A Unified Theory of Trumpism

U.S. voters abroad have you got your ballot yet? All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click "Request My Ballet". Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. Hey everybody, welcome to PodSafe America. I'm John Lovett. I just wrapped a great conversation with Jonathan V. Last of the Bullwork. It went all kinds of places to what went wrong inside the Republican Party, what a post-Trump Democratic Party should be fighting for, and what it means to have a politics that centers virtues like kindness and what happened to lead a country to a place where someone like Donald Trump could be president in the first place. I really appreciate the way Jonathan thinks and writes about politics, especially as one of the rare conservatives who understood from the beginning why it was so toxic to embrace someone as awful as Trump. I'm grateful to him for coming on the show and I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Here it is. Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. Finally, John. You know, I understand that there is a text chain in which whenever Sarah Longwell or Tim Miller has been on the show, you know that you hadn't yet been invited. I'm sorry that it took this long to have you on because I am genuinely such an admirer of the way you think about politics, the way you talk about politics. As I said to you on a sub-stack, a compliment that you then wrote an essay about to kind of dispute, I appreciate those who did something that is clearly harder than it looked, which is be honest and moral from the right or the center right in the face of Trumpism when so many refuse to do that. I think you have a lot to say to help understand this moment. I want to talk about what you called a grand unified theory of Trumpism, which you summarized as and I quote, "The essence of Trumpism is that the other side will always choose surrender over discomfort." I want to use that to kind of help us understand a bunch of different stories, but just what do you mean by that and what are some of the the salient examples to you? Yeah, so I was already met the White House correspondent and it strikes me. This is a lot of the way Trump has approached ways, hands, all of it and especially the way he approached the Republican Party. I have to say this, I mean Trump really did understand the Republican Party in the conservative movement much better than I did. He saw those people for who they are and one of the things he has found even with not them, but just sort of mainstream culture is that if forced to make uncomfortable choices, people normally choose comfort over unpleasantness. This was the White House correspondent's dinner. They invite up on to stage this group of Wall Street Journal reporters who did fantastic reporting about Trump and the Epstein stuff and these people come up on stage and they're like, I guess I'm supposed to shake this guy's hand and they shake hands and then he even when he went and gave his speech afterwards, he was like, "Yeah, can you believe it? These guys up here, they kill me all the time and they just come up and shake my hand." It's like, yeah, it's a little weird, isn't it? And he does that again and again. He's doing that right now about Todd Blanch with, with Tom Phyllis and, and John Corden and they are saying we're totally in on this Todd Blanch thing, even though he was your personal lawyer and even though he aided and embedded the Epstein cover up and even though it was his idea to do this slush fund. But the one thing is that we really would let, we know you said you won't do it, but if you could just write that down for us, that'd be great. And, and Trump's response to this is, "Fuck you." And, and when, when confronted with the fuck you, their response, I don't know if you saw it. I was, I was, I was, this is literally where I was going next. I want to read Tom Till, so yeah, so John Corden and Tom Tillis have been the holdup in the Senate Judiciary Committee, just for people that haven't been following that closely. Yesterday, Thursday, they were supposed to vote on the, on the Todd Blanch nomination. These Trump's former personal defense attorney, the guy that met with Galein Maxwell, who wants to be a, the guy who said that the attorney general is not independent, which was, by the way, Tillis is, or Cornens, or Tillis is red line that's now been crossed, obviously. They have said they're not going to vote because they haven't received a guarantee that they won't pursue a fund to give millions of dollars to insurrectionists and other allies of Trump, who have been, quote unquote, persecuted by Biden. Trump puts out a stemwinder of a statement, defending the fund, justifying it completely, saying, I, I want this. This is good. Let's do the fund. Tillis quotes that statement and writes, and I quote, Senator Cornen and I have been working with Acting AG, Todd Blanch, to end the anti-webinization fund, and he has been forthright, thoughtful and patient. It's a shame. His confirmation has hit a snag only because an incompetent personal advisor to the president refuses to amend the bogus settlement. Once again, Stalin has been failed by the secretariat. If only they would tell him, John, the Kulaks would never have been liquidated, if Comrade Stalin had known what was happening. All the wheat they would have had. We're not for these bourgeois farm owners, even now, right? Cornen and Tillis, these are people that are, I have lost their seats in part because of Trump, who are ostensibly, I would say, probably, you know, when they, when they're alone with their thoughts, believe they are actually doing something good right now. But we have allowed Trump to move our baseline so far that this is what, this is what kind of stands in for Republicans not going along. What, what was your reaction to that statement? I mean, my reaction was, was befuddlement. I mean, I, I don't know about you, but I remember time when people in Washington could be motivated by spite. Yes. I like, I don't know, they're just like, wouldn't, wouldn't there be a fuck me? No, fuck you! I'm not going to confirm your, you know, you just cost me my Senate seat. I'm never going to confirm your AG. You know, good luck. Hope you, the hope the Democrats don't capture the Senate. Right. And there's none of that. There's none of that. It's, you know, you're right about the, the other side choosing surrender over discomfort, but it's that there's a kind of, I think it comes from a place of decadence, which is some version of, I don't, I don't think these guys have really thought very deeply of what it is to use power via negotiation, right? Because the idea that they're saying over and over again, I want to get to yes on Todd Blanche. Like Donald Trump, who is at his heart, what he believes himself to be is a negotiator. That's what he sees himself has. And, you know, obviously we could, we could attack whether or not he's genuinely good at it. But the basics, you know, set a crazy anchor, be erratic, whatever. He has those, he has those tools in his tool chest. And these guys are such, I'm, they're just babies about it. It's unbelievable. Yeah. They're, they're babies. But here's the, the thing is why I think it's vanity. I think this is about them wanting to feel like they drew a line in the sand. But even their line isn't a real line. Like I am sorry. If Todd Blanche signs a piece of paper saying that, you know, we won't do this one. What is that? That, that is a worthless guarantee. It is not worth any is not enforceable. You know, this is not a law. It's not something you have to go to the Supreme Court and have them overturn. It's just a piece of paper. You do whatever they, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Testified under oath that he wasn't going to do anything about vaccines. He said that thing under oath. He went and did it. It's not worth anything. And this is something to cover. Wait, Trump just signed a deal with Saudi Arabia. Did you see this over over nukes like two weeks ago? And the deal was signed. And then he was like, Oh, yeah. I want them to recognize Israel too. And the Saudis are like, Hey, bro, what are you, what are you talking about? We, the paper sign, bro. And he's like, Yeah, no, don't, don't care. You know what I'm saying? This is, this like, so even the idea that like, Oh, well, we got him to sign this piece of paper is itself ludicrous and right. Which is why I think it's all about self image. And it's what they've got to tell themselves. And I don't understand that like I, I could understand, here are the things I could understand, John. I could understand them just saying, I'm getting too old for this shit. Fine. Have your Todd Blanche. I don't give a fuck. I'm out of here. Right? I would understand that. I wouldn't like it. I wouldn't respect it. But I don't understand it. I would understand the, you know, no, the spiteful, I don't care who you could nominate Jesus Christ himself. And I would not, I would not, you know, vote to confirm him. What I can't understand is I'm going to look at the totality of this nominee. I'm going to find one thing about it that I'm going to set as a condition that makes it surmountable and then I'm going to pretend to hold out until you give me a meaningless assurance so that I can say I satisfied my one condition. That is bizarre. Do you understand that? Like, just as a piece of human psychology? I don't other than perhaps because they're so solicitous towards blanche himself and I think they sort blanche into the category as a guy we can work with. Right? Like, you know, he's a guy we can work, he's a serious guy, right? Yeah, he's a Trump's personal attorney, he's one of the serious ones. He's one of the good ones, he's not one of the cooks, right? He's one of ours, right? And he's one of ours. He's not like that. Cracken, lady. Right. He's not like he's not like a Bill Pulti, he's a Clayton, right? We have, we have the Bill Pultis, right? And we have a Clayton. Now, the fact that in practice, Bill Pulti really believes what he says about Trump being persecuted and wanting to destroy his enemies. And Clayton just performs that way for the cameras. They still view that as having a distinction as important, right? And so because blanche is their kind of guy, when they have that meeting and blanche says, look, some version of he can't admit it, he can't say it's bad, we're not pursuing it. There's no intention to pursue it, it's dead. But the more you press on it, you know him, the more he's going to dig in, right? So I am giving you this assurance, it will never be something that I pursue as attorney general. And beyond that, it is just very difficult. I just need room, right? I just need room to operate within this administration. And these, the, they've allowed, you know, there's a, like, it's true in, you know, relationships, you know, crazy. You'll move your baseline, right? You've been in a terrible relationship for a long time and you're just trying to get through the day. And you just, you just trying to kind of eke out a little wins, get things a little bit back towards normal. Meanwhile, what are we talking about here? We are negotiating over whether the president can take 1.776 billion in taxpayer money and just give it to his buddies, some of whom beat up fucking cops at the nation's capital in an insurrection that these guys all believed at the time was so destructive to Trump politically and to the country that they didn't worry, have to worry about him ever again. So they didn't have to, to your, to your theory, do something uncomfortable for the base, which is impeach him and remove him so that he couldn't run again. And they have never learned that lesson because if they learn that lesson, it requires something off. Remember Mitch? Like, they'll, they'll take care of the son of a bitch for us, right? We don't have to do anything on this, they'll do it. And this is, I don't know, and maybe this is persistent. I mean, maybe this is a persistent trait of the human condition that we see in all times in all places. I'm sure if we were to look at the progress of authoritarianism throughout history, we would see a lot of this from people. But it's a, Trump is, Trump is very smart about human nature, I think. And he was smart about understanding that America is not exceptional. Oh, that's interesting. I don't agree with that. I think that is too, too many moves away from the way he sees these people. I think, like, when he shakes the hands of those reporters on that stage, he's actually doing what was a criticism of the dinner that actually in hindsight wasn't as true as we said it was, which is, oh, it's all a game to these fucking people. And that the original criticism of the White House correspondent's dinner was these people are supposed to be antagonists, the press and the administration. And they have this cushy dinner and both optically, so optically, it represents something that is, like, ugly to the American people. But on a substantive level, it reveals something, which is, their commitments aren't real. They aren't serious. I actually, in hindsight, don't agree with that. I disagree with that. I actually think their commitments were real. And actually, what that dinner, it turns out, was about, and something we took for granted is, yes, they're an opposite sides in the game, but they're all believers in the game, right? They're in the stadium together playing the game of democracy. There's not in that, which is why it's so ugly. Because it's not just that people aren't uncomfortable with discomfort. I think that what Trump, it's not that America wasn't exceptional or that we don't believe in America, that in America's sort of special virtues. It's that he understood that there's a lot of people who don't actually care about those virtues enough to do something, right? That's true of the press in that room. That's true of the lawyers at those firms that capitulated that is true of the corporate media. That actually, that is it, that after 30 years of post-history liberalism, there is a lack of understanding of who, you know, there's been a gunshot in the courtyard. Someone's got to call 911. We all can't look out the window and wait for someone else to call 911. Somebody's got to call 911. And his great realization, actually, is that none of these people realize it's their job, right? And I don't think that's an indictment of our view of America. It's an indictment of this generation of elites. All right. I'll have to chew on that. I mean, I think that is certainly true. It may also be true that the rest of America is worthy of indictment, but I'll take that in an advisement. Not much until a window breaks. Then the alarm goes off. Then you get a notification. Then maybe the police will come, but shouldn't true home security be about stopping that chain of events from happening in the first place? That's the question simply safe answered. Digital security systems that only alert you after a break in is already underway, simply safe is designed to help stop intruders before they get inside smart AI powered outdoor cameras to text suspicious activity at the perimeter and alert live US-based agents to step in. Simply safe agents assess the threat, intervene through the outdoor camera to scare off trespassers and call for 911 dispatch. Big update in the Simply Safe World Love and our CEO, Lucinda recently installed a Simply Safe system herself at her home here in Los Angeles. She loves it. She said it was easy to set up. It's easy to turn it on and off from her phone. It's keeping her safe. It's keeping her big puppy safe. It's been great so far. She loves it. Simply safe has been protecting your world for 20 years. Right now you can get 50% off a new Simply Safe system. Go to SimplySafe.com/Cricket. That's SimplySafe.com/Cricket for 50% off. There's no safe like Simply Safe. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You've heard us talk about BetterHelp for a long time, but it's worth mentioning just how much people actually love using it. If you want to see for yourself, head on over to BetterHelp.com/Reviews. They update their page daily with hundreds of real reviews from people sharing how much therapy has helped them. In fact, BetterHelp holds an average live session rating of 4.9 out of 5 across more than 1.7 million client reviews. Check out their reviews yourself to read feedback directly from people who use it. More than 6 million people have used BetterHelp globally. The consistent feedback from real users makes it easy to see why so many people continue to choose BetterHelp. BetterHelp therapists have at least 3 years and 1,000 hours of hands-on experience. I prefer my therapist to be hands-off, like soccer rules. No hands in therapy. That's my rule. But I understand what they mean. It's a metaphor for being actively engaged. They also hold all required education training and certifications across a range of mental health specialties. BetterHelp makes it easy to get started. Answer a few questions. Get matched with a therapist based on your needs and switch therapists at any time if it's not the right fit. Therapists. You got to have one. Go to Therapy. See what stands out and see if BetterHelp is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com/psa. That's better. H-E-L-P dot com. /psa. There's the quote going around. It's something to the effect of more Americans are fascists than we realize and one day we're going to find out. And so I want to, this is actually where I wanted to go next because I think this is an old Hemingway. This is like a Hemingway quote. Yes. People are fascists and they'll find out when the time comes. Yeah. It's something to that butchering. I know. I was afraid I'm afraid I'm falling for a brainy quote like Gandhi once said, live, laugh, love. But the gist of it I think does apply a point you've made repeatedly, which I think there's very little equity, equity to in politics is you can blame Trump. You can blame misinformation. You can blame Republicans. And this is a paraphrase of something you've written 77 million Americans who voted for Trump or some combination of unserious, decadent or weak. Now, it's a lot cheaper in politics to blame the powers that be that's true on the left, that's true on the right. There's not a lot of discussion about the culpability of the actual voters and their agency in this. So if you just, as somebody that has been an observer of conservatism from the inside for a long time, what have you learned about the voters themselves through this period? Well, so I mean, I can tell you my impressions. I can't tell you that they are like facts that I've learned. What I have seen suggests to me though that you to avoid, to avoid coming to the conclusion that voters wanted what they chose, you got to start creating a whole bunch of Rube Goldberg contraptions. And the minute you push on any of these constructs even a little bit, they start wobbling and so you have to build another one, right? And so, you know, when people say something like, oh, they really, they only care about the economy. And you're like, well, but the economy is terrible when Trump's left office. Oh, well, that was just the last 18 months of the economy. And they really, they think about the first, you know, two and a half years. And you're like, well, wait a minute, America's all over the world. always say, what do you do for a little bit lately? They say, well, yes, but then they really understood that the, the, the COVID was an exogenous event and that you can't blame the president for exogenous events are like, what the fuck are you talking about? You think what percentage of the country could spell the word exogenous, right? And so you wind up making all of these things to avoid coming to the conclusion that, no, people saw down Trump for who he was. They heard what he was saying. They heard the things he was saying. And they said, I would like that. And I, and I think the reason people don't want to go there is because that's a dark place, right? I mean, if the conclusion you end, you wind up with is some large portion of that 77 million voters, maybe not all of them, maybe not, maybe not even a majority of them. Maybe, maybe it's only like a third of them wanted this. Like this, this is what they understood Trump to be, to be promising and they wanted it. That's tough, right? You're now saying, well, hold on. So that means we've got like 25 million voters in the country who are fascist, like who, who want a strong man and who are not sold on the liberal order, because the reality is like, you don't need a majority, right? If you have a, I mean, how many, how many Bolsheviks were there, right? When the Russian Revolution, it wasn't like there were 50 million of them, you know, they had like 50,000 guys. If you've got a core group of people committed to illiberalism, you will eventually get illiberalism. And I, that's the sort of stuff that, you know, it just keeps me up at night because I don't know if there's an answer to it, other than maybe the culture heals itself. Wow. That's not very satisfying. Or there has been, you know, forever, because I do think that the, how many matters, right? Whether it's a drug. Because I don't think it is. I, you know, I, I don't think it is. You know, there's, there's a big difference between week on serious and decadent and the distinction between them does matter. But even if there is this, this group of people and look, Trump's approval rating always remains, you know, we've, we've never gotten below 30, right? Like, let's say it's in the mid 30s on a good day. That's a third of the country. That's like, I'm still good with this, which tells you something, whether some combination of loving it or actually kind of not getting really good information about it and sort of and not yet willing to walk away. I do think though, like, you know, to get, to get dark and to think about like how many, you know, how many does he have? There is something about the blood and soil, Trumpism. It may appeal to 25 million people, but there's not that many that are willing to kind of put a lot of blood onto the soil. Like, it is an online movement, right? It is a lot of people on Facebook and Instagram and social media and TikTok and wherever and watching television. Not, I think it's, you know, not as many on TikTok as they would like, but it's an online movement of people riling each other up based on kind of narratives about cities and places they're not at and people they don't really observe or talk to, but they see through television, whether it's an AOC or trans people or whatever. And when push claims to show, you know, he put a good show on at the insurrection. That is a dark day in our history for which Trump is responsible. It could have been stopped with a little bit of planning by security officials if they had taken it more seriously, right? Like, like, this wasn't exactly a, this wasn't a mass mobilization that could have shut down the capital, prevent the traffic, that kind of things that have been traditionally part of what a true, like whatever, revolution or counter-revolution would look like. So maybe they just don't have a guy's. Totally possible. Totally possible. And I look at it and it's just hard to know. And I would say it's not new. This is the other thing that I've really come to. I mean, so I talk a lot about, like, my blind spots. And my biggest is always been race, right? And part of this is just because of the Kanye, I grew up in a very middle class suburb where it was normal and race wasn't a problem. And and you look at, you know, like, oh, we have all these authoritarians. Well, you know, before the civil rights movement, we had all whole swath of the country that was committed to authoritarianism, right? Before the civil war, we had half the country that was committed to a form of authoritarianism. And so there was, I mean, for people of our age who came of age in the post civil rights era, and there is a sense of like, oh, the, you know, so everybody was sort of aligned by the cold war. And so, you know, once you get in that 20 year period post civil rights before the end of the cold war, it looks like you've got this vaguely liberal monolith. This isn't to say that there are racists in the country and whatnot, but just sort of broadly speaking, right? The kind of both Democrats and Republicans were against the commies, you know? And there was the last two years of the Carter administration's approach to the Cold War were indistinguishable from Reagan's approach to the Cold War. Like, and so there was this like, hey, we're all in on liberalism. We don't like the authoritarianism stuff. And I, because of when I was born and, you know, my, my political upbringing, just thought, okay, so that's America. And so this, this Trump stuff is new and different. It's not really. It's much closer to a reversion to a strain of American political thought, which actually ran for a very, very long time. It just happened to have come to an end right before I was born. Does that make sense? Yes. Well, no, it does, it does, it does make sense. You know, whether it's the ways that, and, you know, I think there was downsides to this version of a liberal consensus, the, the, the, the kinds of topics that were acceptable, right, the kinds of people that were considered respectable. Like, there was a, there were real downsides to this actual strange period in which also in the media, there was a, there was a real narrowing of kind of the bounds of the debate and their positive aspects to what happens when an entire culture is built around a kind of narrow debate that there's not as much difference as not as much. And finally, like all of that is certainly true, but you see kind of an emergence of right-wing media during this time that slowly starts building power and influence in part because there is this, you know, there is this sort of darkness in us, in people, right, in our culture and in people. And there was clear whether it's, you know, a, a, a, a, coffin, and then to Limbaugh, right? Like, there was people that realized like, there's a need that's not being met in a pretty broad way. How much causal effect do you give the sort of right-wing media ecosystem as it evolved in where we are now? Because I'm never sure, like, clearly there's some, it has some effect. Right. I wouldn't say that has no effect. It has some effect. But I don't know how much. Like, if you snapped your fingers and it all went away, would things be a lot different? I don't know. What are your thoughts on this? Here's what I've been thinking lately. A lot of what we're seeing is a result of a kind of permission. Like, what is fascism, right? It's a hard thing to define for people. It's, it's, it's a little bit murky. And I think part of the reason it's so murky is, you know, there were a lot of people during Trump 1.0 be like, oh, stop calling him a fascist. That term doesn't apply. Look at everything's working, right? And I increasingly just, I don't think it is best to think about it as an ideology, a goal. It is permission to a kind of evil that we all feel, which is, I will give into my ego completely. I will not accept any kind of injury. I will not have to admit to any kind of fault. I will not have to be wrong. I will not have to accept discomfort. I will not have to accept nuance. The reason there was a pandemic is because fouchy. The reason I was stuck at home is because of the liberals. The reason people died is because of China. The reason I don't, I'm not happy right now is because of, of AOC or Mamdani or whatever. And that is intoxicating. It is an intoxicating way to go through life. For barrens, religious virtue, civic virtue is a, is a bulwark against those, those ideas. We all feel them. Some are better than others has naturally showing a discipline against them. Some are, you know, when you say someone, oh, they don't have a bad bone in their body, it's actually very hard for them to go in that way. We're all on that spectrum. And decades and decades of media, slowly telling people to just let go, just let go. It's fine. You can feel whatever you want to feel, culminates in Trump. Did the media follow the people? Did the people follow the media? Is Trump a symptom? I don't know. But at root, I think it is, I think it is that thing inside of us. It is as old as people. And we will always have to fight it. And it will come and go. Positive America is brought to you by Chime. Look, we all know someone who could use a quick reality check when it comes to their money. And hey, maybe that's someone is you. But no matter where your finances stand, we can all agree on one thing. A good bank should offer great rewards without slapping you with hidden fees. That's where Chime comes in. Chime is changing the way people bank. They're not like a traditional bank that loves to gatekeep the best rewards and pile on hidden fees unless you have a massive balance. Chime offers the most rewarding fee, free banking, all with no overdraft fees, no monthly fees, no minimum balance fees. You get 5% cash back on Chime card in a category of your choice like gas or groceries, all while building credit through regular everyday spending. No credit check required. You can also grow your money faster with a savings rate that's nine times the national average. And if you're ever in a pinch, SpotMe lets you over drafts up to $200. free. Join the millions who are already banking, be free with America's number one choice for banking. Head to chime dot com slash crooked. That is chime dot com slash crooked side of now. It only takes a few minutes. Chime is a fintech, not a bank banking services and chime card provided by Chime's bank partners, qualifying direct deposits required terms and limits apply. Go to chime dot com slash disclosures for details. U S voters abroad. Have you got your ballot yet? Go to vote from abroad.org and click request my ballot as to receive it by email. Questions? Don't delay. Vote from abroad.org. So this is I have a very similar view about the parties in that one of the things that the Republican party was able to do when it was strong was prevent people like Donald Trump from ever being presented to voters, at least to the presidential level, right? And so even if voters would have wanted something like that, it wasn't on offer. They got Bob Dole. They got Mitt Romney. They got more, you know, guys like that. And once Trump appeared and it was like, you know, when he got big cats and captivity and, you know, like they get a taste for live meat and all of a sudden they won't like take the stakes that you throw them anymore. That's what it would it's like with with Trump and Republican voters. Now that they have like, Oh, I could have that. I could have the guy who talks about shooting illegals and says only in the panhandle. I can have a guy who encourages political violence who says, go ahead and knock that guy out. I'll pay for your legal bills. Oh, yeah. You know, like that's the that's the real dope for them. And that's why I have a hard time seeing how we go back because the parties aren't strong enough to prevent people like that from coming in anymore. I mean, just the structure of our party systems are two week. They're both too strong and too weak. Yeah. You know, they're too strong to to to be killed and to have a new party pop up in their place, but too weak to prevent things like these sorts of takeovers. And so you wind up in a sour spot and voters have a taste on vote Republican voters have a taste for this because they were offered Trump as them. And then you saw when when they were offered to Santas, which was basically Trump isn't without the violence without the physical violence. They're like that guy. What are you talking about? Well, yes, also without Trump, which is who is a charismatic figure. And you know, I think there's here's where I would say there's like a little reason to be a little bit less pessimistic because I think there's a little step bass. I think there's a step in there that's important as part of this, which because I, it's not, it's not this idea that Trump suddenly appears and they can have this kind of, you know, it's like, oh, I don't want to be on burger. I don't want, I want the red meat, right? That's certainly true. But there is a moment in you and it plays out during that first primary 2016, where you see Trump doing what Trump's doing. You see Rubio just doing what Rubio's doing and Cruz doing what he's doing. And everybody kind of looks around first and they look around at each other and they're like, is it okay if I do this? Like I want, I'm in. I'm kind of interested. This is attractive to me, but I know it's wrong. It's still by the, I know it's wrong is everywhere still to this day. It is in the understanding that what we're doing is wrong. It, it is inside of, it is the unspoken part of everything. It's, and everything across the media, it is about asswaging the people who know they're doing something wrong. You know, when you see that you never see a liberal, you never see a liberal say some version of this is just a political disagreement. We should still treat each other as friends, right? Like that's something conservatives, there's a conservative effort to say versions of that to kind of make what they've done be normal. But the reason I say all that is because that moment of looking around is a corrective that still exists. Like if you, there are, there are two, if you go, there can be two gates side by side at an airport and two different airlines operating that gate. And at one gate, everybody is obeying the rules of when you board. And at the other gate, nobody is. Why? It is a combination of the culture of the flyers, the expectations of the flyers, and the rules of the airline. Do they enforce? Do they send anybody back if they come up with their boarding group that they're not in? And also, hey, is this an airline where everybody lines up or is this an airline where we all crowd the fucking thing like, like, like, like, we're trying to storm the best deal, right? Like, what kind of vibe is this? And people look around. And maybe there'll be a transgressor and others will follow. Maybe they're won't. It's luck. It's a little bit of luck in what happens. And somebody's got to throw the first brick. But that moment of corrective is still available even now. Or is that wrong? I don't know. So I, yesterday I wrote a piece about about this conference that the Trump administration did two weeks ago. So they did a conference on the resurgence of political terrorism. And he was all, I mean, it's about, of course, irony is dead, right? The, the, the people who reintroduced political violence into America after, like, a 30 year hiatus basically are now like, oh, my gosh, there's violence, right? But the only violence they care about is, is left wing violence. That's, that's the big thing. And you had Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio both give speeches, which were, and I say this in a measured way, indistinguishable from something grobals or Hitler, what have said in the 30s. And I just went and pulled quotes like from, from Hitler and girl speeches. And they're talking about, this is Rubio and, and Miller about the ugly people who, I mean, they're like, they're really getting into the, how do you say it's a physiognomy? Physiognomy? You know, like, the calipers, like, you know, oh, you can tell the just genic types, the intermittent. I am on record predicting of chronology, come back five years ago. Yeah. I agreed. Yeah. So, you know, like, and this is, this is, so why is Marco Rubio, who is supposedly the responsible one, who is the secretary of state, giving a speech at a conference in which he is talking about Americans, is what he's talking about Americans, the protesters, you know, the left wing terrorists, all this, being ugly and deformed and who, you know, spiritually, all they can do is destroy the work of the great men and the great culture that the Aryans have built. And it just, you know, and I just think, I don't know, like, Rubio is a pretty shrewd diviner of what people want from him in any moment. He seems to think that this is what Republican voters want. I don't know, man. It was pretty, I was pretty worked out about this because I mean, it's one thing to like rhyme with Nazis. It's another thing to like copy them. It is, there is a difference between like the Miller rhetoric is as fascist and as, as, as you could imagine, even where it's sort of like, you know what is good and beautiful and true, right? There's a kind of, I don't even know what can I read the passage. Yeah, I got, I got it in front of me. That's here long because it's, it's really amazing. It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent, antifa demonstrations, and you see any photograph of those who are assembled to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person, not one looks normal. They're all deformed in some way and their appearance and their dress and their mannerism. Why is that? Why? If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street and you see an antifa protest, why do the people that are violent demonstrating? Why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them through the course of their life and their decisions has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point where their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred. Trust your instincts to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is. You know that families are right. You know that children are precious. Some beautiful must be protected. Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh-buh. This is so much deeper than issues about taxation and regulation. It's about normal, healthy ordered living. Like this is, you can, you see that. It's like vermin, dysgenic type. It's all right there. You could see like Gerbos looking at that and being like, hey, I think we got to turn this down a little bit. I think we're getting a little bit, okay. Hey guys, I know, I know we're the Nazis, but this is getting a little crazy. Yes, but so what's interesting about that, I saw that passage. And if you turn on Fox News at many points during the day, you will see a kind of brightly colored over the top aesthetic, including facework and changes to the body that are all meant to be like there is that that like you stop and you read that and you're like, what are you talking about exactly? What are you, what are you saying exactly? Because when you look, there is, the other side of that is an aesthetic to fascism, right? Like with what kind of extreme aesthetic to what it means to be beautiful, right? And it does flow from this idea of, which is like one of the lies at the core of fascism itself, which is in the same way you do not need to admit to any flaw or fault or mistake and you can dominate. and actually to lose is always embarrassing, to concede is always embarrassing. One place where we all must concede is to time and death itself, right? Like we must concede to the fact that we are all-- - A lot of Peter Teal has his-- - Well, I was just saying this. - Yeah, the techno fascist for sure, but like that we all have bodies, right? And that actually we all experience pain and we all experience loss. And part of like that rhetoric is around convincing a bunch of people to deny their own kinds of pain, right, to like to model a kind of a strength in which the reason it's okay to support Trump even though he actually does nothing to improve the country is that your dissatisfaction, your pain, it doesn't matter because you actually are sort of a tool of this operation. Do you know what I'm saying? Like there's a kind of like, yeah. There's a kind of ask that they make of their own people to kind of like deny themselves, like their own humanity and how they kind of approach the world. - During Trump 1.0, there was a New York Times piece written. It was like, there was some storm down in Florida and Trump had like done jack shit for people. And the Times reporter is like down interviewing Trump supporters who had been like, you know, hurt by the storm. And so a quote from a woman who says that she was disappointed in Trump because she said he's not hurting the people he's supposed to hurt. And to me, this was like the Rosetta Stone of Trumpism. Like this is, as you say, like they can't stop their immortality, can't stop their own pain, but Donald Trump promises to hurt the people that they hate. And that's really good. - There's a lot of debate about what Democrats should be calling for, what reforms should look like, how we resolve attention, which is if we are able to retake power, it will be a great incentive to use the new executive strength powers to fix what Trump has done while at the same time collectively understanding that limiting the power of the presidency, returning some prerogatives to the legislature and the courts is a good thing. Pete Buttigieg said something interesting about this that you wrote about, which is basically some version of there's places where we need to strengthen the presidency. Basically, we need to strengthen it on the stuff you want me to do. And we need to weaken it on the stuff you don't want me to do. Like we, it has to be stronger going after inequality and fighting the corporations. But we need to be, the president should be weaker when it comes to invasions of privacy and violations of the rule of law. Okay, fine. I agree with that. How are you thinking about executive power and what it means sort of post Trump to kind of protect the country from another one? Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't know the answer. I, you know, there are, you can see like three different pathways for this and it's not clear to me, which is wisest. There was a bunch of debate about this when Biden took office and he chose to try to like, hey, look, Trump was an aberration. That's not who we are. And what we're going to do is we're just going to go back to being normal and we're going to fake it till we make it. You know what, that wasn't a crazy view. That was not a crazy view. It was totally defensible. It was a real theory of the case. It did turn out to be wrong though. And we just need to say that like it was, it was wrong. And it wasn't a little bit wrong. It was a lot wrong. Biden had a successful presidency. He, he had a pretty good economy. Unemployment was below 4% almost the entire time. He beat COVID. We had about a 13 or 14 month period with very high inflation. But then he achieved a soft landing. I mean, this is, this is good as a guess. We did not have a recession. We did not have a big unpopular foreign war. And at the end of it, people chose Trump again. Yeah, even with the, I mean, so so Biden's theory of the case was wrong. What could Democrats do if they take power again? Well, they could try some version of we're going to reform everything. And so we're going to go after the big institutional problems, which led to Trumpism, things like the Supreme Court, things like the electoral college, things like the Senate. They could instead of that, they could pursue accountability. They could say, look, the system is what the system is. But we're going to make sure that everybody who broke any law during that period that just happened, whether they were a member of the government doing things that were legal or whether they were private corporations who were participating in illegal things with doing frauds and whatnot. Everybody pays a price so that people see going forward that if you get another strong man, if you go along with him, there will be consequences, right? That's one thing. Or they could say, hey, you know what? People don't care about process. People don't care about all that stuff. They care about the bottom line. Kitchen table issues, John. And you know what, we're not going to get distracted by worrying about the past and fighting the old fights of the old generation. We're going to look forward to building something new, something that really matters to people's lives. And look, you know more about Democrats than I do. But my sense is they're going to pick door number three if they ever get into power again. And I'm like, great, good luck. Part of it is like that. I worried about that. I worry that there is going to be polling that says very clearly, you know, some version of, do you want to look backwards or do you want to go forward to people are going to say, gosh, I want to go forward. Always. Yep. And that will be a real, there will be a lot of pressure on Democrats to say this. And then you will have the Democrats that are the smart messengers who say some version of the kind of walk a chew gum at the same time. You know, they're going to say it on this show. They've said it before. John, we've got to walk a chew gum at the same time. So we've got to look forward, but also we have to fight for accountability. But all of it to me is avoiding what I think. I think in like in the Democratic heart, right? Like what did what did what a Democrat? What would what would the kind of engaged Democrats who have kind of been part of this debate for a long time? What are they really, what are they really saying that they want what they want? Or what I would I imagine some version of this is what people think we need better, but have find it hard to articulate is we need a period in which we have some version of another founding, right? Like we've been through several Foundings. We in which we kind of have a big debate about authority and limits in that period of friction. There's a lot of room to operate. And then laws and norms kick in and it gets constrained and you get stuck in that for a long time, right? That's what happens after the revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement. And we're kind of where maybe we do. And what that looks like, right, is to the Buttigieg point. You kind of want a period where you can have a president who can operate like Trump, tear down the ballroom. Kind of remove all the executive orders. You've all come around. You've all come around with me on the ballroom. You know what? I'm going to put your values to the test right now. Would you tear down the New Dolos? There's a New Dolos. He wants to build the New Dolos airport. He wants to get rid of the people and movers. You're going to tear that down too. I mean, to what end? Well, it would be another end is this. It's a fix the fact that Dolos sucks. Is this an infrastructure? Yes. He announced this week a giant plan to-- he personally has approved the designs for new terminals at Dolos, which include getting rid of the people, movers, and a 32,000 foot parking structure. Now, should the president be walking through the details of a new parking structure when we're at war with Iran and have no control of the state of Hormuz? No, he should not. But he did do that. Yeah, that's closer to like highway planning infrastructure that I am not in the like Donald Trump built a Donald Trump's transportation department, built a bridge in West Virginia. And so we have to tear that down. That's not where I am. I'm in the ornaments and the personal monuments to himself, which are things like the art, the ballroom, the name on the Kennedy Center. Well, that's what we got to-- My view is that anything that looks like a presidential palace gets pulled down. Yes, anything-- Because you have to show that there's no throne there. Show the next guy. Anything, any part of his infrastructure where you could imagine Uday and Kusay walking out. Yes, to say hello. I think you got to tear it down. [MUSIC PLAYING] US voters abroad. Go to votefromabroad.org and click "Request My Ballot." Ask to receive it by email. Questions? Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. [MUSIC PLAYING] But back on this, that you want to do a court expansion, get rid of the filibuster, pass some sort of-- repeal the big, beautiful bill taxes. A lot of sort of big, strong, executive leading the Congress towards a singular goal. And by the way, but then at some point, you also want to reassert the Justice Department as an independent body, which I think we-- at this point, depending on the court, you have to do through law or constitutional amendment. You want to reassert Congress's prerogatives over the national security state, which requires legislation. Maybe at this point, also a constitutional amendment. There's a bunch of ways in what you want is a period of time where the Democrats-- President operates like Trump before a whole set of rules kicks in in which there can never be a Trump again, which is exactly the kind of thing that dictatorships are made of. Right? Like that's what you know what I'm saying? Like that is what people want and yet that is the problem. That is the problem. I mean, that's the tension. That's what they think they got with Trump. That's the tension. And the other, I mean, there is also a false sense of security here, which is that if the people in a democracy want a Trump, they will get a Trump regardless of what Democrats build in the guardrails, right? Because the guardrails are people. And if America wants authoritarianism, it's going to get authoritarianism. It's going to get a strong man. So you can't fix that part of it, right? And so that honestly, that does, I was making fun of the, you know, Democrats, I just want to look toward the future. Maybe that is the answer. I don't come to you with answers, John. Maybe the answer is you do have to look to the future so that you build something so that people don't think, yes, I want a strong man. Maybe that's, I don't know. I don't know. To me, that doesn't feel like satisfactory, but that doesn't mean it's not the right answer. Well, there's also, I think, I think your story of Biden, and I am a great critic of Joe Biden, is a little, I think it's a little bit over determined in that, if Joe Biden, Joe Biden's theory, right, was we have to, we have to demonstrate what a democracy should look and sound like. We have to reassert some normalcy. We have to achieve some big policy goals to demonstrate that government can work. And because there was an insurrection and he's such a pariah, the Republicans will move on and they will have a primary that sits where you end up with someone somewhere between Trump and what Rubio sounded like in 2014. And you kind of muddle through, right? You know, there have been plenty of cases with history where the kind of charismatic leader goes away and everybody kind of, you don't go back to where you were. But it mattered that there was one charismatic leader and without them people kind of go back to old habits. The problem was to meet two things. One, Joe Biden was way too fucking alt. And as a result, kind of, he became very, he couldn't communicate and his weaknesses as a leader became evidence of his age, his age became evidence of his weaknesses and became a downward spiral for her, for her best efforts was unable to get out of that for various reasons. The other is you could have had Joe Biden doing exactly what Joe Biden did and you put Adam Schiff at DOJ instead of Merrick Garland or somebody gave Merrick Garland, you know, some Adderall in his oatmeal every day without his knowledge. And suddenly you have some prosecutions happening faster, Trump is unable to run for office and the world looks very different. Possible. And I mean, I should say in all this, it is also possible that everything just kind of fixes itself on its own, right? It's possible that none of the things that we've talked about happen and yet a decade for now, things aren't worse than they are right now. They may not be a ton better, but like we haven't continued sliding into authoritarianism. We're only like a third of the way there, the way we are now. So like that's also possible. I'm open to that. I'm open to all possibilities, John. We often find ourselves in the trap of saying, well, what was the real reason and that what I use is like murder on the Orient Express, who did it, all of them did it, right? And it is. Biden was too old and Trump was charismatic and Merrick Garland didn't act with enough impetus, like it's all of those things together. But it's also like and the Supreme Court was pretty clearly going to try to make sure Trump could run again, like they wanted Trump to be able to run again. They were going to do whatever they could to do that, right? So you are in this physics people call it a simple complex system, right? It's not a fully complex system, they're like ecosystems, they're gigantic and they're incredibly resilient. But a government is a simple complex system, which is to say, it's like an engineered biosystem. And those sort of things, simple complex systems are actually really delicate because they don't have all the redundancies and self governing features built into them that true complex systems have. And I think one of the things we've learned over the last decade is that the American experiment is a simple complex system, not a truly complex system. The guardrails are not real guardrails in that if the people go rotten or like sort of lose their minds temporarily or decide they want something bad, they will get it. And you know, maybe you don't need all the people, maybe you just need 47% of them distributed in the correct way or something like that, but you know, they're going to get it. And so I wish I knew what the answer was to all this, virtue. The answer to this is virtue. Let's invite, let's send my talk about virtue for a moment because I, it's, it does seem to be, you step back from all of this and it is just a collective, like you can blame the elites, you can blame the voters, whatever you want to do, there is a, there is a sense in which we've just sort of lost a kind of muscle memory for the importance of making virtue a big part of identity, right? Just like, I remember when I, there was a, there was something that would happen on sitcoms when I, that was just a part of sitcoms all the time, which is, there was a character who would drive back to the bank with the 20 bucks. They got an extra 20 bucks and that character would always drive back to the bank with the 20 bucks. And even in that, it was a cheesy thing. It's obviously a cheesy thing about, but like, there is a, like kind of, and maybe Trump is a reflection of it, he also makes it worse. I think about Fauci, when public health officials said, you don't need masks, right? They were doing it because they wanted health, you know, in a crisis, they're worried about the health system coming apart, they're worrying about first responders dying of COVID. They're desperate to get those people masks and they, and public health had a choice and the choice was between trusting the American people with the truth or doing a kind of nudge because you want to make sure that the PPE gets to the hospitals. They chose to lie because they didn't, they, because they, not lie, heavily lawyer. I would say this, so I've done the Fauci thing a whole lot. Fauci didn't lie, what Fauci did was a very lawyerly depends on what the definition of is is. Yes. So I want to be clear, Anthony Fauci was somebody that devoted his life to public health. He's being smeared to be blamed for the entire pandemic because these people are being fundamentally dishonest. Donald Trump was present. He was lying the whole time. He was a man that did his best in a massive emergency. And I'm not just saying him, collectively the goal was to convince Americans that they did not need masks when they did because, and I think rightly, they knew that if you said to the country, don't buy masks right now, they're life-saving and we need to save them for the people that are in the, in the, in the shit right now. I don't think that they were wrong, right? I don't think they were wrong. Okay. And that, and, and like, and to me, like that is at the root of this, like the, the, that, sort of politicians not politicians and officials not trusting the voters, the voters not trusting those people in return. And I just don't know, like the question is, what does a virtuous cycle look like in which you're kind of getting back to a, a common sense of, of high trust society versus low trust? I wish I knew. Honestly, I wish I knew, John, because it, I think you're right about the general public. But at the same time, the general public is made up of all of those nurses and orderlies and texts and docs and who showed up to hospitals, taking care of people, especially like in New York. I mean, I don't know if people remember, everybody is like this, this mass, you know, forgotten, this mass forgetting about COVID, because like nobody wants to remember it. But New York looked like fucking Doomsday, you know, like they're, they were just like mobile refrigerators with bodies just, you know, stacked inside the, on the alleys outside of hospitals. It was, it was like seeing one of these virus movies and the hospitals were full of people who just went in and tried to save lives and put themselves at risk anyway. You know, all these essential service workers who were like people who worked at just delivery and logistics, people who worked in grocery stores, you know, check out lines and stocking things. Like that's true too. Like those people did that. That was virtue. And so I, it's become so hard to understand, well, why is it that these people will exhibit such true virtue at the individual level? But then when we ask, do you think people respond collectively in the right way? Or would they have run out and just like hoarded, you know, like hoarding toilet paper every time there's a warning about snowstorms? And I don't know how to square the circle there. And I, you know, maybe, maybe the answer is like you just have to trust people. And if they make the wrong choice, so be it. And everybody lives with radical candor. I, I, I don't know the answers. And I wish I did. I think part of it is I do think it matters that Donald Trump had been president for several years. And like he makes these, these kind of he makes mistrust and cynicism more true of us, and I do that. maybe the answer. Like in the same way, why do I think you and Sarah and Tim and others who have had profound disagreements over the years stepped up when others didn't? Well, I think part of it is these virtues aren't just something you believe in. I think everybody would claim to believe in them. They were part of your identity, right? They were part of your identity. And a politics in which Democrats find a way to make those kind of virtues central to how we talk about ourselves, how we talk about what it means to be an American. I do think is kind of points to the way out because I think the difference, I do genuinely think the difference is is what are you? Are you a Republican? Are you a conservative? Are you a Texan? Are you an American? Are you moral? Are you righteous? Are you honest? Are you somebody that is good at are you fair dealing? Right? Like do you cut lines or do you understand why you shouldn't even when you see others doing it? Right? Like these kind of simple things are like kind of I think part of what Trump makes less less salient to people. And I think maybe that's part of the way whether inside the Republican Party or in the Democratic Party, a return to that kind of moral language is maybe part of what has to happen next. Yeah. And I wish again, I don't have any of the answers on this stuff. I think a lot about kindness because kindness is one of these values that sort of sands over vices. If you can fix kindness as your North Star, that cuts across. You don't have to be a Christian or a Jew or Muslim or like it's just it's universal or everybody understands kindness. And to the extent that we could try to just model that and be me talking about kindness. I know it's hysterical. But you're rumored to be a very kind person. That's what the rumor is. Don't believe it. I mean, when they let you out of that room, you're in. But I strive for it. Right? I mean, it is something. I think it's something we can all we can all strive. We can all be aspirationally kind. And maybe that collectively leads us back somewhere less terrible. And I will also just note too that like in politics, these kinds of virtuous words aren't always going to be on the list of polling questions or the list of topics that rise to the top. But I will remember, when Hillary Clinton was campaigning in 2016, and I know every losing campaign did everything wrong and every winning campaign did everything right. And we shouldn't have Pokemon go to the post, went to the polls. But when she would say what we need is love and kindness, it was electric. It was the most electric thing that came around her in a campaign that was kind of more in the kind of neoliberal language of kind of technocracy. That idea of kindness did like kind of bring something out of people. So I do think it's a very good place to leave it. Jonathan V. Last. It has been so good talking to you. You know, and I hope you felt I was kind today. This was so great. I loved hanging out. I would do a show with you every single week. You mean Alex Wagner. Wow. This is great. Okay. Yeah. I got to talk to my bosses. Oh wait. We're an independent media company. You mean Alex? What are you going to do? We'll do a show about pinball. Let's show that comic. Get on the blow and do it. Whatever you want. Yeah. We can talk about. By the way, we can talk about watches too. Got a lot. Are you a watch guy? I'm a watch guy. I got a, I got a grand saco going right now. Oh, which one? I got it. I got the, it's the, it's the, it's the cherry blossoms. It's the cherry blossoms. Oh, the shun blanche. Oh, you know, it's a classic. Grand saco is a, if you love Grand saco, then you really love watches. I'm a nerd. This is, for those, this is a, this is a nerd's, this is a nerd's watch and it, and nerd's stopped me on the street because they know, because they know, but everyone, oh, that's a saco. No, no, no, no, no, my friends. It's a grand saco and the story of grand saco. Zeratzu polishing my friend. And what people don't know is that there was a period of time where saco wanted to compete with the Swiss. And so they had two factories, grand saco and king saco. And they said, fight to the fucking death boys. And you know what? They did. Grand saco won. It's the Japanese way. Jonathan's so good to talk to everybody. Go subscribe to the bulwark. Go subscribe to the triad his, his newsletter and, uh, and subscribe right here on this channel. Help us build a pro-democracy ecosystem to get good information to people. And, and that, that, that prize is kindness. How about that? Wrote, Ben Heffko, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Carol Pellevive, David Tolls, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is probably unionized with the writer's Guild of America East.