Tom Nichols: Our Fatal Complacency

Good morning, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I am Charlie Sykes. As we mentioned yesterday, today is the aids of March, and I’m joined by a guest who will actually get that has historical reference, Tom Nichols, Professor Emeritus of Enable World College, now a staff writer at The Atlantic, and the author of The Atlantic Daily newsletter. So good morning, Tom. Happy tides of March.

Good morning, Charlie Sykes we come to Barry Caesar on this day, We probably should start by talking about the various financial meltdowns that are recurring. We have more banks in trouble. The Saudi is pulling their funding. The fallout is rather dramatic in the stock market. But what are you guys gonna set that aside?

Because who knows? You know what I mean? Obviously, there are woke banks in Europe, as well as in in California. Who knew that? Right?

Because this is all about wokeness. I have been told I’ve been reliably assured it’s all wokeness. Yeah.

Absolutely. I mean, once bank officials start caring about things like, you know, prejudice and racism and stuff, interest rates just go through the roof. This is a well known economic principle first annunciated in the time of Adam Smith.

It is interesting, you know, listening to all of this, you know, the you know, the the Republican politicians who are, you know, talking about, this is not about interest rates going up. It is not about deregulation. The deregulation, by the way, which we supported. It’s all about Wokness because that’s what our chatbot tells us to say. It’s

not about a poorly managed bank that that exactly in the opposite direction of the Fed. No. No human beings here could have made a mistake other than excessively woke, you know, lefties who somehow invested in, you know, environmentally sound trout farms or something.

It does sound. As if a lot of this political rhetoric that we get is generated by, you know, AI all the time, I In my newsletter today, I quote Nick Catagia over at the the dispatch. She’s talking about Ron DeSantis and saying, you know, really, what would you get if you asked to chat GPT to craft a Ukraine policy optimized, to pander, to talk for Karlsson’s viewers rather than to maximize American interest. You would get something like what Ron DeSantis gave out, but all these guys increasingly sound like chatbots. Like, just words that they kinda just throw out there.

The reason for that, I think, is that when you don’t believe in the bullshit you’re putting

out — Right. — you lean on tropes and you say, oh, crap. I gotta talk about Ukraine and I know. That, you know, the base is full of isolation. It’s no nothing’s.

So, you know, harm harm harm harm harm. And you kind of grow around and then you turn into a human version of a chatbot. Right? You say, well, you know, Ukraine, none and or it’s a territorial dispute. And you and you haul off these tropes.

Your answers aren’t interesting because you’re not actually invested in them and you

don’t believe what you’re saying. I wanna come back around to Sandoz in a moment. I In my morning shots newsletter, I said think of yesterday as the first real day of the twenty twenty four campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, and it did not go well Ron Ron DeSantis. He did not go well at all. And I wanna go back on that.

But speaking of humming a humming a humming Ron DeSantis like a chatbot, there was a viral video out from Bethany Mandel. Now many of the listeners may not be familiar with miss Mandel. Whose brain I believe was broken during the pandemic, but she is a conservative writer who has written a whole book about things like Wokeness, and she tweets about Wokeness all the time. And so she’s on this program rising. And she’s asked a very simple, basic question.

Now keep in mind, this is a professional writer who writes extensively about Wokeness, the need to confront Wokeness the need to, you know, push back against workers who’s written a book about it. And she’s asked a very simple question, and I want you to listen to what happens.

Antif Americans consider themselves very liberal, and probably fewer of them consider themselves to be woke. And so you know, when when we close the team to you, could could would you mind defining well? Because it’s come up a couple times. I just wanna make sure we’re on the

same page. Oh, okay. So

I mean, woke is sort of the idea that This is gonna be one of those moments that goes viral. I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define and which is an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and re reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Okay. Sorry.

I it’s it’s hard to explain in a fifteen second sound bite.

I think she’d been given fight once it wouldn’t have gone any better at the fifteen second. What kind of far into this debate for people not to be able to define the word that they believe defines the entire cultural clash that we’re going through. Right? You’d think they would have figured that out. And,

you know, there is a good elevator pitch answer. A friend of mine texted me the end of the day. He said, okay. I’ve had it up to hear with this word. What does it mean?

And I said, it means a new appreciation and a new obsession if you’re a critic with social justice and issues of race and gender and equality. The word meaning because I’d actually asked a friend about this like five years ago and the word started to become a thing that you were kind of asleep before you weren’t really paying attention to these things. You didn’t fully understand them and now you’re woke. Now you’re awake. Now you have a new kind of if you mean it in a positive sense, you have kind of gone from being callous to being more sensitive and awake, If you mean in a pejorative sense, you have suddenly become obsessive about social justice.

You could sum it up in five seconds and say, woke means obsessive about social justice issues. You wanna use it the way Bethany was using it. And she couldn’t come up with that. You know, you and I both enjoyed the Reagan era, Charlie, but they reminded me of moments when people would say, mister president, what do you think about this thing? And Reagan would kinda shake his head and

go,

you know, and they’re being that kinda long, you know, and you could see the press guy scrambling to intervene. That just that was agonizing. And I think it’s because

the word doesn’t mean anything anymore. I think that what she should have said is that to a woke is a little bit like pornography. I can’t define it, but you know it when you see it. That’s really what it’s come down to. That

would have been a better dodge.

I mean, there are things that are worthy of criticism, but this is part of this new political flex of using a word not to mean anything Pacific, but just sort of as a general rubric for things we don’t like. Things we don’t like. Critical race theory. Right? Christopher Ruffo was a gonna mean anything about race that makes people feel uncomfortable.

I’m I’m not actually trying to define — Exactly. — critical race theory has now been replaced with woke and yet they haven’t come up with a way of doing that elevator pitch,

I

guess. When

this friend of mine asked me about this, I said, well, it means anything conservatives don’t like. And he said, come on, we you know, you have to do better than that. I said, I’m just telling you that’s the way it’s used now. But again, if you’re a critic of the whole concept, you’d say, Wokeness is a, you know, consuming obsession with all social justice issues. If you are a fan of the concept, you say a renewed understanding or a new understanding of things you didn’t really comprehend before that you now appreciate is problems.

That’s it. It’s a ten second elevator pitch that covers both ends of how people use it. But I think, again, once you’ve used it so many times to mean to go back to your point about the banks, Shirley, it’s like, oh, you know, we’re betting on bonds at a time when, you know, interest rates are going up and that didn’t work out. Wow. You’re so woke.

It’s gonna get to the point you go to a restaurant and you’re gonna say, Waitr, take this steak back. It’s just

too woke or it’s insufficiently woke. There’s some woke in my soup. That’s also the critique of what’s wrong with Ukraine. Why? We don’t like Ukraine.

You know, Ukraine is too woke. It’s like, at a certain point, you have to, like, okay, guys, either define it or move on. Okay. I’m gonna try to keep coming back to Bethany Mendel, actually, I’m lying. I’m not sorry at all.

This is a question that you ought to expect. Right? Because you already have people in the media who’ve gone around and asked politicians to use the word, can you define it? And they’ve done the, that they don’t know. So it’s been signaled.

And I I mentioned to you when we were having our green room conversation. And by the way, I’m deeply committed to not having interesting conversations in the green room that we leave there as opposed to here. You know what I’m saying here? I mean, I wanna, you know, lay it off. You and I have a tendency to do that a little too often.

You said the nicest thing to me a couple weeks ago when we were drinking at a bar in Washington DC, one of the most flattering things that anyone’s ever said about this podcast. You remember what it was? No. Probably not. I think the location probably erased some of the memory, but God.

You mentioned that sometimes in our conversations, we get into it. We forget that we’re actually on a podcast. We forget that there are other people out there listening into it. Yes. Because we’re just engaging, which is I think the goal of these conversations, it’s just you and me, and we’re just letting it out there.

I mean, there’s not like let’s plan out what we’re going to say, and this is the point that I want people to to draw from it.

I do remember saying that, and it’s absolutely true there are times that I’m sort of, you know, looking around while we’re talking. I’m like, oh, yeah. Right. A lot of other folks are gonna be, you know, listening in, but we actually don’t plan this out or plant zingers or We usually start rolling in the green room, and that’s when you stop and say, no. No.

No. No. We have to stop talking now. Let’s just start, you know, let’s start rolling. I

mean, this is the green room phenomenon where people will be in credibly insightful, inside information will it will be this scintillating conversation and then they come out and they go on camera and they become really boring and wrote and talking point ish. And it’s like, no, no, no, that’s not the good stuff. That goes back to your chat

bot point about, you know what? In a lot of over the years, you’ve had more interesting conversations in green rooms, because that’s where people will be more honest. Right? And what they’re gonna say on television, this is part of the problem with people on on the right now, especially. I’ll both sides this one a little bit.

But

I think part

of the reason that you’re getting, you know, these canned boring answers is because those are the same guys that go back to the green room and you know this happened with any number of conservative figures during the Trump administration and the run up to the twenty sixteen and twenty twenty elections that people would come off camera and they’d direct the green card and say, oh, god, man. That’s just fucking painful and, you know, I didn’t believe any of that bullshit but, you know, you gotta do —

Yeah.

— do your duty for the cause and blah blah blah blah. Most people can spot those kinds of lies. Fox viewers can’t. They apparently just love that stuff. But most people kind of get it when someone goes out there in the eyes kinda get a little glassy and they say things like, well, you know, I haven’t done my cliff claim in a while.

You know, day in the Ukraine is merely a territorial dispute. Know, everybody just understands if that’s just nonsense. Well, it’s also what happens when language, you

know, is transformed from, you know, being a medium to inform people just simply being signals, you know. So I’m on your side. I hate the same people you hate. I’m willing to punch the same people in the face that you want me to. Right?

It’s verbal Semaphor. Exactly. It is all of this just signaling. Don’t worry. I’m on your side.

And so you get that boilerplate. So, you know, news becomes, you know, Humana, Humana, Humana, Humana, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, other channels which we’re not going to mention become fasures and fasures and fasures and white nationalism, you know, blah, nationalism, blah, blah. It’s etcetera. Anyway, so what I was telling you before in the green room, watching Bethany Mendel, I was having a flashback to my conversation with Paul Ryan, which I enjoyed, but one of my regrets was at one point, I asked him the same question. I asked him to define wokeness.

And immediately, based on his body language, it was clear that he didn’t have a good answer for this, and he was uncomfortable with, you know, how people kind of stress themselves and they kinda look up at the ceiling and they kinda Bulwark and and they should have kicked in all of my Apex Predator instincts. You know, there’s blood on the belt. I should have gone there because you know, he gave this boilerplate thing. It was really a definition of from twenty years ago of political correctness, you know, political orthodoxy. And no, You can’t talk about wokeness without talking about social justice, without talking about race, without talking about, you know, our treatment of black people and what happens with police.

And he he clearly wasn’t prepared to talk about that. So anyway. It’s one of those things that you you think about afterwards thinking, you know, if I had more bloodlust, I could have come back at that and but, you know, here we are. We can talk about it on the podcast.

My old Sovietist instincts often kick in when I hear people thinking about woke because it’s what happened among Soviets and with the word Paris Stryker.

You

know, we always say, oh Gorbachev. Yeah. Paris Stryker. Okay. What does it mean?

It’s what’s

the only Russian word I know? So — Yeah. — manner. Yeah. You know,

well and I mean, and technically, in Russian, it means restructuring. Mhmm. I have a somewhat inappropriate joke about Parastricht that actually is but maybe we’ll tell it later if

we have time. We’ll save that for the post green room. Okay. So I wanna talk about Ron DeSantis and why I think that he’s I’m not gonna go so far as to say that he’s flaming out of what David from is a very good analysis in the Atlantic of all of this. And by the way, I I loved his tweet, what we saw yesterday, message from Ron DeSantis, tough on drag queens, weak on national security.

Brilliant. I was

hoping you weren’t gonna mention that. That’s such a great David line. Tough on the oil queen’s week on national security.

So good. And I think there are certain things that are gonna stick him. It was a very bad day. Okay. But before we do this, you had what I thought was an important corrective piece about what Mike Pence said.

And given our news cycle, you and I are speaking on Wednesday morning. Mike Pence delivered a rather remarkable set of, you know, statements to the grid iron dinner on Saturday night, and it feels like it’s already last month. Right? Yeah. There have been so many news cycle But you write in the Atlantic that Mike Pence is trying to warn us about Donald Trump, and we are too complacent to listen.

So for those of us, who succumb to a little bit of snarkiness about, you know, his half courage and he should have done this and he should have done this and all of this. Talk to me a little bit about that warning and what your reaction to it was.

So the former vice president of the United States of America, goes out in public and says, the sitting president, when I served, the man who was president until two years ago, endangered my life and endangered the life of my friends,

my family, the members of congress, Capital Hill, law enforcement, everybody, and history will hold him accountable. And we all went, Oh, by the way, did you tell an offensive joke

about Pete Buttigieg? I just wanted to stop and say, wait a minute. My old Dartmouth student, Yale Kadell, had a great line where he said there were a lot of great actors at Green Iron, but nobody could be Mike Pence with a backbone. You know, that it just didn’t play well because everybody knows that Pence, you know, says these things and then he kind of runs for cover. On the other hand, just take away the names and all the baggage that you have about Mike Pence.

And understand that the former vice president said that my boss, the president of the United States, the commander in chief of America’s Armed Forces, endangered my life intentionally. And in the peace, I suggested doing a thought experiment. Imagine after the nineteen sixty eight riots. In Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. Imagine if Hubert Humphrey had come out and said, I just want

to be very clear that those rioters who endangered my life and the lives of, you know, the good people of Chicago were there because they were instigated by president Lyndon

Johnson. And history will hold president Johnson accountable. That would have shaken the pillars of our republic. And it would have changed history. Mike Pence says it and everybody goes, yeah, whatever.

That joke about Pete Buttigieg, by the way, was a little withy.

I mean, it just is remarkable. Right? He stipulate that, you know, he’s shamefully late with his criticism. The joke was dumb and inappropriate, but you’re right. Perhaps we might zero in on the more important point.

Yes. Focus here people. Hence told us something horrifying this weekend about the condition of our democracy and you describe what you call the national underreaction to these comments. This underreaction is a warning that we have all become too complacent about the danger my former party now Ron DeSantis. And and, you know, I think it is worth reminding ourselves.

Okay. Do you understand what we’re talking about? And have we and I’m sorry to use this word. Have we normalized? Have we become too complacent?

You know, in our national lack of any sort of focus our goldfish memory because we are a nation of goldfish. You know, have we actually forgotten what we’re talking about here? The fact that we are spending the next few new cycles talking about a dominant appropriate joke rather than the fact that the vice president of the United States is telling us what the sitting president of the United States inflicted on the country. You know, it is worthwhile because I think we kinda get stuck in our own sort of wrote reactions. Oh, it’s Mike Pence again.

Oh, Mike Pence the guy who you know, put the water bottle down or Mike Pence who, you know, was anti vote before it was fashionable. All of that, but, you know, this is an interesting point that we shouldn’t lose focus we should still be shocked that a former constitutional officer of the United States actually said this out loud. And I think maybe the aquatic metaphor here isn’t a goldfish. It’s

frogs that we’re This is frog boiling. I mean, Trump fire hoses us year after year and we just get used to it. I don’t know if it’s that we are normalizing it. You know, it’s kind of like You know, when you’re a parent, the first time your kids are just screaming and before I had a kid, I would look at those parents and say, don’t you hear that? You know?

Right.

But your kids are you kids are barbarians, you know, don’t you hear this? And then years later, you know, it’s like, yeah, I kinda get it. You just sorta you know, that bone in your ear just becomes numb to that frequency after a while. And I think that’s kind of what happened. With Trump that we’ve been so shocked that we’re not shocked, but there is one other thing, Charlie.

And I think this is important. The resilience of the American system has lulled us into a false sense of security about January sixth. And what happened? Because when you try and make this case to people, they say, my listen to what Mike Penn said. They say, yeah.

But it turned out okay. You know, Joe Biden got elected and everything’s good now. No. You know, that is a really dangerous thing to think. Joe Biden got elected, but, you know, fifty or sixty thousand votes in a country of three forty million people could have made a huge difference.

The twenty twenty election could have gone sideways in a lot of ways. I mean, thank god that the Republicans and that Donald Trump is so crazy and that the Republicans ran a lot of hot crazy. I mean, thank goodness that Cary Lake was Cary Lake and not someone better at this. Doug must Riano’s gonna try and make a comeback in Pennsylvania. I mean, these people did not just pick up their toys and go home.

And I think for us to think that is whistling past the graveyard sometimes.

Hey, I don’t have this in front of me, but I I saw it on Twitter, so it must be true that the number one song in America right now is Donald Trump the January sixth, the seditionist singing God bless America or something. They they’re they’re new who Anthem or something. And that’s been released and it’s, like, number one on the charts selling more than Carrie Underwood or, I mean, I’m not gonna play it. No. Because we are a deeply serious country, Tom.

We are a serious country that takes these issues with the gravity that they deserve. If we have the former president of the United States seen — Oh,

Jesus. — guys in prison doing the men’s penitentiary choir with samplings of Donald Trump. And we’re playing it on radios instead of saying whiskey tango foxtrot, it is a sign of a deeply unserious country in the way that we sort of commercialize and marketize everything. I saw that and I thought, at first, I kinda chackled and then I thought, you know, this is just This is just horribly offensive. I mean, these people are in jail for an act of insurrection against the government of the United States of America.

Again, to reach some of the conservative listeners. Imagine if in nineteen sixty nine, you know, a bunch of the weathermen were in jail and they they released their, you know, prison version of blowing in the wind with, you know, happy clips from Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy or something. You know, people’s heads would explode. But, you know, because we just don’t take things seriously. And again, because we are complacent.

Because we think the system, all of the sharp edges of the system, have little spongy toddler guards on them. We think we’re gonna be alright. And I think that’s really dangerous. Thing to believe. You

had a conversation with Tom Jocelyn who was one of the principal authors of the House January sixth Committee report, and and he he’s worried that Americans really don’t get grasp with a view to which Republicans have been taken over by the most extreme wing. And as you mentioned, this is not just a, you know, an historical event that took place more than two years ago. It is ongoing. And the party led once again by its intellectual leader Tucker Carlson is completely revising the history of January sixth. And Donald Trump is embracing the coup.

I mean, he is you know, at the same time trying to minimize it, but also saying these were brave patriots who did all of this. So you know, for people who are concerned, if we don’t take it seriously, that was just a dry run for what’s to come. These people I think, you know, we’re right about that, but there is that feeling. I mean, you feel that way that people just aren’t paying attention anymore. The fact that we’re even having a debate about Is Donald Trump still worse than Ron DeSantis?

Well, Ron DeSantis is completely deplorable. But maybe maybe we shouldn’t really have a debate. It’s a silly debate about whether there was no. Donald fucking Trump is dangerous. He tried to overturn the government.

He is a complete lunatic. He is a narcissist. And a real existential danger. He’s in a category all of his own, and yet we’re at the point of going, yeah, to Santa’s Trump pretty much the same thing, and I’m not defending DeSantis. We’re gonna rip on him in a minute.

That’s

a mistake because both Trump and DeSantis are buoyed by and appealing to the same base. The problem is, you know, I mean, Donald Trump’s always been just a a mook a word that I intend to bring back into common usage. Trump’s always been that guy. What’s different is that the base voter of the Republican Party loves that guy. And DeSantis, I’ll just get to the ripping on DeSantis part early.

I Ron DeSantis is First of all, the guy’s kind of a weirdo, which I think is gonna become increasingly clear the more times he has to go out in Pamela, and he’s just a weird guy. But he isn’t trying to tame the base or talk to them or elevate them or speak truth to power. He his big beef with Donald Trump and the base is that he wants to replace Donald Trump. Right? He wants to transfer all that hot crazy culture war or shit onto himself.

He’s not trying to run outside of it. He’s trying to run right into it.

Yeah. I am Trump without the baggage. Exactly. He he will not ever stand up to this crazy and pushback against that he’s going to slipstream behind and say, see, I am a younger, smarter heir of all of this crazy. You get all the crazy without the baggage.

Right. And I’ll be a more effective authoritarian. I actually know how

government works, so I’ll be during the Trump administration, there was great profile Ben Carson where someone at at his cabinet agency said, it’s a good thing he doesn’t know anything about government or he’d break a lot more stuff. But as it is, you know, basically they it was like he comes in and we give him, you know, shiny things to look at, and then we go on running, you know, the department. And I think, DeSantis is saying, no, I’m not gonna be that guy. I actually know how to break things. I know how to use the power.

And everything Ron DeSantis has been doing in Florida, think about it has the undertone of I will use the power of government against my political enemies and yours. I will not govern on behalf of America. I will In a sense, he’s arguing, yes, the presidency should be a instrument of retribution. I’ll just be better at it. Donald Trump.

I think

that’s exactly right. And he’s willing to go to war with mini mouse, but he’s not willing to go to war with Vladimir Putin. I wanna talk about the substance and the politics of Ron DeSantis’ first foray into foreign policy, which I don’t think went well. When I say that yesterday was the first real day of the Republican presidential campaign, What I’m referring to is the fact that so Ron DeSantis comes out. He basically says I am Trump’s mini me once again parodying Trump’s line on Ukraine.

To their credit, many of the other Republicans, the rivals, members of what’s left of the foreign policy establishment, are pushing back really Sarah Longwell. Against Ron DeSantis. Well, in theory, DeSantis and Trump, although you noticed they’re not mentioning Trump’s name here. Mhmm. But I also think that the tell here is that veranda Sanders has a very clear strategy that you just described that I am going to cling as closely as possible to Trump.

I’m not gonna allow any daylight between myself and Trump so that he can’t accuse me of being an establishment. Well, the problem with that is it means that he’s going to be copying everything that Donald Trump does. He believes the road of the presidency lies in sticking to this, you know, script as Trump’s mini me, which is brilliant until somebody calls out the bullshit. You know, don’t misunderstand me, but Donald Trump was the first guy he jumps on him. He says, look, This guy’s flip flopping on Ukraine and he’s just copying me.

Look what he’s doing there. He’s following what I am saying. He was totally different in the past, whatever I want he wants. Nicki Haley is amplifying this saying, Trump’s right. When he says governor DeSantis is just copying him first in his style, then on the entitlement reform, And now on Ukraine, and she drags up that old slogan from nineteen sixties, Republicans deserve a choice, not an echo.

I wanted to get you taken this on because I think this might stick because basically they’re calling out the DeSantis playbook and I’m having flashbacks because I’m old enough to remember twenty sixteen. Are you old enough to remember when Marco Rubio was the future of the Republican Party? And he was surging in the race for president until Chris Christie enhanced him during that debate in New Hampshire. He noted that Rubio kept using the same talking points over over and over again. He was robotically repeating the same line two, three, four times, whatever.

And he sort of laying away and sure enough when he began to press Rubio. What did Rubio do? He used the same talking point. And Christie jumped on and said, there it is. There it is.

The memorized twenty five second speech, there it is, everybody. And Marco Rubio is finished. Yeah. I’m thinking that at this point, if Ron DeSantis continues this mini me campaign, he’s gonna get his own Rubio moment because either Nicky Haley or Trump or everybody else is gonna go, Look, there’s Ron DeSantis. He’s just flip flopping again.

He’s parodying everything that Donald Trump is saying. See, he’s copying him. And if that is in fact the strategy, he’s going to get busted on this. So what do you think?

Yeah, I I think that’s right. This goes back to why I was saying, you know, to Santa’s just a weird guy when you watch him, I mean, he does the, you know, the accordion hands and the little pinky in the air and the whole thing. I mean, he it’s like he’s been weird. It’s very weird that that he almost physically mimics Donald Trump. And I think the other problem for DeSantis in trying to emulate Trump We, the Republicans, especially, live in a post policy world.

They don’t really care about policy. If Trump tomorrow said, we have to go kick Putin’s ass. As an example, last night, I’m watching Fox. As I do, I was a working political scientist now I technically count as a journalist. Right?

So I will watch because I wanna know what other people are watching. So I will sit through an hour or two at a time of Fox. And I was watching Sean Hannity, Massocast, ranting about why Joe Biden isn’t shooting down Russian drones and sending fighter jets to Ukraine and how Biden is just this, you know, complete weini who won’t take on Putin and we gotta get in there and, you know, blow shit up. But then you realize the talking points don’t matter. It’s all emotion.

And the problem for Ron DeSantis is the base, and I think most of America when they say it, they just don’t like him. He’s not a likable guy. No. Trump is a performer. I think Trump is a loathsome human being, but I get it.

I watch him when he goes out on those rallies and the guy is a showman. He knows how to connect. To that particular group of people. And so, you know, I think it’s gonna be worse than the Marco Rubio problem. It’s gonna be I can’t believe I’ll say that Rubio with less charisma.

Is that possible? I mean, I remember thinking, okay, I’ll I’ll support Rubio.

I was gonna sport Rubio. So Ron DeSantis is Rubio with less charisma. Yeah. Or he’s christy but less intelligent and just as abrasive. Christy is a performance artist, whatever you think about him, whereas DeSantis is not see, I’m gonna disagree with you on one thing.

I don’t think the base dislikes DeSantis. I think the base wants to like DeSantis scientist, but they don’t know him yet. I think they will dislike him when they get to know him. But right now, he’s been this blank slate. And you’ve have all of these values projected on them.

I mean, the fanboys over it, and national review are going through some things right now because they’ve been assuring us you know, he was the guy. He was gonna take out Trump and he was gonna be wonderful. So now, there’s actually a piece in national review saying no, no, no, really. You shouldn’t take what Ron DeSantis said too seriously. What a candidate says, no, it’s not that relevant to what they do as president.

Like, really don’t pay any attention to the fact that Ron DeSantis is just exposed himself as somebody that we said he wasn’t.

Yeah. Yeah. And he here’s a line, and I give it free to any of the scientists’ opponents to use. Ron DeSantis is in fact the candidate of the donor class. Right now, at this point in the race, he is the guide that the donor class and the establishment they want to.

Once, they think he’s gonna be the guy. And of course, that’s poison among the base. When they get a whiff of that and try to square that circle, that’s, you know, when you’re I mean, why is Nikki Hanley failing to get traction? Because if there was ever a a Republican who looks like, you know, she’s trying on the armor plating of Mago World, then it doesn’t fit. It’s her.

You know, she is completely inauthentic in every way. And DeSantis, I think, is gonna have I think you’re right. He’s gonna have that Romeo moment where someone’s gonna say, tell us the things that you agreed with under Trump and that you disagree with now,

that you’re running against him and he’s gonna go, hi, he’s gonna have to answer these questions. Okay. So here’s another bit of, like, free advice for DeSantis’ rivals. They should do a mass purchase of buttons They just read Ron exclamation point. Exactly.

Because it’s exactly

who he is now.

Please applaud. Yeah. No. No. That’s feel free to laugh out there.

We can applaud. Alright. So speaking of the appeasement, I will say that one of the bits of good news and you can reign on this parade if you like. How vocal Republican leaders weren’t pushing back against the Sanders’ decision to join the surrender caucus. I do think it’s worth pointing out that his position is indistinguishable from Donald Trump except for he hasn’t gone quite so far as to praise, you know, Vladimir Putin and, you know, talk about how he wants favors from Adam Rep Putin.

But but he’s in the same surrender caucus. So they’re willing to attack DeSantis. That’s a Free Fire zone. They’re not willing to say these things about directly about Trump. But up.

You look at these comments here. You know Chris Charlie Sykes saying that DeSantis is naive, has a complete misunderstanding of the historical context Marco Rubio says I don’t know what he’s trying to say or to do Mike Pence is doubling down on his defense of of Ukraine. There’s no room for Putin apologists in the Republican Party. This is not America’s war, but because if Putin has not stopped and the subordination of Ukraine is not stored quickly. He will continue to move toward our NATO allies.

Lindsey Graham compares Ron DeSantis to Neville Chamberlain. So at this point, conservatives they’re still like a recessive gene remembering ReaganForm policy. They’re not willing to abandon it. So, I mean, this scism is real. And maybe now that DeSantis is joined Trump, you’re gonna see more movement of the base towards isolationism, but it’s not gonna take place without a fight.

And I think that’s probably

a good thing. Yeah. And I think we shouldn’t even call it zombie veganism or or a vegan type policy. You know, I I will happily say that I ascribe a lot of influence to Reagan and especially to George h w Bush who I think doesn’t get nearly enough credit for bringing this whole thing in for a soft landing. But this great triumph for the cold war is that we had a consistent bipartisan steady policy of opposing Communism and the Kremlin’s aggressive territorial grabs around the world.

That, you know, whether you were Retailment or John Kennedy or Ron Reagan or Richard Nixon, American foreign policy, at least in that sense, did not change very much because we all kinda common understanding of a pretty obvious threat. And Trump broke that simply because, again, he always played to the very narrowest and smallest part of the base that would always show up, which is, you know, how he won the Republican primaries as we know. Ron DeSantis is trying to recapture that magic. And I think it’s great that there are some Republicans like Lindsey Graham. By the way, that guy last night when Hannity was ranting, he was talking to Lindsey Graham.

Graham went from, you Ron DeSantis is wrong about this. To going on television that night and saying, you know why this is happening? Because Joe Biden’s a big wuss. That’s why. Again, these guys don’t they don’t keep their talking points straight, they don’t have.

But it’s good to see it. In a similar vein, it was good to see a lot of these senior Republican elected coming out and saying, hey, this Tucker Carlson revision of January sixth, that’s a load of bullshit too. You know, you had guys coming out saying, listen, I was there. I was hiding. And, you know, this revision is so we’ve had it happen twice now where some senior Republican elected have kind of pushed back and said, no, January sixth was a thing that really happened, and Ukraine is an important interest.

Here’s the problem is that you have

these Republicans who are willing to say, We cannot abandon Ukraine. This is the most important fight of our lives. January six was horrible. Something something something, but will support Donald Trump if he’s the nominee. Yeah.

That’s the part that just there’s something that kinda gets lost in the thread here. They can denounce the crazy, the extremism, the Ron DeSantis, you know, on the danger to to the west, but then dot dot dot there’s this ellipses. And, yes, but we would support Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office he wins the Republican nomination. That’s the part that is the reality. And that’s the Larry Hogan moment.

Right? Donald Trump’s a menace, he must be stopped. Well, if he’s the nominee,

we well, I’ll support the nominee, but it won’t be Donald Trump.

No. No. No. Hogan backed off on that. No.

Hogan said he wouldn’t. Yeah. No Hogan did, but there are others like Chris Sunuuu. Who continue to say they’ll support the nominee. Let

me push this harder. People who say I will do anything to stop Donald Trump except actually vote for his opponent in the general election. Right. That’s the always Republican caucus. Right?

I mean, the never trumpers, you know, listen, I did not enjoy voting for Hillary Clinton one little bit. But I said the only way either to stop Donald Trump or to make sure that the popular vote is locked sided enough so that he understands that he doesn’t have some kind of or that he doesn’t understand anything. But the people around him will understand that he doesn’t have a mandate, is that I have to cast this vote in a two party system for his opponent. And one of the big fights that broke out, as you know, because you were in the thick of all this, was the people who said, I am never Trump. Well, what are you gonna do?

Well, I won’t vote or I’ll vote third party, or I’ll be out of the country that day. No, at some point, you have to say, listen, this is, if you’re really serious about stopping Donald Trump, you know, this is the Sean Connery thing from the untouchable. Right? What are you prepared to do? Well, I’ll vote against them in the primaries.

And then, what are you prepared to do, mister Nash? How far are you willing to take this to really mean it that you will not allow another authoritarian takeover of the White House. And my apologies to governor Hogan. I didn’t realize he’d backed the the last I’d heard was that whole I’ll support the nominee stuff. It shouldn’t have been hard though.

This should be the easiest question in the world. Bill Barr.

Same thing. Right? Trump’s own attorney general who knows how dangerous the guy is. He’s terrible. He shouldn’t be president.

He’s none of it. Well, what happened? Barr, to his credit, to his kind of achy credit, I guess, said, well, can’t vote for the democrats because they’re a threat to America. So, you know, gonna have to do what I have do, but I don’t think it’ll come to that.

Well, I’m sorry. That’s that’s not the right answer. I’ve said this before, but it it’s worth reiterating that if you say that Donald Trump is a menace, that he is unfit for office, that he is delusional. But you say that you will vote for him if he is the Republican nominee, you are literally putting party over country. You are explicitly saying my my partisan loyalty from my concern for the future of the country.

Okay? Literally. So you have written books about expertise. You have talked about elitism. You had a very provocative piece recently about the elitism of the American right, which is interesting because, of course, the American right will insist that we are absolutely as anti elitist as they come.

We hate and and are disgusted by the nation’s elites. So what is the elitism of the American right, mister Nichols? You

know, it’s interesting. I came to the Republican party later than you did. I was part of generation Reagan. Right? My first election was nineteen eighty.

I

was

a blue collar kid. I was going to a not great universe. I mean, I have to say, I went to Boston University in nineteen seventy nine, back before it was the b u that people know today. B u in nineteen seventy nine was you know, like a working class university. Mhmm.

You know, I said these are the Republicans are the people who actually care about ordinary people. The Democrats, we used to have lines like the Brienne Chablis crowd. Right? Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Brienne Chablis. I thought it was, you know, Lemizine Leninist was one of my favorites. And now what you have are Republican thought leaders and elected officials who are all drawn from top schools and ivy league universities who don’t wanna live anywhere near the grubby rubs that they hate so much, you know, that they really do hate them. They don’t think of them as, you know, the hardworking people who you know, do the work and keep the country running. They think of them as a bunch of hay seeds who have to be placated with really dumb stuff and this culture war problem all day long and you see this you see this very much in the Dominion filings, right, where the Fox News hosts are all saying, oh, I’m in.

I gotta go on me and I gotta say, all this crazy shit. You know, we gotta deal with Sydney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. And they’re doing it knowing that the only reason they’re doing it is to keep hoovering the pockets of the people who watch their show. It is so immensely disrespectful and immensely hostile to their own viewing audience. But then, you know, you get this the turnaround of people like one of my favorite examples, Elyse The Fanic.

Herbert, you know, who is a kind of bush moderate, who then says, oh, I have to put on the funny hat. And the cane and go down to the midway and start Carney barking? Alrighty then. Because, you know, I I didn’t go to Harvard to end up being on the city council in Watertown, New York. Josh Holly, I was bred for better things.

I went to Stanford. I’m gonna fist pump to a bunch of protesters and then haul s. There is a really despicable elitism and I feel this keenly because I started my career in my twenties you know, making a class transition, right, that I was a working class kid I get all this education and suddenly I’m like working in a think tank and then I’m teaching in an Ivy league school. And I could feel that kind of disdain of highly educated people on the left. And I would say, you

know,

no, this is really unattractive, this kind of elitism, these kind of class differences in America. And I gravitated toward the Republicans because I thought they were the people who more understood that than the Democrats. I am amazed to say thirty five years later that the Republicans have now perfected the art of class warfare of being the Brie and Chablink crowd. Of being the people who, you know, eaten fancy restaurants in Washington and say things like, well, what crap are we gonna shovel to the rooms today? To stay here

to stay here in the Emerald City. Well, speaking of Tucker Carlson, the bow tied trust fund baby who is now the man of the people. And by the way, I mean, Republican Party, which is, of course, led by, you know, Donald Trump, the quasi billionaire with golden toilets, but clearly the man of the people.

I live up the street

from Tucker Carlson’s prep school in Newport, Rhode Island. So you got into it with Tucker. Tucker, like, called you out on the air? Yes, he did. What

was he mad about? What what did you do to grind his gears? I don’t know. I suspect that Tucker’s a block is usually something his interns have found by rummaging around on the Internet. And I suspect — Okay.

— you know, one of the coffee bringers found something I wrote and they handed it to him and they wrote this thing about how

I’m a little jealous.

Hell, you know. Although — No. — even from just this morning too, he’s like, you know, usually you get a lot of hate mail when Tucker calls you out, but they exhausted now. Oh. David got called out by Tucker and his folks, and, you know, there was a kind of a, again, a collective shrug.

But Tucker was mad at me for saying, we must defeat Moscow’s armies and rebuild a better world than it was a piece I’d written about how about how the thirty years of optimism that came after the end of the cold war, which I think you can only really understand if you had lived through the cold war. I was

thirty

one when the Soviet Union fell. You know, and I had a lot of optimism for the next twenty fifteen to twenty years or so. And the past ten years have just drained that all out of me. The and the attack on Ukraine, I’m like — Yeah. — so now we’re back to a kind of post nineteen forty five with to rebuild the international institutions.

We have to recreate, you know, the coalitions in favor of peace and security and trade and cooperation and open this and tucker lost. This my favorite part is he said, Tom Nichols, a man who has I can’t remember how he put it. He put it something like, who’s never achieved anything as far as we know. You know, like, you’re a lot of mine. So Dude, I’m sixty two.

I’ve had three or four careers. That’s what I mean. But it was just a very weird a block of yellow Oh, and me and Victoria Newland, and then he shifted to Baltimore. And he said Baltimore And he he literally said under the leadership of people like Tom Nichols and Victoria Newland, where apparently were the co mayors of Baltimore, you know, and he just went off on this kind of weird rant where You weren’t

actually a character on the wire. Right? I mean, you were one of the guys in the wire.

I was the guy that told you not to take notes on a criminal conspiracy. Exactly. And and he went off on this just to sum up, Tom Nichols is completely insignificant and wrong about everything, but apparently he is in a very powerful position of leadership at the same time. And I will just remind our listeners out there that I am a middle aged overweight semi retired professor who now writes full time for the Atlantic and I live in a small town, Rhode Island. If this is how you become a master of the universe, Darks Van Valley,

the undisputed of the Atlantic. Okay. So here’s the opposite of a palate cleanser, which we usually play at the beginning of it. Our friends of the Republican accountability project put together an absolutely amazing video montage of Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin, where in a minute and a half, you hear Tucker Carlson almost word for word repeating the various talking points of the butcher of Búcha. Maybe we can get Tucker Carlson to, you know, attack the Bulwark podcast bid or the Republican accountability project because let let’s just play this.

You can find this video online. Do yourself a favor and look it up. But here’s the audio. Tucker Carlson channeling his inner Vladimir Putin. Siding with boot.

Who’s signing

with booty? I haven’t seen anybody do that.

You.

The West started the war and we used force in order to stop it. If there is any single American who deserves scorn and yes blame for the invasion of Ukraine, it would be Joe Biden. The Ukrainian people have become hostages at their western masters. Ukraine is not a democracy. It’s a client state of the Biden administration.

The US were training on the future of the utter of military actions by owning geological laboratories in Ukraine. Military by a watch programs are under development in Ukraine financed by the US defense ministry. Western countries were setting military bases on Alberta. The Russians don’t want American missiles on their border. They don’t want a hostile government next door.

NATO took specific actions, expansions to other borders. Getting Ukraine to join NATO was the key to in setting war with Russia. The elites of the west are not hiding their goals. They are trying to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. The Biden administration wanted all along a regime change war against Russia.

The initiators of the sanctions are punishing themselves. So it’s not Vladimir Putin who’s getting punished. It’s American citizens. It’s you. The West will walk the growth of prices in their own countries.

Collapse, that energy sector. Gas price is already the highest they have ever been in history, so the price of natural gas, and the price of electricity, and food and everything else when you buy. I think we should probably take the side of of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine. That is my view. We’re on protein side.

Wow. Wow. Tom? He is on Putin’s side, and this is the guy that Ron DeSantis chose to be his conduit for stating his position on on Ukraine? Absolutely.

And, you

know, it’s not just that Tucker is channeling Putin. Remember, there’s a symbiosis between what happens in places like Tucker Carlson Show and what happens on Russian television and what comes on a Russian television, a big part of that speech as is in every Putin speech is aimed at the west. This is an echo chamber between the primetime on Fox and the Kremlin where Putin says stuff and it gets picked up and echoed and then Tucker says crazy stuff and that gets you know, the Russian propagators go, oh, okay. That’s a good line. I mean, Tucker Carlson has been featured on Russian television.

They they Russian TVOs love him. They think he’s on their side, and they think that because he is. But it’s not just channeling one way. This is a symbiosis here a synergy, while I’m using all my corporate words today, right? Synergy, symbiosis.

But there is a ping pong back and forth here of what works and don’t kid yourself that Putin isn’t speaking to the west. Yeah. Those speeches, there’s nobody in that audience who’s saying, well, you know, I I was undecided about Vladimir Putin here in Moscow. I’m gonna wait to hear this speech. You know, a lot of those speeches are directly aimed at Europe and the United States and, you know, Carlson amplifies that shit.

Well,

and it’ll be interesting to see how Russian state TV amplifies what Ron DeSantis says to say, the fact that he’s buying the idea that Russia’s savage brutal, genocidal, an illegal invasion of Ukraine is a quote unquote territorial dispute. I’m guessing that he’s getting a good deal of play. I’m gonna be interested to watch that. Tom Nichols, thank you so much for joining us again on the podcast. It is always fun.

Always fun, Charlie. Thanks for

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

We’re all juggling life, a career, and trying to build a little bit of wealth. The Brown Ambition podcast with host Mandy and Tiffany thebudget Neistah 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 school tools and even some workplaces where braids, locks, are not considered appropriate, needs to be like written into the law.

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