Speaker 1: This episode was recorded on May twenty first, before Trump
Speaker 1: picked his running mate jd Vance.
Speaker 2: Can I just tell you it's even more cowardly than that, though,
Speaker 2: because they might tell you that they're scared of violence,
Speaker 2: and maybe there's a fleeting thought of that, but it's
Speaker 2: like they really just are scared of criticism, like they
Speaker 2: don't want to get yelled at in the airport, Like literally,
Speaker 2: it's more of that. The more acute concern is I
Speaker 2: don't want to be walking through the airport with my
Speaker 2: wife and have people be like you're trader, you suck.
Speaker 3: I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry o'she.
Speaker 4: I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years,
Speaker 4: living undercover all around the.
Speaker 5: World, and in my thirty three years with the CIA,
Speaker 5: I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Speaker 4: Although we don't usually look at it this way, we
Speaker 4: created conspiracies.
Speaker 5: In our operations. We got people to believe things that
Speaker 5: weren't true.
Speaker 4: Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the
Speaker 4: news almost every day.
Speaker 5: We'll break them down for you to determine whether they
Speaker 5: could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Speaker 4: Welcome to mission implausible.
Speaker 3: I don't think you've ever seen me like this.
Speaker 6: I'm super excited to bring on Tim Miller to the show,
Speaker 6: John and Jerry. I've been telling you how excited I
Speaker 6: am to talk to Tim, because Tim, you're like this
Speaker 6: almost non existent thing. You're someone in politics who has
Speaker 6: somehow maintained I think, many of your core principles, but
Speaker 6: has actually adjusted to realities on the ground by speaking
Speaker 6: truth to power. How do we introduce you? I mean,
Speaker 6: you had a variety of roles in Republican politics. Do
Speaker 6: you want to give us a quick highlight?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 2: I appreciate that very much. I'm doing my best. It
Speaker 2: definitely strayed for a while, and I'm doing my best
Speaker 2: now to be the shepherd. And yeah. So I was
Speaker 2: a spokesperson for a bunch of Republican presidential campaigns as
Speaker 2: McCain first in Iowa and then Huntsman and then Romney
Speaker 2: after he beat us in twenty twelve, and then I
Speaker 2: was the RNC spokesperson for a while during the Romney campaign,
Speaker 2: and then I was Jeblish's spokesperson in twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 2: then after he lost, I was invited to be the
Speaker 2: spokesperson for a group called Our Principal's Pack, which was
Speaker 2: a proto Lincoln project. One of the main differences, though,
Speaker 2: was every member of that pack except me and one
Speaker 2: other person, ended up supporting Donald Trump in the general
Speaker 2: election after we failed, which was pretty strange since the
Speaker 2: only principle of Our Principal's Pack was that Donald Trump
Speaker 2: was not acceptable. So that was the beginning of my disillusionment,
Speaker 2: I think. And yeah, that takes me to now. I'm
Speaker 2: out of that game. I'm in the media business. I
Speaker 2: host the Board podcast and happy to be here with
Speaker 2: you guys.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and the Bullwark, Well, you guys do a lot
Speaker 6: of conversations that are I think, just vital for this time.
Speaker 6: It's a weird island of stability. I live in Vermont,
Speaker 6: where we have weirdly a functional bipartisan legislature with a
Speaker 6: reasonable Republican governor. And I live in an island. And
Speaker 6: then I walked the Bulwark, and I pretend every now
Speaker 6: and then that I live in a world of rational discussion.
Speaker 2: The Vermonck governor is like the Bulwark mascot. He's like
Speaker 2: Scott one left. Yeah, he's the only one left.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So we're obviously going to head towards the fact
Speaker 6: that literally, to have a job as a Republican today,
Speaker 6: you have to actively profess belief in a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 3: That's the anti that's the answer to san poker.
Speaker 6: Yeah, why don't we start there? Can you walk us
Speaker 6: through what is going on in the Republican Party?
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell me you guys, maybe Jerry and John, we
Speaker 2: can offer the psychological analysis of what it is of
Speaker 2: this dominance play I guess by Donald Trump because I
Speaker 2: think a lot of it is instinctual with him more
Speaker 2: than a strategy. I think to be backed into this
Speaker 2: just because he was a child, you can't accept that
Speaker 2: he lost, right, But as he consolidated power following January
Speaker 2: sixth as all these weak quizzlings like Lindsey Graham and
Speaker 2: Kevin McCarthy lost their resolve and kind of went down
Speaker 2: to pay homage to him in order to rationalize another
Speaker 2: term in twenty twenty four, the big lie that he
Speaker 2: created because he was a manchild needed to become real
Speaker 2: because that was the central argument for his candidacy, that
Speaker 2: these people stole this from me, that they stole it
Speaker 2: from you. By extension to the MAGA voters, and now
Speaker 2: whatever the country's going to shit or whatever the argument
Speaker 2: is as a result of this theft, and I need
Speaker 2: to be restored back to power and in order to
Speaker 2: rectify that great crime. So if you're in the conspiracy,
Speaker 2: if you're in the world where you believe the conspiracy,
Speaker 2: like that is the framework, and that was a framework
Speaker 2: that gave him total control over the party. It was
Speaker 2: impossible for Ron Decantis, even had he been a more
Speaker 2: charismatic candidate, to undermine that core argument. If the voters
Speaker 2: believed this, that Trump was robbed and everything was great
Speaker 2: under him, and if it would just be fixed, if
Speaker 2: we got him back in there, then what was the
Speaker 2: point of going for a discount Trump? So it was
Speaker 2: really the central rationale of his decision to run again
Speaker 2: for president, with I think a subrationalf trying to stat
Speaker 2: of jail. Much Now there's no room within the party
Speaker 2: to run counter to that, and so there are two
Speaker 2: lovers to this, like one at the candidate lever. The
Speaker 2: voters are holding the candidates accountable, not Trump, right. Voters
Speaker 2: want candidates that are totally loyal to Trump, and the
Speaker 2: best way to demonstrate whether they're loyal is whether or
Speaker 2: not that they will state this lie. And then at
Speaker 2: the staffing level, I think Trump looks back at twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen and thinks that his main flaw is that he
Speaker 2: had too many people around them who weren't loyal, and
Speaker 2: obviously Mike Pence in the end being the prime example,
Speaker 2: but there have been many examples, and so this time
Speaker 2: they are, you know, rectifying that I look back in
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen to twenty and I see a lot of mistakes,
Speaker 2: but they look back and they see this one mistake,
Speaker 2: you know, that they did not have loyal people around them.
Speaker 2: And so that now is part of the RNC staffing.
Speaker 2: We've got Lara Trump there, you know, as a co
Speaker 2: chair making sure that people stand line.
Speaker 6: Can you make that explicit? Like if I wanted a
Speaker 6: job at the rn C today, what would I have
Speaker 6: to do?
Speaker 2: I mean, I haven't gone through the interview process. I
Speaker 2: don't know for sure, but you know, basically the reports
Speaker 2: are from people that were, you know, because what happened
Speaker 2: was so a bunch of people got fired and they're
Speaker 2: interviewing to be rehired, and during that process, reports which
Speaker 2: I have no reason to doubt, said that they were
Speaker 2: asked about their views about the twenty twenty election, and
Speaker 2: so is every employee asked about that. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but the signal is put out right, like there is
Speaker 2: a there's an environment within the building that's this is
Speaker 2: not something that you speak out about. There was like
Speaker 2: an early kind of like an embryonic example of this
Speaker 2: when Trump was still trying to figure all this out
Speaker 2: and like how much he could control. The RNC was
Speaker 2: in twenty sixteen. This is a lifetime ago. A lot
Speaker 2: of people might not remember this because it feels like
Speaker 2: Trump's owned the party for so long now, But in
Speaker 2: early twenty seventeen, the RNC still was a lot of
Speaker 2: like my for old friends, right, like literally is like
Speaker 2: my co workers. So it's people that worked for Mitt
Speaker 2: Romney who was not Maga ideologues. And so there were
Speaker 2: some of them that got fully on board with Trump,
Speaker 2: and then there are others that just kept their job
Speaker 2: and said, oh, whatever, I'm an institutionalist, we'll ride out
Speaker 2: this wave. So one of those people, a friend of mine,
Speaker 2: was at the committee, and various times Trump would be like,
Speaker 2: do some lie, like, oh, we had the biggest inauguration
Speaker 2: effort or whatever, and then reporters would go to the
Speaker 2: rn C and say do you know the RNC spokesperson,
Speaker 2: do you agree with us? And my friend who is
Speaker 2: over there in the communications department set on calls that
Speaker 2: they would suggest that, okay, we don't need to weigh
Speaker 2: in on this one, we don't need to go along
Speaker 2: with Trump's lies on this one, like let's just stay
Speaker 2: out of it. And that happened one time, and the
Speaker 2: people like okay, And then it happened another time He's overruled,
Speaker 2: and having another time he was overruled. And then after
Speaker 2: the third time, he got a phone call from Jared
Speaker 2: Kushner who was just like, hey, man, do we have problems.
Speaker 2: I hear that you've been expressing on conference called some
Speaker 2: concerns about the message here, and like my friend shut
Speaker 2: up eventually found a new job and was replaced with
Speaker 2: I don't know, some maga maga, you know, maga bought.
Speaker 2: But that all takes time, right, Like it takes time
Speaker 2: for everybody to get churned out, and like the people
Speaker 2: who won't go along get turned out. The people who
Speaker 2: were establishment before, like at least stephonics switch sides, and
Speaker 2: then the new people coming in or all maga, and
Speaker 2: so there is like this slow rolling process of vetting
Speaker 2: to make sure people are on board. And now we're
Speaker 2: in the final formation of that where the RNC is
Speaker 2: literally asking people about this, maybe not every higher but
Speaker 2: enough hires that the word is out that you can't
Speaker 2: undermine them. And then at the candidate level, like I said,
Speaker 2: voters are voting for this, and then on the outside
Speaker 2: you have the Heritage Foundation that's now preparing for if
Speaker 2: Trump were to win. They are doing like these massive
Speaker 2: social media vets, massive deep dives and real social media.
Speaker 2: And the craziest example that I've heard is somebody who's like, oh,
Speaker 2: somebody who's liking Tailor Swift posts. Then they threw the
Speaker 2: person out because it was like, now, okay, that's a
Speaker 2: sign that they're too. Is that an old wife? I
Speaker 2: don't know. That's like word of mouth directionally, that's what's happening.
Speaker 2: Like they are vetting potential appointees for twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: and going through their social media history and making sure
Speaker 2: there's no apostasy against Trump and obviously that they're not
Speaker 2: undermining the big live about twenty twenty Yeah.
Speaker 5: Tip. The impetus for this particular topic was a guy
Speaker 5: the named of Charlie Speace and our Republican National Committee.
Speaker 2: Layd Charlie is my lawyer for a while.
Speaker 5: Top Flight Guy was hired in March by the Trump
Speaker 5: and the Trump team, and just a couple of weeks
Speaker 5: ago in May he resigned. And according to the Post
Speaker 5: and sources, and he's not denying it, it was he
Speaker 5: basically said, I don't want to lie. There's no evidence
Speaker 5: that Trump won twenty twenty. Show me the evidence and
Speaker 5: I'll say it, but I'm not gonna lie about it.
Speaker 5: And essentially he said the Emperor has no clothes and
Speaker 5: he was pushed out. And the question I have for
Speaker 5: you and for everybody else is where does party, loyalty
Speaker 5: and cultish territory begin. Right, fealty to the great Leader.
Speaker 5: John and I in our past lives we dealt with
Speaker 5: a lot of dictators. Kim Chung un now is the
Speaker 5: great comrade. Every birthday the entire country swears a loyalty
Speaker 5: oath to him. Where they all lie, right, They all
Speaker 5: say that he's the greatest leader ever, that North creates
Speaker 5: the gariest country ever, and they all know it's not true.
Speaker 5: But where's your sense of like where this it becomes
Speaker 5: like really poisonous and concerning into cultish territory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we're already deep into the kool aid
Speaker 2: brother I don't know, yeah, or past the point of
Speaker 2: no return on where it gets into cultish territory. The
Speaker 2: Spee's incident is interesting and very telling. Charlie, like I said,
Speaker 2: was one of Jeb's lawyers. He's one of the two
Speaker 2: most prominent Republican lawyers. I just want to use this
Speaker 2: moment to say the most prominent was a guy named
Speaker 2: Ben Ginsberg, who also did the right thing and now
Speaker 2: is being a grandfather and quit this bullshit because he
Speaker 2: couldn't take it any more. Long time ago, Charlie tried
Speaker 2: to walk the line and occasionally he would speak out,
Speaker 2: not much. He wouldn't troll people. It was like when
Speaker 2: it was assd One Tenant Seapack on a panel. You know,
Speaker 2: he was on a panel, and he was up there
Speaker 2: and he's like, I bet you're you guys are gonna
Speaker 2: boo me. But I just I don't think that. There's
Speaker 2: just not a lot of evidences happened. He wasn't rebuking
Speaker 2: them and mocking them or anything. He was just giving
Speaker 2: the facts. And he gets any ut bood. But he
Speaker 2: gets this job. I suspect, and I don't have first
Speaker 2: hand information about this because they paired him with Christina.
Speaker 3: Bob, who is, Oh, she's good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she's an insane person and she's like a lawyer
Speaker 2: slash TV person. It's like a crazy version of Andrew Weisman.
Speaker 2: And so she gets hired and they're like, Okay, we
Speaker 2: also need a real lawyer for to hire this person.
Speaker 2: So I think that they thought that they were getting
Speaker 2: the best of the both worlds here a little bit,
Speaker 2: like Charlie can do the real lawyer ring, she can
Speaker 2: be the front woman for all the MAGA stuff. We'll
Speaker 2: get a little bit of both. And it's telling that,
Speaker 2: like it didn't take very long for like the credible
Speaker 2: person to be the one that got flushed out. In
Speaker 2: a healthy culture, it would have been Christina got flushed out, right,
Speaker 2: But that's not how it works in an environment like
Speaker 2: the culti environment that Trump has intentionally cultivated. And also
Speaker 2: just I should have mentioned spies didn't even publicly say anything, right,
Speaker 2: Like it's again, it would have been one thing if
Speaker 2: it was like Spees was on t Fox and he
Speaker 2: gets blindsided by a question and he speaks some wrong
Speaker 2: speak about the fake election. Lie right, and they're like,
Speaker 2: all right, buddy, you're out. That's how what happened. It
Speaker 2: was private. It was like they felt like they couldn't
Speaker 2: trut him because of private comments. That's even more chilling
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 5: And according to the Post, it was they went back
Speaker 5: to comments that he'd made years ago. They were basically telling,
Speaker 5: you need to rebuke those comments, you need to walk
Speaker 5: those back.
Speaker 4: Let's take a break, we'll be right back.
Speaker 5: And rebec.
Speaker 6: Now, Tim, when you were a staffer, I mean, you know,
Speaker 6: there been changes of the guard.
Speaker 3: I remember when George W. Bush came in.
Speaker 6: There's a bit of tension with his dad's old cronies.
Speaker 6: The Romney crue wasn't exactly the same as the W crew.
Speaker 6: And you know the Dancy has had the same thing.
Speaker 6: The Hillary and Obama people had to learn to get along.
Speaker 6: And so how did that work when you were in
Speaker 6: that world? Like I'm assuming if you're an old George W. Person,
Speaker 6: you can't start saying Romney sucks.
Speaker 2: It's an important point. There's a certain amount of tention
Speaker 2: to Korum de Deli. So for example, I was neither
Speaker 2: because I was coming in when this was happening. But
Speaker 2: you know, at the RNC there was an old gard
Speaker 2: when Romney won the nomination in twenty twelve, it was
Speaker 2: a lot of old Bush people and then you know
Speaker 2: some just kind of establishment Republicans that have been in
Speaker 2: the building forever, and there's always a little bit of tension.
Speaker 2: The RNC chairman at the times Ryan's threevious, right, like
Speaker 2: thinks that he should get to do what he wants
Speaker 2: and book himself for what he wants. And now it's
Speaker 2: kind of like, well, we got to make sure that
Speaker 2: we're not out of line with what the nominee says.
Speaker 2: So you have to take a little bit more of
Speaker 2: a back seat, set your ego at the door a
Speaker 2: little bit to be like, all of that is just
Speaker 2: like healthy management of relationships that you have any time that,
Speaker 2: like two groups are merged together. If there's a new
Speaker 2: boss that comes to town, sometimes you got to change,
Speaker 2: you know, the what processes because this boss likes to
Speaker 2: do it like that. That's to me, that's a pretty
Speaker 2: standard in a category difference from what we're talking about.
Speaker 6: John, Can you think of any countries that you maybe
Speaker 6: spent some time in where a similar cult of loyalty
Speaker 6: was forced upon a nation.
Speaker 3: I just think Russian speak. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it feels almost more Third world to me than
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't know what you know.
Speaker 4: How I see you brought it up when you first
Speaker 4: talked about it, that a lot of this is Donald
Speaker 4: Trump's personality, and to me, this is really just gangster behavior.
Speaker 4: You got to make sure the people around you are complicit,
Speaker 4: that they've committed crimes too, so you have them by
Speaker 4: the ball and the old saying. Those who can make
Speaker 4: you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Once you're
Speaker 4: in the conspiracy and you've lied for him, then you're
Speaker 4: at his beck and call. We see this now with
Speaker 4: the vice president, people who are trying to line up
Speaker 4: to get the vice president position. What do you think
Speaker 4: the twenty twenty four vice president litmus test or loyalty
Speaker 4: tests going to be? Is it visiting the trial and
Speaker 4: smearing the judge? Yeah, big lies and undermining the justice system.
Speaker 3: What do you think?
Speaker 2: It's just like Pence hangs over it so much, this
Speaker 2: idea that oh if only Mike Pence had done the
Speaker 2: right thing, and Pence wasn't a Trump guy like that
Speaker 2: was a straight deal with the devil. Two ways. It
Speaker 2: was a transaction. You're going to give me your little
Speaker 2: kind of religious fairy dust here and bring the evangelicals
Speaker 2: on board, and I'm going to give you a spot
Speaker 2: than the National Party, where Pens haveve lost a lot
Speaker 2: of altitude. His political career was kind of trying to
Speaker 2: go down. This is a different animal than that. Like
Speaker 2: Trump doesn't need to cut a deal with the evangelicals.
Speaker 2: Trump thinks he's winning. So when you think about his
Speaker 2: psyche here, it's not oh, I need to bring on
Speaker 2: somebody because they can help me with hispanics or something.
Speaker 2: He wants to bring on somebody that he knows is
Speaker 2: going to go down with the ship with him. And
Speaker 2: to me, that explains the cartoonish, absurd little apprentice vice
Speaker 2: president that we've seen on cable news the last few weeks.
Speaker 2: These guys, it's almost like the more they embarrass themselves
Speaker 2: in defense of him, the more that's evidence that they'll
Speaker 2: be able to be trusted. That's like the interesting psychological
Speaker 2: kind of question here is does he feel like just
Speaker 2: saying it, saying the lie is enough.
Speaker 4: He heeds a true believer, or does he need a truth,
Speaker 4: we said in Russia to Jo Palese.
Speaker 6: Yeah, not just a what's a show Palese an ask licker.
Speaker 3: Oh that's what you call me.
Speaker 2: And there are plenty of those, Yeah, there are plenty
Speaker 2: of those, the bad kind. You know, nothing wrong with
Speaker 2: nothing wrong with that, but uh, plenty of the bad
Speaker 2: kind out there.
Speaker 5: We're talking here about the RNC and litmus tests are
Speaker 5: loyalty tests. When John and I were in the Agency,
Speaker 5: when we our very first day, we took a loyalty oath,
Speaker 5: and that loyalty oath was to the Constitution and to
Speaker 5: the ideals within that Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Speaker 5: If and when Trump comes to power, he's talking about
Speaker 5: things like I want to be a dictator. On the
Speaker 5: first day, he's talking about mass firings of civil servants.
Speaker 5: It's all about personal loyalty. And he's several times, according
Speaker 5: to media, he's intimated and said before that he's going
Speaker 5: to bring in the Insurrection Act on the very first day,
Speaker 5: the Interaction Act from eighteen oh seven. There's no court
Speaker 5: oversight of this. He can just do it. And so
Speaker 5: you know, all terrible conversations go back to Nazi Germany,
Speaker 5: but I studied in Germany, right, and this is a
Speaker 5: history major. Hitler famously was elected, right, he was elected chancellor,
Speaker 5: but Hindenburg was the president, and Hindenburg was going to
Speaker 5: make sure he didn't do anything crazy. The day Hindenburg
Speaker 5: died to August nineteen thirty four, I think it was
Speaker 5: that very same day, Hitler demanded and got the German
Speaker 5: army to swear an oath of loyalty to him, not
Speaker 5: to the people or the fatherland, which is what it
Speaker 5: had always been up until that. And a year later
Speaker 5: he made all civil servants swear loyalty to him. Right,
Speaker 5: So we're talking about a guy so far in the
Speaker 5: RNC who's talking about intense loyalty to him. We're talking
Speaker 5: about a guy saying he can launch the insurrection at
Speaker 5: misfiring of civil servants weren't sufficiently loyal and issues with
Speaker 5: the military, which he's already had.
Speaker 2: There some things that we know, right, and I'm interested
Speaker 2: in your personality assessment using your guys expertise, because there's
Speaker 2: some things we know. If he gets back in there,
Speaker 2: we know that it's little Himmler Stephen Miller will try
Speaker 2: to do a very draconian immigration regime, and life's going
Speaker 2: to be very bad for undocumented immigrants in the country.
Speaker 2: Whether there's really camps, or whether there's really a wall,
Speaker 2: whether there's really buses, or whether it's child separation. Exactly
Speaker 2: what it looks like, I don't know, but it's going
Speaker 2: to be really bad that we know, and that will
Speaker 2: have some fascist echoes for sure. We will know that
Speaker 2: he will completely take over the Justice Department to make
Speaker 2: sure that he's not held accountable for any crimes. And
Speaker 2: we know that they'll help harden people that do crimes
Speaker 2: on his behalf. And that's pretty dark. Those are all three,
Speaker 2: like really dark bad things that we know are going
Speaker 2: to happen no matter what. Okay, getting to the nightmare
Speaker 2: scenario is now we get into stuff that's okay. Does
Speaker 2: he want to go further than that or does he
Speaker 2: want to just ride on Air Force one and make
Speaker 2: sure that he's never going to jail again golf or
Speaker 2: does he want to like have an American whatever Mussolini
Speaker 2: and I just I don't know. On the one hand,
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter at least for our election purposes. I
Speaker 2: always say to people, like, if you think that the
Speaker 2: latter is a two percent chance that's still way too high.
Speaker 2: We haven't had anybody that was a two percent chance
Speaker 2: in any of our lifetimes. Even if you just think
Speaker 2: it's a two percent chance, that's way too high, I
Speaker 2: just done it. Part of me kind of thinks that, like,
Speaker 2: he's lazy and he just wants to stay out of trouble,
Speaker 2: and there'll be some dark shit that happens, and like
Speaker 2: in the end, if he feels like he's protected from
Speaker 2: JL hell golf. But I'm certainly not fucking confident about that.
Speaker 2: I definitely think that there's a nightmare scenario that is
Speaker 2: way darker than that. And I think that just the
Speaker 2: baseline scenario that I brought up at the top would
Speaker 2: have been unthinkable ten years ago.
Speaker 4: Is the Republican Party dead? Is the old Republican Party dead?
Speaker 4: Is there any life left? Like in the States, And
Speaker 4: the reason I asked, I'll just read an article and
Speaker 4: washing him post today about a real local political build
Speaker 4: in Idaho between the extremist micro Republicans and those Republicans
Speaker 4: that are hoping to save whatever is left of the
Speaker 4: traditional conservative Republican Party.
Speaker 2: The things are ugly in Idaho. The Republican is not
Speaker 2: going back in the way of we were talking to
Speaker 2: Greener about how great John McCain was. John McCain's not
Speaker 2: walking through that door like John McCain and eight ran
Speaker 2: on believing in climate change. We should do stuff about it.
Speaker 2: Immigrants should be welcome. I like, whatever you didn't like
Speaker 2: about his views on various conservative matters, if you're a
Speaker 2: liberal listener, like you know, he was a mainstream center,
Speaker 2: classically liberal, center right Republican, like that person is not
Speaker 2: coming back. The best hope I have is that, like
Speaker 2: if Trump just went away, I feel like the party
Speaker 2: would morph into kind of like a JD Vanceism, and
Speaker 2: maybe JD would not feel quite as much pressure to
Speaker 2: do the as much conspiratorial shit without Donald Trump hanging
Speaker 2: over his head, and then it ends up looking more
Speaker 2: like a European conservative party, like a blood and soil populist.
Speaker 2: I think that there are a lot of these the
Speaker 2: old Republican types who are just voted at the voter level,
Speaker 2: not at the cannon level. The voter who are just like, okay,
Speaker 2: as long as the Democrats are putting up Josh Shapiro's
Speaker 2: and Question Whimer's, that's fine with me. Like it's maybe not,
Speaker 2: maybe we don't agree on everything, but like that's fine.
Speaker 2: So some people do that. I think some become true
Speaker 2: swing voters. An analogy I often uses the Perro voter.
Speaker 2: The pro voter like didn't have a major party candidate.
Speaker 2: They Buchanan in the Republican primary for little while, then
Speaker 2: they voted for Parrot for little while. Then they had
Speaker 2: nobody for a while, and then they had Trump. I
Speaker 2: think that like the old school Republicans are just got
Speaker 2: at for a while, like that, they maybe have a
Speaker 2: candidate that they like in one party in one stayed
Speaker 2: one primary, but they're more they turn more into the
Speaker 2: swing voters. And that's one option. And then I think
Speaker 2: that some of them are just their identity is so
Speaker 2: attached into being a Republican that they morphed into this
Speaker 2: uglier thing. That's the sad part. I think you definitely
Speaker 2: get some of those. So I think it ends up
Speaker 2: dividing up. And so when people are like, oh, it'll
Speaker 2: the party will break up and then something new will come,
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's quite right. I think that
Speaker 2: it'll end up just dispersing between the three options.
Speaker 6: A court mystery for me is why people want their
Speaker 6: jobs so much senators and congressman. I don't even get that.
Speaker 6: It doesn't seem like that great a job. I've had
Speaker 6: some pretty great jobs, none of them would I have
Speaker 6: lied for or.
Speaker 3: But being an R and C staffer is it that awesome?
Speaker 3: Does it pay a fortune?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 6: That's the part I don't get. Don't people look at
Speaker 6: like Paul Ryan and others and know like you just
Speaker 6: end up back home, like trying not to look at
Speaker 6: your kids in the eyes because what you've become.
Speaker 2: I've had a lot of these conversations at the staff level.
Speaker 2: I have to just say I am with you on
Speaker 2: the candidate level, like I do not understand Marco Rubio's calculus.
Speaker 2: So you want to be Donald Trump's secretary of state
Speaker 2: and see you can fucking flame out and who knows
Speaker 2: have to be there justifying why we aren't doing anything
Speaker 2: as Putin invades Georgia. I do. I've talked a lot
Speaker 2: of the staffers though, so I do feel like I
Speaker 2: get it, and I think that there are a couple
Speaker 2: of categories. Number One, at the scariest part about all
Speaker 2: this is that the youngest staffers want this. They're the craziest.
Speaker 2: That is, if you're twenty five, Like, you don't really
Speaker 2: even remember Mitt Romney. You know, if you're twenty five,
Speaker 2: you were thirteen during the Mitt Romney Obama campaign. You've
Speaker 2: chosen to be in Republican politics because you're into the
Speaker 2: Trump shit. You're kind of like into the fascy stuff
Speaker 2: at some level. So the youngest staffers are they're doing
Speaker 2: it because they're into it. That's the scariest part. The
Speaker 2: oldest types that like rationalize all of it. It's like
Speaker 2: anything else in life. Man, how many conferences have I
Speaker 2: had with people like my kids are in high school,
Speaker 2: I got three college tuitions coming up I gotta pay for.
Speaker 2: I'm just trying to keep my head down, keep doing
Speaker 2: this job. The middle ground folks, I think are the
Speaker 2: toughest because they need to have the courage to say, no,
Speaker 2: I'm going to go away from this. I'm going to
Speaker 2: start another career and it's going to be fine. And
Speaker 2: I'm thirty and I got plenty of time. But some
Speaker 2: of them are like, ooh, that seems scary. Oh it's
Speaker 2: better just to go along to get along. Maybe this
Speaker 2: ll end sometime. And there's another category I guess of
Speaker 2: people that they're getting awesome jobs because they wouldn't have
Speaker 2: had them.
Speaker 3: Before, right, because people like you left competitive.
Speaker 2: Man, I have young Democrats to come out to me.
Speaker 2: They're like, man, I want to work for Abgail Spanberger
Speaker 2: or a lista slock In or like one of these
Speaker 2: less more like one of these up andcoming people. But
Speaker 2: there are a million young Democrats who are smart and talented,
Speaker 2: went to great schools that want these jobs. It's very competitive.
Speaker 6: So we need, like Sean Panner, someone to take over
Speaker 6: our party.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, if you want to go work for you know,
Speaker 2: fucking Lara Trump, the line is short, and so you
Speaker 2: can go get a job that you never would have
Speaker 2: had for Mitt Romney or George Bush. And that kind
Speaker 2: of ambition side of it also drives a bunch of us.
Speaker 6: All right, we're gonna get right back into that, but
Speaker 6: first let's hear this all right, back to the show.
Speaker 6: So in Iraq, I had the experience of talking to
Speaker 6: former Bathists and there was like the real interesting Saddam
Speaker 6: Bathists like that, like basically his relatives, and they were
Speaker 6: just obviously all in. There's down at the bottom. There's
Speaker 6: just if you went to college, you had to be
Speaker 6: a Bathist. If you wanted to teach kindergarten, you had
Speaker 6: to be a bathist. They didn't really count, but there
Speaker 6: was like that third and fourth level where there were
Speaker 6: like managing directors of some factory, or like an associate
Speaker 6: dean of Baghdad University or something. I felt, this is
Speaker 6: a feeling that looking in their eyes, these were hollow
Speaker 6: They're mostly men, These were hollow men, and that I
Speaker 6: felt I saw a pain and a kind of something
Speaker 6: pathetic in them. And I mean that in the technical
Speaker 6: sense of the word that I don't feel like I
Speaker 6: see that much in.
Speaker 3: The United States.
Speaker 6: These were people who had compromised at a deep level
Speaker 6: and knew it, and now the bill had come due.
Speaker 6: You've worked with regime stooges.
Speaker 3: All over the world.
Speaker 6: I think I could argue you both were regime sto officers.
Speaker 6: Am I picking up on something you've seen like around
Speaker 6: the Kremlin or old Afghan folks or in Africa?
Speaker 4: The average person is sort of a coward and go
Speaker 4: along to get along and just find the path of
Speaker 4: least resistance. I think what we're seeing now and I
Speaker 4: would guess and I'd be just going to hear timsats
Speaker 4: on this is I think some of these politicians are
Speaker 4: now afraid of the voters. They're afraid of the violence. Yeah,
Speaker 4: they want to suck up to Donald Trump because they're ambitious,
Speaker 4: but they also are afraid of saying the wrong thing
Speaker 4: because the nut jobs is going to be coming after
Speaker 4: them and their families forever. And so in this that sense,
Speaker 4: the cowardly thing to do is just lie and get along.
Speaker 2: And can I just tell you it's even more cowardly
Speaker 2: than that, though, because they might tell you that they're
Speaker 2: scared of violence, and maybe there's a fleeting thought of that,
Speaker 2: but it's like they really just are scared of criticism,
Speaker 2: Like they don't want to get yelled at in the airport,
Speaker 2: like literally, it's more that, like the more acute concern
Speaker 2: is I don't want to be walking through the airport
Speaker 2: with my wife and have people being like you're a trader,
Speaker 2: you suck. I just don't have a lot of sympathy
Speaker 2: for the violence side of it. I think that's a
Speaker 2: real potential threat out there. But really, is Ron Johnson
Speaker 2: really acutely scared that someone's going to come to his house?
Speaker 2: I don't know, more scared than a poll worker who
Speaker 2: lets to go to sit at the polls all day
Speaker 2: or somebody like anyway, I don't know.
Speaker 5: So for Saddam's guys or people like that Mcgabi's guys
Speaker 5: or North Koreans, it's partially that. Yeah, I think they're
Speaker 5: genuinely afraid that if they speak out, that'll be the
Speaker 5: end of them and the end of their family. So
Speaker 5: for guys like in Saddam or Mugabi's guys, they're genuinely
Speaker 5: afraid for themselves if they step out a line, physically afraid,
Speaker 5: but also afraid for their families. But the regime doesn't
Speaker 5: just frighten them, it also gives them something. So Saddam
Speaker 5: they had the big lie. The big lie was that
Speaker 5: Sunnis are the majority, right, and they demonstrably weren't. They're
Speaker 5: only like twenty five percent of the population. But the
Speaker 5: Saddam claimed they were the majority, and therefore they had
Speaker 5: to stay in power. And the other thing is he
Speaker 5: gave them was a sense of nationalism, like we're the greatest, right, Adam.
Speaker 5: You've seen a lot of the Saddam's propaganda, you know,
Speaker 5: we're the chosen ones, Bagdad. And the time of the
Speaker 5: glories of the Arab civilization when we look at parts
Speaker 5: of the US today, it's like they're also giving that
Speaker 5: sense of we're the best, we're the majority, and that's
Speaker 5: also demonstrably not true. Ye.
Speaker 6: By the way, you talked about the Sunni Saddam loyalists.
Speaker 6: The guy who ran my house when I was in
Speaker 6: Iraq was from a Shia Saddam loyalist family too. Yeah,
Speaker 6: And I was looking for a security guard and he said, oh,
Speaker 6: get my uncle, he's great. And his uncle came up
Speaker 6: and we found out that his uncle moved from Nadjeff
Speaker 6: to Baghdad because he was being hunted by Shia death
Speaker 6: squads because he was a Saddam loyalist Shia.
Speaker 3: So I was like, oh, that's a great security guard. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Can I just say nobody in Congress is worried
Speaker 2: about the Shia death squads right from exactly, I'm like
Speaker 2: a little bit less sympathetic. I get in trouble sometimes
Speaker 2: on panels like on this, but I'm just like, I
Speaker 2: just don't sympathize for this. With that, I think that
Speaker 2: there are a lot of people that are in greater threat.
Speaker 4: The right wing off and talks about cancel culture and
Speaker 4: a mob and this and that, but we've seen. If
Speaker 4: you don't play along, if you don't mimic the lie,
Speaker 4: Liz Cheney loses your job, Adam Kinzinger's and Chris Christie's,
Speaker 4: the Mitt Romney's and Will Hurds. Yes, if we're going
Speaker 4: to talk colarities, and that's not the biggest deal in
Speaker 4: the world, but you do get kicked.
Speaker 2: Out, the whole thing is just inverted. It's all Orwellian.
Speaker 2: It's like the best thing that can happen to you
Speaker 2: in Republican politics is to get canceled for saying something offensive.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Then they'll be like, oh, welle is me The left
Speaker 2: is coming for me? Like the last person to get
Speaker 2: actually canceled in Republican world for saying something far right
Speaker 2: with Steve King a long time ago. So yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean that all is just a farce.
Speaker 6: If I was an intelligence officer for another country, this
Speaker 6: is such ripe hunting grounds. You have some huge number
Speaker 6: of people in what may be the ruling party who
Speaker 6: feel a sense of shame, who feel they're being forced
Speaker 6: into weird positions like how would you look at this
Speaker 6: if you or a spy for one of our adversaries.
Speaker 4: That's how we spent spying during the Cold Wars, you're
Speaker 4: looking for those people who know that they're lying, and
Speaker 4: they're ashamed or embarrassed by it, and it has affected
Speaker 4: them or their family or their career in some way.
Speaker 4: You get a long and you can go fine for
Speaker 4: a long time, lying and supporting the regime, but at
Speaker 4: some point you realize the regime is corrupt and they
Speaker 4: don't really care about you, And so they thought that
Speaker 4: being the smartest and they if they followed the rules,
Speaker 4: they would succeed in their family succeed. At some point
Speaker 4: in that career you realize the whole things are farce
Speaker 4: and it's all corrupt and it doesn't work. And those
Speaker 4: are the people you're looking for, the ones that finally
Speaker 4: broke and are willing to admit, at least to a
Speaker 4: foreigner who can keep it secret, that they don't buy
Speaker 4: it anymore. And those are the people who become our spies. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but I don't know if these politics and it cares
Speaker 4: what our politicians think about things. They don't have the secrets.
Speaker 4: It hasn't infected. I don't think the institutions terribly yet.
Speaker 4: But if Trump wins and if the loyalty tests worked
Speaker 4: way down through the FBI and the CIA, in the
Speaker 4: State Department, all this kind of place Justice Department. There's
Speaker 4: going to be people there who have those kind of
Speaker 4: feelings that foreigners will be looking for.
Speaker 5: If two grooms show up for this wedding on January twentieth, right,
Speaker 5: if Trump says he wins and Biden says he wins,
Speaker 5: regardless of who Biden wins and Trump says, no, no,
Speaker 5: I didn't, You're going to have divided loyalties once you
Speaker 5: no longer agree on the peaceful transfer of power and legitimacy.
Speaker 5: Now you've got a problem with military officers and security services. Right,
Speaker 5: are you serving the correct president? And so you know
Speaker 5: that is vulnerability. I think that Russians and others would
Speaker 5: take regardless of who eventually wins, Right, I mean, if
Speaker 5: Trump says he won, and he shows up to be
Speaker 5: you know, tries to shove Biden out of the way
Speaker 5: to get his hand on the Bible to swear in,
Speaker 5: there are going to be people who are saying, no,
Speaker 5: he's right, And I think that the Russians are going
Speaker 5: to go after those folks.
Speaker 2: How many Michael Flynn's do you think we got in
Speaker 2: the military right now? The Michael Flynn thing was extremely alarming.
Speaker 2: He was a national security advisor to Obama and to
Speaker 2: go full red pill and now, I mean he like
Speaker 2: fully believes all of the conspiracies about the elections in
Speaker 2: Russia and Ukraine and the corrupt Ukrainians and Biden, everything,
Speaker 2: you name it. When you talk about that nightmare scenario,
Speaker 2: that's the worrying thing, Like, how many of these guys
Speaker 2: in those positions either believe this or willing to pretend
Speaker 2: they believe it because they have resentments about liberals or something.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: That's a serious concerns, but in the military and positions
Speaker 4: of power like that tremendous concern I mean, I know
Speaker 4: Mike Flynn, I know fairly well. He's sort of the
Speaker 4: Peter principle at work. People have forgotten what that is.
Speaker 4: You know, you rise to your level of incompetence. And
Speaker 4: so he got promoted to a point where he was
Speaker 4: a complete failure as the director of DIA. He got fired.
Speaker 4: But then his ego or whatever couldn't handle the fact
Speaker 4: that he was pushed out and had to come up
Speaker 4: with alternative reasons. Oh, it was because Obama didn't like me,
Speaker 4: because I was going after terrorists or something. He made
Speaker 4: up a lie that he needed for his own ego
Speaker 4: to believe. And of course then when he gets fired
Speaker 4: again from the Trump anddministration, he's got to double down.
Speaker 4: And at the same time he's looking to make as
Speaker 4: much money as he possibly can. In fact, he was
Speaker 4: working for a while for a crystal group where I
Speaker 4: was for a while, and he was doing everything he
Speaker 4: could to make money. So he's working for Russians in
Speaker 4: Egypt that were doing nuclear power, and he was he
Speaker 4: went to Moscow to do things, and the Turk was
Speaker 4: the Turks, yeah, I mean, and so all of those
Speaker 4: things come about.
Speaker 6: The only thing he was going to do for the
Speaker 6: Turks was kidnapped an American CITI and non American soil.
Speaker 5: But yeah, not just the military, but I think there's
Speaker 5: real concern talking to colleagues who are out now, to
Speaker 5: be very clear, not nobody on the inside, but among formers,
Speaker 5: there's real concern that CIA and FBI and DOJ could
Speaker 5: be weaponized. We've always pushed back on that. We've always
Speaker 5: been a political, nonpartisan, served Democrat Republican administrations as best
Speaker 5: we could, but we've always taken a pride in trying
Speaker 5: to push back now always successfully. What differentiation us from
Speaker 5: like Russians and North Koreans is their security services are
Speaker 5: there to protect the regis and ours isn't. Ours is
Speaker 5: there to protect the constitution, and we're not there to
Speaker 5: protect any particular president. Especially with the FBI, that could
Speaker 5: that could change if you had the wrong.
Speaker 3: People in there.
Speaker 6: I did a lot of reporting of the Trump organization
Speaker 6: because at the New Yorker my job was covering Trump's
Speaker 6: business side. I talked to a lot of people who
Speaker 6: had worked there for many years. Most of them thought
Speaker 6: he was kind of an idiot. And I think it's
Speaker 6: not much of an organization. It's more a platform for
Speaker 6: people to run their own scams and deals. But way
Speaker 6: one lawyer explained it to me is when you're hired,
Speaker 6: he gives you a little test and he asks you
Speaker 6: to do something an ethical or maybe illegal. Yeah, and
Speaker 6: then he but the guy said, if you don't do it,
Speaker 6: they still need lawyers to like write contracts and just
Speaker 6: do the business of a business. And so you he
Speaker 6: wouldn't fire you. You were allowed to stick around. And
Speaker 6: then he had his little cronies, Weiselberg and Cohen and whatever,
Speaker 6: and you knew who the inside guys were, but you
Speaker 6: thought they were jokes and lame.
Speaker 2: With regards to that. He didn't like to fire people.
Speaker 3: He is a coversal column. Yeah, yeah, there's a story.
Speaker 5: And the story is your boss comes to you and
Speaker 5: he gives you a package and says, this package has
Speaker 5: to be to that factory in one hour. And you're like, yeah,
Speaker 5: that factory is seventy miles away and the speed them
Speaker 5: it's fifty five. And he says, I need you to
Speaker 5: get that package there in one hour. So so you're
Speaker 5: telling me that if I break the law, I get caught,
Speaker 5: you'll back me, and you know, and he just looks
Speaker 5: at you and he says, yeah, never mind, I'll find
Speaker 5: somebody else.
Speaker 2: So excited for the moral of the story here, do
Speaker 2: you do it or not?
Speaker 5: But the other part of the moral story is he's
Speaker 5: going to find somebody else to do it, and that
Speaker 5: guy may get the promotion and you may not.
Speaker 3: Tim This has been bleak, joyful conversation.
Speaker 6: I do like that you left the possibility that it's
Speaker 6: only going to mean the deep destruction of two or
Speaker 6: three major American institutions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all right, so you left us on an optimistic.
Speaker 2: Yeah there you go. Yeah, I tried it to be
Speaker 2: full resistance Peorn. Maybe he'll just take over the Department
Speaker 2: of Justice and be a soft autocrat and be mean
Speaker 2: to migrants, and then he can be replaced.
Speaker 4: We hope that the incompetence takes over.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of incompetence, but.
Speaker 4: That's upon me all the true believers. Now that's what
Speaker 4: we need to be incompetent. If they bring in true
Speaker 4: believers who are good at what they do, it can
Speaker 4: cause a tremendous damage. But if he brings in the
Speaker 4: true boobs that you can't do anything anyway, then think
Speaker 4: they'll survive it.
Speaker 3: Tim, thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Thank you, guys, Real Pleasure.
Speaker 1: Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'shay, John Cipher,
Speaker 1: and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible.
Speaker 1: It is a production of Honorable Mention and Abominable Pictures
Speaker 1: for iHeart Podcasts.