The Bulwark Podcast XX
[0] Happy Monday and welcome back to the Bull Work podcast.
[1] I'm Charlie Sykes, and because it's Monday, I am joined by my colleague Will Salatan.
[2] So do you have a good weekend, Will?
[3] You didn't get banged up playing basketball again?
[4] No more stitches, no more stitches, not injured.
[5] And I'm super excited for my Astros, who are going to the World Series.
[6] And congratulations to all the fans of the Philadelphia Phillies.
[7] We'll see you in the series.
[8] It's been a long time for them.
[9] So it'll be great.
[10] Well, no, the Astros certainly do look dominant.
[11] And maybe they won't have to cheat this time.
[12] You know, I believe in second chances, Charlie.
[13] You know, won't it be great for the Astros if they can, you know, for many years after the trash can thing without cheating.
[14] Maybe.
[15] They win.
[16] They win it all.
[17] Dusty Baker, you got to refer Dusty Baker.
[18] So it'll be a great story.
[19] It will be a great story.
[20] And that's as much sports that I can handle this morning because, of course, the Green Bay Packer thing is just, I'm sorry, the disillusionment and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the.
[21] and the horror is just too much.
[22] I'm sending you a condolence card.
[23] Yeah, there must be something up in the water about the Green Bay Packer quarterbacks.
[24] I don't know, it's like they have a good run and then they go into weird, strange places and start losing.
[25] I don't know.
[26] Or become Minnesota Vikings, so I don't know.
[27] Do you know how many other cities would kill to have Green Bay's problems?
[28] Yeah, to have a good run, to have a Brett Favre run, to have an Aaron Rogers run.
[29] You're lucky, Charlie.
[30] You're very lucky.
[31] I will cling to that.
[32] However, I also remember the 1970s, And so there was that long period of decades where people go, hey, do you remember the glory days?
[33] And you just don't want to go back to all of that.
[34] Hey, so it was good seeing you in D .C. We had our first live event last Thursday night, and you and many of the Bullwark team were there.
[35] And it was, I would say, a lively event.
[36] It was fantastic seeing all of the Bullwark fans.
[37] We had a panel discussion.
[38] And, of course, a rather, I thought, kind of intense one -on -one.
[39] with a police officer Michael Fanon, who I think it's fair to say.
[40] Would you agree, Will, it didn't hold back much?
[41] No, not.
[42] He matched you at the expletives, which I can't say for anyone else.
[43] Well, maybe I was just following his lead.
[44] You know, it is one of the things that does strike me, though.
[45] You know, this is a midterm campaign that where Republicans are just completely hammering the issue of law and order and wrapping themselves and the cloak of, you know, we back the blue.
[46] We are the party of the police.
[47] And, and yet you look at it.
[48] You look at the Michael Fanon, who basically used to be part of that world.
[49] And it's like he's raising his hand saying, are you kidding me that this is the party that is supposedly so pro -police and yet you can't get them to pay the slightest attention to all of the police officers who were injured and beaten and who died as a result of January 6th.
[50] It's like dropped into a memory hole.
[51] Look, you know, you and I are frustrated about this, but I can't even imagine.
[52] The frustration of somebody who was actually there, who was tased and beaten with a flagpole carrying a, what, you know, Blue Lives Matter flag, that's actually not a joke.
[53] I mean, that's serious.
[54] And yet is watching how the Republican Party is just basically shrugging its shoulders.
[55] And let's face it, you know, millions of voters are, yeah, we don't really care about that.
[56] But we are concerned about law and order and we are backing the police.
[57] Yeah.
[58] First of all, it was great to see you.
[59] I got to meet your family.
[60] family.
[61] And all of you who are listening to the podcast, some of you were there at this bulwark event.
[62] It was lovely.
[63] But what I learned from that Officer Fanon interview so much, first of all, I had no idea that he was a, you know, Fox, as he put it, I was a Fox News enthusiast.
[64] He was watching Tucker Carlson.
[65] He was watching Laura Ingraham.
[66] He was totally into Donald Trump.
[67] And you know how we talk?
[68] Conservatives love to say that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality.
[69] Officer Fanon was a Trumper who was mugged by Trumpers.
[70] And that's what happens is you realize that a lot of these people who claim to be for law and order are willing to use violence against police.
[71] They're not actually sincere about backing the blue.
[72] They're willing to literally beat up the blue if the blue were on the other side.
[73] It really was an education to me in what this means to be for police.
[74] I thought, I don't know about you, Charlie, I had this idea of Officer Fanon as somebody who went to the Capitol to protect Congress and to protect the certification of the election.
[75] And what he said to you in that interview was, no, he said that shit was the furthest, I mean, that's almost a direct quote.
[76] That shit was the furthest thing from my mind.
[77] He went there to stand with other officers who had been putting out distress calls.
[78] He was really there to back the blue.
[79] And then he's assaulted by this crowd that claims to be.
[80] be for police, but as you point out, literally is beating officers with a Blue Lives Matter flagpole.
[81] So it's not about that.
[82] And I would add one other thing, Charlie, and I hesitate to say this, but you played as an introduction to that interview, a voicemail by an angry, hateful person, you know, threatening Officer Fanon.
[83] This is after January 6th, calling them all kinds of names.
[84] And this person said that they were for police.
[85] And they talked about people.
[86] assaulting police.
[87] And the people that this person accused of assaulting police were, I believe the term was black scum.
[88] And so for a lot of people, and I'm sorry to say this, there are a lot of sincere Americans who really believe in backing the police, but there are a lot of folks who say they're backing police.
[89] But what they really mean is that they are against the black people who might be threatening, rioting, or just standing up, just protesting.
[90] And they're for police in that situation and they're not for police when the police are standing up to white Americans who are trying to overthrow an election.
[91] It is very hard to disagree with that.
[92] I mean, the reaction to the Black Lives Matter protest versus January 6th is pretty stark.
[93] It is pretty dramatic.
[94] I actually had a few qualms about playing that voicemail, and I think people in the room were a little bit stunned, you know, wondering how, you know, Officer Fanon would react.
[95] Well, obviously he had released it at some point.
[96] It is the unedited version.
[97] I don't know if I told this, but I'd heard this on one of the cable channels as I was flying into DC and I thought, you know, we should play that.
[98] What I hadn't realized was how heavily edited it was.
[99] And we played the completely unedited version and it was intense.
[100] But I did tell Officer Fanon in advance what I was going to do that I was going to play this.
[101] But also you get the hatred, the reaction and in a sense of the fact that rather than sobering up the country after an act of violence, that it just stoked at all.
[102] The other thing, and I think you're getting at this, you know, in many ways he is the least likely hero of the resistance.
[103] I mean, he's, you know, basically a former redneck cop.
[104] I mean, in a sense, and that's what he kind of describes himself, who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 on the law and order issue because he didn't like the way the Democrats talked about police officers.
[105] And in many ways, that makes him the worst nightmare to Maga World because he is one of them.
[106] He embodies their values in so many ways.
[107] And when he speaks out, when he has been mugged by, their reality or their non -reality, it really poses a significant threat, which is why I think it is so important for the right to discredit him, to not honor his service, to not thank him for his service, or recognize that he is exactly the kind of person that they would most admire in any other circumstance.
[108] So Laura Ingram has to make fun of him, you know, as a crisis actor.
[109] Tucker Carlson has to, the irony of Tucker Carlson questioning anyone's manhood, but questioning his manhood.
[110] And I see that other folks from the writer, you know, targeting him as well, because he has to be taken down.
[111] He has to be discredited because otherwise he is, in many ways, the worst critic they can imagine.
[112] Yeah.
[113] I mean, there's nothing that fake people hate more than authenticity.
[114] And that's what he is.
[115] That's what he has.
[116] That's great.
[117] Officer Fanon is a model, not just of, you know, coming to the aid of his colleagues, of fellow officers, but of self -restraint.
[118] He is what a police officer ought to be, and he described to you a meeting with Lindsey Graham in which Lindsay Graham said to him and the other officers, I believe, the quote from Officer Fanon was, again, attributed to Lindsey Graham, we give you guns, you should have shot them all in the head.
[119] I mean, all these protesters.
[120] So Officer Fanon is explaining to us at this event what it was like to be there.
[121] He said, you couldn't stick a credit card between two people.
[122] The crowd was totally jammed together.
[123] He said, if I had drawn my weapon, the chances that I could have drawn it and fired and hit the person who was actually a threat as opposed to some other person who happened to be in the crowd were like nothing.
[124] And it's kind of an education in these sort of armchair law and order types.
[125] And Officer Fennon, and I wanna say this for the officers out there.
[126] He said, I don't wanna live in a country where police officers can just open fire willy -nilly into a crowd.
[127] I mean, that is what police ought to be.
[128] That is what so many officers are.
[129] And so he is a model of the right kind of officer.
[130] And what Lindsey Graham wanted him to be was sort of a, you know, third world country kind of police officer where you just shoot into crowds.
[131] And, you know, our law officers, the good ones are not going to do that.
[132] It really was an excellent discussion.
[133] Look, we have a lot of great podcasts, but I would strongly urge people to go back and listen to that, not just because it was in front of a live audience, but because of what Michael Fanon had to say.
[134] Okay, so it's Monday.
[135] Let's just catch up on some stuff.
[136] Well, in my newsletter, I sort of ran through some of the stories, you know, this new NBC poll, revealing staggering polarization.
[137] I don't think this is a real shock, but still it is kind of stark.
[138] 80 % of Democrats and Republicans believe the political opposition poses a threat that if not stop will destroy America as we know it.
[139] So that's polarization.
[140] When you have 80 % thinking, we don't just disagree.
[141] The other side is so dangerous that will destroy the country.
[142] Washington Post and every other pundit in the world has a variation of the story.
[143] The Democrats are fearing that the midterm map is slipping away from them.
[144] A lot of warning sign.
[145] The British have a new prime minister, Rishi Sunek.
[146] Could we just talk about that?
[147] I mean, this will be what their third prime minister in the last couple of months.
[148] So, you know, there's a lot of things about this to comment on.
[149] But the first thing is that it's kind of refreshing single political system that can actually get rid of a dysfunctional prime minister.
[150] If you screw up, they actually change the person.
[151] They don't just double down.
[152] There is no cult of personality.
[153] There was not a Boris Johnson cult of personality.
[154] Liz Trust is not hanging on because they're demanding loyalty to her.
[155] So now we have Rishi Sunak, who had been beaten in the quote -unquote convention primary system they have there by Liz Truss.
[156] And I guess conservatives have decided, okay, that wasn't a good choice.
[157] Let's go with this guy anyway.
[158] So next prime minister.
[159] Yeah.
[160] No, this guy is quite interesting.
[161] I mean, to state the obvious, he's the first non -white prime minister of Britain.
[162] And, you know, okay, we had Barack Obama before this.
[163] And, you know, to our credit, Barack Obama was elected by the whole American electorate.
[164] And, you know, this is, so the British system is, this is more like the Speaker of the House, right?
[165] This is members of the legislature choosing their next candidate, the next prime minister.
[166] But I will point out one other thing.
[167] Barack Obama, you know, remember in the whole birther lie about Obama, it was one thing was that he was born in Kenya, false, right?
[168] The other thing was that he was Muslim.
[169] And, of course, there's nothing wrong with being Muslim, but Obama was not, in fact, Muslim, right?
[170] He was a Christian.
[171] He is a Christian.
[172] And what the Brits have done is they're going to have a prime minister who is not just not white, but not Christian.
[173] He's a Hindu.
[174] Really?
[175] Okay.
[176] Yeah.
[177] So this is, they've broken a barrier that we have not broken yet.
[178] And it'll be really interesting to see how, you know, British culture, which is not very religious, but they do have like state churches and that kind of thing.
[179] It'll be very interesting to see how that goes over.
[180] Well, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too far.
[181] But Rishi Sunak is also, you know, immensely wealthy.
[182] I mean, he's worth like 700 million dollars.
[183] He's extremely rich.
[184] He was also the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
[185] And during his contest with Liz Truss, he was the guy saying, you know, your ideas of slashing taxes and doing all the stuff that she eventually did that destroyed her, this was a fantasy world.
[186] He tried to warn the Conservative Party against going with these policies, you know, at a time of inflation.
[187] And apparently back then, the right wing in Britain wasn't willing to listen to him.
[188] And so Liz Trust rolls out these policies, which, by the way, some people have done some great accountability journalism pointing out, you know, all the commentators who said, oh, Liz Trust is brilliant.
[189] This is great.
[190] This is the best budget ever.
[191] And, of course, when the markets completely blew up and ended her prime ministership in 45 days, they've all gone silent.
[192] But Rishi Sunak was the guy saying, look, I actually know how the economy works.
[193] This would be a disaster.
[194] he turned out to be absolutely right.
[195] And in almost the exact opposite of American politics, instead of being excommunicated at exile for being prematurely right about a mistake that his party was making, his party is going, okay, you know, our bad, you got it right, it's your turn now.
[196] Yeah, I mean, it's heartwarming to me, Charlie, to see accountability.
[197] A little bit, yeah.
[198] It is.
[199] Okay, so speaking of Liz Cheney, because I was thinking about, you know, being prematurely right and then being exiled, So she was on Meet the Press yesterday and had a lot of things to say.
[200] So let's play some of it.
[201] And I want to get your reaction, Will.
[202] Liz Cheney asked what happens to the January 6th committee now?
[203] Let's play that first cut.
[204] Where does this investigation go on January 4th?
[205] Well, you know, if we were in a nation where our politics were operating the way they should, the investigation would proceed no matter what.
[206] I think that the Republicans have made very clear that they're not interested in getting to the bottom of what happened or holding people to account.
[207] And I think that also ought to be something that Americans across the country are paying attention to.
[208] Why would you not want to understand how this happened?
[209] Yeah, she's right.
[210] And again, that's kind of, you know, she's not addressing what we were just talking about, but you do see the different political cultures.
[211] Yeah.
[212] And in fact, in that interview, shortly before, I believe the question before that, Chuck Todd is asking her about the midterms.
[213] So she doesn't actually say it in the context of the midterms.
[214] But you'll note in that quote, she says, the Republicans.
[215] It's a broad, I mean, Liz Cheney up to this point has said, you know, election deniers, Doug Mastriano, Carrie Lake, people like that, we should not vote for any of them.
[216] And, you know, you should vote for the Democrat against the election deniers.
[217] This is the first time I've heard her make a categorical statement about her party, the Republicans in the House and Congress.
[218] And she's telling Americans, look, these people are a threat.
[219] They're going to try to shut down accountability over January 6th.
[220] She doesn't actually say you should go out and vote Democratic across the board in the midterms.
[221] But, Charlie, it kind of felt like that was the undertone of the comment.
[222] I don't know what you thought.
[223] Look, it was a pretty dramatic red line for a Cheney to suggest voting for any Democrat.
[224] And I think we ought to be aware of how striking that was.
[225] And by the way, you saw that Lisa Murkowski up in Alaska is endorsing the Democrat for Congress, who's running against a couple of Republicans, including Sarah Palin.
[226] And again, this is kind of extraordinary stuff that's going on.
[227] I mean, well, you know, I can't speak for you, but I thought there might be more of this.
[228] And then there was none of it in terms of the cross party, you know, let's find, let's find some common ground in the middle and actually get things done.
[229] So since there was none of it, every little bit helps.
[230] I think so.
[231] Yeah, I agree with you.
[232] We know, we should hope that Alaska breeds other cases where we start to see Republicans and Democrats who, you know, who believe in getting things done, people in the middle working together.
[233] Okay, back to Liz Cheney and talking about crossing over the particle line.
[234] She was asked about Virginia Governor Glenn Yonkin, one of the good Republicans, going out to Arizona to campaign for Kerry Lake, who is one of the worst conspiracy theorist election deniers.
[235] This is what Liz Cheney had to say about Yonkin's decision to put party over country.
[236] You know, I think they are really indefensible decisions.
[237] And, you know, I've said I think that Glenn Yonkin has done a good job as governor of Virginia, but nobody should be out advocating for the election of people who will not honor the sanctity of our elections process.
[238] And, you know, people who do that are, in fact, putting politics ahead of the Constitution and ahead of the country.
[239] Okay, so that's also interesting that she's calling out her fellow Republicans for not standing up or at least not even, you know, standing down when it comes.
[240] comes to somebody who is as bat -shick crazy as Carrie Lake.
[241] And you got an excellent piece last week in the bulwark about, you know, the number of these election deniers who are actually doing pretty well in the polls.
[242] And I'm sorry to tell people this.
[243] But, you know, lying about the election and believing these indefensible things is apparently not the electoral poison that a lot of us assumed that it might be.
[244] Yeah, it's not.
[245] You know, to me, the interesting polling here, there are a couple of states where it's interesting.
[246] There's Pennsylvania and Arizona where you have clear election deniers at the top of the Republican ticket.
[247] And like in Arizona, the numbers kind of break down, you know, the good news is only 40 % of the voters in Arizona are total, you know, believe the lie about that they want a governor who says that, you know, Trump actually won the election.
[248] But the problem is it's not like the other 60 % are on the other side.
[249] You know, there's only about 20 % on the other side.
[250] And then there's 40 % of Arizona just don't care.
[251] They're like, you know, whatever the governor wants to say.
[252] They don't mind that Kerry Lake is lying about the 2020 election.
[253] And that don't care constituency, I mean, which is roughly going to be equivalent in state to state is, that's the major problem.
[254] You know, you and I are exercised about, lies about the election and about January 6th.
[255] Liz Cheney has exercised about it, but not enough voters are.
[256] Too many of them don't care.
[257] And that's why Lake is polling as well as she is.
[258] And Lake is, at the this point, I think odds on to win that race and because the thing that you and I think is disqualifying about her is not disqualifying in the eyes of most voters.
[259] Yeah, and by the way, our colleague Tim Miller has a fantastic piece in the bulwark today, some kind of some tough love for Arizona, writing about the weakness of the Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs, and he says the Democratic nominee for governor in Arizona, Katie Hobbs, has been a dog's breakfast served inside a dumpster fire.
[260] She's turning over staff after getting sued by a past employee for discrimination.
[261] She's ducking debate.
[262] She's hiding from the press.
[263] She's proven incapable of rhetorically taking the fight to her opponent.
[264] The liberal columnist for the local paper and the co -chair of Biden's campaign have ripped her campaign.
[265] And the more prominent popular Democrats who might aid her efforts are MIA, which is not great.
[266] So speaking of Kerry Lake, kind of an interesting moment where she was fact -checked to her face by Jonathan Carl yesterday.
[267] Let's play a little bit of this, because this is an interesting moment where she's, you know, repeating her lies.
[268] But the interviewer is not giving her a free pass.
[269] Let's play that.
[270] We want to shore up our elections that they are very honest.
[271] And every voter knows that it's an honest system.
[272] Let me just give you a couple of facts.
[273] 2 ,000 mail and ballots were accepted by Maricopa County after Election Day in 2020, after Election Day.
[274] That was a new one on us.
[275] So we took the claim to election officials in Maricopa County who told, us, it's just not true.
[276] In fact, no ballots were accepted after the election day 7 p .m. deadline.
[277] Some ballots were scanned the next warning, giving them a timestamp after election day.
[278] But again, those ballots were turned in on election day by the deadline.
[279] So we're not going to air your interview and your lies directly without including, without patching into it, our fact check.
[280] And it didn't take long at all for them to put a few seconds of, we check this out, and it's not true.
[281] All right.
[282] So speaking of fact checks, Will, Mike Lee was also interviewed yesterday, the Utah Senator who's facing the challenge from independent Evan Buchmullen, which we've talked about is like one of the most interesting Senate races in the country.
[283] Not making any predictions.
[284] The interesting dynamic here.
[285] And he's also fact checked.
[286] In this case, fact checked in in real time.
[287] Let's play that.
[288] Look, there's not a scintilla of truth to what he's suggesting there.
[289] The fact is, there were rumors circulating in the days and weeks leading up to Jan 6th, rumors suggesting that some states would be shifting out their slates of electors.
[290] Now, as a U .S. senator, it was my job to open and count the electoral votes on January 6th.
[291] And we were trying to narrow down what was truth and what was fiction.
[292] I made phone calls to investigate the truthfulness of those rumors.
[293] That's all.
[294] Not advocating, just investigating the truthfulness of them.
[295] But it's the only scenario in which Congress would have had a role.
[296] I concluded after my investigation that the rumors were false.
[297] And on that basis, I voted to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.
[298] Wow.
[299] Yeah.
[300] Well, part of what I liked about this interview is that Fox News, and this is Shannon Bream, who's taken over for Chris Wallace.
[301] And she's done a great job of actually not being a Fox News flunky, right?
[302] She actually is difficult.
[303] She gives tough interviews to Republicans, too.
[304] And what she did here is she played as part.
[305] of her interrogation of Mike Lee, she showed a text message in which he said that he was looking for ways of generating these false electors that he could persuasively defend.
[306] And the text message that she showed on the screen directly falsified his claim there that, as he put it, he wasn't advocating.
[307] He was just investigating whether alternate electors could be put forward.
[308] So, again, a case of media fact -checking in real time that was quite useful.
[309] So speaking of Senate races, in Utah, you do have Evan McClellan who is making this a centerpiece of his campaign.
[310] I mean, this is not a one -off.
[311] And in part because, you know, Evan McMullen is still right of center.
[312] And so he's not running as a Democrat.
[313] The Democrats in Utah very prudently, I think, decided to stand down here.
[314] So this is really an election about the election denial and then the support for overturning an election.
[315] Mike Lee is right in the center of this.
[316] You know, that also has become an issue in other states.
[317] but as you mentioned, it may not be top of mind.
[318] So I just have a question for you.
[319] I'm looking at the map now, and I think that people need to brace themselves for what happens in a wave election where all kinds of flotsam and jetsam get swept into office.
[320] The fact that Herschel Walker is still competitive, is mind -blowing, but it's true.
[321] Dr. Oz, very much closing the gap with Federman, may even take the lead in some polls.
[322] In an Ohio, which is a plus nine Republican state, though, Tim Ryan is still within one point of J .D. Vance, and yet national Democrats have abandoned him.
[323] Chuck Schumer has abandoned him.
[324] Tim Ryan has a chance to beat J .D. Vance.
[325] And yet, it's like off the radar screen.
[326] Can you explain what's going on there?
[327] Because I don't get that.
[328] So you're curious about why Democrats have abandoned the race, given that Ryan is such a strong candidate?
[329] Yeah.
[330] Yeah.
[331] So I have a kind of a conspiracy theory.
[332] I don't know if it's true.
[333] But look, don't get me wrong.
[334] Ryan needs the money.
[335] The money would help him.
[336] But what helps Ryan more than anything else is not being associated with national Democrats.
[337] I mean, he's the guy who literally ran against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker, right?
[338] And, you know, the fact that it looks like there's a feud between him and Chuck Schumer.
[339] And, you know, Ryan, I believe, said he wouldn't necessarily support him.
[340] I think all of that helps Ryan enormously with what remains of swing voters in Ohio.
[341] They don't like the national Democratic Party.
[342] So I'm not convinced that that's bad for Tim Ryan.
[343] I think the message benefit might outweigh the money harm from Democrats staying out of that race.
[344] But look, more power to him.
[345] It would be great for America.
[346] I think you and I agree if we had more Lisa Murkowski's and Mary, what's her name, Mary Peltala, and Tim Ryan's, you know, Evan McMullen's, people in the middle of the spectrum who cannot be counted on by the wing of either party.
[347] That would be great for us.
[348] This is why I like talking to you on Monday, because I can always count on you to say, no, if I dig deep enough, there's a pony in there somewhere.
[349] There is.
[350] Will always thinks there's a pony.
[351] I'm thinking, man, there's this big mountain of shit there.
[352] And yet you are thinking, no, there's a pony in there.
[353] Okay, but can I talk about the shit for a minute?
[354] Let me talk about the shit.
[355] You mentioned at the top about the, I think it was NBC poll, about the polarization, right?
[356] that 80 % of each party thinks the other party's the devil and they're going to destroy America, that is harmful for many, many reasons, but one of them is, you just asked here, why is Herschel Walker doing as well as he is, right?
[357] A terrible candidate, a guy who's obviously a hypocrite in every way, treats women badly, paid for an abortion.
[358] Two abortions, I can't even keep track of how many of this point.
[359] But he's a liar, a fraud in every way.
[360] And yet he gets, being a liar in a fraud, you still can get 45 % guaranteed in any election, sometimes 50.
[361] And the reason is when the polarization gets that intense and everybody thinks the candidate on the other side is the devil, then any idiot, any fraudster who happens to be from your party starts with a baseline that's way too high.
[362] You know, Herschel Walker should have fallen to 35 or 30 % at least after he was exposed as a fraud.
[363] But you only fall to like 45 these days because the polarization is so intense.
[364] No, I think that that's exactly right.
[365] And I think we need to understand that that dynamic.
[366] And that dynamic is going to be with us for a very, very long time.
[367] It has been kind of a lag time.
[368] Like after 2016, I think that should have been pretty obvious that that was the reality.
[369] And I think that we're still and have been a little bit of denial, sort of a lag time there.
[370] Okay, so we've talked a little bit about crime and the crime issue.
[371] And obviously, inflation continues to absolutely hammer the Democrats.
[372] Did you see that story about Stan Greenberg, the Democratic pollster, who is saying that, you know, Democrats, you know, you may think that the right thing to do is to keep talking about your achievements and the bills you passed.
[373] He says, no, you need to shut the hell up about all the work you've done.
[374] It's not that voters don't care.
[375] Greenberg says voters actually turn against Democrats when they hear it.
[376] it's our worst performing message says, I've tested it.
[377] I did Biden's exact words, his exact speech, and that's the test where we lost all of our leads.
[378] It said to the voters, this election is about my accomplishments and not about the challenges you are experiencing.
[379] So he's saying that the Democrats who are, you know, under the impression that they just list all of the great things they've done in the past, that this is the winning message when he says, no, that is not working for you at all.
[380] Voters are being drowned.
[381] They're worried about crime.
[382] They're worried about their schools.
[383] They're worried about inflation.
[384] They're worried about the border.
[385] And if you're talking about yourself, you're not talking about them.
[386] What do you think?
[387] Well, this is fascinating to me for many reasons, but one of them is Greenberg was half of the team with Carville, you know, in the Bill Clinton team.
[388] And James Carville has the opposite take, right?
[389] Carville's message to Democrats was talk about what you pass, not about what you didn't pass, right?
[390] So he is.
[391] pushing the achievements and greenberg i trust greenberg here because he's got data right he's testing this message and he's finding that people are sick of it i think greenberg is right and he's right because of human nature charlie you know what happens is if you're an incumbent politician and there's a problem and you solve it like you get the country vaccinated right you know biden did that people don't say hey joe biden got the country vaccinated so i'm going to vote for him they say great we don't have to talk about we don't have to think about vaccination anymore let's move on to the next thing And the next thing is inflation or the border or crime.
[392] It's whatever the problem is that you didn't solve.
[393] It's an inherent problem with being an incumbent.
[394] And I think Greenberg is right that you can't just say, here's all the stuff we did for you that you no longer think about.
[395] You've got to move on to stuff like inflation that is intense and is really worrying people.
[396] So we have another sound by here.
[397] Again, we've talked about crime, inflation.
[398] The border is a major theme among Republicans.
[399] And I have to say, this is, this has been a part of the polarized world that we live in in the different bubbles that people are in, because you go into, you know, certain democratic progressive bubbles.
[400] And there's never a discussion about what's happening at the border or crime.
[401] There's a Democratic congressman from South Texas, who is, I mean, he's sort of hanging on there.
[402] He's barely hanging on.
[403] And Henry Iquare, who kind of is broken with the orthodoxy on all of this.
[404] And he was on yesterday and saying, look, the.
[405] border is not secure.
[406] This is true.
[407] He's trying to get the Biden administration to take a more aggressive posture.
[408] So let's play Henry Quare.
[409] You know, first of all, no, the border is not secure.
[410] When you have 1 .7 million individuals last year and then another 2 .7, that's over 4 .5 million individuals encounter at the border.
[411] Plus, if you at the getaways, that's going to be over 5 million individuals in just two years.
[412] No, the border is secure.
[413] It's not secured.
[414] And we've got to make sure that we have repercussions there.
[415] Look, I've talked to the administration a week before the December.
[416] This was in December 2020, and I started telling the transition team in December 2020, this is what's going to be happening.
[417] You all have to be ready.
[418] And if we don't have repercussions, we can be compassionate at the border, but you've got to enforce the law.
[419] And if you don't return people, then this is what you're going to have.
[420] Okay, well, well, All right.
[421] This is, I don't know where to start with this.
[422] Let me talk to my fellow liberals on this.
[423] Okay.
[424] If you hang out with a bunch of people who all think the same way, whether they're conservatives or liberals, in my case, liberals, you're often not going to hear about things that they don't want to talk about.
[425] So liberals don't really want to talk about the border.
[426] And you and I have discussed before, you pretty much have to go to Fox News to get to hear anything about what's going on at the border.
[427] If you're a liberal, you watch Kamala Harris.
[428] She says the border is secure because liberals want this issue to go away.
[429] They don't really have a good answer for it because there's There's just so many people coming here.
[430] We have this promise of asylum, and we're just overloaded.
[431] Our system can't handle it.
[432] So what Quayar is doing is he's kind of breaking the silo.
[433] He's saying, you know, I'm a Democrat, but I have to live with this.
[434] My district has to deal with this stuff.
[435] And he's telling you, this is a real problem.
[436] You, liberal media, you liberal America need to wake up.
[437] We need to figure out how to deal with it.
[438] And he pretty much says that there are some policies that, I hate to say it, but that Donald Trump implemented that were designed to sort of manage this massive influx of people.
[439] And you don't want to become Donald Trump and you don't want to become a hater, but you do have to figure out how to manage this flow of humanity that we clearly are not managing at the present time.
[440] So this strikes me as an example, though, of what Rui Tashara calls the Fox News fallacy among Democrats, which is that if Fox News treats something as a big issue, then there's a reflexive pushback, you know, to deny that it is, in fact, an issue at all.
[441] And so you multiply the immigration issue by Fox and by Donald Trump in the wall.
[442] and you get a resistance to talking about it and a resistance to supporting forceful border policies.
[443] And yet you hear you have, and again, this is a Democratic congressman from the border where, let's face it, Democrats are having a hard time, even with Hispanic voters, on this issue in South Texas, since he's waving the red flag.
[444] So I guess here's my question, Will.
[445] Is the Biden administration hamstrung by the nature of the Democratic coalition from taking more aggressive policies.
[446] I mean, my sense is that Joe Biden knows he's got a problem and that people in this administration know they have a problem and they would like to be able to deal with it, but they understand that the progressive flank would be upset, would push back.
[447] Well, all right, so my answer to you, Charlie, is that in principle, the answer is yes, that Biden is hamstrung by it.
[448] And that is to say they're cross -pressured by the Democratic constituency, which does not want to be seen as being mean to migrants, right?
[449] Ron DeSantis is flying migrants to Martha's Vineyard.
[450] Therefore, we're for whatever is, you know, most lenient towards people coming into this country.
[451] But in reality, what Quayar said in this interview is he suggested that quietly under the table, without saying much, the Biden administration is actually restoring some of the Trump administration's policies.
[452] And he named two things.
[453] One was Title 42, the sort of COVID health protection rule, which Biden had suspended.
[454] And the other was the migrant protection protocol, I forget, it's MPP, but it basically means remain in Mexico.
[455] And liberals had all agreed, we weren't going to do this.
[456] We're welcoming everyone.
[457] But the problem is, while people are waiting to have their asylum claims adjudicated, where are they?
[458] Right.
[459] And if we don't have places to put them, then we're sort of sending them into the interior of the country and hoping they show up for hearings later on.
[460] And if only, you know, 20 % or whatever it is of them actually end up qualifying, you've just let a bunch of people in who shouldn't be here, who don't have legitimate asylum claims.
[461] And maybe you shouldn't have those people in this country to begin with.
[462] They can't be in their home country, but they could be waiting in Mexico.
[463] So I have to look at the details, but Qua was certainly suggesting in that interview that Biden is actually restoring some of those policies without admitting it to the left.
[464] All right.
[465] So there's a report in semaphore this morning that Joe Biden's going to try to change the midterm conversation this week at the DNC.
[466] He's obviously going to be touting job creation, the recent decline in gas prices, you know, as you might expect, while drawing a contrast with what he recently termed the Republican mega -maga trickle -down agenda.
[467] But most importantly, that what Democrats are counting on over the next two weeks is a late push on Social Security and Medicare to turn the red tide.
[468] And I've noticed this.
[469] shift that I think there was a reliance, maybe an overreliance on abortion to counter the Republican surge.
[470] And they're recognizing that, okay, abortion is still going to be, you know, a potent issue, but they're also going to be hammering Social Security and Medicare, which, you know, feels like same old, same old playbook, except for real man of political genius Rick Scott putting it in writing and people like Ron Johnson saying that, yeah, we ought to sunset these bills and it ought to be, you know, annual appropriation.
[471] So does.
[472] anything like that change the tide at a moment like this or is that the thing with tsunamis is like you know there's no breaker that's going to make much of a difference at this point what do you think so i'm a skeptic uh and i'm sorry not to be able to deliver the pony inside the giant pile of you know what um but in in this case you know how if you're for football fans if sometimes your team is behind in the fourth quarter and they've been running and they start passing now sometimes teams pass because they have a good passing game but a lot of times teams that haven't been passing and start passing in the fourth quarter are passing because their running game isn't working.
[473] And that's not good.
[474] And I sort of feel like that's what's going on with the Democrats.
[475] They're going to this message.
[476] If this message had been an advisable message earlier on, they would have focused on it more.
[477] But it's really that the abortion message isn't working well enough, right?
[478] The Roe v. Wade was overturned.
[479] They've got some juice out of that.
[480] People were alarmed by it, but those numbers are subsiding now.
[481] And so they're turning to the next thing, whatever else they can do.
[482] And so I don't have a lot of confidence that it's going to work.
[483] Yeah, it is hard to say because you have so many different elections and so many different places.
[484] I think it was the NBC poll that had Republicans now ahead of Democrats by six points in the swing states.
[485] And, you know, people need to, you know, every once in a while, everybody has to take that deep breath and remind themselves the national polls don't really matter when it comes to these things.
[486] The only things that matter are the swing congressional districts and the swing states.
[487] and I think that's where the problem is.
[488] So, Will, we have a lot to talk about between now and the election, and I'm really hoping that you're going to be my go -to guy to find a pony, okay?
[489] I'll find a pony every week.
[490] The Bullwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio production by Jonathan Siri.
[491] I'm Charlie Sykes.
[492] Thank you for listening to today's Bullwork podcast, and we'll be back tomorrow to do this all over again.