The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Welcome to the Bullwark podcast.
[1] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[2] You might remember Bart Gelman writing the worst possible timeline about the 2020 election, and it turned out to be absolutely on target.
[3] Well, he has a new piece describing what to expect from a Republican -controlled House of Representatives.
[4] And Bart Gelman, staff writer at the Atlantic, joins me on the podcast.
[5] Welcome back, Bart. Thank you.
[6] You are a winner of three Pulitzer Prizes.
[7] So my first.
[8] The first question, obviously, is where do you keep them?
[9] I mean, do you keep them in your office?
[10] I mean, really, I mean, as someone who is never going to win a Pulitzer Prize, I just have to vicariously live through this.
[11] Do you have them on the wall?
[12] I do have one on the wall and one little acrylic statute, but it seems a little much to display.
[13] Oh, I don't think so.
[14] I think it would be legitimate to actually, you know, have it, you know, pressed into a medallion and just wear it everywhere.
[15] But anyway, that would just be me. You're also the author of several books, Dark Mirror Edward Snowden in the American Surveillance Society, and Angler, the Cheney Vice Presidency.
[16] So before we dive into your latest piece about the looming Biden impeachment, just give me your thoughts watching, as somebody who has written and studied, the Cheney family, or certainly Dick Cheney, your thoughts watching Liz Cheney out on the campaign trail, endorsing Democrats, including a, Pretty liberal Democrat running for Senate in Ohio, Tim Ryan.
[17] I mean, this is not something that anybody would have predicted a few years ago that Liz Cheney would actually be endorsing Democrats in a general election.
[18] You know, I think she grew up with a father, and I think she shares with her father a deep down belief in what she's saying.
[19] The thing I thought about Dick Cheney is though he was willing to lie.
[20] And he played politics like anybody.
[21] else.
[22] By and large, if he said it, he believed it.
[23] He was a true believer and actually kind of a zealot for his beliefs.
[24] And one of the core beliefs that Liz shares with her father is in the basic rule of law in the Constitution.
[25] I know there are a lot of Cheney critics who would disagree with that, but I believe that to be true when I wrote Angler, and I believe it to be true of Liz Cheney now, and she clearly has sacrificed self -interest for principal here.
[26] It was interesting watching Dick Cheney cut an ad in the final week of her campaign.
[27] Everybody knew she was going to lose that election.
[28] She was willing to give up her seat in Congress.
[29] I mean, she lost overwhelmingly, and there is the former vice president of the United States, once a hyper -partisan Republican, cutting an ad that just held nothing back, just went right at Donald Trump.
[30] So, I mean, we talk a lot about Liz Cheney, but Dick Cheney is right there with her right now.
[31] I mean, again, what a strange moment, what a strange and tangled road we've been on to have Dick Cheney cutting an ad attacking the sitting, you know, a former Republican president of the United States.
[32] That's also quite remarkable for him, isn't it?
[33] Obviously.
[34] It is.
[35] And here I have to say, it took them both long enough.
[36] Yeah.
[37] I know that Dick Cheney, and I presume Liz, we're both seething at Trump's multiple crimes against the rule of law and outrageous policies, if you could even call what he did policies, for years before they said anything.
[38] They knew which team they were on.
[39] They were Republicans.
[40] They weren't going to do anything to hurt the Republican Party.
[41] and they finally reached their limit when it came to trying to overthrow an election.
[42] But just as a citizen, I would have wished that they spoke out sooner.
[43] No, obviously, the pressure to stay in the tribe is so intense.
[44] So you knew that something had to have really blown for the Chinese to break the way they have.
[45] Okay, so let's talk about this piece that you have.
[46] You and I were actually on a cable show over the weekend and engaged in radical agreement on your thesis.
[47] Your latest piece is, of course, based on the prediction that Republicans will win the House in next week's election, which seems increasingly likely.
[48] And you write that sometime next year, the pressure from the MAGA base will build a triggering event will burst all restraints.
[49] Eventually, Republicans will leave themselves little choice, and they will vote to impeach Joe Biden.
[50] Let me ask you this question.
[51] Because, of course, I completely agree with this.
[52] Does anyone actually disagree?
[53] Has anyone pushed back on you and said, no, no, no, there's no way that Kevin McCarthy would go along with impeaching Joe Biden.
[54] That would just be too far.
[55] Does anybody make that case?
[56] Well, I will say, I don't think the Republican caucus is there yet.
[57] I don't think that a majority of Republicans in the conference are looking ahead to January and saying, first thing we're going to do is we're going to impeach Joe Biden.
[58] There are definitely some who do.
[59] dozens, in fact, led by Marjorie Taylor Green, who in fact introduced an impeachment resolution against Joe Biden on the very first full day of his presidency.
[60] And over the coming months after that, she started to get co -sponsors for additional impeachment resolutions and also against various members of the cabinet.
[61] But I believe that the fact that the MAGA base is demanding impeachment, and they are.
[62] There's good polling data on this from UMass Amherst that shows that two -thirds, a little more than two -thirds of all Republicans believe that Biden should be impeached.
[63] And importantly, yes, importantly, a majority believe that he will be impeached.
[64] They have that expectation.
[65] And disappointing MAGA expectations has been shown to be very dangerous for Republicans.
[66] And I think over time, it's going to become as much a litmus test to impeach Biden as it is to endorse the big lie.
[67] What's interesting, of course, is this insight, because you could, you know, as a journalist, go around to the leaders of the Republican caucus and get them on the record.
[68] And they're saying, well, no, we're not really thinking about that.
[69] That's not what we want to do.
[70] And probably they think in their own minds that there would be some way, some off -ramp so that they wouldn't take this path.
[71] I think your insight here is the dynamics of Republican politics, which is bottom up driven as well as top down.
[72] Donald Trump sitting in Mara Lago will demand this.
[73] The base will demand this.
[74] There's nothing in the dynamics of the Republican Party to lead anyone to believe that the leadership of the House would resist any of that.
[75] I mean, that's part of the problem, right?
[76] I mean, so Marjorie Taylor Green may be in the minority at the moment, but when you look at who, what the base expects and will demand and what the Orange God King will demand, I think it's absolutely inevitable that they're going to do this and, you know, for one pretext or another.
[77] Well, it's interesting that you mentioned Trump because we hadn't talked about him yet and he's going to be perhaps the crucial player here.
[78] Trump has control of the Republican caucus in the House more than any other individual.
[79] And he has interestingly not yet called for impeachment of Joe Biden as far as I can tell.
[80] But I think that he is certain to do so, especially as he comes under more and more pressure with his own legal troubles.
[81] He is just by personality, someone who always wants to lash out at the other side.
[82] He is obsessed with revenge for his own impeachments, which humiliated him.
[83] he is unable sort of psychologically or psychiatrically to tolerate the idea that he was impeached and his enemy won't be.
[84] And once he calls for it, especially if there's a triggering event such as an indictment of Donald Trump, I think that the caucus is going to be swept along by that.
[85] Well, also, I think that at some level he understands that the impeachment of Joe Biden also devalues impeachment.
[86] I mean, you and I are both old enough to remember pre Bill Clinton when, you know, only one American president had actually been impeached.
[87] And this was the historic black mark.
[88] You know, you never wanted to be a president who was impeached.
[89] If we ever get to a point where every president is impeached by the other party in control of the House, then it becomes same old, same old, doesn't it?
[90] It becomes routine.
[91] You've watered it down.
[92] You've flooded the zone with impeachments that you can kind of like, well, yeah, well, of course.
[93] And I think at some level, Donald Trump understands that, that, you know, that being a twice impeached former president, you know, is a disgrace until everybody is twice impeached former president.
[94] Right, exactly.
[95] It's this false equivalence that is so central to the Republican Party right now.
[96] And it's interesting.
[97] There have actually been a lot more movement.
[98] toward impeachment in American history than most people know.
[99] There have been 12 presidents that faced impeachment resolutions, including every single president since Jimmy Carter, except amazingly for Barack Obama.
[100] But most of those were unsurious.
[101] They had no chance.
[102] They didn't go anywhere.
[103] And it is now becoming, as historian of impeachment has told me, routine.
[104] Well, you know, as you point out in the article, you know, the poll numbers, you know, showing this overwhelming support for impeachment among Republicans, correspond to the belief among Republicans that Biden is illegitimate.
[105] And you write, this is no coincidence.
[106] Impeachment is the corollary of election denial, the invincible certainty that Biden cheated in 2020 and that Donald Trump won.
[107] If you truly believe that and have not joined a militia, impeachment is the least of the remedies you will accept.
[108] And I think that's also a key point, that if you believe that the election was stolen and you have an illegitimate president, you're going to be willing to accept pretty much everything that would be done to investigate to bring this guy down, right?
[109] I mean, what a catastrophe it would be in this country.
[110] If someone actually did cheat their way to the presidency, I mean, if the guy who won was out in the cold and the guy who lost was in the Oval Office, I mean, that would be just a calamity.
[111] And you would consider just about any remedy to fix that.
[112] And impeachment won't seem radical at all to those folks.
[113] Right.
[114] And I think as a mental exercise, I think that folks should try to imagine, you know, what if you believed that this had happened to your guy?
[115] What would you be prepared to do?
[116] So, yeah, impeachment is pretty much same old, same old.
[117] So Kevin Madden, who's a former GOP Flack, told you the impeachment buzz will be at the backdrop of every kind of.
[118] conversation about a Republican agenda, because the Republican agenda is basically, right, is going to be retribution.
[119] I mean, whatever form that it takes.
[120] So let's talk about this.
[121] Talk to me about Kevin McCarthy on this issue, because he's equivocated on it, at least in public.
[122] Right.
[123] He's equivocated and almost deflected a little bit.
[124] Like, you know, if evidence emerges of a serious crime, of an impeachable offense, then we'll consider that, but we're not going to use impeachment as a political statement, we're going to do serious investigations.
[125] He and Scalise and Stefanik have come together with a strategy that stops short of impeachment because they believe it could very well be an overreach and redound to Biden's benefit.
[126] And so they're going to try to say, look over here, right -wing caucus.
[127] Look over here, Freedom Caucus.
[128] We're doing investigations of Hunter Biden, and we're doing investigations of the border, and we're doing investigations of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
[129] You don't have to worry about impeachment.
[130] We're on the case here.
[131] And then you have incoming committee chairs like Comer and Jim Jordan, who will take oversight and judiciary, respectively.
[132] And they are with the program so far.
[133] But I think Jim Jordan is the linchpin of the impeachment debate.
[134] Right now, he is hedging.
[135] But when it starts to pick up steam, Jim Jordan is never going to be the guy who says, well, that's going too far for me. I'm not that far against Joe Biden.
[136] I mean, he will not allow himself to be outflanked by Marjorie Taylor Green once impeachment becomes a serious subject.
[137] And keep in mind, he will want to make sure that the principal action is located at his own committee, judiciary, which in fact does traditionally handle impeachment proceedings.
[138] So I think once Jim Jordan goes from on the fence to off the fence, that's when you'll know impeachment is around the corner.
[139] Well, and also, I think it's also important to understand, you know, the Republicans' perpetual outrage machine.
[140] You know, part of what we're seeing now is the result of the Republican Party being this bubbling caldron of outrage.
[141] And you keep having to feed that beast.
[142] So you have a lot of Republicans in the base who are sort of prime to.
[143] sniff out any sense of compromise or any hint of weakness, right?
[144] I mean, you can certainly imagine Marjorie Taylor Green, you know, raising millions of dollars attacking any Republican that expressed even mild skepticism about impeachment.
[145] Once this gets rolling, you know, especially because expectations will be so high, you know, if in fact there is the Republicans sweep into Congress, then people are going to demand everything.
[146] We've seen this before.
[147] There's always the desire to not overreach, but the temptations become overwhelming at a certain point.
[148] I think that's what you're describing here, is that they may, you know, you may have Kevin McCarthy and Elise DeFonick sitting around, and Steve Sklees sitting around thinking that they can hold back the tide, but there's really nothing in Kevin McCarthy's background that would lead you to believe that he would success.
[149] Or backbone.
[150] Well, exactly.
[151] That's what I was getting.
[152] Or back.
[153] So let's talk about this.
[154] You know, that you don't think there's any reason to believe that McCarthy can resist the impulse to impeach once it gathers strength because he's, he's not exactly a strong figure, is he?
[155] Look, he watched his two predecessors destroyed by the right wing of the party, by the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, respectively.
[156] And he has made his entire M .O., his entire.
[157] campaign plan to become speaker has been to never get crosswise with the sort of emotional right wing of the party.
[158] And when they come for him on impeachment, he will step out of the way.
[159] He's just not a guy who's going to fight them.
[160] So you also have an interesting note in your piece about what Trump will want.
[161] You know, Doug Hay, who's a McCarthy ally and a former staff member told you that the answer is pretty obvious that Donald Trump's going to want to impeach everybody.
[162] So we might not just see an impeachment of Biden.
[163] I mean, are they going to go through an impeachment paloosa?
[164] Are we going to have, you know, Kamala Harris is going to be impeached for the border?
[165] They're going to go after Merrick Garland if he indicts Donald Trump.
[166] You're going to go after the head of homeland security.
[167] I mean, how many impeachments might we be looking at?
[168] They're going to depend to some extent on triggering events.
[169] And it doesn't even matter very much what the alleged charge is going to be.
[170] Ted Cruz kind of let the cat out of the bag on that one in his own podcast earlier this year.
[171] He said that Joe Biden is likely to be impeached, quote, whether it's justified or not, because he said, quote, what's good for the goose is good for the candor.
[172] If it happened to Biden, it'll happen.
[173] Yes, retribution.
[174] But yes, it's going to start with cabinet, I think.
[175] I think it's probably going to be, Alejandro Maracas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, on grounds that he has allegedly refused to enforce the law at the border, because that's the most powerful, emotional issue right now for the Republican base.
[176] But if there is progression in the Justice Department case against Trump, if there's an indictment, certainly, then I think the pressure will be overwhelming to impeach Garland.
[177] There was a resolution introduced in Biden's first year by Lauren Bobert with some co -sponsors, which wanted to impeach Kamala Harris as well.
[178] And the reciprocal logic here is interesting.
[179] The ground for impeaching the vice president was that she had failed to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president.
[180] So, yeah, nobody's really safe.
[181] There was a resolution against Anthony Blinkett as well, and I can't even remember what the grounds of that one were.
[182] You know, I did see that.
[183] They held a press conference about impeaching Anthony Blinken, and I assumed it had something to do with Afghanistan, but I had no idea.
[184] So, I mean, we ought to make it clear here that you're certainly not predicting that any of these folks will be actually removed from office because the impeachment by the House is one thing, but getting 67 votes in the Senate, even with a Republican sweep, seems extremely unlikely.
[185] I agree.
[186] I agree.
[187] Even if Republicans take the Senate, they're now going to remove any of these guys.
[188] So let's talk about some of these investigations.
[189] So Kevin McCarthy is hoping to throw the red meat to the base by having, you know, endless Benghazi style hearings.
[190] And obviously from day one, we're going to be hearing a lot about Hunter Biden, right?
[191] You talk to a lot of Republican and the subject or emblem of scandal most often mentioned was Hunter Biden.
[192] So how would they connect Hunter?
[193] Hunter Biden's misadventures, of which there are many, to Biden himself.
[194] How does this play out?
[195] That's the exact right question.
[196] Hunter Biden, we know, was a drug abuser.
[197] The evidence on the laptop and elsewhere in profiles about Biden suggests that he was engaging with sex workers.
[198] He was thinly qualified for some of the boards that he sat on, and it seemed as though it was clear that foreign companies wanted access to Hunter in hopes of getting access to the vice president at the time.
[199] But what you don't have is any proof that Hunter actually did involve his father or that his father actually did do anything to intervene on behalf of Hunter's businesses.
[200] And there is nothing in the Hunter Biden laptop that makes those connections directly.
[201] There's some reference to somebody saying there should be money for the big guy.
[202] There's reference to somebody saying that Hunter should introduce them to Joe Biden.
[203] But there's no evidence that those things actually happened.
[204] And yet the Republicans may not need to connect all those dots because there is this miasma of slees all around Hunter Biden, right?
[205] So you just throw up enough and there's enough that people will go man, this is awful, which of course is ironic given, you know, know, what the Trump family was like and what they were engaged in.
[206] There is a certain irony given the dealings of Jared Kushner and Donald Jr. and Eric and Ivanka and all of those folks.
[207] Democrats never went wall to wall with hearings about the Trump kids, but there's not going to be, you know, they talk about it's all about payback, but clearly there's going to be no hesitancy to go after Biden's son.
[208] There won't be any hesitancy on that.
[209] And I mean, I'm not a big proponent of what aboutism.
[210] But when you talk about Hunter, you should omit that in the Trump family, there is clearly on the public record numerous examples of the president himself using corrupt influence to make money.
[211] Lots of money.
[212] Whether it's emoluments or the way he used his hotel with foreign guests and on and on.
[213] So the actual idea of corruption to make money by use of public power is not what is bothering the Republicans.
[214] It's the opportunity to submit to abide.
[215] Yeah, I think that's pretty clear.
[216] So, you know, other possible grounds for impeachment that you read about Biden's immigration policies, border enforcement, botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, federal government's temporary ban on evictions, maybe even the use of the strategic oil reserve, which I'm not sure that rises.
[217] And you write in your article, none of these rises to impeachable conduct by historical standards, but the GOP will find some new cause for outrage, some leading Republicans say the details won't even matter.
[218] And really that's the heart of it, right?
[219] That it doesn't matter what the evidence is.
[220] It's just you'll find some pretext and they'll be all in on that.
[221] And then it becomes the litmus test.
[222] And I think this is one of the most important points you make, because I agree with you that if this actually comes to a vote, any Republican member of the House that votes against it will face the same fate of Republican members that voted to impeach Donald Trump.
[223] I mean, almost all of them have been excommunicated, defeated, forced out of office.
[224] The same fate would be waiting for any Republican that dared vote against a Biden impeachment.
[225] So it would be close to a party -line vote, wouldn't it?
[226] I have to think so.
[227] I think momentum will build in such a way that it's very hard to resist.
[228] The same reasons why you had more than two -thirds of the entire caucus.
[229] vote to upend the election.
[230] And they did that immediately after the riots on January 6th.
[231] They will, pure and simple, be afraid not to vote for impeachment.
[232] I mean, look, impeachment is, of Joe Biden will be another way to say, we hate you.
[233] We think you're an illegitimate president.
[234] We're completely opposed to you.
[235] And what's the strongest step we can take short of actual taking up arms?
[236] And that's to try to remove you from office.
[237] Sure.
[238] And they think this is a political winner in that it weakens Joe Biden, whether, obviously, it's not going to succeed in removing him from office.
[239] But I thought it was interesting also that you point out in the piece that this has all been gamed out for months.
[240] House Republicans, conservative think tanks have been meeting and talking about this.
[241] The Heritage Foundation took part in a planning retreat.
[242] And the plan is for quick impeachment debates involving the Homeland Security Secretary.
[243] So, I mean, there are already.
[244] gearing up.
[245] And again, part of the conservative infrastructure is also being mobilized behind impeachment efforts.
[246] Yeah.
[247] So you have the outside groups that are well -funded and busy ginning up an agenda for the new Republican takeover.
[248] And yeah, Heritage wants to start with Majorcas.
[249] I think he's the best target.
[250] Because, of course, that's thematic going to the border issue, which continues to be, you know, very, very strong, emotional issue for the right.
[251] Okay, so let's just shift gears just for a moment because I'm interested in getting your thoughts about, you know, something else that's been going on this week and how consequential it will be.
[252] It's only been a few days since Elon Musk took over Twitter, which we've talked about on this podcast before, but he's moved very, very quickly to indicate that he's going to put a personal stamp on it in that first 72 hours, he pushed out, you know, a baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband.
[253] So he's the troll in chief.
[254] He's the truther in chief.
[255] We don't know how, you know, whether there will be any guardrails left or how he's going to handle content moderation.
[256] So give me your thoughts about this because now we're going into this period with tremendous pressure being aimed at, quote unquote, big tech.
[257] not to push back against disinformation, hate speech, et cetera.
[258] How does that change the dynamic that we're talking about?
[259] Well, Twitter is not the most important or the most influential of the social media platforms.
[260] It's much smaller than Facebook and YouTube and Instagram and so on.
[261] But it is the social media platform of the political and entertainment elites.
[262] And so it has a leading role in our public.
[263] dialogue, and it's been an important platform.
[264] And it's the only one of them that I could actually tolerate myself.
[265] So I'm moderately active on Twitter, and I find a lot of value in it.
[266] Musk seems hell -bent on demolishing it.
[267] He's got idiosyncratic ideas about what would make it better and what it ought to be.
[268] He doesn't seem to have any concept of content moderation and how hard that is.
[269] If he wanted to try to go completely hands off, he would find out as even Gavis.
[270] and parlor have found out that you have to do some moderation because otherwise your platform does become a complete, you know, hellscape of trolls and misinformation and Nazis and pornography.
[271] So Musk can't help but do some moderation.
[272] Yeah, Charlie Warzel was on the podcast the other day talking about it.
[273] It is really interesting how little thought he's put into this.
[274] Yeah, I mean, he could very easily make decisions in the in the next couple of weeks.
[275] that destroy the platform and he has even for him a not insignificant amount of money bound up in this platform the numbers stud me the debt service on the loans that he took to buy Twitter amount to a billion dollars a year Twitter's entire gross income last I checked was around 700 million so not enough for the debt service and that's gross income that's not net Musk has to actually throw that, whereas the things he's done so far and proposed so far seem likely to drive away many of his most important power users who are the ones that other people come to Twitter to talk to.
[276] So Stephen King, for example, tweeted out that there's no way he's going to pay money to be a verified user on Twitter, that the verification is a benefit to Twitter not to him.
[277] And that's correct.
[278] Somebody I can't remember who I read just yesterday on Twitter talking about the difference between copyright and trademark.
[279] That copyright is something you do for the rights holder.
[280] And trademark is something you do for the general society.
[281] That's what lets you know that when you buy a Coca -Cola, it's a real Coca -Cola.
[282] That's what lets you know when you buy medicine, that it's the real medicine and not some fake.
[283] And that's what verification of users is like on Twitter.
[284] it enables me when I read someone to know it's really that.
[285] Donald Trump's handle was real Donald Trump and was verified.
[286] If Musk makes that something you have to pay for and that anyone can pay for, then he's destroying that trademark.
[287] He's destroying that social utility.
[288] This is really interesting.
[289] I know it's sort of easy to dunk on the blue check marks, and I'm a blue check mark, so I have a conflict of interest, I guess.
[290] I don't know.
[291] I don't get anything out of it as far.
[292] as I can tell.
[293] So a couple of days ago, he floated was $20 a month and everybody, you know, if it don't like to hell with that.
[294] And eventually he announced that it was going to be $8 and you get all these benefits for it.
[295] But it's not clear that the blue checkmark will even be a verification anymore.
[296] It sounds like just for $8 a month, you get it.
[297] And all it says is that you've decided that you're going to give Elon Musk the world's richest man $96 a year of your money right i mean so he's completely devalued it's no longer verification right it's just it's just raw revenue am i missing something there because it doesn't sound like there's any verification it doesn't mean anything anymore except that you're enough of a sucker to give him money look you need authentication for the benefit of other twitter users so that when political junkies read something that purports to be from charlie sykes uh they know it's this charlie Sykes of the bulwark and not a plover in Tulsa who's also named Charlie Sykes or not a bot from China that pretends to be Charlie Sykes.
[298] I mean, there's value in interacting with people you admire or people who have credentials to say things, people who have earned reputations.
[299] And if you can't tell who you're talking to it, if you can't tell who you're reading on Twitter, then a lot of the value is gone.
[300] So we've been talking a lot of about Donald Trump, about the base, about the dynamics of Maga, and, you know, Trump and other conservatives thought that they could create their own websites, whether it's parlor or gab or truth social.
[301] Now that Musk is in charge of Twitter, what do you think?
[302] Does Donald Trump come back?
[303] Does Donald Trump bring his own people back?
[304] Or do they stay in their own, you know, much, much smaller unsuccessful silos?
[305] Well, as always, with Donald Trump, you simply have to try to calculate where the self -interest is.
[306] And Trump had something on the order of 100 million less than that followers on Twitter.
[307] He hasn't nearly replicated that on truth social, not by an order of magnitude.
[308] And on truth social, he's not talking to the mainstream elites that he actually really does want to talk to whether he admits it or not.
[309] And he's, and he gets that, yeah.
[310] Yeah.
[311] So, I mean, that would argue for him.
[312] coming back to Twitter.
[313] On the other hand, he's got a lot of money at stake in Truth Social, and he must know that if he comes back to Twitter, even if he stays on Truth Social, that it's going to demolish Truth Social, that there's no more raison debt for truth social if the MAGA in chief is back on Twitter.
[314] So I can't calculate that for you, but he's going to have a dilemma.
[315] Okay, so because I think this is relevant to what we were talking about before, though.
[316] So he has a lot of money tied up in truth social, but is it his money?
[317] No, he doesn't have his money.
[318] He seldom has his money tied up.
[319] So he has other people's money.
[320] But he has upside.
[321] They're still hoping to take it public using one of those shell companies that has a lot of money at stake.
[322] He can make a lot of money if he could bring that transaction off.
[323] and if the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn't find that they committed fraud along the way, which is under investigation.
[324] There's some sketchiness.
[325] I guess as I'm thinking this through, you know, the one through line with Donald Trump is that he is not loyal to anyone else except to himself, that he sees a benefit to himself.
[326] He is willing to fuck over his investors, his partners, his businesses.
[327] He has walked away from other businesses.
[328] He has left people holding the bag for other debt.
[329] And if he sees an advantage for himself in going back and getting his 100 million followers back again, I have a hard time imagining him not doing it.
[330] I mean, obviously, he's going to look at what is the financial upside.
[331] But in terms of loyalty or fiduciary responsibility, he doesn't care about that.
[332] Yeah, those things don't exist for him.
[333] They don't exist for him.
[334] It literally wouldn't occur to him.
[335] Yeah.
[336] And I'm sure that he has nostalgic for the days in which he could.
[337] drive the news cycle by his tweets.
[338] And I'm just making the prediction that he's going to come back here.
[339] He'll try to find some way to pretend that he's straddling the two while he leaves Devin Nunes to pick up the leavings of what remains of truth, social.
[340] Yeah, great career move for Devin Nunes, huh?
[341] Yeah.
[342] Yeah.
[343] Well, for whatever it's worth, Trump has actually taken a public position already and said that he would not come back to Twitter even if he were allowed to because he's on true social doubt.
[344] I know he says that, that, you know, there are, you know, circumstances change.
[345] And I think that Donald Trump has no problem in changing his mind if it is in his own personal interest and will advance his personal agenda and who knows what Elon Musk will do.
[346] The Elon Musk story, I think, is fascinating again because it reminds us of the non -transferability of certain talents that you can build, a rocket but have no idea how to run a social media company and that you can be a, you know, billionaire genius in one area of your life and be a virtual illiterate moving over.
[347] And I just think that it's pretty obvious that Elon Musk has no idea what he stepped into here.
[348] And I guess the question is, you know, how badly does it turn out and how long before he loses interest?
[349] And, you know, I can't tell any more about Elon Musk's what goes on inside his mind than I can about Donald Trump's mind?
[350] Well, the one thing is he wants to be on the cutting edge of something big and bold.
[351] And when he finds out that he has no choice but to engage in content moderation, and he finds out how difficult and full of dilemmas that is, I think he's going to get bored of it.
[352] I think you're absolutely right.
[353] Bart Gelman, staff writer at the Atlantic winner of three Pulitzer Prizes has a fantastic piece in.
[354] the Atlantic, I think very accurately describing what a Republican Congress is going to do, endless investigations, and maybe serial impeachments.
[355] Definitely worth your time.
[356] Bart, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.
[357] Thanks for having me. The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Siri.
[358] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[359] Thank you for listening to today's Bullwork podcast, and we'll be back tomorrow and do this all over again.