on the deal.

I honestly wouldn’t be able to speak to what’s going on in the Biden administration. Like, it depends on what their priorities are. Do they want to keep the country from defaulting and prevent an economic crisis or do they sacrifice a lot of the political values and programs that they’ve put in place in order to make this so. There’s a detailed budget put out by robot at this same tank, the center for renewing America. That is exactly what the twenty want.

And it’s things like I said, things that target quote unquote, work programs, things that, like, support the war in Ukraine. They want to put way more money into the border, but they would literally cut money from NASA, NASA in order to dewokify the space agency. And if the Biden administration caves on sending, like, underrepresented minorities and women to the moon, like, what the heck? What the heck? How would they live that down?

So Russbought is aligned with Matt Gates in the twenty, and he’s already had this proposed budget and he’s cutting, you know, you imagine NASA, the FBI, CIA, Civil Rights Division, the Environmental Natural Resources Division, cutting the National Science Foundation, cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs for abortion and gender affirming care, the Army Corps of Engineers Yeah.

They also wanna get rid of the the programs that investigate white supremacy. So yeah.

Sure. Where does the leadership of the house. Where does, you know, Jody Arrington, you know, the Chair of the Budget Committee? Where does he come down on all of this? How do they get this resolve is what I’m gonna get it at?

Honestly, I don’t know. There’s a recent story in Punchbowl published this morning that said that Jody Arrington seems to have taken a step back and they brought someone else to lead the efforts on behalf of McCarthy. It’s a question of, like, who can they send in to negotiate with these guys? That will listen to their concerns, convince them that some of their demands are unrealistic, and to bring that back to McCarthy saying here’s what you need to do in order to get people over the finish line. The problem is is that we don’t know exactly what McCarthy agreed to in this budget fight.

And as Gates told me, and this quote was kind of amazing. Yeah. There’s no reason for the twenty to negotiate against what was already agreed to. We shouldn’t have to pay twice for the same hostage.

Yeah.

I

thought that was an amazing quote. So what what did they get for the hostage. Last time, do we actually

know what Kevin McCarthy had to pay? We don’t. This is right. We really, really, really don’t. There are things that he let leak to placate everyone else such as the motion to vacate rule and the NRCC rule, but The more controversial things, if I’m Kevin McCarthy, I imagine that he, like, hid under the rug.

And

Yeah.

Hid from people in his own caucus who probably would have freaked out. So

I wanna double back on something you wrote. We were talking about Trump and DeSantis earlier, but I wanna go back to a piece you wrote in early April, which I think the phenomena you that you wrote about is is still underappreciated even though nothing about Trump is really under covered. It’s the Trump January sixth revival. You wrote about the fact that there’s this creeping realization among Republicans that Trump’s twenty twenty four campaign has become a political jahad akin to the events of January six, and that he is more and more openly aligning himself with the January sixth prisoners, and he’s reframing it from a day of shame to this seminal moment for the movement. And this appears to be increasingly central to his message.

When he went down to Waco when he did that, you know, putting his hand on his heart wall you had that anthem playing from from the prisoners. I don’t know very many normal Republicans who think that the key to winning in twenty twenty four is let’s go re litigate January sixth, and let’s make people think that January sixth was a good thing. And yet, this is a party that appears to be embracing a guy who is gonna make that central to his campaign.

Are they embracing him? Are they still really hoping that DeSantis? Gets his act together.

Okay. You tell me. Uh-huh. You tell me. Are they waiting for the meteor of death to solve the problem for them?

Because I just don’t know what what the plan is. I

mean, that’s why you’re seeing all these other people hopping into the race thinking, maybe if the sandwiches is gone, what if I could sneak in? Tim, Scott, the senator from South Carolina, has now parachuted into the race. It’s a Hutchinson Nikki Haley. Seems to be sticking in it for the long haul or at least up and through a couple primaries. The calculation is that the majority of the Republican Party does not want to re litigate January six But if you’re Trump and you’re looking at DeSantis’ strategy of trying to take more magma people away, you double down, you reframe the worst moment of your life as a turning point for you, actually.

And I think he’s getting a lot of aid from Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson. Like Tucker for the past couple of months has been saying that the investigations for the people who invaded the capital, not as members of a militia, not as members of the Proud Boys, but as tourists who got swept up into the moment and wanted to protest and just wanted to make their voices heard. Then getting arrested and tried and put in prison with a ninety nine percent conviction rate for expressing their political opinion that is a different story than a violent overthrow of the federal government. You can easily silo that into the Stewart Rhodes and the Proud Boys. You know, Trump seems to be stepping away from.

We’ll see how long that’s gonna be the case. But there’s a couple of examples on the left that people point to whenever they talk about January sixth as their moments. You’re from Wisconsin. You remember when the Teachers Unions took over the Wisconsin State Capitol for, like, what, three months.

I do. Very well.

That is something that the pro January six people refer to on a regular basis. Like, oh, they let the Liberals do that in the state capital. They let them camp out at harass lawmakers as they came in. Why can’t we do that without having everyone thrown in federal prison? Ugh.

Not many people died in Madison. I don’t believe that there were any deaths or the cops were beaten up. But, yeah, I but I do hear that. And of course, you know, here in Wisconsin, you raise any question like this. They were, what about what happened in Kenosha, the Kenosha riots.

So, you know, there’s always a what about. Yes. Correct.

Yeah. Literally, the day of January sixth, I was at the capital before anything went down. The story I was writing was hilariously in retrospect a story about Trump supporters who were staying at the capital to harass lawmakers as they entered the building, instead of going to the Trump rally, And I spoke to a preacher who’d come down from Ohio to perform a service at the capital hoping that God would descend and change everyone’s mind and send a miracle. And the way he put it, he pointed at the capital and said, we should be in that building. If we were Bulwark Lives Matter or Antifa, they would let us into that building.

We belong to that building. It belongs to we the people. That’s the minds that I think about whenever I cover anything related to Trump in January sixth.

So you mentioned Tim Scott and other people who are getting into this race. What are they seeing? What does Tim Scott think is happening in the Republican Party that would provide him a lane? What do you think that Chris Chris is seeing. Why is Chris and Nuna who is circling around this particular drain here?

Are they seeing something that we’re missing or Do they have their own separate agenda? Or are they just delusional? What do you think?

I’m not quite sure about whether they’re delusional or not, but I think they make a couple of pretty salient points. Trump will always have a floor of maybe thirty percent of the Republican party who love him. DeSantis is messing up pretty badly in trying to balance the magma movement with a conservative movement. That would prefer stability, insanity, but is, you know, freaked out about what Donald Trump is doing. The more that DeSantis waivers and the more that he gets thrown off balance, the more that a, quote unquote, traditional, normal conservative could sweep in.

Chris Christie, the other day, was speaking at an event thrown by some of Ford. He made this point about how Ron DeSantis is not a true conservative. True conservatives, I would say circa twenty twelve through twenty sixteen would not be punishing a business to the extent that DeSantis is. Like, you’re supposed to be pro business. You’re supposed to let every what was it?

Everyone leave us alone. But

Chris Christie is not going to win the Republican nomination next year. He’s

not going to win the Republican nomination last year. His moment as a political figure probably has passed, but he still has a couple of really good observations. I’m not gonna ding him on that.

Okay. So the the norming Republicans that I still know, that shrinking number, their reaction to watching Ron DeSantis. As if Rhonda Santos falls, we immediately have to pivot to somebody like a Glenn Youngkin. So do we start to have Glenn Youngkin like buzz if the sanders continues to stumble. These Yonkin doesn’t seem all that interested.

No. I mean, there’s been so much Glenn Yonkin buzz ever since he won the the gubernatorial race in Virginia. But honestly, I couldn’t even begin to tell you Well, I guess the question is, who is acceptable to Meng? I mean, I can sort of do

a little chart. Right? I mean, you know, in the Margo world, Trump is obvious slee, you know, the alpha and the omega, Ron DeSantis would be acceptable to much of maga. Some of the other candidates say enough to do it. I mean, so Tim Scott feels like he would be acceptable to Maga?

I think he would be acceptable to Maga if Trump was suddenly out of the picture. I don’t know the meteor hits him specifically and just him. DeSantis probably could just because he’s so intense in how manga he is. But he does risk losing the half of his base that likes him being normal and the half of the base that likes him because In twenty twenty, he kept the state open. Honestly, I think there’s a miscalculation that DeSantis campaign is making and looking at why he won the Florida election by such a giant margin.

In my view, I think it’s a lot of people who appreciate what he did to keep them saying during COVID, but look at what he’s doing now and going, wait a second. I think I’d like to be in a state that allows abortion

up to

fifteen weeks, guys? Yeah. You can certainly imagine that. Yeah. I mean and, like, that’s the popular opinion among most Republicans is if we must have abortion, I think there’s a lot of good reasons as a Republican to the tolerant of abortion up to fifteen weeks is reasonable.

After that, absolutely not six months, six weeks in, that’s a little too crazy for us. So

I wanna get you another sense about this, about what is the consensus in Moggle world about abortion? Because the ProLife move ins had fifty years to prepare for a post world. Fifty years and yet they appear to be caught, you know, completely a little bit confused about where do we go now, we’ve got the turnout. Is it six weeks? Is it fifteen weeks?

Do we ban abortion pills? Should it be national? Should it be statewide? Is there one consensus within manga? Or my sense is there’s just a lot of division, a lot of confusion about this issue.

What do you think?

The base is really pro life. I’ll give them that. Yeah. They’re really pro life. Trump knows how to speak pro life language.

He himself is a bit more moderate, but in the aggregate of what Trump can give them. If he’s slightly squishy on pro life, but builds a wall and is aggressive against China, then they’ll go all in for him no matter what else. Yeah. DeSantis taking the most pro life position one could possibly get away with in this era without, you know, having a giant referendum that humiliates him in Florida. Sure that will win in Florida, but what will that do for the rest of the base that ranks abortion, you know, number four, number five on their lists And the top one is, can we get our jobs back?

Will we have to be forced to take the vaccine? And what are we gonna do about Wocasm?

Is there a possible, you know, Trump version of Nixon goes to China? What happens to the megabase, including the evangelical Christians? If Donald Trump says, okay, this extremism on abortion really really hurt us in the midterms. We need to support a fifteen week ban. I would not support a national law and there must be exceptions war rape and incest.

Anybody else says that they would be, you know, set on fire. Can Trump pull that off? I think he could. Yeah.

You do. I really do. I mean, the die hard evangelicals are already going to go to Mike Pence anyways if he runs. Or, you know, Tim Scott or Ron DeSantis, although, yeah, they might go to DeSantis, but having a guy who’s, like, kinda squishy on abortion for the sake of winning the election. I think Maga in their minds can make that calculation.

Like, I know a lot of manga people who looked at what Ron DeSantis was saying and what I think he went too far. It’s not popular among the rest of the country. We saw what happened in states that had abortion as a referendum. It drove out millions of voters. It became a wedge issue.

We had so many, like, independents of Republicans switched sides in order to protect abortion, we need to get Trump back in power. We’re okay making this brief sacrifice. As long as he’s back in hour and then can listen to our concerns on

a more sustained basis. This is so interesting. Tina Nguyen founding partner National Correspondent at Tuck She formally was a reporter at political and vanity fair. Thank you so much, Tina, for all your time this morning. Thank

you for having me. This is great. And

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

Dissecting politics with exclusive interviews, commentary and humor, useful idiots, with Katie Halper and Aaron Mate. Check out this story that comes via wedding planner, Georgia Mitchell. I’d say that’s a deal breaker. If you were to catch your partner being breastfed by their mother, the thing is she’s here in the second and so —

Right. — really — did responsible journalist in you, Erin. It’s just an allegation. Yeah.

None of my sources have confirmed this story. Right. So

Terrible left true. Then

definitely a deal breaker. Useful idiots. Wherever you listen.