Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast, and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discuss the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds. And Donald Trump says his very talented
Speaker 1: daughter in law, Lara Trump, should run the RNC. We
Speaker 1: have such a great show for you today. MSNBC legal
Speaker 1: analyst Andrew Weissman stops by to debunk all Things her.
Speaker 1: Then we will talk to Harvard professor Fetis scotch Pohl
Speaker 1: about how the right wing is mutating. But first we
Speaker 1: have the host of the Bulwark Daily, The Bulwarks, Tim Miller.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Fast Politics. Fan favorite Tim Miller.
Speaker 2: All right, give me that gold watch.
Speaker 1: I'm going to give you a minute of plugging. Tim
Speaker 1: is now the daily host of the Bulwark podcast, which
Speaker 1: means every fucking day you can get Tim.
Speaker 2: Miller in your ears every day. That's right, baby, and
Speaker 2: then even sometimes twice when I come hang out with
Speaker 2: Molly John Fast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the melodious sounds of Tim Miller.
Speaker 2: I did mention when I did the handoff from Charlie,
Speaker 2: I don't really have his radio voice. He had that
Speaker 2: beautiful cadence and the dulcet tone, and I said, you're
Speaker 2: just you're gonna have to substitute that beauty for my snark.
Speaker 2: You know, hopefully the laughs will overshadow the vocal fry.
Speaker 1: Well, I, as a practitioner a vocal fry myself. He
Speaker 1: does have a real dulcin I mean, he is like
Speaker 1: from the radio world that doesn't exist anymore, which is
Speaker 1: why we love him and think he's so really important.
Speaker 1: So let's talk for a minute about I have a
Speaker 1: piece coming out today, so I always have to plug
Speaker 1: my work in other venues. No, I'm just kidding, but
Speaker 1: the anxiety election, because that's basically what this is, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I haven't read your piece, so I'd look
Speaker 2: forward to reading it. But we all have anxiety, and
Speaker 2: I think this explains I talked about this a little
Speaker 2: bit the end of the Monday Bollard Pod. People are
Speaker 2: mad at each other right now if they have different
Speaker 2: opinions about like the right strategic approach, you know, like
Speaker 2: all of us on the same team, like the anti
Speaker 2: Trump pro democracy team. Like there's a lot of infighting
Speaker 2: happening right now. It's like, oh, you're being too mean
Speaker 2: to bind and it's like, oh no, we're actually trying
Speaker 2: to help by pointing out, this is a real problem
Speaker 2: that needs to be solved, and it's like, no, if
Speaker 2: you mentioned age, then you're then you know, you might
Speaker 2: as well be a Trump or just put your red
Speaker 2: hap backer. And it's kind of like everyone needs to
Speaker 2: take a breath. Tensions are high, Anxiety is high for
Speaker 2: good reason because the threat is so big, and it's
Speaker 2: like everybody that's on the same side, Like if somebody
Speaker 2: is a different strategic approach than you, it's okay to
Speaker 2: listen to It's okay to say that's dumb idea, actually,
Speaker 2: but it's also okay just to listen and say, Okay,
Speaker 2: how can we work this through to put the good
Speaker 2: guys in the best position for victory possible nine months
Speaker 2: from now? And I think that there's there's just the
Speaker 2: nerves are fraying discussing that for sure.
Speaker 1: I think that's really right. I also think that what
Speaker 1: you're saying about the stakes is really important. Right. The
Speaker 1: thing that's like so hard for me as I watch
Speaker 1: it is like twenty sixty and we thought, okay, Trump
Speaker 1: is it's not going to win then, And I kept saying, oh,
Speaker 1: He's going to win, you guys, and everyone'say, no, no,
Speaker 1: he's not gonna win, It's okay. So then he wins.
Speaker 1: Then there's this feeling in twenty twenty you know, if
Speaker 1: you ignore him, he'll go away. What happens instead is
Speaker 1: that he poisons what little was left of the Republican Party.
Speaker 1: And now there are like what was heartening was the
Speaker 1: Senate vote yesterday at foreign aid right, foreign aid, This
Speaker 1: is like what Reagan ran on foreign aid right, Like,
Speaker 1: this is what we do. We are the country where
Speaker 1: you know, we protect Again. I personally that's it's not
Speaker 1: my worldview, but like you know, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama,
Speaker 1: you know, we are the shining city on the hill. Again,
Speaker 1: not my personal view.
Speaker 2: What what you don't think we're shining? You don't think
Speaker 2: we're on a hill, Molly, We're not the land of
Speaker 2: milk and honey.
Speaker 1: I get itchy with nation building, but the point is here,
Speaker 1: it is this is like a central tenet of American democracy.
Speaker 1: And the numbers were pretty good in the Senate. I
Speaker 1: was actually surprised that they were so high, but then
Speaker 1: Mike meg and Mike Johnson was like, now we're not
Speaker 1: going to do that.
Speaker 2: Well, anytime you're heartened, I like to just kind of
Speaker 2: rip that heart out and bring in the darkness. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I was not that hardened twenty nine. I'm not at
Speaker 2: all itchy about jingoism. So those are just two areas
Speaker 2: of disagreement to the USA. So here's the problem. Two
Speaker 2: things happened in the past couple of days that are
Speaker 2: disheartening for me. On this bill. You're right, you're right.
Speaker 2: It passed seventy votes. That's good, and I think that
Speaker 2: that is very important for Ukraine in the short Ukraine
Speaker 2: needs this because if they don't like that, you know,
Speaker 2: it's handing this thing over to Putin and the time
Speaker 2: is ticking and having a window to do this, So
Speaker 2: that was important. The problem is thirty nine center Republicans
Speaker 2: voted for it two years ago down to twenty two,
Speaker 2: so it's moving the wrong direction. Let me tell you,
Speaker 2: I'm teen. People didn't change their mind, Okay, like they
Speaker 2: just are bowing to pressure from the base, which wishes
Speaker 2: this bill was killed for the most part a majority
Speaker 2: of the party. Then the other little nugget I want
Speaker 2: to throw on top of there's my Gallagher. That little
Speaker 2: coward left the Congress at a from Wisconsin at age
Speaker 2: thirty nine. He's the one that every all of my
Speaker 2: friends who are still in the Republican world like hanging
Speaker 2: their hat on, like there are still some good Republicans.
Speaker 2: Look at Mike Galigher, Well, Mike Gallagher voted against impeachment,
Speaker 2: so he's not that good. He leaves. This is the
Speaker 2: old Adam Smith. You know, markets, supply and demand, this
Speaker 2: is my this is my my free market as I'm
Speaker 2: coming back in, free market is at work in the
Speaker 2: Republican Party. The demand from the voters is for mega
Speaker 2: it's for isolationism, it's for bigotry. You know, it's for
Speaker 2: closing borders. And if you are the type of candidate
Speaker 2: that does not like all that stuff, you're either checking
Speaker 2: out voluntarily like Mike Gallagher, or you're losing in primaries,
Speaker 2: or you're very old and in the Senate and people
Speaker 2: are waiting for you to be pushed out. Okay, that's
Speaker 2: like that is it? Like the things are moving in
Speaker 2: exorably the wrong direction with the GOP that said it's
Speaker 2: good for Ukraine. Hopefully they can figure out a way
Speaker 2: to get this up for in the House, because it
Speaker 2: would pass if it got up for a vote. It's
Speaker 2: just a question about whether Maggie Mike Johnson has the
Speaker 2: stones to just block it.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting, Mike Johnson. I want to have a
Speaker 1: minute on Mike Johnson. One of the weird things about
Speaker 1: trump Ism is that you get jobs that you absolutely
Speaker 1: are not qualified for because no one else will do that. Yes, right,
Speaker 1: like the whole Trump administration. You'd be like, you're the
Speaker 1: under secretary of what And it was like, well, the
Speaker 1: other choice was like a guy who was like somebody's cousin.
Speaker 2: That is true. I had a whole kind of chapter
Speaker 2: about these people in the book about how, like you
Speaker 2: just these strivers that got into Trump world, that they
Speaker 2: had no chance getting this job in any other administration.
Speaker 2: Like the idea that Sean Spicer would have been the
Speaker 2: press secretary for any other Republican president like is insane,
Speaker 2: Like nobody would ever have picked him. You could say
Speaker 2: that about all all this press secretaries really, and so
Speaker 2: it like self selects people that are like particularly sociopathic, right,
Speaker 2: because I am so ambitious that I am willing to
Speaker 2: take a job for a guy that has no loyalty
Speaker 2: and that I recognize is completely morally repugnant, because this
Speaker 2: is my one chance to do it, And so that
Speaker 2: is not really a great personality trait to have for
Speaker 2: people running the country.
Speaker 1: I think that's a very good point. So Trump has
Speaker 1: now he controls the House of Representatives, or at least
Speaker 1: he feels he does. They're not a huge majority, but
Speaker 1: he feels he has it. He is in a power
Speaker 1: struggle with Mitch McConnell. They try to get him out
Speaker 1: so he can control the Senate right, which Republicans don't control,
Speaker 1: but they hope they will soon. And then the RNC.
Speaker 1: Now you have some RNC experience here, I do as
Speaker 1: an outsider. It seems to me like Rana Mitt Romney's
Speaker 1: niece has the worst job in the entire world, but
Speaker 1: still Trump wants to give it to his daughter in law.
Speaker 1: Discuss a lot there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean Rona Romney had the worship of the
Speaker 2: world and somehow managed to keep it for like over
Speaker 2: a half decade, like despite being the worst party chairman
Speaker 2: in modern political history and being miserable. It's hard to
Speaker 2: understand it. I guess she just liked those mar A
Speaker 2: Lago Cougar parties so much that she couldn't give him up.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so she gets pushed out. Now Trump is
Speaker 2: going to push in a guy that was the North
Speaker 2: Carolina party chair for the head gig. And this guy
Speaker 2: was famous basically for claiming to Trump that Trump won
Speaker 2: North Carolina because they did such a good job of
Speaker 2: shutting down the fraud, like, you know, like they put
Speaker 2: on the good machines in North Carolina, mister Trump, fantastical
Speaker 2: lies about the twenty twenty election or how you advance
Speaker 2: yourself in the Republican Party. Now, so he gets the
Speaker 2: main job, and then Trump is going to have his
Speaker 2: daughter in law as the co chair, you know, just
Speaker 2: to make sure that he has somebody on the inside
Speaker 2: in case he needs the party to like write checks
Speaker 2: for his legal defense or whatever, you know, just to
Speaker 2: just to make sure that any kind that there's a
Speaker 2: question of, well whether the party should do the right
Speaker 2: thing or whether it should just be a service to Trump. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they'll make sure there's a Trump family member on the
Speaker 2: phone call to hear if there are any dissenters in
Speaker 2: the building. It's very it's very third world. It's very
Speaker 2: like Bella, Russian it is.
Speaker 1: It's very like Banana Republic. Right, are we allowed to
Speaker 1: say Banana public? Yes?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to me, like part of the reason why
Speaker 1: Trump has decided it's rawn A's time to go. Partially
Speaker 1: it's because he wants the RNC to pay his legal bills.
Speaker 1: The excuse he's using is that she's not raising enough
Speaker 1: money for him. Would anyone else do a better job?
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm sorry to do this, but I mean
Speaker 1: just I mean, and I'm hardly a fan of Rana,
Speaker 1: but it seems to me like this is like one
Speaker 1: of these times where Trump is like picking Carrie Lake
Speaker 1: to run for Senate after she is already the governor.
Speaker 1: It's one of these things where it's so incredibly self
Speaker 1: destructive and stupid you have to pause and be like, what, yeah.
Speaker 2: And did you ever watch the TV series about Chernobyl?
Speaker 2: You know, like he's like Soviet like systems where everybody
Speaker 2: is in service to one god king. Like there's some flaws, okay,
Speaker 2: you know, because people lie and there's backstabbing and so yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's scary that Trump and these guys are out
Speaker 2: there and that he's winning in the polls. But like
Speaker 2: the internal processes are not efficient, Like this is not
Speaker 2: a well operating machine here. Okay, it's hard to see
Speaker 2: how somebody could raise more money, Like the question is
Speaker 2: who would you raise more money from, Like they are
Speaker 2: already juicing the ten dollars MAGA donors.
Speaker 1: And those people are going to Trump.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like those people are already giving to Trump, so that
Speaker 2: like there's not a lot of juice left on that orange, right,
Speaker 2: And so then it's like then you go to the
Speaker 2: big donors and they're going to give to the RNC
Speaker 2: for what, right, Like like the RNC has to give
Speaker 2: them a rationale that they're going to do something that
Speaker 2: is useful to those guys, and they're like you're them,
Speaker 2: Like why won't you just give money to you know,
Speaker 2: Mitch McConnell, right, like the NRSC or somebody like hoping
Speaker 2: Nicky yeah or Nikki right. So I'm with you. It's
Speaker 2: hard to see how I think that they're a really
Speaker 2: bad way kind of at least organizationally. Unfortunately, there's some
Speaker 2: other things that are working in their favor right now,
Speaker 2: but the organization, they're in a bad spot.
Speaker 1: Do we have enough information to go on? Like we
Speaker 1: in the media industrial complex who are in a full
Speaker 1: on freak out about everything right now about this anxiety election,
Speaker 1: Like what is the information we are going on? Right, because, like,
Speaker 1: the polls are bad, but the polls have been consistently bad,
Speaker 1: and like, for example, I had this guy on who
Speaker 1: did this piece for the Economists. He's a recovering pollster,
Speaker 1: and he talked about how actually the really good polls
Speaker 1: have Biden down by point five and this is something
Speaker 1: we saw, We've seen since twenty eighteen, flooding the zone
Speaker 1: with junkie polls to help MAGA candidates. So like there's
Speaker 1: certainly some of that going on, right, Like that's not
Speaker 1: to say that Biden is like, but I'm just saying,
Speaker 1: like I do wonder we're not getting great information here,
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure we're transmitting great information either. Like
Speaker 1: it's a country of hundreds of millions of people, Like
Speaker 1: how many are actually reading the New York Times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with that. I think that two things
Speaker 2: are true here. One is that it's just hard to judge.
Speaker 2: We don't have full information on how to judge what
Speaker 2: a Trump Biden matchup is going to really look like
Speaker 2: in February for a couple of reasons. One that we
Speaker 2: don't know exactly the third party situation is going to be. Two,
Speaker 2: I think that there's a lag on economic kind of response. Right,
Speaker 2: the ecounty has been getting better, but it takes people
Speaker 2: a while. You know, you have to do your bills
Speaker 2: for a few months before you realize that you're like, oh, actually,
Speaker 2: like things are looking up right before you, you know,
Speaker 2: look at your Charles schwamb account or whatever and say okay.
Speaker 1: And that's the Harry Truman's inflationary transitory inflationary argument, which
Speaker 1: is Truman had this massive transitory inflation after World War
Speaker 1: Two that pundons thought Dewe would ride to re election
Speaker 1: and that did not happen.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, so there's a delay. So I think that
Speaker 2: there's a and you see some of this. We can
Speaker 2: do a whole history lesson, but you've seen some of
Speaker 2: so many presidential elections, and then there's the Trump. I
Speaker 2: do think that we don't really know what Hayley voters
Speaker 2: are going to do because like the Trump of it
Speaker 2: all hasn't sunken in yet. You know that it's like
Speaker 2: it's really going to be this asshole. It's just starting
Speaker 2: to sink in with normies, so all that stuff. I
Speaker 2: think that the polls will be not perfect, but just
Speaker 2: a better indicator in April than it is now. And
Speaker 2: I think we'll have a better sense of the state
Speaker 2: of play in April or May. I do think though
Speaker 2: it is just it is just reality that like people
Speaker 2: are worried about by age, right, Like that's not bad information,
Speaker 2: it's like people worried about it. How much are they
Speaker 2: worried about it? Are they so worried about it that
Speaker 2: they might vote for a third party or Trump? You know,
Speaker 2: I don't think that we really know the second question yet,
Speaker 2: but I think it's pretty clear for the numbers that
Speaker 2: people are worried about it, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that denial doesn't do anything for anyone, right,
Speaker 1: But I also do think we don't have great mechanisms
Speaker 1: for telling what's going on, right, Like, I mean, Sarah
Speaker 1: a long while does these focus groups, so she at
Speaker 1: least is like in their way with voters and me
Speaker 1: and I talk to someone at the White House who
Speaker 1: said that they do a lot of focus groups and
Speaker 1: one of the things they see is that it's very
Speaker 1: hard to dislike Biden. You can think he is too old,
Speaker 1: but you don't dislike him. And I wonder how much
Speaker 1: that is actually an important bit of data right there, right,
Speaker 1: like that the candidate that even if you have a
Speaker 1: candidate who is old and who you feel, for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: you don't like the fact that he's old. One of
Speaker 1: the things with Hillary was that, I say this as
Speaker 1: a feminist who spends a lot of time thinking about
Speaker 1: why women candidates have such a terrible time in this country,
Speaker 1: I just wonder if being an old white guy actually
Speaker 1: serves Yeah.
Speaker 2: Maybe, And I mean this was the key. I mean,
Speaker 2: the difference between Hillary and Biden was just the intensity
Speaker 2: of that dislike, right I In Biden one basically you
Speaker 2: can just cut away all the other bs and it's
Speaker 2: like voters who told bolsters I don't like Hillary and
Speaker 2: I don't like Trump, mostly voted for trum. The voters
Speaker 2: are told posters, I don't like Trump and I don't
Speaker 2: like Biden, mostly voted for Biden.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 2: There could be a lot of reasons for that, but
Speaker 2: one of the reasons is almost certainly that, which is
Speaker 2: why it makes it hard sometimes to interpret the polls.
Speaker 2: Is like the intensity of the unfavorability right like, they
Speaker 2: were intensely unfavorable towards Hillary and to Biden, it's like,
Speaker 2: I don't really like him. He's not my cup of tea,
Speaker 2: Like okay, and so you know, I definitely think that
Speaker 2: there's a gender element to it. I think that there's
Speaker 2: a conservative media complex attacking Hillary, you know, to it.
Speaker 2: I think that some of it was self inflicted. We
Speaker 2: just know that that is true based on the results
Speaker 2: from sixteen to twenty.
Speaker 1: It's interesting too, though, that the conservative media has decided
Speaker 1: to attack and they've been doing this attack right basement
Speaker 1: Biden since twenty twenty. But it is interesting to me
Speaker 1: that the attack they're using is that Biden gets stuff
Speaker 1: wrong and seems out of it, and their guy suffers
Speaker 1: from the very same problem, right, Like, even if you're
Speaker 1: just to to say, like, even if you take this
Speaker 1: attack and say it's true, I don't think it's true,
Speaker 1: but okay, but you are running someone who you could
Speaker 1: make the exact same attack on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, dude doesn't do anything and he goes to court
Speaker 2: and golfs. I literally. I saw one of his defenders
Speaker 2: said recently that he was golfing so much now because
Speaker 2: he knows he's not going to have time once he's
Speaker 2: saving the country as president. What I mean, he has
Speaker 2: four trials and we're in the middle of an election,
Speaker 2: like that is just not believable, you know. I mean
Speaker 2: the videos you see at Trump were like cow many
Speaker 2: videos have you've seen of mine, just randomly showing up
Speaker 2: to people's weddings and walking around to say hello.
Speaker 1: Well Trump, though Trump wrote, people say Trump can't do
Speaker 1: as many events as he used to be able to.
Speaker 1: And I think about twenty sixteen, like watching him zip
Speaker 1: across the country. Remember, like you do a rally and
Speaker 1: then you get on explaining you do another rally, you know,
Speaker 1: so it is. I just wonder if your attack on
Speaker 1: the Democrat can be very well repurposed to be the
Speaker 1: attack on the I don't know that that's a great
Speaker 1: place to be in, No, thank you.
Speaker 2: I can it's not a good place to be in.
Speaker 2: But you know, again, you just go back to this whole.
Speaker 2: It shouldn't he be in a worse place? Right?
Speaker 1: And you know, you.
Speaker 2: Go around and around on this. But I think that
Speaker 2: he has some very very real vulnerabilities and I think
Speaker 2: that some of them are not showing up in the
Speaker 2: polls yet. There's a little bit of a lag, and
Speaker 2: God will and they.
Speaker 1: Start Tim Miller, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: Molly John Fast anytime, thank you, thank.
Speaker 1: You, thank you. You're the best. Did you know? Rick
Speaker 1: Wilson and I are bringing together some friends for a
Speaker 1: general election kickoff party at City Winery in New York
Speaker 1: on March sixth. We're going to be chatting right after
Speaker 1: Super Tuesday about what's going on, and it is going
Speaker 1: to probably be the one fun night for the next
Speaker 1: eighty days. If you're in the New York area, please
Speaker 1: come by and join us. You can go to City
Speaker 1: Winery's website and grab a ticket. Andrew Weissman is the
Speaker 1: co host of the MSNBC podcast Prosecuting Donald Trump and
Speaker 1: the co author of the Trump Indictments. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of them. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Andrew Weisman, Hey, Molly,
Speaker 1: so great to be here. I love having you, and
Speaker 1: I love running into you, and I'm god we're friends,
Speaker 1: and I also really like you as a human on
Speaker 1: this earth, of which hopefully we'll be here for a while.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to talk to you. Not to get
Speaker 1: too dark.
Speaker 4: We're going to get really really dark, really fast.
Speaker 1: Really fast. One of the many things I like about
Speaker 1: you is that you have had a lot of these
Speaker 1: jobs so well, I can speculate all I want. You've
Speaker 1: actually like worked on the SPET, You've worked in a
Speaker 1: Special Council investigation, You've been in the Mueller investigation. You've
Speaker 1: sort of been in those places where the rest of
Speaker 1: us can only speculate. So I feel like your take
Speaker 1: on her is much more meaningful than pretty much ninety
Speaker 1: nine point nine nine nine percent of the world, with
Speaker 1: the exception of Eric Calder, who I think had a
Speaker 1: pretty was pretty pissed he did.
Speaker 4: Although I have to say, I don't think he's ever
Speaker 4: been in a special counsel But by the way, I
Speaker 4: don't think I actually agree with you that Eric holders.
Speaker 4: Obviously he's been the Attorney General and has incredible experienced.
Speaker 1: I was shocked when I saw that tweet, Like I
Speaker 1: was like.
Speaker 4: Whoa, Yeah, people have come said all sorts of very
Speaker 4: interesting things. I mean, one of the things that I
Speaker 4: think he has said is why is he even asking
Speaker 4: what the date is of the death of Joe Biden's son.
Speaker 4: I didn't realize he was giving like a memory test.
Speaker 4: I mean, like, how does that even come up?
Speaker 1: You also were appointed by George W. Bush in a
Speaker 1: world when things were normal, so you really understand the
Speaker 1: sort of the nonpartisan space that is supposed to be
Speaker 1: the DOJ.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I have served since nineteen ninety one. I've served
Speaker 4: under I think every Attorney general since then in various capacity.
Speaker 4: So I think Mary mccordy and I talked about this,
Speaker 4: which is until, like the Trump era, you can't think
Speaker 4: about politics at all in your job. It just was irrelevant.
Speaker 4: And then when I was on the Moller investigation, it
Speaker 4: suddenly was like a big thing. And it's so funny
Speaker 4: because now people think of me as some far left liberal,
Speaker 4: whereas like most of my friends are like liberal. You
Speaker 4: were in the government for twenty one years. I teach
Speaker 4: at NYU Law School. I can tell you I'm not
Speaker 4: viewed as liberal there. It's sort of the warping of
Speaker 4: norms and perceptions that has happened, I think during the
Speaker 4: Trump era, and I mean Trump era, whether he's president
Speaker 4: or running for president.
Speaker 1: I want you to talk us through the decision to
Speaker 1: pick her, and I think it comes back to the
Speaker 1: decision to pick Merrick Garland. In twenty twenty. The world
Speaker 1: looked a little different, right. There was a sense that
Speaker 1: maybe if Democrats, though we were, weren't warned. I want
Speaker 1: to say this because I think it's important we were
Speaker 1: warned by certain experts in authoritarianism that Democrats would not
Speaker 1: be able to just pretend that things were normal and
Speaker 1: go back to norms and that it would all work
Speaker 1: like that, But they tried, and I think that appointing
Speaker 1: Merrick Garland, Biden was trying to say, you know, here's
Speaker 1: a guy who was a judge. Just talk us through
Speaker 1: what you think Biden was doing by putting Merrick Garland
Speaker 1: on the job and then subsequently what he was doing
Speaker 1: by picking her.
Speaker 4: I think that's a great place to start, because there's
Speaker 4: a lot to be said, and there's a lot that
Speaker 4: has been said about her report itself, but it's useful,
Speaker 4: I think, to pull back the camera to it's a
Speaker 4: secondary issue, but a really important one, and in many
Speaker 4: ways maybe the bigger issue. So I think think that
Speaker 4: in picking Merrick Garland, Joe Biden was doing frankly what
Speaker 4: he said he was doing, which is he viewsed the
Speaker 4: Department of Justice as apolitical and its individual charging decisions
Speaker 4: would be made independently of the White House, and they
Speaker 4: need to be made independently of the White House. You know,
Speaker 4: there was as a break from the sort of unitary
Speaker 4: executive why but precisely because it's not appropriate to have
Speaker 4: Donald Trump when he was president saying let's go after
Speaker 4: Democrats and not go after Republicans. You know, I want
Speaker 4: them to not charge my friends. I want them to
Speaker 4: dismiss those cases. I mean, so this was a way
Speaker 4: to say, you know what, who's going to have more
Speaker 4: integrity than somebody who has years ago been in the department.
Speaker 4: So he's aware of how it works. But he's been
Speaker 4: a very respected judge for over twenty years the DC Circuit,
Speaker 4: and you know, by all accounts, is an honorable, good person,
Speaker 4: and I think nothing that's happened in any way make
Speaker 4: me doubt any of that in terms of his being
Speaker 4: acting in good faith and being a brilliant, smart, lovely, thoughtful,
Speaker 4: empathetic person as you can tell. But I do have
Speaker 4: a butt coming, right, which is that I think that
Speaker 4: the appointment that where you say, in order to investigate Democrats,
Speaker 4: you need to have a Republican appointed as a prosecutor,
Speaker 4: a lah Ken Starr, right, And the idea is like,
Speaker 4: it's a Republican who is looking into Hunter Biden, but
Speaker 4: by the same time, it's a Republican who's looking into
Speaker 4: Mike Pence. So it's like Republicans investigate republicans, and republicans
Speaker 4: investcape democrats, and it's republicans who investigate republicans because you
Speaker 4: would be subject to attack if you've had a Democrat there,
Speaker 4: but you have a Republican, investigate democrats because if you
Speaker 4: appointed a Democrat and you would say, oh, they're going
Speaker 4: to pull their punches. So no matter what you had,
Speaker 4: America on appointing Republicans for all of these things. I
Speaker 4: think that that sort of taking the easy road up
Speaker 4: front of Oh, I don't want to have an attack
Speaker 4: on me for doing this. I want to show that
Speaker 4: I'm bending over backwards buys into one that's a political decision,
Speaker 4: a small p political decision, and you're there precisely because
Speaker 4: you weren't supposed to take politics into account. If you
Speaker 4: are picking the best person for the job. Come on,
Speaker 4: you think all three of those people just happened to
Speaker 4: be the best person for the job. I mean, it's
Speaker 4: like what Bush said about Clarence Thomas. I mean, come on,
Speaker 4: by the way, I'm not saying that you shouldn't consider
Speaker 4: race and the apployment to the Supreme Court. I think
Speaker 4: you should. I just don't think you should deny it.
Speaker 4: And so here I think you're buying into the idea
Speaker 4: that people don't act out of principle, and it was
Speaker 4: an overreaction to the attack on Muller and his team,
Speaker 4: of which you know, as you said, I was one,
Speaker 4: and is the kind of thing that I think missed
Speaker 4: an an opportunity to educate the public about why you're
Speaker 4: not going to be looking at the party politics as
Speaker 4: somebody that it's irrelevant in the department. I understand why
Speaker 4: he did it. I just think it was the wrong decision.
Speaker 4: And I would say that, by the way, even if
Speaker 4: I thought that her report was flawless. It's just you
Speaker 4: are buying into the idea that people cannot be impartial.
Speaker 4: And you know what, Judges can be impartial, Jurors can
Speaker 4: be impartial, prosecutors can be impartial, and so you don't
Speaker 4: sit there and pick a jury by saying, oh, listen,
Speaker 4: it's a Republican on trial. So, by the way, all
Speaker 4: of you have to be Republicans, you right, right.
Speaker 1: The thing is democrats playing by these twenty twelve rules.
Speaker 1: The assumption here is that her will not be a partisan,
Speaker 1: that her will go into this committed to the truth
Speaker 1: and I think this is true. And you tell me
Speaker 1: if you think this is true when you read the report,
Speaker 1: and I thought Joe Scarborough some so succinctly. He couldn't
Speaker 1: indict him legally, so he indicted him politically. There's so
Speaker 1: much editorializing, and so the reality is he's not there
Speaker 1: to talk about what he thinks about Joe Biden. Neurologically,
Speaker 1: he just isn't.
Speaker 4: I agree, And I think there are two ways to
Speaker 4: look at what Rob Herd did. I think in terms
Speaker 4: of the substance of what he found, it was presented
Speaker 4: in a way that I thought was misleading.
Speaker 1: Will you talk about that a little more? Yeah.
Speaker 4: So Ryan Goodman, who's a professor at NYU, with me,
Speaker 4: we write a piece for Just Security. He's one of
Speaker 4: the managing editors of it. It's a legal forum that's
Speaker 4: really terrific as wonderful pieces on the website. So we
Speaker 4: did a piece on Saturday where one of the things
Speaker 4: we did is posited another way. The introduction could have
Speaker 4: been written that would have been very clear as to
Speaker 4: what it was finding and what it wasn't finding. What
Speaker 4: we were reacting to was that in the news. I
Speaker 4: won't say uniformly, but major outlets reported that Rob Hurr
Speaker 4: found that Joseph Biden had in fact committed a felony,
Speaker 4: but that they were not recommending prosecution because of discretionary
Speaker 4: reasons like his age or his memory.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is what somebody transmitted to Trump, which
Speaker 1: made him so furious because he was like, well, then
Speaker 1: they shouldn't prosecute.
Speaker 4: Me either, right, So that is not what he found.
Speaker 4: And we cite over and over again the passages from
Speaker 4: this four hundred page plus report, but the introduction was
Speaker 4: particularly inept in the way it was done or intentionally misleading.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to speculate about the intent for it.
Speaker 4: I'm just saying that one of the things we did
Speaker 4: in our piece was we wrote a different way the
Speaker 4: introduction could have been written that would have been one
Speaker 4: hundred percent accurate and would have been very very clear
Speaker 4: that there was evidence to open the case. Because of
Speaker 4: course there was classified documents found where they shouldn't have been,
Speaker 4: So there's a basis to open the case. But the
Speaker 4: key issue is knowledge and intent and whether this was wilful,
Speaker 4: meaning that you had knowledge of the documents, you knew
Speaker 4: that they were classified, and national defense information, and you
Speaker 4: knew you were doing something wrong, and over and over
Speaker 4: and over again, one, two or three of those things
Speaker 4: were not present, and over and over again. Her later
Speaker 4: in the report says that, and he says there are
Speaker 4: innocent explanations that could not be refuted. I'm paraphrasing, but
Speaker 4: that's like page six. He says, they're innocent explanations we
Speaker 4: cannot refute. In fact, he says they're innocent explanations. We
Speaker 4: found evidence in favor of affirmative evidence to prove. You
Speaker 4: know what that means as a prosecutor, you cannot go
Speaker 4: forward if they're innocent explanations that you cannot refute. That
Speaker 4: actually means innocence.
Speaker 1: Right, right, But it's written in such.
Speaker 4: A way that I mean, how about their innocent explanation
Speaker 4: that are true?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 4: So that's sort of one aspect which has gone less attention,
Speaker 4: which is that the report's getting misreported, right.
Speaker 1: Right, because reading comprehension is fucking hard. I say this
Speaker 1: as someone who myself has failed.
Speaker 4: And then the second piece, which of course has gone
Speaker 4: lots of attention, is the embroidery, the sort of James
Speaker 4: Comy two point zero aspect of this, which is positing
Speaker 4: what would happen at a trial that's not going to happen, right,
Speaker 4: You're not going to bring a case, but you're now
Speaker 4: speculating at that trial, which I'm not going to bring,
Speaker 4: it is possible that Joseph Biden will testify, which you
Speaker 4: don't know, and if he testifies, he could say I
Speaker 4: have a bad memory, which, by the way, is also
Speaker 4: irrelevant because what his memory is like today is irrelevant
Speaker 4: to what his memory was at the time that the
Speaker 4: documents were found. And by the way, I'm also going
Speaker 4: to speculate that at this trial that's not happening, where
Speaker 4: he may testify, but I don't know if you will.
Speaker 4: I'm going to then say he's going to to say
Speaker 4: that I do have a bad memory. That was, by
Speaker 4: the way, disproved within twenty four hours when Joseph Biden,
Speaker 4: of course said I don't have a bad memory. So
Speaker 4: everything about it was so gratuitous it just was not needed.
Speaker 4: And that's where to go back to your point about
Speaker 4: I worked on a special counsel investigation just to be
Speaker 4: slightly in the weeds. Don't worry, I won't be too
Speaker 4: boring or too long. A special counsel is a person
Speaker 4: who is part of the Department of Justice. You are
Speaker 4: not outside of the Department of Justice, and the Special
Speaker 4: Council Rules require it's not optional. It is required that
Speaker 4: you adhere to Department of Justice policies. Nothing about the
Speaker 4: Special Council Rules exempt you. In fact, the Special Council
Speaker 4: Rules say you can be fired if you do not
Speaker 4: follow a Department of Justice guidelines. One of those is
Speaker 4: that you do not denigrate people if you are not
Speaker 4: charging them. I'm just giving paraphrasing it. In fact, you
Speaker 4: know you can't denigrate people even if you are charging them.
Speaker 4: People have gotten in trouble for bringing an indictment and
Speaker 4: then giving a press conference where they then start denigrating somebody.
Speaker 4: That's something you're not supposed to do. Your personal opinion,
Speaker 4: those kinds of issues you leave aside, and as people
Speaker 4: have probably heard here listening to this podcast, you speak
Speaker 4: in court. And so this was just not adhering to
Speaker 4: the best traditions of the Department. And I guess I
Speaker 4: would say at the very least, it showed incredibly poor judgment.
Speaker 4: And the best example of that is, even if you
Speaker 4: thought it was appropriate to talk about Joe Biden's memory,
Speaker 4: that you would choose to talk about his son. I
Speaker 4: don't just don't know how that's relevant, even if you
Speaker 4: thought it was relevant. I know, there's even if you
Speaker 4: could cobble together some convoluted, fanciful theory that you would
Speaker 4: choose that example tells you much more about Rob Her
Speaker 4: than Joe Biden. It is so classless and shows such
Speaker 4: a corese sense of propriety and respect. I mean, it
Speaker 4: was truly shocking.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: I kept on thinking of constantly saying, like, you know
Speaker 4: who raised you? I could just see if I did
Speaker 4: anything like that, my parents calling me up and saying,
Speaker 4: I don't know who raised you, Like you know, you
Speaker 4: weren't raised by wolves. That's not appropriate behavior.
Speaker 1: It feels like when you read it, I think you
Speaker 1: were the one who said this, but somebody said or
Speaker 1: wrote that part of what it looks like is her
Speaker 1: trying to have a long future in Trump world, that
Speaker 1: there are so much gratuitous stuff with that. I mean,
Speaker 1: do you think that's true?
Speaker 4: You know, I don't know what's going on in his head.
Speaker 4: We certainly have seen instances where people have done that,
Speaker 4: and it's like a tryout for a senior position in
Speaker 4: the Justice Department, like the Bill Barr memo, right exactly.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to go there as to what was
Speaker 4: running through his head. I just know what's on paper,
Speaker 4: and I can judge that I don't think one needs
Speaker 4: to even get to his motivations that. I mean, you
Speaker 4: can speculate there are certainly ways in which there could
Speaker 4: be those improper motivations. But even if it was well intentioned,
Speaker 4: it was still inappropriate.
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine it's well attention. Now Republicans are
Speaker 1: incredibly excited and think that they have a sort of
Speaker 1: great way to stick it to Biden. So they're going
Speaker 1: to have now hearings where he's going to testify. And
Speaker 1: will they be able to play the audio? Is there
Speaker 1: a precedent for playing audio from these interviews. I've never
Speaker 1: heard it.
Speaker 4: But it's hard because I don't think we've seen all that.
Speaker 4: But I mean, I'm sure there'll be an effort to
Speaker 4: try and get the transcripts in the audio and to
Speaker 4: play this on a loop. I have to say my
Speaker 4: view on that issue, there's sort of the underlying issue
Speaker 4: of does the president have memory problems that would make
Speaker 4: it inappropriate or difficult for him to serve I don't
Speaker 4: really care what Rob Hurr has to say. He's another person.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's where people shouldn't buy into giving him
Speaker 4: any more weight than I don't think people I didn't
Speaker 4: care what James Comey had to say about Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 4: We could all make our own judgment. I don't need
Speaker 4: Rob her or James Comey to tell me that. I
Speaker 4: think that's one where I can leave that aside. If
Speaker 4: there's an issue that either Donald Trump or Joe Biden
Speaker 4: has as to their fitness in terms of their policies,
Speaker 4: their character, their memory, their health, whatever it is, they
Speaker 4: can go ahead and talk about it, and they do.
Speaker 4: There's some evidence, and that's the way they should deal
Speaker 4: with it. To my mind, this is not a particular
Speaker 4: point of interest, but.
Speaker 1: Is there a precedent for playing the audio?
Speaker 4: I don't know if it's in this exact context, but
Speaker 4: you can certainly if you were calling somebody, you could
Speaker 4: and there was audio or there was a transcript, you
Speaker 4: could try and get that information and then use it.
Speaker 4: I'm sure there's a transcript of it. And I think
Speaker 4: the White House is still considering what do because they
Speaker 4: have to do a classification review. So I think there's
Speaker 4: going to be more to come on that, but at
Speaker 4: the very least there would be a transcript, but there
Speaker 4: could be audio as well.
Speaker 1: But the fact that this is being released, I mean,
Speaker 1: they're like, I think about the Mueller Report, right, And
Speaker 1: there was a lot of hymning and hawing about the
Speaker 1: Mueller Report, and then in the end we saw Bill
Speaker 1: Barr was like, this is too long to read. Don't worry,
Speaker 1: it's fine. Our guy didn't do anything wrong. Trump World
Speaker 1: politicized the report, and the way it was released there
Speaker 1: was just much more sort of couching and partisanship around it.
Speaker 1: I sort of almost wondered why Biden World. I mean,
Speaker 1: I understand why they didn't do more of that, but
Speaker 1: I wondered if Democrats are like still not meeting the
Speaker 1: moment here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so one guess what, Molly, I still remember that
Speaker 4: me too. I actually I read this book about the
Speaker 4: Mueller investigation and it starts with that. It starts with
Speaker 4: the moment.
Speaker 1: And you were working for Mueller at that point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was working her Mueller. And I was in
Speaker 4: a car when I heard about the bar summary, and
Speaker 4: I just thought that the reports I was hearing over
Speaker 4: the radio just had to be wrong. Everyone expected that
Speaker 4: he was just going to release if you wanted to
Speaker 4: do a summary. We wrote summaries of the report and
Speaker 4: we thought, oh well we did that, so he can
Speaker 4: just release those. And of course he wrote his own.
Speaker 4: And by the way, just just say something positive about
Speaker 4: Merrick Ireland. I mean, this is one where if you
Speaker 4: want to know anytime a summary would be vindicated to
Speaker 4: say this report vindicates the principle, it would be the
Speaker 4: rob Her report vindicates Joe Biden. There was no crime there.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's so similar to Mike Pens whereas Bill
Speaker 4: Barr spun it the other way when he wrote a
Speaker 4: purported summary that wasn't I have to say that's to
Speaker 4: Merrick Garland's credit that he was not trying to do that.
Speaker 4: He was like, you know what it is, what it is.
Speaker 4: I think where you can fault Merrick Ireland is that
Speaker 4: he does have an obligation if he thinks that it
Speaker 4: violated DIO rules, he could have pushed back. There would
Speaker 4: have been political upheaval or that he would have been
Speaker 4: accused of, you know, trying to change it or and
Speaker 4: doing it for political reasons. But you know what, that's
Speaker 4: why they pay you the big bucks. If you're not
Speaker 4: doing it for political reasons, and you're doing it because
Speaker 4: it is gratuitous smirching of someone who is not being charged,
Speaker 4: that's your job, and the fact that you're going to
Speaker 4: be falsely accused of doing it for political reasons is
Speaker 4: not a reason not to do it. That goes very
Speaker 4: much back to the initial appointment issue, where I think
Speaker 4: you know what, pick the best person. And as a
Speaker 4: friend of mine said in a nutshell, the appointment of
Speaker 4: Rob Hurr was fundamentally a political decision, a small p
Speaker 4: not a merit decision. You were not picking the best
Speaker 4: person for the job. You were trying to find a
Speaker 4: qualified person who would not get sort of blowback because
Speaker 4: this person is of the same party as the person
Speaker 4: being investigated.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Andrew, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 4: You're welcome.
Speaker 3: FEEDA.
Speaker 1: Scotch Cole is a professor of government and sociology at
Speaker 1: Harvard University and the author of russ Belt Union Blues.
Speaker 1: While working class voters are turning away from the Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Fast Politics, Professor scotch Pol.
Speaker 3: Thank you, nice to be here, so.
Speaker 1: Great to have you. I just really wanted you to
Speaker 1: come on the podcast to talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: the Tea Party and how it relates to where we
Speaker 1: are right now, because I think I feel like we
Speaker 1: don't spend enough time talking about the sort of we
Speaker 1: are the United States of Mnesia, and we don't spend
Speaker 1: enough time talking about just the very recent history.
Speaker 3: Right Well, you know, the Tea Party erupted, of course,
Speaker 3: soon after Barack Obama was elected in two thousand and
Speaker 3: eight took office in two thousand and nine, along with
Speaker 3: the Democratic control of both Houses of Congress. At that time,
Speaker 3: that kind of trifecta of control for one party was
Speaker 3: a rare occurrence, and even while Barack Obama was running
Speaker 3: for office, but certainly after he was elected, with Democrats
Speaker 3: in control of the federal government, conservative people in the
Speaker 3: United States were I would say startled and terrified, right
Speaker 3: And within a very short period of time, the activists
Speaker 3: among them dressed up in costumes and started running demonstrations
Speaker 3: that suggested that the America they believed in was at
Speaker 3: stake with this presidency, a message amplified by conservative media.
Speaker 3: So we all know that demonstrations occurred from then on.
Speaker 3: My colleagues and I also honed in on the fact
Speaker 3: that over the next couple of years up to two thousand,
Speaker 3: regularly meeting local tea party groups, volunteer groups of people
Speaker 3: protesting Democrats, and the Obama presidency took to the field
Speaker 3: in the United States, and by twenty eleven, my co
Speaker 3: author of Vanessa Williamson and I were out in the
Speaker 3: field in several states to the United States interviewing grassroots activists.
Speaker 3: We weren't contenting ourselves with a national polls set or
Speaker 3: with what national spokespeople on TV said. We were actually
Speaker 3: talking to the grassroots activists and attending some of their
Speaker 3: tea party meetings. Those people, older, white, conservative minded people,
Speaker 3: overwhelmingly were fascinated by Donald Trump. While we were in
Speaker 3: the field interview Oh wow. Even then, I can remember
Speaker 3: one lady saying to me that she was intrigued because
Speaker 3: grassroots tea partiers were not enthusiastic about Mitt Romney as
Speaker 3: a possible candidate for the GOP in twenty twelve, and
Speaker 3: that was the time when Donald Trump was making a
Speaker 3: name for himself by challenging Barack Obama's birth certificate and
Speaker 3: his citizenship, and that fascinated some of those grassroots activists.
Speaker 3: And I remember thinking at the time, if he were running,
Speaker 3: he would be a very attractive candidate for these people.
Speaker 3: Now flash forward over the years, we know that surviving
Speaker 3: Tea partiers, activists, people who told national posters that they
Speaker 3: sympathized with the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party,
Speaker 3: and ultimately people elected to Congress, especially after twenty ten,
Speaker 3: who considered themselves Tea Party supporters, they have been all
Speaker 3: along and still are if they're alive and are still
Speaker 3: in office. They are the core of the most enthusiastic
Speaker 3: MAGA supporters. And I can say that partly because I
Speaker 3: continued personally to go into the field and interview very
Speaker 3: conservative people after Donald Trump was elected and those still meeting.
Speaker 3: There were still some Tea Parties meeting as late as
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen. They were gung ho for Donald Trump. But
Speaker 3: we also know from national polls in recent years that
Speaker 3: those who say they were active in the Tea Party
Speaker 3: you're sympathetic with it, are very exercised about immigration and
Speaker 3: very supportive of Donald Trump and his attempts to build
Speaker 3: a wall around America.
Speaker 1: I want to go back to what you said a
Speaker 1: little bit earlier when we were talking about this, because
Speaker 1: I don't know that I realized exactly the timing on this.
Speaker 1: They didn't like Mitt Romney because he felt insufficiently I
Speaker 1: want to say racist, But what was the complaint about
Speaker 1: Mitt Romney.
Speaker 3: Well, I think the accurate term is ethno nationalists because
Speaker 3: Tea Party people have been and MAGA people still are
Speaker 3: very exercised about immigration into the United States, particularly by
Speaker 3: people of non European origin, as well as upset about
Speaker 3: African Americans gaining political power. This is an ethno nationalist
Speaker 3: view of the world that you could call racist. I
Speaker 3: prefer the eth non nationalist term. But look, Mitt Romney
Speaker 3: was not satisfactory to Tea partiers for the same reason
Speaker 3: that all of the people running against Donald Trump in
Speaker 3: twenty fifteen on that were dispensed by him one after
Speaker 3: another and their Republican primaries were not as acceptable. There's
Speaker 3: a sense that the Republican establishment has not responded over
Speaker 3: the years, or didn't until recently, until it was trumpified
Speaker 3: to what are the most intense concerns of grassroots conservatives,
Speaker 3: and those concerns certainly included putting a stop to immigration,
Speaker 3: making sure that black political power in and through the
Speaker 3: Democratic Party does not go too far for some of them,
Speaker 3: maybe about half going back to a more traditional family
Speaker 3: roles and limiting access to abortion and other kinds of
Speaker 3: rights for women.
Speaker 1: Right and birth control goes with that, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, really a whole set of it. And also
Speaker 3: just tension out well professional women.
Speaker 1: I can't believe we're having this conversation.
Speaker 3: Hillary Clinton was in some ways the perfect emblem of that. So,
Speaker 3: I mean, all of these concerns are kind of piled
Speaker 3: on top of each other and have created a movement
Speaker 3: that I think goes in a straight line from the
Speaker 3: Tea Party to the Maga movement, although the Maga movement
Speaker 3: includes more younger men than the TEEP originally did. That
Speaker 3: they think the kind of America they believe in is
Speaker 3: being stolen, is being taken away from them. And Donald
Speaker 3: Trump is admired because he tells it like it is
Speaker 3: and because he's promising to bring back the real America.
Speaker 3: And one Tea part of her that I interviewed as
Speaker 3: late as twenty seventeen, still meeting in his tea party,
Speaker 3: and when I finally got around to the end of
Speaker 3: the interview and I said, well, you know, I'm not
Speaker 3: sure he's really going to build that wall. My interview
Speaker 3: is a very very I'm listening. I'm not preaching people,
Speaker 3: but toward the end of an interview, I will kind
Speaker 3: of gently he said, it doesn't matter because his heart's
Speaker 3: the right place. He's trying, and you know, I want
Speaker 3: to say that there's nothing foolish about that. I think
Speaker 3: people in general partly make decisions about politicians in terms
Speaker 3: of whether they're trying, whether they seem to be on
Speaker 3: your side, whether they seem to express your value. So
Speaker 3: I didn't think that there was anything scandalous about what
Speaker 3: he said or surprising, but that's what he said.
Speaker 1: I think that's a really important point, right, that this
Speaker 1: is not you know, people don't vote for candidates because
Speaker 1: I mean, they know that politics are not an ATM.
Speaker 1: When we talk about this group, I always think of
Speaker 1: this as the kind of America's like, and maybe this
Speaker 1: is overly optimistic, as America's last gasp before a possible
Speaker 1: multi racial democracy that we are in the sort of
Speaker 1: democratic growing pains small day. Do you think that's right
Speaker 1: or do you think I'm being overly optimistic? And what
Speaker 1: supports or doesn't this idea.
Speaker 3: I'm teaching a course right now in which we're looking
Speaker 3: back at that period from the end of the Civil
Speaker 3: War through the turn of the twentieth century, when a
Speaker 3: multi racial democracy, or possibilities for it briefly emerged, actually
Speaker 3: took shape during congressional reconstruction, and then was brutally rolled
Speaker 3: back and ultimately snuffed out legally for decades. Now I
Speaker 3: have to hope I'm an old lady now so I
Speaker 3: won't live to see it that nothing like that could happen.
Speaker 3: Now things move faster, but we are definitely in a
Speaker 3: period where outright reversal, not just stopping progress toward a
Speaker 3: multiracial democracy, but outright reversal of the rule of law
Speaker 3: and of participatory accountability for our government is at stake.
Speaker 3: And that's because once Donald Trump was elected, and it
Speaker 3: was a flucal election in many ways, a lot of
Speaker 3: things had to come together to give him that minority
Speaker 3: when through the Electoral College in twenty sixteen. From then on,
Speaker 3: it's not just Donald Trump, is it. It's an entire
Speaker 3: political party that has bought into even the most extreme
Speaker 3: Harvard graduates, like a least Deefonic, are suggesting that we
Speaker 3: should have what amounts to a dictatorship in this country.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of people now invested in the
Speaker 3: project of holding minority authoritarian power and exercising it with
Speaker 3: cruelty and fierceness against those who are opposed. And that
Speaker 3: has happened in US history before, it has happened in
Speaker 3: many countries' histories before, it could happen here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm struck by what you're saying, because it does
Speaker 1: seem Trump was just Trump, right, he was not the
Speaker 1: party until systematically he and his people basically removed everyone
Speaker 1: who wasn't him. I think you saw it really in
Speaker 1: this most recent primary contest, right, You did see DeSantis
Speaker 1: ran as mini Trump, and I actually was more anxious
Speaker 1: about DeSantis because I felt like DeSantis had taken the
Speaker 1: scary authoritarianism that is trump Ism, but was also much smarter. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: Trump's people were attached to him in a way that
Speaker 1: couldn't be transferred to DeSantis. Is that a good sign?
Speaker 1: Or am I just being optimistic to be optimistic.
Speaker 3: DeSantis, I don't know how smart he is and an
Speaker 3: unlikable and non entertaining person if there ever was one,
Speaker 3: and I would not argue that he embraced all of
Speaker 3: trump Ism. I think this whole anti Dei thing is
Speaker 3: a middle class version of trump Ism. It's people who
Speaker 3: attended colleges and felt like they weren't in the mainstream,
Speaker 3: you know, at the Stephonics stands up for that to
Speaker 3: thinking that the fight over Harvard is the I don't
Speaker 3: think ordinary grassroots Trump supporters are all that interested in
Speaker 3: that battle. I think they are much more interested in
Speaker 3: blocking immigration, in carrying through kind of the use of
Speaker 3: government power to regulate what they would like to see
Speaker 3: as the ability to win elections by real Americans, which
Speaker 3: they think of themselves as, and getting back at those
Speaker 3: who they feel have dissed them, who have taken the
Speaker 3: reigns of cultural and economic dynamism in this country and
Speaker 3: pass them by. Remember, people who were overwhelmed for Trump
Speaker 3: and therefore living communities where everybody likes Trump are exurban
Speaker 3: to not so much rural as small town. There's a
Speaker 3: sharp geographic divide. And of course those are areas that
Speaker 3: have a lot of extra leverage in the electoral College,
Speaker 3: the Senate, and in gerrymandered legislatures.
Speaker 1: So those are the states with not a lot of
Speaker 1: electoral votes.
Speaker 3: Well, they're also the people who are beyond the circle
Speaker 3: of counties around Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, which I've studied closely.
Speaker 3: You know, they're very competitive.
Speaker 1: I mean, they captured.
Speaker 3: Both in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan in twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 3: Joe Biden only kind of inched his way back to
Speaker 3: better margins in some of those outlying areas. It starts
Speaker 3: right at the edge of the inner ring of suburbs
Speaker 3: around the metropolitan in every state.
Speaker 1: Is it right to believe, not morally right, but correct
Speaker 1: to believe that what is happening in this country is
Speaker 1: a divide largely not always true, but that people who
Speaker 1: are more educated tend to be Democrats and people who
Speaker 1: are less educated tend to be Republicans, with the exception
Speaker 1: of the very wealthy.
Speaker 3: Well, both parties are cross income and cross to a
Speaker 3: lesser degree cross educational credential coalitions. The Democrats are a
Speaker 3: coalition of college educated, with more and more college educated
Speaker 3: who used to be moderate Republicans moving toward the Democrats,
Speaker 3: especially in dynamic metro Politan areas. But they are also
Speaker 3: dependent on a constituency of lower income people of color
Speaker 3: who live in the cities, and those people are drifting
Speaker 3: away to some degree. The Republicans are a coalition of
Speaker 3: I would say small business type people, construction type people,
Speaker 3: middle class people in more religious areas, more right wing
Speaker 3: religious areas of the country, and a fair number of
Speaker 3: blue collar workers. Although I think our tendency to think
Speaker 3: of all Trumpers as non college educated is not quite right.
Speaker 3: It's right overall, but there are a lot of college
Speaker 3: educated people that are bought into this.
Speaker 1: Which is a terrifying sentence in itself. Right, talk to
Speaker 1: me about the dependency Democrats have on these lower income
Speaker 1: voters and why they're leaving the Democratic Party.
Speaker 3: Well, I think some of the men among them are tempted,
Speaker 3: but let's think about it. I mean, the Democrats have
Speaker 3: been and there's a new paper out by Jacob Packer
Speaker 3: and Paul Pearson that really does a brilliant job of
Speaker 3: showing that the Democratic Coalition has been reinvented recently among
Speaker 3: using government spending pretty aggressively to both address concerns that
Speaker 3: college educated voters have, like the environment, and to try
Speaker 3: to deal with some of the lower income people's needs,
Speaker 3: particularly their needs for family supports. So the Democratic Party
Speaker 3: is not they're not AOC, but they've put together a
Speaker 3: more progressive economic program that speaks to the needs of
Speaker 3: a very broad cross class coalition in the metropolitan areas.
Speaker 3: The trouble is the Republicans have enough power to block
Speaker 3: a lot of that. And if you look at not
Speaker 3: just what happens in a lot of state legislatures, but
Speaker 3: look at what happened with Build Back Better. It started
Speaker 3: out with a really bold redistributive, that is, equality enhancing
Speaker 3: set of proposals, and as it finally made it through,
Speaker 3: a lot of the things like the Chin tax Credit,
Speaker 3: which had reduced poverty enormously, were stripped away, partly because
Speaker 3: of Republicans and partly because of Joe Manchin. If you
Speaker 3: can't deliver, if you promise and you can't deliver, which
Speaker 3: is the Democrat's dilemma. They can get to fifty to fifty,
Speaker 3: but they can't quite get enough federal power to deliver,
Speaker 3: and they've lost the courts. That is something that Trump
Speaker 3: rives on. Trump thrives on the idea that appeals to
Speaker 3: many non college people that oh, if just a powerful
Speaker 3: president would just cut through all this nonsense and just
Speaker 3: do things. And of course Trump will promise anything to anybody.
Speaker 3: He will in this election. He's going to promise everything,
Speaker 3: and a lot of people don't even pay attention till
Speaker 3: the last minute. And of course the media system completely
Speaker 3: magnifies everything Trump says while mainly broadcasting legal cases that
Speaker 3: the college educated people are following, which really turn off
Speaker 3: the color people. I mean, they're just not interested in
Speaker 3: whether the fourteenth Amendment is officers or come on, you know,
Speaker 3: let's face it, that's ridiculous. So Trump rides, I'm not
Speaker 3: getting things done.
Speaker 1: Okay, thank you so much, professor. This was so interesting,
Speaker 1: and so I hope you will come back.
Speaker 3: Sure, let's make sure we don't feel one of the
Speaker 3: cases that the college educating are following.
Speaker 2: No Mo.
Speaker 1: Jesse Cannon, Maley, Jong Fast. You know what violence I love.
Speaker 3: There's only one type, Crazy Texas Republican on crazy Texas
Speaker 3: Republican violence the best.
Speaker 1: It's worth remembering that as much as Democrats and Republicans
Speaker 1: have iire between each other, this Republican party really really
Speaker 1: has a lot of ire. So here we go. Ken
Speaker 1: Paxton ag You will remember they tried to impeach him once.
Speaker 1: He is trolling John Cornyan, who again this is like
Speaker 1: Pexton is Maga maga, So he's mad at John Cornyan
Speaker 1: for voting to send aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
Speaker 1: The thinking here is that sending this humanitarian aid, some
Speaker 1: of this as military aid, will prevent further conflicts, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter because maga Ken Paxton wants to score
Speaker 1: the points with the megabase and so he is now
Speaker 1: declared war on John Cornan. There are no winners here,
Speaker 1: only losers. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the
Speaker 1: best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos.
Speaker 1: If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to
Speaker 1: a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.