The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Welcome to the bulwark podcast.
[1] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[2] Welcomeing back, Dana Milbank, nationally syndicated op -ed columnist for the Washington Post, author of a new book called The Destructionists, the 25 -year crack -up of the Republican Party.
[3] Dana, you're probably going to have to update that when it comes out in paperback, you know.
[4] I know.
[5] I've already up to 27 -year crack -up, the 28 -year crack -up.
[6] The number keeps changing, like, you know, strikeouts on the scoreboard.
[7] This could be like one of those textbooks that have to be updated every year, right?
[8] You know, new, revised edition.
[9] 10th edition, the 40 -year crack -up of the Republican Party.
[10] Yeah, speaking of which, I just have to start off by commenting on the incredible jury verdict against Alex Jones.
[11] You know, as I wrote in my newsletter this morning, I mean, you know, the just punishment would be for Alex Jones to roll up to the gates of hell completely dead broke.
[12] But yesterday was a good start for all of the years of lying about murdered children.
[13] But I think it's naive to think that somehow this is going to sober up the right -wing media culture that really advanced Alex Jones and continues to defend it.
[14] Yeah, I don't think so.
[15] And who knew that conspiracy theory mongering was so lucrative that he might be able to come up with a billion dollars.
[16] But, of course, it's symbolic that he'll never need to cough that up.
[17] But you've got to think that these lawsuits against Fox News, against the likes of pillow guy, Mike Lindell, are still going on very similarly.
[18] So there is some recompense available out there, and it may bankrupt them, but, you know, even if it's not going to get money to the actual victims of it, there is moral victory here.
[19] I think so, too.
[20] And, you know, a billion dollars here, billion dollars there before you know it, it adds up to some pretty significant money.
[21] That's right, right.
[22] Right, you get to $1 .4 trillion, you've covered the deficit for the year.
[23] I know this is getting old now, but, you know, watching him, he was live streaming, actually, when the verdict was coming down, treating it like it was a whole joke when the jury announced that one of the plaintiffs named Robbie Parker, you know, was going to get $120 million.
[24] Jones is pumping his fist, yelling, yeah, woo, and he's, you know, talking about, you know, come on, get those numbers up, it's hilarious.
[25] And, of course, he used it as a chance to grift more, raise more money.
[26] See, that doesn't strike me as amazing.
[27] What is amazing to me is that other people can look at him and go, yeah, I want to be on his side.
[28] I want to be on his team.
[29] You know, Marjorie Taylor Green is defending him and Charlie Kirk is defending him.
[30] And like, why would you expend any moral bandwidth on this scum -sucking creep?
[31] Well, I think, you know, there is no shame.
[32] So I think in his world, it only confirms the conspiracy theories that they're all out to get him, right?
[33] I mean, so it's a perfectly circular situation.
[34] So any facts that come out to the contrary to show that he's full of it are, in fact, evidence that he's right over the target.
[35] It's only a bigger conspiracy than he believed in the first place.
[36] None of this breaks through until, you know, they've got the January 6th committee today.
[37] It doesn't seem to matter.
[38] You know, they've got Trump dead to rights.
[39] That'll be outlined again.
[40] But that only confirms in the conspiracy crowd that they're just out to get him, that it's all fake, that it's all rigged.
[41] that it's all a setup.
[42] Well, this is also how all of the incentives has changed, because I am old enough to remember that an accusation of racism or anti -Semitism or of, you know, serial deception about dead kids would have been negative.
[43] You said maybe a little, yeah.
[44] Would have had negative consequences.
[45] When Republicans would have, you know, turn their backs on you, when he would have been excommunicated, you know, William F. Buckley, Jr. had a long and winding road to the point where, you know, he, you know, threw all the anti -Semites out of the conservative movement.
[46] And now you look at what you're talking about, you know, the self -confirmation.
[47] You have, you know, Kanye West engaging in, you know, complete anti -Semitism and everybody's kind of shrugging their shoulders.
[48] Even Ben Shapiro is offering rationalizations.
[49] You have Tommy Tuberville down in Alabama, blatantly racist.
[50] And it's not just that they're shrugging it, that they're sort of normalizing it.
[51] It's now become sort of a badge of honor.
[52] So at one time, this would have been really negative.
[53] Now you're accused of me. Hey, that's anti -Semitic.
[54] That's a lie.
[55] That is, that is racist.
[56] They now then use this as a fundraising tool.
[57] See, I am a victim.
[58] I am a martyr for challenging the regime.
[59] It's almost become a positive.
[60] Yes.
[61] And it's reflexive to say, no, it's actually the other side that is the racist.
[62] It is the other side that is fomenting violence by the very fact that they're criticizing me. I think it was just yesterday Peter Thiel's PAC in Arizona came out with just a a flagrantly racist ad against Mark Kelly, even, you know, photoshopping a sombrero onto him.
[63] Like, you could not get any more of a caricature than that.
[64] There won't be any apology forthcoming.
[65] And, you know, and this is a campaign when, in theory, he's trying to reach out to the Latino vote.
[66] There's no shame, there's no consequence.
[67] And indeed, it used to be sort of an undertone.
[68] But now it's the melody.
[69] It works to your advantage.
[70] You know, the idea of standing by the January 6th insurrection.
[71] is now required if you're a candidate in the party.
[72] It's not just something to be quietly tolerated.
[73] You're supposed to be out there saying the election is rigged.
[74] And in fact, we must only vote on paper ballots and count them by hand by candlelight and deliver them by horse -drawn carriage.
[75] Well, you wrote about that Tommy Tuberville thing.
[76] I mean, we've mentioned this before.
[77] But it's worth spending just a moment because this sort of thing is, as I said, you know, there used to be a different sort of reaction to it.
[78] You know, when he talks about, you know, crime, you know, that, You know, the Democrats want reparations for, you know, the descendants of enslaved people because they think the people who do the crime or owe that bullshit.
[79] And this was the biggest applause line of the rally, at least it sounded like.
[80] Yeah, that's the point.
[81] It's not just that somebody got up there and said something crazy.
[82] It's that that is exactly what the audience wanted to hear.
[83] You know, I went through the facts of the matter that, okay, yes, crime definitely soared in 2020, largely because of the pandemic.
[84] It's not soaring now.
[85] It's not really dropping either, but we're not currently in some huge crime wave.
[86] The majority of violent crime in this country is not done by people with black skin.
[87] It's done by people with white skin.
[88] And, you know, if you actually look at what are the most violent parts of the country, the highest per capita homicide rates, well, it is now what it has always been, southern states.
[89] So the year ends in an even number, and it's the fall.
[90] It's going to be everybody be frightened about crime.
[91] Now, that's been going on forever.
[92] It's certainly given relatively high crime rights relative to recent decades, so you can expect that now.
[93] But just always saying what had been the quiet part out loud, saying the people who want reparations are the people who do the crimes, you know, likely putting the sombrero on Mark Kelly's head.
[94] It's just right out there.
[95] There's no dog whistling anymore.
[96] Well, and the audience knows exactly what's going on here.
[97] I mean, they're not being misled.
[98] I mean, they are cheering and stomping their feet because they go, wow, he went there.
[99] He did this.
[100] Well, you pointed out in one of your columns that the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is the, you know, Super PAC affiliated with Kevin McCarthy, has emphasized crime more than any other topic except for the economy in the ads.
[101] And of course, this is Trump's theme.
[102] You know, Trump had a rally.
[103] And he said, murder, shooting, stabbings, rapes, carjackings are skyrocketing.
[104] Bloodthirsty criminals are laying waste to Democrat run cities.
[105] Crime is rampant like never before.
[106] That really is the dominant message from Republicans, or let me say that that seems to be the message that is working for them right now across the country.
[107] Yeah, and it works steadily.
[108] And just as we're saying that, you know, Alex Jones is perfectly free to say whatever he wants because his listeners are insulated from any contrary review and any information they get that contradicts that will only be seen as confirmation that his conspiracy is correct in the first place.
[109] I think it's true of crime as well or the immigration crisis.
[110] It doesn't actually matter what the facts are on the ground.
[111] It's just permeated the extent to it.
[112] So if those of us who live in the fact -based community essentially have no ability to push back against this, we can point out that it's not true.
[113] Most of the country can know that it's not true.
[114] But the people who are standing there cheering when Tuberville says that black people are the ones who commit crime in America, they're not being reached with this contrary information.
[115] I don't know whether you saw it last night, but, you know, Matt Iglesias, I think he might have been triggered by your piece.
[116] Matt Ingladesis went off on Twitter yesterday afternoon about conservatives who were struggling to blame liberals for a national increase in murder in 2020.
[117] And of course, one of the arguments that you hear is that this crime wave, the violence, happened because, you know, cops all around the country sort of went on this facto strike over the Black Lives Matter protest, host George Floyd.
[118] Even Mitch McConnell's speechwriter replied to Iglesias' thread saying that there was a Ferguson effect going on nationwide in 2020.
[119] What do you think?
[120] There are a whole bunch of things going on in 2020.
[121] I mean, I'm not a criminologist, but, you know, as I understand it, it's been teased out.
[122] And they're that certainly could have been an effect.
[123] It certainly wasn't the dominant effect.
[124] The pandemic reshaped our lives in so many ways.
[125] And we're often hearing right now from the Republicans.
[126] When Donald Trump was in office, you know, we weren't having so many immigrants trying to get into the country.
[127] Gas prices were so much lower.
[128] Well, there's a very good reason for that because the economy had completely collapsed and no immigrants wanted to come into the country.
[129] Nobody was buying gas because there was no business being conducted.
[130] And yes, crime rates were soaring because our entire society had been turned on its head by the pandemic.
[131] And only a small piece of that was, you know, Black Lives Matter and the rest.
[132] Well, let's talk about another big story today.
[133] The January 6th committee, perhaps having its final hearing.
[134] Now, by the time people hear this podcast, they'll know a lot more than we know now, but I think we're getting a pretty good preview.
[135] This is what the New York Times reported this morning.
[136] The House Committee investigating the January 6th attack is planning on Thursday to present a sweeping summation of its case against former President Donald J. Trump at what could be its final hearing seeking to reveal damaging, I'm sorry, damning new evidence about Mr. Trump's state of mind and his central role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
[137] So this is being billed as a sweeping summation of its case.
[138] it's not clear whether there's any bombshell new evidence.
[139] It is just sort of like perhaps just reminding us of this.
[140] So give me your sense of where we're at in this investigation.
[141] Well, I like your Freudian slip.
[142] It's damning, but not necessarily damaging in the slightest.
[143] But it does sound like a summation.
[144] They've given a pretty good preview of it, you know, all members of the committee will speak.
[145] Whenever I hear that as somebody, you know, who will be in the room covering and I, you know, feel like, all right, we're needing some Red Bull here.
[146] You don't want to have a day full of speeches, but there is all kinds of new evidence, mostly the Secret Service emails that will confirm what we've seen earlier.
[147] And apparently a whole lot of footage of Roger Stone.
[148] And I don't know about you, but I can't get enough footage.
[149] That's what I'm most interested in.
[150] Roger Stone.
[151] So, you know, it will solidify what the committee has done already and that they have Donald Trump dead to rights for any number of potential.
[152] crimes and even taking it out of the realm of crime, just very clearly his role in fomenting this violence, attempting to overthrow the election, and indeed doing nothing or indeed stoking the violence when others were trying to get him to stop.
[153] So we know that.
[154] We will know that to an even greater extent after today.
[155] There are signs that it's had some effect in public opinion.
[156] I noticed this Yahoo News, UGov poll.
[157] You know, the number of Republicans who believe the the big lie has over time drifted down, you know, from two -thirds, 66 % to an average of 60%.
[158] Okay, well, that's not great, but it's, you know, headed in the right direction.
[159] And, you know, maybe that's a January 6th committee effect.
[160] And, you know, maybe over time the truth does eventually catch up and win out if things continue to go in that direction.
[161] So that's a little bit hopeful.
[162] But we've also seen that, you know, this is having really zero mention from either side on the campaign trail.
[163] Yeah, I'm not seeing a lot of ads about it as well.
[164] So the hearing is planned for two and a half hours with a 10 -minute break and it will be the panels first without any live testimony from witnesses.
[165] I'm guessing you're going to be going to get a lot of video.
[166] Are you going to be in the room?
[167] Did you, did I hear you right?
[168] I'm going to be in the room.
[169] I've got one of the coveted seats.
[170] You know, I love to do the scene of these hearings.
[171] The problem is it's kind of hard to do the scene because everybody on the panel agrees and you don't have, you know, Jim Jordan lobbying spitball.
[172] So So it's a little hard to cover from that point of view, but at least in the past, you know, there have always been surprises and it's always been gripping.
[173] And the fact that aren't live witnesses doesn't mean there won't be videotaped testimony.
[174] And that's been some of the best stuff in the past, too.
[175] Well, and they've also done a really good job of having some surprises that, you know, every day we've done this, I think I've done a podcast where I say, well, we have a pretty good idea of what, and no. Right.
[176] They actually have, they have something and we don't know what it's going to be.
[177] I'm very interested in finding out what we're going to learn about the Secret Service and what those actually say.
[178] You did not have cleaning ketchup off the wall in the Oval Office on your bingo card.
[179] I didn't either.
[180] Did not have trying to strangle the head of his Secret Service detail.
[181] So, yes, our listeners will know a great deal more than we do shortly.
[182] So you wrote another very interesting piece about the class of 2022.
[183] I mean, we've spent a lot of time and attention focusing on the Senate candidate.
[184] you know, because they're so colorful and lively.
[185] But you took time out to focus on some of the Republican nominees for the House, which in many ways may be even more significant because if conventional wisdom is correct and the Republicans take control of the House, these folks will be in the majority.
[186] So could we just, like, walk through some of them?
[187] Tell me about that North Carolina woman.
[188] Oh, goodness gracious.
[189] The one who hit her husband with an alarm clock and then try to hit another person with a car and punching her daughter, and she's the Republican nominee for Congress.
[190] And let's be, you know, and let's be clear that she does deny doing all these things.
[191] On the other hand, she also does believe that humanoid reptiles are governing the United States of America, so the denials may need to be taken with a grain of salt.
[192] So, yes, she denies actually striking one of her ex -husbands with a frying pan, but the allegation is, in fact, she menaced him with it.
[193] I think that was the same ex -husband.
[194] She tried to run over with the car.
[195] He escaped.
[196] And a totally different ex -husband is the one who got hit with the alarm clock.
[197] I see.
[198] Okay.
[199] And then, yes, there was, and there was also the daughter alleging domestic abuse in terms of punching.
[200] Well, tell me more about the reptiles.
[201] You haven't been listening to Alex Jones, nothing, because there are indeed a race, I guess, you'd call it, if we can use that term, of humanoid reptiles who have invaded, I guess.
[202] I don't think they're terrestrial.
[203] They are, in fact, running the government.
[204] Joe Biden is one of them.
[205] You know, it's an extension of QAnon.
[206] Dana.
[207] It's true.
[208] Dana.
[209] Do people actually believe this?
[210] There are people in America who believe it.
[211] And some of them may be in the new congressional majority.
[212] Now that this is a competitive seat, got a lot of Q &on believers in there.
[213] You've got a lot sort of who appraised the proud boys.
[214] You've got the guy in Ohio who painted his lawn with 120 gallons of blue paint to make a pro -Trump sign and marches around in his ads carrying a weapon saying he'll do whatever it takes in a civil war to get his country back.
[215] Now, it's not clear, you know, how much military experience he has because he's the guy who actually lied about his military record.
[216] I mean, there are so many of them.
[217] And I only picked out the ones who were in sort of the two dozen most competitive races.
[218] You know, if you broaden it out a bit, I was just reading this morning.
[219] It happened, I think, just yesterday in Maine, the Republican candidate running against Shelley Pingree, he compared lobster regulations to child rape.
[220] Well, who hasn't?
[221] I mean, yeah.
[222] Right.
[223] I mean, I'm sure the lobsters feel that way.
[224] I've often thought so.
[225] I mean, if you're a crustacean, you're, you know, certainly feeling that this is an unfair environment.
[226] I don't want to beat the dead iguana here.
[227] But, you and I am engaged, and we can engage in, you know, rhetorical hyperbole about, you lizard people, and we can talk about swamp creatures and, you know, Donald Trump's, you know, lizard instincts and everything.
[228] But this candidate, and apparently some people on Alex Jones's show, believe that actual aliens came from some other planet to this planet and that they are in positions of political power.
[229] That is correct.
[230] These are people who are allowed out on their own unsupervised.
[231] That's right.
[232] In fairness, I'm not up on it enough to know how the reptilian humanoids got here, whether it was UFO or whether they were here to start with, and we didn't know about it.
[233] So I'm not up to that level.
[234] But I mean, is that entirely different?
[235] I mean, we started Q &N with the notion that satanic Democrats who run the government have been...
[236] Satanic pedophiles.
[237] Pedophiles, right.
[238] But the reason they've been trafficking these pedophiles, is so they can take their adrenal glands and distill adrenochrome from it.
[239] And then they consume the adrenochrome stolen from these children.
[240] It's sort of a fountain of youth that allows them to live and be youthful forever.
[241] I don't know how this squares with President Biden, since he clearly needs a little more adrenochrome.
[242] So when you do the update on your book, you might at some point in, you know, in 2040 say, you know, I am old enough to remember when we thought that Marjorie Taylor Green was dangerous.
[243] Looking back on that kinder, gentle, or more innocent time, where people just denied the election and they didn't actually believe in satanic reptiles running America.
[244] Right.
[245] Well, think of her as the Bob Michael or the Bob Dole of our time.
[246] Yeah, the good old days.
[247] Can we get back to the Republican Party?
[248] the Republican Party of Paul Gosart and Louis Gohmert.
[249] I mean, don't you feel nostalgic for those days?
[250] See, the scary thing about your piece, though, is that you go through all of these various, you know, stories, including, you know, one guy in Wisconsin, who I think is more likely than not to win a flip, a Democratic seat.
[251] His name is Derek Van Orden, who actually used campaign funds from his last failed run to travel the January 6th protest.
[252] So, but, you know, so he's an election denier January 6th guy, and he's likely to be elected to Congress.
[253] And was photographed, you know, on the wrong side of police barricades.
[254] Yeah, no, I think he's probably going to win in that district.
[255] So, I mean, this is the interesting thing that, you know, they all could be part of the Republican majority.
[256] We're not talking about, we're not just picking some, you know, random eccentric crazy person who is, you know, in the minority in the legislature in Oklahoma.
[257] Absolutely.
[258] That's why I pick from the two dozen most competitive races targeted by both parties.
[259] And look, if, you know, assuming the Republicans take over the House, which I think is more likely than not, it's not going to be by a huge majority, most likely.
[260] So, you know, five or ten seats, that means the balance of power will be held by those who participated in some way in the insurrection, you know, have sympathies for QAnon and the proud boys.
[261] I don't know if there will be 10 lizard humanoid believers in the caucus, but each election brings a whole new iteration of crazy.
[262] So the Freedom Caucus will look positively sane compared to the latest prop to come in.
[263] And there's a perfectly good reason for that.
[264] It's when you have so few competitive seats.
[265] The only contest is in the primary.
[266] And the only way you can win the primary is by getting attention by being the most outrageous, the most uncompromising.
[267] So it's perfectly logical that this is what's happening.
[268] So Kelly Cooper in Arizona, once the January 6th rioters released on day one, first thing, We're just absolute amnesty.
[269] Let them out.
[270] The alarm clock woman wants executions for people who stole the 2020 election.
[271] She wants to have the death penalty.
[272] She tweeted she wants trials and executions, but it came out as trails and executions.
[273] So it may not have been given a whole lot of forethought.
[274] And this may not be sexy, but it's sort of typical.
[275] Carolyn Levitt, nominee up in New Hampshire, says that the alleged climate change is manufactured by the Democratic Party.
[276] Right.
[277] And that's practically normal.
[278] That's what I'm saying.
[279] We keep moving the Overton window of this is really extreme and this is really crazy.
[280] You write that the would -be Republican class of 22 is extraordinary in the number of oddballs and extremists in its ranks.
[281] This is no accident.
[282] The trend in Republican primaries accelerated by Trump has favored those with the most eye -popping tapestry of conspiracy theories and unyielding positions.
[283] Geopree primaries are dominated by a sliver of the elector on the far right, which of course is true.
[284] And maybe the this is premature, but you look around the country and you go, and yet all of these people might be elected in a general election.
[285] Again, there used to be this world in which if you nominated a crazy, you guaranteed you would lose the general election.
[286] But Herschel Walker is competitive.
[287] Blake Masters is competitive.
[288] You know, obviously, J .D. Vance is competitive.
[289] These real serious nut jobs in the House are all potential new Congress people.
[290] Yes.
[291] Because voters will vote for them.
[292] So these are, you know, at least talking in the case of the House, I think it applies to a lot of the Senate race, as you mentioned, these are the competitive districts.
[293] As Trump has proven, you know, if you can turn out your people in extraordinary numbers, you can win despite not necessarily having the majority approval of the public.
[294] So I think that's what's potentially happening in this case.
[295] You know, you could look at it the other way around and say, given this environment, if the Republicans had not nominated all these nutters.
[296] They'd be in a much better position, certainly in the Senate, and I would argue substantially better in the House, too, given the environment out there with inflation and the economy and everything else.
[297] So you could look at it as a half -full situation saying, yes, they still are being punished for having these views, but not to the extent that they were.
[298] And I think that's the tribal nature of politics, that you just have to rally around your guy.
[299] You know, Charlie, I didn't even include abortion in this.
[300] You know, a lot of people are saying, you know, no abortion and no exceptions.
[301] I did include one guy who said he would allow for an exception.
[302] I think he's in New Hampshire would allow for exception for the life of the mother.
[303] But first, she would have to go through a panel to determine whether she's allowed to live or not.
[304] So we now actually have a guy calling for death.
[305] You know, after the, you know, the fiction of the death panels from Obamacare, there is now an actual call for death panels.
[306] So it's poetic.
[307] There does seem to be an emergency, at least national Republican consensus, that you can have exceptions for rape, incest, and Herschel Walker.
[308] Right?
[309] The three big exceptions, yes.
[310] Yeah, that's right.
[311] Hershal Walker, what do you think the odds are that Herschel Walker is going to tell his horny bull story again?
[312] You know, the story of the bull who's, you know, impregnated all those cows and wants to impregnate more.
[313] I just love replaying the video, just trying to see inside what's going on inside Rick Scott's head as he's watching all of this, you know?
[314] I mean, Rick, you bought the ticket.
[315] You take the freaking ride.
[316] But I don't walk a man. He's been so good for so long to those in our profession.
[317] But I remember when I was excited just about him saying that, you know, our good air goes to China and they send back bad air.
[318] And I thought he was off his rocker then.
[319] So, you know, people sometimes forget that, you know, senators cast votes, yes, but they also are supposed to do some legislative work that will deal with complicated public policy.
[320] There once was a time, believe it or not, I don't think I'm making this up, am I, when serious legislators in the United States Senate would sit down and they would hash out complex pieces of public policy.
[321] and laws and would actually make a policy.
[322] Can anyone seriously imagine Herschel Walker sitting through a subcommittee meeting doing that sort of thing?
[323] Yes.
[324] I can picture him talking with Tommy Tuberville, the aforementioned Tuberville, who has said that the three branches of government are the House, the Senate, and the executive.
[325] So he will tutor Herschel Walker on how to get his legislation into law.
[326] Obviously, it's easy now to dunk on Madison Cawthorne, who admitted that he really wasn't that interested in legislation.
[327] So he didn't really have a legislative staff.
[328] He just had a PR staff.
[329] And now apparently he has no staff whatsoever.
[330] He's kind of closed up shop and like, you know, if you're one of his constituents, hey, you know, screw off.
[331] In some ways, he was just more honest about it.
[332] Like, no, I'm, I'm here to be a, you know, a troll, a social media troll celebrity.
[333] I'm not interested in the legislation, which is really not any different than what you're seeing Ted Cruz has become or that Dr. Oz would be or that Herschel Walker would be.
[334] It is an entire class of politicians that apparently just have no interest whatsoever in doing the job of government, which is actually a job, right?
[335] I mean, it's actually a responsibility.
[336] It should be.
[337] And this, too, is totally rational.
[338] There was a time when, you know, seniority mattered.
[339] You worked your way up the ranks and then you got to write legislation.
[340] Yeah.
[341] So these folks are saying, well, heck, I can skip all of that.
[342] and have a tremendous amount of influence if I can just get myself onto Fox News.
[343] John Boehner wrote about Michelle Bachman doing this, you know, some period.
[344] It was a key moment.
[345] Yeah.
[346] So, and, you know, it's been this realization that the way to power in Washington is not being a, you know, a broker of deals or some idea guy who comes up with legislation and sells it, but of just getting attention by being the most outrageous.
[347] Then you have power.
[348] That's what, that's what power is right now.
[349] Well, speaking of power, you want to talk about Elon Musk for a moment?
[350] Oh, yes.
[351] Because I'm looking at this headline in your paper, The Washington Post, Musk appeasement of Putin and China stokes fears of new Twitter policies.
[352] That's a hell of that line.
[353] So can we just like, okay, can we slow this down a little bit?
[354] Elon Musk, the world's richest man, is actively pushing an aggressive agenda of appeasement, not just of the monster of Ukraine, but also of China.
[355] The person most likely to own Twitter next month has proposed solving the war in Ukraine by letting Russia keep territory.
[356] One praise from a top Chinese diplomat for suggesting that China take control of Taiwan and welcome a widely followed celebrity back to Twitter who had just had his Instagram account suspended for threatening Jews all within the past week.
[357] That's right.
[358] And it's only Thursday.
[359] I mean, it's 2020 the sort of the year of the oligarch.
[360] And how is that working out for?
[361] us.
[362] But let's just, I'm sorry, that's, I'm getting ahead of my.
[363] So Elon Musk, Dana, what the hell?
[364] It's intrigued me all along is what this does to his, you know, loyal customer base, the, you know, the wealthy, urban, coastal, progressive who's buying a Tesla, the people who can afford get, get, you're not, you're not buying a Tesla if you're living out in rural America.
[365] So there are signs that it's beginning to hurt.
[366] Now, my column on this is written not coming out till Friday.
[367] So I don't want any of your listeners to steal it, but I have suggested that Musk is going to need to replace these customers.
[368] And the obvious way to do this is to release the Tesla Model Q and go for some of those who actually do want the humanoid reptilian skin seats in their Tesla.
[369] Okay.
[370] So, you know, bookmark this because, you know, I think in your paperback update edition, you'll say, when I first wrote this column, I thought it was a joke.
[371] However, And I said, here it is.
[372] There are actually Tesla's running on adrenachrome and hydroxychloroquine right now.
[373] So, I mean, Elon Musk has had, you know, a series of success.
[374] He's also had failures.
[375] But I think this is another illustration of the non -transferability of certain successful skills that you can be successful doing A and be a complete idiot here.
[376] But the story about how he is appeasing Vladimir Putin and maybe even shutting, you know, not allowing the Ukrainians to use Starlink in Crimea and suggesting.
[377] at a time of real international tension that we just turn over Taiwan, forget about Taiwan, Taiwanese democracy.
[378] It is sort of breathless that, and the more he says these things, the more he becomes a sort of an iconic figure on the right, which is really so weird for those of us that remember when conservative Republicans did not want to appease the Russians, did not want to appease the Chinese.
[379] This is where my head's starting to hurt here, Dana.
[380] One of the big themes of, you know, Trump world is we need to be tougher on China.
[381] We need to go after China.
[382] We need to have a hard line on China.
[383] And here's Elon Musk base.
[384] Yeah, let's give him Taiwan.
[385] And everybody's go, oh, Elon.
[386] Oh, yes, absolutely.
[387] Yeah, I mean, he is denying that he actually spoke with Putin before giving out the pro -Putin peace plan for Ukraine.
[388] But to me, that's like, okay, fine.
[389] The point was in the actual policy that he's proposing, not we are the, the thing actually came from.
[390] This has been some time in the making.
[391] I guess over the last six months has pretty much gone full MAGA.
[392] I don't see how that works as a Tesla strategy or as a Twitter strategy.
[393] He may wind up doing a great deal of harm to both.
[394] So I guess we can only assume that he actually means it.
[395] So in a few minutes we have right now, I have been reluctant to engage in much forecasting on this show because I still suffer from PTSD with all of the projections back from 2016, 2018, 2020.
[396] So give me your sense of the trends you're seeing in the midterm.
[397] You know, the conventional wisdom has swung from, it's going to be this massive Republican wave to wait.
[398] The Democrats are coming back.
[399] Dobs has changed everything to know on third thought.
[400] Maybe the Republicans are picking up moment.
[401] Where are we at here?
[402] Yeah, and I think it keeps whipsowing back and forth because it depends on which part of the elephant you're looking at.
[403] There's a huge turnout to be expected from Republicans, but it also looks like there's going to be huge turnout from Democrats.
[404] So, you know, note that I'm not making a prediction for what the outcome is going to be other than there are a lot of people who are feeling very passionate about the election right now and are going to be turning out in extraordinary numbers for a midterm election and possibly even, you know, getting close to president.
[405] level.
[406] So, I mean, I suppose that's healthy for democracy.
[407] Unfortunately, it took, you know, the near death of democracy to make people show up.
[408] But I think people saying there's going to be a Republican wave and people saying there's this huge Democratic backlash, they both could be right.
[409] That is interesting.
[410] Now, I hate myself for saying this, but it could all come down to turnout.
[411] All time.
[412] Yeah.
[413] No, well, you know, there's a new pullout in Wisconsin.
[414] And it is kind of It shows Ron Johnson opening up a six -point lead over Mandela Barnes among likely voters, which is pretty bad for Barnes.
[415] But when you look at all registered voters, it's a dead heat.
[416] So what it means is that the larger the turnout, the better it is for Democrats.
[417] So if it is a traditional off -year election, which has lower turnout, then it's going to be very, very good for Republicans.
[418] If it is a massive turnout of Democrats, like you see in a presidential election year, then, you know, then the result could be much, much tighter.
[419] So, I mean, the fact that you have two different pictures based on likely versus registered, I have to say, my sense is at this point in the election, those likely polls are the ones to pay attention to.
[420] Yeah, that's right to the extent you pay attention to any of these polls.
[421] I mean, it's just a lot of garbage out there right now.
[422] But, you know, if you looked at that, Ron Johnson poll, I think that it wasn't the spread.
[423] read so much as I think he was at 52%.
[424] So, you know, if you got an incumbent scoring above 50%, he's probably in good shape.
[425] And I mean, I think you've said this as well.
[426] I, you know, Ron Johnson has been in pretty good shape, you know, throughout this election.
[427] I don't think Democrats had it very high on their list of bumping him off much as they, much as they would have liked to.
[428] They should have.
[429] And, you know, the question of whether Mandela Barnes is the candidate for that.
[430] But anyway, you know, they are where they are.
[431] So it's a competitive race.
[432] That's all we can say for sure.
[433] Well, it's interesting about this race, and I know that people are tired of me talking about it, but Republicans and Johnson are pounding Mandela Barnes on a regular basis for being too left wing, you know, for being too soft on crime, for being too much of a socialist.
[434] And most of Barnes's ads have been, no, no, no, I'm a regular guy.
[435] I am not that.
[436] I am, you know, like last night after watching like six ads in a row about how dangerous Mandela Barnes is going to be and how he's going to destroy the economy and destroy your neighborhoods.
[437] The Mandela Barnes ad shows him buying milk and that he knows the price of milk, which is not really counterpunching.
[438] This morning you wake up finding out that, you know, he's calling in the cavalry now and he's going to be bringing in Bernie Sanders.
[439] Oh, good.
[440] So here is all of the, you know, I am not a, I'm not a left wing.
[441] I'm not bringing in Bernie there's a closing argument, not the intended one.
[442] There is, there's my hand on my face again, or my head on my desk, whatever.
[443] Dana Milbank, thank you so much for joining us.
[444] It is always a pleasure.
[445] Dana's a nationally syndicated op -ed, columnist for The Washington Post, and you should definitely read his new book, The Destructionist, the 25 -year crack -up of the Republican Party.
[446] Dana, thanks for coming on today.
[447] Thank you, Charlie.
[448] Pleasure is mine.
[449] And thank you all for listening to today's Bull Work podcast.
[450] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[451] We'll be back tomorrow, and we will do this all over again.